Ahasuerus Read online

  Ahasuerus

  by

  Edgar Quinet

  translated, annotated and introduced by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  Introduction

  Ahasvérus by Edgar Quinet, here translated as Ahasuerus, was first published in 1834 by the Bureau de la Revue des Deux Mondes. The Revue des Deux Mondes was the periodical for which Quinet was then working; founded in 1829; the editor who had taken it over in 1831, its editor François Buloz, had rapidly made it one of the chief focal points for the activity of the French Romantic Movement, featuring the literary work of Victor Hugo, George Sand, Honoré de Balzac, Alfred de Vigny and Alfred de Musset, among others, although it differed from the movement’s other chief organ, the Revue de Paris, in adopting a much broader remit in its articles on cultural, political and economic affairs. Quinet, a historian of a new breed, interested in human history in its broadest sense, seen primarily as the history of ideas, and intent on developing a theoretical account of the progressive evolution of those ideas, was an important contributor in helping to shape and develop that agenda.

  Excerpts from Ahasvérus had been published in the Revue des Deux Mondes in the year before its release in book form, and it had been represented in advance as a work of an entirely new kind: an epic drama, in prose rather than verse, which would encapsulate the theory of history that Quinet was trying to develop in its broadest possible sense, in a quasi-allegorical fashion. It would place the history of humankind within a context derived from the principal means by which the ancestors of the people of Quinet’s era and culture had tried to interpret their own identity and history, and thus further their development: the Christian religion. Rather than dealing with the evolution of the religion as a historical phenomenon, as he had already done and was to do much more elaborately in his non-fiction, Quintet set out in Ahasvérus to turn that process inside out, using the ideas of the religion as a mythological container and framework for the phenomena of history.

  The story told in Ahasvérus thus begins with the Creation of the world—preceded by a prelude in which God, his angels and saints are imagined to be conducting a critical review of his work—and, with only a handful of brief pauses for detailed examination, moves rapidly to its supposed future terminus: the Last Judgment. Because it is a critical analysis rather than a dramatization, however, the “plot” does not conclude with the Last Judgment, as previous literary visions of the Apocalypse had done, but goes beyond it, in order to pass judgment on the verdict. In this epic, therefore—uniquely, at the time—the Last Judgment is not only appealed but set aside, reweighed in a supposedly-superior balance and found wanting.

  The verdict passed on the human race by the Eternal Father is supplemented by a very different individual judgment delivered by Christ of a particular individual that he had cursed to be a witness to the unfolding of human history—Ahasvérus, the Wandering Jew of legend—but even that is not the end of the story. Having overturned the traditional Last Judgment and substituted one more in keeping with modern ideas, the author continues his narrative to provide a further vision, which passes judgment not on humankind but on God himself—or, strictly speaking, on the idea of God—in a curious and strangely poignant coda.

  That tripartite climax went far beyond all previous literary ambition, and deliberately so. The work was planned from the outset as something uniquely far-reaching, and, by virtue of the manner of its publication, was loudly trumpeted as such. The novel’s publication date is sometimes given in bibliographies as 1833, not so much because of the appearance of excerpts in the Revue des Deux Mondes in that year, but because the periodical published a long review-essay of the complete text in December 1833 by the critic Charles Magnin, “Ahasvérus et de la nature du génie poétique,” [Ahasvérus and the Nature of Poetic Genius] which—as its title indicates—proclaimed the work’s virtues in no uncertain terms. Magnin’s essay was reprinted as a preface in the second edition of Ahasvérus, issued in 1843, and again in the version included in Quinet’s Oeuvres complètes in 1858, and has thus remained firmly associated with it ever since, ensuring that the text has always been accompanied by a certification, not merely of its ambition, but of its genius.

  The notion of the work’s literary genius was not endorsed by all the work’s contemporary critics, and the tripartite climax provided a challenge to religious believers, which was bound to make the work seem dangerously heretical to some. Its sheer peculiarity meant that many readers simply did not know what to think about it, finding it too alien for comfortable analysis, there being nothing else in the literary canon at the time—and precious little since—with which it might be juxtaposed for the purpose of comparison. Whether it is a work of genius or not, however, it is certainly an extraordinarily exceptional work, whose uniqueness recommends it for attention and admiration.

  Even if it is considered to be merely bizarre, the extremity of Ahasvérus’ bizarrerie establishes it as a literary landmark; whether or not one disagrees with the import of its philosophy, there is no doubt that it does have sufficient ingenuity and philosophical profundity to make it worthy of serious contemplation and consideration. It is astonishing that it has not been translated into English previously; had it been translated in the 1830s, it might well have risked prosecution under English law on a charge of “blasphemous libel”—the charge that suppressed the full version of Percy Shelley’s “Queen Mab,” one of the few works with which Ahasvérus bears some slight comparison—but that does not explain why no one undertook the task when that danger receded.

