Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France: Volume 1 - Texts and Materials (International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, 246) 303139321X, 9783031393211

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International Archives of the History of Ideas 246 Archives internationales d'histoire des idées

Kirill Chepurin Adi Efal-Lautenschläger Daniel Whistler Ayşe Yuva   Editors

Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France Volume 1 - Texts and Materials

International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d’histoire des idées Founding Editors Paul Dibon Jeremy Popkin

Volume 246

Honorary Editor Sarah Hutton, Department of Philosophy, University of York, York, UK Editor-in-Chief Guido Giglioni, University of Macerata, Macerata, Italy Associate Editor John Christian Laursen, University of California, Riverside, CA, USA Editorial Board Members Jean-Robert Armogathe, École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris, France Stephen Clucas, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK Peter Harrison, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia John Henry, Science Studies Unit, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK Jose R. Maia Neto, University of Belo Horizonte, Belo Horizonte,  Minas Gerais, Brazil Martin Mulsow, Universität Erfurt, Gotha, Germany Gianni Paganini, University of Eastern Piedmont, Vercelli, Italy John Robertson, Clare College, Cambridge, UK Javier Fernández Sebastian, Universidad del País Vasco, Bilbao, Vizcaya, Spain Ann Thomson, European University Institute (EUI), Florence, Italy Theo Verbeek, Universiteit Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands Koen Vermeir, Paris Diderot University, Paris, France

International Archives of the History of Ideas/Archives internationales d'histoire des idées is a series which publishes scholarly works on the history of ideas in the widest sense of the word. It covers history of philosophy, science, political and religious thought and other areas in the domain of intellectual history. The chronological scope of the series extends from the Renaissance to the Post-­ Enlightenment. Founded in 1963 by R.H. Popkin and Paul Dibon, the International Archives of the History of Ideas/Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, edited by Guido Giglioni and John Christian Laursen, with assistance of Former Director Sarah Hutton, publishes, edits and translates sources that have been either unknown hitherto, or unavailable, and publishes new research in intellectual history, and new approaches within the field. The range of recent volumes in the series includes studies on skepticism, astrobiology in the early modern period, as well as translations and editions of original texts, such as the Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Diseases (1730) by Bernard Mandeville. All books to be published in this Series will be fully peer-reviewed before final acceptance.

Kirill Chepurin  •  Adi Efal-Lautenschläger Daniel Whistler  •  Ayşe Yuva Editors

Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France Volume 1 - Texts and Materials

Editors Kirill Chepurin University of Hamburg Hamburg, Germany

Adi Efal-Lautenschläger University of Tel Aviv Tel Aviv, Israel

Daniel Whistler Royal Holloway, University of London Egham, UK

Ayşe Yuva Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne Paris, France

ISSN 0066-6610     ISSN 2215-0307 (electronic) International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d’histoire des idées ISBN 978-3-031-39321-1    ISBN 978-3-031-39322-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39322-8 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

To Peter Whistler

Contents

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Editors’ Introduction: Mutation, Contestation, Hybridisation: Hegel, Schelling and French Philosophy, 1801–1848����������������������������    1 Kirill Chepurin, Adi Efal-Lautenschläger, Daniel Whistler, and Ayşe Yuva

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Translators’ Note�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   21 Daniel Whistler and Ayşe Yuva with Kirill Chepurin and Adi Efal-Lautenschläger

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Landmarks�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   25 Daniel Whistler and Ayşe Yuva with Kirill Chepurin and Adi Efal-Lautenschläger

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French Translations and Editions����������������������������������������������������������  125 Daniel Whistler and Ayşe Yuva with Kirill Chepurin and Adi Efal-Lautenschläger

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Mechanisms of Dissemination����������������������������������������������������������������  143 Daniel Whistler and Ayşe Yuva with Kirill Chepurin and Adi Efal-Lautenschläger

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Chronology of Key Works ����������������������������������������������������������������������  175 Daniel Whistler and Ayşe Yuva with Kirill Chepurin and Adi Efal-Lautenschläger

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Biographical Glossary ����������������������������������������������������������������������������  207 Daniel Whistler and Ayşe Yuva with Kirill Chepurin and Adi Efal-Lautenschläger

Bibliography ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  219 Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  233

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Chapter 1

Editors’ Introduction: Mutation, Contestation, Hybridisation: Hegel, Schelling and French Philosophy, 1801–1848 Kirill Chepurin, Adi Efal-Lautenschläger, Daniel Whistler, and Ayşe Yuva Abstract  This introduction familiarises the reader with the project undertaken in Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France by focusing on the various methodological requirements for its transnational reception-history. Such a methodology should trace the mutations, contestations and hybridisations that constitute the dissemination of Hegel’s and Schelling’s philosophies into France. We argue, in particular, for a renewed method in the history of post-Kantian philosophy which is, firstly, more sensitive to the work of intellectual history and the history of ideas; secondly, as interested in the material processes by which an argument circulates as the validity of that argument itself; and, thirdly, which does away with the canon, as far as possible, in favour of a history of philosophy done in a minoritarian key. Keywords  Transnational approaches · Philosophical transfers · Philosophical sociology · Collaboration · Michel Espagne · Michael Werner · Pierre Macherey

K. Chepurin University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany A. Efal-Lautenschläger University of Tel Aviv, Bar-Ilan University and the Beit Berl Academic College, Tel Aviv, Israel D. Whistler (*) Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK e-mail: [email protected] A. Yuva Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Chepurin et al. (eds.), Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France, International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d’histoire des idées 246, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39322-8_1

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K. Chepurin et al. If there is “French” philosophy, then it must be understood as having been elaborated under conditions analogous to those that have made possible the existence of a French language— a permanent communication and confrontation with foreign forms of expression which have fed it, even as they have been encountered as part of an unstable, unequitable, and conflictual exchange. (Macherey 1990: 8)

1.1 A (Relatively) Forgotten History Ever since, if not before, Judith Butler published Subjects of Desire in 1987, anglophone theory has been obsessed with the story of “the French Hegel”.1 It is a story which has been used to make sense of, among many others, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Catherine Malabou, as well as previous generations, including Georges Bataille and Jean-Paul Sartre.2 And it was canonised in Vincent Descombes’ narrative (2012) of mid-twentieth-century French philosophy as a product of the “three Hs”—Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger. This story of “the French Hegel” typically begins with Jean Wahl’s 1929 Le Malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel, Alexandre Kojève’s Paris lectures on the Phänomenologie des Geistes from 1933 to 1939 and Jean Hyppolite’s first French translation of the Phänomenologie in 1939. And yet, to tell a story of Hegel in France that commences with these events is but to repeat a myth: what it tends to exclude is both the century of Hegel-­ reception in France prior to Wahl’s book and the way this reception history is intertwined with the fate of the other German Idealists (such as Schelling). Indeed, on the first point, even when Bruce Baugh, for instance, entitles an article, “The Early Reception of Hegel in France”, he properly begins his story in the 1900s—consigning the previous hundred years of reactions, interpretations and appropriations of Hegelianism in nineteenth-century France to footnotes (1993a: 261). The aim of the present volume is therefore to contest the myth that has built up within anglophone scholarship that Hegel only became important to French philosophers in the “Hegel-­ renaissance” of the 1930s, and so to tell another story of the reception of both Hegel and Schelling—together—from the beginning of the nineteenth century, through 1815 (the year of the Bourbon Restoration and the reopening of the universities in France) and through 1830 (the year of the July Revolution and the institution of a Cousinian regimen within French philosophical life) to the 1848 Revolution.3 Nevertheless, it is important to stress that anglophone history of philosophy is somewhat anomalous in the extent to which it has endorsed this myth. While the earlier, nineteenth-century reception-history of Hegel and Schelling is not exactly  See, e.g., Baugh (1993b), Baugh (2003), Plotnitsky (1992), Rockmore (2013) and Roth (1988).  See, e.g., respectively, Barnett (1998), Somers-Hall (2012), During (2000), Gasché (2012) and Baugh (2020). 3  In what follows and in the volume as a whole, we use the term “France” as shorthand for “francophone communities”—that is, we are also (and often particularly) interested in the receptions of Hegel and Schelling in liminal Francophone communities, such as Lausanne. See the discussion of “hybridity” below. 1 2

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well-known even in France itself,4 outside of the English language there do exist a variety of histories of French philosophy that have spent a long time telling alternative stories of Hegel’s and Schelling’s reception—from Reymond’s “L’influence de Schelling en France et en Suisse romande” (1954) and d’Hondt’s Hegel et les français (1998) to Oldrini’s Hegel e l'hegelismo nella Francia dell'Ottocento (2001), Puisais’s La naissance de l’hégélianisme français, 1830–1870 (2005), Bellantone’s two-volume Hegel in Francia, 1817–1941 (2006) and Fedi’s “Schelling en France au XIXe siècle” (2018a). Even Jarczyk’s and Labarrière’s De Kojève à Hegel (1996) and Schneider’s Der französischer Hegel (2007) make significant comments on this earlier history. Moreover, there further exist a whole host of exercises in the comparative “sociology of philosophical studies” (Espagne and Werner 1986: 66) presented under the aegis of “across the Rhine”, found in germo in the works of Jean-Marie Carré (1947) and André Monchoux (1965), before flourishing in the works of Michel Espagne and Michael Werner5 and in a series of subsequent collections.6 Even in the anglophone literature, if one looks hard enough outside of mainstream history-of-philosophy publications, one can find, for example, Paul Rowe’s extremely helpful reconstruction of the early Alsatian reception of German Idealism in A Mirror on the Rhine? (2000) or a few pages of global summary in Michael Kelly’s doctoral thesis, Hegel in France (1992).7 These studies exist very much on the margins of philosophy scholarship, and so go hand-in-hand with a more general and prevalent ignorance there of French eclecticisms, spiritualisms and positivisms, outside of familiarity with one or two exceptions like Ravaisson and Comte (see, e.g., Sinclair 2019, Pickering 1993–2009). The customary focus on one partial story of Hegel’s reception (from Wahl to Malabou) has left other stories untold—not just the one we tell in this volume, but French reception-histories of Fichte and Herder, as well as the twentieth-century French reception of Schelling. In this light, Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France aims to acquaint English-language readers with the ways in which debates and concepts from German Idealism were taken up, transformed and sometimes rejected by French philosophers between 1801 and 1848. This includes detailing how Hegel and Schelling's ideas were taken up by philosophers who are relatively familiar to anglophone readers (e.g., Ravaisson and Proudhon), but also by numerous intellectual figures who tend to be overlooked by historians of philosophy (e.g., Bénard, Barchou de Penhoën, Lèbre, Lechevalier, Lerminier, Matter, Amédée Prévost,

 Among francophone philosophers, only a handful have recently taken French thought in the early nineteenth century as a monument equally worthy of study as the “great” German Idealist systems (e.g., Delphine Antoine-Mahut, Annie Petit, Patrice Vermeren, etc.). 5  See especially Espagne (1999, 2004), Espagne and Greiling (1996), Espagne and Werner (1988) and Werner and Zimmerman (2004). 6  See Höhn and Füllner (2002), Lüsebrink and Reichardt (1997), Quillien (1994) and Valentin (1985). 7  Likewise, two English-language annotated bibliographies give passing attention to nineteenth-­ century receptions of Hegel—those of Kelly (1981) and Bohm and Mudimbe (1994). As the above emphasis implies, nothing substantial has previously been published in English on Schelling’s early French reception. 4

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Willm and many others). Specifically, we hope that charting these lines of appropriation or critique will add significantly to the “legacies of idealism” research that has been carried out over the last decade (e.g., Boyle and Disley 2013)—first, by tracing the transdisciplinary encounters of idealism with aesthetic, political and religious debates of the day, and, secondly, by adding a significant transnational dimension to this research-programme and so improving contemporary understandings of the sheer diversity of post-Kantian projects in early nineteenth-century Europe. Hence, many of the chapters that follow in this volume and the second volume grapple with key topics, such as the genesis of the traditional nineteenth-century picture of Hegel as panlogicist and archetypal systematiser; the “idealist” tendencies in eclecticism and spiritualism (particularly via Schelling’s influence); the connection between radicalism, rationalism and pantheism in nineteenth-century French thought; or the importation of aesthetics from Germany into nineteenth-­ century France. From the perspective of the historiography of French philosophy, Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France hopes to furnish a fuller picture of the modern French philosophical tradition as it has fed, in particular, into the better-known vistas of twentieth-century philosophy, so as to give scholars of twentieth-century French philosophy the resources to make sense of the historical controversies out of which canonical philosophies (Bergson’s, Wahl’s, Hyppolite’s, etc.) sprang. More generally still, we hope to describe a primal scene of the “German crisis of French thought” (Digeon 1959) subsequently played out in various anxious encounters with Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger (as well as Hegel, repeatedly).

1.2 Transnational Philosophical Encounters in the Nineteenth Century Unlike many other periods of the history of philosophy, the European nineteenth century continues to be split up into various “national” schools (“German” Idealism, “French” Spiritualism, “British” Utilitarianism, etc.). This is for the most part how nineteenth-century philosophers understood themselves (i.e., according to a volksphilosophische framework by which philosophies express national “spirits”), but it is nevertheless odd that it has been subject to so little interrogation since. Transnational perspectives in the history of philosophy are widespread when it comes to Medieval Scholasticism, early modernity, etc., but philosophical scholarship on the nineteenth century not only remains Western-centric, it also takes the categories of Volksphilosophie at their word to assume that intellectual traditions are constrained by national borders.8  What is at stake here—among many other issues—is the relation between the historical and the philosophical in the history of philosophy. As Gueroult put it, “In its very terms, the notion of the history of philosophy poses a problem. No other expression unites, in the first view of the matter, two concepts that are more contradictory” (1979: 33). Philosophy is considered both independent from its historical genesis and encased within it. And this historical genesis is messy—much mess8

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An obvious example from the mid-twentieth century is Copleston’s History of Western Philosophy, which splits the nineteenth century into three volumes each based on a different national tradition: From Fichte to Nietzsche (1963), From Bentham to Russell (1966) and From Maine de Biran to Sartre (1974). In recent years, histories of early nineteenth-century philosophy have retained similar structures, carving the field into isolated national traditions. For instance, a general volume such as Conway and Schrift’s Nineteenth-Century Philosophy (2014) still tends to divide up chapters nationally (e.g., “French Spiritualist Philosophy”, “Dostoevsky and Russian Philosophy”, etc.). What is more, such bias is reinforced through institutional practices: university teaching similarly splits material on the nineteenth century into national schools, immunising future researchers against transnational perspectives and so replicating the problem across generations. This nationalisation of philosophy demands interrogation. There is “nothing at all natural, nor given, nor obvious, nor universal” in the idea of “French” philosophy (Macherey 2013: 16); no essentially “French” (or “German”) tradition of philosophising; but instead a set of practices and structures produced at a specific time “artificially according to an order imposed by custom”—a philosophie à la française, as Macherey dubs it (2013: 16–17). Indeed, this “French” (or “German”) set of practices and structures is precisely a product of the early nineteenth century, when philosophy became attached to the nation-state and determined by its interests. In short: “The notion of a national philosophy is inseparable from the modern construction of the nation-state” (Fabiani 2010: 183).9 In this context, the above “nation-­focused” approach has two obvious, immediate disadvantages: first, historians become less able to discern what connects various philosophers with different geographical origins (e.g., Cousin and Schelling) by ignoring the transnational intellectual networks that connected them; and secondly, hybrid philosophers who worked “multi-nationally” across traditions, or in the hybrid border zones between nations, slot less easily into scholarly narratives. In other words, this “nation-focused” framework for the geopolitics of early nineteenth-century philosophy is not able to either identify or account for those philosophies of the period that do not fit neatly into a national tradition. This is truer of the category of “idealism” than many other philosophical movements of the period: it was constructed out of transnational debates and practices, and each national tradition that took up such concepts did so with half an eye on their European context. Idealism “as a European category” proves a particularly radical

ier than historians of philosophy usually have time for: it involves hybrid domains of crossing traditions, overlapping translations and cross-fertilizations. 9  More fully, Macherey writes, “One must renounce the myth of French philosophy, in order to recognise the effective existence of a philosophie à la française. By this latter expression, I designate the fact that in France, in very particular historical conditions, there appeared a specific manner of thinking philosophically, not in relation to intemporal conditions of a spirit which would naturally be French, but in relation to the development of philosophical practices themselves inseparable from the formation of a nation-state in France” (1990: 8; see Macherey 1999). On this point, see further Sinclair and Whistler (2023).

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example of the failures of research to overcome its “nation-focused” approach. Moreover, expressions of the need for something more than such a framework is frequently encountered in the texts of the period themselves. In 1835, for example, Barchou de Penhoën prefaced his Histoire de la philosophie allemande depuis Leïbnitz jusqu'à Hegel with a call for “the philosophical alliance of France and Germany” (1836: 1.7) and Joseph Willm argued in his Essai sur les nationalités des philosophies that, on the one hand, “never has there been less of a European philosophy”, but, on the other hand, that it is possible to discern in Franco-German networks of intellectual exchange during the 1830s a coming “together of German and French philosophy” and, as such, the beginning of a “universal philosophy” (1835: xii, xvi–xxii, xliii). Ten years later, there arose a flood of proposals for “a project of intellectual alliance between Germany and France” in the run-up to the 1848 Revolution: French and German socialists, like Louis Blanc (1843) and Arnold Ruge (1845), led calls to collaborate on projects, such as, most famously, the Deutsch–französische Jahrbücher (see Calvié 2004, Körner 2003). Moreover, not only did categories like “idealism” but also such central political-philosophical terms as “socialism” and “communism” come to function across national borders and national traditions—not to mention key political-theological terms such as “pantheism” which, in the eyes of its nineteenth-century detractors and supporters alike, operated both transhistorically and transnationally. Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France hence attempts, in one minor way, to break with the above-rehearsed “nation-focused” paradigm that dominates the historiography of nineteenth-century philosophy. This attempted break is inevitably partial and incomplete—first, because the perspective of this volume remains all-too Eurocentric; and secondly, because the very focus on the French reception of German Idealism cannot but provide a nationally inflected perspective on the transnational philosophical contexts of the time (even the term “transnational” still partially presupposes a national prism). Still, by looking at the various Franco-German alliances and hybrids of the period, we hope to draw attention to modes of philosophising that disrupted national traditions. We do not have to mechanically apply national borders to philosophy. What is called “French” or “German” philosophy does not in some way precede transnational encounters, as some internally constituted identity, but is typically constituted precisely through such exchange (as Macherey suggests in the epigraph to this introduction).10 We want to suggest that the intellectual crossing of national borders in the early nineteenth century was not just incidental, but central to how the philosophical

 See further Gross et al. (2019), Landrin (2009). One should keep in mind, too, that the modern post-Westphalian idea of a national “spirit” dwelling within the borders of a nation-state was employed by Herder and the Romantics to re-mediate the world of the global, or the variety of human Geist (of traditions and historical forms of life) around the globe. As such, the notion of applying national borders to philosophy was itself formed within a global and transnational (if Eurocentric) horizon, and the idea of national “spirits” is fundamentally relational or mediational, not isolationist, in its origin and character. 10

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enterprise of the period was conceived; and so a transnational historiographical approach is necessary to make sense of it. Of course, more needs to be done: lines of thought that have been marginalised by the “nation-focused” paradigm include not only those Alsatian and Swiss philosophers who saw themselves as mediators between French and German traditions (Goschler, Lagarmitte, Lèbre, Lerminier, Matter, Ott, Pictet, Amédée Prévost, Secrétan, Weill, Willm)11, but also, for example, those who lie well outside the remit of this volume, such as the Germanophone Czech or Bohemian philosophers based in the Austrian Empire who attempted to continue the Left Hegelian enterprise in a Slavic context. Nevertheless, this does not mean that, in order to analyse these texts and practices, we must affirm some indeterminate whole named “European philosophy”. While much could be said for the “internationalist” strain of thought that arose in France during the 1820s as a sublimated version of Napoleonic conquest with new models for confederative cooperation (in the wake of the failure of Napoleon himself), it remains true that the category of Europe should solely interest the historian of ideas when understood as a set of heterogeneities, not as a homogeneous space of spiritual unity. For example, Bertrand Binoche (2007: 329) has made a compelling case for the obstacles any idea of “a spiritual Europe” throws up for a comparative history of philosophies. As the above suggests, to take a transnational approach is to switch attention to those overlooked philosophers who resist in some small way national intellectual traditions (even if they also indirectly constitute them). And, just as in the case of the border lines between national traditions generally, it remains surprising that so much institutional pressure is still applied to preserving a view in which canonical “great” philosophers are studied at the expense of so-called “minor” figures, who have been no less significant in constituting or disrupting philosophical traditions. Indeed, part of what is at stake in this volume, particularly in Volume One, is an initial move towards reversing this tendency and doing the history of post-Kantian philosophy without a canon, to upend any idea that philosophy curricula should orient themselves around stationary and fixed models that are thereby determined as “objects” worthy of our study.12 This is fundamentally a question of the imbalance between traditional conceptions of the “great” German systems and “minor” French philosophies, and the very artificiality of their separation. In his Études de philosophie “française”, Macherey (2013: 17) focuses on the notion of “hybridisation” as central to making sense of nineteenth-century French philosophies, particularly in their appropriations and misappropriations of German philosophy. He suggests that expressions of a hybrid identity found in French philosophy of the period should be regarded as “productive recourses, that is to say, operations that are susceptible to analysis and generative of a new meaning”. The nineteenth century was not first and

 This is a thesis pushed by Reymond (1954), in particular, in focusing on an “Alsatian strand” and “a Swiss strand” in Schelling’s early reception-history. 12  Even if our title—in the privilege it grants Hegel and Schelling—still makes some concession to the traditional approach. 11

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foremost the century of a purified “German” philosophy but consisted of multiple series of hybridised objects (see Binoche 2013: 7).13 In other words, what might it look like to do the history of nineteenth-century philosophy with the sorts of dynamic, partial and hybrid objects of study that come into view from a transnational perspective? I.e., what might it look like to do the history of this philosophy in a resolutely minoritarian key?14

1.3 Hybrid Stories At some point early on in the nineteenth century, France began to think of recent German philosophy as an event of international significance. It came to be assumed that at the end of the eighteenth century something had happened in Germany which French intellectuals needed to come to terms with and to catch up on. To reckon with German Idealism—to “try it on for size”, so to speak—was an intellectual fashion and the pages of the Revue des Deux Mondes or the Revue encyclopédique, for instance, testify to this. Moreover, this encounter with Germany was necessarily staged under the rubric of the difficulty—and sometimes the impossibility—of translation. As Macherey has argued, the idea that French philosophers had to speak their own language—a language that German philosophers did not speak (and vice versa)—was a relatively new one at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and a direct consequence of philosophy’s new position at the heart of the nation-state. In place of a philosophical French that was, for much of early modernity, the language of intellectual Europe—the language of the universal, of a communication that crossed borders fluently—there now arose a French that exclusively indexed a particular philosophical standpoint. In Macherey’s words,

 One implication is that more work is also needed on the ways in which philosophy in Germany itself was a transnational, hybrid product. 14  Once again, it is worth stressing that for anyone working in the history of ideas, intellectual history or even any other chronological period of the history of philosophy than the nineteenth century, there is little that is radical in this question. However, an intellectual sub-discipline, like the history of post-Kantian philosophy, tied so tightly to ready-made canonical texts “liberated” from histories of the book, of publishing practices and of academic structures calls for a rejoinder like the following imperative from Binoche for a renewed approach that “would take as its object minor figures [les mineurs]—that is, authors who have been academically devalued as ‘small’ philosophers and even as not philosophers at all… Such an approach can only be understood if one immediately takes one’s distance from the ‘great authors’ retained by the university as alone worthy of interest and if one condemns the historian for taking as her exclusive object the respectful reconstitution of venerable systems which are juxtaposed like so many magnificent cathedrals communing in the same love of truth, or indifferent to every outside, entirely enclosed on themselves and their hermetic splendour” (2013: 6). 13

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In the new situation created after 1800, at the moment when in France the post-­revolutionary era began, the fact of doing philosophy in the French language had to take on a new ­meaning: it now implied the creation of a style of thought specifically adapted to the conditions of a “French” expression, that is, the constitution of a philosophy which not only speaks in French, but speaks French. (1990: 10)

This philosophical event by which different philosophical traditions became attached to various languages gave rise to new intellectual difficulties: it was no longer to be taken for granted that a philosopher might be able to have access to any text or be able to understand it.15 A set of “difficulties of international philosophical communication” arose that did not exist before (D’Hondt 2005: 9), and, with them, a new set of hermeneutic criteria such as clarity, obscurity and depth as linguistic, not just conceptual categories (see Macherey 1990: 9). This is one reason why most French commentaries on German Idealism in the nineteenth century were prefaced with a lament upon German philosophical obscurity—both linguistic and conceptual—and an insistence on the very different stylistic norms dominant in France.16 Even Willm, bilingual and author of a four-volume work on German Idealism, still insists that Hegel is “the most untranslatable of writers” (1846–9: 4.383) and Bénard, Hegel’s only named translator before 1848, admits that “a complete and literal translation would be barbarous and unintelligible” (in Hegel 1840–52: 1.vi). Auguste Ott’s comment that Hegel wrote “an indecipherable algebra in an obscure language” is representative of the era (1844: 528). Two strategies were possible to overcome this difficulty: first, to give up on presenting anything but a generalised, popular account of Hegel’s and Schelling’s doctrines on a superficial level, explicitly renouncing communicating the intricacies of dialectical movement; or, secondly, to affirm Franco-German intellectual collaboration on the basis of a reimagining of ways in which philosophising could transcend linguistic givens. Moreover, this transcendence of national givens could be conceived either from the perspective of a geographic universalism (e.g., with reference to a philosophical “Europe”, as discussed in the previous section) or a geographic singularity, such as the hybrid identities of Alsatian and Swiss thinkers on the borders between France and Germany. These philosophers were often bilingual, educated on both sides of the Rhine and removed from centres of intellectual and institutional power (Paris, Berlin, Munich).17 They were philosophers operating on the “cultural fringes” (Espagne and Werner 1987: 975), and Alsatian Strasbourg, in particular, functioned as “a cultural melting pot due to its very particular linguistic, confessional and political characteristics”, as well as distinct publishing and academic structures (Espagne

 This is a structural transformation that Willm emphasises repeatedly in his 1835 essay on the nationality of philosophies (discussed in §4.1.6). 16  This is further complicated by the fact that French commentators on Hegel and Schelling were not always reading the primary texts, but responding to other commentaries and even reporting hearsay, rumour and unauthorised notes (particularly when it came to Schelling’s unpublished later work). 17  Fedi labels this their “transfrontalière erudition” (2018a: 16; see Espagne and Werner 1987: 975). 15

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and Werner 1987: 981).18 Hence, while these liminal thinkers in Alsace and elsewhere were typically “quite obscure” (see Fedi 2018a: 16),19 it is precisely this “obscurity” that, among other things, allowed them to explore ideas outside of nationally determined intellectual orthodoxies and to take up identities explicitly defined by a transnational project (in, for example, the Nouvelle revue germanique or the Société encyclopédique des bords du Rhin). Their hybridity in many ways made possible the more generalised concept of hybridity Macherey invokes according to which French philosophies of the period were “hybrid” or even “eclectic” mixtures—impure all the way down. This is more than an issue of the transposition of German concepts into a French context or even of a study of influences; what is fundamentally at stake in this hybridity is the principle that reception is inherently deformation and recreation (as well as, in some instances, the letting die of unappropriated ideas). Reception involves attitudes of aggression, puzzlement and bemusement far more often than affirmation or even fascination. French philosophers mutated German philosophy; hence, to study them is to insist on conceptual deviations as constitutive, to embrace D’Hondt’s axiom that “ideas change colour in crossing frontiers” (1971: 3), and so to develop “a sociology or social history of intellectual movements and currents of thought which have passed from one cultural space to another with all the sometimes instructive deformations that this type of phenomenon can engender” (Werner 1985: 278). This notion of “instructive deformations” should indeed be central, and this is what Espagne and Werner hammer home in one of their most programmatic statements: “The problem of cultural transfers is traditionally determined by the question of authenticity of influence, [e.g.,] whether Villers understood Kant… However, what, in fact, matters is a reversal of this question—passing from the question of the object to the question of function, from the question what to the question how”, such that “a model comes to be constructed in which fidelity or infidelity lose their pertinence” (Espagne and Werner 1987: 284). The point is that we should not continue to practise a method founded on any framework of centre and periphery, in which a “German centre” radiates out into French margins. As Espagne (2013) has shown, these Franco-German exchanges of the period exemplify a process of “reinterpretation”, rather than mere “circulation”  In the volume below, we make similar claims for Lausanne at the start of the 1840s (see §3.5.4 below), and they could perhaps also be made of Geneva which through P. A. Stapfer’s patronage saw Adolphe Pictet and Amédée Prévost take up a mediating role as early as the 1820s. It is also worth emphasising that in the 1830s there were in fact two distinct “Strasbourg schools” concerned with German-French intellectual borders: the group gathered around the Nouvelle revue germanique and Willm, which was friendly to Cousin and relatively hospitable to German Idealism, and the group based at the University’s Philosophy Faculty where Bautain held a chair, which was hostile to Cousin and so opposed to the importation of German philosophy. The first group worked at the border to make it more porous; the second did so to police it. 19  Puisais, for one, celebrates our “evident lack of knowledge of [this tradition’s] authors and their works”, using it as an opportunity to map the contours of the “less familiar… other face” of the nineteenth century (2005: 22). Nevertheless, he still retains reference to the “great men” of the philosophical canon (2005: 23–4) against whom these obscure figures are necessarily to be defined. 18

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or “influence”, compelling us to give up on any idea of the superiority of an original archetype.20 He is clear, “A transposition, however distant it may be, has as much legitimacy as the original” (2013: 3). “Reception” is not a passive process in which French thinkers are reduced to a kind of receptacle or mirror; on the contrary, it is evident from what follows that French encounters with German texts, proceeding by operations of selection and hierarchization, produced a philosophical “constellation” in the sense that Henrich (1992) gave the term. To put it another way: we are implicitly contending that Henrich’s analysis of the production of “German” Idealism through “constellations” needs extending across national borders, in order to create what Espagne and Werner dub “a topography of transfers” (1987: 988). The study of marginal texts in other languages, of transnational exchange-networks and of the “soft diplomacy” of institutional practices (from the appointments of corresponding fellows and official study trips to translations and essay prizes) makes it possible to consider the production of idealisms anew and break open the (national) silos within which canonical “great authors” are too often confined.21 In consequence, there is no single method to be employed when telling the story of Franco-German constellations in the early nineteenth century. Nevertheless, it has become clear that any analysis of philosophical arguments needs supplementation by an analysis of material exchanges—along the lines of the “cultural transfer” model developed by Espagne. This equally necessitates a move away from any idea of the original (German) text acting as a norm against which to measure the “success” of the (French) interpretation: it is not particularly interesting, in the context of this volume, to know whether Schelling's or Hegel's philosophy was really “pantheist”. The “pantheism controversy” is, instead, a very helpful example of transnational re-imaginings in the nineteenth century: while it originated from Germany, the controversy soon took on very different forms in France and Italy (even while the association of pantheism with atheism, nihilism, and absence of freedom, advanced by Jacobi in the German context, persisted in a transnational manner). In this way, what matters is understanding which concepts and interpretative  The “cultural transfers” model has also proven influential in the field of translation studies—and subsequently been enriched by an understanding of translations across national borders that, apart from one or two exceptions (e.g., Roig-Sanz and Meylaerts 2018), now does away with any centre-­ periphery framework (see, e.g., Göpferich 2007; Leerssen 2014). 21  This method is what Binoche calls the “other history of philosophy… the blind spot of our professional day-to-day work” (2013: 7). The practice of this “other history” has been most fully theorised (in a slightly different context) by Fabiani, who insists, “Philosophy is not populated just by a collection of texts, connected by the thread of tradition. It also incorporates objects, places and practices. It includes all receptions, even the least orthodox. Like any other type of work, philosophy-­texts presuppose different appropriations in space and time, learned and bad readings… Concepts have a social life” (2010: 17). See further Valpione (2022) for a series of arguments for the importance of incorporating this critical study of philosophical institutions into the practice of the history of post-Kantian philosophy. It is worth further bearing in mind that the French texts in question here were themselves often writing histories of modern German philosophy and so employed their own historiographical methods (see Piaia 2022: 358–9). Moreover, in turn, these methods have sometimes come to determine practices of history of philosophy and history of ideas today—see Kelley (2002: 9–64). 20

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operations made possible particular uses of Schelling’s and Hegel’s philosophies, and how they went on to become the objects of subsequent controversy. As Werner and Zimmermann have insisted when developing their method of “histoire croisée” (2003), it is necessary to go beyond a determinate philosophical exchange to account for triangulations, e.g., how the names of Hegel and Schelling are appropriated by so many French philosophers (from Lerminier and Leroux onwards) as a proxy for Victor Cousin and “his” version of their philosophies. Something similar to the above has been suggested in an anglophone context by Sarah Hutton (2014; see Kramer 2004) when arguing for a reformed disciplinary practice on the borderline between history of philosophy and intellectual history. However, perhaps its most pertinent elaboration is Jean-Paul Cotten’s contention that early nineteenth-century French philosophies can only be treated according to “an impure history of philosophy” that foregrounds the “politics of philosophy” at stake in the philosophies of the period through an approach that is “at the same time historical and theoretical” (1992: 207, 212). That is, while Cotten reaffirms the need for “an immanent analysis” of philosophical arguments, doctrines and texts as “indispensable”, he also considers it “never sufficient”: it further requires “historical conjecture” concerning the consolidation of philosophical institutions in post-­ revolutionary France, as well as, in a transnational context, “a history of philosophical diplomacy” or, more precisely, “philosophico-political diplomacy” (Cotten 1992: 161, 192, 201). For Cotten, such a history of philosophy is necessarily impure, because it “mixes together” these various methods, oscillating between disciplines to make sense of French philosophy (1992: 208–9). Following Cotten and Hutton—as well as Espagne and Werner—we are interested, in addition to philosophical argumentation, in the specific roles that translations, scientific academies and publishers played in the construction of Franco-German philosophies, i.e., not only the question, “Which cross-border collaborations generated philosophical developments?”, but also: “How were such collaborations established?”, “What socio-political factors facilitated this?” and “And what role did official research structures, such as academies, play in this exchange?” Of course, much more work needs to be done in the anglophone scholarship to answer these questions: the present volume has a number of limits, including geographical ones and chronological ones. It also necessarily suffers from the propensity of comparative-philosophy approaches to privilege noise over silence and so fails to accurately represent the ways in which Hegel and Schelling were staunchly ignored by many French philosophers of the period.22 To put it another way, there is no implicit claim here that Hegel and Schelling were major sources for nineteenth-­ century French philosophy; or put yet another way: this volume should not be used as the basis of a faithful picture of the landscape of early nineteenth-century French philosophy, even if we hope it might contribute to one.

 As Bellantone stresses in this context, “Even the absence of Hegel represents a choice” (2011: 1.14). 22

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1.4 Subjective Idealism and Absolute Idealism in France The scope of the volume announced in the title, Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France, immediately raises three questions that help further orient what follows: (1) Why place Hegel and Schelling together? (2) Why just Hegel and Schelling, but not Kant and Fichte (or others)? (3) Why limit the scope to (roughly) 1801 to 1848, i.e., to just the early nineteenth century? The answers to the first two questions are bound up together in the contingencies of the francophone reception of German Idealism. Broadly speaking, the reception-­ histories of subjective idealism and absolute idealism in France were different, but, within the latter, Schelling’s and Hegel’s philosophies were—at least until the late 1830s—understood as two related versions of the same project, often generically dubbed, the “philosophy of nature” or “philosophy of identity”. 23 Kant’s critical philosophy had been introduced into France relatively early24: Charles Bonnet penned a series of notes on the Kritik der reinen Vernunft before his death in 1793 (Müller and Pozzo 1988) and a couple of Kant’s more minor philosophical works, including the Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen, were translated in 1796.25 However, the major figure in Kant’s early reception-history is Charles de Villers, who from his privileged position in Göttingen penned a series of works between 1798 and 1801 that were determinative for French interest in early German Idealism for generations: Notice littéraire sur M. Kant et sur l'état de la métaphysique en Allemagne au moment où ce philosophe a commencé d'y faire sensation (1798); a summary of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, entitled simply Critique de la raison pure (1799), and Philosophie de Kant, ou Principes fondamentaux de la philosophie transcendentale (1801). It was because of Villers’ work that, for instance, Cousin could expect his audience to follow a whole lecture course given at the Sorbonne in 1818 on the exposition and critique of Kant’s philosophy. The story of Fichte in France is less easy to pin down (see Philonenko 1997): for example, despite obvious similarities, Maine de Biran knew little of Fichte’s work and none of it first-hand (Radrizzani 1997b, 2023). Nevertheless, Cousin is once more a helpful witness, since some of his earliest writings from around 1816 are framed as rebuttals to what he sees as the nihilistic implications of Fichte’s treatment of the I as an absolute (e.g., Cousin 1833: 242–52) and bear little resemblance to his negotiations with Schelling and Hegel a few years later. Cousin’s narrative is not the only one: for earlier protagonists (Staël, Degérando, Ancillon), Fichte and Schelling are associated very closely as heirs to Kant (while Hegel goes largely unnoticed). However, a few years later, it is Cousin’s rather dogmatic division between the “subjective idealism” of Kant and Fichte and the “objective  For example, when Cousin wishes to praise both Hegel and Schelling in the same breath, he calls them “the leaders of the philosophy of nature” (see Cousin 1833: xli). 24  See, e.g., Azouvi and Bourel (1991), Bourel (1994), Bonnet (2011) and Fedi (2018b). 25  See §4 below for full details of French translations of Kant before 1848 (along with those of Fichte, Hegel and Schelling). 23

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idealism” of Schelling and Hegel that becomes widespread in France and goes on to hold the two sets of thinkers apart in French philosophical consciousness during much of the rest of the nineteenth century.26 It is frequently expressed, for example, through the idea that Schelling “reversed” Fichte’s philosophy—in its content, attitude, style and method (e.g., Barchou de Penhoën 1836: 2.104–5). As Bellantone has noted (2011: 1.132), one of the most frequent topoi of French discussions of German Idealism at this period (alongside complaints about obscurity) “was the distinction which opposed Kant-Fichte to Schelling-Hegel”. The story of Kant in France and the story of Fichte in France are different stories, involving different time periods, different obstacles and sometimes different protagonists—they deserve, that is, a different volume. This is why we have chosen not to include them. On the other hand, for the first few decades of their reception-history, Schelling and Hegel were regularly mentioned in the same breath. Of course, hints of Schellingian philosophy were disseminated in France slightly earlier than Hegel’s, but, through Cousin in particular, the two came to be identified as co-representatives of one philosophical “school”—the twin emblems of the “new German school” of philosophy. Throughout the 1820s and 1830s, Hegel and Schelling were typically read as saying the same thing (the principle of identity or, more polemically, pantheism) with different emphases—Hegel’s logical and conceptual, Schelling’s mystical and intuitive. Louis Prévost supplies a representative example: “Hegel is pantheist in the same way as Spinoza and Schelling, for, in his work, there is an internal unity, a communal essence in relation to which individuals are only accidents. Call this unity substance or idea, call it God—it doesn’t matter. The words do not change the nature of things. Schelling’s pantheism is poetic, Hegel’s is logical—this is their entire difference” (1844: 296–7). Particularly visible in this regard was a stress on Hegel’s discipleship27: one of the constant features of the various “family trees” of German Idealism proposed in France during this period was Hegel’s position as an offshoot from Schelling’s early philosophy. Leroux provides the most radical version of this position: “Schelling [was] the very father of German philosophy; for his masters, Kant and Fichte, were evidently only his precursors, and undertook only to prepare the movement he gave [philosophy] and which he propagated directly to Hegel, to Krause, to Oken, to Baader, to the Schlegels, to all literature, and to all the science of Germany” (1982: 25). Schelling is, Leroux puts it elsewhere, “like a great oak out of which all scientific Germany has formed branches” (1982: 14). For Leroux, the German Idealist “family tree” begins and ends with Schelling, and all subsequent German intellectual productions, Hegel’s included, are merely variations on Schellingianism. Ultimately, it was Schelling himself who contributed most towards shattering the illusion of his and Hegel’s fundamental agreement, with the publication of his  The “massive” influence of this distinction on French German Idealism scholarship from Cousin into the early twentieth century is often bemoaned in the French scholarship, among Fichteans especially—see, e.g., Ragghianti and Vermeren (2018: 40); Radrizzani (1997a: 7). 27  E.g., Cousin (1833: xli), Leroux (1982 [1842]: 14) and Lèbre (1843: 6) all use the term “disciple” to describe the Hegel-Schelling relation long after Hegel’s death. 26

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“beurteilende Vorrede” to Cousin’s Fragments philosophiques, twice translated into French in 1835 and again in 1842. This work made clear the extent to which the later Schelling’s philosophy was engaged in a critique of Hegel—and was greeted by many, including, most notably, Ravaisson and Leroux, as a way to revitalise the legacy of German Idealism in France in a non-Cousinian mode. As a result, during the 1840s, Schelling’s philosophy became associated with spiritualism, Christian revelation and divine transcendence in a way that Hegel’s philosophy was not, and, in addition, criticisms of Hegel were frequently made by way of Schelling’s late philosophy. This suggests once more the need to bind Hegel’s and Schelling’s names together in any story of their early nineteenth-century French reception.28 Things were very different from the 1850s onwards. Both Hegel and Schelling drifted further into the margins of French philosophical discussion, but Schelling far more so than Hegel. Any account of the reception-history of German Idealism in late nineteenth-century France could certainly not pretend that Schelling held a significant place, outside of a few discussions in manuals on the history of philosophy (e.g., in Delbos 1893). On the contrary through later iterations of the pantheism controversy and Vera’s extensive programme of Hegel-translations, Hegel re-­ emerged as a divisive figure in French consciousness during the 1870s. During much of the Second Empire, though, there was, in Oldrini’s phrase, a “liquidation of Hegelianism” in France (2001: 145). This is the main reason for ending this volume in 1848: the subsequent period would require a different approach that focused on polemics over Hegel alone which were accelerated with the outbreak of the 1870 Franco-Prussian War.

1.5 Structure Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France consists of two volumes. The first volume attempts to provide the reader new to the reception-history of Hegel and Schelling in early nineteenth-century France with materials and resources necessary to gain some overall familiarity with it. Not only is nineteenth-century French philosophy frequently overlooked terrain for anglophone historians of philosophy, but also the protagonists of our story are, as we have discussed above, often  Noticeably, however, during the first half of the nineteenth century, the rhythms (as it were) of Hegel’s and Schelling’s receptions in France remain different—coming to the fore and receding into the background of French philosophical consciousness at different times. As Puisais has noted (2005: 61–6), Hegel’s reception is closely correlated, if not determined by political structures: after the first mentions of him in 1804, Hegel is completely absent from French discussion until 1817— dates which “correspond approximately to the period of Empire” (2005: 61); during the Restoration, Hegel’s fate is tied almost exclusively to Cousin’s concealed forms of appropriation; before becoming an explicit subject of discussion from the very moment of the July Revolution onwards. On the other hand, Schelling’s reception undergoes peaks that correspond to his own philosophical itinerary, e.g., when he breaks his “silence” to respond to Cousin in 1834 and when he arrives in Berlin in 1841. 28

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so-called “minor” figures who had the freedom, time and competence to grapple with German Idealist texts outside of the constraints of Parisian intellectual life. Hence, it focuses on providing the textual summaries, biographical information and intellectual context necessary to orient the reader through this thicket of half-known names and books. It is here, above all, that we gesture towards the methodological imperative outlined above: to supplement analysis of philosophical argument with its material conditions, and to do so by attending to the journals, editions, translations, academic prizes, corresponding fellowship appointments and research trips that made the philosophising possible. The main body of the present volume consists of five chapters, each of which adds to our retelling of the network of ideas and their material conditions at stake in this reception history. Chap. 3, “Landmarks”, rehearses the narrative from the history of ideas of this French reception, thereby introducing the anglophone reader to some of the more established controversies, such as Cousin’s use of Hegel in his 1828 lecture course, Lerminier’s accusation of plagiarism, the arrival of Hegelian radicalism in Paris at the turn of the 1840s and the growing institutional distrust of absolute idealism in the run up to the 1848 Revolution. To this end, it consists of six sections narrating, first, the beginnings of this reception in Villers, Degérando, Staël and others; secondly, Cousin’s eclectic reception of Hegel and Schelling; thirdly, the attempt to escape the eclectic monopoly on the interpretation of German Idealism in Lerminier, Heine and Leroux; fourthly, the increasingly fraught debates around pantheism and political radicalism that emerged in the wake of Hegel’s reception by the Saint-Simonians, the German émigré-population in Paris, Proudhon and the Catholic Right; fifthly, the “resurrections”, as Leroux put it, of Schelling’s philosophy at play in francophone philosophy during the 1830s and 1840s, whether in Ravaisson, Leroux, Lamennais or Secrétan; and finally, the various relationships established between absolute idealism and academic philosophy in the run up to the 1848 Revolution in the work of Bénard, Vera, Taine and Saisset. Subsequent chapters then catalogue the series of translations of Schelling’s and Hegel’s work that were published in mid-nineteenth century France, then the journals and encyclopaedia-­projects that were largely responsible for disseminating their ideas and subjecting them to critique, the role of the prize-essay competitions of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques in stimulating further debate over the value of German philosophy and the various forms of research visit and epistolary network that further supported this reception history. The final chapters of the volume provide a relatively exhaustive chronological list of the French publications which discuss Hegel and Schelling between 1800 and 1848 and a biographical glossary of the figures involved in their reception history.29 The second volume goes on to provide a series of extended studies on particular moments in this reception-history, including the pantheism debate, Cousin’s history of philosophy, Proudhon’s theory of economic contradiction and Bénard’s  Each chapter contains a bibliography of works explicitly cited in that chapter. However, a general bibliography is to be found at the end of the volume which includes all works mentioned, as well as cited, in the volume. 29

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Hegel-­translations. In general, however, it is by means of all the interventions collected in both volumes one and two that we and the contributors aim to redress the serious neglect in the anglophone scholarship of both early nineteenth-century French philosophy and the story of Hegel and Schelling in France prior to the advent of Wahl, Kojève and Hyppolite.30

Bibliography Azouvi, François, and Dominique Bourel. 1991. De Königsberg à Paris: La Réception de Kant en France (1788–1804). Paris: Vrin. Barchou de Penhoën, Auguste. 1836. Histoire de la philosophie allemande depuis Leibniz jusqu’à Hegel, 2 vols. Paris. Barnett, Stuart, ed. 1998. Hegel after Derrida. London: Routledge. Baugh, Bruce. 1993a. Limiting Reason’s Empire: The Early Reception of Hegel in France. Journal of the History of Philosophy 31 (2): 259–275. ———. 1993b. Hegel in Modern French Philosophy: The Unhappy Consciousness. Revue Laval théologique et philosophique 49 (3): 423–438. ———. 2003. French Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernism. London: Routledge. ———. 2020. Hegel and Sartre: The Search for Totality. In The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Existentialism, ed. Jon Stewart, 499–522. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bellantone, Andrea. 2006. Hegel in Francia, 1817–1941, 2 vols. Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino. ———. 2011. Hegel en France, 1817–1941, 2 vols. Trans. Virginie Gaugey. Paris: Hermann. Binoche, Bertrand. 2007. La raison sans l’histoire: Échantillons pour une histoire comparée des philosophies de l’Histoire. Paris: PUF. ———. 2013. Quelle histoire, de quelle philosophie? In Pierre Macherey, Études de philosophie “française”, 5–14. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. Blanc, Louis. 1843. D’un projet d’alliance intellectuelle entre l’Allemagne et la France. La Revue indépendante 11: 40–67. Bohm, A., and V.Y.  Mudimbe. 1994. Hegel’s Reception in France. Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 6 (3): 5–33. Bonnet, Jean. 2011. Dé«kant»ations: Fonctions idéologiques du kantisme dans le XIXe siècle français. Oxford: Peter Lang. Bourel, Dominique. 1994. Les premiers pas de Kant en France. In La réception de la philosophie allemande en France aux XIXe et XXe siècles, ed. Jean Quillien, 11–26. Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille. Boyle, Nicholas, and Liz Disley, eds. 2013. The Impact of Idealism: The Legacy of Post-Kantian Thought, 4 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Butler, Judith. 1987. Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. New York: Columbia University Press. Calvié, Lucien, ed. 2004. Arnold Ruge: Aux origines du couple franco-allemand. Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail. Carré, Jean-Marie. 1947. Les écrivains français et le mirage allemand, 1800–1940. Paris: Boivin. Conway, Daniel, and Alan D. Schrift, eds. 2014. Nineteenth-Century Philosophy: Revolutionary Responses to the Existing Order. London: Routledge.

 We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers of an earlier version of the two-volume manuscript and particularly to Sarah Bernard-Granger for their comments and suggestions which improved this work immeasurably. 30

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Copleston, Frederick. 1963. A History of Western Philosophy, vol. 7: Fichte to Nietzsche. London: Search Press. ———. 1966. A History of Western Philosophy, vol. 8: Bentham to Russell. London: Search Press. ———. 1974. A History of Western Philosophy, vol. 9: Maine de Biran to Sartre. London: Search Press. Cotten, Jean-Pierre. 1992. Autour de Victor Cousin: Une politique de la philosophie. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Cousin, Victor. 1833. Fragments philosophiques. 2nd ed. Paris: Ladrange. D’Hondt, Jacques. 1971. Hegel et les socialistes. La Pensée 157: 3–25. ———. 1998. Hegel et les Français. Hildesheim: G. Olms. ———. 2005. Préface. In Eric Puisais, La naissance de l’hégélianisme français, 1830–1870, 7–10. Paris: L’Harmattan. Delbos, Victor. 1893. Le problème moral dans la philosophie de Spinoza et dans l’histoire du spinozisme. Paris: Alcan. Descombes, Vincent. 2012. Modern French Philosophy. Trans. L.  Scott-Fox and J.M. Harding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Digeon, Claude. 1959. Le crise allemande de la pensée française (1870–1914). Paris: PUF. During, Lisabeth. 2000. Catherine Malabou and the Currency of Hegelianism. Hypatia 15 (4): 190–195. Espagne, Michel. 1999. Les transferts culturels franco-allemands. Paris: PUF. ———. 2004. En deçà du Rhin. L’Allemagne des philosophes français au XIXe siècle. Paris: Cerf. ———. 2013. La notion de transferts culturels. Revue Sciences/Lettres 1: 1–21. Espagne, Michel, and Werner Greiling, eds. 1996. Frankreichfreunde. Mittler des deutsch-­ französischen Kulturtransfers (1750–1850). Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag. Espagne, Michel, and Michael Werner. 1986. Les correspondants allemands de Victor Cousin. Hegel-Studien 21: 65–85. ———. 1987. La construction d’une référence culturelle allemande en France: genèse et histoire (1750–1914). Annales 4: 962–992. ———. 1988. Transferts. Les relations interculturelles dans l’espace franco-allemand. Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les Civilisations. Fabiani, Jean-Louis. 2010. Qu’est-ce qu’un philosophe français? La vie sociale des concepts (1880–1980). Paris: Éditions EHESS. Fedi, Laurent. 2018a. Schelling en France au XIXe siècle. Les cahiers philosophiques de Strasbourg 43: 13–80. ———. 2018b. Kant, une passion française, 1795–1940. Hildesheim: Georg Olms. Gasché, Rodolphe. 2012. Georges Bataille: Phenomenology and Phantasmatology. Trans. Roland Végső. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Göpferich, Susanne. 2007. Translation Studies and Transfer Studies. A Plea for Widening the Scope of Translation Studies. In Doubts and Directions in Translation Studies, ed. Y. Gambier et al., 27–39. Amsterdam: Benjamins Publishing. Gross, Austin, et al. 2019. Philosophy and Nations. In Philosophy and Nations: Essays from the Radical Philosophy Archive, ed. Austin Gross et al., vol. 2, 3–15. London: Radical Philosophy. Gueroult, Martial. 1979. Philosophie de l’histoire de la philosophie: Dianoématique. Vol. 2. Paris: Aubier. Hegel, G.W.F. 1840–52. Cours d’esthétique, 5 vols. Trans. Charles Bénard. Paris: Joubert. ———. 2005. Esthétique: Cahier de notes inédit de Victor Cousin, ed. Alain Patrick Olivier. Paris: Vrin. Henrich, Dieter. 1992. Konstellationen. Probleme und Debatten am Ursprung der idealistischen Philosophie (1789–1795). Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Höhn, Gerhard, and Bernd Füllner, eds. 2002. Deutsch-französischer Ideentransfer im Vormärz. Bielefeld: Aisthesis. Hutton, Sarah. 2014. Intellectual History and the History of Philosophy. History of European Ideas 40 (7): 925–937.

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Jarczyk, Gwendoline, and Pierre-Jean Labarrière. 1996. De Kojève à Hegel: Cent cinquante ans de pensée hégélienne en France. Paris: Albin. Kelley, Donald R. 2002. The Descent of Ideas: The History of Intellectual History. London: Routledge. Kelly, Michael. 1981. Hegel in France to 1940: A Bibliographical Essay. Journal of European Studies 11: 29–52. ———. 1992. Hegel in France. Birmingham: Birmingham Modern Languages Publications. Körner, Axel, ed. 2003. 1848—a European Revolution? Basingstoke: Macmillan. Kramer, Lloyd S. 2004. Intellectual History and Philosophy. Modern Intellectual History 1 (1): 81–95. Landrin, Xavier. 2009. L’éclectisme spiritualiste au XIXe siècle: Sociologie d’une philosophie transnationale. In Le commerce des idées philosophiques, ed. Louis Pinto, 29–65. Paris: Croquant. Lèbre, Adolphe. 1843. Crise actuelle de la philosophie allemande. Revue des Deux Mondes, new series 1 (1): 5–42. Leerssen, Joep. 2014. Networks and Patchworks: Communication, Identities, Mediators. Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 92 (4): 1395–1402. Leroux, Pierre. 1982. Discours de Schelling à Berlin / Du cours de philosophie de Schelling / Du Christianisme, ed. Jean-François Courtine. Paris: Vrin. Lüsebrink, Hans-Jürgen, and Rolf Reichardt, eds. 1997. Kulturtransfer im Epochenumbruch. Frankreich- Deutschland, 1770–1850. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag. Macherey, Pierre. 1990. La philosophie à la française. Revue des Sciences philosophiques et théologiques 74 (1): 7–14. ———. 1999. Y a-t-il une philosophie française? In Histoires de dinosaure: Faire de la philosophie, 1965–1997. Paris: PUF. ———. 2013. Études de philosophie “française”. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. Monchoux, André. 1965. L’Allemagne devant les lettres françaises: De 1814 à 1835. Paris: Armand. Müller, Gerhard H., and Riccardo Pozzo. 1988. Bonnet critico di Kant due Cahiers Ginevrini del 1788. Rivista di Storia della Filosofia 43 (1): 131–164. Oldrini, Guido. 2001. Hegel e l’hegelismo nella Francia dell’Ottocento. Milan: Guerini. Ott, Auguste. 1844. Hegel et la philosophie allemande, ou exposé et examen critique des principaux systèmes de la philosophie allemande depuis Kant, et spécialement de celui de Hegel. Paris: Joubert. Philonenko, Alexis. 1997. Fichte en France. In Fichte et la France, ed. Ives Radrizzani, vol. 1, 11–34. Paris: Beauchesne. Piaia, Gregorio. 2022. Historicism and Eclecticism: The Age of Victor Cousin. In Models of the History of Philosophy, vol. 4: The Hegelian Age, ed. Gregorio Piaia, Giuseppe Micheli, and Giovanni Santinello, 341–434. Dordrecht: Springer. Pickering, Mary. 1993–2009. Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography, 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Plotnitsky, Arkady. 1992. In the Shadow of Hegel: Complementarity, History, and the Unconscious. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Prévost, Louis. 1844. Hegel. Exposition de sa doctrine. Toulouse: Labouïsse-Rochefort. Puisais, Eric. 2005. La naissance de l’hégélianisme français, 1830–1870. Paris: L’Harmattan. Quillien, Jean, ed. 1994. La réception de la philosophie allemande en France aux XIXe et XXe siècles. Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille. Radrizzani, Ives. 1997a. Préface. In Fichte et la France, ed. Ives Radrizzani, vol. 1, 2–10. Paris: Beauchesne. ———. 1997b. Maine de Biran: un ‘Fichte français’? In Fichte et la France, ed. Ives Radrizzani, vol. 1, 107–140. Paris: Beauchesne. ———. 2023. La réception de Fichte en France au XIXe siècle. Les Cahiers philosophiques de Strasbourg 53.

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Ragghianti, Renzo, and Patrice Vermeren. 2018. Introduction. In Victor Cousin, Philosophie morale (1819–20), 3–53. Paris: Garnier. Reymond, Marcel. 1954. L’influence de Schelling en France et en Suisse romande. Studia Philosophica 14: 91–111. Rockmore, Tom. 2013. Hegel in France. In The Bloomsbury Companion to Hegel, ed. Allegra de Laurentiis and B. Jeffrey Edwards, 321–328. London: Bloomsbury. Roig-Sanz, Diana, and Reine Meylaerts, eds. 2018. Literary Translation and Cultural Mediators in “Peripheral” Cultures. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Roth, Michael S. 1988. Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France. New Haven: Cornell University Press. Rowe, Paul. 2000. A Mirror on the Rhine?: the Nouvelle revue germanique, Strasbourg 1829–1837. Oxford: Peter Lang. Ruge, Arnold. 1845. Über die intellektuelle Allianz der Deutschen und Franzosen. In Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, 301–353. Mannheim: Grohe Verlag. Schneider, Ulrich Johannes, ed. 2007. Der französischer Hegel. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Sinclair, Mark. 2019. Being Inclined: Félix Ravaisson’s Philosophy of Habit. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sinclair, Mark, and Daniel Whistler. 2023. The Institutions of Modern French Philosophy. In The Oxford Handbook of Modern French Philosophy, ed. Mark Sinclair and Daniel Whistler. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Somers-Hall, Henry. 2012. Hegel, Deleuze and the Critique of Representation: Dialectics of Negation and Difference. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Valentin, Jean-Marie, et al., eds. 1985. De Lessing à Heine. Un siѐcle de relations littéraires et intellectuelles entre la France et l’Allemagne. Paris: Didier. Valpione, Giulia. 2022. Philosophy and its Institutions: Politics at the Heart of the Canon. Hegel Bulletin 43 (3): 353–370. Villers, Charles de. 1798. Notice littéraire sur M. Kant et sur l’état de la métaphysique en Allemagne au moment où ce philosophe a commencé d’y faire sensation. Le Spectateur du nord (April). ———. 1799. Critique de la raison pure. Le Spectateur du nord (April). ———. 1801. Philosophie de Kant, ou Principes fondamentaux de la philosophie transcendentale. Metz. Wahl, Jean. 1929. Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel. Paris: PUF. Werner, Michael. 1985. A propos de la réception de Hegel et de Schelling en France pendant les années 1840. In De Lessing à Heine. Un siѐcle de relations littéraires et intellectuelles entre la France et l’Allemagne, ed. Jean-Marie Valentin et al., 277–291. Paris: Didier. Werner, Michael, and Bénédicte Zimmermann. 2003. Penser l’histoire croisée: entre empirie et réflexivité. Annales 58 (1): 7–36. ———. 2004. De la comparaison à l’histoire croisée. Paris: Seuil. Willm, Joseph. 1835. Essai sur la nationalité des philosophies. In F.W.J. Schelling, Jugement de M. Schelling sur la philosophie de M. Cousin. Trans. J. Willm, v–xliii. Levrault: Paris. ———. 1846–9. Histoire de la philosophie allemande depuis Kant jusqu’à Hegel, 4 vols. Paris: Ladrange.

Chapter 2

Translators’ Note Daniel Whistler and Ayşe Yuva with Kirill Chepurin and Adi Efal-Lautenschläger

Abstract  This short note summarises the intent of the following chapters in the volume: to help readers gain an introductory overview of how Hegel’s and Schelling’s philosophies were circulated, transformed and subjected to critique in France from 1801 to 1848, with a focus on enumerating the various figures, publications and mechanisms of transmission at stake. It further records and justifies the major translation decisions made in the volume, especially in the context of the various translation-strategies for German Idealism already being developed in early nineteenth-century France. Keywords  Translation decisions · Spirit · General · Concept · Literalism The following chapters are intended to help readers gain an introductory overview of how Hegel’s and Schelling’s philosophies were circulated, transformed and subjected to critique in France from 1801 to 1848. Hence, the focus of this initial volume is on enumerating the various figures, publications and mechanisms of transmission (i.e., both the ideas and the material conditions) that led to Hegelian and Schellingian arguments and concepts, as well as the very names “Hegel” and “Schelling”, becoming the object of discussion in France during these years.

D. Whistler (*) Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK e-mail: [email protected] A. Yuva Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected] K. Chepurin University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany A. Efal-Lautenschläger University of Tel Aviv, Bar-Ilan University and the Beit Berl Academic College, Tel Aviv, Israel © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Chepurin et al. (eds.), Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France, International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d’histoire des idées 246, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39322-8_2

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That is, rather than undertaking interpretations of these materials and entering into scholarly debate over their meaning (as the essays in Volume Two do), this volume provides a propaedeutic by giving readers a sense of the material shape of the reception of absolute idealism in France up until the 1848 Revolution. To this end, what follows—and particularly the “Landmarks” chapter—takes the form of a sourcebook and primer. We have tried as much as possible to let the primary sources speak for themselves through short extracts embedded in a historical narrative with as little interpretative scaffolding as possible. This will, we hope, allow readers to immerse themselves more fully in the debates as they unfolded. As we noted in the introduction above, this book is about translation—both the conceptual translation of philosophical concepts over national borders and the linguistic translation of texts and terms from German into French. This situation is further complicated by the aim of what follows: to provide English translations of the material. Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France thus passes through three languages, charting the fate of texts produced in German as they come to be encountered in French and subsequently translating them into English. That is, our own practice as translators and editors adds substantially to the transnational context already present in the subject matter. What makes these lines of transmission across three languages even more interesting is that the linguistic relations between the German and French texts at stake occurred during a period when many of the norms surrounding philosophical translation across national languages were in their infancy (it had only been a century since major philosophical works began appearing less regularly in Latin). In particular, French conventions for the terminology of Kantian and post-Kantian philosophies were very much in the process of being worked out. Hence, while a stable glossary of concordances between German, French and English words might be a tempting addition to this project, it would to some extent cover over the turbulence palpable in the linguistic choices being made by French philosophers in the first half of the nineteenth century. When it came to translation, this was a period of experimentation, of hesitancy and often of bemusement. The constant refrain that Hegel (in particular) was untranslatable1 is a symptom of this, so too are the very different translation strategies on display. To take an extreme example: the first two French translators of Hegel had opposed approaches. On the one hand, an anonymous translator of extracts from the Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts attempted to retain a word-for-word correspondence between the German and the French and, on the other hand, Charles Bénard, in his translation of the lectures on aesthetics, adopted a much looser approach (see §4.2.1 and §4.2.2 below). Hence, when it comes to the noun, die Selbstbestimmung, the anonymous translator invents the neologism, “l’autodiorisme” (from the Greek diorismos) (Hegel 1832: 79), whereas Bénard opts for the more relaxed “la détermination de soi-même” (Hegel 1840–52: 1.82) and similarly for the noun, der Selbstzweck, the anonymous translator invents

 See p. 9 in the Introduction above for examples of this sentiment.

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“l’autoscope” (from the Greek skopos) (Hegel 1832: 76), whereas Bénard uses the more laconic “être son but à lui-même” (Hegel 1840–52: 1.52). Practically, one implication of the above is that, in the translations that follow, we have not aimed to apply an overly rigid concordance of terms between the languages, but respected the idiosyncracies of each new approach to the problem of rendering Schelling’s and Hegel’s philosophies outside of German. There is of course much terminology that does translate easily across the three languages, particularly the more abstract nouns derived from Latin and Greek such as der Idealismus—l’idéalisme—idealism or die Metaphysik—la métaphysique— metaphysics. The triad der Begriff—la notion—concept is one further instance where, despite the very different etymologies, there is a relatively unproblematic concordance across the three languages. However, as is to be expected, there are plenty of examples where terms from the three language do not correspond neatly. To take two famous examples: while der Geist and l’esprit share a similar semantic range, there is no English equivalent—and so we have indicated the French original whenever translating l’esprit as “mind” rather than as “spirit”. In a similar vein, while German and English both distinguish in analogous ways between die Wahrnehmung—perception and die Apperzeption—apperception, for some French philosophers (e.g., Cousin—but not Maine de Biran) l’aperception can both signify non-­technical “perception” generally and recall technical discussions of “apperception” in Leibniz and Kant. In this instance, we have attempted to convey the primary resonance in our English translation. The nature of some correspondences varies across different philosophers. A good example is the relationship between général and allgemein—for some, the two terms are synonymous; for others, “universel” corresponds to specifically post-­ Kantian uses of “allgemein”, whereas “général” is reserved for forms of comprehensivess that mark out a difference from German philosophy. We have therefore preserved the distinction and kept général as “general” in our translations. This is also the case where there is a suspicion that a philosopher might have (deliberately or not) misunderstood the German original: most obviously in Ancillon’s refusal to distinguish the transcendental from the transcendent, i.e., his indiscriminate use of “transcendant” for both; and so too in Barchou de Penhoën’s fairly idiosyncratic reconstruction of Schelling’s Erster Entwurf, where the temptation would be to standardise it through reference to existent English translations of Schelling’s writings. Nevertheless, we also wish to stress that the below translations aim primarily at accessibility and readability, rather than serving as a substitute for the critical English-language editions that, in so many cases, are sorely lacking. To this extent, we have translated for clarity, altering punctuation and sentence structure on a few occasions. We have also, as mentioned, tried to keep the accompanying scholarly apparatus and scaffolding to a minimum and avoided employing notes to give a running commentary on our translations. In line with contemporary anglophone philosophical tastes (as opposed to traditional anglophone translation decisions), we have avoided capitalisations (e.g., “the absolute”), except, of course, when the French original is capitalised. The major exception is “Spirit” which we have retained in its

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traditional Hegelian capitalised form where relevant. Finally, we have for the most part attempted to render our translations as gender-neutral as possible, with the exception of traditional religious imagery, e.g., concerning the Incarnation, where the language of “man” felt unavoidable. A few further notes will help the reader find their way around the rest of the volume. First, translations of the French titles of works are given in Chap. 6, but not in earlier sections, so as to avoid breaking the flow of the narrative. Secondly, readers should keep in mind throughout that Chap. 6 (“Chronology of Key Works”) and Chap. 7 (“Bibliographical Glossary”) provide much of the background, contextual and sometimes introductory detail to help flesh out the initial synoptic narrative told in Chap. 3.

Bibliography Hegel, G.W.F. 1832. Système d’Hegel sur l’État. Trans. Anon. Revue européenne 5: 73–88. Hegel, G.W.F. 1840–52. Cours d’esthétique, 5 vols. Trans. Charles Bénard. Paris: Joubert.

Chapter 3

Landmarks Daniel Whistler and Ayşe Yuva with Kirill Chepurin and Adi Efal-Lautenschläger

Abstract  This chapter is intended to provide some introductory orientation concerning what the Hegelian and Schellingian reception in France looked like. It tells a chronological story of its development with a focus on some of its key moments or landmarks, including Germaine de Stäel’s De l’Allemagne, Victor Cousin’s journeys to Germany, Pierre Leroux’s radical appropriation of Schelling, the pantheist critique of Hegel and Hyppolite Taine’s early flirtation with Hegelianism. It is, therefore, meant to resume some of the standard reference points for any understanding of this topic. Keywords  Spiritualism · Eclecticism · Perfectibility · Dialectic · Soul · Matter · Victor Cousin · Pierre Leroux · Eugène Lerminier · Heinrich Heine · Augusto Vera · Félix Ravaisson

3.1 Beginnings When Kant’s philosophy entered French intellectual consciousness at the turn of the nineteenth century—primarily through Charles de Villers’ 1801 Philosophie de Kant—Schelling’s name came up in close association with Fichte’s, as one of Kant’s D. Whistler (*) Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK e-mail: [email protected] A. Yuva Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected] K. Chepurin University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany A. Efal-Lautenschläger University of Tel Aviv, Bar-Ilan University and the Beit Berl Academic College, Tel Aviv, Israel © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Chepurin et al. (eds.), Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France, International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d’histoire des idées 246, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39322-8_3

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successors. Hegel’s name first appears a couple of years later in 1804, but he is merely mentioned in passing as Schelling’s collaborative partner—a derivative offshoot from Schelling’s master-system. To put it crudely, France will only discover Hegel as a distinctive philosophical voice in 1817 with Cousin’s visit to Germany and, even then, he will be constantly paired with Schelling until at least 1835. This lack of attention given to Hegel in his own right is further indexed by an orthographical instability infecting his very name during these years: across authors, he passes from “Hugel” to “Ègel” to “Hégel” to “Hegel”. Hence, the early reception of absolute idealism in France, from 1801 to 1817, is mainly a story of various interpretations of Schellingian philosophy, often as part of engagements with Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy more generally. The protagonists of these early encounters either have strong personal connections to German intellectual culture (Villers was based at the University of Göttingen, Friedrich Ancillon was a Berlin Huguenot) or they discover it through travel and interpersonal mediation (Germaine de Staël toured Germany, first in 1804 with A. W. Schlegel as guide, and then in 1807–8; Joseph Marie Degérando married into a germanophone family). Moreover, what these authors shared was the idea that the progress of philosophy in France after the revolutionary period depended, to some extent at least, on a detour through Germany and familiarity with its contemporary philosophical developments. And yet, this felt need to appropriate German philosophy was in no way uncritical: while German philosophers are praised—in explicit opposition to eighteenth-century French philosophers—for a return to interiority and the “spiritual” (in some sense), Schelling’s philosophy, in particular, is taken to be unable to grasp morality, individuality and finitude. Even this early in the French reception, the charge of pantheism and the disregard for the finite become recurrent themes in evaluations of Schelling’s thought.

3.1.1 Before 1805: Villers to Degérando Charles de Villers makes the first philosophically significant mention of Schelling in French in his 1801 Philosophie de Kant,1 as part of his call for a critique of the supposed materialism of eighteenth-century French philosophy. For Villers, eighteenth-­century philosophy was a speculative excess in need of tempering, just like the excesses of the French Revolution. And it is in the context of what to do with the concept of “matter” after materialism that Villers turns to Schelling and his attempt to overcome the classical opposition between matter and spirit, so as to conceive of matter as more than an inert, externally determined thing: When transported into a theory of things as they should be in themselves, these ideas of matter and spirit [esprit]—simple manifestations of our way of knowing that have reality only for us—cause confusion and hinder all progress. What is a force, for example? Is it

 French titles mentioned in the below are systematically given English translations in §4 below.

