The Culture of Disaster 9780226358239

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The Culture of Disaster

THE

Culture Disaster OF

Marie-Hélène Huet

the university of chicago press chicago and london

is the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of French at Princeton University. She is the author of numerous books, including Mourning Glory: The Will of the French Revolution and Monstrous Imagination.

´le `n e h u e t marie-he

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2012 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2012. Printed in the United States of America 21  20  19  18  17  16  15  14  13  12   1  2  3  4  5 isbn-13: 978-0-226-35821-5 (cloth) isbn-10: 0-226-35821-6 (cloth) This publication is made possible in part by a subvention from the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications, Princeton University. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Huet, Marie-Hélène. The culture of disaster / Marie-Hélène Huet. pages; cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-226-35821-5 (cloth: alkaline paper) isbn 0-226-35821-6 (cloth: alkaline paper) 1. Disasters.  2. World politics.  3. Disasters in literature.  I. Title. d24.h77 2012 363.34—dc23 2011050731 a This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

conten t s List of Figures / vii Acknowledgments / ix Introduction: The Nature of Disasters / 1 part one Acts of God, Deeds of Men / 15 1: Enlightenment and the Plague / 17 2: The Silence of Lisbon (1755) / 39 3: The Reign of  Cholera (1832) / 57 part tw o Political Disasters, Time in Ruins / 77 4: Losing Rome (Rousseau) / 79 5: Nightwatch: Terror and Time / 101 6: The Politics of  Mortality / 129 part thr e e Tall Ships and Falling Stars / 147 7: The Face of Chaos (Medusa) / 149 8: The Sphinx of the Ice Fields / 171 part fo ur The Culture of Disaster / 201 9: Now Playing Everywhere / 205 Notes / 231 Index / 257

figure s 1. Jean-François de Troy, The Plague in the City of Marseilles in 1720 / 18 2. Anon., Lisbon Abyss (eighteenth century) / 40 3. Robert Seymour, Cholera Tramples the Victor and the Vanquish’d Both (1831) / 61 4. Giovanni Paolo Pannini, Ruins with the Pyramid of Gaius Cestius in Rome (early eighteenth century) / 84 5. Revolutionary watch with two dials (late eighteenth century) / 120 6. Anon., Robespierre Guillotining the Headsman after He Has Guillotined All the French People (1793) / 140 7. Théodore Géricault, Etude de têtes de suppliciés (Decapitated Heads) (early nineteenth century) / 150 8. Villeneuve, A Matter of Reflection for the Crowned Jugglers . . . (1793) / 151 9. Théodore Géricault, Sighting of the Argus: Study of Bodies for “The Raft of the Medusa” (early nineteenth century) / 157 10. Théodore Géricault, Body Parts: Study of Arms and Legs for “The Raft of the Medusa” (1818/19) / 168 11. François-Étienne Musin, The HMS Erebus in Ice (1846) / 172 12. Engraving by J. Hamilton and J. Mc Goffin, Ice Bergs Near Kosoak (Life Boat Cove) (nineteenth century) / 173 13. Report on John Franklin’s death (1847) / 176 14. Edouard Riou, Volcano at the North Pole (nineteenth century) / 181 15. Edouard Riou, The Forward in Ice with Sun Halo (nineteenth century) / 185 16. Anon., Burial in Ice under Paraselenae (nineteenth century) / 186 17. George Roux, The Halbrane in Ice with Sun Halo (nineteenth century) / 191

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18. George Roux, The Sphinx of the Ice Fields (nineteenth century) / 192 19. René Magritte, La Reproduction interdite (ca. 1937) / 200 20. Still from Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) / 209 21. Still from Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-up (1966) / 214 22. Still from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) / 222

acknowled g m e n t s I wish to thank the librarians who guided me through the labyrinths of the special collections I visited during the preparation of this book. Chief among them are the librarians of the Bibliothèque Nordique and the Archives de la Police Judiciaire in Paris. I received generous help from the staff of the Assistance Publique archives, the curators of the rare books collection of the medical library at the Université Descartes, and the librarians of the Warburg Institute in London. This book is gratefully dedicated to them. I am deeply indebted to Michael E. Brown and to the readers for the University of Chicago Press for their many fruitful comments and suggestions. Research for this book was funded by several grants from the Princeton University Committee for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Excerpts from chapter 4 were published as “On the Uses of Negative Freedom,” in Rousseau and Freedom, edited by Chris­ tie McDonald and Stanley Hoffmann. Copyright © 2010 by Cambridge University Press. Reprinted with permission. Chapter 6 first appeared in Diacritics 30, no. 3 (Autumn 2000): 28–39. Copyright © 2000 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Parts of chapter 7 appeared in Yale French Studies 111 (2007): 7–31, edited by Dan Edelstein and Bettina Lerner. I thank the editors for their permission to reprint this material.

introduc t i o n

The Nature of Disasters Writing in Paris at the height of the cholera epidemic that devastated the city in 1832, Chateaubriand observed: If this scourge had plagued us in the middle of a religious era, and penetrated the poetry of customs and popular beliefs, it would have left a striking example. Imagine a pall floating like a banner from the towers of Notre-Dame . . . churches filled with imploring crowds, priests chanting day and night the prayers of a perpetual agony, the viaticum carried from house to house with bells and candles, bells tolling incessantly, monks with a cross in hand, calling for the people to repent at crossroads, preaching that God’s anger and judgment were visible on the corpses already blackened by the fire of hell. . . . None of this: cholera reached us in a century of philanthropy, incredulity, newspapers, and material administration. This plague without imagination has encountered no cloisters, no monks, no graves or gothic crypts; like the terror in 1793, it has strolled mockingly in broad daylight, in a brand-new world.1

In these lines Chateaubriand makes a dual statement about disaster and modernity: in a world no longer dominated by religious beliefs, disasters have lost their tragic dimension. No mystical anguish presides over the devastation. The rituals of prayer and penance that attended medieval epidemics have given way to the cold appraisal of material needs. But the city may confront a disaster more frightening than the plague of ancient times: “Cholera had its terror,” Chateaubriand adds, “the brilliant sun, indifferent crowds, and the banality of life that went on everywhere endowed these times of plague with a new character and a new kind of dread. . . . In Paris, merchants were accused of poisoning the wine, liquors, candy and food; several individuals were slaughtered, dragged through the streets, and thrown into the Seine. The authorities 



introduction

had themselves to blame for imprudent or false announcements.”2 In this post-Revolutionary era, disaster bears the stamp of a terror haunted by mob violence and summary executions. Paranoia, the great disease of the French Revolution, fed rumors, anger, and uprisings. “Choleric riots” spread throughout Europe as quickly as cholera itself, taking their toll in every country. If there is a hint of regret in Chateaubriand’s evocation of past calamities—and he notes that these pages are written from the rue d’Enfer 3—it is unclear at this point which he regrets more: the passing of the religious fervor that channeled anguish into remorse, or the rational discourse that freed men from their guilt but failed to control this deadly disease. In many ways, the cholera epidemic of 1831–32 ushered in the era of disaster as an administrative problem of political containment. Both a consummate politician and an apologist for Christianity, Chateaubriand was quick to perceive that cholera meant more than sudden death, mob scenes, and swift executions. For Chateaubriand, cholera was a properly modern disaster, that is, a natural disaster that could only be fully understood when redefined in political terms. This book seeks not to examine the political and natural disasters that have lined the path to modernity, but rather to show how efforts to understand disastrous events have shaped post-Enlightenment thought. Our culture thinks through disasters. Implicitly or explicitly, disasters mediate philosophical inquiry and shape our creative imagination. The Enlightenment project is widely credited with the recognition that natural disasters were not sent by a wrathful God but stemmed from the workings of a violent universe. Plagues, earthquakes, and fire had to be understood—and exorcised—through the rational examination of physical causes. But the vision of a disaster willed by God was swiftly replaced by one of human-engineered calamity. If volcanoes erupted and the earth shook without divine intent, humans made the damages greater and more grievous to bear. Through an examination of reactions to natural catastrophes and political upheavals, this book argues that the state of emergency that characterizes current Western culture—which is related to what Giorgio Agamben describes as a state of exception—stems from a pervasive anxiety about catastrophic events now freed from their theological meanings and worsened by human failures.4

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etymologi es There is a rich semantic field devoted to the description of the misfortunes that have been recorded since the beginning of human history. Although the origin of the word “calamity” has not been entirely established, it is usually thought to be derived from the Latin calamus, meaning “stalk”; the word first designated the loss of a harvest or the threat of famine. “Catastrophe,” closely associated with classical tragedy, originally meant the “turning downward,” or the fatal turning point that would seal the destiny of the tragic hero. “Peril” has a particularly complex etymology: Roman law may have been the first to define the concept of financial risk as disaster in the making. The word periculum, according to Antoine Leca, designated the “fortune of the sea,” and referred by extension to a hazardous contract, one no more secure than a ship in rough waters.5 The perils of the sea yielded a periculo creditori, a risk to those lenders whose investments were at the mercy of a shipwreck. Leca further observes that the word “risk” itself may have come from the Latin resecum, that which cuts, hence the reef that can sink a ship. The Spanish word riesgo still designates both a reef and the danger it presents for seagoing vessels. The association of “peril” with the dangers of the seas was remembered in the Middle Ages in the name of the Mont Saint-Michel, au-péril-de-la-mer: the religious fortress and monastery had been built on a rock surrounded by shifting sands and galloping tides. Our understanding of peril has thus always included a double-edged threat, that of a treacherous nature and that of risk-taking speculation. The quest for the Golden Fleece led Jason and the Argonauts through the most dangerous of sea voyages, and not even the securing of the prized fleece could save the hero from a terrible end: some versions of the tale suggest he killed himself, others that he was crushed to death by the stern of the ship. From the lure of the sirens to the melancholy Glaucus, whose horrible appearance distracted sailors—and whom Plato and Rousseau would see as the disfigured image of the human soul—the sea embodied at the same time the turbulence of the mind and the violence of the natural world. “Disaster” has its own distinctive origin, associating misfortune with the loss of a protective star, with being abandoned by the stars and left to one’s miserable fate among countless perils and calamities. In French the form désastré (literally, “disastered”) came first; it was derived from the Italian dis-astrato, which designated the state of having been disowned by the stars that ensure a safe passage through life. The word is thus



introduction

directly related to disorders of uncommon magnitude: the destruction, despair, and chaos resulting from the distant power of cosmic agencies.

mythologi es Comets and stars themselves were long perceived as a reminder of the ancient deities that reigned over the world: incensed at the outrage his priest had suffered from Agamemnon, Apollo “strode down from Olympus’ peaks” and let fly at the Achaean army poisoned arrows that carried “a fatal plague.”6 The plague came to represent the ultimate, the purest form of disaster. First described by Homer as sent from the sun-god, it would later be attributed to a fatal convergence of planets. “The [signs] of future plagues can be found in the universal or particular movements of natural things, and are called prognostics. The first are found in the Heavens, following the Stars’ various positions and encounters, and those of some meteors. The others are sublunar,” wrote a seventeenth-century physician. “Astrologers say that Eclipses, of either the Sun or the Moon, taking place in the air or water triplicity, mostly in Scorpio, or in the tail of the lunar Dragon, under the unfavourable aspects of Mars and Neptune, easily signify severe and generalized Plagues.”7 From the Paris Faculty of Medicine to countless astronomers throughout Europe, physicians and prophets alike blamed the combined influence of Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars for the spread of the deadly disease. Once it reached Earth on the shafts of Apollo’s silver bow, or through a fateful stellar influence, the plague could not be contained. One of the most enduring beliefs about the disease suggested that it spread among humans through the gaze: “The disease manifests itself with all its strength and suddenly kills when the breath [spiritu] that emanates from the patients’ eyes contaminates the eyes of those who stand around them,” noted a treatise published by the Montpellier Faculty of Medicine.8 We know of the fatal power of the gaze through another mythical figure, that of the terrifying Gorgon. Medusa, her head crowned with serpents, petrified all those who looked at her. She, too, has her place in astronomical discourse about the plague. Located in the Perseus constellation under the name of Algol, Medusa’s head was described by Ptolemy and his followers as the bearer of cruel and violent death. Giuntini Junctinus—the sixteenthcentury theologian, mathematician, and astrologer who translated Ptol­ emy’s Tetrabiblos—thought Algol the most evil star in the firmament.9 In 1623 Guy de la Brosse similarly warned his readers: “Astrologers

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threaten Paris with numerous venomous diseases such as plagues, pleurisy and dysentery, which is confirmed by the presence of Medusa’s head very near the Zenith.” “While the snake is alive, it attracts all earthly venoms that are in conformity with its own,” he added. The plague’s venom, once let free in the air, “seems like a universal agent of corruption and destruction in Nature, similar to that of fire in Art.”10 Medusa’s snakes thus rivaled Apollo’s arrows in their power to strike humans with disasters. But Apollo himself was associated from the beginning with the monstrousness of serpents: “Tellus [Earth], against her will, produced a Serpent never known before, the huge Python, a terror to men’s new-made tribes . . . [Apollo] destroyed the monster with a thousand arrows.”11 For Apollo also healed. Snake venom was used in remedies against the plague, and an atropopaic Medusa adorned the shield of Agamemnon. With their destructive and healing powers, Apollo and Medusa represent the two faces of the sun; the darker side of the Greek God is echoed by Medusa’s face, an “apocalyptic sun” framed by a halo of serpents.12 Apollo and Medusa reappear every time chaos threatens and epidemics destroy. They haunt medical treatises and the pages of the Encyclopédie dedicated to the plague. They permeate the iconography of the Terror as metaphors of might and evil, or as a distant hope for a cosmic reordering of causes and consequences.

d isasters in the age of enlightenment Two major disasters struck Europe in the eighteenth century: the plague that devastated Marseilles and the Provence region in 1720, causing fifty thousand deaths, and the earthquake that leveled the city of Lisbon in 1755, killing thirty thousand people. It is often argued that the Lisbon earthquake can be seen as the first “modern” disaster, prompting philosophy to provide a rational understanding of natural catastrophes. The Enlightenment repudiated the supernatural causes that had long attributed disasters to cosmic influences or the anger of a merciless God. Susan Neiman writes that “taking intellectual reactions to Lisbon and Auschwitz as central poles of inquiry is a way of locating the beginning and end of the modern.”13 Although many priests saw in the devastation of Lisbon a divine punishment for human sins, multiple voices throughout Europe decried the view that a vengeful God would kill innocent beings, and sought instead a scientific explanation for the disaster. “Explaining the natural causes of catastrophes, trying to understand [them], is thus of



introduction

crucial importance in humanity’s taking responsibility for its own history,” write Anne-Marie Mercier-Faivre and Chantal Thomas.14 But the philosophers who claimed to account for the Lisbon tragedy through the workings of the physical world did more than argue for the superiority of science and reason over superstitious beliefs: by shifting responsibility from the will of an indifferent God to the failings of humans—as Rousseau did when he blamed the number of deaths in Lisbon on the builders of the city—Enlightenment philosophers reframed the concept of natural disaster. They dismissed the supernatural forces that dwarfed all efforts to contain their fury. They argued instead that disasters were acts neither of God nor—entirely—of nature. Long before the Lisbon earthquake, however, and in fact from the beginning of the use of the word “disaster” in modern European languages, the term associated the cosmic origin of disastrous events with the responsibility borne by humans for their own misfortunes. In King Lear, Shakespeare left it to Edmund, the treacherous bastard son of Gloucester, to tear open the etymology of the word: This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeit of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical pre-dominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc’d obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whore-master man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star. (I.2)

The history of disasters is thus also the history of humans wresting from the heavens the source and reason of their misfortunes: an enterprise, perhaps an exploit, as perilous as the crossing of seas. If the Lisbon earthquake had a clear impact on philosophical reflections, the view that it radically transformed the way we think about disasters is, I would argue, a retrospective judgment that has much to do with the nature of the disaster itself. What is “modern” about Lisbon is not the ushering in of a rational discourse about disasters, nor the recognition that humans bear a responsibility in all forms of disasters—Shakespeare, among others, had already made that claim. Rather, what may strike us as modern stems from the fact that we have inherited from the culture of Enlightenment an “anthropologically primitive fear and need to control rebellious nature”—to use Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s

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terms—which is shattered anew by every physical disaster.15 Each natural disaster challenges both the mastery that was our goal and the political system that was put in place to serve such a purpose. By contrast, what may appear “ancient” about the plague that a few years before had caused many more deaths than the Lisbon earthquake is that the disease never returned and is now entirely curable, “mastered.” No doubt the shadow of the plague reemerges every time an epidemic threatens, but the Marseilles plague and the Lisbon earthquake need to be viewed from different perspectives. A close examination of the texts written at the time of these events shows no obvious difference in the sheer intensity of the philosophical battles they inspired, or in the anxiety caused by the sudden destruction of the two cities. The Encyclopédie devoted only a short paragraph to the Lisbon earthquake, but several long articles to the plague. It was a disease the philosophers fully expected to recur. The selection of Lisbon as a modern disaster is thus also, and perhaps primarily, a judgment on the way we think of the time in which we live: an age when uncontrollable disasters always threaten the fragile order we have imposed on chaos. From Hurricane Katrina to the Haiti earthquake and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, we still battle the elements and our lack of foresight. As Anson Rabinbach asks, “Was the dark side of modernity ultimately created by the Enlightenment dream of a ‘world without shadow, of everything bathed in the light of reason’?”16 I would suggest that, instead, the dark side of Enlightenment itself yielded a world of shadows where dreams of controlling a rebellious nature gave rise to a scientific project itself fraught with perils and anxieties. By making disasters a properly human concern, the Enlightenment may not have dealt a final blow to theology, but it certainly set the stage for the sense of emergency that would durably transform the post-Revolutionary age. Eighteenth-century philosophers made a lasting contribution to a modern understanding of disaster by sweeping away the divine explanation of human wreckage to seek among humans alone the cause of human ills and in nature alone the cause of physical chaos. But the resulting interpretation of disasters made the disorder they caused more profound and their burden at the same time more personal and more political.

political anx i eties In his examination of the history of the state of siege as “gradual emancipation from the wartime situation to which it was originally bound in



introduction

order to be used as extraordinary police measure to cope with internal sedition and disorder,” Agamben describes the process that at the same time expands government powers and suspends all legally established constitutional laws. The resulting “state of exception” that has become the paradigm of government, Agamben argues, was first defined by the French Constituent Assembly decree of July 8, 1791, which envisioned the necessity for towns and ports in a state of siege to confer upon a single military command all the powers previously granted to civil governments. Agamben further notes that “the modern state of exception is a creation of the democratic-revolutionary tradition and not the absolutist one.”17 Certainly the state of siege had been imposed before—though not in legal terms—every time a disaster struck and exceptional measures were taken to restore order. But under an absolutist regime, these measures required no official definition and no legal sanctions other than the sovereign’s will. Thus when it was rumored that the Regent had ordered the burning of the entire city of Marseilles during the 1720 plague, no decree and no vote was needed to confirm or dispel the rumor: absolutism itself allowed for the most extreme measures in times of emergency. There is nonetheless a strict parallel between the state of exception as suspension of the juridical order itself and the state of emergency brought on by disastrous events. Not just in the resulting conferral of all authority to an executive power that has force of law, but rather in the parallel separation—what Agamben calls the “emancipation”—from the norm that presides over both the legally defined social contract and the concept of natural order. The history of disaster since the Enlightenment is not simply, as has been argued, the history of the “naturalization” of disasters— that is, the dismissal of their supernatural causes and their reattribution to purely natural phenomena. It is also, and mostly, a history of the politicization of disaster, the emancipation of disasters from nature to the socius. Disaster, like the state of siege defined by the Constituent Assembly, suspends all accepted laws; it challenges the concept of natural order and reassigns in part the origin of natural disorder to the civil authority responsible for ensuring the well-being of citizens. To echo Agamben’s words, disaster is not a special kind of natural phenomenon; it is rather a suspension of the natural order that defines the workings of nature, opening the space for men’s failure to control their costs and consequences.

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fragmenta ti ons Part I of this book focuses on natural disasters and “dis-astered” bodies. It argues that the Enlightenment not only put an end to theological interpretations of disasters but also did away with the idea of a purely natural disaster. Rarely discussed commentaries on the 1720 Marseilles plague and the 1755 Lisbon earthquake illustrate the specific nature of the fear generated by disease and destruction in the Age of Reason. As the debate slowly shifted from the divine origin of disasters to their unpredictable unfolding, the responsibility for widespread destruction fell more on humans and less on nature. The discussion of disaster was reclaimed as an encounter between will and subjection, between human reason and what humans need to know but never will. Anticipating Antonin Artaud’s description of the plague as the eruption of body fluids “furrowed like the earth struck by lightning, like lava kneaded by subterranean forces,”18 the Encyclopédie viewed the epidemic as a mechanism of radical undoing that leaves nothing untouched—body, city, or state—“breaking the strongest bonds of families and society.”19 For the Chevalier Louis de Jaucourt, the disease combined all diseases; it was a disaster that subsumed all disasters. The plague’s symptoms were so varied and contradictory that they defied interpretation. The disease’s nature alone betrayed its identity, which was nothing but pure paradox: cold and fever, strength and exhaustion, delirium and deadly quiet. Larvatus prodeo. This masked threat is described as the site of the unknowable—that is, of the absolute limits of human power and reason. The cholera epidemic of 1831–32 was widely seen as an administrative problem of medical and political control. Disasters always had posed a challenge to authorities, defying order and threatening established patterns of collective behavior. As the epidemic slowly progressed from the Gulf of Bengal to Europe and the United States, no disaster was ever more predictable. Yet no government managed to stop its advance. The impact of the epidemic was measured both in terms of an enormous number of fatalities and the inability of medical and political authorities to agree on a strategy to contain the outbreak. The particularly fierce debate that pitted the partisans of contagion against those who argued that the disease was propagated by atmospheric conditions set the stage for highly politicized measures that alternately condoned expulsions and internments. The cholera riots that added to the chaos caused by the disease prompted Heinrich Heine to observe that conservative politics itself became a casualty of the disease.

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The second part of the book examines the concept of political disaster that closely followed the Enlightenment’s reexamination of natural disasters. The idea of political disaster that stemmed from Rousseau’s preoccupation with the denaturalization of the human soul could not simply be limited to historical events, be they terror, coups d’état, or the corpselittered battlefields of senseless wars. From Rousseau to the Revolution and to Chateaubriand, the sense of living through disastrous circumstances became interiorized as a unique form of individual destiny. A divided subject confronted a new order. Rousseau stated early in his career that man’s estrangement from his original state had led to his repeated failures. The political state was doomed to remain imperfect, and the relations between the subject and the state would never reach a proper balance. Rousseau’s views on political authority and personal subjection led him to emphasize in his later writings a form of negativity that found a unique expression in the notion of anéantissement (literally, being subjected or reduced to nothingness), the result of a complex and intimate negotiation with the concept of disaster itself. In the early days of the French Revolution, a message was sealed inside a bottle and buried in a grave located in the Auvergne region of France. This unusual call for help and the fate of Gilbert Romme, the man who had co-signed the message with a Russian aristocrat, illustrate the urgency of Revolutionary reform, seen as part of a desperate battle against time. It was Romme who presented to the Convention the first reform of the Revolutionary calendar and who made a daring proposal to adopt decimal timekeeping. He was later condemned to death, in part for having protested against the death penalty for political dissidence. His personal trajectory intersected that of a nation at war with the ghosts of its past and the fear for its own future. When he presented his calendar, a political economy of time, Romme read in the heavens an echo of the Revolution’s achievements. He dreamed of a historical time in accord with scientific calculations and an auspicious cosmos. Disasters would be exorcised. But the debates about calendar reform all bear witness to a form of political trauma that, if less dramatic than the spectacle of the guillotine and the violence of the Terror, testifies with dreadful accuracy to the danger of being abandoned by the stars. On the other side of the political spectrum, Chateaubriand responded to the sense of urgency brought about by the French Revolution and the Empire by emphasizing the political nature of the earthly terror that replaced the dread of eternal fire. When he wrote about the Revolution and what he saw as its most tragic legacy—the end of the monarchy that

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11

had ruled France for nine hundred years—Chateaubriand saw himself as intimately associated with the fate of the dead king. He was the ghostly survivor called to witness an uneasy restoration followed by the coronation of an illegitimate successor to the throne. Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’outre-tombe thus transformed the end of the legitimate monarchy into a personal tragedy. His was a deliberate step in the increasing interiorization of the concept of disaster. The tragedy that struck the monarchy became an integral part of Chateaubriand’s political self as an effect of both choice and personal destiny. Part 3 is dedicated to the ways in which a changed culture reconsidered the oldest perils experienced by men: the mythical hazards of sea crossings. The view that human agency also played a role in natural disasters found a striking illustration in the 1816 wreck of the Medusa. The frigate had been put under the command of Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys, a former émigré who had not sailed for over twenty years. The loss of the Medusa and the fate of the 150 men set adrift on a raft provoked a wave of protest and indignation across Europe. Théodore Géricault’s painting, the survivors’ dramatic accounts with their admission of cannibalism, and the various theatrical stagings of the disaster all sought to capture and control the terror of the last days at sea. The figure of the Gorgon haunted this disaster; but the most dangerous insight to be gained from the history of the wreck had to do with what is properly inhuman among humans themselves. When Géricault withdrew from his circle of friends to dedicate himself to painting the Raft of the Medusa (Le Radeau de la Méduse) he amply demonstrated that disaster occupies a distinct space in the process of creation: as radical undoing and as a form of shattering energy secretly contaminated by the thought of wreckage. Chapter 8 is devoted to interpretations that built upon the idea of disaster as the extreme limit of human encounters with inhuman space. Jules Verne’s polar novels were inspired in great part by the loss of Sir John Franklin’s expedition in search of the Northwest Passage, a loss described as “the worst disaster in the history of British polar exploration.”20 The disappearance of Franklin’s two ships, the Terror and the Erebus, with a total of 133 men on board, launched an impressive number of search expeditions. The first discovery of corpses, suggesting there had been episodes of cannibalism, brought back the horror of the Medusa. Verne’s literary investigation of polar geography invests the adventure novel with a tragic aura, borrowing startling images of the celestial phenomena reported by contemporary explorers. The paraselenae

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that shine over burials and the volcano that erupts at the North Pole throw a ghostly light on the vanity of human efforts. At the other end of the earth, a magnetic sphinx-like mountain dominates the desolation of the Antarctic, devouring men and ships alike. Fragmentation, the visible or hidden mark of disaster, is dramatically exemplified by body parts left to dry on the ropes of a raft, as anatomical fragments painted with tragic beauty by Géricault, or again as relics from lost ships and men scattered over frozen landscapes. Part 4 argues that the memory of disasters past plays a specific role in our cultural imagination. Disaster movies have always owed their success to their denial of the disaster’s greatest danger, in that they save the individual from the threat of anonymity. Their heroes remain whole, even when maimed or wounded, their spirits undaunted by private doubts and external threat. By contrast, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-up and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation elaborate on the birth of disastrous events as solitary confrontations between the self and its desire for knowledge. In both films, technology serves to increase the perception of a fleeting reality while at the same time withholding the mastery to be gained from forbidden truth. The movies seize upon the moment when the technology that affords Coppola’s Harry Caul or Antonioni’s Thomas a narrowly defined control points to a murder they have been unable to prevent or interpret. Layers of carefully constructed perceptions become unraveled to expose the bare truth of their conflicted selves. Thinking through disasters is best exemplified in our incapacity to reassemble fragments into a reassuring whole. The films of Coppola and Antonioni are explicitly related through their acknowledged debt to a short story by Julio Cortázar, “Las Babas del diablo.” Such is not the case for the third film, which I view nonetheless as encapsulating the dilemma so powerfully exposed in the first two works. The increasing sense of emergency that structures modern relations of power was brilliantly conveyed by Ridley Scott in his 1982 film Blade Runner, the story of four defiant replicants/slaves doomed to an early death, and their killer’s realization that he, too, was programmed at his inception for a future he could not control. We are called to witness the arrival of a new message-bearer: a replicant from an “off-world” colony, a fallen star from somewhere closer to the “shoulder of Orion” than to Earth, where he has returned to die. Inasmuch as it retains the echo of its etymological sense, disaster finds a privileged representation in this

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science-fiction dystopia. The movie acts as reflection and prismatic shattering of the light we have gained in the face of disasters. At one point in The Writing of Disaster, Maurice Blanchot reflects that “the cosmic order still subsists, but as an arrogant, impatient, discredited reign.”21 The emerging constellations of long-past stellar events offer a glimpse of the chaos that was not mastered. “Fiery the angels fell,” says Roy Batty, the dying replicant of Blade Runner, “thunder rolled under their shores, burning with the fires.”22 And so provisionally we, too, confront our undoing. Though the chapters that follow do not explicitly comment on the disasters that have most recently reassessed the power of nature over men, each one anticipates contemporary crises: it is easy to recognize in older discourses about the plague or cholera some of the arguments that ostracized AIDS patients. The assessment of human responsibility in the loss of lives caused by the Lisbon earthquake has been echoed by the bitter realization that stronger levees might have saved the city of New Orleans. The personal political crises that led to, or stemmed from, the French Revolution can be seen as the prelude to a critical reassessment of the modern subject as fragmented body and mind, public and private, torn by conflicting desires and secret ambitions. This book hopes to capture some of the changing conceptual structures that have given natural and political disasters a pervasive impact on the concepts of rationality and science in an era best defined by its post-traumatic disorders.

Part One acts of god, de e d s o f m e n

In the war zone, where one cannot escape situating the texts under discussion, a variety of speech act continues to wage battle. It turns out that we have stumbled into a twilight zone between knowing and not knowing, a space where utterances (“as well Publick as Private”) create myths whose transmissions are primarily oral. They operate according to a logic of contagion, communicating, like certain diseases, a kind of uncontrollable proliferation. avital ronell, “Street-Talk”

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1 Enlightenment and the Plague On May 25, 1720, the ship Grand Saint-Antoine sailed into Marseilles, carrying a full cargo of silks, cotton, and bales of wool she had taken on board in Smyrna and Cyprus. Her captain, Jean-Baptiste Chataud, showed the port officials his patentes nettes, letters certifying that medical authorities had inspected the ship in her various ports of call, and found no sign of dangerous disease. There were a few warning signs, however: the Grand Saint-Antoine had lost five men during her voyage: three sailors, a passenger from Turkey, and the ship’s own surgeon. Authorities in Livorno had forbidden the ship to dock, scrawling on the back of Tripoli’s patente nette that all precautionary measures should be taken when the ship reached her final destination. Upon arriving in Marseilles, the Grand Saint-Antoine’s cargo was put through routine disinfection procedures, and a two-week quarantine was imposed on her crew: not unusual for a ship coming from the Middle East. But the Grand Saint-Antoine also carried the plague that would devastate Marseilles over the following year, causing more than forty thousand deaths in the city alone.1 Spreading to the cities of Aix and Toulon, the disease cut a swath of fear that would haunt political and medical authorities for years to come. In The Theater and Its Double, Antonin Artaud gives a memorable account of the epidemic that swept Marseilles after the arrival of the Grand Saint-Antoine, describing the plague as a disease that challenged all ancient and modern scientific explanations. He views the plague’s symptoms as manifestations of an extreme disorder that inscribed on the body the signs of an untamed chaos: [The victim] is seized by a terrible fatigue, the fatigue of a centralized magnetic suction, of his molecules divided and drawn toward their annihilation. . . . His pulse, which at times slows down to a shadow of itself, a mere virtuality of a pulse, at others races after the boiling of the fever 17

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Fig. 1. Jean-François de Troy, La Peste dans la ville de Marseille en 1720, par J.-F. de Troy (The plague in the city of Marseille in 1720, by Jean-François of Troy). After an engraving by Simon Thomassin. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photograph: © Pierre Barbier / Roger-Viollet / The Image Works.

within, consonant with the streaming aberration of his mind. . . . [T]he body fluids, furrowed like the earth struck by lightning, like lava kneaded by subterranean forces, search for an outlet. The fieriest point is formed at the center of each spot; around these points the skin rises in blisters like air bubbles under the surface of lava, and these blisters are surrounded by circles, of which the outermost, like Saturn’s ring around the incandescent planet, indicates the extreme limit of a bubo.2

But for all the telluric violence suffered by the plague victims, Artaud notes, autopsies revealed no internal lesions: Whatever may be the errors of historians or physicians concerning the plague, I believe we can agree upon the idea of a malady that would be a kind of psychic entity and would not be carried by a virus. If one wished to analyze closely all the facts of plague contagion that history or even memoirs provide us with, it would be difficult to isolate one actually verified instance of contagion by contact.3

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Alexandre Yersin’s 1894 discovery of the bacillus that caused the plague, Artaud argues, hardly explained the true nature of the disease. Artaud proposes instead to explore the plague’s “spiritual physiognomy,” one that underlines the “spiritual freedom” with which the plague develops, “without rats, without microbes, and without contact” and from which he would deduce “the somber and absolute action of a spectacle.”4 Artaud’s mystical reading of the disease duplicates, in fact, many of the observations of witnesses to the Marseilles 1720 epidemic. What Artaud calls the “frenzy” of the last of the living, and “the surge of erotic fever” that seized the recovered victims, also impressed witnesses in Marseilles: “Many people thought that the plague excited love, and that there was an extraordinary disposition to procreate, in order to replace so many people who had died,” wrote one observer. “The hospitals themselves have become tabernacles for sinners,” wrote a priest, “death is almost always the result of fornication, adultery, and rape.”5 The path of devastation caused by the disease and the disorders that followed its outbreak were watched with growing anxiety by the rest of Europe. More than the disaster of Lisbon, the plague of Marseilles set the stage for the most important debates of the Age of Reason, calling attention to the radical limits of scientific knowledge and human understanding.

a protean di sease By the time the Chevalier de Jaucourt—one of Diderot’s closest collaborators—wrote the articles dedicated to the plague in the Encyclopédie, Europe had been free of the disease for a number of years. Yet fear of the plague was intense. Though it has been assumed that by the 1750s scientific discourse had long eclipsed the superstition and legends of old times, it is worth noting that the Encyclopédie’s articles on the plague describe at length the ancient terrors and all the obscure anxieties that had long made the plague the paradigm of all diseases. Jaucourt defines the plague as “an epidemic disease, contagious, very acute, and caused by subtle venom disseminated through the air.” After detailed descriptions of the disease’s “terrible rage,” Jaucourt concludes that the best protection from the plague (also reflected in a much-quoted proverb) is to flee its devastation: Mox, longe, tarde, cede, recede, redi (flee promptly, go far away, return a long time afterward). The elusive disease, he writes, strikes rich and poor indiscriminately, old and young alike, and it produces an infinite diversity of contradictory symptoms. Antoine

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Furetière’s Dictionnaire universel had already noted that the signs of the plague were so varied that “one can hardly find two sick men with the same symptoms.”6 The patient’s pulse may be “strong” or “weak and frequent,” writes Jaucourt; it is “at times even, at times uneven.” Some patients are feverish and exhausted while others remain strong; some suffer hemorrhages “through the nose or the mouth, through the eyes, or the ears, or the penis or the womb”; some sweat blood all over their bodies, experiencing “exterior cold with fire inside.” The patients’ urine may remain “unchanged,” or “very different”; it may be “clear or cloudy,” or again “bloody.” Diseased bodies may be covered with purple or black spots, which may be “sometimes numerous, sometimes few in number, sometimes large, sometimes small, sometimes exactly round, sometimes on one part of the body, sometimes on another, sometimes all over the body.” Although the plague’s “venom” acts “very differently” from that of other diseases, it seems to combine them all in the dizzying array of its symptoms. Jaucourt faithfully echoes Guy de la Brosse’s 1623 treatise, which stated: “A venom is nothing other than a malignant substance, stamped with the image of death and the power to destroy the subject against whom it acts: the plague’s venom is the most general of all venoms and acts in accord with [il a convenance avec] all of them; indeed it contains them all.”7 As a later commentator would put it, “The plague exhibits the symptoms of all the other diseases.”8 Jaucourt’s description of the plague’s symptoms follows a complex and contradictory list of its causes: the plague may be carried by the southern winds, he wrote, yet be caused by an absence of wind; it may result from excessive cold or excessive heat, very dry or very humid air. Anticipating Artaud’s remarks that “the Grand Saint-Antoine did not bring the plague to Marseilles” because “it was already there,” Jaucourt notes that the seeds of the plague could remain hidden for a very long time in infected bodies. “Thus one saw persons fall dead, and suddenly struck with the plague when simply opening infected bales, unloaded from ships that came from the Orient.” Everything conspires to upset the body. “A poor diet and an abuse of non-natural things, either in the air or in the food, or lack of exercise may greatly contribute to attracting this disease.” When simply breathing or eating or famine can kill, and the wind or the lack of it can infest a city with the plague, the outlook is bleak. Jaucourt readily admits the defeat of men in his paragraph entitled “Prognosis”: It is all the more unfortunate that no one has yet uncovered the cause or the cure of this terrible disease, although we have a number of complete

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treatises on its cause and the ways to treat it. It is indeed the cruelest of all evils. All shudder at the name of the disease alone; this fear is but too justified; a thousand times more fatal than war, it kills more people than fire and sword. One reflects with horror on its terrible devastation; it carries off entire families, mature men, adults, children still in their cradle; even those who are still hidden in their mother’s womb, although they appear to be protected, incur the same fate; it is even more pernicious for pregnant women, and if their child is born, will not to live but die; the air is fatal to him. The air is more fatal still for those with a strong and vigorous constitution. The plague destroys relations among citizens, communication among parents; it breaks the strongest bonds of families and society. In the face of so many calamities, men are continuously on the verge of falling into despair.

With no cure in sight, and no effective ways of containing the disease, Jaucourt focuses on the plague’s most serious legacy: by breaking men’s natural bonds—those that unite family members—the plague threatens the social project at the core of the philosophes’ program. Once communications are disrupted, men are plunged into the isolation of an earlier age, deprived of the care and compassion of others. When Jaucourt writes that the plague is more deadly than any war, he alludes not only to the number who died, but to the more radical undoing of the social ties without which progress cannot be measured or secured. The plague thus signals a disruption more extreme than the symptoms that transform and disfigure the diseased body. It serves as a dark reminder that man’s domination of nature, for all its realized ambitions, is at the mercy of the winds. In one of their more trenchant definitions, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno define the program of Enlightenment as “the disenchantment of the world; the dissolution of myths and the substitution of knowledge for fancy.” The mastering of matter, the regulated ordering of the natural world that formed the centerpiece of Enlightenment philosophy, they argue, left no room for the multitude of deities and hidden spirits who alternately protected and threatened mankind. “There was to be no mystery—which means, too, no wish to reveal mystery.” Man’s sovereignty over the natural world was to be secured through a form of knowledge that organized nature, through the objectifying act of naming, classifying, and “the regulative thought without whose fixed distinctions universal truths cannot exist.”9 The endless pursuit of knowledge that arose out of a terror of the unknown would thus achieve a double goal: to insure man’s freedom from fear and to secure his domination of the physical world.

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From this perspective, Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie has been justifiably described as Enlightenment’s consummate project. But in the Encyclopédie, too, the search for knowledge battles its own demons, disclosing in many ways the fears that restricted its triumph. The entries on the plague betray not just the limitations of man’s extant knowledge, but also a more pervasive fascination with the inchoate world man sought to dominate and to rationalize. For the plague defies enlightenment, and the disease’s essential contradictions return the world of men to untamed disorder. Jean-Jérôme Pestalozzi had identified the plague as the very space where the mind encounters its greatest challenge and runs the risk of being “shipwrecked,” for “the idea of the plague is so terrifying that it weakens judgment.”10 Certainly there is a rational system at work in the Encyclopédie description: Jaucourt lists four forms of the plague and six different ways of identifying it; he separates remedies into two categories, preservative and therapeutic. The list of herbal remedies is quasi-exhaustive, though not determined by any form of effectiveness: Jaucourt is careful to include a potion made with blessed thistle as well as the “celestial theriac” (a preparation made with opium and viper’s flesh, praised by Galen, and thought to have protected Mithridates from poisons). He also reviews the common medical practices, describing the physicians’ conflicting opinions, but his long piece ends with one of the Encyclopédie’s bleakest notes: “One is forced to conclude from everything that has been said about the plague that this disease is totally unknown to us as far as treatment and causes; and also that experience has only instructed us about its disastrous effects.” In his article Jaucourt states that the 1720–21 plague of Marseilles killed approximately fifty thousand people in the city alone and “produced more than 200 volumes of treatises.” Among these was the Lettre de M*** à M. S*** à Nismes, written in Marseilles during the epidemic and which summed up the state of current medical knowledge: “The Plague is one of those impenetrable mysteries that defy reason.”11 At the time Jaucourt was writing, the plague remained a real threat. But apart from inspiring a legitimate fear, the plague represents the ultimate disorder, one that negates or reverses all measure of human progress. The plague is unpredictable, identifiable only by its defiance of all definition, recognizable only in that it simulates all other disorders. The plague can be located at the space where the very distinction between order and disorder ceases to be meaningful: a body exhibiting no symptoms and a body exhibiting all symptoms are equally susceptible of carrying the disease. By its nature,

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the plague involves more than human concerns; it implicates far greater forces of radical disruption.

cosmic uph ea vals When discussing sources of the plague, authors evoked heaven and hell, cosmic configurations and the bowels of the earth. Jaucourt, too, followed in a long tradition when he wrote that earthquakes were thought to cause the plague: when the earth opened up, poisonous vapors infested the atmosphere. Drawing from Lucretius’s double theory that pestilence arose from the earth and descended from the clouds, all treatises on the plague suggested that opposite elements conspired to unleash the disease on humans. The Black Plague12 of 1348–50 had been attributed to a fatal conjunction of Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter in that year, and celestial portents were said to have foretold other occurrences of the disease. The outbreaks that devastated Trent in 1574, and later Padua and Venice, were believed to have been caused by the appearance of a new star in 1572. The physician de la Brosse commented at length on the relationship between the stars and the plague: “Astrologers say that eclipses, either of the sun or the moon, taking place in an air or water triplicity, mainly in Scorpio or the lunar Dragon’s tail, positioned in unfavorable aspects of Mars and Saturn, are apt to signify great and general plagues, as well as the conjunctions of superior Planets, new Stars and Comets.”13 John Gadbury’s 1665 London’s Deliverance Predicted: In a Short Dis­ course shewing the Causes of Plagues also mentions that “the furious and hostile beams of the fiery planet Mars for the most part give beginning to the Pestilence, and are the eminent cause of its raging; and Saturn gives it continuance.”14 In 1800 Jean-Pierre Papon would note that although Italians attributed their most devastating plagues to God’s anger, doctors and physicians gave them a less elevated origin. Some argued it was a fire coming out of the earth, or fallen from the heavens in the Orient, that, spreading to the occident consumed more than a hundred leagues, devouring men, animals, trees, and stones; from which resulted a corruption that infected the mass of the air, and fell from the sky as would the snow, burning men, earth, and mountains.15

For its part, the Paris College of Medicine attributed the plague to a “combat of the sun and the stars against the sea.”16

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These descriptions have in common the blurring of boundaries and the fusion of opposite elements—air, water, and fire, heaven and earth—all suggesting a return to primitive chaos. Certainly the cosmic signs or causes of the plague meant to duplicate a divine—and thus ordered—origin, such as Apollo’s silver bow, which unleashed the plague on Agamemnon’s armies. Heaven was the source of the hellish disease that destroyed humans. “Homer’s plague marks the stage at which prayer and sacrifice have displaced magic in the struggle with pestilence,” writes Raymond Crawfurd.17 From Göttingen to Orvieto, San Gimignano, Nuremberg, and Rouen, a rich iconography showed Christ and his angels firing off the arrows that carried the plague to terrified mortals.18 But even when sent by a justifiably angry god, the punishment far exceeds the sins it is meant to punish. All sense of measure is lost. As a Portuguese author in the seventeenth century noted: The plague is, without a doubt, of all life’s calamities, the cruelest, and veritably the most atrocious. It is with great reason that it is called by antonomasy le Mal. For there is no evil on earth comparable or similar to the plague. As soon as this violent and impetuous fire lights up a kingdom or a republic, one sees stunned magistrates, terrified populations, and disarticulated governments. . . . Everything is reduced to extreme confusion. Everything is ruin. . . . Men fear the very air they breathe. They are afraid of the dead, of the living, and of themselves, since death very often wraps itself in the clothes that cover them. . . . One has no pity for one’s friends, since pity itself is perilous.19

linguistic conta mi nation The naming process itself, the separation of signs and things that allows for the analytical examination and classification of the natural world, seems to be affected by the plague. It is as if the old powers, mysteriously hidden in the words of a magical time, once again threatened those who contemplated the plague. In France, notes Jean-Noël Biraben, “the plague inspired such a terror that one avoided calling it by its name, more often referring to it as ‘the contagion,’ or ‘the mortality.’ ”20 In England it was called “the sicknesse.” Denis Reynaud and Samy Ben Messaoud have noted that during the 1720 Marseilles outbreak, the press carefully avoided using the word “plague.”21 The French word for the plague, peste, like the English word “pestilence,” came from the Latin pestis, which designated

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all forms of scourge and catastrophe. “It is only during the fourteenth century, from the time of the famous Black Plague, that the word came very quickly in common language to designate this epidemic characterized by buboes and carbuncles (or the spitting of blood) that caused many sudden deaths.”22 The English word “plague,” or the German Plage, both derived from the Latin flagellum, which originally meant a blow and later came to mean the disease that delivered the worst of all blows. In the development of language, proper names normally precede common names, which already imply a form of classification. But in the case of the plague, the common names peste or plague acquired the restricted meaning of the proper name long after they came into use as common names for catastrophic diseases—unless one considers that the plague itself, exhibiting as it did the symptoms of all other illnesses and producing the effects of all other disasters, encompasses them all. Physicians always spoke of the “plague venom,” and de la Brosse remarked that “a venom is nothing but a malign substance, bearing the image of death, and the power to destroy the subject against whom it acts: the plague venom, which is the most general, is in accord with all venoms, nay, contains them all, whether mineral, vegetable, or animals.”23 Its multiple symptoms make the plague hard to identify: “The plague would not have caused such cruel ravages in Marseilles if it had not come as if by surprise; but it was so skillful in dissimulation that it disguised itself, like another Proteus, under different figures or Symptoms which made it unrecognizable, and thus deceived most of the Physicians,” wrote an anonymous witness to the Marseilles epidemic.24 In his Observations faites sur la peste qui règne à présent à Marseille et dans la Provence, JeanBaptiste Bertrand repeated: “[The plague] is a Proteus, it is said, who changes shape every day,” making it particularly difficult to find a single remedy for it.25 This image would be used again by Patrick Russell, who wrote in 1792 that “the plague is a sort of Proteus.”26 The word “plague” thus did not simply designate a specific disease, but the capacity of a single disease to contain all diseases, of one evil to subsume all evils, a powerful reminder of both the fragility of life and the limits of human knowledge.

disorde rs The first official victim of the plague in Marseilles was Marie Dauplan, a woman from the poor district of the city. When she died suddenly on

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June 20, 1720, no one thought to connect her death with those that had occurred aboard the Grand Saint-Antoine.27 A second victim expired a week later from a high fever. With the appearance of buboes on patients, a sudden increase in the number of deaths, and the spreading of the disease to the rich districts of the city, authorities finally grew alarmed. Initial precautions—burying bodies in quick lime, isolating patients, sealing infected houses—were discreetly implemented on July 10, but secretly, to prevent the spread of alarm throughout the city. Rumors of the disease, however, soon reached Aix, and an intendant sent an urgent message to the Marseilles magistrates. Interestingly, he was not worried about the plague itself, but about the fears that would arise if word got out that the city was infected: “I see from the rumors spreading here that you have not kept secret the accident that happened in the Lenche quarter. . . . The practice however is to keep these misfortunes very secret while taking all measures to prevent new occurrences with vigilance.”28 Marseilles officials indeed refused to name the disease, but a violent storm that occurred at the time would later be described as the unmistakable sign of the impending disaster: “During the night of the 21st to the 22nd of July, a furious storm raged over the city with rain, hail, lightning, and thunder more terrible than anyone could remember. Lightning struck a thousand times around the city as if it wanted to destroy us; it only wanted to threaten us, but it seemed to be the tragic sign of the misfortunes that were going to beset us.”29 The mythical powers of heaven were more easily recognizable in retrospect than the clinical signs of the plague. Like an eerie echo of the storm that had lit up the skies just a few days earlier, the entire city was soon engulfed in a blaze ordered by the magistrates to purify the infected atmosphere. The fires burned for three days, making public the nature of the disease whose name remained unspoken. By then the number of deaths had risen prodigiously, and rigorous measures were put in place. Guards would be posted to prevent inhabitants from affected districts from leaving their houses; food would be distributed, patients isolated. Plague had officially entered the city. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault describes the measures recommended in times of the plague as “an organization in depth of surveillance and control.” First, a strict partial partitioning: the closing of the town and its outlying districts, a prohibition to leave the town on pain of death, the killing of all stray animals; the division of the town into distinct quarters, each governed by an intendant. Each street is placed under the authority of a

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syndic, who keeps it under surveillance; if he leaves the street, he will be condemned to death. . . . [A]ll this constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism. The plague is met by order.30

In Sicily a physician named Ingrescia had said that the plague could only be fought with gold, fire, and the gallows: gold to buy food for a population no longer able to work, fire to purify the atmosphere, and the gallows to maintain order.31 During the Great Plague of Milan, in 1630, authorities had sequestered houses, nailing shut their doors and windows to prevent infected inhabitants from leaving and spreading the disease.32 At the time of the Marseilles plague, a physician’s treatise suggested the rigorous widespread network of surveillance that Foucault would later associate with panopticism. In his Traité de la peste, published in Geneva in 1721, Jean-Jacques Manget spelled out in particularly dramatic terms the pitiless measures that alone could save a place or a country from the epidemic: All People and all Countries wishing to remain in a perfect state of health must pay continuous attention to what takes place among their neighbors. If rumors spread that a contagious disease is gaining a foothold [in a neighboring land], they must break off all communication and all exchanges with it. They must prohibit all inhabitants of both provinces, the infected and the healthy, from engaging in any sort of communication in the future, under any pretext, on pain of death: and for this decree to be religiously observed it will be important to post well-armed Soldiers on the borders, and to build gallows on all public roads; either to intimidate those who will want to leave the infected country or to hang on the spot those who will have defied the prohibition.

Manget went on to warn that if the disease spread to a new town despite all precautions, that town should be immediately surrounded by guards “who will have the right to kill without pity all those who, despite the prohibition against doing so, either enter or leave.” The same rule should apply to infected houses, which “will be surrounded as well by wellarmed guards who will shoot those who will want to leave; for it is infinitely better in such a case to take the life of a few suspicious persons than to allow them to communicate with those who are Healthy.”33 According to Manget, such strict measures had never before been applied except in Silesia, which had successfully avoided the plague when it raged among its neighbors.

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Foucault notes that the plague had given rise to a “whole literary fiction: suspended laws, lifted prohibitions” that overshadowed “the political dream of the plague, which was exactly its reverse.”34 But in Marseilles, neither the festival nor its disciplinary opposite ever ruled the infected city. The plague outran both the last frantic effort to live life to the fullest and the repressive measures meant to control its rampage. As one anonymous observer wrote: One saw streets littered with plague-ridden furnishings that had been thrown through the windows, and bodies, the number of which increased by the hour for lack of arms to remove them. Among these bodies, agonizing patients who had abandoned their sickbeds cried for help from neighbors shut within their houses, or from a small number of passers-by. And they almost always implored in vain: terror hardened hearts; the slightest help was refused. Happy was he who received a sip of the water mixed with blood that stagnated in the open sewers!35

Henri François-Xavier de Belsunce, Bishop of Marseilles, wrote to the Regent on August 20, 1720: “For 8 days I have seen and smelt 200 dead bodies, rotting around my house and under my windows. I have been obliged to walk through the streets, all without exception lined on both sides with half-rotten cadavers, half-eaten by dogs. The middle of the streets was so filled with plague-ridden rags and refuse that one did not know where to walk.” On September 4 he wrote to the Archbishop of Arles: “The dead are left in the street and are not buried; the sick are left there as well, and die without assistance. . . . The odor and the spectacle of so many cadavers that fill the streets have prevented me from going out for a good number of days, as I cannot bear them.”36 By late summer, the magistrates themselves admitted their helplessness. They called in the notorious and dreaded corbeaux—convicts promised a commutation of their sentence in exchange for performing the dangerous task of removing the bodies. But the corbeaux proceeded to loot houses, killing witnesses and throwing the dead and the dying together on the carts, then fleeing at the first opportunity. The restoration of order in the devastated city took place sometime in September. At that point, a witness noted the lugubrious silence of a desolated city transformed into a “somber desert,” where “everything is generally closed and forbidden.”37 Only then did systematic removal of the dead take place. By that time, more than two thousand putrefied bodies could be counted on the broad Tourette esplanade. When Langeron,

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commander of the galleys, took over the running of the city, he ordered all municipal officials and physicians who had fled to return immediately to Marseilles. The precarious reorganization of the hospitals, financial help from the Regent, and cautiously restored communications with the kingdom brought a measure of relief. If the scene was far from the tragic celebration of life and last grasp at rebellious pleasure that Artaud envisioned, it was also far from the rigorous surveillance grid proposed by various authors. The plague had not been met by order. Rather, as the plague itself receded from a city stripped of life and hope, a slow reorganization took shape, not so much to battle the disease as to acknowledge its devastation and the lasting traces left on the haunted survivors.

contagion A second wave of rumors began to spread through Marseilles, as frightening as the initial news that the plague had descended upon the city. The Grand Saint-Antoine had been burned in the harbor, at the order of the Regent, and it was widely believed that the city itself would soon follow. “At the Regent’s Council there was talk of burning Marseilles to consume the city and everything in it.” The Regent himself was reported to have stated: “Better a city perish than an entire kingdom.”38 From the beginning, rumors and the plague shared the same logic of proliferation. In the first historical account of the plague, Thucydides wrote that rumors spread by Pericles’s enemies greatly contributed to the terror that filled the people of Athens. As many commentators later remarked, the Athenians faced a truly contagious disease: not the plague, but the spread of malicious lies, which caused far greater damage than the sickness that decimated the city. Dan Sperber has recently proposed an “epidemiological theory” that aims to establish a “relationship of reciprocal relevance between cognitive and social sciences, comparable to the relationship that exists between pathology and epidemiology.”39 Indeed, the association of language and disease, communication and illness, reaches back to the first descriptions of epidemics. In his 1755 Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among Men, Rousseau imagined primitive men freed from an awareness of their impending death. “They finally die without it being perceived that they cease to be, and almost without perceiving it themselves.” What Rousseau calls “the immense distance there must have been between the pure state of nature and the need for languages”40 also describes the time when diseases first

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appeared and spread. Words, like epidemics, circulate, killing as surely as the invisible agents of incomprehensible illnesses. Rousseau himself gave in his Confessions the most eloquent example of the role of rumors, what Avital Ronell describes as the “rhetoric of dark rumblings”41 that accompanies the contamination of the social body.42 The structure of paranoia, fed by the double phenomenon of true disease and false rumors, never failed to add its own peculiar brand of destruction to the dread of epidemics. “When rumors affecting his standing are not noticeably stray but appear in some sinister way to be motivated, they are shown to reach Rousseau’s ear via what is called the grapevine—a method of transmission whose origins are in the Civil War, but which extends toward all wars and pestilence,” notes Ronell.43 The rumors surrounding the plague had their own specificity that duplicated the ways in which the disease itself circulated. The spreading of rumors was fed by, and in turn reflected, two opposing views on the plague: that it spread through the air or through contact with contaminated bodies. Although the words “epidemic disease” now designates both contagious and non-contagious diseases, for centuries the word “epidemic” had a meaning quite contrary to that of “contagious” diseases. Epidemic diseases spread through the atmosphere, and common wisdom dictated that one should flee as far as possible from the corrupted atmosphere that poisoned city or country. Contagious diseases required opposite measures: rigorous isolation or containment of infected bodies and places. The differences between contagious and epidemic infections thus implied radically opposing views of the diseased body or the subject’s rights and obligations within the social contract. Until the nineteenth century, as Françoise Hildesheimer has observed, the official medical opinion was that the plague was not a contagious disease. Indeed, as late as 1846, a 1,056-page report published by the French Royal Academy of Medicine concluded that the plague was carried through the air, and that “no rigorous observation proves that the plague can be transmitted by contact with patients” in a well-ventilated area.44 Although popular observers, administrative authorities, and a few physicians such as Frascator and Athanasius Kircher, held that the plague spread by contact, most faculties of medicine taught that the corruption of the air was mainly responsible for its dissemination.45 Two of the most famous physicians summoned to Marseilles in 1720, Chirac and Chicoyneau, insisted the disease was not contagious. The Pancoucke dictionary, which summarized medical opinion prevalent at the time, suggested that few diseases were contagious, and most epidemics were

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caused by the corruption of the air: “One has to posit as a principle that all epidemic diseases come from the atmosphere to which they owe either their origin or their propagation. Once this principle is admitted, the word carries a fixed meaning that is quite distinct from that of the word contagion.”46 The Pancoucke distinguished three forms of epidemics: first “constitutional epidemics, due to the alteration of the air when it comes into contact with the body and due most of all to rapid changes of one quality of air into its opposite. These epidemics follow the order of medical seasons, to wit spring and fall.” Second, the author listed “effluvian epidemics” caused by vapors rising from swamps and stagnant waters. Finally, “miasmatic epidemics” were caused by the putrefaction of sick animal bodies and carried by the winds. Like effluvia, miasma entered the body through the lungs. The author of the article on epidemic diseases noted that typhus (which is now thought to have been the plague described by Thucydides) “has none of the characters of contagious diseases.”47 As for the plague, the writer asserted, no medical evidence was sufficient to decide whether it was epidemic or contagious. Although overwhelming fear of contagion dictated well-established methods of fighting infection including lazarettos, quarantines, and cordons sanitaires, a great many medical institutions strenuously fought the notion that the plague spread by human contact. One of the most interesting texts on the question of contagion was written by Silvestro Facio after the Milan epidemic of 1576 and published in France with a treatise by Guillaume Patel. Paradoxes of the Plague, in which is clearly shown how one can live and stay in infected cities without fear of contagion adopts the device already used by Boccaccio’s Decameron: during seven days of conversations, Facio and his interlocutors debate not just whether the plague is contagious, but whether belief in contagion may not itself have deadly consequences. “All the plagues of which we have learned through historians have been caused by the price of food and beverages, earthquakes, a large quantity of unburied dead bodies or cadavers, ponds and swamps, or else by infected air resulting from Celestial figures, and southerly winds.” Measures of isolation that governments may take are thus useless, causing unnecessary disruptions, ruining commerce, and impeding vital communications. Above all, Facio argues, one should resist the view that the plague is contagious. “To believe that one contracts the plague by touching the hand or the cloak of a plague victim is more dangerous for the alteration of the mind than any disease.”48 The figure of repetition that characterizes rumors and propels their inevitable spread thus imitates the plague. Rumors are contagious and will

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kill as surely as the deadliest disease by isolating patients, depriving them of needed care, or by preventing inhabitants from fleeing the poisonous air that threatens their health. At the time of the Marseilles plague, one inhabitant offered remedies against the plague, the medical body, and, most of all, “the Contagion of its dangerous ideas.”49

venoms In 1726 Antoine Deidier, Conseiller-Médecin du Roy, gave the inaugural speech for the solemn opening of the Montpellier School of Medicine. His speech was entitled “Dissertation in which is established a specific opinion on the contagion of the plague.” Deidier, who had been dispatched by the Paris authorities to fight the Marseilles plague outbreak, offered a balanced view on the question of contagion. “My Dissertation will be ambidextrous, so to speak; I will first try to prove that the plague is only too contagious, and I will subsequently show that contagion is not produced by a simple atmosphere carrying pestilential atoms, but only by immediate and prolonged contact.”50 Deidier then proceeded to discuss two medical works, one by the German-born Jesuit Kircher, who strongly believed in the extremely contagious nature of the plague,51 and the other by a physician named Gerstman, who had argued, following a number of authors, that the plague was caused by a feeling of terror. Deidier’s initial comments on Gertsman’s work read like another example of the Enlightenment’s struggle against damaging superstition: Although [Gertsman] is described as a practicing physician in the book entitled Le Tombeau de la peste, his opinion is that the plague is neither contagious nor epidemic . . . but results uniquely from a terror that drastically modifies the nature of the blood, provoking abscesses and bubonic eruptions. But is an author who thinks in these terms awake or dreaming? Which new oracle told him that terror has the capacity to produce the illnesses one is afraid of ? Are there any illnesses that do not frighten hypochondriacs?

