DEFENDING SPIRIT,SPIRITUALIZING MATTER: NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH ACADEMIC PHILOSOPHY AND THE MEDICAL SCIENCES

This review essay discusses Larry Sommer McGrath's Making Spirit Matter: Neurology, Psychology, and Selfhood in Modern France (2020), a history of the philosophical current known as “spiritualism.” The book covers the long nineteenth century, focusing especially on the first part of the Third Republic (1870–1914), and studies how French academic philosophers confronted the discourses about human cognition and behavior that were produced by physicians—namely, physiologists and pathologists, phrenologists, neurologists, alienists, and psychiatrists. It describes how, while engaged in this confrontation, French philosophy took a peculiar shape, eventually influencing the development of some sciences—namely, psychology, which emerged progressively as a discipline at the crossroads of medicine and philosophy. In the second part of the essay, starting from a terminological analysis of a series of terms dealing with “spirit,” I consider the formation of spiritualism by adopting an approach that diverges slightly from the ones proper to history of philosophy and intellectual history. I inscribe the philosophical discourses in their contexts of emergence, paying particular attention to institutional macrostructures and their inertia. This provides another perspective on “spiritualism,” which may no longer be conceived as a current or a school; rather, it should be conceived as the effect of the conditions of possibility of academic philosophy in France. It seems to me that, starting from the beginning of the nineteenth century, because of the organization of the educational institutions, the French philosophers’ agenda consisted mainly in opposing all forms of materialism, mechanism, and determinism and in defending the legitimacy of their discipline.     

Sur les traces de Cortés: L'expédition du Mexique d'après Le Monde illustré

Unlike L'Illustration, with which it competed under the Second Empire, the weekly Le Monde illustré, which first appeared in 1857 and which was protected by the imperial government, did not count among the political newspapers overtaxed under Napoléon the Third's repressive regime. For this reason, it made great strides thanks to its blind allegiance to a French imperialism that had asserted its authority during the Crimean war, but which spent itself during the war against Juárez and his republican partisans in Mexico. While the French liberal press criticized the Second Empire foreign policy, Le Monde illustré persisted in turning the Mexican war into an antijuarist pacification favorable to a new Latin colonial empire, as well as to an application of the Saint-Simonian doctrine on Mexican industry and economy. In order to achieve this, the illustrated reports on the expeditionary force, military operations, and French victories were a warmongering that aimed to place this campaign in the afterglow of the conquistadors' era, as well as to idealize the imperial army as a symbol of the French nation.     

Pierre-Antoine Antonelle and representative democracy in the French Revolution

This article examines the political thought of Pierre-Antoine Antonelle, a prominent democrat during the French Revolution. In pamphlets and newspaper articles between 1795 and 1799 he put forth an elaborate theory of ‘representative democracy’ which was a novel and radical vision of political reform and republican international order. His political and economic plan for a democratic future was focused on conceptualizing a realistic transition path to a genuinely republican society. In the wake of historians who pointed out the existence and importance of the idea of ‘representative democracy’ during the Directory, this article delves into the content of this idea by placing it in the context of Antonelle and his fellow travellers’ political struggle to consolidate the Republic while avoiding both anarchy and aristocracy.     

Partisan identity in the French civil war, 1405–1418: reconsidering the evidence on livery badges

This article examines the efficiency with which John the Fearless used his personal badges during his conflict with Louis of Orleans and the Armagnacs, and questions current thinking on the relationship between the emblems of both parties. As early as 1405, he began distributing emblems that corresponded directly to his ideology: first the carpenter's plane, and from 1410 onwards, his mason's level, two symbols that were representative of his platform for reform. In August 1411, his urban supporters in Paris and elsewhere began wearing crosses of St Andrew, his patron saint, as a means of identifying themselves as Burgundian partisans. This study argues that in making a conscious decision to link his symbols to his ideology, and in making them available to his vassals and urban supporters alike, John the Fearless forged a strong Burgundian community that transcended social barriers. In so doing, he also manufactured an Armagnac anti-community, a tangible entity against which his partisans' animosity was directed from 1411 onwards. As badges of allegiance, the symbols helped fuel a war that had, thus far, remained a private conflict between the princely houses of Burgundy and Orleans.     