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matter? Is it spirit? […] Isn’t it time to reject the remnants of the old physics, and adopt broader and healthier ideas? For fifteen years our neighbours have been discussing such points: Schelling’s speculative physics, although conceived in a sense that differs from Kant’s, in that it goes far beyond it, will become a landmark in the philosophy of nature; but it seems that a good book has more difficulty crossing the Rhine than an Austrian army. (Villers 1801: 202–3)

It is in 1804, however, that a more substantial discussion of Schelling—as well as the first mentions of Hegel—occur in Francophone literature. First, in the January issue of the Archives littéraires de l’Europe, Geoffroy Schweighäuser penned an article on “the current state of philosophy in Germany” that provides a history of the various post-Kantian systems which culminates in a battle between Schelling’s (and Hegel’s) speculative system and Jacobi’s common-sense personalism (see D’Hondt 1994: 58). Schweighäuser opts in favour of the latter, but nevertheless provides the following summary of “this system of Schelling and Hegel” (1804: 203): Fichte’s school has been replaced by Schelling’s. This new master, who is both a metaphysician and a naturalist at the same time, began by extending and developing his predecessor’s ideas by applying them to the natural sciences, but it was only a little while before he declared his opposition. Schelling has been reproached for almost always failing to decide between idealism, realism and even materialism. However, it is possible to respond that he has done so only to make use of the latitude accorded to the most recent system which the author himself calls a realist idealism or an idealist realism. […] One will be astonished to see in his work a general physics deduced a priori from certain propositions that are given like axioms of thought; one will become dazed, feeling oneself, so to speak, carried far from the earth by the audacious wings of this author and viewing experimental physics as some nebulous region that must quickly be  transcended in order  to arrive at true insight. […] Schelling has added something to Fiche through a method that, today, his followers proclaim as the sole true one; it consists in treating the universe as a synoptic table [tableau], to constantly oppose facts contrary to each other; and to seek the general fact, the common principle that reunites them. This general fact is, then, once more conceived as secondary and opposed to yet another [fact], on the assumption that a still more general fact will encompass the first two; and one should continue this process for as long as possible. By this operation which the author himself compares to  the integral calculus and to which he has given mathematical forms, he ends up arriving at an originary unity in which thought and matter, rest and motion, existence and nothingness are united. […] His originary unity is neither God nor matter, it is both of them; we distinguish nothing in it, it is a mathematical point, but it becomes everything by the hand of the speculator; from it is born the universe by an evolution which knows no limit. (Schweighäuser 1804: 197–200)

Schweighäuser concludes by surveying what he considers to be the religious excesses of Schelling’s followers (including Schleiermacher), who, he claims, appropriate all sorts of Christian imagery to express this primal indifference. 1804 also saw the first appearance of a far more influential account of Schelling’s philosophy in Joseph Marie Degérando’s 1804 Histoire comparée des systèmes de philosophie. Schelling himself never approved of Degérando’s reconstruction of his thought (he complains to Cousin, “Indian mythology cannot be more confusedly represented in the most pitiable work than my system was in Degérando’s comparative history” [Cousin and Schelling 1991: 243]); nevertheless, it was this interpretation that became normative for much of his French reception. Generally, four of its features define the later reception: (a) the emphasis Degérando places on Schelling’s

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1800 System des transzendentalen Idealismus and its parallelism thesis (mind and nature emerge from absolute identity as two parallel attributes) (see Fedi 2018: 17); (b) his comment that, while Schelling does not possess “a sharp and prudent reason”, his philosophy “at least” has the virtue of “an energetic imagination”, i.e., his philosophy is more poetic than rigorous (Degérando 1804: 2.317); (c) the charge of obscurity, i.e., that the German Idealists are complicated and hard to understand (Degérando 1804: 1.31); and (d) the invocation of pantheism, i.e., Schelling’s philosophy is a Spinozist “extension” of Fichtean Idealism (Degérando 1804: 1.331–332). Degérando had long been interested in contemporary developments in modern philosophy, corresponding with his future wife, the germanophone Alsatian Marie-­ Anne de Rathsamhausen, on the German intellectual scene in the late 1790s; and his interest in German philosophy was particularly remarkable to his French contemporaries—as one acquaintance put it, “Degérando seems to be seriously occupied with German literature and philosophy” (J.  F. Reichardt, in Hassler 1994: 75). In the 1804 edition of Histoire comparée des systèmes de philosophie this interest in recent German philosophy is incorporated into a broader attempt to reconcile past systems through a renewed Lockeanism, which, he argues, has a better claim to bring about philosophical peace than Kant’s supposed synthesis of empiricism and rationalism. To show Kant’s failures, he turns to post-Kantian developments in Fichte and Schelling—their quarrels and one-sidedness offer proofs of the failure of the Kantian project: The only positive result that critical philosophy has yet produced has been to successively give birth to several unanticipated systems, which only it could have engendered and which in their turn have brought about new revolutions and divided the Kantian school into many sects animated in their various controversies. […] We have seen that criticism, in its origin, was a kind of transcendental idealism, associated with an experimental realism. […] A need was soon felt to give it another character. Fichte, Schelling, Bouterweck reduced it to a mere practical realism, with the difference that the first two associated it with an idealism and the latter with an equally transcendental scepticism; Bardili, on the contrary, raised it to the dignity of a rational realism. Hence, some have diminished, others have augmented the uncertain role ascribed to the reality of knowledge by the great founder of the critical school. (Degérando 1804: 2.269–270)

Ultimately, Degérando understands idealism (in a much narrower sense than Staël will) as an epistemology, and so places Schelling’s philosophy in continuity with Fichte’s, “which deduces everything from the thinking subject” (1804: 2.297). According to Degérando, Schelling tried to solve the perennial problem of the existence of external objects by postulating an “absolute reason” beyond the opposition of the subjective and the objective (1804: 2.303–318). The following text is where Degérando establishes this interpretation at length and, it is important to note that, in contrast to much of the subsequent Schelling-reception, it is filled with precise citations of Schelling’s work—a long series of footnotes quoting and translating passages from Schelling’s System des transzendentalen Idealismus and Zeitschrift für spekulative Physik (not reproduced here):

3 Landmarks Schelling soon understood that transcendental idealism was called to a higher destiny [than Fichte had realised], and he drove it there, casting aside in the process Fichte’s consideration or tolerance for common sense, leaving behind the world that exists for one’s eyes as a kind of given. He transcended all the crutches borrowed from empiricism and did not even accord [empiricism] the least introductory function in philosophy. Instead, he raised himself to the originary absolute: he abstracted from the thinking subject as well as from the thing which is thought. He established himself in complete indifference to these subjective and objective [elements]—something which greatly agitated the Kantian school, and he gave this indifference the name, absolute reason. Thus having arrived at a completely new degree of abstraction, he was able to achieve a more elevated gaze over science; he was able to perceive and bring together things that Fichte, more interested in developing the details, had been unable to comprehend; he saw a mass of wonderful things. He saw that philosophy in general is nothing but the free imitation, the free repetition of an original series of actions in which an act of consciousness unfurls; that philosophical skill does not only consist in being able to freely repeat this series, but above all in being able—in the midst of this free repetition—to obtain some consciousness of the primitive necessity of these actions; that the problem of theoretical philosophy is to explain how the idea of unlimited activity in the I can become limited; that the highest idea of philosophy is the absolute identity of thought and extension, of the ideal and the real. He saw two general sciences, previously isolated—philosophy of nature and transcendental philosophy—which, although starting from opposed positions, seek out each other, encounter each other, penetrate each other and are identified with each other. He saw idealism and materialism mutually penetrate each other in the same way, such that the subjective and the objective have nothing but a relative difference between them: matter, in his eyes, is now nothing but intellect which obscures itself, and intellect but matter which illuminates itself. He saw the I show itself first of all as something infinite, as a non-being which has only negative properties, to then posit a limit to itself by an absolutely free and absolutely necessary act; sensation results from this self-envisaging of the I as limited. He saw consciousness produced by the struggle of two activities opposed in their directions—one eccentric, the other concentric, one ideal, the other real—both, moreover, equally infinite, enclosing an infinity of actions. He has been present at every site of this combat, described them, and, at the moment when these two contrary forces seemed primed to reciprocally annihilate themselves, he has seen them suddenly remove this danger through a third mediating activity, which finds the means to prolong the struggle by identifying the combatants. He saw history under an aspect which, until his work, had not been available to philosophers; it is presented to his eyes as the idea of an infinite progressivity [progressivité], as the constant realisation of a certain ideal, in an entire species of beings. It continually approaches its ideal; but the moment when it attains it, it cannot itself be demonstrated by either experience or theory; it is solely an article of faith in the belief of the one who acts. [...] “Nature being the consciousness of what is deprived of consciousness and intellect being consciousness of what is accompanied by consciousness,” universal consciousness of what is, or is not, when repeated by this same act, comprehends, for Schelling, all that exists; it constitutes absolute reason. The equal and absolute reality of nature as intellect and of intellect as nature, demonstrated in all their aspects, led him to this final stage of total co-penetration, born from all [the previous] contrasts, which properly forms the essential character of the system of absolute identity. This originary and infinite I, source of all reality as of all science; this utter freedom with which it is endowed; this productive power by which it creates itself and then creates all of nature; this new region discovered beneath the ordinary senses of human beings—this may perhaps not satisfy a strict and prudent reason, but at least does satisfy an energetic imagi-

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D. Whistler et al. nation. And are not systems as often destined for the needs of the imagination as for those of reason! In this way, we can explain how Fichte’s and Schelling’s systems have been able to excite the enthusiasm of an ardent and industrious youth. The extreme severity of the forms they have adopted, the very aridity of their expositions has ended up nicely concealing from the imagination the role it has undertaken in this work, and such a poetry expressed in the language of the highest abstractions has come to be taken as a science. (Degérando 1804: 2.306–18)

Particularly striking at the end of this passage is Degérando’s emphasis, mentioned above, on Schelling’s science of the imagination and of poetry: this will go on to influence the French Hegel-reception too, supplying a typical framework for understanding what is distinctive about Hegel’s project in opposition to Schelling’s (reason vs. imagination, logic vs. inspiration).

3.1.2 Ancillon Friedrich Ancillon was a German Huguenot, based in Berlin but with strong connections to France. Known primarily as a historian (and elected a foreign member of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques on that basis), Ancillon explicitly saw himself as aspiring to mediate between French and German traditions, but from an insider German point of view. Thus, he writes, Placed between France and Germany, belonging to the former by the language in which I hazard to write and to the latter by my birth, my studies, my principles, my affections and, I dare say, by the colour of my thinking, I would desire to be able to serve as a literary mediator or a philosophical interpreter between the two nations. (Ancillon 1832: 10)

This claim is based, moreover, on a broader conception of the nature of French and German philosophy that Ancillon reflected on in an 1832 “preface containing a parallel between German philosophy and French philosophy”. It neatly sets up the traditional opposition between the German and French traditions which informs French reflection during the entire nineteenth century. Ancillon writes, Although Germany and France are next to each other and the relations between the two sets of inhabitants have been numerous, nothing resembles each other less than French literature and German literature; and nothing is more opposed than the philosophy of the two nations. In the former, experience sits on the throne; in the latter, pure reason. They differ in means as well as goal, and as they do not share a starting point, they cannot meet each other in their reasoning nor arrive at the same results. (Ancillon 1832: 4)

He concludes from this in a way that anticipates Cousin’s eclectic project: The two systems result from an exaggeration of a true idea. Because they proceed by the path of exclusion, they possess only half-truths; they are true in what they admit, but false in what they reject. Everything begins with sensation, or everything appears to begin there, but it does not follow from this that everything results from [sensation] or even that everything consists in it. (Ancillon 1832: 8–9)

What is of more specific interest is Ancillon’s essay on “the most recent systems of German philosophy” first published in his 1809 Mélanges de littérature et de

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philosophie (and subsequently reprinted in the 1832 work above). Where Ancillon goes beyond Degérando in his reading of Schelling is by emphasising the prominence of intellectual intuition in Schelling’s account, i.e., how Schelling’s step beyond the opposition between subject and object described by Degérando is bound up with a concept of intellectual intuition as what grasps “absolute existence”. This leads him to insist on an opposition (rather than a mere distinction) between Fichte’s “transcendent idealism” (Ancillon makes no distinction throughout between the “transcendent” and the “transcendental”) and Schelling’s philosophy of nature in a way that neither Degérando nor Staël do, but that will be key to the later French-­ reception. In the section, “Presentation of critical philosophy, transcendent idealism, the philosophy of nature”, to which he appends a footnote that reads, “Kant, Fichte, Schelling, are the authors of these three systems [respectively]. I will name them here just once in a dissertation that should be about things and not people”, Ancillon writes, Idealism had made the object disappear, but there could still be doubts about the nature and value of the processes by which the subject grasps or posits itself. The transcendent reality of the self could be attacked; the self, in the principles of critical philosophy, was only a phenomenon in its own eyes, and only had reality in its mystical marriage with the object; the subject, as a determinate subject, could hardly pertain to existence itself in all its purity. The author of the philosophy of nature went one step further, and the subject which had denied the object any independent existence, which had stripped it and destroyed it so as to have the honour of producing it, this subject itself disappeared. According to the philosophy of nature, it is no longer a question of examining whether things outside us have real existence, or rather whether there is something outside us; but it is a question of knowing whether we ourselves are a real object, in the transcendent sense of that word. Pure truth is not absolute subjectivity, absolute subjectivity is not pure truth; object and subject are correlates that assume each other, and as soon as one of these two terms is removed, the other disappears with it. Truth lies only in absolute existence; there is only one existence—one, eternal, unchanging. […]. By an act called intellectual intuition, we grasp absolute existence; this existence is God, the principle of unity and happiness. This existence is one; to affirm it is to know it, to know it is to affirm it. […] There is a perfect identity between knowledge and existence; there is also a perfect identity between form and matter; but we cannot help but admit in absolute existence a true antithesis, that of unity and plurality. What is this antithesis, and where does it come from? Being, as a perfect unity, must manifest itself, and cannot manifest itself in itself; it cannot therefore manifest itself or reveal itself as a unity, it must therefore necessarily be itself and other than itself; it is a kind of magic bond that unites it and another. […] Thus, real and absolute existence consists in the bond that joins unity and plurality: unity as unity, plurality as plurality do not exist properly; there is only the copula, that is, pure and simple existence. These are the main results of the philosophy of nature in its most recent form. (Ancillon 1809: 2.142–5)

Ancillon continues that Schelling ultimately fails, because he begins with “universal existence”, rather than a “determinate existence” (Ancillon 1809: 2.170). Like Spinoza, Ancillon claims, Schelling fails to explain individuality, i.e., the transition from the absolute to individual existence. Ancillon presents Schelling’s failings in terms of “three doubts” about “the fundamental basis of transcendent idealism and the philosophy of nature.” The “first doubt” concerns the nature of

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existence, that “nothing is prior to existence”, leading to the consequences that, first, “one cannot demonstrate any existence without already admitting a given existence, much less demonstrate existence in general” and that, secondly, “it would be madness to try to define existence—existence is simple and indivisible.” The “second doubt” focuses on the idealist attempt to define universal existence: “But do we know what universal existence is, and can we attach any meaning to this expression?” Ancillon continues, It can be known, say the authors of the new systems, by abstracting from all individual and determinate existences, or rather by annihilating them, and then one grasps the unique, eternal, universal existence through intellectual intuition. I also believe that existence is an internal, immediate perception, and that is basically what the authors of the new systems call intellectual intuition. […] But this immediate perception of existence gives us our existence, and gives us nothing beyond it. (Ancillon 1809: 2.171–2)

Finally, Ancillon’s “third doubt” concerns the relation between universal and individual existence in the German Idealists. He writes, In the systems of transcendent idealism, as in that of the philosophy of nature, the one and unchanging being, God, must reveal or manifest itself. In the first case, […] this existence is divided and subdivided into a multitude of existences, which are all reflections of being. In the second, perfect unity gives birth to plurality, or opposes itself to plurality, because it cannot manifest itself as perfect unity; and this is how, in transcendent idealism, the universe is born, and in the other system, nature. Here we can ask: if there is only one absolute, immutable and universal existence, and if everything that seems to exist does not exist, why does this existence emerge from its holy darkness, or rather from its unalterable and pure light, to manifest itself and reveal itself? To whom does it manifest itself, since it alone exists? Does it need to manifest itself to itself? And how can it manifest or reveal itself? (Ancillon 1809: 2.176–7)

Ancillon concludes by positioning contemporary German philosophy as a whole on the side of the inner life and the soul in a gesture that anticipates Staël’s De l’Allemagne. When reading German philosophy, he writes, “one cannot avoid a feeling of admiration for this inner life, this life of thought that forms a distinctive feature of the national character and genius of the Germans. Here is the true greatness and dignity of human nature.” This is, he continues, a form of thought that “rises from the depths of the self that withdraws into itself, from the soul, […] that is the focus of religion, of poetry, of great and beautiful moral activity.” Nevertheless, such a withdrawal has its dangers: “The nation which refuses the external world as far as it can […] will care more about the movement of thought than about the movement of active life; the universe will belong to it, but the world will sometimes be lost to it.” (Ancillon 1809: 2.183–5). Ancillon’s comments above on the concept of existence also very soon gave rise to the first explicit controversy in the reception of absolute idealism in France—a debate between Cousin and Ancillon that ran from 1815 to 1817. In his 1815–16 lectures, Cousin makes an initial sally against Ancillon’s critique of Schelling: Schelling’s error is far less than yours. His absolute existence is at least a real, universal, eternal and divine existence. But no one knows what your existence is: it is not universal existence prior to the I, as Schelling’s is; for, if it were so, you would not be different from

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Schelling. Nor is it the existence of the I. […] It must just be an abstraction. (Cousin 1862: 155–6).

In a retrospective note, Cousin adds that he is only here “stammering on German philosophy and particularly on Schelling’s system” for he knew them at this time “solely through the intermediary of Ancillon” (Cousin 1862: 156; see [1866] 2011: 220). A year later, Cousin subsequently reports ([1866] 2011: 96), he met Ancillon in Berlin. Hearing him criticise “universal existence” and praise Jacobi, Cousin in turn challenges Ancillon’s distinction between awareness of existence and awareness of the self, even if he agrees with Ancillon (Cousin [1866] 2011: 97–8) that we should begin philosophy with a particular idea of a determinate being: I tried hard to provoke him into a serious philosophical conversation; but could only draw from him extremely general claims: that reason must be distinguished from reasoning; that the system of universal existence is the plague of German philosophy; that Schelling corrupted metaphysics and physics. He often quoted to me a book that he is currently publishing in Berlin and Paris and dedicates to Jacobi, whom he calls the Plato of Germany. (Cousin [1866] 2011: 96)

What emerges here most clearly is a debate that would structure much of the French reception of absolute idealism over the value and priority of the universal.

3.1.3 Staël and Maine de Biran No one did more to focus French intellectual attention on post-Kantian philosophical developments in Germany than Germaine de Staël in De l’Allemagne, first published in 1810. Staël had come to be acquainted with German philosophy through Villers, Henry Crabb Robinson and A. W. Schlegel, among others, and then visited Schelling personally in Munich in December 1807 in order to gain more familiarity with his philosophy—and, in so doing, she inspired a series of philosophical journeys across the Rhine in the subsequent decades (see §5.4.1 below). Staël is far more explicit than her predecessors in opposing German Idealism to the ontological materialism which she sees as resulting in empiricisms, utilitarianisms and revolutions, and so paints post-Kantian German philosophy as the “spiritualist” alternative to such empirico-materialism. According to Staël, the “idealist doctrine” asserts the spirituality of the soul and free will—it is the genuine heir to Descartes and the antidote to revolutionary errors (Staël 1813: 3.130; see Yuva 2012). Staël’s De l’Allemagne is thus intent on uncovering a spiritualist dualism that can resist eighteenth-century intellectual excesses. But, she notes, Fichte and Schelling both attempt to undo Kant’s dualism in the name of a single, monistic principle (nature, in Schelling’s case). And for this reason, even if she does not condemn him, Staël remains reluctant to endorse Schelling’s project: The two most celebrated philosophers who have succeeded Kant, are Fichte and Schelling. They too claimed to simplify his system; but they hoped to do so by putting in its place a species of philosophy more elevated even than his.

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D. Whistler et al. Kant firmly separated the two domains of soul and senses and this philosophical dualism ended up exhausting those minds who wish to rest in simple ideas. […] Fichte and Schelling divided between them the empire which Kant acknowledged was a divided one, and each has chosen his own half as the whole. Both have gone beyond the sphere of ourselves, and have attempted to ascend to a knowledge of the system of the universe. Very different from Kant, who applied the same power of mind to show those things the human mind [esprit] can never know, in order to exhibit those things which are within its power. (de Staël 1813: 3.108–10; translation modified)

Notwithstanding his limitations, Staël is also quick to point to what she thinks is promising in Schelling’s early philosophy. She claims that Schelling’s great merit is to have proposed a definition of nature that supersedes any materialist approach (de Staël 1813: 3.152–5). Ultimately, Staël does not fully condemn Schellingian “imagination”, but considers his system to be a valuable production despite a number of idiosyncrasies: Schelling has much more knowledge of nature and the fine arts than Fichte, and his lively imagination could not be satisfied with abstract ideas; but, like Fichte, his object is to reduce existence to a single principle. He treats with profound contempt all philosophers who admit two principles, and will not allow the name of philosophy for any system but that which unites everything and explains everything. Unquestionably he is right in saying that system would be the best; but where is [the system]? Schelling claims that nothing is more absurd than the expression, so commonly used—the philosophy of Plato—the philosophy of Aristotle. Should we say, the geometry of Euler—the geometry of la Grange? There is but one philosophy, according to Schelling, or there must be none at all. Certainly, if by philosophy we only understand the enigma of the universe, we may say, with truth, that there is no philosophy. The system of Kant appeared insufficient to Schelling, as it did to Fichte; because [Kant] acknowledges two natures, two sources of our ideas – external objects, and the faculties of the soul. But, in order to arrive at the desirable unity, in order to get rid of that double life, physical and moral, which gives so much offence to the partisans of simple ideas, Schelling refers everything to nature, whereas Fichte makes everything spring from the soul. Fichte sees nothing in nature but the opposite of mind: in his eyes it is only a limit or a fetter, from which we are constantly endeavouring to free ourselves. Schelling’s system gives more leisure, and greater delight, to the imagination; nevertheless, it necessarily reverts to Spinoza’s system; but, instead of sinking the soul down to the level of matter, which has been the recent practice, Schelling endeavours to raise matter up to the soul; and although his theory entirely depends upon physical nature, it is, nevertheless, a very ideal one at bottom, and still more so in form. The ideal and the real furnish, in his language, the place of intellect and matter, of imagination and experience; and it is in the union of these two powers in complete harmony in which, in his opinion, the single principle of the organized world consists. […]. It cannot be denied that Schelling closely approximates to the philosophers called pantheists, that is to say, those who attribute to nature all the attributes of the Divinity. But what distinguishes him is the astonishing sagacity with which he has managed to connect his doctrine to the arts and the sciences; he is instructive and thought-provoking in all his observations. […] To maintain ideas of religion in the midst of the apotheosis of nature, Schelling’s school supposes that the individual within us perishes, but that the inward qualities which we possess enter again into the great whole of eternal creation. Such an immortality is terrible like death; for physical death itself is nothing but universal nature recalling to herself the gifts she had given to the individual.

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Schelling draws from his system some very noble conclusions as to the necessity of cultivating the soul’s immortal qualities, those which stand in relation to the universe, and thus [the necessity] of despising everything in us that relates to our circumstances alone. But are not the affections of the heart, and even conscience itself, allied to the relations of this life? In most situations we feel two distinct motions—that which unites us with the general order, and that which leads us to our particular interests; the sentiment of duty, and [on the other hand, the sentiment of] personality. The noblest of these motions is the universal. But it is precisely because we have an instinct which would preserve our existence that it is a fine thing to sacrifice that instinct. […] Vague ideas of reunion with nature will, in time, destroy the empire of religion over our souls; for religion addresses itself to each of us individually. Providence protects us in every detail of our lot. Christianity is adapted to every mind, and sympathizes, like a confidential friend, with the desires of every heart. On the contrary, pantheism, or nature deified, by inspiring religion for everything, disperses it over the world, instead of concentrating it in ourselves. […] What is truly admirable in German philosophy is the examination of our self to which it leads; it ascends to the origin of the will, even to the unknown spring of the course of our life; and then, penetrating the deepest secrets of grief and of faith, it enlightens and strengthens us. But all systems which aspire to the explanation of the universe can hardly be analysed by means of clarity of expression: words are not proper to ideas of this kind, and the consequence is that, in making use of them, all things are overshadowed by the darkness which preceded the creation, not illuminated by the light which succeeded it. (de Staël 1813: 3.114–20; translation modified)

Staël ends with a mystic image of Schelling as someone who blurs the boundaries between self and nature and speech and silence. Alongside this blurring of self and nature, as well as tropes of spiritualising the natural sciences, is an emphasis on Schelling’s aesthetics, continued in her subsequent chapter on “the influence of the new German philosophy on literature and the arts”. Staël had, in fact, come to know of the contents of Schelling’s Jena lectures on the philosophy of art through Henry Crabb Robinson who attended them (see Behler 1976: 144–8)—as did Benjamin Constant, who also shows familiarity with (and makes criticisms of) Schelling’s writings in his journal (see Behler 1976: 146, Reymond 1954: 92). Pierre Maine de Biran was a passionate reader of Staël and devoured De l’Allemagne in 1815, before participating in Staël’s salons after her return from exile (Fedi 2018: 20) and, in turn, disseminating her ideas at the Metaphysical Club to a young Cousin, alongside Philipp Stapfer. Nonetheless, Biran had been somewhat familiar with Schelling’s position prior to reading De l’Allemagne based on his knowledge of Degérando’s account, for in his 1812 Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie he makes a few remarks on the author “of the systems most recently known in Germany under the names, transcendental idealism and philosophy of nature” (Maine de Biran 1859: 1.169), including (for example) the following fairly precise reference reproduced from Degérando’s notes: “The I,” says the author of a system widely disseminated in Germany under the name of the philosophy of nature, “obtains consciousness of its action only in willing alone and the expression of will is the first condition of self-consciousness.” (Maine de Biran 1859: 1.205)

Other references to Schelling are scattered through Biran’s writings—for example, a passing reproduction of the very same quotation from Degérando appears in the

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1805 De l’aperception immédiate (Maine de Biran 2020: 90). Despite this paucity of his engagement with Schelling, a tradition did emerge in late 1830s France of seeing positive affinities between Biran and Schelling (see §4.1.8 below), culminating in the more general claim, “Without ever having known German, Maine de Biran thought and wrote in philosophy like a German” (Janet 1868: 355).

3.2 Victor Cousin and the Eclectic School In Bellantone’s words, “Until the 1850s, all reference to Hegel in France was associated with the name of Cousin or that of his school or his doctrine—eclecticism” (2011: 1.33), and the same is true of reference to Schelling, at least until the late 1830s. Victor Cousin was presented consistently by his contemporaries, especially his German allies, as having brought German philosophy to France—hence, Schelling: “Philosophical Germany can only congratulate itself on having found such a worthy admirer as you”; Eduard Gans: “You are a friend of Germany”; Giacomo Meyerbeer: “You first made Kant and Hegel known to the French”; and K. L. Michelet: “You have defended the cause of German philosophy”. Michelet in fact continues, “The success that German philosophy has come to attain in Paris is yours; you were the first to attract the attention of France to German philosophy and thereby procure this philosophy a European renown”.2 It is the legacy of Cousin’s role as official exegete of German Idealism that is narrated in this section.

3.2.1 Journeys Through Germany In early 1817, a twenty-five-year-old professor of philosophy, enchanted by “the dazzling clouds of Staël’s book” (Fedi 2018: 20), paid a visit to the author of De l’Allemagne and her companion, A.  W. Schlegel, in her rooms in Paris to seek advice on a trip to Germany to experience first-hand the intellectual avant-garde across the Rhine (see Janet 1885: 29). It was to be, in Vermeren’s words, “more a philosophical promenade than a study trip” (1982: 80). As a result, during 1817, Cousin travelled through Heidelberg, Göttingen, Berlin and Jena, and, when in Heidelberg, met a relatively obscure professor named G. W. F. Hegel who had just published the first edition of his Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften. In 1818, Cousin embarked on a further journey through Heidelberg and on  to Munich (where he met Schelling, as well as Jacobi), and finally Tübingen. Apart from an extract on Goethe, Cousin only began publishing his account of the 1817 journey forty years later in 1857 (concluding it in 1866). The Souvenirs  The Schelling quotation is taken from Cousin and Schelling (1991: 214); the Gans from Espagne and Werner (1990: 105); the Meyerbeer from Espagne and Werner (1986: 83); and the Michelet from Espagne and Werner (1990: 171). 2

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d’Allemagne is therefore a difficult book to classify, since it reflects both a first encounter with German philosophy and also Cousin’s retrospective evaluation from a very different philosophical position. In short, Cousin wishes to achieve two conflicting tasks: first, to emphasise that, when it came to contemporary German philosophy, he got there first; and, secondly, to insist on the fact that he was never fully seduced by Germany and that, when it comes to the charge of pantheism in particular, he was no Hegelian. Nevertheless, the text retains something of the excitement of Cousin’s first meeting with Hegel—which Bellantone labels “the most important event in the fate of Cousin’s work and certainly the least expected and premeditated” (2011: 1.43): In a university town [like Heidelberg], it was also necessary to see some professors. Schlosser introduced me to his friend Daub, the philosophical theologian whom he had praised so highly. […] He told me, with admirable modesty, that if I was curious about philosophy, it was not to him, but to the professor of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, Hegel, that I should speak. I remembered that this name had been pronounced to me among several others by Friedrich Schlegel along with some rather mediocre praise, and I hesitated over whether I would visit him. I was in a hurry to return to Frankfurt and had not intended more than two or three days for this outing. However, out of a scruple of conscience, I decided to go see Hegel a few hours before the carriage left. But that day the carriage left without me; the next day it left without me again, and the next day I left Heidelberg only with the firm resolve to return and stay there for a while before returning to France. What had happened? I had found the right man for me without looking for him. From our very first words, Hegel liked me, and I liked him; we gained each other’s confidences, and I recognized in him one of those men to whom we must attach ourselves, not to follow them, but to study and understand them, when we are fortunate enough to encounter them along our paths. It is not very easy to explain this sympathy, which was so prompt and strong, that attracted me to the Professor of Philosophy at the University of Heidelberg. Hegel did not yet have a reputation that could exert any prestige over a young man’s imagination: he was only considered a distinguished student of Schelling. It was not his brilliant speech and the charm of his words that seduced me either: he always spoke with difficulty in German, and he spoke very poorly in French. Here is how I explain to myself the inclination I first felt for him […] Hegel loved France, he loved the principles of 1789, and, to use an expression of Emperor Napoleon, of which Hegel often reminded me, he too was Blue. I was charmed to find in a man of his age and merit my most intimate feelings; and he, already old, wished to warm his soul on my fire. Moreover, Hegel’s was a spirit of boundless freedom. He submitted all things to his speculations: religions as well as governments, arts, letters, sciences, and he placed philosophy above all of them. He let me see, so to speak, the ghost of great and vast ideas; he presented to me, in his own somewhat scholastic language, a myriad of general proposals, each bolder and stranger than the next, which had the effect of Dante’s visible darkness on me. Not everything was entirely unintelligible to me, and what I understood gave me a strong desire to know more. At least between Hegel and me there was something in common, a common belief in philosophy, a common conviction that there is or can be a science truly worthy of the name, which not only expresses the moving dreams of the human imagination, but the intrinsic character of beings. Hegel was dogmatic; and, although I could not yet find my way around his dogmatism, he attracted me in that direction. For his part, he was grateful for the efforts I made to hear him and for my taste for grand speculation. Thus, our friendship was formed, and this link of both heart and mind was never broken, even as over time the difference in our views on metaphysics became ever more apparent, and politics remained our sole last link. (Cousin [1866] 2011: 53–6)

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This impression of having in some sense “discovered” Hegel for France is one that Cousin often gives—particularly in this 1833 passage: [In 1817] Hegel was then far from being the famous man that I have since rediscovered in Berlin, fixing all eyes upon him and at the head of a populous and ardent school. Hegel did not yet have a reputation except as a distinguished disciple of Schelling. He had published books that had been little read; his teaching had scarcely begun to make him more known […] From our first conversation, I got [devinai] him, I understood his whole scope [toute sa portée], I felt myself in the presence of a superior man. And when from Heidelberg I continued my travels in Germany, I announced him everywhere, I prophesied him to a certain extent; and on my return to France, I said to my friends: Gentlemen, I have met a man of genius. (Cousin 1833: xxxvii–xxxviii)

Notwithstanding this praise for Hegel’s superiority, in the later Souvenirs d’Allemagne, Cousin goes on to relate how he started reading Hegel’s newly published Enzyklopädie, but struggled with the “scholastic” style of the work, before finally being helped by F.  W. Carové (Cousin [1866] 2011: 189–90). Hence, Cousin’s initial judgement on Hegel’s philosophy is one of suspicion more than anything else: On first glancing at the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, and even before probing its depths, we cannot help but pay tribute to the astonishing power of thought that bursts forth everywhere, presides over the construction of the system and its exposition. The most striking feature of this system is a symmetry, a parallelism, an inflexible order, which is reflected in the major divisions of the Encyclopedia, in their main subdivisions, and in the way they are further applied to the smallest details. This order is ternary: everything is done, everything operates, everything is presented three-by-three, both at the base and at the top of the construction. It was precisely this beautiful order that awakened my first doubts and made me suspect the whole system. (Cousin [1866] 2011: 192–3)

Cousin goes on to provide a more detailed reading of the opening of Hegel’s Logic, criticising it (in a way that immediately recalls his argument with Ancillon) for not being able to produce determinate being out of the indeterminate being with which it begins: This first part [of the Logik] consists of three terms: 1° being in itself, das Seyn; 2° determinate being, das Daseyn; 3° being that is for itself, das Fürsichseyn. Let us look closely at the order of these three terms. First of all, we may wonder whether the order in which they are presented here expresses the order in which we acquire them, or the very order of nature as it is outside us. If it is the order of acquisition of our knowledge, then there are so many reasons to doubt that the human mind proceeds in this way! The general idea of being in itself, das in sich Seyn, of pure and indeterminate being, without any quality, is not given to us first; it only comes after the particular idea of this or that determinate being whatever it may be. […] Even if we answer, as we might, that this is the real order of beings, it is even more doubtful that this is the natural development of these three terms. It seems to me that there is an irreparable gap between the first term and the second. Being in itself, pure and indeterminate being, cannot produce determinate being, unless a power of determination is already placed into indeterminate being in itself. However, this cannot be assumed without destroying the very hypothesis from which we began, that of an undetermined being without quality or quantity, therefore without any causality. (Cousin [1866] 2011: 193–4)

Cousin prefers Hegel’s various applications of his philosophy to art, history, politics and religion (Cousin [1866] 2011: 195), but even here he notes Hegel’s fondness for

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an eighteenth-century sceptical tradition that Cousin himself wants to forcefully reject. Thus, in relation to an anecdote Cousin tells of Hegel’s aversion to Catholicism, he concludes, “As soon as it was a question of Catholicism, Hegel forgot our common principles, and sometimes he engaged in behaviour that was not worthy of a philosopher.” Cousin continues, Despite all his enlightenment, Hegel remained a kind of eighteenth-century philosopher […] He did not hide his sympathies for the philosophers of the last century, even for those who had fought against the Christian cause and spiritualist philosophy. Like Goethe, he defended Diderot, and he sometimes told me: Don’t be so severe; they are the lost children of our cause. (Cousin [1866] 2011: 197)

At bottom, what is at stake in this reference back to the eighteenth century is the spectre of Spinozism: The philosophy of nature admits the real existence of man, the world and God. Very well. Spinoza also acknowledged these three existences; but he was wrong about their true character and their relationship. […] It is impossible for me not to remember what little sympathy Hegel showed me when I told him that my purpose was to fight the philosophy of the eighteenth century. We only began to get along and like each other when we talked about the French Revolution and constitutional monarchy. When I returned to Heidelberg, reading with Carové the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, and finding difficulties there that the good Carové could not solve, I asked Hegel himself for the explanations I needed, he always avoided my questions, not realizing that he was fully answering them by avoiding answering them. […] Being in itself, which occupies the first degree of being, and from which the rest [of being] emerges, is not for itself, that is, it is deprived of consciousness and personality. Hegel’s pure being therefore seems to me to be very similar to Spinoza’s infinite and absolute being. (Cousin [1866] 2011: 213–4)

What is perhaps most visible in the above is what Jarczyk and Labarrière dub the dual “seduction and incomprehension” (1996: 19; see Macherey 2013: 278–85) Cousin experienced towards Hegelian philosophy. Also significant is Schelling’s role as a foil to Hegel and, elsewhere in the Souvenirs, Cousin will place a very different emphasis on his relation to Schellingianism than to Hegelianism. Thus, speaking of a Hegelian philosophy which reduces the personality of God to human personality (such that God “knows solely in us and through us”), Cousin continues, “God forbid that I would attribute such a system to Schelling on the faith of his enemies!” (Cousin [1866] 2011: 214) He then takes the topic up once more in a footnote at the end of the work: I was talking here about Schelling according to the opinion that his supporters and opponents gave me of him at the time, and as I had represented him in 1816 on the faith of Ancillon. Since then, I have come to know Schelling himself, and I have witnessed the final vicissitudes of his career. Yes, I confess, my distinguished friend, in the first excitement of a natural and necessary reaction against Fichte’s idealism, may have been carried away by a kind of Spinozism; but, like all great minds and noble hearts, as he was evolving, he was working to perfect himself. He has always claimed that his first word has been mistaken for his last, and it is certain that from quite early on, and to my knowledge since 1825, he has spoken out against the consequences that the Hegelian school was trying to draw from his principles, which he felt had been misunderstood, and that his last opinion, publicly taught for many years in Erlangen and Berlin, was a more or less clear and consistent theism—one that was sincere and even Christian. (Cousin [1866] 2011: 220)

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The passage ends with a note directing readers to Cousin’s later criticisms of Schelling’s early philosophy in the preface to the third edition of the Fragments philosophiques. In 1818, Cousin set out to Germany once more, heading south for Munich where he met Schelling in person for the first time on 2nd August. In their few meetings over the next month, Schelling seems to have acted very briefly as something of a tutor to Cousin, attempting to give him lessons in the true philosophy at the Munich Academy. Cousin describes these conversations in his diary: I saw [Schelling] once again on 4th [August 1818] at the Academy. He made me speak so as to get to know me. I presented him with my method, the manner in which I conceive science, the intellectual life and its different degrees, and he allowed me to speak for at least an hour without interrupting me. When I finished, he said to me: this isn’t bad; but it’s not philosophy; it is, if you like, a kind of preparation for the study of things; but there is nothing real here, for it is the science of science, not science. Science is the study of life and the human life, that is, of the life of nature or the struggle which constitutes the present. One must follow this struggle in its details and its progress, show its end, its beginning and its ground, the instant when it is not, when it will no longer be, and the means to make it cease, that is, morality. One must raise oneself to the point of absolute indifference, at which the struggle does not still exist, find the ground of the beginning of the struggle, its nature, its progress, its current state and its end. Desire the science of the real, the true philosophy which confronts things instead of immersing itself in abstractions. (in Tilliette 1974: 1.253; see Mauve and Vermeren 1988: 53–4)

Two days later, Schelling goes on to explain his own philosophical project to Cousin: On 6th [August] Schelling set out to me the three fundamental ideas of his philosophy with such lofty abstraction and such subtlety of analysis that I did not understand a lot of it, except that his is a power of mind which I have not yet encountered anywhere else. (in Tilliette 1974: 1.253; see Mauve and Vermeren 1988: 54)

Whether or not his humility is feigned here, the very same structure of personal praise and doctrinal incomprehension that oriented Cousin’s Hegel-reception is visible here as well.

3.2.2 Cousin’s Idealist Decade, 1818–29 Out of Cousin’s journeys across Germany emerged a first-hand acquaintance with the major figures of German philosophy that allowed him to act for the next decade as an “intercessor or intermediary between German thinking and France.” (Cotten 1994: 86).3 While mentions of Hegel and Schelling are scarce in Cousin’s publications of the period (marginalised for the most part to a series of dedications—see §6) and while it is perhaps accurate to say with Puisais that Cousin introduced absolute idealism

 For further aspects of Cousin’s various roles in determining the French reception of Hegel and Schelling, see §5.2.3, §5.3.1, §5.3.2, §5.3.3, §5.4.2 below. 3

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“very timidly, even almost clandestinely” into France (2005: 75), there are still suggestions of Cousin’s reception of absolute idealism in his lectures of the period. Cotten even suggests that some familiarity with the early Schelling’s position is present as early as Cousin’s 1815–16 lectures (Cousin 1841: 148; see Cotten 1994: 89). Indeed, when his contemporaries describe the early Cousin’s “metaphysical fever” (Janet 1885: 92) or his “all-too-ardent head” (Maine de Biran 1954–7: 2.303; see Goldstein 2008: 139), these tend to be coded references to his germanophilia. Accordingly, in 1817 Cousin will use the term “phenomenology” to describe a propaedeutic investigation that aims to raise the philosopher into the domain of metaphysics—what Bellantone calls, “a phenomenological psychology turned towards a metaphysical ontology” (2011: 1.52). That is, Cousin labels “the subjective system” of his philosophy a “psychology or phenomenology” and develops it as follows: All our subjective knowledge—as facts of consciousness, of phenomena—is called psychology or phenomenology, the science of the subjective, the primitive and the actual. The study of our objective knowledge, considering it in relation to their object, that is, to external real existences, is called ontology. Everything objective is transcendent in relation to consciousness, and the appreciation of the legitimacy of principles by which we obtain the objective is called transcendent logic. The science as a whole carries the name metaphysics. (Cousin 1833: 254)

To attain this “transcendent logic”, he continues, one must practise a method of “immediate abstraction” in which one eliminates the empirical part of all knowledge and everything which separates it from the absolute. The result is the “necessary idea of the absolute” (Cousin 1833: 261) which forms the starting point of genuine logic. A year later, in 1818, not only will Cousin develop a conception of pure apperception of the truth which, to Cotten’s eyes at least, “makes one think of Schellingian intellectual intuition” (1994: 91), he will also insist once more on “logic as a space proper to pure reason applied uniquely to the highest principles of the real [that] is clearly Hegelian in origin” (Bellantone 2011: 1.54–5). These lectures “on absolute truths” are intended to provide an “introduction to all science, or the science of science”, whose “fundamental axiom” is that “the absolute [is] the scientific element.” (Cousin 1833: 285) The task of the lectures is, then, in Cousin’s own words, “to ceaselessly transport the absolute into the relative and to ceaselessly bring the relative into the absolute, to be always in the absolute, that is, in science” (1833: 285). Such an enterprise is, for Cousin, to be divided into the following parts: 1. On the absolute, as idea, or in its relation to reason—rational Psychology 2. On the absolute, outside of reason, in its relation to existence—Ontology 3. On the legitimacy of the passage from the idea to being, from rational psychology to ontology—Logic. (Cousin 1833: 286–7) Rational psychology comprises “the different degrees by which observation arrives at the absolute” (Cousin 1833: 289), while the highest part, or “fourth and final degree” of metaphysics is defined as the “perspective of pure reason” where “all relativity, all subjectivity, all reflexivity expires in the spontaneous intuition of absolute truth” (Cousin 1833: 290). In the 1818 lectures on Du Vrai, du Beau et du Bien

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themselves, Cousin expands on this characterisation of spontaneous intuition as “abstracted from all subjective coverings”, as, that is, “a pure apperception, in which affirmation does not contain negation, and in which therefore reflection has not intervened” (Cousin 1836: 122, 149). As late as the 1860 edition of Du Vrai, du Beau et du Bien, Cousin is still calling this kind of insight an “intellectual intuition” and an “absolute affirmation” (1860: 66). Through it, “I arrive at the ground of the absolute itself” and thereby solve “the question of the absolute” (Cousin 1836: 131, 121). Cousin goes on to characterise the absolute not only in Neoplatonic terms (“without character or criterion”), but also Schellingian ones: it determines both consciousness and nature “with the sole difference that the former knows it and the latter does not”. In another nod to Schelling (who practises an absolute abstraction from subject and object in his identity-philosophy), this absolute is known by means of an abstraction that raises what is absolute “to its pure form”, i.e., through the “elimination of the I and not-I, [such that] the absolute remains” (Cousin 1833: 297). Hence, this notion of “immediate abstraction” which “eliminates the particularity of phenomena” to “arrive immediately at the idea” plays a significant role in both the 1817 and 1818 lecture courses as an instrument for obtaining absolute, mind-independent truths (Cousin 1836: 173). Ultimately, in 1818, Cousin will conclude, “Logic alone can lead to ontology” (1833: 298), insofar as it also includes dialectic as “the second part of logic”, and— recalling the Phänomenologie des Geistes—consciousness’s relation to such logic remains solely that of “witness”, not “judge” (Cousin 1833: 300; see Macherey 2013: 285–91). However, it was outside his own philosophical work that Cousin gained a reputation in France as possessing the keys to unlocking German thought—and four events, in particular, during the 1820s cemented this reputation. The first was Cousin’s arrest in Dresden in October 1824, after which he was imprisoned in Berlin as “a dangerous man capable of inciting political revolts” (in Vermeren 1982, 1995: 77–81) and forced to remain in Berlin (first, under house arrest without papers, and then on parole) for seven months, before being released (returning to Paris in May 1825). While the causes of this episode are not relevant, its effects are. To begin, Schelling and particularly Hegel played a key role in having Cousin freed by the authorities: both wrote to the Berlin government and Hegel’s intervention was taken to be decisive. Hegel had written to K. F. von Schuckmann, Prussian Minister of the Interior, In my association with [Cousin] during his stay of several weeks in the summer of 1817, I came to know him as a man with very serious interest in the sciences in general, and in his own special field in particular. I may add that it was in this capacity alone that I then came to know him. He showed himself to me at the time to be a man driven by an ardent desire to familiarize himself as exactly as possible with the way philosophy is pursued in Germany. Such an aspiration was to me especially appreciated, coming from a Frenchman. Furthermore, the zeal and thoroughness with which he tackled our abstruse way of doing philosophy (traits which could not be underestimated judging from the notebooks which he sent me at the time, and which formed the basis of his philosophical lectures at the University of Paris), along with his otherwise upright and gentle character, have aroused in

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me, I may well say, a lively, respectful, and sympathetic interest in his scientific endeavour. (Hegel 1985: 634–5; see Pinkard 2001: 524–7)

Even more telling is the significance of this event within French philosophical culture. It was a kind of “founding event” in nineteenth-century Franco-German intellectual relations (Espagne and Werner 1990: 15–16), making of Cousin “the legend of a philosopher persecuted for liberty”, a “martyr for the cause of free thought” (Vermeren 1982: 78, 108). Ten years later, Heine still feels the need to deflate this myth in the first edition of De l’Allemagne: People recount that a while ago the German government took our great eclectic [Cousin] for a liberal hero and thus imprisoned him where he had no other book to read but Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. […] This is a pretty popular tradition […] and each century it will increase until finally Cousin’s name will acquire a symbolic sense and the mythologues will no longer see in Cousin a real individual, but only the personification of the martyr of liberty, who, languishing in prison, sought consolation in Wisdom, in the Critique of Pure Reason […] As for the real history of Cousin’s imprisonment, its origin is no allegory […] But that he did, during his hours of leisure, study Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, this is doubtful for three reasons: the first is that this book is written in German; the second is that one must know German to read it; the third is that Cousin does not know German. (Heine 1970–80: 8/1.488–9; see Espagne and Werner 1990: 19–20)

Whatever the validity of Heine’s critique, it shows the aura Cousin’s Berlin adventure bestowed on him. Heine’s critique also draws attention to another key topos in Cousin’s reception of German philosophy: his lack of expertise in German Idealist texts, i.e., Cousin’s tendency to privilege personalities over concepts and arguments in his reception of German philosophy. That is, Cousin’s relation to German Idealism is primarily a matter of friendships: he writes to Hegel’s widow after Hegel’s death, “I loved him deeply; I owe him the best hours of my life” (in Janicaud 1984: 454), and to Schelling of “the profound and inalterable friendship with which I will always be your devoted Cousin” (Cousin and Schelling 1991: 245). As Janicaud points out, in matters of philosophical influence, “friendship should not perhaps be underestimated” (1984: 452; see Mauve and Vermeren 1988: 54). Nevertheless, Cousin did still have plenty of access to Hegel’s and Schelling’s texts. This is clearest with respect to Hegel: in addition to his reading of the first edition of Hegel’s Enzyklopädie, Hegel further sent him a copy of the second edition (in Espagne and Werner 1990: 90); he obtained via Hotho manuscripts on the lectures on the philosophy of world-­ history, lectures on the history of philosophy, an extract from the lectures on the philosophy of religion; and the lectures on aesthetics from 1823 (see Hegel 2005). Moreover, the enforced Berlin stay was crucial in this regard too: not only is it likely that Hegel and Cousin had numerous conversations during this period (see Janicaud 1984: 453), but Cousin will have learnt much second-hand about Hegel’s philosophy from Hegel’s students of the time, like Gans. As Bellantone put it, “During these months, Hegel gave his lectures on philosophy of history and it would not be absurd to think that he was able to follow these lectures, at least in part and discuss philosophical problems privately with Hegel and his students” (2011: 1.105).

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The second event of the 1820s crucial to reenforcing Cousin’s role as mediator of German philosophy was the circulation of his own work in Germany—particularly the 1826 edition of his Fragments philosophiques, which Cousin sent directly to key German contacts and which Carové published in German translation. Schelling’s response, for example, was warm: the preface “gave me a true and great pleasure”, he writes (Cousin and Schelling 1991: 203), continuing, “You ask me for advice! Well, I can only say to you: continue; you have completely followed the idea of the true system. Perhaps the path you’ve proposed to follow is a little longer than it fundamentally needs to be” (Cousin and Schelling 1991: 204). At the same time Cousin sent the Fragments to Hegel with this letter: You owe me in this regard a serious letter from time to time. I have sent you my Fragments, i.e., the Preface, which is alone readable […] It is an account of my essays in philosophy from 1815 to 1819. Come down from the heights and lend me your hand. There are four points in this little writing: 1. the method; 2. its application to consciousness or psychology; 3. the transition from psychology to ontology; and 4. a few attempts at a historical system. […]. Be all the more pitiless knowing that, since I am determined to be useful to my country, I will always take the liberty of modifying the directives of my German masters according to the needs and condition, such as it is, of this poor country. This I have forcefully said to our excellent friend Schelling, and I believe I wrote it to Gans as well. It is not a question of creating here, as in a hothouse, an artificial interest in foreign speculations, but rather of implanting in the entrails of the country fruitful germs which will develop naturally according to the primitive qualities of the native soil, of impressing upon France a French movement which will subsequently go forward on its own. […] You tell me the truth, Hegel, and I will transmit to my country whatever of it  it is capable of understanding. (in Hegel 1985: 639)

Hegel’s attention was piqued, replying to Cousin of “the interest which your Fragments have inspired in me” and promising, via his intermediaries Gans and Hotho, “two analyses of your Fragments and translation of Plato” for the new Jahrbücher fur wissenschaftliche Kritik (in Espagne and Werner 1990: 80—see §5.1.1 below). Thirdly, in 1829, Cousin published a two-volume translation of the standard Kantian history of philosophy, W. G. Tennemann’s Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie für den akademischen Unterricht as updated by Amadeus Wendt in 1825 into a fourth edition. This fourth edition newly included material on contemporary German philosophy—as Cousin himself summarises, “The notes left by Tennemann had already extended the exposition to further systems, such as those German systems which emerged after Kant’s. Wendt himself added some articles on further living German philosophers”. However, with the exception of Schelling, Cousin chose only to “retain the bibliographical part” of these contemporary articles “to give France an idea of contemporary German philosophy”, while “omitting the exposition of their doctrines” (Cousin 1829b: 1.xxvi-xxvii). As a result, while the translation included a substantial, 30-page reconstruction of Schelling’s philosophy of identity (which is close to Degérando’s reconstruction in its understanding of Schelling’s philosophy as the working out of a parallel between transcendental philosophy and philosophy of nature), it cuts the section on Hegel to four pages (Cousin 1829b: 2.347–51). Notwithstanding this omission, the French edition of Tennemann’s

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Manuel went on to become an early, accessible source for understandings of German Idealism, especially among students (e.g., Ravaisson). The fourth and most significant episode in Cousin’s reception of German Idealism in the 1820s was his 1828 lecture course, Introduction à l’histoire de la philosophie. In March 1828—directly following Hegel’s visit to Paris in Autumn 1827—Cousin, reinstated to his teaching positions, gave an initial series of lectures on philosophy and history—“one of the great intellectual events of the end of the Restoration” (Espagne and Werner 1986: 79). Janicaud dubs the content of this lecture course “a diluted Hegelianism” or, less pejoratively, a “second-wave Hegelianism” in Cousin’s trajectory (1984: 455–6; see Cotten 1994: 90, Rey 2013: 47–50), and Espagne and Werner describe it as “a genuine assimilation” of German Idealism (1990: 9). This Hegelianism is explored in detail in Rey’s and Whistler’s studies in volume two. For present purposes, two representative passages are worth reproducing. First, a moment at the end of the final lecture (Lecture 13) in which Cousin supplies a brief sketch of recent German philosophical developments: Let us now cross the Rhine: what do you see in Germany? Is it the constant and absolute domination of Kant’s and Fichte’s subjective idealism? No, gentlemen: Fichte died in 1815, and even before his death a new philosophy, unable to remain at rest within the system of absolute subjectivity, and, so to speak, at the highest point of the I, fell back down to earth and returned to a more real viewpoint. Contemporary German philosophy, which exercises as much influence and as much authority in Germany as Kant’s and Fichte’s ever did, is entitled philosophy of nature. This name alone indicates to you well enough some kind of return to reality; and, just as today France does not believe its glory is compromised when it asks for inspiration from the philosophy of Germany, so too it is not entirely a patriotic illusion which leads me to presume that the most illustrious representatives of the philosophy of nature are interested in the progress of recent French philosophy and that Munich and Berlin no longer disdain Paris. What am I saying, gentlemen? That Germany, which [previously] disdained France, takes notice of it, and France, which had, so to speak, isolated itself from the rest of Europe, turns its eyes towards Germany. In Germany, subjective idealism is succeeded by a philosophy that draws its glory from the name philosophy of nature; and, in France—if not on the ruins of sensualism, then at least in opposition to it—there arises a philosophy in which one cannot fail to recognise the pronounced characteristics of spiritualism and idealism. What should one conclude from these changes? One must conclude that the reign of the exclusive systems of sensualism in France and subjective idealism in Germany has passed; and that French philosophy by its new idealism and German philosophy by its doctrine of nature aspire to meet each other and to take each other’s hand, and that in this still fragile mixture of idealism and realism is silently formed a genuine eclecticism in European philosophy. (Cousin [1828] 1991: 353–4)

A less explicit, but even more influential passage occurs earlier in the lecture course (at the opening to Lecture 5). Here Cousin establishes a triadic schema of categories by which to understand all of human thinking and its historical products in a way that seems intended to echo Hegelian dialectic: Recall the conclusions of the previous lecture. Reason, in whatever sense it is developed, to whatever it is applied, whatever it considers, can conceive nothing except what is under the condition of two ideas that preside over the exercise of its activity. […] [From this] there results one sole proposition, one sole formula which is the very formula of thinking and

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D. Whistler et al. which can be articulated, according to the case in hand, by the one and the multiple, time and eternity, space and immensity, unity and variety, substance and phenomenon, etc. Moreover, the two terms of this comprehensive formula do not constitute a dualism in which the first term is on one side and the second on the other, without any relation between them also being perceived by reason. The relation which links them is equally essential. […] The result of all this is that the two terms, as well as the relation of generation which draws the second from the first and which, therefore, continuously relates them, are the three integral elements of reason. It is not in the power of this reason in its most daring abstractions to separate any of these three terms from each other. Try, for example, to detach unity, and variety on its own can no longer be ascribed, it is no longer comprehensible; on the other hand, try to remove variety and you have an immobile unity, a unity which is not made manifest and which is not a thought, since all thought is representable by a proposition, and one sole term does not suffice for any proposition. Finally, remove the relation which intimately links variety and unity and you destroy the necessary link between the two terms in all propositions. We can thus regard as an incontestable point that these three terms are distinct, but inseparable, and they constitute at once a necessary triplicity and unity. (Cousin [1828] 1991: 119–20)

In the form of the three categories of the finite, the infinite and the relation between the finite and the infinite, Cousin will apply this triadic schema to all productions of human life and history as their fundamental structure. Moreover, in 1829, he will continue his lectures with a reaffirmation of his quasi-Hegelian thesis of the identity of philosophy and history of philosophy (Cousin 1829a: 171), as well as a conception of philosophical history in terms of the cyclical recurrence of four systems (sensualism, idealism, scepticism, mysticism) that bears more than a passing resemblance to the four perennial systems of philosophy (materialism, intellectualism, idealism, realism) outlined in Schelling’s 1802 Bruno (see Azar 1986: 989).

3.2.3 The Fragments Philosophiques of 1833 and Its Aftermath Just as with the first edition of his Fragments philosophiques, Cousin sent copies of the 1828 lecture course to Hegel and Schelling. Their critical responses in many ways provided the material for Cousin’s subsequent relationship with German Idealism. Hegel, for example, focuses on the above passage from Lecture 13. Rather than bemoaning the fact that his own philosophy is not mentioned, he instead shows concern at Cousin’s failure to grasp what is at stake in any recent German philosophy and even jumps to Schelling’s defence against Cousin’s reconstruction of the “philosophy of nature”: “I would have preferred you not to have spoken at all than to have undertaken this historical part in the manner in which you do. I should say that Schelling’s philosophy, which you do mention, embraces in its principles much more than you attribute to it, and you must know that well” (in Espagne and Werner 1990: 121–2). Schelling’s response to Cousin’s lecture course is twofold. On the one hand, like Hegel, he is bemused by Cousin’s misrepresentation of his philosophy,

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but—more seriously—he is concerned that Cousin has betrayed him in favour of a crude Hegelianism. He writes, You have entered onto the territory of German philosophy by way of Heidelberg [i.e. as a Hegelian]; you have begun to know the system deriving from me only in the sense it has been given by some people who are badly indoctrinated or weak in judgment, and in a form transmitted in the narrow mind of a man who thought he was grasping my ideas, like some creeping insect thinks it is seizing a plant leaf it has crunched within its jaws. (Cousin and Schelling 1991: 208)

Schelling goes on to bemoan the fact that Cousin bases his account of philosophy of nature on his earlier philosophy, neglecting the change in direction it had since undergone—“a completely different development of my first principles” (Cousin and Schelling 1991: 209). He concludes, “I might be angry to be so little known by you” (Cousin and Schelling 1991: 209). As Cousin immediately saw, what was partly at stake here was a charge of “naivety” in trying to find some common ground between Hegel and Schelling (Espagne 1985: 267). Nevertheless, he refused to pick sides, and this would remain his strategy into the 1830s: “I love you and esteem you both profoundly and profit from both of you”. He continues to Schelling, I have studied Kant and I believe that I understand him. I scarcely dare say that about Fichte. As for you, I have studied you less, I understand you less; you are too far above me for me to be able to measure you. So, I have profited from what suits me, here and there, in your ideas, but without judging the whole, without adopting or rejecting your system. It is the same with Hegel, with the difference that with him I am reduced to positive conversations, his books being closed to me. Only, it seems to me that you resemble each other on many points; and when I see you fight, I would willingly say: My dear friends, you are struggling against yourselves. (Cousin and Schelling 1991: 213)

To put it another way, Cousin’s insistence on the inalienably French context to his project means he remains relatively uninterested in the fine-grained differences and shifting loyalties of the German philosophical scene: “I am completely immersed in the polemic against Locke, Condillac, Helvetius, Cabanis, Tracy, etc. This is the battlefield for me. I am in Paris and not in Germany” (Cousin and Schelling 1991: 213). This exchange with Schelling establishes the battlelines that Cousin will develop in his Preface to the 1833 edition to Fragments philosophiques, his most developed account of his philosophical relationship to German Idealism. And here what becomes most prominent is the tension between what Macherey (2013: 291–3) dubs the “nationalist” and “internationalist” tendencies of Cousin’s project: on the one hand, Cousin wishes to present himself as immersed in Hegel’s and Schelling’s philosophies, but, on the other hand, he is increasingly keen on doing so only for the sake of a French philosophical renewal. As early as 1818, when returning from his first trip to Germany, Cousin had already refused to “throw [French philosophers] impetuously into the premature study of foreign doctrines” and instead recommended “letting the new French philosophy develop itself from its own virtue, by the power of its own method […] by following the hereditary instincts of the French genius” (in Barthélémy-Saint-Hilaire 1895: 1.74), and this became an ever-more visible theme in his correspondence with Hegel, with Cousin writing to Hegel in

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April 1830 of “using and naturalising in France the spirit” of German Idealism (in Hegel 2017: 3.301). This project forms the basis of the central passage in the 1833 preface to Fragments philosophiques. In this text, Cousin is in the midst of responding to a series of criticisms that had been made by the Fourierist Paul Laurent in a 1826 critical review of the first edition (as well as implicitly Lerminier’s plagiarism charge— see §3.3.1 below). Laurent had accused Cousin of betraying the legacy of sensualism and the Idéologues by siding with “ontological speculation” (Laurent 1826: 36). He continues—and, in so doing, is the first of Cousin’s commentators to link his philosophy to German Idealism and to pantheism in print—“Does not all this high speculation inevitably result in the doctrine of absolute identity which ascends, via Spinoza, Giordano Bruno and the Neo-Platonists, to those first Eleatics—a doctrine which approximates in many respects to the modern idealists of Germany?” (Laurent 1826: 338) In the 1833 preface, Cousin responds in a highly personal way, which at times makes use of his notes from his trip through Germany as well as an unfinished obituary penned on Hegel’s death (see §5.2.3). Responding to a rendition of Laurent’s “most devestating” accusation (as well as, implicitly, those of Lerminier and Comte—see §3.3 below) that “all this [i.e., my philosophy] is just an importation of German philosophy”, which has proven “enough to stir up as much patriotism as if I had introduced a foreigner into the heart of my country” (Cousin 1833: xxx), Cousin writes, By the end of 1817, I had left behind me the first German school [of subjective idealism]. It is then that I took a trip around Germany. I can say that, at this epoch of my life, I was precisely in the state where Germany found itself at the beginning of the nineteenth century, after Kant and Fichte, and at the appearance of the philosophy of nature. My method, my direction, my psychology, my general views had come to a stop, and so led me to the philosophy of nature. I saw it only in Germany. […] What then is this philosophy? Can I speak of it in a few words? […] Schelling placed himself immediately in the absolute. According to him, if philosophy desires a solid terrain, it must abandon psychology and dialectic, the I just as much as the not-I, and, without being burdened by the objections of scepticism, raise itself immediately to absolute being, common substance and the common ideal of the I and the not-I, which relates exclusively neither to the one nor to the other, but which encompasses both and is their identity. This absolute identity of the I and not-I, of man and nature, is God. It follows from this that God is in nature as well as in man. It follows, then, that this nature has in itself as much value as man, that it has its truth like man, since it exists to the same extent, and that it must resemble man since it derives from the same principle: their only difference is that of consciousness to non-consciousness. Moreover, God cannot be less in humanity than in nature; if nature is, in some sense, as rational as the human mind [esprit], the human mind must have laws as necessary as those of nature; and the world of humanity is as regularly made as the external world; what is more, the world of humanity is manifest in history; history then has its laws; it thus forms in its diverse epochs and in its apparent aberrations a harmonious system, just as the external world is one in the diversity of its phenomena. From this double implication and their common principle derives the high importance of historical studies and the physical sciences. From this point and for the first time, idealism was introduced into the physical sciences and realism into history; the two spheres of philosophy, enemies up until then—psychology and physics—are finally reconciled; an admirable sentiment for both reason and life, a sublime poetry extending into all philosophy; and, above, this idea of God which is present everywhere and serving the whole system as principle and light. The first years of the nineteenth century saw appear this great system. Europe owes it to Germany and Germany to Schelling. This system is the true one; for it is the most complete

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expression of the entirety of reality, of universal existence. Schelling gave this system to the world; but he left it filled with lacunas and imperfections of all kinds. Hegel, coming after Schelling, belongs to his school: he has made of it a place apart, not only by developing and enriching the system, but in giving it, in many respects, a new face. The admirers of Hegel consider him as the Aristotle to another Plato; the exclusive partisans of Schelling wish to see in him only the Wolff to another Leibniz. Whatever one thinks of these slightly haughty comparisons, no one can deny that a powerful faculty of invention has been given to the master, and profound reflection to the disciple. Hegel borrowed from Schelling; and me, weaker than both, I borrowed from them both. There is folly in reproaching me for it, and I certainly show no great humility in recognising it. More than twelve years ago, when dedicating my edition of Proclus’ commentary on the Parmenides to Schelling and Hegel, I publicly called them both my friends and my masters, and the leaders of the philosophy of nature of our century. It is sweet today to renew this homage; I will never repeat enough my sincere admiration and my tender friendship. Thank God, I do not have a soul that would ever be embarrassed by gratitude. But while being pleased to proclaim the resemblances which link the philosophy I profess to those of these two great masters, I must also in truth confess that some fundamental differences separate me from them, despite myself. […] I blush to insist on them, but I cannot but recall the first and most fruitful of all—that of method. As I have already said, my two illustrious friends place themselves straightaway at the pinnacle of speculation; me, I begin from experience. To escape the subjective character of the inductions of an imperfect psychology, they begin with ontology, which is nothing but a hypothesis; I begin with psychology, and it is psychology itself which leads me to ontology and saves me from both scepticism and hypothesis. Confident that the truth carries with it its self-evidence, and that it is moreover for the whole to justify all its parts, Hegel begins by abstractions which are for him the ground and pattern of all reality; but nowhere does he indicate or describe the procedure which gives him these abstractions. Schelling speaks sometimes of intellectual intuition as the procedure which grasps being itself; but for fear of imprinting a subjective character on this intellectual intuition, he claims that it does not fall within consciousness, which makes it absolutely incomprehensible to me. […] Here as everywhere is manifest the general difference which separates me from the new German school—that is, the psychological character fully imprinted on all my views and to which I am scrupulously bound as a crutch for my weakness and a guarantee for my inductions. (Cousin 1833: xxxv–xliii)

In the 1828 Nouveaux Fragments philosophiques, Cousin had summarised much of the above by speaking of his project as bringing German Idealism “to the tribunal of French good sense and there condemned and constrained to [...] contract a belated but fruitful alliance” (Cousin 1828: iii; see also [1866] 2011: 221). As soon as it was written, Cousin sent the 1833 Preface to Schelling with the following comment: “There is a new introduction in which I speak much of you. It is one of the most important pieces that I have written” (Cousin and Schelling 1991: 218). Schelling seemed to agree: after reviewing it in a notice for the Bayerische Annalen, he arranged for one of his former students, Hubert Beckers, to publish a translation of the preface (re-titled, pertinently enough, Über französische und deutsche Philosophie) and added his own “beurteilende Vorrede”, an expanded version of the notice.4 Cousin, excited to have drawn Schelling out of a twenty-year silence, rushed to have Schelling’s introduction translated and it appeared in three  Schelling does not give this preface a title himself: there is no title in Beckers’s translation, except a reference on the cover to “eine beurteilende Vorrede von Schelling”. In Schelling’s Werke, K. F. A. Schelling entitles it, Vorrede zu einer philosophischen Schrift des Hrn. Victor Cousin; and it is translated into French by Ravaisson, Willm and Grimblot under variations of the formula, Jugement sur la philosophie de Cousin. 4

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different versions over the next few years (see §4.1.5, §4.1.6, and §4.1.8 below). Schelling’s introduction begins with explicit, if measured praise for Cousin couched in a more general appeal for transnational intellectual cooperation and a critique of Germanic obscurity that is familiar within the French context: In his frequent voyages to Germany, Cousin has acquired the esteem and the friendship not only of men who follow the same career as him, but of intellectuals in general; and what will continue to make his work of interest to literary Germany—alongside Guizot and a few others—is that he was the first, after the revolutionary wars and the empire, to call the attention of his compatriots to German science and literature. […] Who could not also agree that for clarity, accuracy and precision of style in scientific matters there is something to be learnt from our cousins in the West? Style, the manner of saying things, when one attaches some value to them, reacts always on the things themselves. Germans have for so long philosophized among themselves alone that their speculations and their language have become further and further removed from what is universally intelligible. Just as some families separate from the rest of society and living among themselves end up—among other repulsive peculiarities—affecting idiosyncratic expressions only intelligible to themselves, so too with Germans in philosophy. After a few vain attempts to spread Kant’s ideas beyond their borders, they renounced the task of making themselves comprehensible to other peoples and instead now regard themselves as the philosophical elect, forgetting that the original goal of all philosophy—a goal often forgotten but still necessary—is to make oneself universally intelligible. (Schelling 1856–61: 10.204)

That is, Schelling continues, he is breaking his silence to publish on Cousin in order “to bring German and French philosophy together” (Schelling 1856–61: 10.204; see Whistler 2018). Schelling goes on to both describe and then criticise Cousin’s own attempts to bring together the French tradition of psychological analysis with the German tradition of metaphysical speculation. In particular, Schelling associates Cousin’s attempt with pre-Kantian dogmatism, but another spectre haunts the text too, although it is never named—that of Hegelianism. Schelling’s critique of Cousin resembles the critique of Hegel he was simultaneously developing in the 1830s. To characterise in a few words Cousin’s philosophical individuality, we will say that he felt the necessity to raise up the empiricism that he found around him and that he recognised it still as his point of departure into a rational philosophy grounded on universal principles. […] We note two essentially different parts that it is impossible to reunite into one and the same science. In effect, the first does not leave the sphere of psychology and therefore subjectivity, and finds in consciousness only the faculty of universal principles, thanks to which then a second part, a dogmatic and objective part, must prove the existence of the external world, that of our own personality and that of God. If this second part alone merits the name of science and metaphysics, the first can at most be used as preparation and ground for it. […] In the second place, [Cousin’s] metaphysics is completely similar to that which reigned before Kant, in that it rests on the syllogism alone and everywhere is contented with the what without any interest in the how. Whatever connections it otherwise has with scholasticism in ground and form, what it shows scarcely goes beyond the ancient metaphysics of the School, and it is still far from being a real philosophy, such as is demanded of modern systems. (Schelling 1856–61: 10.209–10)

Schelling goes on to determine one of the key differences between his philosophy, on the one hand, and Cousin-Hegelian philosophising, on the other, in relation to the concept of process:

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According to Cousin, reason is not subjective or derived from personality, but he nevertheless only conceives it in the subject, in us; moreover, it is precisely for this reason that it is in need of being explained, if one wants to recognise genuine objectivity in it, in another sense than Kant did. This explanation, one can easily see, only becomes possible as much as one grants that reason itself comes from the object, not—of course—by the intermediary of the senses, the only manner by which it has until now been represented, but by showing that it is itself the prius posited subjectively, re-established from objectivity in its priority and its primitive subjectivity. But this explanation presupposes a process, which the author seems always little disposed to allow. This is perhaps the cause of what is defective in both his own philosophy and in his manner of judging German philosophy. For it is precisely in this idea of process that the genuine progress of modern philosophy consists, and not in the matter of propositions; this method is the genuine essence of German philosophy. We do not mean to speak here of process in its improper and abusive application to the logical idea; but of the real process of the philosophy which first made use of this important notion. (Schelling 1856–61: 10.221)

Schelling’s “beurteilende Vorrede” concludes with a certain irony concerning Cousin’s enthusiasm for German philosophy that was to prove influential: Cousin speaks of his personal relations with contemporary German philosophers. One cannot but admire the young man’s confidence with which the author, who according to his own confession understood Hegel very little or not at all, goes on to announce and in some way prophesize the genius! One can see, in this writing itself and elsewhere, what good will lies in these words. Regarding the Germans, regarding those who, at least, have a genuine understanding of their philosophy, it is certain that they can only approve of his sage reserve and that they have never blamed him for not making himself in France an advocate of a specific German philosophy. He has incontestably felt that German philosophy is still delivered to a work and the true crisis which will explain this work is yet to be reached. […] Cousin’s love for German philosophy has been criticized as an anti-French tendency; however, on the contrary, he has faithfully conserved [the French] national character for which, as he himself says, precision and clarity are essential. (Schelling 1856–61: 10.223–4; see Whistler 2019)

3.2.4 1838 and After: Cousin Against Michelet Under intense attack both for his reliance on German Idealism and his lack of understanding of it (as the rest of the “Landmarks” chapter will make clear), Cousin was forced to revisit his relation to Hegel’s and Schelling’s philosophies as the 1830s progressed, and to provide a more robust attack on them in order to decisively separate himself from their position. In short, Cousin shored up his domestic institutional power by giving up on German philosophy. Hence, by 1847, Cousin had edited the text of his 1833 preface to remove, most significantly, the claim (extracted above) that Schelling’s “system is the true one; for it is the most complete expression of the entirety of reality, of universal existence”, and earlier in 1838 he penned a foreword responding to international critics, like Schelling himself. The relevant section runs,

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D. Whistler et al. To Germany and to Schelling I will say: With respect to your haughty disdain for psychological method, permit me to oppose the authority of [William] Hamilton and all my other adversaries. If this authority does not suffice for you, I will join to it that of these persons who perhaps appear to you to have a certain weight: they are Socrates, Descartes and Kant, the father of German philosophy—not to mention Fichte and Jacobi; for, to note in passing, before the philosophy of nature, the excellence of the psychological method was as uncontested in Germany as it is today in other countries. And what have you put in place of this method? Before there was at least intellectual intuition. But one of two things [is true of it]: either intellectual intuition falls under the gaze of consciousness, or it does not. If it does not fall under it, from where do you know it? What reveals to us its marvellous existence? With what right, what claim do you speak of it? If it does fall under the gaze of consciousness, we are thus reduced to psychology, and I send you back to your own objections. They are reduced to this argument: psychology cannot lead to metaphysics, to real objects, to existences; for it does not get out of consciousness and all that is in consciousness is purely subjective. Here is that formidable principle. But this principle is only an assertion: where is its proof? According to us, it is reason which directly knows the truth, and not only abstract truths, universal and necessary principles, but real objects, existences. The question is whether this power of reason is less legitimate because it falls under the gaze of consciousness. But who has demonstrated that consciousness does not merely contemplate what it sees, but also has the astonishing property of metamorphosing it under its magic gaze and imposing its own nature upon it? In that case, all truth is forever subjective; for all truth can be known only by a mind who has consciousness of it. […]. To what God does Schelling aspire today? Is it to the abstraction of being, which I have taken the liberty of mocking a little, notwithstanding all the respect I bear for the memory of Hegel? No assuredly. Is it the absolute identity of subject and object, of the philosophy of nature? It does not appear so. Schelling’s God is the spiritual and free God of Christianity. I applaud this with all my heart; but what can better guide us on this new route than the deepened study of the intelligent and free being that God has made in his image? (Cousin 1838: x–xiii; see also 2001: 84–5)

Cousin once again sent the text to Schelling describing it as the place “where I defend the psychological method against your attacks” (Schelling and Cousin 1991: 244). And this text would become Cousin’s standard reference point for his later attitude towards absolute idealism. He writes to Hamilton in September 1843, “Little by little I’m disengaging myself from German philosophy; and I’m immersing myself more and more in psychology” (in Barthélémy-Saint-Hilaire 1895: 3.275; see Rey 2013: 151–3). Thus, in his preface to the 1843 Des pensées de Pascal, Cousin broadly repeats the same position: A profound psychology as a point of departure, and as the final goal a grand philosophy— moral and religious and at the same time liberal—such is my work, if it is permitted for me to speak thus, in opposition to the atheism which produces the superficial psychology of empiricism and in opposition also to the hypothetical method of the German school, born from the absence of all psychology. (Cousin 1843: li; see also 2001: 85)

After the 1848 Revolution, Cousin’s attitude would become even more hostile. In the 1857 third edition of Philosophie écossaise, he speaks of “the bad metaphysics of degenerate Germany” (1857: xii; see also 1872: vii–viii), and, in 1853, distinguishes between two phases in the evolution of German Idealism: its “foolhardy abandonment” of the psychological method “precipitated [it], first, into ambitious and hypothetical speculations and soon [secondly]  into the most unfortunate

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systems that dishonoured and lost those across the Rhine from the cause of philosophy” (Cousin 1862: 17). Moreover, he continued to edit and reissue his publications to erase German influence from his philosophy—for example, deleting an 1838 passage on German philosophy as “incontestably the most prominent of modern philosophies since Cartesianism” (Cousin 1838: xv; 1865: lxxxviii), as well as adding a note to the 1833 passage on Hegel and Schelling reproduced above which reads: A sentiment of delicacy and pride carried me away here and I depicted the philosophy of nature with a flourish, exaggerating a little what I owed it. Insofar as the new German philosophy has developed and has now revealed itself in all its principles and its consequences, I have visibly separated myself from it, and French spiritualism is today—in terms of the foundations of its ideas and its method—the most decided adversary of the school which is taken, in Germany as elsewhere, as Hegel’s heir. (Cousin 1865: lxv)

Nonetheless, Cousin still retains fondness for Schelling, who is saved from some of this vitriol. This is evident from his comparisons of Hegel and Schelling in Souvenirs d’Allemagne (see §3.2.1 above), as well as from passing comments such as the following, written a couple of years after Schelling’s death: “Schelling alone remained standing for some time upon the ruins of German philosophy” (Cousin 1860: 432). An episode illustrative of where Cousin ends up in relation to Hegel, in particular, is a controversy from 1849 described by K. L. Michelet: When in 1849 I entered into the room of involuntary republicans, [Victor Cousin] shouted at me: “It is your philosophy [i.e., Hegelianism] which has lost France.” He had already transitioned from the study of philosophy to writing on the women of bygone centuries. He had already been infected by the prejudices of the Prussian Government against philosophy. Since I quickly responded to this welcome: How lost? Is France lost? His French vanity won the day over his initial outburst, and we remained good friends. (Michelet 1884: 123)

Michelet went on to publish an open letter addressed to Cousin in the journal, La Liberté de penser, lamenting the way in which institutional French philosophy had turned its back on Germany during the 1840s and defending a fairly radical Hegelian immanence (such that it forced the journal’s editor, Amédée Jacques, to “decline responsibility, both on behalf of the Review and myself, for some of the doctrines you express so well” [Michelet 1849: 422]). Michelet here openly proclaims the position Quinet had ascribed to him a decade earlier in writing to Ravaisson: “Your competitor Michelet has quite simply just declared that he and the true heirs of Hegel are more or less anti-Christian. Think of the scandal!” (in D’Hondt 1971: 13) Michelet’s letter revolves around Cousin’s claim “that Hegelian philosophy has caused all that you call the evils from which France and above all Germany are now suffering” (Michelet 1849: 422)—and, in defence of Hegelianism, Michelet proffers a defence of philosophy that both mimics Cousin’s early work (“from a purely material and mechanical existence, it raises the human being to spiritualism and to freedom” [Michelet 1849: 423]) and also, more specifically, focuses on the question of pantheism: To stop [German philosophy], you wanted to introduce into philosophy the doctrine of a divine personality which has self-consciousness. Without it, you said, virtue is impossible and atheism patent. You accused German philosophy of lacking originality in this regard, of walking in the footsteps of Diderot and d’Holbach. […] Eighteenth-century French