Deidier went on to illustrate his point: “Have you ever seen anyone so frightened by an unexpected encounter with a viper that he felt its mortal bite from the mere fear of being attacked? Would the terror of the plague alone be endowed with the fatal power of causing the disease?”52

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Obviously more than one terror needed to be laid to rest in discourses on the plague, and Deidier’s evocation of the viper’s bite is anything but a coincidence. The Fall from grace and innocence that presided over human destiny also informs theories of the plague. Certainly, as Crawfurd puts it, “the association of the serpent and pestilence is well-nigh worldwide. The Vedas teem with it: classical and Christian literature and art are full of it.”53 Mythological lore gives us the full measure of the ambiguous power of serpents. The avenging Erinyes, endowed like Medusa with snake hair, pursued Orestes relentlessly. Their fury was appeased when Apollo purified Orestes and a new rite was devised to honor them, but at least one tradition suggests that the Erinyes claimed their revenge, after all, when Orestes was killed by a serpent’s bite. Serpents are the symbol of healing as well, adorning the staff Apollo gave his son Asclepius, demigod of medical arts. Snake venom kills and heals in equal measure. In his 1623 Discours des maladies épidémiques et contagieuses, Guillaume Patel returned to the mythological image of Apollo: Formerly, the people of Lydia adored Apollo, surnamed by them the plague bearer, not because he sent the plague, but rather because he put an end to it. For this reason, not just the people of Lydia but all the Ancients, Romans and others, made statues and images of the God Apollo. . . . In his Iliad, Homer tells us that Apollo sent the plague on the Greeks, for Agamemnon was unjustly holding the daughter of his priest Chryses: similarly, Virgil teaches that the Jucquains were struck by the plague for having threatened Polimura. Thus, Valerius the great recounts in Book 4, Chapter 8, that the plague having afflicted Rome for almost three consecutive years, they could not find any other remedy than to send an embassy to Epidaurus to bring back Aesculapius, already dead and deified, instead of whom they put on their ship a large serpent and having brought him back, they built a temple in his honor, on an island of the Tiber, near Rome.54

Echoing the Bible’s “fiery snakes” sent by God to punish the sins of His people, modern writers spoke of the plague as a “rain of snakes,”55 and of the mysterious agent of the sickness as “venom.” In 1620 Jean de Lamperrière speculated that southern winds brought the plague from “Arabia and other countries infested with venomous creatures from which they draw their malignity.”56 A few years later de la Brosse noted that, at the time of his writing, a particular conjunction of stars and planets

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threatened to bring the plague, “which is confirmed by the head of Medusa that is very near the zenith.” Medusa’s head, in the Perseus constellation, served as the reminder of the pervasive presence of venom in the universe, the remnant of a primitive and terrifying world. “The venom arising from chaos still draws from its disorder,”57 wrote de la Brosse. He further explained why the flesh of the viper—along with opium, the main ingredient of the venerable theriac—was thought to be an effective agent against the plague venom: One wonders why and how [the viper] is a remedy against the plague, given that it is itself plague and venom. While the Serpent is alive, it attracts those venoms from the earth that are similar to its own; once it is dead, this same faculty, spread all over its substances, acts in the same way: it still attracts venom analogous to its own. . . . Not that the viper’s flesh is in any way venomous, even though it has the faculty to attract venom, for an animal’s venom is like the last and the most perfect accomplishment of its form. After having distilled the venom from chaos, it always stores it somewhere in reserve, to be used in good time.58

In de la Brosse’s analysis, fascination with serpents is closely tied to a tale of domination and ordering of the universe. The serpent’s power stems from the chaos of earlier times, and the serpent accomplishes naturally what humans still strive to do: extracting order from chaos, thriving on the deadly invisible agents disseminated all over the universe. It stores venom as humans do knowledge, or the way the “viper’s tongue” gathers and spreads vicious rumors. De la Brosse’s description of the plague venom as “a subtle, indeed spiritual enemy of human life” would later be echoed in Jaucourt’s Encyclopédie article when he reflects on the subtle agents that transmit diseases: “We must be allowed to propose that seminal agents must be considered as extreme manifestations of the class of material beings, placed as it were at the confines where material beings border on abstract beings.”59 For de la Brosse, the plague’s “universal agent of corruption and destruction [acts] in Nature as fire does in Art.”60 This final enigmatic observation may have no other purpose than to bring together the combined forces of nature and art, or rather to suggest that the serpent—Nature’s own agent of spiritual and material destruction—tempter, god and devil, poison and remedy, model and nemesis, is, like the plague, a metaphysical concept.

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on terr or Terror proliferates as well at the confines of a scientific investigation faced with material beings that border on the abstract. The terror that terror alone could kill as surely as the plague must be fought with an energy equal to that of the disease itself. During one of the plague outbreaks that ravaged the city of Lyons in the seventeenth century, a witness told of “people who were seized by such terror at the sound of the bells tied to the carts [carrying the dead] . . . that they fell dead on the spot.”61 In 1630 a French doctor named Bompart reminded his readers that “the most learned physicians all believe that the fear of this disease is enough to cause it in a suspicious atmosphere. This comes from imagination and from a heart so frightened that it is weakened and no longer resists the venom.”62 Lodovico Antonio Muratori had warned: “Apprehension, terror, and melancholia are also a plague . . . for they weaken our optimism and prepare the mass of our humors to be more receptive to, and in a way attract from afar the poison that pervades [the air], as experience has shown in a multitude of cases.”63 Jaucourt had read his classics: he lists Muratori’s work in the bibliography he provides at the end of his article, later adding himself that “all the Marseilles victims did not die from the plague, and terror killed a greater number than the disease itself.” Clearly the terror inspired by the plague far exceeded the prospect of painful death from war, famine, and fevers. The tragic aura that surrounded the disease from its first historical account survived intact into the Enlightenment—witness the second article dedicated to the plague in the Encyclopédie under the subcategory of “Modern and Ancient History.” Jaucourt begins his article with three lines borrowed from La Fontaine’s Les Animaux malades de la peste, where the plague is described as “un mal qui répand partout la terreur” (“a terror-spreading evil”). Next he gives what appears to be a rather conventional, melodramatic description of the plague as “the cruel daughter of the goddess Nemesis.” But Jaucourt quickly moves beyond the traditional imagery to draw a different picture, one that challenges the most important principles of the Enlightenment: Animals escape [the plague’s] terrible rage, while man alone serves as its prey. It brings a cloud of death on his guilty house, abandoned by temperate and beneficial winds. Everything then is disaster [Tout n’est alors que

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désastre]. Majestic Wisdom averts her vigilant eye; sword and scales fall from an idle Justice; commerce no longer brings its useful assistance; grass grows in deserted streets; men’s abodes are transformed into places worse than wild deserts; there is no one in sight, except for some frenetic wretch attempting to free himself from his bonds and escape from his fatal house, deadly sojourn of horror. The door that has not yet been infected dares not turn on its hinges; it fears society, friends, parents, and even the children of the home. Love, overwhelmed by misfortune, forgets the heart’s tender bonds and sweet promises; the firmament and atmosphere that bring life to all, are now infected with the arrows of death; everyone is struck in turn and dies without receiving care nor last farewells; no one orders his coffin: thus black despair spreads its funereal wing over devastated cities, while inflexible guards placed all around complete the scene of desolation, giving a gentler death to he who attempts to escape it.

We recognize several familiar motifs borrowed from the abundant literature on the plague, but—more important from the point of view of the Encyclopédie’s philosophical intent—the text conveys the sense that the social project itself is threatened by the plague and its terror. The metonymy that articulates the center of Jaucourt’s description—“the door that has not yet been infected”—points to, yet denies the possibility of escape. The threshold of fear cancels the frontier between the inside and the outside. There is only the totality of disaster and the giving up of all the basic tenets of sociability—pity, law, government, love, and decent burials. In this abrupt return to a primitive state where men have everything to fear from men, death may be caused by disease, an armed guard, or a parent’s neglect. Hildesheimer points out that “the disease was perceived not as individual but collective suffering. It is not the individual who is struck, but the city, the country. Death is collective. In the end, the epidemic is not thought of as disease but as a form of death, a lightning [ fulgurante] death; one imagines the plague, but not the plague-stricken; the active element is no longer the human but the disease.”64 The loss of individual identity may well be the essential cause of the terror the plague inspired in the time of Enlightenment. This loss was both social and ontological. The primacy of the collective fate that doomed all without distinction of age or social standing, the severing of ties that turned friends into enemies, the radical disorganization of the governing institutions—all conspired to erase the place traditionally assigned to the individual within the city. When Artaud describes the “spontaneous conflagration which the plague lights wherever it passes” as “nothing else

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than an immense liquidation,”65 he is referring to the loss of fixed categories and of beliefs born of experience, doctrine, or social practices. In this context, we may reexamine the spatial partitions authorities attempted to set in place during epidemics of the plague. The dream of rigid divisions meant to transform the city created a grid that was not unconnected to the grid of knowledge dreamed of by the Encyclopedists. This knowledge was limited, to be sure: healthy, defiant, putrefied, or moribund, the bodies conveyed no information apart from the fact of their immobilized presence at a certain point in the city. The Gorgon’s gaze and the serpent’s venoms had effectively won the fight: the city was paralyzed with fear and mired in an imagined order. In the frozen space of the city, the grid serves not to organize categories of knowledge—for there is nothing left to know other than the presence of the plague—but, rather, as grid alone: it serves no other purpose than its own enforcement, the last gesture against the primitive chaos that annihilates all experience. The grid’s paralyzing effect duplicates the paralysis induced by the fear of the plague. In the diseased and immobilized city, authority now mimics the plague, as if the last and desperate gesture against its devastation was not subjection but reenactment. To many critics, the 1755 Lisbon earthquake remains the disaster most closely associated with the Enlightenment, for it provided Enlightenment philosophers, from Voltaire to Rousseau and Kant, the most dramatic opportunity to rethink the relationship of man to his Creator and the workings of the natural world. The Encylopédie’s articles on the Lisbon earthquake and its aftermath were written—like the article on the plague— by Jaucourt. But “Lisbonne” and “Tremblements de terre” stand in sharp contrast, in both style and content, to the articles he wrote on the plague. Earthquakes have always frightened men, Jaucourt notes, but they have also excited a lively curiosity that has entirely elucidated their origin: “It’s obvious that, without descending to the impenetrable depths of man, one can find in many places enough agitated matter to produce all the effects we have mentioned.”66 There is no mystery in earthquakes, no need to imagine a fire consuming the center of the earth to explain them. Direct observation suffices, and if science can explain them, so can it allay metaphysical fear of an angry or indifferent God. For these reasons, the Lisbon earthquake has been described by critics as the first disaster of a post-theological age. Although the disaster’s scope and drama were still fresh in everyone’s memory when Jaucourt wrote about the earthquake, there is more than

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a little flippancy in Jaucourt’s account of the event: “On the morning of November 1st 1755, at 9:45 in the morning, took place the tragic phenomenon that [still] moves curious minds to reason, and sensitive souls to shed tears. I will leave to Physicists their conjectures, and to historians of that Country the right that belongs to them of depicting a Disaster of such extent.”67 A culture can surely be defined by the challenges it meets and the mysteries it explains, but also—and perhaps more so—by the enigmas it cannot solve and the fears it cannot allay. In this sense, the plague was Enlightenment’s disaster, an elusive affliction that bore traces of a primitive chaos, a direct threat to the power of reason. As Jaucourt’s articles make explicit, confronting the disease also means confronting the protean explanations put forward during centuries of fear and puzzlement. Yet the agent of the plague—this element “bordering on the abstract”—and the infinite variety of the symptoms it produced, found another theorization in Diderot’s Le Rêve de D’Alembert, not as disease but as the very principle of natural organization. In an ever-changing universe, D’Alembert dreams, “what is a living creature? . . . The sum of certain tendencies. . . . Can it be that I myself am anything more than a tendency? . . . I am tending toward a limit. . . . Life is a series of reactions. . . . As long as I am alive, I act and react as a mass; when I am dead I shall act and react in the form of disparate molecules.”68 If the Enlightenment inherited from a long tradition a view of the plague as a disaster of cosmic origin and proportions, it also reframed its protean nature as intricate agent of dispersion, one of those “imperceptibly small dots made up of still smaller molecules”69 that participate equally in the organization of life and the dissolution of consciousness. Diderot’s concept of fragmentation, not as death but as pure energy, dramatically transforms the power of “quasi-abstract” elements to react and transform, to adhere and disperse, as manifestations of nature’s own principle. From this perspective, the plague is not a foreign disorder disrupting physical and social bodies; it is an intricate part of nature itself. Its only power would be to make more visible and dramatic the limits toward which we tend and to signal that such limits are those of both the body and philosophy.

2 The Silence of Lisbon (1755) On November 1, 1755, an earthquake leveled the city of Lisbon and caused considerable damage throughout Portugal, southern Spain, and northern Africa. The earthquake was felt as far away as Great Britain, Holland, and Germany; some observers even thought it was related to a tremor that shook buildings in North America on the same day. The silence that followed gave the first intimation that a disastrous event had taken place in Portugal. As Anne Saada and Jean Sgard have shown, the progressive dissemination of the news followed a path comparable to seismic waves themselves, though in reverse order: Europe heard first from locations on the outskirts of the disaster, with information progressively emerging from areas closer to the epicenter of the earthquake.1 The Gazette de France reported unusual swirls in the Garonne River in Bordeaux, and similar waves were observed from Swiss lakes to Scottish lochs. In his Memoirs, Giacomo Casanova, who was jailed in Venice at the time, wrote that the large master beam in his cell had moved “as if turning upon itself,” though the tremor did not, as he had hoped, cause a complete collapse of the Doge’s palace.2 Numerous testimonies, some apocryphal, were published in the following months. They described in detail the repercussions of the earthquake and the chaos that spread throughout the city as a tsunami and a raging fire completed the destruction. One witness assured his readers that the disaster that befell the capital of Portugal offered “such a Spectacle of Terror and Amazement, as well as the Desolation to Beholders, as perhaps has not been equaled since the Foundation of the World!”3 Another added that “it would be impossible to pretend justly to describe the universal horror and distress which every where took place. The Inquisition, with all its utmost cruelty, could not have invented half such a variety of tortures for the mind as we were then suffering.”4 The number of estimated casualties ranged from 10,000 to 100,000, the lack of precise information on the exact population of Lisbon allowing for wildly differing figures.5 Before making the Lisbon disaster into a 39

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Fig. 2. Anon., Lisbone Abysmée (Lisbon abyss) (eighteenth century). Photograph: National Information Service for Earthquake Engineering Library, Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center, University of California, Berkeley.

philosophical cause célèbre, Voltaire remarked somewhat casually: “All the losses have been exaggerated. The hundred thousand men who perished in Lisbon have already been reduced to twenty-five thousand; they will probably soon be reduced to ten or twelve thousand. Only merchants know the precise amount of their losses, for they know the quantity of their goods, and kings never know the number of their men.”6 No doubt, exaggerated numbers reflected “the terror of the day,” as T. D. Kendrick has justly argued. Lisbon itself was not a large city, nor was it a city of great architectural beauty, he notes, but “it was staggeringly rich, rich in the almost fabulous contents of its palaces and churches, rich in the great stores of bullion and jewels and costly merchandise in its wharves and business premises, rich in its tremendous commercial importance.”7 Although it is difficult to establish with certainty the extent of the material damage, modern scholars such as Malcolm Jack estimate that seventeen thousand out of twenty thousand houses were destroyed.8 Half the churches and several palaces, along with invaluable collections of precious art, were damaged either by the tremors or by the fire that raged

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for almost a week. The first published description appeared in a pamphlet from Coimbra dated December 20, 1755. The Carta em que hum amigo dá noticia a outro do lamentavel successo de Lisboa contains an epic account of the earthquake. Kendrick summarizes it as follows: “The earth, we are told, had opened in great yawning caverns; the seismic waves were so tremendous that the very sea-bed was exposed . . . heretics became suddenly converted to the Roman faith. The loss of life was colossal.”9 This apocalyptic language was quite familiar to religious authorities such as Charles Wesley, a leader of the evangelical revival in England, who had written on the wake of the London earthquakes that “in many Places the Earth would crack, and open and shut quick and fast, of which Openings two or three Hundred might be seen at a Time; in some whereof the People were swallowed up, others the closing Earth caught by the Middle, and squeezed to Death; and in that Manner they were left buried with only their Heads above Ground; some Heads the Dogs eat.”10 Interestingly, the first writers to challenge both the dramatic exaggerations of early reports and the excess of preachers were written by religious men themselves. An explanation of the earthquake was quickly offered by such respected figures as Antonio Pereira, a priest of the Congregation of the Oratory, and even more significantly by a prestigious Benedictine from Spain, Benito Jerónimo Feijóo y Montenegro. His views on the disaster were published under the title A New Theory about the physical cause of Earthquakes, now explained by electric phenomena, and specially adapted to the shock felt in Spain on November 1st 1755.11 Contrary to what has sometimes been stated, passionate scientific interest in natural phenomena, seismic in particular, did not originate with the Lisbon disaster: minor earthquakes had struck London in 1750, and the tremors felt in the following years in various parts of Europe had spawned a number of scientific studies that added to an already sizable amount of literature. Nor did the Lisbon disaster substantially alter the belief that an angry God demanded penance, or modified views on the role of Providence: the rhetoric used by church authorities in times of disasters was a familiar one; it had been used whenever wars, famine, or epidemics decimated a country, and would be used again long after the 1755 catastrophe. As for the role of Providence, it had been debated at great length for quite some time already. Indeed, reflections on the forces of the natural world, the fragility of human life, or the need for repentance had spurred enough treatises to fill the library shelves of any self-respecting bourgeois. The general repercussions of the disaster, including the speedy reconstruction of the city under the authority of Sebastião José de Carvalho

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e Melo (later elevated to the rank of Marquis of Pombal), have been the object of extensive studies. So have the philosophical debates that at times pitted religious figures against scientists, philosophers against philosophers, and almost all of Europe against the Portuguese authorities, who relied on autos-da-fé to purify the city of heretics—and liquidate the last opposition to Pombal’s authority. It has been often assumed that the Lisbon earthquake effectively shattered the optimism attributed to the early part of the eighteenth century, though Kendrick rightly notes: “It is said of the Lisbon earthquake that it brought an age to an end, and in the sense that the characteristic popular optimism of the first half of the eighteenth century did not long survive the disaster, this saying is as true as any such generalization can be about so self-contradictory and complicated a subject as eighteenth-century thought.”12 In addition, a familiar narrative constructed long after the fact has asserted that theodicy did not survive the Lisbon earthquake. Certainly the irony of an earthquake striking on All Saints’ Day, at a time when many people were in church, was not lost on survivors or observers. It had some well-known precedents, too: in 1284 the vault of Beauvais Cathedral, at forty-eight meters (157 feet) the highest in Europe, had collapsed on the worshipping faithful. But the Lisbon earthquake struck a new chord. If it did not alter significantly the philosophical views expressed by Enlightenment thinkers, it nonetheless sharply focused their questioning of divine rationality. It reflected in many other ways the changing world of communications and a new approach to social reform. Most of all, the Lisbon earthquake testified to the dread associated with the nature of a disaster one cannot predict or control. A few texts stand out among the large production that resulted from the disaster: at one extreme of the philosophical spectrum, a two-volume essay written by the Jansenist Laurent-Etienne Rondet and generally overlooked by scholars; at the other extreme, the debate that opposed Voltaire and Rousseau, which, I would argue, shows that the most radical philosophical challenge to the traditional view of disasters was offered not by Voltaire but by Rousseau.

the last pr ophecy “The ruin of Lisbon was accompanied by a multitude of phenomena that spread from South to North in the entire Occident: Has anything

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ever happened of a similar scope? ” writes Laurent-Etienne Rondet in his Réflexions sur le désastre de Lisbonne. Earthquakes are a symbol of disturbances among peoples, and it is one of the emblems under which Saint John describes the revolution that he announces to us at the opening of the sixth Seal: when the sixth Seal was opened a great earthquake took place . . . the sun darkened, the moon became as red as blood, stars fell to the earth . . . the sky withdrew . . . all the mountains and the islands were thrown from their bases.13

Rondet, a Jansenist, was an editor of religious texts. His best-sellers included works by the Abbé Racine, an Apparat Royal ou Dictionnaire Français-Latin and a Tableau des contradictoires opposées aux CI prop­ ositions condamnées par la bulle Unigenitus. He also edited excerpts from the Bible de Sacy, considered one of the founding texts of the PortRoyal school. Rondet wrote mostly prefaces, synopses, and commentar­ ies. His Réflexions sur le désastre de Lisbonne, published in 1756, and followed a year later by the Supplément aux réflexions sur le désastre de Lisbonne, thus presented a sharp departure for a man more inclined to embrace the works of others than to put his own thoughts to paper. Interestingly, these works were published anonymously, “En Europe, aux depens de la Compagnie.”14 Kendrick, one of the few scholars to have discussed Rondet’s work, calls the Réflexions sur le désastre de Lisbonne a “horrifying example” of the view that God’s wrath was responsible for the destruction of Lisbon.15 Rondet’s work, however, is not a simplistic comment on the religious meaning of disasters, nor can it be confused with the sermons preached on the occasion by fanatical doomsayers. Rondet was not interested in calling for penance or in exhorting populations to renounce the worldly pleasures of the flesh. His enterprise was theological, and Réflexions sur le désastre de Lisbonne offers the most complete and perhaps the last apocalyptical analysis of a natural disaster. “ ‘All things hide a mystery,’ the famous Pascal used to say; all things are veils that cover God,”16 writes Rondet in his avertissement. God’s power, and the “mysterious language of His voice full of strength and majesty,” speaks through the smallest wonders of nature but more forcefully still through the dramatic phenomena that upset the natural order. Rondet’s ambitious purpose consisted in recognizing the hidden signs of God’s obscure language through the multiple phenomena that accompanied

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the Lisbon disaster and in answering the essential question: “How does God speak?” It is true that, in past centuries, we have observed earthquakes, leveled cities, shaken provinces, storms, floods, volcanic eruptions, celestial fires, in one word, all sorts of phenomena at different times and in different areas: but have we ever seen that the same blow that destroys a city is felt on the same day and almost at the same hour across a space of seven to eight hundred leagues, from South to North, and from West to East, and that on the same day and in that same space, waters are everywhere swelling and agitated? . . . Here . . . the sea rises over the land and rivers flow back to their sources . . . there fountains dry out but soon overflow . . . elsewhere rivers leave their beds, flood the countryside, threaten the cities. . . . Here, mountains shake, rocks are split and fall; there bloodcolored torrents spurt forth from the core of mountains . . . wind rises from the South, snows melt and form rapid streams that overcome everything on their passage.17

For Rondet, the Lisbon disaster bears the unmistakable signs of God’s language, a language distinct from the signs ordinarily read in the ordered wonders of the physical world.18 In this case, God speaks through the manifestation of pure chaos and the catastrophic abolition of all natural and measurable rules He Himself had created. To a large extent, one can recognize God’s language precisely because it defies understanding or predictability, and this is where Rondet stands radically apart from moralists and theologians: there is no obvious message to be deciphered and no available translation. The sheer magnitude of the disaster and the multiplicity of natural phenomena involved in the cataclysm sketch out a semantic of excess, a language without rules, wild utterances whose meaning is withheld, and whose origin alone is recognizable. As the waters rise and fall, alternately drying out fountains and flooding plains, as they flow backward, run white or the color of blood, they defy the recurring patterns and the recognizable order that alone make scientific reflection possible. What is remarkable is not just the simultaneous occurrence of unusual events, Rondet remarks, but the infinite and chaotic variety of their irregularities.

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the ton du si ècle In Rondet’s narrative, the Lisbon disaster was of unprecedented scope and caused lasting prodigies: The coasts of Africa feel the aftershock of the Lisbon earthquake; the ground shakes and opens up, buildings fall, mountains are split, the sea rises, torrents spurt from rocks, men by the thousands are crushed under ruins, an entire population is swallowed by the earth. America itself is rattled. On 17 November, other shocks are felt in Africa, Europe and the Americas. . . . On the 21st, new disaster in Lisbon, the Tago overflows its banks, houses crumble down, three hundred people die. In the night of the 27th to the 28th more shocks in the Brabant, around Köln, and France’s northern provinces.19

Rondet’s task was apocalyptical, in the original sense of unveiling, and his search for the true meaning of the disaster followed two distinct paths. First, in order to appreciate the mysterious quality of God’s language, one must dispel all fanciful interpretations: “We see the formation of a cloud, we even feel the wind blowing, but what consequences do we draw from this observation? Some divert themselves by examining how the cloud was formed, and from which direction came the wind that blew over from East to West and from North to South: some only see a combination of natural effects; and soon, following the ton du siècle [fashionable tone], shall we not be told that it is all an effect of electricity?”20 Second, by disproving false interpretations and privileging the view that disaster itself is language, Rondet aimed to reveal—if not the meaning of God’s language—then the secret meaning of the only text that can throw light on the Lisbon event: Saint John’s Apocalypse. This two-pronged approach yields a singular evaluation of the nature of disaster. For Rondet, the process of unveiling essential to apocalyptic discourse requires the erasure or the repression of all other forms of discourse, because they only obliterate the truth they pretend to uncover. In order to read the Lisbon disaster as language, Rondet states, one must repudiate the ton du siècle that would rely on pseudoscientific terms to understand the voice of God. In his discussion of Immanuel Kant—On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptical Tone in Philosophy—Jacques Derrida has commented at length on the elusive concept of tone, and more particularly on the meaning of an

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apocalyptic tone: Kant used this expression when denouncing the geometrical mysticism, or the mystical interpretation of numbers that had plagued philosophy since Plato and Pythagoras: “This mathematical mysticism, this idolatry of figures and numbers always goes hand in hand with the phenomena of sect, cryptopolitics, indeed superstitious theophany that Kant opposes to rational knowledge. Numerology, mystic illumination, theophanic vision—all that indeed belongs to the apocalyptical world.”21 Rondet’s effort to provide a commentary on the Lisbon earthquake would appear in every way to oppose Kant’s rational approach to knowledge. Not only does Rondet himself fervently endorse the primary apocalyptical discourse that, for Kant, corrupted generations of philosophers with “mystic illumination,” but he also denounces the ton du siècle that corrupts theology with crypto-scientific explanations. For Rondet, far from revealing the secrets of extraordinary events, false science obliterates the truth of God’s purpose. Yet if Rondet takes pain to denounce scientific interferences, he does not repudiate scientific explanations: he simply qualifies their applications. Scientific discourse, he claims, can never account for physical events that defy the order of nature, and disasters are themselves aberrations of the natural world. They stand outside nature; they contradict all the expected regularities of the physical world. How could scientific discourse, a discourse dedicated to the assessment of norms and the measurements of recurring numbers, explain the reversal of all laws in a world suddenly at odds with the very rules that organize it? It would be easy to dismiss Rondet’s objections to purely scientific explanations of disasters as standard religious suspicion of rationalist expertise, to make him a perfect example of religious fanaticism in the age of Enlightenment. But Rondet sided with the philosophers when denouncing the zealots, the Jesuits, and the fanaticism of the Inquisition. His purpose in fact radically differs from the extreme religious views that interpreted the disaster as a sign of God’s wrath and a signal of the need to repent. When Rondet proposes a rigorous interpretation of the Lisbon disaster as fulfillment of John’s Apocalypse, he seeks not to preach but to reveal at once the meaning of the disaster and the truth of the prophecy. Rondet’s rhetoric thus operates a circular verification: we know that God himself has spoken through the disaster of Lisbon because Saint John announced it, and we know that Saint John told the truth because the disaster he predicted has just taken place. Indeed, such is always the paradoxical truth of prophetic discourse, that until the predicted future takes place, no possible verification can be found; the prophecy remains shrouded in mystery and uncertainty.

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This may also be why prophecies that transmit the word of God are themselves the subject of interpretations that indefinitely postpone their realization: which plague, which war, which conjunction of the stars actually fulfills a specific prophecy? A history of prophetic commentaries often reads as a litany of the disasters that devastated a people over the centuries, each period claiming for itself the accomplishment of a given prediction. But in his Réflexions sur le désastre de Lisbonne, Rondet offers a view of prophecies that, again, distinguishes him from traditional commentators: “According to the prophets,” he writes, “earthquakes are the symbol of upheavals [ebranlement ] among humans: this is one of the last emblems used by Saint John when he describes the revolution that will come with the opening of the Seventh Seal. . . . When the Seventh Seal was opened, there was a big earthquake, ET ECCE TERRAEMOTUS MAGNUS FACTUS EST, the sun darkened, the moon became like blood, stars fell from the sky.” “What the earthquake spared in Lisbon, the fire destroyed,” he adds, “and how many times have the prophets predicted the effects of God’s wrath using the symbol of an avenging fire!”22 But for Rondet, the prophecies do not simply announce specific events, and the events mentioned in prophetic texts should not be read literally, even when they happen to take place. When John predicts an earthquake, he only predicts human turmoil and revolutions. Thus, no earthquake can be said to fulfill John’s prediction literally, but only—and inasmuch as natural phenomena are themselves symbols—allegorically. The proper reading of John—or Joel or Elijah—should never consist in a systematic correlation between words and events, but rather in a coming together of symbols. The language of prophetic discourse is symbolic, and once it is understood that unnatural events are themselves symbols— that disasters are nothing but language—the truth of prophecies can be unveiled. In these pages, Rondet describes the symbolic circularity of prophetic discourse as one always in need of unraveling, or rather, of reassembling. His rhetoric performs the verification implied in the original meaning of the sýmbolon: an object divided into two parts, whose halves are joined again, restored to a primary whole. The Lisbon disaster is the other half of John’s symbolic prophecy. The only truth ever verified is that we are dealing with symbols, that Truth itself is in the nature of a symbol. Not surprisingly, Rondet’s unconventional reading elicited a fair amount of criticism from ecclesiastical authorities, and the second volume of the Réflexions, published a year later, starts with a revision of his reading of John’s Apocalypse: “When I spoke of the earthquake Saint John

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situates at the opening of the Sixth Seal, I only considered it as a symbol of the future upheavals peoples would suffer with the coming of the terrible revolution Saint John describes at this juncture. . . . But Saint John’s prediction may perhaps have a more literal accomplishment; and this accomplishment is perhaps the one we have just witnessed.”23 Certainly, Rondet adds, quoting a scientist from Louvain: No areas are more prone to earthquakes than mountains and islands, due to the cavities where the winds that produce these movements are contained, and the presence of matters susceptible to feed the fires that are often present under these islands. But, although these earthquakes are due to natural causes, divine Providence however usually arranges these causes so that they produce their effects when people are ready to endure some calamity, wars, plagues, or famines, and that humans can prepare themselves to suffer or to be spared through their prayers.24

In a move similarly meant to appease orthodox reading of prophecy, Rondet adds a section on the “cloud of crickets” that invaded Portugal’s province of Alentejo a few months before the earthquake, another event predicted by Saint John. But although Rondet seems to abandon the purely metaphoric reading he had proposed earlier, he maintains the view that the Lisbon disaster is not an immediate sign of God’s anger, but must be understood as another manifestation of the “mysterious language of God, His voice full of strength and majesty.”25 Through Rondet’s writing, a different conception of natural disasters emerges. Though originating in a world ruled by physical laws, disasters cancel all the principles of the natural world. Because they don’t obey recognizable patterns, it would be vain to offer a rational explanation of their origin. But for all their chaotic unfolding, disasters follow a linguistic pattern that can be read as divine precisely because this pattern defies understanding. This interpretation is not an apology for an irrational God, but rather a claim that human understanding will fail if proceeding only through the power of reason.

reason after li sbon In one of his last lectures on Leibniz, Gilles Deleuze said that for philosophy, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 played a role comparable to the discovery of Nazi concentration camps:

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This earthquake, strange as it may seem, played a role in Europe for which I see no equivalent except in the Nazi concentration camps, and in the question that resounded after the war: how is it still possible to believe in reason after Auschwitz, when a certain type of philosophy has become untenable, even though that philosophy had shaped the history of the nineteenth century? It is extremely curious that in the eighteenth century, the Lisbon earthquake assumed something of that questioning, when all of Europe asked itself: how is it still possible to maintain a certain form of optimism founded in God? You see, after Auschwitz the question was asked: how is it possible to maintain the least optimism on the nature of human reason? After the Lisbon earthquake: how is it possible to maintain the least faith in a rationalism originating in God?26

The philosophical debates resulting from the Lisbon earthquake should not be read as a challenge to a simplified belief in optimism but as a challenge to God as the origin of rationality. And Leibniz’s optimism, Deleuze is quick to note, needs to be qualified: It does not mean there will be fewer abominations. It’s something else. It does not mean that abominations will leave me indifferent. . . . To be content with the world . . . is to find within oneself the strength to face up to everything that is abominable, to find within oneself the strength to resist the abominable when it happens. In other terms, self-enjoyment means: to be worthy of the event . . . be it a catastrophe or a great love. . . . This is a theme that runs across philosophy.

More than a sign to be read, an event to be understood, or a wrong to be righted, a catastrophe is a challenge to one’s dignity and strength. Leibniz’s optimism would, if not preclude entirely, at least limit the sort of questioning that would take place after Lisbon, when the problem of good and evil was raised anew. In that sense alone, Deleuze argues, can one read in Voltaire’s Candide a reworking of a number of problems. The tale shows that “the problem of good and evil cannot be posed as it was a century before. I believe this is the end of the blessed and the damned. . . . [A]fter 1755, the problem will be posed differently.”27 What would replace notions of damnation after 1755? Two answers come to mind, emanating from two different quarters, one anxious to reject the ton du siècle, the other firm in its repudiation of the ton apocalyptique. At the beginning of his Réflexions, Rondet writes, “Should we then think that all those who perish in these horrifying earthquakes are victims

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of the Lord’s anger? God forbid! The Lord, always fair in his judgments, sometimes allows those who are just and innocent to suffer the calamities of life along with the sinners and the ungodly, because no man in this life is entirely exempt from sin, and that all men, including children, are subjected to dying.”28 In a section of his study of the Lisbon earthquake entitled “On the Use of Earthquakes,” Kant suggests that earthquakes might have a natural purpose that goes beyond scientific understanding: “We are ignorant of the benefit that [even] the causes which frighten us in the earthquakes may procure for us, and yet would willingly banish knowledge of them. As men who were born to die, [why] can we not bear that a few should die in an earthquake?”29 Distant as they may be in their philosophical presuppositions, both Rondet and Kant dismiss a direct relationship between disaster and divine retribution. Theses regarding original sin notwithstanding, the death of the innocents is proof enough that when it comes to natural disasters, no simple divine equation between sin and punishment can be invoked. The possible benefits of turmoils that cause countless deaths escape us as well because, among other things, we cannot see beyond a narrow understanding of nature’s ways or God’s will. Kant’s and Rondet’s lines of thought intersect at a significant point of their reflections on the Lisbon disaster: Rondet discusses the deaths of the innocents at the very beginning of his work, before embarking on a long reading of the Apocalypse and an obsessive retelling of all the natural phenomena observed at the time of the earthquake. Kant, on the other hand, begins with his own interpretations of the natural phenomena recorded in Rondet’s second volume, offering at the very end his observation that men should accept the toll exacted by natural disasters, whose ultimate purpose cannot yet be fully grasped. In Rondet and in Kant, God’s agency is twice removed, hidden behind the mysterious language of John or behind the mysterious workings of nature. Rondet opens his Réflexions with the observation that God’s language is veiled; Kant concludes this section of his study with these words: “The grounds I have adduced for encouraging [such gratitude] are indeed not of the nature of those which afford the greatest conviction and certainty. But even conjectures deserve to be assumed when the object is to move men to the desire of being grateful to the Supreme Being who, even when he chastises, is worthy of reverence and love.”30 Both Rondet’s and Kant’s texts were published in 1756, offering a brief philosophical encounter of sorts between two opposing views of a chaotic

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nature: Rondet, who explicitly privileges a religious explanation, betrays a fascination for the infinite varieties of phenomena observed by witnesses and scientists; Kant, primarily interested in a scientific explanation of earthquakes, concludes with a reference to a vengeful God.

disaster and politica l responsibility Voltaire’s “Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne” has been widely seen as the first radical attack against Leibniz’s theodicy, a call to a pre-Kantian form of reason against the incomprehensible actions of an “indifferent God.”31 We know that Kant wavered in his adherence to Leibniz’s theodicy, before finally repudiating its philosophical principles in 1791. But for his part, in 1756 Voltaire was more preoccupied with decrying the narrow view of a providential God than with taking Leibniz to task. Voltaire was no doubt eager to ignite the sort of general philosophical debate he relished while indulging his taste for dramatic poetry. He boasted that the Lisbon disaster, together with his poem, had struck the final blow against the idea of Providence. As he said with admirable directness to one visitor: “Eh bien, M. Le Professeur, de cette affaire, la Providence en a dans le cul.” (“Well, Professor, with this business, Providence has it up the ass.”)32 Voltaire’s poem has been far more admired than Rousseau’s somewhat belabored reply. As adversaries, they were an uneven match. Rousseau suffered from the burden of uncompromising convictions. Voltaire’s beliefs were tempered by a strong regard for his personal safety. Indeed, before publishing his poem, Voltaire circulated it among influential acquaintances and revised it extensively in order to appease his critics. “I had to say what I thought and to say it in terms that would upset neither the too-philosophically minded, nor the credulously inclined.”33 Though Voltaire liked to see himself as a thorn in the Jesuits’ clerical flesh, he made sure not to offend Protestant authorities who could have made his life uncomfortable.34 When Rousseau undertook to respond to Voltaire, however, he did not bother to acquit Providence, though he found that the concept of Providence offered a measure of hope beneficial to mankind. The idea of Providence may well be an “error,” he admits, but he prefers it to “fatality.” Still, “one is to believe that individual events are nothing in the eyes of the Master of the universe, that his providence is only universal.” (Rousseau alone would dare to write “only universal.”) The choice is

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not between belief and disbelief in a providential God, Rousseau states, but in the correct appreciation of the physical workings of the universe. At this point he anticipates Kant by observing that individual fates are of little importance when viewed from a larger perspective. “Undoubtedly,” writes Rousseau, “this material universe cannot be more precious to its Author than a single thinking and sentient being. But the system of a universe that reproduces, conserves, and perpetuates all the thinking and sentient beings of this universe must be dearer to him than a single of these beings.”35 For good measure, Rousseau had previously written several lines aimed squarely at Voltaire’s complacency and vanity: I learned in Zadig, and nature confirms this every day, that a premature death is not always a true evil, and can pass for a relative good. Of so many men crushed under Lisbon’s ruins, several, no doubt, escaped greater misfortunes; and, in spite of the moving character of such a description and what it adds to poetry, it is not certain that a single of these victims suffered more than if, in the normal course of events, he had waited with prolonged anguish for the death that would surprise him.36

Voltaire had made full use of the disaster as a showcase for his dramatic talents. We could venture that Rousseau’s well-directed shaft enraged him. If there is a philosophical lesson to be derived from the Lisbon disaster—and that alone would make the event have some usefulness to mankind—it lies, for Rousseau, in the reframing of the question of evil: although the concept of God needs no rescue from such devastation, the concept of man does. It is precisely when our individual hopes are crushed, our destiny abruptly changed, that we must recall our intrinsic freedom: a freedom that transcends the physical laws of a world we do not yet comprehend, a freedom that is both a gift and a curse. As the Second Discourse makes clear, the concepts of good and evil did not apply to primitive men, even though their freedom was unquestionable. “It seems at first that men in that state, not having among themselves any kind of moral relationship or known duties, could be neither good nor evil.”37 But men are free agents endowed with—or doomed by—perfectibility. The new men—“free, perfected and thus corrupted”—have built far from Eden a precarious city that they prized above their own wellbeing. “Without leaving your question of Lisbon, concede, for example, that nature had not assembled in that place twenty thousand six- or sevenfloor houses. And that if this large city’s residents had been more regu-

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larly distributed and lodged in lighter quarters, the damage would have been far less, and perhaps non-existent.” Moreover, many inhabitants of Lisbon perished because they would not leave behind their precious possessions, “one his clothing, another his papers, another his money.”38 Russell Dynes identifies this passage as “the first truly social scientific view of disaster.”39 The shifting of responsibility from nature’s blind force to men’s corrupted blindness and greed inaugurates a new vision of disasters. It suggests a redistribution of blame and duties that will lead in two directions: first, the gradual disparition of the concept of purely natural disasters. A disaster is never caused entirely by nature, and Kant will later make a similar case: “We live tranquilly on a ground whose solid foundations are sometimes shaken. We build without care on vaults whose columns now and then waver and threaten to collapse.”40 The strength of nature is at times demonstrated in a dramatic way, but the consequences of natural disasters are a purely social and political matter. Rousseau underlines the human role in natural disasters when he lists the lessons to be learned from an earthquake destroying a shoddily built capital. These lessons are still valid when we think of a hurricane overwhelming the defective levees protecting a low-lying city or the fate of nuclear plants built in earthquake-prone areas. Soon after Rousseau, acts of God would be relegated to the vocabulary of insurance companies, and the Revolution would give the concept of “risk” its first legal definition.41 Second, along with Rondet and Kant, Rousseau is intent in repudiating a tone, or rather two tones: that of the zealots and priests “who always invoke divine justice in purely natural events,” and that of philosophers—such as Voltaire—who express their righteous indignation against the decrees of Providence and the workings of the physical world. The Lisbon earthquake certainly struck the eighteenth-century imagination in a new way, but its importance may need to be measured not only by the content of the philosophical commentary that ensued, but by the specificity of the fear it elicited. The Encyclopédie, as we have seen, was much more preoccupied by the plague than by earthquakes, which surely gives an indication of where the major anxieties of the time lay. The recurrence of the plague seemed inevitable; the chances of an earthquake leveling another city were more remote, and, from a philosophical standpoint, a dual approach was needed: a scientific understanding coupled with a firm dismissal of religious superstitions. There again, Rousseau may have gone much further than Voltaire in sketching out in his letter

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the basis of the religious code he would develop in The Social Contract as a purely negative obligation: “There is, I believe, a sort of profession of faith, the articles of which are for the laws to establish, but aside from moral principles and natural right, it must be purely negative . . . among dogmas that need to be proscribed, intolerance is without a doubt the most hateful.”42 For Rousseau, the negative obligation to refute fanaticism is thus inseparable from the desire to separate natural disasters from both divine intent and from Voltaire’s indictment of Providence. He makes it clear that, from the start, there was perhaps never a natural disaster, that all disasters owed their destructive capacity to men’s inability to comprehend the physical world and to take its violent nature into account. Saada and other scholars have pointed out that the philosophical impact of the Lisbon earthquake may have been somewhat overstated. “Generally speaking,” Saada writes, “the earthquake did not result in a challenge to the idea of optimism, or that of God’s existence. The German Enlightenment, which was deeply theological, integrated the Lisbon earthquake to their view of the world.”43 Mercier-Faivre and Thomas caution against the temptation to “decipher the history of ideas according to a linear scheme,”44 with a strict separation between the before and the after. We can read the reactions to the earthquake as signaling a moment of added uncertainty when all forms of authority—whether divine, political, philosophical, or scientific—met their most radical challenge. With this juncture in mind, we can also reconsider the conclusion Kant wrote to his second essay on Lisbon. Deriding the “pretty dreams” and wild hypotheses of would-be scientific experts such as Herr Professor Krüger, who had imagined digging through the earth’s upper crust to provide a safe exit to its internal fire—thus diminishing the chance of earthquakes— Kant states: From the Prometheus of recent times, Mr. Franklin, who wanted to disarm thunder, up to the one who wanted to extinguish the fire in Vulcan’s workshop, all such efforts are pieces of evidence of the temerity of man, which is combined with a capacity, which stands in a rather meager relation to it, and lead him finally to the humbling recollection, with which he should justly begin, that he is yet never anything more than a man.45

As we know, the response to Kant was not provided by the demonstrated usefulness of the lightning rod, an invention much lauded by Robespierre and other Revolutionary leaders, but would come at a much later date, from the pen of Friedrich Nietzsche.46

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The French Academy dictionary listed the expression tremblement de terre (earthquake) in the entry tremblement (tremor) in the eighteenth century and, starting with the 1762 edition, added Lisbon as an example. At the same time, the dictionary mentions that the word tremblement has a figurative meaning of “great fear or trepidation,” as in: “One must serve God with fear and trepidation [tremblement ].” In the next edition, published in 1798, the meaning of tremblement as “trepidation” has disappeared, along with its religious meaning, but the allusion to the Lisbon earthquake remains. However, by the sixth edition, in 1835, neither Lisbon nor God appeared in the entry for tremblement. The Lisbon disaster and the religious fear it had inspired seemed to have been obliterated by new and more urgent concerns. Our own preoccupation with Lisbon—the fact that it is so often read as a defining moment in the history of the Enlightenment—stems, I would argue, from a tone that was not repudiated. Originally, the Greek word tonos designated several concepts: the quality of a sound and the height of a pitch: “Tone is always implicated in specific modes of vibration and vibrancy,” notes Peter Fenves in his introduction to Derrida’s discussion of Kant.47 Tonos also applies to colors and the variations of tint one may encounter. But most of all, tonos denotes a tension, and this is the sense privileged by Deleuze in one of his lectures on Spinoza: “All things are defined by tonos, the contracted effort that defines the thing. The kind of contraction, the embryonic force that is in the thing; if you don’t find it, you don’t find the thing.”48 The force that resides within the thing and generates tension is susceptible of doing considerable damage: Deleuze mentions in his lecture that the Stoics’ favorite example was that of “a sunflower seed lost in a wall” and “capable of bringing down that wall.” Discourses about the Lisbon disaster generated a unique form of pitch and tension: Rondet’s apocalyptic tone, with his denunciation of a ton du siècle uniquely focused on frivolous physical explanation; Voltaire’s vibrant reaction; and lost among the philosophical tenors, the multitude of witness reports, some clearly fictitious, others undeniably authentic—all producing a particularly discordant response to the disaster. Finally let us note that the concept of tonos—which implies vibration, energy, and a pos­ sibly destructive force—is itself related to the tremblement capable of leveling Lisbon and jolting believers and atheists out of their complacency.

3 The Reign of Cholera (1832) The yellow fever epidemic that spread through Barcelona in 1821 and the cholera epidemic that reached western Europe and the United States in the 1830s amply illustrate how the idea of natural disaster that slowly emerged from Enlightenment thought yielded a view of disaster as administrative emergency. If a few preachers still claimed that God’s anger had sent these curses, most of the debates focused on questions of control and containment. The medical establishment itself became fully aware that its input would have immense political impact. Responsibility for the epidemics now rested squarely on government actions and conflicting interests. If men had not deserved the disease, they were nonetheless responsible for its spread and the disorders that ensued. Commonly referred to as a “plague,” the July 1821 yellow fever epidemic did nothing to advance medical knowledge and exacerbated the opposition between those who argued that the disease was disseminated through the air and those who claimed that it spread through contact.1 It is impossible to understand fully the passions unleashed by the debates that would later surround the great cholera epidemic of 1831–32 if one does not take into account the impact of yellow fever in Spain and the collective memories of the state of siege that fought the disease by condemning the city. Yellow fever had struck Spain before, but only sporadically, and it had been limited to the south, where it rapidly subsided. In the summer of 1821, the disease arrived in Barcelona on a ship coming from Havana, the Gran-Turco. The first victims were crew members, passengers, and visitors of various ships anchored in the harbor. The fever was first mentioned on August 8 by the Diario de Barcelona. But for a full month, authorities denied that it was yellow fever or that the disease was contagious. By September, however, alarm spread throughout Spain, and the unpopular sanitary cordons were set into place. 57

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All travelers and ships that had sojourned in Barcelona were put under quarantine, and citizens of Madrid were called upon to guard the gates of their own city against possible “invaders” from Catalonia who were suspected of carrying the disease. The guards were also asked to unmask any Catalans who might have infiltrated the city. At the same time, all of Barcelona was ringed by soldiers—the sanitary cordon—whose mission was to prevent any flight from the infested city. The city’s beaches were put under surveillance for fear that residents might escape by sea. Physicians and pharmacists were expressly forbidden to leave. Those who tried to flee risked being shot. As it turned out, however, the sanitary cordon was notoriously ineffective: a few bribes secured an escape, and the cordon itself became an infamous place of debauchery: “There were taverns, cabarets, and even those places maintained by corruption in the heart of large cities that outrage public morality.”2 The Barcelona “plague” deepened the political divide between the contagionists, whose sanitary cordon effectively abandoned the entire city to the disease, and the liberals, who sided with the epidemist faction in opposing all forms of quarantine and who urged residents to flee the city. To the liberals, the contagionists embodied the worst aspect of a conservative regime; they were quickly labeled oppressors of the people. Coming a few months after the Revolution that had obliged the Spanish Bourbon king, Ferdinand VII, to accept a Constitution, yellow fever gave European absolutist regimes the justification they needed to mass substantial armies on the Spanish border. Their official mission was to control the spread of the epidemic, but with a view to reestablishing the king’s full powers. The situation became strikingly reminiscent of 1790, when the Army of the Princes had gathered on the French borders, forming a political and military cordon, as if to prevent the disease of Revolution from spreading to other countries. Indeed, the Revolution had been repeatedly compared to an epidemic disease—one that was rapidly disseminated through the air, like lightning, or through contact with an infected population. The armies gathered on France’s borders were prepared to invade the country, just as the army that was called to man the sanitary cordon along the Pyrenees in 1823 awaited orders to invade Spain and restore absolute monarchy. Thus the doctrine of contagion, which advocated total isolation, produced a militarized zone that, although meant to prevent those inside from leaving the infected area, was also intended to prepare for an invasion. As a French military officer of the time, Maréchal Marmont, wrote in his Memoirs: “A revolutionary center, so close to a country filled as ours was

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with important factors of trouble, was a threat. A large gathering of troops was organized on the border, and a cordon was established on the pretext of a contagious disease that had just appeared in Spain.”3 One Puymarin wrote in the Annuaire historique pour 1822 that the government deserved to be applauded for having protected France from both “the yellow fever and the revolutionary plague.”4 Among the newspaper articles quoted by Léon-François Hoffmann in his study of the yellow fever epidemic in Spain, one published by the royalist La Quotidienne in August 1820 best exemplifies the close association between disease and revolution: “Let’s hope that the Spaniards, already prey to a horrible scourge, will save their strength to fight the revolutionary plague.”5 Interestingly, while conservatives saw Revolutionary ideas as a contagious disease to be contained at all costs, liberals had previously likened the 1789 French Revolution to a vast storm spreading through the air. Mary Wollstonecraft had compared the troubles in France to “hurricanes, whirling over the face of nature.” British philosopher and preacher Richard Price had warned: “Behold, the light you have struck out, after setting America free, reflected in France, and there kindled into a blaze that lay despotism to ashes, and warms and illuminates Europe.”6 Two systems of thought were thus opposed, perfectly echoing the doctrines that opposed contagious and epidemic diseases: Revolutionary ideas, carried with the speed of winds, spread like thunder and lightning, invading countries, forcibly affecting the people exposed to them—almost subjecting them—to the uncontainable power of new thoughts. For more conservative thinkers, Revolutionary thought was simply carried from one person to another, like a contagion. And it could be contained by force, with the simultaneous use of invasion, isolation, and exclusion. In the medical discourse regarding yellow fever or cholera, epidemists stressed the idea that disease spread through the air and entered the body through the lungs. The theory of an impalpable dissemination of the dis­ ease further amplified the view—already expressed at the time of the plague—that unnecessary fears of contagion made one more susceptible to the disease. In 1831 Dr. James Johnson, editor of the Medico-Chirurgical Review, would write to the London Times: “The choleraphobia will frighten to death a far greater number of Britons than the monster itself will ever destroy by its actual pestilence.”7 When the United States faced cholera, U.S. Army physician William Beaumont stated that “the greater proportional number of deaths in the cholera epidemics are, in my opinion, caused more by fright and presentiment of the death than from the fatal tendency . . . of the disease.”8 More pragmatic, and determined to

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make use of military might, those who saw revolution as a contagious disease were also quick to put into place the sanitary cordon that would prevent both ideas and bodies from spreading trouble any further. Yellow fever provided the French government with the perfect ideological and medical rationale for massing troops on the frontier with Spain. Connections between disease and politics had existed more or less covertly since the Middle Ages. But they were openly discussed on the occasion of the 1821 Barcelona plague. The worst effect of epidemics, it seemed, was not medical but social: they disrupted order and bred revolution. The Barcelona yellow fever outbreak served to prove that the politics of containment and the politics of invasion were one and the same. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault speaks of what he calls the distribution of bodies in space. Discipline necessitates enclosure, and, at times, strict confinement, even in times of peace and in the absence of crisis.9 The principle of the sanitary cordon resulted in practices both more obvious and less intrusive. Full containment of the infected population combined the exclusion that had once been reserved for lepers with the immediate violence of invasion.

expectati ons The cholera epidemic that swept Europe in the early 1830s was different from any previous plague in that it was entirely foreseen and expected.10 In 1818 a first pandemic spread from Bengal to the East, reaching Singapore in 1819, China in 1820, and Japan in 1823. It struck the Middle East, extending as far as Persia, Syria, Astrakhan, and the Bourbon and Mauritius islands in 1823. A second round of the disease seems to have broken out in India four years later. It was reported in Afghanistan and Persia, and followed the caravans from Bukhara to Orenbourg, where it was identified in August 1829. Cholera reached the Crimea, followed the Volga and the Don rivers, first touching Moscow in September 1830. It was observed simultaneously in eastern Turkey, Bulgaria, and Moldavia. Western Europe followed the progress of the disease with concern, but also with a certain medical detachment—until the November 1830 Polish rebellion against Russian sovereignty. Russian troops invaded Poland in February 1831, carrying cholera with them. The disease broke out in Warsaw in April, reaching

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Fig. 3. Robert Seymour, Cholera Tramples the Victor and the Vanquish’d Both. (McLean’s Monthly, October 1, 1831.) Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine, London. Photograph: Light, Inc.