  Edgar Quinet was born in 17 February 1803 at Bourg-en-Bresse in the Ain. His mother’s family was Protestant, his father’s Catholic; although Quinet was received into the Catholic Church, taking his first communion there, his personal beliefs seem to have been in conflict even then, and to have remained conflicted throughout his life. His father was a fervent republican who had resigned his commission in the army after Napoléon’s coup in order to devote himself to scientific studies. In spite of his own resignation, and although he had left Edgar almost entire to the care of his mother previously, Jérôme Quinet wanted his son to go into the army after finishing his studies in Bourg and the Collège de Lyon, but Edgar wanted to go his own way, and was already nursing literary ambitions at the age of seventeen. The subsequent dispute soured his relationship with his father permanently, and made Edgar’s close relationship with his mother increasingly awkward.

  Jérôme Quinet initially accompanied his son to Paris in 1820 in order to enroll him in the École Polytechnique, but was persuaded to compromise and allow him to study law instead. As soon as he was left to his own devices, however, Edgar began to neglect the narrow curriculum prescribed for law students in order to develop much wider scholarly interests and attempt to develop his literary talents. His first publication, in 1823, was Tablettes du juif errant [Pages from the Wandering Jew’s Notebook], which was planned as an extensive work but eventually materialized—when he could not interest a publisher in a fuller version of the envisaged project—as a relatively brief piece, little more than a short story.

  When Quinet reprinted Ahasvérus in volume VII of his Oeuvres complètes in 1858, he accepted the inevitability of appending Tablettes du juif errant to it, but took care to emphasize in his preface not only that it was an item of juvenilia, really unworthy of preservation, but that it was so completely different from the later work as to qualify as its “opposite” rather than a preliminary sketch. The difference is not quite as extreme as he suggested, however; Tablettes is a first-person narrative in which the Wandering Jew offers a few flippant anecdotes excerpted from the long catalogue of his memories, but the sum of those anecdotes does provide a synoptic account of a theory of history, in
which the evolution of the Christian religion inevitably plays a central role. In consequence, it does share a certain degree of common consciousness with the late work, which is not so much an opposite as an inversion of it.

  Quinet became something of a wanderer himself after 1823—a circumstance whose irony, in the context of his two accounts of the Wandering Jew, did not escape him. He suggested in the preface to the serialized excerpts that he had been working on the longer work throughout that interim, although other evidence makes it clear that he did not actually set out to compose Ahasvérus until 1831. What he evidently meant was that he had continued his experimental literary endeavors during his various travels, thus laying useful groundwork for his major endeavor; given the patchwork nature of Ahasvérus, it is by no means improbable that some of the individual “monologues” or “prose poems” making up its substance had been written long before he began to conceived the overall plan of the epic and began to organize it as a focused and coherent endeavor.

  Quinet’s original intention in setting out on his travels was to go to America, and he initially went to England with the plan of obtaining a passage from there to New York after a relatively brief sojourn, but he was summoned back to France when his sister fell dangerously ill; although he subsequently returned to England, he then changed direction and went to Germany instead of America, where he spent a good deal of time in the late 1820s. That change of agenda was inspired by the fact that while he was in England, attempting to master the language fully before going on to New York, he read an English translation of Johann Gottfried Herder’s Indeen zur Philosophie der Geschichte de Mensscheit [Outlines of the Philosophy of the History of Humankind], which struck him with the force of a revelation, perhaps all the more so because Herder had died (in 1803) leaving it incomplete, crying out for further elaboration and proper conclusion. Quinet began work almost immediately on a French translation, although he had to learn German in order to do that, and he went to Germany partly to secure that education and partly to track Herder’s work, as it were, to its source in German idealistic philosophy and the German Romantic Movement—or, as it was represented in Herder’s day, as the Sturm und Drang [Storm and Stress] movement.

  Herder, born in 1744, had been a student of Immanuel Kant at the University of Königsberg, but had become a protégé of Kant’s less famous colleague Johann Hamann, whose inclinations were far more mystical, and who was more interested in the emotions than the “pure” and “practical” reasoning of which Kant produced his two epoch-making analyses. Herder did, however, retain enough Kantian influence to import a strong element of rational pretention into his analyses, whose initial target was German literature and its history. It was that interest which brought him into contact with J. W. Goethe in 1770, and it was his crucial influence on Goethe’s literary endeavors that founded the Sturm und Drang movement and gave birth to German Romanticism, helping to ensure the strong influence thereon of idealistic philosophy and a marked interest in national folklore as a key to the evolution of national identity.

  Although Herder insisted in the book that made such a deep impact on Quinet that history ought to be and could be a science, he was also insistent that it was essentially the history of ideas rather than mere events, and that ideas were the true actors in history, while human collectives were the embodiments of those ideas and individual humans merely microcosms reflecting the macrocosmic ideas of their religions and nations.

  That approach to history was crucial to Quinet’s conceptualization of Ahasvérus and is essential to the understanding of it; the “characters” in the epic are ideas, which have their own evolutionary dynamic, and the material entities featured therein—which include cities and natural phenomena as well as individuals, such as Ahasvérus, the Christ who curses him and the fallen angel who loves him—are essentially symbolic expressions or representations of those ideas. Such eccentrically-loquacious voices as the various cities, the Ocean, Strasbourg Cathedral and personalized Death, here conceived as an old crone named Mob, can all meet and converse on more-or-less equal terms within the framework of the drama, which is set in a hypothetical “mindspace” rather than scenes sketched in the backcloths of an imagined stage.