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D. Whistler et al. p­ hilosophy had dared to say: matter is God, and the great whole, that is, the mass of modifications of matter, is the only existing thing. German philosophy takes one step more. It declares matter itself to be a modification of impersonal reason, as one of your most spiritual[ist] philosophers named the first cause. Is this the language of atheism? […] I am also of the opinion that personality and self-consciousness are not outside of the divine being; rather, they constitute a necessary element of infinite existence. Consciousness implies the opposition of subject and object, that is, a finite state of mind. And, just as genuine infinity is not outside of the finite, since otherwise the finite would be the limit of the infinite which would thus cease to be what it is, finite minds are modifications, according to Spinoza, or fulgurations (as your Leibniz says) of divinity. Divine personality and consciousness are the individual subject itself, insofar as, in its finite form, it dreams and brings forth the divine spark hidden under terrestrial ashes. Divine being is not an abstract substance living outside the world, like the gods of Epicurus. It is the essence of things appearing in phenomena; and, since phenomena coincide with the divine nature, it is humanity. God is made man. (Michelet 1849: 423–4)

Michelet concludes pointedly, You thus see in full, sir, that there are philosophers who are entirely enslaved to theology, or thinkers unable in their old age to bear all the dazzling light of naked truth, or finally some eclectics who have searched in vain for this truth under the multicoloured cloak of myth and the common opinion of men. For me, I distinguish my philosophy, as Leibniz did his, from that common philosophy in the arms of which you now seem to want to rest, as on your laurels. (Michelet 1849: 427)

3.2.5 German Idealism and the Eclectic School: Willm and Barchou de Penhoën Cousin’s presentation of Hegel’s and Schelling’s philosophies was influential— almost hegemonic—over French thinking for many years. And part of his modus operandi was to form alliances or discipleships among a network of aspiring philosophers who would then undertake the task of explaining, popularising and evaluating German philosophy in a Cousinian key, i.e., under the auspices of “eclecticism”. Many of the figures discussed throughout the sections below could be understood in this way: Saint-Marc Girardin, Jacques Matter, Amédée Prévost, Charles de Rémusat, Émile Saisset, C. J. Tissot, even the early Félix Ravaisson, Edgar Quinet, Augusto Vera and Étienne Vacherot, etc. Perhaps, however, the main representative of Cousin in French German-Idealist studies was Joseph Willm, editor of the Nouvelle revue germanique (see §5.1.6),5 one of  the earliest translators of Schelling into French (see §4.1.2, §4.1.3, and §4.1.6), the author of the authoritative entries on Hegel and Schelling for the eclectic Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques (see §5.1.15) and the winner of the  This journal went under a series of titles, but almost all the engagement with Hegel and Schelling occurred while it was entitled, the Nouvelle revue germanique—and so we refer to the journal as a whole under this particular name. See §5.1.6 below. 5

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1836 Académie prize on German Idealism for his four-volume, Histoire de la philosophie allemande depuis Kant jusqu’à Hegel (see §5.3.4). He was, in Rowe’s words, “the closest France possessed to a genuine expert on German thought” (2000: 223; see Bernard-Granger 2023a). Willm’s reputation was in part based on his germanophone background: as an Alsatian, he had access to Schelling’s and Hegel’s texts, as well as a sense of the nuance of their philosophical terminology, in a way that his francophone peers did not. He had begun using German Idealist materials in the 1820s, when he lectured in Strasbourg with Schelling’s Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischen Studiums as a textbook, but it was in 1835 that his contribution to French scholarship really began with a “Hegelian turn” and the publication of his Essai sur la philosophie de Hegel in ten instalments in the Nouvelle revue germanique between January of that year and December 1837—one of the earliest French texts dedicated to Hegel’s philosophy (following the pioneering work of Amédée Prévost, in particular—see §6). Willm’s approach to Hegel is explicitly eclectic: “All philosophy, whatever it is, must contribute to the triumph of truth; all philosophy is a fragment of the universal philosophy; and this means we focus more on what appears good and useful in Hegel’s philosophy than its faults” (Willm 1836: 4). In this early work, Willm even goes so far as to identify the movement of absolute Spirit with the eclectic incorporation of truths, defining Hegelian Spirit as “a supreme rule according to which, by means of a transcendent and universal eclecticism, one can recognise the truth everywhere and strip it of the various forms that it takes on across diverse times and places” (Willm 1836: 32). As a result, relatively uniquely in the early French tradition, Willm attempts to be impartial to Hegel: “We are neither one of Hegel’s partisans, not one of his detractors. […] We will examine his system without favour and without hate” (Willm 1836: 4; see Puisais 2005: 176–9). Moreover, what is “good and useful” in Hegelianism, according to Willm, is broadly speaking its defence of a liberal tradition. That is, Willm’s uses his Essai to show that Hegel is no proponent of servility to an absolutist Prussian state, but rather “a champion of liberty and rational reform” (Rowe 2000: 249). The absolutist image of Hegel—Hegel as “the apostle of the totalitarian state” (Puisais 2005: 65)—had, indeed, been a common one in his earliest French reception, propounded by Lerminier (see §3.3.1 below), as well as some of the contributors to Willm’s own Nouvelle revue germanique who variously characterised Hegel at the turn of the 1830s as a “philosopher of the Prussian state” and an obstacle to political reform (Anon. 1832: 176). These readings motivate Willm’s response: Properly understood, Hegel’s system rejects the objection so often reproduced against it of being occupied solely with chimeras and, instead, encompasses nothing but what can be reconciled with the highest ideals or with a critique of abuses and with every legitimate desire for reform. It is enough to see the whole in which this principle [of the rationality of reality] is produced to be convinced that Hegel’s philosophy was not intended to serve material interests or to use its authority [to justify] existing abuses, since it proclaims rational all genuine reality, thereby refusing the reality of all that is not rational. (Willm 1836: 92; see Puisais 2005: 185–9)

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Alongside Willm, as an influential commentator on absolute idealism in 1830s France, stood Auguste Barchou de Penhoën. In parallel to Willm, Barchou—who had also been close to Staël—penned the first work solely dedicated to Schelling’s philosophy in France in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1833 and then, on the back of Cousin’s further encouragement, incorporated it into a two-volume Histoire de la philosophie allemande depuis Leibnitz jusqu’à Hegel published in 1836 (see Piaia 2022: 382–3). Barchou de Penhoën’s early Schelling essay is split into two parts—the first on the philosophy of nature and the second on the philosophy of history. The latter— while showing an eye for the detail of the primary text—treads the ground already covered by Degérando’s reconstruction of the System des transzendentalen Idealismus; more eye-catching is the first part which creatively reconstructs Schelling’s writings on the philosophy of nature from around 1799 and 1800, including (without mentioning it) the Erster Entwurf eines System der Naturphilosophie. No other French philosopher of the period is as interested in this material. Barchou begins with a section “on dualism” that roughly corresponds to Schelling’s theory of actants at the opening to the Erster Entwurf: The master-key and ground of the entire system is dualism. Two contrary principles are in struggle. They form an equilibrium in diverse conditions. They combine in different ways. The points of space where they form an equilibrium are everywhere in symmetrical opposition in regard to the others. It is likewise with the different combinations which are the manifestation of their struggle. This is the unique cause of the infinite multitude of phenomena which appear on the surface of the earth; this is the first and last reason for reality itself. (Barchou de Penhoën 1833a: 338–9)

On the basis of these ontological claims, Barchou de Penhoën goes on to consider more applied natural phenomena in sections on ether, matter, motion, chemical composition, electric force, magnetic force, caloric force, light, atmosphere, the organism, life and polarity. He concludes his overview with a return to the basic principles of the philosophy of nature in a section “on a general formula of the system”: Let us admit in space two contrary principles. Let us admit that—in virtue of an internal force which is proper to them—these two principles move freely in space. Let us also admit, in order to fix our ideas, that they move only along one line, a straight line. For the same reason, instead of trying first to grasp them ourselves in all their abstraction, let us represent them under the form of living forces of mechanics, while taking care however to spiritualise it, i.e., the concept, as much as possible, to purge it insofar as we are capable of its material elements. Let us admit finally that these two principles move in contrary directions. A moment will arrive when they encounter each other on a given point of the line. A conflict will there be established between them. […] Increases of the motor energy of the two principles can be represented by an infinite number of increasing degrees; and likewise diminutions of energy by an infinite number of

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decreasing degrees of energy. The result is that the number of points of conflict found on the line must also be unlimited, infinite. But now is the moment to insist on something already indicated: We have admitted that the movement of contrary principles, in their activity, occurs in a straight line; and it was a hypothesis whose sole object was to make it easier for us to represent what must occur in their encounter. But they do not actually move in this way: it is not thus in reality. Instead of moving along one sole straight line, the opposed principles move, on the contrary, in every direction, spreading out in all directions; and, at the same time, upon each of these innumerable multitude of lines that they create necessarily occurs all the phenomena we previously restricted to the one line. This must be so, for if we suppose that each of the conflicts of contrary principles has for its expression something in the universe; if we suppose that each of the relations of opposition which these diverse conflicts have between them is indeed expressed in a manner visible to us by the relations that these things have between them in space and time, then we will recognise, in the dualism I’ve just described, the general law of the universe; we will recognise in the diverse combinations of this dualism a whole order of invisible and hidden things of which the universe is a visible and shining manifestation. (Barchou de Penhoën 1833a: 356–8)

The second part of Barchou de Penhoën’s essay on the philosophy of history concludes with a series of general reflections on Schelling’s significance: Before finishing these few pages, perhaps it would not be completely useless to remember once more the perspective Schelling takes up in writing on the above material. This perspective, as we have already said elsewhere, is that of a transcendental idealism, where reality does not exist, where the I and its modifications are the only things to exist. And these modifications of the I are possible only on the condition that each of them appears simultaneously as something objective and something subjective. The subjective reunites on its side all the characteristics that we attribute to freedom; the objective all those, on the contrary, under which necessity appears. In this way, the problem discussed in the previous pages could, by receiving a rigorously transcendental expression, be formulated in the following way: “How is the I conscious of a primitive harmony between the subjective and the objective?”—a new form by means of which it might well be worth rethinking the problem. We would then be inhabiting a higher, more abstract sphere that is even more distant from that of positive reality, the fundamental idea, the general formula of Schelling’s philosophy of history.—However, this is not the moment, it seems to me, to undertake such an endeavour.—Instead, I will quickly terminate this long excursion into the regions of idealist philosophy, regions little populated until now by the French public and where I have journeyed fearful of not being accompanied by the reader without impatience and fatigue on their part. (Barchou de Penhoën 1833b: 186)

Barchou’s 1836 Histoire embeds this reading of Schelling (the section runs to over 100 pages) into a broader narrative of German Idealism, as part of the most expansive discussion of German Idealism prior to 1844. His exposition of Schelling still ends in 1815 and he still focuses on the principle of identity as the “master key” to his philosophy; however, there is a renewed emphasis on Schelling’s difference from Fichte: Fichte represents heroism in the struggle with the external world, in human thought restricted to the intimacy of the I. […] Schelling represents, on the contrary, the profound calm of intellect […] a calm and reflective appreciation of men and things. (Barchou de Penhoën 1836: 2.105)

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To put it another way, Barchou insists on the non-revolutionary character of Schelling’s philosophy, as exemplary of “the tendency of that part of Germany which had accepted, to a certain point, the influence of French domination” (Barchou de Penhoën 1836: 2.104). And it is this position which allows Barchou, in his preface to the work, to call for a renewed “philosophical alliance of France and Germany” (Barchou de Penhoën 1836: 1.7), much like Cousin and Willm were also doing in the 1830s. When it comes to Hegel, Barchou’s Histoire provides “the most explicit and most happy indication of a possible reunion between historico-philosophical eclecticism and certain principles of Hegelianism” (Bellantone 2011: 1.158). Hence, Barchou is quick to praise what he sees as valuable in Hegel’s philosophy: “Using the powerful fire of his logic, he merges in a whole idealism critical philosophy, art, naturalism, religion, State, and history. […] Here lies Hegel’s eternal glory” (1836: 1.243; see Piaia 2022: 383). Just as with Schelling, the principle of identity is placed at the centre of Hegel’s philosophy: Hegel “everywhere seeks unity—it is the distinctive character of his philosophy”, whether it is “the identity of existence and thought” or “of reason and reality” (Barchou de Penhoën 1836: 2.128, 2.132). Barchou also notes the centrality of logic to Hegel’s project, although it is, he continues, a logic that “must be taken in a completely different way than it ordinarily is in philosophy—a distinctively ‘objective’ logic” (Barchou de Penhoën 1836: 2.148–9).

3.3 Attacks on Cousin’s Version of Absolute Idealism Cousin’s early reception of German Idealism was at bottom a political gesture: the aura bestowed by his “insider” knowledge of German intellectual life directly translated into institutional prestige and cultural power. And he worked hard to retain that power, to “conserve a position of monopoly over the importation of German cultural goods” by “controlling the works or ideas coming from Germany” (Espagne and Werner 1990: 14–15). Unsurprisingly, this strategy met with resistance, and one of the ways in which this resistance manifested itself was in opposing the Cousinian exegesis of German Idealism. This resistance took on a number of forms. First, there were those who portrayed Cousin’s turn to Germany as a betrayal of long-­ standing French philosophical norms. This view was inaugurated by F. J. V. Broussais’ 1828 De l’irritation et de la folie which polemicised against the “Kanto-Platonism” infecting France as a result of Cousin’s turn away from physiology (1828: xiv); it was then consecrated by Auguste Comte who likewise bemoans “some men” who, “misunderstanding the current and irrevocable direction of the human mind, have for ten years been trying to transplant German metaphysics among us” (Comte [1828] 1998: 229). Secondly, there were those, like Henri Maret, who treated Cousin’s turn to Hegel and Schelling as a symptom of their shared degeneracy— coupling them together in order to undermine German philosophy and eclecticism in one swoop, often under the rubric of “pantheism” (see §3.4.4 below). And finally,

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there were those who were interested in “finding out about another Germany” (Espagne and Werner 1990: 15) beyond Cousin’s version of it—to discover alternative German Idealisms less consistent with institutional eclecticism. To interpret Hegel and Schelling otherwise than Cousin was an act of academic rebellion—and such rebels constitute the subject matter of this section.

3.3.1 Lerminier In 1829, Eugène Lerminier became the first French philosopher to summarise Hegel’s philosophy in print. Having grown up in a German-speaking Alsatian community, he had the tools to be the first to cite a specific work by Hegel in French (the 1830 edition of the Enzyklopädie). And it was his reading of Hegel that was later to be praised by both Gans and Marx (see Vermeren 2011: 83, Audren 2011: 16) As Lerminier himself writes in the preface to his 1831 Philosophie du Droit, The chapter I dedicated to Hegel [in this work] had finished printing when news of his death reached Paris. This sad news did not change my philosophical conviction, but it did suggest other words to me. How can one see disappear such a powerful intelligence as that of the Berlin professor without pain mingled with respect? […] I do not wish to fail to incline my head before the tomb of an illustrious man, whose name I was the first, in France, to pronounce and to make known some of his ideas, but by restoring his glory to him. (Lerminier 1831: 1.xxxiii).

By calling himself “the first” to speak the name “Hegel”, Lerminier enters into combat with Cousin: he invokes Hegel precisely in order to undermine and resist eclectic orthodoxy. That is, implied in the above is the contention that, while Cousin had avoided naming Hegel, refused to analyse his philosophy in print and had relied on personal attachments rather than textual citations, Lerminier is doing the opposite. Despite his criticisms of Hegel, Lerminier—unlike Cousin— “renders unto Hegel what belongs to Hegel” (Puisais 2005: 98). In other words, Lerminier’s difference from Cousin is, first and foremost, methodological—desacralizing Cousin’s power by turning Hegel into one more object of scholarly attention among others. As Espagne and Werner write, “Lerminier’s 1831 philosophy constitutes one of the first to detail Schelling’s and Hegel’s thinking in France in a manner that is grounded on study of the original texts. Lerminier is not content with global judgments, but tries to reconstruct the original texts” (Espagne and Werner 1986: 77). Every citation of Hegel and Schelling Lerminier provides includes the original German text as well as a translation. Nevertheless, Lerminier’s position remains close to the broad liberalism of Cousin’s early work, for, while Lerminier was, in his own words, a “heretical” Saint-Simonian (Lerminier 1831: 1.xxvii), he was also a student of Jouffroy (in turn a student of Cousin) and part of the coterie of “Globistes” closely connected to Cousin. Indeed, in defending Hegel against Lerminier in 1833, Amedée Prévost could remark: “The philosophical principles which serve as the basis of [Lerminier’s] work do not appear to me to differ at all from the eclectic doctrine taught by Cousin”

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(Prévost 1832: 124). There are in fact passages in Lerminier’s writings that seem to repeat verbatim Cousin’s 1828 lecture course (see Puisais 2005: 111). However, Lerminier subscribes to these broadly Cousinian principles for different reasons— that is, in order to develop a new jurisprudence and, in Puisais’s words, to make use of philosophy as “the first source and first step towards the development of a political and legal doctrine”, by uniting it with history—a union which is ultimately cashed out in his work as “the union of Hegel and Savigny” (Puisais 2005 110–11) (the latter having formed the subject of Lerminier’s doctoral thesis in the mid-­1820s). And so, in analogy with Cousin, Lerminier makes use of German thought for the sake of a new French national tradition of jurisprudence; indeed, his 1833 De l’influence de la philosophie du XVIIIe siècle sur la législation et la sociabilité du XIXe siècle includes a call for an alliance between French and German philosophical traditions, just as Cousin, Willm and Barchou were doing contemporaneously (Lerminier 1833: 72–73, 97–99). The chapter on Hegel in the 1831 Philosophie du droit is Lerminier’s most decisive intervention into Hegel-scholarship. It begins with nine pages devoted to Schelling (Lerminier 1831: 2.189–98), which—as is traditional—use the System des transzendentalen Idealismus as the basis of their reconstruction, but also (uncommon in the early French context) quote the 1809 Freiheitsschrift (Lerminier 1831: 2.192). This summary of Schelling’s philosophy serves, however, merely as a preliminary step to help the reader better understand Hegel, who is Lerminier’s focus. At the heart of the chapter is a reconstruction of the Enzyklopädie, whose dialectical movement is schematically summarised as follows: When thought which thinks itself posits itself in relation to the world, it destroys itself as that form of thought in itself; and it is by destroying itself as this first form that it attains a second form, that is, as something other to itself, nature. In other words, matter is solely the idea itself in its heterogeneity. When these two acts have occurred, thought, which immediately destroyed itself in itself and which then existed in something other than itself, returns into itself, constitutes itself in its own consciousness—and then the three terms are posited: the trinity is created. (Lerminier 1831: 2.200)

Puisais draws attention to some of the more distinctive elements of Lerminier’s reading of Hegel present in this passage: the interpretation of negation as self-­ destruction, Aufhebung as the eternal return of the same, and the enumeration of the Hegelian “trinity” as abstract being, nature and consciousness (Puisais 2005: 119–21). More generally, features of Lerminier’s 1831 reading that subsequently become influential on the later reception-history include: (i) a claim that “Schelling will help us better understand Hegel” (Lerminier 1831: 2.198) which continues the tradition of pairing together Schelling’s and Hegel’s philosophies as complementary; (ii) a corresponding distancing of the absolute idealism of Schelling and Hegel from the subjective idealism of Kant and Fichte: Lerminier breaks the Kant-Fichte-­ Schelling-Hegel series into two opposed halves (by splitting them into separate chapters); (iii) a condemnation, lament and apology to the reader for Hegel’s obscurity—as Lerminier puts it, “Kant’s and Fichte’s phraseology is a model of clarity next to Hegel’s language” (Lerminier 1831: 2.199); (iv) a tendency to focus on Hegel’s Enzyklopädie as the key text for interpretation and to relatively marginalise

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the Phänomenologie des Geistes (see Lerminier 1835: 2.118); (v) an emphasis on the “hyper-rationalism” (Bellantone 2011: 1.133) and abstract “sterility” of Hegel’s system (Lerminier 1831: 2.205), i.e., on its exclusion of experience and life; (v) a criticism of Schelling’s and Hegel’s philosophies as pantheisms—Hegel articulates a “scholastic pantheism” (Lerminier 1831: 2.217) and so takes his place in the canon of Western philosophy as “the logician of modern pantheism” (Lerminier 1835: 2.138). The chapter on Hegel in the Philosophie du droit concludes, It is time to characterize this dialectic without limits and without end, which encloses within its vast monotony God, man, the world, societies and history, which departs from abstraction to arrive at abstraction, departs from a dialectical point to return to a dialectical point, departs from the one to come back to the one, and finds the identity of substance [to consist] in the identity of abstraction and formula. Undoubtedly, the thought of the German philosopher is powerful; there is something of Aristotle in this man; he displays rare industry in the mechanism of thinking. But where are the positive discoveries for social philosophy? Where is the profound and independent observation of facts? Where is the liberal spirit that always ought to animate the thinker, free him from the present and lead him towards the future? And how could he have a free spirit in the first place, this slave to logic? How could he observe, swept away as he is in this dialectical turmoil, in these swirling formulas that envelop and imprison him? But that is not all. What is the consequence of this idealist identity of abstract reason which serves to constitute God, the world, and history? Just as Spinoza introduced divine necessity everywhere, so Hegel introduces reason everywhere; he cloaks the facts in philosophical legitimacy; he elevates history to the sacrality of the pure manifestation of the absolute; and he advances the following axiom: All that is rational is real, and all that is real is rational (Was vernünftig ist, das ist wirklich; und was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig). […] With such a philosophy, one constantly absolves power, amnesties despotism, tolerates the evils of humans, their ignorance and their suffering. With such a philosophy, one fails to understand revolutions, even finds metaphysical reasons to condemn them, even goes so far as to condemn the efforts that a people undertakes, within the confines of the law, to reform its constitution. (Lerminier 1831: 2.214–6)

The implication is clear: Cousin may well have seen Hegel as a liberal ally, but for Lerminier his philosophy is one of Restoration—one of centralised power, injustice and reaction. As Puisais puts it, Lerminier “turns Hegelianism into a rigorous conservatism which totally eradicates all forms of novelty, progress or social reform”, into, that is, an “absolutism by metaphysics” (2005: 129). The Lerminier of 1831 provides a forceful image of an absolutist Hegel, and Savigny is once more a key influence, particularly his polemic against Hegel’s philosophy of right in the Vom Beruf unserer Zeit für Gesetzgebung und Rechtswissenschaft. While Lerminier is no member of Savigny’s historical school of law, he still makes use of his critique for his own polemic against Cousin (see Bodenheimer 2014: 83–4). And in 1831, such is the doctrinal nub of Lerminier’s critique of Cousin: what Cousin mistakes as liberalism in Hegel’s philosophy is in fact—once one reads the texts properly—an apology for absolutism. Lerminier will continue to reflect on Hegelianism in a steady stream of works over the next four years, and, after a visit to Germany in 1833 to hear Gans lecture, his attitude towards it softens somewhat. In his 1835 Au-delà du Rhin (“the principal

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source, after Staël, for the representation of cultural Germany” in France [Monchoux 1965: 152]), he begins—in Gansian fashion—to speak of Hegel as “a possible starting point for new and fruitful developments” (Lerminier 1835: 2.137–8). However, for our purposes, it is another text that proves influential on the development of French philosophy: the third letter of Lerminier’s Lettres philosophiques adressées à un Berlinois, written on 5th March 1832 and serialised initially in the Revue des Deux Mondes. Here, rather than criticising Hegel, Lerminier is intent on simulating a dialogue with an anonymous Hegelian correspondent to show the inadequacies of Cousin’s use of Hegelianism. The text functions, indeed, as one of the most important “anti-eclectic manifestos” in 1830s France (Puisais 2005: 133). The very framing of the Lettres philosophiques brings Cousin’s purported expertise on German philosophy into question, for Lerminier is able to rhetorically presuppose insider knowledge of German philosophy on the part of his German addressee and at Cousin’s expense. And it is in this context he writes, As a literary spirit, [Cousin] turned towards the literature of philosophy; his is a mobile imagination and so he easily abandoned one beautiful theory for another he found more beautiful still; he is an ardent speaker and so he made flow in other souls an understanding and enthusiasm for science. Such has been Cousin: it is his character to never be able to find and feel philosophical reality himself; he must do so translated, discovered, systematised; then he understands it, borrows it and presents it. I sense, sir, that we are together reaching an inevitable conclusion; we are obliged to infer that Cousin is not, properly speaking, a philosopher; and I know that this has been your view for a long time; you have even said that in Germany they start smiling if some Frenchman, freshly arrived, speaks of our compatriot as a genuine metaphysician. (Lerminier 1832: 75)

In this vein, Lerminier will go on to speak of Cousin’s “imitative eclecticism” and “borrowed idealism” (1832: 76), and this derivative nature of eclecticism becomes the central topic of the continuation of the letter: Between 1820 and 1829, many different impressions have crossed [Cousin’s] path. After having adhered exclusively to Kant’s rationalism, after having brushed against Fichte’s idealism, Cousin was not long in suspecting and recognising that these two philosophies had been superseded by two new systems whose authors were Schelling and Hegel. Transported afar either by correspondences or traveller’s visits, something happened. In 1824, he undertook a journey in Germany during which he was arrested in Dresden by the Prussian police and led to Berlin, suspected of being a Carbonari and revolutionary. […] By a happy chance, our traveller could make use of his captivity, for he entered into daily conversation with Hegel’s school: during long conversations, Gans and Michelet from Berlin explained to him their master’s system; they weeded out from his mind its Kantianism and some errors of Fichte, in order to substitute for them the principles and implications of an eclectic, optimistic realist [position], which boasted of its ability to explain all, comprehend all and accept all. Cousin was quick to turn to this philosophy with his usual haste; he grasped on the fly how important the change was: he would no longer be an oppositional, revolutionary and troublesome philosopher for state powers, but a sage standing over all parties, all systems, and so, by his inexhaustible impartiality, giving the most servile guarantees to power. […] Reappointed to his teaching position in 1828, Cousin took pleasure in exciting surprise and admiration. In an eloquent introduction of thirteen lectures, he developed with his artistic imagination and his talent as an orator some principles of Hegel’s system which seemed to emerge out of his own head and belong to him. From the heights

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of a dogmatism of which he alone held the secret, he inspected history, philosophers, great men, war and laws, Providence and its decrees. He professed the legitimacy of a universal optimism and pronounced, in the name of philosophy, the absolutisation of history. I know, sir, that in Berlin you do not share the enthusiasm with which we welcomed these lectures; you could not understand how we could import a doctrine without naming its author. Hegel joked about this with a fairly satirical indulgence and you, sir, you uttered on this topic a harsh word that I can scarcely write—the word plagiarism. (Lerminier 1832: 81–5)

Such is the idea that Lerminier wishes to communicate most to his reader: “Cousin’s metaphysical theft” (Lerminier 1832: 85). And it is to be contrasted in the reader’s head with Lerminier’s own practice of explicitly citing from Hegel’s texts and entering into open dialogue with them. His own good scholarly practice, Lerminier wishes to emphasise, is one of the elements that differentiates his Hegel-reception from Cousin’s.

3.3.2 Heine and Lechevalier Heinrich Heine arrived in Paris on 19th May 1831  in order to escape his “cold, Prussian chains” and experience “the fatherland of champagne and the ‘Marseillaise’” (Heine 1970–80: 17.157)—that is, to experience post-revolutionary fervour and escape the increasing political repression and anti-Semitism of Prussia. On arrival, Heine was inducted into the liberal intelligentsia by Quinet and Jules Michelet and frequented Saint-Simonian circles (see §3.4.1 below). It was within these circles that Heine wrote De l’Allemagne depuis Luther in three instalments in December 1834 for the Revue des Deux Mondes (later published in book form in 1835 and in German as Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland). Like Ancillon before him, Heine positioned himself as a German speaking to a French audience in need of philosophical education—that is, he played on his own particular privileged access to recent German philosophy so as to enter into competition with Cousin’s version of German philosophy. Heine had attended Hegel’s lectures at the University of Berlin between 1821 and 1823, including lectures on the philosophy of history, and there forged a “liberal Hegelian alliance” with Eduard Gans. As an exile, Heine was able to put these first-hand experiences to good use— in Kramer’s words, “He could write for the French audience as a German ‘insider’ (someone who could be trusted to unravel German mysteries with French wit and clarity)” and, conversely, in his work as the Paris correspondent for German reviews, he could equally write “for the German audience as a Parisian ‘insider’ (someone who lived there and knew the leading French figures)”: “Heine used his ‘Germanness’ in France as often as he used his ‘Frenchness’ in the articles he sent to Germany” (Kramer 1988: 102). The title Heine chose to educate the French public on German philosophy was intentionally close to Staël’s earlier book: Heine was attempting to wean Paris (and particularly the Saint-Simonians—see §3.4.1 below) off the Staëlian image of German metaphysics as spiritual, other-worldly and impractical. A comment from

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June 1842 that Heine makes (in the third person) concerning Pierre Leroux is particularly clear on this point: One of the great philosophers of France is without a doubt Pierre Leroux and he confessed to me six years ago that he had only, by means of the book De l’Allemagne by Heinrich Heine, come to understand that German philosophy is not as mystic and religious as the French public are led to believe, but on the contrary very cold, almost glacial when it comes to the force of abstract being, and irreligious to the point of denying the existence of the supreme Being. (Heine 1855: 252)

Heine wishes to present an alternative, relatively irreligious version of German Idealism. And to that extent, he also wants to insist that Cousin in particular gets Hegel and Schelling entirely wrong. Thus, while in an early text from 1831 (Kahldorf über den Adel in Briefen an den Grafen M. von Moltke) Heine still (in line with Lerminier) speaks of “Hegel, the Orléans of philosophy, who founded, or rather, put into order a new regime, an eclectic one” (Heine [1831] 2007: 131), this identification of Hegel with Cousinian eclecticism is precisely what he will refuse in De l’Allemagne. While Heine’s vitriol towards Cousin cools quickly in the late 1830s and early 1840s, to the extent that he sends Cousin his work for patronage (Heine 1970–80: 22.68) and admits that “we treated you badly before, you who are always so good to my German compatriots” (Heine 1855: 203), in 1834 Cousin was certainly Heine’s principal target. In an appendix to the first version of De l’Allemagne, not reproduced in subsequent editions, Heine attacks Cousin directly: That man who loves the truth still more than he loves Plato and Tennemann is unjust when it comes to himself; he took liberties with the truth when he wished to persuade us that he took a lot from Schelling’s and Hegel’s philosophy. My duty is to protect Cousin from his own claim. He calumniates himself on this occasion. In my soul and my conscience, I can admit that this honest man has taken nothing, absolutely nothing, from Schelling’s and Hegel’s philosophy; and, if he recalls some memory of these philosophers, it can only be their friendship […] Cousin has always observed the sixth commandment in regard to German philosophy: he has not stolen any idea, not even the smallest morsel of an idea. (Heine 1970–80: 5.118)

On this point, Heine cites at length from Hinrichs’s attack on Cousin in the Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik (see §3.3.3 below). It is not just Cousin that is being criticised here, but Lerminier’s criticism of Cousin too: whereas Lerminier attacks Cousin for borrowing too much from Hegel, Heine responds that Cousin did not understand Hegel well enough to be able to plagiarise him. Heine accuses Cousin of claiming to be more German than he is. In the 1836 De l’histoire de la nouvelle et belle littérature en Allemagne (reissued in German as Die romantische Schule), Heine will sum up this line of thought as follows: “Cousin has presented a whole lot of wish-wash, but no German philosophy” (Heine [1836] 2007: 188). The closing paragraph to De l’Allemagne itself is the key site for Heine’s critique of Cousin’s reading of German Idealism: Our philosophical revolution is over. Hegel completed its great circle. All we see since then is the development and expansion of the doctrine of philosophy of nature. As I have said, this doctrine has made its way into all of the sciences and has brought forth the most

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extraordinary and splendid things. […] Philosophical follies which can be pressed into the service of the powers that be and the Catholic doctrine of incarnation would have dampened your enthusiasm and paralyzed your courage. I think it, thus, of world-historical importance that your great eclectics, who, at the time, wanted to teach you German philosophy, did not understand it in the least. Such providential ignorance was beneficial for France and for all of humanity. (Heine [1834] 2007: 113–14)

Alongside the remarks on Cousin’s failure to grasp German philosophy, another closely related theme is visible in the conclusion to De l’Allemagne: the reactionary nature of Schelling’s philosophy. This is a very new topos in the French reception history and emerges in reaction to not only Cousin’s liberal alliance with Schelling, but also the absolutist reading of Hegel in Lerminier and others at the turn of the 1830s. That is, in addition to Heine’s repetition of more traditional material from the French reception, such as attributing pantheism to Schelling (“Spinoza’s doctrine and philosophy of nature as worked out by Schelling in his better period are essentially one and the same” [Heine [1834] 2007: 108]) and criticising his method as poetic (“Schelling is one of those creatures to whom nature gave more poetic inclination than potency. […] He lives more [than Fichte] in intuitions; he does not feel at home in the cold heights of logic; he likes to lose his head in the flowery valleys of symbolism” [Heine [1834] 2007: 107–8]), Heine also wants to make a point new to the French context—a point that proved as effective as it was simple: “Schelling, not Hegel, was the tool of absolutism” (Rowe 2000: 244). French readers had got it wrong in accusing Hegel of justifying state power without qualification, for this position should be attributed to Schelling instead. Hence, Heine writes, Schelling now abandons the way of philosophy and seeks, by means of a kind of mystic intuiting, to arrive at an intuition of the absolute itself […] This is where philosophy ends in Schelling and poetry, or I would say, folly, begins. […] A greater thinker now emerges who develops philosophy of nature into a complete system, who explains with this synthesis the entire world of appearances, who adds even grander ideas to the grand ideas of his predecessors, and who carries out the synthesis in every discipline, thus grounding it scientifically. He is a pupil of Schelling, but a pupil who gradually assumed all of the power of his teacher in the realm of philosophy; seeking dominance, he outgrew Schelling, and finally cast him out into the darkness. It is the great Hegel, the greatest philosopher produced by Germany since Leibniz. There is no question that he towers above both Kant and Fichte. He is sharp like the former and powerful like the latter, and at the same time has a fundamentally peaceful soul, a harmony of thought which we do not find in Kant and Fichte, since in these two it is more the spirit of revolution which rages. To compare this man with Joseph Schelling is completely impossible; for Hegel was a man of character. And even if he, like Schelling, produced several rather dubious justifications of the powers that be in state and Church, at least this happened for a state which, at least in theory, revered the principle of progress, and for a Church which considered the principle of free research its lifeblood. (Heine [1834] 2007: 110–11)

Ironically, just like Cousin, Heine fails to reconstruct Hegel’s philosophy in any detail: he breaks off his conclusion at the very moment an exposition of Hegel’s system itself becomes necessary. In his later Geständnisse, he admits that “he at first intended to write a short essay explaining the Hegelian philosophy as an appendix

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to a new edition of [the work], but after two years of work on the manuscript, he found it not to his liking, to be too abstract and pointless” (Pinkard 2007: xxiii)). However, what is crucial—and new in France in 1834—is a sense of opposition between Hegel and Schelling. According to Heine, Hegel’s philosophy is not derivative of Schelling’s or an extension of it, but the overthrow of its conservative and orthodox tendencies. In a fateful twist, Heine insists that it is Hegelianism that can become a resource to revolutionary thinking, whereas Schelling has “become a renegade to his own teaching; he left the altar which he himself had consecrated, he slipped back into yesterday’s stables of belief, he is now a good Catholic and preaches an otherworldly personal God” (Heine [1834] 2007: 111). In consequence, Heine is just as committed as the eclectics to an alliance between French and German thought, but it is a very different one—one between a revolutionary France and a Hegelian radicalism that anticipates the coming of Left Hegelianism. In Heine’s own words, “The great affair of my life was to work on the entente cordiale between Germany and France”—or, more fully, to “develop the elective affinities [Wahlverwandtschaften] between the practical, revolutionary drive of the French and the philosophical dreams of the Germans” (Heine 1973–97: 15.210; see Höhn 2002: 256). And one of the fruits of this work was the short-lived journal, L’Europe littéraire, with which Heine was closely involved—an anticipation of Marx’s and Ruge’s Deutsch-Französische Jahrbüche. It too had the express intent, in Heine’s words, “to make the French familiar with the intellectual life of Germany” (1970–80: 21.52). For our purposes, one of the most significant pieces published in the journal was a very Heinean critique of eclecticism’s appropriation of Hegelianism by the Saint-Simonian, Jules Lechevalier, who had studied with Hegel in the late 1820s (see §3.4.1 below). The second part of Lechevalier’s four-­ part review of Théodore Jouffroy’s Mélanges from October 1833 (i.e., a few months before the publication of De l’Allemagne) takes particular aim at Cousin’s Hegel: It is as the culminating stage of philosophy and scientific method that eclecticism has been taught at the Sorbonne by V[ictor] Cousin: he teaches it as nothing else but the accomplishment of the history of the human mind [esprit] and as the sounding of the trumpet of the last judgment for all systems. And it is to German philosophy that he attributes this method. All those who know a little about the philosophical history of Germany can judge whether such an honour would be accepted by Kant, Fichte, Schelling or Hegel. Hegel, above all, had a genuine aversion to eclecticism that he expressed many times in his writings and oral lectures. […] The Sorbonne professor, a powerful orator and incisive dialectician, has genuinely taken possession of some of the historical and metaphysical results of Hegel’s theory: the justification for war, the idea of heroes and great men intervening in the destiny of peoples, the dogma of the legitimacy of the victor, the application to chronological epochs and to geographical places, the three logical categories—infinite, finite, relation of the infinite and the finite—all this, very obviously, came from Berlin. But on this basis to confound eclecticism with Hegel’s method! There is the same distance between them as between the summit of the tower of Babel and the Orion nebula. The tower of Babel is eclecticism and the nebula, from which we count scarcely one or two stars, is Hegel’s Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences. […] Without understanding all the mysteries of Hegel’s audacious ontology, it is easy to recognise that his scientific method is diametrically opposed to eclecticism. Eclecticism

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takes as its starting point psychology, Hegel begins from ontology; eclecticism admits the constraint of common sense, Hegel—conceiving empiricism and critical philosophy as an inferior condition of human thought—claims to ascend to absolute truth from immediate knowing. Finally, to the eyes of eclecticism, history is a battlefield where four systems are endlessly reproduced, so as to be endlessly rejected by the common sense of the masses, until one day they are all four buried and blessed in the name of common sense by the comprehensive reflection of eclectic philosophy. In Hegel’s philosophy, each system, admitted as a whole, represents a particular category of absolute truth. The history of the human mind [esprit] is the ascent of the intellect to absolute truth, by following a series whose terms are fixed and successive, and the progressive absorption, to its profit, of all systems. Here two diverse doctrines are not placed face to face and, to the applause of the people, knocked against each other like two marionettes; the system which represents the inferior category is consumed, absorbed (aufgehoben), assimilated and reproduced by the superior system, until the human mind [esprit] is able to identify itself with absolute truth. […] Whatever we are doing, we are not here providing an apology for Hegel’s system; we are solely noting the impossibility of confusing it with eclecticism. (Lechevalier 1833: 125–7)

3.3.3 Hinrichs Cousin’s 1833 Preface to his Fragments philosophiques (see §3.2.3 above) was widely circulated in Germany in both the French edition and in Beckers’ translation, and from this there followed a series of reviews and reflections by I.  G. Fichte, C. H. Weisse and Amadeus Wendt, among others. For our purposes, the most significant of these reviews was published in August 1834 in the inaugural issue of the Hegelian organ, the Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik, by the Right Hegelian, Hermann Hinrichs. The hostility Hinrichs displays towards Cousin is notable, not only because it shows a certain distancing from Cousin among the German Hegelian community (which had been so eager to seek Cousin’s advice in establishing this very journal in the first place—see §5.1.1 below), but also because it proved influential back in France, quoted by Heine and (through him) Leroux as ammunition in their rejection of Cousinian orthodoxy. Cousin himself immediately saw how damaging it could be (Cousin and Schelling 1991: 229–31). Hinrichs’ review opens, Cousin philosophises in a way that is easy and comfortable. He has his admirers not solely in France, but in Germany and everywhere else. Cousin views the entire domain of philosophy as a beautiful garden in which flowers of the mind bloom from every tree. Just as the bee buzzes from one to another and sucks honey from all the flowers, so too the eclectic philosopher plucks the most beautiful blooms which he weaves into a garland to adorn his head. He blithely enjoys and consumes what others have worked hard on, sweat pouring down their faces, while these flowers, separated from their stem and roots, wither in deadened bouquets. However, blending and mixing is the eclectic mode of philosophising. Whenever Cousin has been able to choose what seems the best in each system, it must be because he understands the value of everything. Impartially and disinterestedly, he hovers over [each truth], applies no shackles to his thinking and holds his intellectual gaze open and free. Without having a system himself, he makes all systems his own. (Hinrichs 1834: 283–4)

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Building on these ironic similes, Hinrichs later in the review turns to Cousin’s relation to Hegel and Schelling. Focusing on the “objective and absolute nature” of Cousin’s account of reason, Hinrichs notes that he “believes that with this idea of reason he has perfectly made the Schellingian standpoint his own.” However, he continues, Schelling’s account is much more sophisticated, much less inchoate and “formless”. In particular, when Cousin goes on to attack Schellingian intellectual intuition, he “polemicises with a formless reason against the Schellingian form of reason, whose content he recognises as the truth”, and ultimately Cousin’s wish to ground reason in psychology means that he ends up committed to the idea that “reason should be absolute and also subjective…. a hybrid being that could not be more monstrous.” Cousin possesses, Hinrichs concludes, “false and highly superficial ideas of reason and the Schellingian absolute” (Hinrichs 1834: 290). Hinrichs then exclaims, “And what should we make of his polemic against Hegel!”, continuing: Of the Hegelian system he has no other idea than that it is one and the same as the Schellingian. He shows that he has no idea of the great and essential differences between them. […] Hence, when Cousin says of Schelling that he has a great power of invention and that Hegel possesses a power of profound reflection, it is as if Hegel had invented nothing, even though his method is an invention for all times. […] We read not long ago in Lerminier  that  Cousin has borrowed, much—very much, indeed—from Hegel, and Cousin himself insists on this. However, if this were actually the case, it could be true only of very general ways of speaking or only on occasion. […] This much is clear: Cousin has understood nothing, absolutely nothing of Hegel. Cousin often visited Germany where he learned to love and treasure Schelling and Hegel as two of the greatest philosophical masters of the century, […] It seems clear that Cousin thinks he must abuse his friend Hegel in order to remain good friends with Schelling, who is still alive. However, he ends up abusing the very person he is trying to pay homage to: he knows just as little of Schelling as of Hegel, and so shows his unworthiness for such a character and such a mind precisely when he intends to recommend himself to Schelling. […] However, irrespective of whether Hegel is worthy of so little esteem, Cousin states that, from his first conversation with him, he perceived Hegel’s importance and felt himself in the presence of a highly gifted man. Moreover, he has avowed this publicly on all sides, and, after he returned to France, he said to his friends, “Gentlemen, I have just met a genius!” Now we know to whom Hegel is indebted for his great fame in France; for the friends of Cousin have certainly believed such words and have faithfully repeated them, since, owing to Cousin’s mediation, France has come to learn of this genius. He later adds, the impression that Hegel left on him is deep but confused and only with effort did he recognise a few words of profound meaning. We must wonder how Cousin could have spent whole evenings, deep into the night, conversing with Hegel when he asserts that Hegel did not speak French with any fluency. […] Why could Cousin not have helped him with his German! He pretends back in France to be familiar with German; but obviously, when in Germany, he let fall this pretence, and had Hegel tried harder with French, then Cousin would have been reduced to the role of a deaf-mute. […] The guilt evidently lies less in him than in Hegel who, as Cousin expressly says, was not capable of making his work accessible through spoken conversation. Who does not wish to excuse the utter ignorance of Cousin in everything that pertains to Hegelian philosophy! […] If Cousin does now want it to be known that he introduced German speculation into France, then we Germans can certainly give him as little thanks as his compatriots for the way his endeavour has turned out. (Hinrichs 1834: 292–4)

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A year later, Hinrichs will pen a further review in the Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik of Beckers’s German translation of Cousin’s Fragments. He focuses on Schelling’s introduction, but does make the following sole reference back to Cousin’s own philosophy: Schelling provides a judgment on the Cousianian Fragments, but this judgment appears merely to pick a fight with Hegel; he praises Cousin’s person, since he cannot praise his Fragments—indeed, he cannot bring himself to do so. He has good things to say about Cousin’s perspective on the history of philosophy alone, but in a way he still, nevertheless, praises Hegel, since it is universally known that Cousin first became familiar with this perspective from Hegel in Berlin. We firmly believe that, if a German had written these Cousinian Fragments, Schelling would not have considered them worth a glance. (Hinrichs 1835: 275–6)

3.3.4 Leroux’s Réfutation de l’éclectisme Pierre Leroux’s relation to German Idealism is, crudely speaking, a matter of two stages, separated by the decisive event of Schelling’s first Berlin lectures in late 1841. The first is a destructive stage during which Leroux shows the dangers of an eclecticism that has badly understood Hegelianism; the second is a constructive stage during which he makes use of the late Schelling’s philosophy to think a non-­ eclectic future for thought. This section is concerned with the first stage, and the second stage is dealt with in §3.5.2 below. The most significant feature of Leroux’s reception of German Idealism during the 1830s is its synthesis of Lerminier’s criticism of Cousin as a plagiarist with Heine’s and Hinrichs’s criticisms that Cousin fundamentally misunderstands German Idealist philosophy. That is, Leroux presents a picture of Cousin as a figure who desperately tries to be “a French Hegel” but gets it entirely wrong: Cousin is a failed imitator. In Leroux’s own words, “Cousin copied and aped [Hegel] in France and borrowed everything from him without fundamentally understanding any of it” ([1842] 1982: 56; see Régnier 1988). Ironically, however, like Cousin, Leroux’s German was poor and so his familiarity with Hegel’s and Schelling’s own texts was minimal at this stage (see d’Hondt 1971: 9). As a result, in the 1839 Réfutation de l’éclectisme he relies on quotations from Lerminier’s texts (Leroux [1839] 1979: 71–5, 231–2), as well as drawing implicitly on Heine’s De l’Allemagne (and, through him, Hinrichs)—even if he is also slightly critical of Lerminier in particular (Leroux [1839] 1979: 76). As Abensour has helpfully noted, “Leroux’s speech is double—philosophical and socialist at the same time” (1985: 19); that is, Leroux does not merely confront Cousin’s Germanism with a competing academic description of reality, but does so with social practice, a practical reflection that exceeds disciplinary and institutional limits. And, as this suggests, what fundamentally lies behind Leroux’s critique of Cousin is a refusal of the Cousinian and Hegelian “reduction of the philosopher to the professor of philosophy”. Such a reduction is for him “the death of philosophy”

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(Abensour 1985: 11). Hence, to quote Abensour once more, “Leroux was one of the first to propose a comparison between Hegelianism and Cousinianism, inviting us to situate his struggle against Victor Cousin in the larger framework of a struggle against the Hegelian institution of philosophy at the heart of the modern state” (1985: 11). It is in this context that the 1839 Réfutation confronts absolute idealism. On the one hand, in this work, Leroux insists that Cousin gets Hegel and Schelling wrong by repeating a line of thought (increasingly employed by Cousin himself) that they differ fundamentally in terms of methodology—or, as Leroux puts it, “if Cousin had understood the meaning of Kant, of Schelling, of Hegel, he would not have introduced into France the false psychology that reigns today”. He continues, “Instead of occasionally mentioning the names of Kant, Schelling and Hegel to the French public, Cousin should have begun by refuting them, since he has wished to teach a psychology so directly contrary to theirs” (Leroux [1839] 1979: 187–9). On the other hand, Leroux identifies Cousin with what he takes to be the limitations of German Idealist thinking—particularly its failure to take seriously society and community. In the section on “philosophy of humanity” in the Réfutation, Leroux writes, Germany has been occupied with the life of the I. But is there then only solitude in life? Is there only the I or only solitary “I”s? Is there only the I, God and nature? No: there are others; “I”s communicate among themselves, and form, in time as in space, living groups. What is love, what is family, what is the nation, what is humanity? These are the philosophical questions that have occupied France more than Germany; here is the terrain of its philosophy. The result of the past  two centuries in France has been to produce on these questions an idealism of the life of the “we” comparable and parallel to the idealism of the life of the “I” which has occupied Germans. This idealism is the doctrine of progress and perfectibility. […] Cousin is not of the French school, not of the school of the eighteenth century or of the revolution, not of the school which has been summed up in this phrase: “the indefinite perfectibility of the human species”. Far from it: as we have seen, he professes not to know what French philosophy is; and today what he rejects and detests most is the doctrine of progress. Thus, it is in no way by following French philosophers that Cousin has advanced in the field of philosophy of history. It is by following the steps of the German school of Hegel. This is not the place to show that German Idealism has been incapable of creating a genuine philosophy of history. For reasons I’ve tried to set out elsewhere, the movement of Kant, continued by Schelling, has ended solely in a great fatalism that their successor, Hegel, has extended into the past as well as the present. The idealism of the solitary I could not understand the life of humanity with any sympathy; it could result solely in logical formulae. […]. As everyone knows, in France under the Restoration, i.e., under the Holy Alliance, Cousin provided a repetition of Hegel’s system, if not in its ideas (on which I cannot decide, not knowing Hegel’s writings), at least in its spirit and tendency. It is again by logic, and with what he calls the absolute, that Cousin has arrived at philosophy of history. Just as he did not seek God within himself by way of sentiment and reason together, but outside himself by way of logic, so too he has not felt humanity within him, and is not himself united in a common humanity; he has not even sought out humanity, but has sought what he calls the laws of history, as a not-I which is completely foreign to his life. (Leroux [1839] 1979: 234–7; see Rey 2013: 440–2)

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Present here is a common complaint on the sterility and formulaic nature of Hegelianism, but Leroux makes use of it for two distinctive ends—to show up its failure to take seriously intersubjectivity as well as its failure to appreciate the genuine historicity of human life. In 1842, he will turn to the late Schelling to partially remedy these failings.

3.4 Post-Hegelian France Just as, in Germany after Hegel’s death, Hegelianism split into various groups, underwent mutations and was used in ways Hegel may well not have countenanced himself, so the same was true in France. That is, the late 1830s witnessed the breakdown of the Cousinian stranglehold, not just on French philosophy in general, but on its mediation of German Idealism. This led to a process of fragmentation—what D’Hondt labels an “ideological cacophony” (1998: 286), a mass of disparate, if often cognate uses and abuses of Hegel and Schelling that resist linear presentation. As Grandjonc puts it, in contrast to the early 1830s, the later circulation of Hegel “is situated in a very dense and very complex network of Franco-German relations. […] When it comes to the relations between the German disciples of Hegel and the French socialists in the 1840s, their diversity and multiplicity is quite astonishing” (Grandjonc 1978: 80). Moreover, these transformations of Hegelianism bear witness to a reaction against the nascent institutionalisation of philosophy that had begun in the Restoration and early days of the July Monarchy. The appropriation of Hegelianism by politically radical currents of thought, in particular, is far less tied to individual professors publishing work in reputable journals and presses.6 Hegelianism is (to some extent) no longer institutionally mediated, but takes place in informal, illicit or suppressed media—in the less visible margins. Finally—and perhaps most importantly for this book—the mutated Hegelianisms of the 1840s see a turn away, in many forums, from any engagement with the detail of Hegel’s texts and arguments The ways in which Marx, Hess or Ruge talked “Hegelese” with their French contemporaries, creating new ways of articulating economic and social problems in terms of concepts like contradiction, dialectic, etc., is not strictly speaking part of the French reception of Hegel. In other words, the challenge posed by the transformations of Hegelianism after Hegel’s death is where to draw the line between what is strictly pertinent to the reception of Hegel and Schelling, narrowly understood, and what develops out of a broader post-­ Hegelian atmosphere.

 We employ the term “radical” frequently in what follows to denote, in a relatively imprecise manner, a host of overlapping positions which were felt to threaten political, philosophical and religious orthodoxies because of their social implications. This broadly follows the usage of “les radicaux” current in France at the period (see Simon 1843). 6

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3.4.1 “The Hegelians of Saint-Simonianism” The Hegelianism-Saint-Simonianism relationship was one of the most significant channels for the entry of German Idealism into France during the 1830s: it stands next to Cousin’s eclecticism as an alternative, but just as fundamental mechanism by which Hegelian ideas were circulated while subject to transformation. It is no surprise that Lerminier, Heine, Lechevalier and Leroux—to mention just figures from previous sections—had strong connections with the Saint-Simonian movement, even if in Leroux’s case in particular they had turned against it vehemently. In this space occupied by both Hegelianism and Saint-Simonianism, Eduard Gans plays a particularly important role. Indeed, his work in bringing Hegelianism to France behind the scenes, as it were, has already been noted with respect to Cousin, Lerminier and Heine—and, as well as the Saint-Simonians, he influenced Saint-Marc Girardin (see §6 below) and some of the German émigrés in Paris. When it comes to the French reception of Hegel, Gans was everywhere. No wonder, from a Berlin perspective, Varnhagen von Ense recorded how Gans “knew and loved the French nation, he spoke and wrote French like no other scholar did here and he maintained close contact with France”. He was, von Ense continues, “the representative of the French spirit in Germany” (in Waszek 1989: 583). In 1830, after a visit to Paris, Gans had fallen out with Hegel over the July Revolution and the two were only reconciled on the latter’s deathbed (see Pinkard 2001: 632–5, 638–40). While Hegel disapproved of such an upheaval in French civil society, Gans was more drawn to the French revolutionary spirit. And it is at this moment—when turning against Hegel towards Paris—that Gans became post-­ Hegelian: he began looking for a way to develop Hegelianism beyond Hegel himself. In Gans’s own words, “[Hegel’s] philosophy belongs to history. A development within philosophy proceeding from the same basic principles will be necessary to offer a new interpretation of a changed reality” (1836: 133). This changed reality was the 1830 Revolution and all that it entailed (including the ever more pressing spectacle of industrialised society), and ultimately Gans found—via Lerminier, in particular (see Gans 1836: 103)—the solution to the renewal of Hegelianism within the Saint-Simonian movement. Gans himself was clear: “The Saint-Simonians have said something great and put their finger on an open sore of the present age” (Gans 1836: 100; see Breckman 2001a: 550–1). While, in this instance, the “open sore” referred particularly to slavery, he more generally saw in Saint-Simonianism a way of thinking which had affinities to Hegel’s basic principles—pointing out that some theses of Hegel “have found themselves transformed among the Saint-Simonians”— and which nevertheless understood the social crisis of the early nineteenth century better than Hegel himself. Gans sought “a synthesis between Hegelianism and Saint-Simonianism” (Waszek 1989: 586; see Puisais 2005: 150), and, to that end, turned to France to “modernise Hegel” (Breckman 2001a: 552) and “realign” his doctrines into something “essentially emancipatory and plebeian”, something that engaged with the open sores of slavery, wage-labour and excess poverty (Waszek 1989: 582; see 1987).

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Gans was not the only one looking to France in order to update Hegel. As Breckman sums up, In turning to the Saint-Simonians [in 1830], Gans was not alone among Germans. The July Revolution rekindled German interest in French politics and ideas, and with Paris once again the spiritual home of all European progressives, the Saint-Simonians emerged as the most intriguing of the city’s progressive movements. (Breckman 2001a: 548)

For example, another pioneering figure in forging links between Hegelianism and Saint-Simonianism was Gans’s friend, Heinrich Heine, who began attending Saint-­ Simonian meetings almost immediately on his arrival in Paris in 1831 (see Kramer 1988: 87–8). Heine saw in the Saint-Simonians an unconscious Hegelianism—for example, that “God is in the ‘process’, as Hegel expresses it […] is also thought by the Saint-Simonians” (Heine 1970–80: 8/2.1410; see Espagne 1985: 264). Nevertheless, he also thought that the French Saint-Simonians had followed Stäel’s vision of German philosophy too closely in order to appropriate a form of religiosity that supported their radical praxis (see Bodenheimer 2014: 90–1). Heine’s own De l’Allemagne is, in part, an attempt to rectify this, and it is the reason that the book is dedicated to Prosper Enfantin, one of the leading figures among the second generation of Saint-Simonians. Heine was attempting to open Saint-Simonian eyes to the fact that there was more to German philosophy than the vague religiosity of Stäel’s account, that Hegel’s philosophy gave rise to a concrete, practical theory which could better support radical practice (see Bodenheimer 2014: 155–75). That he failed in this attempt can be seen by Enfantin’s initial response to the work: “Leave the benches and chairs of philosophy; that is not where you must take back up and continue the work of Madame de Staël. Make us understand the German heart and not the mysteries of its thought” (in Heine 1970–80: 24.342). There were indeed possible affinities between these French and German traditions: a commitment to the immanence of the divine, an appeal to labour and industry as a motor of progress in history, a view of politics that placed emphasis on civil society as the site of power, and a refusal of religious tradition. While Henri de Saint-Simon himself was generally dismissive of German philosophy in his passing references (e.g., “the extravagant doctrine of transcendental philosophy” [Saint-­ Simon 1865–78: 4.204; see Bodenheimer 2014: 102]), he had still spoken of a pantheistic union of spirit and matter in Le nouveau christianisme in a way that spurred his successors to find the resources to cash it out theoretically (see Breckman 2001b: 151–64). Along these lines, Enfantin worked to create a transnational “universal association” (or collective) in which a Franco-German alliance could bear fruit (see Höhn 2002, Espagne 2007). In short, according to Michel Espagne’s influential thesis, what Heine—along with Gans—first realised was the possibility of using Saint-Simonian popular discourse as the exoteric garb in which Hegelian concepts could be circulated more widely: “Saint-Simon appears in this context as a happy possibility of translation of the basics of German philosophy and particularly Hegelianism”, “a translation of a philosophical language into a popular one, of a theoretical language into a practical one” (Espagne 1985: 265; see Espagne 1986). And this is particularly true of what Heine dubbed “the open secret [and]

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clandestine religion of Germany”: pantheism (Heine [1834] 2007: 59). In his 1845 Die soziale Bewegung in Frankreich und Belgien, Karl Grün explicitly dubbed Saint-­Simonianism “the translation of German pantheism” (Grun 1845: 80). With Saint-Simonianism, the relationship between French and German philosophers became genuinely bidirectional. The idea of the confluence of Saint-­ Simonianism and Hegelianism, which Gans and Heine had brought to Paris and was cashed out in Enfantin’s circle, was then exported back to Germany. German philosophers were fascinated by this apparent transformation of Hegelian ideas into a popular social movement. Friedrich Buchholz began translating Saint-Simonian texts into German in the mid-1820s (Breckman 2001a: 549) and an early pamphlet speaks of “a resemblance between these French ideological oddities and the philosophy of Hegel” (see Régnier 2003). However, much of the work of appropriation was achieved by a series of four works that foregrounded the relation between German Hegelianism and French Saint-Simonianism as a model for Franco-German intellectual and political alliances: F. W. Carové’s 1831 Der Saint Simonismus und die neuere französische Philosophie (continued in his 1838 Neorama), K. G. Bretschneider’s 1832 Der Simonismus und das Christenthum, Moses Hess’s 1837 Die heilige Geschichte der Menschheit von einem Jünger Spinozas and Karl Grün’s 1845 Die soziale Bewegung in Frankreich und Belgien. All of them presented Saint-Simonianism as “a form of German thought in French clothing” (Espagne 1985: 272–3; see Schmidt am Busch 2007). Nevertheless, these works were not uncritical: Carové, for instance, attempted to demonstrate that, despite its pretentions to Hegelianism, Saint-Simonianism did not progress much further than Schelling’s initial abstract versions of absolute idealism; Grün similarly postulated an affinity with Schelling, although also focusing on how Hegelianism subsequently brought to completion both Schellingian and Saint-Simonian philosophy; and Hess argued that these Franco-German parallelisms were ultimately to be explained by an upsurge of Spinozist pantheism across Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century (see Espagne 1985: 272–5, D’Hondt 1971: 21–3). In France too, this specific Franco-German connection became a recurring subject of discussion, especially among those who wished to criticise Saint-Simonianism as intellectually suspect. In this vein, Lerminier (as a lapsed Saint-Simonian) spoke of the two as equally “resurrection[s] of pantheism” (1833: 224; see D’Hondt 1971: 15) and Henri Maret wrote in his Théodicée chrétienne of “the secret links which unite [Saint-Simonian] doctrine to Hegelianism” (1844: 409). It is Leroux, however, who is most vocal: he charges Enfantin with explicitly developing Saint-­ Simonian doctrine in a Hegelian direction. He and his circle are, in Leroux’s words, “the Hegelians of Saint-Simonianism”—or, more fully, We know this terrible philosophy [of Hegelianism] only too well. We have seen it up close; we have seen it at work. And it is not only of Cousin’s eclectic school that we’re speaking. It is said that Cousin did not understand Hegel, and we willingly admit this. But we have been in contact with other men who have understood Hegel well. Sooner or later the truth must out. France knows the ideas set out by Enfantin. It must one day know that Enfantin’s metaphysics is positively that of Hegel, and that it is in Hegel’s footsteps that the Saint-Simonian school have been led astray.

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The Saint-Simonian school contained a pure and divine germ of the doctrine of perfectibility inherited from eighteenth-century philosophy. But it lacked a metaphysics until the Hegelians brought Hegel’s doctrine of the Incarnation to them from Berlin. […] The alliance of the two schools was an easy fit. Hegel’s disciples were Saint-Simonians; Saint-­ Simon’s disciples were Hegelians. The healthy ideas of Turgot, Condorcet and even Saint-Simon himself were no longer considered anything but a diluted anticipation of what arrived from Germany. (Leroux [1842] 1982: 67–9)

Leroux concludes, “Hegel directly produced Cousin and Enfantin” (Leroux [1842] 1982: 70; our emphasis). One member of Enfantin’s circle implicated in Leroux’s attack was Jules Lechevalier (see §3.3.2 above), who, after meeting K.  L. Michelet (see Michelet 1884: 271–2), embarked on a trip to Berlin in 1828 with the express intent “to assimilate Hegel” and, on his return, affixed a portrait of Hegel to his bedroom wall (Régnier 1988: 236). Leroux might well also have been implicating other members of Enfantin’s circle, such as Henri Lagarmitte, the Alsatian who took charge of reviews of German philosophy in Le Globe after its Saint-Simonian takeover in 1830 (see §5.1.1 below) or Eugène Rodrigues who translated Lessing (Espagne 1985: 272, D’Hondt 1971: 17). In addition, Leroux might have been thinking of Gustave d’Eichtal who was the first Saint-Simonian to spend time in Germany and study with Hegel in the mid-1820s (see D’Hondt 1971: 20, Bodenheimer 2014: 71–4). D’Eichtal was, in Bodenheimer’s phrase, “the Saint-Simonian pioneer in all things Hegelian” (2014: 76); he had also studied with Auguste Comte in 1822 (prior to the latter’s break with Saint-Simonianism), and, in 1824, undertook the task of bringing his two teachers together, presenting Comte with an extract of Hegel’s work and reciprocally Hegel with Comte’s Premier système de politique positive. D’Eichtal subsequently reported Hegel’s reaction in a series of letters to Comte. On 18th November 1824, d’Eichtal wrote to Comte, Just as you would say that the spirit of unity of an individual or a people is the abstract expression of the series of its acts, Hegel has absolutely the same idea; but he says that the essence of the spirit of a people or an individual is to pass into its acts, be transformed into facts and objectify itself, such that there is Spirit only to the extent that it is realised, etc. Unfortunately, I believe that he thinks he has thereby said something more than you; but the identity of results [between you] definitively show the identity of principles. This identity even exists in practical principles, for Hegel defends governments, i.e., is an enemy of the liberals. Moreover, he possesses to a high degree that abstract perspective on history about which we have so often spoken. His school is today at the summit of the German school, and it is to him we must link ourselves, because there is a genuine identity of doctrine on all the essential points. (in Bodenheimer 2014: 75–6)

After having read some Hegel, Comte responds on 10th December: I am very happy to become acquainted with Hegel and I regret that your extract wasn’t more extensive. He is much less strong than Kant, but he is without a doubt a man of merit. […] I believe there is between us and him a great number of points of contact although I don’t believe at the moment, like you do, that there is an identity of principles, and I don’t think that we should link ourselves to him very closely. […] I am eager to hear what such a distinguished mind has made of my work. If you judge it convenient, you could thank him on my behalf and tell him that I am thinking of him. (in D’Hondt 1971: 17–18, see Régnier 1988: 233–4)

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In response, D’Eichtal reports Hegel’s reaction to Comte’s Premier système as follows, “Hegel has also read your work, was very happy with the details, but has attacked the general conception” and did call some of the sections “petty” (in D’Hondt 1971: 18). While Comte asks for more details of this critique, he is nevertheless still optimistic, “I believe that, in Germany, he is the man most capable of pushing forward the positive philosophy” (in D’Hondt 1971: 18). Whatever else one can take from this episode (and the Saint-Simonian lens with which D’Eichtal would have represented the two men to each other cannot be overlooked), it marks the beginning of a long estrangement of positivism from German philosophy—a period in which Comte’s attitude towards Hegel and Schelling is often little more than hostile indifference. And, despite some prejudice in the traditional anglophone literature on positivism that “there is no doubt that at least some of the leading positivists were strongly affected by Hegel” (Kelly, 1981: 21; see Charlton 1959: 134), this seems unlikely. Rather, as Clauzade powerfully shows in his study in volume two, the most visible way in which German Idealism impacted on positivist philosophy was in its account of organic life via Oken’s philosophy of nature.