Silesia and the Prussian border in June. From there, nothing could stand in its way: it was seen in Hungary, Austria, and Constantinople in June and in Lithuania, Livonia, and Saint Petersburg in July. In November 1831, cholera reached Sunderland, in the northeast of England. Edinburgh and London reported the disease in January and February 1832; it reached France by that spring. Crossing the Atlantic, it invaded Quebec in June and quickly spread to Montreal and New York. A year later, British troops carried the disease to Portugal and Spain, and finally to Marseilles and Italy in 1834 and 1835. No chronological description, however, can fully convey the contem­ porary perception of the inexorable advance of the disease. One of the most compelling accounts is provided by Amariah Brigham in his 1832 Treatise on Epidemic Cholera; including a Historical Account of Its Origin and Progress. Brigham tracks the spread of the disease year by year, docu­ menting each new stage with detailed eyewitness accounts. In a section entitled “Progress of the Cholera in 1829,” he writes:

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The disease did not, this year, appear in the Presidency of Bengal. . . . At Bombay, there were a few cases, but the disease exhibited nothing remarkable. . . . Cholera appeared anew in Persia in 1820. . . . It was supposed to have been brought there by communication with Caboul. The severity of the cold season, however, prevented the disease prevailing with great violence, after a few weeks it died. . . . During this year, cholera, as if impatient of the limits to which it has hitherto been confined, crossed the Ural mountains, which separate Asia from Europe, and appeared in the city of Orenbourg. . . . The first case was that of a soldier in the garrison at Orenbourg. He was attacked in the morning of the 26th of August, and died in 12 hours. One week after, a woman died of suspicious symptoms, and after another week, on the 8th of September, another suspicious and fatal case occurred. Neither of these persons had communications with any infected place, and no traces whatever could be found of the way in which cholera arrived at Orenbourg.11

Thus significant distance lay between people and places affected by the Asiatic cholera, which was endemic to the area of Jessore, Bombay, and Calcutta, and those struck by the cholera epidemic that spread to Europe. The Asiatic cholera, like the guillotine of the French Revolution, could be seen as the great equalizer: as Brigham observes, in Bombay “the victims belonged to all classes of society; the rich and the poor, officers and soldiers, Europeans and Hindoos, were alike affected and destroyed by the malady.”12 But for Brigham, the spread of cholera beyond the Urals explicitly invokes factors other than human-to-human contamination. Brigham’s belief in epidemic causes is further emphasized in his discussion of cholera in Europe: On the 26th of June [1831], cholera appeared in the imperial city of St. Petersburg. The Czar became terrified, and with his court retired from the city, and surrounded himself with a cordon militaire, allowing no approach from without. . . . The disease prevailed this year in Hungary, and the numerous communications which existed between Hungary and Austria, by means of the Danube, created great fears in Vienna, the capital of Austria. The city was surrounded by a double cordon, but notwithstanding this precaution, the disease appeared the 16th of August. The disease prevailed at Vienna about three months, during which period 4,046 cases were noticed, and 1,936 died of the disease. The cholera of Vienna destroyed more of the nobility and people belonging to the upper classes of society than it had in any other place: and it was likely more fatal

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here, than it had ever been before noticed, to the physicians and other attendants on the sick.13

As these lines make clear, the sanitary and military cordons had a double use. For those who, as in Barcelona, were prevented from fleeing a city infected by the disease, the cordons were both a prison and a death sentence. The cordon followed the medieval tradition of walling up the areas of a city where the plague had broken out. Conversely, the cordon also served to keep the outside from corrupting the inside, creating an area of safety for the isolated body within its walls. This military strategy closely identified a city with a fortified castle and relied on strong defenses to keep the assailants at bay. A third strategic element emerged, combining the politics of exclusion, containment, and invasion. By the nineteenth century, it was no longer the identity of those contained within or kept outside that defined the cordon’s significance. The czar and his court opted for voluntary confinement, in order to keep the disease at bay, a strategy that proved successful. With the same view in sight, the Spanish authorities chose to confine the diseased inside Barcelona and to keep the city surrounded by the still healthy bodies who manned the gates of the city. But when it came to cholera, there was no longer a single place for the disease. As it spread beyond its traditional bounds—carried by winds, armies, or rivers, crossing oceans and mountains—cholera challenged both the notion of natural borders that was so important to nationalist movements, and that of political frontiers constantly redefined by wars, invasion, and inheritance. Nonetheless, as Richard Evans notes: in 1831–32, most of the European governments followed the same political strategy, using traditional methods of surveillance to fight cholera. Very few of them would later find that their policies had been effective. . . . In most of the European governments, sanitary cordons, quarantines, and other regulations had obviously proved ineffective. The measures were then softened or abandoned.14

contagionists and epidemists The battle lines had been drawn. On the one hand, contagionists thought it urgent to establish strict measures—reinforced by police—to isolate infected cities and, within those cities, infected patients. Longer quarantines

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would be imposed so that disease would not spread from the ships that had for so long been associated with the progress of the plague in the Occident. Epidemists, on the other hand, insisted that isolation was useless and dangerous. From their point of view, the best and most humane policy was to encourage people to move away from the infected areas and contaminated atmosphere. Epidemists cast the debate as a new and serious quarrel of the Ancients (contagionists) vs. the Moderns. They scoffed at isolation and surveillance practices inherited from the Middle Ages, and forcefully challenged the displays of military might which they associated with conservative governments. One of the most elaborate and significant pamphlets against the contagionists was published in 1831 by J. Leymerie, former médecin-en-chef of the Cochin hospital in Paris. In Choléra, Protestation contre la loi sanitaire intervenue, he states: Although the opinion that the atmospheric causes to which I have drawn attention for more than twenty years as the exclusive reasons for cholera, the plague, and yellow fever has gone around the world, and the peoples are now enlightened on this point by the example of Barcelonnette, which stopped the contagion when it stopped the sanitary cordon, I owe it to the oath I have taken as member of the society of the anti-contagionists of Barcelona, to protest, as I have always protested, against all the measures of sanitary laws that would be founded on the system of contagion . . . [a]nd that of infection. I insist all the more on that last system as it has prevailed for several years in [medical] academies; in spite of the numerous proofs that have been established against it, its authors have not abandoned their belief, which would have been all the more desirable as it would have stopped the reckless efforts of the diplomatic and speculating partisans of necessary and torture-like contagion.15

In Leymerie’s text, the system of contagion is equated with reactionary thought. His principal target is Alexandre Moreau de Jonnès, an author of numerous warnings to the public and to the government that cholera was contagious. Moreau de Jonnès advocated measures of containment. More to the point, perhaps, Moreau de Jonnès was also a legitimist, who had strenuously opposed the July 1830 Revolution and the installation on the throne of a more liberal king, Louis-Philippe, the son of Philippe Egalité. In his treatise, Moreau had written:

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If it were not for the July Revolution, the cholera morbus would still be confined to Asia, or at least sufficiently distant to protect us for a long time from fearing its attacks. . . . Statesmen, from whom we expect a firm and intelligent defense of the territory against the cholera morbus, are the very ones who voted against the admirable sanitary legislation proposed by the Restoration government . . . but then they preferred the revolt accompanied by the plague.16

To which Leymerie replied, “No, M. Moreau de Jonnès, this is a revolt against the plague and the plague-bearers like you, and we will support that revolt with all our power.”17 Thus for Leymerie and most of his partisans, the debate was not just medical but political: the same ruling classes that had opposed Revolutionary ideas had contributed to the spread of a disease they were now prepared to fight with barbarian measures. As Leymerie put it, contagion was a political concept. I have said it many times since we have been preoccupied with pestilential epidemics: wars and quarrels among potentates, like earthquakes break down [decomposent] the earth and destroy the human race. Meanwhile, true and false scientists, in good or bad faith, amuse kings and peoples with their benevolent discourses, contagion, infection, and the beneficiary is always the cemetery. . . . I persist in comparing the system of contagion to a diplomatic fabrication.18

Moreau de Jonnès was an influential member of the Académie des Sciences, the Institut, and an Officier d’Etat-Major. He had published that same year a Rapport au Conseil supérieur de santé sur le CholéraMorbus pestilentiel. Written before the epidemic reached either Britain or France, his report was decidedly alarmist: “No contagious disease has spread so rapidly, eliciting terror and causing so many deaths among so many peoples since the black plague that devastated all the regions of our hemisphere.” Drawing from a large number of reports written mostly by British medical observers (Borbin, Boyle, Orton, Jukes, Ainsly, Walker), Moreau concludes: “There are no reasons to believe that [the cholera morbus] can be transmitted through the air beyond a distance of a few meters, and it is at least quite certain that there is no justification to the belief that it can be carried from one place to another through atmospheric fluctuations.”19 Similar debates raged across Europe and America in the years preceding

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the cholera invasion. In his 1832 Letters on the Cholera Asphyxia as it has appeared in the city of New York, Martyn Paine, a physician, reflected his country’s general view when he wrote that the disease was epidemic and listed among the causes “the exhalations which arise from filth and decaying materials. . . . [F]ew have suffered the disease who have lived temperately and prudently without the malarious districts. Consequently the disease has chiefly prevailed, and deaths have principally occurred, among the most abject of the lower orders.”20 The contagionist view was forcefully represented in Britain by Charles Maclean, who had witnessed cholera in India and the plague in the Middle East.21 The stakes were high: the health of the population, but also the fate of all commercial communications. Durey writes: Contagionists . . . compared cholera with the highly infectious smallpox, while noncontagionists theorized from the examples of fevers, which they asserted were of local origins. . . . In [the autumn of 1831] the noncontagionist London Medical and Surgical Journal claimed a great victory for the noncontagionists at the Westminster Medical Society. For in addition to the weaknesses of available data . . . it was not possible in 1831 to find an acceptable definition of the word contagion, even within the contagionist camp.22

At the height of Britain’s cholera epidemic, it was widely asserted that the only reason the nation had not taken the contagionist stance was that the merchant class had so successfully lobbied against sanitary cordons and quarantines. The battle played out in Russia as well. First, the government adopted measures inherited from the experience of the bubonic plague, but, as Roderick McGrew notes, by 1830 it balked at expanding quarantines that would significantly affect trade with Asia and activities in the Black Sea ports.23

occult forces For all the studies and debates that preceded the European outbreak, an understanding of the nature of the disease itself was nowhere in sight. On July 26 and 30, and again on September 13, 1831, the Académie de Médecine of Paris listened to a particularly striking admission of helplessness. The eminent authors of yet another Rapport sur le cholera-morbus commissioned by the Académie declared:

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Cholera reigns over great and murderous epidemics spread over vast territories through the effect of circumstances that we are unable to know or evaluate rigorously. [It spreads] through occult causes that we are unable to seize or predict, independently of the specific conditions or the physical individual elements that create it, well beyond the atmospheric variations and the modification of seasons that give birth to it and outside the local particularities, and the hygienic influences which produce it, far from the acute diseases and the feverish states to which it is associated. Such cholera has never before presented itself to medical observations.24

Far from indulging in theories that would make the disease seem familiar so it might be treated more effectively, the authors simultaneously stressed its dramatic novelty and its occult causes. The report quoted a British physician, Dr. Kennedy, who had extensively studied cholera in India: “According to [Kennedy], there is in cholera something occult that keep vital forces in a state of violent oppression. . . . [O]ne is forced to admit without possibility of contradiction, that [this disease] first took hold under the action of occult general causes, that is, through epidemic transmission.”25 What, then, are the occult forces at work in the spread of this plague? They are, the authors believe, forces connected to large-scale telluric or cosmic events. Noting how quick and deadly cholera can be, they write: “In Macassar, the disease lasted hardly more than three hours, killing even monkeys, dogs and cattle. Two years before, there had been a violent earthquake.”26 But more importantly, this remarkable report explains why, in the early 1800s, theories of epidemic transmission of diseases were able to take over theories of contagion. As surviving documents about the bubonic plague make clear, both theories had existed concurrently for centuries. Suddenly, however, those who professed that cholera was epidemic by nature had become the “Moderns.” At stake, of course, were the repudiation of antiquated and barbarian practices such as isolation, lazarettos, sanitary cordons, and the risks that cholera patients would be left to die without care. They had a point. No doubt inspired by the medieval practice of marking with a cross the doors of plague victims, contagionists Dubois, Chomel, and Parent-Duchatel had advised the Paris authorities to “inscribe on all the houses where cholera had spread a specific and recognizable sign, which would be left until eight days after the end of the disease.”27 In Great Britain, the Privy Council accepted a proposal stipulating that “the sick were to go to temporary hospitals only if they or their

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relatives agreed. If they refused, families suffering from cholera were to remain in isolation in their own homes, with the word SICK emblazoned on their doors, until the period of convalescence was completed.”28 The marks of the disease were thus double: to borrow linguistic categories, cholera had symptoms and signs. Contagionism was anti-social, notes Charles Rosenberg. In the United States, C. R. Gilman, Horatio Jameson, and the American Journal of the Medical Sciences, among others, viewed the measures proposed by contagionists (quarantines and sanitary cordons) as “engines of oppression, despotism, and bureaucracy.”29 “It is no accident,” Erwin H. Ackerknecht writes, “that so many leading anti-contagionists were leading scientists. To them, this was a fight for science, against outdated authorities and medieval mysticism, for observation and research against systems and speculation.”30 The terminology used by contagionists testified eloquently to their repressive vision of governmental intervention. A few months before cholera arrived in France, the Gazette médicale gave a positive review of a book that praised the worst social practices resulting from contagionism: A. Brière de Boismont’s Relation historique et médicale du Choléra-Morbus de Pologne. The Gazette concluded, along with the author, that “isolation and sequestration of contaminated or suspect individuals are the first measures to be adopted.”31 The epidemists thus fought a dual battle: on the practical level, they objected to the medical measures likely to result from contagionist views, and they opposed strong government intervention. After all, the sanitary cordon deployed at the time of the Barcelona plague had resulted in the restoration of an absolutist regime in Spain; sequestration and isolation clearly impinged on the rights of citizens. Contrary to what has been observed by most historians, the epidemist system stemmed directly from the philosophy of the Enlightenment. The eighteenth century was uniquely preoccupied by all the manifestations of nature, particularly those related to the phenomena of electricity and magnetism.32 Thus, the centuries-old idea that the atmosphere itself carried the poisonous elements of the plague, yellow fever, or cholera had been reinforced by the Enlightenment’s studies of those most spectacular of atmospheric disturbances: thunderstorms and lightning. In 1756 Diderot’s Encyclopédie described in detail the violent spread of electricity through the air: The thunderbolt can be broken up or turned away by the sound of several large bells or by shooting a cannon; this stimulates in the air a great

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agitation that disperses the thunderbolt into separate parts; but it is essential not to toll the bells when the cloud is directly overhead, for then the cloud may split and drop its thunderbolt. In 1718, lightning struck twenty-four churches in lower Brittany, in the coastal region extending from Landerneau to Saint-Pol de Léon; it struck precisely those churches where the bells were tolling to drive it away; neighboring churches where bells were not tolling were spared.33

The 1831 report of the study commission to the French Académie Royale de Médecine contained strikingly similar comments on the spread of epidemics: “Annals of astronomy record the stories of a number of various meteors that, in a manner similar to the epidemics we have just discussed, crossed over vast areas. Their constant effect was felt successively over a number of countries, within various limits, leaving intact some districts and striking others more or less severely.” The report also cites the example of a severe thunderstorm that struck the southwest of France, crossing various European countries all the way to Finland over deep valleys, considerable heights, and wide rivers.34 This 1831 report was not the only one comparing the effluvia that carried cholera with atmospheric disturbances. In his “Du Choléra épidémique observé en Pologne, en Allemagne et en France,” C. M. Stanislas Sandras concludes that cholera stemmed everywhere from one general cause, always the same, which followed an unpredictable course: “To put it briefly, the morbid cause is an alteration of exterior agents, unrelated to humans; it can cross the seas and the deserts, and landing in a peopled area, it will manifest itself through its deleterious action on the population.”35 Cholera spread like a gigantic storm. The charged atmosphere, in its overwhelming power, could carry the disease over considerable distance and, like thunder or a tornado, spare a city or hamlet in its capricious and devastating path. “Cholera’s progress is due to telluric causes. . . . [T]he disease is due to cosmic considerations.”36 When, at the height of the Parisian epidemic, observers noted the high number of casualties at the Hôtel-Dieu hospital, a letter published in the Gazette Médicale sought to reassure the public in these terms: The Hôtel-Dieu is located in the middle of the most unhealthy area [of the capital] and any physician who has spent 4 or 5 hours there every day, longer than he spends in his own house, is subjected to the Hôtel-Dieu atmospheric influences rather than to those of his own residence. Now that cholera has arrived in France and wanders everywhere, would it not be

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fitting that all the credulous souls and believers in contagion abstain from bringing up discussions whose logical consequence would be to divide France, departments, cities, neighborhoods with sanitary cordons and lazaretti?37

The debates between contagionists and epidemists spread as fast as the disease itself through all the countries struck by cholera, giving more or less weight to the importance of local miasma, and to what Michael Durey describes as contingent contagionism.38 Epidemists were generally viewed as more progressive than the contagionists; certainly their opposition to measures such as quarantines and lazarettos, and their insistence that the medical body providing care to the cholera patient was not itself at risk, conveyed a greater concern for a humane treatment of those affected by the disease. Still, as Durey has shown in the case of England (and McGrew in the case of Russia), the political divide was not always so clear: “To claim that contagionism was merely the stronghold of conservatism and outmoded opinion would be to miss an essential point. It was a theory that could equally well be held by radicals and medical scientists well-versed in modern empirical techniques.”39 Durey quotes Thomas Wakley, an English surgeon and founder of the journal The Lancet, as “an obvious example of an ultra-radical professing contagionist principles (he was still a member of the National Union of the Working Classes in 1831).”40

enlightenment and sub jectivation From a philosophical standpoint, the main difference between contagionists and epidemists lay in their views of the role and agency of the subject. For contagionists, the victim of a disease also became its agent. In a way, contagion theory invests the individual with a form of authorship and yields a doctrine of social responsibility similar to the concept of authorial responsibility. One contracts the disease from another subject, and one is also fully responsible for its dissemination. Early critics claimed that when Diderot wrote his Lettre sur les aveugles à l’usage de ceux qui voient, the government regarded him as affected by the disease of atheism. The prison sentence that followed—quarantine at Vincennes—served as a way of preventing the dissemination of the illness of Enlightenment. Vincennes became the lazaretto of suspected authors. Just as contagion allows new organisms to be affected, so do ideas corrupt minds, gather

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strength, and affect an increasingly large number of writers and thinkers who are linked together by physical contact, through immediate proximity or mediating elements such as conversations, letters, and translations. Much could be said about the strikingly similar observations made by contagionists on the dangers presented by the discarded clothing of plague or cholera victims and contemporary reactions to the books published by Enlightenment philosophers. Such a way of thinking was itself endorsed, though for a different purpose, by the Baron d’Holbach when he wrote a book entitled La contagion sacrée; ou, Histoire naturelle de la superstition. Religion, d’Holbach argues, was a germ that had infected kings and subjects alike, spreading the disease of superstition, with little hope of a cure. From early times, d’Holbach remarks, there had been an alliance between medicine and religion, and therein also lay the initial germ of superstition: “Some priests studied the secret virtues of plants, the diseases of the human bodies, and ways of curing them. . . . [T]he first physicians were priests.” But priests kept their discoveries secret, shrouding their knowledge in mystery, claiming to perform miracles, and spreading superstitious beliefs. “Cebes,” d’Holbach writes, “represents imposture seated at the entrance of life and offering all who present themselves at its gates the goblet of error. This goblet is superstition. It has no other effect than to infect those who drink it with the sacred contagion, to make them suspicious of remedies, subjecting their lives to the power of spiritual charlatans.”41 D’Holbach went as far as examining the effects of religious contamination on specific physical dispositions: choleric and bilious tempers being far more susceptible to the grievous consequences of the disease than phlegmatic characters. “Religion infected Kings, intoxicated subjects, spreading fire and trouble throughout nations,” notes d’Holbach,42 and the only remedy—truth—though readily available through reason, seems unpalatable to princes or tyrants.43

di sease and revolution: heine’s cholera The social unrest that plagued European countries at the time of the epidemic has been well documented.44 In his study of the Parisian epidemic of 1832, R. S. Bray mentions a proclamation plastered in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, stating that “cholera is an invention by the bourgeoisie and the government to starve the people.”45 One persistent rumor declared that cholera was nothing but a government or aristocratic plot to control

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the people and rid countries of their lower classes. Russia had a number of “choleric riots” in June 1831. In Saint Petersburg, several physicians were killed, a hospital was destroyed, and the sick were left to die in the streets, “liberated” from their oppressors. A Parisian pamphlet offered this “remedy against the cholera morbus”: “Take two hundred heads from the Chambre des Pairs, two hundred and fifty heads from the Chambre of the deputies that will be designated to you . . . those of Philippe [the king] and his son, roll them over to the Place de la Revolution, and the atmosphere in France and Belgium will be purified.”46 The violence that accompanied the spread of cholera in Paris was eloquently described by Heinrich Heine in his dispatches to the Augsburg Gazette, which deserve special attention. Heine admits to being more affected by the street scenes he witnessed than by cholera itself. Echoing Chateaubriand, he writes: It has been a time of terror far more horrible than the first, with executions taking place so quickly and with so much mystery. [This time] it was a masked executioner, who strolled the street followed by an invisible itinerant guillotine. . . . [T]he pages that follow may have the merit of having been written like a bulletin sent from the battleground as the battle rages, and thus expressing the true color of the moment.47

The masked executioner of earlier times, the itinerant guillotine that symbolized Revolutionary justice, and the unjust workings of cholera are all met with scenes of summary executions. Death is willed and given with the same brutality that had shocked the foreign observers of the Revolution. On one page in particular, Heine emphasizes the conflicting images of political terror that compounded the medical emergency: One thought the end of the world was coming. It was mostly at street corners in the red-painted taverns that groups were assembled and deliberated. Woe to those who looked suspicious and woe to those whose pockets were found to contain something dubious. The people rushed upon them as a wild beast, as an enraged pack. Many escaped through their wits, many were saved from danger by the intrepidity of the municipal guard that patrolled everywhere on that day; others were grievously wounded: six men were slaughtered without pity. Nothing is more horrible than the people’s anger, when the people is thirsty with blood and kills its unarmed victims. Then the black waves of a sea of men surges through the streets, with here and there the foam of the workers’ shirts, like white unfurling

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crests; and they rumble and howl wordlessly, like demons or the damned. I heard at the corner of the rue Saint-Denis the famous cry: A la lanterne! And voices trembling with rage told me they were hanging a poisoner. . . . In the rue de Vaugirard, two men who were carrying white powder were killed. I saw one of those unfortunates when he was still moaning, and when the old women took off their wooden clogs to strike him on the head until he died. He was entirely naked, covered with blood and contusions; they tore not only his clothes, but his hair, his lips and his nose; then came a disgusting man who tied a rope around the corpse’s feet and dragged him through the street crying repeatedly: Here comes the cholera morbus! An admirably beautiful woman, her breast uncovered and with bloodied hands, was present: she kicked the corpse one last time when it passed in front of her. . . . The following day, we learned through the papers that the unfortunates who had been killed with such cruelty were quite innocent; and the suspicious powders found on them were chlorates or camphor or other preservatives against cholera.48

The scene unfolds as a deliberate reminder of the violent days of the French Revolution, when rioters hanged suspicious individuals to lampposts: their hurried executions demanded no trial except that administered by an angry mob. As they respond to the natural disaster of cholera, the “enraged pack” now roaming the streets of Paris in search of suspects itself resembles a giant wave, a human tsunami borrowing from nature and from hell the destructive violence of howling winds and demons. Chateaubriand’s rue d’Enfer looms in the background.49 Identifying human ferocity with natural fury, Heine completes the metaphor that had first consisted in comparing cholera to a masked executor (one remembers the larvatus prodeo of the plague). Heine locates and underlines the continuity between the political and the natural at their point of excess. The two meet when they are out of bounds, exceeding their proper confines, and defying their usual order. Normalcy is abolished, including the separation between man and the physical world he seeks to understand and control. But Heine’s account also bears unmistakable signs of contemporary times. The workers’ white shirts and the beautiful woman with her halfbare breast are recent additions: they occupied center stage in Delacroix’s La Barricade; ou, La Liberté guidant le peuple, his homage to the July Revolution, which was shown in the 1831 Salon. For Heine, the cholera epidemic is the invisible agent linking two eras and bringing to light the

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unresolved tensions that give all revolutions their sense of urgency: hence the admirable beauty of Liberty and her bloodied hands. In the preface he wrote to the 1833 publication of his dispatches, Heine further states: “I would advise you to pay attention to one thing: the 1793 Moniteur. It’s a magic book that you cannot put in chains, and it encloses in its pages formulations far more powerful than gold and guns: words that can wake the dead in their graves, and send the living to the darkness of death, words that transform dwarves into giants, and words with which one can crush giants, words that can crush your power as an axe the head of a king.”50 The Moniteur was the official newspaper that printed all the reports and sessions of the Convention, deliberations, speeches, and decisions. In a single year, it had covered the death of the king and the creation of the Revolutionary calendar that had deepened France’s isolation from all of its European neighbors. Heine’s warning also relies on the principle of contagion: the Revolution is still alive, and its words can act as powerfully as any deadly disease—except perhaps for the Revolution’s paradox of being at the same time an agent of death and resurrection, of fear and ideal. Not accidentally, cholera was also called King Cholera—in pamphlets,51 and at some point in his text, Heine states that Robespierre, the regicide, was “the purest hero of the French Revolution.”52 In this context, the Moniteur of 1793 alone, perhaps, could suggest a lasting cure. In a passage that was initially censored in the German edition of his book, Heine comments on the widespread rumor that the poisoning of the people was caused not by Louis-Philippe, the “citizen-King,” but by the Carlists, partisans of the deposed and very conservative King Charles X, the brother of  Louis XVI: Some poor wretches were perhaps actually bribed to spread over the food supply a number of harmless powders, meant to excite disquiet and popular anger. If such was the case, one must not be too harsh against the people for its turbulent behavior, all the more so as it did not stem from private hatred but from the “concern for public interest in full conformity with the principles of Terror.”53

The most unexpected consequence of the epidemic, in the end, would be political: “What I have gained in knowledge in these days of murder,” Heine writes, “is the conviction that the power of the elder Bourbon branch will never again rise in France.”54 The cholera epidemic thus finished what the French Revolution had begun and Chateaubriand would

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forever mourn: the elimination of the Bourbon dynasty. When the rioting ended, as it did after the government imposed a rigid order on the city, Heine conveyed the new mood in Paris with carefully worded sentences: “The calm of death reigns over the entire city. A stone-like gravity is imprinted on all the faces.”55 This stone-like gravity, the “sérieux de pierre,” echoes Robespierre’s name and the puns that circulated at the time of the French Revolution on the austere Jacobin. The natural disaster has now become thoroughly political, not just because of the perception that it was the government’s responsibility to fight and defeat a plague that the Cardinal of Paris persisted was sent by God,56 but because the ultimate—and lasting—result from the epidemic was itself political. The epidemic that killed millions of people across India, Russia, Europe, and the United States also put the last nail in the coffin of the legitimate monarchy that had ruled over France for more than nine hundred years. Of course, natural disasters had always had a political element, if only in the rumors that attributed epidemics to a political adversary. But contemporary perceptions of the cholera epidemic placed a remarkable emphasis on politics in their assessment of the disaster.57 If the French Revolution had been compared to a natural disaster, a violent storm that destroyed everything in its path, the natural disaster represented by the 1831–32 cholera epidemics was best understood in political terms as the prolongation of an endless terror. Following the riots that accompanied the burial procession of General Lamarck, a victim of cholera, Paris was declared to be in a “state of siege” similar to the state of exception discussed by Giorgio Agamben.58 Watching the soldiers and bayonets that filled the streets, Heine notes simply: “The suspension of legality that currently exists here is intolerable: it is a plague more fatal than cholera.”59

Part Two

pol itical disaster s, t i m e i n r u i n s In hoping to make sense of natural disasters, the Enlightenment battled a legacy of beliefs that attributed floods, earthquakes, and epidemics to the sins of men and the opposition of the stars. As the conviction grew that natural disasters were caused by the physical world alone, so did the belief that men added to the scope of destruction by their own greed and ambitions. The growing sense of responsibility at stake in the managing of disasters made it apparent that if men had not incurred God’s wrath through their sins, they had increased their woes through their own failures. There were no purely natural disasters, disasters wrought by physical disorders alone—only a combination of nature’s fury and human negligence. All disasters involved problems of political administration. It was easy for Rousseau, raised in Calvinist Geneva, to believe that men had been destined to live through countless disasters. All disasters followed from the first and greatest one of all: the expulsion from Eden. For the philosopher, an understanding of disaster necessarily implied an understanding of a distant past, told and retold as warning and legacy. But Rousseau substituted for Genesis—the original version of crime and punishment—a complex history of encounters that would doom men to a life of thwarted hopes and repeated violence. His Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among Men sketches out an imagined history of primitive men, filling the missing parts with philosophical speculations that makes it clear that the political state will always remain imperfect and subject to disastrous upheavals. The second part of this book focuses first on Rousseau’s writings about men’s fragmented past and his views that the very elements that made man’s progress possible—his perfectibility and freedom—also led to his downfall. Rousseau’s political history projects the image of the philosopher as physician, charged with delivering a dire prognosis yet stubbornly intent on curing the patient. Rousseau thus adds to the Enlightenment’s 77

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interpretation of disasters a historical and political dimension that would find its greatest echo in the early days of the French Revolution. Rousseau’s past is anything but continuous or certain: history is marked by its own storms and earthquakes opening wide faults where there had been cities and populations. What is left, and known to us, has been thoroughly disfigured by years of ignorance and superstition. Rome plays an important role both in Rousseau’s attempt to reassess history and in the French Revolution’s search for a republican model. But while Rousseau sought to retrieve, correct, or reconstruct large fragments of lost history, the revolutionaries were anxious to erase a past that reminded them of oppression and superstitious beliefs. How and where to begin? It is significant that in establishing a new calendar that would start with the first day of the Republic, the mathematician Romme—himself a great admirer of Rousseau—appealed to the same cosmic forces that had been believed to be favorable or fateful to men. Science was put at the service of a strange cause. Kant had once laughed at Benjamin Franklin’s attempts to tame thunderbolts, a task the philosopher believed to be impossible. By contrast, the Revolution celebrated Franklin as a statesman and a scientist. But the same admiration that placed scientific progress at the heart of Revolutionary reforms and guided the new calendar calculations also yielded a strong measure of anxiety. Starting over in history, writing a new beginning, is an enterprise fraught with dangers. More than any other example, perhaps, the creation of a new calendar illustrates the need to place the young Republic under the guidance of the stars. For Chateaubriand, who had lost his brother on the scaffold and fought against the Revolution, few events had been more fatal to his country than the execution of the king and the abolition of the monarchy. The political disasters that struck the nation became Chateaubriand’s own, shaping his life and ambitions. In the course of his long political career, Chateaubriand visited Rome several times. He was fascinated by the archaeological digs that exhumed a past in ruins. These fragments of a destroyed glory offered him a unique reflection of his own destiny. Chateaubriand’s memoirs exemplify what we call the interiorization of disaster: a personal investment in a collective upheaval to which we have been witness, or from which we have inherited a sense of emergency. Chateaubriand makes explicit a mode of thinking that would, from then on, make disasters a pervasive presence in our culture.

4 Losing Rome (Rousseau) d isfigurement and usurpations In the preface to his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among Men, Jean-Jacques Rousseau writes: [Like] the statue of Glaucus, which time, sea, and storms had so disfigured that it looked less like a god than a wild beast, the human soul, altered in the bosom of society by a thousand continually renewed causes, by the acquisition of a mass of knowledge and errors, by changes that occurred in the constitution of bodies, and by the continual impact of passions, has, so to speak, changed its appearance to the point of being nearly unrecognizable.1

Rousseau borrowed this image from the Republic, where Plato had written: “We have seen [the soul] only in a condition which may be compared to that of the sea-god Glaucus, whose original image can hardly be discerned because his natural members are broken off and crushed and damaged by waves in all sorts of ways, and incrustations have grown over them of seaweed and shells and stones, so that he is more like some monster than he is to his own natural form.”2 Various legends were associated with the god Glaucus, who had started life as a mere mortal. Rendered immortal when he accidentally discovered a magic herb, he grew fins and was obliged to live in the sea. Monstrous in shape, his passions went unrewarded. He received the gift of prophecy from Apollo (who dispensed both the plague and visions of the future) and would appear to sailors, making dire predictions. The disfigurement described by Plato and Rousseau is not, however, that suffered by the humble fisherman turned into a sea monster, but that of a replica, a statue broken by waves, doomed by time and the sea to suffer a disfigurement similar to the one that had affected its original model. 79

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Jean Starobinski reads a measure of hope in Rousseau’s statement that the statue of Glaucus was nearly recognizable, a hope that allows Jean-Jacques to describe the original soul through the power of imagination and philosophy combined. But beyond the rhetoric of unveiling and the expressed desire for transparency that, for Starobinski, propels Rousseau’s quest for the origins, the image of the god Glaucus conveys a fate that prefigures in many ways Rousseau’s own attempts to dig up the past and his failure to leave an image of himself free from errors, lies, or the injuries of time. The parasites encrusted on Glaucus’s broken statue have been identified, and Rousseau names them: the mass of knowledge and errors that have compromised the human soul and pose the greatest challenge to historians and philosophers alike. But the most striking example of this rhetoric of disfigurement—the patient examination of the combined effects of loss and posthumous additions that distort the past—can be found in the fourth book of The Social Contract, where Rousseau engages in a long discussion of Roman institutions.3 He first retraces in detail the vertiginous divisions of the Roman people into three initial tribes, each divided into ten curiae, each endowed with a military body called a centuria, to which were later added another urban tribe and fifteen rural tribes. As long as they corresponded to the collective identity of the people they regrouped, Rousseau states, these divisions were meaningful. But soon enough, “the censors, after having long arrogated to themselves the right to transfer citizens arbitrarily from one tribe to another, allowed most of them to be inscribed in whichever one they pleased . . . so that the idea of the word tribe . . . became almost a chimera.”4 The initial weakness of the Roman system and the ultimate source of its eventual downfall can thus be traced to a double loss: that of an identity rooted in place and that of a word rooted in a fixed meaning. The idea of tribe, corrupted both by wandering citizens and by arbitrary censors, was subjected to a radical heteronomy. The floating signifier also wanders aimlessly, away from the mooring that alone would secure a measure of linguistic transparency and certainty. But another form of fragmentation and disfigurement presides over our knowledge of Roman history. Rousseau had previously noted: “We have no very reliable remains of the earliest period of Rome. It is even highly probable that most of what is related about it are fables. And in general, the most instructive part of the annals of peoples, which is the history of their establishment, is the part we know least about.” To illustrate his point, Rousseau adds in a footnote: “The name Rome, which suppos-

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edly comes from Romulus, is Greek, and means force. The name Numa is Greek too, and means law. How likely is it that the first two kings of that city had in advance names so highly relevant to what they did?”5 If the common name “tribe” suffered from a double form of arbitrariness, the names of the two first kings of Rome suffered from being too appropriate. Here, the corruption results not from the loss of an initial meaning but from the retroactive attribution of meaning. The renaming of the kings successfully erased their original names, adding to the confusion surrounding the history of Rome. Rousseau, we know, had carefully read Livy, who summarized the meaning of the king’s names in the passage describing the selection of Numa as successor to Romulus: “Considering that the city was but of short standing, and had been founded by means of violence and arms, he formed a design of establishing it anew, upon principles of justice, laws and morals.”6 Whether in the common name “tribe,” or in the too-proper names of Romulus and Numa, the value of language is systematically discounted, either because the names no longer mean what they were supposed to— the meaning has been diminished, eroded, ruined as it were—or because words have come to mean too much, replacing initial designations—the original names of the first kings of Rome—with later metaphorical names. The retroactive attribution of these names to powerful men separated these words from their Greek origin: a form of usurpation, a transfer from the common ground of linguistic understanding to the private realm of distinguished individuals, a theft as it were, from common rule to privileged rulers. Just as “the idea of the word tribe shifted from property to persons,”7 so, already, had the words “force” and “law,” thus adding to the confusing history of ancient Rome. The linguistic usurpation identified by Rousseau in the fourth book of the Social Contract is closely related to another, equally disquieting form of political usurpation. In his Political Fragments, Rousseau asks: “What makes laws so sacred, independently of their own authority even, and what makes them so preferable to simple acts of the will? It is firstly that they emanate from a general will that is always right when it comes to individuals.”8 Thus a legitimate ruler can only be established by virtue of a law to which he himself must obey. “When we go back to the origin of political right, we find that before there were chiefs there were necessarily laws. One at least was necessary in order to establish the public confederation, and a second one to establish the form of government.”9 The “extraordinary man” who undertakes to give laws to a people should not himself be a ruler, argues Rousseau in the Social Contract. “When

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Lycurgus gave his homeland laws, he began by abdicating the throne.”10 Oaths of allegiance to a ruler in no way admit his authority to establish laws that should emanate from the people alone. “In all the pledges made by any minister or officer to his prince, the following clause must always be understood: except for the laws of the State and the safety of the People.”11 Nothing could be less appropriate, therefore, than the linguistic slippage that would give a ruler, Numa, the name of the very principle over which he cannot or should not rule. A similar usurpation is at work in the attribution of the name meaning “strength” to the founder of Rome. The common pact necessary to establish civil society implies the absolute repudiation of the right of the strongest in favor of laws emanating from the general will. But the founder of Rome himself laid the groundwork for the most prestigious of all political models by impersonating the force Rousseau radically dismissed as illegitimate in the beginning of the Social Contract: “The strongest is never strong enough to be the master forever unless he transforms his force into right and obedience into duty . . . one is only obligated to obey legitimate powers.”12 Thus, the name of Romulus, meaning “force”—a name that has profoundly inflected the mythical history of the origins of Rome—also describes an original fall, that of a man “by nature meant for governor” and “who never lived up to the true nature of a king, but fell off and ran into tyranny,” to quote Plutarch.13 The Encyclopédie, for its part, describes Romulus as “a prince of uncertain birth, suckled by a prostitute, raised by shepherds, become chief of brigands.” Romulus killed his brother in a blind rage, then plundered and ravaged the neighboring cities, forsaking “his popular behavior for kingly arrogance, odious to the people to whom in particular the state he assumed was hateful.”14 Romulus the murderer and Numa the wise (chosen by the auguri, not elected) both trampled the laws that should preside over any form of  legiti­ mate government. The linguistic usurpation that replaced their original names with magnificent surnames duplicates the political usurpation that presided over their reigns: one king the embodiment of might, not right, the other an initiator of laws, but himself illegitimately put on the throne.

roman ru i ns In the first chapter of Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud offers a key to Rousseau’s reflections on the impossibility of retrieving the original history of Rome. “The best information about Rome in the republi-

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can era,” Freud writes, “would only enable [the visitor] at the most to point out the sites where the temples and public buildings of that period stood. Their place is now taken by ruins, but not by ruins of themselves but of later restorations made after fires and destruction.”15 In this passage Freud echoes Montaigne, who had noted in his Journal de voyage: “Those who said that one at least saw the ruins of Rome said too much . . . the world, enemy of its long domination, had first smashed and shattered all the pieces of this admirable body, and because, though dead, shattered and disfigured, it was still abhorrent to him, it had buried its very ruins.”16 Like its ancient history, the Glaucus-like body of Rome is lost forever. In Freud’s discourse, the ruined Rome stands as metaphor for the multiple layers of the mind where “what is primitive . . . is commonly preserved alongside of the transformed version which has arisen from it.”17 Freud adds: Now let us, by a flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past— an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one. This would mean that in Rome the palaces of the Caesars and the Septizonium of Septimius Severus would still be rising on their old height on the Palatine and that the castle of S. Angelo would still be carrying on its battlements the beautiful statues which graced it until the siege by the Goths, and so on. But more than this. . . . Where the Coliseum now stands we could at the same time admire Nero’s vanished Golden House. On the piazza of the Pantheon we should find not only the Pantheon of today, as it was bequeathed by Hadrian, but, on the same site, the original edifice erected by Agrippa; indeed, the same piece of ground would be supporting the Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva and the ancient temple over which it was built.

Having reached that point, Freud abruptly dismisses the metaphor he had lovingly developed: There is clearly no point in spinning out our phantasy any further, for it leads to things that are unimaginable and even absurd. If we want to represent historical sequence in spatial terms we can only do it by juxtaposition in space: the same space cannot have two different contents. Our attempt seems to be an idle game. It has only one justification. It shows us how

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Fig. 4. Giovanni Paolo Pannini, Ruins with the Pyramid of Gaius Cestius in Rome (early eighteenth century). Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Rome. Photograph: Scala / Art Resource, New York.

far we are from mastering the characteristics of mental life by representing them in pictorial terms.18

If Freud’s “phantasy” is deemed unsuitable to represent the multiple layers of the mind, it does offer a vivid spatial image of the working of metaphor: the repression of an initial signifier, to which another one is substituted, appropriate by virtue of an implicit comparison. The ruins that are not “ruins of themselves,” but ruins of later additions or substitutions, both bury and retain where they now stand the remnants of the

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original body of Rome. Metaphor similarly buries and retains its original signifier, implicitly present in the new formed image. Whatever will be uncovered by archaeological digs or psychoanalytical probing will be evidence of repairs and alterations, the original artifacts doubly destroyed by time and human agency. The Roman metaphor however is buried, but not erased, by Freud. What he calls the “checkered past” of Rome does not reappear in the text, yet is left standing at the beginning of Civilization and Its Discontents, just as the original Rome once stood before being destroyed by the Goths. For Freud, Montaigne, or Rousseau, one can no more ignore the ruins of Rome than imagine the monuments as they once stood. The ruins embody a past that can be neither forgotten nor recovered. Thus they also exemplify the passing of time and political power, or time as the ultimate metaphor for political power. Ruins of ruins, fragments half-buried in the sacred soil of Rome, they seem all the more powerful for having been so radically destroyed. For Rousseau, Romulus and Numa are Roman ruins, metaphoric surnames still standing in place of the repressed names of the first two kings. Rousseau dismisses, as Freud later would, these remnants of Roman history, burying them, as it were, in a footnote of the Social Contract. No doubt, Rousseau’s suspicions that these names were too appropriate to be accepted as authentic may seem paradoxical in view of the theory he proposed elsewhere that the first names, inflected by passion, were metaphorical. But the history of Rome, even in its beginnings, is far removed from the first attempts of natural man to designate the objects and beings surrounding him. Scholars have commented at length on what Jacques Derrida describes as Rousseau’s history of denaturalization.19 Long after the catastrophic events that brought about the emergence of the social state, Rome represents for Rousseau and for all his contemporaries the paradigm of a cyclical and perverted history with its founding murder, its tainted glory, and its irreversible demise. When Rousseau describes the beginnings of Roman history as irretrievable, he reiterates the challenge that opened the Second Discourse, when he had set out to imagine the original nature of the human soul. He himself concludes the first part of his discourse with a disclosure of his operative strategy: “When two facts given as real are to be connected by a series of intermediate facts which are unknown or considered as such, it is up to history, when it exists, to present the facts that connect them; while it is up to philosophy, when history is lacking, to determine similar facts that might connect them.”20

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(“C’est à la Philosophie, à son défaut, de déterminer les faits semblables qui peuvent les lier.”) Philosophy occupies the space where history is not only lacking, but has also failed, the space defined and circumscribed by the défaut, which is both an absence and a breakdown. Rousseau’s projects belong to an archaeological philosophy, a systematic uncovering of broken artifacts, shattered and glorious, disfigured yet indispensable to any understanding of one’s nature and legacy. In this respect, Rousseau’s history is that of a long post-traumatic disorder, the sequel of a disastrous event we can hardly recognize and from which we will not recover.

postmortems The publication in 1762 of The Social Contract and Emile precipitated a series of official judgments against Rousseau.21 The works were banned or burned throughout Europe, from Rome to liberal Amsterdam. The Paris Parliament that condemned Emile also ordered its author arrested and jailed. Refutations of Rousseau’s ideas began to appear everywhere. Private letters meant for public consumption, and works discussing his ideas point by point, circulated freely. “I have no sympathy for JeanJacques,” wrote the officious Madame Du Deffand. “He would return everything to chaos; I have never seen anything more contrary to common sense than his Emile, nothing more contrary to morals than his Héloïse, and nothing more boring and obscure than his Social Contract.”22 In the Confessions, Rousseau narrates in detail the flight that followed the official censure of his works and the calls for his arrest. The rest of the story is well known and offered Rousseau infinite opportunities to describe both the vast plot he imagined against him and the animosity he truly encountered during his years of wandering: “Here begins the work of darkness in which I have found myself enshrouded for the past eight years,” he writes at the beginning of book XII of the Confessions.23 The most significant “work of darkness,” however, is not the plot against Rousseau, but the work he wrote as a sequel to Emile, entitled Emile et Sophie; ou, Les Solitaires. In this deliberate destruction of Emile, the educational monument he had built with such care, Rousseau outlines a radically new interpretation of his views on the nature of political disaster and the practice of freedom. At the end of Emile, the hero has married the young woman who was meant for him. His proud tutor looks upon their family with pride and emotion: “[Emile’s and Sophie’s] worthy parents see their own youth

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renewed in that of their children; they begin to live, as it were, afresh in them again . . . they perceive, for the first time, the true value of life. . . . [I]f there is happiness on earth, it is in the haven where we live that it is to be found.”24 Near the end of the book, Emile prepares himself for the roles of both father and tutor to his future child. Emile’s own teacher, his mission officially concluded, will remain a part of the small society to which he has contributed so much. If happiness can be a measure of achievement, then Emile’s education has been a success. But in Emile et Sophie; ou, Les Solitaires, death, betrayal, and the most degrading of social practices—slavery—all combine to wreck Emile’s life and hopes. Les Solitaires consists of two long letters. In the first, Emile tells his tutor of the disasters that befell him and destroyed his marriage. “I was free, I was happy. Oh my master! You had given me a heart made for happiness, and you had given me Sophie. . . . Alas! . . . All has disappeared as a dream; young still, I have lost everything, wife, children, friends, absolutely everything, intercourse with my fellow men even. . . . I am dead to everything I cherished.”25 Emile briefly recalls his past happiness: “Already father of two children, I divided my time among an adored wife and the dear fruits of her tenderness; you helped me prepare for my son an education similar to mine, and my daughter growing under her mother’s eye, would have learned to resemble her.” The secret of contentment is sketched genealogically: the son will be another Emile, and the daughter another Sophie. But Sophie’s parents and Sophie and Emile’s daughter all die in the space of a few years, leaving Sophie disconsolate and Emile unable to bear the spectacle of her grief. Sophie later betrays Emile and finds herself pregnant with another man’s child. “Society women’s adulteries are only gallantries,” writes Emile, “but an adulterous Sophie is the most odious of all monsters.” Sophie has lost her innocence and Emile has lost his own sense of self: “All was changed for me. I was not the same as the day before, or rather I was no more; it was my own death I was crying over.”26 Even as he praises the values taught by his tutor, Emile fully measures the vanity of their founding principle: “I could not hide from myself the fact that I was reasoning in order to mislead myself, and not to enlighten myself.”27 The failure of reason precipitates the destruction of the most perfect fiction ever imagined by a philosopher. As Emile meditates on Sophie’s betrayal, thoughts of infanticide invade the text: What! Nature herself will authorize this crime; and my wife, sharing her love between her two sons, will be forced to share her affection between

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their two fathers! This idea, more horrible that any that ever crossed my mind, lit a blazing new rage in me; all the furies torn my heart again at the thought of this abhorrent sharing. Yes, I would have preferred to see my son dead than to see Sophie have a son from another father.28

Remorse notwithstanding, there is no future for Sophie’s or Emile’s progeny: “If my family had followed my recommendations, Sophie would have raised this child, and this child would perhaps be still alive; but perhaps, also, Sophie was already dead for me.”29 It is not clear at this point whether the announced death is that of Sophie’s illegitimate child or that of the son she had with Emile. The sons will remain forever unnamed and their genealogy thoroughly confused. Emile abandons his wife and flees his country, to lead for an unspecified period of time the life of a wanderer. His story takes an unlikely turn when the ship he has boarded for a crossing to Naples is captured by pirates, and Emile is sold as a slave. At this point, Rousseau reiterates the principles he had outlined in The Social Contract. “I changed masters several times: they called that selling me; as if a man could ever be sold. They sold the work of my hands; but my will, my understanding, my being, everything that made me and not another [tout ce par quoi j’étais moi, et non pas un autre] could certainly not be sold.”30 The greater part of the second letter describes Emile’s stoic resolutions in the face of his enslavement. One of the few scholars to have seized on the importance of Les Solitaires, Thomas Kavanagh sees in Rousseau’s sequel an essential complement to his treatise on education. “It is difficult to accept Emile’s ending as an authentic closure,” he writes, noting that Les Solitaires is “a text far more essential to the central concerns of Emile than the rocambolesque Afrikareise to which it is often reduced.”31 For Pierre Burgelin, as well, Les Solitaires continues Emile’s education, putting the value of the tutor’s principles to the most rigorous tests. “Emile and Sophie’s education remains in a sense incomplete,” notes Burgelin. “What is the merit in their happiness? Everything has been prepared for them, given to them even. They have never met those true obstacles life raises on the best paths in order to test us. . . . It is necessary to transform their success and teach them to overcome failure by themselves.”32 Burgelin points out that Emile’s strength while a slave recalls the Stoic models of antiquity. Indeed, Emile’s wisdom and sense of justice do not fail him, and he gains a superior form of freedom while in the hands of the vilest masters. For Burgelin, Rousseau’s intentions are unambiguous:

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“Fate may well make [of Emile] a slave in Algiers; it will also give him the opportunity to find his place in a society that will be first that of the slaves, where he will try to raise a general will. . . . Just when Rousseau is about to lose everything, when persecution pushes him into exile, he gives himself this lesson. His system is complete.”33 From this point of view, the unfinished sequel would constitute the crowning achievement of Emile’s education. Emile has learned to transcend loneliness and despondency, rising from the depth of servitude to a position of influence.34 Rousseau never finished Les Solitaires, but he never forgot it. “I have for this work a weakness I do not fight,” he wrote in 1768. Pierre Prévost recounted his own reaction when, years after its original composition, Rousseau read the text aloud to his guest: “The reading of this fragment . . . acquired a new price through the passionate accent of his voice, and through the form of contagious emotion to which he abandoned himself.”35 Rousseau, it appears, clung to the enslaved Emile, to the ruins of his pupil’s happiness and the doubtful outcome of his stoic resolutions. The writing of Les Solitaires stretched over a period of sixteen years “as a lasting agony,” notes Frédéric Eigeldinger.36 Emile remained a slave whom Rousseau could neither free nor kill. Rousseau’s friends or publishers, most famous among them Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, proposed various happy endings for Les Solitaires: In one version, Emile and Sophie are reconciled; in another, Emile marries a Spanish woman stranded on an island, Sophie finds them, and they live briefly in a ménage à trois. Whether or not Rousseau himself participated in concocting the sequels, he never wrote them. I would argue that the unfinished state of Les Solitaires is integral to the message it meant to convey, and that its incompleteness is itself a philosophical necessity.

negative fr eedom As he begins his life of wandering, Emile writes to his tutor: “If at times I asked myself: What I am doing? Where am I going? What is my goal? I replied to myself: What I have done in being born but start on a voyage that must end only with my death? I accomplish my task, I remain in my place, I use this short life with innocence and simplicity, I always do great good by the evil I do not do among my fellow men.”37 These lines echo a passage Rousseau had marked years before, though not commented on, in his notes on D’Helvétius’s De L’Esprit. “The great man considers as a blessing all the evil other men do not do to him.”38 The specific use

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of the negative form—“le mal que je ne fais pas”—relates directly to one of the pervasive themes that Rousseau would develop in the unfinished Reveries. He describes his life as a reclaimed solitude, defined by a specific use of freedom: that of not doing. “I have often abstained from a good action I had the desire and the power to do, frightened of the subjection I would submit myself to afterward if I yielded to it without reflection.”39 What, precisely, is the nature of a freedom born of abstention? In Les Solitaires, Emile’s enslavement sets the stage for a philosophical demonstration of the ambiguous nature of freedom: “The time of my servitude was that of my reign,” he writes, “and I never had more authority over myself than when I was in barbarians’ chains.”40 At first glance, these lines seem to echo the fourth chapter of the Social Contract, where Rousseau states that “a man who makes himself another’s slave does not give himself.”41 But what is the nature of Emile’s reign or that of his freedom? “If freedom consisted in doing what one wants, no man would be free,” Emile explains, “all men are weak, dependent on the course of events, and on harsh necessity. . . . [H]e who knows best to want what necessity orders him to do is the freest, since he is never forced to do what he does not want to.”42 To accept, even to desire, one’s obligations thus yields the only kind of freedom that is possible for man. For once man has entered society, absolute freedom eludes him. With a startling economy of words, the ominous formulation of the Second Discourse—“In becoming sociable and a slave [man] becomes weak”43—equates the subjection of man’s independent mind with the corrupting effect of social interactions. Although man is capable of choosing or rejecting an action through an act of the will, the increasing pressures placed upon him by society subject him to the worst kind of servitude. In Les Solitaires, however, the “necessity” that dictates to man lies not only in the limitations imposed by social servitude, but in all the constraints that prevent man from asserting his positive freedom. The highly restricted choice open to Emile—or, for that matter, to Jean-Jacques— consists in yielding to adversity, even desiring it. On one occasion Emile’s tutor had defined freedom as a narrow choice between obligation and necessity, stating that the truly free man wants only that which it is within his power to obtain or to do. While Emile is a slave, he remembers his tutor’s teachings. “I am freer than I used to be. Emile a slave! I said again. Eh! In what sense? What have I lost of my primitive freedom? Was I not born a slave of necessity? What new yoke can men impose upon me?”44 Emile’s initial reappraisal of his restricted freedom faithfully echoes the views of the Stoics on liberty. Rousseau had read Epictetus: “Of things

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that exist, some are in our power, some are not in our power. . . . But if you hold that only to be your own which is so, and the alien for which it is, alien, then none shall ever compel you, none shall hinder you, you will blame no one, none shall harm you, you will not do the least thing unwillingly.”45 As he recites lessons from a happier time, Emile no longer addresses his tutor as Maître, but as Père: the semantic shift that prefaces Emile’s transformed circumstances is also a matter of genealogical necessity, a counterpoint to the confusion that could not be dispelled when it came to Emile’s sons. There is no longer a master-tutor; Rousseau has relinquished the post, and the word has been corrupted by the practice of slavery. Father will do better, a father of choice and a just compensation for the sons one chooses to have or have not. But it soon becomes apparent that the lessons of the father/tutor do not yield the superior freedom to which Emile had once aspired. “In my current state, what can I will?” he writes. “To avoid annihilation, I need to be moved by another’s will for lack of my own.”46 This form of abdication goes beyond the Stoics’ essential imperative, that if one cannot command events to conform to one’s will, then one must conform one’s will to unavoidable events. And Emile’s lack of will is a far cry, too, from the revolt of the slaves anticipated at the end of the Second Discourse, where Rousseau had written that “the despot is master only as long as he is the strongest, and as soon as he can be driven out, he cannot protest against violence. The uprising that ends by strangling or dethroning a sultan is as lawful an act as those by which he disposed, the day before, of the lives and goods of his subjects.”47 As Jean Starobinski has noted, Friedrich Engels thought these last pages represented for Rousseau the ultimate overcoming of oppression, a revolution through which men “accomplish the negation of a negation.”48 But by the time Rousseau wrote Les Solitaires, nothing but Emile’s abdication of his will to another’s can save him from complete annihilation, l’anéantissement, that for Rousseau is both bliss and a curse. Alienation—both accepted and desired—thus serves as the last, and most compromised, exercise of freedom. These two modes of freedom—accepted alienation and abstention—appear again in the Reveries, spelling out in the most explicit terms Rousseau’s paradoxical redefinition of liberty. In the “First Walk,” he writes: “I am henceforth nothing among men, and that is all I can be, no longer having any real relations or true society with them. . . . [T]o abstain has become my sole duty.”49 In the “Sixth Walk,” he repeats, “Some kinds of adversity elevate and strengthen the soul, but some strike it down and kill it, such is the one to which I am prey . . . but [my adversity] has

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only made me null.”50 Echoing D’Helvétius once again, he adds: “Unable to do good either for myself or for others, I abstain from acting.”51 At that point, it seems, Rousseau abdicates all forms of involvement in the political or the social body. His claim to sovereignty, like that of Emile’s reign while a slave, entails an absolute withdrawal from the sphere of action.

dissoluti on Rousseau’s anéantissement may have found its most explicit formulation in the well-known passage in the Reveries where he describes the “delicious moment” of regaining consciousness after having been knocked down by a dog and waking up having forgotten everything including his own name. “Here Rousseau, in an anticipatory fort/da game of textual command, narrates the power to forget from his place as subject,” notes Avital Ronell. “With suspicious precision,” she adds, “he remembers . . . the experience of forgetfulness.”52 “I was born into life at that instant,” Rousseau writes, “and it seemed to me that I filled all the objects I perceived with my frail existence. Entirely absorbed in the present moment, I remembered nothing; I had no distinct notion of my person nor the least idea of what had just happened to me; I knew neither who I was nor where I was.” In this ecstatic loss of individual consciousness, Rousseau’s feeling of existence expands beyond the boundaries usually set by purpose or memory. “I felt a rapturous calm in my whole being; and each time I remember it, I find nothing comparable to it in all the activity of known pleasures.”53 Freud provides us with an analytical description of such moments. At the beginning of Civilization and Its Discontents, he mentions a letter he had received from the French writer Romain Rolland in which Rolland described “the true source of religious sentiments” as “a peculiar feeling . . . a sensation of ‘eternity,’ a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded—as it were, ‘oceanic.’ ” At first Freud rejected the concept: “I cannot discover this ‘oceanic’ feeling in myself,” he writes. But he goes on to suggest that this “oceanic” experience may well be connected to an earlier stage of the ego, a residue of “a much more inclusive—indeed, an all-embracing—feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it.”54 This “feeling of [an] indissoluble bond, of being one with [the] external world as a whole,” and Rousseau’s description that he filled all available space with his “frail existence” open the possibility of anéantissement as epiphany, an unmediated relief from

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the burden of individual consciousness and the compromises inherent to all actions. But the experience of indifferentiation, of an intimate bond between the ego and the world that, for Freud, harkens back to early childhood, is itself contemporary with, and compromised by, the infant’s helplessness and longing for the father—the true source of the religious sentiment that Rolland attributed to his “oceanic feeling.” Freud is quick to note that “the derivation of religious needs from the infant’s helplessness and the longing for the father aroused by it seems to me incontrovertible, especially since the feeling is not simply prolonged from childhood days, but is permanently sustained by fear of the superior power of Fate.”55 Leaving aside Emile’s longing for his master/father or the fragility of the child’s intimate bond with the world, let us simply recall Leo Bersani’s observation that a further reversal will take place later in Freud’s text, when the “blind fury of destructiveness” that characterizes the death drive is described in terms strangely reminiscent of the oceanic feeling “traceable to the limitless narcissism of infancy.”56 Behind the various forms of annihilation that emerge in Rousseau’s later works—be they Emile’s subjection to another’s will or Rousseau’s temporary loss of individual consciousness—there remains a form of destructiveness that compromises not only Jean-Jacques’s consciousness of the self, but the image he wishes to leave and that has become more valuable than his own existence. If there is no stated violence in Emile’s deliberate acceptance of, and subjection to, a master’s will, there is a destructive fury at work in Rousseau’s systematic undoing of the happy life he had so carefully contrived for his ideal pupil. The anéantissement at work is not merely that of Emile’s will but also that of Rousseau’s Emile, the treatise that in his Confessions he called his best work.

abstenti on Rousseau’s readers are familiar with his fear of being confused with the mediocre poet Jean-Baptiste Rousseau, but the anxiety that dominated his later years was caused by the conviction he had that his writings were disfigured, plagiarized, censored, buried, as it were, by imitators, enemies, and political authorities. “I wrote my first Confessions and my Dialogues in constant anxiety about ways to keep them from the rapacious hands of my persecutors in order to transmit them, if it were possible, to other generations,” he writes in the “First Walk” of the Reveries.57 A similar anxiety

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had appeared at the time Emile was published: “A few days before or after the publication of my book; for I do not recall the exact time very well, another work appeared on the same subject taken word for word from my first volume, aside from some platitudes that were mixed into this extract. This book carried the name of a Genevan called Balexert, and it was said in the title that he had won the prize of the Academy of Harlem. I understood easily that this Academy and this prize were of an entirely new creation in order to disguise the plagiarism from the public’s eyes.”58 Rousseau later deplored the publication of the Dialogues de Phocion, “in which I saw only a compilation of my writings made without restraint and without shame.”59 Rousseau is thus dealing with a problem of legacy, or rather with the laws affecting legacy such as naming the father, naming the child, true and false resemblances, adultery, and usurpation. No doubt the sin of plagiarism should have meant little for a man who, after all, had hoped at one time to inspire followers, whose stated ambition had been to exert a beneficial influence on his fellow men—in other words, to act freely as a philosophical guide to his contemporaries. But a greater fear haunted Rousseau: that his own books, the children of his intellect, would be unfaithfully read or illegally printed. The Confessions describe at length his publisher Rey’s fraudulent impressions. The Third Dialogue mentions “the extraordinary measures taken to alter and disfigure his writings,” and finally the loss of his papers “all passed into the hands of his persecutors, who did not fail to destroy those that might not suit them and modify the others at their whim.”60 Rousseau’s legitimate progeny is thus threatened by suppression, loss, and adulteration, while illegitimate works written by other hands claim his paternity. The “Second Walk” reiterates what has becomes the main preoccupation of the author’s later years. After his accident, and having heard the rumor that he was dead, Rousseau discovers that “they had at the same time started a subscription for printing the manuscripts they would find in my home. By that I understood that they were keeping a collection of fabricated writings available just for the purpose of attributing them to me right after my death.”61 The “ghost of paternity”62 that pursues Rousseau and destroyed Emile slowly emerges as the major burden of Jean-Jacque’s later years. The burden of this unwanted, illegitimate progeny is also described in the “Third Walk,” when Rousseau, evoking the Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar, adds that his work had been “vilely prostituted and profaned among the present generation.”63 Though not excluding the possibility that one day the Profession might make a revolution among

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men, he does not anticipate that it will happen in a foreseeable future. It has become clear: Rousseau will have no progeny. Torn by the theft of his papers, the fraud of his publisher, the works falsely attributed to him, and the adulteration of his own works, he suffers from the angst of a betrayed Emile: an adulterous Sophie, who has become in Emile’s eyes hardly better than a prostitute, has led Emile to abandon his own son, the authentic and the inauthentic inextricably linked in a renunciation that becomes also the ultimate gesture of freedom. The Dialogues, meant to reestablish Rousseau’s legitimate paternity, themselves engendered two texts he thought could alone protect the work of his tortured mind.64 His “History of the Preceding Writing” describes his failed attempt to leave his manuscript, wrapped like a newborn child, on the main altar of Notre-Dame, hoping that this enfant trouvé would somehow reach the prince’s eyes and vindicate his author. Finding the choir closed, Rousseau sent a copy of the Dialogues to Condillac and gave a partial one to Brooke Boothby, a young Englishman who had visited him. Still doubting that he would be read without being betrayed, Rousseau imagined distributing a small text, To all Frenchmen who still love justice and truth, in which he denounced in advance the publication of a distorted version of his life. In this feverish activity, which contrasts with the more leisurely pace of the Reveries, Rousseau finally names the father’s law, or rather the law of the father’s will, which is to renounce and to disown. The negative freedom that alone sustains Emile, and appeases the later years of Jean-Jacques, is that of disowning, of withholding the father’s name. Yet Rousseau’s final estrangement from society is no just renunciation, and his willful abstention produces an elusive sense of freedom that is also evoked by Kant, not in the Critique of Practical Reason, but in his analytic of the sublime. “The satisfaction in the sublime in nature,” Kant writes, “is only negative . . . , namely a feeling of the deprivation of the freedom of the imagination by itself, insofar as it is purposively determined in accordance with a law other than that of its empirical use.” The sacrifice of the power of imagination is associated in Kant’s analysis with the negative presentation of morality and liberty, “for the inscrutability of the idea of freedom,” Kant notes, “entirely precludes any positive presentation.”65 Rousseau’s will to inaction, his choice to be null, serves paradoxically as the ultimate affirmation of the self. Left to his sole inclination, Rousseau would take action and fully participate in the world that rejected him. His final refusal to act reflects a far greater measure of strength. “I abstain from acting,” he notes, “for all my weakness is with

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regard to action, all my strength is negative.”66 The key word, in this case, is “strength,” and the best commentary on Rousseau’s strength at this point may well be Gilles Deleuze’s description of Nietzsche’s will to power: “Will to power does not mean that the will wants power. . . . Will to power must be interpreted in a completely different way: power is the one that wills in the will. . . . What the will to power wills is a particular relation of forces, a particular quality of forces. And also a particular quality of power: affirming or denying.” Rousseau’s pre-Nietzschean will “does not aspire, it does not desire, above all, it does not desire power,” to use Deleuze’s wording again.67 Rousseau’s force resides in his will not to act. It is best expressed in his withdrawal from the sphere of influence to which he had once aspired and in his power to deny, even to himself, an inclination to act. In his Critique, Kant adds a suggestive comment: “The separation from all society is also regarded as something sublime if it rests on ideas that look beyond all sensible interest.”68 The well-known solitude first posited in the Reveries is the result of proscription: “The most sociable and the most loving of humans has been proscribed from society by a unanimous agreement.”69 But Rousseau’s loneliness is slowly transformed into a meditation that opens the way to an interior vision of the self that “silences the imagination” (a recurrent theme of the “Second Walk”) and claims separation from society as the fragile condition for an elusive happiness. The unfinished Reveries complete the unfinished Solitaires in at least one respect: they elucidate the nature of Emile’s mastery not as empirical freedom, not as triumph over adversity, not as stoicism, but rather as the new discovery that the negative freedom of abstention alone will bring the restful anéantissement that is both an object of fear and an object of desire.

the ring of gyges At the beginning of the “Sixth Walk,” Rousseau describes the lame child whose repeated entreaties first charmed, then annoyed the philosopher, particularly because the child called him by his name: “He never failed to call me Monsieur Rousseau many times, to show that he knew me well. But to the contrary, that only taught me that he knew me no more than those who had instructed him.” The name of Rousseau has been so disfigured among men that the philosopher refuses to be recognized by it, and the episode opens up the possibility that renouncing one’s own role

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might entail renouncing one’s own name as well. In the meditation that follows, Rousseau writes: “If I had been invisible and all powerful like God, I would have been beneficent and good like Him. . . . If I had been possessor of the ring of Gyges, it would have freed me from dependence on men and made them dependent on me.”70 The legend of Gyges served to open a discussion of liberty in Plato’s second book of The Republic: The liberty which we are supposing may be most completely given to [the just and the unjust] in the form of such a power as is said to have been possessed by Gyges the ancestor of Croesus the Lydian. According to the tradition, Gyges was a shepherd in the service of the king of Lydia; there was a great storm, and an earthquake made an opening in the earth at the place where he was feeding his flock. Amazed at the sight, he descended into the opening, where, among other marvels, he beheld a hollow brazen horse, having doors, at which he stooping and looking in saw a dead body of stature, as appeared to him, more than human, and having nothing on but a gold ring; this he took from the finger of the dead and reascended.71

The ring turns out to confer the power to disappear and to reappear at will: “Whereupon [Gyges] contrived to be chosen one of the messengers who were sent to the court; where as soon as he arrived he seduced the queen, and with her help conspired against the king and slew him, and took the kingdom.”72 The story, as told by Glaucon to Socrates, is meant to show that no man, just or unjust, could resist the temptations put in his way by such absolute power: Suppose now that there were two such magic rings, and the just put on one of them and the unjust the other; no man can be imagined to be of such an iron nature that he would stand fast in justice. . . . Then the actions of the just would be as the actions of the unjust; they would both come at last to the same point. And this we may truly affirm to be a great proof that a man is just, not willingly or because he thinks that justice is any good to him individually, but of necessity.73

Similarly, Rousseau agrees that “the ability to penetrate everywhere invisibly might have made me seek temptations I would have poorly resisted. . . . Anyone whose power puts him above other men ought to be above human weaknesses; otherwise, this excess of strength will in effect serve only to put him below others and below what he himself would have been had he remained their equal.” And Rousseau concludes: “All things

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considered, I believe I will do better to throw away my magic ring.”74 Freed from the necessity that binds both the just and the unjust when they are burdened by excessive powers, Rousseau determines to remain among men, disfigured though he is by his enemies, yet not invisible: “If men persist in seeing me as the opposite of what I am and if the sight of me provokes their injustice, I must flee them to deprive them of this sight, not disappear from their midst.”75 Once again, in his analytic of the sublime, Kant gives the best commentary on Rousseau’s narrowly defined isolation and self-sufficiency in the face of adversity: To be self-sufficient, hence not to need society, yet without being unsociable, i.e., fleeing it, is something that comes close to the sublime, just like any superiority over needs. In contrast, to flee from human beings out of misanthropy, because one is hostile to them, or out of anthropophobia (fear of people), because one fears them as enemies, is in part hateful and in part contemptible.