  Although Herder and Quinet were not as extreme in their philosophical idealism as Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who argued that Kant’s notion of a “noumenal” world of things-in-themselves ought to be rejected, in accordance with the recognition that consciousness can have no reliable grounding outside its own contents (solipsism), there is a sense in which Ahasvérus is a thoroughly solipsistic work, set entirely within the consciousness of its author or reader, not merely in the inevitable and trivial sense that all literary works are essentially immaterial, but in a deliberate and methodical manner.

  Because literary endeavor is a kind of “secondary creation” (as the German idealistic philosopher Alexander Baumgarten put it) no literary work can contain a “real world” and “God” can never be any more, in any literary work, than a character enslaved to the author’s notion of him, but most authors nevertheless insist on maintaining the pretence that they are writing about an external “primary creation,” which they are doing their utmost to represent accurately. Ahasvérus makes no such pretence; within Quinet’s work, the secondary world of his fiction is simply and manifestly a nexus of ideas, and God, like Ahasvérus, the sea and the stones in the road, is simply an idea within it, operating purely in relationship to other ideas. The question of God’s possible real existence outside the text is simply not an issue, any more than the question of whether there ever really was a Wandering Jew. The reader who cannot appreciate that has little chance of understanding the grounds on which the novel’s Last Judgment is appealed, and the reason why the story then extends further than the revised judgment to the magnificently peculiar third element of its tripartite climax.

  Quinet’s translation of Herder was brought to the attention, in advance of its publication, of the French realist philosopher Victor Cousin (1792-1867), who was also famous as a great orator and educationalist. Although Cousin had by then rejected the idealistic philosophy that had once fascinated him, he had retained a strong scholarly interest in it, and he saw Quinet’s philosophical pilgrimage to Germany—which had included meetings with Goethe, Ludwig Tieck and other contemporary stars of the Romantic Movement—as the echo of one he had made himself, in order to meet G. W. F. Hegel and Friedrich Schelling. Cousin immediately took Quinet under his wing, and introduced him to other members of his intellectual circle.

  The most important contact Quinet made via Cousin’s patronage was another ambitious young historian, Jules Michelet, with whom he formed a lifelong friendship of great importance to both writers, but Cousin also introduced him to the famous salon-keeper Madame Récamier and her great friend René Chateaubriand, hailed by the members of the French Romantic Movement as their founding father, and author of the influential Génie du Christianisme (1802; tr. as The Genius of Christianity), another work that Quinet had found inspiring, and on whose intellectual legacy he tried to build.

  Cousin also brought Quinet into contact with Pierre-Simon Ballanche, another unorthodox historian attempting to develop a theoretical overview of human evolution. In that quest, Ballanche had given a crucial role to the notion of “palingenesis,” or successive regeneration, by means of which he tried to combine two theses then generally seen as competing rivals: the assertion that all civilizations went through a kind of life-cycle in which they were doomed to decadence once they had passed their peak, and the notions of continual social progress based on technological and scientific advancement.

  Like Herder, Ballanche did not live long enough to finished his intended masterwork explaining the palingenetic history of humankind, but he did contrive to produce a sketch of it in literary form, La Vision d’Hébal (1931)1, with which Quinet must have been familiar, and which might well have helped to prompt him to plan his own literary sketch of his very different thesis. Like Ahasvérus,
La Vision d’Hébal begins with the Creation and proceeds to a futuristic Last Judgment, but the devout Ballanche’s last judgment really is final, providing an justificatory “explanation” of the vicissitudes of human history, in which the continual rise and fall of civilizations is explained as a necessary epicycle with a progressive pattern that ultimately leads to a triumphant Christ-assisted redemption. There is a sense in which the argument of Ahasvérus is a flat contradiction of Ballanche’s thesis; in Quinet’s skeptical thinking, humankind does not stand in need of moral redemption but in need of imaginative liberation; in the final analysis, the idea of a divine judgment, however well-intentioned and useful it might once have been as a moral spur, is a shackle better cast off and left behind.

  Victor Cousin also used his social influence to further Quinet’s travels, by obtaining an appointment for him in 1829 to accompany a government mission to Greece, then attempting to obtain independence from the Ottoman Empire. With that experience behind him, Quinet hoped to obtain a government post in France after the “July Revolution” of 1830, but the outcome of that upheaval—which replaced the superannuated Bourbon dynasty with the more liberal monarchy of Louis-Philippe—proved disappointingly slight to the staunchly republican Quinet, and his views were apparently considered far too radical for him to be given any further political appointment. He joined the staff of the Revue des Deux Mondes instead, immediately beginning to contribute substantial articles on various historical and political topics, including “De l’avenir des religions [On the Future of Religions] (1831) and “L’Avenir de l’art” [The Future of Art] (1832). He had already followed up his Herder translation with a book researched during his excursion to Greece, De la Grèce moderne, et ses rapports avec l’antiquité [On Modern Greece and its relationship with Antiquity] (1830) and he also produced De l’Allemagne et de la Révolution [On Germany and Revolution] (1832) before completing Ahasvérus.