3.4.2 The Arrival of Left Hegelianism On 1st December 1838 the Left Hegelian tradition first received widespread attention among French philosophers, for the issue of the Revue des Deux Mondes released on that date included Edgar Quinet’s review of F. D. Strauss’s 1835–6 Das Leben Jesu: If [Das Leben Jesu] had appeared to be the thought of one sole man, so many minds would not all have been so alarmed simultaneously. But when they saw that [the work] was, as it were, the mathematical conclusion to almost all the works that have been written across the Rhine for the last fifty years and [when they saw] that each had added a stone to this sad sepulchre, learned Germany shuddered and recoiled before this work. Such is what has been happening in that country for the last three years. Indeed, if one follows for a moment the spirit which has reigned in philosophy, in criticism and in history, we would merely be astonished that this conclusion had taken so long to appear. We cannot fail to notice that Dr. Strauss has had precursors in each of the leaders of the school which has blazed for half a century and that it was impossible for a system prophesied so many times to not have ended up revealing itself. […] The man who today has made the biggest step for Germany is not Kant, Lessing or Frederick the Great; it is Benedict Spinoza. Here is the spirit that one encounters at the bottom of its poetry, its criticism, its philosophy, its theology, as the great tempter under the tangled tree of science. Goethe, Schelling, Hegel, Schleiermacher, to merely mention the masters, are the fruit of his works. (Quinet 1838: 589–90)

And it is with this background in mind that Quinet turns to Das Leben Jesu itself: According to the foregoing, one can judge the tendency of things when, in 1835, there appeared, somewhat obscurely but with the royal privilege, the History of the Life of Jesus

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by Dr. Strauss, Dozent at the Tübingen evangelical and theological seminary. Although minds had of course been prepared for this denouement, the effect of it was so sudden, so electric, so extraordinary that, contrary to all received customs in such matters, the Prussian Government consulted the protestant clergy to know whether it would not be appropriate to prohibit this work in its states. […] What was then this book, which in the country of theological novelties, disconcerted the most audacious [minds]? As I have already made clear, it was the conclusion of the premises posited half a century earlier. […] In tearing down the metaphysical veil which covered over these [earlier] doctrines, it reduced the question to the simplest terms, such that, in so doing, it became evident for the first time the extent of the work of destruction that had been accomplished. Like Antony, it lifted Caesar’s robe. Each could recognise in this great corpse [of Christianity] the wounds he had inflicted in the shadows. (Quinet 1838: 602)

In his conclusion, Quinet returns to the Hegelian context of Strauss’s work: Hegel’s metaphysics—increasingly the master of this century—is also the most vaunted when it comes to the absolute conformity of doctrine with positive religion. From this perspective, it is nothing but the transfigured catechism, the very identity of science and evangelical revelation, or rather, the Bible of the absolute. As it had given the last word to reason, it was natural that it regarded Christianity as the last expression of faith. After explanations that were so frank, so clear, so satisfying, what was found at the bottom of this orthodoxy? A tradition without gospel, a dogma without immortality, a Christianity without Christ. Is this really what the Church was awaiting? Once upon a time, says the legend, a pious scholastic knocked on the door of a convent in the Ardennes; he wore the thick beard of an anchorite. On his belt he carried the Summa of St Thomas Aquinas, which he murmured on his path. “Open,” he said, “I arrive from the desert”. The doors open, the monks crowded round him. But under his frock, who did appear? The eternal Tempter who began by saying: “I, my brothers, am also a logician”. […] I will state openly that pantheism in Germany today tries to substitute itself for the spirit of the Gospel, and that it is to this that the whole debate can be reduced. How supple is the Christian institution such that this second reformation can be accomplished without rupture? Can the completely personal God of the crucifix become the God-Substance, without people noticing this change through making the gradations manageable and insensible? Everything is contained in these words. Christ on the Calvary of modern theology today endures a passion crueller than the passion of Golgotha. Neither the Pharisees nor the scribes of Jerusalem presented him with a drink as bitter as that which is poured out for him abundantly by the doctors of today. Each incorporates [Christ] into his own [philosophy] through violence; each wishes to receive him into his system as in a whitened sepulchre. What transfiguration will he undergo? Will the God of Jacob and St Paul become the God of Parmenides, of Descartes and of his disciple Spinoza? We all live in the expectation of this great, unique event. (Quinet 1838: 624–6)

If one thing is clear from Quinet’s review, it is that Strauss’s treatment of Christianity is not to be understood as an aberration, perversion or deviation from earlier German Idealisms, but as their result and logical conclusion. Strauss’s book is the culmination of Schelling’s and Hegel’s metaphysics. For Quinet, Hegelianism fully becomes itself—explicitly and properly—at this moment. And this will be a claim that recurs repeatedly in France over the next decade: Schelling and Hegel have come to be fully revealed (and realised) in Left Hegelian radicalism. It is one of the reasons why Left Hegelianism was experienced as such a trauma for much of liberal and conservative France: it was seen to be the natural conclusion to a position they had previously been tempted by under the name of Hegel. To combat socialism,

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radicalism and revolution, it was therefore necessary to now rid oneself of all remnants of absolute idealism—a gesture that connects thinkers as different as Cousin and Maret. In other words, after Quinet’s review, the word “Hegel” was never the same again: to use it was immediately to place oneself in relation to the various radical political and anti-religious movements of the time, i.e., “Hegel” became a politico-­ theological concept. Hence, Puisais’s thesis: “The introduction of Hegelian philosophy into France can be understood […] only on the basis and on the very ground of politics” (2005: 82). To take one example: in her novella L’Hégélien, composed at the start of the 1850s, Valérie de Gasparin paints a portrait of this “Hegelian” precisely as a revolutionary “deluded by some horrible utopia, decorated with flowers and dripping with blood” and exclaiming, “Our social revolution will issue from the tomb” (Gasparin 1858: 123). As Puisais summarises, by this time, “the term Hegelian seemed to characterise a general polemical attitude, a revolutionary commitment, a will to struggle” (Puisais 2005: 21). In short, the entry of Left Hegelianism into France entailed the failure of other interpretations of Hegel, especially the reactionary and liberal interpretations that had previously been so dominant. Hegelianism came to be considered, instead, by conservatives and liberals alike as one of the causes of the 1848 Revolution, as summed up in Cousin’s purported exclamation to Michelet in 1849, “It is your philosophy which has lost France” (see §3.2.4 above). 1840s France included, then, a number of different groups: the liberal and conservative thinkers who turned against Hegelianism because of its radical associations (Cousin, Quinet, Maret); radical thinkers who were nevertheless staunchly anti-Hegelian (e.g., Louis Blanc—see below); and those radical thinkers closely associated with Hegelianism, especially those Young Hegelians within the large German émigré population in Paris. It is this latter, rapidly growing group of émigrés who solidified this association between Hegelianism and political radicalism in France. From a size of 6.708  in 1831, the German émigré population in Paris exploded to 59,334 by 1846—Grandjonc even conjectures that at times in the mid-­1840s close to one in ten Parisians were German (Grandjonc 1970: 97–8; see Grandjonc 1975). While the population was for the most part composed of craftsmen and labourers, by August 1843 around 60 German journalists were based out of Paris and the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung alone had six Paris correspondents, including Heine, Börnstein and Eckstein (Grandjonc 1970: 99). Most of the leading German radical theorists emigrated to Paris for a time: Heinrich Ahrens, Carl Bernays, Ludwig Börne, Friedrich Engels, Hermann Ewerbeck, Karl Grün, Georg Herwegh, Moses Hess, Heinrich Laube, Karl Marx, Arnold Ruge, Karl Schepper, Sebastian Seiler, Jakob Venedey, Ferdinand Wolff and Wilhelm Weitling. Émigrés from neighbouring Germanophone countries also contributed to the circulation of Hegelianism, such as the Pole Auguste Cieszkowski. On the one hand, these radical thinkers followed Ruge in seeing in France “the pure and unalterable principle of human freedom” (Ruge 1844: 6). As Ruge exclaimed in Zwei Jahre in Paris, “We are going to France, the threshold of a new world. May it live up to our dreams! At the end of our journey, we will find the vast valley of Paris, the cradle of the new Europe” (Ruge 1846: 1.4). On the other hand, as Grandjonc shows, “The group [of

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émigrés] from the neo-Hegelian school who arrived in Paris from 1843 onwards— Hess, Ruge, Marx, Grün, etc.—were very conscious of possessing an irreplaceable theoretical and philosophical culture of major significance to France and that could be disseminated to the French in exchange for a political praxis” (Grandjonc 1978: 81). In other words, post-Hegelian thinkers were in demand in Paris, and this is one of the reasons it became a home to so many of them. Moses Hess stood at the centre of this post-Hegelian  Franco-German émigré-­ network: as Paris correspondent for the Rheinische Zeitung, he was well acquainted with both French and German socialist leaders. When Ruge arrived in Paris in August 1843, Hess introduced him to Louis Blanc, Étienne Cabet, Victor Considerant, Pascal Duprat, Pierre Leroux, George Sand, Flora Tristan and Louis Viardot (Ruge also went on to meet Lamennais and Alphonse de Lamartine) (see Grandjonc 1978: 80). When Marx then arrived in Paris in late October 1843, he was charged with following up on Ruge’s and Hess’s contacts for the Deutsch– Französische Jahrbücher, including Blanc, Leroux, Lamennais and later Proudhon (see Gregory 1983: 167–80). Even Engels, who did not arrive in Paris until mid-1844, was educated in French socialist traditions from Lorenz von Stein’s Der Sozialismus und Communismus des heutigen Frankreichs sent to him by Hess. It is perhaps little wonder that in November 1845 Proudhon could confess to knowing “more than twenty Germans, all doctors of philosophy” (Proudhon 1875: 6.353). Collaborations between post-Hegelian German radicals and French socialists proliferated—to name one example, in March 1844 a meeting of international socialist associations took place that included Bernays, Marx and Ruge from the German side, Leroux and Blanc from the French and the Russians Bakunin and Tolstoy (see Grandjonc 1978: 80). There emerged, in other words, an atmosphere in Paris in which post-Hegelian forms of thought and ways of speaking were communicated through various mechanisms specifically established by the émigré community to shuttle between the two philosophical cultures, such as journals (see §5.1 below), translations (e.g., Ewerbeck’s and Grün’s renderings of Feuerbach and Proudhon) and societies (e.g., the Deutscher Volksverein [1832–4], the Bund der Geächteten [1834–36], the Bund der Gerechten [1836–48]). And a good example of the central role Hegel’s philosophy sometimes played in these collaborative organs is legible from Marx’s time in Paris. It was in Paris that Marx returned to the study of Hegel and tried to think through the implications of Hegelianism in conversation with French radicalism. Such is the tenor of the 1843 Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie, i.e., this is the period Marx retrospectively describes as his “critical re-examination of the Hegelian philosophy of law” in Paris which led to a rejection of the value of any description of the “so-called general development of the human mind” and, instead, an embrace of describing “the material conditions of life […] which Hegel [calls] ‘civil society’” (Marx 1975–2004: 30.5). This project is most obvious in the 1845 Die heilige Familie (written with Engels) which attacks the Bauers’ Hegelianism by staging a debate between France and Germany, in which France provides the resources to take on Hegel’s legacy (see Kramer 1988: 152). Marx and Engels use what they learnt in France to attack the Hegelian school back in Germany; for example, they

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write, “If Edgar [Bauer] compares French equality with German self-consciousness for an instant, he will see that the latter principle expresses in German, i.e., in abstract thought, what the former says in French, that is, in the language of politics and of thoughtful observation” (Marx [1845] 1956: 39; see Kramer 1988: 152–4). The spectre of Hegelianism and its compatibility with contemporary radicalism was also at stake in the various calls for a radical Franco-German intellectual alliance in the run up to the 1848 Revolution. This is true implicitly of an appeal like Feuerbach’s for German philosophy—“the male principle, the seat of idealism”—to be united with the “female principle, the sense for the finite, the seat of materialism which is French” (in Höhn 2002: 241–2), and also explicitly in the controversy between Louis Blanc and Arnold Ruge. In response to Ruge’s initial calls for such an alliance, Louis Blanc published D’un projet d’alliance intellectuelle entre l’Allemagne et la France in November 1843, which argues in four propositions that: (i) “Germany should proceed towards freedom by unity”; (ii) “It can, by itself, achieve unity”; (iii) “To become genuinely free, it might have need of France”; and (iv) “An intellectual alliance between the two peoples is thus an eminently desirable thing” (Blanc 1843: 67). Key to Blanc’s argument is the contention that Germany’s need for France stems from its misguided, Hegelian philosophy. Only when Germany has learnt to philosophise properly from the French and so become free from the errors of Hegelianism will it be able to become genuinely free. Hence, Blanc’s call for a Franco-German alliance is grounded on a rejection of German Idealism that runs as follows: It is impossible to deny that learned Germany has often taken obscurity for profundity, a pedantry of forms for novelty of ideas; much like the classical sibyl, it has partly grounded its authority on the mystery with which it has taken care to surround itself. […] With Schelling’s pantheism imagination takes flight; nature is filled with God. […] And this omnipresence of God will undermine the effects of social demarcations and weaken ideas of distinct nationalities from day to day. Politics will expand into the beyond; morality will be confounded with poetry. […] Moreover, human thought will float in clouds; energetic sentiments will give way to vague and sickly aspirations; patriotism will be sacrificed to a cosmopolitan drunkenness, daughter of dreams, and those who are so plunged deliciously into [pantheistic] ecstasy will end up anxiously quarrelling with each other in the satiety of the infinite. (Blanc 1843: 57)

On Blanc’s analysis, from out of Schellingian pantheism emerges Hegelian atheism—an atheism fully revealed in Strauss’s work: “The truth is that Hegel’s doctrine is confined to atheism; and this atheism was made clear by the most fervent of his disciples. Interrogate Hegelians of the new school today, they will respond directly: ‘We are faithful atheists’” (Blanc 1843: 59). In short, for Blanc, Hegel’s and Schelling’s philosophies both consist in “pompously unintelligible formulas that conceal an emptiness” and are therefore politically dangerous: Atheism in philosophy corresponds to anarchy in politics. And such is the danger from which Germany must seriously seek to secure itself the day it is saved from despotism. It is of course marvellous that Germany has developed a taste for action; that the youth have become attentive to current affairs, to the practice of life; that it is finally delivered to political preoccupations from which the mysticism of its professors has for so long held it back. But can the ardour of the German youth be regulated in its energy? We doubt it, because,

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once again, atheism—the final outcome of the exhaustion of philosophy in Germany—has anarchy as its corollary. (Blanc 1843: 60)

Germany has need of French political experience, its expertise in social action and mass revolution, in order to save itself from Hegelian anarchy. Ruge’s and Marx’s Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher (which appeared once in February 1844) functioned as a direct rebuttal of Blanc’s argument: it undertakes a reframing of the call for a radical Franco-German alliance within a Hegelian framework—a post-Hegelian antidote to Blanc’s French perspective (see Calvié 2004). That is, like Blanc, Ruge expresses a desire for “the union of the German and French people in the same principle, an irresistible alliance of the freedom of both peoples” (Ruge 1844: 12). But the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher worked towards this end by confronting its German Idealist heritage head-on: as well as publishing the opening to Marx’s Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie (which was helpfully suited to the French context with its description of Hegelianism as “logical, pantheistic mysticism” [Marx 1975–2004: 3.7]), and as well as inviting Feuerbach (in vain) to write a critique of Schelling, Ruge also employed his editorial preface to stress the relationship between Hegelian philosophy and political freedom. In opposition to Blanc’s claim that political freedom cannot grow on Hegelian soil, Ruge takes on the role of philosophical teacher, educating the “uninformed” French about a post-Hegelian vision of freedom: As strange as it may sound to the uninformed, the Hegelian system freed us Germans from arbitrariness and the fantastic. By treating the entire transcendent world of all previous metaphysics as a realm of reason, it was left to us merely to abolish the transcendence of reason in order to enjoy the advantages of its logical certainty and consistency. [Gazing up] at the heavens of the Hegelian system from the earth of human reason, one is thus equipped like a pilot making use of their charts of the heavens for orientation on earth. For us Germans, this heavenly star is the logic of the Hegelian system, which itself is the entire system in a heavenly, self-contained form. […] The demand for freedom among those who emerge from Hegelian philosophy is therefore no mere will [for freedom], but a motivated will; not a liberal good will, but a necessary consequence; not a product of chance, but the result of the history of the German spirit, a form of awareness of all its previous work which cannot be gainsaid. (Ruge 1844: 4)

The continued importance of Hegel in these debates was further recognised by French thinkers: Pascal Duprat’s review of the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher, which appeared at the same time as the journal in February 1842 (and thus may well have owed something to Ruge himself [see Grandjonc 1974: 107]), emphasised its Hegelian background. Even the title of the review, “L’École de Hegel à Paris”, shows the extent to which, for the French reader of La Revue indépendante, Hegel remained the major reference point for understanding the radicalism entering Paris through its émigré community. Ruge is presented repeatedly as “a disciple of Hegel” (Duprat 1844: 483), and the review concludes—after a long series of quotations— with the figure of Hegel very much at the centre of Duprat’s evaluation: The goal of [the journal’s] editors, as we have just seen, is to, in some sense, throw a bridge across the Rhine and to work for the union of the two countries. It is to be Hegel who will preside over this major international treaty. We have not examined here whether Hegel’s

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3.4.3 Proudhon One of the more significant radical, francophone encounters with Hegel’s philosophy occurred in Joseph-Pierre Proudhon’s writings over the course of the 1840s. Ultimately, Proudhon’s treatment of Hegel is similar to Leroux’s treatment of the late Schelling (see §3.5.2 below): an unclassifiable thinker, outside of most institutional structures, making heterodox uses of a German Idealist for the sake of their own very different project. That is, in both cases, fidelity and accuracy are somewhat cast aside. In the mid-1840s, Proudhon developed his own conception of dialectic in close conversation with Hegelian sources, and Castleton’s study in volume two provides a definitive account of its genesis and the sources for Proudhon’s incorporation of Hegelian language into the 1846 Système des contradictions économiques, ou philosophie de la misère; the following is intended merely as a brief introductory summary to introduce his detailed analysis. This is a much-contested field, partly due to the fact that Proudhon (again, like Leroux) did not read German, so had relatively little first-hand knowledge of Hegel’s works, and it is not helped by Marx’s comments that he (alongside Grün) had taught Proudhon “Hegelese” in 1844–5 without Proudhon genuinely understanding it: “I infected him, very much to his detriment with Hegelianism, which, owing to his lack of German, he could not study properly” (Marx 1975–2004: 20.28). This is a polemic continued in Marx’s Misère de la philosophie where he criticises Proudhon for “wanting to frighten the French by flinging quasi-Hegelian phrases at them” and making use of “nothing of Hegel’s dialectics but the language” (Marx 1975–2004: 6.162–3). Moreover, beyond Marx and Grün, one can further draw up a long list of German émigrés with whom Proudhon was in contact during the mid-1840s, including Bernays, Ewerbeck, Heine, Hess, Leske, as well as Heinrich Bürgers, Roland Daniels, Adolph von Ribbentrop and Alexandre Weill; but what is key here is that there was certainly no one-way circulation of ideas from Germany to Proudhon: “The true neo-Hegelian socialists like Hess, Ewerbeck and Grün learnt a good part of their true socialism from Proudhon’s Qu’est-ce que la propriété?” (Grandjonc 1978: 85; see Haubtmann 1981). The facts on which any account of Proudhon’s Hegel-reception is based are fairly straightforward: in the 1846 Système des contradictions économiques Proudhon calls Hegel “a Titan of philosophy” (Proudhon 1846: 2.221) and, in 1848, he further claims that—alongside the Bible and Adam Smith—Hegel was one of “my true masters” (Proudhon 1875: 1.xxii). In fact, a Hegelian reference, in a fairly

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generalised form, is already present in the 1840 Qu’est-ce que la propriété?, when Proudhon translates his argument into “a Hegelian formula” (Proudhon 1890: 187) with a thesis (community) and an antithesis (property), such that “when we have discovered the third term, the synthesis, we shall have the required solution. Now, this synthesis necessarily results from the correction of the thesis by the antithesis” (Proudhon 1890: 195). And, in fact, Hegel had been on Proudhon’s mind in his correspondence from, at least, December 1839 when he writes to the Kant-translator C. J. Tissot, “I know that this Hegelian dialectic is not to your tastes […] I will only tell you that Hegel’s logic, as I understand it, satisfies my reason infinitely more than all the old instructions that were fed to us from our infancy. […] His logic is marvellously appropriate in order to render reason of certain facts that we would not know beforehand how to consider but as inconveniences, abuses, the outliers of some others” (Proudhon 1875: 2.231–2). He further affirms a year later that Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel “have neared themselves to the true system of things more than anyone else before” (Proudhon 1875: 2.248). Yet, Macherey is right that these Hegel-references from around 1840 do not amount to much: “At the period he wrote Qu’est-ce que la propriété?, Proudhon is not able to comprehend what makes the Hegelian dialectic original, and interprets it instead on the model of the Kantian antinomies” (Macherey 2013: 326). This begins to change, however, in 1843 with the publication of De la création de l’ordre dans l’humanité, in which Hegelian dialectic becomes one model among others for the articulation of social history, alongside competing Kantian and Comtean models. In Chapter Three of De la création Proudhon now presents Hegel’s dialectic as follows, Hegel generalized [Kant’s] ingenious idea [of arranging categories under the rubric of thesis, antithesis and synthesis]. The world, the Universe-God, according to him, develops in three consecutive moments, forming between themselves the terms and the period of eternal evolution: I, not-I, Absolute. This is a vast classification of nature and of ideas into three major series, subdivided by three, insofar as imagination can achieve it. The natural sciences, morality, politics, jurisprudence—everything takes place in them: the series follow each other and are interlinked in a marvellous way. […] Never has human genius made such a prodigious effort. […] Hegel anticipated the facts, instead of waiting for them, and forced his formulas on them, while forgetting that the possible law of the whole is insufficient to give an account of the details. In a word, Hegel was imprisoned in a particular series, yet still claimed to be able to explain nature, which is as varied in its series as in its elements. (Proudhon 1843: 116–17)

As Proudhon puts it in a later passage, “There are few dialecticians comparable to Kant; unfortunately, he did not reduce his dialectic to principles, as Hegel did” (Proudhon 1843: 115). At the very least, the metaphysical ambition of Proudhon’s project—situating itself alongside Hegelian speculation—is palpable: economic reality is to be understood by appeal to metaphysics; or, in Proudhon’s own words, “Economic science is for me the objective form and the realisation of metaphysics; it is metaphysics in action” (Proudhon 1888: 1.43).

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Yet, Proudhon is also clear that De la création does not represent the full incorporation of Hegelianism into his own philosophy, for “I had only just happened to hear about Hegel” and, in any case, Hegelianism was a “system in which I always felt imprisoned” (Proudhon 1843: 164). This note of scepticism is repeated in his letters of the period. Proudhon writes in May 1842, for example, “I don’t let myself at all be abused by the metaphysics and the formulas of Hegel” (Proudhon 1875: 2.47). However, by October 1844, Proudhon is treating Hegel very differently  (once more) in his correspondence: What brings me to despair is, on the one hand, the backwardness of the French public relative to philosophical studies and, on the other hand, the retrogressive and intolerant monopoly exercised by the cliques of the university. These difficulties are more or less insurmountable. At the same time, if I cannot abruptly change men, I want to try at least—in placing myself at the centre of their views—to bring them to my point of view, just as in a panorama the mechanic alters the spectacle by rotating the spectator. In order to rid myself of an inextricable embarrassment which Kant formally declared impossible, I am therefore going to try working towards the popularisation of metaphysics by putting it into action. To achieve this, I will employ the most profound dialectic, that of Hegel. (Proudhon 1875: 2.157–8)

It is precisely this project of making use of Hegel’s dialectic that is realised in Système des contradictions économiques—the use of the concept of “contradictions” in its title already appeals to a Hegelian (or, at least, post-Hegelian) way of thinking. This work marks the highpoint of Proudhon’s Hegelianism. In it, as Proudhon expands in a letter from January 1845, “I hope finally to teach the French public what the dialectic is” and, even though “I have never read Hegel, I am persuaded that it is his logic I am going to employ in my next work” (Proudhon 1875: 2.175; see on this claim in particular, Castleton’s study in volume two). Macherey summarises nicely the way in which Proudhon goes on to make use of Hegelian dialectic in Système des contradictions économiques itself: In the Philosophie de la misère is to be found, under a very general form, the schema of the Hegelian philosophy of history, and of [Proudhon’s] schema one can say that it also represents an effort to systematise contradictions by reintegrating them into the framework of a dynamic whole where their reciprocal contestation is ultimately revealed to be productive, creative, to the extent they stimulate a progression which—without these contradictions— could not have occurred. Such a history bears the mark of the negative [as] the motor principle of the social dynamic, that is, the march towards justice and equality. […] The solution to the problems of the economy must pass through all the forms of unhappiness and of suffering, thus of “misery”, which constitute the successive steps of its history. […] They are the stations of the cross which lead to a better world. And on this precise point Proudhon is unqualifiedly “Hegelian”, to the extent that he reappropriates the notion of the labour of the negative operating within a process which progresses only through the bad. (Macherey 2013: 339, 342)

In fact, for Macherey, Proudhon’s famous claim in this text that “Dieu, c’est le mal” (i.e., divine providence “progresses only through the bad”) is to be interpreted as “an ultra-Hegelianism, an unrepentant Hegelianism in which Hegel would scarcely have recognised himself” (Macherey 2013: 348).

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In the Système des contradictions économiques, Proudhon uses Hegel most explicitly when it comes to the tension in recent economic theory between two kinds of value—use-value and exchange-value. He writes, The contradictory idea of value, so clearly exhibited by the inevitable distinction between useful value and value in exchange does not arise from a false mental perception, or from a vicious terminology, or from any practical error; it lies deep in the nature of things, and forces itself upon the mind as a general form of thought— that is, as a category. Now, as the idea of value is the point of departure of political economy, it follows that all the elements of the science—I use the word science in anticipation—are contradictory in themselves and opposed to each other: so truly is this the case that on every question the economist finds himself continually placed between an affirmation and a negation, alike irrefutable. […] Does it follow, as has been said with such ridiculous emphasis, that every truth, every idea, results from a contradiction,—that is, from a something which is affirmed and denied at the same moment and from the same point of view,—and that it may be necessary to abandon entirely the old-fashioned logic, which regards contradiction as the infallible sign of error? This babble is worthy of sophists who, destitute of faith and honesty, endeavour to perpetuate scepticism in order to maintain their impertinent uselessness. Because antinomy, immediately it is misunderstood, leads inevitably to contradiction, these have been mistaken for each other, especially among the French, who like to judge everything by its effects. (Proudhon 1888: 1.83–4)

If nothing else, one can discern here the extent to which, over a five-year period, Proudhon has moved away from the reading of Hegel in Qu’est-ce que la propriété?, that is, away from an understanding of Hegel’s dialectic that collapses it into Kantian antinomy.

3.4.4 Pantheism and Anti-Hegelianism: From Bautain to Maret and Ott The radical Hegel that invaded France from the end of 1838 onwards was bound to generate a reaction, and that reaction came to be associated with one word in particular—“pantheism”. As Chepurin’s study in volume two shows, “pantheism” had been used in all sorts of ways in the French reception of Hegel, from Lerminier in 1831 onwards, to rebuke Hegelian conservatism, just as much as Hegelian radicalism. However, the term came to be decisively co-opted as a weapon of the Catholic right in their struggle against liberal and revolutionary ideas in France. That is, from 1840 onwards, the critique of pantheism came to be associated with a group of Catholic thinkers anxious about a religious crisis in nineteenth-century Europe for which Hegel served as symbol. This was, in many ways, a turn away from reading radical Left Hegelianisms back to reading Hegel himself—an attempt to root out the problem at its source—and, in consequence, in the 1840s Hegel’s name was decisively fixed as an object of polemic, rather than an invitation for analysis or study (see D’Hondt 1971: 4). More specifically, this was a controversy born out of political debates around the secularisation of teaching in France: the real adversary

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was  often taken to be Victor Cousin who—as the leading member of the Royal Council of Public Instruction—directed the attack on ecclesiastical authority over primary education through legislation passed in 1833. As contemporaries were quick to point out (see Simon 1843), it was no coincidence that “pantheism” was first used as a strategic weapon against Cousin and German philosophers by the Catholic party in 1833 (in Louis Bautain’s De l’enseignement de la philosophie en France au dix-neuvième siècle). Bautain’s trajectory is something of a mirror to Cousin’s: one of Cousin’s first students, he met Hegel and Schelling in the immediate wake of Cousin, writing to Cousin himself in January 1819 of Schelling as “the most rigorous mind I have ever met” and of Hegel’s “subtlety of mind and force of dialectic” (in Barthélémy-Saint-­ Hilaire 1895: 2.258–9; see Ragghianti 2001: 24–5). However, from there Bautain’s and Cousin’s paths diverged, and from his position in Strasbourg Bautain attacked his former teacher. Bautain’s original polemics against Cousin’s pantheism did not yet mention German philosophy; it was only in 1835 with the publication of Philosophie du christianisme that it came to the fore. Hegel’s name—and, to some extent, Schelling’s too—became one more tool for undermining Cousin, collateral in a intranational debate over French institutional structures. In Philosophie du christianisme, Bautain reprimands the Catholic Church for focusing on an old adversary that no longer exists (eighteenth-century materialism) and so missing “the real enemy which every day becomes more formidable and, if its progress is not stopped, threatens to infest everything. We mean pantheism which today flows into all parts of the world, which defines, so to speak, the civilisation of our time” (Bautain 1835: 148). He continues, using a phrase that would resonate over the next decade, “This [pantheism] is the true heresy of the nineteenth century” (Bautain 1835: 148). Such pantheism has become “seductive” and “even become popular” (such that “everything today is impregnated with this great error”), precisely because it has arisen from “the vaporous idealism of Germany” (Bautain 1835: 151–2, 157). Bautain continues, The fruit of these philosophical inspirations which have come to us from Germany is not a crude or materialist pantheism like Spinozism, nor a dry or abstract one like rationalism; but an ideal, intellectual, spiritualist, transcendental pantheism which is announced as the universal science, the science of the absolute, locating the principles of all things in the idea, which is deployed magnificently across all phases of humanity as well as all forms of nature. (Bautain 1835: 153)

Bautain concludes that Fichte, Schelling and Hegel “all say the same thing: God, man and the world are one in substance and distinct solely in form; man and the world are attributes of God or modifications of the great whole” (Bautain 1835: 154–5). This was a polemic continued by Bautain’s students in Strasbourg. Isidore Goschler, for example, dedicated his 1839 thesis, Du panthéisme, to Bautain, and included within it sections on Schelling and Hegel. Taking as his basic thesis that “Germany has managed through long and learned elaborations to systematise in the most rigorous and most absolute manner Spinozism in its ideal part” (Goschler 1839: 50) and that this has resulted in an “apotheosis of the flesh […] an adoration

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of matter identified with spirit” (Goschler 1839: 135), Goschler offers a reading of Schelling that is remarkable in the French context for using the 1809 Freiheitsschrift as its only reference point. Thus, while Goschler admits that, unlike Spinoza, Schelling defends the personality of God and that there is a dynamic to God’s creation by which divine “immanent desire” is both concealed and expressed, it is still the case for Schelling that the universe is “both substance and idea, matter and thought, nature and God, identified” (Goschler 1839: 47–8). On the contrary, no qualifications are required with Hegel: “Hegel—more complete, more rigorous, bolder and more consistent that Schelling—professes a doctrine which is the apogee of pantheism” (Goschler 1839: 48). Goschler’s Hegel insists on the identity of God and world: “In nature, in spirit, in pure thought or the idea, in its absolute or ideal form, in its concrete and natural form, in its active or spiritual form, it is always the same absolute, the Idea, God, whether as self-subsistent, Seyn, as God exteriorised in nature, Daseyn, or as God re-entering into himself, Fürsichseyn.” There is but “one infinite series with an endless richness of forms, appearances, phenomena” (Goschler 1839: 48–9). Henri Maret was not strictly Bautain’s student, but followed closely in his footsteps, and his 1840 Essai sur le panthéisme marks the highpoint of the Catholic polemic against this eclectic-German Idealist-pantheist hybrid. His attacks on Hegelianism struck a nerve—the Essai sur le panthéisme went through three editions in five years, and its message was simple: Cousin’s eclecticism had opened a door for Left Hegelianism to infiltrate France. Cousin had followed Hegel in transforming philosophy into a “rationalism” from which fatalism, pantheism and atheism derived (see Bressolette 1977, Vermeren 1995: 231–6). For Maret, both Hegel and Cousin are “representatives of one and the same philosophical error”—and that error is personified in someone like Strauss (Bellantone 2011: 1.264). Such was the impact of Maret’s (and Bautain’s) critique that Cousin’s work of the 1840s is mostly spent insisting on his distance from both pantheism and Hegel (see Ragghianti 1991, §3.2.4 above). The Essai opens as follows: Ideas obey irresistible logical necessities; and the French philosophy of the nineteenth century is forced to avow its pantheism or to confess that it is nothing. [Pantheism] is the unity of a century which has none; it is that bad and false unity which is raised against divine and catholic unity. Once this is well understood, all the intellectual, moral and literary phenomena that this century presents become intelligible. The metaphysical, moral and historical sciences are all today more or less imprinted with the pantheistic spirit. There can be no other, since all fashionable theories on being and life, thought, the development of humanity, the past, the present and the future are imprinted with pantheist philosophy. (Maret 1840: ix)

As Maret goes on to conclude, “Pantheism thus explains the century; the century in its turn proves the presence and effects of pantheist doctrines” (Maret 1840: xii). This omnipresent pantheism is, moreover, a direct attack on Christian values: Christianity, from its birth, has come into conflict with pantheism. All errors, all superstitions come to be concentrated in Alexandrian eclecticism and pantheism. The majority of major heresies of the first century are more or less inspired by pantheist doctrines. Today,

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The task for Maret then is to reveal the latent pantheism of the age and demonstrate its nihilistic consequences. He is clear about his project: “We are examining contemporary philosophy in order to discover that it is merely a disguised or avowed pantheism. From this fact results an important conclusion […] Two routes are from now on open to minds; they must choose between Catholicism and pantheism” (1840: xv). It is in this context that Maret turns to German Idealism, for “nothing is more important than the study of the modern systems of German philosophy” (Maret 1840: 156). Or, more fully: Spinoza formed no school […] Germany, the country of Protestantism, had been and must be the first theatre of [pantheism’s] development. […] We borrow from our neighbours across the Rhine the application of their principles, their historical theories; and we do not have the will or the courage to avow the principles themselves. There results from this a chaos in the human mind today that is very difficult to pierce. Knowledge of German philosophy alone can explain this truly extraordinary intellectual state. We will recognise the arbitrary borrowings that we make of German theories, and we will reattach these fragments to their necessary unity. (Maret 1840: 155

Relying heavily on long quotations from Ancillon’s and Barchou’s histories of German Idealism, Maret summarises Kant’s, Fichte’s, Schelling’s and Hegel’s systems, before concluding: It will be evident to the reader that the metaphysical systems of Germany, whose general principles we have just set out, are merely ancient pantheism reclothed in new forms. We do not discern that pantheist doctrines have made any real progress in the hands of German thinkers. We always rediscover at the bottom of these systems unity—the identity of substance—the very principle we have seen so precisely expressed and formally articulated by Vedantist philosophers, the very principles which the Pythagoreans, Eleatics and Neoplatonists affirmed; the very principle we discovered in the Middle Ages in the writings of Scotus Erigena, in the renaissance writings of Giordano Bruno and the very principle that Spinoza made the pivot of his whole system. Fichte founded an individual pantheism, which has its analogue in the school of Buddha […] Schelling brings us back to the Eleatics and to the Neoplatonists. Like them, he admits the identity of being and knowledge, a world of reality and a world of illusion. Xenophanes, Parmenides, Plotinus and Proclus also place themselves at the heart of absolute unity, of pure existence and find there the identity of all things. God, for Schelling, is not a distinct object of reason. God is unity and the whole; the universe and God are the same thing, so too unity and knowledge of unity. What appears to thought as different, multiple, limited cannot be so in its essence, but uniquely in its appearance. The finite is merely an illusion. Hegel’s logical emanations, converted into real beings, have a striking relation to the emanations of the Gnostics. The absolute produces and absorbs everything. The life of the absolute is never complete or finished; such that God does not properly exist, but produces himself every day, every day he develops; and the formula that one dares not pronounce for fear of professing a blasphemy: Gott ist im Werden, Deus est in fieri perfectly expresses the doctrine of this school. (Maret 1840: 164–6)

In order to reach these conclusions, Maret further passes through some of the major topoi of the French scholarship of the 1830s, including: (i) the identification of

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Hegel’s and Schelling’s philosophies, such that “at bottom Hegel’s principles are not different from Schelling’s” (Maret 1840: 181); (ii) the identification of “the secret of German philosophy” in a gradual tendency towards immanence and ultimately anthropocentrism that follows the logic of Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu; (iii) the identification of Hegel’s philosophy with Cousin’s—“there exists between [them] the most perfect relations; the identity of results indicates the identity of principles” (Maret 1840: 20); and (iv) the identification of pantheism with panlogicism, such that everything can be transparently explained by the philosopher. These lines of argument are radicalised in Maret’s 1844 Théodicée chrétienne, based on his increasingly familiarity with the German texts themselves, particularly Schelling’s System des transzendentalen Idealismus, Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik and Enzyklopädie (Maret 1844: 386). Nevertheless, the stakes remain the same: “In reality, we have the choice between Hegel’s nihilism and the Christian doctrine of creation” (Maret 1844: 429). That is, for Maret in the Théodicée chrétienne, German philosophy is even more radically subversive than Spinoza’s: [Spinoza’s atheism] reappeared in the following century in the heart of Protestant Germany under new forms. However skilled these disciples of Spinoza have been they could not surpass their master, who had drawn the guiding idea of his system from the shadowy traditions of the Kabbala and conforms on this point to many of the cults and schools of antiquity. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, without being better logicians than this bad sophist, were still more opposed, if this is possible, to those primary truths which form the common sense of humankind. (Maret 1844: xi)

Maret later continues, This philosophy necessarily implies the negation of all the principles established in my lecture course. If there is only one substance, there is no absolute and real distinction between the finite and the infinite. If the absolute develops in nature and in human spirit, then there is no perfect God, no personal God prior to the world, distinct from the world, cause of the world. If the absolute develops its essence in the production of the world, there is no genuine creation. Thus, nothing is more opposed to Christian doctrine than the philosophy of the absolute. (Maret 1844: 373)

Maret attempts to show this by returning to the opening of Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik: Since becoming is not infinite, it is and can only be nothingness. Here our task is easy. What can come from nothingness? Nothing; ex nihilo nihil. To place nothingness as the principle of being is the strangest of aberrations. Hegel knows this, since he seeks a middle point between nothingness and being, i.e., becoming; and we are showing that this middle point is illusory. Thus, if Hegel wishes to be consistent, he must begin from absolute nothingness; and he has the task of deducing the universe from it. This error we are indicating is the cause of all the lacunas, of all the vices in the Hegelian theory. From it comes the impossibility of explaining logical and real movement in being; from it comes the impossibility of avoiding abstraction; from it ultimately comes the fatal end to which Hegel is led. Having decided against beginning with living and real infinity, from the God of conscience and humanity, having wished to submit infinity to the law of progress, and making God perfectible, Hegel ended up with nothingness. Indeed, however long you conceive the movement of the absolute which develops eternally in nature and in spirit, this movement never ends; the absolute always has before it an infinity of developments. It is always making itself; it never is. Therefore, the absolute exists at no given

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Maret sees pantheism everywhere—in Cousinian France just as much as in Hegelian Germany, although there is a difference in form between them—as he puts it in the Essai, German pantheism is “fixed and formal”, French pantheism is “indeterminate and vague” (Maret 1840: xxiv). In consequence, Maret sees his task as merely placing a mirror in front of French philosophers to confront them with their “indeterminate” pantheism. However, a different path is taken by Auguste Ott in one of the most substantial expositions of Hegel’s philosophy of the 1840s, Hegel et la philosophie allemande. For Ott, Catholic France is the site of resistance to the pantheism emanating from Germany which is a strictly Protestant phenomenon. It is France that will save Western Europe. Despite his anti-Protestant position, Ott was Alsatian and, like Willm, positioned himself as an insider to both French and German philosophical cultures, with the language skills needed to fully access Hegel’s texts. Indeed, as Oldrini has insisted (2001: 73), Ott’s work was the first dedicated monograph on Hegel to make use of this first-hand familiarity, and what resulted was the largest and most detailed work of the period on Hegel. Ott’s book is, nevertheless, also a violent attack on Hegel (see Bellantone 2011: 1.236) where “Hegel” stands for a politico-theological position that Ott wishes to eradicate. Ott frames his account in terms of a threefold identity between Protestantism, Hegelianism and pantheism. He opens, “German philosophy is not an isolated fact in modern history; it is the expression of the very spirit of the German people, of their religious beliefs, of their moral tendencies. These tendencies are not those of France” (Ott 1844: vi). France’s Catholicism exempts it from the ineluctable march to pantheistic atheism—and is thus able to resist German nihilism. In this vein, Ott continues, France is a Catholic nation; here predominate sentiments of unity, social ideas; from a French perspective, the individual is subordinate to society, the I is only one point on the circumference; the reason of each must submit to the reason of all. Germany is the country of Protestantism, of the spirit of division and separation; here, the I takes centre stage, individual reason recognises no higher authority, the individual point of view dominates the social. To these two perspectives correspond two philosophies, but two opposed, ­contradictory philosophies that can never be reconciled. It is for the future to decide which tendency will prevail, the French tendency or the German tendency. It will be one or the other, but certainly not both. For us, who believe our country is on the right path, we wish for it to remain faithful to its tradition—to abandon it would be a renunciation of the very principle of its nationality. (Ott 1844: vi-vii)

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Like Maret, Ott takes the opportunity to implicitly attack Cousin for betraying French principles for German pantheism. It is within this framework that Ott immerses himself in the details of the Hegelian system, following precisely the “arrangement and divisions adopted by Hegel in his Encyclopedia” (Ott 1844: ix). That is, to demonstrate Hegel’s “systematisation of pantheism” (Ott 1844: 4), Ott furnishes, for example, the first French translation of Hegel’s critique of Spinoza (see Bellantone 2011: 1.258), takes seriously the Wissenschaft der Logik as “Hegel’s major work” (Ott 1844: 92), and provides a full analysis of the concept of Aufhebung, concluding that it is “an absurdity to common sense” (Ott 1844: 85). Nevertheless, the heart of Ott’s critique is to be found in Hegel’s place within a larger narrative concerning the nihilistic results of Protestantism, defined as “the negation of all superior authority to individual reason” (Ott 1844: 6). What is lost in this rebellion against authority is “social experience” (Ott 1844: 24) and concrete existence: “Despite the so oft-repeated assertions of Hegel and his school, his system does not conclude in concrete facts, it does not contain them”. Ultimately, from Ott’s perspective, “Protestant philosophy is over. Hegel has given it the last word” (Ott 1844: 528), and that last word is “atheism” (Ott 1844: 121).

3.5 Turns to Schelling In 1829, Victor Cousin had assigned to Schelling “the rights of the dead” (Cousin 1829b: xxv). And yet, whispers still circulated in France of Schelling’s ongoing philosophical development. Indeed, in the very same year, Carové wrote to Cousin, “Schelling persists still in his silence despite all the insistence of his friends, despite all the promises that he does not cease to break; however, I hope that soon we will be amply recompensed for our long wait” (in Espagne and Werner 1990: 108). Confirmation that Schelling had indeed embarked on something philosophically new came in the final months of 1835 with the translation of his “beurteilende Vorrede” (see §3.2.3), in which he articulates his critique of Hegelianism. Hence, in Bellantone’s judgement, 1835 marks a “decisive year” in the French reception of German Idealism, because it made visible “anti-Hegelian themes”: “For the first time in France there was created a clear distinction between Schelling’s and Hegel’s thought” (Bellantone 2011: 1.160). Previously (or, at least, prior to Heine’s De l’Allemagne the previous year), Hegel and Schelling were coupled together in a common project: they were both seen as committed to a philosophy of identity— one had developed it logically, the other imaginatively, but the fundamental principles were shared. This now changed, and the change was then accelerated by Schelling’s arrival in Berlin in Autumn 1841—an intellectual event whose reverberations were felt in Paris. Schelling now openly became a key ally for those thinkers wishing to resist Hegelianism in some form. The rediscovery of Schelling did not merely take the form of a discovery of a German source for French discontent with Hegelianism; it also effectuated an

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opening up of German Idealism to French audiences beyond the Hegelian—beyond the system of identity (and so beyond Cousin too), in the name of alternative forms of German philosophy. Of course, the late Schelling’s philosophy was not the only anti-Hegelian tendency opening up German philosophy that was available to French philosophers—Tissot’s use of Kant to criticise Hegel (see §6 below), as well as the emergence of traces of Trendelenburg’s critique of Hegel (see Bellantone 2011: 1.282) were also important; but for the purposes of this volume, it is the diremption of the Schelling-Hegel bond that matters.

3.5.1 Ravaisson Félix Ravaisson’s appreciation of the late Schelling is the subject of much scholarly debate—existing somewhere between, on the one hand, Bergson’s insistence that there was no determinative influence of Schelling on Ravaisson, but merely a “natural affinity, a community of inspiration” between them (Bergson 1904: 12) and, on the other hand, Koyré’s passing remark that Ravaisson was “an authentic disciple” of Schelling of the kind that Hegel never possessed in France (Koyré 1931: 151). Pinpointing Ravaisson’s Schellingianism is not helped by the fact that his remarks on Schelling are spread thin over a series of fragments, asides and letters. Often those passages in his published works that seem, on the face of it, most Schellingian lack any determinate reference back to Schelling. While it may be an exaggeration to speak with Baruzi (1933: 3) of Ravaisson’s “secret enthusiasm” for Schelling, it is certainly the case that Schelling lurks behind the scenes as a source of Ravaisson’s (and, through him, an entire school of French spiritualism’s) anti-Hegelianism. Ravaisson certainly knew of Schelling’s philosophy in the early 1830s, perhaps through manuals of the history of philosophy like Tennemann’s (Fedi 2018: 24), and Schelling receives a significant mention at the end of his 1834 prize-essay on Aristotle—discussed in detail in §5.3.2 below. That year, Ravaisson entered into correspondence with Schelling (on the basis of Cousin’s recommendation of him as “one of my young friends with great hopes” [Cousin and Schelling 1991: 235]), sending Schelling his Aristotle prize-essay and then later in the decade—following his stint as Cousin’s secretary in 1835 and his subsequent break with Cousin—De l’habitude, his doctoral dissertation Speusippi de primis rerum principiis, and the first volume of the Essai sur la métaphysique d’Aristote. In response, Schelling wrote back: “I can foresee a day when we will agree on the essential points of philosophy, and I hope you will surmise that I will always regard with the greatest interest whatever you send me” (in Schuhl 1936: 506). By 1835, Ravaisson had read Schelling’s System des transzendentalen Idealismus and Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischen Studiums (see Janicaud 1984: 461–2, Sinclair 2019: 117), as well as Friedrich Stahl’s application of Schellingianism to law (see Courtine 1994: 113). Moreover, Ravaisson also possessed a manuscript of Schelling’s 1835–6 lectures on the philosophy of mythology (see Baruzi 1933, Mauve 1995: 73). Then, in Winter 1839, he travelled to Munich to attend Schelling’s lectures on the

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philosophy of revelation. This event is discussed further in §5.4.1 below; but, to summarise, in Munich Ravaisson discovered, in his own words to Edgar Quinet, a “new and truly important phase of German philosophy”, which takes philosophy out of its “logical prison” and its “dry formalism” to inaugurate “a free and substantial philosophy—one which is, as [Schelling] calls it, genuinely positive”. There is, Ravaisson notes, “a singular conformity between this new direction and that which I wish to undertake” (in David 1952: 454–5). Hence, when the late Ravaisson sounds the call for “a philosophical epoch whose general character would be the predominance of what one might call a spiritualist realism or positivism” (Ravaisson [1867] 2022: 506), it is not hard to hear muted Schellingian resonances. Ravaisson’s enthusiasm for the late Schelling was therefore motivated by an aversion to Cousin’s and Hegel’s philosophies. While it is perhaps unfair to Cousin to say with Bellantone that “Cousin and Ravaisson take opposed decisions: the first chooses Hegel and the second Schelling” (2011: 1.163; see also Janicaud 1984: 459), it is certainly true, as Bellantone goes on to suggest, that Ravaisson’s choice for Schelling is bound up with his preference for Aristotle, for movement and for concrete life, and thus with his attempt to rid contemporary philosophy of a stale Platonism that he considers to be still latent in Cousin and Hegel. Bellantone continues, “Ravaisson wished to overturn that Platonic-Cartesiano-Hegelian structure which had been used to hold up the eclectic school and to replace it with an Aristotelian-Pascalian-Schellingian system under the protection of Maine de Biran” (Bellantone 2011: 1.169). On this reading, Ravaisson takes his place alongside the thinkers of the previous sections, like Lerminier and Heine, who use German Idealism to resist Cousinian hegemony; but while Heine, for instance, does so by turning to an alternative Hegel, Ravaisson appeals to the late Schelling. In this vein, Ravaisson makes a series of critical remarks against Hegel, after reading the Logik, the lectures on the history of philosophy and the lectures on philosophy of religion by the mid-1830s. He writes that the “dialectic is lost in insipid and uncertain speculation; it pays out in general notions which only ever represent the outside and surface of things; it is paid back in forms which contain nothing but empty abstractions” (Ravaisson 1837–46: 1.283–4). Or, as he also puts it in 1837, “The attribution of movement and life to a logical entity is a contradiction”, continuing to speak of Platonism in a way that recalls his interpretation of Hegelianism as a “system of forms without substance, of abstractions without reality” (Ravaisson 1837–46: 1.110). As he puts it later in the same work, Hegel is “lost in a vain logic” (Ravaisson 1837–46: 1.259). Ravaisson will later go on to speak of Hegelian philosophy as pantheism, as mechanism, as formalism and as logicism—or, in Janicaud’s summary, “a logicist formalism and an intellectualist mechanism” (1984: 458–9). It is in the context of this reaction against abstraction, logicism and formalism that Ravaisson’s scattered mentions of Schelling should be situated, such as his claim in the 1840 La Philosophie contemporaine that “German philosophy has found itself strengthened, enlarged, with its perspective on living reality and spiritual energy—Schelling finds in action, in personality, in freedom, the base of any future metaphysics” (Ravaisson [1840] 2016: 77) or his claim in the Testament

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philosophique (from the very end of the century) that “the strong heart desires Being (Schelling) and is not content with shadows, idols and phantoms” (Ravaisson 2016: 299; see Bernard-Granger 2023b). Even more significantly, Ravaisson’s philosophy often appropriates larger Schellingian structures, such as in the preference for the Gospel of John and the account of the Christianity-Judaism relation in the Testament philosophique that recalls Schelling’s lectures on the philosophy of revelation in its invocation of Jesus Christ as “the new Prometheus and the new Orpheus” who “casts fire on this earth” and on the old religions in preparation for a “reign of the spirit” (Ravaisson 2016: 318; see Courtine 1994). This appropriation is perhaps most obvious in De l’habitude—as Sinclair points out, “The basic structure of Ravaisson’s text recalls Schelling’s project in the 1800 System of Transcendental Idealism” (2019: 116). Hence, De l’habitude unites the real and the ideal, describes nature as unconscious intelligence, constructs a hierarchical series of phenomena and gives prominence to aesthetic intuition. When, for example, Ravaisson speaks of “immediate intelligence where subject and object are confounded” as “a real intuition, in which the real and the ideal, being and thought are fused together” (Ravaisson [1838] 2016: 44), the Schellingian overtones are hard to miss—and it is these implicit, but unmistakable convergences between Ravaisson and Schelling that Sinclair and Woodard explore in their studies in volume two.

3.5.2 Leroux’s Defence of Schelling As Abensour has put it, in 1842 “Pierre Leroux turned his gaze towards Berlin to welcome Schelling’s arrival as a sign of renewal” (Abensour 1991: 117). This was a perverse move on Leroux’s part: the originator of the term “socialist”, “the most proletarian of philosophers” (Thoré, quoted in Abensour 1991: 127), found in the late Schelling’s lectures on the philosophy of revelation—which, on the surface at least, appeared culturally conservative—the foundations of a radical future. It is little wonder that Leroux’s position shocked French and German philosophers and, to some extent, accelerated plans for a better understanding and closer alliance between French and German intellectual traditions. Nevertheless, Leroux’s surprise turn to Schelling—interpreted as a representative of the future of radicalism— makes sense when understood as a continuation of his critique of Cousin and Hegel rehearsed in §3.3.4 above: Leroux is looking for an alternative to what he calls “the fatalism” of Paris and Berlin, and he discovers it in the late Schelling. The controversy rests on three articles that Leroux penned in his La Revue indépendante in early 1842. The first comprises a translation of Schelling’s inaugural Berlin lecture prefaced with a laudatory introduction, which reads: The lecture we now translate has caused a very lively sensation in Germany. Finally breaking his silence which had lasted more than a quarter of a century, Schelling has left Munich, where he lived in retirement with the title of Secretary of the Academy of Fine Arts, and has just taken over Hegel’s very own chair. […] He has come to gravely pronounce the condemnation of Hegel’s philosophy, and to announce, with a kind of pomp and with a great sense

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of conviction, a complete and relatively new philosophy, a true and solid philosophy. Certainly, for all those interested in science, this is a spectacle full of interest—Schelling’s resurrection is almost miraculous. […] Truly, there is something great—I will say more, something divine and providential—in the reappearance, after so long an eclipse, of the intellectual inspiration for so many. The last fifty years of intellectual Germany seem a poem the conclusion to which now approaches—here is the main hero who reappears at the close. […] All this, I am saying, is the kind of thing to strike people markedly. But there is something more remarkable still in our eyes: it is the manner in which Schelling appears to have acquitted himself of this task; it is his condemnation, without vacillation and without the least vestige of jealousy, of the fatalist Eclecticism that Hegel had grafted onto his own philosophy; and, above all, it is his promise to resolve the questions which today arrest the human spirit. (Leroux [1842] 1982: 13–16)

The shockwaves following Leroux’s endorsement of the late Schelling against Hegel resulted in a series of immediate, critical responses, all founded on the assumption that Leroux, in his naivety, had just misunderstood what was going on in Germany. Leroux mentions two of them in his subsequent article on the controversy; the first is an anonymous letter sent to him from a broadly Hegelian position: Schelling owes his current position to a movement of reaction. Here’s how. Minds across the Rhine are divided into two camps: on one side, the so-called historical school and, on the other, the philosophical school. The former proceeds on faith and the traditions of the past, is inspired by the Middle Ages, and in politics desires English institutions. The latter aspires to the new faith, is attached to the Revolution, and moves forward in politics in France’s footsteps. As long as he lived, Hegel was the most eminent leader of the philosophical school. […] Schelling belongs to neither one of these schools. He holds the middle ground between the two parties. […] The Berlin government called Schelling to demolish Hegel, hoping to one day reconstruct on the ruins of science the Christian-feudal order, the object of its worship. And the poor old man responded to the call! After a silence of thirty years, he comes, after the death of the architect, to try, with feeble hands, to undermine the edifice for which he had supplied the best materials. (in Abensour 1991: 133–4)

The second letter, published in La Phalange in April 1842, was written by Alexandre Weill—close to Heine and Feuerbach and a regular contributor to radical émigré journals in Paris. It provides another corrective to Leroux by informing him of the real situation in Germany: I must observe to you that you go too far in the consequences you draw from Hegel’s and Schelling’s philosophy. Not that these consequences are not correct in themselves, but, in you and through you, they already go beyond these philosophies, for they are neither in Hegel nor in Schelling. You do wrong to one of them and attribute too much to the other. Something quite remarkable: you attribute to Schelling social consequences that he has never envisaged and to the heights of which he does not even aspire. I repeat to you that these consequences are logical and inevitable; but Schelling does not know of them, for the philosophy of 1842 is no longer the philosophy of 1820. You have understood him better than he understands himself. And, on the contrary, you push Hegel too far into pantheism according to the reasoning of some of his disciples, and thus you greatly enlarge the ditch that separates these two men. (in Abensour 1991: 135)

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Weill continues, “You, who call yourself a Schellingian par excellence, are a pure-­ bred Hegelian… You thus belong to Hegel’s school and not Schelling’s, and you accord the latter an honour he does not merit” (in Abensour 1991: 137). Over the next few months, an array of intellectuals began queuing up to tell Leroux that he had got German philosophy wrong, and that Hegel was more conducive to political radicalism than Schelling. At one end of the spectrum, for instance, Karl Rosenkranz denounces Leroux for “having written much on Hegel and Schelling and condemning the former as an absolutist and praising the latter as a democrat without knowing anything about them both except from hearsay” (Grandjonc 1978: 82). At the other end of the spectrum is Blanc’s insistence that “we believe that Pierre Leroux is nobly deceived when on Schelling’s new journey to Berlin he raises a cry of hope. Pierre Leroux, this great and generous spirit, could not, must not easily believe that Schelling would renounce one part of his past” (Blanc 1843: 60). Marx says something similar in his letter to Feuerbach of October 1843 which, provoked by Leroux, reflects on the way in which Schelling has “cunningly enticed the French, first of all the weak, eclectic Cousin, then even the gifted Leroux. For Pierre Leroux and his like still regard Schelling as the man who replaced transcendental idealism by rational realism, abstract thought by thought with flesh and blood, specialised philosophy by world philosophy!” (Marx 1975–2004: 40.283–4). Leroux responded to many of these charges in the subsequent issue of La Revue indépendante in an article entitled, Du cours de philosophie de Schelling. While there does emerge in this second instalment “the birth of a doubt” (Abensour 1991: 123) concerning Schelling’s ability to follow through on the project outlined in his inaugural lecture, Leroux still doubles down on his preference for the late Schelling over Hegel. “Nothing,” Leroux writes, “is more important, in our opinion, for the advancement of science in general and of all the sciences than this event [of Schelling’s Berlin lectures] which has initially made such a loud noise in Germany” (Leroux [1842] 1982: 25). What follows is a detailed critique of the Hegelian system. First, Leroux considers Hegel to have merely rounded off Schelling’s early system, such that “it does not take much time to see that Hegel, with all his logic and all his categories, has added nothing genuinely solid to the conceptions he received from Schelling” (Leroux [1842] 1982: 44). And so, secondly, what Hegel therefore ends up doing, according to Leroux, is radicalising the pantheist tendencies of the early Schelling—and this is most visible in the emphasis Hegel places on the doctrine of the Incarnation. That is, rather than following his French contemporaries by focusing on problems with Hegel’s logic, his method or his political philosophy, Leroux identifies the source of all Hegel’s errors in his philosophy of religion: There is in Hegel a supreme philosophical thought which links together and dominates all this development – it is as follows: All religion, according to Hegel, consists in the incarnation of God in man. God does not exist in an inactive manner; the absolute idea, God, has a tendency to realise itself. The result of this first movement is nature. In the universe, there are all the phases, all the combinations of the idea as it emerges from itself. The idea in its diversity and exteriority tends to come to self-consciousness; and this phenomenon, miracle or final effort of creation,

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produces humankind. But this miracle does not stop with the creation of humankind; it continues in the life of humanity. The diverse religions that have appeared on earth up to now can be considered as a continuous creation; they are the expression of this development, of this movement of the divine essence into man. […] Hegel believed he had thereby attained the very essence of religion and his disciples believe it still. (Leroux [1842] 1982: 42–3)

Leroux concludes, “Hegel is attached to the Incarnation; it was the Trinity that he needed to understand. Religion, science is to be found there” (Leroux [1842] 1982: 48; see Rey 2013: 438–9). And it is in the context of this critique of Hegelian incarnationism that Leroux returns to the possibilities offered by the late Schelling for a renewal of both philosophy and religion: Schelling wants to give a soul to philosophy by uniting it to religion. Philosophy has no soul with Hegel. It is merely a logic. Hegel’s system has been called (and it is an admirer who does so) the theology of logic. This phrase is true. Hegel’s God is only an idea. The whole question at stake between Schelling and Hegel is to know whether God exists or whether he is but a vain word. If God exists and is manifest in the world, the general government of the world is a divine fact. Here is Providence, and this Providence appears in humanity. Christianity, therefore, is no product without God’s design. Christianity is not a pure conception of the intellect; it is, as Schelling says, a fact, and this fact has God for its origin and for its centre the person of Christ as the Gospel represents him to us. Even in appearing to return to the ancient Revelation, Schelling renders the human mind [esprit] a great service. Hegel’s philosophy is such a prodigious error that this reaction has become necessary. (Leroux [1842] 1982: 77)

And with this Leroux concludes, Schelling arrives to negate the absolute distinction that Hegel made between religion and philosophy. This for Germany is immense progress. Schelling arrives, and, by the fact alone that he has a very different feeling for past religions or Christianity than Hegel did, he gives, as I have said, a soul to the philosophy which lost it. This is immense progress for philosophical Germany. With Schelling, philosophy became active, out of the sterility in which it remained under the ice of Fatalism. For, once again, Hegel proves that philosophy has no soul, no heart, no charity, no love for all that suffers in the world; during the twenty years Hegel reigned, philosophy became aristocratic, servile to the powerful, brutally despising the lowly. Hegel himself made philosophy, as Cousin has, a doctrine for the rich and powerful. […] With a wave of his wand Schelling destroys this conception which (as we know) has lost so many students from philosophy in France and in Germany. Honour then to Schelling, and let us not call such a necessary work retrograde. But Schelling does not stop there. When it comes to the metaphysics of his philosophy, he re-establishes God and the divine Trinity in the spirit of German philosophers, falsified by the absurd Hegelian trinity. (Leroux [1842] 1982: 80–1)

For Leroux, Schelling inaugurates a new epoch of thinking the philosophy-religion relation and so new possibilities for a post-Christian philosophical religion. While Schelling himself remains bound to the Christian paradigm, Leroux uses him to think beyond it. According to Leroux, “what we call Christianity has long been

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nothing but a cadaver” (Leroux [1842] 1982: 33) and “the religion of the future will not be Christian” (Leroux 1832: 286). That is, despite Schelling himself, his philosophy possesses the resources for taking us beyond Christianity into something new (see Breckman 2005, Rey 2013: 431–7)—as Leroux puts it at the beginning of his final article on the controversy in La Revue indépendante, Du christianisme: We have proven, succinctly, to be sure, but robustly for us, that […] we are at the end of Christianity. But, while separating ourselves from Schelling on the manner of resolving the problem, that is, on the process by which he identifies or brings together philosophy and Christianity, we accept the position that he has ascribed to philosophy of either giving up or finally understanding the divine essence of religion. We say like him and this is something we have said for many years: no essential separation between religion and philosophy. And we add: Let philosophy succumb and re-enter the tutelage of Revelation; it is not strong enough to become the religion of humankind. (Leroux [1842] 1982: 89–92)

3.5.3 Lamennais Much earlier than some of the other thinkers described in this section—in 1832— Félicité de Lamennais encountered Schelling’s philosophy. This was a moment of crisis in his thinking brought on by the suspension of his journal L’Avenir—a period when he was becoming increasingly critical of Roman authority, leaving behind the 1817 Essai sur l’indifference en matière de religion, which had made him a darling of the Catholic Right, for something more radical. And it was at this moment in August 1832—in Munich in transit to Rome—that Lamennais met Schelling (see Lewis 1954, Tilliette 1974: 1.353–9). For Lamennais, this encounter constituted an opportunity to experiment with the limits of philosophy—more precisely, to test the extent to which Schelling’s philosophy could be reconciled with Catholic dogma, and so whether the Catholic critique of German philosophy in terms of indifference, pantheism and heterodoxy also held good for the late Schelling. This encounter was in fact part of Lamennais’s flirtation with philosophy in the early 1830s—three aspects of which are worth mentioning. First, in May 1830, he had taken an interest in reading Hegel who he ironically reports to be “the Plato of the Antichrist” to the Countess de Senfft (Lamennais 1863: 2. 125), in a phrase that Amédée Prévost would later appropriate and popularise (see §5.2.1 below). Secondly and more generally, he was at the time in the midst of drafting what would later become his Esquisse d’une philosophie (see §3.6.1 below). Thirdly, 1832 marked the beginnings of a quarrel with Lerminier into which Lamennais was being drawn over the role of the Catholic religion within the French state. At the time of the meeting with Schelling, Lamennais was finalising a review of Lerminier’s Lettres philosophiques adressées à un Berlinois that takes up Lerminier’s concept of pantheism as its central theme—that is, Lamennais uses Lerminier’s criticism of Hegelianism as pantheist against Lerminier himself and the other liberal “Globistes”

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who had supported the July Revolution. He writes (deliberately reducing Lerminier to another Cousinian), The author of the Lettres philosophiques occupies a distinguished place among men who have emerged from the eclectic school. […] Lerminier believes in the absolute and limitless authority of human reason. […] I have already had occasion to remark that the human mind [esprit], left to its own devices, will constantly go on to lose itself in the abyss of pantheism, whenever it wishes to travel a little further in the exploration of the great problems of God, man and nature. This is what happened to the most advanced philosophy of the Orient, this is where lofty Greek philosophy ran aground, and finally this is where the most profound thinkers of modern Germany, Fichte, the naturalist school, Hegel and his French disciples have led. (Lamennais 1832: 30–1)

Such is the background to Lamennais’s meeting with Schelling in 1832, which his follower, Alexis-François Rio (present alongside Charles Montalembert), reports as follows: There was a moment when I believed that [Lamennais] was going to make another conquest [i.e., conversion to his form of Catholicism] […] It was when the famous Schelling, who was then in the third phase of his philosophical career, confided in me mysteriously his desire or rather his need to have a particular conversation with the Abbé de Lamennais whom he knew only from his writings, but whom he considered, on this testimony alone, as the foremost dialectician of his time. […] The conversation in question took place a few days after our arrival in Munich, such that we did not have long to get ourselves up to speed on the new viewpoint Schelling had been developing [in his Munich lectures] only viva voce and before listeners forbidden to contradict him. Our stupefaction was immense when he began to explain to us, in the guise of a preamble, his ingenious combination of the three apostolic churches between which he divided out the work of the redemption of the human species. (Rio 1872: 2.165–6)

Rio continues, Schelling had made or at least had appeared to make prodigious concessions not only to Christianity such as the majority of Protestant theologians conceived it; but even to the Catholic Church with its traditional organ, and he had almost come to regret that this unity of doctrine to which this Church owed all its strength could not be roughly transplanted into the domain of the philosophical sciences. Evidently, this was his dominant preoccupation, as was soon proved by the path that the long and curious conversation at which I was privileged to assist took. (Rio 1872: 2.167)

The contents of the conversation itself are set out in a letter Lamennais subsequently sent to Rio on 28th August 1832: We [i.e., Lamennais and Schelling] mutually agreed that one of the characteristics of the new epoch that we are entering would be the spiritual overcoming of peoples, that is, consciousness and intelligence would cease to be, to any degree, dependent on purely human power. Schelling went further and explained that, in his opinion, this dependence would extend to the Church itself, such that each person would depend solely on his own reason for his beliefs, even if he were still forming a universal belief founded on an invincible conviction emergent from the development of science—and this would then replace faith. Such science would be self-sufficient and would bring the human species to unity. It would have as its basis, on the one hand, primitive facts and, on the other, a method still unknown to the world by means of which one would progressively and in a rigorous manner deduce these primitive facts, the entirety of Christianity, or, in other words, all the laws of humanity.

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The discussion being established, [Lamennais] observed: 1. That these primitive facts on which science must operate and without which it would not exist—facts dogmatic as well as historical—must, first of all, be believed and believed as indubitably certain, and that science, far from being self-sufficient, would necessarily rest on a prior faith, and one of a completely different nature to scientific conviction. 2. That scientific development of this prior faith, if it were possible in Schelling’s sense, would not be possible except among a small number of men; the majority of the human race would always remain foreign to it. Schelling was convinced by this, adding that the majority of the human race would continue to be led by the path of authority, believing without interrogating the teaching of those who had formed their conviction by scientific method. [Lamennais remarked]: according to this idea, the Catholic principle was to be recognised as indispensable for the majority of the human race and it was to be overcome only by those who, in the Catholic Church, are called the teaching body, those who are destined to form by teaching the faith of others. Schelling was persuaded by this. But [Lamennais asked] what certainty will scientific results obtain? If one says that reason which affirms them cannot err, one makes the reason of each person more infallible than the Church itself, to which is attributed merely an infallibility of tradition; one makes it infallible like God himself. If [the reason of each person] can err, all truths without exception, all the laws of humanity, remain in doubt. Schelling did not want to attribute this divine infallibility to human reason; and on the second horn of the dilemma, that is, on the possibility of error, and therefore on opposed convictions among those who scientifically form their beliefs, he said that the accord, the unity would subsist in the method alone and not in the application of the method. This was not to resolve the difficulty, but to admit it and to declare it insoluble. Schelling sensed this and he appeared to agree: 1. That there was an order of primitive facts independent of science and which served as its basis. 2. That these facts, other than the trove of historical events in the monuments of Christianity, included dogmas, precepts—in a word, all that exists by faith in the Catholic Church and is proposed by it as such. 3. That the primitive facts thus defined subsist by themselves; that science does not give them and could not undermine them; 4. That every scientific result in contradiction with these facts is, by that alone, to be recognised as false, and must be rejected as such—which Schelling formally avowed. (in Rio 1872: 2.167–70; see Lewis 1954: 348–9)

Lamennais would later write of Schelling on the latter’s death in 1854: “I believe that if we had had the time and the ability to penetrate more into one another, we would have mutually found ourselves in agreement on the essential ground of things; and that is a lot, that is everything” (in Rio 1872: 2.197). Nevertheless, this proved to be the limit of Lamennais’s direct involvement with the absolute Idealists.

3.5.4 The “Lausanne School”: Secrétan and Lèbre At the Academy of Lausanne in the 1830s a circle of students gathered around the theologian, Alexandre Vinet, a leader of the Swiss Protestant revival. Two of these students were Charles Secrétan and Adolphe Lèbre who both developed Vinet’s ideas via trips to Munich to study with Schelling. The nineteen-year-old Lèbre attended Schelling’s lectures in 1833 and Secrétan did the same in 1836 and 1839 (see Fedi 2018: 32, Grin 1932, Tilliette 1974: 1.377–8). Lèbre would move to Paris

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in 1841 where he published his major reflection on the late Schelling’s philosophy, the 1843 Crise actuelle de la philosophie allemande, whereas Secrétan remained in Lausanne (until 1846) lecturing on the philosophy of law, out of which emerged his two volume La Philosophie de la liberté, first published in 1848. The thirteenth and fourteenth lectures of this work are devoted to “Schelling’s new philosophy”. Secrétan is for many “the francophone philosopher most profoundly influenced by Schelling” (Reymond: 1954: 100)—Schelling is present from his youth when he collaborated with his grandfather on an unfinished translation of the System des transzendentalen Idealismus (see Reymond 1954: 100); Schelling is also present in his very first work from 1840, La Philosophie de Leibnitz, which “borrows” extensively from Schelling’s Munich lectures on the history of philosophy to draw a parallel between Spinoza and Leibniz (Secrétan 1840: 144). The concluding paragraph to the work reads, It is not by chance that I am concluding by turning your gaze to the author of the philosophy of nature. Schelling is the descendant of Spinoza and Leibniz. Leibniz reclaimed spontaneity and life for the universe’s intellect; Schelling introduced this life and spontaneity into the idea of the world—it is a life and spontaneity which one seeks in vain in the mechanism of preestablished harmony, according to which all causality, all activity is merely illusory. (Secrétan 1840: 145)

Schelling is perhaps even more visible in Secrétan’s next work, the 1841 De l’âme et du corps: The root of modern philosophy is a dynamism or, according to ordinary language, a spiritualism, as old as human thought. […] Ardent but obscure in Spinoza, this spiritualism lights up in Leibniz in vivid sparks; it warms back up and ripens in the immortal work of the old man of Königsberg, becomes concentrated in Fichte and then increases its intensity to spread outwards with Schelling like a torrent of fire and with Hegel like a stream of light. Identity of contraries, fundamental spirituality, evolutionary progression—on this common basis has been raised the two most recent speculative systems: in the eyes of Hegel everything is thought and the movement of thought; for Schelling everything is will and the metamorphosis of will; thinking itself is resolved into will. (Secrétan 1841: 111–12)

In a footnote, Secrétan goes on to describe an “affinity” between Hegel and Schelling and contemporary French philosophy: Despite the difference of methods and national genius, we find in the French philosophy of our century perspectives that are not without some affinity to those of these two great thinkers. Maine de Biran’s empiricism envelops Schelling in germ. Cousin’s eclecticism is a softened echo of Hegel. (Secrétan 1841: 112–13)

However, De l’âme et du corps also marks the moment at which Secrétan begins to distance himself from Schelling’s philosophy, however partially. He writes, What in particular has prevented me from entirely accepting the forms in which Schelling has presented his philosophy in both his texts and his lectures [is] the always recurring temptation to recombine freedom and necessity. (Secrétan 1841: 114)

The error of such an act of recombination is to fail to respect the fundamental nature of “the principle of absolute freedom” (Secrétan 1841: 116) which is sacrosanct in Secrétan’s work. That is, it fails to relegate its opposite, necessity, to “a secondary

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phenomenon” (Secrétan 1841: 115) that does not exist on the same level as freedom: “If everything is will, freedom is the supreme category, for the will is essentially free. Schelling himself recognises this […]. Hence, necessity does not enter at all into the essence of things” (Secrétan 1841: 115). Moreover, Secrétan continues this process of distancing himself from Schelling in 1842  in debate with C. H. Weisse’s critical review of La Philosophie de Leibnitz. For Weisse, Secrétan’s book is not only derivative (since Secrétan reveals himself as little more than “a disciple” of Schelling, turning Leibniz into “a vehicle for treating ideas which he owes to the study of the new Schellingian philosophy” [Weisse 1842: 265–6]), but a deformed derivation of Schelling’s ideas—“a mistaken transposition of Schellingian philosophy”: “Whether Schelling would actually agree with his account may well be doubted” (Weisse 1842: 266). Secrétan responded to Weisse in the next issue of I. H. Fichte’s Zeitschrift für Philosophie und spekulative Theologie as follows: I certainly heard Schelling in Munich, and I admit to being his pupil on certain important teachings. The views I have expressed did not develop within me without instruction, that is, without German instruction; but the reviewer seems to believe in “a mistaken transposition of Schelling’s philosophy”—and that I have not done and have not attempted anything of that sort at all. Incidentally, I may boldly assert that Schelling’s basic view of divine freedom struck me as both familiar and comforting when I, a young student, entered his lecture hall. I already believed in it and looked there merely for its proof—a proof for which I still search in different ways. Schelling constructs the concept of the absolutely free God from a prius; this construction is the essence of his teaching, and from this construction he develops the means to make the realms of nature, religion and history understandable from within. [...] I have not attempted such a thing and do not trust myself to judge the feasibility of this beginning. I come to the concept of absolute freedom through a completely different means; in my fragments this freedom is actually presupposed. [...] I do not say that God is nothing but his freedom; but rather he is absolutely free, and therefore unfathomable in his essence, and everything else can be explained speculatively from this freedom. (Secrétan 1842: 152–5)

This is the context to Secrétan’s detailed reconstruction of Schelling’s late philosophy in the 1848 La Philosophie de la liberté. Here he tells a story about Schelling’s development that has become very familiar to post-existentialist readers of Schelling: the early work (Secrétan draws principally on the System des transzendentalen Idealismus) is defined in terms of the “unity” of “unconditional being, the absolute being of Schelling’s system” which “follows Spinoza in absorbing individuals and seeing in them only transitory shadows” (Secrétan 1848–9: 1.221). The turning point in his story is the Freiheitsschrift, which, according to Secrétan, breaks with the early system and liberates a fuller, more significant notion of freedom: The Freiheitsschrift “clearly reveals” Schelling’s later “tendencies” to affirm freedom wholeheartedly (Secrétan 1848–9: 1.249). The later Schelling’s elaboration of a concept of freedom is his great triumph, Secrétan continues, for it allows him to recover a robust ethics, a philosophy in the service of action and concrete existence (Fedi 2018: 36). Secretan exclaims, “Everything is resolved in will. This is Schelling’s glory to have proclaimed this fecund truth. He has reconciled the claims

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of realism and idealism, he has provided the foundations for a genuine spiritualism, which merely appears to be an idealism” (Secrétan 1848–9: 1.346). Nevertheless, Secrétan refuses to follow Schelling into the intricacies of his doctrine of the potencies (or dynamic stages of being) and other speculations: “The design of explaining the nature of the free God by means of the potencies seems to us to lead the mind into representing divine freedom as a conditional freedom and limited by the potencies” (Secrétan 1848–9: 1.337–8; see Fedi 2018: 37). Schelling’s philosophical schema limit absolute freedom and so Secrétan formulates the need “to exit from Schelling’s system” in the name of “a full, complete freedom which creates possibilities and realises them” (Secrétan 1848–9: 1.341). Hence, he adds in a note to the 1865 edition of the work, “La Philosophie de la liberté is not only a system independent [from Schelling’s] […] it belongs to another order altogether” (Secrétan 1865: 1.283). And, as late as the 1870s, Secrétan was still navigating his ambivalence towards the late Schelling—as the modern philosopher closest to thinking concrete existence and voluntarism, but one that fails: “Historically my philosophy incontestably proceeds from Schelling. […] But it is essentially a refutation of Schelling” (in Reymond 1954: 105). Lèbre similarly bases his reading of German Idealism around a demand for a philosophy of freedom which could ground morality and provide an escape from the logical necessitarianism of Hegelianism. However, he is far more circumspect than Secrétan about what the late Schelling might have to offer and far more drawn to the charge of pantheism that was such a popular feature of conservative criticisms of German philosophy (see §3.4.4 above). Lèbre’s anxieties over German Idealism were initially expressed in his 1838 Critique religieuse et morale du panthéisme published in the Revue Suisse, edited by Secrétan. Like Maret, Lèbre sees pantheism everywhere: it is “forcibly in vogue today—everyone talks about it and judges it […] few errors are as crude and as learned, as dangerous and as perfidious, as opposed to the truth and as easy to disguise under its forms” (Lèbre 1856: 405). He continues more specifically, “Philosophy is modern pantheism, poetic with Schelling, dialectical with Hegel, social with Saint-Simon and Fourier”. Lèbre does admit, though, that he mainly has Hegel in his sights, for “it is Hegel who has given the most severely philosophical formula of it [and] makes us forget Jesus; the Science of Logic makes us forget the histories of the Gospels” (Lèbre 1856: 409, 419). On the contrary, in 1838, the late Schelling troubles Lèbre as a possible exception: “When I accuse Schelling of pantheism, I am speaking solely of his philosophy of nature. He has now considerably modified it, or, better, abandoned it for a new system whose principle is a personal, free and eternal God”. And while Lèbre thinks it probable that Schelling’s late philosophy still fails to free itself from pantheism entirely, it does still point in the right direction (Lèbre 1856: 409). It is precisely to confront this doubt over the success of the late Schelling’s project that Lèbre comes to write Crise actuelle de la philosophie allemande. Like Secrétan after him, he is interested in which German philosophers best answer the call of freedom in a way that supports morality and concrete existence, i.e., without retreating back into speculative metaphysics. And Lèbre is clear, since “Schelling has nearly completed the cycle of his lectures” in Berlin and “maintained the cause

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of Christian science against the Hegelians”, an “impartial judgment” on his late philosophy (according to these criteria) is at last possible (Lèbre 1843: 5–6). Lèbre begins, however, with Schelling’s earlier philosophy, showing how it “satisfied the most diverse needs of the epoch” by restoring the rights of the external world after Fichte, finding reason “everywhere in the universe” and justifying a turn to nature (Lèbre 1843: 7). On the basis of Schelling’s early work, “All the sciences took on a new energy. They no longer remained isolated, as scattered stones in a building whose design is lost. Their nobility was regained, for they all had the science of God as their end” (Lèbre 1843: 7). However, he continues, early Schellingianism soon degenerated from “a general enthusiasm” to “a genuine drunkenness”, for it spoke too much “to the imagination”: “Analogy was consulted more than reason: a dangerous and unruly mysticism was substituted for science; everything fell into a strange chaos” (Lèbre 1843: 7–8). An antidote to Schellingian “anarchy” was required: “The disorder became such that one finally felt the need to return to a strict method. And this was what Hegel undertook” (Lèbre 1843: 8). Hence, Lèbre begins to expound the Hegelianism against which the late Schelling reacts: A disciple of Schelling, Hegel did not intend to begin creating a system and wanted only to give his master’s a more rigorous form. He took back up, following Kant and Aristotle, the analysis of reason. His logic is his claim to glory. It is admirable in originality and depth. Never had there been developed to this extent such delicacy of analysis, subtlety of discernment, dialectical vigour. […] Reason is not an aggregate of ideas, it is a wonderful organism; there is in it something like an incessant circulation of thought. Kant had undertaken the anatomy of reason, Hegel wrote its physiology; Kant had given the list of concepts, Hegel provided their system. This logic will be imposed on the human mind and will spread across the world. Hegel has his place, not among the dazzling geniuses, those poets of the intellect named Plato, Malebranche or Leibniz, but in an assembly less numerous and more austere, among the legislators of thought, among those who discovered some fragments of its laws, like Aristotle, Bacon and Kant. […] Hegel’s logic is going to revolutionise thinking; it has already become a redoubtable weapon of destruction. […] Hegel took a scythe to all the systems produced by another method. He has discovered the logic of the infinite; the old logic is only that of the finite. However, Hegel was exclusive like all reformers. The new logic became everything for him. He no longer saw in it solely eternal forms of the thought of being; he saw in it being itself, he took it for God. He introduced his system through his Phenomenology, and it shows the path which leads to its principal error. In this beautiful work, he places himself in the immediate viewpoint where we are things; he successively examines sensible perception, the understanding, all the means of knowledge which, in some manner, are subjective. In all of them, he discovers and points out a contradiction. They furnish solely the finite, what is imperfect, transitory, apparent. Logic, which alone lifts us above all contradictions, furnishes solely the infinite, that is, being, truth, God. God, as infinite, cannot, according to Hegel, be personal: these two ideas exclude each other. (Lèbre 1843: 8, 10–11)

This is the moment when German philosophy becomes closely tied to pantheism. Using Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu as an example of the way in which Hegelianism has finally fully revealed itself, Lèbre continues, Today there is necessarily felt a powerful attraction towards pantheism, for it is the great event of contemporary thought. We are not particularly surprised to find it among our neigh-

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bours. Their impersonal and abstract genius, a sort of tenderness for nature, an instinct for the infinite easily lost them to this world—everything in their thinking and in their imagination predisposes them to it. […] After his death, Hegel’s disciples were freer in their movements […] On the left— among the true heirs, I won’t say of Hegel’s spirit, but of his philosophy—there emerged a young and numerous phalanx, ardent in their battle to breach Christianity, to overturn the old institutions, to provoke a vast revolution. This party has incontestable merits. Its writers clearly explain Hegel’s system which until then had been so little accessible. They carry into abstract speculation a lucidity they have been the first to provide in Germany. They know how to render philosophy popular and practical; they have brought it down from the academy into the public sphere and are interested in every current event. They have, finally, renounced that duplicity too common in Germany of hiding, under the language of faith, destructive thoughts concerning Christianity. (Lèbre 1843: 15, 19)

It is at this point that the late Schelling enters the philosophical scene, according to Lèbre’s analysis: “Schelling walked into the middle of these opposing passions. His opening speech was avidly read all over Germany. It was treated as a kind of coronation speech and the resemblance was only too perfect” (Lèbre 1843: 26). And he goes on to evaluate the late Schelling’s philosophy as follows: There are two ways of considering the universe: either one deduces everything from the supreme principle by logical necessity, one descends from God to the world, as from a principle to its consequence, such that, there being God, the world must also be, and one cannot be conceived without the other and God cannot not produce the world; or God has created it by an act of will, by a free decision. The world is necessary, or it is accidental. These two conceptions cannot subsist together in the same mind: they are irreconcilable and the only ones possible: one is true and the other false. Moreover, pure reason, the logical method, gives solely a necessary world. The free act is not determined a priori, as we have said, it is known only a posteriori, by experience. The experimental or historical method must thus find its place in philosophy, if freedom is to find its place in the world. […] Schelling’s whole system is an apology for Christianity. Historical method, the conception of a personal god and of free creation, a theory of mythologies—all combine equally to this end. Object to Schelling concerning the truth of Christianity and his philosophy is entirely undermined; refute him on this point and the rest immediately crumbles; there will be nothing more. This brings home to us the justice of Leroux’s appreciation of Schelling. Leroux undertook a difficult task: he had for information [on the late Schelling] scarcely one insignificant article from the Augsburg Gazette and he concluded from it that Schelling, the most illustrious philosopher of his country, was, or rather must be, in Germany what Leroux is in France—this is a misunderstanding. […] Leroux and Schelling have completely opposed views on God and on humanity, on mythology and on Christianity. On what do they agree? If I look to Germany for Leroux’s ideas, I will find them only in the Left Hegelians. […] Has Schelling brought us the truth we have been seeking in vain until now? Has he spoken the word that must end our doubts? I would like to believe so, but I cannot. By means of his ontological hypothesis Schelling explains nature and history, mythologies and Christianity—everything, in a word. But this hypothesis is not the foundation. […] Arriving at Christianity, he gives it merely an ontological explanation and neglects the moral explanation; this is to denature it. It illuminates the mystery of the two essences united in the incarnate Word, rather than that of Atonement. […] In Schelling’s system Jesus Christ is

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more a demiurge than a redeemer. In this regard, he might perform miracles in nature, but he would not have changed wills nor healed hearts. […] Hence, Schelling is satisfied neither with the demands of logic nor with those of freedom; he does not reconcile faith and science; he is discontented with both of them. He has shown that reason leads inevitably to pantheism; he has made the need to transcend it more urgent; but he has not provided the means to do so. (Lèbre 1843: 28, 36–7, 40)

Lèbre thus concludes pessimistically and much like Maret and Ott, A parallel crisis is found across the world. Everywhere among European peoples there is the same shaking of beliefs, the same anguish of souls, the same disorder of spirits. A doubt from whose power we wished in vain to hide obsesses us. In the temples it whispers its words to the kneeling masses; it troubles the priest before the altar. In the sanctuary of consciousness, it awaits us again, and proposes to us utility in place justice, well-being in place of duty. The dreadful guest follows us to the domestic hearth and there argues against family and property. All is put into question, all becomes precarious, all seems menaced. The old Orient is also awaiting the same evil, it is astonished to no longer believe, it is defying its gods, who do not protect it against us. For the first time scepticism spreads its shadows over the whole face of the earth and, in this obscurity, sadness, fear and ennui take hold of us. It will not be a logician who will put an end to these vast uncertainties. These are not the games and difficulties of the school, but cruel and profound perplexities. Great events have given rise to them, and great events alone will be able to put an end to them. (Lèbre 1843: 42)

3.6 Academic Philosophy and German Idealism at the End of the 1840s 29th June 1851 is the date that symbolises, to all intents and purposes, the expulsion of Hegelianism from the French academy. It was on that date that Étienne Vacherot was dismissed from his post as Director of Studies at the École Normale Supérieure on suspicion of Hegelian sympathies. Charges had been made against him earlier that year by Auguste Gratry (priest at the École Normale Supérieure) in his Lettre à M.  Vacherot, which targeted Vacherot’s three-volume Histoire critique de l’école d’Alexandrie. Vacherot’s volumes set up a convoluted series of correspondences between Alexandrian eclecticism, Neoplatonism, Cousin’s eclecticism and Hegelian speculation; but Gratry cuts through them and baldly states, “Your doctrine, Sir, is that of Hegel” (1851: 114)—or, more fully, “Sir, you are Hegelian; only you do not form part of what is called the Hegelian Left, like Proudhon; but you are still Hegelian, and you admit the principle and the results of his doctrine” (Gratry 1851: 109–10). For Gratry, Vacherot’s book is an expression of “Hegelian sophistry” (Gratry 1851: 137–8). The spectres of radicalism, atheism and fatalism associated with Hegel’s name—particularly after the 1848 Revolution—meant the authorities felt compelled to act. With Vacherot’s dismissal came the end to institutional Hegelianism in France until the twentieth century—what Oldrini refers to as the “liquidation of Hegelianism” in the 1850s (2001: 145). Schelling had already left the scene. When Charles Bénard published a translated anthology of Schelling’s works in 1847 (see §4.1.10), it had already come too late:

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after the flurry of interest in the early Berlin lectures at the beginning of the 1840s, Schelling was lost from view—and would not return in any substantial way until the 1930s. Even the late Ravaisson’s ascent into positions of institutional power did little to rekindle interest in Schelling, who remained a somewhat esoteric source for the “positive spiritualism” developed during the 1860s and 1870s. Schelling became one more “dead” name in the history of philosophy, subject to brief analysis in Janet’s and Seailles’s 1887 Histoire de la philosophie; Victor Delbos’s 1893 Le Problème moral dans la philosophie de Spinoza et dans l’histoire du spinozisme; and volume four of Renouvier’s 1896 Philosophie analytique de l’histoire (see Fedi 2018: 59–60). At the end of the 1840s, then, in an increasingly hostile environment to absolute idealism, Hegel’s name only persisted in hints and feints. Bellantone, for example, argues that, after 1848, there remained solely “a minoritarian party in the philosophical and cultural world” still interested in Hegel—figures who had emerged from the eclectic milieu and, unlike Cousin, kept some interest in German philosophical developments. They were, for the most part, “renegade” eclectics like Vera, Vacherot, Taine, Renan, Bénard and Saisset (Bellantone 2011: 1.299). While their work from the 1850s and beyond falls outside the scope of this volume, their formation and first publications form the subject matter of this section.