As if he were responding to Rousseau, Kant is quick to add: Nevertheless, there is a kind of misanthropy (very improperly so called), the predisposition to which is often found in the mind of many wellthinking people as they get older, which is certainly philanthropic enough as far as their benevolence is concerned. . . . Falsehood, ingratitude, injustice, the childishness in ends that we ourselves hold to be important and great, in the pursuit of which people do every conceivable evil to each other, so contradicts the idea of what they could be if they wanted to, and are so opposed to the lively wish to take a better view of them that, in order not to hate them, since one cannot love them, doing without all social joys seems to be only a small sacrifice. This sadness . . . is sublime.76

Rousseau had written: “I have become solitary or, as they say, unsociable and misanthropic, because to me the most desolate solitude seems preferable to the society of wicked men which is nourished only by betrayals and hatred.”77 At the end of his Reveries, Rousseau has gone beyond the obligations that tied him to other men, the desire to defend his true image, and also beyond the brief ecstatic state of “filling the world with his frail existence,” Freud’s “oceanic feeling.” He notes, “I can no longer, as before, throw myself headfirst into this vast ocean of nature, because my weakened and

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slackened faculties no longer find objects sufficiently defined, sufficiently settled, sufficiently within my reach to which they can strongly attach themselves, and because I no longer feel myself vigorous enough to swim in the chaos of my former ecstasies.”78 In his seminal essay The Two Concepts of Liberty, Isaiah Berlin describes the negative sense of liberty as “the answer to the question: What is the area within which the subject—a person or group of persons—is or should be left to do or be what he wants to do or be, without interference by other persons?”79 As presented by Berlin, the concept of negative freedom differs in an important way from Rousseau’s willed negation of all actions, or the sense of annihilation he experienced or desired in the last years of his life. In addition, Rousseau’s comments on his reclaimed freedom maintain a fragile association between the sensible and the suprasensible world that Kant would take pains to dissociate in his Critiques. The Reveries describes a liminal space where freedom is “cleared of everything that is only empirical,” to use Kant’s formulation, and yet expresses itself in the sensuous world of aimless wanderings or collecting plants. “Forced to abstain from thinking for fear of thinking about my misfortunes in spite of myself, forced to keep in check the remainders of a cheerful but languishing imagination,” Rousseau clung at the same time to the remains of an imaginary existence: “I pass three-fourths of my life occupied with instructive and even agreeable objects in which I indulge my mind and my senses with delight, or with the children of my fancy whom I have created according to my heart.”80 This reclaimed paternity best illustrates Rousseau’s use of negative freedom: not so much freedom as sublime, but freedom as the sublimation of a long-endured necessity. Rousseau’s last meditations on negative freedom are a far cry from the political program he had sketched out in the Social Contract, but they are not unrelated to the reflections on ancient Rome that had served to illustrate his views on the illegitimacy and violence of its first beginnings: they draw a parallel history of usurpation, subjugation, and loss. Rousseau himself presented his personal trajectory as the hopeless struggle to establish legitimacy and paternity. The genealogical rupture that separates us from our distant origins or makes it so difficult to know the beginnings of Rome also prevents the successful formation of the political state. The nature of political disasters is forcefully illustrated by slaughter and slavery but more often endured as intimate subjection. This is also why the relation between subject and state that Rousseau had sought to define and legislate in the Social Contract cannot be repaired. The fragmented

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subject now duplicates the shattered cities destroyed by earthquakes and the diseased bodies of past and future plagues. Beyond the will to subjection that alone can triumph from adversity, there is only anéantissement and withdrawal from the socius. It is certainly paradoxical that the French Revolution would look to Rousseau as a philosophical model and that many of its legislators would seek to apply measures directly borrowed from the Social Contract. Through the Revolution’s faith and hopes, this child of Rousseau’s political imagination was restituted to its legitimate father, but as a political ideal soon to be disfigured by measures of emergency that violated its governing principles.

5 Nightwatch: Terror and Time In late September 1790, in the Auvergne region of France, a glass bottle was placed into the still-open grave of a young man. Inside was a note with the following message: François-Joseph Clément, from the Canton of Vaud in Switzerland, attached for fifteen years to the service of Paul Otcher, Count Strogonoff, died on September 28, 1790, in the neighboring house belonging to Gilbert Romme, after a 21-day illness, in his thirty-sixth year. The Gospels and the Declaration of the Rights of Men and Citizens being left here testify to his religious and civil opinions. The report of his burial has been recorded in the registers of the Municipality of Gimeaux. May those who will find these lines respect the remains of a man who served without servility and loved liberty and virtue above all things. This is the request of his travel companions and friends. Signed: Paul Otcher, Gilbert Romme, J.-B. Tailhand, J. Bathiat1

Bottles containing sealed messages had long been used in scientific experiments to determine the direction of sea currents. They also evoked shipwrecks and the survivors’ last effort to send a call for help. But the message sealed in a bottle and left in Clément’s grave sums up a life already spent and honors the memory of an honest and simple man. The buried bottle entombs the text within the grave, a mise en abyme that supplements the traditional epitaph addressed to those who come across a headstone. These words from beyond the grave—what Chateaubriand would later call l’outre-tombe—also testify to the uncertainty of the times: in linking the Gospels with the Declaration of Rights, the message reflects the fragile harmony that briefly prevailed at the beginning of the French Revolution but was soon to be shattered by civil war and heightened violence. In those troubled times, peaceful rest for the dead could not to be guaranteed, and Michelet would detail better than any other historian 101

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the overflowing cemeteries of the Terror, the desecration of royal tombs, the transfer of human remains from one mass grave to another.2 Giorgio Agamben has pointed out that the 1789 Declaration of Rights “shows that it is precisely bare natural life—which is to say, the pure fact of birth—that appears here as the source and the bearer of rights.”3 But no declaration and no legal recourse covered the “bare state” of death. Nothing could be done to ensure peace for François-Joseph Clément except perhaps to plead that his remains be left undisturbed and his memory honored. Two of the message’s signatories, Paul Otcher and Gilbert Romme, had recently joined the Club des Amis de la Constitution, also known as the Club des Jacobins. To demonstrate his new Republican convictions, Otcher, the son of Russia’s Count Strogonoff, had abandoned his aristocratic title and even changed his surname. Romme, a French mathematician, had served as Otcher’s preceptor for the previous eleven years. In the summer of 1787, Romme along with his pupil and their servant Clément had taken a long trip through the Alps, guided by the works of Georges-Louis Leclerc, Count of Buffon, and by those of Horace Benedict de Saussure (who would later lead a successful expedition to the top of Mont Blanc). Romme outlined the goals of their excursion: “1. to exercise our bodies to the tiring effects of journeys, to the deprivations one sustains during travel, and to the frugality of mountains; 2. to study the geography and history of this country, its natural, political, and moral constitution; 3. to study its factories.”4 One recognizes in these lines the influence of Rousseau. Romme borrows from the letters on the Valais that Saint-Preux writes to Julie in La Nouvelle Héloïse and, of course, the pedagogical program outlined in Emile. The message left by Romme and Otcher in Clément’s grave can thus be read as an addendum to their alpine excursion: a final homage both to the philosopher himself and to the simple man who had shared the innate sense of virtue and liberty that Rousseau attributed to the people of the Valais. Above all, one reads a form of anxiety in the lines written and signed by the preceptor and his pupil, and in the unusual method of their unscheduled delivery: the careful placement of the Gospels and the Declaration of Rights, side by side, in Clément’s grave suggests that, in these early days of the Revolution, all citizens had to show proof of conforming beliefs. A Protestant, Clément had not had a religious burial; the enclosure of the sacred texts in his grave testified better than any sacrament to his religious convictions. Yet the text makes it clear that the presence of neither Gospels nor the new Declaration of Rights could alone guarantee Clément’s final rest.

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The curious rite that accompanied Clément’s burial captures the essence of the gathering Revolutionary storm: the growing suspicions surrounding relations between the church and the nation, and the early impact of the Revolution on all men, dead or alive, enlightened men of science, or ordinary servants. To leave a message in a bottle was perhaps the best way to express the uncertainty of life and death—what Romme would call “the shock of opinions, interests and ambitions”—that characterized the beginning of the Revolution.5

a rising sta r Born in 1750 in the Auvergne, Romme had arrived in Paris in 1774 to complete medical studies. He soon became absorbed in a variety of scientific inquiries. “My instruction is my only goal, my only passion,” he wrote at the time. “All modern discoveries have the right to interest me, and I investigate them with fervor. . . . I throw myself heart and soul into anything that appears to be interesting, without considering whether it throws any light upon the field that must lead me to a career.”6 Eventually Romme abandoned medicine to devote his time to mathematics and experimental physics, later accepting the post of tutor to the son of Russia’s Count Alexander Strogonoff. The position had discouraged no less influential a man as Saussure, but Romme had no prospects and left Paris for St. Petersburg, at the end of 1779. Rousseau’s influence on Romme’s early career can be seen not only in the educational methods Romme adopted, but also in the way he defined his position in the Strogonoff household when he wrote to the Countess: If I were a simple individual, free from all functions, the contestations that arise between us would be for me nothing but so many absurdities, so many wrongs that would make me unworthy of your kindnesses. . . . But do you forget that you have entrusted me with a most sacred task? . . . I will accept distractions, caprices, injustice but I will never accept servility or humiliations.7

Romme stayed in Russia until 1786, perfecting his pupil’s education and pursuing his own research in the natural sciences. When he was finally allowed to leave, he took Paul with him to Geneva, where he renewed his acquaintance with Saussure. He also developed an interest in horology that would play a crucial role in his Revolutionary career.

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Less than three months after the preceptor and his pupil buried Clément, they, too, were separated: alarmed by the news from France and Romme’s endless delays in returning his son to Russia, Count Strogonoff sent an envoy to bring the young man home. After Paul’s departure, Romme turned to public life and began to play an active role in the Revolution. He was first elected to the Legislative Assembly on September 7, 1791, and again to the Convention, where he allied himself with the Montagne and voted for the king’s death. But his great moment came when he was named to the Committee of Public Instruction and entrusted with a project meant to complete France’s ambitious reforms: a calendar that would mark a new historical beginning and a more rational way of measuring time. Several scientists later claimed to have played a major role in devising the Revolutionary calendar (among them JosephJérôme Lefrançois de Lalande), but Romme the mathematician deserves the credit for most of its initial conceptualization.8

astronomical odds When Romme first presented his new calendar to the Convention, on September 20, 1793, he described its goal as twofold: to realign the year with more precise astronomical observations and to do away with a nomenclature that evoked the names of “tyrants, oppressors of their countries . . . or gods.” As he put it: The Vulgar Era arose among an ignorant and credulous people amid the troubles preceding the fall of the Roman Empire. For eighteen centuries its designations of the duration of time have been entwined with the progress of fanaticism, the debasement of nations, the scandalous triumph of pride, vice, and stupidity, the persecution and humiliation visited on virtue, talent, and philosophy by cruel despots or by those permitted to act in their name. . . . The Vulgar Era was the era of cruelty, of deceit, of perfidy, and of slavery. It ended along with Royalty, the source of all our ills.9

Romme described the new era proposed by the Committee as “a new page in history, and in its new course, as simple and majestic as equality. Accordingly, Romme proposed to discard the names of the months and days, which, besides recalling names of fallen gods, echoed superstitious beliefs inherited from the “cabalistic Egyptian order.”10 Astronomical accuracy would be served as well by the resetting of bissextile years, which

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Julius Caesar had fixed “as befitted his pride rather than astronomical concordance.”11 Despite several corrections and reforms, Romme noted, common timekeeping had failed to mark the true equinox. Moreover, different regions had arrived at their own ways of defining the calendar year, sometimes choosing a season, sometimes a historical event, as its symbolic beginning. “As long as its length was not determined by exact knowledge of the movement of the earth around the sun, the year has been vague, and its beginning has run successively over all the seasons,” Romme stated.12 The new calendar thus met two needs: to erase the past and to provide accurate measures of duration, free from all “the errors and superstitions transmitted by centuries of ignorance.”13 The program fitted perfectly with the scientific ambitions of the Enlightenment. More significantly, however, Romme observed that on September 22, 1792, the day the Republic was declared in France, at exactly nine hours, eighteen minutes, and thirty seconds, the sun reached the point of true equinox, entering the sign of Libra: “Thus was the equality of day and night observed in the heavens at the same time that civil and moral equality was proclaimed by the representatives of the French people as the sacred foundation of its new government.”14 The perfect harmony that Romme perceived between natural movements and historical events—what Charles Coulston Gillispie describes as “sidereal destiny”15—inspired Romme to propose the most significant element of his reform: Sacred Egyptian traditions posited the earth emerged from chaos under the same sign [Libra] as our own Republic, and fixed [at this point] the origin of things and time. This combination of so many circumstances imprints a sacred character to this season, one of the most remarkable when it comes to our revolutionary accomplishments, and a time that will no doubt be among the most celebrated festivals of future generations. We propose to you that the first day of the true Fall equinox, which was also that of the founding of the Republic, be decreed as the era of the French and the first day of their year, abolishing at the same time the common era in all civil usage.16

Romme’s proposal, which became the basis for the new calendar, was a clear attempt to reconcile scientific principles with patriotic fervor. But its most intriguing aspect lay in its audacious attempt to place history under the powerful symbolic alignment of the stars. The move claimed a form of predetermined legitimacy, visible in the movement of astral

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bodies and fully decipherable through scientific progress: it did nothing short of exorcising dis-aster, in its etymological sense. The rigorous scientific discourse used by the commission combined with the ancient trust in the obscure power of the stars to watch over men’s destiny and to protect the country from ruin and defeat. As the nation stood alone, torn by internal strife, surrounded by coalition troops, and practically bankrupt, the bold idea of re-creating a measurement of time seemed a way to reconcile heaven and earth. The metaphor of the Revolution as a devastating storm—a recurring image in Count Strogonoff ’s letters to Romme—would be erased by the celebration of the Republic’s beginning as perfect harmony between the stars and human achievements. The move replicated the perfect balance of proclaimed equality. Thus, the nation would not be dis-astered, abandoned by the stars. There would be no shipwreck, no stranded or desperate victims. The new calendar adopted by the Convention would reflect the cosmic harmony that had presided over the birth of a new Republic. Paradoxically, it was Romme’s scientific mind that led him, in the same discourse, to denounce the role of astronomy in ancient calendars. “We propose a new nomenclature which is neither celestial nor mysterious, but stems entirely from our revolution.”17 Yet the beginning of the new era that Romme proposed owed everything to a single and inspiring astral disposition: The sun shone down over the two poles, and successively over the entire globe on the very day when, for the first time, the torch of liberty that must one day enlighten all of mankind illuminated the French nation with all its purity. Thus, the sun passed from one hemisphere to the other on the day when the people, triumphant over the oppression of kings, passed from a royal to a republican government. The French have been completely delivered unto themselves during this happy season when the earth, made fruitful by celestial influences and human work, lavishes its gifts and rewards with magnificence the toils, the labors, and the care of the working man.18

Romme’s proposal divided the year into twelve months of thirty days each, rounding out the year with five epagomena (six in leap years)—all bearing names evoking glorious events or civic virtues: Republic, Unity, Fraternity, Liberty, Justice, Equality, Regeneration, Reunion, the Tennis Court, the Bastille, the People, the Mountain, followed by Adoption, Industry, Rewards, Paternity, and Old Age (La République, L’Unité,

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La Fraternité, La Liberté, La Justice, L’Egalité, La Régénération, La Réunion, Le Jeu de Paume, La Bastille, Le Peuple, La Montagne; Epagomena: L’Adoption, L’Industrie, Les Récompense, La Paternité, La Vieillesse).19

the empire o f si gns The Convention approved the major changes proposed by Romme, except for his nomenclature. It later adopted more poetic names devised by Fabre d’Eglantine: Vendémiaire, Brumaire, Frimaire for the fall season; Nivôse, Pluviôse, Ventôse for the winter months; Germinal, Floréal, Prairial for spring; and Messidor, Thermidor, and Fructidor for the summer. Fabre, too, emphasized that the new calendar must erase traditional ways of marking time. But he focused mainly on the importance of abolishing religious signs (the Convention was then in the middle of its deChristianization project). Pointing to “the hold [empire] that images have over human intelligence,” he aimed to consecrate the role of agriculture in France, and using the “imitative harmony of language,” to make it easy “through pronunciation alone of the name of the month to feel perfectly . . . the season, the temperature, and the state of vegetation.”20 The calendar confirmed Fabre’s reputation as a poet, although we know now that the surname he had adopted—“Fabre d’Eglantine”—commemorated a poetry prize he fraudulently claimed to have received from the Toulouse Académie des Jeux Floraux.21 The final version of the Republican calendar was adopted on November 24, 1793, and remained in use until January 1, 1806, when Napoleon’s France realigned itself with the rest of the Western world after thirteen years spent stranded on a time island. The concern generated by all the signs inherited from the “Vulgar Era” was further illustrated in two brief and contradictory interventions of Romme’s on the floor of the Convention. On October 22, 1793, he asked that all signs of royalty and feudalism be erased from playing cards and replaced with Republican emblems. But, as Deputy Chabot observed, “You will never eliminate the players’ lack of morality. It is perhaps useful to let them play with kings and queens; it is at least important that they not play with the emblems of freedom and the Republic.”22 The Convention applauded Chabot, and the project was abandoned. Two days later, Romme presented a motion to prevent the “removal, destruction, mutilation of printed books or manuscripts, of engravings and

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drawings, of paintings, bas-reliefs, statues, medals, and all the other objects that interest the arts, history, and instruction, on the pretext of removing all the signs of feudality from libraries, workers, or merchants.” The motion was approved.23 Romme’s two proposals, presented between the time his calendar project was submitted and the date of its final approval, serve both to underscore and to contrast the unique nature of temporal signs and their role in the fabric of Revolutionary ideology. Playing cards, books, and other objects could go on carrying signs from a bygone era, but the calendar—the proper means of recording history—along with history itself had to be entirely reinvented.24

“a small corner of order in a disordered uni verse” 25 The French Republic’s newly adopted calendar further isolated the country from its neighbors. France stood alone with its new conventions: exchange with its hostile neighbors would take more than an ideological shift, the peaceful resolution of conflict, or the reconciliation of opposite principles. It would require a double act of translation: from one language to another, from one established time system to a new one. It remains to be seen whether the Convention was more preoccupied with the project of educating the French people—training the population to rethink time—or with the need to make a dramatic statement, separating itself from a common European form of historical thinking. The fact that the calendar—rather than currency, weights, or distances—was the only convention shared by most of the Western world emphasizes its unique and central role in the possibility of thinking about all forms of common human experience. The solemn rhetoric that accompanied the reform made no mention of other countries: this was strictly a national affair. The new era was to be the “era of the French,” a break from the nation’s past and from the past and present of all other nations. France was divesting itself of centuries of “fanaticism,” “debasement,” and the company of others. To be sure, France’s calendar reform was not without precedent, and Romme was quick to mention in his project earlier attempts to correct inaccuracies that had become the “despair of chronologists, historians, and astronomers.”26 But, perhaps by virtue of the unique harmony between the equi-

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nox and the onset of the Republic, it was fitting that France, and France alone, conceive and enact its own time measurements. It is also one of the most paradoxical aspects of the French Revolution that a government historians have for so long associated with the idea of universal values was the first to break so completely from the accepted conventions of historical time. The ideology at stake, with its new names and numbering system, can easily be understood in terms of political principles and national pride. It is more difficult to account for the radical isolation the nation was risking—perhaps aspiring to—through its new standards. Yet only once during the public debates that followed Romme’s presentation did anyone point out the difficulties that would necessarily follow the implementation of the new decree when it came to foreign affairs. Deputy Bentabole remarked: “The national Convention has done all it had to do by adopting the French Era; I think it should stop there. To modify time’s subdivisions and their names is useless and even dangerous. . . . [W]e want to unite peoples through fraternity: thus, far from breaking our communications with them, we must, if possible, multiply them. I ask that the rest of the project be adjourned.”27 He was overruled. Indeed, the Convention expressed no desire to export its newfound astronomical accuracy, and the debates alluded only once to the vague hope that other nations might follow France’s example. Deputy Duhem asked that months be identified simply by numbers: “Your calendar, which otherwise would have been only that of the French nation, will become that of all the peoples. They will never stray from the numerical order which is the natural one.”28 But the adoption of Fabre d’Eglantine’s nomenclature a few weeks later not only erased religious names from the old calendar; it pushed the Republic and its neighbors further apart than ever before. Clearly, the new time system devised by Romme and his team of scientists relied upon (or conjured up) the idea of an entirely ordered physical world. This was not the natural world subjected to the power of man that Enlightenment writers had dreamed of, but rather a world that naturally yielded, in its predictable unfolding, all the reassurance of mathematical regularity. “The rigor of the principles developed in the first part [of the decree] requires that the calendar be cleared of everything that does not strictly belong to the division of the year, or to the positions of the stars that, through their light, most affect the primary needs of men, either in assisting their labors, or in regulating their times,” declared Romme on

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November 24, 1793.29 For some, such as Romme and his colleagues, the reorganization of time happily reunited natural observations with numerical conventions. For others, such as Duhem, the entire system, including its numerical order, was rooted in the physical world: “The people will never abandon the numerical order which is that of nature itself.”30 The idea of a regulated nature arising implicitly or explicitly from the reorganization of the calendar thus brought together previously separate domains: astronomy, mathematics, ideology, and political economy were now conjoined in an interpretation of nature that left out any possibility of disorder, that is, of disaster. The legislative measure certainly reflected the Enlightenment belief that an ordered nature would soon yield its secrets. But it mostly invoked a more archaic hope of mythical proportions: that achieving harmony with the heavens would somehow shield the Revolution from storms and disasters. One recognizes in the Revolutionary calendar all the signs of the ultimate utopia—the production of a regulated society in perfect accord with the harmony of an ordered universe. In this fall of 1793, largely devoted to the de-Christianization program, the Republican calendar was a strange act of faith. The new Republic marked a new beginning that celebrated its harmony with the heavens and its complete isolation from other earthly powers.

the beginnings of history Of course, the rewriting of historical time could not be that simple. To begin with, a retroactive law was needed to convert the year just past— September 1792 to September 1793—into the first year of the Republic. Thus Year I was never actually lived as such; the glorious hour where the equality of nights and days echoed the newly proclaimed equality among all citizens was never experienced as conscious origin or a privileged moment of cosmic harmony. To be sure, there was a mood of sheer exultation among the troops fresh from the victory of Valmy and the deputies who had abolished the monarchy. Some countries were even won over by the youthful exuberance of the new Republic. Michelet, at least, saw it that way. “The world gives itself to France,” he writes in the title of chapter 1 of book 8, the first volume in the History of the French Revolution to be dedicated to the Republic. “The Convention had raised the flag of the Republic on September 21 on the Tuileries pavilion. Within two months all the neighboring peoples had embraced this flag and raised it on their towers and cities.”31 But whatever sympathies the Republican

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model awoke among philosophers and peoples, France was already at war and would remain at war until the end of Napoleon’s empire. The first day of the Republic was actually lived as the twenty-second day of September, in the aftermath of the August 10, 1792, Revolution and in the uneasy anticipation of having to decide the king’s fate. There was thus no shared consciousness of what Romme would describe as the unique “opening of a new book of time.” The first day of Year I was lived vicariously as the commemoration, a year or so later, of a past beginning, a reassigned point of reclaimed origin. While most calendars take as their starting point a past event,32 the Revolutionary calendar’s purpose was not simply to count the years and record history. It was to celebrate the dawn of the new era and the constitutional transformation of history in a time of emergency. The calendar meant to open a different era simply rewrote past history as new time. The retrofitted consciousness of the Republican era would be deprived of the immediacy of experience. In his Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History, first published in January 1786, Kant considers at some length the ways in which an unremembered history could be written: To base a historical account solely on conjectures would seem little better than drawing up a plan for a novel. Indeed, such an account could not be described as conjectural history at all, but merely as a work of fiction.— Nevertheless, what it may be presumptuous to introduce in the course of a history of human actions may well be permissible with reference to the first beginning of that history, for if the beginning is a product of nature, it may be discoverable by conjectural means. . . . Thus a history of the first development of freedom from its origins as a predisposition in human nature is something quite different from a history of its subsequent course, which must be based exclusively on historical records.33

Kant is imagining two beginnings, one dating from the appearance of a species endowed with the latent capacity to choose freely a course of action, and a second dating from the time when man first used his freedom but—not able to reason properly—chose an evil course of action. The conjectural history defended by Kant, a history unremembered and unrecorded by a human species still living in a state of animality, is also our only approach to the state of nature and, in many ways, to what it means to understand nature itself. Rousseau had developed a similar argument

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in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among Men when he assigned to philosophy the role of completing missing fragments.34 For Rousseau, the space of philosophy—and perhaps also its beginning—was located very precisely where history was silent, where it failed to provide us with the connective tissue of unremembered and unexamined lives. Kant, more cautious than Rousseau, took the “sacred document” of Genesis “as [his] map.” But his essay nevertheless reaffirms the necessity and the legitimacy of speculation in the reconstitution of historical beginning. Of course, there are several histories and several beginnings. In a long note added to the essay, Kant distinguishes between the necessarily conjectural history of man in a state of ignorance and innocence, and the history that followed the moment when man, released “from the womb of nature,” first made use of his freedom: “The history of nature, begins with goodness, for it is the work of God, but the history of freedom begins with evil, for it is the work of man.”35 That second history, or rather the second beginning of history—the history of man’s freedom and of man’s access to a state of humanity—is thus also one of disastrous consequences (as Rousseau had already argued). Yet—and this is where Kant departs from Rousseau—this disaster offers a measure of hope. “For the individual, who looks only to himself in the exercise of his freedom,” Kant argues, “a change of this kind represented a loss; for nature, whose ends in relation to man concerns the species, it represented a gain.” The advent of a government subject to law rather than the rule of force allowed human aptitudes to develop, chief among them sociability. And, though the period also marked the advent of greater inequalities, Kant reaffirms his belief that “we should be content with providence and with the course of human affairs as a whole, which does not begin with good and then proceed to evil, but develops gradually from the worse to the better; and each individual is for his own part called upon by nature itself to contribute towards this progress to the best of his ability.”36 The gradual improvement fostered by providence thus serves to counteract the evil that had followed man’s emergence from the innocent state of nature. At one point in the essay, Kant explicitly defends Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among Men, which shows, quite correctly in Kant’s view, “that there is an inevitable conflict between culture and the nature of the human race as a physical species each of whose individual members is meant to fulfill his destiny completely.” And, he adds: “In his Emile, his Social Contract, and other writings, [Rousseau] attempts in turn to solve the more difficult problem of what course culture should take in order to endure the proper development, in keeping with their

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destiny, of man’s capacities as a moral species, so that this [moral] destiny will no longer conflict with his character as a natural species.”37 The tasks of the historian and the philosophers are thus entwined in Kant’s essay, except that the historian’s efforts lead him to examine the recorded past alone, while the philosopher takes a wider view to the actions of humans, regarding them as individuals and as members of a species. Kant further speculates on what might constitute, after the history of the natural beginnings of man and the history of freedom, a third beginning yet to come: “Since culture has perhaps not yet really begun—let alone completed—its development in accordance with the true principles of man’s education as a human being and citizen, the above conflict [between culture and the nature of the human race] is the source of all the genuine evils which oppress human life, and all the vices which dishonour it.” Here Kant inserts a long footnote giving specific examples of the conflicts “between man’s aspiration towards his moral destiny, on the one hand, and his unchanging obedience to laws inherent in his nature and appropriate to a crude and animal condition, on the other.”38 Chief among them, for Kant, is the question of inequality: This inequality is inseparable from culture so long as the latter proceeds, as it were, without a plan (and this is inevitably the case for a considerable period of time). But it was surely not imposed on man by nature, for nature gave him both freedom and reason, and reason decreed that this freedom is subject to no other limits than those of its own universal and external legality, which is known as civil right. Man was meant to rise, by his own efforts, above the barbarism of his natural abilities, but to take care not to contravene them even as he rises above them. He can expect to attain this skill only at a late stage and after many unsuccessful attempts.39

For the revolutionaries of 1793, the declaration of civil rights and the erasure of past inequalities had clearly ushered in the last stage of Kant’s history. They felt they had accomplished at least one important step in man’s attempt to rise above barbarism and proclaim the universality of civil right. But the question remained of how best to write this historical account and determine the specific nature of this beginning. These questions were in fact inseparable. In the spring of 1792, more than eighteen months before he presented the Republican calendar, Romme—taking 1789 as a point of departure—had begun dating his letters from “the Fourth year of freedom,” and then from the “Fourth Year of freedom and equality.” But the letters he wrote at that time also have a recurring

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theme: the “terrors,” and the “false terrors” that circulated in Paris and threatened the work of the National Assembly. In January 1792, Romme noted that horses were being rounded up and that the king was again expected to flee. The newly declared civil rights were threatened, the government challenged, the rule of law ignored. “The [Assembly] will triumph, let there be no doubt about it,” wrote Romme, “because the people are here, the people want to be free, and they want to be free through the law.”40 The new calendar would make clear to all that the French Revolution was irreversible. “The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action,” writes Walter Benjamin in “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” “The great revolution introduced a new calendar. The initial day of a calendar serves as a historical time lapse camera.” For Benjamin, the French Revolution’s explosion of the historical continuum was anchored in ancient Rome. “To Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome reincarnate.”41 The new calendar was both the manifestation of an explosion in the continuum of history and a prodigious temporal loop, a spectacular compression of the ages that allowed ancient Rome to inhabit the here and now, and the here and now to connect with a past long gone. Benjamin’s formulation also suggests that the violence that accompanied the Revolution shattered the conventional and complacent understanding of past eras that would become the general view of historians such as Fustel de Coulanges: a history anchored in all the comfort of a continuous chronological narrative. In his admiration for Rome, however, Robespierre may have experienced a different kind of historical consciousness, one that Benjamin describes in another section as “[seizing] hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.”42 The memory of Rome takes hold of the Revolution, time is shattered, and a new beginning is decreed. We do not know when, or whether, the moment of danger took on such urgency that the calendar became an absolute necessity, or whether the calendar with its new beginning celebrated the realization that a vertiginous time warp was taking place. But the calendar did testify to a specific form of historical consciousness that, for Benjamin, asserted not so much the possibility of a new beginning—of a radical break with the past—as the experience of shattering a continuum, of reordering fragments from a past that had been summoned in haste by the urgency of the moment.

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It is worth noting that the Roman republic that inspired so many plays and speeches at the time of the Revolution is itself conspicuously absent from the calendar. When Romme announced that “the organization of the year we propose is almost entirely drawn from the too-soon abandoned practices of the most enlightened peoples of antiquity,” he was referring not to Rome but to the Egyptians.43 The desire to reconcile astronomical precision with the practices of cultivation dictated the calendar’s ultimate organization: “This project is the result of several consultations with men enlightened in celestial movements and antiquity,” and its goal is admirably summed up in these words: “We have sought what could be suitable for the man of the fields whose calendar must be as simple as the nature from which he is never separated.”44 But the inscription of nature in the calendar, and most of all nature’s role in eradicating religious and superstitious symbols, is itself historically marked. Reaching back, the calendar resuscitates long-forgotten practices, combining mathematical observations with the recognition of man’s role in both the cultivation and the understanding of nature. It attests both to the explosion of time described by Benjamin and to an awareness of the new pact between nature and culture that Kant had described when speculating about the end of history.

the tyranny of the hour Romme’s revisions went further still: not content with the opening of a new era at the point of true equinox or with regulating the duration of the months, he also proposed to reorder the day into ten hours of one hundred minutes each. He first broached the subject of decimal time in his presentation of September 20, 1793: “The day from midnight to midnight is divided in ten parts. Each part is divided in ten other parts, and so on until the smallest portion commensurable with duration.” He stressed all the advantages of his plan: The [current] division of the hour into sixty minutes and the minutes into sixty seconds is very inconvenient for calculations; French astronomers have made some modifications to their instruments that tend to make their operations quicker and more exact. Their improvement will be complete when time will be subjected to the simple and general rule of decimal division. . . . We have built a few sample watches, with decimal divisions of the day. They measure up to the 100,000th part of the day, which is

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equivalent to the heartbeat of a healthy man of average size marching in step, double-time.45

We will return later to the military cadence evoked by Romme, and the natural sound of an individual heartbeat drowned out by the marching of an anonymous army. For now, let us note that the final presentation of the calendar decree included a long section devoted to the technology involved in the implementation of decimal time, detailing all its advantage for clockmakers: “The new division of the day must perfect horology and make the productions of this art useful and accessible in price to the majority of citizens,” stated Romme. Up until now, we have not taken advantage of the benefits provided by: 1. a good way of dividing the dial; 2. the shape of the hand which, instead of indicating [the hour] through its extremity alone could produce several indications at the same time on different concentric circles. . . . It is very important that clockmakers find a way to adapt old watch and clock movements to the new decimal division, making the smallest amount of modifications.46

Of course, the length of the hour had always been a matter of consensus. Romme briefly evoked the various methods of measuring days: from the moment of the first cry of the cock, to the rising or the setting of the sun. If many of these methods aligned themselves with natural phenomena, others were purely matters of convention, particularly beginning the new day at one second past midnight—the general rule at the time of the Revolution, except in Basel. That city, Romme observed, started the day one hour earlier, “in memory of the service rendered to the city by the man who foiled a conspiracy by ringing the bell at eleven o’clock as if it were midnight.”47 The measure of the day thus took into account the various factors that ordered a well-run state: astronomical observation, consensus, historical memory, and, above all, political authority. Gerhard Dohrn–van Rossum has commented at some length on the legend that attributed to King Charles V of France an ordinance “requiring all churches in Paris to regulate their tolling by the clocks or, according to some accounts, by the clock at the royal palace, the Horloge du Palais.”48 Though largely undocumented, as Dohrn–van Rossum shows, the story illustrates the symbolic transfer of authority, at the end of the Middle Ages, from monastic

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to royal authority. The progressive ordering of time, the replacement of bells with clocks to mark the hour, had tremendous impact on administrative policy, labor rules, and the general functioning of government. From this perspective, Romme’s redefined hour, and the length of its subdivisions, would be the final transfer of power from the royal government to the republican State. It would complete the revision of the calendar, reconciling astrometric precision with mathematical purity. This is a particularly important point: if, as Romme and other deputies claimed, numbers emanate from nature, then the decimal hour was nature in all its absolute regularity; it was the perfect expression of nature made predictable, free of the cataclysms that defied prognostics and preventions. We know that, across the centuries, the division of the day into hours had taken place gradually and by different means. From early sundials to canonical hora, from the ringing of bells to municipal clocks, and from the simple observation of sunrise and sunset to the divisions within the hour, the increasingly precise measurement of time reflected both the political rule and the progress of horological art. A history of measured time is thus also a history of power and discipline. “Scholarship on the history of Jewish schools . . . has stressed the abundance and strictness of regulations that were concerned with time-discipline in the broader sense,” notes Dohrn–van Rossum.49 The 1676 school regulations of Nikolsburg in Moravia stated: “No teacher may teach without a sandglass.” The sandglass marked the passage of time, but that was not the only time under consideration. When it came to calculating a teacher’s salary: “Boys who are learning the alphabet count for half an hour, those studying the Pentateuch for three-quarters of an hour, those studying the Talmud for one hour. Those who, in addition to the Talmud, are learning the commentary Tosafot count for five quarters of an hour.”50 Public clocks appeared in the late fourteenth century, disseminating a notion of equally divided hours “that was more abstract with respect to the period of daylight though not completely detached from it,” writes Dohrn–van Rossum. Consensus on the division of the hour was not reached until much later and by a circuitous route. Some experts, following Galen, suggested that hourly divisions should be based on the human pulse; others, such as Galileo, reversed this notion, measuring the rate of the pulse by the swings of the pendulum.51 As we know, Romme also incorporated the pulse of the living body into the more abstract mathematical reckoning of time when he mentioned “the heartbeat of a healthy man of average size marching in step,

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double-time.”52 These words sum up a Revolutionary program as well: stipulating not only that nature should be measured with scientific accuracy, but that in time of emergency, the ordinary citizen should be enlisted and trained to defend the nation. The time of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule, to echo Benjamin.53 As defined by Romme, the decimal hour was the perfect measure for a time of emergency; it made emergency the standard for present and future days, marked by horological precision and the beat of the marching step. The difficulties of implementing decimal time were acknowledged from the start: “Since the modifications required in horology by these changes can only be made progressively, we ask that the new division become obligatory for civil use only in the Third Year of the Republic.”54 The final decree, however, postponed the deadline further, to Year VIII of the Republic. The Convention only invited artists to design the “the simplest, the best, the most efficient, and the least expensive movement” for decimal clocks and watches,55 as a way to encourage the population and the clockmakers to accept the change. If the Revolutionary attempt to redefine the divisions of the day was intimately linked to the calendar reform, Benjamin, for one, was prompt to note the profound difference between the two types of time measurements: “The calendars do not measure time as clocks do; they are monuments of a historical consciousness of which not the slightest trace has been apparent in Europe in the past hundred years. In the July Revolution an incident occurred which showed this consciousness still alive. On the first evening of fighting it turned out that the clocks in towers were being fired on simultaneously and independently from several places in Paris.”56 The counting of hours associated with productivity and wages, power and discipline, would thus appear to be the exact reverse of the historical consciousness at work in the conception of the Revolutionary calendar: decimal time was not a blasting out of the past into the here and now, nor the victorious explosion of time Benjamin recognized in the Convention’s opening of a new era. It was a repressive reordering. It was a measure fitting mathematical simplicity and the military training of a nation at war. Unlike the new calendar, decimal time was never implemented. The project was officially abandoned on 18 Germinal, Year III (April 7, 1795). Still, clocks and watches were produced during the brief period between the decree adopting decimal time and its official annulment. These timepieces, too, testify to the measures of emergency that marked the Revolution.

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in the dead of night The watch gazes back at the viewer with its two dials. It has a simple white enamel face, framed in a brass case, void of any decoration. The right dial—the duodecimal one—gives the traditional time, its hour hand circling twice around: from midnight to midday, and again through the afternoon hours back to midnight. On the left, the decimal dial’s hour hand goes around only once, showing the noon hour (five o’clock) as a vertical line bisecting the dial. The hands of both dials turn with the same key, at the same time; a separate key winds the watch mechanism. In addition to the hours, the dials also show the minutes, to the quarter hour on the duodecimal dial and at twenty-minute intervals on the decimal dial. Each dial is autonomous in the way it tells time, but the two are linked in their operations. The left-hand dial is of no use to one interested in conventional twenty-four-hour days, except that, since the hands go around the clock only once, it distinguishes between a.m. and p.m. hours, which the duodecimal dial cannot do. The watch has none of the fancy enamel decorations one can admire on the Revolutionary-era dials in the collection of the Carnavalet Museum.57 No allegories of freedom or equality, no images of the Bastille, no tree of liberty. This watch is a functional timepiece, produced not for show but for use in a period of transition, a watch testifying that there is perhaps no end to the times of transition and emergency, that the divesting of the past must be endlessly measured and repeated with every passing minute of every passing day. It is the kind of watch a modest man of conviction would carry: plain and easy to read, with nothing to detract from its purpose, a simple object ushering in a grandiose era. From what we know of Romme—the austere, virtuous, dedicated man of the Auvergne Mountains, the assiduous reader of Rousseau, the enthusiastic mathematician—it is easy to imagine him carrying such a watch. He had invested much energy into his timekeeping reform. On 9 Brumaire, Year II (October 30, 1793), he asked that decimal time be given pride of place: “A talented clockmaker has honored the Convention with the gift of a decimal clock,” he said. “It is built in such a way that a bust can be mounted above it. We have thought that the clock could be placed under the orator’s stand, given that it can be seen from a long distance. The choice of a bust has not yet been made. I propose that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.”58 But in what was perhaps a sign of darker times, at MarbonMontaut’s instigation, the bust of Marat was chosen over that of Rousseau.

Fig. 5. Revolutionary watch with two dials (late eighteenth century). Private collection. Photograph: Frank Ward.

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In contrast to the grand decimal clock bestowed on the Convention, the two-dial pocket watch is meant for private use, a training tool as well as a timekeeping device. The watch also highlights the symbolic break that took place in the fall of 1793: at no time do the hands of the two dials point to the same hour except at midnight. The old and the new converge in the darkest hour, then go their separate ways again at the beginning of the new day—a virtual mirror of the history of the Revolution. An account of the French Revolution entirely dedicated to its nocturnal activities would, in fact, capture the essential and most heroic moments of its unfolding. It would begin with the night of August 4, 1789, when a small group of deputies, their assembly continuing into the dead of the night, did away with the feudal system that had structured the kingdom for centuries: “This night ended the immense and painful dream of the thousand-year-long Middle Ages. The dawn that would soon rise was that of liberty. Ever since that wonderful night, no more orders, but Frenchmen; no more provinces, but one France!” commented Michelet.59 It was just before midnight on June 20, 1791, when the king and his family took flight, to be arrested in Varennes the following night. Michelet starts his description of the August 10, 1792, Revolution by describing a “very beautiful night, softly lit by the moon, peaceful until midnight, perhaps even a little later.” Not all men responded to the call. “They heard the bells toll, but it was not usual to start a riot in the middle of the night.”60 Later, when the king was condemned to death, his appeal rejected, and a stay of execution denied in a debate that lasted through three long nights, each member of the Convention came to the Tribune to speak his vote aloud. The final session lasted until 3:00 a.m. on the morning of January 20, 1793. In casting his vote for the king’s death, Romme stated: “If I voted as a citizen, humanity and philosophy would make me loath to pronounce for the death penalty, but as representative of the nation, I must derive my vote from the law itself: the law punishes all criminals without distinction, and I no longer see in Louis but a great criminal. I ask that he be condemned to death. This sentence alone can expiate his crimes.”61 The last dramatic night of the Revolution, as described by Michelet, was that of 9 Thermidor, when Robespierre, Saint-Just, and their friends were arrested by the Convention and taken to jail, then freed by forces of the Commune that remained loyal to them. All through that night, Robespierre, Saint-Just, Lebas, Couthon, the young Robespierre, Payan, and Lerebours debated whether to send for the army. Robespierre’s

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hesitation to sign an act of insurrection against the elected government sealed their fate. Within minutes, troops sent by the Convention invaded the Common House. Robespierre was seriously wounded, then executed without judgment, along with his friends, on the following day. For Michelet, the spirit of the Revolution died with Robespierre, and with him the philosophical ideals that had inspired, in the “flash of danger,” the resurrection of Republican Rome. After Thermidor, writes Michelet, “an atrocious comedy began, with lucrative assassinations committed in the name of humanity, revenge of sensitive men slaughtering patriots.”62

romme’s fa te Romme died less than a year after Robespierre, in one of the purges meant to rid the Convention of the last faithful Montagnards. During the night of 30 Floréal, the bell tolled again, calling for the people to invade the Convention, demanding bread and the implementation of the constitution that had been approved in 1793. When the people forced open the doors, Romme—who had played no part in the insurrection—spoke in an effort to restore order. He proposed the immediate release of jailed patriots and the abolition of the death penalty in matters of political opinion. “It was more than enough to cause his arrest and his death sentence,” writes Gerard Walter.63 Tallien, now leading the reaction, exclaimed that “these men should no longer live when the sun rises again.”64 The six designated victims, who came to be known as the Martyrs of Prairial, killed themselves on 29 Prairial, when they heard their sentence. The letters they had written from prison offer a striking meditation on the power of the law to do “violence to the most just.”65 If Romme was often compared to Robespierre for his Rousseauist convictions, his austerity, and his incorruptibility, one of the friends who died with him, Jean-Marie-Claude-Alexandre Goujon, offered a striking resemblance to Saint-Just. “Very tall, young, handsome, with curly hair falling to his shoulders,” he shared with Romme and Robespierre a passion for Roman antiquity fed by his readings of Plutarch.66 At twentynine, Goujon was hardly older than Saint-Just had been when he was sentenced to the guillotine. Goujon’s family slipped him a knife during the trial’s intermission, and before he died, Goujon sent a last letter to his mother that is strongly reminiscent of Saint-Just’s notes a few days before 9 Thermidor. “I have lived for liberty,” wrote Goujon. “I have always done what I believed to be right, just and useful for my country. . . . May

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the French people keep the constitution of equality it accepted in its primary assemblies. I had sworn to defend it and to die for it. I die happy not to have betrayed my oath.”67 The men whom Edgar Quinet would call the “last of the Romans” were buried in the Monceau Cemetery, where Robespierre and Saint-Just also lay—“the true relics of the Revolution,” writes Michelet in some of the most eloquent pages of his Journal.68

ghosts of the revolution Rumors soon began to fly that Romme and Goujon were not dead. It was noted that their bodies had been set aside when the other corpses were thrown into the common grave. Indeed, no surgeon had been allowed to verify that their suicide attempt had been successful. The story that Romme was alive circulated for several years, and on 17 Vendémiaire, Year VI (October 8, 1797), the Rapporteur républicain, a political and literary newspaper, stated: Romme is being resurrected. The former member of the Convention, who was condemned at the time of the Prairial events by a military tribunal, was believed dead from the wounds he inflicted upon himself before his judges. It is said that Romme’s body was set aside and delivered to his friends, who called on skillful doctors, and that he was saved by prodigies of art and friendship. It is said that he went to Russia, where he had resided before the Revolution. There, he was received by a young Russian whom he had taught and who is a dignitary at the Court of Paul 1st.

The newspaper predicted Romme’s imminent return to Paris.69 Romme’s own nephew, trying to uncover the truth, wrote a memorable account of his visit to the executioner Charles-Henri Sanson: The drawing room into which I was introduced reflected in no way the function of the master of the house. Not the smallest emblem of the place of execution, not the smallest miniature of the egalitarian triangle: it was unbelievable; instead, one saw mirrors, elegant armchairs, a rich clock and engraving representing country scenes, for when the drama was in the street, it was necessary for the eglogue to take refuge in the drawing-rooms. A young woman played the harpsichord and an older woman seemed to be giving her a music lesson: I was in the presence of Sanson’s wife and

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daughter. None of the daughter’s features betrayed her sinister filiation: God had not marked her with the seal of reprobation. She was pretty and looked quite innocent. These two ladies, dressed with elegance and simplicity, received me with politeness and consideration. Sanson was in his study. . . . The executioner, in a dressing gown, read and meditated. One would have imagined him to be a man of letters.70

The visit was inconclusive: eager to please, Sanson opened for his guest the guillotine register, but the name of Romme was nowhere to be seen. Indeed, why would Sanson have guillotined a man who was already dead? A visit to the guardian of the Monceau Cemetery proved unhelpful as well: “More than 900 human heads were chopped off  by the executioner’s hand. Do you think that by digging through this ossuary you could find your relative’s head?” This was my last visit; I withdrew convinced that not even Shakespeare’s gravediggers could solve the great enigma of death.71

eclipse In The Contest of Faculties, first published in 1798, Kant examines the possibility of achieving a “prophetic narrative of things to come,” citing the French Revolution as “an occurrence in our own times which proves this moral tendency of the human race” toward improvement.72 He writes: The revolution which we have seen taking place in our own times in a nation of gifted people may succeed or it may fail. It may be so filled with misery and atrocities that no right-thinking man would ever decide to make the same experiment again at such a price, even if he could hope to carry it out successfully at the second attempt. But I maintain that this revolution has aroused in the hearts and desires of all the spectators who are not themselves caught up in it a sympathy which borders almost on enthusiasm, although the very utterance of this sympathy was fraught with danger.73

Kant’s sympathy with the principles of the Revolution allowed him to identify “something moral which reason recognises not only as pure, but also (because of its great and epoch-making influence) as something to which the human soul manifestly acknowledges a duty. Moreover, it

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concerns the human race as a complete association of men (non singulorum, sed universorum), for they rejoice with universal and disinterested sympathy at its anticipated success and at all attempts to make it succeed.”74 The Revolution also aroused in Kant a prophetic inspiration— an echo of the conjectural history of the beginnings of the human race. “Even without the mind of a seer,” he writes, “I now maintain that I can predict from the aspects and signs of our times that the human race will achieve this end, and that it will henceforth progressively improve without any more total reversals. For a phenomenon of this kind can never be forgotten, since it has revealed in human nature an aptitude and power for improvement of a kind which no politician could have thought up by examining the course of events in the past.”75 Kant specified from the start that the knowledge he was seeking was not discoverable “from known laws of nature (as with eclipses of the sun and moon, which can be foretold by natural means).”76 Though Kant acknowledges the setbacks that had already besieged the Revolutionary project, he nevertheless contends that even if the intended object behind the occurrence we have described were not to be achieved for the present, or if a people’s revolution or constitutional reform were ultimately to fail, or if, after the latter had lasted for a certain time, everything were to be brought back onto its original course (as politicians now claim to prophesy), our own philosophical prediction still loses none of its force. For the occurrence in question is too momentous, too intimately interwoven with the interests of humanity and too widespread in its influence upon all parts of the world for nations not to be reminded of it when favourable circumstances present themselves, and to rise up and make renewed attempts of the same kind as before.77

Obviously, Kant’s preoccupation with historical evolution was far removed from that of traditional historians. Kant’s “history of future times,” a “ predictive history,” rides on the hopes of a possibly failed revolution as assuredly as the eclipses of the sun and the moon derive from the laws of nature. Moreover, as Kevin McLaughlin has pointed out, there is more at stake in beholding the Revolution than “sympathetic identification with its participants,” and participation alone does not save the participant: “As Kant explicitly says in the final pages of The Contest of Faculties, participation means involvement in an infinitely wider, ‘unforeseeable’ development within which the human species must be understood as transitory phenomenon.”78 Yet Kant expressed the conviction later

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shared by Michelet that the legacy of the Revolution would never be forgotten. For Michelet, writing in the last years of the Second Empire, “the altar of Right, of Truth, of eternal Reason still stand intact . . . as solid as the calculus of Laplace and Lagrange, who laid there the law of time.”79 Pierre-Simon Laplace and Joseph-Louis Lagrange were two of the prestigious mathematicians and astronomers who had contributed to the development of new decimal measures implemented during the Revolution and had been consulted by Romme on the matter of the calendar. For both Kant and Michelet, astronomy thus came to embody a form of inalterable truth, discoverable through reason, and itself the proof that nature functions according to reasonable and predictable laws. As such, the knowledge of astronomical laws transcends the knowledge of a short-term history, which is one of strife, failure, and tragedy. Yet just as the heavens provided such an auspicious start to the new era of the French on the day of the fall equinox in 1792, they also reflected the disaster that would follow just a few years later. “The dawn began in ’89,” Michelet writes, “then came daylight, all clouded with storms, then the dark and deep eclipse. . . .”80 Today the sterile plain of Monceau, where the greatest minds of the Revolution were buried, no longer exists; it was later covered over by the boulevard Malesherbes, the anonymous remains of the Montagnards transported to the catacombs. By contrast, a visitor to a small garden in Gimeaux, in Auvergne, can still see the grave of the loyal servant and companion Joseph Clément, buried by Romme and Otcher in 1790. It is marked by a small pyramid inscribed on three sides: J.-F. Clément, from the Canton of Vaud in Switzerland, was buried here on September 30, 1790. No one must be troubled for his religious opinions as long as he respects public order. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.81

The pyramid was a particularly important symbol in eighteenthcentury Freemasonry, and we know that Romme was a member of the Loge des Neuf Soeurs, which had included, at various times, Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, Count Strogonoff, and a number of scientists, including the astronomer and mathematician Jérôme Lalande. The peak of the pyramid represents the perfect moment when man, purified from his earthly incarnation, is reintegrated into the great unity, a moment of

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spiritual embrace that is both the goal and the end of life. It is less simple to decipher the precise meaning of the gesture that consisted in burying in the grave the message that Romme and Otcher had carefully sealed in a glass bottle—except perhaps as the troubled premonition of things to come, of the long eclipse that would defy all hopes for a lasting harmony between astronomical bodies and human affairs.

6 The Politics of Mortality In the twenty-sixth book of his Mémoires d’outre-tombe, Chateaubriand recounts his 1821 arrival at the French Embassy in Berlin, citing a flattering portrait of him that had appeared in the morning newspaper of March 22: “M. de Chateaubriand is of a somewhat short, yet slender, stature. His oval face has an expression of reverence and melancholy. He has black hair and black eyes that glow with the fire of his mind.”1 To which Chateaubriand flatly adds: “Mais j’ai les cheveux blancs, j’ai plus d’un siècle, en outre, je suis mort.” (“But I have white hair; I am more than a century old, and besides, I am dead.”)2 Chateaubriand’s words do not refer, of course, to the year 1821, nor to the time when he is writing his Mémoires. Rather, they refer to the time when we, the readers, turn to this specific page of the Mémoires: as you are reading these lines, Chateaubriand warns, I am dead. The words dramatically interrupt the story of his successful mission to Berlin to remind us that our reading of the text entails the death of its author. Moreover, the French en outre brings us back to the title of the Mémoires d’outre-tombe—from beyond the grave. In 1836 Chateaubriand signed a contract with a society of shareholders: in exchange for an immediate payment of 156,000 francs and a life annuity, he sold “the literary ownership of his Mémoires as they existed and as they would exist at his death.” Commenting on the transaction, Maurice Levaillant notes: “With this agreement, Chateaubriand brought material security at the price of a concession that he never got over: instead of appearing after a period he had first prescribed as fifty years after his death, his Mémoires would suddenly appear, so to speak, live from his grave.”3 As Chateaubriand himself put it in his avant-propos, publication would take place “as soon as my bell tolls!”4 The contract for the Mémoires is described as a painful necessity: “No one can know how much I suffered from having been required to mortgage my grave,”5 a metonymic shifting of the object of exchange from the 129

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work being sold to the grave that Chateaubriand always associated with literary creation. The association between memoir and tomb that provided the title of his work is thus echoed and amplified by the constant relation, noted by many scholars, between the grave and the act of writing. Just a few lines after he lamented having mortgaged his literary grave, Chateaubriand also reports that he has secured an islet in the bay of Saint-Malo, the Grand-Bé, as a burial site.6 Proposing an arrangement rigorously parallel to the legal agreement he had made for the Mémoires, he adds that should he die outside of France, “I wish that my body not be brought back to my homeland until fifty years after an initial burial.”7 Half a century of silent mourning seemed to be the ideal length of time to wait before discovery, and possibly disturbance, of both his mortal remains and his immortal work. Maurice Blanchot’s comment that “to write is to surrender to the fascination of time’s absence”8 sheds some light on the imaginary years Chateaubriand evokes as the years of blankness that preside over thought, but also free it. In Chateaubriand’s case, the written anticipation of a past yet to come—fifty years that will not obliterate his own past but will provide a suspension of time—secures a freedom strangely echoed by the description of his arrival in Berlin.

outre-tombe “I am dead,” as Chateaubriand says in writing of his arrival in Berlin, conveys that outer limit of language that Roland Barthes discusses in regard to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.” Poe’s story relates a scientific experiment on a dying man, the first ever to be “mesmerized in articulo mortis.”9 The experiment reaches a horrendous climax when the patient, who no longer gives “the faintest sign of vitality,” is interrogated by the narrator and suddenly utters with a hideous sound that is “harsh, and broken, and hollow”: “I have been sleeping—and now—now—I am dead.” This is perhaps what a voice from outre-tombe should sound like: “I have spoken both of ‘sound’ and of ‘voice,’ ” notes Poe’s narrator. “I mean to say that the sound was one of distinct—of even wonderfully, thrillingly distinct—syllabification.”10 The articulo mortis is such: both a voice and a sound, an articulation that allows words to be recognized even as they fall outside the conventional limits of linguistic possibilities. “There is here,” writes Barthes, “a staging of speech impossible as speech: I am dead . . . a scandal of language. In the ideal total of all the possible utterances of the language, the juxtaposition of the first

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person (I ) and of the attribute ‘dead ’ is precisely the one which is radically impossible: it is the blank, the blind spot of language. . . . What is said is nothing but this impossibility: the sentence is not descriptive, not constative: it affords no other message than that of its own utterance.”11 At one point in his analysis, Barthes also remarks: “Once M. Valdemar is medically dead, the narrative should conclude. . . . The revival in the story therefore appears at once as a narrative necessity (for the text to continue) and a logical scandal. This scandal is that of the supplément: for there is to be a supplement to the narrative, there must be a supplement of life: once again the narrative is equivalent to life.”12 The French version is perhaps more forceful: “Le récit vaut pour la vie,” which means they have the same exchange value, but also that the narrative is valuable (as a way to say invaluable) for life itself. Chateaubriand was so poor at the time he signed the contract for his Mémoires that his contracted story saved his life and also made his narrative worth living. The question arises, then, of a dual obligation: an obligation toward the publisher to keep writing as long as he lives, and an obligation to lead a life worth writing about, and worth being read about long after he has died. Chateaubriand’s statement “I am dead” is not voiced, as that of M. Valdemar, from the liminal space between living and dying, unless one acknowledges a unique relation between death and presence, or between death and the deferment of presence—fifty years to be exact—willed by Chateaubriand. Death is everything, and nothing more than the mortgaging of a tomb. For Chateaubriand also has a contractual obligation to die; it is risk-free, yet burdensome enough to be recalled constantly. The paradox that the narrative is equivalent to life itself, but that its equivalence can only be achieved in death, structures the writing of Chateaubriand’s text as that which gives life and supplements it. Commenting on the title of the memoirs, Denis Hollier remarked: “Memoirs from beyond the grave implies precisely that a sign survives its utterance. Chateaubriand constantly reminds his readers that they are hearing ‘the voice of a dead man.’ ”13

grave anxi ety Few passages testify more eloquently to Chateaubriand’s reappropriation of death as a way of life—that is, as a way of a life worth writing about—than the letters he wrote to Madame Récamier from Rome, in 1829, and carefully copied in the vigorous/moribund body of the Mémoires. These lines

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are perhaps more significant for having been written while Chateaubriand was involved in complicated negotiations to secure the Grand-Bé as his burial site. While in Rome, Chateaubriand had become passionately interested in archaeological digs at the “most beautiful and the most deserted” site of Torre Vergata. The digs, he trusted, would yield enough artifacts to compensate for the writer’s expenses; they were a commercial undertaking: “I hope to find something that will reimburse me for all the money lost at this lottery of the dead.” Death becomes part of a chance contract, less secure than the annuities paid by the publisher of memoirs yet to be written, but potentially more rewarding. On February 12, Chateaubriand is able to report a significant discovery: “The excavation is successful; I have found three fine heads, a draped female torso, and a funeral inscription by a brother to a young sister, which touched me.”14 Beyond the market value of treasured artifacts, the archaeological digs provide Chateaubriand with autobiographical material that will further his contractual obligations. His emotions at reading the epitaph allude to the loss of his sister Julie in 1799, but more significantly, perhaps, to the loss of his beloved sister Lucile in 1804. It could not be more appropriate for his memoir project than to have the first writing the author uncovered take the form of a funereal inscription. A few days after his discovery, Chateaubriand mentions the death of the Roman Prince Giovanni Torlonia, who had been a fabulously rich banker: “Death is here; Torlonia went yesterday evening after two days’ illness. I saw him lying all painted on his deathbed, his sword by his side. He lent money on pledges, but on such pledges! On antiquities, on pictures huddled promiscuously in an old, dusty palace.” The circulation of money, which stands metaphorically for the circulation of blood, is short-circuited by sudden death. Or rather, money alone remains, feeding off the dead, enriching those who promise to die sooner or later: a pledge from pilfering, borrowing, hungry writers or destitute aristocrats. Chateaubriand, invigorated, it seems, by hushed and profitable transactions, reports immediately afterward: “One sees nothing but dead people carried dressed-up through the streets; one of them passes regularly under my windows when we sit down for dinner.”15 It was indeed usual in Rome to carry the dead through the streets, their faces uncovered, before they were taken to church services and the cemetery.16 Paradoxically, while the living dead walk the streets, those who have long been dead are nowhere to be found, though their tombs are everywhere. Not only is Chateaubriand surrounded by the strolling deceased, but open and empty graves dot the Roman landscape with sharp remind-

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ers of death. As he evokes the sight of young women searching for love, he reflects: “At the end of the road, they will fall into those sepulchers, always open here, into those ancient sarcophagi which serve as basins to fountains hangings from porticoes.” Remembering his walks through Rome later on (probably along the Appian Way), he adds: “There are more tombs than there are dead in this city. I imagine that the deceased, when they feel too warm in their marble resting places, glide into another that has remained empty, as a sick man is moved from one bed to another. One would believe he hears the skeletons pass, during the night, from coffin to coffin.” Chateaubriand had previously visited the Vatican museums and noted: “When the weather is poor, I retire into Saint Peter or else I get lost in the museums of this Vatican with eleven thousand rooms and eighteen thousand windows ( Justus Lipsius). What solitudes of masterpieces! One gets there through a gallery the walls of which are covered with engraved epitaphs and old inscriptions: death seems to have been born in Rome.”17 The city he loves “passionately” he can now claim as his own birth site, that of death itself. Rome offers, like writing, an exemplary architecture, a labyrinth that promises a masterpiece to the reader of memoirs willing to accompany this solitary walker through the Roman ruins. To be sure, Chateaubriand’s description of Rome as a city with more graves than corpses may be seen as an echo of contemporary preoccupations with overflowing graveyards. From the middle of the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century, as Philippe Muray has shown,18 crowded cemeteries became a collective obsession, a lugubrious reminder that the dead far outnumbered the living, and that to be buried in a common grave was a fate worse than death itself. Naomi Schor further associates Romantic melancholia with the constant transfer of corpses from one burial site to another, and away from the city centers. “The dead and their remains did not cease circulating,” she notes, adding that Lucile’s lonely death—perhaps a suicide—and her burial in a common grave in an unknown cemetery each played a crucial role in Chateaubriand’s writing: “The missing tomb serves only to enhance the power of Chateaubriand’s writing: words have supplanted the missing sister; she lives on only in the tomb Chateaubriand has built for her.”19 From this perspective, Chateaubriand’s purchase of the Grand-Bé islet, chosen for its dramatic and grandiose setting, would afford him the best protection against the dread of common graves. But in Rome, singularly, individual graves outnumber the dead. The tombs—those proliferating writing sites—have freed the corpses they once sheltered. Chateaubriand’s strolls can take