Shadow and Light: Louis-Xavier Eyma (1816–76) and French Opinion of the United States during the Second Empire

This article is a study of a neglected yet significant French writer on the United States, Louis-Xavier Eyma (1816–76). In the period of the Second Empire (1852–70), Eyma wrote more about the United States than any other author, and was recognised as a reliable and influential guide to US society. What makes his career particularly interesting is that his work defies any simple categorisation. Whilst elements of his writings smack of anti-Americanism, he wrote with admiration about many aspects of US democracy and society. At the same time, he did not belong to the group of liberal writers who, according to some scholars, used praise of the United States as a coded means of criticising repressive government at home. Eyma was a staunch monarchist who opposed the introduction of democracy in his native France. Eyma's career demonstrates the complexity of French attitudes towards the United States, and points towards the need for a comprehensive study of French writing about the United States in the period of the Second Empire.     

A Colonial Expedition? French Soldiers’ Experience at the Dardanelles

As many French soldiers as ANZACs fought at Gallipoli. Their preconceptions had more to do with colonial campaigning than with the dominant French experience of the Great War — mass mobilisation to defend the nation on home territory. Moreover, a significant proportion of the troops at the Dardanelles were colonial. Yet the French soldiers discovered at Gallipoli a ‘front’ that was part of the mutual siege that ringed Europe and that bore more than a passing resemblance to the front in France. The article explores the experiences and perceptions of the French soldiers facing this paradox.     

The romance of the Inland Isle: Tocqueville's Democracy in America and the landscape of Providence

Nearly two centuries after its publication, Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1990a) remains among the most influential accounts of American political culture. This essay argues that the rhetorical foundation of the Democracy's enduring cultural power is its “imaginative geography” (Said 2000), about which I make two, interrelated claims. The first has to do with the Democracy's identification of the American land with divine Providence. I claim that the providential landscape is the chief means by which Tocqueville contains and organizes the account of the tension between achieved liberty and natural freedom that drives the Democracy. My second focus is on the romantic character of the providential landscape. Cosgrove (2005, p. 302) reflects upon the “tenacity of the island condition on the Western imagination” as frame and vessel of “imagination, desire, hopes and fears.” I argue that the Democracy's “Inland Isle,” as I call it, is a metaphorical island in this sense, and that its theoretical capacity and exhortative power derive from Tocqueville's use of an idiom expressive of a distinctively French tradition of landscape theorizing in which garden metaphor was used to construct meanings of equality and freedom, and voice and identity, in an emerging national, bourgeois order.     

A spatial analysis of human fertility in Scotland: Reappraisal and extension

In an earlier study of Scottish fertility (Jones, 1975) it was concluded that a substantial part of the areal variability in county and major city Crude Birth Rates could be attributed to variations in age structure and, to a lesser extent, socio‐economic composition. Because Crude Birth Rate levels are affected by population composition this study seeks to determine the extent to which areal variations in reproduction can be attributed to behavioural rather than structural effects. It is suggested that areal differences in Scottish reproductive behaviour reflect well defined, deeply ingrained and temporally persistent differences within Scottish society.     

The general will beyond Rousseau: Sieyès’ theological arguments for the sovereignty of the Revolutionary National Assembly

Cultural history's recent treatments of Sieyès’ political theory have understood his political writings in their convergences with and divergences from Rousseau's political theory. By sketching a thoroughgoing analogy between the ecclesiological arguments in Malebranche's Entretiens sur la Métaphysique et sur la Religion (1688) and the arguments that Sieyès offers on the floor of the National Assembly concerning the nature of representation, I suggest that we should recontextualize Sieyès’ speeches vis-à-vis the broader discourse of the ‘general will,’ which was theological at its root. That is, the arguments Sieyès offers for the sovereignty of the National Assembly, separately and in combination, appear to have been shaped by a malebranchiste ecclesiology that grew out of the particular context of the Jansenist challenge to the Church. This argument has ramifications not just for our understanding of Sieyès and revolutionary political theory but also for what have been called the “religious origins of the French Revolution.”     

The cannonade of Valmy

Abstract

The eccentric American zoologist Richard Lynch Garner (1848–1920) spent almost two decades living with Nkomi people in southern Gabon between 1893 and 1918. His essays often discussed the connections between occult beliefs and political change during the chaotic era of concessionary companies in the colony. This period is often seen by historians as a violent period that destroyed pre-colonial political institutions in equatorial Africa. However, Garner described how he engaged with local occult beliefs in ways that reveal the continued use of landlord/stranger relationships in the colony. While Garner employed chemicals and phonographs as a means of gaining authority over his African hosts, Gabonese people sought to incorporate Garner into their communities through healing rituals and boycotts backed by supernatural threats. Although the American constructed Gabonese people as gullible and backward, a close reading of his writings demonstrates how southern Gabonese communities placed Garner and his technology into a long tradition that tied together European wealth, supernatural forces, and rights of local people over foreigners. The nineteenth century Nkomi kingdom might have crumbled, but links between occult forces and political power survived and adapted to the new realities of the early colonial era.