3.6.1 The Importation of German Aesthetics: From Jules Michelet to Charles Bénard At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Charles de Villers lamented, “A good Aesthetics, fully systematic and complete, is still a work to be done in French” (Villers 1800: 382; see Décultot 2002: 165). In fact, the field of “philosophical aesthetics” was for the most part missing from French discussions of art from D’Alembert’s and Diderot’s Encyclopédie through to the 1840s. Cousin had given a set of lectures that dealt with the beautiful, alongside other concepts, in 1818 and Jouffroy dedicated a lecture series to aesthetics in 1826; however, it was left to their student, Charles Bénard, to properly remedy the lacuna (see Décultot 2020: 311–13, Décultot 2009). Moreover, when aesthetics was mentioned in France during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was as a “foreign science”—a domain of philosophical reflection that belonged primarily to Germany. It came to France through the writings of Louis de Beausobre who had assisted at Baumgarten’s lectures at the University of Frankfurt, through translations of J.  G. Sulzer’s aesthetic theory, through Charles Vanderbourg’s work on Schiller from 1804 and through Friedrich Ancillon’s essays (see Décultot 2002: 162–5). As late as 1857, Jules Barthélemy-­ Saint-­Hilaire could report to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques that “it is said that aesthetics belongs to the philosophers across the Rhine and, after having created it more than a century ago, it is for them above all to study and

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develop it” (Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire 1862: 75). In fact, in the Hegel-reception of the 1830s and 1840s, Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics were often avoided: Willm’s Histoire de la philosophie allemande accords them a relatively marginal position; Rémusat does not even mention aesthetics at all in his 1845 report to the Académie; and Ott dismisses them in a footnote to his 1844 Hegel et la philosophie allemande, “This is one of Hegel’s most complete lectures courses, but contains long digressions on small details which do not properly belong to the domain of philosophy” (Ott 1844: 447; see Décultot 2002: 178). Bénard took on the task of remedying France’s lack of philosophical aesthetics precisely by tackling its failure to engage with German Idealist philosophies of art. It was by introducing Hegel’s and Schelling’s texts to a French public in translation and commentary that Bénard undertook to make aesthetics a legitimate field of philosophical inquiry. Hence, while Hegel’s aesthetics was one of the last pieces of the system to receive detailed analysis in France, it was—via Bénard—the first to be translated. This reversal is traced in detail in Décultot’s study in volume two; for the purposes of this “Landmarks” chapter, it is worth briefly giving a sense of Bénard’s three major texts on aesthetics. The first in the Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques acts as a manifesto for the introduction of aesthetics into France via German Idealism. It begins: AESTHETICS. This is the name given to the science of beauty and the philosophy of the fine arts. This word, derived from Greek (aisthesis, sensation), would no doubt better suit a theory of sensibility; but today it is consecrated by usage. In spite of the importance and the interest of the questions with which it deals, aesthetics only belatedly gained independence and the rank due to it among the philosophical sciences. It has been cultivated with ardour in Germany for half a century, its name in France is just beginning to be known. We propose, in this article, to initially counter some prejudices that it still meets in many minds. (Bénard 1845: 293)

Bénard’s task is clear: to use the resources of absolute idealism to argue for aesthetics’ place in French philosophy. Bénard fulfilled this promise by translating extracts from Schelling’s aesthetics alongside the whole of Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics during the 1840s (see §4.1.10 and §4.2.2 below for full details), culminating in the 1852 final volume with a substantial evaluation of Hegel’s aesthetics as a whole, Essai analytique et critique sur l’esthétique de Hegel. In this concluding commentary, Bénard—in good eclectic fashion—shows what is worth preserving and what can be discarded from Hegel’s aesthetics. For example, he values Hegel’s emphasis on “the pre-eminence of the spiritual over the external and material element”, yet is critical of the extent to which Hegel straitjackets his discussions of artworks into a metaphysical system. Rather, a “metaphysics of the beautiful” needs to “occupy a distinct place, proportionate to its importance” (Bénard 1852: 288, 293). According to Bénard, Hegel often seems to be at his best in this lecture course when he forgets about metaphysics and the system to celebrate individual artworks and styles for their own sake. That is, Hegel’s lectures are at their best when they are at their least philosophical: The magnificence of creation, the richness of its productions, its visible and hidden harmonies, its beauties in the details and in the whole, its infinite care, its perfections revealed in

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the tiniest objects—all this escapes the philosopher or leaves him cold. In place of admiring the wisdom of the worker that furnished such works and conceived of the general order of the universe, he sees only the blueprints of an artist who works blindly and does not know what he is doing. […] It is when Hegel begins to discuss Beauty in Art or the Ideal that, getting away from these systematic ideas, he becomes interested in the qualities we have just enumerated—and it is here his work becomes really interesting. […] It is here that his power of analysis and the richness of his distinctive views come to characterise his work. (Bénard 1852: 291–2)

In this vein, Bénard concludes his evaluation as follows, Notwithstanding its faults, lacunas and imperfections, Hegel’s system seems to us to represent this interesting branch of human knowledge dubbed aesthetics, or the philosophy of art, better than anything previously, because of its extensiveness, its ideas, the robustness of its principles, the profundity of its insights, the fecundity of its perceptions and the richness of its details, in its elevated moral tendency and the intelligence with which all the questions of art and literature are treated, as well as by the qualities of its style. We have reproached it for being almost entirely conceived from the perspective of the author’s metaphysics; but, owing to the above, it will live longer than the system. (Bénard 1852: 314)

A few years earlier, Bénard had undertaken exactly the same kind of project by bringing Schelling’s aesthetics to the attention of the French public in his preface to the 1847 anthology, Ecrits philosophiques. It gives an extensive summary of lecture fourteen of the Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischen Studiums and the 1807 Über das Verhältnis der bildenden Künste zu der Natur (Schelling’s lectures on the philosophy of art were first explicitly discussed in France only in Pictet’s 1856 Du beau dans la nature, l’art et la poésie, although there had been background familiarity with them since Staël). Just as in his entry to the Dictionnaire, Bénard sees his task as one of “making more completely known a part of Schelling’s system”, i.e., the aesthetics, “precisely because it is the most unknown” (Bénard 1845: xlii). He continues by justifying that choice: Schelling did not only introduce a new perspective on how the physical world is studied and founded a philosophy of nature; at the very same moment he altered how art is viewed and so renewed this most interesting domain of philosophy, or, better said, he created it a second time. At the very least, no one disputes that aesthetics received from him a strong and fertile impulse. However, Schelling did not develop his views on art in a complete and systematic manner. His manner of envisaging art in general and the place that art occupies in the development of humanity is limited to the end of the System of Transcendental Idealism. When it comes to particular claims [about art], his thinking erupts from every corner of his other works. But it is, above all, the Discourse on the Plastic Arts and their Relation to Nature that contains the development of his theory, and its applications to some of the questions that interest the arts in general, as well as sculpture and painting in particular. (Bénard 1845: xlii–xliii)

Schelling also helps Bénard to show his contemporaries why a discipline of philosophical aesthetics is required, i.e., Schelling provides a model of the German university, which includes space for the philosophy of art, which can be transposed into France: A university is not a school of the visual arts; it is not there that one learns to become a sculptor, a painter or a musician. But the principles and the theory of the fine arts, their history and the laws that preside over their development are the object of a most interesting

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That is, philosophy makes sense of art in a distinctive and speculative way—it “disengages the eternal ideas that form the foundation of its creations and comprehends the laws and necessary principles upon which creation relies” (Bénard 1845: cxlii). Ultimately, Bénard argues that “knowledge of art and its works is indispensable for the philosopher” (Bénard 1845: cxliii). Such is the significance of art for philosophy that Bénard promises his reader a future treatise on Schelling’s aesthetics (which was never realised)—“a separate dissertation, intended to explain and to evaluate Schelling’s ideas on art, and to demonstrate the influence they exercised over the aesthetic theories of the nineteenth century” (Bénard 1845: xlii). The role played by Schelling’s Über das Verhältnis der bildenden Künste zu der Natur in Bénard’s account (as providing, in particular, “the principle of imitation of nature under a new aspect” [Bénard 1845: clii]) is representative of its relatively wide circulation in early nineteenth-century France: like the Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischen Studiums, it was perceived as one of Schelling’s more accessible works. Moreover, there were also a couple of moments—prior to Bénard’s work and the becoming-official, as it were, of aesthetics in the French academy— that Schelling’s essay entered into French theory. Proceeding in reverse chronological order backwards from Bénard’s work to Staël’s brief remarks (see §3.1.3 above), one can note, for example, that Lamennais formulated the section on art in his Esquisse d’une philosophie on meeting Schelling in Munich in 1832 (see also §3.5.3 above). As a result, his account of artistic production, including his deployment of a notion of poiesis, has Schellingian resonances. Lamennais writes, “Art is for the human being what creative power is in God; whence the word poésie in the plenitude of its primitive usage” (1840–6: 3.135–6). Or more fully, Because the beautiful is nothing in its essence but the manifestation of the true, and because nothing could be manifested except by a form that determines and specifies being, it follows that the beautiful is being itself endowed with a form, and that, as such, form is the proper object of art, not simply the necessary, immaterial, eternal form of pure idea, but that very form realized under the conditions of extension in the contingent world of phenomena, and, as a consequence, art implies two inseparable elements, the spiritual or ideal element whose primary type is the infinite, and the material element whose primary type is the finite. The former corresponds to primordial, absolute unity, and resolves itself in this unity; the latter [corresponds] to limited, partial, diverse manifestations outside of this primary unity, and is dissolved into them. The natural relation of these two elements, unity and variety, constitutes the essential harmony of art. (Lamennais 1840–6: 3.137)

Lamennais concludes, The individual subject, so to speak, corporeally assimilates creation and makes it into an extension of its own organism. Through art, the subject associates itself with the creative action of God and expresses in its works the divine exemplar, effecting—according to the extent of its powers—the union of the finite and the infinite and realising the beautiful. (Lamennais 1840–6: 3.477)

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An even earlier (and remarkable) French appropriation of Schelling’s philosophy of art occurs in 1827–8 in Jules Michelet’s lectures on philosophy given at an école préparatoire. In the midst of a series of remarks on the history of sculpture, he makes the following aside: Schelling’s definition [of art] is ingenious: According to him all free and reflective creation of the human mind, as it realises and represents an original and eternal idea of reason, is called art. Art is therefore the realisation of the eternal ideas of reason; as such art contains an eternal idea, and, as the eternal idea is part of God, it follows that art is a revelation. All products of art unite [within themselves] a double character—they are derived, on the one hand, from divine inspiration which is unconscious of itself, namely, genius, and, on the other hand, from the artist’s internal and self-conscious activity, namely, industry. In the composition of a great painting, there are two things: the primary idea and the talent that realizes this idea. Art is at the same time product of God and of human liberty. In any finite work an infinite idea is necessary. […] The second quality that Schelling demands, is that the product of art should unite great repose with the highest degree of movement; and the grand, the sublime, results from this. […] The third condition demanded by Schelling is [for art] to satisfy not only curiosity, but also the understanding, reason. (Michelet 2016: 152–6)

3.6.2 Vera In Jarczek and Labarièrre’s words, “With Vera things begin in earnest” (1996: 21). With the publication of his Introduction à la philosophie de Hegel in 1855, Vera took his place as the most serious and committed French Hegelian of the nineteenth century—a position cemented through a series of translations of Hegel’s texts (see §4.2.3 below). That is, he became the epitome of “total Hegelianism”—“the most orthodox of European Hegelians” (Bellantone 2011: 1.301). The story of how Vera came to take up this role, i.e., his trajectory during the 1840s, is told in detail in Bellantone’s study in volume two; however, it is worth rehearsing a couple of the details as part of this “Landmarks” chapter. Broadly put, Vera’s trajectory is one from an orthodox eclectic position suspicious of Hegelian logic to an enthusiastic embrace of a logicist Hegelianism contra eclecticism. It is therefore a trajectory that runs against most other francophone academic philosophers of the period, particularly the tendency of the eclectic school itself. Vera reverses the institutional move away from German philosophy in France to find value in precisely those features of it (e.g., its abstract nature) that were under suspicion. Hence, on the one hand, in his 1845 thesis, Problème de la certitude, Vera rehearses the kind of Schellingian-Trendelenburgian criticisms of Hegel familiar in the French tradition since Cousin: It is difficult to see how one could make the idea of nature emerge from the idea of logic by means of a pure deduction and without experience being involved: we can merely draw from one logical being another equally logical being; and thus we will not attain a real nature but an ideal nature; we will not have concrete organised beings, qualities and matter, but abstract organised beings, qualities and matter. Ultimately, it will always be the logical

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idea. The idea-nature might express something different from the idea-logic, but as idea there will be no difference between them. (Vera 1845b: n.p.)

On the other hand, when, two years later, Vera publishes an entry on Hegel in Franck’s Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques, he has completely reversed his evaluation of exactly the same phenomenon: “Without idealism there is no genuine science, and therefore all doctrines opposed to it end, in very different forms and ways, in the negation of knowledge. What is the essential condition of science? It is to be grounded on immutable laws, on necessary and absolute principles […] The idea [alone] is necessary, immutable and eternal” (Vera 1847: 181). What these two quotations indicate is the extent of Vera’s evolution. Further insight into this evolution can be gleaned from a series of articles that Vera wrote for the newly established La Liberté de penser in 1848, i.e., on the very precipice of the 1848 Revolution. In his article, Philosophie de la religion de Hegel, in particular, Vera provides an exposition and defence of Hegel on the integrity of religion that implicitly runs counter to the Left Hegelian attacks on religion that had become so visible. At the very moment when France most associates Hegel’s name with the radical, irreligious doctrines that are seen to be stoking the fires of revolution, Vera turns away from contemporary events (at least on the surface level) to provide a scholarly account of Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of religion that is provocative in its untimeliness. As Vera puts it in a footnote to the article, “Philosophy, said Hegel, must mix itself in the world and in life, but it should remain superior to them” (Vera 1848: 157). He further writes in an almost Platonic gesture, The relations of religion and philosophy must be based on the very nature of this science. To investigate the rational element of things, namely, ideas, to grasp ideas under their external representation, in the midst of succession and the infinite variety of phenomena, to show how they are engendered one after the other, and to follow them through all their developments—this is the object of philosophy. Therefore, philosophy is an essentially speculative science, for the absolute, the eternal is only accessible to solitary and reflective thought. And from this it becomes clear that philosophy does not ground religions any more than it grounds the state, art, etc. […] Every time that philosophy takes up this viewpoint, it leaves its own domain, posits itself in opposition to itself, and descends from the sphere of being into that of appearance, from the imperishable region of ideas into that of change and death. It is not that the philosopher should disdain experience, separate herself from the world and life. On the contrary, she should place herself at the heart of reality, penetrate it, so to speak, with her thought and reflect on all its richness in her intellect. But all her efforts, all the power of her faculty should concentrate on the knowledge of principles, laws and the rational life of the world. This is the highest and most perfect activity, the genuinely creative activity. Religions, art, the state—their developments and their transformations are manifestations, in time and space, of eternal principles placed outside of time and space, and these [manifestations] are commonly called creations. […] Therefore, philosophy needs to: 1. Investigate the constitutive principles of every religion, the rational elements that every positive religion conceals; in other words, it needs to determine the universal and abstract idea of religion. However, since religion, like art and the state, has a history, philosophy needs to: 2. Construct a rational history of religions, a history in which one discovers the application and realisation of its principles. In this respect, one must begin from the perspective that every religion contains a germ of truth. It

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is easy to condemn a religion, and to efface it with one stroke of the pen, as it were. (Vera 1848: 157–8)

Vera begins to undertake precisely this investigation on the following pages: If religion is a manifestation of divine Spirit, the history of religions will just be the description of God’s manifestations and the different aspects under which he is revealed to the world. God and the world, or, to speak with more precision, divine consciousness, human consciousness and their relation—here is the entire material of this history and the theatre in which it develops. And this relation of infinite consciousness and finite consciousness must not be represented as an external relation and one which stops, so to speak, at the surface of Spirit; but rather as an internal and substantial relation, as a relation where the infinite descends into the finite to penetrate it in its substance and to efface its finitude. But if God is the absolute idea, the idea which, in the unity of its being, is the principle and ground of all existence, the history of religion will just be the history of the Idea: each religion will mark a degree, a face of its manifestations, and absolute religion will be that wherein the Idea is expressed in its perfect form and clarity. Every religion has its roots in thinking and begins within the idea—idea and thought being inseparable; both the difference between religions and the degree of truth contained in them comes from the difference of the nature of the idea which grounds them. For every idea is true, but all ideas do not contain the absolute to the same degree. Hence, for example, the idea of finality is superior to the idea of being, the idea of science to the idea of quantity. If this is so, then the Idea should determine: 1. the form and content of each particular religion; 2. the form and content of their history. (Vera 1848: 161)

On this basis, Vera’s article concludes in a way that seems implicitly to enter into confrontation with the more radical interpretations of Hegel circulating in France at the time: If the idea is the principle, the essence of things, everything begins from the idea and everything ends in the idea. But, we have seen that in its most perfect form the idea is Spirit, and it is Spirit which has entered into possession of self-knowledge and freedom. This, Hegel says, is the true significance of the maxim, Know thyself. For to know oneself is to know what is universal and absolute in spirit, that is, absolute Spirit. Therefore, the movement and end of history will have no other object than the manifestation of Spirit in reality and in thought, a manifestation accomplished in art, in the state, and, in its highest degree, in religion and philosophy. (Vera 1848: 163)

With these words, Vera seems to revel in being the exception: the only one to take Hegel at his word in France, even if perversely so in the midst of the ongoing political battles over Hegel’s legacy.

3.6.3 Later Generations: Taine and Saisset With the final verdict on the Académie prize on German Idealism given by Charles de Rémusat in 1845, French institutional philosophy under Cousin had settled its accounts with contemporary German philosophy (see §5.3.3 below). The result was something like aversion, tempered with respect and a sense of France’s own philosophical failings. It was left to a later generation of academic philosophers, often

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closely allied with the eclectic school in one of its forms, to renegotiate the relationship between French and German philosophies. However, rather than developing a new appreciation of Hegel, these philosophers, who will go on to determine academic French philosophy in the 1850s and beyond, more often than not repeated the Cousinian gesture of interest, followed by ambivalence and disdain towards German philosophy. This is true of both the early Hyppolite Taine and his erstwhile teacher, Émile Saisset. Taine’s trajectory represents a movement from flirtation with Hegel to a rejection of him. He began reading Hegel in 1847 and, unlike an earlier generation of French philosophers, was comfortable working in German, accessing Hegel’s works first-­ hand (alongside Schelling’s System des transzendentalen Idealismus). Taine later recalled of this period from the late 1840s: I read Hegel every day for an entire year, in the provinces; it is probable that I will never rediscover sensations equal to those he gave me. Of all philosophers there are none who know how to climb to such heights or whose genius approaches such prodigious immensity. (Taine 1857: 34)

Or, as Taine put it in correspondence at the time, “What a good idea it was to learn German! […] Hegel is a Spinoza multiplied by an Aristotle. He is very different from the ridiculous metaphysics we’ve been fed” (in Dumas 1972: 153). Taine read the Wissenschaft der Logik, the lectures on the philosophy of history, leaving 38 pages of notes on this text, as well as 20 pages of notes on the lectures on the philosophy of religion. He was taught by Bénard and Vacherot at the École Normale Supérieure in 1848–9; and, influenced by Bénard, planned a doctoral thesis on Hegel’s aesthetics. However, the plan was quashed on receiving feedback from another of his teachers at the École Normale Supérieure, Jules Simon, in March 1850: “Do not introduce the language of a particular school, above all not Hegel’s school” (see Giraud 1901: 34). Taine’s resulting doctoral thesis, La Fontaine et ses fables, still contained echoes of Hegelian aesthetics (though not mentioning Hegel directly) and has been taken to be, in Kelly’s words, “an application of the purest Hegelian aesthetic theory” (1981: 31; see Rosca 1928). Indeed, Hegelian themes— particularly from the lectures on the philosophy of history—are present throughout Taine’s studies at the turn of the 1850s, such as his student work on fifth-century Athens or his Pensées sur l’histoire de la philosophie from June 1850 (see Dumas 1972: 152). Throughout his early work on history, he aims to chart the general laws of historical types and trace their ideal and organic development. And Taine even seems to have entertained the idea of writing on Hegel’s logic in the 1852 agrégation competition—as a kind of scandalous riposte to Vacherot’s dismissal (Dumas 1972: 153). In the end, Vacherot seems to have talked Taine out of it, and generally the early 1850s are marked by Taine’s drifting away from speculative and what he labels “constructive” philosophical methods in favour of “analytic” and positivist ones. He begins to become critical of Hegel’s neglect of non-logical factors (e.g., individual psychology, climate) in his construction of history and his failure to grasp “concepts of right, individual will and inviolable personhood” in politics (see Dumas 1972:

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154–5). Taine’s flirtation with Hegelianism ends up as nothing more than an initial moment of juvenilia. Saisset was a decade older than Taine and established as a professor at the Collège de France and, as the French translator of Spinoza, was already on the defensive and suspected of pantheism when he turned his attention briefly to German Idealism in the mid-1840s. Unlike Taine, there is no suggestion of a serious flirtation with German philosophy at this point in Saisset’s career; rather, his defensive strategy is to articulate the 1840s institutional aversion to Hegel’s and Schelling’s philosophies. That is, even if Saisset fleetingly recognises the “seductive power” of these philosophies (Bellantone 2011: 1.313), he gives the emergent “official” position of disdain for German Idealism canonical form in an extensive review he writes for the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1846, De la philosophie allemande. The article is framed as a review of some of the more recent French works on German Idealism (Rémusat’s report to the Académie, Husson’s translation of Bruno, Ott’s book on Hegel); but these are hardly mentioned in favour of a global summary of the state of relations between philosophical Germany and France. The review opens by posing the problem of how to explain the unity of Kant’s, Fichte’s, Schelling’s and Hegel’s philosophies, when, on the surface, they appear so different: German philosophy presents to the historian’s reflections a perhaps unique phenomenon in the annals of thought. It begins with Kantianism, a circumspect and strict doctrine, so defiant in regard to reason that it appears to condemn it to the most irredeemable scepticism, and yet the work of the philosopher of Königsberg is only the first link in a chain of systems that are different yet inseparable and which come to an end, as their last term, in Hegel’s philosophy, that is, in the most absolute, vast and rash dogmatism that ever was. How have these astonishing contrasts, these extraordinary movements of the human mind [esprit] been produced? What links Fichte to Kant, Schelling to Fichte, Hegel to Schelling, and makes of these contrary doctrines the branches of the same tree, or, if you like, the successive undulations of the same current? (Saisset 1846: 608–9)

To answer the problem, Saisset begins by providing a summary of German Idealist doctrines that is cribbed from Rémusat’s presentation to the Académie a year earlier (Saisset 1846: 610). What is more significant for our purposes is the criticisms Saisset makes in part two of his article: If I am not mistaken, German philosophy has for half a century been under the dominion and, as it were, the spell of an illusion, and this is what makes clear to me the fundamental vice of its method, the astonishing revolutions and singular aberrations of its systems. This illusion is to believe that absolute science is possible for the human mind. By absolute science I mean the absolute and universal explanation of things—this is the chimera which, since Fichte, German philosophy has pursued, and each of the systems to which it has in turn given birth is solely an effort to grasp the ungraspable phantom. […] Evidently, if philosophy pursues absolute science, philosophical method is a priori method, grounded on pure ideas, following the order of things, explaining everything, deducing everything, mistrusting experience, recognising no limit, no condition. For this science such a method is needed; these two chimeras are made for each other. If I am not deceived, the secret of all German speculation lies here: the principle of the identity of thought and being, common ground of both Schelling’s and Hegel’s system, the

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At stake here is Hegel’s and Schelling’s fundamental misunderstanding of—and so failed attack on—the kinds of empiricisms central to the French tradition. Citing Schelling’s “beurteilende Vorrede”, Saisset writes, What Schelling, what the metaphysicians of Germany cannot understand is that philosophy is a science, a science worthy of this name and that, at the same time, it must give an account of two things: on the one hand, the nature of the human mind, its conditions, its limits, its laws; on the other, the givens of experience. A philosophy limited to the study of human nature appears to them to bear a wholly relative and wholly subjective character. […] Our basic reply to Schelling and to Germany is: philosophy such as you conceive it, in its homogeneity and its absolute universality, is, by its very definition, an ideal—or, to put it better, an entirely inaccessible chimera, without any proportion to the human mind and to the whole constitution of our nature. We defy you not only to construct this philosophy, but even to begin to do so. As for the objections you address to us, they apply not to us, but to the human mind. It is the nature of things that you criticise. Against you, what is more, we could wish for no better defenders than yourselves. The capital crime with which you reproach us, that of consulting experience, you commit as well as us, thus adding to the inconveniences of an illusion those of inconsistency too, and complicating your situation such that, if experience has its dangers, you are exposed to them and, if it has advantages, you do not benefit from them. Yes, I dare say it in the name of history: to conceive philosophy as independent of the limits of the human mind and the conditions of experience is to place the human subject between absolute scepticism and a closely related exaltation of folly—a false dichotomy, equally repudiated by the consciousness of humanity, by the laws of a precise logic and by the very nature of thought. You say: A human being knows nothing unless it knows everything, and there is no middle point between absolute science and absolute ignorance. Certainly, metaphysics is not a dream, and we believe that it has been given to the subject to penetrate beyond sensible appearances, to probe its own nature, to attain at its ground those invisible causes which sustain and animate the universe, to carry its gaze up to the being of beings and, for a few of us, to glimpse the awesome marvels of such perfection. (Saisset 1846: 642–3)

Saisset concludes by following Rémusat once more to ask in conclusion: if contemporary German philosophy gets so many things wrong, if it is to be rejected so vehemently, is there any value in studying it at all? Do the French have anything to learn from the Germans? He writes, Is this to say that we have nothing, in turn, of any use to learn from Germany? We are far from such a thought. Of the essential reproaches that our neighbours have addressed to us, even if none of them are perhaps entirely valid, almost all of them are still of a nature to provoke serious reflection in France. This is not the moment to insist on it, but we want to at least indicate it frankly: as severe as we are in France towards German philosophy, it would sit badly for us to be too indulgent to ourselves. They tell us: you make do with experience within a restricted domain, enclosed as you are in a narrow psychology. Aspire to something higher, to a real metaphysics which attains the origin and the ground of things. Do not limit yourself to completely formal theodicy, to completely negative scholastics; take account of what progress has been accomplished, instead of returning to Descartes; imitate him by making progress!

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Not all of these lofty reproaches are equally well-founded, thank God; but we should, nonetheless, not hide from ourselves that, especially during the last fifty years, and particularly in France, there has occurred a deplorable separation between philosophy and the sciences. In the seventeenth century, metaphysics and physics, the science of God and the science of nature were distinguished, but not separated; the fruits of this union were admirable. […] A product of the eighteenth century, the divorce of metaphysics and the sciences has now been consummated, and, in truth, I do not know which of the two suffers most. Germany here provides us excellent models. In all epochs, philosophy has there penetrated all the particular sciences in a common life. The [sciences] gain from this alliance movement and unity; philosophy draws from it, in turn, applications which enrich it, test it and consecrate it. Today, for example, Schelling’s and Hegel’s systems have had the most powerful influence on the progress of the natural sciences. The philosophy of identity has had its physicians and its physiologists—it is enough to name Steffens, Troxler, Oken. In Germany, philosophy animates and governs everything. Not only does it dominate the sciences, but it is intimately mixed with religious questions. […] Let us know how to borrow from Germany something of its generous ardour. Above all, let us guard against isolating philosophy. Let us remember that in Descartes’ and Malebranche’s time it was intimately mixed with the sciences, with religion, with the entire intellectual and moral life of society. It is in this way that French philosophy played a role in the great events of the world; it is in this way that it will be able to keep [this role] and augment it yet further. (Saisset 1846: 647–50)

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Lechevalier, Jules. 1833. Théodore Jouffroy, Mélanges. Deuxième partie. L’Europe littéraire 10 (17): 125–129. Lerminier, Eugène. 1831. Philosophie du droit, 2 vols. Paris: Paulin. ———. 1832. Lettres philosophiques adressées à un Berlinois. Paris: Paulin. ———. 1833. De l’influence de la philosophie du XVIIIe siècle sur la législation et la sociabilité du XIXe siècle. Paris: Didier. ———. 1835. Au-delà du Rhin, ou tableau politique et philosophique de l’Allemagne depuis Madame de Staël jusqu’à nos jours, 2 vols. Paris: Bonnaire. Leroux, Pierre. 1832. De la philosophie et du christianisme. Revue encyclopédique 55: 281–340. ———. 1979. Réfutation de l’Éclectisme, où se trouve exposée la vraie définition de la philosophie, et où l’on explique le sens, la suite, et l’enchaînement des divers philosophes depuis Descartes. Paris: Honoré Champion. ———. 1982. Discours de Schelling à Berlin / Du cours de philosophie de Schelling / Du Christianisme, ed. Jean-François Courtine. Paris: Vrin. Lewis, Geneviève. 1954. Lamennais et Schelling. Revue philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger 144: 347–351. Macherey, Pierre. 2013. Études de philosophie “française”. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. Maine de Biran, Pierre. 1859. Œuvres inédites, 3 vols, ed. E. Naville. Paris: Dezobry. ———. 1954–7. Journal, 3 vols, ed. Henri Gouhier. Neuchatel: La Baconnière. ———. 2020. Of Immediate Perception. Trans. Mark Sinclair. London: Bloomsbury. Maret, H.L.C. 1840. Essai sur le panthéisme dans les sociétés modernes. Paris: Debécourt. ———. 1844. Théodicée chrétienne ou comparaison de la notion chrétienne avec la notion rationaliste de Dieu. Paris: Leroux and Jouby. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 1956. The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism. Against Bruno Bauer and Company. Trans. Richard Dixon. Moscow: FLPH. ———. 1975–2004. Collected Works. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Mauve, Christiane. 1995. Ravaisson, lecteur et interprète de Schelling. Romantisme 88: 65–74. Mauve, Christiane and Patrice Vermeren. 1988. Le passage de la ligne: politiques de la nationalité philosophique sur les deux rives du Rhin. Le Cahier du Collège International de Philosophie 6: 53–65. Michelet, Jules. 2016. Philosophie de l’histoire, ed. Aurèlien Aramini. Paris: Champs classiques. Michelet, K.L. 1849. Lettre à M. Cousin. La Liberté de penser 4 (23): 442–447. ———. 1884. Wahrheit aus meinem Leben. Berlin: Nicolai. Monchoux, André. 1965. L’Allemagne devant les lettres françaises: De 1814 à 1835. Paris: Armand. Oldrini, Guido. 2001. Hegel e l’hegelismo nella Francia dell’Ottocento. Milan: Guerini. Ott, Auguste. 1844. Hegel et la philosophie allemande, ou exposé et examen critique des principaux systèmes de la philosophie allemande depuis Kant, et spécialement de celui de Hegel. Paris: Joubert. Piaia, Gregorio. 2022. Historicism and Eclecticism: The Age of Victor Cousin. In Models of the History of Philosophy, vol. 4: The Hegelian Age, ed. Gregorio Piaia, Giuseppe Micheli, and Giovanni Santinello, 341–434. Dordrecht: Springer. Pinkard, Terry. 2001. Hegel: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2007. Introduction. In Heinrich Heine, On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany, ed. Terry Pinkard and trans. Howard Pollack-Milgate, vii–xxxii. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Prévost, Amédée. 1832. Hegel. Revue de Paris 46: 115–124. Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph. 1843. De la Création de l’ordre dans l’humanité. Paris: Trinquier. ———. 1846. Système des contradictions économiques ou Philosophie de la misère, 2 vols. Paris: Guillaumin and Cie. ———. 1875. Correspondance, 3 vols. Paris: Librairie internationale. ———. 1888. The System of Economic Contradictions or, The Philosophy of Poverty. Trans. Benjamin R. Tucker. Boston: Tucker.

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Chapter 4

French Translations and Editions Daniel Whistler and Ayşe Yuva with Kirill Chepurin and Adi Efal-Lautenschläger

Abstract  This chapter lists the translations of Hegel’s and Schelling’s writings published in French before 1848. It contrasts the flurries of translation-activity to which Schelling’s philosophy was subject (nine works published during the 1830s and 1840s) to translations of Hegel which were few and far between. This was, we conjecture, partly due to the impact of the Left Hegelians (whose works were quickly translated), rather than Hegel’s texts themselves, on French philosophical consciousness. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of the German-language texts and editions studied by French philosophers in the early nineteenth century. Keywords  Charles Bénard · Joseph Willm · Félix Ravaisson · Phenomenology of Spirit · Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences · System of Transcendental Idealism In his 1845 report to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques, Charles de Rémusat introduced his comments on the reception of German Idealism in France by noting that there then existed translations of just “three great works by Kant, two or three by Fichte, one by Schelling and scarcely one by Hegel” (Rémusat 1845: 6). While the numbers are not strictly accurate, Rémusat does identify one of the more remarkable features of Hegel’s and Schelling’s early French D. Whistler (*) Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK e-mail: [email protected] A. Yuva Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected] K. Chepurin University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany A. Efal-Lautenschläger University of Tel Aviv, Bar-Ilan University and the Beit Berl Academic College, Tel Aviv, Israel © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Chepurin et al. (eds.), Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France, International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d’histoire des idées 246, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39322-8_4

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receptions—a dearth of translations, most obviously in Hegel’s case. Translations of Schelling only began appearing frequently from the mid-1830s onwards, and Hegel-translations were even more scarce: little more than a part of Bénard’s translation of the lectures on aesthetics appeared before 1848. While remarkable, it is nevertheless unsurprising. This translation history roughly corresponds to the rate of translation in other languages: the first English, Italian and Russian translations of Hegel were published in the late 1840s and 1850s. It also roughly corresponds to the speed with which other German Idealists were translated into French. Kant’s three Critiques were only translated by C. J. Tissot and Jules Barni from 1837 onwards, alongside the Metaphysik der Sitten and Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft.1 And, in parallel, translations of Fichte started appearing only in 1831 (De l’idee d’une guerre légitime); the 1794 Wissenschaftslehre was first attempted in 1843 by Grimblot in a work entitled, Doctrine de la science. Principes fondamentaux de la science de la connaissance.2 While, as Clauzade points out in his study in volume two, Lorenz Oken was a slight exception to this rule and a major edition of his naturephilosophical system appeared as early as 1821 (as too was Cousin’s 1829 translation of Tennemann), the other major exceptions came from the Left Hegelian tradition which—because of the scandal they excited (see §3.4.2 above)—quickly appeared in French: Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu was translated by Émile Littré in 1839 only 4 years after it first appeared in German. In this respect, Hegel was far outpaced by Hegelianism. The work of the German émigré community in Paris focused on the translation of more radical Hegelian texts: Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christentums appeared, in very loose translation, in two volumes as Qu’est-ce que la religion, d’après la nouvelle philosophie allemande and Qu’est-ce que la Bible, d’après la nouvelle philosophie allemande in 1850, translated by Ewerbeck (before being subsequently retranslated more faithfully in 1862). Contemporary French philosophy also began to be translated into German around this period. For example, Carové’s Religion und Philosophie in Frankreich included, among other short texts, the preface to the 1826 first edition of Cousin’s Fragments philosophiques, and Karl Grün translated Proudhon’s Système des contradictions économiques into German in 1847.

 The full list of Kant-translations from the period reads: Projet de paix perpétuelle, trans. Anon. (1796); Observations sur le sentiment du beau et du sublime, trans H. P. Imhoff (1796); Principes métaphysiques de la morale, trans. C. J. Tissot (1830); Critique de la raison pure, 2 vols, trans. C. J. Tissot (1837); Métaphysique des mœurs et Critique de la raison pratique, par fragments, 2 vols, trans. C. J. Tissot (1837); Logique, trans. C. J. Tissot (1840); La religion dans les limites de la raison, trans. J. Trullard (1841) (also translated by P. Lortet in 1842); Leçons de métaphysique, trans. C. J. Tissot (1843); Critique du jugement suive des observations sur le sentiment du beau et du sublime, trans. J. Barni (1846). 2  Three further Fichte translations appeared during the period: Destination de l’homme, trans. A. Barchou de Penhoën (1836); De la destination du savant, trans. M. Nicolas (1838); Méthode pour arriver à la vie bienheureuse, trans. F. Bouillier (1845). 1

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4.1 Schelling-Translations While translation of Schelling’s work did not occur particularly early in his reception history (such that Fedi can insist on their rarity [2018: 15]), it did still occur regularly before 1848. Indeed, there was something like a flurry of translations published in the aftermath of Schelling’s arrival in Berlin, and, in total, ten translations of Schelling’s writings had been published by 1847 (in addition to unpublished translations of Schelling’s very early works penned by Cousin). On the contrary, no Schelling-translations were then published in French after 1847 until Politzer’s version of the Freiheitsschrift in 1926 (although Sautreaux did abandon a project of translating Schelling’s entire Werke during the final decade of the nineteenth century). This pattern is the reverse of Hegel’s reception, where translation began in earnest only after 1848. In addition, Degérando’s extensive translated quotations from the System des transzendentalen Idealismus and Zeitschrift für spekulative Physik in 1804 formed something of a sourcebook for later readers (see §3.1.1 above) to such an extent that it may well have been only after the revelation of Schelling’s late philosophy in 1835 that further translations were deemed necessary. Another feature of Schelling-translation before 1848 was Schelling’s own involvement in the projects, particularly in advising on possible translators of his anticipated “philosophy of mythology” project. As early as an 1822 letter to Cousin, Schelling raised the possibility of introducing his philosophy of mythology into France, further suggesting it to be a “work which I believe capable of being understood and perfectly judged in France” (Cousin and Schelling 1991: 203, 237). Expectation and frustration grew during the subsequent decades as nothing appeared—Cousin responding in 1826, “What have you decided for your Mythology? When will it appear? I await it with an impatience equal to my admiration” (Cousin and Schelling 1991: 203). Possible translators were even approached: Ravaisson was initially lined up, although by 1838 (at the latest) he had been ruled out; other options raised included Adolphe Pictet and Joseph-Daniel Guigniaut (Cousin and Schelling 1991: 206, 215, 246; see Mauve and Vermeren 1988: 61).

4.1.1 Adolphe Pictet (Trans.), Des Divinités de la Samothrace3, in Bibliothèque universelle, 1822 Pictet, based in Geneva, published this translation of Schelling’s 1815 report anonymously in Stapfer’s Genevan Bibliothèque universelle (see Reymond 1954: 99). It includes many of the extensive philological notes Schelling added to the speech, although Pictet remarks that some of the omitted ones “could only have interested a few specialists” (in Schelling 1822: 319). In a short preface, he views the speech as part of a turn in Schelling’s thought towards a unified system of mythology. It reads,  French titles mentioned in the below are systematically given English translations in §6 below.

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The following piece was read at the Munich Academy of Sciences in 1815 by the famous Schelling, then published with the author’s notes. We know that this profound thinker has powerfully contributed to the development of German philosophy. After penetrating the essence of nature and gazing into the mysteries of the intellect, he has directed his works to the general history of the human spirit [esprit]. Armed with vast erudition, he consulted the annals of various peoples to discover there the antique system which, he contends, was the source of all mythologies. Such a work, undertaken by a man of genius equally versed in the principal branches of the sciences, should excite the interest of all those who attend to the great problem of the universe. The speech which follows is the first result of the author’s investigations. Recently he has announced a more extended work on Greek mythology in general. We will make known this work when it appears. (in Schelling 1822: 319)

4.1.2 Joseph Willm (Trans.), Sur les objections ordinaires contre l’étude de la philosophie, in Nouvelle revue germanique, 1830 Willm had been using Schelling’s Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischen Studiums as a textbook for his teaching in Strasbourg during the 1820s and in 1830 provides a translation of the fifth of these lectures in which Schelling defends the rights of disinterested speculation against various empiricisms and moralisations of philosophy. There is no initial preface justifying the choice of text, but Willm includes a series of translator’s footnotes. The first of them catalogues “Schelling’s principal philosophical works”, ending arbitrarily in 1807 and concluding, What distinguishes [Schelling’s philosophy] above all is that it is a profound and almost universal science; and, as little as one might be disposed to receive its doctrines, one could not read his works without drawing from them some major fruits and without conceiving a high esteem for their author’s genius and character. (in Schelling 1830: 51)

As well as footnotes applying Schelling’s criticisms to French eighteenth-century sensualism, English utilitarianism and La Rochefoucauldian moralism, Willm also provides a commentary on two key features of German Idealist philosophy. First, he notes that “whereas in French we use the word idea [idée] to designate all species of logical representations, Germans distinguish between concepts (Begriffe) and ideas (Ideen)” and, in particular, they “reserve the name ideas for representations which appear formed by that superior faculty that they specifically name reason (die Vernunft), and which relates to intelligible things, placed above the realm of sensible observation” (in Schelling 1830: 52–3). Secondly—and just as in the later Essai sur la philosophie de Hegel—Willm partially identifies absolute idealism with Cousinian eclecticism: It is one of the distinctive characteristics of the philosophy of absolute identity to regard all previous systems, as long as they are grounded on ideas, as incomplete forms or, if one prefers, particular sides or faces of universal philosophy. It alone claims to have taken on absolute form; it exists according to this eclectic relation [to previous philosophy], but with this difference [from eclecticism]: that it claims not only to have reconciled and brought to unity all previous doctrines, but to have enriched, completed and, so to speak, brought them into identity. (in Schelling 1830: 59)

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4.1.3 Joseph Willm (Trans.), M. Schelling et M. Cousin, in Nouvelle revue germanique, 1833 A translation of the initial critical notice Schelling placed in the Bayerische Annalen on Cousin’s 1833 preface to the Fragments philosophiques—the text that would, a year later, be worked up by Schelling into the fuller “beurteilende Vorrede” to Beckers’s edition. Willm includes a French translation in the Nouvelle revue germanique only a couple of weeks after its initial appearance in German on 7th November 1833, and it forms the basis of his 1835 translation of Schelling’s full “beurteilende Vorrede”, including, for example, many of the same footnotes. The translation is prefaced with the following note: The famous Schelling who, since Hegel’s death, is once again the foremost living philosopher of Germany, the foremost in application and originality, but who has for so long rested from his creations, has now broken his silence in the Bayerische Annalen to dedicate a quite remarkable article to the new edition of Victor Cousin’s Fragments philosophiques, or rather to the new preface which precedes this edition and which we have already reviewed. We are going to translate this article as faithfully as possible: at the same time as throwing new light on Schelling’s manner of philosophising, it is able to give a quite exact idea of the relations and degree of affinity of Cousin’s eclecticism to German philosophy and particularly to that of the illustrious author of the system of identity. (in Schelling 1833: 277; see Cousin 2010)

4.1.4 Eduard Kolloff (Trans.), Philosophie de la mythologie par Schelling, in Revue du Nord, 1835 Those attending Schelling’s lectures in Munich were asked not to communicate their contents outside the lecture hall. One philosopher who flouted that request was Eduard Kolloff who—after emigrating to Paris—published an unauthorised summary of the first half of Schelling’s Munich introduction to the philosophy of mythology in the Revue du Nord, one of the key venues for émigré philosophy in the 1830s (see §5.1.9 below). The text is less a strict translation than a second-hand summary, but still functions as a way of bringing Schelling’s words to a French audience. On hearing reports of the publication, Schelling sent a series of panicked letters to Cousin and the second instalment of Kolloff’s summary was blocked. This “Kolloff affair” dramatizes very clearly the power asymmetry between those established in the French and German academies and the émigré-philosophers on the fringes of academic publishing. Schelling writes to Cousin of “an enterprise that cannot but be felt to be extremely dishonest and blameable”, worrying that “the philosophical ideas promised for a second article would without doubt be still more disfigured than the historical ideas in the first have been”. He appeals in particular to Cousin’s friendship to “draw to a close this bad affair” (Cousin and Schelling 1991: 238–9) and he further drafts a letter for publication in the Journal des débats (on which  Saint-Marc Girardin worked) condemning Kolloff:

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A certain Eduard Kolloff, resident in Paris, has undertaken to offer to the public, in the Revue du Nord, an exposition of my philosophy of mythology, for which he draws materials solely from the transcribed notebooks of those following my public lectures. I formally disavow this publication, made without my consent or my knowledge, and, in accordance with all moral principles, I can only consider it an act contrary to all sentiment of equity. I am too well persuaded by the honourable sentiments of French scholars to fear that they will judge, by the incorrect and incoherent rhapsody of a student, a lecture course on philosophy that I have just myself submitted to the publisher and whose publication I have perhaps delayed solely in order to make it more worthy to be offered to the public. I content myself with believing that Kolloff, whom I remember having known, has not sufficiently reflected on his actions and I even judge it possible that he believed he was obliging me by taking the trouble to make my ideas known in France, without considering that he owes this revelation to the confidence under which I place my audience and which he has himself enjoyed. I hope that Kolloff will justify this interpretation by ceasing the publication he has begun; if he does otherwise, the world will know how much worth he accords to its principles of equity, as will I myself with genuine regret on such a sad day. (Cousin and Schelling 1991: 240)

Cousin’s response exhibits the difference in status between his and Kolloff’s positions in the philosophical community: “I am one of the people in Paris most aware of all that is published about German philosophy. All my friends know perfectly what important occurrences there are in this field. And well, I have never heard speak of this Kolloff, nor of his articles. The Revue du Nord is itself scarcely known. It has not one distinguished editor, and no notice is taken of it. No one at all knows about this article by Kolloff on your mythological ideas” (Cousin and Schelling 1991: 239). In the end, it was the intervention of Schelling’s publisher, J. G. Cotta, that put an end to the affair, with Schelling concluding, “I find it so badly written, so disorderly and carrying such an imprint of perfect ignorance that it can make no impression and certainly not be regarded as a faithful expression of my ideas” (Cousin and Schelling 1991: 237). Kolloff’s article itself includes a short preface which begins by analysing “the fundamental principles of [Schelling’s] old system of natural philosophy” which lie, Kolloff state, in the principle of absolute identity which had “the double goal of constructing the ideal by the real and the real by the ideal” (in Schelling 1835a: 67). He then notes how this “natural philosophy […] wore itself out many years ago”, ending in either “natural histories” (e.g., Oken) or “religious tendencies” (e.g., Steffens, Baader, etc.) (in Schelling 1835a: 69). Kolloff continues, The author of this school has also abandoned his old philosophical principles and has devoted himself exclusively for a number of years to historical investigations. After a literary solitude of nearly ten years, Schelling has presented the results of his studies and holds a series of public lecture courses at the University of Munich; an assortment of students and listeners attended his lectures and saw developed there the new edifice of his system of philosophy. He gives his new system the name philosophy of mythology, and it is thus that I took the opportunity to appropriate the most recent investigations of this great philosopher, one of the most distinguished men of Germany. His philosophical course has not yet been published and is known neither in France nor Germany. I am going to offer a summary of this new system and, above all, Schelling’s ideas on the world as well as the results of his historical views; for what Schelling calls philosophy of mythology could equally be designated philosophical investigations into the history of the world. (in Schelling 1835a: 69–70)

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The twenty-page summary of the lectures follows broadly, if crudely the structure of the first eight lectures of the Berlin Historisch-kritische Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie, with critiques of poetic and allegorical understandings of mythology and the development of Schelling’s own conceptions of the monotheism-­polytheism relation, crisis, the origin of community and the relation between language and myth. The summary culminates with the principle: “There is objective truth in the mythological crisis; this truth is neither disguised nor disfigured, it is an immediate and direct truth. Mythology is truth, such as we know it” (in Schelling 1835a: 96). Kolloff then defers discussion of “the theogonic movement in human consciousness in general and among the different peoples of antiquity” (in Schelling 1835a: 96) to a second instalment.

4.1.5 Félix Ravaisson (Trans.), Jugement de Schelling sur la philosophie de M. Cousin et sur l’état de la philosophie allemande en général, in Nouvelle revue germanique, October 1835 The 23-year-old Ravaisson was commissioned by Cousin in early 1835 to translate Schelling’s “beurteilende Vorrede”, i.e., his introduction to the German translation of Cousin’s own 1833 preface to the Fragments philosophiques (see §3.2.3 above), after Willm had been too slow in providing this translation himself (Mauve 1995: 66—see §4.1.6 below). Ravaisson’s short preface to the translation runs: Schelling had kept silent for more than fifteen years; but he has broken this silence for the Preface published by Cousin in 1833 at the head of the second edition of the Fragments philosophiques and translated into German in 1834. This preface in which Cousin sets out his own system and seeks to determine its relations of resemblance and opposition with modern German philosophy provided Schelling with the opportunity for and the subject of a work which is fairly short but of the greatest importance in every way and a complete translation of it will perhaps be welcome here. The judgment which the greatest philosopher of our century makes on the present state of philosophy in France merits particular attention on our part. As for his reflections on the state of philosophy in general, on its future and the new period it will enter so as to undergo, in his opinion, a final revolution, these are of a more universal and higher interest. We are familiar with Schelling’s new doctrine, or at least the new form he will give his system, from extracts from his lectures on mythology, by the works of some of his more distinguished students, such as Stahl, Sengler, etc.; today, in his Preface in front of us, he allows us to glimpse some features of it and gives us his perspective. Already philosophical Germany, weary from the inflexible yoke of Hegelian Logic, has begun to turn its gaze towards Munich; it awaits with impatience the fruition of promises from this powerful and indefatigable genius, whose lectures have, so to speak, entirely formed them and who will be able to once again become their master. (in Schelling 1835b: 3–4)

Ravaisson also includes a footnote which optimistically promises, We learn at this moment that Schelling is on the point of publishing, under the title of the Philosophy of Mythology, the great work on which he has been working for so many years. (in Schelling 1835b: 4)

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4.1.6 Joseph Willm (Trans.), Jugement de M. de Schelling sur la philosophie de M. Cousin, Paris/Strasbourg, 1835 Soon after the initial publication of Schelling’s “beurteilende Vorrede”, Willm conceived the idea of publishing some of it (building on his pre-existing translation of the critical notice on which it was based). He writes to Cousin on 18th October 1834: As for [Schelling’s] preface itself, which is not only remarkable for the name of its author and its subject matter, but which will be a historical piece of the greatest interest, I have spent eight days almost exclusively on it. For those who are able to understand it, it throws a bright light on both your philosophy and on that of Hegel and on the current state of philosophy in general; it is more than a mere preface, intended to recommend another writing, it is a peace-offering and reconciliation offered to French philosophy by the greatest of German philosophers, a manifesto against the philosophy of Berlin and almost the announcement of a new philosophy, of the philosophy Schelling himself is soon, we hear, disposed to present to the public. […] Schelling’s intention is to do justice to your genius and not depreciate it, to come to an understanding with you rather than refute you. (in Rowe 2000: 239–40)

Cousin came to be frustrated with Willm’s “extreme slowness” in finishing the translation (Cousin and Schelling 1991: 235), because Willm wished to include a prefatory essay that took too long to prepare. In the end, he commissioned Ravaisson to produce something quicker and it ultimately appeared only a few weeks before Willm’s version. Ravaisson’s version was published in Willm’s own Nouvelle revue germanique, despite the obvious conflict and Willm’s initial judgment on Ravaisson’s translation (writing to Cousin, “The beginning of the translation you have wished to send me I find, in reality, very weak, and, except for your opinion, I would have thought there was no need to finish it” [in Rowe 2000: 240]). Willm includes a series of explanatory footnotes in his translation of the essay, including one which defends Cousin against Schelling’s accusation of Hegelianism: “Despite the profound impression that Hegel made on Cousin, despite the friendship that linked them, Cousin did not become a partisan of Hegel and saw in him only an illustrious disciple of Schelling” (in Schelling 1835c: 56). Willm appends to the end of the translation a long note on “process” which is, he claims following Schelling, a concept lacking in French philosophy and in need of importation from German thought. The note reads, We are going to explain, as much as possible, this expression, process, which plays such a large role in the philosophical language of Schelling and Hegel. This word […] has long been employed in German in the terminology of chemistry. The chemical process (chemischer Prozess) is a name for that series of modifications that bodies experience in internal reactions which are successively effects and causes and produce for their final result a new compound. In borrowing this expression from chemistry, Schelling gives it the meaning of progressive work, successive development, producing a series of transitory forms in the interest of a definitive form. In all development there is a point of departure and a given matter, a primitive state, then degrees of formation, moments of development, which can be considered in themselves as producing a determinate form, but which—relative to the general goal—are only means destined to prepare and to lead to a final result, the last term of the work, the end of the process. Hegel made a lot of use of this word in his history of phi-

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losophy. […] And it is the notion of process that, according to Hegel, constitutes the ground of the philosophy of nature. […] There is, moreover, many species of process or, to put it better, this concept applies in diverse ways and to all kinds of development towards a determinate goal. One must distinguish relative process from absolute process […] There is simple process, individual process, universal process, etc. This idea applies equally to physical things and to intellectual and moral things, to the history of the world, to the history of philosophy, to a flower, to an animal, to the universe. As we see, Schelling reproaches Hegel for having abusively applied the notion of process or of transformation by means of progress to the logical idea, whereas in his system is found the real process (der Realprozess), or the application of this method to things themselves, not only to material things, but also to moral and intellectual things. (in Schelling 1835c: 38–40)

Willm’s prefatory essay to the translation is entitled, Essai sur la nationalité des philosophies, and begins as follows: The small piece we offer here in translation with some modesty—since it is only the preface to another preface—will nevertheless occupy a place both within the history of German philosophy and within the history of European philosophy. It will be cited in the former as having marked the re-entry onto the public scene of an illustrious thinker who, after a silence of twenty years, has finally consented to speak and to assume once more the authority which pertains to his genius. It will be cited in the latter as having contributed to the reconciliation of German and French philosophy and, through their alliance, to preparations for a universal philosophy. […] For us, its interest is owing to the measured and serious critique it contains of Cousin’s philosophy, as it has recently been formulated. But what characterises this writing and gives it a quite particular value is not Schelling judging Cousin, but French philosophy examined according to the views of German philosophy. Basically, Schelling judges Cousin’s doctrine less from the point of view of his own system as from the German point of view; it is less Schelling’s system opposed to Cousin’s system as German method compared to French method; it is the state of thought in France faced with the thought of Germany; it is the most advanced philosophy in Europe attempting to win over the one which follows most closely behind it; it is the genius of one nation who wishes to comprehend and penetrate the genius of another nation; it is, finally, the successor of Kant and Fichte wishing to come to an understanding with the successor of Descartes and Condillac. (Willm 1835: v–vii)

The notion of philosophical “nationality” is precisely understood against this framework of the need for “preparations for a universal philosophy”: In no other epoch has European thought presented so great a diversity as in our days, never has it been so diffuse; the more it has been nationalised, the more it has ceased to be intelligible for all cultivated minds. […] Never have we been so far from understanding each other, and never has there been less of a European philosophy. […] It is needless to insist on the many other differences, like those of religion, customs and literary and political institutions, to make sensible how much discord has arisen between the diverse philosophies of Europe, and, above all, those of France and Germany, after fifty years of progressing alone, and how great, if not insurmountable, the difficulties have appeared, when the two have wished to understand each other. This tendency of the best minds in Germany and France to come together and understand each other is the most interesting fact of the history of philosophy of recent times. In this great work of exchange and reconciliation, it is the French—Cousin at their head—who show the most ardour and method. (Willm 1835: xxi–xxii, xxvi–xxix)

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The end of the essay then undertakes a defence of Cousin against various criticisms, including Lerminier’s (see Puisais 2005: 161–5), arguing for the compatibility of an interest in foreign systems with the essentially French nature of Cousinian philosophy, such that “each nation pursues its own path and is left to its own genius”, but “without being afraid to enrich the national thought with the better productions of foreign thought”, for, “when combined”, the national and the international “will refine and complete each other” (Willm 1835: xlii–xliii; see Bernard-Granger 2023).

4.1.7 Pierre Leroux (Trans.). Discours de Schelling à Berlin, in Revue indépendante, 1842 Leroux’s polemical use of Schelling’s inaugural lecture at the University of Berlin from 15th November 1841 is described in §3.5.2 above, along with extracts from his initial preface to the translation of the lecture. To the translation, which appeared in April 1842, Leroux adds the following note: Schelling’s first essay, On the Possibility of a Universal Form to Give Philosophy, goes back to 1795. He was scarcely 20 years old, when he composed this piece where he criticises Kant for not leading science into unity. In 1797 he published Ideas to Establish a Philosophy of Nature, which he rewrote entirely in 1803. In 1798, On the World-Soul, a Hypothesis from Physics to Explain the Universal Organism appeared. But it is in the following years that he arrives at his most explicit exposition of his system. In 1799, he gave a Plan of a System of Philosophy of Nature and an Introduction to this Plan; in 1800, a dissertation entitled, System of Transcendental Idealism; in 1802, a dialogue under this title: Bruno or the Divine and Natural Principle of Things. At the same time, he edited a Journal of Speculative Physics and a Critical Journal of Philosophy, alongside Hegel. After this epoch, he manifested a new tendency in his thinking with a work entitled, Philosophy and Religion, which appeared in 1804. Then his silence began. (Leroux [1842] 1982: 16–17)

4.1.8 Paul Grimblot (Trans.), Système de l’idéalisme transcendantal, suivi de: (1) D’un jugement sur la philosophie de M. Victor Cousin et sur l’état de la philosophie française et de la philosophie allemande, et (2) Du discours prononcé par M. de Schelling à l’ouverture de son Cours de Philosophie à Berlin, Paris, 1842 This first volume of translations dedicated to Schelling—undertaken in the wake of Schelling’s arrival in Berlin—is presented as an initial volume of a series of Œuvres choisis de Schelling, with the two appendices retranslated by Grimblot for the volume. Grimblot writes programmatically of this project, “Kant has become known, understood and accepted [in France]. I believe that it is time to show what

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philosophy has become in the hands of his immediate successors, and it is with the thought of promoting this philosophical project that I have undertaken to translate the principal works of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel” (in Schelling 1842: vi). Only one further volume of the series (a translation of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre) appeared in 1845. Bellantone for one considers Grimblot’s translation and preface to be one of the more significant anti-Hegelian texts of the period, standing alongside Ravaisson’s and Leroux’s work and contributing to the “rupture of the traditional association between Hegel and Schelling”, so as to thereby “liberate Schelling’s thought” (Bellantone 2011: 1.227–9). The 60-page translator’s preface reconstructs the argument of the earlier sections of Schelling’s System in detail, with a brief biographical note on Schelling’s output before 1800, and a study of points of affinity with contemporary French philosophy, which Grimblot splits into “two schools”—the psychological school of Biran and Cousin and a “more curious” school associated with Pierre Leroux and Jean Reynaud, which is, for Grimblot, based on a Leibnizian “faith in progress” (in Schelling 1842: lvi). Both schools have affinities with Schelling’s System: By its point of departure and by its method this book has genuinely real links with the two principal philosophical schools which have come to prominence in this country; and it is for this reason that, among Schelling’s works, without speaking of the eminent rank it occupies among them, the System of Idealism, it seems to me, ought to be presented first to the French philosophical public. (in Schelling 1842: lvi)

The section on Schelling’s affinities with Maine de Biran is particularly significant in developing Schelling as a resource for spiritualism in France. Grimblot writes, Biran did not possess the philosophical experience which had put Fichte on the path to the ideality of knowledge; it was enough—it was a lot—to shake off the yoke of Condillac’s ideology. Biran, who could not comprehend the scope of transcendental idealism conceived from a logical viewpoint, had to retreat before dogmatic idealism, the only one of which he was able to form an idea—the one which transforms all knowledge into appearance. Nevertheless, he had the presentiment of the importance of the results of the critical philosophy and the links which unite it to previous systems. In his work on Leibniz, where he deepened to such a remarkable degree the system of the great philosopher, after having explained the tendency of this system which he had so intimately penetrated, to a universal and absolute spiritualism, he writes, “It would be as curious as it would be instructive to observe the effects of this tendency of Leibnizianism on the progress of philosophy in German from Leibniz to Kant and from Kant to today”. These effects which are so strongly imprinted in the works we are translating in this volume would have no doubt vividly interested Biran. Attentive readers, who notice it without trouble, will conceive a higher idea, if possible, of the luminous wisdom of Biran. (in Schelling 1842: lx–lxi)

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4.1.9 Claude Husson (Trans.), Bruno, ou du principe divin et naturel des choses, Paris, 1845 Based on the 1842 re-edition of Schelling’s Bruno, Husson includes a two-page introduction to his translation which praises Schelling’s treatment of “the sublime theory of absolute unity […] the highest question that can be proposed in metaphysics and transcendent philosophy” (in Schelling 1845: i), and which positions Schelling as the culmination of a modern commitment to the principle of unity running through Descartes, Bruno, Spinoza and Leibniz (in Schelling 1845: ii). Husson also emphasises that Bruno is only part of Schelling’s system and gives as evidence an extract from a personal letter received from Schelling that reads, “The books that I have promised for so long and which are now on the brink of appearing will have, I hope, the same advantage of being translated into French; they will contribute to making comprehensible in its totality the system of which Bruno only makes known one face alone” (in Schelling 1845: ii).

4.1.10 Charles Bénard (Trans.), Écrits philosophiques et morceaux propres à donner une idée générale de son système, Paris, 1847 This volume is intended as something like an introductory anthology to Schelling’s early philosophy, including translations in full of the 1802/3 Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischen Studiums, the 1807 Über das Verhältnis der bildenden Künste zu der Natur and the 1803 essay, Über Dante in philosophischer Beziehung. A final section consists of a set of extracts on key topics in metaphysics, religion, history, philosophy of nature and art drawn from Schelling’s publications between 1797 and 1804, including the Einleitung zu seinem Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie, Philosophie und Religion, and substantial passages from Grimblot’s translation of the System des transzendentalen Idealismus. Bénard includes a 160-page prefatory essay to his translations, split into three sections. The first section, “On the Necessity of Making Known the Recent Systems of German Philosophy”, begins with the same question that had opened Grimblot’s introduction five years earlier: “Is this a well-chosen moment to translate into French the works of German philosophy?” (in Schelling 1847: i; see Schelling 1842: v) Treating Schelling’s and Hegel’s systems as one for the purpose of this section (and, of course, Bénard was simultaneously working on a translation of Hegel’s aesthetics), Bénard emphasises that they had come to seem outdated by the mid-1840s—a matter of the past. The interest previously shown in Germany for this high metaphysics is “today singularly enfeebled, if not extinct” (in Schelling 1847: xxvi). “Germany,” Bénard suggests, “has entered a new phase of its history” (in Schelling 1847: xxvi)—one in which Schelling and Hegel are left behind. It is for this reason that Bénard opens with his question concerning the relevance of his

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translations, and his answer rests on the concept of systematicity, and so involves a long excursus on the nature of the philosophical system in general (in Schelling 1847: xv–xxii). Broadly, Bénard’s argument is that systems lay claim to universal truths that remain relevant and present, despite appearing obsolete. He writes, “Other doctrines have been proposed, but these so-called systems have never been able to reach a state of organisation and precise formulation in a complete manner. They are partial solutions to diverse problems […] without universal bearing” (in Schelling 1847: xxvi). In contrast, Hegel’s and Schelling’s systems are still a matter of the present, since “representing the last great effort of the human spirit to attain a solution to [fundamental] problems, they exercise a general, universal influence and will continue to exercise it until the coming of a new system” (in Schelling 1847: xxxiv–xxxv). The second section constitutes an argument in favour of translating Hegel and Schelling, instead of providing introductory “generalities” in journal articles or long erudite treatises that preserve “material fidelity” at the expense of “‘the spirit’ of the philosophy” (in Schelling 1847: xlix). Translation, Bénard points out, preserves the unity of “style and thought, form and ground” (in Schelling 1847: li). The final lengthy section provides a critical digest of the translated texts, interrogating Schelling’s vision of the university and the artist’s mission—as extracted in §3.6.1 above.

4.2 Hegel-Translations In 1850, Hermann Ewerbeck prefaced his loose translation of Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christentums as follows, Why has no one yet translated Hegel’s works, such as the Philosophy of Religion (1 vol.), History of Philosophy (3 vol.), the Phenomenology (1 vol.) or Logic (3 vol.)? It’s true that Ch[arles] Bénard has translated the Aesthetic, and Cl[aude] Husson Hegel’s Philosophy of History; but why does no one consult them? And why have so many other far inferior philosophical books been translated? […] A good translation of Hegel would be of the highest importance for familiarising young France with young Germany, in the same way as a German translation of Auguste Comte’s positive philosophy would be very desirable. (Ewerbeck 1850: v–vi; see Espagne 2002: 34)

Ewerbeck felt a frustration shared by many French philosophers during the 1840s. Compared to the flurry of translation activity that brought Schelling’s texts into France, only two extant translations of Hegel were begun prior to 1848 (although Ewerbeck also indicates the existence of a third— a lost translation of the lectures on philosophy of history by Claude Husson). When compared to the speed with which Left Hegelian texts such as Feuerbach’s were translated, Hegel’s own works suffered greatly, lost beneath the later Hegelianisms that were circulated far more widely in France. As Bellantone puts it, “The rapidity with which knowledge of the writings of the Young Hegelians was diffused is stupefying in relation to the slowness with which Hegel’s thought was propagated. […] The former overtook the latter, submerged it and completely covered over its specificity” (2011: 1.225).

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4.2.1 Anon. (Trans.), Système d’Hegel sur l’État, in Revue européenne, 1832. This was not only the first very partial translation of Hegel to be made into French, it was also the first publication of any kind in French devoted to Hegel’s philosophy. And even in this first French substantial engagement with Hegelianism, the notion of “system” is foregrounded. The article consists of a translation of §§257–282 of Hegel’s Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts which will, the translator claims, “give an idea of his philosophy”, both because these paragraphs are “easier to understand” and also because they are timely, since “we have not yet well understood the genuine concept of the state” (in Hegel 1832: 75). Unlike the translations of Hegel begun in the 1840s and early 1850s, the translator here stresses that “I will translate as literally as possible, and to do so will use composite words taken from the Greek for German words which have no analogy in our language” (in Hegel 1832: 75).4 The translator picks on the word Moment in particular as idiosyncratic to a French ear—meaning something different from an instant in time, but rather a “point of transition from one domain to another” (in Hegel 1832: 75). The end of the translation promises a continuation in the next issue, which did not come to pass. To the translation is prefixed a two-page introduction, including a note from the journal’s editor. While the editorial note praises “this famous metaphysician […] who has brought about a revolution in thought”, it also lays emphasis on the “courage” of the anonymous translator, the “attention and patience” needed by the reader to understand Hegel and the very “restricted circle of readers” to whom his philosophy will make sense (in Hegel 1832: 73). The translator’s introduction also focuses on the obscurity of Hegelian terminology, defending the fact that “new developments in thought require new developments in speech” (in Hegel 1832: 74) and stressing Hegel’s philosophical task “to seek to grasp (1) the idea in its generality; (2) its reality; and (3) its transition from generality to reality” (in Hegel 1832: 74–5).

4.2.2 Charles Bénard (Trans.), Cours d'esthétique, 5 vols, Paris/Nancy, 1840–52 The sole major translation-project on Hegel begun before 1848 tackles his lectures on aesthetics. Volume 1 (including the introduction and initial chapters on the idea of the beautiful) was published in 1840, volume 2 (on symbolic, classical and romantic forms of art) in 1843 and volume 3 (on architecture and sculpture) in 1848. Volume 5 from 1852 includes a commentary, Essai analytique et critique sur l’esthétique de Hegel, and its argument is summarised in §3.6.1 above.

 See further our remarks on translation strategy on p. 22 above.

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Volume 1 contains a substantial translator’s preface that points to the absence of reflection on art in nineteenth-century French philosophy: “Eclecticism has brought the theories of Plato, Plotinus, St Augustine and Kant […] back to life; but, in general, aesthetics has played little part in its investigations” (in Hegel 1840–52: 1.ii). And yet, Bénard is quick to point out that German “investigations and meditations have emerged from works which would well merit to be known in France and translated into our language” (in Hegel 1840–52: 1.iv). This is the context for Hegel’s singular contribution to the discipline of aesthetics: “Although we do not adopt all the principles developed here, it is impossible not to admire the powerful intellect which has coordinated and linked together all the parts of this vast composition” (in Hegel 1840–52: 1.v). And it is for this reason Hegel stands alongside Plato, Aristotle and Kant in philosophical stature (in Hegel 1840–52: 1.v–vi). The preface finishes by acknowledging the obscurity of Hegel’s terms and responding that “a complete and literal translation would be barbarous and unintelligible” (in Hegel 1840–52: 1.vi); hence, Bénard will try, where he can, to render Hegel’s style accessible to the French public. This is a line of thought continued in the short prefatory note to volume 2 which reaffirms Bénard’s method of translation as “treating the original with great liberty and permitting us numerous licences” (in Hegel 1843–52: 2.ii), in order to substitute a plain French style for German obscurantism. Indeed, Bénard goes so far as to admit: “After having sufficiently penetrated into the thought, we have sometimes felt the need to forget the text and to seek, within our own language, more intelligible and less foreign forms” (in Hegel 1843–52: 2.ii). As Décultot points out (2002: 162; see Jarczyk and Labarrière 1996: 20), Bénard’s stress on providing an adaption rather than a literal translation may well have been a political gesture to distance himself from the Hegelian text itself at the moment when French institutional philosophy was becoming increasingly sceptical of it.