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him from epitaph to epitaph, from forgotten words to solitary masterpieces. His own literary body is safe. Moreover, a form of life flourishes among the ruins: “Soon the night brings the inhabitants out of their palaces and the stars out of the firmament; earth and the heavens become repopulated; Rome is brought back to life; and the life that has silently begun again in the darkness, around the tombs, resembles the life and movements of the shades going back down to Erebus at the approach of the day.”20 As the “shades” are allowed once more to walk the earth, they revive the ongoing project of the Mémoires. They complete the precious artifacts extracted from the archaeological digs to provide a ghostly image of Chateaubriand’s life. Predictably enough, many readers would react strongly to Chateau­ briand’s “funereal obsession,” to what Sainte-Beuve would call his “idée fixe.” “Like the kings of Egypt,” he exclaims, “[Chateaubriand] spent his life meditating and planning his own grave.”21 Not given to metaphorical reading, Sainte-Beuve expresses particular annoyance with the archaeological digs and quotes a letter Chateaubriand sent from Rome to Madame Récamier: “I find many empty sarcophagi; I shall be able to choose one, although my dust will not have to drive away that of those who are long dead, which has been swept away by the wind. . . . I shall at least have a grand tomb in exchange for a small life.”22 To which Sainte-Beuve adds: “What fuss and what posing even in death!”23 SainteBeuve, who was notoriously allergic to Chateaubriand’s “posing” prose and not above fabricating a few quotes himself to buttress his point, nonetheless seized upon the main element of the memoirs from Rome: that they are written entirely from the point of view of death, of being a dead writer. His “small life” has been sold, commodified, and death is the condition of his work’s “seeing the light.” Through writing, life becomes a monument, a “grand tomb,” a glorious grave, and the tombstone the table upon which he writes. Unlike the Roman dead who have been scattered to the winds, whose names are forgotten, who have left nothing but empty graves, Chateaubriand is securing for himself a unique burial site and an irreplaceable memorial: both the Grand-Bé and the Mémoires are the ghosts of his Roman nights.

historical fra cture Chateaubriand’s self-indulgence in all things morbid and grandiose—and grandiose because of their specific morbidity—is explained elsewhere,

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and in connection with his political activities. The death that has presided over all his writings, he claims, is that of his mother. He received the news in London, having just published the highly controversial Essay on the Revolutions. In the Mémoires, Chateaubriand quotes extensively from the letter that his sister Julie had written to him on July 1, 1798. “My friend, we have lost the best of mothers. . . . If you knew how many tears your errors had caused our venerable mother to shed; how deplorable they appear to all who think and profess not only piety, but reason: if you knew this, perhaps it would help you to open your eyes and give up writing.”24 The impious, unreasonable, ungrateful son has too closely embraced the cause of the Revolution. It is too late for forgiveness, though perhaps not for expiation. “My sister informed me of my mother’s last wish [that he return to religion]. When the letter reached me across the sea, my sister herself was no more; she too had died from the effects of her imprisonment. These two voices from the grave, death acting as death’s interpreter, made a profound impression on me.” It is not clear how Chateaubriand meant to respond to these calls, except by throwing away the Essay and finding a better cause to defend in his unstoppable desire to write: “I did not recover from my distress until the thought occurred to me of expiating my first work by means of a religious work: this was the origin of the Génie du Christianisme.”25 But if this change of inspiration may have been an afterthought, another and more durable evidence had surfaced for the writer: that voices from the dead are more powerful than voices from the living. More than the religious turn of the Génie du Christianisme, the effect of Julie’s letter is the main theme of the Mémoires.

thy brother’s name Many deaths would be involved in the story of Chateaubriand’s birth as a posthumous writer. On April 22, 1794, his elder brother, and heir to the title, was guillotined along with his wife and her family. The executioner Charles-Henri Sanson, whose diary usually consists in recording the names of his victims, left a long and moving description of this particular scene. At that time, he notes, even the fanatics of the guillotine had lost their rage: “When the carts [carrying the condemned] arrive, it is as if the plague was passing through: doors, windows, everything is closed, the street is deserted.” Before the execution, Sanson wrote, “Malesherbes went to Chateaubriand, his granddaughter’s husband; he kneeled down

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along with his wife and the widow Rosambo, Malesherbes’ daughter, and the old man blessed the three of them.”26 Meanwhile, Chateaubriand, exiled in London, had changed his name “that no Englishman could pronounce,” to that of Combourg, “that my brother had borne and that reminded me of the pains and pleasures of my early life.”27 But “the family’s misfortunes, which I learned from the papers, and which made me known under my real name (for I could not hide my grief ), increased interest in me. The public gazettes announced the death of M. de Malesherbes, that of his daughter the Presidente de Rosambo, that of his granddaughter; the Comtesse of Chateaubriand; and that of his grandson-in-law, the Count of Chateaubriand, my brother, immolated on the same day, at the same time, on the same scaffold.”28 Death comes as revelation. Chateaubriand must assume at the same time his own name and his brother’s title—not by choice but by fate. It may seem that too many names will appear on the text as epitaph already, and too many identities weigh upon the budding writer; but the various losses all lead to a single political determination that Chateaubriand would best describe, after the revolution of 1830 in his “Proposition relative au bannissement de Charles X.” Although Republican government in France was not impossible, Chateaubriand observes, the country could never have adopted it: “The praise of Terror and terrorists had horrified public opinion and memory: our slaughtered parents rose from their graves and asked us if we were going to toast the memory of their executioners.”29 By 1830 the dead of Chateaubriand’s past speak in a single voice. The violent summons emanating from the common graves of the Revolution dictates a political and religious path from which he will not depart. What does it take to be a royalist under the Empire, the Restoration, the Revolution of 1830, the July Monarchy, or the Second Republic? A singleness of purpose that answers a call from beyond the grave. The dead writer is reborn again as politician. For posterity, the writer often eclipsed the political actor; yet not only did Chateaubriand play an important role in four decades of political upheaval, but most of the writing of the Mémoires takes place during the time when he was most actively engaged in politics. He claimed he first thought of the project while secretary to the ambassador in Rome, though the beginning of the Mémoires themselves is dated 1811. The list of Chateaubriand’s political activities is indeed long and impressive: in 1792 he joined the Army of Princes fighting the French Revolution and was seriously wounded at the siege of  Thionville; in 1803 Napoleon appointed him secretary to the legation in Rome; later that year

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Chateaubriand became “chargé d’affaires” in the Valais. He resigned in 1804 and withdrew his support from Napoleon when he learned that the Duke of Enghien, a member of the royal family, had been abducted and summarily executed on the emperor’s order. With the fall of Napoleon, Chateaubriand once more entered the political fray, writing several influential texts: De Buonaparte et des Bourbons and Réflexions politiques, both published in 1814, and La Monarchie selon la Charte, published two years later. Important political appointments followed: interim minister of the interior in 1815, minister to Berlin in 1821, ambassador to London in 1822, ambassador to Rome in 1828. The fall of Charles X in 1830 signaled the end of Chateaubriand’s active political career but did not curtail his personal commitments. Loyal to the cause of the legitimists, who rejected the nomination of Louis-Philippe, son of Philippe-Egalité—who had embraced the Revolution and voted for Louis XVI’s death—Chateaubriand worked to further the cause of Charles X’s grandson Henri. He traveled to Prague to visit the exiled king and the child he called Henri V. Thus, from his early enlistment in the Army of Princes to his futile attempts to salvage the claims of a child king, Chateaubriand never ceased to be involved in France’s public affairs.

band of brothers Chateaubriand’s strong political convictions may be responsible for his double life as private mourner of multiple deaths and vigorous public politician; the survivor of countless tragedies worked tirelessly to support a regime that would restore France to its former glory. Never mind the fact that Chateaubriand’s father was already an anachronism, attached to the narrowest view of his feudal rights and professing an “odious” haughtiness toward his inferiors. Anachronism would be Chateaubriand’s legal inheritance, a birthright of sorts in those years of endless change.30 The Mémoires mourn the past and dissect political events with a remarkable appetite for life: Chateaubriand never tires of his role in events he witnessed, secret decisions in which he participated, public offices he would proudly assume. He is a formidable enemy, too, happy to dispatch a minister, a cabinet, an emperor, with a few deadly lines. The reconciliation of an energizing history with a deadening past occupies center stage in the Mémoires. Just as his brother’s death leads to the disclosure of his identity—gives him an identity—political trauma illuminates his personal life. The letter from Rome referring lightly to the dead moving from one

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grave to another directly echoes the eerie scene of January 1815, when Chateaubriand attended the exhumation of Louis XVI, whose remains were taken from a common grave in the cemetery of the Madeleine to the royal burial place at Saint-Denis.31 In the eulogy he wrote three days later, and which is quoted extensively in the Mémoires, Chateaubriand described the desolate crypt of Saint-Denis after the Revolution had profaned all the other royal graves: “In the resting places of those obliterated kings and princes, Louis XVI will lie alone! . . . How is it that so many dead have risen? Why is Saint-Denis deserted?”32 As in Rome later on, in Saint-Denis (which the historian Jacques Le Goff calls the “place of monarchical immortality”33) the graves far outnumbered the dead. Originally, the choice of Saint-Denis as royal mausoleum had been meant to express and celebrate the continued association between the Crown and the Church. For Le Goff, “The dead kings will henceforth display the continuity of the monarchical institution. They are enrolled for eternity in the propaganda of the monarchy and the nation.”34 In this instance, the empty tombs are all the more disquieting for their challenge of the continuity of monarchy. Eternity has been shortchanged. The radical dispersion of bodies that accompanied the Revolutionary profanations makes the delayed and ceremonious burial of Louis XVI an uncertain testimony to the durable association between the throne and the Church. But more to the point, Chateaubriand adds: On beholding the catafalque leaving the cemetery, laden with the remains of the Queen and the King, I felt a sudden rush of emotion; my eyes followed it with a fatal premonition. At last Louis XVI rested at Saint-Denis; as for Louis XVIII, he slept at the Louvre. Together the two brothers would begin together a new era of legitimate kings and specters [une autre ère de rois et de spectres légitimes]: a vain restoration of the throne and the tomb, and their dust has already been scattered by time.35

Family lines become blurred. For Chateaubriand, the royal shadows walk hand in hand; the royal fate duplicating his personal history. Chateaubriand can reclaim his life after all, armed with the conviction that he does not stand alone. His destiny will be that of the Bourbons, of his commitment to the monarchy. In Saint-Denis, the two royal brothers are described as “legitimate specters”: one guillotined, the other surviving in exile, then restored to the throne, but dead by the time Chateaubriand writes these lines. The fate of Louis XVI and his brother Louis XVIII

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mirrors that of Chateaubriand and his guillotined brother. The elder sons have been executed, and the younger sons have been involved in “a vain restoration.” At this point, “vain” takes on several meanings that Stendhal, in his cordial dislike of Chateaubriand, would have relished: fruitless, conceited, but also without due respect for piety, for the name of God. The monarchy’s attempt to resurrect the Old Regime echoes the writer’s hope of playing a significant role in this hopeless enterprise, knowing full well that it was doomed from the start. As Chateaubriand pointed out in the 1818 Remarques sur les affaires du moment, he is linked to the royalists by “une fraternité de malheur,” a “brotherhood of misfortune.”36 “We know that the dead are mighty rulers,” Freud would note, “we may be surprised to learn that they are regarded as enemies.” For Freud, the various taboos surrounding the dead spread like a disease. “The taboo of the dead displays, if we may keep to our infection analogy, a peculiar virulence.”37 Death itself is contagious as we know, too, from the long association between the Terror and the various plagues that devastated the world across the centuries. In a contemporary engraving, a forest of guillotines show their raised blades along with a lonely Robespierre getting ready to execute the executioner after having killed all the others. The image tells us something about the Revolution, but more still about survival guilt, the anxiety resulting from anger and grief, and the general ambivalence one feels toward the dead. When describing the circumstances in which he began writing, Chateaubriand mentions what was to be his last encounter with his elder brother: “In Brussels I rejoined my brother, who was returning to France to mount the scaffold; one scarcely dared to dress the wound I had in my thigh, because I was doubly contagious [from dysentery and smallpox].” His brother would mount the scaffold as a king would mount a throne, almost deliberately. At the same time, or at least in the same sentence, Chateaubriand is naturally suffering from a quasi-emasculating wound and a contagious disease. The wound he received while fighting the Revolution with the Army of Princes in 1792 and the smallpox that spread like death itself frame Chateaubriand’s new life as a writing ghost. “Thus it was under a death sentence and, so to speak, between the sentence and the execution that I wrote L’essai historique.”38 “Between the sentence and the execution”—such may be the definition of historical time, or rather of writing time. Death has been ordered, and the writer condemned in advance to an execution paralleling that of his brother and his king. To be sure, the subject loyal to the king suddenly becomes the

Fig. 6. Anon., Robespierre guillotinant le boureau après avoir fait guillot tous les Français (Robespierre guillotining the headsman after he has guillotined all the French people) (1793). Photograph: © Musée Carnavalet / Roger-Viollet / The Image Works.

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sovereign subject, writing an Essay altogether too open-minded and “impious” that another death—his mother’s—would kill once and for all. As a dead writer, Chateaubriand experienced several false starts. At the end of his Mémoires, Chateaubriand wrote that his life had so far been divided into distinct parts, in which he had played different roles. “Three catastrophes have marked the three preceding parts of my life,” he notes. “I saw Louis XVI die during my career as a traveler and soldier; at the close of my literary career Bonaparte disappeared; the fall of Charles X put an end to my political career.” In 1830 he added, “If I had died on the 7th of August of this year, the last words of my speech to the House of Peers would have been the last lines of my story; and the fact that my own catastrophe is that of a past of twelve centuries (i.e., that of legitimate monarchy), would have magnified my memory. My drama would have ended magnificently.” This perfect coincidence, which Chateaubriand takes pains to regret, eludes his death wish, and for all the magnificence of dying along with the regime he had defended, he feels a form of liberation: “I am obliged to admit it, a certain interior satisfaction is mixed with my sorrow; I reproach myself because of it but I can’t help it: this satisfaction is that of slavery freed from chains. . . . Happy to put an end to a political career that was odious to me, I lovingly return to my rest.” He intends to retrieve the carefree feelings of his youth, daydreaming as a protection “against this horde of truth that awakens in old age, as dragons hidden in ruins.”39 But politics pursues Chateaubriand as a lasting supplement to his various lives. In response to a proposition that would have confirmed the banishment of Charles X and his grandson Henri, and make punishable by death any attempt on their part to return to France, Chateaubriand assailed the illegitimacy of the new king, Louis-Philippe: “So, what did your prince find in this fateful [Tuileries] palace? Instead of an innocent resting place, free of sleepless nights, remorse, and ghosts, he found an empty throne shown to him by a decapitated specter, holding in his bloody hand the head of another specter. And from this throne . . . you would force your chosen king to order the murder of the Child whose place he occupies!”40 The bloody ghost is, of course, Louis-Philippe’s father, Philippe-Egalité, who had voted for the death of his cousin Louis XVI, then was himself guillotined by the Revolution. Specters haunt not only the royal palace, but Chateaubriand’s old age: parricides, cousins, brothers, inner enemies, and political foes threaten his own retirement plans.

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During a trip from Paris to Venice in 1833, the onetime statesman passed through Verona, where he had played an important role in a congress that brought together, in 1822, all the major political powers of Europe. “The Congress of Verona was the most brilliant of all,” notes Jean-Paul Clément. “Three sovereigns, nine ministers of foreign affairs, Wellington, a host of ambassadors, ministers, attachés, all of high European society, and stunning celebrations, with music provided by Rossini himself.”41 Almost a dozen years later, Chateaubriand paused to reconsider the event, briefly embarking on one more tour of political duty: How many ambitions were stirring among the actors in Verona! How many destinies of nations were examined, discussed, and weighted! Let us call the roll of these seekers after dreams; let us open the book of the Day of Wrath: Liber scriptus proferetur ; monarchs! princes! ministers! here is your ambassador, here is your colleague returned to his post: Where are you? Answer. The Emperor of Russia, Alexander? “Dead.” The Emperor of Austria, Francis II? “Dead.” The King of France, Louis XVIII? “Dead.” The King of France, Charles X? “Dead.” The King of England, George IV? “Dead.” The King of Naples, Ferdinand I? “Dead.” The Duke of  Tuscany? “Dead.” Pope Pius VII? “Dead.” The King of Sardinia, Charles Felix? “Dead.” The Duke of Montmorency, French foreign minister? “Dead.” Mr. Canning, English foreign minister? “Dead.” M. de Bernstoff, Prussian foreign minister? “Dead.”

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M. de Gentz, of the Austrian Chancery? “Dead.” Cardinal Consalvi, Secretary of State of His Holiness? “Dead.” M. de Serre, my colleague at the Congress? “Dead.” M. d’Aspremont, my secretary of embassy? “Dead.” Count Neipperg, the husband of Napoleon’s widow? “Dead.” Countess Tolstoi? “Dead.” Her tall young son? “Dead.” My host at the Lorenzi Palace? “Dead.”42

In this scene, the responses of the departed monarchs and other luminaries of Verona directly repeat Chateaubriand’s earlier statement: “Dead. I am dead.” There is, however, a curious error in this “roll call of the dead”: according to the Mémoires, the list comes from Chateaubriand’s travel diary of 1833, but at that time Charles X—the king to whom Chateaubriand had sworn his undying loyalty—was not dead, only exiled. Chateaubriand’s exacting career in the service of a regime that was old before he ever started to write was always, and necessarily, marked by the shadow of death, and perhaps nowhere more explicitly than in this slip of the pen. For Charles X, no longer on the throne, was himself a survivor, a legitimate specter, living, like Chateaubriand the writer, “between the sentence and the execution.” When he reached Venice, Chateaubriand visited the island of San Cristoforo, which had served as cemetery for the Serenissima until San Michele became the place for burying the dead. The visit launched in Chateaubriand another suggestive train of thought on his political career: “In the cemetery . . . stands an octagonal chapel dedicated to St. Christopher. The saint, taking a child on his shoulders at the ford of a river, found him heavy; now the child was the Son of Mary, who holds the globe in His hands: the altar-piece represents this fair adventure.” At this point Chateaubriand adds, as an afterthought: “And I, too, have tried to carry a child-king, but I had not realized that he was sleeping in his cradle with ten centuries: a load too heavy for my arms.”43 These lines

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directly allude to the writer’s lonely and futile efforts to support the claim to the throne of the young Henri V. When Chateaubriand noted later, in the avant-propos of his Mémoires, that his cradle was his tomb and his tomb his cradle,44 he would similarly collapse the experience of time, his own and that of the Bourbons. As he put it elsewhere, “This House knows wonderfully how to die; true, it has been learning death for close to nine hundred years.”45 Of course, Chateaubriand had long ago ceased to believe in the immortality of the monarchy. Claude Lefort notes that after 1830 Chateaubriand’s faith had been thoroughly shaken: “The monarchy has legitimacy and immortality on its side, this much he says; but he also knows that it is dead.”46 Sainte-Beuve, for his part, somewhat maliciously relates an exchange between Chateaubriand, the staunch monarchist, and La Mennais, the apostle of Republican ideas, in these words: “Chateaubriand said to La Mennais, whom he met again at Madame Récamier’s after years had gone by, and when the abbot had already gone over to democracy: ‘I agree with you; but you understand, I have not been able to part with this carrion (i.e.; legitimacy) [ je n’ai pu me séparer de cette charogne].’ ”47 Elsewhere, Chateaubriand compares Charles X’s mortal remains to those of “an aborted child” buried alongside the mother whose death it had caused.48 Sainte-Beuve, and many critics after him, noted that for Chateaubriand legitimate monarchy died after Louis-Philippe ascended to the throne. One can argue, however, that the association between death and the monarchy permeated the Mémoires from the beginning. Independently of Chateaubriand’s official statements about the possibility of, and need for, a successful royalist regime, he had known for years that the monarchy was doomed. Private mourning, public melancholia, executions, exile, abandoned graves—such were the price and consequences of a sworn loyalist commitment to a lost cause. The slow demise of the regime over ten centuries demanded both an activist and a mourner-in-chief, that is, perhaps, a writer-historian capable of tracing, through his own decline and longings, the crumbling architecture he recognized and claimed in Rome, and elsewhere, as his own. The Mémoires reads as the longest obituary ever written for the French monarchy. Perhaps we should reconsider in this light Chateaubriand’s remark on arriving in Berlin in 1821: “En outre, je suis mort.” Outre comes from the Latin ultra, also the name of the conservative group of “pure royalists” who formed the political core of the extreme right at the time of the Restoration. Although Chateaubriand differed from the Ultras on a number of issues, he joined

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the party out of moral obligation to his own past and that of his country. As Pierre Clarac notes: “He felt bound to those who yesterday were his fellow emigrants, by one of his commitment of faith which always seemed sacred to him.”49 His enduring fidelity was both to the dead and to a political model anchored not just in the past, but in a past that could not be revived. “En outre, je suis mort” thus also conveys Chateaubriand’s somber assessment of his pledge to the monarchy: “En ultra, je suis mort ” (“As an Ultra, I am dead.”) The present tense would not constitute a linguistic scandal, a radical impossibility, but rather the recognition that a lifelong political engagement was dedicated to an anachronistic regime fruitlessly attempting to re-create, from beyond its grave, a long-expired order. In sharp contrast with the collapsing of time that resurrected Rome as a model for the Revolution, Chateaubriand lived through dead history as a long and fully interiorized disaster. The overthrow of the absolute monarchy and the impossible restoration of the Bourbon dynasty combined to shape his life as dis-astered destiny. Unlike Rousseau and Romme, he saw no need to look for the beginnings of Roman history and no desire to emulate its Republican glory. Roman ruins perfectly suited him as they stood: broken monuments yielding fragments of the past, ready for pilfering. But beyond Chateaubriand’s mournful complacency in the salvaging of epitaphs for a lost cause, an unexpected desire emerges: to find in the wreck of history and his own protracted death an anéantissement not unlike Rousseau’s “will to nothingness.” Emile had found in his slavery a narrow definition of freedom as fully accepted necessity; Chateaubriand’s legitimist cause—the carrion that travels with him everywhere—is a chosen subjection to absolute sovereignty.

Part Three tall ships and fa l l i n g s t a r s

. . . hear the last of our sea sorrow. william shakespeare, The Tempest

Ever since antiquity, the dangers of the sea have held a peculiar fascination. Scylla and Charybdis made travel more perilous and conquest more difficult. Ancient legends suggested that a blissful afterworld lay just beyond the horizon line separating the sea from the sky: somewhere in the vicinity of the Fortunate Islands, beyond the columns of Hercules, or again in the island of Avalon, the resting place of King Arthur. Almost in view, yet infinitely remote, these islands held the promise of happiness. But the crossing was as uncertain as life itself. Somehow, ship names held on to the mythological past that gave a name to the natural forces that obscured their guiding stars; in the Titanic disaster, we contemplate not only the formidable power of an iceberg but the vanity of men who wanted to be gods: Oceanus, the first of the Titans, sank the ship that would claim his fame. Old tales of terror and prowess take on a renewed meaning whenever humans are faced with the full strength of inhuman elements. Two sea disasters made a lasting impression on the nineteenth-century imagina­ tion. The first was the 1816 wreck of the French frigate Medusa on its way to claim from the British the colonial outpost of Saint-Louis-duSénégal. The second was the disappearance of Sir John Franklin with his two ships, the Terror and the Erebus, during the 1845 expedition in search of the Northwest Passage. The passionate debates that followed these two disasters reflected national pride, a growing investment in colonial expansion, and the discovery that the seas were not the only threat to men who sought to dominate nature. In these two expeditions, and in the works of artists and authors they inspired, the ancient 147

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gods return to haunt the scenes of wreckage. If they no longer provide an answer, they still contaminate the stories, adding fragments of logic and images of power and death to the resurrected enigmas of the past. In the accounts of these disasters, meanings proliferate, spreading rumors fed by the mythical figures of Medusa and Erebus. From the first, politics and colonial power were inscribed into the two expeditions. But if the failure of these missions inflicted a blow to the pride of their respective nations, the horror generated by the disasters stemmed from the discovery that humans had played a fateful role in their tragic endings: acts of betrayal and cannibalism revealed by the survivors of the Medusa shocked all the Europeans countries. A scandalized outcry greeted the news that cannibalism again had played a role in the fate of Franklin’s crew. Cannibalism illustrated the full power of the disaster to fragment and destroy. Géricault’s Fragments anatomiques, which he painted while he was preparing the Raft of the Medusa, provides a stunning image of this dismembering: legs and arms artistically rearranged, but impossible to reassemble as a complete body. When humans are returned to their primitive bestiality, moreover, they join the ancient monsters that devoured their victims. Together the two disasters make explicit the generative principles that spread epidemics and informed theories of disaster: contamination and fragmentation. The chapters that follow are dedicated to a close examination of the wreck of the Medusa and the search for Sir John Franklin. They also propose to demonstrate that, when interpreting disasters, artists and writers themselves became “contaminated” by the events and obsessed with fragmentation. Disasters invaded their creative imagination, producing shattered visions or prismatic refractions of the disasters. The aesthetic of dismemberment that emerges from Géricault’s works and from Jules Verne’s “polar” novels illustrates the inner workings of disasters now born from the loss of a protective star and from the destructive power of humans.

7 The Face of Chaos (Medusa) It is said that when Danton mounted the scaffold in the spring of 1793, he told his executioner: “Show my head to the people, Executioner, it’s well worth a look!” Danton’s formidable face was widely recognized for its rugged features and blunt determination. (He had once declared, “Nature gave me the stern face of Liberty.”) It was the executioner’s wellknown practice to grasp the decapitated heads of the guillotine’s most famous victims by the hair and hold them up before the crowd gathered to witness their deaths. The executioner’s victorious gesture did not always produce the desired effect: in the case of Louis XVI, the people had been kept too far away from the scaffold to see anything. After Charlotte Corday’s beheading, when the executioner’s assistant held up her head and slapped her face, the crowd responded with indignation. But the gesture did signal a special kind of triumph over enemies: whether conspirators or aristocrats, they were all traitors to the Revolution. It was a gesture reserved for the most famous names, an ultimate distinction that restored to the victims the privilege they had once enjoyed. The guillotine was known as the great “equalizer,” but the heads raised high above the crowd restored the hierarchy that death had stolen from its victims. Danton, the plebeian who had so dominated the politics of the young Republic, commanded on the scaffold a distinction that had first been accorded to a king. As scholars and historians have often noted, engravings of the Revolution’s executioner displaying his victims’ decapitated heads to the people recall the mythic image of Perseus holding high the head of Medusa. But in images from the Terror, the focus has shifted from the triumphant hero to the defeated monster. The executioner was often left out of the engravings, which showed a quasi-disembodied hand—the victor, after all, was not a single individual but the people—clutching the hair of the various monsters who had betrayed the nation. For the revolutionaries, 149

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Fig. 7. Théodore Géricault, Etude de têtes de suppliciés (Decapitated Heads) (early nineteenth century). Photograph: © The Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.

it seems, Medusa never died entirely: Perseus’s triumph had to be endlessly repeated to ensure victory. For Jean Clair, the reappearance of the myth of Medusa during the Revolution is symptomatic: Medusa reappears every time the normal order of things is upset and chaos threatens. . . . Her iconography during the upheaval of the Revolution is particularly significant, and more significant still is her connection, from that point on, with the unique machine that would become known as . . . the guillotine. Medusa had undoubtedly been associated, from her beginnings, with the theme of decapitation. A beheaded monster herself, she presides over the bloody sacrifice of humans’ decapitation, which they rightly call “capital punishment.”

Clair describes the form of the guillotine as

Fig. 8. Villeneuve, Matière à réflexion pour les jongleurs Couronnées. Qu’un sang impur abreuve nos Sillons. (A matter of reflection for the crowned jugglers. What an impure blood waters our fields.) ( January 21, 1793). Photograph: © Musée Carnavalet / RogerViollet / The Image Works.

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the perfect arrangement of a rectangle, a trapezoid and a circle. . . . In all cosmogonies and traditions, the circle is the perfect, primordial form within which the various hierarchies of creation were written and inflected. But the guillotine reverses the traditional pattern, inscribing the circle within a square that itself is cut off by a trapezoid inscribed within a second rectangle. The guillotine is not only the instrument of a de-theologisation of the universe: it is the instrument of a negative cosmology.1

By a strange coincidence—one that would profoundly influence the career of Théodore Géricault—the early nineteenth century’s most famous shipwreck was that of the Medusa, a frigate on her way to Senegal carrying 395 passengers, weapons, money, and a bust of King Louis XVIII. In 1818, when Géricault began his monumental painting The Raft of the Medusa, he prepared for the work by collecting body parts from nearby hospitals and making several studies of severed heads. One of these paintings now hangs in the Stockholm national museum as Etude de têtes de suppliciés: decapitated heads of executed criminals, lying on a sheet—a post-Revolutionary connection between the guillotine and the frigate Medusa.2 But Géricault’s Etude shows no sign of the executioner’s hand. The severed heads are anonymous, no longer representing victory against a mythical enemy. Perseus and the Gorgon have both vanished, leaving decapitation as fragmentation without triumph, death without agency. Still, the memory lingers; though hidden; the myth remains, if disguised. It is as if an invisible Gorgon had triumphed in the end, claiming for herself the sword of Perseus. Many episodes thus conspired to weave multiple symbolic threads between the Revolution and its legacy, threads that were as deadly and as terrifying as Medusa’s gaze. The story of the disaster that struck the ship Medusa, of the men who survived to tell it, and of Géricault’s painting of its survivors is one such episode.3

narrating di sa ster The ill-fated voyage of the Medusa has been recounted with striking regularity by historians, scholars, and novelists. I will briefly review the facts: In June 1816, four ships left France for Senegal, on a mission to reinstate authority over territorial outposts first established by the French, briefly occupied by British troops, then returned to their first colonizers as part

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of the 1815 treaty that had also restored the monarchy in France. The ship’s passengers strongly reflected post-Revolutionary society with its conflicting political loyalties and ever-widening social divisions. Among the passengers were eight cartographers—described as “explorers”—who had been sent out to map the Cape Verde peninsula. Some 160 soldiers, many with dubious pasts, had been recruited for the mission. The soldiers chose their own officers and formed a group solidly apart from the sailors, who deeply mistrusted them. First on board, and “maître après Dieu,” was the ship’s captain, Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys, who had served honorably in the King’s Navy before the Revolution, distinguishing himself in battle at sea off America in 1780. Chaumareys had joined the Army of the Princes in 1790 to fight against the Revolution in France. The Restoration gave him back his career, as well as the command of the Medusa. At 3:15 on the afternoon of July 2, the Medusa ran aground in shallow waters near the Bank of Arguin, off the coast of Africa. Chaumareys had opted for a route dangerously close to the shore, parting company with the expedition’s other ships, the Loire, the Echo, and the Argus. The Medusa carried only six lifeboats, which were promptly filled by most of the ship’s officers, the captain, the territorial governor, and all their families. They set off toward the coast (where they would eventually be rescued), leaving another 148 men, one woman, and a twelve-year-old child to fend for themselves on a hastily built raft. The larger lifeboats were to tow the raft, but the ropes were cut and the raft was set adrift with little food or water—and none of the navigational tools needed to steer it toward land. Over the next thirteen days, storms, mutiny, thirst, and hunger decimated the raft’s survivors, who sat in water up to their waists. Twenty of them died the first night, drowning or being crushed between the raft’s boards, to which they had been tied. Fighting and riots turned into a murderous rage during the following nights in perfect illustration of what Norbert Elias calls a breakdown of civilization, a systematic undoing of social restraint. When the Medusa’s companion ship Argus finally spotted the raft, only fifteen survivors were left on board. An officer of the Argus later wrote, “These unfortunate men had been obliged to fight and kill a large number of their comrades . . . others had been swept into the sea, had died of hunger or had gone mad. Those I saved had eaten human flesh for several days, and when I found them, the ropes that served as stays were covered with pieces of the meat they had hung up to dry.”4 Of

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the small number of delirious survivors, five would die a few days later in a Saint-Louis hospital. During his return voyage to France, one of the raft’s survivors, a surgeon named Henri Savigny, wrote an account of the Medusa’s fateful trip. He showed it to the captain of the Echo, who asked for a copy, which was then turned over to the Ministry of Naval Affairs. Savigny’s account was soon leaked to the press, and on September 8, 1816, the Journal des Débats published the first official report that the Medusa had been lost along with 135 people. Five days later, the newspaper published Savigny’s horrifying tale of his time on the raft. Publication of the two texts set off a violent political storm. Members of the opposition, along with the liberal press, were quick to point out that the Medusa’s captain was an aristocrat who had spent the Revolution­ ary years in England and had not sailed a ship for twenty years. He had been given command of the Medusa over more experienced and betterqualified officers only because he was an émigré. Moreover, Chaumareys, violating the first rule of a commander, had abandoned his ship before all her passengers were safely off. Within a year, in 1817, Savigny joined with Alexandre Corréard, one of the cartographers who had been on the raft, to publish a full account of the voyage to Africa: the wreck, their ordeal at sea, and their days of despair in Saint-Louis. The first edition of this work rapidly sold out. Public indignation grew as readers learned of the chaos that followed the shipwreck, and the treason of the officers who cut loose the lifeboats in order to save themselves. The public reacted with fascinated horror to the admission of cannibalism. Corréard and Savigny’s book was soon translated and talked about all across Europe. Pirated copies were hastily printed, if one can judge by a text now in the library of the Warburg Institute: it is an abridged version on cheap paper, with a fake publisher’s name and address, but with a beautiful illustration.5 In September 1818 the Edinburgh Review published an extensive piece comparing two narratives of recent shipwrecks—that of the British ship Alceste off the coast of Korea and that of the Medusa. To the author of the article, the two narratives formed a solid basis for assessing the behavior of the two nations in comparably trying circumstances: Never was there a contrast so striking, as in the conduct of the English and French sailors. On the one side, all is great, and calm, and dignified. On the other, page rises over page, one event towers above event, in horror and depravity. . . . The panic terror of the French crew, as soon as the ship

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was stranded, was the more striking, as contrasted with their preceding levity and disregard to every prudent warning; with their rejecting every precaution, and refusing to listen to the voice which told them that destruction was inevitable. . . . All legitimate discipline was lost.

Still reeling, perhaps, from the devastating years of the Napoleonic wars, the author adds for good measure: The pusillanimity of the French exposed them to unheard-of calamities, and excited among them the most demoniacal feelings. It caused the death of nine-tenths of the wretches who had embarked upon the raft. . . . The resources of the two frigates, immediately after they were stranded, were much alike; but the sentiments which governed the Frenchmen deprived them of the advantages of their united efforts; while the minds of the English were wholly directed to the general good, and bent upon the means of saving one and all. . . . The very impulses which act attractively among other men, and make their hearts expand with kindness and benevolence, are repulsive to [the nature of the French]. In the day of sympathy affection is changed to hatred, and pity is converted to envy. They prefer their own destruction to the safety of their fellow-sufferers, and crush to atoms, under their own feet, the plank which divides them from eternity.6

The wreck of the Medusa became a political cause célèbre and its account a best-seller; it was reenacted, with many special effects, on stages from Paris to Dublin, where it was shown on huge canvases as a “Novel Marine Peristrephic Panorama of the Shipwreck of the Medusa.” A later account, published anonymously in the years following the Second Republic, described the wreck as one of the legends that shaped the political consciousness of post-Revolutionary France; the author wrote that the story “had an immense impact; it broke all hearts, and everyone wept over the unfortunate victims of this unprecedented catastrophe; public opinion turned furiously against M. De Chaumareys, responsible for this horrifying tragedy; it demanded satisfaction.” The trial of Chaumareys was also described, in strongly political terms, as a clash between the legacy of the Revolution and the reemergence of the Old Regime: On March 3rd, 1817, eight months after the frigate Medusa was cravenly abandoned, M. Le Vicomte Hugues Duroys de Chaumareys was brought

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before a military court, an appearance he contemptuously considered as a simple formality. “The revolutionaries,” he said, “caused it all; almost all the officers placed under my command were jacobins, terrorists, bonapartists; they conspired against me, and I could not but fail.”

The author concludes, “Fortunately, the vicomte Hughes Duroys de Chaumareys was unanimously found guilty of causing the frigate la Méduse to go aground, and a majority of five votes out of eight con­demned him to be struck from the roll of Officers, never to serve again. . . . The wreck of the frigate la Méduse is among the recent events that created the greatest uproar in the world.”7 A year or so later, when Géricault set out to paint the large canvas he would exhibit at the Salon of 1819 in the category of History Painting, he, too, became unusually engrossed in the tale of disaster. Art historians have discussed at length Géricault’s long preparation for the painting, his meeting with the two survivor-authors, Corréard and Savigny (who also served as models), and his request that the Medusa’s carpenter build him a miniature replica of the raft. Géricault made a series of preliminary sketches, showing the Medusa going aground, the passengers boarding the boats, the first mutiny on the raft, and scenes of cannibalism, to mention just a few. These sketches are usually seen as evidence of Géricault’s exploration of the various dramatic possibilities of the story, and expressions of his hesitation over which specific scene to choose for the Salon. But they also form a kind of ghost narrative, as if the painter needed to immerse himself in all the chapters of the story before he could convincingly show the tragic unfolding of the events that led to the disaster. Géricault’s absorption with the tragedy was reflected not only in the careful reconstitution of the Medusa’s wreck, but also in the way he transformed his own life during the work: for several months he abandoned all social interactions, seeing only a few friends and the models who came to his studio; he even thought about shaving his head. If Géricault’s meticulous preparations for The Raft of the Medusa have been documented, some unanswered questions remain in the disaster’s two parallel narratives: the written account by the two Medusa survivors and the succession of images that Géricault created to preserve the memory of the wreck. How do these tales and representations tell the story of the disaster that struck the Medusa? How do myth, history, and mimesis conspire to produce a narrative that immediately appealed to, and horrified, the nineteenth-century public?

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Fig. 9. Théodore Géricault, Sighting of the Argus: Study of Bodies for “The Raft of the Medusa” (early nineteenth century). Musées des Beaux-Arts, Rouen. Photograph by Philipp Bernard. Photograph: Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, New York.

randomness To this day astrologers believe that one of the most evil stars in the sky is Algol—Medusa’s head in the constellation Perseus. In commenting on the regular appearance of Medusa in scenes of chaos and despair, Jean Clair spoke of negative cosmology. These words are a particularly apt description of disasters. When a disaster strikes, the very space that humans occupy in relation to the stars is destabilized; they are uprooted from their assigned place and cast adrift. These sorts of uprootings—whether caused by an overturned ship, an earthquake, a volcanic eruption—radically disrupt the sequence of events that can be expressed and explained in ordinary narrative. Cosmology itself is a form of epic narrative that retraces in scientific or mythological terms the formation of the universe with all of its recurring movements. In a narrative account, even those events that are new or unheard-of are integrated into a recognizable discursive pattern

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that gives them a form of order. This order, in turn, provides an underlying signification that ties together the old and the new and makes sense of otherwise incomprehensible accidents. Disasters challenge ordinary narratives. The contradiction between disasters and narrative accounts goes a long way to describe the public’s peculiar fascination for extraordinary catastrophes. Or rather, it explains the immediate and repeated efforts to produce an account, to understand a disruption so great that, initially at least, it can only be offered as fragments. Television has made more explicit the way in which disaster—which is fragmentation itself—strikes the survivor: the endlessly repeated images of the Challenger explosion that occupied all American screens on January 28, 1986, freezing the time at seventy-three seconds after liftoff. So did September 11 inscribe in our memory striking images of incomprehensible violence, each one adding to those that went before without ever forming—initially, at least—the complete narrative that would leave no question unanswered or make visible the internal forces that led to such destruction. Disaster is first the negation of sense and expectation; and this negation resists insertion in a dialectical move that would bring closure. A disaster defies both causality and sublimation, allowing for no redemption. Disaster narrative thus always combines efforts to express the shattering of lives with the desire to assign human responsibility. Images of fragmentation necessarily disrupt all accounts. By contrast, it is the search for the human factors that holds these tales together: from the levees of New Orleans to the deforestation of Haiti, it appears that a negative cosmos has found among humans its most disturbing allies. Corréard and Savigny’s Naufrage de la frégate la Méduse faisant partie de l’expédition du Sénégal en 1816 is an explicit effort to transform disaster into human tragedy. The survivors’ story elicits terror and pity, but remains recognizable as the temporary, if fatal, disruption of a wellestablished order caused either by the French national character (as the Edinburgh Review writer would have it), flawed maps (as the Medusa’s captain would have it), or Restoration politics that favored birth over merit (as the French liberal opposition of the day stated). On the stages of Europe, the wreck of the Medusa played out once as tragedy, and many times over as farce, providing audiences the pleasurable thrill of experiencing a raging storm from the safety of their box seats. In some presentations, the actors would freeze as if petrified, reproducing to general applause the scene depicted on Géricault’s canvas. In an opera written by the brothers Cogniard and staged in 1839 at the Renaissance Theater

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in Paris, the wreck provided a dramatic backdrop for a touching love story with a happy ending.8 Corréard and Savigny’s account, and even Géricault’s more macabre preparations for his painting—far from dwelling on a cosmic negativity so enormous that it eludes all representation— seem, if anything, to be obsessed with a recounting that would ultimately explain everything. No detail is allowed to escape the authors’ memory or the artist’s sketches: they carefully distinguish between the individual days and nights of agony, the smallest gestures, the biggest battles, and the briefest moments of hope and despair. Unlike Maurice Blanchot’s fragments, those “furtive groupings that fictively open and close the absence of totality” in their apprehension of disaster,9 Corréard and Savigny’s testimony is entirely directed toward the tale’s tragic ending, and thus toward its own realization. The aimless drift evoked by Blanchot finds no echo in the aimlessness of the raft, where the miraculous intervention of God restores order just when all was thought to be lost. Recalling one of their last, exhausting days on the raft, Corréard and Savigny write: Mr. Corréard felt that he must die in the course of the day; yet he had a presentiment that we should be saved; he said that so extraordinary a series of events was not destined to be buried in oblivion: that providence would preserve some of us at least, to recount to mankind the heartbreaking picture of our unhappy adventures. Through how many terrible trials have we passed! Where are the men who can say that they have been more unfortunate than we have? The manner in which we were saved is truly miraculous: the finger of heaven is conspicuous in this event.10

Here the writers present the ultimate, if not altogether obvious, reordering of the dis-astered state of the raft. They describe the miracle that saved the raft as an image of successful writing, the conspicuous finger extended to Adam, but also the human hand that first traces the outline of a shadow in an effort that Enlightenment thinkers considered as the origin of writing. From the beginning, there is a form of overdetermination in the Me­dusa narrative. Taken as the very opposite of the disaster, overdetermination charts a course for the story, working to erase the negative cosmology that presided over it. Every detail contributes to a miraculously retrieved, soon-to-be fully restored, meaning. Every coincidence is pointed out, a substitute for pure randomness. Describing the moment

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when the Medusa first struck the Bank of Arguin, Corréard and Savigny write: This event spread the most profound consternation. If in the midst of this disorder there were any men who remained sufficiently collected to make observations, they must have been struck with the extraordinary changes impressed on every countenance; some persons were unrecognizable. Here one might see features become shrunk and hideous; there a countenance which had assumed a yellow and even greenish hue, some men seemed thunderstruck.11

The French edition of 1818 added: “Others, fixed in their places, with no strength to move, stood petrified; it was as if the terrible Gorgon whose name we bore had passed before them.”12 In these lines the narrators stand at once inside and outside the text, we and them, strangely dissociated in their role of witnesses and participants. A triangle now presides over the narrative, ordering chaos, creating both a distance and an indissoluble link between its participants—those who write, those who died, and the mythical Medusa that emerges in times of unrest and tragedy. Later in the narrative, Corréard and Savigny call attention to the names of the ships (Medusa, Echo, Argus, Loire) that formed the expedition, not because the names served as an obscure prophecy, but to heighten the drama of their tale. In invoking the ships’ names, they add an extra layer of irony, telling us that one of the raft’s passengers exclaimed, “If that brig is sent to look for us, let us pray to God that she may have the eyes of Argus.”13 In his Pharsalia, Lucan made an association between Medusa and Argus when he wrote that even before he slayed Medusa, Perseus’s scythe “was already stained with the blood of Hundred-eyed Argus.”14 Corréard and Savigny restage these encounters, reminding us of the strong bonds between mythology and history. Their tale illustrates history’s attempt to reach the general truth that Aristotle saw as tragedy’s superiority over the retelling of actual events. Coincidences create links across time; they work paradigmatically, highlighting similitudes. Thus one is led to point out a coincidence and, at the same time, to motivate this critical step. Jean Clair, in noting that Petronius’s description of  “Discord” can be perfectly applied to a 1797 engraving representing the Republic as Medusa, writes, “Such a connection is anything but gratuitous. Medusa, as I said, reappears every time the normal order of things is overthrown.”15 A coincidence is always rich with the promise that it might offer a key or yield a meaning that was previously hidden.

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If coincidences work paradigmatically, details strengthen the weave of the narrative, working syntagmatically to reinforce the shape of things yet to come. The description of the breaking up of the Medusa offers a particularly eloquent example of Corréard and Savigny’s overdetermined account of the shipwreck: At night the sky became cloudy, the winds came from the sea, and blew violently. The sea ran high, and the frigate began to heel with more and more violence. . . . She bulged in the middle of the night, the keel broke in two, the helm was unship’d, and held to the stern only by the chains, which caused it to do dreadful damage; . . . the floor of the captain’s cabin was lifted and water entered with frightening force.16

In these lines the very part of the ship that governs her, that gives her direction—the helm—becomes the source of the ship’s ultimate destruction. The battering sounds echo the errors the captain himself made when he laid out the route the frigate would follow. Chaumareys loses his footing as the flooring is lifted and broken apart by the waves. The chain of order is broken, and it will not be restored except, of course, by its retelling. Another episode in the Medusa story—probably the one that attracted the most attention—describes the day the raft’s surviving passengers realized they would have to eat human flesh: An extreme resource was necessary to preserve our wretched existence. We tremble with horror at being obliged to mention that which we made use of ! We feel our pen drop from our hand; a deathlike chill pervades all our limbs; our hair stands erect on our heads!—Reader, we beseech you, do not feel indignation towards men who are already too unfortunate; but have compassion on them. . . . Those whom death had spared in the disastrous night which we have just described, fell upon the dead bodies with which the raft was covered, and cut off pieces, which some instantly devoured.17

The authors may invite us, briefly, to think of them as Medusa-like, with their hair standing on end from the horror of the images they describe, but they never let the pen fall from their hands. From this point on, though, their text seems contaminated by the cannibalism they describe. Those who abstained, at first, from eating human flesh—that is, the narrators— are eventually “consumed [dévorés] by hunger and thirst” until they, too,

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share in the forbidden meal. Now the narrative becomes oddly casual. On the morning of their fourth day on the raft, they write: [Th]e sun rose on our disaster, and shewed us ten or twelve of our companions extended lifeless on the raft. This sight affected us the more as it announced to us that our bodies, deprived of existence, would soon be stretched on the same place. We gave their bodies to the sea for a grave, reserving only one, destined to feed those who, the day before, had clasped his trembling hands, vowing him an eternal friendship. The day was fine; our minds, longing for more agreeable sensations, were harmonized by the soothing aspect of nature, and admitted a ray of hope.18

But worse was yet to come: the moment when the injured were thrown overboard so that the last rations of wine could be saved for those who might still live a little longer. Interestingly, this admission is presented as the repetition of an earlier, and now vanished, confession. It is known that the passengers’ last hours on the raft were marked by an unbearable disappointment: they had spotted the ship Argus, but then she disappeared from the horizon. It is at this point that the first writing of the wreck—the one the reader will never see—took place: “We then proposed to inscribe upon a board an account of our adventures, to write all our names at the bottom of the narrative, and to fasten it to the upper part of the mast, in the hope that it would reach the government and our families.”19 With the group’s sins now acknowledged by all, the confession was properly witnessed and signed, as it were. It was fastened to the raft’s mast to form the shape of a cross: the simultaneous symbol of suffering, forgiveness, and redemption. Corréard and Savigny’s later account—the one we are reading—is but the duplication of a shorter, presumably more desperate, confession, composed after all hope had been abandoned. As if to strengthen this perception, the writers conclude their work with a list of the names of all those who signed the first narrative aboard the raft.

medusa’s si sters In the beginning of The Book to Come, Blanchot, recalling the encounter of Ulysses and the Sirens, writes: Were the sirens, as tradition has sought to persuade us, only the false voices that must not be listened to, the trickery of seduction that only dis-

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loyal and deceitful beings could resist? There has always been a rather ignoble effort among men to discredit the Sirens by flatly accusing them of lying: liars when they sang, deceivers when they sighed, fictive when they were touched; in every respect non-existent, with a childish nonexistence that the good sense of Ulysses was enough to exterminate. It is true, Ulysses conquered them, but in what way? Ulysses, with his stubbornness and prudence, his treachery, which led him to enjoy the entertainment of the Sirens, without risks and without accepting the consequences; his was a cowardly, moderate, and calm enjoyment, as befits a Greek of the decadent era who will never deserve to be the hero of the Iliad.

Still, Blanchot argues: After the Sirens had been conquered by the power of the technique that always tries to play safely with unreal (inspired) powers, Ulysses was still not done with them. They reached him where he did not want to fall and . . . they engaged him, and many others, in this fortunate, unfortunate navigation, which is that of the tale, the song that is not immediate, but narrated, hence made apparently inoffensive: ode becomes episode.20

In some versions of the myths, the Sirens and Medusa had the same father, and they all shared the ability to fly. The unbearable cruelty of the forbidden feast on board the Medusa is made bearable and forgivable by a narrative so tightly woven as to make the reader deaf to the Sirens’ song, and to what Blanchot calls “a suspicion of the inhumanity of every human song.”21 And such is the safety of narrative (and perhaps of the confession): it dispels the inhuman, instead praising the good common sense that allowed both Ulysses and the Medusa raft’s passengers to survive so that their stories could be told, their hope could be preserved, and God could ultimately place the pen into the hands of its survivors. But the same défaut that created both the inhuman quality of the Sirens’ song and its seductiveness haunts the Medusa narrative, not in the cohesion of its telling or its tightly argued justification, but in the gaps that periodically disrupt the account and the odd supplements that were tacked onto the story. The most interesting of these addenda does not even appear in the table of contents and is not signed. It is an appendix to the text, misleadingly entitled “Notes de M***. Sur le naufrage de la Méduse, et sur les productions et le sol des Etablissements d’Afrique.” In fact, the appendix is a series of footnotes written by one of the lifeboat passengers, commenting on the story of the raft; it is also the aftertext to

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the confession we will never read. One of these footnotes refers to the storm that drowned many of the raft’s passengers on the first night and bears the title “On the sudden Gale experienced by the Raft.” The anonymous author writes: This strong gale was the same North West wind which in this season, as has been said before, blows every day with great violence after sunset; but which that day began sooner, and continued till four o’clock the next morning, when it was succeeded by a calm. The two boats which resisted it, were several times on the point of being wrecked. The whole time that this gale lasted, the sea was covered with a remarkable quantity of galères or physalides ( physalis pelasgica) which, arranged for the most part, in straight lines, and in two or three rows, cut through the direction of the waves at an angle, and seemed at the same time to present their crests or sails to the winds, in an oblique manner, so as to be less exposed to its impulse. It is probable that these animals have the faculty of sailing two or three abreast, and of lining themselves in a regular or symmetrical order; but had the wind surprised them, so arranged on the surface of the sea and before they had time to sink and shelter themselves at the bottom, or did the sea, agitated on these shores to a greater than usual depth, make them afraid, in this situation of being thrown upon the coast? However it be, the order of their march; their disposition, in respect to the force which impelled them, and which they strove to resist; the apparent stiffness of the sail, seemed at once admirable and surprising.22

The physalides, arranged in rows like an army marching into battle, form a strange spectacle, adding a puzzling quality to the description of the violent winds that almost sank the lifeboats. An armada better able to resist the towering seas than any boats steered by men, the physalides float undisturbed on the crest of the waves in a magnificent display of order and mastery over the elements. The author’s description of their geometric formation is also notable: two or three deep, they cut a repeating, oblique angle across the waves—not unlike the blade of a guillotine. The writer marvels again and again at the phenomenon, the way it coincides with the fatal storm, its strange manifestation of an order that escapes and transcends the chaotic elements of nature. He marvels, too, that men on the verge of being drowned by the high waves are drawn, in spite of themselves, to this uncanny display of a natural wonder. The anonymous footnote to Corréard and Savigny’s narrative becomes

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even more intriguing when one considers that the physalides are better known under another name. In 1758 Linnaeus, struck by the creature’s snake-like “hair,” gave it the name medusa. It is the name commonly used in French to describe jellyfish, the medusae that stunned Roland Barthes one day at Malo-les-Bains.23 The name is more rarely used in English, but still appears in all dictionaries. With this in mind, we can read the footnote in a different light, as an example of what Leo Bersani terms “the seductive powers of language itself, the ways in which it turns away from the objects it designates.”24 The footnote’s anonymous writer (who is identified, interestingly, only by the initial M***) simultaneously points to, and dissimulates, the vertiginous proliferation of mythological signifiers that have transformed the narrative from its beginning. In this case, the uncanny appearance of the medusae blends history and mythology. The oblique line traced over and over by the waves across the medusae’s rigid sails does not decapitate but underlines the medusae’s power. And M***’s comments, by their placement at the end of the book, constitute the aftertext of an aftertext, an afterthought reflecting both on the events of the book and on the narrative itself. These notes add their own, partly hidden, intertextual reference to a tragedy we can know only as confession, and, like all confessions, as a text in search of redemption. One could speculate further on the process of naming: naming ships, naming plants and animals, even Linnaeus’s own seeming fascination with mythology in general, and Medusa in particular. It was a fascination so compelling that he gave the name medusae to both an animal and a plant, each time because of the specimen’s eerily floating “hair.”

géricault’s b odies Discussions of The Raft of the Medusa generally include not only the multiple sketches and studies that preceded the painting of the large canvas, but the series of works representing the fragmented bodies Géricault had borrowed from the nearby hospital for his study of anatomy. The Raft might be best described, then, as a collection of works that both anticipate and follow the large painting that was presented at the Salon. All the works bear the stamp of Géricault’s detailed preparations and carry the mark of his obsession with death and suffering that endured long after his completion of the main work. From the startling Fragments anatomiques to the various Têtes de suppliciés and his many studies of various episodes

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of the raft odyssey, Géricault produced works that can be seen—not unlike a myth—as variations on a theme, enriching and sometimes contradicting each other. Critics have never forgotten the Medusa myth that presided over Géricault’s work and have frequently pointed out (at times apprehensively, as if such biographical facts could only corrupt the attention Géricault’s art deserves) that he cut off his curls or that he painted one survivor’s windswept hair with notable virtuosity. Géricault had always taken the utmost care with his hair, putting it in curling papers every night. But, as Jean Clair notes at the end of his lengthy discussion of the elaborate hairdos that preceded and accompanied the Revolution, “Nothing is accidental: the smallest gesture has significance, either protective or cathartic.”25 In a similar vein, Michel Schneider organizes his study of Géricault’s Raft around the myth of Medusa. In Un Rêve de Pierre: Le Radeau de la Méduse, Géricault, he argues convincingly that the Raft should not be viewed from a religious perspective, as salvation seemingly promised by the appearance of the Argus on the horizon. “If one looks at the dead son’s body,” Schneider writes, “he is neither Christ taken down from the Cross (there exist representations of the Savior’s decomposed body by Pontormo or the Rosso fiorentino, for example), nor is he the Son of God wrested from his grave, released from the earth. He is a corpse who will keep on being dead, who will sink forever, without grave nor redemption.”26 Schneider goes on to say: The name of the Medusa, given to the frigate that ran aground, designated the mythical figure whom Perseus defeated by the ruse of making himself invisible; the ship’s bowsprit was adorned with Medusa’s head. But this name also conjures up a sea creature with a hundred tentacles. One does not know whether what paralyzed Géricault with fear was the thought of cadavers petrified by the cold, or the thousand rivulets that death painted on the bodies of the drowned. . . . The raft does represent a scene of horror, and, like Gorgô, shows us something that words cannot express: the unspeakable, un-relatable, unthinkable journey of the shipwrecked victims.27

In other words, Géricault was submitting himself to a metaphorical encounter with the monster. Concerning the painter’s sacrifice of his curls, Schneider adds: They say he did it to avoid having to go out, to avoid women and distractions. But it was simpler than that: he wanted to become one of the

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shipwrecked, to put himself in the grip of terror. The Raft is one of these pictures that fuses one’s eyes to the rest of his body, rendering it passive and mute. Medusa is to Perseus what the Sphinx is to Oedipus: destiny encountered, the monster that lives inside oneself. Each hero must kill it, but while Oedipus speaks to the horrible Sphinx (solving the riddle she gives him, whose ultimate meaning is: What is a life? What is time, which raises beings up and then bends them back down toward Earth?), not a word is exchanged between Perseus and the terrible Gorgô.28

For Schneider, coincidences that bear the mark of mythological contamination give pause. “It was probably a coincidence—but let’s admit it was a beautiful one—that the two ships, the shipwrecked and her savior, bore the names of mythological creatures both endowed with a murderous gaze: Medusa, death striking through the eyes, and Argos, countless glances [ panoptès] that outlive blindness just the way rot grows and survives even after the organism’s death.”29 But what aspect of the Medusa myth, we might ask, invites the horror of putrefaction? Another coincidence emerges, one not previously mentioned by art critics, but no less troubling than Medusa’s regular reappearance in times of political unrest. Géricault’s biographers have noted that although he executed his studies of severed limbs during the period when he was preparing the Raft, the figures he portrayed on the raft were all drawn from live models. But Géricault kept in his studio the body parts the hospital had given him, so that he could “observe and record their gradual decay.”30 The awful stench of the cadavers drove away his friends, though it did not seem to trouble the painter. In this Géricault seems to have reproduced a similar episode in the life of Leonardo da Vinci, as recorded by Vasari. When asked by Piero da Vinci to paint a buckler, Vasari writes: Leonardo started to think what he could paint on it so as to terrify anyone who saw it and produce the same effect as the head of Medusa. To do what he wanted Leonardo carried into a room of his own, which no one ever entered except himself, a number of green and other kinds of lizards, crickets, serpents, butterflies, locusts, bats, and various strange creatures of this nature; from all these he took and assembled different parts to create a fearsome and horrible monster which emitted a poisonous breath and turned the air to fire. . . . Leonardo took so long over the work that the stench of the dead animals in his room became unbearable, although he himself failed to notice because of his great love of painting.31

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Fig. 10. Théodore Géricault, Body Parts: Study of Arms and Legs for “The Raft of the Medusa” (1818/19). Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen. Photograph: Bridgeman-Giraudon / Art Resource, New York.

In both cases, the dismembering seems to be an integral part of an encounter with Medusa, who, like all monsters, is herself a composite of body parts. The apotropaic quality of Medusa’s severed head spreads to the decaying limbs scattered around the painter’s lair as objects of repulsion, as stark reminders of the Gorgon’s deadly power, but also as indispensable elements that—when combined on the canvas—vanquish the deadly gaze. As Hal Foster puts it, describing Rubens’s depiction of Medusa, “The art of painting triumphs over the force of chaos.”32 Eugène Delacroix also admired Géricault’s representation of the severed limbs, which he unhesitatingly connected with Medusa: “This fragment is truly sublime: it proves more than ever that there never was an odious serpent or monster, etc. This is the best argument in favor of the Beautiful, as it should be understood.”33 Schneider’s study itself underlines the metamorphic qualities of Géricault’s painting. “Can it not be said, in the end, that with its shipwrecked bodies lying on a heap of boards and barrels like hair on a de-

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capitated head, the painter dedicated to the gloomy sky, as a propitiatory gift or offering, the terror that petrified life?”34 We know the power of the gaze in the dissemination of the plague. In L’Œil et l’esprit, Maurice Merleau-Ponty also describes “a gaze from within, a third eye that sees pictures and even mental images, just as one speaks of a third ear that filters messages from the outside through the noise they create within us. . . . The eye sees the world, and all that the world lacks, to make a picture.”35 Before challenging Medusa, Perseus stole the one eye her sisters shared among themselves, saying he would return it only if they showed him the way to the Gorgons. Thus did Perseus briefly possess a third eye—not, it is true, the better to find his way, but as bargaining tool, to force the sisters to show him where Medusa slept. The eye performed no visual feat, but his possessing it testified to Perseus’s shrewdness, the same shrewdness that saved Odysseus when he encountered the Sirens. Perseus’s trick made the Medusa story possible, allowed it to be recounted not merely as an episode but, as we have seen, as a reverberating echo, layered with distorted sounds and generating a multiplicity of reawakenings. It is an echo unfaithful to, yet intimately connected with, the myth that bestowed upon its monster’s name an endless legacy of violence and the beauty of serpents.

