TIMOTHY LARSEN RENAN, JOSEPH-ERNEST (1823–1892)

TIMOTHY LARSEN RENAN, JOSEPH-ERNEST (1823–1892)

Renan served several genres (history, Semitic philology, philosophy) but he made his name—and many an enemy—primarily due to his biblical scholarship and his attempt to apply ‘scientific’ rigour and methods in the study of biblical tradition and the life of Jesus Christ himself. Faith in science was Renan’s major animating spring. He was born in Brittany on 28 February 1823 (Renan, author of La Poesie des Races Celtiques, believed that his Celtic (Breton) origins balanced his rationalism with a poetic quality—a self- perception shared by his greatest British admirer Matthew Arnold, who had partly Cornish origins). Renan was educated to become a priest, completing his education in the prestigious Saint-Sulpice seminary. Yet, he did not take vows in the end. He renounced his vocation in 1849, as his historical researches and his philological study of Semitic languages led him to question the shibboleths of revealed Christianity. Subsequently to his departure from Saint-Sulpice, Renan continued to study, securing the agrégation in 1849 and a doctorate at the Sorbonne in 1852.

His first book, L’Avenir de la science (written in 1848–9, and published in 1890) showed clearly his belief in science, which would permeate his entire life and work. Renan began in the early 1850s his life-long co-operation with the Revue des deux mondes and the Journal des débats. In 1856 he married Cornelie Scheffer, with whom he had three children (two of which survived). In 1856 he was elected to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres. And major recognition came when, in 1859, Napoleon III’s

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education minister appointed Renan Professor of the chair of Hebraic, Chaldean and Syrian languages at the Collège de France.

At his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France (23 February 1862) Renan claimed that Jesus was such an ‘incomparable man, so great [a man]’, that it was understandable why so many people came to be so struck by his character and teachings as to take him for a God. This would not do for Renan though, as he thought that everything had to be judged from the point of view of positive science. Within days from the inaugural lecture, his course was suspended. When, undeterred, Renan published in 1863 his Vie de Jésus, where he explicitly rejected the divinity of Christ, Renan was dismissed from the Collège

de France—he was to be reinstated after the republican 1870 revolution against the defeated Second Empire, in 1871, and even to become the director of the Collège from 1883 until his death in 1892.

Meanwhile, Renan published the series of books entitled Les Origines du Christianisme . The Vie de Jésus (1863) was the first in the series, to be followed by Les Apôtres (1866), then Saint Paul et sa mission (1869), until the eighth and final volume appeared in 1883.

Following France’s humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, Renan published La Réforme intellectuelle et morale de la France (1871), where he attributed the outcome of the war to the superiority of Prussian education and exhorted France to turn to science education.

His autobiographical Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse (1883), of which the most famous part is the Prière sur l’Acropole, relate the circumstances that led him to lose his faith (Fraisse 1979; Pommier 1972).

Despite his significance during his time due both to his biblical scholarship and to his standing as an inspiration for freedom-of-enquiry liberals, and despite the voluminousness of his scholarly and critical work, Renan is most remembered for his famous Sorbonne lecture Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? (11 March 1882), which acquired canonical status in the literature on nationalism and nationhood in the late twentieth century and since. The lecture has to be seen in the context in which it was contributed:

12 years after the FrancoPrussian War and the annexation of Alsace and much of Lorraine by the newly formed German Empire. German historians had stepped into the fray of political debate arguing that Alsace and Lorraine were German by right, because the population of the two provinces spoke German and shared a German culture more generally. Renan begged to differ. Language, culture or race were not enough to define a nation, according to him. What Renan offered instead is what is still considered to be the best known articulation of the theory that nationality is primarily a matter of will, of the desire of a group of people to live together, and an eloquent exposition of how such a desire comes about. Some of his statements in the lecture have been quoted innumerable times. The significance of some of his statements in that text has been highlighted in one of the most successful late twentieth-century books on the origins of nationalism, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1991). Some of his statements in that lecture have become very well known and oft-quoted:

A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things, which are really only one, go to make up this soul or spiritual principle. One of these things lies in the past, the other in the present. The one is the possession in common

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 550 of a rich heritage of memories; and the other is actual agreement, the

desire to live together, and the will to continue to make the most of the joint inheritance.

(Renan 1995:153) And, as he put it in the most quoted sentence in the lecture:

The existence of a nation is (if you will forgive me the metaphor) a daily plebiscite, just as that of the individual is a continual affirmation of life [emphasis added]…. A province means to us its inhabitants; and if anyone has a right to be consulted in the matter, it is the inhabitant. It is never to the true interest of a nation to annex or keep a country against its will. The people’s wish is after all the only justifiable criterion, to which we must always come back.

(Renan 1995:154)