4.2.3 Vera After 1848 From 1854, a new era in French Hegel scholarship began, motored by a new impulse to translate Hegel’s texts. Hence, there appeared, first, in 1854 J. G. Wallon’s and H. Slomas’ very free rendering of the La Logique subjective de Hegel, which explicitly imitated Bénard’s translation method (in Hegel 1854: ii–iii) and quoted from his preface to the Schelling anthology (in Hegel 1854: iv–viii); and, secondly, in 1855 Bénard published another Hegel-translation, La Poétique, in two volumes. Nevertheless, it was above all Augusto Vera’s translation programme that brought Hegel’s texts to francophone readers in a systematic fashion. During the mid-­ nineteenth century, he published as follows: (a) Augusto Vera (trans.), Logique de Hegel [Enzyklopädie, Part I], 2 vols. Paris, 1859.

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(b) Augusto Vera (trans.), Philosophie de la nature de Hegel [Enzyklopädie, Part II], 3 vols. Paris, 1863–6. (c) Augusto Vera (trans.), Philosophie de l’esprit de Hegel [Enzyklopädie, Part III], 2 vols. Paris, 1867–9. (d) Augusto Vera (trans.), Philosophie de la religion de Hegel, 2 vols. Paris, 1876–8.

4.3 Texts and Editions In the context of a relative dearth of translations, access to Hegel’s and Schelling’s original texts played a significant role in effecting their reception. Prior to 1832, only Hegel’s Enzyklopädie and Grundriss der Philosophie des Rechts were widely consulted: Cousin read the first edition of the Enzyklopädie in Heidelberg with Carové on its publication in 1817 (see §3.2.1 above), but it was the second edition that circulated more widely, from Lerminier’s citation of it in the 1831 Philosophie du droit onwards. During the 1820s, Cousin tended to rely on lecture manuscripts and transcriptions of Hegel’s works, received via Hegel’s students (Hotho, in particular) (see §3.2.2 above). While the Phänomenologie des Geistes is often said to have been “discovered” in France by Kojève, Hyppolite and Wahl in the 1930s, and, while it was of course not translated until the twentieth century (much later than into English or Italian), it was still seen as a valuable document for understanding Hegel’s development. Both Lerminier and Amédée Prévost cite it (see Bellantone 2011: 1.141), and Willm is keen to accord it a substantial place in the system, describing at length the process by which “spirit learns to know itself as such” as science itself, such that the “genesis of science in general is the object of the Phenomenology” (Willm 1846–9: 3.398). After 1832, knowledge of Hegel’s texts in France became more widespread, owing to the publication of Hegel’s complete works by the Verein von Freunden des Verewigten, the group of Hegel’s former students led by K. L. Michelet and including, for example, Gans, Hotho, Marheineke and Rosenkranz. The works appeared from 1832 to 1845 in eighteen volumes (with a nineteenth volume of correspondence added much later in the century), and the volumes were already in the process of being reissued in a second edition before the 1848 Revolution. Parisian subscribers to the initial 1832 volume included—alongside political dignitaries— J.  J. Ampère, Saint-Marc Girardin, Jules Lechevalier, Eugène Lerminier, J. V. Poncelet and Amédée Prévost (Michelet 1832: xxiii–xxiv); a copy was sent to Strasbourg ultimately for Willm’s use; and Cousin was presented with a copy by Michelet himself. One of the immediate fruits of the dissemination of this edition was a rapid gain in prestige accorded to the Wissenschaft der Logik which appeared as part of this edition in 1834. The situation was very different for those accessing Schelling’s work in the original language—and, indeed, compared to Hegel, there are extremely few citations of specific works by Schelling in the French commentaries of the period. The 1800 System des transzendentalen Idealismus and, to a lesser extent, the Vorlesungen

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über die Methode des akademischen Studiums were typically taken to be the key texts in Schelling’s corpus, and almost all accounts of Schelling’s pre-Munich work are based on them. Noticeably, the more explicitly monistic texts from the Zeitschrift für spekulative Physik and the Kritische Journal der Philosophie are mainly absent from the French reception. Some reference is to be found to Schelling’s 1797 essays from the Philosophisches Journal and Barchou provides a reading of the Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie (see §3.2.5 above); but the 1804 Philosophie und Religion and 1807 Über das Verhältnis der bildenden Künste zu der Natur are the only post-1803 publications typically discussed. Hence, compared to its contemporaneous reception in the United States (see Rasmussen 2019), the Freiheitsschrift is relatively absent from the French reception-history (with the exceptions of Goschler, Lerminier, Secrétan and Willm)—and this further suggests that the 1809 anthology, Philosophische Schriften, in which the Freiheitsschrift first appeared, was not widely circulated (and no other anthologised edition of Schelling’s original texts appeared until after his death in 1854).

Bibliography Barchou de Penhoën, Auguste. 1836. Histoire de la philosophie allemande depuis Leibniz jusqu’à Hegel, 2 vols. Paris. Bellantone, Andrea. 2011. Hegel en France, 1817–1941, 2 vols. Trans. Virginie Gaugey. Paris: Hermann. Bernard-Granger, Sarah. 2023. Universel philosophique et particularités nationales: Willm, entre Schelling et Cousin. Schelling-Studien 10: 129–152. Cousin, Victor. 1833. Fragments philosophiques. 2nd ed. Paris: Ladrange. ———. 2010. De la méthode en psychologie (suivie d’une analyse critique de Schelling), ed. Serge Nicolas. Paris: L’Harmattan. Cousin, Victor, and F.W.J.  Schelling. 1991. Correspondance, 1818–1845, ed. Christiane Mauve and Patrice Vermeren, Corpus 18/19: 199–249. Décultot, Élisabeth. 2002. Ästhetik/Esthétique: Étapes d’une Naturalisation (1750–1840). Revue de métaphysique et de morale 2: 157–178. Espagne, Michel. 2002. Retour à Hermann Ewerbeck. Cahiers d’études germaniques 42: 33–42. Ewerbeck, Hermann. 1850. Qu’est-ce que la Bible d’après la nouvelle philosophie allemande? Paris: Ladrange. Fedi, Laurent. 2018. Schelling en France au XIXe siècle. Les cahiers philosophiques de Strasbourg 43: 13–80. Hegel, G.W.F. 1832. Système d’Hegel sur l’État. Trans. Anon. Revue européenne 5: 73–88. ———. 1840–52. Cours d’esthétique, 5 vols. Trans. Charles Bénard. Paris: Joubert. ———. 1854. La logique subjective. Trans. H. Sloman and J. Wallon. Paris: Ladrange. Jarczyk, Gwendoline, and Pierre-Jean Labarrière. 1996. De Kojève à Hegel: Cent cinquante ans de pensée hégélienne en France. Paris: Albin. Leroux, Pierre. 1982. Discours de Schelling à Berlin / Du cours de philosophie de Schelling / Du Christianisme, ed. Jean-François Courtine. Paris: Vrin. Mauve, Christiane. 1995. Ravaisson, lecteur et interprète de Schelling. Romantisme 88: 65–74. Mauve, Christiane and Patrice Vermeren. 1988. Le passage de la ligne: politiques de la nationalité philosophique sur les deux rives du Rhin. Le Cahier du Collège International de Philosophie 6: 53–65.

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Michelet, K.L. 1832. Einleitung in Hegels philosophische Abhandlungen. Berlin: Dunker and Humblot. Puisais, Eric. 2005. La naissance de l’hégélianisme français, 1830–1870. Paris: L’Harmattan. Rasmussen, Joel. 2019. Schelling and the New England Mind. International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 80 (1/2): 101–114. Rémusat, Charles de. 1845. De la philosophie allemande. Paris: Ladrange. Reymond, Marcel. 1954. L’influence de Schelling en France et en Suisse romande. Studia Philosophica 14: 91–111. Rowe, Paul. 2000. A Mirror on the Rhine?: the Nouvelle revue germanique, Strasbourg 1829–1837. Oxford: Peter Lang. Schelling, F.W.J. 1822. Des divinités de la Samothrace. Trans. Adolphe Pictet. Bibliothéque universelle 20/21: 319–38, 3–21. ———. 1830. Sur les objections ordinaires contre l’étude de la philosophie. Trans. Joseph Willm. Nouvelle revue germanique 5 (16): 51–60. ———. 1833. M.  Schelling et M.  Cousin. Trans. Joseph Willm. Nouvelle revue germanique 15 (59): 277–294. ———. 1835a. Philosophie de la mythologie par Schelling. Trans. Eduard Kolloff. Revue du Nord 2: 67–96. ———. 1835b. Jugement de Schelling sur la philosophie de M.  Cousin et sur l’état de la philosophie allemande en général. Trans. Félix Ravaisson. Nouvelle revue germanique, 3rd series, 4: 3–24. ———. 1835c. Jugement de M. de Schelling sur la philosophie de M.  Cousin. Trans. Joseph Willm. Paris: Levrault. ———. 1842. Système de l’idéalisme transcendantal, suivi de: (1) D’un jugement sur la philosophie de M.  Victor Cousin et sur l’état de la philosophie française et de la philosophie allemande, et (2) Du discours prononcé par M. de Schelling à l’ouverture de son Cours de Philosophie à Berlin. Trans. Paul Grimblot. Paris: Ladrange. ———. 1845. Bruno, ou du principe divin et naturel des choses. Trans. Claude Husson. Paris: Ladrange. ———. 1847. Écrits philosophiques et morceaux propres à donner une idée générale de son système. Trans. Charles Bénard. Paris: Joubert. Tissot, C.J. 1840. Histoire abrégée de la philosophie. Paris: Ladrange. Willm, Joseph. 1835. Essai sur la nationalité des philosophies. In F.W.J. Schelling, Jugement de M. Schelling sur la philosophie de M. Cousin. Trans. J. Willm, v–xliii. Levrault: Paris. ———. 1846–9. Histoire de la philosophie allemande depuis Kant jusqu’à Hegel, 4 vols. Paris: Ladrange.

Chapter 5

Mechanisms of Dissemination Daniel Whistler and Ayşe Yuva with Kirill Chepurin and Adi Efal-Lautenschläger

Abstract  Any account of the conditions for making possible the dissemination of German philosophy in France in the nineteenth century must include the various publications, institutions and mechanisms that supported, promoted and encouraged it. To this end, this chapter is interested in the structures that made the reception of Hegel’s and Schelling’s philosophy possible in France. It includes sections on the journals that discussed their work, the obituaries of Hegel that appeared in the early 1830s, the role of the prize-essay competitions set by the Académie des sciences morales et politiques, the research visits undertaken to Germany and the epistolary networks that all supported their reception. Keywords  Journals · Epistolary networks · Research visits · Académie des sciences morales et politiques · Obituaries Any account of the conditions for making possible the dissemination of German philosophy in France in the nineteenth century must include the various presses, institutions and mechanisms that supported, promoted and encouraged it. This chapter is thus interested in the structures that made the reception of Hegel’s and Schelling’s philosophy possible in France. Since this is often an account of institutions and their effects, Victor Cousin’s name looms large in what follows—perhaps D. Whistler (*) Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK e-mail: [email protected] A. Yuva Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected] K. Chepurin University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany A. Efal-Lautenschläger University of Tel Aviv, Bar-Ilan University and the Beit Berl Academic College, Tel Aviv, Israel © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Chepurin et al. (eds.), Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France, International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d’histoire des idées 246, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39322-8_5

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larger than would be the case if it were possible to reconstruct more informal, subterranean modes of dissemination that took place outside the academy in the same amount of detail.

5.1 Journals and Encyclopedias Journals and periodicals were the principal means by which new intellectual developments were disseminated in nineteenth-century France (see Monchoux 1965: 165). Journals of the period carried introductions to Hegel’s and Schelling’s philosophies, updates on their intellectual evolution (particularly with respect to Schelling’s arrival in Berlin in 1841), and the first formulations of criticisms of their work. In addition to the journals, a couple of large publishing projects in philosophy were undertaken during the period to produce newly updated dictionaries and encyclopedias to reflect nineteenth-century attitudes. Certainly not many journals were particularly open to new German ideas: there were those for which Hegel and Schelling were too radical, like the pre-­ revolutionary Journal des savants, as well as those for which Hegel and Schelling were too conservative, such as Börne’s La Balance (which appeared three times in 1836) or the prominent émigré journal, Vorwärts!, which appeared biweekly in 1844 before being suppressed and which included Heine, Hess, Marx and Ruge as contributors. There were also those journals which reviewed contemporary German literature and politics but avoided philosophy, such as the Revue de Paris (with the exception of Prévost’s 1832 Hegel-obituary; see  §5.2.1). Stapfer’s Bibliotheque universelle de Genève included German philosophy but—apart from one translation (§4.1.1)—little that was more recent than Kant. A similar avoidance of German Idealist thinking is present in many of the émigré journals of the 1840s, such as Die Zeit, Die Stimme des Volkes, Der Stern, Der deutsche Steuermann, Blätter der Zukunft and the Pariser Horen. The Panorama de l’Allemagne which appeared from June 1838 to February 1839, edited by the German émigré German Mäurer, included contributions from Heine, Quinet, Girardin, Spazier (an editor of the Revue du Nord) and Strauss, but no substantial discussions of Hegel or Schelling (Grandjonc 1970: 114). Ultimately, only the Alsatian Nouvelle revue germanique had as its primary goal the dissemination of German philosophy in France (see Monchoux 1965: 165), and, among the émigré journals, something similar was true of the Revue du Nord and the one-issue Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. There were, nevertheless, a handful of journals that still offered a sympathetic forum for work on absolute idealism, and they are enumerated below in roughly chronological order.

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5.1.1  Le Globe As the intellectual voice of the July Revolution and “the most famous review of the Restoration” (Monchoux 1965: 196), the “Globistes” held sway over liberal France and were avidly read in Germany as the most familiar French journal abroad, including by Hegel (see D’Hondt 1971: 20). Entirely devoted to reviews, Le Globe was founded in 1824 and edited by Pierre Leroux and Paul-François Dubois (who was later a subscriber to the Berlin edition of Hegel’s complete works) (see Goblot 1995: 23–38). In 1830, the journal was taken over by Saint-Simonians under the directorship of Michel Chevalier, adding the new subtitle, Journal de la doctrine de Saint-­ Simon. The journal stopped publishing in April 1832. Until 1830, the “Globistes” tended to be Cousin’s students, Damiron and Jouffroy, and their own students, Ampère, Lerminier and Rémusat (see Goblot 1995: 46–8). For reasons of circumstance and principle, Cousin was not involved in the establishment of Le Globe, even though it was “partially an expression of Cousin’s network” (Espagne and Werner 1987: 986); rather, Jouffroy served as intellectual mentor to the group. Nonetheless, Cousin would often attempt to influence the journal’s content indirectly (see Goblot 1995: 52–4). Despite the fact that Le Globe is generally taken to have functioned as “one of the principal routes of the diffusion of German ideas into France before the July Revolution” (Espagne 1985: 269), none of its reviews were specifically devoted to any of Hegel’s or Schelling’s texts (either before or after the July Revolution). Their names are more often encountered in passing (often as part of discussion of the roots of eclecticism). As Rowe summarises, “The review’s coverage did not stretch to detailed studies of the philosophical systems themselves. Instead, it published reviews of histories of philosophies and articles on the overlaps between philosophy and other scholarly disciplines” (2000: 15). In fact, prior to Lerminier’s arrival on the journal in 1827, it published far less material on Germany than on Greece, Italy or South America. Yet, Le Globe was an object of fascination to Hegel’s students such as Gans and Hotho, for they wished to be mentioned in it as a mark of international esteem, and were also interested in modelling their new Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik, which was founded in 1826, on the editorial model of Le Globe (see Espagne and Werner 1990: 35–7, Waszek 1994, §5.4.2 below).

5.1.2  Le Catholique The organ for Ferdinand von Eckstein’s romantic and speculative Catholicism, Le Catholique appeared between 1826 and 1829. Eckstein’s familiarity with German philosophy—through his studies at the University of Halle and his close relation with Friedrich Schlegel—meant that Schelling’s and Hegel’s names often came up

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in the pages of Le Catholique, much earlier than in many other French journals; but references usually took the form of little more than passing accusations of pantheism (see Monchoux 1965: 205–7).

5.1.3  Revue des Deux Mondes Founded in August 1829, the Revue des Deux Mondes was taken over by François Buloz in 1831 who remained its editor until 1871. The “two worlds” of the title refer to Europe and the Americas between which the journal was intended to mediate— one of its full original titles was, Revue des Deux Mondes. Journal des voyages, de l’administration et des mœurs, etc., chez les différents peuples du globe ou archives géographiques et historiques du XIXe siècle; rédigée par une société de savants, de voyageurs et de littérateurs français et étrangers [Journal of the Two Worlds: A journal of travel, administration and customs, etc., among the various peoples of the globe, or the geographical and historical archives of the nineteenth century; written by a society of French and foreign scholars, travellers and authors]. However, prior to a more conservative turn in 1848, Buloz understood the journal’s remit in a very loose sense and concerned himself far more with gathering a stable of influential liberal journalistic talent, particularly those at the fringes of romanticism and Saint-Simonianism (see Furman 1975): Lerminier, for example, held an editorial role for a time. As a result, during the 1830s the journal went on to become “the most widely read and influential review of its kind” (Rowe 2000: 18). This is the background to the fact that the vast majority of substantial interventions on German Idealism by eclectic, liberal and more academically-inclined voices of the period appeared in this journal: Barchou, Girardin, Heine, Lèbre, Lerminier, Quinet, Saisset and Taillandier all published extensive pieces on Hegel and Schelling in articles that had the ultimate aim of crystallising (and influencing) the official position French intellectuals should be taking up in relation to recent German philosophy.

5.1.4  Revue encylopédique Having been founded in 1819 by Marc Antonie Jullien, after the July Revolution, in 1831, the Revue encylopédique was edited by Leroux, alongside Hyppolite Carnot. The journal came to an end in 1835. It had long been seen as similar to Le Globe in representing the voice of progressive France (with the Lerouxian epigraph, “Freedom, Equality, Association”) (see Aramini and Bourdeau 2015). Most significantly for our purposes, it included an early announcement of the new edition of Hegel’s work (see §4.3 above) in February 1832 as follows, Those of our readers who are attentive to philosophical studies will take pleasure in the opening of a subscription for the complete edition of the works of the famous philosopher, G. W. Hegel, who died 6 months ago in Berlin from the cruel epidemic which today devas-

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tates Paris. […] There are many branches of philosophy which were not treated in the printed works of the living Hegel, but on which he lectured. These various lecture courses will compose the second part of the edition, which will be the most interesting because of its novelty. We are above all curious to know the author’s ideas on the philosophy of religion, a subject so talked about today by the most elevated minds. […] We propose to soon give in the Revue encylopédique an exposition and examination of Hegel’s philosophical doctrines. The German publication encourages this plan, even if it postpones its realisation: we need to become familiar with the new ideas present in the manuscripts that the famous professor left in the hands of his students. Hegel’s death has left a palpable void in the philosophical world. (Anon 1832: 464–5)

This promise for an extended account of Hegel was not realised in the Revue encylopédique itself, which mentions Hegel often without providing many details of his philosophy, and indeed, many of these mentions are derivative of material taken from the Nouvelle revue germanique (Rowe 2000: 16).

5.1.5  Revue européenne Edited by Éloi Jourdain with Edmond de Cazalès and running from 1831 to 1835, the Revue européenne was closely connected with the more prominent liberal Catholic journals, L’Avenir and Le Correspondant. As its name suggests, it was interested in forging transnational intellectual alliances in Western Europe and Cazalès, in particular, was a Germanophile who visited Schelling (along with Jourdain). It is in this context that in January 1832 the Revue published the first French theoretical article devoted to Hegel’s philosophy (see §4.2.1 above)—2  years before Amédée Prévost’s. As Monchoux concludes, “For Éloi Jourdain and his friends, Hegel was considered with respect, but without sympathy” (1965: 212).

5.1.6  Nouvelle Revue Germanique Founded in 1823 and ending in 1837 when it was absorbed into the Revue du Nord, the Nouvelle revue germanique was an Alsatian journal published in Strasbourg that went under a series of names, such as the Revue germanique and the Bibliothèque allemande (it should not be confused with Auguste Nefftzer’s anti-Hegelian Revue germanique founded in 1858). At the centre of the journal’s activities was Joseph Willm who had principal charge of the journal between 1829 and 1834, as well as editing the philosophy section over a longer period. The aim of the journal was to provide its French audience with a complete and accurate picture of German intellectual developments—a source of information about present-day Germany for those back in Paris—and, for this purpose, it was indeed read by Cousin, Heine, Hugo, Leroux, Jules Michelet, Nerval, Quinet, and Sainte-Beuve, among others (see Rowe 2000: 40–1). Its profile was such that

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Cousin attempted to influence its content via Willm (see Rowe 2000: 71). The journal’s prestige came from its Alsatian provenance which included germanophone contributors who had often studied at German universities—Rowe notes on this point, “the advantages its Alsatian origins gave it over Parisian competitors” (Rowe 2000: 91). Until 1835, the Nouvelle revue germanique was the only specialist journal on German philosophy publishing to a French audience and thus played a crucial role in disseminating Hegel’s and Schelling’s philosophies. This aim to provide an accurate picture of German intellectual life was, in part— as with Heine—an attempt to overcome Staël’s influence and move depictions of Germany on from De l’Allemagne. As an early editorial put it, “Germany is today completely different and infinitely richer than before and Madame de Staël’s work would need to be redone, if anyone were capable of it” (in Rowe 2000: 77). Initially, this involved an objective, systematic and generally eclectic approach, and often German texts were included in the journal without any critical comment whatsoever. From Willm’s ascension to editor in 1829, the emphasis moved away from literature narrowly construed to a more philosophical focus, and, owing to prevalent scepticism towards German philosophy in France, this necessitated more reflective and critical commentaries. One of Willm’s first acts as editor was to include a translation from Schelling’s Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischen Studiums (see §4.1.2 above) and in 1835 the journal would include Ravaisson’s Schelling-translation (see §4.1.5 above). However, during the last few years of its existence during the mid-1830s, Hegel’s philosophy was the journal’s central concern. As an editorial announced in 1834, “in philosophy, all of Hegel and his school is still to be made known” among the French (Willm 1834: viii) and remedying this was a task the Nouvelle revue germanique took seriously (see Mauve and Vermeren 1988: 60): from 1833 onwards, almost every issue includes some discussion of Hegel’s philosophy. This culminated in Willm’s own Essai sur la philosophie de Hegel that appeared over ten issues from 1835 to 1837 (see §3.2.5 above).

5.1.7  L’Europe littéraire L’Europe littéraire ran daily from 1st March 1833 to 1st January 1834. Heine was one of its editors and his Die romantische Schule first appeared in this journal as De l’histoire de la nouvelle et belle littérature en Allemagne. Jules Lechevalier’s review of Jouffroy’s Mélanges, part of which takes the form of a critique of eclecticism’s reading of Hegel (see §3.3.2 above), was also printed here.

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5.1.8  Revue du progrès social A short-lived journal from 1834 founded and edited by Jules Lechevalier. It discussed politics, literature and philosophy for the purposes of critiquing existing institutions and developing a consensus around a roughly Saint-Simonian notion of a progressive society. Owing to Lechevalier’s influence (see §3.4.1 above), Hegel’s philosophy was a major point of reference and Amédée Prévost published his early elucidation of the Hegelian system in this journal (see §6 below).

5.1.9  Revue du Nord Founded in Paris in 1835, the journal was quickly required to change its name to Revue des États du Nord et principalement des pays germaniques, owing to an existent Revue du Nord published in Lille by E.  Brun-Lavaille. It was founded and edited by J. E. Boulet, based in Metz, and R. O. Spazier, a German émigré-writer in Paris, nephew of Jean Paul Richter and friend of Ludwig Börne (see Rowe 2000: 20), before being taken over by J.  O. Pellion in 1837 and ceasing publication in 1838. Its primary intention, like the Nouvelle revue germanique, was to generate intellectual exchange between France and Germany and, to that end, its epigraph read, “All peoples that lack intellectual commerce with others are but broken links in a chain”. However, unlike the Nouvelle revue germanique, it was an émigré-journal removed from academic power (hence, Cousin’s disdain for it during the Kolloff-­ affair—see §4.1.4 above). As Kramer puts it, “The city was full of [migrant] poets, journalists, political theorists, philosophers, and travellers who were looking for ways to publish their latest criticisms, solutions, and observations. The Revue du Nord, for example, drew upon a whole community of now-forgotten German émigrés as well as the works of Poles and Frenchmen to fill its columns with translations, reviews, and articles” (Kramer 1988: 56). The contributors were eclectic: on the one hand, there were contributions from Kolloff, an émigré banned from Paris for subversive activity (see Grandjonc 1970: 110–1); on the other hand, it included contributions penned by Tissot, Professor at the University of Dijon, future corresponding member of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques and translator of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Moreover and again unlike the Nouvelle revue germanique, it did not devote as much space to recent philosophical trends. As Rowe summarises, “The Revue du Nord published a number of articles on German philosophy, but these were not on the whole particularly informative. Hegel received only superficial treatment. Schelling on the other hand was better served” (Rowe 2000: 21).

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5.1.10  Revue suisse Founded by Secrétan in 1837, the Revue suisse was a sympathetic forum for critical work on German Idealism among the francophone Swiss community (particularly those with links to Vinet’s school in Lausanne), and it is here that Lèbre published his first attack on the pantheistic tendencies of German philosophy.

5.1.11  La Revue indépendante The journal was founded in 1841 by Pierre Leroux, George Sand and Louis Viardot, who remained editors until 1845; in 1847, Pascal Duprat took over as editor for the final year of its publication. Leroux compared the genesis of the journal with the Revue des Deux Mondes: “[It is] a journal in the same format as Buloz’s and appearing, like his, every fortnight; philosophical, literary and political, like his; but free, and also frank and hospitable” (in Lacassagne 1973: 126; see Brémand 2015). In line with Leroux’s own agenda, it was more open to socialist and non-established voices (including workers’ poems). It became the philosophical journal of the radical opposition to the eclectic establishment and was taken by Ruge as a model for his and Marx’s Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. To this extent, it really did function as the radical mirror of the Revue des Deux Mondes, at the moment when the French establishment was loathe to publish anything positive about German Idealism. Significant essays by Duprat, Pompery, Weill and Leroux himself on Hegel and Schelling appeared in its pages, and it was the only French journal to carry a review of Marx’s and Ruge’s Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher when it appeared (see §3.4.2 above).

5.1.12  Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher Marx’s and Ruge’s one-issue journal of 1844 that argued both implicitly and explicitly for a political reckoning with Hegel’s legacy—see §3.4.2 above.

5.1.13  La Revue nouvelle Edited by Eugène Forcade, a historian and political economist who collaborated on the Revue des Deux Mondes, La Revue nouvelle ran between 1845 and 1848. It had a similar remit to the Revue des Deux Mondes, with a similar emphasis on inspiring French literary and political innovation through making known foreign trends. It was in this venue that Guiran sought to carry on his polemic against Rémusat on Hegel’s philosophy (see §5.3.4 below).

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5.1.14  La Liberté de penser A monthly journal founded by Amédée Jacques, Jules Simon and Émile Saisset in December 1847 and running until November 1851, La Liberté de penser was, as its name suggests, a key organ for the defence of laic politics and intellectual freedom. In 1848, it published a series of articles by Augusto Vera on Hegel’s philosophy of religion and philosophy of the state against the backdrop of the 1848 Revolution (see §3.6.2 above). It was also K. L. Michelet’s preferred venue for his 1849 open letter criticising Cousin for his turn away from German philosophy (see §3.2.4 above).

5.1.15  D  ictionnaire des sciences philosophiques, 6 vols, ed. Adolphe Franck 1844–52 A highly academic initiative, this dictionary was organised and completed by established philosophy professors at prestigious institutions (Sorbonne, Collège de France, École Normale Supérieure, Lycée Henri IV), particularly second-­generation eclectic thinkers with allegiance to Victor Cousin. Its editors included members of Government and the Inspector Generals of universities, as well as those with an interest in German philosophy such as Bénard, Saisset, Simon, Tissot, Vacherot and Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire. Joseph Willm wrote the articles on Hegel, which appeared in 1847 (Willm 1847: 3.26–43), and Schelling, which appeared in 1851 (Willm 1851–52: 5.508–29). The entry on idealism, which includes a long critical analysis of Hegel, was written by Vera and appeared in 1847 (Vera 1847: 3.180–94). The article on pantheism, written by Saisset, also includes reference to both Hegel and Schelling and was published in 1849 (Saisset 1849: 4.521–48). Bénard’s entry on aesthetics is discussed in §3.6.1 above. For the most part, however, German philosophy takes on the role of enemy to the late eclectic orthodoxy expounded in the Dictionnaire. For example, the opening preface penned by Franck (although attributed to all the editors) mocks those “echoes which reach us from the other side of the Rhine” and which lament the fact that French philosophy “lacks unity and audacity [that is, lacks] a vast system free of experience, where everything is given to pure speculation […] [and established] according to an arbitrary principle which thought—absolute mistress of itself— adopts or rejects, modifies and transforms, as it pleases” (Franck 1844: ix). Against those who accuse the eclectics of becoming “humble disciples of Germany”, Franck responds, like Cousin before him, that they “remain faithful to Descartes”, to “a country where good sense” is paramount, whose philosophers do “not put dreams in place of reality, nor esteem prophets or genius-creators” (Franck 1844: ix). Likewise, in his article on method, Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire attacks the German “war on good sense and clarity”, which has the following cause:

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Instead of following Descartes, they have imitated Spinoza, and have, like him, taken for their starting point a logical formula—something arbitrary and variable. As a result, they have by degrees arrived at the most absurd and disastrous nihilism, terrible for both reason and society, expending, in their deplorable and vain effort to construct an error, a hundred times more labour and intelligence than they would have required to conquer the truth. (Barthélémy-Saint-Hilaire 1849: 268)

5.1.16  Nouvelle Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire philosophique, scientifique, littéraire et industriel, offrant le tableau des connaissances humaines au XIXe siècle, 8 vols incomplete, ed. Pierre Leroux and Jean Reynaud, 1834–47 The Nouvelle Encyclopédie was the radical alternative to the Dictionnaire written by relative outsiders in the 1840s, such as Charles Renouvier. It attempted to update d’Alembert’s and Diderot’s Encyclopédie for the nineteenth century by opening it up to contemporary, broadly socialist concerns. Leroux penned many of the philosophy entries until the completion of volume 4 (the letter “E”); afterwards, only occasionally contributing one or two entries (most notably, one on synthesis) to the unfinished final volumes. The long 1836 “eclecticism” entry constitutes a first draft of what will become his Réfutation de l’éclectisme in 1839, including many of the same claims, such as, “Cousin had no difficulty borrowing the doctrine of the Berlin school; he rapidly abandoned one imitation for another, and, hiding Hegel’s justification of the past and the present under the name of an eclecticism taken from Proclus and the Alexandrians, he succeeding in committing two plagiarisms at once” (Leroux 1836: 481). Generally, however, there is surprisingly little detailed engagement with Hegel’s and Schelling’s philosophies in the Nouvelle Encyclopédie: the incomplete later volumes lack entries on idealism, Hegel or Schelling, and the pantheism entry—penned presumably without Leroux’s involvement—makes little mention of Hegel and Schelling. See further Rey’s study in volume two.

5.2 Obituaries One distinctive type of publication that initially disseminated Hegelianism into France during these years was the obituary—that is, the one or two obituaries that appeared after Hegel’s death on 14th November 1831. Nevertheless, most of the French journals and reviews did not carry any obituary (this was still very early in Hegel’s French reception) and only one journal, the Revue de Paris, published an original one. Even the Revue des Deux Mondes did not mention Hegel’s death, and the Revue encyclopédique lists in passing that “J. W. F. [sic] Hegel, famous professor of philosophy at Berlin” was a recent victim of the cholera epidemic (see Rowe 2000: 233–6).

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5.2.1  Revue de Paris The Revue de Paris regularly published on German literature and letters, but it was surprising that—of all the journals in France in the early 1830s—it devoted space to a philosopher’s death (see Monchoux 1965: 209). Nevertheless, Amédée Prévost penned an extensive obituary which was published in 1832 and which anticipates in many ways his ground-breaking first article on Hegel in 1834. Indeed, this obituary is the first writing dedicated to Hegel available in French. Prévost’s obituary begins, “Germany and philosophy have suffered an immense loss from the death of Hegel, Professor of Philosophy in Berlin, who succumbed on 14th November 1831 to an attack of cholera” (1832: 115), before going on to provide biographical details of his life and publications. The obituary also undertakes to evaluate Hegel’s philosophical significance, beginning with an account of his nascent influence in France: Hegel regarded clarity as a quality of an inferior order and in the preface to the Encyclopedia he formally articulated the thought that a philosophy should be obscure. […] This vice of form is the principal cause which has prevented his name and his system from rapidly becoming popular in Europe. It is only in the last years of his life that his reputation penetrated France. In his 1828 course, Cousin reproduced some of his doctrines with that elevated eloquence which characterises him. Lerminier and Michelet have also made known some of his principles on law and on the philosophy of history. As for his metaphysical system, it is almost entirely unknown in France, and I make no claim to explain it here in its entirety. (Prévost 1832: 117–18)

Prévost goes on to provide a critical account of Hegel’s system as a “synthetic” enterprise: The object of philosophy, Hegel says, is the truth, and God being the sole truth and reality, the object of philosophy is God, the absolute object. Where there is no knowledge of God, there can be no knowledge of the real. Philosophy must not content itself with a purely subjective knowledge of existence; it must attribute the status of objectivity, of necessity, of truth in itself to knowledge. Hegel adds, philosophy must agree with reality and experience, both internal and external; this agreement, neglected for so long in German philosophy, is the final highest goal of science; it is the touchstone (at least, the external one) of the truth of a system. Here is placed the principle: all that is real is rational; all that is rational is real. To justify it, Hegel appeals to religious dogma: “All that God does is well done”, and to a distinction by which he establishes that existence is in part reality and in part appearance; that errors, evils and all that relates to them do not merit to be called reality, but are merely transitory, contingent, purely possible facts, which might as well be as not be. In other words, evil is here below only to produce good; the good alone has a substantial and necessary reality. […] Speculative thought is free in itself; its procedure is a priori syntheticism. It is neither in intuition, nor in representation, nor in sentiment, but in thought alone and in pure thought that philosophy is possible and real. We already see the fundamental principle of Hegelian method. It can be summarised thus: to develop from thought the concept of God, and in this concept the concepts of all things. It could appear contradictory, on the one hand, to rely on experience and, on the other, to proceed solely a priori; but we must observe that nothing in Hegel’s method involves putting aside the facts of experience, but just raising them to ­synthetic form, to cast off their character of contingency so as to give them that of necessity, which can only be produced by pure thought, proceeding a priori.

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[…] The majority of people who have mentioned Hegel’s works in France have represented him incorrectly as a disciple of Schelling. Hegel is indeed in agreement with Schelling on his fundamental principle, namely, that the basis of philosophy is knowledge of the absolute, in which subject and object are reunited as their identity, their indifference. But he stands completely apart from him with respect to method. Schelling conceives logic as a science of an inferior order, and this opinion which was prevalent for some time had some happy results, such as opening up the old borders between the sciences. But at the same time this doctrine favoured the swerves of what Schelling called the productive imagination, and it is Hegel’s glory to have brought philosophy to its only genuine form, the scientific form, and to have put an end to these Pindaric excesses, to this dithyrambic tone which had been adopted by most of Schelling’s disciples. Hegel considers logic to be the fundamental science, and he has introduced a new method into it that he sometimes called the immanent movement (determined solely by itself) of the concept. […] A second point of separation between the two philosophers is that Hegel is not as preoccupied as Schelling with the objective side of philosophy and he has sought to do more justice to the I than the not-I, to the human than to nature. Hegel has accorded to human spirit the rank it should occupy above the material world, as expressed by this formula: Matter is the idea in its heterogeneity. Morality and natural law which Schelling and his disciples had neglected have been studied and developed by the Hegelian school. It is in this relation that we have said that, against Kant and Fichte’s establishment of a subjective idealism and Schelling’s of an objective idealism, Hegel has grounded in his philosophy an absolute idealism. (Prévost 1832: 118–23)

The obituary also gives a defence of Hegel’s philosophy against Lerminier’s criticisms of its reactionary nature (Prévost 1832: 123–4), and ends with the following claim, “I have the deep conviction that Hegel has traced the method on which future developments of philosophy in Germany and in France will be based. After Kant came Fichte; after Fichte, Schelling; after Schelling, Hegel. The chain now appears broken” (Prévost 1832: 124).

5.2.2  Nouvelle revue germanique In the Nouvelle revue germanique, Joseph Willm translated Gans’s obituary of Hegel which had originally appeared in the Preussische Staatszeitung and was also partially reused by P.  A. Stapfer in the Bibliothèque universelle de Genève. To Gans’s obituary, Willm adds the following prefatory note: Hegel is dead! The most famous of German philosophers, since Schelling condemned himself to silence, has died in Berlin on 14th November, a victim of cholera. As happens almost always when a distinguished man leaves the scene, all the parties and the University of Berlin, above all, are unanimous in their regrets; they held out their hands to his tomb. Yet, this was not the behaviour of the two orators charged with eulogising the illustrious dead. One of them, Marheineke, went so far as to compare Hegel to Jesus Christ, and was firmly persuaded that the disciples of this new prophet should immediately go preach the New Gospel to all peoples. The second orator, Förster, merely compared his master to the great Alexander, on the basis that, following the example of the generals of the Macedonian hero, Hegel’s disciples are now going to divide up the empire of his thought. If the public gossip

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is to be believed, Hegel declared, a few days before his death, that his heart was broken with the thought that, of all his followers, only one had understood him and that even this one had done so badly. Whatever the truth of this anecdote, it is certain that it will be difficult to replace Hegel at the University of Berlin. Neither Franz Baader nor Herbart will be called, and Schelling will not wish to come. (Willm 1831: 368)

Moreover, Willm makes two modifications to Gans’s obituary. First, where Gans speaks of Hegel as “first philosopher of the epoch”, Willm notes, “Fichte had died, and Schelling…!?” (Willm 1831: 369). Secondly, Willm deletes (without indication) the following passage from Gans’s original text: “No one can replace him [...] Hegel leaves behind a number of brilliant pupils, but no successor. For philosophy has completed its cycle for now; its further progress can only be taken to be an intellectual working-through of the subject matter, according to the manner and method in which the deceased did so”. As Rowe comments, “Willm thus removed from his version of the Gans obituary some strong praise of the deceased and the idea that philosophy could only progress by using Hegel’s methodology. Willm was clearly less of an enthusiastic admirer of Hegel’s philosophy than Gans” (2000: 236).

5.2.3 Cousin’s Incomplete Obituary In 1832, Victor Cousin also dictated an unfinished and unpublished obituary to his secretary, which only appeared posthumously (see Cotten 1994: 92). It provides a brief history of German Idealism up until Hegel (and, as such, is perhaps Cousin’s most extended and explicit discussion of German Idealism) and some passages were recycled for the 1833 Preface to Fragments philosophiques—most noticeably, the controversial claim that Schelling’s “system is the true one” (Azar 1986: 987–8; see §3.2.3 above). In introducing the fragment in his biography of Cousin, Barthélémy-­ Saint Hilaire comments, “This fragment proves that in 1832 Cousin was still charmed by German philosophy” (1895: 3.54). The obituary breaks off just at the moment when Cousin is about to begin talking about Hegel’s philosophy itself—as Rowe puts it, “Neither [Willm] nor Cousin was prepared to present the outlines of Hegel’s philosophy in their obituaries: either they didn’t [yet] understand it well enough themselves, or they didn’t think the French were ready for it yet” (Rowe 2000: 236). The obituary reads, George-Frederick Hegel France must not let pass unnoticed the immense loss that the philosophical sciences have just suffered in the person of G.-F. Hegel, Professor at the University of Berlin, who died in that city, not of an attack of apoplexy, as the Staatszeitung wrote, but of cholera, on 14th November last year—precisely the same date when, in 1720, Germany and Europe lost Leibniz. The name of Hegel will live as long as German philosophy, that immortal heir to Cartesian philosophy. In whatever era he lived, he would have been a philosopher and a great philosopher. A powerful [faculty of] reflection was so much the character of his mind

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[esprit] that it is almost impossible to conceive him doing anything but peering into the depths of every object which his century and his country, whatever they might have been, had presented to him, and recalling their elementary principles, ideas and events. Hegel was born metaphysician as Goethe was born poet and Napoleon man of war and man of state. Born in Stuttgart in 1777, appearing after Fichte as the contemporary, compatriot and friend of Schelling, he necessarily belonged to the great philosophical school which Schelling founded. But, within this school, he found a place that was not only elevated but also original. […] Schelling is truly the man who imprinted a new direction on German philosophy. From the first days of the nineteenth century, Schelling demonstrated, with methods as rational as Jacobi’s scarcely were, that Fichte’s not-I is not the entire real world; that the real world is in fact opposed to the I, but in an opposition that the I has not made, but that it encounters and that it submits to; and that God is not the absolute I, but the absolute of the I; and not only of the I, but also of the not-I; such that it embraces and encompasses them both alike, such that it is both their common substance and common ideal, such that it relates exclusively neither to one nor to the other, but to both, and such that it is absolute identity. Moreover, if God is the absolute identity of the I and the not-I, of the human being and nature, it follows that he is in nature as well as in man; it follows further that this nature has in itself as much value as the human being; that it exists in the same way; that it has its truth like [the human]; and furthermore, that this truth, equal to that of humanity, resembles [humanity’s], since it derives from the same principle; that the laws of nature, without being a reflection of the laws of human reason, must resemble them. The only difference which separates nature and the human is that of consciousness and non-consciousness. […] From this double implication and their common principle derives the high importance of historical studies and the physical sciences. From this and for the first time, idealism was introduced into the physical sciences and an inflexible regularity into history; the two spheres of philosophy, enemies and discordant up until then—psychology and physics—are reconciled; an admirable sentiment for both reason and life, a sublime poetry extending into all philosophy and, above, this idea of God present everywhere and serving the whole system as principle and light. The first years of the nineteenth century saw appear this great system: Europe owes it to Germany and Germany to Schelling. This system is the true one; it is the system of our century, at once idealist and realist; it is the system destined to reign throughout the whole of Europe, because it satisfies both the needs of the Mediterranean and the needs of the North; because it is the most complete expression of the entirety of reality, of universal existence. As we have said, it does not destroy the double system of Kant and Fiche; it develops it, like all true revolutions which resume the past and add to it, which give and receive, harvest and sow. […] One should not tire of repeating that it is subjective idealism, it is Kant, it is Fichte, which is—in right as in fact—the ground of the new German philosophy. Once the internal world was recognised, it was necessary to pass to other things and enter into every other sphere, but with the same spirit and the same flame—that is, with idealism. This is what Schelling has done. Departing from subjective idealism and always guided by idealism, he arrived at a rational physics, at a rational history and a living God. This is the good: one must also speak of the bad; and if Schelling has found the true system, time alone can perfect and complete it. (in Barthélémy-Saint-Hilaire 1895: 3.48–54)

What is perhaps most distinctive about the conclusion to Cousin’s fragment is the claim that Kant and Fichte provided the proper foundations of “the new German philosophy”, and Schelling (and, by extension, Hegel) continued their project, but also perverted it—suggesting presumably the possibility of an alternative way of building a metaphysics on their insights.

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5.3 Académie des sciences morales et politiques A marker of academic reputation in the early nineteenth century was recognition from the Académie des sciences morales et politiques (one of the five academies of the Institut de France). This recognition came in the form of membership, associated membership or a prize—and at stake in these decisions was the legitimation that the Académie could bestow on German philosophers or those engaging extensively with German philosophy.

5.3.1 International Membership The relevant German foreign members (“membres associés étrangers”) of the Académie from its post-revolutionary renovation in 1832 through to 1848 include: Friedrich Ancillon, 1833–1838, Chair of History F. W. J. Schelling, 1835–1855, Chair of Philosophy

Schelling’s chair was secured at the second attempt through the influence of Victor Cousin, beating Friedrich Schleiermacher to a nomination and then Savigny in the final election (see Cousin and Schelling 1991: 225, Prévost 1835: 395). Cousin had himself been elected to the Académie in 1832 and would go on to obtain membership for several allies, including Damiron in 1836, Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire in 1839, Rémusat in 1842, Franck in 1844 and Willm (as a corresponding fellow) in 1845. After Schelling’s death in 1854, the philosophy chair for foreign members was occupied by two further German thinkers: the ally of Schelling and acquaintance of Cousin, Christian August Brandis (from 1855 to 1869), followed by the anti-Hegelian, Friedrich Trendelenburg (from 1869 to 1872). Amédée Prévost took the opportunity of Schelling’s election to pen a short precis for the Revue du Nord entitled, Nomination de Schelling à l’Institut, which reads, The famous philosopher Schelling, President of the Munich Academy, has been named the foreign associate of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques, replacing Malthus. […] Schelling obtained a near unanimity of votes which is just compensation for his failure 3 years ago during the first nomination of five foreign associates. In this short interval of time minds have move on a lot in a direction which represents German philosophy. To the extent that the progress of ideas carries us further towards spiritualism and towards Christianity, the precautions against German philosophy increasingly disappear. It is now no longer permitted for serious minds to profess that disdain for German philosophy which was witnessed at the beginning of the nineteenth century. […] Schelling is at this moment the most illustrious representative of the spiritualist philosophy; he is the only surviving member of that great philosophical family which began with Kant and ended with Hegel. The epoch of his success and the greatest vogue for his system was in the first years of the nineteenth century. At this time his doctrine excited a universal enthusiasm in Germany; it did not solely influence philosophy, but natural history, philology, the arts, poetry were also inspired by the vistas Schelling opened up on nature or humanity. Schelling’s doctrine was nearly universally adopted for 15 or 20 years, then Germany saw appear Hegel, the Aristotle of the philosophical movement of which Schelling is the Plato.

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[…] Schelling’s silence for 17 years has not been absolute. […] His influence in Germany has necessarily diminished because of the uncertainty regarding his [new] opinions, but his renown is always immense. By admitting him into its bosom as one of the greatest geniuses of Germany, the Académie solely does what is just; it is merely to be regretted that it has deferred doing so for so long. (Prévost 1835: 395–7)

The article closes with an editorial note advertising Kolloff’s “analysis of Schelling’s new system, which is not yet published in Germany” to appear in a subsequent issue (Prévost 1835: 397; see §4.1.4 above). Alongside his election to the Académie (and again through Cousin’s influence), Schelling was also presented with the Legion of Honour in September 1833, alongside other German luminaries such as Savigny and Alexander von Humboldt (see Cousin and Schelling 1991: 222–4). In parallel, through Hegel’s initial support, Cousin was himself elected as a foreign member of the Berlin Akademie der Wissenschaften in May 1832 (after first standing for election unsuccessfully in 1830). He was later joined in the Berlin Akademie by Ravaisson in 1847. In exchange for Schelling’s election, Cousin was also made a foreign member of the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften in September 1833: he had in fact been technically elected in Summer 1830, but, for various unrelated reasons, the election was not ratified by Ludwig I until 1833 (Cousin and Schelling 1991: 216, 219). After 1848, Cousin was also elected to the Göttingen Akademie der Wissenschaften.

5.3.2 The 1833 Prize In 1833, the newly restored Académie began setting essay competitions, as it had during the eighteenth century. These prizes were opportunities for the Académie to set the agenda for research and publications (much in the way the agrégation began indirectly to do later in the century), as well as to celebrate those works which confirmed, developed, or occasionally corrected institutional consensus. The Académie prize most directly relevant is that on German Idealism set in 1836; however, the first 1833 prize on Aristotle’s Metaphysics anticipated some of the institutional culture wars to come over German philosophy. The prize itself called for a “critical analysis of Aristotle’s work entitled the Metaphysics” to be submitted by the end of 1834. First prize was awarded to Félix Ravaisson for an entry he did not subsequently publish in its original form, but rewrote heavily into his two volume Essai sur la métaphysique d’Aristote that began to appear in 1837. A specially created second prize was awarded to K. L. Michelet, whose Examen critique de l’ouvrage d’Aristote intitulé Métaphysique appeared in print in 1836. To put it crudely: second prize was awarded to an explicitly Hegelian interpretation of Aristotle and first prize went to one with affinities to Schelling.

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Cousin’s report for the Académie, published in 1835 as De la métaphysique d’Aristote, makes clear the German background to the way the entries were evaluated. Hence, Michelet’s work both succeeds and fails because of its overtly Hegelian analysis: it both deepens understanding of Aristotle’s metaphysics, but also limits it to a partial (and anti-eclectic) perspective: “There is too much here of the language of a particular school”, Cousin insists, continuing, “The author himself tells us that he belongs to that most recent German philosophy […] [which] recognises Hegel as its leader. The author appears to be a fervent disciple of this philosopher” (Cousin 1835: 89). Indeed, Michelet opens the published version of his entry with an extended quotation from Hegel’s 1816 lectures on the history of philosophy, dubbing Hegel in the process, the “leader of one of the most celebrated schools in Germany” (Michelet 1836: v). He continues to position Hegel as Aristotle’s true heir, speaking of “the immense influence of Aristotle’s Metaphysics” on Hegel (1836: 268), and concludes his commentary with the rhetorical question, “Is there no principle, no category, no thought, no truth from Aristotle’s Metaphysics that is not preserved, for instance, in Hegel’s Logic?” (Michelet 1836: 306) While Ravaisson’s 1834 entry also displays detailed knowledge of Hegel’s interpretation of Aristotle, he subjects it to criticism. Speaking of the Aristotelian thesis of the unmoved mover, Ravaisson writes, To [this doctrine] Hegel has attributed a feature which it doesn’t have. According to him, Aristotle’s νους [nous], the essence, describes—when thinking itself—a circular movement like the heavens in the sensible world. Not only is this an opinion which no text of Aristotle can justify, it is also an error which entirely falsifies the meaning of his theory. The νους is absolutely immobile, since movement presupposes the possible; and the νους is a pure act; it is thus immediately identical to itself. Hegel wrongly believed that act and potency [puissance], δυναμι [dunami] and ενεργεια [energeia], there find their identity. He attributes to it the characteristic that it essentially lacks and whose lack is the true condemnation of Aristotelianism: the reconciliation of the possible and the actual—this is the goal still to be attained in philosophy and which is glimpsed for the first time in Alexandrianism. (Ravaisson [1834] 2001: 203)

Even more significant is the conclusion to Ravaisson’s entry which makes three proposals about what the “true philosophy” alluded to above should actually look like: The true philosophy is that which aspires to an absolute metaphysical system, to an infinite science. This should understand Aristotelianism in its profound unity as a necessary moment of universal thought. In place of destroying reality and life, dividing it like an aggregate of mechanically juxtaposed ideas, it will accept it entirely so as to absorb it into its own life; and it is by transforming it into a larger system that it will give it its absolute worth. What must this system be? What is the philosophy to which the future belongs? We do not believe we are here obliged to give a formal and complete response to such a problem. The great scientific movement of our times is not finished, and we will not hazard to indicate its end. Only by enclosing ourselves within the framework traced by us do we arrive— borne by history—to the results just developed and which we summarise thus: 1. True method is in the return of spirit into itself, in which it grasps itself both in its power and in its development, as active cause and an absolute force.

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2. The supreme principle of all reality in existence as in thought is force, where the infinite and the finite are differentiated and identified without cease in the movement of life.— The system of thought and of the world is constructed by a harmonic progression of the principle of force as universal dynamism. 3. The law of philosophical method represents the law of thought and existence. It is explication and implication (analysis and synthesis), the reduction of differences to an ever-­ higher unity in which they rediscover their value and their absolute truth. We do not want to profess Schelling’s system here: this system has not yet been formulated. Still less do we want to adopt Hegel’s absolute idealism: he conceived being as pure spirit, while the higher principle of force contains, in a higher unity, thought, will, love. Our approach is based, without accepting its monadological hypotheses, solely on a Leibnizian idealist-realism brought to life and organised by modern science and in which Aristotelianism has enjoyed its latest regeneration. These are the principles which are from now on immortal, which have directed us in our work, and which will direct us in the future in our philosophical studies. (Ravaisson [1834] 2001: 212–3)

Notwithstanding the enthusiastic embrace of Leibniz, the reference to Schelling does not come out of nowhere: all three of the features Ravaisson identifies as “true philosophy” correspond to an image of Schelling’s early philosophy based on the System des transzendentalen Idealismus and the contemporaneous philosophy of nature. Ravaisson still minimally distances himself from Schelling, and this is presumably because what he is doing looks so Schellingian. Ravaisson’s unambivalent affirmation of Leibniz is a way of allying himself with a less contentious figure in the politico-philosophical context of mid-1830s France. Moreover, it is Ravaisson’s insistence on a distance from Schellingianism that contributed to his first prize in the Académie competition, via Cousin’s evaluation of it as a fundamentally eclectic gesture: It is not difficult to recognise that the author of this entry has passed through German philosophy. We congratulate him on having preserved his freedom of thought amid this commerce with foreign geniuses; on having borrowed inspirations from Germany without submitting to the yoke of any particular school. He himself declares that he has exclusively adopted neither the doctrine of Schelling nor still less, he says, that of Hegel. Both have visibly animated and nourished his thinking; but they have not imprisoned it. The only system which he consents to recognise as the ground of his own is Leibniz’s. (Cousin 1835: 115)

In repeating Ravaisson’s words, Cousin places the emphasis far more on the critical distance that holds with respect to both Hegel’s and Schelling’s philosophy: on Cousin’s reading, Ravaisson takes up an eclectic (and so “French”) relationship to German philosophy. Further to Cousin’s interpretation, Schelling offered his own comments on receiving both Cousin’s report and Ravaisson’s entry itself, telling Cousin of “my admiration for your Report on Aristotle” as “a masterpiece from the academic point of view”, “the work of a superior spirit” and a document of the “philosophy which has newly taken roots in France and for which young talents are already ready to enter into the lists”. Schelling compares Ravaisson who “touches on a great truth” with Michelet who “remains enclosed in the narrow circle of his master’s ideas” (Cousin and Schelling 1991: 236).

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5.3.3 The 1836 Prize: Context The third prize-essay set by the Académie and the first relating to modern philosophy (the second prize was also on Aristotle) was proposed by Victor Cousin in November 1836. It originally asked for submissions before the end of 1838 that were to undertake: A critical examination of German philosophy, defined as: 1. Presenting, through extensive analyses, the principal systems to have appeared in Germany from Kant to the present day; 2. Focusing, above all, on Kant’s system which is the principle of all the others; 3. Evaluating German philosophy; discussing the principles on which it rests, the methods it employs, the results it has attained; investigating the proportion of errors and the proportion of truths encountered in it, and [investigating] what, in the final analysis, can legitimately be preserved, in one form or another, of the philosophical movement of modern Germany. (Rémusat 1845: 1–2)

When Schelling read the proposal, he angrily suggested that Cousin should have asked his opinion first, and “I would have very humbly advised you to defer it for some years”, fearing that the vogue for Hegelianism and the inability of entrants to judge his own system in its entirety would skew the results. In Schelling’s own words, “German philosophy is necessarily on the point of undergoing a final crisis once more, and so we cannot judge the beginning, the middle nor the beginning of the end until a scientific movement such as that of German philosophy is entirely finished and has reached its end” (Cousin and Schelling 1991: 242). Significantly, the results of the competition were continually delayed. Despite being the third prize to be set in 1836, it was the fifth to reach judgment in 1844 (the fourth prize on Descartes and the fifth on the Alexandrian School had already concluded by the time a decision was reached). Rémusat’s final report to the Académie was published in 1845, 9 years after Cousin had first made the proposal. Six entries had been submitted by the original deadline of the end of 1838, but Cousin judged them all insufficient; as Rémusat reports, “They seemed still for the most part mere essays […] There was in them merely the seed of a good work” and “for the seed to be developed, the academy extended the competition for two more years” (Rémusat 1845: 2). A new deadline was thus set for 30th September 1840 and seven entries were submitted this time, but again Degérando (who was now making the judgment on behalf of the Académie) decided that “none of them yet appeared complete enough to win the prize”. A further deadline was set for September 1843 and only three entries were resubmitted. Judgment on them was further postponed to February 1845 and then confirmed in mid-May 1845 (Rémusat 1845: 2–3). In part, this delay is due to changing institutional relations to German Idealism during this period—the period marked by the shift from Cousin’s relatively laudatory, if qualified remarks in the second edition of Fragments philosophiques to his robust critique of it in his subsequent works. In particular, what changed between

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1836 and 1845 was the advent of Left Hegelianism in France (see §3.4.2 above) and, with it, an increasing association of absolute idealism with revolutionary politics, pantheism and atheism. It is plausible, for example, that one reason for the decrease in entries in 1843 is an increasing frustration felt by German entrants against this backdrop: K. L. Michelet seems to have passed from enthusiasm at the possibility of submitting an entry in the mid-1830s (particularly since it may have opened up a post at the Collège de France) to increasing malaise concerning the French attitude to Hegelianism (see §3.2.4 above; Espagne and Werner 1990: 33). As Cousin would complain to Schelling himself, “I really wish some of your friends had submitted something” (Cousin and Schelling 1991: 242).

5.3.4 The 1836 Prize: Rémusat’s Report This context put Rémusat in an awkward, even embarrassing position when summarising German Idealist philosophy to the Académie. His role, in Bellantone’s words, was to “make official a change in perspective on Hegel [and Schelling] amongst the eclectics” (2011: 1.307). His report on the entries is preceded by a 150-­ page, “Introduction to the doctrines of Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel”, which undertakes precisely this task under the auspices of trying to “make accessible the philosophy of the absolute” in France (Rémusat 1845: cxlvii). Rémusat begins with a passage taken verbatim from his original speech to the Académie: German philosophy has just completed an epoch comparable perhaps to the 50 years which in Greece followed the school of Socrates. Kant is author of this great movement. His modest life offers nothing which raises it to the tragic heroism of the son of Sophroniscus [Socrates], although his virtue was as pure; but his original genius was almost equal to the greatest names in the history of thought. It is he who more resolutely than any other realised that idea of the moderns, that the mind of man, in itself isolated from everything it reflects on, from everything it attains, from everything it assumes, is the pure object of philosophy. […] If the world is problematic but the human mind is not, the existence of the world depends entirely on the human mind, and reason creates all it conceives. This is at least what Fichte drew from Kantianism […] But if thought produces all that it comprehends, what exists does so only in conformity to thought, and the world is identical to the intellect; the description of the ideal concords with the description of the real, and natural philosophy has for its original the philosophy of the human mind. This is what Schelling dared think, and what he tried to establish with the double power of method and imagination—adept like a Greek philosopher in mixing physics with poetry. This is the same system of universal identity which Hegel dressed up in rigorous forms in an immense deduction, disguising hypotheses under an algebraic appearance, and creating from every portion [of reality] a philosophy that manages to be both a demonstration and a novel. Hence, Kant said the idea only guarantees itself, Fichte adds: the idea gives being. Being reproduces the ideal, continues Schelling. The idea is being, concludes Hegel. And here it becomes a kind of sceptical idealism that renews under our eyes Spinoza’s pantheism. (Rémusat 1845: vi–vii)

The very fact that German Idealist thinking is connected so frequently in this opening passage to other figures from ancient and modern philosophy already suggests that Rémusat is keen on downplaying its novelty.

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Rémusat goes on to provide an extended reconstruction of each German Idealist system in turn. The reconstruction of Schelling’s system focuses solely on “general features” (Rémusat 1845: lxxiii) to such an extent that Schelling’s name itself barely appears and there is no reference to specific works. His reconstruction follows the pre-existing French tradition of prioritising Schelling’s parallelism thesis (i.e., philosophy of nature and transcendental philosophy are parallel expressions of identity) (Rémusat 1845: lxxii–v) and his concept of intellectual intuition (Rémusat 1845: lxxix). With a cursory mention of the Berlin lectures (1845: clvi), Rémusat also stresses the unfinished nature of Schellingian philosophy: “Schelling’s doctrine has nowhere been completed. To resume it completely is a difficulty that the authors of the entries judged by the Académie have not perfectly overcome” (Rémusat 1845: lxxxiii). Ultimately, his account rests on the implausibility of the principle of identity as presented in Schelling’s metaphysics: This principle [is] so repugnant to the customs of our spirit, to the notions of common sense, to the philosophical maxims of our schools. […] A French reader will willingly take it as so extravagant that he will be tempted to reject it a priori, that is, if he finds it at all intelligible. We are far from having the pretention to rehabilitate the principle of identity— the Eleatic philosophy, the philosophy of Alexandria, the philosophy of Schelling and of Hegel—strikes us, imposes itself on us, but it does not persuade us. However, it is necessary to make comprehensible to everyone how intellect can basically be led to the doctrine of identity, and it is possible to show that this doctrine holds more of a place in our received opinions than one might think and that it permeates many minds who do not think it does. (Rémusat 1845: lxiii–lxiv)

Ultimately, the principle of identity ends in pantheism: “Absolute identity is not the principle, but the unity of everything. It is the god of Spinoza, conceived in a spiritual pantheism” (Rémusat 1845: cvii). Hegel’s philosophy is given a relatively more concrete exposition and the Enzyklopädie is mentioned once (Rémusat 1845: cxxxii). As so often in France, Hegel is presented as a “student of Schelling”, such that “the differences between them are not fundamental” (Rémusat 1845: cxviii). Nevertheless, what does differ, according to Rémusat, is the direction of travel: the principle of identity was for Schelling, following Spinoza, the ground of his system, but for Hegel it is its end (Rémusat 1845: cxviii); it is to be deduced, not immediately posited. Hegel thus radicalises the notion of progress already found in Schelling, with the result that Rémusat is keen to emphasise dialectical movement in Hegel’s work (Rémusat 1845: cxxvii). Nevertheless, there are for Rémusat, amidst his “thousands of doubts and thousands of objections” (Rémusat 1845: cxli), four fatal criticisms to be made of the Hegelian system. First, “in Hegel’s philosophy there is no place for freedom, if freedom is to be something other than immanent activity” (Rémusat 1845: cxxxvii); secondly, the individual can never possess the truth, because truth belongs only to the whole, to the absolute and to the infinite, but “the I is the consciousness of being which is neither absolute nor infinite” (Rémusat 1845: cxl); thirdly, Hegel assumes “a fatalistic law of development, itself absolute” which seems to function as a kind of “fiat in this universe” (Rémusat 1845: cxliii) and so merely postpones a more fundamental question—“how and why did universal

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movement begin?” (Rémusat 1845: cxliii); finally, Hegel’s notion of time is lacking, for, reduced to the immanent movement of the concept, it is no longer the temporality of human subjectivity (Rémusat 1845: cxlv). In conclusion, Rémusat considers—on the basis of the entries he has read—what French philosophy might be able to learn from across the Rhine. He writes, We are strongly attached to French philosophy. We have been born, so to speak, at its breast and nourished on its milk… Heaven preserve us from an attack on its essence and from weakening any of its authority. (Rémusat 1845: cxlviii)

Nevertheless, French philosophy may well be too dependent on Locke and Condillac, i.e., on analysis and definition: “It risks writing merely a natural history of the human intellect and reducing philosophical science to a subjective idealism without weight and without conclusion” (Rémusat 1845: cxlix). In short, what French philosophy lacks is an appreciation of the “great problems, the problems of the nature of things. And it is in this respect that the example of German philosophy can be good for it” (Rémusat 1845: cl). Rémusat continues, It is time to dare to raise one’s eyes to the goal that [German philosophy] has posed and to enter into the regions it has trod, without however following in its footsteps. We must imitate them while retaining the precious guarantees of method, of erudition, of language, of experience, which are the ground of our philosophical wisdom […] In a word, let us rehabilitate what is most difficult and most elevated in all philosophy, metaphysics. (Rémusat 1845: cl)

Some kind of alliance between French and German thinking is still possible—even for an eclectic in 1845—as long as the French “remain prudent” (Rémusat 1845: cli). This is a topic Rémusat also returns to at the end of his evaluation of the competition entries. Here he is keen on justifying the Académie’s decision to set a prize on German philosophy when it has become such controversial material. The Académie, he writes, “could not pass before this great image of German philosophy by obstinately keeping a fearful silence”. Like Cousin, Rémusat stresses the need to judge this philosophy according to the “rules of philosophical common sense in France”, and this will allow French philosophy “to characterise it in relation to ourselves and to distinguish ourselves from it by signalling both its originality and its errors” (Rémusat 1845: 203). That is, Rémusat is clear, “French philosophy cannot fully accept German philosophy” (Rémusat 1845: 205); but: “Break apart the historical unity of German philosophy, take a look at its different moments, seek out its different schools, its principal representatives, and you will feel some esteem, belonging, admiration reborn within you. Fragments often obtain the approbation that is refused to the whole” (Rémusat 1845: 207–8). Moreover, it is on this basis, in the report itself, that Rémusat turns to his evaluation of the submitted entries. He is looking for, he is clear, “not general views, not simple appreciations of doctrines, sufficient for the majority of readers, but a more detailed exposition, […] a historical and scientific description of the entire movement of philosophy among our neighbours over these past 60 or 70 years” (Rémusat 1845: 5). And, as a result, the prize is won by Joseph Willm for his entry, which will go on to be published in four volumes as the Histoire de la philosophie allemande depuis Kant jusqu’à Hegel (see §5.3.5 below).

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In addition, a “very honourable mention” is given to Fortuné Guiran, a translator of Ludwig Börne, who had spent much time in Berlin, and Guiran later published the parts of his entry dedicated to Kant in the 1845 inaugural volume of the La Revue nouvelle. What ultimately lets Guiran’s entry down, according to Rémusat (just like Michelet’s entry to the 1833 prize), is its partiality towards Hegel and Hegelian jargon; “The author is Hegelian” (Rémusat 1845: 79; see Guiran 1845: 287)—that is, Guiran writes on German philosophy without being able to escape its pull, without gaining sufficient eclectic distance. A year later, Guiran responded to this charge with an open letter to Rémusat (Lettres à M. Charles de Rémusat sur la philosophie de Hegel), in order to show Rémusat that adherence to Hegelianism is no error, both owing to the cogency of the system and also the extent to which institutional eclecticism was, via Cousin, founded on Hegelian principles. As Guiran writes, while “the principle of Hegel’s philosophy contains, in my opinion, the intellectual future of humanity, you have condemned it in your Rapport as an error, or at the very least as a dangerous risk. And you have thus, despite yourself, under the authority of your own name, fostered that disgust at ideas and blind hatred of philosophy that characterise the current tendencies of the human mind [esprit] in our country” (Guiran 1846: 63).

5.3.5 Willm’s Histoire de la philosophie allemande depuis Kant jusqu’à Hegel Willm’s winning entry is praised by Rémusat, in directly related terms, precisely for its “impartiality” achieved through both “an intelligent fidelity” to the concepts discussed and “an enlightened independence” (Rémusat 1845: ix). Thus, on the one hand Willm’s entry, according to Rémusat, was “more exact and more technical” than the others (Rémusat 1845: cxxxv), even to the extent that it confronts the “insurmountable difficulty” of Hegel’s philosophy and its “strangest appearances”, in order to “make them plausible” (Rémusat 1845: cxxxv). But, on the other hand and much more importantly, Willm still ends by condemning Hegelian philosophy (with the one exception of his history of philosophy, which was of course so important to Cousin). Thus, Rémusat concludes that the work is “seriously instructive” and “useful” (Rémusat 1845: 200) and “publication is very desirable in the interest of philosophical knowledge” (Rémusat 1845: 202), even if he makes the reservation that “a less complete, less detailed, more eclectic analysis might influence the mind of the reader more” (Rémusat 1845: 200). Willm’s Histoire was subsequently published between 1846 and 1849: the first volume focuses on Kant (1846, 539 pp.), the second volume treats Fichte and Jacobi (1847, 645 pp.), the third volume switches its subtitle from “the reign of transcendental and subjective idealism” to “the reign of absolute and objective idealism” and focuses on Schelling and Hegel (1847, 477 pp.); the final volume sweeps up a number of other thinkers, including, most prominently, Herbart (1849, 610 pp.).

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Willm’s reading of Schelling turns on the fact that he considers him both “dogmatic and realist” and “critical and idealist” at the same time (Willm 1846–9: 3.206). Like all French commentators before him, Willm identifies the ground of Schelling’s metaphysics in “the identity in the absolute not only of thought and being, ideas and things, subject and object, but all contraries and all opposites, all differences […] idealism and realism, stoicism and epicureanism, freedom and necessity, morality and felicity” (Willm 1846–9: 3.206). Nevertheless, Willm is attentive to evolution and development in Schelling’s thinking, and he separates Schelling’s philosophy into two periods divided by 1815. For this reason, Fedi dubs Willm “the most rigorous analyst of Schellingian chronology” (2018: 42–3). Moreover, on top of criticisms of Schellingian fatalism and the “illusion” of intellectual intuition (following Cousin in the 1838 foreword to Fragments philosophiques—see §3.2.4), Willm also charges Schelling with pantheism, even if “it is a logical monism rather than a real pantheism”, and this is because “when it comes to its practical results and consequences, this system is a genuine pantheism and is exposed to the same criticisms in this regard as proper pantheism” (Willm 1846–9: 3.370–1). On this basis, Willm evaluates Schelling’s philosophy as follows: Nothing is simultaneously more grandiose and simpler than the fundamental idea of Schelling’s system: the universe is the identical expression of divine thought, and human reason is the identical expression of God’s intellect and therefore of the universe. […] Philosophy is a poem without fiction, whose subject is the birth of the universe by divine thought, thought reproducing with consciousness and freedom what eternal activity produces without consciousness and with a necessary spontaneity. […] However, seen more closely, this great idea offers only the inconsistency of an illusion which evaporates as soon as one examines it, and tries to express it with more precision. (Willm 1846–9: 3.380–1)

Willm’s attitude to Hegel is equally ambivalent—and, although bilingual, he still dubs Hegel “the most untranslatable of writers” (Willm 1846–9: 3.383). What distinguishes Willm from previous French writers on Hegel is less the novelty of his interpretation (which passes through the key topics of the principle of identity, the priority of logic, movement and process) or the content of his criticisms of Hegel’s fatalism and pantheism than his precise, detailed attention to the chronology, particularly Hegel’s development from Glauben und Wissen, through the first Jena writings and into the Phänomenologie des Geistes (see §4.3 above). Willm’s book contains in fact the first exposition in France of Glauben und Wissen (Bellantone 2011: 1.147). However, Willm does still stand in continuity with other early readers of Hegel in France in using the Enzyklopädie as his norm and touchstone. As an example of Willm’s analysis, the following is his commentary on the opening to Hegel’s philosophy of history: History knows [for Hegel] only a geographical beginning. “The history of the world,” says Hegel, “starts from the Orient and marches towards the Occident; Asia is the beginning, and Europe is the end.” But what is necessary about this point of departure and this process? Why does civilization start from the Orient and not the Occident, why does spirit, instead of continuing its development in the Orient, set out on a voyage to Europe, and why does its evolution terminate solely here?

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Moreover, if history is the necessary development of the universal spirit in time, if reason dominates everything and invariably tends towards a predetermined end, why does not the same progress involve humanity in its entirety, why do so many nations remain outside this movement? Why does Europe alone participate in this heritage while the peoples of the Orient remain stationary? And if, once it has been assured in Europe, the progress will proceed to spread everywhere, what will be the end result of this movement? Will humankind have existed on Earth only for the universal spirit to give itself, by means of so many generations and sacrifices, the consciousness of itself? And once it has been realized entirely, what will be the outcome of this drama, this immense epic? Once freedom has triumphed everywhere, and the golden age of which poets dreamt in the past has been realized in the future, what will ultimately become of humankind? To all these questions the system of absolute science has no answer. In order to apply the general principles of his philosophy to the march of history, Hegel had to abstract not only from certain facts of little importance, or what could be regarded as pure accident, but from the entire variety of manners and institutions, powerful wills and movements—now progressive, now retrograde—that really make up history. If there is in history a necessary and absolute progress, why does it follow that this progress is not accomplished with the constant regularity of an organic development? There is more to the historical development of humanity than a movement of Spirit seeking to give itself the consciousness of freedom, and the perfectibility of the species comprises much more than freedom alone, which is not the goal of civilization but only its condition and means. Finally, this freedom towards which the universal spirit tended, beginning with the Orient, and which it achieved in the French Revolution—was it the product of a more or a less advanced development? Madame de Staël said that it was freedom that was old, and not servitude. What has been perfected over time is less the feeling and the love of freedom than its organization and the institutions that guarantee it for everyone. And so, what is the relationship between political freedom as it has existed in various forms and at different times, and the definitive consciousness [of freedom] towards which universal Spirit in Hegel tends? It is not under the rule of absolute idealism that the constitution conceived in 1789 was established in France, and thus the last term of the universal spirit’s work in the history of humankind does not coincide with that of philosophical development reaching its perfection in the systems of Schelling and Hegel. It is under the rule of sensualism that the regime of freedom was born, which does not mean that the sensualism of Locke and Condillac is more favourable to it than the rationalism of Leibniz and Descartes; but, nevertheless, it has also not been demonstrated that there is a necessary causal relationship between pantheistic idealism and universal freedom. No doubt a mind that has the consciousness that it is itself the absolute must bear any yoke with impatience and recognize the sovereignty of all; but, in order to arrive at freedom, to desire it for oneself and for others, it is not necessary to be a pantheist—it is enough to recognize human dignity in general and to be animated by a love of justice and humanity. (Willm 1846–9: 446–9)

5.4 Crossing the Rhine: Visits and Letters The final set of mechanisms in the production of a French reception of German absolute idealism were those that involved the creation of networks of acquaintances and information that passed back and forth across the Rhine—both physically through travel and intellectually through correspondence.