8 The Sphinx of the Ice Fields the fate of sir john franklin During his 1841 expedition to the Antarctic, James Clark Ross named two volcanic peaks after the ships under his command, the HMS Terror and the HMS Erebus. The ships’ names may have seemed especially appropriate for the volcanoes: one was extinct, while the other actively spewed fire and fumes over the desolate landscape. The names of Ross’s vessels were not unusual: a first Terror had been launched in 1696, then captured and destroyed by the French in 1704. The Erebus was the second warship to bear the name of the son of Chaos, or Khaos, the foremost of the primordial Greek deities. In Hesiod’s Theogonia, Erebus represents darkness and is later changed into the river that runs through the kingdom of the dead. Transformed from warships into expedition vessels, the Terror and the Erebus had glorious and dramatic careers. During Ross’s Antarctic voyage, the Erebus collided with the Terror in the course of a particularly difficult navigation among icebergs. But the ships returned to a triumphant homecoming in 1843. Ross, who could claim unparalleled knowledge of both polar regions—he had discovered the North Magnetic Pole on a previous expedition with his uncle, Sir John Ross—was knighted and received the French Legion of Honor. But the voyages of the Terror and the Erebus were not over: the ships were fitted with steam engines and propellers, their keels reinforced with thick metal plates, and on May 19, 1845, they sailed again, in search of the Northwest Passage, under the command of Sir John Franklin. They carried provisions for a three-year voyage, along with 138 crew members (five of whom were later sent back to England). It was to be the ships’ final voyage. The Terror and the Erebus were spotted by whalers on July 26, 1845, at the entrance of Lancaster Sound in the Bay of Baffin, but they were never seen again. The fate of Sir John Franklin and his crew, and of the two famed ships that had carried them so far north, 171

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Fig. 11. François-Étienne Musin, The HMS Erebus in Ice (1846) (BHC3325). Photograph: © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.

launched what must surely be the greatest number of rescue operations ever recorded in naval history. If the commander of the Medusa, Hughes Duroy de Chaumareys, was the most despised in naval history, Sir John Franklin was its revered hero: he had fought in the Battle of Trafalgar, proposed reforms to the harsh penal system of Tasmania, and led a successful expedition to the Hudson Bay. His disappearance shocked a public fascinated by polar explorations and used to Franklin’s triumphant returns. A reward of twenty thousand pounds was offered by the British Admiralty to anyone who could find the vanished men. American expeditions, financed by a rich sea merchant named Cornelius Grinnell, sailed in 1850 and again in 1853. At one point Elisha Kent Kane, a medical officer on board the American ship Advance, recorded sighting eight vessels in the Bay of Baffin, all on the same quest, all, like the Advance, “surrounded by the imminent hazards of sudden consolidation in an open sea . . . [a]ll minor perils, nips, bumps, and sunken bergs . . . discarded.”1 The first remains of the Franklin expedition were found in 1850: three graves, traces of fire, and sledge tracks on the ice. More upsetting news reached England in 1854, when John Rae reported hearing from Inuit hunters that the ships had been trapped in ice, and that some of the men, dying from cold and starvation, had resorted to cannibalism. “At a later

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date in the same Season,” he wrote, “but previous to the disruption of the ice, the corpses of some thirty persons and some Graves were discovered on the Continent, and five dead bodies on an Island near it . . . from the mutilated state of many of the bodies and the contents of the kettles, it is evident to us that our wretched Countrymen had been driven to the last dread alternative—cannibalism—as a means of prolonging existence.”2 The report of cannibalism so outraged British society that Rae was discredited. In “The Lost Arctic Voyagers,” serialized in December 1854 by Household Words, Charles Dickens wrote a passionate refutation of Rae’s methods and conclusions: There is one passage in [Dr. Rae’s] melancholy report, some examinations into the probabilities and improbabilities of which, we hope will tend to the consolation of those who take the nearest and dearest interest in the fate of that unfortunate expedition, by leading to the conclusion that there is no reason whatever to believe, that any of its members prolonged their existence by the dreadful expedient of eating the bodies of their dead companions. Quite apart from the very loose and unreliable nature of the Esquimaux representations (on which it would be necessary to receive with great caution, even the commonest and most natural occurrence), we believe we shall show . . . that it is in the highest degree improbable that

Fig. 12. Engraving by J. Hamilton and J. Mc Goffin for J. M. Butler, Ice Bergs Near Kosoak (Life Boat Cove) (after a sketch by Dr. Kane) (nineteenth century). From Elisha Kent Kane, The Second Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin (Philadelphia: Childs and Peterson, 1856). Private collection. Photograph: Frank Ward.

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such men as the officers and crews of the two lost ships would, or could, in any extremity of hunger, alleviate the pains of starvation by this horrible means.3

Undaunted by Rae’s report, Franklin’s widow appealed to the public, raised funds, and won renewed support from the Admiralty. No less than twenty-five additional expeditions were sent in search of the missing Franklin. In 1859 Leopold M’Clintock, commanding officer of the Fox, reported the most concrete evidence of the explorer’s fate: a “sad and touching relic” with a “double story”—a document found on a cairn on the coast of King William Island. This “relic” and the account given by M’Clintock of its finding both deserve special attention: The record paper was one of the printed forms usually supplied to discovery ships for the purpose of being enclosed in bottles and thrown overboard at sea, in order to ascertain the set of the currents, blanks being left for the date and position. . . . Upon it was written apparently by Lieutenant Gore, as follows: “28 of May 1847. H.M. ships ‘Erebus’ and ‘Terror’ wintered in the ice in lat. 70º05'N.; long. 98º23'W. Having wintered in 1846–7 at Beechey Island, in lat. 74º43'28"N.; long. 91º39'15"W; after having ascended Wellington Channel to lat. 77º, and returned to the west side of Cornwallis Island. Sir John Franklin commanding the expedition. All well. Party consisting of 2 officers and 6 men left the ships on Monday 24th May 1847. Gm. GORE, Lieut. Chas. F. DES VOEUS, Mate”4

Here M’Clintock inserts a long passage celebrating Franklin’s accomplishments to that date: “Seldom has such an amount of success been accorded to an Arctic navigator in a single season,” he writes. “But, alas!” he adds a little later, round the margin of the paper upon which the Lieutenant Gore in 1847 wrote those words of hope and promise, another hand had subsequently written the following words: —“April 25, 1848.—H. M. ships ‘Terror’ and ‘Erebus’ were deserted on the 22d April, 5 leagues N. N. W. of this, having been beset since 12 September, 1846. The officers and crews, consisting of 105 souls, under the command of Captain F. R. M. Crozier, landed here in lat. 69º37'42"N., long. 98º41'W. Sir John Franklin died on the 11 June,

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1847; and the total loss by deaths in the expedition has been to this date 9 officers and 15 men. (Signed) F.R.M. Crozier, Captain and Senior Officer, James Fitzjames, Captain, H.M.S. Erebus.” 5

A reproduction of the message—with word of Franklin’s death scribbled along the margins—shows, within the confined space of the sheet, the unfolding disaster. In a way, this slip of paper records, perhaps more effectively than any calendar or journal could, the dramatic passing of Arctic time. M’Clintock, by separating his accounts of the two messages that were inscribed a year apart, explicitly tries to convey the tragic enigma of the year that was marked but not told: a discussion of Franklin’s career serves as a last eulogy before the news that he, along with one of the signatories of the original document, had perished: There is some additional marginal information relative to the transfer of the document to its present position . . . from a spot four miles to the northward, near Point Victory, where it had been originally deposited by the late Commander Gore. This little word late shows us that he too, within the twelve-month, had passed away. In the short space of twelve months how mournful had become the history of Franklin’s expedition; how changed from the cheerful “All well!” of Graham Gore! . . . A sad tale was never told in fewer words.6

M’Clintock’s report did not end the search for Franklin’s party. Yet despite the numerous expeditions launched in the hope of recovering more remains of the lost explorers and their ships, remarkably few artifacts have been found. Most of them are gathered at the National Maritime Museum under the name of “Franklin’s relics.” The search for the Northwest Passage could not be dissociated from the search for Franklin. The two stories became so intertwined that by the end of the nineteenth century “going to search for Franklin” commonly meant going to search for the Northwest Passage—with a substantial difference, however: Franklin was hopelessly lost, but there was still hope that the mythical passage could be found and sailed. At any rate, the Franklin expedition, the Terror and the Erebus, could not be forgotten. Together they raised a series of recurring questions that would later inform Jules Verne’s novels about the nature of exploration and search, the role of interpretation, and the dread of cannibalism.

Fig. 13. Report on John Franklin’s death (1847). From Captain M’Clintock, The Fate of Sir John Franklin Discovered in the Arctic Ocean (Philadelphia,  J. T. Lloyd, 1860). Private collection. Photograph: Frank Ward.

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John Rae had reported the Inuits’ account of the disastrous end of Franklin’s party, interpreting the details of the scene as evidence that cannibalism had taken place. Dickens’s indignant response constitutes the most serious argument about the necessity and perils of interpretation. He faults the “unreliable nature” of the Eskimos’ tale, the imperfect understanding of Rae’s interpreter, and the specificities of individual languages that make it difficult to find perfect equivalents for certain words. Yet, reluctantly drawn to the scene, Dickens attempts a different interpretation of Rae’s possibly corrupted account by asking: “Had there been no bears thereabout; to mutilate those bodies; no wolves, no foxes? Most probably the scurvy . . . would of itself cause dreadful disfigurement— woeful mutilation—but, more than that, it would not only soon annihilate the desire to eat (especially to eat the flesh of any kind), but would annihilate the power.” Finally Dickens suggests that the Eskimos themselves probably killed Franklin’s men. “There are pious persons who, in their practice, with a strange inconsistency, claim for every child born to civilization all innate depravity, and for every savage born to the woods and wilds an innate virtue. We believe every savage to be in his heart covetous, treacherous, and cruel.”7 Beyond the obvious ideological premises of Dickens’s solution, his theory offered a double advantage. It absolved Franklin’s men of the most repulsive crime—the universal taboo of cannibalism—and it imagined them dying valiantly in combat: sick and weakened, to be sure, yet morally undefeated. But the matter could not easily be put to rest. The better to prove the innocence of Franklin’s party, the second part of Dickens’s “The Lost Arctic Voyagers” reviewed the most famous cases of cannibalism, prominently featuring the story of the raft of the Medusa. Dickens picked up where the Edinburgh Review had left off: unlike the ships Terror and Erebus, the Medusa had been under the command of an undeserving captain: “No discipline worthy of the name had been observed aboard the Medusa from the minute of her weighing anchor,” and “the crew consisted of the scum of all countries.” Dickens continues, “Is it with the scourged and branded sweepings of the galleys of France, in their debased condition of eight-and-thirty years ago, that we shall compare the flower of the trained adventurous spirit of the English Navy, raised by Parry, Franklin, Richardson, and Back?” The last paragraph of Dickens’s textual analysis also reveals the ultimate purpose of the interpretation of disastrous events and is worth quoting at some length:

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In weighing the probabilities and the improbabilities of the “last resource,” the foremost question is—not the nature of the extremity; but, the nature of men. . . . Utilitarianism will protest “they are dead; why care about this?” Our reply shall be, “Because they ARE dead, therefore we care about this. . . . Because they lie scattered on those wastes of snow, and are as defenseless against the remembrance of coming generations, as against the elements into which they are resolving, and the winter winds that alone can waft them home, now, impalpable air; therefore cherish them gently, even in the breast of children. Therefore, teach no one to shudder without reason, at the history of their end. Therefore, confide with their own firmness, in their fortitude, their lofty sense of duty, their courage, and their religion.”8

For all practical purposes, in engraving a textual headstone with their glorious stories, Dickens was giving the scattered and mutilated bodies a proper burial. His text also throws light on the specific relationship between disaster and interpretation, on the repeated desire for disasters to be interpreted, to be given the meaning they elude. To paraphrase JeanLuc Nancy, interpretation begins after disaster,9 if only because disaster strikes a terror that must be repudiated, or a dread that must be overcome by analysis and reasoning. In Franklin’s story, Erebus, the son of Chaos, presides over the enigma of death as a return to chaos. Interpretation is a form of exorcism, but also draws from the disaster its resources and its paradoxical methodology. In this sense, one can apply to interpretations born of disaster what Walter Benjamin writes about translation: Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information—hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations. But do we not generally regard as the essential substance of a literary work what it contains in addition to information—as even a poor translator will admit—the unfathomable, the mysterious, the “poetic” something that a translator can reproduce only if he is also a poet?10

For Dickens, Rae acted as a bad translator, not only because the interpreter who was with him could not perfectly understand the language of the Inuit, but because the man limited himself to transmitting information, when what was needed was a deeper comprehension of Franklin’s disappearance. What Dickens also makes visible is the desire to endow

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disaster with its own unfathomable depths, the better to decipher it poetically, though without the slightest hope of solving its enigma. There can be no last word on the understanding of disaster, only the construction of multiple layers of interpretation that together provide an insight into the collective imagination. “By virtue of its translatability the original is closely connected with translation,” notes Benjamin, “in fact, this connection is all the closer since it is no longer of importance to the original.”11 The rhetorical laying to rest of the corpses discovered by the Inuits, and the dismissal of the rumors spread by John Rae, failed, however, to give the dead any rest; they only signaled that the multiple accounts generated by additional searches, and the finding of additional “relics,” would yield in equal parts incidental information and the fascinating fragments of an unsolved mystery.

fictions of interpretation The passionate interest generated by the loss of the Terror and the Erebus and the disappearance of their captains and crews are no doubt responsible for the writing and success of Jules Verne’s polar novels, most particularly the 1866 The Adventures of Captain Hatteras (Voyages et aventures du capitaine Hatteras) and the 1897 Sphinx of the Ice Fields (Le Sphinx des glaces). The novels are in great part inspired by the published accounts of the various searches for Franklin and further demonstrate the mythical fascination of polar conquest in the second half of the nineteenth century.12 The Adventures of Captain Hatteras was published in two parts, entitled The English at the North Pole and The Desert of Ice.13 The first novel takes place in 1860 and starts with the announced departure of the Forward for a mysterious destination, which is later disclosed as the North Pole. Its chapter 17 is entirely dedicated to the story of Sir John Franklin, describing King William Island, where some remains of the Franklin expedition were found, as “the scene for the worst tragedy of modern times! A few miles west the Terror and the Erebus had been lost forever.”14 As the small group of explorers proceeds slowly toward what Kane had called “the Polar limit of all northernness,”15 they experience all the rigors of the Arctic winter. Impeccably documented, the novel borrows extensively from Kane’s and McCormick’s narratives, which had recently been translated into French.16

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From the discussion of tropical driftwood carried by counter-currents to the coast of Greenland, to fights with polar bears, fox hunting, the phenomenon of red snow, and the description of theatrical activities during the long Arctic night, Verne clearly seems intent on integrating into his novel the most precise details of recent explorations. After multiple adventures that will seem improbable only to those who have not read accounts of actual polar expeditions, Hatteras and his friends approach the polar region aboard a small boat (the Forward having been destroyed in an explosion): At that moment the storm unleashed its power and there came a torrent without name of the aerial waves; the boat lifted out of the water, and began to speed at vertiginous speed; its foresail was torn away, and fluttered off into the darkness like a great white bird; a circular hole, a new Maelstrom, formed in the swirl of the waves. The navigators, enlaced in this whirlpool, moved so fast that the lines of the water seemed motionless, in spite of their incalculable speed. . . . Then they were overcome by dizziness. Within them was the ineffable feeling of the abyss!17

The explorers are thrown from the whirling abyss only to discover, in an episode familiar to all readers of Verne, that a volcano occupies the precise geographical location of the pole: The mountain, in full eruption, was vomiting a mass of burning boulders and slabs of glowing rocks; it seemed to be repeatedly trembling, like a giant’s breathing; the ejected matter rose to a great height in the air amidst jets of intense flames, and lava flows wound down its flanks in impetuous torrents; here inflamed serpents twisted their way past the smoking rocks; there burning waterfalls fell through a purple mist; further on a river of fire, formed of a thousand igneous streams, threw itself into the sea as a boiling outfall.18

Hatteras and his friends may have reached undiscovered territory, but the description of the Pole owes much to the lost Inventio Fortunata, possibly written in the fourteenth century, which describes the North Pole and the Magnetic Pole as the same location and shows a black rock occupying the site, surrounded by a giant whirlpool. The rupes nigra, or black rock, at Earth’s extreme northern point, and its surrounding whirlpool, were regularly evoked in sixteenth-century texts. In a 1577 letter,

Fig. 14. Edouard Riou, Volcano at the North Pole, from Jules Verne, Voyages et aventures du Capitaine Hatteras (Paris: Hetzel, 1866). Private collection. Photograph: Frank Ward.

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John Mercator cited Jacobus Cnoyen—to whom we owe a summary of the lost Inventio—describing the Arctic region: In the midst of the four countries is a Whirl-pool into which there empty four in-drawing Seas which divide the North. And the water rushes round and descends into the Earth just as if one were pouring it through a filter funnel. It is four degrees wide on every side of the Pole, that is to say eight degrees altogether. Except that right under the Pole there lies a bare Rock in the midst of the Sea. Its circumference is almost thirty-three French miles, and it is all magnetic stone.19

It is worth noting that Verne’s volcano is revealed just when “the fog was split like a curtain torn apart by the wind,” offering the first glimpse of “an immense plume of flames.”20 One recognizes in these pages, as with the evocation of a whirlpool, the influence of Edgar Allan Poe, whose work would play such an important role in Verne’s other polar novel, The Sphinx of the Ice Fields. Verne had initially planned to have Hatteras throw himself into the crater and die at the Pole. “The volcano is the only grave worthy of him,” he wrote to his publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel.21 But at Hetzel’s insistence, Verne modified his conclusion: Hatteras returns to England, but he has gone mad. “His madness was of the gentle sort, but he did not speak, he no longer understood, for power of speech had apparently departed at the same time as his reason.” During his long daily walks, he always follows the same path and returns walking backward. “The doctor attentively observed such a strange mania, and soon understood the reason for such a singular obstinacy; he guessed why the walk followed a fixed direction, under the influence, as it were, of a magnetic force. Captain John Hatteras marched constantly north.”22

traces and refra ctions As they progress toward the North Pole, Hatteras and his crew discover traces of past expeditions: “It was clear that Hatteras was inadvertently following the signs of a major disaster; he was advancing along the only practicable route, collecting the remains from some horrible shipwreck.” Initially the novel strongly resembles a fictitious search for Franklin: beyond the many mentions of the catastrophe and the long account of its unfolding, multiple allusions weave a tight net of cross-references between

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Hatteras’s adventures and those of his predecessors. Hatteras’s ship, the Forward, bears a name similar to Kane’s rescue ship, the Advance. At one point the explorers kill a fox that had been tagged by James Clark Ross twelve years before: “While wintering, James Ross had the idea of trapping a large number of white foxes; he put copper collars on their necks, with engravings of where his ships were, the Enterprise and the Investigator, plus the food stores. These animals often cover huge distances in search of food, and James Ross hoped that one might fall into the hands of men from Franklin’s expedition. This explains everything, and our guns uselessly killed that poor animal, which once might have the saved the life of two crews.”23 The real-life message reaches only fictitious travelers. During their return from the Pole, the explorers come across the dead bodies of the group of mutinous sailors who had burned the icebound Forward and then abandoned the expedition. The scene described by Verne is eerily reminiscent of the testimony reported by Rae and so violently attacked by Dickens. Not long previously, this valley had been the scene of a last battle against time, against despair, against hunger; and from certain horrible remains, it could be understood that the wretches had fed on human bodies, perhaps living bodies, and amongst them, the doctor recognized Shandon, Pen, and the whole miserable crew of the Forward. . . . [T]he crew had clearly experienced a thousand tortures and a thousand despairs before resorting to this terrifying catastrophe; but the secret of their misery is buried with them under the snows of the Pole forever.24

But while Verne’s novel follows previous textual traces, borrowing and integrating the multiple relics of previous narratives, its own specific fiction lies in the fact that the extraordinary conquest it describes leaves no trace behind—except for the novel itself. Although the voyagers read with passionate interest the signs left by previous explorers, Hatteras himself violently objects to the idea of leaving any message or trace. “The doctor had had the idea of building a cairn . . . and depositing a note indicating the passage of the Forward and the expedition’s purpose. But Hatteras formally opposed this notion: he did not wish to leave any traces a rival could use.” Moreover, the explosion of the Forward, an “immense disaster,” will also make it as hard for future expeditions to find it as the Terror and the Erebus themselves. Following Hatteras’s intentions, however, Clawbonny “built a cairn at the precise point where the captain had first

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landed on the island. . . . On the face of one of the stones Bell engraved this simple inscription with a chisel: john hatteras, 1861.”25 This could be the tombstone, written at the time Verne had planned to conclude the novel with Hatteras’s death in the volcano;26 in the revised version, Hatteras’s body returns to England, but his reason has died on the rupes nigra of the Pole. The cairn, however, Verne is careful to note, may well be destroyed by the volcanic eruption. Indeed, the question of traces remains at the heart of the relationship between Franklin’s disappearance and the searches that followed his disastrous expedition. These traces, or their significant absence, also structure the relationship between interpretation and fiction.

parhelia The specific nature of the Verne/Hetzel project for the Extraordinary Voyages required a large measure of scientific information and precision. But the nature of the various discoveries described in Hatteras raises a different set of questions. The status of an exploration and that of a search expedition are strikingly different. One consists in opening the way, the other in retracing a path, and it is at the very least intriguing that, when it came to writing his novel, Verne should be more preoccupied with the searches for a missing explorer than with the explorations themselves. If exploring can be compared to writing on a blank space, delineating new coastlines, giving names to unexamined islands, or mapping out a continent, why should the act of writing in Hatteras be so absorbed by an entirely different and disastrous model—that of retracing a path, looking for clues—a model whose explicit goal is not to create but to duplicate, and whose success would lie in the uncovering of the already discovered? One answer may lie, metaphorically, in a specific form of optical sign frequently observed in polar areas and carefully noted in the records Kane and M’Clintock wrote during their search for Franklin. The par­ helia, also called sun-dogs or “mock-suns,” appear as sun halos, or as multiple suns formed by ice crystals. Although they can be observed anywhere, they are far more striking in low temperatures such as those of the polar regions.27 In his diary for October 5, Kane wrote at length of the phenomenon: “The air was filled with bright particles of frozen moisture, which glittered in the sunshine—a shimmering of transparent dust. At the same time, we had a second exhibition of parhelia, not so vivid in prismatic

Fig. 15. Edouard Riou, The Forward in Ice with Sun Halo, from Jules Verne, Voyages et aventures du Capitaine Hatteras (Paris: Hetzel, 1866). Private collection. Photograph: Frank Ward.

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Fig. 16. Anon., Burial in Ice under Paraselenae, from Captain M’Clintock, The Fate of Sir John Franklin Discovered in the Arctic Ocean (Philadelphia, J. T. Lloyd, 1860). Private collection. Photograph: Frank Ward.

tints as that of the 30th of September, but more complete. The sun was expanded in a bright glare of intensely—white light, and was surrounded by two distinct concentric circles, delicately tinted on their inner margins with the red of the spectrum.”28 The nighttime equivalents of the par­ helia, the paraselenae, are illustrated as well in M’Clintock’s text. Para­ selenae illuminate a burial in the ice pack under the Arctic night: The body was then placed on a sledge, and drawn by messmates of the deceased to a short distance from the ship, where a hole through the ice had been cut: it was then “committed to the deep,” and the Service completed. What a scene it was! I shall never forget it . . . the deathlike stillness, the intense cold, and threatening aspect of a murky, overcast sky; and all this heightened by one of those strange phenomena which are but seldom seen even here, a complete halo encircling the moon, through which passed a horizontal band of pale light that encompassed the heavens; above the moon appeared the segments of two other halos, and there were also mock moons or paraselenae to the number of six. The misty atmosphere lent a very ghastly hue to the singular display, which lasted for rather more than an hour.29

The optical phenomena of parhelia and paraselenae are not the only refractive effect to be seen in the polar regions. On September 13, when the captain of the Advance spotted a ship, Kane wrote:

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On looking without a glass, I distinctly saw the naked spars of a couple of vessels. . . . On looking with the glass, the masts, yards, gaffs, every thing but the bowsprits, were made out distinctly. . . . We changed our course. . . . The fog, however, closed around them. Still we stood on. Presently, a flaw of wind drove off the vapor; and upon eagerly gazing at the spot, now less than three miles off, no vessels were to be seen. . . . Refractive distortion plays strange freaks in these Arctic solitudes; but this could hardly be one of its illusions. . . . As plainly as I see these letters did I see those brigs.30

The relationship between refractive phenomena and the acts of reading and writing is thus explicitly stated. Both the ghost ships of the “Arctic solitudes” and Kane’s narrative obey the principle of refraction, a light distorted by the prism of an ice crystal producing a second image of far greater proportions. It is significant, too, that an illustration of a par­ helion is inserted in Hatteras at the moment when “the Forward was at the very spot where the American vessels, the Rescue and the Advance . . . experienced such terrible dangers.” Verne adds: “Dr. Kane was on that expedition; at the end of September 1850, surrounded by ice floes, the ships were irresistibly forced back into Lancaster Sound. . . . It was Shandon who narrated this disaster.”31 Numerous examples of parhelia and paraselenae enrich Verne’s text, and refraction plays a dramatic role on several occasions, changing animals into beasts of gigantic proportions. They constitute a vivid metaphor of the fragmenting power of disastrous events. But the most striking parhelion in Verne’s writing career may well be represented in the form of an Antarctic novel, his sequel to Edgar Allan Poe’s 1838 The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. “The North Pole demands the South Pole, this is both a question of rhetoric and geometry,” notes Henri Robillat. “The Vernian corpus would have been incomplete if the Sphinx of the Ice Fields had not been placed symmetrically to the great polar novel of the beginning of Verne’s career.”32

mirage The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, published in 1838 by Edgar Allan Poe, was translated into French twenty years later by Charles Baudelaire. For many Americans, the French enthusiasm for Poe remained an enigma, perhaps even a sign of poor taste. “Baudelaire is compromised

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by his having made himself the apostle of our own Edgar Poe,” wrote Henry James in 1878. “With all due respect to the very original genius of the author of the Tales of Mystery, it seems to us that to take him with more than a certain degree of seriousness is to lack seriousness one’s self. An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.”33 Two years before the publication of Hatteras, Verne had published a long article on Poe in the Musée des Familles, dedicating the last part of his introduction to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and recapping the strange adventures that befell the young man from Nantucket.34 Verne carefully describes the three distinct but related episodes that compose the Narrative: Pym and his friend Augustus Barnard’s ill-fated adventure onboard the Ariel and their first shipwreck; their second and more tragic adventure onboard the Grampus, where mutiny, massacre, and cannibalism decimate the crew; and Pym’s last journey, when he is rescued, along with a sailor called Dirk Peters, by a schooner from Liverpool, the Jane Guy. Impelled by Pym’s evil genius to press on and explore the mysteries of the Antarctic, Captain Guy and his crew discover a new island called Tsalal. There, everything is entirely black: the people, the birds, and the water itself, which, although it has the appearance of limpidity when falling, writes Poe, presented “to the eye, as it flowed, every possible shade of purple.”35 The novel concludes with the destruction of the ship by the natives and the miraculous escape of Pym and Dirk Peters, carried by strong currents toward the South Pole aboard a fragile boat. Verne quoted extensively from the last mysterious entries of Poe’s novel, which describe “a limitless cataract, rolling silently into the sea from some immense and fardistant rampart in the heaven,” and its dramatic conclusion: March 22. The darkness had materially increased, relieved only by the glare of the water thrown back from the white curtain before us. . . . And now we rushed into the embraces of the cataract, where a chasm threw itself open to receive us. But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.36

These last pages have generated abundant critical interpretations covering a wide range of possibilities, including the realistic explanation put forward by Richard Kopley, who notes that the cataract described by Poe could well be an aurora australis and the shrouded form that arises

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across the path of Pym and Peter that of the very ship, which, one presumes, rescued Pym and Dirk Peters after their adventure. In his edition of Poe’s Narrative, Kopley also notes that the shrouded figure has been variously interpreted as death (Moldenhauer, Peden) and as a Lazarus figure conquering death (Eakin); as goodness (Stroupe) and as perversity (Cox); as knowledge (O’Donnell, Helen Lee) and as the limits of knowledge (Lévy); as imagination (Liebler, Wells), the narrative itself  (Kennedy, Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing), and the white at the bottom of the page (Ricardou); as a Titan (Ljungquist), as a divinity (Bonaparte, Fiedler, Bezanson), and as Pym’s unrecognized white shadow (Irwin, Robinson, American Apocalypse).37

Marie Bonaparte, a student of Freud, was in fact more precise when she called the veiled human figure an image of the mother’s body, a representation of Poe’s death drive, the impossible desire to return to the mother’s womb. Verne, for his part, commented upon the ending with these words: “And the narrative is thus interrupted. Who will ever resume it?”38 This is the task Verne would undertake, years later, in his Sphinx of the Ice Fields (Le Sphinx des glaces), thus giving himself, to quote Tim Unwin, a “second opportunity to discuss Poe’s story.”39 Verne’s novel takes place in 1839, eleven years after the events recounted in the Narrative. The narrator embarks on the Halbrane, whose melancholy captain has been searching the southern seas for Pym’s lost companions, and more particularly for his brother, the captain of the Jane Guy. Also aboard the Halbrane is Dirk Peters, hoping to find Pym, whose ultimate disappearance Poe had mentioned in a note added to the Narrative, speaking of “the late sudden and distressing death of Mr. Pym” that accounted for the interruption of his journal. Verne imagined that Pym, separated from his companions, had remained in the polar regions while Peters had returned to the United States, where he had published the narrative. Like many other Verne novels, and like the search for Franklin, The Sphinx of the Ice Fields thus leads the reader through unexplored territories in search of missing persons. In this case, there are no fabulous machines or superhero, no wars, no conquests, not even the charting out of new territories, but a relentless descent into Poe’s nightmarish landscape, and what first appears to have been the ultimate unveiling of the shrouded figure that dominated the Narrative’s last paragraph. At the conclusion of The Sphinx of the Ice Fields, the survivors of yet another shipwreck—that of the Halbrane, seized by an overturning

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iceberg—relive Pym’s last adventure. Their boat is taken at terrifying speed toward the prodigious mass that gives the book its title: With its strange shape, this mountain resembled an enormous sphinx . . . in the seated pose of the winged monster Greek mythology placed on the road to Thebes. . . . The monster grew larger as we came near, without losing any of its mythological forms. It stood isolated on this immense plain, producing an effect I could not describe. There are impressions which can be reproduced by neither pen nor speech. And—but it could only be an illusion of our senses—it seemed as if we were attracted to it by the strength of its magnetic attraction.40

The mountain is indeed a gigantic magnet that explains the tragic conclusion of Pym’s adventures: “After having gone beyond the South Pole, Pym, like us, had fallen into the monster’s zone of attraction! . . . [A]nd there . . . seized by the magnetic fluid before having had the time to rid himself of the gun he was wearing on his shoulder, he had been projected against the mountain.”41 It could certainly be argued that, in keeping with Verne’s interest in scientific discoveries and his view of Poe as both a fantastic writer and a rational thinker, the magnetic mountain of the South Pole offers a “natural,” if not exactly persuasive, explanation of Poe’s mysterious text. Unwin described this process as the fictionalization of science, observing that “for Verne, if fiction feeds on science, then science also feeds on fiction, for fiction is what motivates science.”42 Interestingly, 1839, the date of the beginning of Verne’s novel, is also the year when Sir James Ross Clark, who had discovered the North Magnetic Pole, led the expedition to the Antarctic on the Terror and the Erebus. It is thus possible to read Verne’s Sphinx as the hypothetical conclusion of several tragic polar adventures: the fictional voyage of Pym, the real-life explorations of the Terror and the Erebus, and the mysterious end of Sir John Franklin and his crew. The poles are the place of the “vertiginous attraction of the abyss”43 that Verne had described in Hatteras, and it is easy to see how the black rock (rupes nigra) of the North Pole becomes the white mountain of the Antarctic, which was always imagined to be the exact opposite of the North. Verne had explicitly rejected the myth of a magnetic mountain in Hatteras as a hypothesis fed by credulity; neither Ross nor Hatteras and his crew, Verne writes, had found a mountain “capable of attracting vessels, tearing off their iron, anchor by anchor, nail by nail.”44 But the image still held a fascination although, surprisingly, Verne dismissed the

Fig. 17. George Roux, The Halbrane in Ice with Sun Halo, from Jules Verne, Le Sphinx des glaces (Paris: Hetzel, 1897). Private collection. Photograph: Frank Ward.

Fig. 18. George Roux, The Sphinx of the Ice Fields, from Jules Verne, Le Sphinx des glaces (Paris: Hetzel, 1897). Private collection. Photograph: Frank Ward.

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possibility that the Sphinx stood at the magnetic pole or even close to it: “Did the proximity of the magnetic pole cause such effects?” he asks when describing its fatal attraction. This was the first idea that crossed our minds. But upon reflection, this explanation had to be rejected. Moreover, at the place where the magnetic meridians meet, no phenomena other than the vertical position of the magnetic needle in two similar points of the globe can be observed. This phenomenon, already verified by local observations in the Arctic regions [and here Verne is alluding to James Clark Ross], should be identical in the Antarctic. Thus there was a magnet of prodigious strength in the zone of attraction into which we had penetrated. One of those surprising effects that had been previously relegated to the rank of fables had taken place under our eyes. Who has ever been willing to admit that ships might be irresistibly attracted by a magnetic force, loosening their metal bindings on all sides, their hull opened up, the sea swallowing them into its depths? . . . [Y]et, it was so.45

Verne notes that winds bringing a “formidable accumulation” of electric fluid to the polar regions also cause the “luminous magnificence” of both the aurora borealis and aurora australis. It is even believed—though the fact has not been observed—that at the very moment when a violent positive electric discharge takes place in the Arctic regions, the Antarctic regions are subjected to negative discharges. Indeed, these continuous currents that make the compass wildly fluctuate, must possess an extraordinary influence, and . . . for [such a] current to circulate around this sphinx, what was necessary? . . . [N]othing but a metallic vein. . . .46

The sphinx nonetheless occupies the pole of attraction, though its precise location remains unverifiable: “I think that this mountain must have been located in the magnetic axis as a sort of gigantic calamity . . . but as for determining if it was precisely at the austral magnetic pole, our compass could not have done so. . . . [A]ll I have to say is that its needle, wildly fluctuating and unstable, no longer indicated any orientation.”47 We know of Verne’s obsession with maps and the geographical precision of his texts, but here—and in spite of the map inserted in the text showing the location of the sphinx—the travelers have lost their compass, and when Dirk Peters suddenly points to the remains of Pym’s body, they

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know they have entered another dimension: “ ‘—there! . . . yes . . . there!’ I could not describe the impression these three words made upon us: three cries, as Edgar Poe would have said, emanating from the depth of the ultra world.”48 At this precise moment, it could be argued, Verne claims his text as fiction: a very specific form of fiction, to be sure, borrowing Poe’s voice the better to put a final end to Poe’s creation. Peters does not survive this grim discovery: “He tried to get up closer . . . to kiss the ossified remains of his poor Pym . . . his knees gave out . . . a sob compressed his throat . . . a spasm tore his heart . . . he fell . . . dead. . . .”49 As Michel Serres and others have noted, Verne’s novels invest ancient mythology with the figure of science as modern myth. In Jouvences sur Jules Verne, Serres reads Michel Strogoff as the tale of a modern Oedipus, wandering across Siberia, blind but lucid at last, engaged in a form of initiation.50 The Sphinx of the Ice Fields is more explicit still, and no less complex, in its recasting of the Greek legend. The novel was first published two years after H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, where a sphinx also presides over the futuristic landscape inhabited by the Eloi and the Morlocks. Propelled into futurity, the Time Traveller first sees the gigantic form of the sphinx through a curtain of hail strangely reminiscent of the vapors and the cataract that opened up to reveal the shrouded figure towering over the last page of the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym: A colossal figure, carved apparently in some white stone, loomed indistinctly beyond the rhododendrons through the hazy downpour. But all else was invisible. My sensations would be hard to describe. As the columns of hail grew thinner, I saw the white figure more distinctly. It was very large, for a silver birch-tree touched its shoulder. It was of white marble, in shape something like a winged sphinx.51

Like a modern Oedipus, the Time Traveller limps through his adventure; like Pym he comes back to tell his story, only to leave again: “The Time Traveller vanished three years ago. And, as everybody knows now, he has never returned.”52 In ancient Arabic, the word for sphinx meant the “father of Terror,” and in another of Poe’s stories, the vision of a sphinx blinds the beholder. One of the Tales of Mystery and Imagination describes how, during the cholera epidemics that devastated New York—like the plague that had devastated the ancient city of Thebes—a young man, plunged into abnormal gloom by the growing number of casualties, describes the sudden appearance of a frightening and gigantic animal, so terrible that he “in-

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stinctively buries [his] face in his hands,” covering his eyes as to protect himself from the apparition. The monster is nothing but an insect “of the genus Sphinx, of the family Crepuscularia, of the order Lepidoptera, of the class Insecta—of insects.” But for all its innocuous and fragile existence—the insect has just been caught in a spider’s web—the description taken from a book of natural history legitimates the fear experienced by the narrator: “The Death’s-headed Sphinx has occasioned much terror among the vulgar, at times, by the melancholy kind of cry it utters, and the insignia of death it wears upon its corselet.”53 As Claude Lévi-Strauss has pointed out, the various retellings of the story of Oedipus (Freud’s included) incorporate similar elements: whether the truth-seekers’ infirmities result from an encounter with the sphinx or from a related episode, all the figures of Oedipus suffer from a physical defect (they are either lame or blind); the man-devouring monster strikes terror; and knowledge or self-knowledge alone can vanquish the monster and lead to her destruction. It is rather remarkable that, eager as he claimed he was to provide a rational explanation for a fantastic tale, Verne opted to revive a myth in such detail. The ice monster devours ships, causing them to lose their bindings, their hulls to burst open, and to be “swallowed up” by the sea. At the foot of the gigantic mountain lie the wrecks of previous boats, like so many bones testifying to a gruesome feast. Arthur Gordon Pym’s whitened remains are themselves transformed into a monstrous form: “a body, or rather a skin-covered skeleton, that the cold of these regions had preserved intact. He had a bent head, a white beard that fell to his belt, hands and feet armed with nails as long as claws.”54 The figures of insight and blindness associated with the Oedipus tale already played an important role in Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. The cataract described in the last entries, like a curtain descending over the eye, finally opens to reveal a vision itself covered by another veil: the gigantic draped figure that dominates the last entry of Pym’s journal. Perhaps we should resist the temptation to lift the veil, to give meaning to the hidden shape that looms so large over the last entry, and focus instead on its narrative purpose—whatever is there cannot be identified by human eyes, and the end of the tale will not, should not, be told. Though he lifted the prohibition, in part, Verne insists on the metaphoric curtain that veils both the mythological truth and the uncertainty of exploration: “Dense fog everywhere,” notes the narrator, “not the mist that is dissolved by the first rays of the sun, and disappears with the winds. . . . No! a yellowish fog, rather, with a musty smell, as if this Antarctic January had been the ‘brumaire,’ [the foggy month] of the northern hemisphere. . . .

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From the yellowish sky oozed vesicular mists that covered the top of our ice mountain.”55 In the midst of this thickened fog and as “new vapors accumulated,” the narrator describes “one of those strange hallucinations that Arthur Pym’s mind must have experienced”: I thought I was finally seeing what he had seen! . . . This solid fog was the curtain of mist that hung over the horizon, over his madman’s eyes! . . . I looked for this “limitless cataract rolling silently into the sea from some immense and far-distant rampart into the heaven.” I looked for the yawning rents behind which was a chaos of flitting and indistinct images agitated by the powerful gusts of wind! . . . I looked for the white giant, the giant of the Pole! . . . Finally, reason prevailed. This visionary turmoil, this wild distraction disappeared little by little,” adds Jeorling, but “not once did the curtain open in front of us, and if the iceberg, which had moved forty miles during the last day, had gone beyond the extremity of the earth’s axis, we were never to know! . . .”56

At this point Verne inserts a long note: Twenty eight-years later, what M. Jeorling had been unable to glimpse, another had seen, another had set foot on this part of the globe, on March 21st, 1868. . . . And at the very moment when the northern horizon cuts the solar disk in two equal parts, he took possession of this continent in his own name, unfurling a flag embroidered with a golden N. In the open sea floated a submarine called the Nautilus, and her captain was Captain Nemo.57

With these lines, Verne tears away the veil for his readers, showing what was doubly invisible to the narrator of the Sphinx of the Ice Fields, what Mr. Jeorling had been unable to see: “the chaotic volcanic landscape of the pole, littered with basaltic fragments, scoria, ashes, lava, and blackish rocks, and the scene that would take place only at the equinox of 1868.” The curtain thus opens briefly, but on another text, another fiction, and another time, to be closed again forever. Nemo appears only as a fleeting vision soon to be eclipsed by the continuing narrative. This curious note, however, introduces a more complicated twist to the narrative of the Antarctic: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Vingt mille lieues sous les mers) had been published twenty-seven years earlier, and Verne’s fame owed much to the daring adventure he had described

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as Nemo’s submarine odyssey. By referring to a text previously written, though it took place later than the novel he was in the process of completing, Verne also points out a series of unresolved contradictions: no abyss threatened Nemo, no giant sphinx encountered and fatally attracted the submarine. The landscape was desolate, with a limited vegetation of lichen, but in the air “life was overabundant” with thousands of birds of various species; on land the “baroque cries” of penguins echoed the “formidable roaring” of walruses.58 Nemo lists all the travelers who ventured near the Pole without ever reaching it, including James Clark Ross with the Terror and the Erebus, but nowhere does the name of Poe’s hero appear. The fiction of Nemo summoned in the footnote belies the fiction of Pym to which Verne gives credence throughout The Sphinx of the Ice Fields, as the parhelia and refraction themselves belie the evidence of the senses. It may just be a question of geographical displacement, of course: in The Sphinx of the Ice Fields, Verne stresses several times that the travelers have gone beyond the Pole, unable to see it or even to measure their location accurately, since the sun remained invisible behind the persistent fog.59 But if the Pole is the point of invisibility, the presence of the magnetic mountain seems nonetheless to elucidate a mystery. When Jeorling recognizes the magnetic attraction of the mountain, he writes: “I understood, and in an instant it threw a terrible light on the last catastrophe of which Hearne and his accomplices had been the victims.”60 This terrible light emanating from the “monster” is the revelation that the crew members who had stolen the lifeboat of the Halbrane had died at the foot of the mountain.

cannibali sm Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym dwelled at some length on the cannibalism associated with the Greek legend of the man-eating sphinx. Pym at first hesitates to describe the scene where the three starving survivors of the Grampus agree to draw lots and then to kill and eat the designated victim: “It is with extreme reluctance that I dwell upon the appalling scene which ensued.” He repeats later, “I must not dwell upon the fearful repast which immediately ensued. Such things may be imagined, but words have no power to impress the mind with the exquisite horror of their reality.” Yet Pym goes on: “Let it suffice to say that,

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having in some measure appeased the raging thirst which consumed us by the blood of the victim, and having by common consent taken off the hands, feet, and head, throwing them, together with the entrails, into the sea, we devoured the rest of the body piecemeal.”61 Though more brutal than common accounts, these pages echo other nightmarish descriptions from wreck survivors, notably those of the Medusa. Verne himself gave the story of the Medusa and its episode of cannibalism center stage in Le Chancellor, writing to Hetzel that it represented his own Gordon Pym.62 Dirk Peters, Poe’s cannibal, first appears as Hunt in Verne’s novel, and only reveals his true identity halfway through the book. “How did Captain Len Guy and I, who had so often read Edgar Poe’s book, . . . fail to guess that the man who had boarded the ship in the Falklands and the half-Indian Peters were one? . . . Well, both Captain Guy and his passenger Jeorling had a veil over their eyes! . . . I admit it; we were two blind men.” Blindness is contagious, and the sudden discovery of Peters’s identity brings the terrible scenes “so completely beyond the register of human experience, and going beyond the credulity of men.”63 In The Future of an Illusion, Freud describes the three instinctual desires that have been uniformly prohibited by civilization: “[These] instinctual wishes,” he writes, “are those of incest, of cannibalism, and of murder.” But “the attitude of culture to these oldest instinctual wishes [is not] the same in each case,” he adds, “cannibalism alone seems to be proscribed by every one.”64 The cannibal sphinx that emerges so powerfully from images of modern disasters belonged to the category of the subhuman, to use Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s expression: “One is either above . . . in the company of Zeus . . . or in the monstrous world of whatever is subhuman, in the company of the Sphinx.” “On the shield of Parthenopaeus the Sphinx, which is both female and subhuman (it eats raw flesh), pins down a citizen of Thebes.”65 Eating raw flesh, and particularly raw human flesh, reduces the human to the monstrous category of the subhuman monster. Pym and Peters, who briefly tasted the forbidden flesh, are united by symbolic destiny at the foot of the mandevouring mountain. They join the fictitious sailors of Hatteras’s For­ ward, the real-life men of the Franklin expedition, and the survivors of the Medusa in disclosing another and perhaps more disturbing outcome of disastrous events: the return of the human species to the subhuman category of monstrosity. We should note as well that The Sphinx of the Ice Fields, in restaging the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym—the better to erase some of its

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episodes66 or to develop some of its themes—also stages a form of literary cannibalism, in the sense of a ritual tribute to the dead father. The boldness that consists in providing a sequel to Poe’s work, in daring to lift—if only in part—the veil that hides the human figure, thus replays in various ways the murder of the father and the Oedipus tale. From this perspective, we should not be surprised that, at the end of a voyage whose goal is to retrace that of Pym’s, we should see looming on the horizon the figure of a sphinx. A slight displacement, however, prevents us, in the end, from reading Verne’s novel as the sequel that claimed to elucidate the last pages of the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Although the reader is (mis)led in identifying the sphinx with the shrouded human figure that arises in the last entry of Pym’s journal, Verne himself carefully abstains from doing so, a rather remarkable omission in a novel so preoccupied with providing a conclusion and an explanation to an unfinished narrative. The sphinx thus does not lift the drapery that covered the gigantic shape, but it is particularly interesting to observe, as Jean-Pierre Picot does, that the mythical position of the sphinx on the map provided by Verne is in the vicinity of the Erebus volcano. In Greco-Latin mythology, Picot notes, the Erebus opens the way to the underworld, and the sphinx’s “double thanatological functions” are to mount guard (over a threshold) and to propose enigmas: “The enigma is that of human destiny, and the threshold is that of the other world.”67 Magritte may well have offered the most appropriate illustration of Verne’s novel. His La Reproduction interdite shows a young man whose face is doubly withheld from the beholder: his back is turned to us, and the mirror, contrary to all physical laws of refraction, duplicates our own perspective rather than reflecting the face of the man standing before it. Next to the man, on a simple shelf, lies Poe’s novel as translated into French by Baudelaire: Les Aventures d’Arthur Gordon Pym. The book and his title are reflected normally in the mirror, making the withheld face more enigmatic still. This painting is often considered as a “portrait” of Magritte’s patron Edward James, who had commissioned the work. It can certainly be read as Magritte’s own meditation on the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and perhaps as a comment on the undisclosed identity of the figure that haunts the last pages of the novel.68 But it seems even more appropriate as an illustration of the Sphinx des glaces, if one considers that in French, the same word—glace—designates both ice and a mirror. In the conclusion of his novel, Verne writes: “Arthur Pym, the hero so

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[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

Fig. 19. René Magritte, La Reproduction interdite (ca. 1937). © C. Herscovici, London / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Banque d’Images, ADAGP / Art Resource, NY.

magnificently celebrated by Edgar Poe, showed us the way. . . . May others follow, may others wrest away from the Sphinx of the Ice Fields the last secrets of the mysterious Antarctic!”69 It could be argued that Jules Verne rewrote the myth of the sphinx, but with a variation, using the very solution to the riddle as riddle itself: “What is man?” As the book and the mirrored ice both suggest, the answer, and even the possibility of answering, are illusions, or at best enigmas. The painting, too, is a parhelion.

Part Four the culture o f d i s a s t e r

The final chapter is devoted to the ways the idea and the memory of disaster have pervaded a culture that is still fighting epidemics and diseases long thought to have been controlled or eradicated. Recent news of the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano, which disrupted air travel for days, only echoed the far more serious Laki eruption, which lasted from June 1783 to February 1784. The Laki eruption caused the deaths of several million people worldwide and is thought by some historians to have played a role in the hunger protests that led to the French Revolution. The powerful earthquake that hit the poorest country of the world, Haiti, on January 12, 2010, was a reminder of past disasters and past human failures to cope with them. As I write these lines, the Fukushima reactors still leak radioactive fumes, a new form of disaster caused by natural forces and unmastered technology. Though cholera is no longer a medical enigma, it persists in Haiti. The AIDS epidemic, too, gave rise to multiple debates about contagion and first led to measures that blocked patients’ freedom, a striking reminder of the repressive practices that rose from the plague and cholera epidemics. Instant global access to images of new disasters is the more disturbing, perhaps, for recalling lessons that still have not been learned. In modern perceptions of disasters, individual lives tend to become an abstract concept, lost in the sheer magnitude of the loss. In the logic of disaster—if such an expression can be applied to an event best defined as ultimate disorder—the group takes over the private subject. News reporters have regularly adopted a strategy to fight the spreading of anonymity that makes all victims alike: by focusing on a grieving family or a single ruined school, they restore individual voices to the inhuman aftermath of disastrous events. But there is no way to restore unity, coherence, and individual identity in the category of the “lost and unaccounted-for.” It is worth dwelling a little longer on the fate of those who disappear without a trace, wiped out into the abstraction of numbers: individuals 201

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so completely blotted out that no visible remains can be found. In some countries they remain legally alive for seven years, the ghostly owners of a name and goods immobilized in the hope of a highly improbable return. Then, under the law, the livings may declare these “undead” as dead. The abstract name that had legally immobilized assets ceases to exert a function long defunct, allowing for the ultimate distribution of an unwilled legacy. But in the chaos following disasters, the sheer number of the dead and unaccounted-for wipes out individual beings—these “aggregated masses of particles” Diderot had evoked earlier—and accelerates their total dispersion. If modern science and economics can view populations as numbers alone and measure progress as statistics, what can translate the meaning of millions of dead and missing into a sum of individual lives? Rather than investigate the extensive documentation of recent disasters, I have chosen to examine their indirect but recognizable impact in some of the cultural archives of modern times. One of the ways modern culture thinks through disaster is perhaps best exemplified in its obsessive preoccupation with living subjects threatened by the fragmenting effects of unresolved conflicts. Leaving aside the works that were directly inspired by disasters, I focus on more indirect strategies that best exemplify, in my view, the culture of disaster. Three films, in fact, imposed themselves as I considered not just modern disasters but the way they spread, contaminate bodies, obliterate identities, and produce new questions about the role and responsibilities of individual subjects: Blow-up, The Conversation, and Blade Runner. In a recent work Timothy Mitchell writes with eloquence about the development, in the nineteenth century, of an increased belief in the power of secular rationality: “The movement of history could be ascribed to the growing technical control that reason acquired over the natural and social world. . . . Whichever aspect of modern, secular rationality one emphasized, everything could be understood as the development of this universal principle of reason, or a reaction against it, or its failure, delay, or absence.” Disasters outline the limits of secular rationality and its technical power over the social and physical world. Mitchell gives a fascinating account of combined biological, human, and chemical progress that, in the case of Egypt, led to a reconfiguration of political power and economic practices. Beneath it all, he argues, capitalism “survives parasitically, like the Plasmodium falciparum, taking up residence in human bodies and mind.”1 Mitchell’s comparison recalls the Baron d’Holbach’s statement about sacred superstition spreading like a contagious disease encouraged

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by the priests who would be physicians.2 The specific contamination I will emphasize in the last chapter deals with bodies and minds, with technology, murder, perception, and fragmentation. The contaminating process that defeats rationality raises questions about identity and memory, showing with eerie precision the confrontation of the solitary subject with a single moment of disastrous revelation.

9 Now Playing Everywhere In an interview he gave about his film The Conversation, Francis Ford Coppola briefly spoke about what it meant to be a spectator seated in the dark space of a movie theater: “These sounds and lights get you working,” he stated, so that at the end of the film something has happened, “there are other things unresolved,” a form of disquiet that leads up to deeper questioning.1 The experience Coppola describes for the spectator—a transformation he himself, as filmmaker, hopes to produce in the spectator—duplicates the fate of The Conversation’s protagonist, Harry Caul, a sound engineer specializing in surveillance, who is slowly drawn into the material he has recorded for a client he suspects of planning a murder. Harry has been hired by the executive of a large corporation (Robert Duvall) to spy on a pair of young lovers, Paul and Ann (Frederic Forrest and Cindy Williams). The relationships are never made explicit, although we are led to believe that Ann is the corporate executive’s young wife and that prying into this affair is no more than a sordid assignment perpetrated by a technically brilliant but equally sordid surveillance expert. “Five thousand dollars, not bad for a day’s job, scum!” the executive’s assistant tells Harry right to his face after he has been paid for his deed. According to the film’s lore, the name “Caul” resulted from a misspelling of “call” (not the most likely misspelling, but that does not matter), and the film plays nicely on the homophony of sounds that associates the protagonist with calls he makes almost reluctantly and using the fewest possible words—until he spells out his name as C-A-U-L, when asking for an appointment with the man who has hired him. The story of the accidental caul is further emphasized by the clear plastic, flimsy raincoat Harry wears in any weather. To be “born in a caul” means to be born still enveloped in the amniotic sac or membrane. From ancient times, the caul was interpreted as a sign of great good fortune; it was carefully preserved and sometimes sold to sailors, as it was believed to offer protection 205

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against drowning. As many film critics have noted, Harry Caul (who, needless to say, hardly resembles a newborn baby) walks around in his transparent raincoat, as if still enveloped in that protective membrane that was supposed to give mysterious powers. At the beginning of The Conversation, the camera slowly zooms in from a high-angle shot above San Francisco’s Union Square, “an inexplicable shot, from an inexplicable angle, with inexplicable, distorted sounds,” notes Robert Phillip Kolker.2 The camera briefly focuses on a mime that any San Franciscan of the day would have recognized as Union Square’s most familiar figure, and whose daily spectacle—trailing after one pedestrian, then whirling to follow another, mimicking their walks and gestures—was once as emblematic of downtown San Francisco as the “City of Paris” building that dominated Union Square. (It was replaced, not long after the film was shot, by a Neiman Marcus store, an early sign of the Texas invasion that would soon sweep the country from Dallas to the White House.) The silent mime is the only character who can clearly be understood among the indistinct noises of the square. But he only gestures, directing our attention to the various strollers, among them an obviously annoyed Harry. The mime points silently to those we should watch, duplicating the role of the camera in a film that will play continuously with the idea of duplication. The spectator thus knows from the first that the movie will be all about silence, random noises, and stolen words, about masks and anonymity, about seeing without being seen: a film about spectatorship. Gene Hackman’s subdued performance as Harry won him consider­ able applause, and he spoke on several occasions about the difficulty of play­ ing a character who is defined, early on, by a series of negative statements. To his landlord: “I don’t have anything personal, you see, except my keys”; to his inquisitive girlfriend: “I don’t have any secrets”; to the company whose executive hires him: “I don’t have a phone.” There is no need to detail the brilliant sound effects that play with the spectator-turnedeavesdropper, except to mention the remarkable overlapping sounds that link the shot of Harry riding down the elevator to the scene back in his workshop where he rewinds the tape once more, trying to unlock its secrets. In this instance, the absolute continuity between the sound of the elevator and that of the rewinding tape do not add to the narrative, but they startle the spectator. What we thought we had heard was really something else entirely (and by then we should have recognized the sound of a tape being rewound). But only a specialist would truly know: Harry.

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In discussing The Conversation, Coppola seized on the publicity that the Watergate scandal had accidentally provided for his film and on the country’s sudden focus on the question of political surveillance. The public should know “what is going on,” he said, adding that he had chosen to show the moment when Harry—a man who made a point of staying detached from the consequences of his work—finally took responsibility for his actions. Thus presented, the film could be viewed as a story of sin and redemption, of loneliness, betrayal, and the cost of getting involved. Critics were quick to point out the autobiographical elements that enriched the dream section in which Harry tells Ann about his childhood. Moreover, the gradual discovery of Harry’s vulnerability, his weaknesses, the revelation that his past actions had led to the murder of three people (including a woman and her child), all echoed the contemporary political scene. But this convenient—and by no means unjustified—interpretation also served to mask some of the more disturbing elements of the movie, which combine to leave the spectator with “other issues unresolved.” One of them has to do with the duplication of the famous scene in which Harry discovers a murder has taken place: convinced that his client will use the tape (stolen from him by a call girl) to harm the young couple he was hired to observe, Harry goes to the hotel where they made their assignation and takes the adjacent room, hoping to overhear the action taking place next door. In a series of fast-paced shots, the murmur of conversation becomes a heated exchange. Harry rushes to his balcony only to hear a piercing scream and see a bloody hand pressed on the semi-opaque partition. Harry returns to his room, turns on the TV, and pulls the bedcovers over his head. In the next scene we see him later that night, when the TV programming has stopped and only warbled colors appear on the screen. When Harry enters the room where he suspects a murder may have taken place, he finds the place empty, immaculate, with no sign of violence—until the memorable scene when he flushes the toilet and it overflows with blood and the remnants of a white shirt. This scene has been described by David Denby as “one of the most grimly satisfying scenes in recent movies, a true horror epiphany.”3 Slavoj Žižek singles it out as one of the greatest moments of cinematography. The camera shoots the scene at low angle, so that the blood seems to fall from the upper half of the screen, as if to flood the theater itself. The scene has been interpreted as an homage to Hitchcock’s Psycho and remains imprinted in the spectator’s memory as a cathartic surge of emotions released with the overflowing blood—a revelation that fails to solve the mystery.

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There follows the most elusive and problematic sequence of the film: Harry, having read in the morning paper that the executive who hired him has died in an auto crash, realizes that the murder had been planned from the beginning by the young lovers he had thought were the intended victims. He rushes to the corporation’s office and joins a crowd of newsmen who are questioning Ann about the sudden death of her husband. A series of quick cross-cuts flashes images of the hotel room where we can see Paul killing Ann’s husband. In their fragmented form, these images duplicate the earlier scene of Harry discovering the deserted room—but this time the walls are covered with blood. We see Ann saying a tender adieu to her husband and covering her ears as he is suffocated with a clear plastic bag; we hear screaming, then see the dead man covered with another sheet of transparent plastic. The first continuous sequence in that same hotel room had opened with Harry’s face framed by the half-open door and a clean wall to his left. In the second, fragmented sequence, a similar shot shows Harry opening the door, but the camera moves to a blood-spattered wall. The cut-aways that interrupt the scene of Ann talking to the journalists thus identify the murderers, transforming Ann’s sweetness and youth into cold-blooded betrayal. The film editing leads the spectator to understand these fragmented images of the murder scene as Harry’s sudden revelation about the plot he had detected but not understood. And just as these images echo and complete Harry’s previous discovery of the murder, another image flashes through his mind and completes the conversation he had tried so hard to reconstruct and to understand: the moment in Union Square when he thought he had heard Paul say: “He’d kill us if he had the chance.” Harry now hears the same words but with different emphasis: “He’d kill us if he had the chance.” It does not matter at this point that the soundtrack was indeed altered by Walter Murch, and with Coppola’s consent. The sound bites and the fragmented images that interrupt the scene of Ann being interviewed by the journalists provide the solution of at least one enigma. The spectators—as spies and eavesdroppers—can feel an uneasy form of closure over the plot whose true nature has eluded them and Harry for so long. As David Denby sums up: “Someone gets killed, but in the emotional and moral terms of the movie the catastrophe is Harry’s; he suffers a spiritual and moral death from which there is no possible resurrection. . . . Against his will, Harry has become part of a murder plot.”4 Yet the revelation leaves the spectators uneasy not so much because they, along with

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Fig. 20. Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) from Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974). Photograph: © Archives du 7e Art / DR / Photo 12 / The Image Works.