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5.4.1 Research Visits Those personally involved in Franco-German philosophical exchanges in the early nineteenth century are situated according to one of three geographical positions. First, there were those philosophers permanently resident in Germany but writing primarily for a French audience, like Ancillon; Villers; Quinet, who, after studying at the University of Heidelberg in 1826–7, married in Germany and spent the best part of the next decade based there; Claude Husson (the translator of Schelling’s Bruno and Hegel’s history of philosophy) who lived in Munich for 11 years; or even Louis Prévost who spent several years in Germany prior to publishing his Hegel monograph (Prévost 1844: viii). Secondly, there were those German philosophers, particularly Hegel’s students, who visited France in various capacities to disseminate philosophical information. Gans’s three visits to Paris in 1825, 1830 and 1835 are particularly significant, as too is Heine’s role in bringing philosophical expertise to France (émigrés who came to Paris in the 1840s often followed self-consciously in his footsteps) (see §3.4.2 above). But equally significant is Hegel’s own visit to Paris in September 1827 (see D’Hondt 1968: 192–211, Pinkard 2001: 550–9). In Paris, Hegel—in his own words—“hunted up Cousin right away” (Hegel 1985: 650), greeting his wife on his arrival with the words, “I am now writing to you, my dear, from this capital of the civilized world, in the office of my friend Cousin” (Hegel 1985: 649). Hegel’s experience of French intellectual life was mediated almost entirely through Cousin and his liberal circle—his early days were spent “running around to take in the noteworthy sights and […] eating and chatting with Cousin, whose faithful friendship has taken care of me in every other respect as well” (Hegel 1985: 653). As he puts it on 26th September, “I am of course with Cousin every day” (Hegel 1985: 658). Thirdly, there were those French philosophers who travelled to Germany to attend lectures or visit intellectual masters. Everyone in this category followed, faithfully or not, in Staël’s footprints—Staël even directly advised Cousin on the logistics of his first trip through central Germany in 1817. Cousin himself would make four visits to Germany in 1817 (when he first met Hegel), 1818 through Southern Germany (when he met Schelling), 1824–5 (when he was arrested in Dresden and held in Berlin—see §3.2.2) and then in 1831 in a ministerial capacity to collect information on German education systems. In Staël’s and Cousin’s wake, it became more frequent for young francophone philosophers to spend time in Germany. As Jacques Matter wrote in the 1840s, “Many Frenchmen, Alsatians, Lorrainians, Bretons, Provençals have heard Schelling in Munich” (Matter 1845: 31). Schelling himself similarly reports, “There arrive here from time-to-time French students; but they are, for the most part, from Lamennais’s school. I would also desire to see some of another stamp” (Cousin and Schelling 1991: 219; see Tilliette 1999: 292). Many philosophers visited Berlin and Munich informally (such as Bautain, Léon and Eugène Bore, Edmond de Cazalès, Éloi Jourdain, Henri-­ Dominique Lacordaire, Lamennais, Lerminier, Jules Michelet, Amédée Prévost, Rio and Taillandier), but any list of those who attended Schelling’s lectures would

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include, as well as Matter himself, Charles de Montalembert at the Munich lectures in 1828; Adolphe Lèbre in Munich during 1833; Xavier Quiris and Eduard Kolloff at a similar time; Charles Secrétan in Munich in Winter 1836 and Autumn 1839; and Henri-Frédéric Amiel in Berlin in the mid-1840s (see Tilliette 1999: 290–5). Hegel’s premature death prevented French students from attending his lectures in the same quantity. However, it is certain that Jules Lechevalier came to Berlin in 1828 to hear Hegel, as well as Gans and Michelet, and d’Eichtal studied with him earlier in the decade. Moreover, Saint-Marc Girardin and Adolphe Pictet seem to have been the only francophone thinkers to  have attended both Hegel’s and Schelling’s lectures: Pictet, inspired by Cousin, did so in 1822 (while Schelling was still at Erlangen) and Girardin visited Berlin in 1830 and Munich in 1833. The most significant of these visitors to Germany after Staël and Cousin was, however, Ravaisson. During late 1839, he attended Schelling’s Winter lecture course on the philosophy of revelation in Munich. Its importance is demonstrated by two letters he wrote from Munich—the first on 27th November to his former teacher, Hector Poret: I have seen lots of Schelling and he has brought me, as much as he could, up to date on his new ideas which will without doubt achieve, through this philosophy, a new and perhaps fruitful epoch. Unfortunately, my too imperfect knowledge of German has not allowed me to read, as he wanted, the first part of a book which he has finally decided to publish. (in David 1952: 454)

This letter implies that Ravaisson had privileged access to Schelling’s lecture notes of the period (Mauve 1995: 68), but it also contains what must be a strategic understatement of his German language skills (he had already translated Schelling into French in 1835—see Mauve and Vermeren 1988: 61–3). The second, more effusive letter is to Edgar Quinet from 23rd November 1839. It begins with Ravaisson’s reaction to Parisian academic politics, particularly “Cousin’s opposition” to Quinet’s new position, as well as the gossip surrounding his “rejection” of Jules Michelet from the Collège de France. Ravaisson then continues, You know already how and why I’m in Munich and not, according to my first project, in Heidelberg. I prefer the bigger and more philosophical town, and I am far from repenting of my resolution. I have here found Schelling all guns blazing and in the youth of his great spirit; I could study very closely this new and truly important phase of German philosophy which he will author. No, all is not finished here with Hegel. Schelling today emerges from this scholastic cloud, he renounces what he calls the dry formalism and the sterile inflatedness of all that logic, and he has already given in his lectures, which I am reading, elements of a free and substantial philosophy—one which is, as he calls it, genuinely positive. Both of us find a singular conformity between this new direction and the direction I believe I’m taking and I’ve tried to sketch. […] But even if this philosophy is not destined to bring about a new scientific epoch (at least, here and in Schelling’s direction), it will at least have the effect of delivering the German mind from the chains of abstractions which muzzle it, to draw the holy from its logical prison. And it is perhaps in France, on virgin territory, that we will be able to realise that promise and fulfil the newly discovered ideal. For the rest, the war between Schelling and Hegel’s turbulent students is violent and passionate. […] We will, I hope, speak of all this at leisure. (in David 1952: 455–7)

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Quinet responded: “Everything you tell me of Munich and your work gives me the desire to see you again! So, you have Schelling’s secret! It is high time you returned to philosophy which is dying at home” (in Schuhl 1936: 501). Central to Ravaisson’s experience of Schelling’s lectures is not only their emancipatory potential through a return to the concrete, but also the juxtaposition of Cousin’s suffocating hold on French philosophical institutions and the revolution in thinking that Schelling promises. According to this letter, Schelling provides Ravaisson with the possibility of an alternative to the hegemony of Cousinian eclecticism, as well as Hegelian dialectic.

5.4.2 Epistolary Networks A further mechanism of “soft diplomacy” in Franco-German philosophical culture was the exchange of letters. Correspondence functioned as a way of disseminating information and expertise, as well as creating and consolidating personal networks of acquaintance. Such correspondences are too extensive to chart in full here; nevertheless, Michel Espagne and Michael Werner’s research on Cousin’s epistolary networks provides a helpful case study. Espagne and Werner argue that Franco-German philosophical correspondence should not be understood as a proliferating series of discrete exchanges, but as nested sub-networks—“parallel and complementary networks” (Espagne and Werner 1990: 24)—within an overall network that was, for the most part, governed by Victor Cousin from the 1820s into the 1840s. Goldstein speaks of Cousin’s correspondence as perhaps the most “effective institution” of philosophical control in post-revolutionary France (Goldstein 2008: 202). Indeed, for Espagne and Werner, Cousin’s role in initiating and sustaining this circulation of letters “cannot be overestimated” (Espagne and Werner 1986: 84), for it provided him with his most powerful tool in consolidating his monopoly over the import of German ideas into France. That is, letters from Germany supplied him with the materials needed to remain up to date on German philosophical developments and retain an aura of expertise: “The multitude and quality of information about German philosophy at Cousin’s disposal from his German contacts is without precedent in French intellectual history” (Espagne and Werner 1986: 70). This quantity of information was also multidisciplinary and may be defined in terms of an “extreme diversification” (Espagne and Werner 1986: 69): his correspondents “belong to the most diverse branches of intellectual activity, demonstrating the interdisciplinary, even universalist character of the ‘Cousin phenomenon’” (Espagne and Werner 1986: 80–1). They touched on educational theory and practice, politics, theology, art, philology, and classical literature, as well as philosophy. There are around 400 extant letters that Cousin received from German correspondents, most of which date from before 1848. They include most significantly:

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from F. W. J. Schelling from Eduard Gans from K. L. Michelet from F. W. Carové from Friedrich Creuzer from Friedrich Thiersch from F. D. E. Schleiermacher from G. W. F. Hegel from H. G. Hotho

Some of these exchanges are spread over a long period of time (the Schelling-­letters stretch from 1818 to 1845), while some are concentrated in the late 1820s or early 1830s (like those from Hotho). The letters Cousin sent and received performed a number of intellectual functions. As already mentioned, their primary function was dissemination of information—for example, in 1826, Gans is quick to inform Cousin of the news that “Hegelian philosophy has divided into two branches” (in Espagne and Werner 1990: 61). As Espagne and Werner point out, this dissemination of information can become on occasion almost pedagogical and “didactic in tone”, based on “a latent conviction of German theoretical superiority” (1986: 73–4). Letters from Hegel’s students were a valuable source of up-to-date news on Hegel’s work and health, as well as a source of solace for Hegel’s own silence. As Hegel put it in 1826, “I have considered myself to be in a kind of conversation with you through the intermediary of common friends” (in Espagne and Werner 1990: 71). Gans, Hotho, Michelet and occasionally Carové all acted as Hegel’s “secretaries”, in Cousin’s phrase, apologising on his behalf (e.g., “Hegel was on the point of writing to you, when a slightly serious indisposition befell him” [in Espagne and Werner 1990: 66]) and extending proofs of his friendship (e.g., “You cannot have a more tender more eager friend than Hegel” [in Espagne and Werner 1990: 61]). In Espagne’s and Werner’s words, “Hegel writes little to Cousin and limits himself essentially to an exchange of politesse, as if he wanted to delegate the ‘serious’ part of this correspondence to his students” (1986: 67). However, it was not just one-way traffic: throughout the early 1830s during the formation of the Hegelian Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik, Cousin’s Hegelian correspondents sought information on the editorial model of Le Globe (see extracts in Espagne and Werner 1986: 62, 66, 83; Waszek 1994). That is, it is worth stressing that “Paris was as important for the Hegelians as Berlin was for Cousin” (Espagne and Werner 1990: 35): Carové, for example, solicited Cousin repeatedly for information (Espagne and Werner 1990: 33–4), in order to undertake his project of disseminating contemporary French philosophy in Germany. A letter from F. E. Beneke is exemplary: “I very willingly accept your amiable offer of an exchange of news on what happens in our philosophical world. But all the advantage will be mine. Among us philosophical development has attained a phase of senility and almost an age of death” (in Espagne and Werner 1990: 138).

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Cousin’s correspondence also functioned as a means of gaining support and help for aspiring young thinkers and protégés. The young Cousin himself obtained a letter of introduction from Hegel to visit Goethe (Espagne and Werner 1990: 10), and more concertedly Schelling and Cousin employed their correspondence to recommend students to each other: Cousin sent a letter for Saint-Marc Girardin in 1833 (Cousin and Schelling 1991: 220), while Schelling sent them for Amédée Prévost in 1827 (Cousin and Schelling  1991: 207), Joseph Müller in 1833 (Cousin and Schelling 1991: 219, 221), Xavier Quiris in 1834 (Cousin and Schelling 1991: 228; see Tilliette 1999: 293) and Joseph Daxenberger in 1839 (Cousin and Schelling 1991: 247). Indeed, their correspondence is at times little more than a display of such soft power—an “alliance due as much to tactical considerations as theoretical convergences” (Espagne and Werner 1986: 69). In the case of the Cousin-Hegel correspondence, Jacques Derrida likewise comments that these letters mark “the birth of philosophy in the age of European civil service” (Derrida 2002: 125). Cousin’s political ascendancy in the aftermath of the July Revolution particularly attracted German thinkers in need of patronage in France (see Espagne and Werner 1986: 75): K. L. Michelet, for example, initially wrote to Cousin in the hope of a chair in Aristotelian philosophy in Paris. Cousin’s correspondence additionally served as a conduit for the circulation of texts, sending and receiving publications across the Rhine. Cousin was particularly keen to send his German contacts each of his publications during the 1820s and 1830s, including his editions of Proclus and Descartes, and Hegel makes use of the edition of Proclus gifted him by Cousin in his lectures on the history of philosophy. The correspondence therefore further functioned as a means to obtain feedback on these publications: Gans, for example, reports back to Cousin that “your [1828] lecture course has here made some sensation and is considered the intimate journal of philosophical France. We admire the spirit that animates it” (in Espagne and Werner 1990: 126). Equally, Cousin receives a running commentary on the success of Carové’s translation of the 1826 Preface to Fragments philosophiques (in Espagne and Werner 1990: 65, 80, 82, 103).

Bibliography Anon. 1832. Publication des ouvrages de Hegel. Revue encyclopédique 53: 464–466. Aramini, Aurélien, and Vincent Bourdeau. 2015. Synthèse et association. La Revue encyclopédique de Leroux, Reynaud et Carnot. In Quand les socialistes inventaient l’avenir: Presse, théories et expériences,1825–1860, ed. Thomas Bouchet et al., 84–96. Paris: La Découverte. Azar, Amine A. 1986. Le cas Victor Cousin, un étrange observateur de la pensée germanique pendant le début du XIXe siècle. Critique 473: 981–998. Barthélémy-Saint-Hilaire, Jules. 1849. Méthode. In Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques, ed. Adolphe Franck, vol. 4, 253–270. Paris: Hachette. ———, ed. 1895. M. Victor Cousin, sa vie et sa correspondance, 3 vols. Paris: Hachette. Bellantone, Andrea. 2011. Hegel en France, 1817–1941, 2 vols. Trans. Virginie Gaugey. Paris: Hermann.

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Brémand, Nathalie. 2015. Une version socialiste de La Revue des Deux Mondes. La Revue indépendante de Leroux et Sand. In Quand les socialistes inventaient l’avenir: Presse, théories et expériences, 1825–1860, ed. Thomas Bouchet et al., 239–246. Paris: La Découverte. Cotten, Jean-Pierre. 1994. Victor Cousin et la ‘mauvaise métaphysique de l’Allemagne dégénérée’. In La Réception de la philosophie allemande en France aux XIXe et XXe siècles, ed. Jean Quillien, 85–110. Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille. Cousin, Victor. 1835. De la métaphysique d’Aristote. Rapport sur le concours ouvert par l’Académie des sciences morales et politiques. Paris: Ladrange. Cousin, Victor, and F.W.J.  Schelling. 1991. Correspondance, 1818–1845, ed. Christiane Mauve and Patrice Vermeren, Corpus 18/19: 199–249. D’Hondt, Jacques. 1968. Hegel en son temps. Paris: Éditions sociales. ———. 1971. Hegel et les socialistes. La Pensée 157: 3–25. David, M. 1952. Le séjour de F.  Ravaisson à Munich d’après une lettre inédite. Revue philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger 142: 454–456. Derrida, Jacques. 2002. Who’s Afraid of Philosophy? Right to Philosophy I. Trans. Jan Plug. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Espagne, Michel. 1985. Le nouveau langage: Introduction de la philosophie allemande en France de 1815 à 1830. In De Lessing à Heine. Un siѐcle de relations littéraires et intellectuelles entre la France et l’Allemagne, ed. Jean-Marie Valentin et al., 262–276. Paris: Didier. ———. 1986. Le saint-simonisme est-il jeune-hégélien? In Regards sur le Saint-Simonisme et les Saint-Simoniens, ed. Jean-René Derré, 45–69. Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon. Espagne, Michel, and Michael Werner. 1986. Les correspondants allemands de Victor Cousin. Hegel-Studien 21: 65–85. ———. 1987. La construction d’une référence culturelle allemande en France: genèse et histoire (1750–1914). Annales 4: 962–992. ———. 1990. Lettres d’Allemagne. Victor Cousin et les hégéliens. Tusson: Du Lérot. Fedi, Laurent. 2018. Schelling en France au XIXe siècle. Les cahiers philosophiques de Strasbourg 43: 13–80. Franck, Adolphe. 1844. Préface. In Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques, ed. Adolphe Franck, vol. 1, v–xx. Paris: Hachette. Furman, Nelly. 1975. La Revue des Deux Mondes et le romantisme, 1831–1848. Geneva: Droz. Goblot, Jean-Jacques. 1995. La jeune France libérale: Le Globe et son groupe littéraire, 1824–1830. Paris: Plon. Goldstein, Jay. 2008. The Post-Revolutionary Self: Politics and Psyche in France, 1750–1850. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Grandjonc, Jacques. 1970. La presse de l’émigration allemande en France (1795–1848) et en Europe (1830–1848). Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 10: 95–152. Guiran, Fortuné. 1845. De la philosophie allemande depuis Kant jusqu’à nos jours. La Revue nouvelle 5: 287–236. ———. 1846. Lettres à M. Charles de Rémusat sur la philosophie de Hegel. La Revue nouvelle 8: 62–92. Hegel, G.W.F. 1985. The Letters, ed. and trans. Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kramer, Lloyd S. 1988. Threshold of a New World: Intellectuals and the Exile Experience in Paris, 1830–1848. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Lacassagne, Jean-Pierre. 1973. Histoire d’une amitié. Pierre Leroux et George Sand. Paris: Klincksieck. Leroux, Pierre. 1836. Éclectisme. In Encyclopédie nouvelle, ed. Pierre Leroux and Jean Reynaud, vol. 4, 462–538. Gosselin: Paris. Matter, Jacques. 1845. Schelling ou la philosophie de la nature et la philosophie de la révélation. Paris: Comptoir. Mauve, Christiane. 1995. Ravaisson, lecteur et interprète de Schelling. Romantisme 88: 65–74.

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Mauve, Christiane and Patrice Vermeren. 1988. Le passage de la ligne: politiques de la nationalité philosophique sur les deux rives du Rhin. Le Cahier du Collège International de Philosophie 6: 53–65. Michelet, K.L. 1836. Examen critique de l’ouvrage d’Aristote intitulé Métaphysique. Paris: Mercklein. Monchoux, André. 1965. L’Allemagne devant les lettres françaises: De 1814 à 1835. Paris:Armand. Pinkard, Terry. 2001. Hegel: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Prévost, Amédée. 1832. Hegel. Revue de Paris 46: 115–124. ———. 1835. Nomination de Schelling à l’Institut. Revue du Nord 1: 395–397. Prévost, Louis. 1844. Hegel. Exposition de sa doctrine. Toulouse: Labouïsse-Rochefort. Ragghianti, Renzo. 2001. Victor Cousin et la querelle du panthéisme. In Victor Cousin, Nouvelle théodicée d’après la méthode psychologique, 7–51. Paris: L’Harmattan. Ravaisson, Félix. 2001. De la métaphysique d’Aristote, 1834. In De la nature à l’esprit: Études sur la philosophie française du XIXe siècle, ed. Raynald Belay and Claire Marin, 197–213. Lyon: ENS Éditions. Rémusat, Charles de. 1845. De la philosophie allemande. Paris: Ladrange. Rowe, Paul. 2000. A Mirror on the Rhine?: the Nouvelle revue germanique, Strasbourg 1829–1837. Oxford: Peter Lang. Saisset, Émile. 1849. Panthéisme. In Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques, ed. Adolphe Franck, vol. 4, 521–548. Paris: Hachette. Schuhl, Pierre-Maxime. 1936. Félix Ravaisson, Edgar Quinet et Schelling: Lettres. Revue de métaphysique et de morale 43 (4): 487–506. Tilliette, Xavier. 1999. Schelling: Biographie. Paris: Calmann-Lévy. Vera, Augusto. 1847. Coup d’oeil historique et critique sur l’idéalisme. Paris: Panckoncke. Waszek, Norbert. 1994. Eduard Gans, die “Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik” und die französische Publizistik der Zeit. In Die “Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik”: Hegels Berliner Gegenakademie, ed. Christophe Jamme, 93–118. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog. Willm, Joseph. 1831. Nécrologie de Hegel. Nouvelle revue germanique 19 (36): 268–270. ———. 1834. Préface. Nouvelle revue germanique 18 (72): iii-ix. ———. 1846–9. Histoire de la philosophie allemande depuis Kant jusqu’à Hegel, 4 vols. Paris: Ladrange. ———. 1847. Hegel. In Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques, ed. Adolphe Franck, vol. 3, 26–43. Paris: Hachette. ———. 1851. Schelling. In Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques, ed. Adolphe Franck, vol. 5, 508–529. Paris: Hachette.

Chapter 6

Chronology of Key Works Daniel Whistler and Ayşe Yuva with Kirill Chepurin and Adi Efal-Lautenschläger

Abstract  The present chapter enumerates in chronological order—fairly exhaustively—those francophone works which discussed the philosophies of Hegel and Schelling and were published between 1800 and 1848. Where a work has not been mentioned in the previous chapters, a short precis of its significance for Hegel’s and Schelling’s reception-histories is provided. Keywords  F. W. J. Schelling · G. W. F. Hegel · Victor Cousin · Joseph Willm · Pierre Leroux · Charles de Villers The following is a list of all the major works dedicated to discussions of Hegel’s and Schelling’s philosophies in France between 1800 and 1848, as well as a representative sample of works that include some substantial reference to them.1 Where a work has not been mentioned in the analysis above, a cursory indication of its significance for Hegel’s and Schelling’s reception-histories is provided. The list is limited to published works and, as such, excludes other important materials  Works explicitly quoted in this chapter appear in the bibliography at the end of the chapter. However, full citation details of all the works mentioned in this chapter are to be found in the general bibliography at the end of the volume. 1

D. Whistler (*) Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK e-mail: [email protected] A. Yuva Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected] K. Chepurin University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany A. Efal-Lautenschläger University of Tel Aviv, Bar-Ilan University and the Beit Berl Academic College, Tel Aviv, Israel © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Chepurin et al. (eds.), Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France, International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d’histoire des idées 246, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39322-8_6

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recording engagement with absolute idealism, e.g., journals, drafts, letters and notes of lecture courses, such as Cousin’s notes on Hegel’s aesthetics or Secrétan’s notes on Schelling’s Munich lectures. 1801 (i) Villers, Charles de. Philosophie de Kant ou Principes fondamentaux de la philosophie transcendantale [Kant’s Philosophy, or the Fundamental Principles of Transcendental Philosophy], Metz. See §3.1.1 above.

1804 (i) Degérando, Joseph-Marie. Histoire comparée des systèmes de philosophie relativement aux principes des connaissances humaines [Comparative History of the Systems of Philosophy in Relation to the Principles of Human Knowledge], 3 vols, Paris. See §3.1.1 above.

(ii) Schweighäuser, Geoffroy. “L’État actuel de la philosophie en Allemagne” [“The Current State of Philosophy in Germany”], in Archives littéraires de l’Europe. See §3.1.1 above.

1809 (i) Ancillon, Friedrich. Mélanges de littérature et de philosophie [Miscellany of Literature and Philosophy], Paris. See §3.1.2 above.

1812 (i) Maine de Biran, Pierre. Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie [Essay on the Fundaments of Psychology], Paris. See §3.1.3 above.

1813 (i) Staël, Germaine de. De l’Allemagne [On Germany], 2 vols, London. See §3.1.3 above.

1821 (i) Proclus, Procli philosophi platonici opera [Works of Proclus, the Platonic Philosopher], vol. 4, ed. V. Cousin, Paris. The fourth volume of Cousin’s edition of Proclus’s works, which comprises Proclus’s commentary on the Parmenides, is dedicated to Hegel and Schelling: “amicis et magistris, philosophiae praesentis ducibus [To my friends and teachers, the leaders of contemporary philosophy]”. It is no coincidence that Cousin chose the Parmenides for this dedication, writing to Schelling, “I hope you will see in this commentary some glimmers of your ideas” (Cousin and Schelling 1991: 202).

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1822 (i) Schelling. F.  W. J. Des Divinités de la Samothrace [The Deities of Samothrace], trans. A. Pictet, in Bibliothèque universelle. See §4.1.1 above.

1824 (i) Pictet, Adolphe. Du culte des Cabires chez les anciens Irlandais [On the Worship of the Cabiri in Ancient Ireland], Geneva/Paris. Building on his 1822 translation of Schelling’s Über die Gottheiten von Samothrake, Pictet provides a reconstruction of Irish Druid mythology that attempts to show that it corresponds to and so corroborates Schelling’s conclusions about Samothrace. It is therefore heavily dependent on Über die Gottheiten von Samothrake, citing it around 30 times over its 150 pages.

1825 (i) Montrol, François Mongin de. “Le Cimetière de Lystenal” [“Lystenal Cemetery”], in Le Mercure du dix-neuvième siècle. Montol’s essay includes passing reference to the concept of the world-soul from Plato’s Timaeus—a concept which he then traces through the history of philosophy from Parmenides, Aristotle and the Stoics, through Van Helmont, to “the ideas of Kant’s school” (by which Schelling is presumably meant)—such ideas are, he concludes, “just the repetition or application of ancient opinions” (Montrol 1825: 76).

1826 (i) Cousin, Victor. Fragments philosophiques [Philosophical Fragments], 1st ed, Paris. Cousin’s first major publication of his own philosophy does not yet mention Hegel or Schelling by name, but does provide excerpts from and summaries of his 1817 and 1818 lecture courses partly influenced by them—see §3.2.2 above.

(ii) Laurent, P.  M. Review: V. Cousin, Fragments philosophiques, in Le Producteur. See §3.2.3.

(iii) Plato, Œuvres, vol. 3: Protagoras, Gorgias, ed. and trans. V. Cousin, Paris. Cousin’s translation includes a long dedication to Hegel, dated 15th July 1826, to thank him for his support during his Berlin incarceration (see §3.2.2 above): “To G. W. F. Hegel, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Berlin. My dear Hegel, I pray you to accept the homage of this translation of the Gorgias. It is due, of course, to you as the first to restore the maxims contained in this ancient monument to its place of honour, amidst the eternal principles of the philosophy of right. But another reason leads me to address this homage to you. Ten years ago, Hegel, you received me in Heidelberg like a brother and, from that first moment, our souls understood each other and loved each other. Absence and silence do not cool your friendship; and when recently, travelling once more in Germany, the excessive police force, directed by an odious politics, dared to

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D. Whistler et al. attack my freedom, making the most atrocious accusations against me and declaring me convicted and condemned in advance, you rushed spontaneously to present yourself before my judges, to tell them that you were my friend and to give your word for mine. I wish, Hegel, to thank you publicly for this noble conduct, not for you nor for me, but for philosophy. You proved that it is not always a sterile occupation and that the genius of abstraction can very well be accompanied with firmness of soul and courage in life. One more time, Hegel, I thank you.” The dedication caused some controversy in Germany owing to its implication of Hegel’s influence over the Prussian Government (see Pinkard 2001: 546).

1827 (i) Ballanche, Pierre-Simon. Essais de palingénésie sociale [Essays on Social Palingenesis], 3 vols, Paris. Ballanche’s work is a speculative philosophy of history based on the categories of the unity of humankind and a trinitarian structure of social evolution, which, even though it does not discuss Hegel, bears an obvious closeness to a progressivist reading of Hegel.

(ii) Carové, F.  W. Religion und Philosophie in Frankreich [Religion and Philosophy in France], Göttingen. A volume of translations of contemporary French philosophy and theology, including the Preface to the first edition of Cousin’s Fragments philosophiques and the introduction to Cousin’s edition of Descartes.

(iii) Cousin, Victor. “Platon” [“Plato”], in Le Globe. Written in the weeks following Hegel’s visit to Paris in Autumn 1827, according to Janet “this writing bears the most precise and most certain witness to Hegel’s immediate influence” on Cousin (Janet 1885: 232). It is close in method to Cousin’s 1828 lecture course, establishing a schema of a priori triplicities— roughly, affirmation, negation and synthesis—through which Plato’s life and work are to be understood. Janet also conjectures that it is precisely because of its overt Hegelianism that Cousin did not use this text as a “general introduction” for his Plato-translations as he first planned nor reprint it in any subsequent form (Janet 1885: 231–2).

(iv) Eckstein, Ferdinand von. “De la philosophie” [“On Philosophy”], in Le Catholique. A reconstruction of Eckstein’s romantic Catholic philosophy which treats Schelling in passing as follows: “Schelling, Fichte’s successor, was more consistent, since, in his pantheism, following the example of the Stoics in their system, he transformed the human soul into the world-­soul and identified the I with the not-I, the human with nature, to the extent that, in this system, the limit of the finite is everywhere overcome by human spirit, which lives freely in the infinite after having absorbed the entire universe into its individual being. If Schelling had taken a step further, he would have recognised the Creator, he would have returned to Catholicism, instead of seeking God, with the pantheists, in a perfect equation of I and not-­I, the human and nature.” (von Eckstein 1827: 402)

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1828 (i) Anon. Review: J. D. Choisy, Des doctrines exclusives en philosophie rationnelle, in Le Globe. The review serves as an occasion for a sustained critique of the movement of “philosophy of nature”—the author identifies Schelling as leader of the school but also cites Steffens and Oken, among others. The critique centres on the relationship between empiricism and rationalism in their work, arguing that ultimately philosophers of nature make use of the veneer of scientific method to disguise a “pure rationalism” (Anon. 1828a: 670).

(ii) Anon. “Un moraliste au cours de M. Cousin” [“A Moralist at Cousin’s Lecture Course”], in Le Gymnase. An anonymous critical report on Cousin’s 1828 lecture course, under which bubbles the accusation—never made fully explicit—that Cousin has betrayed French philosophical traditions by his obscure speculations (see Monchoux 1965: 170). For example, “the moralist” writes, “Cousin has done little to gain any clarity in his language. […] He entirely renounces the French language to speak a language which has no name, writing, for example, that ‘all subjectivity along with all reflexivity expires in the spontaneity of apperception’” (Anon. 1828b: 268).

(iii) Anon. “Lettre de Munich, sur la nouvelle université de cette ville” (“Letter from Munich on the City’s New University”), in Le Mémorial catholique. As part of a survey of contemporary intellectual events in Munich, the reporter writes of Schelling, “It is known that the inventor of the philosophical system of ideality has entirely turned towards Christianity. And it is, it seems to me, more by way of historical investigations than by the path of speculation that he has reached this result. This is why it is difficult to reconcile his philosophical system, which he is always keen to defend, with the ideas of Christianity. He is currently occupied with the composition of a work which will probably vanquish all doubts in this regard. When Schelling publicly stated that he was convinced of the truth of the Christian religion, he excited a great astonishment […] and some thought he had become a Catholic, which is false. […] It is true, nonetheless, that Schelling is very moderate and very just when he comes to speak of Catholicism” (Anon. 1828c: 394).

(iv) Broussais, F.  J. V. De l’irritation et de la folie [On Irritation and on Madness]. Paris. See §3.3 above.

(v) Cousin, Victor. Cours de philosophie. Introduction à l’histoire de la philosophie [Lecture Course on Philosophy: Introduction to the History of Philosophy], Paris. See §3.2.3 above.

(vi) Comte, Auguste. Examen du traité de Broussais sur l'irritation [Commentary on Broussais’ Treatise on Irritation], Paris. See §3.3 above.

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1829 (i) Anon. Review: K.  E. Schubarth and K.  A. Carganico, Über Philosophie überhaupt, und Hegels Enzyclopädie insbesondere, in Nouvelle revue germanique. Presumably written by Willm (it anticipates his future essays on Hegel), this review uses the “diatribe against philosophy” (Anon 1829: 192) found in K. E. Schubarth’s and K. A. Carganico’s anti-Hegelian polemic to introduce readers to Hegel’s philosophy. Hegel is understood as part of the Kant-Fichte-Schelling sequence culminating in a “logical pantheism” (Anon 1829: 193). Much is also made of the slowness with which Hegel attracted followers in Germany, compared with the brief dazzling popularity of Schelling’s system of identity.

(ii) J. B. Review: Wolfgang Menzel, Die Deutsche Literatur, in Le Globe. The review makes passing reference to Schelling as Fichte’s heir and describes his absolute identity as “Spinozism raised to its highest power”, in which “spirit and matter are only emanations, manifestations of the divine idea”, and with the result that “Schelling is chief of the German pantheists” (J. B. 1829: 583).

(iii) Lerminier, Eugène. Introduction générale à l'histoire du droit [General Introduction to the History of Law], Paris. Chapter Eighteen of this work is devoted to Gans’s “new philosophical school” in jurisprudence and, as part of this account, provides “a sketch of Hegel’s system”— its first French reconstruction. See §3.3.1 above.

(iv) Schulz, Wilhelm. ”L’Allemagne en 1829” [“Germany in 1829”], trans. J. Willm, in Nouvelle revue germanique. An abridged translation from Schulz’s 1829 Almanach für Geschichte des Zeitgeistes this essay covers many areas of contemporary German life and includes within that a page on Hegel’s philosophy, which is “without a doubt a very important and very natural element in the history of the development of the human mind” (Schulz 1829: 117). Ultimately, though, Schulz criticises Hegel as a reactionary and this piece is one of the means—alongside Lerminier’s early work—by which a reading of Hegel as political absolutist enters French philosophy at the turn of the 1830s. Schulz associates Hegel’s philosophy—particularly the Doppelsatz from the Philosophie des Rechts—with a post-revolutionary movement of reaction: “In accordance with the principle that what currently exists is rational, Hegel’s philosophy has in many of its developments shown its predilection for absolute monarchy”. It continues, “It has as its object to defend what exists positively and thus participates in the narrow and exclusive spirit of the system of absolute stability in politics. These philosophers [like Hegel] could well slow down, but never stop the progressive march of the liberals” (Schulz 1829: 116–17). Notably, as translator, Willm includes a concluding footnote which insists, “We must recall to our readers that we have acted here merely as translator, and do not share all the opinions of the author” (Schulz 1829: 126).

(v) Tennemann, W. G. Manuel de l’histoire de la philosophie [Manual of the History of Philosophy], trans. V. Cousin, 2 vols, Paris. See §3.2.2 above.

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1830 (i) Anon. Review: F. W. Carové, Religion und Philosophie in Frankreich, in Le Globe. This pro-eclectic review discerns in Carové’s anthology of recent French philosophy “the beginning of philosophical communication across the Rhine” (Anon 1830: 92), stressing the importance of Cousin in particular receiving attention from a student of Hegel. The anonymous reviewer writes, “If nineteenth-century France is going to seek inspiration in Germany just as eighteenth-century [France] borrowed from England, it is with genuine satisfaction that we also see Germany turn its gaze towards France and investigate with interest the signs of the new spirit which is awakening among us in religion and philosophy.” (Anon 1830: 91) The reviewer also defends Cousin against Carové’s amicable criticisms on causality and natural laws, particularly by invoking Hegel’s authority against his student Carové.

(ii) Schelling, F. W. J. “Sur les objections ordinaires contre l’étude de la philosophie” [“On Common Objections to the Study of Philosophy”], trans. J. Willm, in Nouvelle revue germanique. See §4.1.2 above.

(iii) Thurot, François. De l‘entendement et de la raison: Introduction à l‘étude de la philosophie [On the Understanding and on Reason: Introduction to the Study of Philosophy], Paris. An early critique of Cousin’s philosophy that draws attention to its origins in Schelling with particular attention paid to “the abuse of words” or “the illusion so often produced by the sterile combinations of abstract concepts” in Schelling’s and Cousin’s philosophy. At bottom, Schelling erred in “modifying in various ways Kant’s phraseology or inventing new terms” (Thurot 1830: 326–7; see Vermeren 1991: 66–8).

1831 (i) Carové, F.  W. Der Saint-Simonismus und die neuere französische Philosophie [Saint-Simonianism and Recent French Philosophy], Leipzig. See §3.4.1 above.

(ii) Lechevalier, Jules. “Religion Religion”], in L’Organisateur.

Saint-simonienne”

[“Saint-Simonian

One of the earliest rapprochements of Saint-Simonianism and Hegel which is most striking in Lechevalier’s claim that, when it comes to the discovery of a law governing human behaviour, “Hegel [among others] sought it, Saint-Simon found it” (Lechevalier 1831: 19).

(iii) Lerminier, Eugène. Philosophie du droit [Philosophy of Law], 2 vols, Paris. See §3.3.1 above.

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(iv) Quinet, Edgar. “De la révolution et de la philosophie” [“On Revolution and Philosophy”], in Revue des Deux Mondes. Before Heine popularised the interpretative strategy in France, Quinet had already begun finding analogies between German philosophy and French politics. According to this essay, Fichte is the philosopher of “a flagrant and contemporary revolution”, and, after this, “comes the age of poetry and recomposition that we call empire” which had for “its mission to force the genius of the French Revolution out of its egoistic circle and to sow it along all the great paths and to generalise it in the world of history”, and, just as Napoleon takes the Revolution to Egypt, so too “Schelling’s philosophy also began to repeat both the dreams of Alexandria and the pantheism of the Scandinavians. To no theory have we yet seen a progress so adventurous nor one that conquered with such ease.” Finally, “Hegel founded his school at the centre of the Holy Alliance. This moment of enchantment when all these kings rediscovered their past was so easy to remake [and] gave an extraordinary idea of the vital power of what the human being imagines it has destroyed.” (Quinet 1831: 467–8)

1832 (i) Ancillon, Friedrich. Essais de philosophie, de politique et de littérature [Essays on Philosophy, Politics and Literature], Paris. See §3.1.2 above.

(ii) Hegel. G.  W. F. “Système d’Hegel sur l’Etat” [“Hegel’s System of the State”], trans. Anon., in Revue européenne. See §4.2.1 above.

(iii) Börne, Ludwig. Lettres écrites à Paris [Letters Written in Paris], trans. F. Guiran, Paris. Börne’s text includes a satire on those “fine, cravat-wearing” Parisians who “gather together on a fixed day in a very elegant place to philosophise and drink lemonade […] They then dispute, at their leisure, about God, immortality, the external and internal senses, nature and attraction. Hegel would fall over with laughter. No one knows what they want. There is nothing more comical. […] It is true that the French have never been profound philosophers in the German manner. […] Philosophy is daily food for us Germans” (Börne 1832: 52–3).

(iv) Bretschneider, K.  G. Der Saintsimonismus und das Christenthum [Saint-­ Simonianism and Christianity], Leipzig. See §3.4.1 above.

(v) Gans, Eduard. “Leçons sur l’histoire des dernières cinquante années” [“Lectures on the History of the Last Fifty Years”], trans. J. Willm, in Nouvelle revue germanique. Gans’s “series of lectures on the progressive movement of the spirit of our century” (1832: 101) does not itself mention Hegel, but an editorial note by Willm makes clear that this account of the inner progressive unity of the nineteenth century emerges out of “the Hegelian school” (Gans 1832: 97).

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(vi) Gans, Eduard. “Nécrologie: Hegel” [“Obituary: Hegel”], in Nouvelle revue germanique. See §5.2.2 above.

(vii) Lagarmitte, Henri. Review: E. Quinet, De l’Allemagne et de la Revolution, in Le Globe. Under its Saint-Simonian directorship, Lagarmitte notes in passing the role of Hegel as “the inspirer of the principal conceptions of the eclectic school” (Lagarmitte 1832: 113).

(viii) Lamennais, Felicité de. Review: E. Lerminier, Lettres philosophiques à un Berlinois, in Le Semeur. See §3.5.3 above.

(ix) Lerminier, Eugène. ”Lettres philosophiques addressés à un Berlinois” [“Philosophical Letters addressed to a Berliner”], in Revue de deux mondes. See §3.3.1 above.

(x) Prévost, Amédée. “Necrologie: Hegel” [“Obituary: Hegel”], in Revue de Paris. See §5.2.1 above.

1833 (i) Barchou de Penhoën, Auguste. “Schelling: I. Esquisses de la philosophie de la nature” / “Schelling. II.  Esquisses de la philosophie de l’histoire” [“Schelling I: Outline of the Philosophy of Nature” / “Schelling II: Outline of the Philosophy of History”], in Revue des Deux Mondes. See §3.2.5 above.

(ii) Bautain, Louis. De l'enseignement de la philosophie en France au dix-­ neuvième siècle [On the Teaching of Philosophy in Nineteenth-Century France], Strasbourg. See §3.4.4 above.

(iii) Cousin, Victor, Fragments philosophiques [Philosophical Fragments], 2nd ed., Paris. See §3.2.3 above.

(iv) Cousin, Victor. Rapport sur l’état de l’instruction publique dans quelques pays de l’Allemagne et particulièrement en Prusse [Report on the State of Public Education in some Principalities of Germany and Prussia in Particular], Paris. The fruit of Cousin’s fourth trip to Germany in a government capacity—this survey devotes half of its pages to detailing the Prussian system of education, implicitly understanding it as a consequence of Hegelianism.

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(v) Lechevalier, Jules. Review: T. Jouffroy, Mélanges, in L’Europe littéraire. See §3.3.2 above. An extended version of this review (under the title, “Examen de l’éclectisme et de la philosophie du sens commun”) appeared in the first volume of Lechevalier’s own Revue du progrès social in January 1834 (see Lechevalier 1834a).

(vi) Lerminier, Eugène. “De l'influence de la philosophie du XVIIIe siècle sur la législation et la sociabilité du XIXe siècle” [“On the Influence of Eighteenth-­ Century Philosophy on Nineteenth-Century Legislation and Sociability”], in Revue des Deux Mondes. See §3.3.1 above.

(vii) Schelling, F. W. J. “M. Schelling et M. Cousin” [“Schelling and Cousin”], trans. J. Willm, in Nouvelle revue germanique. See §4.1.3 above.

(viii) Willm, Joseph. “Victor Cousin et la philosophie allemande” [“Victor Cousin and German Philosophy”], in Nouvelle revue germanique. Willm begins by praising Cousin as “having contributed the most to familiarising the French with German thought”: “He has not been content to translate it and to comment on it, to naturalise it in some way, to implant it in our soil; he has begun an intellectual movement from it with his system”. Yet, Willm then asks, “How has it come about that Cousin is being reproached for the borrowings he made from philosophical Germany as a crime?” (Willm 1833a: 18) What follows is a staging of the debate between Lerminier and Cousin, beginning with an extract from Lettres philosophiques à un Berlinois as the “accusation”, followed by Cousin’s “defence” (Willm 1833a: 20), i.e., an extended extract from the 1833 preface—with particular focus on his remarks on Hegel and Schelling.

(ix) Willm, Joseph. “Révision de la philosophie morale depuis Kant et Jacobi: IV. Fichte et Schelling / V: Schelling” [“Transformations in Moral Philosophy since Kant and Jacobi: IV.: Fichte and Schelling / V.: Schelling”], in Nouvelle revue germanique. The final two parts of a series on contemporary German philosophy begun by Willm in 1831—this is one of Willm’s first forays into the analysis and evaluation of absolute idealist doctrines. The discussion of Schelling is oriented around the overarching thesis that “Schelling ends up in an intellectual fatalism” and “antimoralism”, because, ultimately, he cannot “distinguish good from evil” (Willm 1833b: 130–1). However, the analysis is tempered by a strict periodisation of Schelling’s works into two phases separated by the 1804 Philosophie und Religion and the 1809 Freiheitsschrift: much of the analysis—particularly in the final instalment—is devoted to showing the ways in which these later works bring morality and religion back to the centre of Schelling’s philosophy via the concept of the Abfall, the Grund-Existenz distinction, the question of the possibility of evil, and the definition of religiosity. The final paragraph of the essay turns to Hegel, who, Willm here suggests, is not to be considered “the leader of a new philosophical school”, but “merely the most illustrious of Schelling’s disciples” (Willm 1833c: 276), although in a concluding footnote Willm does promise a more detailed examination of Hegel’s system as a whole—the Essai sur la philosophie de Hegel that was to begin appearing two years later.

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1834 (i) Cousin, Victor. Über französische und deutsche Philosophie [On French and German Philosophy], trans. H. Beckers with a preface by F. W. J. Schelling, Stuttgart. See §3.2.3 above.

(ii) Heine, Heinrich. “De l’Allemagne depuis Luther” [“On Germany since Luther”], in Revue des Deux Mondes. See §3.3.2 above.

(iii) Hinrichs, H. F. W. Review: V. Cousin, Fragments philosophiques, 2nd ed., in Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik. See §3.3.3 above.

(iv) La Nourais, “Hegel: Lettre au Dr C.F. Bachmann par le Dr C. Rosenkranz” [“Hegel: Rosenkranz’s Letter to Bachmann”], in Nouvelle revue germanique. A short notice that begins, “Just like everyone else occupied with literature or scholarship who has developed their own ideas and placed their name at the head of a new system, Hegel’s Berlin philosophy has had its disciples, its partisans and also its enemies and its detractors. The struggle had begun during his life and continues after his death” (Nourais 1834: 94). La Nourais goes on to “recommend” Rosenkranz to anyone with an interest in German philosophy as a defence of Hegel against Carl Friedrich Bachmann’s polemics.

(v) Lechevalier, Jules. Études sur la science sociale [Studies in Social Science], Paris. Lechevalier here puts himself in dialogue with Comte as another social scientist emerging out of Saint-Simonianism, but concluding in favour of Fourierism. On the one hand, he speaks of his own project in ambitious terms: “If it is a science worthy of the name, it is one that contradicts neither the unity of God nor the unity of the world, nor the universality of universal spirit itself; this science is one and universal and, in its different spheres, it relates all causes to one cause, all effects to one effect, all laws to one law” (Lechevalier 1834b: xvi). But, on the other hand, he praises Fourier’s refusal to provide a universal philosophy of history, for, otherwise, “he would have verified everything in order to make no conclusions from it, like the German historical school does; or in order to conclude from it what actually is the case, like Schelling’s and Hegel’s philosophy does—and, following them, French eclecticism too; or rather, like Saint-Simonianism, he would have drawn conclusions about a future, but a future of repetition and repatching” (Lechevalier 1834b: 16).

(vi) Michelet, Jules. Introduction à l’histoire universelle [Introduction to Universal History], Paris. Michelet’s text includes a passing critique of Hegel’s philosophy of history for “violating the sacred asylum of human freedom so as to petrify history” (Michelet 1834: 53).

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(vii) Prévost, Amédée. “Philosophie allemande: Hegel” [“German Philosophy: Hegel”], in Revue du progrès social. While it might not be strictly true to call this “the first text explicitly devoted to Hegel’s philosophy” in France (Bellantone 2011: 1.137), Prévost’s article is perhaps the most significant of the pre-Willm interpretations of his philosophy. Prévost develops some of the major topoi already found in Lerminier’s account: the reference to Spinoza (Prévost 1834a: 477); the charge of pantheism (or, in Prévost’s term, “theopantism”); the view of Hegel’s major contribution as “restoring German philosophy to scientific form” (Prévost 1834a: 480). However, Prévost’s reading is also distinctive in its refusal to read German Idealism as a whole in terms of unity or even continuity (“Kant’s successors left their master far behind them and, by adopting some of his principles, they arrived at entirely different results” [Prévost 1834a: 476]), and in his stress, unlike any of his forbears, on the concept of the dialectic (see Bellantone 2011: 1.142).

(viii) Prévost, Amédée. “Bulletin philosophique de l’Allemagne” [“Philoso-­ phical Bulletin on Germany”], in Revue du progrès social. Prévost’s critical notices include—alongside one on a work by Krug—his critical reconstruction of Schelling’s 1834 preface to the Beckers’s translation of Cousin’s Fragments philosophiques (a year before it was translated into French). It provides some detail of Schelling’s “positive philosophy” drawn from the hints found in works by Stahl and Rapp, and concludes, “All friends of philosophy should rejoice in seeing the mutual esteem and admiration that the two greatest philosophers of Germany and France show each other, despite some differences of opinion. Schelling’s preface is a victorious response to the accusations directed against Cousin. […] Such objections hardly deserved to be refuted, but there was a great deal of seriousness in the accusation of plagiarism addressed against Cousin in relation to Schelling and Hegel. Nothing could be more peremptory in this respect than an answer from Schelling himself: it seems to us to shut the mouths of Cousin’s enemies” (Prévost 1834b: 432).

(ix) Quinet, Edgar. “Poètes allemands: Henri Heine” [“German Poets: Henri Heine”], in Revue des Deux Mondes. In his introduction of Heine to a French readership, Quinet takes the opportunity to describe recent developments in German culture under the categories of death and indifference. These “evils”, he argues, “infected philosophy and thus fully entered into the German heart”. They are there in Schelling’s later philosophy—“a dying science and a dying faith placed together and seeking to revive each other”—the “debris” of science, faith and poetry, on which a “vast tomb” has been erected. They are also there in “Hegel’s nihilism” which is now being “absorbed into social science” owing to a resurgent “hunger and thirst for the real world” (Quinet 1834: 555, 561–2). Quinet’s growing hostility to German philosophy will later be consecrated in the 1839 volume, Allemagne et Italie and the 1842 article, “La Teutomanie”.

(x) Wendt, Amadeus. Review: V. Cousin, Fragments philosophiques, 2nd ed., in Göttingische gelehrte Anzeigen. A faithful and relatively appreciative notice summarising Cousin’s 1833 Fragments philosophiques and providing some of the intellectual context behind the turn to eclecticism in France. In particular, Wendt focuses on Cousin’s failure to distinguish Hegel’s and Schelling’s philosophy and on the need for a proper

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exposition of his ontology beyond its psychological foundations (see Vermeren 1991: 77–8). On Cousin’s behalf, Willm translated the notice for the Nouvelle revue germanique in October 1835.

1835 (i) Anon. “Théologie hégelienne” [“Hegelian Theology”], in Le libre examen. The short precis narrates how, after Hegel’s death, his “faithful disciples have formulated Christianity according to his ideas”, and observes that, on first glance, “Hegel’s doctrine appears a philosophical translation of Christianity which is so faithful and so beautiful that I am not astonished that so many have attracted by it. There is such an analogy between the teachings of the Gospel and Hegel’s speculations that the latter often seem to be but the former understood philosophically”. Nevertheless, “in reality an immense abyss separates them and the minds which think them through on either side are in complete opposition”—and what ultimately separates them is the “arrogant and disdainful hauteur” of the philosophers (Anon. 1835: 65).

(ii) Bautain, Louis. 1835. Philosophie du christianisme [Philosophy of Christianity], 2 vols. Paris/Strasbourg. See §3.4.4 above.

(iii) Cousin, Victor. De la métaphysique d’Aristote. Rapport sur le concours ouvert par l’Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques [On Aristotle’s Metaphysics: Report on the Competition of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques], Paris. See §5.3.2 above.

(iv) Fichte, I. H. Über die Bedingungen eines spekulativen Theismus; in einer Beurtheilung der Vorrede Schellings zu dem Werke von Cousin: Über französische und deutsche Philosophie [On the Conditions of a Speculative Theism, in an Evaluation of Schelling’s Preface on Cousin’s Work, On French and German Philosophy], Elberfeld. This is another German reaction to Beckers’s translation, and I.  H. Fichte will later refer back to it in his 1845 introduction to the French translation of his father’s Méthode pour arriver à la vie bienheureuse. In the latter work, I. H. Fichte points out that he has written previously “on the importance of French interest in our philosophy”, but “since this small work is not properly available to you”, he goes on to cite a key passage (Fichte 1845: 3–4) which reads: “What distinguishes the French in their scientific productions and what has a more profound connection than we might believe to the just appreciation of the truth is clarity, the harmonious achievement of the idea, rigour of exposition, precision of definitions. In general, [the French] find themselves less embarrassed than us by extreme conclusions about which they are less complacent in their own originality; and if, because of their inflexible terminology and neglect of exposition, German philosophers seem to solely monologue with themselves, French philosophers are continually entering into relations with each other. […] Add to this, as a characteristic gift of the French mind, the prompt comprehension and happy application of new ideas, even when they do not grasp a problem in all its depth, it must be admitted that the French possess precisely what we lack and the acquisition of which becomes more and more urgent for us. […]

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D. Whistler et al. Here lies the importance of the French mind in relation to German philosophy and the influence it should exercise on us. Insofar as the French have assimilated our theories, we can recognise externally the degree of clarity and scientific polish of these theories. They are the primary and irrecusable judges of the clarity, maturity, accuracy of an idea. If, by Cousin’s own confession, it results that—except for some thoughts and general excitations—nothing of German philosophy has penetrated into French thought, we must not attribute this fault solely to the French, but recognise that the great results of our philosophy have not yet been presented in all their scientific rigour nor in popular exposition.”

(v) Girardin, Saint-Marc. Notices politiques et littéraires sur l’Allemagne [Political and Literary Notices on Germany], Paris. The volume includes an 1831 address to students at the Sorbonne on the history of German thought (“The progress of philosophy in Germany from Luther to the present day”) in which Girardin distinguishes French and German intellectual cultures on the basis of their reactions to the Reformation. Counterintuitively, he suggests it was France, not Germany, that radicalised Luther’s work via the Cartesian project, which “divorced” philosophy from religion. Hence, in France, “philosophy continued to separate itself more and more from theology and from God” and “this completely human route ended ultimately in ­materialism”, to the extent that “atheism was the denouement of the progress of philosophy in France.” In Germany, on the other hand, “philosophy could, to a certain point, live in the same sanctuary as religion”: “It had lost the God given to it by Catholic authority; and had now to rediscover God by way of philosophy. Hence, German philosophy is profoundly religious” (Girardin 1835: 153). So, Girardin concludes, one can establish a contrast between the two traditions: “If one sought an epigraph for the history of philosophy in France and in Germany, then one can say of the history of philosophy in France: how it ended up excluding God, and of the history of philosophy in Germany: how it ended up rediscovering God. This is the big difference between the two philosophies” (Girardin 1835: 153–4). And it is on the basis of this anti-pantheistic interpretation that Girardin goes on to read absolute idealism as “rediscovering God” through its speculation: “In German philosophy, we rediscover God, it is so profoundly religious! It has so much need of divinity!” He concludes as follows with reference to Schelling and Hegel: “In Hegel’s system, reason is everything. The laws of mechanics, the laws of morality, of politics, of religion, all is ultimately in reason. Reason is an encyclopedia; it is the world; it is the universe. Logic, i.e., the explication of reason, is the general system of the world. There is nothing in the world which is not included in reason, and reason—being all—is God. This is the fate of theology in logic. See now the work which is undertaken. In the Middle Ages, philosophy was humbly at the service of religion. In our epoch, on the contrary, religion is at the service of philosophy. The roles have been reversed: philosophy previously served as commentary on religion; today it is religion which is used as the symbol and allegory of philosophy. Philosophy rediscovers all its ideas in religion, and it there rediscovers them under the living and practical form of worship, under a form worthy of the respect and adoration of men. Here is the great revolution which has been accomplished in the two disciplines—what was previously servant, today is sovereign.” (Girardin 1835: 154–5)

(vi) Hinrichs, H.  F. W.  Review: V. Cousin, Über französische und deutsche Philosophie, in Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik. See §3.3.3 above.

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(vii) Kolloff, Eduard. “Philosophie de la mythologie par Schelling” [“Schelling’s Philosophy of Mythology”], in Revue du Nord. See §4.1.4 above.

(viii) Lerminier, Eugène. Au-delà du Rhin, ou tableau politique et philosophique de l’Allemagne depuis Madame de Staël jusqu’à nos jours [Beyond the Rhine, or the Political and Philosophical Description of Germany from Madame de Staël to the Present], 2 vols, Paris. See §3.3.1 above.

(ix) Pölitz, K.  H. L. “Revue des principaux changements opérés dans la métaphysique en Allemagne depuis Kant jusqu’à nos jours” [“Review of the Principal Changes in German Metaphysics from Kant to the Present”], trans. C. J. Tissot, in Revue du Nord. A translation by the Hegel-critic, Tissot, of an essay by the Leipzig professor, Karl Heinrich Ludwig Pölitz, which provides a detailed account of post-Kantian German philosophies, treating Hegel as a minor figure only mentioned in passing, alongside J.  J. Wagner, as a “collateral line leading from Schelling’s system”, and treating Schelling, alongside Reinhold and Bardili, as proposing a system of identity “in which the subjective and the objective are identical in the absolute” (Pölitz 1835: 521).

(x) Prévost, Amédée. “Nomination de Schelling à l’Institut” [“Schelling’s Nomination to the Institute”], in Revue du Nord. See §5.3.1 above.

(xi) Schelling, F. W. J. “Jugement de Schelling sur la philosophie de M. Cousin et sur l’état de la philosophie allemande en général” [“Schelling’s Judgement on Cousin’s Philosophy and the State of German Philosophy in General”], trans. F. Ravaisson, in Nouvelle revue germanique. See §4.1.5 above.

(xii) Schelling, F.  W. J. Jugement de M. de Schelling sur la philosophie de M.  Cousin [Schelling’s Judgment on Cousin’s Philosophy], trans. J. Willm, Paris. See §4.1.6 above.

(xiii) Tissot, C. J. “Du réalisme ou de l’absolutisme de Hegel comparé au criticisme de Kant” [“On Hegel’s Realism or Absolutism, compared to Kant’s Criticism”], in Revue du Nord. An early version of Tissot’s Kantian attack on Hegel, emphasising the essentially finite nature of reason against any version of the absolute—developed more fully in Tissot’s Histoire (see below).

(xiv) Willm, Joseph. “Essai sur la philosophie de Hegel” [“Essay on Hegel’s Philosophy”], in Nouvelle revue germanique. Published in instalments from 1835–7 and collected in an 1836 volume. See §3.2.5 above.

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1836 (i) Barchou de Penhoën, Auguste. Histoire de la philosophie allemande depuis Leibniz jusqu’à Hegel [History of German Philosophy from Leibniz to Hegel], 2 vols, Paris. See §3.2.5 above.

(ii) Cousin, Victor. Du Vrai, du Beau et du Bien [On the True, the Beautiful and the Good], Paris. See §3.2.2 above.

(iii) Dupuy, Adolphe. “Sur l’état actuel du protestantisme en Allemagne” [“On the Current State of Protestantism in Germany”], in Nouvelle revue germanique. Dupuy devotes a section to theologians of the Hegelian school, who he designates as “rationalists par excellence” (Dupuy 1836: 180). He insists that Hegelianism and Christianity “are fundamentally very different, even opposed” and that basic Christian dogmas like a transcendent God and the immortality of the soul are incompatible with it. However, he does explore a reconciliation between Hegelianism and “symbolic dogmatics”, where the formulae of Christianity are borrowed to express Hegelian truths (Dupuy 1836: 181). Dupuy criticises generally the tendency of the Hegelians to reduce morality to dialectics, for “the dialectical spirit is to be construed as habit without life, without warmth and without consolation” (Dupuy 1836: 182).

(iv) Gans, Eduard. Rückblicke auf Personen und Zustände [Reminiscences on People and Circumstances], Berlin. An account of some of Gans’s most important encounters among his vast network of French contacts, including his claim that the Frenchmen who best understood Hegel are Lerminier and Girardin (Gans 1836: 63–4, 103).

(v) Heine, Heinrich. “De l'histoire de la nouvelle et belle littérature en Allemagne” [“On the History of New Fine Literature in Germany”], in L’Europe littéraire. See §3.3.2 above.

(vi) Leroux, Pierre. “Éclectisme”, in Nouvelle Encyclopédie, vol. 4, ed. P. Leroux and J. Reynaud, Paris. See §5.1.16 above.

(vii) Michelet, K.  L. Examen critique de l’ouvrage d'Aristote intitulé Métaphysique [Critical Examination of Aristotle’s Metaphysics], Paris. See §5.3.2 above.

1837 (i) Hess, Moses. Die heilige Geschichte der Menschheit von einem Jünger Spinozas [The Sacred History of Mankind by a Spinoza-Disciple], Stuttgart. See §3.4.2 above.

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(ii) Ravaisson, Félix. Essai sur la métaphysique d'Aristote [Essay on Aristotle’s Metaphysics], 2 vols, Paris. The second volume was published in 1845. See §3.5.1 above.

1838 (i) Carové, F. W. Neorama, 3 vols, Leipzig. See §3.4.1 above.

(ii) Cousin, Victor. Fragments philosophiques [Philosophical Fragments], 3rd ed., Paris. See §3.2.4 above.

(iii) Lèbre, Adolphe. “Critique religieuse et morale du panthéisme” [“A Religious and Moral Critique of Pantheism”], in Revue suisse. See §3.5.4 above.

(iv) Pictet, Adolphe. Une Course à Chamounix [A Trip to Chamounix], Geneva/Paris. A fictionalised account of a conversation involving Pictet (“the Major”), Franz Liszt, George Sand and others, during which Liszt proposes a reading from Barchou’s history of German philosophy, particularly “the exposition of Schelling’s system that I vividly desire to know” (Pictet 1838: 135–6). After some comic resistance from Sand at the idea of “doing metaphysics” together, which involves throwing the book into the street and sketching a satirical drawing, “the Major opened the book to the chapter on the philosophy of nature, and he began by reading the preliminary reflections; but soon leaving aside the author’s text, he launched himself on the subject” (Pictet 1838: 138–9). Pictet, who emphasises that he “had had the good fortune of seeing and hearing [Schelling] at the University of Erlangen” (Pictet 1838: 139), provides “a rapid sketch of that so vast and so profound a mind, so subtle and rich, in which the force of thought and the sense of beauty, speculation and poetry, are united to a degree unknown since Plato” (Pictet 1838: 139–40). Indeed, according to him, “Schelling had laid the true foundations of art, made the great idea of freedom the pivot of his whole system, brought into science the vivifying notion of a personal God” (Pictet 1838: 140). Barchou’s book is soon put aside, owing to the need for “a perpetual commentary on obscure and incomplete propositions, on propositions which, presented in an abrupt manner and without sufficient linking, had too much the air of strange paradox” (Pictet 1838: 141). Instead, the major offers a “philosophicopoetic improvisation” (Pictet 1838: 143) on the philosophy of Schelling’s middle period, and particularly the process of creation which emerges from “primitive nature, prior to all manifestation, an obscure principle, eternally hidden under the light of divine consciousness and which thought alone is able to grasp under the form of a desire for being, a hunger for realisation and existence” (Pictet 1838: 141–2). The episode ends in satire, however, as Sand asks the participants to give their opinion on the obscure maxim, “The absolute is identical to itself” (Pictet 1838: 144).

(v) Quinet, Edgar. “De la vie de Jésus par le docteur Strauss” [“On Strauss’ Life of Jesus”], in Revue des Deux Mondes. See §3.4.2 above.

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(vi) Ravaisson, Félix. De l’habitude [On Habit], Paris. See §3.5.1 above.

1839 (i) Bautain, Louis. Psychologie expérimentale [Experimental Psychology], 2 vols. Paris/Strasbourg. Bautain continues his polemic against the pantheisms of France and Germany by identifying a “spiritual pantheism, which has been established among us in accordance with that German philosophy with which we have been infatuated for twenty years”. He continues, such pantheism “is a doctrine more dreadful to the true progress of the human mind [esprit] than materialism, because it is more specious, loftier, more satisfying for human pride which it caresses in the most tender, delicate and subtle way” (Bautain 1839: 1.230). Elsewhere in the work he identifies this German pantheism with the apotheosis of the human subject “by exalting its reason beyond measure and identifying it with what is called universal reason or the absolute” (Bautain 1839: 1.198). Such a doctrine fails for argumentative reasons (it “explains nothing”) and even more for moral ones—exhibiting pride and arrogance (Bautain 1839: 1.198–9, 231).

(ii) Cieszkowski, Auguste. Du crédit et de la circulation [On Credit and Circulation], Paris. The sequel to Cieszkowski’s overtly Hegelian Prolegomena zur Historiosophie from 1838, Du crédit does not mention Hegel explicitly, but does draw on his theory of the state in its economic analysis.

(iii) Girardin, Saint-Marc. Review: E. Gans, Rückblicke auf Personen und Zustände, in Revue des Deux Mondes. Girardin’s review is in fact more of an obituary (Gans died in May 1839), structured around a series of “memories” of Gans, emphasising the extent to which Gans “loved France with a passion, knew it […] and in spiritual, elegant and varied conversations mixed German erudition with French vivacity” (Girardin 1835: vii). Girardin also stresses Gans’s liberalising role in the Hegelian school: “He brought about a curious revolution in the heart of that school, for he had dragged it away from justifying all established powers, even absolute power, according to the maxim that what is has a reason to be; and he led it little by little to liberalism” (Girardin 1835: xiii). The review was reprinted as a preface to Lomenie’s 1845 translation of Gans’s Histoire du droit de succession en France, under the title, “Souvenirs de M. Gans”.

(iv) Goschler, Isidore. Du panthéisme [On Pantheism], Strasbourg. See §3.4.4 above.

(v) Leroux, Pierre. Réfutation de l’éclectisme, où se trouve exposée la vraie définition de la philosophie, et où l’on explique le sens, la suite, et l’enchaînement des divers philosophes depuis Descartes [Refutation of Eclecticism, in which is set out the true definition of philosophy and in which the meaning, succession and connection of various philosophers since Descartes is explained], Paris. See §3.3.4 above.

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(vi) Strauss, D. F. Vie de Jésus [Life of Jesus], trans. É. Littré, 2 vols, Paris. The second volume appeared in 1840. See §4 above.

1840 (i) Hegel, G. W. F. Cours d'esthétique [Lectures on Aesthetics], 5 vols, trans. C. Bénard, Paris/Nancy. The five volumes were published between 1840 and 1852. See §3.6.1 and §4.2.2 above.

(ii) Lamennais, Félicité de. Esquisse d’une philosophie [Outline of a Philosophy], 4 vols, Paris. The last volume appeared in 1846. See §3.5.3 above.

(iii) Maret, H. L. C. Essai sur le panthéisme dans les sociétés modernes [Essay on Pantheism in Modern Societies], Paris. See §3.4.4 above.

(iv) Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph. Qu'est-ce que la propriété? [What is Property?], Paris. See §3.4.3 above.

(v) Ravaisson, Félix. “Philosophie contemporaine” Philosophy”], in Revue des Deux Mondes.

[“Contemporary

See §3.5.1 above.

(vi) Secrétan, Charles. La philosophie de Leibnitz [Leibniz’s Philosophy], Geneva/Paris. See §3.5.4 above.

(vii) Tissot, C.  J. Histoire abrégée de la philosophie [An Abridged History of Philosophy], Paris/Dijon. The Histoire contains Tissot’s most sustained attack on Hegel and Schelling from a Kantian perspective. Hegel’s and Schelling’s philosophies are, in fact, treated identically, since both of them commit the absolute-idealist error of postulating an absolute: “Everything is confounded, becomes one, indifferent from the transcendental and primordial perspective on things” (Tissot 1840: 365). Tissot continues, “Hegel falls into most of the same vices as Schelling; he takes abstractions for realities; the manner in which he categorises is often fictional and not the expression of the operations of nature; he contradicts reflection scarcely less than he does good sense in failing to recognise the difference between idea and reality” (Tissot 1840: 365–6). Ultimately, Tissot concludes, “Hegel’s absolute has no more reality than Schelling’s identity […] The absolute of reason is only a form of human intellect […] [And] reason is essentially human or subjective” (Tissot 1840: 366).

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1841 (i) Hess, Moses. Die europäische Triarchie [The European Triarchy], Leipzig. One of the offshoots of Hess’s argument for the common emancipatory projects motivating contemporary thinking in the “triarchy” of Britain, France and Germany—this is an early version of the radical call for an intellectual FrancoGerman alliance.

(ii) Gros, L. De la personnalité de Dieu et de l'immortalité de l'âme—Examen de quelques résultats de la philosophie allemande [On Divine Personality and the Immortality of the Soul: An Examination of some Results from German Philosophy], Berlin. A French summary and critical examination of K. L. Michelet’s 1841 Vorlesungen über die Persönlichkeit Gottes und Unsterblichkeit der Seele oder die ewige Persönlichkeit des Geistes that demonstrates the need for more traditional understandings of central Christian dogmas.

(iii) Saintes, Amand. Histoire critique du rationalisme en Allemagne: depuis son origine jusqu'à nos jours [Critical History of German Rationalism from its Origin to the Present], Paris. Saintes provides a detailed critical examination of the origins and development of the German school of theological rationalism, in which Biblical exegesis is subordinated to the norms of reason. As always, Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu haunts the work and Marheineke is also discussed, but there is very little discussion of Hegel himself, apart from a very precise citation from the third book of the Wissenschaft der Logik (Saintes 1841: 62). There is also a brief chapter on Fichte’s and Schelling’s influence on theology (Saintes 1841: 320–9).

(iv) Secrétan, Charles. De l’âme et du corps [On the Soul and Body], Lausanne. See §3.5.4 above.

1842 (i) Leroux, Pierre. “Discours de Schelling à Berlin”, “Du cours de philosophie de Schelling”, “Du christianisme” [“Schelling’s Address in Berlin”, “Schelling’s Lecture Course in Philosophy”, “On Christianity”], in La Revue indépendante. See §3.5.2 and §4.1.7 above.

(ii) Matter, Jacques. Schelling et la philosophie de la nature [Schelling and the Philosophy of Nature], Paris. Matter’s monograph, which was revised and expanded in 1845 to include the late philosophy more substantially under the title, Schelling, ou la philosophie de la nature et la philosophie de la Révelation, is the only monograph devoted to Schelling to appear in French before 1848 (or, in fact, before the 1930s). As such, it provides a more detailed chronological account of Schelling’s philosophy than most French commentators, splitting Schelling’s works into three periods: a philosophy of nature (from 1797 to around 1802), a philosophy of spirit (identified

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most fully with the 1804 Philosophie und Religion) and a philosophy of God (the Munich philosophy). Matter was an Alsatian contributor to the Nouvelle revue germanique who moved to Paris under Cousin’s influence (see Goldstein 2008: 191–2) and, through his close relations to German intellectual trends, draws on pre-existing German critiques of Schelling, particularly Marheineke’s (see Matter 1845: 192), to show how Schelling’s new conception of the divine puts orthodoxy into “crisis” (see Fedi 2018: 51).

(iii) Pompery, Édouard de. “Examen du cours d’esthétique de Hegel” [“Review of Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics”], in La Revue indépendante. This is a review of the first 1840 volume of Bénard’s translation of Hegel’s Cours d’esthétique. It focuses on the relation between the philosopher and the artist, noting how Hegel was “not content to just erect a philosophy”, but was also “pulled inexorably onto the terrain of Art” (Pompery 1842: 391–2). At stake for Pompery is the discrepancy between Hegel’s system as “a profession of pantheistic faith”— “propounding the doctrine that God is in universal life and is manifest in everything, proclaiming the reconciliation of spirit and matter, the infinite and the finite, the real and the absolute” (Pompery 1842: 394)—and the reality of artworks. This discrepancy comes to a head in the practice of abstraction to which Hegel is susceptible—Pompery laments, “O abstraction—to what folly do you drag even the best minds!” (Pompery 1842: 407) In short, Hegel’s aesthetics fails, because “he separates life from reality, the human from nature, the beautiful in the ideal from the beautiful in nature” (Pompery 1842: 408).

(iv) Renouvier, Charles. Manuel de philosophie moderne [Manual of Modern Philosophy], Paris. Renouvier touches upon Schelling and Hegel as part of his account of the emergence of the “philosophical restoration of the nineteenth century”. His narrative sees Schelling stray too far from “logic” and “scientific method”, before being “corrected” by Hegel (Renouvier 1842: 563). In Hegel’s philosophy, “the method is irreproachable”, and, indeed, for Renouvier, “Hegel’s philosophy is the apogee of knowledge of the absolute; it explains the symbols of religion, unites Descartes’s method, Bruno’s thinking, and corrects Spinoza’s doctrine by teaching what Spinoza neglected—the eternal progress of all beings” (Renouvier 1842: 564). However, Hegel divinises the human by failing to recognise what separates the human subject from life in the absolute; and, in fact, Renouvier continues, it is Charles Bonnet’s metaphysics which provides “the only possible basis for a natural history” (Renouvier 1842: 565). See Dunham’s study in volume two.

(v) Schelling, F.  W. J. Système de l’idéalisme transcendantal [System of Transcendental Idealism], trans. P. Grimblot, Paris. See §4.1.8 above.

(vi) Secrétan, Charles. “Erklärung des Herrn Professor Secrétan in Lausanne in Bezug auf die Anzeige seiner Schrift: La philosophie de Leibnitz” [“Clarification of the Notice on Secrétan’s Work, Leibniz’s Philosophy”], in Zeitschrift für Philosophie und spekulative Theologie. See §3.5.4 above.

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(vii) Stein, Lorenz von. Der Socialismus und Communismus des heutigen Frankreichs [Socialism and Communism in Contemporary France], Leipzig. It was this book more than any other that taught the German Left Hegelian community about French radical politics, and, despite the fact that Hegel is not mentioned, Stein’s Saint-Simonian language was perceived as fundamentally Hegelian.

(viii) Tissot, C.  J. “Hegel”, in Biographie universelle, vol. 19, ed. L. G. Michaud, Paris. Tissot provides a substantial biographical account of Hegel’s development (particularly his break from Schelling) and a summary of his system based on the divisions of the Enzyklopädie, before concluding with “a personal perspective”. Hegel’s system, he writes, is, “as a construction, as poetic as it is ingenious and its principal merit seems to us to have carried to the extreme the falsity of Schelling’s conception and to have brought to light the profound aberration buried in German philosophy since the day it wished to surpass Kantian criticism. In two words, what is new in Hegel’s philosophy cannot be accepted and what can be accepted in it does not have the merit of being entirely new. […] In vain does this idealism adorn itself with the pompous title of the absolute, for it is no less by that a production of the human mind” (Tissot 1842: 43).

1843 (i) Blanc, Louis. “D’un projet d’alliance intellectuelle entre l’Allemagne et la France” [“On a Project of Intellectual Alliance between Germany and France”], in La Revue indépendante. See §3.4.2 above.

(ii) Cousin, Victor. Avant-propos à des Pensées de Pascal, rapport à l’Académie française sur la nécessité d’une nouvelle édition de cet ouvrage [Preface to Pascal’s Pensées: Report to the Académie française on the Need for a New Edition of this Work], Paris. See §3.2.4 above.

(iii) Duprat, Pascal. “Études critiques sur les historiens allemandes contemporains: Léopold Ranke” [“Critical Studies on Contemporary German Historians: Leopold Ranke”], in La Revue indépendante. Duprat makes use of Ranke, “evidently a philosopher of the Hegelian school who is scarcely interested in Schelling” (Duprat 1843: 390), to comment on the philosophical scene in Berlin, informing his French readers that, despite the fear “that Schelling would efface his illustrious rival” with his Berlin lectures, they were “received frostily”. Hence, “it is still Hegel who continues to dominate in Berlin” (Duprat 1843: 388).

(iv) Ferrari, Joseph. Essai sur le principe et les limites de la philosophie de l’histoire [Essay on the Principle and Limits of the Philosophy of History], Paris.

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Ferrari’s work includes a 25-page critique of Hegel’s philosophy of history as a “proof by theodicy”. In general, Ferrari is sceptical of Hegel’s attempt to move, in Cousinian language, “from the subjective to the objective, from appearance to reality”, so as to identify “reason in nature” (Ferrari 1843: 224–5).

(v) Lèbre, Adolphe. “Crise actuelle de la philosophie allemande” [“The Current Crisis in German Philosophy”], in Revue des Deux Mondes. See §3.5.4 above.

(vi) Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph. De la création de l’ordre dans l’humanité [On the Creation of Order in Humanity], Paris. See §3.4.3 above.

(vii) Rosenkranz, Karl. Über Schelling und Hegel. Ein Sendschreiben an Pierre Leroux [On Schelling and Hegel: A Letter to Pierre Leroux], Königsberg. See §3.5.2 above.

(viii) Simon, Jules. “Spinoza”, in Revue des Deux Mondes. During his review of Saisset’s recent edition of Spinoza’s works, Simon makes the following comment in passing that represents the eclectic orthodoxy on pantheism against those like Maret who see it as infecting French intellectual life: “Pantheism has its partisans in Germany, but has never had them in France, or at least never serious ones. The reason is quite simple: here [pantheism] has good sense against it” (Simon 1843: 786; see Ragghianti 2001: 40).

(ix) Taillandier, Saint-René. “Situation intellectuelle de l’Allemagne” [“The Intellectual Situation in Germany”], in Revue des Deux Mondes. Taillandier’s essay is a cartography of German philosophy, linking German cities to the characteristics of thought produced there. Thus, Munich is “an asylum for those battling within philosophy” and was “where Schelling found himself when he lost the empire of philosophy: overcome by a more powerful sovereign, Schelling had to come to Munich, while Hegel governed over German science” (Taillandier 1843: 110–11). On the other hand, Berlin is the natural home of philosophical loyalties and passions. Hence, “In Berlin, Hegel’s metaphysics founded more than a school. There is something of a religion in its immense proportions, its imperious and intolerant authority. It has been twelve years since his death, but the inspiration which animated this great man is not extinct; it is carried on by his disciples. […] He kindled all these serious young people whose souls he rendered almost fanatical” (Taillandier 1843: 115). Tailliander reports a visit to Schelling just prior to his journey to Berlin in 1841 and finding him ill at ease with entering a place full of such fanatical loyalties (Taillandier 1843: 121).

(x) Vera, Augusto. “Philosophie allemande: Doctrine de Hegel” / “Logique de Hegel” [“German Philosophy: Hegel’s Doctrine” / “Hegel’s Logic”], in Revue du Lyonnais. Two very early articles by Vera which take a Cousinian line towards Hegel, criticising Hegel’s speculative point of departure—see Bellantone’s study in volume two.

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1844 (i) Bouillier, Francisque. Théorie de la raison impersonnelle [Theory of Impersonal Reason], Paris. The standard eclectic account of rationality as knowledge of impersonal—as well as objective and necessary—ideas makes, as one might expect in the 1840s, little reference to Hegel, except for his lectures on aesthetics which are invoked in the chapter on absolute ideas of beauty.

(ii) Duprat, Pascal. “L’École de Hégel à Paris—Annales d’Allemagne et de France, publiées par Arnold Ruge et Karl Marx” [“Hegel’s School in Paris—the German-French Yearbook”], in La Revue indépendante. See §3.4.2 above.

(iii) Franck, Adolphe. “Préface,” in Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques, vol. 1, ed. A. Franck, Paris. See §5.1.15 above.

(iv) Gioberti, Vincenzo. Considérations sur les doctrines religieuses de M. Victor Cousin [Remarks on Victor Cousin’s Religious Doctrines], trans. V. Tourneur, Reims. A translation of an extract from an 1840 work by Gioberti which, as the translator notes, attacks Cousin as “having given his country the unfortunate gift of German pantheism”, a gift that undermines all Catholic dogmas (Gioberti 1844: 364). For example, “the most essential points” of Cousin’s doctrine of God “belong to Friedrich Schelling and Georg Hegel, his most famous disciple” (Gioberti 1844: 252; see Moreau 1983: 545–6).

(v) Maret, H. L. C. Théodicée chrétienne ou comparaison de la notion chrétienne avec la notion rationaliste de Dieu [Christian Theodicy, or A Comparison of the Christian Concept with the Rationalist Concept of God], Paris. See §3.4.4 above.

(vi) Ott, Auguste. Hegel et la philosophie allemande, ou exposé et examen critique des principaux systèmes de la philosophie allemande depuis Kant, et spécialement de celui de Hegel [Hegel and German Philosophy, or An Exposition and Critical Examination of the Principal Systems of German Philosophy since Kant and Hegel’s in Particular], Paris. See §3.4.4 above.

(vii) Prévost, Louis. Hégel. Exposition de sa doctrine [Hegel: An Exposition of his Doctrine], Toulouse. Prévost’s book is fairly unique in 1840s France in not subjecting Hegel to an agenda, intellectual or political, but, instead, mounting a partial defence of Hegel on the basis of impartial analysis (hence, the emphasis on “exposition” in the title). It is relatively unique, therefore, in not being an anti-Hegelian work in France, but is rather dedicated to K.  L. Michelet and written and published in

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Toulouse (as Prévost’s doctoral thesis) far from Cousinian institutional power (see Bellantone 2011: 1.275). From the beginning, Prévost is quick to praise Hegel: he is “at once the Aristotle and the Proclus of modern times. Like Aristotle, he is above all concerned with method and has a complete encyclopedia of human science in his writings; like Proclus, he has reunited and grounded in his system the principles of previous philosophies” (Prévost 1844: 4). And yet, ultimately, Prévost ends up lightly criticising the predominance of ideal universality (over real particularity) in Hegel’s system: “The very name of absolute idealism which Hegel gave to his doctrine seems to involve an implicit confession that problems of the identification of the ideal and the real have not been completely resolved. If the ideal dominates, if the absolute becomes the predicate of one of the terms to the exclusion of the other, the synthesis cannot itself be absolute. We will see this predominance of the ideal over the real reproduced under all forms in the architecture of his system. It will be in turn: in logic, the predominance of abstract identity over difference; in philosophy of nature, the subordination of experience to a priori synthesis; in natural law, the disappearance of the individual before the state; in religion, facts without value before the idea.” (Prévost 1844: 291) In the end, this means that, for Prévost too, Hegel is a pantheist: “In his work, there is an internal unity, a common essence in relation to which individuals are only accidents. Call this unity substance or idea, call it God—it doesn’t matter. The words do not change the nature of things. Schelling’s pantheism is poetic, Hegel’s is logical – this is the entire difference.” (Prévost 1844: 296–7).

(viii) Ruge, Arnold. “Plan der deutsch-französischen Jahrbücher” [“Plan for the German-French Yearbook”], in Deutsch-französische Jahrbücher. See §3.4.2 above.

(ix) V.  A. “Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques: M. Cousin et Hegel” [“The Dictionary of Philosophical Sciences: Cousin and Hegel”], in La Revue indépendante. This review-essay constitutes a polemic against the eclectic programme set out in Francks’s “Preface” to the Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques (see §5.1.15 above) (as well as Bénard’s translation of Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics), arguing that this programme is both fundamentally Hegelian and disowns these Hegelian influences. It thus takes up once again Lerminier’s thesis that Cousin plagiarised Hegel: “Desirous of producing in France a system to which he could give his name, [Cousin] is content to use Hegel’s, and to hide his borrowings under the most bitter critique of the work of his master. […] It appears easier for him to negate all the advantages he has received” (V. A. 1844: 362). The author compares it to a “parricide” from Greek tragedy motivated by “bitter ingratitude” (V. A. 1844: 363). Over the course of the article, the author goes through the basic eclectic principles set out in the Dictionnaire and sets them against cognate passages from Hegel’s oeuvre, at the same time showing how the eclectics have misunderstood the Hegelian ideas behind these principles. For example, after pointing out one borrowing from the lectures on the history of philosophy, the author concludes that Cousin’s thought “is very nicely expressed in the passage from Hegel. Cousin has given it a specific colouring, and that is all” (V. A. 1844: 368). The author adds, “We have been very happy to demonstrate that the programme of the Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques was taken from Hegel; and we can also remark on the dogmatism of its redaction. The words we think, we maintain, are frequent, and yet it is Hegel who thinks and maintains” (V. A. 1844: 573).

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(x) Weill, Alexandre. “Souvenirs de Hegel” [“Recollections of Hegel”], in La Revue indépendante. This is a biographical sketch of Hegel based on the idea that “described from an aesthetic perspective, as genuine reflections on his personality, Hegel’s creations could be better understood”, even if “Hegel himself did all he could to efface himself, sacrificing his subjectivity for truth” (Weill 1844: 554). Key to Weill’s argument is a comparison with Schelling: “Before Hegel German philosophy was aristocratic, Hegel rendered it popular. […] Whereas Schelling philosophised as an inspired artist, Hegel envisaged thought as a duty and, under its voluntary yoke, he worked day and night, forehead bathed in sweat” (Weill 1844: 556–7). And, in this vein, the portrait of Hegel concludes, “It was Hegel, Schelling and Hölderlin who came to plant a tree of liberty [as students in Tübingen] while swearing to sacrifice both their science and their blood to destroy tyranny and to protect freedom, beauty and truth. Hölderlin glimpsed for just an instant this paradisiacal image; […] Hegel remained faithful to his oath and to his youth until his death, but Schelling, the third in this pact, what did he do with his tree of liberty? Alas, he exchanged it for a smile from the King of Bavaria and a ribbon bearing the King of Prussia’s initials!” (Weill 1844: 560–1)

1845 (i) Bénard, Charles. “Esthétique”, in Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques, vol. 2, ed. A. Franck, Paris. See §3.6.1 above.

(ii) Blainville, Henri Marie Ducrotay de. Histoire des sciences de l’organisation et de leur progrès, comme base de la philosophie [History of the Life Sciences and their Progress, as the Basis of Philosophy], 3 vols, Paris. See Clauzade’s study in volume two.

(iii) Engels, Friedrich and Karl Marx. Die heilige Familie [The Holy Family], Frankfurt am Main. See §3.4.2 above.

(iv) Grün, Karl. Die soziale Bewegung in Frankreich und Belgien [The Socialist Movement in France and Belgium], Darmstadt. See §3.4.1 above.

(v) Guiran, Fortuné. “De la philosophie allemande depuis Kant jusqu’à nos jours” [“On German Philosophy from Kant to the Present”], in La Revue nouvelle. See §5.3.4 above.

(vi) Rémusat, Charles de. De la philosophie allemande: Rapport à l'Académie des sciences morales et politiques [On German Philosophy: Report to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques], Paris. See §5.3.4 above

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(vii) Schelling, F. W. J. Bruno, ou du principe divin et naturel des choses [Bruno, or On the Divine and Natural Principle of Things], trans. C. Husson, Paris. See §4.1.9 above.

(viii) Vera, Augusto. Platonis, Aristotelis et Hegelii de medio termine doctrina [The Doctrine of the Middle Term in Plato, Aristotle and Hegel], Paris. See §3.6.2 above.

(ix) Vera, Augusto. Problème de la certitude [The Problem of Certainty], Paris. See §3.6.2 above.

1846 (i) Guiran, Fortuné. “Lettres à M. Charles de Rémusat sur la philosophie de Hegel” [“Letters to Charles de Rémusat on Hegel’s Philosophy”], in La Revue nouvelle. See §5.3.4 above.

(ii) Jeannel, Charles. Des Doctrines qui tendent au panthéisme [On Doctrines which Tend to Pantheism], Paris. A different approach to the charge of pantheism from that found in Bautain and Maret, Jeannel—in his thesis defended at the University of Poitiers—makes use of Victor Cousin’s late Cartesian eclecticism as a weapon against the German school, identified with “the ontological doctrine”. This ontological doctrine “rapidly” and “irresistibly” becomes pantheism, whereas only “the psychological doctrine refutes pantheism” (Jeannel 1846: 15–16), where “the psychological doctrine” is Cousin’s Cartesianism. As a result, as Moreau (1983: 549) points out, Cousin is transformed here into “security against the pantheist danger” coming from Germany.

(iii) Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph. Système des contradictions économiques, ou Philosophie de la Misère [System of Economic Contradictions, or the Philosophy of Poverty], Paris. See §3.4.3 above and Castleton’s study in volume two.

(iv) Saisset, Émile. “La philosophie allemande. Des derniers travaux sur Kant, Fichte, Schelling et Hegel” [“German Philosophy: On Recent Works on Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel”], in Revue des Deux Mondes. See §3.6.3 above.

(v) Vacherot, Étienne. Histoire critique de l’École d’Alexandrie [Critical History of the School of Alexandria], 3 vols, Paris. The final volume appeared in 1851. In the later volumes of this work, Vacherot draws a close connection between Proclus and Hegel. For example, he writes, “Without admitting that Hegel borrowed his Triad from Neoplatonism, it is impossible not to be struck by the resemblance between the two theories. The absolute, the idea, according to Hegel, is invariably developed according to the following law: it is posited, then it is opposed, then destroys this opposition by a

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(vi) Willm, Joseph. Histoire de la philosophie allemande depuis Kant jusqu’à Hegel [History of German Philosophy from Kant to Hegel], 4 vols, Paris. The final volume appeared in 1849. See §5.3.5 above.

1847 (i) Marx, Karl. Misère de la philosophie [The Poverty of Philosophy], Brussels. See §3.4.3 above.

(ii) Matter, Jacques. De l'état moral, politique et littéraire de l'Allemagne [On the Moral, Political and Literary State of Germany], 2 vols, Paris. Matter provides a survey of the contemporary state of German culture, including that of the émigré community in Paris. In his chapter devoted to “Philosophical Schools”, he notes that, unlike in France, philosophy and religion are there united, but that unity has not led to a reconciliation, but ever more discord owing to great schisms among philosophical doctrines (Matter 1847: 205, 209). In this respect, Matter contrasts the disunity of German philosophy in the late 1840s with the period “when Hegel lectured in Berlin and governed all of Germany with his speech, by his students”. He continues, “Such was Hegel’s ascendancy that Schelling’s doctrine, which had given birth to it, was reduced to silence” (Matter 1847: 213).

(iii) Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph. Philosophie der Staatsökonomie oder Notwendigkeit des Elends [Philosophy of State-Economy or the Necessity of Poverty], 2 vols, trans. K. Grün, Darmstadt. See §3.4.2 above.

(iv) Schelling, F. W. J. Ecrits philosophiques et morceaux propres à donner une idée générale de son système [Philosophical Writings and Extracts to Give a General Idea of his System], trans. C. Bénard, Paris. See §4.1.10 above.

(v) Taillandier, Saint-René. “De la crise actuelle de la philosophie hégélienne: Les partis extrêmes en Allemagne” [“On the Current Crisis in Hegelian Philosophy: The Extreme Parties in Germany”], in Revue des Deux Mondes. In part a review of Ruge’s Zwei Jahre in Paris and Max Stirner’s Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, Taillandier accounts for post-Hegelian German philosophy under the rubric of “crisis”, both to the extent that German émigrés like Ruge seem to have turned against Germany itself in an act of “flagellation” (Taillandier 1847:

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239) and also because the Left Hegelians have betrayed the Hegelian legacy, bringing philosophy down from its “ideal regions” to “abase reason before a brazen materialism” (Taillandier 1847: 241).

(vi) Vera, Augusto. “Idéalisme”, in Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques, vol 3, ed. A. Franck, Paris. The text was republished in the same year as Coup d’œil historique et critique sur l’idéalisme [A Historical and Critical Overview of Idealism]. See §5.1.15 above.

(vii) Willm, Joseph. “Hegel”, in Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques, vol. 3, ed. A. Franck, Paris. See §5.1.15 above.

1848 (i) Loménie, Louis de. Galerie des contemporains illustres par un homme de rien [A Gallery of Illustrious Contemporaries by a No One], vol. 2, Brussels. The second set of Loménie’s biographical portraits includes a chapter on Schelling, which, Loménie admits, is dependent on Matter’s book for the philosophical detail (Loménie 1848: 550), as well as Rémusat’s report to the Académie. It consists for the most part in extracts from Schelling’s first 1841 lecture in Berlin and, as this suggests, emphasis is placed on the late Schelling’s arrival in Berlin as a philosophical event (Loménie 1848: 548–9).

(ii) Secrétan, Charles. La Philosophie de la liberté [The Philosophy of Freedom], Lausanne. The second volume was published in 1849. See §3.5.4 above.

(iii) Taillandier, Saint-René. “De la littérature politique en Allemagne: Un Pamphlet du docteur Strauss” [“On Political Literature in Germany: A Pamphlet by Strauss”], in Revue des Deux Mondes. Written in the wake of the 1848 Revolution, Taillandier tries to take stock of the role of post-Hegelian radicalism in bringing it about, resolutely insisting that if “the young Hegelian school believes there is progress in a crude pantheism that would immobilise history, let them see whether the human race is not against them” (Taillandier 1848: 525).

(iv) Vera, Augusto. “La Philosophie de la religion de Hegel” / “Un Mot sur la philosophie et la Révolution française” / “La Religion et l’Etat” [“Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion” / “A Word on Philosophy and the French Revolution” / “Religion and the State”], in La Liberté de penser. See §3.6.2 above.

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Bibliography Anon. 1828a. J.  D. Choisy, Des doctrines exclusives en philosophie rationnelle. Le Globe 91: 670–671. ———. 1828b. Un moraliste au cours de M. Cousin. Le Gymnase 1: 258–270. ———. 1828c. Lettre de Munich, sur la nouvelle université de cette ville. Le Mémorial catholique 10: 391–396. ———. 1829. Schubarth, K.E., and K.A.  Carganico, Über Philosophie überhaupt, und Hegels Enzyclopädie insbesondere. Nouvelle revue germanique 2 (6): 189–192. ———. 1830. F. W. Carové, Religion und Philosophie in Frankreich. Le Globe 23: 91–92. ———. 1835. Théologie hégelienne. Le libre examen 5 (9): 65–67. Bautain, Louis. 1839. Psychologie expérimentale, 2 vols. Paris/Strasbourg: Dérivaux. Bellantone, Andrea. 2011. Hegel en France, 1817–1941, 2 vols. Trans. Virginie Gaugey. Paris: Hermann. Börne, Ludwig. 1832. Lettres écrites à Paris. Trans. Fortuné Guiran. Paris: Paulin. Cousin, Victor. 1828. Nouveaux fragments philosophiques. Paris: Pichon and Didier. ———. 1833. Fragments philosophiques. 2nd ed. Paris: Ladrange. Cousin, Victor, and F.W.J.  Schelling. 1991. Correspondance, 1818–1845, ed. Christiane Mauve and Patrice Vermeren, Corpus 18/19: 199–249. Duprat, Pascal. 1843. Études critiques sur les historiens allemandes contemporains: Léopold Ranke. La Revue indépendante 9: 567–592. Dupuy, Adolphe. 1836. Sur l’état actuel du protestantisme en Allemagne. Nouvelle revue germanique 8 (23): 168–187. Eckstein, Ferdinand von. 1827. De la philosophie. Le Catholique 7: 395–438. Fedi, Laurent. 2018. Schelling en France au XIXe siècle. Les cahiers philosophiques de Strasbourg 43: 13–80. Ferrari, Joseph. 1843. Essai sur le principe et les limites de la philosophie de l’histoire. Paris: Joubert. Fichte, J. G. 1845. Méthode pour arriver à la vie bienheureuse, trans. F. Bouillier with an introduction by I. H. Fichte. Paris: Ladrange. Gans, Eduard. 1832. Leçons sur l’histoire des dernières cinquante années. Nouvelle revue germanique 12 (46): 97–127. ———. 1836. Rückblicke auf Personen und Zustände. Berlin: Veit. Gioberti, Vincenzo. 1844. Considérations sur les doctrines religieuses de M. Victor Cousin. Trans. Victor Tourneur. Jacquet: Reims. Girardin, Saint-Marc. 1835. Notices politiques et litteraires sur l’Allemagne. Paris: Joubert. Goldstein, Jay. 2008. The Post-Revolutionary Self: Politics and Psyche in France, 1750–1850. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Janet, Paul. 1885. Victor Cousin et son œuvre. Paris: Alcan. J. B. 1829. Wolfgang Menzel, Die Deutsche Literatur. Le Globe 45: 353–356. Jeannel, Charles. 1846. Des Doctrines qui tendent au panthéisme. Paris: Firmin-Didot. Lagarmitte, Henri. 1832. E. Quinet, De l’Allemagne et de la Revolution. Le Globe 29: 113–114. Lechevalier, Jules. 1831. Religion saint-simonienne: Enseignement central. (Extrait de l’Organisateur). Paris: Everat. ———. 1834a. Examen de l’éclectisme et de la philosophie du sens commun. Revue du progrès social 1 (1). ———. 1834b. Études sur la science sociale. Paris: Renduel. Loménie, Louis de. 1848. Galerie des contemporains illustres par un homme de rien. Vol. 2. Brussels: Meline and Cans. Matter, Jacques. 1845. Schelling ou la philosophie de la nature et la philosophie de la révélation. Paris: Comptoir. ———. 1847. De l’état moral, politique et littéraire de l’Allemagne, 2 vols. Paris: Amyot. Michelet, Jules. 1834. Introduction à l’histoire universelle. Paris: Hachette.

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Monchoux, André. 1965. L’Allemagne devant les lettres françaises: De 1814 à 1835. Paris: Armand. Montrol, François Mongin de. 1825. Le Cimetière de Lystenal. Le Mercure du dix-neuvième siècle 19: 72–77. Moreau, Pierre-François. 1983. Trois polémiques contre Victor Cousin. Revue de métaphysique et de morale 88 (4): 542–548. La Nourais. 1834. Hegel: Lettre au Dr. C. F. Bachmann par le Dr. C. Rosenkranz. Nouvelle revue germanique, 2nd series, 2 (2): 91–3. Pictet, Adolphe. 1838. Une Course à Chamounix. Paris: Duprat. Pinkard, Terry. 2001. Hegel: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pölitz, K.  H. L. 1835. Revue des principaux changements opérés dans la métaphysique en Allemagne depuis Kant jusqu’à nos jours. Trans. C. J. Tissot. Revue du Nord 1: 517–554. Pompery, Édouard de. 1842. Examen du cours d’esthétique de Hegel. La Revue indépendante 5: 391–413. Prévost, Amédée. 1834a. Philosophie allemande: Hegel. Revue du progrès social 1 (1): 1–3. ———. 1834b. Bulletin philosophique de l’Allemagne. Revue du progrés social 2 (9): 429–439. Prévost, Louis. 1844. Hegel. Exposition de sa doctrine. Toulouse: Labouïsse-Rochefort. Quinet, Edgar. 1831. De la révolution et de la philosophie. Revue des Deux Mondes, 1st series 3 (4): 464–474. ———. 1834. Poètes allemands: Henri Heine. Revue des Deux Mondes, 2nd series 1 (4): 353–369. Ragghianti, Renzo. 2001. Victor Cousin et la querelle du panthéisme. In Victor Cousin, Nouvelle théodicée d’après la méthode psychologique, 7–51. Paris: L’Harmattan. Renouvier, Charles. 1842. Manuel de philosophie moderne. Paris: Paulin. Saintes, Amand. 1841. Histoire critique du rationalisme en Allemagne: depuis son origine jusqu’á nos jours. Paris: Scherer. Schulz, Wilhelm. 1829. L’Allemagne en 1829. Trans. J.  Willm. Nouvelle Revue Germanique 3 (10): 115–137. Simon, Jules. 1843. Spinoza. Revue des Deux Mondes, new series 2 (5): 756–786. Taillandier, Saint-René. 1843. Situation intellectuelle de l’Allemagne. Revue des Deux Mondes 4 (1): 91–132. ———. 1847. De la crise actuelle de la philosophie hégélienne: Les partis extrêmes en Allemagne. Revue des Deux Mondes 19 (2): 238–268. ———. 1848. De la littérature politique en Allemagne: Un Pamphlet du docteur Strauss. Revue des Deux Mondes 22 (4): 508–526. Thurot, François. 1830. De l‘entendement et de la raison: Introduction a l‘étude de la philosophie. Paris: André. Tissot, C. J. 1840. Histoire abrégée de la philosophie. Paris: Ladrange. ———. 1842. Hegel. In Biographie universelle: ancienne et moderne, ed. L.G. Michaud, vol. 19. Paris: Michaud Frères. V. A. 1844. Du Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques: M. Cousin et Hegel. La Revue indépendante 16: 362–380. Vacherot, Étienne. 1846–51. Histoire critique de l’École d’Alexandrie, 3 vols. Paris: Ladrange. Vermeren, Patrice. 1991. Le baiser Lamourette de la philosophie. Les partis philosophiques contre l’éclectisme de Victor Cousin. Corpus 18/19: 61–83. Weill, Alexandre. 1844. Souvenirs de Hegel. La Revue indépendante 17: 553–561. Willm, Joseph. 1833a. Victor Cousin et la philosophie allemande. Nouvelle revue germanique 14 (53): 18–34. ———. 1833b. Révision de la philosophie morale depuis Kant et Jacobi: IV. Fichte et Schelling. Nouvelle revue germanique 14 (54): 120–142. ———. 1833c. Révision de la philosophie morale depuis Kant et Jacobi: V. Schelling. Nouvelle revue germanique 15 (59): 252–276.

Chapter 7

Biographical Glossary Daniel Whistler and Ayşe Yuva with Kirill Chepurin and Adi Efal-Lautenschläger

Abstract  A register of names, dates and brief biographical details to orient the reader in an introductory manner through the constellation of figures implicated in the dissemination and reception of Hegel’s and Schelling’s philosophy in early nineteenth-century France. Keywords  French philosophers · German philosophers · Social theorists · Radical theorists Ahrens, Heinrich (1808–1874): Educated at the University of Göttingen, Ahrens spent time in Paris before taking up the position of Professor of Philosophy at the University of Brussels, where he lectured on natural right, political theory and jurisprudence. Amiel, Henri-Frédéric (1821–1881): Genevan philosopher and writer who spent the mid-1840s studying in Germany with Schelling, there writing the memoir, Berlin au printemps de l’année 1848. Ampère, Jean-Jacques (1800–1864): Son of the physicist, André-Marie Ampère, after studying with Cousin, Ampère went on to become a professor at the

D. Whistler (*) Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK e-mail: [email protected] A. Yuva Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected] K. Chepurin University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany A. Efal-Lautenschläger University of Tel Aviv, Bar-Ilan University and the Beit Berl Academic College, Tel Aviv, Israel © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Chepurin et al. (eds.), Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France, International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d’histoire des idées 246, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39322-8_7

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Sorbonne and the Collège de France, specialising in German and Scandinavian languages. Ancillon, Friedrich (1767–1837): Berlin Huguenot, pastor of the French Reformed Church, politician allied with Metternich, and tutor to Royal Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, the significance of Ancillon’s popularization of German literature and philosophy to the French is mentioned by both Staël and Cousin. Bakunin, Mikhail (1814–1876): Radical philosopher whose exile from Germany, where he attended Schelling’s 1841 Berlin lectures, brought him into the émigré-­ communities of Switzerland, Belgium and Paris. Ballanche, Pierre-Simon (1776–1847): Influenced by Chateaubriand and Hegel, among others, Ballanche developed a metaphysics of progress in his unfinished philosophical poem on the past, present and future, the Palingénésie. Barchou de Penhoën, Auguste (1799–1855): Primarily a military strategist and conservative politician, Barchou also wrote on German philosophy and literature, particularly Fichte and Schelling. Barni, Jules (1818–1878): Secretary to Cousin in the 1840s, professor at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and the Lycée Charlemagne and later republican politician, Barni translated numerous works by Kant and Fichte over the course of his lifetime. Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire, Jules (1805–1895): Student of Cousin, politician, translator of Aristotle and biographer of Cousin, Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire was appointed to the Chair in Ancient Philosophy at the Collège de France in 1838 and elected to the Académie des sciences morales and politiques in 1839. Bautain, Louis Eugène Marie (1796–1867): Early student of Cousin, he travelled through Germany and met Hegel and Schelling at a similar time to Cousin, before, installed as Professor of Philosophy at the University of Strasbourg, turning against his former teacher and inaugurating the pantheism controversy, then moving to the University of Paris as Professor of Moral Philosophy in 1853. Beckers, Hubert (1806–1889): Professor of Philosophy at Dilligen and subsequently the University of Munich, Beckers was a close ally of Schelling’s and, after his death, the chief defender of his philosophical legacy. Bénard, Charles (1807–1898): A student of Victor Cousin and Professor of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure, who introduced Hegel’s aesthetics into France through translations and commentaries and translated Schelling’s works. Beneke, Friedrich Eduard (1798–1854): Correspondent of Cousin, opponent of Hegel and the German Idealists and ally of Fries, Beneke’s courses were banned in Berlin and promotions were blocked because of his polemic against Hegel, which forced him to Göttingen, before a happier return to the University of Berlin in 1832. Bernays, Karl Ludwig (1815–1876): Radical journalist from Mainz who collaborated with Marx on the Rheinische Zeitung, with Ruge and Marx on the Deutsch-­ Französische Jahrbücher and with Börnstein on Vorwärts!.

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Blainville, Henri Marie Ducrotay de (1777–1850): Zoologist and anatomist, who was Professor at the Museum of Natural History in Paris, and cognisant in the philosophies of nature of Schelling, Goethe and Oken. Blanc, Louis (1811–1882): Hostile to Hegel’s “pantheism”, Blanc was a politician, theorist of a religiously charged socialism, a major actor in the 1848 Revolution, as well as a historian of the 1789 Revolution. Boré, Eugène (1809–1878): Professor of Armenian at the Collège de France, before undertaking missionary work and linguistic research in Turkey and Iran. Boré, Léon (1806–1882): Elder brother of Eugène, translator of Goethe and author of devotional works. Börne, Ludwig (1786–1837): A Jewish convert to Protestantism, Börne came to Paris after the July Revolution to pen between 1830 and 1833 the 115 letters that constitute Briefe aus Paris and to establish La Balance, a literary émigré journal. Börnstein, Heinrich (1805–1892): Born in Lviv (then under Austrian control as Lemberg), Börnstein lived in Paris between 1842 and 1849 propagating revolutionary ideas and editing the journal, Vorwärts!, the key organ for radicalism among the German émigré community there. Bouillier, Francisque (1813–1899): Professor of Philosophy at the University of Lyon, inspecteur général of public instruction and later director of the Paris École Normale Supérieure; influenced by Cousin’s psychology, he returned to Descartes to renew eclecticism and was also a translator of Fichte. Boulet, Jean-Étienne (1804–1864): Based in Metz, where he practised as a lawyer, Boulet founded the Revue du Nord with Spazier in 1835, translated Gaius’s Institutes and authored an 1839 Manuel pratique de langue grècque. Brandis, Christian August (1790–1867): Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bonn and specialist on ancient thought, out of which emerged his Handbuch der Geschichte der Griechisch-Römischen Philosophie begun in 1835. Bretschneider, Karl Gottlieb (1776–1848): A conservative evangelical theologian, who held academic and ecclesiastical posts across eastern Germany and, among many works on dogmatics and apologetics, published on the theological significance of Saint-Simonianism. Buchholz, Friedrich (1768–1843): A German political and philosophical historian, Buchholz translated over forty treatises by Comte, Henri de Saint-Simon and the Saint-Simonians and, through this, introduced sociological theory into Germany. Buloz, François (1803–1877): Director of the Revue des Deux Mondes from 1831 into the late nineteenth century. Bürgers, Heinrich (1820–1878): Born in Cologne, an influential member of the Communist League, who stood trial for his revolutionary activity in 1852. Carnot, Hyppolite (1801–1888): A republican politician, who in 1830 wrote an Exposé de la doctrine saint-simonienne, worked on the Saint-Simonian journal, Le Producteur, and, with Leroux, took over the Revue encylopédique in 1831. Carové, Friedrich Wilhelm (1789–1852): A student of Hegel in Heidelberg, Carové was blocked from academic advancement because of his political involvement in the Burschenschaften movement, but nevertheless published a series of works popularising French ideas in Germany.

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Cazalès, Edmond de (1804–1876): A priest and liberal Catholic theologian with strong interests in German intellectual culture; close to Lamennais and Montalembert, contributor to their L’Avenir, editor of the Revue européenne, and author of the 1853 Étude historique et critique sur l’Allemagne contemporaine. Cieszkowski, Auguste (1814–1894): Born near Warsaw and educated at Jagiellonian University, University of Berlin and University of Heidelberg, Cieszkowski’s thinking was decisively influenced by K. L. Michelet, leading to his Prolegomena zur Historiosophie that substantially influenced Moses Hess. Comte, Auguste (1798–1857): The founder of positivism, secretary to Saint-Simon between 1817 and 1824, before breaking with Saint-Simonianism in the late 1820s, out of which emerged his mature works, such as the Cours de philosophie positive and the Discours sur l’esprit positif. Constant, Benjamin (1767–1830): Political theorist, politician and member of the Coppet circle, Constant was active at the end of the French Revolution, exiled during the Empire and leader of the liberal opposition during the July Monarchy, as well as penning a series of treatises on republicanism and liberty. Cousin, Victor (1792–1867): Born in Paris, Cousin took on Royer-Collard’s teaching at the Sorbonne in the history of philosophy from 1815 and founded the eclectic school, before being suspended for liberal ideas and subsequently—after arrest in Germany—orchestrating a triumphal return to the Sorbonne in 1828, appointed to a series of institutional and political posts during the July Monarchy, and wielding a determinative influence over the French academic landscape until the 1840s. Damiron, Jean-Philibert (1794–1862): An early student of Cousin and later professor at the École Normale Supérieure and the Sorbonne, a member of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques and a founding member of Le Globe. Daub, Karl (1765–1836): A proponent of Protestant speculative theology, professor at the University of Heidelberg from 1795 and rector at the university when Cousin met him on his first tour of Germany. Degérando, Joseph Marie (1772–1842): Born in Lyon in 1772, Degérando quickly established his reputation with prize-essays on epistemological subjects as a heterodox member of the Idéologues, before becoming a rival of Villers over the introduction of Kantian philosophy into France and publishing the epochal Histoire comparée des systèmes de philosophie in 1804. Dubois, Paul-François (1793–1874): Liberal journalist and Professor of Rhetoric at Besançon and the Lycée Charlemagne, Dubois founded Le Globe with Leroux in 1824 and was subsequently elected a deputy after the July Revolution of 1830. Duprat, Pascal (1815–1885): A left-wing republican politician, part of the 1848 Revolution and opponent of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, Duprat studied philosophy in Heidelberg, contributed to La Réforme, alongside Louis Blanc, and to La Revue indépendante. Dupuy, Adolphe (n.d.): Based in Mulhouse, a pastor of the schools and colleges there, who contributed to the journals of the time on Swiss, German and Alsatian culture.

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Eckstein, Ferdinand von (1790–1861): Born in Copenhagen to a Jewish-Protestant family, Eckstein was drawn to the romantic ideas of Friedrich Schlegel, under whose influence he converted to Catholicism, before coming to Paris under the Restoration, to undertake work as a police-inspector, journalist and orientalist. D’Eichtal, Gustav (1804–1886): A Catholic convert from Judaism, D’Eichtal became a fervent Saint-Simonian via Comte’s influence in 1822 and, after a visit to Greece from 1832 to 1836, began publishing studies in Greek history and culture. Enfantin, Barthélemy-Prosper (1796–1864): Introduced into Saint-Simonian circles as a student, Enfantin became a leader of the movement after Saint-Simon’s death, while working on the journal Le Producteur. Ewerbeck, August Hermann (1816–1860): German doctor who arrived in Paris in 1841 and led the Bund der Gerechten, translated Cabet into German and Feuerbach into French, and tried to introduce Proudhon to the German socialists; his L’Allemagne et les Allemands was published in Paris in 1851. Ferrari, Joseph (1811–1871): An opponent of Cousin who published a polemic against eclecticism in the 1849 Les philosophes salariés, as well as constructing his own rival history of philosophy in his Essai sur le principe et les limites de la philosophie de l’histoire. Fichte, Immanuel Hermann (1796–1879): Son of J. G. Fichte and one of the main proponents of the speculative theology movement which constructed a philosophical theism opposed to Hegel and relatively close to the late Schelling. Forcade, Eugène (1820–1869): Historian, economist and principal contributor to the Revue des Deux Mondes, Forcade founded La Revue nouvelle in 1845 and La Semaine financière in 1854. Franck, Adolphe (1809–1893): Jewish philosopher, student of Cousin, who directed the Dictionnaire des Sciences Philosophiques and translated the Zohar. Gans, Eduard (1797–1839): Philosopher, jurist, Jewish convert to Protestantism and successor to Hegel at the University of Berlin, Gans was one of Hegel’s key disciples and the one with the strongest connection to France which he visited in 1825, 1830 and 1835, meeting Cousin, Girardin, Guizot and Lerminier, among others. Gasparin, Valérie de (1813–1894): Swiss writer on religious communities, contributor to L’Avenir and author, in 1858, of the novella, L’Hégélien. Gioberti, Vincenzo (1801–1852): Italian priest, philosopher and politician who spent time in Parisian liberal circles—although opposed to Cousin’s school— before briefly becoming representative for Sardinia in the Italian parliament. Girardin, Saint-Marc (1801–1873): Professor of History at the Sorbonne after the 1830 Revolution, contributing editor to the Journal des débats and Revue des Deux Mondes, and author of a report on education in southern Germany at Guizot’s request in 1835. Goschler, Isidore (1804–1866): Student of Bautain’s at the University of Strasbourg, before breaking with him and being called to direct the Collège Stanislas in Paris, as well as translating from German the Dictionnaire encyclopédique de la théologie catholique during the 1860s.

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Gratry, Joseph (1805–1872): Theologian and, from 1847, chaplain of the École Normale Supérieure from which position he tirelessly attacked various crypto-­ Hegelianisms in French philosophy, particularly in his 1857 Logique. Grimblot, Paul (1817–1870): Diplomat and French consul in Ceylon and Burma, with a particular interest in Indology, Grimblot translated Fichte and Schelling during the 1840s. Grün, Karl (1817–1887): Radicalised after completing his doctorate at the University of Berlin, Grün was exiled to Paris in the mid-1840s and came to know Cabet, Considérant, Heine, Proudhon and Bakunin, translating Proudhon and penning his account of French socialism, Die sozialen Bewegungen in Frankreich und Belgien, in 1845. Guigniaut, Joseph-Daniel (1794–1876): Professor and Director of the École Normale Supérieure, Guigniaut was a Hellenist who translated Creuzer’s Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, besonders der Griechen during the 1820s. Guiran, Fortuné (n.d.): Translator of Börne’s Briefe aus Paris, dramatist and the runner-up in the Académie competition on German Idealism set in 1836, the result of which led to him defending Hegel against Rémusat in La Revue nouvelle, with which he was closely associated; Guiran went on to become a Proudhonian and edit the Le Démocrate du Vaucluse from 1850. Heine, Heinrich (1797–1856): Poet, journalist and philosopher, student of Hegel in Berlin, before arriving in Paris in 1831, publishing key texts like the 1834 De l’Allemagne in both French and German. Herwegh, Georg (1817–1875): Member of the Young Germany movement, whose collection of poems, Gedichte eines Lebendigen, gained him notoriety in Germany from where he moved to Paris in 1844. Hess, Moses (1812–1875): Born in Bonn to a Jewish family, Hess was Paris correspondent for the Rheinische Zeitung and came to know Marx and Engels in this role, playing an important part in disseminating socialist, communist and proto-­ Zionist ideas among the German émigré community. Hinrichs, Hermann Friedrich Wilhelm (1794–1861): A student of Hegel at Heidelberg and subsequently Professor of Philosophy at Breslau and Halle, Hinrichs was one of the key figures in the Right Hegelian tradition. Hotho, Heinrich Gustav (1802–1873): A disciple of Hegel and professor at the University of Berlin from 1829, Hotho undertook many secretarial duties for Hegel during the latter’s lifetime and took on responsibility for editing his lectures on aesthetics after his death. Husson, Claude (n.d.): After spending the 1830s in Munich, Husson moved to Paris to teach German at the royal colleges, while translating Schelling and a non-­ extant version of Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of history. Jacques, Amédée (1813–1865): Philosopher and psychologist and founder—with Jules Simon and Émile Saisset—of the journal La Liberté de penser, Jacques taught at the École Normale Supérieure and the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and subsequently emigrated to Argentina after the 1848 Revolution.

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Jeannel, Charles (1809–1886): Philosopher who, after defending his 1846 thesis at the University of Poitiers, Des doctrines qui tendent au panthéisme, sympathetic to Cousin’s late eclecticism of common sense, took up posts in Rennes and Montpellier. Jouffroy, Théodore (1796–1842): An early student of Cousin, contributor to Le Globe and La Revue européenne and the exponent of Scottish philosophy within the eclectic school, which informed his work on ethics and natural right. Jourdain, Éloi (1806–1861): Catholic publisher and writer, under the pseudonym of Charles Sainte-Foi, as well as editor of the Revue européenne. Kolloff Eduard (1811–1879): Born in Tarnów (then in Galicia, now Poland), a student of Schelling in Munich during the early 1830s, a historian of art and early theorist of the daguerreotype, as well as a member of the émigré community in Paris during the mid-1830s where he contributed to a number of émigré-journals, including the Revue du Nord and La Balance. La Nourais, Prosper-Alexis de (b. 1810): Economist, contributing editor to the Nouvelle revue germanique and author of L’association des douanes allemandes in 1841. Lacordaire, Henri-Dominique (1802–1861): Priest, journalist and orator who was close to Lamennais for a period during the 1830s, before resubmitting to Papal authority and later writing, Considérations sur le système philosophique de M. de Lamennais. Lagarmitte, Henri (1807–1834): Committed Saint-Simonian who was tasked with editorial responsibilities for reviews of German literature and philosophy in Le Globe after its Saint-Simonian take-over in 1830, Lagarmitte was also author of the influential Profession de foi saint-simonienne. Lamennais, Félicité de (1782–1854): Priest, philosopher and social reformer, Lamennais achieved early celebrity with his Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de religion, before his radicalism put him into conflict with the Roman Catholic Church with which he formally broke in 1833. In 1834 Pope Gregory XVI condemned his works which gradually became even more radical in their espousal of Christian socialism. Laurent, Paul-Mathieu (1793–1877): Lawyer and Saint-Simonian with editorial responsibilities on Le Globe, Laurent entered political life after the 1848 Revolution, as well as publishing a Résumé de l’histoire de la philosophie in 1826, alongside historical and political works. Lèbre, Adolphe (1814–1844): A student of Vinet at the Academy of Lausanne, Lèbre attended Schelling’s lectures in Munich at the age of nineteen, before moving to Paris to begin a literary career cut short by early death. Lechevalier, Jules (1806–1862): Saint-Simonian student of Cousin and reader of Hegel, close to the Fourierists, Lechevalier edited their journal Le Phalanstère as well as editing his own Revue du progrès social, and working with Proudhon on a mutualist bank project prior to exile to Britain. Lerminier, Eugène (1803–1857): Legal historian and leading light of the “new jurisprudence” movement, Lerminier spoke German thanks to a childhood in

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Strasbourg, before—as professor at the Collège de France and involved in Le Globe and Guizot’s Revue française—turning on eclecticism violently. Leroux, Pierre (1797–1871): An early Saint-Simonian and coiner of the French term, “socialisme”, Leroux was an ever-present figure in philosophical France for over two decades: editing Le Globe, La Revue indépendante, Revue encyclopédique and the Nouvelle Encyclopédie, formulating an idiosyncratic religious socialism in works such as the 1840 De l’humanité and leading the attack on Cousinian eclecticism in his Réfutation de l’éclectisme, before being forced into exile after the 1848 Revolution. Leske, Carl Friedrich (1821–1886): German publisher of radical and revolutionary material during the 1840s, including work by Grün and Proudhon. Littré, Émile (1801–1881): Positivist philosopher, as well as politician, physician and lexicographer, Littré first translated Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu into French, alongside works by Hippocrates and Pliny. Loménie, Louis de (1815–1878): Professor of Literature at the Collège de France and the École Polytechnique, member of the Académie Française and contributing editor to the Revue des Deux Mondes. Maine de Biran, Pierre (1766–1824): The forefather of nineteenth-century French spiritualist philosophy, who also worked as a regional administrator; his Influence de l’habitude sur la faculté de penser was the first of a series of writings to win influential prizes from European academies and, as his work was rediscovered, he came to be regarded as a key source for non-eclectic philosophy in France. Maret, Henri Louis Charles (1805–1884): A priest, theologian, and professor at the Sorbonne, who was for a time close to Lamennais, Maret was responsible for the escalation of the French pantheism controversy in his 1840 attack on Cousin and Hegel, Essai sur le panthéisme. Marheineke, Philip (1780–1846): Professor of Theology at the University of Berlin, Marheineke was briefly influenced by Schelling and worked with Schleiermacher, but was most indelibly marked by Hegel’s philosophy, becoming the most prominent “idealist” theologian. Marx, Karl (1818–1883): In Paris during 1843 and 1844, during which time he co-­ edited the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, Marx was at that time on a path of increasing radicalisation. Matter, Jacques (1791–1864): Professor of history, philosophy and ecclesiastical history at the University of Strasbourg and contributor to the Nouvelle revue germanique, before moving to Paris to be closer to the centre of Cousinian power, Matter published the first French monograph exclusively on Schelling. Mäurer, German (1811–1883): A socialist journalist, who after studying in Berlin, moved to Paris in 1833, where he was a member of the Bund der Geächteten and its successors, as well as editing and contributing to numerous émigré journals. Michelet, Jules (1798–1874): Preeminent historian, close to Cousin and Parisian liberal circles, who was appointed to the Collège de France in 1838, before being dismissed along with Quinet in 1852. Michelet, Karl Ludwig (1801–1893): Of Huguenot origin, Michelet was one of Hegel’s foremost students, and, after vainly seeking a chair in Aristotelian phi-

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losophy in Paris in the mid-1820s through Cousin’s influence, was appointed Professor of Philosophy in Berlin in 1829. Montalembert, Charles Forbes René de (1810–1870): Follower of Lamennais with whom he collaborated on the journal L’Avenir in the 1830s, Montalembert espoused a liberal Catholicism which led to him resisting Cousin’s educational reforms and opposing the Second Empire from the Chamber of Peers. Montrol, François Mongin de (1799–1862): Liberal historian, journalist and abolitionist who undertook a political career as député for Haute-Marne after the 1830 Revolution. Nefftzer, Auguste (1820–1876): Founder of the Revue germanique in 1858 and Le Temps in 1861, Nefftzer translated Strauss’s theological work and wrote a series of critical articles, “Hegel et la philosophie allemande”, in 1858. Ott, Auguste (1814–1903): Born in Strasbourg and influenced by Philippe Buchez, Ott published the 1844 Hegel et la philosophie allemande, which was hostile to idealism and eclecticism—a polemic continued in the 1883 Critique de l’idéalisme et du criticisme. Pictet, Adolphe (1799–1875): Born in Geneva, Pictet studied in Paris and assisted at Cousin’s lectures, before travelling through Germany to hear Hegel and Schelling lecture; on his return to Geneva, Pictet devoted himself to historical linguistics. Pölitz, Karl Heinrich Ludwig (1772–1838): Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wittenberg and the University of Leipzig, Pölitz’s reflections on German Idealism were translated in the Revue du Nord. Pompery, Édouard de (1812–1895): A socialist journalist, close to Fourierism, Pompery also wrote extensively on aesthetics for the liberal and radical journals of the period. Poncelet, Jean-Victor (1788–1867): Scientist and engineer who taught at the Sorbonne and the École Polytechnique. Poret, Hector (1799–1864): Professor of Philosophy at the Collège Rollin, exponent of Scottish philosophy, translator of James Mackintosh’s History of Moral Philosophy and August Matthiae’s Lehrbuch für den ersten Unterricht in der Philosophie, and teacher of Ravaisson. Prévost, Amédée (1811–1842): Originating from Geneva and one of the first French writers to devote works to Hegel, Prévost was in Munich with Schelling in the late 1820s and, in 1835, was charged with establishing a school of philosophy in Tulle (South-West France), later becoming a corresponding fellow of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques. Prévost, Louis (n.d.): Based in Toulouse, Prévost’s principal doctoral thesis on Hegel (Hegel: exposition de sa doctrine) offered a qualified defence of Hegel; he went on to publish a Programme de cours élémentaire de philosophie in 1866. Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph (1809–1865): A precursor of anarchism, promoter of mutualist associations and economic philosopher, with whom Marx regularly sparred during the mid-1840s. Quinet, Edgar (1803–1875): Politician, historian and philosopher who spent time in Heidelberg and translated Herder in 1827, before embarking on a series of books

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and reviews on German culture and philosophy during the 1830s that were increasingly hostile. Quiris, Xavier (n.d.): Student of Schelling around 1833 and early disciple of Lamennais, Quiris went on to translate Joseph Franz Molitor’s work on Judaism—in which an inserted passing comment on Schelling led to accusations of betrayal by Schelling himself. Ravaisson, Félix (1813–1900): French spiritualist philosopher, influenced by Maine de Biran, winner of the Académie 1835 prize on Aristotle and secretary to Cousin, before breaking with him in 1840 in part under the influence of the late Schelling. Rémusat, Charles de (1797–1875): Philosopher, liberal politician and government minister, who contributed extensively to the Revue des Deux Mondes and the Revue Française under Cousin’s influence and was elected to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques in 1842 and to the Académie française in 1846. Renouvier, Charles (1815–1903): A relative outsider to the philosophical establishment, who was educated at the École Polytechnique rather than the École Normale Superieure, during the 1840s Renouvier published a philosophy handbook and contributed to Leroux’s Nouvelle Encyclopédie, before constructing his own neocritical system. Reynaud, Jean (1808–1863): After graduating from the École Polytechnique, Reynaud co-directed, with Leroux, the Nouvelle Encyclopédie from 1833 and was elected as deputy in 1848, before publishing in 1854 his Philosophie religieuse: Terre et Ciel. Rio, Alexis-François (1797–1874): Catholic historian of art, lifelong friend of Montalembert, and follower of Lamennais, his history of Italian art appeared in the 1860s as L’art chrétien. Robinson, Henry Crabb (1775–1867): British lawyer, diarist and essayist who studied across Germany between 1800 and 1805 (including at Schelling’s Jena lecture courses) and formed a brief friendship with Staël. Rosenkranz, Karl (1805–1879): Student and biographer of Hegel, who attempted to moderate between the Right and Left Hegelian movements. Ruge, Arnold (1802–1880): Journalist and editor of the Left Hegelian organ, the Hallische Jahrbücher, between 1838 and 1841, then the Deutsche Jahrbücher in Dresden between 1841 and 1843, before working temporarily with Marx on the Deutsch-französische Jahrbücher in Paris in 1843–4. Saintes, Amand (1801–1878): Professor of Literature in Marseille before converting to Protestantism and holding a series of positions in the Reformed Church in Switzerland. Saint-Simon, Henri de (1760–1825): Economist and social theorist whose works formed the basis of the Saint-Simonian movement in nineteenth-century France, a brand of utopian socialism that sought the creation of an industrial society and had tendencies towards pantheism. Saisset, Émile (1814–1863): Student and then professor at the École Normale Supérieure, who succeeded Cousin as chair of history of philosophy at the Sorbonne from 1856, and was known for his translation of Spinoza in 1842.

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Sand, George (1804–1876): Popular novelist who founded La Revue indépendante with Leroux and Viardot in 1841. Schapper, Karl (1812–1870): German socialist politician, who fled to Paris in 1836 after a series of imprisonments, before becoming a member of the Bund der Gerechten. Schlosser, Friedrich Christoph (1776–1861): Professor of History at the University of Heidelberg when Cousin met him on his first tour of Germany. Schuckmann, Kaspar Friedrich von (1755–1834): Prussian politician who held a series of increasingly important ministerial roles in the Prussian government, in which capacity he was responsible for Cousin’s incarceration in Berlin. Schulz, Friedrich Wilhelm (1797–1860): Radical German journalist and publisher based in Hesse where he worked as a translator for the publisher Cotta; but, from the mid-1830s, he was forced into a series of exiles in Switzerland, during which time he wrote the influential Die Bewegung der Production. Schweighäuser, Jean Geoffrey (1776–1844): Part of a dynasty of classical scholars in Strasbourg, Schweighäuser was tutor to Wilhelm Humboldt’s family in Paris, prior to being appointed professor at the Protestant Seminary of Strasbourg. Secrétan, Charles (1815–1895): Professor of Philosophy at Lausanne and Neuchâtel, a member of Alexandre Vinet’s Lausanne circle, and author of works on Leibniz, Schelling and, in 1868, on Cousin. Seiler, Franz Sebastian (1810–90): German socialist, publisher of the Rheinische Zeitung, close to Weitling. Simon, Jules (1814–1896): Student of Cousin and suppléant to his chair of the history of philosophy at the Sorbonne, Simon edited numerous works in the history of philosophy and co-founded La Liberté de penser. Spazier, Richard Otto (1803–1854): Émigré journalist, nephew of Jean Paul and editor of his collected works, Spazier founded the Revue du Nord with Boulet in 1835. Staël, Germaine de (1766–1817): Daughter of the Swiss Protestant banker Jacques Necker, Staël left France to take refuge in Coppet several times during the Terror and the Empire, using it as a base for visits to Germany in 1804 and 1807–8, out of which emerged her book, De l’Allemagne. Stapfer, Philipp Albert (1766–1840): A Protestant Swiss philosopher, whose role was crucial in the dissemination of Kant’s philosophy into France, and who was close to Maine de Biran. Stein, Lorenz von (1815–1890): After studying at the universities of Kiel and Jena, Stein came to Paris to continue his studies in 1841, under the influence of Hegel and Saint-Simonianism. Taillandier, Saint-René (1817–1879): A student in Heidelberg, when he met Schelling, Taillandier was appointed Professor of Eloquence at the Sorbonne, to the Académie française and briefly as Minister of Public Instruction in 1871; his regular contributions to the Revue des Deux Mondes formed the material for his 1849 Histoire de la jeune Allemagne. Taine, Hyppolite (1828–1893): Philosopher and historian, who turned from eclecticism to positivism during the 1850s, becoming Professor of the History of Art

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and Aesthetics at the École des Beaux Arts and Professor of History and German at the École spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr. Thiersch, Friedrich Wilhelm (1784–1860): Professor of Classical Literature at the University of Munich, ally of Schelling and reformer of the Bavarian education system. Thurot, Jean-François (1768–1832): Close to Cabanis, a member of the Auteuil circle, Professor at the College de France from 1814 and translator of Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus, Euripides and Locke. Tissot, Claude Joseph (1801–1876): Professor of Philosophy at the University of Dijon, Tissot translated Kant into French, including the Kritik der reinen Vernunft in 1837. Tourneur, Louis-Victor (1818–1889): Priest of the town of Sedan near Reims and from 1873 President of the Académie nationale de Reims. Vacherot, Étienne (1809–1897): A student of Cousin and subsequently Director of Studies at the École Normale Supérieure from 1839 until he was suspended for suspected Hegelianism and resigned after refusing to swear an oath to Louis-­ Napoléon Bonaparte. Vera, Augusto (1813–1885): An Italian student of Cousin, Vera went on to become the most famous Hegelian in French during the nineteenth century, embarking on a series of translations of the Enzyklopädie during the 1850s and 1860s; after a stay in Britain, he was appointed Professor of Philosophy in Naples in 1862. Viardot, Louis (1800–1883): Art critic and director of the Théâtre-Italien, who, after working with Leroux on Le Globe, founded La Revue indépendante with Leroux and Sand. Villers, Charles de (1765–1815): Born in Lorraine, Villers emigrated during the Revolution and spent most of his life in Göttingen, where he became a professor and sought to promote Kant’s philosophy back in France. Vinet, Alexandre (1797–1847): Swiss Protestant theologian and critic, whose focus on freedom of religion inspired a group of students at the Academy of Lausanne where he taught. Weill, Alexandre (1811–1899): An Alsatian Fourierist from a Jewish family who studied in Frankfurt and had close links with Heine and Feuerbach. Weisse, Christian Hermann (1801–1866): Professor of Philosophy at the University of Leipzig and leader, with I. H. Fichte, of the speculative theology movement. Weitling, Wilhelm (1808–1871): German communist activist and theorist who briefly emigrated to Paris in 1837. Wendt, Amadeus (1783–1836): Professor of Philosophy at Leipzig from 1816 until 1829 when he was called to the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Göttingen. Willm, Joseph (1792–1853): Professor of Philosophy at the Protestant Seminary of Strasbourg, Inspector of the Academy of the Base-Rhin, corresponding member of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques and editor of the Nouvelle revue germanique; alongside his work in education reform, Willm undertook to introduce Hegel and Schelling to the French through a series of translations, articles and books.

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Index

A Absolutism, 61, 65 Académie des sciences morales et politiques, 16, 30, 107, 125, 149, 157–167, 200, 210, 215, 216, 218 Aesthetics, 4, 94, 107–111, 114, 200 Ahrens, H., 78, 207 Amiel, H.-F., 169, 207 Ampère, J.-J., 140, 145, 207 Ancillon, F., 13, 23, 26, 30–33, 38, 39, 63, 88, 107, 157, 168, 176, 182, 208 Aristotle, 34, 49, 61, 92, 93, 104, 114, 139, 157–161, 177, 187, 190, 191, 199, 201, 208, 216, 218 Art, 35, 38, 58, 107–113, 136, 138, 139, 170, 191, 213, 216 Atheism, 11, 52–54, 80, 81, 87, 89–91, 106, 162, 188 B Bakunin, M., 79, 208, 212 Ballanche, P.-S., 178, 208 Barchou de Penhoën, A., 3, 6, 14, 23, 54–58, 126, 183, 190, 208 Barni, J., 126, 208 Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire, J., 107, 108, 151, 152, 157, 208 Bataille, G., 2 Bautain, L.E.M., 10, 85–91, 168, 183, 187, 192, 201, 208, 211 Beausobre, L. de, 107 Beckers, H., 49, 67, 69, 129, 185–187, 208

Bénard, C., 3, 9, 16, 22, 23, 106–111, 114, 126, 136–139, 151, 193, 195, 199, 200, 202, 208 Beneke, F.E., 171, 208 Bernays, C., 78, 79, 82, 208 Blainville, H.M.D. de, 200, 209 Blanc, L., 6, 78–81, 96, 196, 209, 210 Börne, L., 78, 144, 149, 165, 182, 209, 212 Börnstein, H., 78, 208, 209 Bouillier, F., 198, 209 Boulet, J.-É., 149, 209, 217 Brandis, C.A., 157, 209 Bretschneider, K.G., 74, 182, 209 Bruno, G., 46, 48, 88, 115, 134, 136, 168, 195, 201 Buchholz, F., 74, 209 Buloz, F., 146, 150, 209 C Cabet, E., 79, 211, 212 Carnot, H., 146, 209 Carové, F.W., 38, 39, 44, 74, 91, 126, 140, 171, 172, 178, 181, 191, 209 Catholicism, 16, 65, 66, 85–87, 90, 98–100, 147, 178, 179, 188, 198, 210, 211, 213, 216 Cazalès, E. de, 147, 168, 210 Christ, 77, 94, 97, 105, 154 Cieszkowski, A., 78, 192, 210 Comte, A., 3, 58, 75, 76, 137, 179, 185, 209–211

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Chepurin et al. (eds.), Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France, International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d’histoire des idées 246, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39322-8

233

234 Condillac, É.B. de, 47, 133, 135, 164, 167 Considerant, V., 79 Constant, B., 35, 210 Cousin, V., 5, 10, 12–16, 23, 26, 27, 30, 32, 33, 35–72, 74, 75, 78, 86, 87, 89, 91–94, 96, 97, 101, 106, 107, 111, 113, 126, 127, 129–136, 140, 143, 145, 147–149, 151–153, 155–162, 164–166, 168–172, 176–181, 183–191, 195, 196, 198, 199, 201, 207–211, 213–218 Creuzer, F., 171, 212 D Damiron, J.P., 145, 157, 210 Daub, K., 37, 210 Daxenberger, J., 172 Degérando, J.M., 13, 16, 26–31, 35, 44, 56, 127, 161, 176, 210 D’Eichtal, G.S., 75, 76, 211 Deleuze, G., 2 Derrida, J., 2, 172 Descartes, R., 33, 52, 77, 116, 117, 133, 136, 151, 152, 161, 167, 172, 178, 192, 195, 209 d’Holbach, P.-H.T.B., 53 D’Hondt, J., 9, 10, 27, 53, 71, 74–76, 85, 145, 168 Dialectic, 42, 45, 48, 61, 71, 82–86, 93, 170, 186 Diderot, D., 39, 53, 107, 152 Dubois, P.-F., 145, 210 Duprat, P., 79, 81, 82, 150, 196, 198, 210 Dupuy, A., 190, 210 E Eckstein, F. von, 78, 145, 178, 211 Eclecticism, 4, 10, 16, 30, 36, 43, 45, 54, 55, 58, 59, 62, 64, 66, 67, 69, 72, 74, 87, 93, 96, 99, 101, 106–108, 111, 114, 128, 129, 145, 146, 148–152, 159, 160, 164, 165, 170, 183, 185, 186, 197–199, 201, 209–211, 213–215, 217 Enfantin, B.-P., 73–75, 211 Engels, F., 78, 79, 200, 212 Espagne, M., 3, 9–12, 36, 43–47, 58, 59, 73–75, 91, 137, 145, 162, 170–172 esprit, 23, 26, 34, 48, 66, 67, 97, 99, 115, 128, 140, 156, 165, 192, 210 Ewerbeck, A.H., 78, 79, 82, 126, 137, 211

Index F Ferrari, J., 196, 197, 211 Feuerbach, L., 79–81, 95, 96, 126, 137, 211, 218 Fichte, I.H., 45, 102, 104, 165, 187, 194, 201, 208, 209, 211, 218 Fichte, J.G., 3, 5, 13, 14, 25, 27–31, 33, 34, 39, 45, 47, 48, 52, 57, 60, 62, 65, 66, 83, 86, 88, 89, 99, 101, 104, 115, 125, 126, 133, 135, 154–156, 162, 165, 178, 180, 182, 184, 194, 201, 208, 209, 211, 212 Forcade, E., 150, 211 Franck, A., 112, 151–152, 157, 198, 200, 203, 211 Freedom, 11, 16, 29, 37, 53, 57, 78, 80, 81, 93, 101–103, 105, 106, 113, 151, 160, 163, 166, 167, 178, 185, 191, 200, 218 G Gans, E., 36, 43, 44, 59, 61–63, 72–74, 140, 145, 154, 155, 168, 169, 171, 172, 180, 182, 183, 190, 192, 211 Gasparin, V. de, 78, 211 Gioberti, V., 198, 211 Girardin, S.-M., 54, 72, 129, 140, 144, 146, 169, 172, 188, 190, 192, 211 God, 14, 27, 31, 32, 39, 48–50, 52, 54, 61, 66, 70, 73, 77, 80, 83, 86–89, 96, 97, 99, 100, 102–105, 110, 111, 113, 117, 153, 156, 166, 178, 182, 185, 188, 190, 191, 195, 198, 199 Goethe, J.W. von, 36, 39, 76, 156, 172, 209 Goschler, I., 7, 86, 87, 141, 192, 211 Gratry, A.J.A., 106, 212 Grimblot, P., 49, 126, 134–136, 195, 212 Grün, K., 74, 78, 79, 82, 126, 200, 202, 212, 214 Guigniaut, J.-D., 127, 212 Guiran, F., 150, 165, 182, 200, 201, 212 Guizot, F., 50, 211, 214 H Heine, H., 16, 43, 63–67, 69, 72–74, 78, 82, 91, 93, 95, 144, 146–148, 168, 182, 185, 186, 190, 212, 218 Herwegh, G., 78, 212 Hess, M., 71, 74, 78, 79, 82, 144, 190, 194, 210, 212 Hinrichs, H., 64, 67–69, 185, 188, 212

Index Hotho, H.G., 43, 44, 140, 145, 171, 212 Husson, C., 115, 136, 137, 168, 201, 212 I Infinity, 29, 39, 46, 54, 56, 57, 66, 80, 87, 89, 104, 105, 108, 110–113, 159, 160, 163, 178, 195 Intuition, 31, 32, 41, 42, 49, 52, 65, 68, 94, 153, 163, 166 J Jacobi, F.H., 11, 27, 33, 36, 52, 156, 165, 184 Jacques, A.F., 53, 151, 168, 212 Jeannel, C., 201, 213 Jouffroy, T.S., 59, 66, 107, 145, 148, 184, 213 Jourdain, E., 147, 168, 213 July Monarchy, 71, 210 K Kant, I., 10, 13, 14, 23, 25–28, 31, 33, 34, 36, 43–45, 47, 48, 50–52, 55, 60, 62, 65, 66, 70, 75, 76, 83, 84, 88, 92, 104, 115, 125, 126, 133–135, 139, 144, 154, 156, 157, 161, 162, 164–167, 176, 177, 180, 181, 184, 186, 189, 198, 200–202, 208, 217, 218 Kantianism, 4, 7, 8, 11, 22, 23, 26–29, 33, 44, 50, 62, 83, 85, 115, 162, 189, 193, 196, 210 Kojève, A., 2, 3, 17, 140 Kolloff, E., 129–131, 149, 158, 169, 189, 213 L La Liberté de penser, 53, 112, 151, 203, 212, 217 La Nourais, P.-A. de, 185, 213 Lacordaire, H.-D., 168, 213 Lagarmitte, H., 7, 75, 183, 213 Lamartine, A. de, 79 Lamennais, F.R. de, 16, 79, 98–100, 110, 168, 183, 193, 210, 213–216 Laube, H., 78 Laurent, P.-M., 48 Le Catholique, 145–146, 178 Le Globe, 75, 145, 146, 171, 179–181, 183, 210, 213, 214, 218 Lèbre, A., 3, 7, 14, 100–106, 146, 150, 169, 191, 197, 213

235 Lechevalier, J., 3, 63–67, 72, 75, 140, 148, 149, 169, 181, 184, 185, 213 Left Hegelianism, 7, 76, 77, 112, 126, 137, 196, 216 Leibniz, G.W., 23, 49, 54, 56, 65, 101, 102, 104, 135, 136, 155, 160, 167, 190, 193, 195, 217 Lerminier, E., 3, 7, 12, 16, 48, 55, 59–65, 68, 69, 72, 74, 85, 93, 98, 99, 134, 140, 141, 145, 146, 153, 154, 168, 180, 181, 183, 184, 186, 189, 190, 199, 211, 213 Leroux, P., 12, 14–16, 64, 67, 69–72, 74, 75, 79, 82, 94–98, 105, 134, 135, 145–147, 150, 152, 190, 192, 194, 197, 209, 210, 214, 216–218 Leske, C.F., 82, 214 L’Europe littéraire, 66, 148, 184, 190 Liberalism, 75, 78, 180 Littré, É., 126, 193, 214 Locke, J., 47, 164, 167, 218 Lockeanism, 28 Logic, 30, 38, 41, 42, 58, 61, 65, 70, 81, 83–85, 89, 93, 96, 97, 103, 104, 106, 111, 112, 114, 116, 131, 137, 154, 159, 166, 169, 188, 195, 197, 199 Loménie, L. de, 203, 214 M Macherey, P., 2, 5–10, 39, 42, 47, 83, 84 Maine de Biran, P., 5, 13, 23, 33–36, 41, 93, 101, 135, 176, 214, 216, 217 Malabou, C., 2, 3 Maret, H., 58, 74, 78, 85–91, 103, 106, 193, 197, 198, 201, 214 Marheineke, P., 214 Marx, K., 59, 66, 71, 78–82, 96, 144, 150, 198, 200, 202, 208, 212, 214–216 Materialism, 26, 27, 29, 33, 46, 80, 86, 188, 192, 203 Matter, J., 3, 7, 54, 154, 168, 169, 194, 195, 202, 203, 214 Mäurer, G., 144, 214 Metaphysics, 23, 33, 37, 41, 50, 52, 58, 61, 63, 74, 75, 77, 81, 83, 84, 93, 97, 103, 108, 109, 114, 116, 117, 136, 156, 159, 163, 164, 166, 191, 195, 197, 208 Meyerbeer, G., 36 Michelet, J., 63, 107–111, 147, 168, 169 Michelet, K.L., 36, 51–54, 62, 75, 78, 111, 140, 151, 153, 158–160, 162, 165, 169, 171, 172, 190, 194, 198, 210, 214

236 Montalembert, C.F.R. de, 99, 169, 210, 215, 216 Montrol, F.M. de, 177, 215 N Nation, 5–8, 32, 70, 72, 90, 133, 134 Nefftzer, A., 147, 215 Nouvelle Encyclopédie, 152, 190, 214, 216 Nouvelle revue germanique, 10, 54, 55, 128–129, 131–132, 144, 147–149, 154–155, 180–185, 187, 189, 190, 195, 213, 214, 218 O Oken, L., 14, 76, 117, 126, 130, 179, 209 Ontology, 41, 42, 44, 49, 66, 67, 187 Organism, 56, 104, 110 Ott, A., 7, 9, 85–91, 106, 108, 115, 198, 215 P Pantheism, 4, 6, 11, 14–16, 26, 28, 35, 37, 48, 53, 58, 61, 65, 74, 77, 80, 85–91, 93, 95, 96, 98, 99, 103, 104, 106, 115, 116, 146, 151, 152, 162, 163, 166, 167, 178, 180, 182, 186, 192, 197–199, 201, 203, 208, 209, 214, 216 Parmenides, 49, 77, 88, 176, 177 Perfectibility, 70, 75, 167 Pictet, A., 7, 10, 109, 127–128, 169, 177, 191, 215 Plato, 33, 34, 44, 49, 64, 98, 104, 139, 157, 177, 191, 201, 218 Pölitz, K.H.L., 189, 215 Pompery, É. de, 150, 195, 215 Poncelet, J.-V., 140, 215 Poret, H., 169, 215 Prévost, A., 3, 7, 54, 55, 59, 60, 98, 140, 144, 147, 149, 153, 154, 157, 158, 168, 172, 183, 186, 189, 215 Prévost, L., 14, 168, 198, 199 Proclus, 49, 88, 152, 172, 176, 199, 201 Protestantism, 88–91, 99, 100, 190, 209–211, 216–218 Proudhon, P.-J., 3, 16, 79, 82–85, 106, 126, 193, 197, 201, 202, 211–215 Psychology, 41, 44, 48–50, 52, 67, 68, 70, 114, 116, 156, 209

Index Q Quinet, E., 53, 54, 63, 76–78, 93, 144, 146, 147, 168–170, 182, 183, 186, 191, 214, 215 Quiris, X., 169, 172, 216 R Radicalism, 4, 16, 66, 77–81, 85, 94, 96, 106, 203, 209, 213 Rationalism, 4, 28, 61, 62, 86, 87, 167, 179, 194 Ravaisson, F., 3, 15, 16, 45, 49, 53, 54, 92–94, 107, 127, 131–132, 135, 148, 158–160, 169, 170, 189, 191–193, 215, 216 Realism, 27, 28, 45, 46, 48, 93, 96, 103, 160, 166 Rémusat, C. de, 54, 108, 113, 115, 116, 125, 145, 150, 157, 161–165, 200, 201, 203, 212, 216 Renouvier, C., 107, 152, 195, 216 Restoration, the, 2, 15, 61, 70, 71, 145, 211 Revolution, 64, 65, 70, 78, 81, 82, 105, 112, 131, 138, 170, 182, 188, 192 Revue de Paris, 144, 152–154, 183 Revue des Deux Mondes, 8, 56, 62, 63, 76, 115, 146, 150, 152, 182–186, 191–193, 197, 201–203, 209, 211, 214, 216, 217 Revue du Nord, 129–131, 144, 147, 149, 157, 189, 209, 213, 215, 217 Revue du progrès social, 149, 184, 186, 213 Revue encylopédique, 146–147, 209 Revue européenne, 138, 147, 182, 210 Revue indépendante, La, 81, 94, 96, 98, 134, 150, 194–196, 198–200, 210, 214, 217, 218 La Revue nouvelle, 150, 165, 200, 201, 211, 212 Revue suisse, 150, 191 Reynaud, J., 135, 152, 190, 216 Rio, A.-F., 99, 100, 168, 216 Robinson, H.C., 33, 35, 216 Rosenkranz, K., 96, 140, 185, 197, 216 Ruge, A., 6, 66, 71, 78–81, 144, 150, 198, 199, 202, 208, 216 S Saintes, A., 194, 216 Saint-Simon, H. de, 73, 75, 103, 145, 181, 209–211, 216

Index Saint-Simonianism, 16, 59, 63, 66, 72–76, 145, 146, 149, 181–183, 185, 196, 209–211, 213, 214, 216, 217 Saisset, E., 16, 54, 107, 113–117, 146, 151, 197, 201, 212, 216 Sand, G., 79, 150, 191, 217, 218 Sartre, J.-P., 2, 5 Scepticism, 28, 46, 48, 49, 84, 85, 106, 115, 116, 148 Schepper, K., 78 Schiller, F., 107 Schlegel, A.W., 26, 33, 36 Schlegel, F., 37, 145, 211 Schleiermacher, F., 27, 76, 157, 171, 214 Schlosser, F.C., 37, 217 Schuckmann, K.F. von, 42, 217 Schulz, F.W., 180, 217 Schweighäuser, G., 27, 176, 217 Secrétan, C., 7, 16, 100–106, 141, 150, 169, 176, 193–195, 203, 217 Seiler, S., 78, 217 Simon, J., 71, 86, 114, 151, 178, 197, 208, 212, 217 Socialism, 6, 77, 82, 209, 212–214, 216 Spazier, R.O., 144, 149, 209, 217 Spinoza, B., 14, 31, 34, 39, 48, 54, 61, 65, 76, 77, 87–89, 91, 101, 102, 107, 114, 115, 136, 152, 162, 163, 186, 190, 195, 197, 202, 216 Spirit, 23, 55, 75, 113, 167 Spiritualism, 4, 15, 45, 53, 92, 101, 103, 107, 135, 157 Staël, G. de, 13, 16, 26, 28, 31–36, 56, 62, 63, 73, 109, 110, 148, 167–169, 176, 189, 208, 216, 217 Stapfer, P.A., 10, 35, 127, 144, 154, 217 Stein, L. von, 79, 196, 217 Strauss, D.F., 76, 77, 80, 87, 89, 104, 126, 144, 191, 193, 194, 203, 214, 215 Subjectivity, 31, 41, 45, 50, 51, 164, 179, 200 Sulzer, J.G., 107

237 T Taillandier, S.-R., 146, 168, 197, 202, 203, 217 Taine, H., 16, 107, 113–117, 217 Tennemann, W.G., 44, 64, 92, 126, 180 Thiersch, F., 171, 218 Thurot, F., 181, 218 Tissot, C.J., 54, 83, 92, 126, 149, 151, 189, 193, 196, 218 Tolstoy, L., 79 Tourneur, L.-V., 198, 218 Transcendental, 23, 28, 29, 31, 35, 44, 57, 73, 86, 96, 135, 163, 165, 193 V Vacherot, E., 54, 106, 107, 114, 151, 201, 202, 218 Vanderbourg, C., 107 Venedey, J., 78 Vera, A., 15, 16, 54, 107, 111–113, 139–140, 151, 197, 201, 203, 218 Viardot, L., 79, 150, 217, 218 Villers, C. de, 10, 13, 16, 25–30, 33, 107, 168, 176, 210, 218 Vinet, A., 100, 150, 213, 217, 218 W Wahl, J., 2–4, 17, 140 Weill, A., 7, 82, 95, 96, 150, 200, 218 Weisse, C.H., 67, 102, 218 Weitling, W., 78, 217 Wendt, A., 44, 67, 186, 218 Werner, M., 3, 9–12, 36, 43–46, 58, 59, 91, 145, 162, 170–172 Willm, J., 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 49, 54–58, 60, 90, 108, 128–129, 131–134, 140, 141, 147, 148, 151, 154, 155, 157, 164–167, 180–182, 184, 186, 187, 189, 202, 203, 218 Wolff, C., 49