Harry, have been tricked by the double expertise of the director/editor and that of the murderous lovers, but rather because of the ambiguous status of the disclosure. As represented in its fragmented form—flashes going through Harry’s mind—the murder scene overflows with incoherence, especially when we see blood covering the walls. The executive was suffocated by a plastic bag; where does the blood come from? Whose blood is it? As the executive lies on the bed, covered in clear plastic, we see his stained shirt and a wound to the heart, as if only such a wound could sufficiently expose the full horror of the crime. The melodramatic scene breaks with the obsessively low-key details of Harry’s surveillance method, his technological manipulations of the tapes and his patient reconstitution of missing words. We are in another dimension, that of the most precise surveillance engineer’s mind gone awry over his first involvement in a conversation he has tragically misunderstood. Harry has overstepped his role and now collects his fee. Looking at these fragments again, we see the murderer, wrapped, like Harry Caul himself, in a protective nylon jacket; and we see the body wrapped in still more transparent plastic, like multiple cauls,

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multiple images of Harry as murderer, witness, and victim. Harry’s caul envelops them all: he has been both agent and casualty of a truly unspeakable, unheard-of, crime. In the last and much-discussed scene of the film, Harry, back in his apartment, gets two calls on the telephone he had pretended not to have. The first time there is only silence on the line, but when Harry answers the second call, he hears a voice say: “We know that you know, Mr. Caul, and for heaven’s sake don’t get involved. We’ll be listening to you.” Harry searches unsuccessfully for a bugging device, destroying his place in the process, and he ends up sitting among the rubble and playing his saxophone to the accompaniment of a jazz recording. There are two points worth noting: The first has to do with the way the last scene echoes the opening aerial shot high above Union Square, when the camera circled around as if searching for a clue, following one character, then another, briefly taking the mime as a guide, until it found Harry. In the last scene, the oscillating camera follows Harry circling around the apartment, searching for a clue, following one possibility, then another (including an all-plastic Virgin Mary), but this time turning up nothing. Murch noted that in the scene the camera was “aggressively a presence,” adding to the sense that Harry is under surveillance.5 But by that time, Harry himself is acting like the camera lens of the initial scene, betraying something we had started to forget, even though every single scene in the movie made it absolutely obvious: that the film is primarily about technology, that Harry, who first uses a bug detector in his own apartment, then abandons it, has himself become part of a technological apparatus that detects and misleads in equal measure. There are no more leads for him to follow. The claustrophobic atmosphere of a film told mostly from the point of view of a single character (“At one point, I chose to go with the eavesdropper,” Coppola stated) has reached its apex. The second point to be made—part of the ironic subtext—has to do with the fact that the words we hear coming from the phone are only a taped message. The sound of the tape being rewound, or accelerated briefly, precedes the message. Who is speaking, then? One of the lovers/murderers? The executive’s assistant, who may also have had a hand in the plot? Or perhaps the other brilliant sound expert, Bernie Moran, who had once fooled Harry by planting a bug in his shirt pocket and who knows more secrets about Harry’s life than anyone else? Walter Murch remarked that “it was a courageous act on [Coppola’s] part never to flesh out the story of the murder that finally happens. We know that there are

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two suspects, but what or who they are, and what their real jobs are, and what their relationship is, we don’t know, because Harry does not know.”6 The choice to stick to a single point of view, never to let the spectator see or hear anything that Harry himself does not see or hear, deprives the spectator of the mastery that would come—as it does at the end of most of Hitchcock’s movies—with all-encompassing knowledge, including that of the director’s intentions. The release of the film in VHS, and its subsequent remastering for DVD, allowed for a last duplication: Coppola and Murch both allude to the fact that Harry Caul’s work is, in a sense, very similar to that of a film director or a film editor. “There were many times while making the film that I had a sense of doubling,” said Murch. “I’d be working on the film late at night, looking at an image of Harry Caul working on his tape, and there would be four hands, his and mine.”7 The spectator now viewing the film on tape or DVD can experiment with replaying the scenes, something that was impossible when the movie first came out. It is in fact difficult not to rewind obsessively some of the scenes, trying to reconstruct and make sense of fragments, trying to build a coherent and complete narrative. We want to gain the mastery Harry never gained, in the hope of escaping the relentless single point of view of the eavesdropper, thus combining the perspectives of the director and film editor. But in doing this, we, too, end up duplicating Harry’s descent into a nightmarish obsession that never leads to any form of knowledge, but yields only on a few additional and tantalizing clues. In this way, we could well argue that The Conversation is one of the few films that reach their full realization, a finality of sort, in the shift from large-screen format to DVD/videotape, which give the spectator/listener the endless possibility of repeated mishearing that is at the core of the film itself. Avital Ronell once described such an experience as built from the start “into the thing you pick up when you listen to a transmitter, any transmitter, conveying electric utterance.”8 It also shows in an important way the difference between Harry’s craft and that of the filmmaker, or the limits of the exercise that consists in trying to equate Harry and Coppola. By the end of the movie, they have parted company in more ways than one. Not just because the bug that may have been installed in Harry’s apartment is not found, nor because Harry never learns the entire truth of the murder. As it turns out, Coppola never did, either. We should take seriously Murch’s comment that “even Francis did not know: he felt that if he knew, he’d somehow be infected

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with that knowledge, and he’d be obliged to shoot it, to have it just in case.”9 Harry desperately wants to know what Coppola, for his part, refused to know, recognizing at once that knowledge, like the plague, is infectious and will contaminate the integrity of a point of view, which, in the end, is radically not his own.

genealogi es The Conversation comes with a rich list of antecedents, identified by critics or provided by Murch and Coppola themselves. From Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf came the name of Harry, his loneliness, and perhaps his saxophone; from Hitchcock an echo of Psycho’s shower scene. “It was very much in Francis’s mind, from the beginning, to try to make an alloy of Herman Hesse and Hitchcock, to forge an unlikely alliance between those two sensibilities,” Murch stated. “The struggle of the film, at every level, was how to achieve that balance.”10 In addition, another distinguished network of influences links the movie to Julio Cortázar’s 1964 short story entitled “Las Babas del Diablo” (literally, “The Devil’s Drools,” translated as “Blow-Up”). Cortázar’s story directly inspired Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 Blow-up, a film Coppola had seen and much admired, and that would later inspire Brian De Palma’s 1981 Blow Out. These works all share a common theme: that of a crime uncovered through the deliberate or accidental recording of an apparently ordinary scene. Cortázar’s short story focuses on a photographer, Michel, who idly watches what looks like the seduction of a young adolescent by an older woman on the Ile Saint-Louis in Paris. When he takes a photograph of the couple, the boy flees; the woman angrily demands the roll of film, joined by a man who had been watching all along from a parked car. Back in his studio, the photographer develops the film; becoming obsessed with the blown-up image; as he thinks back on the scene, he comes to realize that a much more sinister encounter had been taking place than the awkward seduction he thought he had witnessed: What I had imagined earlier was much less horrible than the reality, that woman, who was not there by herself, she was not caressing or propositioning or encouraging for her own pleasure, to lead the angel away with his tousled hair and play the tease with his terror and his eager grace. The real boss was waiting there, smiling petulantly, already certain of the busi-

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ness; he was not the first to send a woman in the vanguard, to bring him the prisoner manacled with flowers. The rest of it would be so simple, the car, some house or another, drinks, stimulating engravings, tardy tears, the awakening in hell.11

The success of Antonioni’s adaptation, Blow-up, has often been attributed to its provocative representation of the “swinging sixties,” complete with drugs, jazz, rock, free love, and a steaming scene with iconic model Veruschka. Yet it is a strikingly somber film. Antonioni chose to film not the exuberant London, but its grim suburbs and gloomy alleys. The movie opens with Thomas (David Hemmings) leaving a rooming house, and somehow the dark mood set in the first scene is never alleviated by the move to shooting sessions, parties, or outdoor scenes. The movie follows two days in the life of  Thomas, and the growing disquiet that undermines his sense of control after he discovers that the pictures he took of a couple embracing in a park disclose what appears to have been a murder. The main elements that inspired three directors as different as An­ tonioni, Coppola, and Brian De Palma were already present in Cortázar’s story: one apparently innocent scene conceals a crime that is revealed through a technological device. In all cases, the exact nature of the crime and the identity of those involved remain mysterious. Technology mediates the perception of reality, leading the protagonist to look for much more than he could at first grasp, but in the end neither pictures nor tapes can yield the ultimate key to the plot that has been uncovered. Another and perhaps more important recurring element has to do with the fact that, although the technological devices used by the photographers or the eavesdroppers allow for the partial revelation of a possible crime, none of those who expertly play with these devices initially suspect the mystery they are about to uncover. It is only when the subjects of the pictures demand the film, or when Harry’s tape and Thomas’s film are stolen, that a closer look reveals the darker elements of what had first been a routine job or a casual snapshot. In The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, Slavoj Žižek states that “[cinema] does not give you what you desire. . . . It tells you how to desire.”12 By becoming objects of desire, the mechanical reproductions suddenly become invested with additional meaning, raising the question of representation—of this specific form of representation and desire—to a different level. The recorded fragments break the continuum of the story: as retrievable fragments, they stand outside the time of experience recorded by the

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Fig. 21. Thomas (David Hemmings) from Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-up (1966). Photograph: © MGM / Ronald Grant Archive / Mary Evans / The Image Works.

film or the main narrative (the photographer taking pictures in the park or Harry taping the conversation in Union Square). In this way, too, they escape the various definitions provided by Deleuze in L’Image-temps when he considers the relation between the “present image” and the flashback. These fragments—“He’d kill us if he had the chance,” or the blown-up images of the park scene—are not played just as flashbacks. They are more directly related to Benjamin’s definition of the prodigious break that explodes the continuum of history in times of emergency.13 But in this case, there is no revolution taking over the task of rewriting a history of rupture and renewal. Thus Harry’s constant rewinding of the tapes, Thomas’s obsessive enlarging of the photographs, or Michel’s interrupted reverie come as close as possible to the representation of a pure disruption. There is no before/after of revelation. The protagonist/ spectator witnesses only the relentlessly disruptive power of partial repe­ tition. Times of emergency such as these have been fully interiorized as pure anxiety. The fragments bursting forth from an initially misperceived reality imprint on Harry’s mind, or in Michel’s memory, the repetition of their failure to apprehend what should have been understood and to

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prevent what did happen from happening again: “The time had run out,” writes Michel, “the game was played out.”14

“reality in question” When Antonioni was interviewed by Les Cahiers du Cinéma during the filming of Blow-up in London, he made two separate statements about his film: “It often happens to me that I experience the imperfection of feelings before I experience the feelings themselves.” Later he said: “I want to recreate reality in an abstract form. . . . I want to put reality in question. This is an essential point of everything that is related to the visual aspect of the movie, given that one of its main themes is to see correctly [ juste], or not to see the correct [ juste] value of things.”15 The abstract representation of reality is certainly exemplified by the exaggerated enlargement of the shots to a point that makes the images unrecognizable. If, initially, we (and Thomas) believe we see both a hand holding a gun and a corpse lying at the foot of a tree, further enlargements yield only blurred shadows, withholding any form of disclosure. “Faced with this sudden revelation of the revealing powers of the image, and surprised himself, or so it seems, to see his life re-ordering itself around this unexpected center of interest, the photographer little by little invests himself in the game,” writes Michel Delahaye. “Blow-up becomes a quest that follows the vision of a death—about which we will know no more.” For Delahaye, the quest is directly related to the very question cinema itself asks over and over again: “What does this eye see and how does it see?”16 If we take this question seriously, then the murder mystery serves only as mise en abyme of the technological mystery represented by the—possibly destructive—power of the lens. “We live in a climate of mystery novel. We are immersed in the mystery novel,” Antonioni declared years after he had finished Blow-up.17 Still, mystery fiction is one of violence and desire, but also of closure and final elucidation: two elements that are strikingly absent from Antonioni’s or Coppola’s films. We should thus remain wary of the clues Antonioni so complacently laid out for the spectators in search of meaning: I don’t know what reality is like. Reality escapes us, it changes continually. When we think we’ve reached it, the situation is already something else. I always doubt what I see, what an image shows me, because I “imagine”

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what’s beyond that; and what’s behind an image is unknown. The photographer of Blow-up, who is not a philosopher, wants to see more, more closely. But what happens is that because he enlarges too much, the object itself decomposes and disappears. Therefore there is a moment in which one seizes reality, but the moment immediately after, it escapes. That is, to some extent, the meaning of Blow-up.18

sight and sound Fredric Jameson made a radical distinction between Blow-up and the sequels represented by The Conversation and Blow Out: The wind that blows through the great trees in Antonioni’s park only mildly lifts and ruffles the segments of the portrait. Photography’s prestige here is to be equal to the simulacrum and more interesting than the reality, but otherwise little more than a way of killing time. Perhaps we need to drive a wedge more dramatically between the senses after the great synaesthesias of the modern periods, and to restore some of the liberating freshness and horror of the auditory image in a society that has become a collection of visual spectacles. Is this then finally perhaps the deeper meaning of the sequence whereby Blow-up’s postmodern sequels—De Palma’s Blow Out (1981) and Coppola’s The Conversation (1974)—transfer the visible clue to the realm of the sound: the unconscious, Utopian longing to be awaken from the spell of images, and to be awakened by sounds as piercing as shots or whispers?19

The synaesthesia that, as Jameson remarks, was the poetical goal of modern aesthetics is systematically unraveled in Antonioni’s and Coppola’s films. We should add that this unraveling dramatically shifts the focus of the movies away from the murder plot, such as it may be, and away from the protagonists, back to the spectator as frustrated voyeur/ eavesdropper. What the movies state most forcefully is the disconnectedness of our experience of reality, not just in the Heideggerian sense that Jameson identified in Blow-up,20 but in the fact that coming to terms with the opacity of reality exposes our own limitations: it is not just what we cannot see and hear properly, and certainly not what we should not see or hear properly (here the moral and the practical terms become irrelevant), but what prevents us from seeing and hearing at the same time, from compensating for the incompleteness of our understanding.

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Diderot’s 1749 Lettres sur les aveugles famously led to his threemonth imprisonment in the Donjon at Vincennes. The text was read as a challenge to religious belief in what Paul Vernière calls the “physicotheological proofs of God’s existence.”21 In his examination of the lives and discourses of the blind man of Puiseaux and those of Nicholas Saunderson,22 Diderot expressed some of his most daring thoughts on God’s injustice, on the physical evolution of species, and on the nature of the universe. “I have no eyes,” exclaims Saunderson to a minister. “What had we done to God, you and I, one to posses this organ and the other to be deprived of it?” Far from being as perfect a creation as there can possibly be, the world, for Saunderson, is nothing but “a composite, subject to revolutions that all indicate a continual tendency towards destruction.”23 Diderot had hoped to make a powerful statement on the mechanisms that perfected the acquisition of knowledge through our various senses. His Lettre examines in great detail how the sense of touch compensates for the missing sight: “Saunderson saw through the skin,” he writes.24 More than thirty years later, he would add in his Supplément à la lettre sur les aveugles, “I have been told of a blind man who knew the color of materials by touching them.”25 If the Enlightenment did not express a utopian aspiration for the complete overwhelming of combined sensations that played such a role in Modernist aesthetics, it nevertheless insisted on the unifying principle capable of organizing the knowledge received through the senses, even when one sense became deficient or was entirely absent. Not only did the body compensate for this deficiency by developing the ability of the other senses to apprehend reality; it also provided, through the mechanism of compensation, a different and more advanced form of knowledge. In the end, this mechanism allowed the blind subject a perception of external reality that was as delicate and complex as that of a being endowed with all the senses. True, the quality of knowledge varied, and Diderot’s point that there is no common metaphysical experience helped to trigger his jail sentence, but in the Lettre the mechanisms of sensation and perception all work toward a single thought process that testifies to both the human capacity to apprehend reality and the unity of the thinking subject. This is precisely where the series of films loosely derived from Cortázar’s short story illustrate the radical rupture that has eroded not just the way technology has transformed the perception of reality that Antonioni so willingly discussed in his interviews, but also, and more profoundly, the breaking apart of our sensorial apprehension of external objects. This breaking apart takes center stage in both Blow-up and The

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Conversation: scenes that come to occupy the core of the investigation can never be captured by a routine combination of sensorial perceptions. The added perceptual acuity provided by technological expertise comes at the cost of other sensations. The park scene in Blow-up is rendered artificially silent by the complex use of sound itself: the amplified rustling of leaves blocks all the sounds one should normally perceive, making more obvious their eerie absence. Similarly, Harry’s mastering of listening devices makes more acute his incapacity to see that the pen Moran slips in his pocket has a recording device, to see what takes place in the room next to his, and finally to see where the bug in his apartment may—or may not—be located. The protagonists’ apprehension of reality is thus both enhanced and diminished. The distorted relationship between sight and sound invests each film with a specific form of anxiety. Blow-up is, first of all, “an observation on the possibilities and the limits of the gaze,” writes Stig Björkman.26 It also boasted the longest sequence in cinematic history that was entirely soundless, the better perhaps to emphasize the moment when, in the last scene, Thomas joins the tennis game played by the mimes, and we begin to hear the sound of a ball we cannot see. The switch from sight to sound that is so vividly at the heart of The Conversation was already playing a role in Antonioni’s work, not as substitute, not as complement, but as additional fragmentation. Above all, the incompleteness of perception powerfully illustrated in the photographic shots and snatches of conversation demonstrates the fact that, for all the increase it provides in sensory perception, technol­ ogy can never reproduce the totality of a scene but only a segment that is in equal part revelatory and misleading. The fragments disclose a partially obstructed reality, and the fact that there may be a mystery concealed in their ordinariness only comes to light when the players themselves (the characters being taped or photographed) betray their importance. The enhanced reality provided by technology (amplification, enlargement) serves to dissolve both the perception of reality and the perceiving subject. Slavoj Žižek also points to the nature of partial perceptions in The Conversation when he describes the scene in the hotel room and Harry’s hope to be able to observe what takes place next door as “a desperate attempt to visualize this bodily, material, support of what he hears.”27 But the only images we will see of the murder taking place are Harry’s imagined representations. For Žižek, the passage from silent to “talking” films

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testified to a loss of innocence: “What we get with sound is interiority, debt, guilt.” Coppola plays brilliantly with the disembodied taped voice that triggers The Conversation’s last scene, as Antonioni did with the artificiality of sounds that alternate in Blow-up with deafening silence until we, too, are reduced to hearing what the natural rebound of an absent tennis ball would sound like. The partial objects (tapes, photographs) have taken a life of their own, circulating and distributing anxiety or endless questioning. Most of all, they contribute to the sense that the protagonists themselves have become fragmented shadows of their previous selves. Not, it should be added from a purely moral point of view, as Harry taking responsibility, or as Thomas joining the mimes’ tennis game in a form of epiphany. Prédal describes this last scene as Thomas having passed through the mirror. “This reunion [with the mimes] offers a metaphor for the problems of representation raised in the film. The film enters another dimension, shattering realism.”28 But there remain those unfulfilled desires for a cohesive reality technology only offered as fragments. Harry’s reluctance to let go of the tapes and Thomas’s refusal to give up the photographs emphasize their fetishistic attachments to objects that stood as patently misleading substitutes for the knowledge that had eluded them so far. Technology has been endowed with the power of oversensitivity, the capacity to hear and see what one cannot hear or see, the better to underline the protagonists’ in­ ability to perceive fully, to be realized as complete beings, to escape the realization summed up by Žižek’s formula that “beings are a partial something.” The movies’ conclusions reveal only one truth: that these technological forays are only remnants that need to be endlessly supplemented, and that the imaginary supplements that Harry or Thomas are called upon to provide further fracture their own consciousness.

dysfunctional i dentities Blow-up generated many more critical analyses than The Conversation, and one of the striking constants of these analyses was the critics’ quasiunanimous censure of its protagonist: Thomas is described as “superficial,” “self-absorbed,” “amoral,” “the complete narcissist”; in short, to quote Jameson, the photographer is a “repulsive” character. Clearly, there is a conscious effort on the part of the spectators, particularly of

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self-conscious spectators, to dissociate themselves from the hero, to establish a distance that will exclude or repudiate all possibility of identification. This dissociation is no doubt encouraged by Antonioni’s filming technique. It stands in sharp contrast with the form of identification with the protagonist that works so powerfully, for example, in Hitchcock’s films. If the frequent comparisons of Rear Window, Blow-up, and The Conversation center on the question of voyeurism, they ignore the radical difference between the spectator’s reluctant, though unquestionable, identification with an immobilized and vulnerable Stewart, and the rejection of any identification with Harry or Thomas. In Antonioni’s and Coppola’s cases, the identification process takes place not with the hero but with the supposedly knowing subject represented by the filmmaker. In a revealing interview, Peter Bowles, who played Thomas’s friend in Blow-up, related how Antonioni, over Bowles’s objections, cut the speech that would have explained the movie: “If I leave the speech, everyone will know what the film is all about, but if I leave the speech out, everyone will say it is about this, it is about that . . . it will be controversial. . . . Trust me. I am not God, but I am Michelangelo Antonioni.”29 The deliberate withholding of clues staged in the blurred photographic enlargements or the shifting emphasis of sounds in the crucial part of Harry’s tapes invite the spectator to emulate the elusive masterminds who hold the winning cards—the filmmakers themselves. Of course, self-conscious spectators are necessarily led to reflect on the making of the movie; but in this case, the process implies the dismissal of the protagonists, of the anxiety induced by their experience of a technologized reality. The contaminating effect of fragmentation would be similar to the way a windshield can be shattered by the single impact of a small stone, or the way Edvard Munch painted the eye floater, or hemorrhage, which came to plague his vision. The spectators’ hoped-for identification with Coppola or with Antonioni—the self-described God substitute—is primarily a move away from the disabled subjects portrayed on the screen and toward their all-knowing creators. The fact that Coppola refused to know about the murder makes no difference to the spectators who, while viewing the film, cannot possibly assume his ignorance. Nor, if they knew about it, would they have to see it as a limitation, but rather as a matter of choice in the accomplishment of a specific goal. The desired series of identifications that informs narrative in general and cinema in particular endlessly slips from spectators to protagonists to directors. It received an ultimate treatment in Ridley Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner.30

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l.a., 2019 Blade Runner focuses on one of the most enduring themes of science fiction, the uncanny effect of human-like beings irrupting into the world of humans and wreaking havoc with their lives. Although there have been many variations on this motif, the traditional representation of androids—starting with Invasion of the Body Snatchers31—plays on their capacity to behave like ordinary humans, except for the fact that they cannot feel emotions or that their emotions stem from a different sensibility. The essential difference between imperfect humans and their perfect duplicates lies in the capacity to experience moral suffering, happiness, or pity. In Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, however, replicants are not free from feelings, and human emotions are inextricably linked with memories of early childhood, particularly maternal memories. The action follows a group of violent “replicants,” escaped from an off-world colony, Nexus 6, where they were held as slaves, and their effort to obtain from their maker back on Earth the chance of expanding their life span, which has been fixed at four years. When replicants are no longer needed or represent a threat, they are eliminated, or “retired” by blade runners, and it is protagonist Rick Deckard’s task to rid Los Angeles of the group of violent androids who have returned to challenge the humans who control their short lives. In one of the early scenes of the film, Leon, one of the replicants, is administered a Voight-Kampff test aimed at detecting replicants: while he answers a series of routine questions, a camera focused on his eyes registers the level of emotion raised by the interview. Leon’s voice expresses a wide range of feelings: nervousness, impatience, insecurity. At one point, the interviewer asks: “Tell me only about the good things that come to mind, about your mother. . . .” Leon coldly replies: “Let me tell you about my mother,” draws a gun, and shoots the interviewer. The maternal and the emotional divide are thus tied from the beginning: the motherless creation of the humanoids generates violence-prone creatures, unconstrained by the empathy that drives humans toward one another, the feeling of pity that Rousseau associated from the beginning with human nature. And in this case, the lack of a mother also seems to invite rebellion against the law of the father/creator who manufactures the androids and decides on their longevity. Rick Deckard’s mission to eliminate the four replicants who have escaped from Nexus 6 is complicated by his involvement with Rachael, a new and more advanced replicant who has been implanted with memories

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Fig. 22. Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). Photograph: © Ronald Grant Archive / Mary Evans / The Image Works.

from the niece of the director of the Tyrell Corporation, the same corporation that manufactures androids. She does not know she is not human and cries when Deckard reveals the truth to her. When Rachael fails to return to work in the Corporation, she is added to the list of replicants who must be “retired.” Initially the difference between Rachael and the Nexus 6 replicants appears to be centered in the role of memory as grounding agent, unifying the experiences of past and present, providing for the possibility of feeling human and developing emotions that link humans to other humans. Once that faculty, too, is dismissed as pure technological effect, as simulacrum, the question of what constitutes a human subject— or, to put it more precisely, what constitutes the subject as agent—becomes insolvable. “I remember [piano] lessons, but I don’t know if it’s me or Tyrell’s niece,” Rachael says. Later she tells Deckard, “I want you, but maybe it’s not me.” Fragmentation has been fully interiorized. By contrast, Roy, the leader and the most impressive of the Nexus 6 replicants, suffers not from an identity crisis but from anxiety over his own impending death. When he manages to meet his maker, there is no doubt as to the subject who says, with a measure of ironical emphasis on the last word, “I want more life, father.” Tyrell, after congratulating Roy on being a marvel of technology, admits that he himself cannot alter the

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genetic engineering that determines his longevity. Roy blinds him with his thumbs, then kills him. The Oedipus myth is thus restaged, but with a determined role reversal. Roy kills the father, and the price that must be paid for the parricide is exacted on the too-human figure of a powerless father who dies blind to/for the double crime of having usurped the role of the father and having failed in his responsibilities. Laius, after all, had condemned his son to die; in Blade Runner the father figure is punished for the projected infanticide the myth seemed to have forgiven.

sleight of ha nd Roy’s inevitable death adds to the further blurring of the mythological images that endow the film’s brilliant technical effects with the ghosts of collective memories. Already feeling the numbness that precedes death, Roy drives a nail through his palm to reawaken his feelings and pursues Deckard in a frantic chase across the rooftops of L.A. Deckard himself has lost the use of two fingers broken by Roy in retaliation for the murder of his fellow replicants. Hanging precariously on the edge of a roof and about to lose his grip, he is unexpectedly saved by Roy: “Quite an experience to live in fear,” Roy tells him before hauling him up. “That’s what it is to be a slave.” It has become quite obvious at this point that the replicants are in fact endowed with feelings that result not from any capacity to remember a maternal past, but from the power relations that have subjected them to the harsh life of forced labor and a shortened life span. As he dies, Roy is transformed into a Christ-like figure, with a hand bearing stigmata: a dove briefly nestles in his arms, flying away after his death. There is something oddly triumphant in Roy’s last words: “I’ve seen things you people would not believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. . . . Time to die.” The reference to Tannhauser, the mythical legend of sin and redemption, sensual love and sacred love, is not arbitrary: Roy, too, has reached a larger-than-life status, half-divine, half-human, still a full replicant—but of what?32 The cosmic elegy that accompanies his death is not accidental, either. Roy’s character has far exceeded the engineering that permitted him to live as a programmed slave for four years.33 His memories will fade with him, to be retained only in these brief lines that have become among the most famous in science-fiction dialogue.

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The movie ends soon after Roy’s death, with Deckard and Rachael running for their lives toward an uncertain future.34 One of the many questions the film never fully answers is that of Deckard’s identity. In many interviews, Ridley Scott insisted that Deckard was himself a replicant and that several clues in the film pointed to his being just another product of the Tyrell Corporation.35 When Rachael asks Deckard whether he’s ever taken the Voight-Kampff test, Deckard does not reply. At one point, he is seen dreaming of a unicorn, but when he returns to his apartment after Roy’s death, he finds an origami unicorn left by his boss, Gaff, a suggestion that Gaff knows which dreams may have been implanted in Deckard’s mind. Two elements further emphasize the uncertainty of Deckard’s origin: First, we never know whether Deckard himself knows what he is; and second, although Scott insisted that Deckard was a replicant, Harrison Ford—who played him—always vigorously denied it. The disagreement between director and character—not coincidentally—duplicates the wedge between the replicants and their makers. The rebellion of the actor/replicant may well be inscribed from the first, not because of the script (both screenwriters privileged the idea of the character’s uncertain identity), but rather because of the contaminating effect that breaks apart the perception of reality—which is nothing but the perception of identity—within the movie. Kaja Silverman has persuasively argued that Blade Runner encourages us to think of the difference between humans and replicants as “purely positional . . . as an ideological fabrication.”36 “Blade Runner announces itself in its prologue to be centrally concerned with what we have come to call ‘difference’—with the cordoning off, within the socius, of certain groups, who are deemed to be somehow ‘Other’ in relation to an unmarked and implicitly superior norm.” The undermining of the differences between humans and replicants serves as well to disclose how much our own memories are indebted to a purely conventional past: “Like the Nexus 6 replicants, then, every human psyche is organized around memories which are both deeply fantasmatic, and which are riven through and through with ‘otherness’—memories which might be said to belong to Tyrell’s niece.”37 During the fight between Leon and Deckard, there is a striking image of a shattered windshield where the vision of the dark, polluted, rainy Los Angeles is decomposed into a myriad of glowing segments. The repeated fragmentation that played a central role in Blow-up and The Conversation has become the aesthetic obsession that propels the movie as it also breaks it up visually into multiple pieces of a puzzle impossible to reassemble. It

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may be significant that both Ridley Scott and Hampton Fancher listed The Conversation as one of the films they had seen and admired before hiring Ford to play Deckard. One may find an echo, perhaps a quote, in the transparent caul-like plastic in which the replicant Zhora wraps herself as she flees from Deckard. At her death, she is seen wrapped and covered with glass or plastic shards. Fragmentation is at work here as well, as it is, too, in the “city speak” of one of the first scenes where words borrowed from several languages form a sentence only understandable as fragments. I mentioned earlier Coppola’s belief that “something happens” to the spectators as they sit in the dark and watch a movie. After he saw Blade Runner, Guillermo del Toro simply stated: “I never saw the world the same way again.”38 If the movie is in part about replicants contaminated by the reality in which they live to the point of feeling as humans do, it is also about the way duplicate reality contaminates humans to the point of disrupting the feeling of their own humanity. In this sense Pauline Kael may have been right in stating, when she first saw the movie, that “it [had] not been thought out in human terms.”39

toxic assets In Cinema 2, Deleuze evokes a passage from Herman Melville’s Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (which he reads as being particularly relevant to the movies of Orson Welles): The sheets of the past exist, they are strata from where we draw our recollection-images. . . . [W]e go . . . from stratum to stratum at the heart of the pyramid, at the cost of terrible effort, and all that to discover that there is no one in the funeral chamber—unless it is here that “the substance without stratification” begins. This is definitely not a transcendental element; but it is an immanent justice, the earth, and its non-chronological order in so far as each of us is directly from it and not from parents: autochthony. It is in the earth that we die and atone for our birth.40

The strata of the past that lie at the core of our present, and that need to be patiently unraveled, find their most exemplary illustration in Rachael’s struggle to understand that her own memories are implanted ones, that the pyramid-like structure of the Tyrell Corporation holds nothing but empty chambers, hiding only the troubling question of her birth, or “inception.”

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Claude Lévi-Strauss saw in the Oedipus tale a struggle to come to terms with two possible versions of our origins. “The Oedipus myth provides a kind of logical tool which relates the original problem—born from one or born from two?—to the derivative problem: born from different or born from same? By a correlation of this type, the overrating of blood relations is to the underrating of blood relations as the attempt to escape autochthony is to the impossibility to succeed in it.”41 The replicants offer a striking version of modern autochthony, as beings born from a single principle, but corrupted by the knowledge that one should be born from two, and struggling to find the supplement that could make them equal to humans in the authenticity of ancient memories, particularly those of the lost mother. But Blade Runner goes further still in its staging of the empty pyramid evoked by Melville and inhabited by a sterile father. The replicants/slaves are not born from the Earth—an Earth shown to be polluted, overpopulated, and darkened by rain—but from a technology that attempts to duplicate both the power of the Titans (Roy is a “combatlevel,” remarkably advanced, replicant) and their condition as beings defeated from the start and condemned to return to the depth of the decaying earth from which they rose. A form of usurpation has taken place, which reorganizes the multiple strands of a narrative that pits the replicants against their father and Deckard against his own self. The disordered rows of broken sphinxes that led to the empty pyramid of Pierre’s “Titanic” dream42 are now replaced by the dilapidated streets leading to the Tyrell Corporation. They signal that Roy’s murder of the father will be no more than the murder of a pseudo-father, a man who did not give life but only “inception” and a scheduled death. Tyrell is a mere imitation of a father. Indeed, there is some argument as to whether the Tyrell we see is himself the replicant of a long-dead Tyrell: one of the scenes that was either cut from the film or never shot showed the frozen body of the “real” Eldon Tyrell “encased in a Cryo Crypt, thereby informing us that the Tyrell we have been watching is a replicant, who has been able to create replicants.”43 For his part, Roy dies strangely undefeated: Titan-like, he has returned to earth to die, but his death is staged high above the city, with his last memories of infinite space, from the shoulders of Orion to Tannhauser Gate. Blade Runner’s initial commercial failure was due in great part, or so it was thought, to its bleak vision of a future that was so much at odds with more upbeat science-fiction movies such as Star Wars. But the happy ending hastily imposed by producers (and now removed from the director’s cut version) did nothing to improve the movie’s box-office earnings.

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Although Blade Runner’s early viewers may have been quite different from those who saw, and passionately admired, Blow-up and The Conversation, one has to wonder what it was that so deeply affected the audience that spectators were left so unhappy or, as in Guillermo del Toro’s case, so thoroughly transformed. One possible answer has to do with the fact that the very technology that made possible the brilliant special effects of the movie is itself on trial, or rather with the sense that what we owe to technology—not just as a tool of mastery suddenly turned against us, but as a revelatory agent—also shows the self as a shattered simulacrum and, more perversely still, our hidden desire for that simulacrum. Once prompted to describe what led him to make Blade Runner, Ridley Scott stated that he had been “drawn to the moral content of [Hampton Fancher’s] screenplay. Its central conceit was the idea of an officially sanctioned killer murdering what were, after all, really people, even if they were synthetically developed.”44 Several critics—among them Richard Schwartz, Kaja Silverman, and Judith Kerman—have noted that the film raises questions related not just to power struggle, but racial discrimination and the Holocaust. Thus, Silverman writes: Because Batty is the leader and presumably the instigator of the Nexus 6 expedition, which is quite literally an uprising of slaves against unjust masters, he is the figure who most fully represents “blackness” in the film. It may seem at first glance deeply problematical that this category should be embodied by a figure who is physically the very embodiment of the Aryan ideal. However, it is precisely through this character’s hyperbolic “whiteness” that Blade Runner most dramatically denaturalizes the category of “slave”—the category which our culture still manages, in an attenuated way, to rhyme with negritude.45

More generally, Batty and the Nexus 6 replicants testify to the arbitrary constitution of the Other as non-human that Kerman describes when she writes, “The question of how people treat other people when they define them as not-humans, or consider their own political ends more important than the humanity of the enemy, was made newly urgent by the technology and political will which made genocide and mass warfare possible.”46 The growing unease experienced by spectators whose sympathies become divided as the replicants appear more human and the humans— with the exception of the frail J. F. Sebastian—more inhuman is thus

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embedded in the growing awareness that the film they are watching is not about the future but about their own past. Much has been said, including by Scott himself, about the way Blade Runner points aesthetically to the past: “a forty-year-old film set forty years in the future.”47 The past in question, however, is not just an aesthetic conceit, “the cinematic world of Philip Marlowe, with its low-key lighting, rain-streaked streets, femme fatale, and retrospective male voice-over,” to use Silverman’s apt description.48 The film is about memory, the appropriation of memories in the constitution of subjectivity. It is also about the complicated relationship between memory and will that leads Rachael to wonder whether she is indeed the one who desires, or whether she merely duplicates someone else’s desires. Through Rachael’s confused awareness, the film incorporates the off-screen memory that haunts the replicants’ fate. One scene that was never shot—apparently due to budgetary and scheduling difficulties—but that Scott was intent on including, would have dispelled all remaining ambiguities. “We would have been shown a massive pit excavation with a furnace at one end into which were being dumped bodies. Batty emerges from the bodies and the other replicants join him in killing the workers.”49 One can imagine that the producers, already anxious about the bleak future described in Blade Runner, would have been more than reluctant to include a sequence that, from the start, would have directed the spectators to look back at inconceivable crimes of the past. The omitted scene would have taken us to the out-world of Nexus 6, beyond the strictly defined setting of the dirty and dripping city that serves as the film’s once and future landscape, showing us that there is no further escape, that the disaster that has already struck humans has emptied the heavens of any form of hope. In The Writing of the Disaster, Maurice Blanchot speaks of the Holocaust as “the absolute event of history—which is a date in history—that utterburn where all history took fire, where the movement of Meaning was swallowed up.”50 Blanchot’s fragmented meditation on the Holocaust emphasizes the way in which the Holocaust also exceeded our understanding of the disastrous: “Naturally, ‘disaster’ can be understood according to its etymology—of which many fragments here bear the trace; but the etymology of ‘disaster’ does not operate in these fragments as a preferred, or more original insight, ensuring mastery of what is no longer, then, anything but a word. On the contrary, the indetermination of what is written when this word is written, exceeds etymology and draws it into the disaster.”51 The Holocaust now lies in the margins and at the center of all

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thoughts about disaster, as the scene that will always haunt the undefined space where fiction and philosophy alike repeatedly try to prevent catastrophe and assess damage. Blanchot died on February 20, 2003. In a seminar given by Jacques Derrida a few days later, he commented at length on their friendship and on the deep influence Blanchot had exerted on his own work. “You all know who is Maurice Blanchot in this century, and all the radiant and abyssal traces his presence, and his withdrawal, will have forever left.”52 In the same seminar, Derrida mentioned a letter that Blanchot had sent him along with one of his texts on Paul Celan, Le Dernier à parler. Quoting from this letter, Derrida read Blanchot’s dedication of his work: “Ce modeste présent qui ne vaut que par le souvenir de celui [donc Paul Celan], si admirable, que nous n’avons pas su préserver du naufrage.”53 The translation of Blanchot’s dedication proved unexpectedly complicated, and at my request, Ann Smock, Blanchot’s translator, made the following suggestion: “This modest gift, whose sole value lies in the memory of him whom we so much admired and did not succeed in protecting from disaster.”54 Summing up the difficulties arising from the choices one must make when trying to render Blanchot’s text into English, she added: There’s always the question of whether it should be “disaster” or “the disaster.” . . . [H]ere the meaning is perhaps primarily the Holocaust, and “the” should go back in? But then again, since Blanchot used the word “naufrage” [wreck], making you think of the common expression “sauver une personne du naufrage,” maybe no “the” is better.55

These lines express, in my view, not just the difficulty inherent in Blanchot’s formulation, but also the problems of all discursive strategies that have hoped to account for disaster. Celan disappeared on April 19, 1970, and his body was found in the Seine River some days later. The wreckage of Celan’s life—his parents’ death in Nazi camps and his suicide, years later, in Paris—briefly anchored the memory of the Holocaust in the event of his death, in Blanchot’s book and its dedication. The explicit, yet elusive, quality of Blanchot’s dedication testifies to the impossibility of turning away from (the) disaster, of erasing from memory what can be described as Images in Spite of All, to use Georges Didi-Huberman’s words56—images that remain powerless to reawaken or to console. Ridley Scott did not shoot the scene that would have shown Roy emerging from the furnace where the bodies were dumped; the spectators did not see it flashing off the screen as an image from outer space. But

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the unshot scene nonetheless left its traces as the unprogrammed ghost memory of replicants, now spread over unheard-of constellations as C-Beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. Fallen angels and ships on fire near the shoulders of Orion haunt what Blanchot called the “inapparent brilliance of sidereal space, a “clearness bereft of  light” 57 that discloses nothing but the “discredited” reign of the cosmic order.

note s introducti on











1. Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’outre-tombe, ed. Maurice Levaillant and Georges Moulinier (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1951), 2:534–35. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. 2. Ibid., 2:536–37. 3. The rue d’Enfer (Hell Street) began at the rue des Francs-Bourgeois and ended at the Barrière d’Enfer, near the Observatoire area. Its name may have been derived from the rue inférieure, in opposition to the rue supérieure, the name formerly given to the rue Saint-Jacques, which ran parallel to the rue d’Enfer. Another tradition attributed the name to the Vauvert palace, built in the ninth century by King Robert, abandoned, and said to have been haunted by devils. Saint Louis gave the abandoned building to the Chartreux, who chased away its infernal ghosts. See Jean de la Tynna, Dictionnaire topographique, historique et étymologique des rues de Paris (Paris: J. Smith, 1817). 4. See Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 5. Antoine Leca and François Vialla, eds., “L’Emergence historique de la notion de risque,” in Le Risque épidémique (Marseille: Presses de l’Université d’AixMarseille, 2003), 8. 6. See Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles, with an introduction and notes by Bernard Knox (London: Penguin, 1990), book I. 7. Guy de la Brosse, Traicté de la peste (Paris: Jérémie et Christophe Perier, 1623), 45–46. 8. Tractatus de epidemia, Montpellier. Quoted in Jean-Noël Biraben, Les Hommes et la peste en France et dans les pays européens et mediterranéens (Paris: Mouton, 1975), 1:23. 9. Giuntini Junctinus was born in Florence in 1523 and died in Lyons in 1580. His Speculum astrologiae was first published in 1573 and quickly became a classic work of astrological reference. 10. De la Brosse, Traicté de la peste, 120, 39. 11. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. A. D. Melville, I, pp. 439ff. 12. See Clark Hopkins, “The Sunny Side of the Greek Gorgon,” Berytus 14 (1961): 22–35; and Sylvain Détoc, La Gorgone Méduse (Paris: Editions du Rocher, 2006), 90–93.

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13. Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 2. 14. Anne-Marie Mercier-Faivre and Chantal Thomas, eds., L’Invention de la catastrophe au XVIIIe siècle, Du châtiment divin au désastre naturel, Etudes publiées sous la direction d’Anne-Marie Mercier-Faivre et Chantal Thomas (Geneva: Droz, 2008), 11. 15. I quote from Anson Rabinbach’s important work In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 17. 16. Ibid., 15. 17. Agamben, State of Exception, 5. 18. Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 19. 19. Chevalier Louis de Jaucourt, “Plague,” in Encyclopédie. 20. Presentation of the section devoted to “Franklin’s Relics,” National Maritime Mu­ seum, Greenwich, UK. 21. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 55. 22. Roy Batty in Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott (Warner Brothers, 1982). The most recent version of the film, Blade Runner: The Final Cut, was issued in 2007.

chapter one





1. It is difficult to state with precision the number of fatalities caused by the Marseilles plague. Ch. Carrière, M. Courdurié, and F. Rebuffat provide a detailed examination of surviving records and suggest that forty thousand residents died in the city alone, and fifty thousand in the city and region. See Marseille ville morte: La Peste de 1720 (Marseille: Maurice Garçon, 1968), 293–302. 2. Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, 19. 3. Ibid., 18. 4. Ibid., 23. 5. Quoted in Carrière, Courdurié, and Rebuffat, Marseille ville morte, 118, 120. 6. Le Dictionnaire universel d’ Antoine Furetière (Paris: SNL Le Robert, 1978), vol. 3. 7. De la Brosse, Traicté de la peste, 33. 8. Jean-Pierre Papon, De la Peste; ou, Epoques mémorables de ce fléau et les moyens de s’en preserver, 2 vols. (Paris, Lavillette, An VIII [1799]), 1:264. 9. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1972), 3, 5, 14. 10. Jean-Jérôme Pestalozzi, Dissertation sur les causes et la nature de la peste (Bordeaux: R. Brun, 1722), 1, 2. Pestolazzi was a physician from Venice who had moved to Lyons in 1696 and worked in its most important hospital, L’Hôtel-Dieu. His Dissertation, written at the time of the Marseilles epidemic, received the first prize of the Bordeaux Academy. 11. Lettre de M*** à M. S*** à Nismes, où l’on explique quel est le système populaire de la peste (Marseille: Jean-Baptiste Roy, 1721), 24.

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12. See Rosemary Horrox, The Black Death (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994); and William Naphy and Andrew Spice, The Black Death: A History of the Plagues (1345–1730) (Stroud: Tempus, 2000). 13. De la Brosse, Traicté de la peste, 46. 14. John Gadbury, London’s Deliverance predicted in A Short Discourse showing the Causes of Plagues in general and The probable time (God not contradicting the course of second Causes) when this present PEST may abate (London: E. Calvert, 1665), 17. There is a long bibliography of treatises about the plague. For my purpose, I have focused on texts that are directly relevant to the debates that surrounded the Marseilles epidemic. I also found helpful analyses in the following works: Ernest Gilman, Plague Writing in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Leeds Barroll, Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare’s Theater (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); R. S. Bray, Armies of Pestilence: The Impact of Disease on History (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2000); A. Lloyd Moote and Dorothy C. Moote, The Great Plague (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Rebecca Totaro, Suffering in Paradise: The Bubonic Plague in English Literature from More to Milton (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2005); William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York: Doubleday, 1976); Georges Didi-Huberman, Memorandum de la peste (Paris: Bourgois, 1983); and Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau, Les Chemins de la peste, le rat, la puce et l’homme (Paris: Tallandier, 2007). 15. Papon, De la Peste, 1:124. 16. Quoted in ibid., 1:126. 17. Raymond Crawfurd, Plague and Pestilence in Literature and Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914), 6. 18. See Jean Delumeau, La Peur en Occident (Paris: Fayard, 1978), 104. 19. Francisco de Santa Maria, Historia das sagradas congregaçoes seculares de S. Jorge em alga de Venesa e de S. João evangelista en Portugal (Lisbon, 1697), 271. Quoted in Delumeau, La Peur en Occident, 112. 20. Biraben, Les Hommes et la peste, 1:22. 21. Denis Reynaud and Samy Ben Messaoud offer an in-depth analysis of press releases on the Marseilles plague in “La Gestion médiatique du désastre,” in L’Invention de la catastrophe au XVIIIe siècle, ed. Mercier-Faivre and Thomas, 201. 22. Biraben, Les Hommes et la peste, 1:22. 23. De la Brosse, Traicté de la peste, 33. Just as the plague constantly changed its appearance, popular imagination envisioned the “ghost of the plague” in a myriad of shapes and disguises: in the Tyrolean Valley, a long-legged man wearing a red cloak was said to have appeared at the same time as the plagues of 1521 and 1649; in Transylvania, it was an old woman dressed in black, her face hidden by a white scarf, who spread the disease. She was variously called the “traveling mother,” the “old Pagan,” the “white one,” the “plague mother,” the “colossus,” and sometimes (in hopes of appeasing her) the “good mother.” Val Cordun, “ ‘La Mère voyageuse,’ personnification et exorcision de la peste dans la zone des Portes de Fer,” in Congrès International d’Histoire de la Médecine (Constantza: Bucharest, 1970); quoted in Biraben, Les Hommes et la peste, 2:20. In Vienna the plague could be seen as a bluish flame escaping from the lips of its dying victims. In Düsseldorf the small blue flame descended from heaven; it was seen for the last time in 1630

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24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33.



34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42.

43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48.

notes to pages 25–31 when it was successfully walled in by a mason. See Biraben, Les Hommes et la peste, 2:19. Lettre de M*** à M. S*** à Nismes, 27. Quoted in Stéphanie Genand, “Les Enjeux du discourse médical: La peste de Marseille, 1720,” in L’Invention de la catastrophe au XVIIIe siècle, ed. MercierFaivre and Thomas, 303. Genand’s remarkable study discusses the question of the contagious nature of the disease and concludes, “The plague resists, like Proteus, all attempts to enclose it within discourse” (318). Patrick Russell, A Treatise of the Plague (London: J. Robinson, 1791); quoted in Papon, De la peste, 2:116. The most complete modern account is that of Carrière, Courdurié, and Rebuffat, Marseille ville morte. Quoted in ibid., 58. Ibid., 62. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), 198, 195, 197. See also Gilman’s discussion of Foucault’s political reading in Plague Writing in Early Modern England, 42–58. See Papon, De la peste, 1:367. See comments in Crawfurd, Plague and Pestilence, 180, on Manzoni’s description of the plague and his account in Colonna Infame of the trial and execution of the two accused of spreading the plague. S. Manget, Traité de la peste, recueilli des meilleurs auteurs anciens et modernes, et enrichi de remarques et Observations Théoriques et Pratiques (Geneva: Philippe Planche, 1721), 2:543–45. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 197–98. Sur la peste de Marseille en 1720 (London: Hardouin and Gatty, 1786), 12. Quoted in Carrière, Couturié, and Rebuffat, Marseille ville morte, 102–3. Ibid., 104. Ibid., 141. Dan Sperber, La Contagion des idées: Théorie naturaliste de la culture (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1996), 47. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses, ed. Roger D. Masters, trans. Roger D. and Judith R. Masters (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964), 109, 121. Avital Ronell, “Street-Talk,” in Finitude’s Score: Essays for the Millennium (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 99. The parallelism between the circulation of words and coins, the development of language and trade, is also associated with disease in the description of plague carbuncles as a “token of the plague.” Ronell, “Street-Talk,” 93. M. Dr. Prus, Rapport à l’Académie Royale de Médecine sur la Peste et les Quarantaines, fait au nom d’une commission (Paris: J.-B. Baillière, 1846), 103. The report paid particular attention to the risks of plague in newly occupied Algeria. Françoise Hildesheimer, La Terreur et la pitié: L’Ancien Régime à l’épreuve de la peste (Paris: Publisud, 1990). Dictionnaire des sciences médicales par une société de médecins et de chirurgiens (Paris: Pancoucke, 1815), 468. Ibid., 469, 487. Silvestro Facio, Paradoxes de la peste, où il est monstré clairement comme on peut

notes to pages 32–39

49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63.

64.



65. 66. 67. 68.

69.

235

vivre & demeurer dans les villes infectées, sans crainte de la contagion (Paris: Bourriquant, 1620), 15, 198. Lettre de M*** à M. S*** à Nismes, 13. Antoine Deidier, Dissertation où l’on établit un sentiment particulier sur la contagion de la peste, pour l’ouverture solennelle de l’Ecole de Médecine de Montpellier (Paris: Charles d’Houry, 1726), 9. Athanasius Kircher had observed the 1656 outbreak of the plague in Rome and published his Scrutinium physico-medicum contagiosae luis, quæ dicitur pestis in 1658. Deidier, Dissertation, 23. Crawfurd, Plague and Pestilence, 4. Guillaume Patel, Traicté de la peste advenue en ceste ville de Paris en l’an mil, 1596, 1606, 1619 et 1623, avec les remèdes (Paris: Nicolas Callemont, 1623) , 35, 36. See Papon, De la peste, 1:124; and Auguste Cabanès, Les Fléaux de l’humanité (Paris: Albin Michel, 1955), 28. Quoted in Biraben, Les Hommes et la peste, 2:22. De la Brosse, Traicté de la peste, 57. Ibid., 120–23. Chevalier Louis de Jaucourt, “Contagion,” in Diderot, L’Encyclopédie. De la Brosse, Traicté de la peste, 43. Grillat, La Peste de Lyon; quoted in Cabanès, Les Fléaux de l’humanité, 31. M. Bompart, Nouveau chasse-peste (Paris, 1630); quoted in Delumeau, La Peur en Occident, 117. Lodovico Antonio Muratori, Del Governo della peste e delle maniere di guardarsene (Modena: Per Bartolomeo Soliani stamp. ducale, 1714), 329; quoted in Delumeau, La Peur en Occident, 117. Hildesheimer, La Terreur et la pitié, 24. Similarly, in his introduction to Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (London: University Press, 1969), Louis Landa observes that in Defoe’s text, the victims of the plague “are nameless dead, and the tragedies, with few exceptions, are not individual” (xvi). Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, 27. “Tremblements de terre,” Encyclopédie. “Lisbonne,” Encyclopédie. Denis Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew and Other Works, trans. Jacques Barzun and Ralph H. Bowen (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), 124, 125. Ibid., 129.

chapter two



1. Anne Saada and Jean Sgard, “Tremblements dans la presse,” in The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755: Representations and Reactions, ed. Theodore E. D. Braun and John B. Radner (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2005), 208–24. See also Saada, “Le Désir d’informer: Le Tremblement de terre de Lisbonne, 1755,” in L’Invention de la catastrophe au XVIIIe siècle, ed. Mercier-Faivre and Thomas, 208–30. 2. See Jean-Paul Poirier, Le Tremblement de terre de Lisbonne (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2005), 77. 3. An Account of the late Dreadful Earthquake and Fire, which destroyed the city of Lisbon, the Metropolis of  Portugal in a Letter from a Merchant Resident there, to his Friend in England (London: J. Payne, 1755); reprinted in Judite Nozes, The Lisbon

236



4.



5.



6.



7.



8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14.



15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.



22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

notes to pages 39–50 Earthquake of 1st November 1755: Some British Eye-Witness Accounts (Lisbon: British Historical Society of Portugal, 1977), 17. An Account of what happened to Mr. Thomas Chase, at Lisbon, in the great Earthquake: written by himself, in a letter to his Mother, dated the 31st of December 1755, in The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, ed. Nozes, 56–57. The official number of inhabitants was usually inflated for reasons of political strategy. Voltaire, lettre à Jean-Robert Tronchin, in Correspondance, ed. Theodore Besterman (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1978), 4:641. Thomas Downing Kendrick, The Lisbon Earthquake (New York: Lippincott, 1957), 59, 51. Malcolm Jack, “Destruction and Regeneration: Lisbon 1755,” in The Lisbon Earth­ quake of 1755, ed. Braun and Radner, 11. Jack refers to numbers given by Kenneth Maxwell in Pombal, Paradox of the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955). Kendrick, The Lisbon Earthquake, 89. Quoted in Mathias Georgi, “The Lisbon Earthquake and Scientific Knowledge in the British Public Sphere,” in The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, ed. Braun and Radner, 88. Cited in Kendrick, The Lisbon Earthquake, 99. Ibid., 209. Laurent-Etienne Rondet, Réflexions sur le désastre de Lisbonne (En Europe, Aux dépens de la Compagnie, 1756), 1:6, 166. As Kendrick writes, “ ‘Aux dépens de la Compagnie’ probably means that the publication was paid for out of a Jansenist secret fund founded in the seventeenth century in order to maintain the fight against the Jesuits by publications and to provide support for their Jansenist victims.” Kendrick, The Lisbon Earthquake, 148. Ibid., 145. Rondet, Réflexions, 1:iii. Ibid., 1:2–3. For the classic religious interpretation, see the Abbé Migne, Histoire du ciel, où l’on recherché l’origine de l’idôlatrie et les méprises des philosophes sur la formation des corps célestes et de toute la nature (Paris: veuve Estienne, 1758). Rondet, Réflexions, 4. Ibid., 8. Jacques Derrida, On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy, trans. John Leavey Jr., in Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Immanuel Kant, Transformative Critique by Jacques Derrida, trans. John Leavey Jr., ed. Peter Fenves (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 135. Rondet, Réflexions, 1:166, 169. Ibid., 2:xvi. Ibid., 2:ii; emphasis in original. Ibid., 1:iii. I quote from the notes of Deleuze’s Vincennes–St. Denis course on Leibniz, given April 7, 1987, available at http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle= 147&groupe=Leibniz&langue=1. Ibid. Rondet, Réflexions, 1:17. Immanuel Kant, “History and Physiography of the Most Remarkable Cases of the

notes to pages 50–58

30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

41.

42.

43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48.

237

Earthquake Which Towards the End of the Year 1755 Shook a Great Part of the Earth,” in Four Neglected Essays by Immanuel Kant, trans. John Richardson, ed. Stephen Palmquist (Hong Kong: Philopsychy Press, 1994), 25. Ibid., 27. See Gilbert Larochelle, “Voltaire: Du Tremblement de terre à la déportation des Acadiens,” in The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, ed. Braun and Radner, 227. Voltaire, Correspondance, 4:1427. Letter to Cideville, April 12, 1756; quoted in Monika Gisler, “Perceptions of the Lisbon Earthquake in Protestant Switzerland,” in The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, ed. Braun and Radner, 253. Ibid., 253–55. Rousseau, “Lettre à Voltaire,” in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Henri Gouhier (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 4:1069, 1067. Ibid., 4:1062. Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses, 128. Rousseau, “Lettre à Voltaire,” 4:1061. Russell Dynes, “The Dialogue between Voltaire and Rousseau on the Lisbon Earthquake: The Emergence of a Social View,” International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters 18, no. 1 (March 2000): 106. Immanuel Kant, “On the Causes of the Tremors of the Earth,” in Kants Werke: Akademie-Textausgabe, trans. Catharine Diehl (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1968), 1:419. See Leca and Vialla, “L’Emergence historique de la notion de risque,” 10. Leca discusses the concept of civil responsibility that became part of constitutional law in England under George III and in France during the 1780s. Rousseau, “Lettre à Voltaire,” 4:1073. The same lines reappear, with few modifications, in On the Social Contract: “There is, therefore, a purely civil profession of faith, the articles of which are for the sovereign to establish . . . the dogmas of the civil religion ought to be simple, few in number. . . . The existence of a powerful, intelligent, beneficent, foresighted, and providential divinity. . . . As for the negative [dogmas], I limit them to a single one: intolerance.” Rousseau, On the Social Contract with Geneva Manuscript and Political Economy, ed. Roger D. Masters and trans. Judith R. Masters (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978), 130–31. Saada, “Le Désir d’informer,” 230; and Hans Erich Bödeker, “Die Religiosität der Gebildeten,” in Wolfenbütteler Studien zur Aufklärung, 145–95. Mercier-Faivre and Thomas, L’Invention de la catastrophe au XVIIIe siècle, 30. Kant, Kants Werke: Akademic-Textausgabe, 1:472. On Franklin’s invention and the French Revolution, see Marie-Hélène Huet, Mourning Glory: The Will of the French Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 9–31. Peter Fenves, introduction to On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy, by Derrida, 12. From Deleuze’s lecture on Spinoza, given February 17, 1981, available at http:// www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=38&groupe=Spinoza&langue=2.

chapter three

1. See François Delaporte, Histoire de la Fièvre jaune (Paris: Payot, 1989). 2. Quoted in Léon-François Hoffmann, La Peste à Barcelone (Paris: P.U.F., 1964), 7.

238

3. 4. 5. 6.



7.



8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

notes to pages 59–67 Quoted in ibid., 33. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 38. Wollstonecraft and Price are both quoted in Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution, 1789–1820 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 44, 48. See also Huet, Mourning Glory, 19–31. See Michael Durey, The Return of the Plague: British Society and the Cholera, 1831–32 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1979), 136. For an in-depth study of the role of the medical profession in France in the years that preceded cholera, see Matthew Ramsey, Professional and Popular Medicine in France, 1770–1830: The Social World of Medical Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Quoted in Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 75. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 141–49. For an important discussion of disaster, government, and collective behavior in contemporary social theory, see Michael E. Brown and Amy Goldin, Collective Behavior: A Review and Reinterpretation of the Literature (Pacific Palisades, CA: Goodyear, 1973), 16–107. Amariah Brigham, A Treatise on Epidemic Cholera; including a Historical Account of Its Origin and Progress (Hartford, CT: H. and F. J. Huntington, 1832), 51–52. Ibid., 51. Ibid., 55–56. Patrice Bourdelaïs, Peurs et Terreurs face à la contagion (Paris: Fayard, 1988), 127–28. J. Leymerie, Choléra, protestation contre la loi sanitaire intervenue (Paris: David, 1831), 5; emphasis in the original. Alexandre Moreau de Jonnès, quoted in Leymerie, Choléra, 20. Moreau’s text had been published by La Gazette de France on August 22, 1831. Leymerie, Choléra, 20. Ibid., 84, 91. Alexandre Moreau de Jonnès, Rapport au Conseil supérieur de santé sur le choléramorbus pestilentiel (Paris: Cosson, 1831), 3, 34. Martyn Paine, Letters on the Cholera Asphyxia as it has appeared in the city of New York (New York: Collins and Hannay, 1832), 14. See Durey, The Return of the Plague, 106. Ibid., 112. See Roderick E. McGrew, Russia and the Cholera, 1823–1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965), 48–49. Rapport sur le choléra-morbus, lu à l’Académie de Médecine en séance générale, les 26 et 30 juillet 1831 (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1831), 9. The report is signed by a commission composed of Keraudren, President; Marc, Chomel, Desgenettes, Dupuytren, Louis, Emery, Desportes, Boisseau, Pelletier, Itard, and Double, rafforteur. Ibid., 22, 83. Ibid., 88. See J. Lucas-Debreton, La Grande peur de 1832 (Le choléra et l’émeute) (Paris: Gallimard, 1932), 43. Lucas-Debreton is one of the first historians to have provided a full analysis of the Paris riots during the Parisian cholera outbreak of 1832.

notes to pages 68–74

239

28. Durey, The Return of the Plague, 20. 29. See Rosenberg, The Cholera Years, 77, 79. 30. Erwin H. Ackerknecht, “Anti-Contagionism between 1821 and 1867,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 22 (1948): 567; quoted in Rosenberg, The Cholera Years, 80–81. 31. Gazette Médicale 2, no. 46 (November 12, 1831): 394. The Gazette sided regularly with the contagionists in urging strong measures of isolation and confinement. 32. See Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968). 33. “Thunder,” in Encyclopédie. 34. Rapport sur le choléra-morbus, 134–35. 35. C. M. Stanislas Sandras, “Du Choléra épidémique observé en Pologne, en Allemagne et en France,” Gazette médicale 3, no 31 (May 12, 1832): 247. 36. J. Delpech, Etude sur le choléra-morbus en Angleterre et en Ecosse pendant les mois de janvier et de février 1832; quoted in Gazette médicale 3, no 31 (May 12, 1832): 242. 37. Gazette médicale 2, no. 31 (May 12, 1832): 234. 38. Durey, The Return of the Plague, 117. On the general question of miasma and the increasing preoccupation with hygiene, see Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). 39. Durey, The Return of the Plague, 108–9. 40. Ibid., 109. 41. Paul Henri Dietrich, Baron d’Holbach, La Contagion sacrée; ou, Histoire naturelle de la superstition (Londres, 1770), 1:76, 97. 42. Ibid., 2:193–94. 43. In 1932 this promising concept was taken up again by Casimir Alexander Fusil, who wrote a book entitled La Contagion sacrée; ou, Jean-Jacques Rousseau de 1778 à 1820 (Paris: Plon, 1932). In 1996 Dan Sperber wrote from an anthropological standpoint, in La Contagion des idées. 44. See Ange-Pierre Leca, Et le choléra s’abattit sur Paris (Paris: Albin Michel, 1982); Patrice Bourdelais and Jean-Yves Raulot, Une Peur bleue: Histoire du choléra en France (Paris: Payot, 1967); Patrice Bourdelais and André Dodin, Visages du choléra (Paris: Belin, 1987); and Catherine Kudlick, Cholera in PostRevolutionary Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). Kudlick’s chapter 3, “The Epidemic and Revolutionary Traditions,” is particularly well-documented on the multiple threads that associated the disease with the revolutions of 1789 and 1830. 45. Bray, Armies of Pestilence, 180. 46. Quoted in Leca, Et le choléra s’abattit sur Paris, 90. The Place de la Revolution was the name given to what is now the Place de la Concorde during the French Revolution. It also served as the place of executions until 1794. King Louis XVI was executed there on January 21, 1793. 47. Heinrich Heine, De la France, Französische Zustände, ed. Raymond Schiltz (Paris: Montaigne, 1930), 100, 101. 48. Ibid., 105–6. 49. See “Introduction.” 50. Ibid., 16.

240

notes to pages 74–82

51. The expression also appears in Edward H. Dixon, Scenes in the Practice of a New York Surgeon (New York: De Witt and Davenport, 1856), particularly in the section on “Scenes in the Southern Practice” recounting an epidemic in 1839 entitled “King Death in His Yellow Robe” (81). 52. Heine, De la France, 36. 53. Ibid., 107. 54. Ibid., 108. 55. Ibid., 107–8. 56. Heine writes that Monseigneur de Quelen, Archbishop of Paris, “had long prophesied that God would send cholera to punish a people who had expelled the very Christian king and struck from the Chart the Catholic religion’s privileges.” Ibid., 110. 57. The increased exchanges among industrialized nations accelerated the spread of the disease and made more urgent the control of populations. William McNeill rightly points out that industrialization played a significant role in the progression of cholera: “The first and in many ways most significant manifestation of the altered disease relationships created by industrialization was the global peregrination of cholera.” William McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, 261. Leeds Barroll offers an in-depth study of the early relationship between politics, disease, and art in Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare’s Theater. With a different chronology in mind, Françoise Hildesheimer speaks of the Old Regime of epidemics, which would end with the first effective medical responses at the end of the nineteenth century. See Fleaux et société: De la grande peste au choléra, XIVe–XIXe siecle (Paris: Hachette, 1993). 58. See Agamben, State of Exception, 1–31. 59. Heine, De la France, 198.

chapter four



1. Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses, 91. 2. Plato, The Republic, X, 611, trans. B. Jowett (New York: Random House, 1950), 384. 3. Commenting on this section of the work, Robert Derathé writes: “It is clear . . . that this essay in four chapters on Roman institutions is not of great interest to the reader. In reality, it was only, for Rousseau, a matter of enriching, be it with a digression, this fourth book, so as to insert a chapter on civil religion.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), 3:1495. For Derathé, Rousseau’s digression, like the barnacles that grew on Glaucus’s limbs, do nothing but disfigure the Social Contract. 4. Rousseau, On the Social Contract, 114–15; translation modified. 5. Ibid., 113. 6. Titus Livius, The History of Rome, trans. George Baker (New York: Mesier, Collins and Co., 1823), I, 19, p. 33. 7. Rousseau, On the Social Contract, 115. 8. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Fragments politiques, ed. Robert Derathé, in Oeuvres complètes, (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 3:492. 9. Ibid., 3:491. Derathé notes that by “confédération publique,” Rousseau means civil society or political association. 10. Rousseau, On the Social Contract, 68.

notes to pages 82–89

241

11. Rousseau, Fragments politiques, 491–92. 12. Rousseau, On the Social Contract, 48, 49. 13. Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, trans. John Dryden, revised by Arthur Clough (New York: Modern Library), 47. 14. Ibid., 42. 15. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Norton, 1961), 16; my emphasis. 16. Michel de Montaigne, Travel Journal, trans. Donald Frame (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1983), 79; translation modified. 17. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 15. 18. Ibid., 17–18. 19. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 258. 20. Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses, 141. 21. The Paris Parliament condemned Emile to be destroyed on June 9, 1762; on June 19, the Petit-Conseil of Geneva ordered both Emile and On the Social Contract to be lacerated and burned by the Executioners of High Justice outside the doors of the Hôtel de Ville as “reckless, scandalous, impious, and an attempt to destroy Christian religion and all governments.” Emile was banned in Bern on July 10 and in Rome on September 9. 22. Quoted by Gagnebin and Raymond, eds., in Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, 1:1545. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. 23. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, ed. Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters, and Peter G. Stillman, trans. Christopher Kelly, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1995), 5:493. 24. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, trans. Barbara Foxley (London: Dent, 1993), 532; translation modified. 25. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile et Sophie; ou, Les Solitaires, ed. Charles Wirz and Pierre Burgelin, in Oeuvres complètes, 4:881. Emile’s first sentence is written as counterpoint to Saint-Preux’s letter to Julie: “O, Heavenly powers! you had given me a heart made for unhappiness, give me one made for felicity” (book 1, letter 5). 26. Ibid., 4:884, 896, 894. 27. Ibid., 4:901. 28. Ibid., 4:904. 29. Ibid., 4:909. 30. Ibid., 4:918. 31. Thomas Kavanagh, Writing the Truth: Authority and Desire in Rousseau (Berke­ ley: University of California Press, 1987), 83, 85. 32. Burgelin, in Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, 4:cliii. 33. Ibid., 4:clx. 34. Certainly Emile is resilient, and he uses terms strongly reminiscent of On the Social Contract to describe his condition as slave, but the account Emile gives of this event is significant, too, in that Emile’s actions consist precisely in refusing to act. Few actually follow Emile’s example, and since Emile himself is sold to another master, the reader never learns the subsequent fate of the other slaves. 35. Quoted by Burgelin, in Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, 4:clxiii. 36. See Frédéric S. Eigeldinger’s recent edition of Rousseau’s Emile et Sophie; ou, Les Solitaires (Paris: Champion, 2007), 1, 18–22. 37. Rousseau, Les Solitaires, 4:914.

242

notes to pages 89–98

38. Rousseau, “Notes sur ‘De L’Esprit,’ ” in Oeuvres complètes, 4:1127. 39. Rousseau, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. Charles E. Butterworth (New York: New York University Press, 1979), 78. 40. Rousseau, Les Solitaires, 4:917. 41. Rousseau, On the Social Contract, 49. 42. Rousseau, Les Solitaires, 4:917. 43. Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses, 111. 44. Rousseau, Les Solitaires, 4:917. 45. The Discourses of Epictetus, trans. T. W. Rolleston (Mount Vernon, NY: Peter Pauper Press, 1947), 17. 46. Rousseau, Les Solitaires, 4:917. 47. Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses, 177. 48. See Jean Starobinski’s discussion of Friedrich Engels, “Anti-Dürhing,” in La Transparence et l’obstacle (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 44. 49. Rousseau, The Reveries, 6. 50. Ibid., 80; translation modified; my emphasis. 51. Ibid. 52. Ronell, “Street-Talk,” 97–98. 53. Rousseau, The Reveries, 16. 54. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 11, 15, 12. 55. Ibid., 19. 56. Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 19. 57. Rousseau, The Reveries, 7. 58. Rousseau, Confessions, book XI, 481. 59. Ibid., book XII, 520. 60. Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly, trans. Judith R. Rush, Christopher Kelly, and Roger D. Masters (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1990), 236, 245. 61. Rousseau, The Reveries, 19–20. 62. Ronell, “Street-Talk,” 101. 63. Rousseau, The Reveries, 34. 64. See Leo Damrosch’s description and comments of the circumstances surrounding the writing of these texts in Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 476–81. 65. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 151–52, 156. 66. Rousseau, The Reveries, 83. 67. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 85. 68. Kant, Critique, 157; emphasis in original. 69. Rousseau, The Reveries, 1. 70. Ibid., 75, 82. 71. Plato, The Republic, 47. 72. Ibid., 48. 73. Ibid. 74. Rousseau, The Reveries, 82–83. 75. Ibid., 83. 76. Kant, Critique, 157; emphasis in original. 77. Rousseau, The Reveries, 95.

notes to pages 98–107

243

78. Ibid., 95–96. 79. Isaiah Berlin, The Two Concepts of Liberty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), 7. 80. Rousseau, The Reveries, 95, 117.

chapter fi ve











I wish to thank Debra Zaller for her contributions to this chapter. 1. See Marc de Vissac, Romme le montagnard (Clermont-Ferrand: Dilhan-Vivès, 1888), 132–33. On Romme, see also Jean Ehrard and Albert Soboul, Gilbert Romme et son temps: Actes du Colloque de Clermont-Ferrand (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966). 2. See Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française, ed. Gérard Walter (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1952), 2:922–29; John Goldworth Alger, Paris in 1789– 1794 (London: George Allen, 1902), 147ff.; Marie-Hélène Huet, Mourning Glory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 125–48. 3. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 127. 4. Vissac, Romme le montagnard, 107. 5. Ibid., 131. 6. Quoted in ibid., 28–29. 7. Ibid., 77. 8. Several members of the Committee on Public Instruction participated in the elaboration of the calendar. Among them Charles-François Dupuis and Claude Joseph Ferry. Additionally, members of the Academy of Sciences (geometer Joseph-Louis Lagrange, chemist Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau, Gaspard Monge, and astronomer Joseph-Jérôme de Lalande) were regularly consulted. 9. Archives parlementaires, 20 septembre 1793 (Paris: Paul Dupont, 1909), 74:550. This passage has been translated by Charles Coulston Gillispie in Science and Polity in France: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Years (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 293. See his chapters 5 and 6 on science, the Revolution, and the Revolutionary calendar, 286–444. 10. Archives parlementaires, 74:552. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., 74:550. 13. Ibid. Ironically, the republican calendar itself contained an error commented upon as follows by Gillispie: “If the year were always to begin on the day of the true equinox, three episodes of five-year spans between leap years would occur at irregular interval each century.” Gillispie, Science and Polity in France, 297. A modification of the calendar was proposed in 1795, but a vote on the measure was postponed indefinitely. 14. Ibid. Quoted in Gillispie, Science and Polity in France, 294. 15. Gillispie, Science and Polity in France, 294. 16. Archives parlementaires, 74:551. 17. Ibid., 74:552. 18. Ibid., 74:551. 19. Romme offered to keep June, which he said was “the only [name] that was worth transmitting because it reminds us that Brutus expelled Tarquinius.” The origin of the name June has been variously attributed to the goddess Juno and to the name of  Junius Brutus, the founder of the Roman Republic. Clearly Romme opted for the latter.

244

notes to pages 107–114

20. See Archives parlementaires, 24 octobre 1793 (Paris: Paul Dupont, 1910), 77:500–501. 21. Philippe-François-Nazaire Fabre took the name of Fabre d’Eglantine to commemorate the first prize he claimed he had received from the Toulouse Académie des Jeux Floraux. There is no record of Fabre’s having received “l’églantine d’or” (the golden wild rose) for the best poem, but he did win second prize—a “lys d’argent”—for a sonnet he had submitted to the Académie. The lys being a royal emblem, it was no doubt wise for him to choose to add the wild rose to his last name. Fabre d’Eglantine’s fame remains essentially associated with the names he devised for the republican calendar created by Romme. 22. Archives parlementaires, 22 octobre 1793, 77:410. 23. Ibid., 24 octobre 1793, 77:486. 24. The calendar went into effect on November 24, 1793, and remained in use through December 31, 1805. It was briefly revived in May 1871, which probably prompted this comment from Joseph Lovering, published in the 1872 Proceedings of the Academy of Arts and Sciences: “Of the Republican calendar, the late John Quincy Adams said: ‘This system has passed away and is forgotten. This incongruous composition of profound learning and superficial frivolity, of irreligion and morality, of delicate imagination and coarse vulgarity, is dissolved.’ Unfortunately, the effects of this calendar, though it was used for only about twelve years, have not passed away. It has entailed a permanent injury on history and on science.” Quoted in Nachum Dershowitz and Edward M. Reingold, Calendrical Calculations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 161. 25. Stephen H. Hawking, A Brief History of Time (London: Bantam, 1988), 152. 26. Archives parlementaires, 74:550. 27. Ibid., 5 octobre 1793, 76:129. 28. Ibid., 76:122. 29. Ibid., 24 novembre 1793, 80:11. 30. Ibid. 31. Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française, 1:1133. 32. The Hebrew calendar counts the years from the Creation and the Gregorian calendar from the anno domini, the birth of Christ, following a usage that had spread through the Middle Ages. 33. Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, ed. H. S. Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 221. See also Reinhart Roselleck’s discussion of time and history in The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), particularly chap. 6; and Sanja Perovic, “The French Republican Calendar: Time, History, and the Revolutionary Event,” Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies (August 1, 2011): 1–20. 34. See Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses, 141. 35. Kant, Political Writings, 227. 36. Ibid., 234. 37. Ibid., 227. 38. Ibid., 227–28. 39. Ibid., 229. 40. Letter to A. Dubreuil, quoted in Alessandro Galante Garrone’s Gilbert Romme: Histoire d’un révolutionnaire 1750–1795, trans. Anne and Claude Manceron (Paris: Flammarion, 1971), 438, 442.

notes to pages 114–125

245

41. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), 263. 42. Ibid., 257. 43. Archives parlementaires, 74:553. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., 74:552. 46. Ibid., 80:13. 47. Ibid., 80:11. 48. Gerhard Dohrn–van Rossum, History of the Hour: Clock and Modern Temporal Orders, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 217. 49. Ibid., 253. 50. Ibid., 255. 51. See ibid., 282–87. 52. Archives parlementaires, 74:552. 53. See Benjamin, “Theses,” 259. 54. Archives parlementaires, 74:554. 55. Ibid., 80:13. The vote took place on 25 Pluviôse, Year II (February 13, 1794). See Yves Droz and Joseph Flores, Les Heures révolutionnaires (Besançon: Association Française des amateurs d’horlogerie ancienne, 1990), 117. 56. Benjamin, “Theses,” 263–64. 57. For the most complete documentation on watch and clock making during the French Revolution, see Droz and Flores, Les Heures révolutionnaires, as well as David S. Landes, Revolution in Time (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1983), and Catherine Cardinal, ed., La Révolution dans la mesure du temps, 1793–1805 (La Chaux-de-fonds, Switzerland: Musée international d’horlogerie, 1989). 58. Archives parlementaires, 30 octobre 1793 (Paris: Paul Dupont, 1911), 78:377–78. 59. Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française, 1:216–17. 60. Ibid., 1:966, 969. 61. The text of  Romme’s statement is published in Vrissac, Romme le montagnard, 156. 62. Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française, 2:990. 63. See ibid., 2:1546. 64. Quoted by Garrone, Gilbert Romme, 371. 65. Giorgio Agamben discusses Plato’s text on sovereign nomos, which “leads with the strongest hand / Doing violence to the most just,” in Homo Sacer, 30–38. 66. Garrone, Gilbert Romme, 372. On Goujon, see R. Guyot-F. Thénard, Le Con­ ventionnel Goujon, and F. P. Tissot, Souvenirs de la journée du 1er Prairial, an III; contenant deux écrits de Goujon, son hymne en musique; suivi de sa défense, de celles de Romme et de Bourbotte, et de deux lettres de Soubrany (Paris, an VIII). 67. Quoted by Garrone, Gilbert Romme, 398. 68. Michelet, Journal, (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), 2:193; and Huet, Mourning Glory, 124–48. 69. See Vissac, Romme le montagnard, 232. 70. Ibid., 234–35. 71. Ibid., 236. 72. Kant, Political Writings, 182. 73. Ibid. 74. Ibid., 184.

246

notes to pages 125–131

75. 76. 77. 78.

Ibid., 185. Ibid., 177. Ibid., 185. Kevin McLaughlin, “Culture and Messianism: Disinterestedness in Arnold,” Victorian Studies (Summer 2008), 615–39. 79. Michelet, “Preface of 1868,” in Histoire de la Révolution française, 1:13. 80. Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française, 1:217. 81. See Garrone, Gilbert Romme, 241. Garrone himself visited Gimeaux in 1965 and saw the small pyramid.

chapter si x







1. Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’outre-tombe, ed. Maurice Levaillant and Georges Moulinier (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 2:39. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are by J. L. Caplan. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos’s translation, The Memoirs of François René Vicomte de Chateaubriand, Sometimes Ambassador to England, is notoriously inaccurate. 2. Chateaubriand, Mémoires; my emphasis. Teixeria de Mattos omits the last part of the sentence—“en outre, je suis mort ”—from his translation of the Mémoires. 3. Ibid., 1:xv. 4. Ibid., 1:1. 5. Ibid. 6. The Comtesse d’Agoult would later write to Barchou de Penhoën, in a letter dated October 1, 1850: “I am struck by the severe and grandiose site M. de Chateaubriand chose for his resting place. He remains the best-buried of all mortals [even] now that Napoleon has been brought back from Saint-Helene. This will do much for his future glory.” Quoted in Jacques Vier, La Comtesse d’Agoult et son temps (Paris: Armand Colin, 1955–63), 6:18. 7. Chateaubriand, Mémoires, 1:3. 8. See Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980), 30. 9. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” in Tales of Mystery and Imagination (New York: Dent, 1975), 281. 10. Ibid., 286–87. 11. Roland Barthes, The Semiotic Challenge, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1988), 285, 286; emphasis in original. Poe’s text and Barthes’s analysis can be read as well in connection with Jacques Derrida’s commentary on the relationship between the present tense I am, the question of presence in Husserl, and its relationship to death. Derrida notes: “To think of presence as the universal form of transcendental life is to open myself to the knowledge that in my absence, beyond my empirical existence, before my birth and after my death, the present is. . . . The relationship with my death (my disappearance in general) thus lurks in this determination of being as presence. . . . The appearing of the I to itself in the I am is thus originally a relation with its own possible disappearance. Therefore I am originally means I am mortal.” See Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 54; emphasis in original. 12. Barthes, The Semiotic Challenge, 280; trans. modified; emphasis in original. 13. Denis Hollier, “French Customs, Literary Borders,” October 49 (1989): 50.

notes to pages 132–138

247

14. Chateaubriand, Mémoires, 2:296, 297, 303. 15. Ibid., 2:321. 16. My thanks to Chiara Sferazza for shedding light on funeral practices in Rome at the time of Chateaubriand’s visit. 17. Chateaubriand, Mémoires, 2:347, 365. Justus Lipsius (1547–1606) was a philologist and humanist who wrote extensively on politics and religion and spent time in Rome as Cardinal de Granvelle’s secretary. 18. See Philippe Muray, Le Dix-neuvième siècle à travers les âges (Paris: Denoël, 1984). 19. Naomi Schor, One Hundred Years of Melancholy, Zaharoff Lecture for 1966 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 7. 20. Chateaubriand, Mémoires, 2:365–66. 21. Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Chateaubriand et son groupe littéraire sous l’Empire (Paris: Garnier, 1861), 1:201. 22. Actually, Sainte-Beuve quotes from two separate letters. The first part of the quote comes from a letter Chateaubriand wrote to Madame Récamier on March 31, 1829, which he reproduced almost entirely in the Memoires (2:231). The second part of the quote comes from the last letter Chateaubriand wrote from Rome to Madame Récamier and refers not to the empty sarcophagi but to Rome itself. The exact text is as follows: “My dear, I am coming to fetch you. I am going to take you back with me to Rome. Ambassador or no, it is where I would die hard by your side. At last I shall have a great tomb for a little life.” See André Maurois, Chateaubriand: Poet, Statesman, Lover, trans. Vera Fraser (New York: Harper, 1938), 289. 23. Sainte-Beuve, Chateaubriand et son groupe, 1:201. 24. Chateaubriand, Mémoires, 1:397. 25. Ibid., 1:398. 26. See Charles-Henri Sanson’s journal, La Révolution française vue par son bourreau, ed. Monique Lebailly (Paris: Le Cherche-Midi, 2007), 190–92. This original text is not to be confused with other pseudo-memoirs of Sanson. The Mémoires de l’exécuteur des hautes oeuvres pour servir à l’histoire de Paris pendant le règne de la Terreur, published in 1829, was the work of Lombard de Langres, writing under the name of M. A. Grégoire. A second text, Mémoires pour server à l’histoire de la Révolution française, published in 1830, is also a fabrication, on which Balzac probably collaborated. 27. Chateaubriand, Mémoires, 1:362. 28. Ibid., 1:363; my emphasis. 29. Chateaubriand, “Proposition relative au bannissement de Charles X,” in Grands écrits politiques, ed. Jean-Paul Clément (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1992), 2:620. 30. Naomi Schor associates Chateaubriand’s melancholy with his mourning of a political order. Sexual desire, she argues, along with historical loss, produced in Chateaubriand a longing for an unattainable woman. Commenting on the Bassompierre episode of the Mémoires, she notes: “What Chateaubriand tacitly suggests is that the revolution which has swept away the aristocracy affected the power structure that had acted as an enhancer of sexual desire. Power was no longer to be an aphrodisiac; and the after-effect left by the loss of that potent drug is melancholy.” Schor, One Hundred Years of Melancholy, 15. 31. At more or less the same time, mobs disinterred the remains of Rousseau, who had been solemnly taken to the Pantheon during the French Revolution, and threw them into the Seine River.

248

notes to pages 138–154

32. Chateaubriand, Mémoires, 1:906; emphasis in original. 33. Jacques Le Goff, “Saint-Louis et les corps royaux,” in Le Temps de la réflexion 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), 264. 34. Ibid., 269. 35. Chateaubriand, Mémoires, 1:907. Interestingly, Teixeira de Mattos, in his translation of the Mémoires, erased a morbid effect of Chateaubriand’s style by reading “scepters” (“scepters”) instead of “spectres” (“ghosts”). His translation reads: “A new era of legitimate kings and scepters: vain restoration of the throne and the tomb.” Chateaubriand, Mémoires, 3:394. 36. Remarques sur les affaires du moment, 31 juillet 1818, in Œuvres complètes (Paris: L’Advocat, 1836–41), 25:321; quoted in Clément, Chauteaubriand, 285. 37. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. A. A. Brill, in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud (New York: Modern Library, 1938), 847. 38. Chateaubriand, Essai historique politique et moral sur les révolutions anciennes et modernes considérées dans leurs rapports avec la Révolution française, ed. Maurice Regard (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1978), 6, 7. 39. Chateaubriand, Mémoires, 2:482, 487, 488. 40. Chateaubriand, “Proposition relative au bannissement de Charles X,” 2:664. 41. Jean-Paul Clément, Chateaubriand (Paris: Flammarion, 1998), 295. 42. Chateaubriand, Mémoires, 2:767. 43. Ibid., 2:785. 44. Ibid., 1:2. 45. Ibid., 2:908. 46. Claude Lefort, “Mort de l’immortalité,” in Le Temps de la réflexion 3, p. 197. 47. Quoted in Claude Mouchard, “Deux Secondes de vie,” in Le Temps de la réflexion 3, p. 149. Like Chateaubriand, La Mennais (1782–1854) was born in Saint-Malo. He entered Holy Orders, then embraced progressive ideas and broke with Rome and the Catholic Church. 48. Chateaubriand, Mémoires, 2:911. 49. Pierre Clarac, A la Recherche de Chateaubriand (Paris: Nizet, 1975), 111.

chapter seven







1. Jean Clair, Méduse: Contribution à une anthologie des arts du visuel (Paris: Galli­ mard, 1989), 127. See also Philippe Bonnefis, Sur quelques proprietés des triangles rectanges (Paris: Galilée, 2008), on the symbolic configuration of the guillotine. 2. See Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmeyer, “Géricault’s Severed Heads and Limbs: The Politics and Esthetics of the Scaffold,” Art Bulletin (December 1992): 599–615. 3. For a discussion of Géricault’s use of the “bitume de Judée” that is responsible for the degradation of the canvas, see Germain Bazin, Théodore Géricault: Etude critique, documents et catalogue raisonné (Paris: Wildenstein Institute, 1997), 6:43–45. 4. Quoted in Philippe Masson, L’Affaire de la Méduse: Le Naufrage et le procès (Paris: Tallandier, 1989), 83–84. Other accounts based on archival research are Jean-Yves Blot, La Méduse: Chronique d’un naufrage ordinaire (Paris: Arthaud, 1982); and Georges Bordonove, Le Naufrage de la Méduse (Paris: Laffont, 1973). 5. The copy is an abridged and undated version of Corréard and Savigny’s account, entitled Tableau de l’horrible naufrage de la frégate française La Méduse, contenant un détail exact de tous les malheurs qui suivirent la perte de ce Navire, et de

notes to pages 155–167



6. 7.



8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.



27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

249

toutes les scènes déchirantes qui eurent lieu sur le Radeau, où s’étaient refugiés 150 des gens de l’Equipage (Paris: chez Tiger). Edinburgh Review 30 (September 1818): 388–406. Le Naufrage de la Méduse, in Légendes populaires, no. 23 (Paris: Martinon), 90–92. The publication is not dated but was probably printed in the 1850s. MM. Coignard frères, Le Naufrage de la Méduse, Opéra en Quatre Actes, music by MM. Devoir and Flotow, in La France dramatique au XIXe siècle (Paris: Tresse, 1841), 13:2–14. Blanchot, The Writing of Disaster, 58. J.-B. Henry Savigny and Alexandre Corréard, Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816, Undertaken by Order of the French Government, Comprising an Account of the Shipwreck of the Medusa, the Suffering of the Crew and the Various Occurrences on Board the Raft, in the Desert of Zaara, at St. Louis, and at the Camp of Daccard (London, 1818; and Marlboro, VT: Marlboro Press, 1986), 71; trans. modified. Ibid., 15; trans. modified. Alexandre Corréard and J. B. Henri Savigny, Le Naufrage de la frégate La Méduse, faisant partie de l’expédition du Sénégal en 1816; Relation contenant les événements qui ont eu lieu sur le radeau, dans le désert de Sahara, à Saint-Louis, et au camp de Daccar (Paris: Eymery, Delaunay, Ladvocat, 1818), 46; emphasis added. Savigny and Corréard, Narrative, 66. Lucan, Pharsalia, trans. Robert Graves, in The Medusa Reader, ed. Marjorie Garber and Nancy J. Vickers (New York: Routledge, 2003), 41. Clair, Méduse, 126. Savigny and Corréard, Narrative, 19; trans. modified. Ibid., 52–53. Ibid., 54. Ibid., 68. Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 4, 5. Ibid., 3. Savigny and Corréard, Narrative, 179; trans. modified. Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard; excerpt published in Garber and Vickers, The Medusa Reader, 131–32. Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 167. Clair, Méduse, 150. Michel Schneider, Un Rêve de Pierre: Le Radeau de la Méduse, Géricault (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 22. Schneider echoes Lorenz Eitner’s comments: “The Raft of the Medusa is a personal statement free of official ideology. Its drama has no heroes and no message. No God, saint, or monarch presides over the disaster; no common cause is in evidence; no faith, no victory justifies the suffering of the men on the Raft.” Lorenz Eitner, Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (London: Phaidon, 1972), 51. Schneider, Un Rêve de Pierre, 29. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 38. Eitner, Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, 36. See also Sylvain Laveissière and Régis Michel, Géricault (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1991), 280. Giorgio Vasari, Life of Leonardo da Vinci, in Garber and Vickers, The Medusa Reader, 60–61.

250

32. 33. 34. 35.

notes to pages 168–179 Hal Foster, “Medusa and the Real,” RES 44 (2003): 161. Eugène Delacroix, Journal (Paris: Plon, 1996), 644; emphasis in original. Schneider, Un Rêve de Pierre, 35. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’Œil et l’esprit (Paris: Folio Gallimard, 1964), 24–25.

chapter ei ght





1. Elisha Kent Kane, The U.S. Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin: A Personal Narrative (New York: Harper, 1854), 184. 2. Quoted in Russell A. Potter, “Sir John Franklin: His Life and Afterlife,” Elisha Kent Kane Historical Society, 1996, 2. The complete disappearance of Franklin’s two ships and crew remains unexplained, although recent studies have argued that the lead-seamed food tins they carried were probably responsible for the disaster. See Owen Beattie and John Geiger, Frozen in Time: Unlocking the Secrets of the Franklin Expedition (New York: Dutton, 1987); and Scott Cookman, Ice Blink: The Tragic Fate of Sir John Franklin’s Lost Polar Expedition (New York: John Wiley, 2000). To this day, remarkably few remnants of Franklin’s expedition have been found. A 2008 expedition backed by the Canadian government failed to locate the ships. In 2010, however, using remote-controlled video technology, Parks Canada discovered the British rescue ship HMS Investigator sunk in the shallow waters of Mercy Bay. The team’s head of underwater archaeology told a reporter that they will next “use similar technology to find the Erebus and Terror”; see http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/07/28/tech/main6722181.shtml. 3. Charles Dickens, “The Lost Arctic Voyagers,” Household Words 10, no. 245 (December 2, 1854): 361. 4. Captain M’Clintock, The Fate of Sir John Franklin Discovered in the Arctic Ocean (Philadelphia, J. T. Lloyd, 1860), 219. 5. Ibid., 220, 221. 6. Ibid., 221–22. 7. Dickens, “The Lost Arctic Voyagers,” December 2, 1854, 362. 8. Ibid., December 9, 1854, 392–93. 9. Jean-Luc Nancy, “After Tragedy,” unpublished keynote address, “Catastrophe and Caesura: Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe Today,” New York University, April 10–12, 2008. 10. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1955), 69–70. 11. Ibid., 71. 12. William Butcher mentions three books as the main sources for Verne’s Hatteras: Ferdinand de Lanoye et Amateur Etienne Hervé, Voyages dans les glaces du Pôle arctique: Sir John Ross, Edward Parry, John Franklin, Beechy, Black, MacClure et autres navigateurs célèbres (1854); Lucien Dubois, Le Pôle et l’équateur (1863), and F. de Lanoye, La Mer polaire: Voyage de l’Erèbe et la Terreur et expéditions à la recherché de Franklin (1854). This last title is a partial translation of Elisha Kent Kane’s reports on the Grinnell expeditions. Captain M’Clintock’s The Fate of Sir John Franklin was translated into French under the title La Destinée de Sir John Franklin dévoilée (Paris: A. Bertrand, 1860). Franklin was well-known in France, and the book he had written about his previous arctic expeditions had been translated by M. Dufauconpret under the title Histoire de deux voyages entrepris par

notes to pages 179–183

13.

14.

15. 16.

17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

251

ordre du gouvernement anglais (Paris: Gide, 1824). Verne’s interest in the Franklin expedition is illustrated as well by the number of times it is cited in his novels. The novel was first serialized in Pierre-Jules Hetzel’s Le Magasin illustré d’éducation et de récréation (March 20, 1864–December 5, 1865). On the attraction of the poles in Verne’s novels, in addition to the works cited by Butcher, see Marcel Lecomte, “Le Thème du grand Nord,” L’Arc 29 (1966): 66–68; and Dossiers du Collège de Pataphysique 16, “Centenaire de la découverte du Pôle Nord par le Capitaine Hatteras” ( July 1961). Jules Verne, The Adventures of Captain Hatteras, trans. William Butcher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 97. William Butcher’s edition of Hatteras in­ cludes an extensive bibliography and Verne’s initial ending of the novel. It should also be noted that the history of shipwrecks had been a well-established genre since the middle of the eighteenth century. A particularly illuminating compilation is the Histoire des naufrages, a three-volume text initially written by Desperthes, augmented by J.-B.-B. Eyries. The complete edition was published in 1832 by Louis Tenré, in Paris. Kane, The U.S. Grinnell Expedition, 149. In his biography of Jules Verne, William Butcher notes: “Verne borrows throughout from Hervé and Lanoye, indeed copying about eight pages word for word, mistakes included, making this the lengthiest plagiarism identified in his works.” Jules Verne: The Definitive Biography, with an introduction by Arthur C. Clarke (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006), 156. Verne also owned a copy of JosephRené Bellot’s Journal d’un voyage aux mers polaires exécuté à la recherché de Sir John Franklin, published in 1854. The enthusiasm of the French for polar expeditions and their passionate interest in the fate of Sir John Franklin are demonstrated in the multiple articles and communications published in various journals and the bulletins of learned societies. The president of the French Society of Geography, Victor-Adolphe Malte-Brun, published an update on all the searches in his Coup d’oeil d’ensemble sur les différentes expéditions arctiques entreprises à la recherché de Sir John Franklin, et sur les découvertes auxquelles elles ont donné lieu (Paris: A. Bertrand, 1955). I believe that one other text may well have inspired Verne’s description of the ice fields: Léonie d’Aunet, Voyage d’une femme au Spitzberg (Paris: Hachette, 1854). Léonie d’Aunet was the only woman aboard an early scientific expedition to the Arctic. Nowadays she is also remembered as one of the mistresses of Victor Hugo. Verne, Hatteras, 319–20; trans. modified. Ibid., 321. Jean-Luc Steinmetz comments on the mystique of the poles and the possible influence of Verne’s novel on Rimbaud in “Pacotilles pour un ‘Barbare,’ Les Illuminations, un autre lecteur?” in Les Lettres Romanes (1994), 65–74. Cited in E. G. R. Taylor, “A Letter Dated 1577 from Mercator to John Dee,” Imago Mundi 13 (1956): 56–68. Verne, Hatteras, 318. Letter dated April 25, 1864; published in Olivier Dumas, Piero Gondolo della Riva, and Volker Dehs, eds., Correspondance inédite de Jules Verne et de PierreJules Hetzel (Geneva: Slatkine, 1999), 1:27. Verne, Hatteras, 348, 349. Ibid., 172, 142–43. Ibid., 345–46; trans. modified.

252

notes to pages 184–189

25. Ibid., 87, 340.  26. See Olivier Dumas, “La Mort d’Hatteras (avec la fin du manuscrit de Jules Verne),” Bulletin de la Société Jules Verne 73 ( January 1985): 22–24; and “Le Véritable Hatteras,” Bulletin de la Société Jules Verne 168 (December 2008): 33–41. 27. For an explanation of the phenomenon, see David K. Lynch and William Livingston, Color and Light in Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 171–75. 28. Kane, The U.S. Grinnell Expedition, 222. 29. M’Clintock, Fate of Sir John Franklin, 82–83. 30. Kane, The U.S. Grinnell Expedition, 187. 31. Verne, Hatteras, 116–17. See the series of articles written by Edmond-P. Gehu, “La Géographie polaire dans l’oeuvre de Jules Verne,” Bulletin de la Société Jules Verne, 9 (December 1937): 181–98; 10 (March 1938): 31–44; 11–13 ( June–December 1938): 177–84. 32. Henri Robillat, “D’un Pôle à l’autre,” Cahiers du Collège de Pataphysique 19 (1961): 31–35. 33. Henry James, French Poets and Novelists (New York: Macmillan, 1878), 76. 34. Jules Verne, “Edgar Poe et ses œuvres,” Musée des Familles, April 1864, 193–208. See Arthur B. Evans, “Literary Intertext in Jules Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires,” Science-Fiction Studies 23, no. 2 ( July 1996): 171–87. Terry Harpold discusses another example of Poe’s influence on Verne in “Verne, Baudelaire et Poe,” Revue Jules Verne 19–20 (2005): 162–68. See also Jean-Yves Tadié, Regarde de tous tes yeux, regarde! Jules Verne (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 25–41. 35. Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, ed. Richard Kopley (London: Penguin, 1999), 168. 36. Ibid., 216–17. Verne quotes the last entries from Baudelaire’s translation in their entirety, reproducing the much-discussed error of the last sentence, where Baudelaire translated the “hue of the skin of the figure” as “la couleur de la peau de l’homme.” 37. Kopley’s notes to Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, 242. 38. Although The Sphinx of the Ice Fields is the only Verne novel to be explicitly presented as a sequel to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Verne acknowledged the influence of Poe’s novel on another of his works when he wrote of Le Chancellor, “It’s my Gordon Pym, but truer, and, I believe, more interesting”; Correspondance inédite de Jules Verne et de Pierre-Jules Hetzel, ed. Dumas, della Riva, and Dehs, 1:253. As Jean-Pierre Picot has noted, Hatteras, written just two years after Verne’s article on Edgar Allan Poe, offers a tacit homage to the American writer: see Picot, “Verne, Poe, Schéhérazade, le ménage à trois?” Europe 909–10 ( January–February 2005): 80–92. By a curious coincidence, a lieutenant on board one of the expeditions in search of Sir John Franklin under the command of Sir Edward Belcher was a certain Pim from Bedford, Connecticut. He is mentioned in several accounts, with a striking description of his quasi-phantasmatic apparition when he reached the icebound Investigator, commanded by Captain M’Clure, bringing them news of help. Poe’s influence on Verne has been well-documented and recognized as early as 1866 by Théophile Gautier in “Les Voyages imaginaires de M. Jules Verne,” republished in Jules Verne, ed. Pierre-Andre Touttain, Cahiers de l’Herne 24 (October 14, 1874): 85–87. 39. Timothy Unwin, Jules Verne: Journeys in Writing (Liverpool: Liverpool Uni­ versity Press, 2005), 209. In his work, Unwin provides a detailed examination of

notes to pages 190–199

40. 41. 42.



43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54.

55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64.

65. 66.

253

Verne’s rewriting of Poe’s text and concludes that “if all writing is rewriting, then the example of Le Sphinx des glaces demonstrates that the rewritten text is capable of profound originality” (212). Jules Verne, Le Sphinx des glaces (Paris: Hachette, 1970), 478, 484. Ibid., 486. Timothy Unwin, “The Fiction of Science, or the Science of Fiction,” in Jules Verne: Narratives of Modernity, ed. Edmund J. Smyth (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 57. Verne, Hatteras, 449. Ibid., 120. Verne, Sphinx, 481. Ibid., 482. Ibid., 483–84. Ibid., 484. Ibid., 486. Michel Serres, Jouvences sur Jules Verne (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1974). H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (New York: Berkley Highland, 1963), 33–34. Ibid., 139. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Sphinx,” in Tales of Mystery and Imagination (London: Dent, 1975), 68. Verne, Sphinx, 486. This scene is reminiscent of the discovery of bones in the Voyage to the Center of the Earth (Voyage au centre de la terre). Ibid., 402. Ibid., 403–4. Ibid., 404. Jules Verne, Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, ed. Jacques Noiray (Paris: Folio, 2005), 523, 528. See the map inserted in the text. On the question of maps, see Terry Harpold, “Verne’s Cartographies,” Science-Fiction Studies 32 (2005): 18–42. Verne, Sphinx, 481. Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, 115, 117. In a letter to Pierre-Jules Hetzel, Verne wrote that the “raft of the Medusa had not produced anything as terrifying” as his novel (February 15, 1871); Correspondance, 155. For a recent study of Le Chancellor, see Yves Gilli, Florent Montaclair, and Sylvie Petit, Le Naufrage dans l’oeuvre de Jules Verne (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998), 113–40. Verne, Sphinx, 274, 275. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, trans. W. D. Robson-Scott (New York: H. Liveright, 1928), 17–18. See also “Destins du cannibalisme,” Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse 6 (1972). Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 288, 292. See Lionel Dupuy, Jules Verne, L’homme et la terre: La Mystérieuse géographie des voyages extraordinaires (Dôle: La Clef d’Argent, 2006). Dupuy discusses at length both Poe’s influence and that of travel narratives such as Dumont d’Urville’s important Voyage au Pôle Sud et dans l’océanie sur les corvettes l’Astrolabe et la Zélée par ordre du Roi pendant les années 1837–1838–1839–1840 (1842–46). Dumont d’Urville left just a few years after a cholera epidemic killed his young daughter. He had never given credence to Weddel and Morrell’s reports that there was a sea free

254

notes to pages 199–215

of ice in the Antarctic, but he faithfully tried to fulfill part of the mission defined by the government to penetrate as far South as possible. He came back to France to a hero’s welcome but died tragically, along with his wife and son, in a railway accident in 1842. On the space of writing in Verne, see Daniel Compère, “Jules Verne et la modernité,” Europe 595–96 (November–December 1978): 27–36; and Marie-Hélène Huet, “Itinéraire du texte,” in Jules Verne, Colloque de Cerisy (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1979), 9–26. 67. Picot, “Verne, Poe, Schéhérazade, le ménage à trois?,” 90. 68. I would like to thank George Slusser and Rob Latham, who kindly invited me to present part of this text at the 2009 Eaton Conference on “Extraordinary Voyages: Jules Verne and Beyond.” The text was subsequently published in Verniana 2, no. 2 (2010): 149–78. 69. Verne, Sphinx, 496.

part fo ur

1. Timothy Mitchell, Rules of Experts, Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 1, 303. 2. See discussion in chapter 3 of the Baron d’Holbach’s statements about sacred superstition.

chapter ni ne



1. Commentary by Francis Ford Coppola, “Special Features,” The Conversation, written, produced, and directed by Francis Ford Coppola (Paramount Pictures, 1974, Widescreen DVD Collection). 2. Robert Phillip Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Kubrick, Coppola, Scorsese, Altman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 194. 3. David Denby, “Stolen Privacy: Coppola’s The Conversation,” Sight and Sound 43, no. 3 (Summer 1974): 133. 4. Ibid., 132. 5. See Michael Ondaatje, The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film (New York: Knopf, 2002), 175. 6. Ibid., 164. 7. Ibid., 154. 8. Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 252. 9. Ondaatje, The Conversations, 164. 10. Ibid. 11. Julio Cortazar, Blow-up and Other Stories, trans. Paul Blackburn (New York: Random House, 1967), 113–14. 12. The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, directed by Sophie Fiennes, presented by Slavoj Žižek (Amoeba Film Productions, 2006). 13. See discussion in chapter 5, “Nightwatch.” 14. Cortázar, Blow-up, 114, 115. 15. “Antonioni à la mode anglaise,” Les Cahiers du cinéma 186 ( January 1967): 13–15. 16. Michel Delahaye, “Blow-up,” in Les Cahiers du cinéma 193 (September 1967): 64–65.

notes to pages 215–224

255

17. See Revue du cinéma 297 ( June 1985); interview quoted in René Prédal, Mi­ chelangelo Antonioni; ou, La Vigilance du désir (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1991), 50. 18. Quoted in Peter Brunette, The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 125. 19. Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 141–42. 20. Ibid., 20. 21. See Paul Vernière’s introduction to Diderot, Oeuvres philosophiques, xi. 22. Nicholas Saunderson was born in 1682; he lost his eyesight due to smallpox when he was a year old. He went on to become professor of mathematics at Cambridge University and received the title of Doctor in Law by King George II in 1728. He died in 1739 of scurvy. 23. Denis Diderot, Lettre sur les aveugles, in Oeuvres philosophiques (Paris: Garnier, 1964), 122, 123. 24. Diderot, Lettre sur les aveugles, 117. 25. Ibid., 152. 26. Stig Björkman, Michelangelo Antonioni (Paris: Le Monde and Cahiers du cinéma editions, 2007), 60. 27. The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema. 28. Prédal, Michelangelo Antonioni, 121. 29. Interview with Peter Bowles, The Guardian, June 24, 2005. 30. Blade Runner, produced by Michael Deeley, directed by Ridley Scott, screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, from the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. For a comprehensive account of the making of the movie, see Paul M. Sammon, Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner (New York: Harper, 1996), and Ridley Scott: The Making of His Movies (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1999), 63–73. 31. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956, directed by Don Siegel. The 1978 remake was directed by Philip Kaufman. 32. The lines were added by Rutger Hauer, the actor who plays Roy, and to such powerful effect that Ridley Scott, though known as a rather autocratic director, left them in the final version of the film. The scene and the speech have since become a classic moment of successful science-fiction movie-making. 33. In this way, Blade Runner is strikingly reminiscent of Villiers de L’Isle Adam’s L’Eve future, in which the “replicant” Hadaly becomes mysteriously endowed with an elusive and undeniable spirituality. 34. Worried about the dark mood of the film, the producers had initially demanded a happier ending with Deckard and Rachael successfully escaping and driving through a gorgeous landscape. Landscape footage was obtained from Stanley Kubrick, who agreed to give Scott unused scenes he had shot for The Shining. 35. In an early review of the film, Allen Brodsky was quick to point out that Deckard was, indeed, a replicant: “The irises of the creatures who certainly are replicants . . . in certain close–ups take on a distinct red tint. The eyes if the humans never do— except for Deckard’s. . . . Just as the replicants have been made to be slaves, and do men’s dirty work, so Deckard is a kind of slave to the police.” “Blade Runner, the Man-Made Superman,” Cinemacabre 5 (1982): 18–23. 36. Kaja Silverman, “Back to the Future,” Camera Obscura 27 (September 1991): 110, 111.

256

notes to pages 224–230

37. Ibid., 110, 119–20. 38. “Five Favorite Films with Guillermo del Toro,” Rotten Tomatoes, November 14, 2008, http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/hellboy_2_the_golden_army/news/ 1780895/five_favorite_films_with_guillermo_del_toro/. 39. See Pauline Kael’s review of Blade Runner for the New Yorker. Quoted in James Clarke, Ridley Scott (London: Virgin Books, 2002), 78. 40. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: Athlone Press, 1989), 115. 41. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grunfest Schoepf (New York: Anchor Books, 1967), 212. 42. See Herman Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (New York: Harper, 1852), 468, chap. 25, sec. 4. 43. Clarke, Ridley Scott, 79. 44. Quoted in Sammon, Ridley Scott, 65. 45. Silverman, “Back to the Future,” 115. 46. Retrofitting Blade Runner, ed. Judith B. Kerman (Bowling Green, KY: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1991), 1. 47. Harlan Kennedy, “Ridley Scott interview,” Film Comment 18, no. 4 (1982): 66; quoted in Silverman, who discusses this aspect of the film at length in “Back to the Future,” 109. 48. Silverman, “Back to the Future,” 109. See also Giuliana Bruno, “Ramble City: Postmodernism and Blade Runner,” in Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, ed. Annette Kuhn (London: Verso, 1990), 183–95. Bruno’s brilliant analysis focuses on both the postmodern aesthetics of the city and schizophrenia as the simultaneous inability to experience temporality and failure to enter the symbolic order. 49. Clarke, Ridley Scott, 79. 50. Blanchot, The Writing of Disaster, 47; emphasis in original. 51. Ibid., 116–17. 52. Jacques Derrida, Séminaire: La Bête et le souverain (Paris: Galilée, 2010), 2:251. 53. Ibid., 2:252–53. 54. E-mail from Ann Smock, who did the admirable 1986 translation of Blanchot’s The Writing of Disaster. 55. Ibid. 56. Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, trans. Shane B. Lillis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 57. Blanchot, The Writing of Disaster, 55.

index Björkman, Stig, 218 Black Plague, 23, 25 Blade Runner. See Scott, Ridley Blanchot, Maurice, 13, 130, 159, 162–63, 228–30 Blow-up. See Antonioni, Michelangelo Bonaparte, Marie, 189 Bonnefils, Philippe, 248n1 Bordonove, Georges, 248n4 Bourdelais, Patrice, 239n44 Braun, Theodore E. D., 235n1 Bray, R. S., 71 Brigham, Amariah, 61–63 Brodsky, Allen, 255n35 Brosse, Guy de la, 4, 23, 25, 33–34 Brown, Michael E., 238n10 Brunette, Peter, 255n18 Bruno, Giordana, 256n48 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de, 102 Burgelin, Pierre, 88–89 Butcher, William, 250n12, 251n14, 251n16

Ackerknecht, Erwin H., 68 Adorno, Theodor W., 6, 21 Agamben, Giorgio, 2, 8, 75, 102 AIDS, 13, 201 Alger, John Goldworth, 243n2 Algol, 157 anéantissement (annihilation), 100, 145 Antonioni, Michelangelo: Blow-up, 12, 201, 212, 213, 215–17, 219, 220 Apocalypse (Saint John), 45–48 Apollo, 4, 5, 24, 33, 79 Argonauts, 2 Argos, mythology, 160, 166 Argus (ship), 153, 162 Aristotle, 160 Artaud, Antonin, 9, 17–19, 36 astronomy: and the calendar, 104; and di­ sasters, 4, 23–24, 31, 33–34, 102, 157, 219–20 Athanassoglou-Kallmeyer, Nina, 248n2 Audoin-Rouzeau, Frédérique, 233n14 Barroll, Leeds, 233n14 Barthes, Roland, 130–31, 165 Baudelaire, Charles, 187, 199 Bazin, Germain, 248n3 Beattie, Owen, 150n2 Beaumont, William, 59 Benjamin, Walter, 114, 118, 178, 179 Ben Messaoud, Samy, 24 Berlin, Isaiah, 99 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, JacquesHenri, 89 Bersani, Leo, 93, 165 Bertrand, Jean-Baptiste, 25 Biraben, Jean-Noël, 24, 231n8

Cabanès, Auguste, Dr., 235n55, 235n61 cannibalism, 11, 161–62, 172–75, 197–99 Cardinal, Catherine, 245n57 Casanova, Giacomo, 39 Celan, Paul, 229 Challenger, 158 Chateaubriand, François-René de, 1–2, 10, 72, 73, 101, 129–45; Essai historique 139–41; Génie du Christianisme, 135; Mémoires d’outre-tombe, 129–30, 135, 136, 138 Chaumareys, Hugues Duroy de, 11, 153, 154–56, 160, 172 257

258

index

cholera, 1, 9; and contamination, 60–71; and politics, 58–60, 71–75 choleric riots, 2, 9, 75, 238n27 Clair, Jean, 150, 157, 160 Clarac, Pierre, 145 Clément, Jean-Paul, 142 Compère, Daniel, 254n66 contagion: and AIDS, 201; belief in, 19–32, 58, 63–66; and subjectivation, 70–74, 202–3 contamination, linguistic and spiritual, 11, 71, 202 Cookman, Scott, 250n2 Coppola, Francis Ford: The Conversation, 12, 201, 205–12, 215, 216, 219 Corbin, Alain, 239n38 Cordun, Val, 233n23 Corréard, Alexandre, 154, 158–62, 164 Cortázar, Julio, 12, 212, 213, 217 Crawfurd, Raymond, 24, 33 Danton, Georges-Jacques, 149 Darnton, Robert, 239n32 decimal time, 115–20 Defoe, Daniel, 235n64 Dehs, Volker, 251n21 Deidier, Antoine, 32 Delacroix, Eugène, 73, 168 Delahaye, Michel, 215 Delaporte, François, 237n1 Deleuze, Gilles, 48–49, 214, 225 Delumeau, 233n18, 233n19 Denby, David, 207, 208 De Palma, Brian, 212, 213, 216 Derathé, Robert, 240n3 Derrida, Jacques, 45, 55, 229, 246n11 Dershowitz, Nachum, 244n24 Détoc, Sylvain, 231n12 Dick, Philip K., 255n30 Dickens, Charles, 173, 177–79, 183 Diderot, Denis, 22, 38, 20, 217 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 229, 233n14 disaster: as administrative problem, 1–2, 63–66, 128n10; etymology, 3–4, 159; as individual destiny, 10–11, 139–45; and myth, 147–200; as political question, 51–53, 57–60, 70–75, 77–78, 134–37; and prophecy, 43–47; and rationality,

49. See also contagion; contamination; fragmentation; terror Dixon, Edward H., 240n51 Dohrn–van Rossum, Gerhard, 116, 117 Droz, Yves, 245n55, 245n57 Dumas, Olivier, 251n21, 252n26 Dupuy, Lionel, 253n66 Durey, Michael, 66, 70 Dynes, Russell, 53 Edinburgh Review, 154–55, 158, 177 Eigeldinger, Frédéric, 89 Eitner, Lorenz, 249n26, 249n30 Elias, Norbert, 153 Encyclopédie: and earthquakes: 68–69; and the plague: 5, 7, 9, 19–26, 34–38; and Roman history, 82 Engels, Friedrich, 91 Enlightenment, 5–6, 17–36, 68–75, 217 Epictetus, 90 epidemic transmission, 30–31, 62–75 Erebus, HMS. See Franklin, Sir John Erebus, mythology, 179, 199 Erebus volcano, 199 Erhard, Jean, 243n1 Evans, Arthur B., 252n34 Evans, Richard, 65 Eyjafjallajökull volcano, 201 Fabre d’Églantine, Philippe François Nazaire, 107, 108 Facio, Silvestro, 31 Fancher, Hampton, 225, 227 Feijóo y Montenegro, Benito Jerónimo, 41 Fenves, Peter, 55 Flores, Joseph, 245n55, 245n57 Foster, Hal, 168 Foucault, Michel, 26–27, 60 fragmentation: and disaster, 9–13, 89, 159; and flashback, 209, 214; and language, 225; and perception, 203, 216; and technology, 213, 219 Franklin, Sir John, 11, 147, 171–79, 182 Frascator, 30 Freud, Sigmund, 82–85, 92–92, 98, 139, 195, 198 Fukushima Daiichi, 7, 201

index Gadbury, John, 23 Galen, 22, 117 Garber, Marjorie, 249n14 Garrone, Alessandro Galante, 244n40 Geiger, John, 250n2 Genand, Stéphanie, 234n25 Georgi, Mathias, 236n10 Géricault, Théodore, 11, 12, 152, 156, 158; Etude de têtes de suppliciés, 152; Frag­ ments anatomiques, 148; The Raft of the Medusa, 11, 148, 152 Gillispie, Charles Coulston, 105 Gilman, Ernest, 233n14 Gisler, Monika, 237n33 Glaucus, 3, 79, 83 Goldin, Amy, 238n10 Gondolo della Riva, Piero, 251n21 Gorgons, 37, 160, 169 Goujon, Jean-Marie-Claude-Alexandre, 122 Gyges, 96–97 Haiti earthquake, 7, 158, 201 Harpold, Terry, 252n34, 253n59 Hawking, Stephen H., 244n25 Heine, Heinrich, 9, 71–75 Helvétius, Claude-Adrien, 89, 92 Hesiod, 171 Hesse, Herman, 212 Hetzel, Pierre-Jules, 182 Hildesheimer, Françoise, 30, 36 history: beginnings of, 110–15; and time, 108 Hitchcock, Alfred: Psycho, 207, 212; Rear Window, 220 Hoffmann, Léon-François, 59 Holbach, Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’, 71, 202, 254n2 Hollier, Denis, 131 Holocaust, 5, 228–30 Homer, 24 Hopkins, Clark, 231n12 Horkheimer, Max, 6, 21 Horrox, Rosemary, 232n12 Jack, Malcom, 40 James, Henry, 188 Jameson, Fredric, 216, 219

259

Jaucourt, Chevalier Louis de, 9, 19–25, 34–38 Johnson, James, 59 Kael, Pauline, 225 Kane, Elisha Kent, 172, 179, 183, 184, 186 Kant, Immanuel, 37, 45–46, 50–55, 95–96, 98; Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History, 111–13, 115; The Con­ test of Faculties, 124–25 Katrina, Hurricane, 7, 13, 158 Kavanagh, Thomas M., 88  Kendrick, Thomas Downing, 40, 41, 43 Kerman, Judith, 227 Kircher, Athanasius, 30, 32 Kolker, Robert Phillip, 206 Kopley, Richard, 188 Kudlick, Catherine, 239n44 Lagrange, Joseph-Louis, 126 Lalande, Joseph-Jérôme Lefrançois de, 104, 126, 243n8 Lamperrière, Jean de, 33 Landa, Louis, 235n64 Laplace, Pierre-Simon, 126 Larochelle, Gilbert, 237n31 Leca, Ange-Pierre, 239n44 Leca, Antoine, 3 Lefort, Claude, 144 Le Goff, Jacques, 138 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 48–49 Leonardo da Vinci, 167 Levaillant, Maurice, 129 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 195, 226 Leymerie, Jean, 64–66 Lisbon earthquake, 5, 6, 7, 9, 39–55 Livy, 81 Lucan, 160 Lucas-Lebreton, J., 238n27 Maclean, Charles, 66 Magritte, René, 199–200 Manget, Jean-Jacques, 27 Marat, Jean-Paul, 119 Marseilles, 7, 8, 9, 17–38 Masson, Philippe, 248n4 McCormick, Robert, 179 McGrew, Roderick, 66, 70

260

index

McLaughlin, Kevin, 125 M’Clintock, Leopold, 174, 175, 186 McNeill, William H., 233n14 Medusa, mythology, 4, 5, 33, 148, 150, 160–63, 166–68 Medusa wreck, 11, 147, 148, 152–56, 172, 177, 198 Melville, Herman, 225–26 memory: and history, 110–11, 114; and identity, 221–22, 225 Mercier-Faivre, Anne-Marie, 6, 54 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 169 Michelet, Jules, 101, 110, 121, 122, 126 Mitchell, Timothy, 202 Mithridates, 22 Montaigne, Michel de, 83, 85 Moote, A. Lloyd and Dorothy C., 233, 233n14 Moreau de Jonnès, Alexandre, 64–66 Munch, Edvard, 220 Muratori, Lodovico Antonio, 35 Muray, Philippe, 133 Murch, Walter, 208, 210, 211, 212 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 178 Napoléon, 107 Neiman, Susan, 5 Northwest Passage, 147, 175 Nozes, Judith, 235n3 Oedipus, 194, 195, 223, 226 Ondaatje, Michael, 254n5 Otcher, Paul. See Strogonoff, Count Paine, Martyn, 66 Papon, Jean-Pierre, 23 paraselenae, 11, 184–200 parhelion, 184–200 Patel, Guillaume, 31, 33 Perovic, Sanja, 244n33 Perseus, 149, 150, 152, 169 Pestalozzi, Jean-Jérôme, 22 Physalis pelasgica, 164 Picot, Jean-Pierre, 199, 252n38 plague: and the collective body, 36; and confinement, 25–26, 62; and contagion, 30–33, 65–66; and mythology, 33; as social disorder, 20–21, 58–60; as spiri­

tual disorder, 17–19; and the stars, 4, 17–36, 57 Plato, 3, 46, 79, 97 Plutarch, 122 Poe, Edgar Allan, 130, 182, 187–89, 194, 198–200 Poirier, Jean-Paul, 235n2 Prédal, René, 255n17 Proteus, 25 Putter, Russell A., 250n2 Rabinbach, Anson, 7 Radner, John B., 235n1 Rae, John, 172, 173, 174, 177–79, 183 Ramsay, Matthew, 238n7 Raulot, Jean-Yves, 239n44 Reingold, Edward M., 244n24 Revolution, French, 8, 10, 13, 59, 62, 72– 75; and de-Christianization, 110; as historical rupture, 136, 155, 201 Revolutionary calendar, 74, 101–27 Reynaud, Denis, 24 Robespierre, Maximilien, 114, 121, 122 Rome: history of, 79–82; as republican model, 114–15; ruins of, 82–84, 132–34, 145 Romme, Gilbert, 10, 101–27 Rondet, Laurent-Etienne, 42–48, 49–50 Ronell, Avital, 15, 30, 92, 94, 211 Roselleck, Reinhart, 244n33 Rosenberg, Charles, 68 Ross, James Clark, 171, 183, 190, 197 Ross, John, Sir, 171 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 3, 10, 29–30, 37, 103, 119, 145; The Confessions, 93; Dia­ logues, 94, 95; Emile, 86–87, 93, 102, 112; Emile et Sophie; ou, Les Solitaires, 86–90; on Lisbon, 42, 51–42; La Nou­ velle Héloïse, 102; Political Fragments, 81; Rêveries, 90–93; Second Discourse, 85–86, 112; The Social Contract, 79–82, 86, 88, 99–100 Russell, Patrick, 234n26 Saada, Anne, 39, 54 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, 134, 144 Saint-Just, Louis-Antoine de, 121, 122 Sammon, Paul M., 255n30, 256n44

index Sandras, Stanislas, 69 Sanson, Charles-Henri, 123–24, 135 Saussure, Horace Benedict, 102, 103 Savigny, Henri, 154, 158–59, 164 Schneider, Michel, 166–67 Schor, Naomi, 133, 247n30 Schwartz, Richard, 227 Scott, Ridley: Blade Runner, 12, 13, 201, 220–25 Sgard, Jean, 39 Shakespeare, William, 6, 147 Silverman, Kaja, 224, 227, 228 Sirens, 162–63, 169 Smock, Ann, 229 Soboul, Albert, 243n1 Sperber, Dan, 29 Sphinx, 12, 171–200 Starobinski, Jean, 80, 91 Steinmetz, Jean-Luc, 251n18 Strogonoff (or Stroganov), Pavel Alex­ androvich, known as Paul Otcher, 101–2 Strogonoff (or Stroganov), Alexander Sergeyevich, Count, 102, 103, 106, 126

Terror, HMS. See Franklin, Sir John theology, and disaster, 2, 5–6, 42–51 Thomas, Chantal, 6, 54 Thucydides, 20 Titanic, 147 Torlonia, Giovanni, Prince, 132

Totaro, Rebecca, 233n14 terror, and disease, 1, 5, 35–36, 72,–73, 139 Terror, and the French Revolution, 102, 139

yellow fever, 55–60 Yersin, Alexandre, 19

261

Ulysses, 162–63 Unwin, Timothy, 190, 253n42 Vasari, 167 venom, and the plague, 5, 19, 25, 32–35 Verne, Jules, 11, 148, 175–200 Vickers, Nancy J., 249n14 Vidal-Naquet, Pierre, 198 Vissac, Marc de, 243n1 Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet, 37, 40, 42, 49, 51–52 Walter, Gérard, 233 Watergate, 207 Wells, Herbert George, 194 Wesley, Charles, 41 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 59

Žižek, Slavoj, 207, 213, 218–19