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THE ORIGINS OF CONTEMPORARY FRANCE - VOLUME 6
THE ORIGINS OF CONTEMPORARY FRANCE - VOLUME 6 HIPPOLYTE A. TAINE BOOK FIFTH. The Church.
CHAPTER I. MORAL INSTITUTIONS
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III
BOOK SIXTH. Public instruction.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III. Evolution between 1814 and 1890.
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After Taine's death in March 1893 his nephew Andr? Chevrillon
arranged his last manuscripts on the Church and Education for
publication and wrote the following introduction which also tells us
much about Taine and his works
PREFACE By Andr? Chevrillon.
"To treat of the Church the School and the Family describe the
modern milieu and note the facilities and obstacles which a society
like our own encounters in this milieu such was the program of the
last[1] section of the "Origins of Contemporary France." The preceding
volume is a continuation of the first part of this program; after the
commune and the department after local societies the author was to
study moral and intellectual bodies in France as organized by
Napoleon. This study completed this last step taken he was about to
reach the summit. He was about to view France as a whole to
comprehend it no longer through a detail of its organs in a state of
formation but its actual existence; no longer isolated but plunged
along with other occidental nations into the modern milieu
experiencing with them the effects of one general cause which changed
the physical and intellectual condition of men; which dissolved
sentiments formerly grouping them together more or less capable at
length of adapting themselves to new circumstances and of organizing
according to a new type suited to the coming age that now opens before
us.
Only a part of this last volume was written that which relates to
the Church and to public instruction. Death intervened and suddenly
arrested the pen. M. Taine at this moment was about completing his
analysis of subordinate societies in France. - For those who have
followed him thus far it is already clear that the great defect of the
French community is the fragmentation of the individuals who
isolated dwindling and prostrate at the feet of the all-powerful
State who due to remote historical causes and yet more so by
modern legislation have been made incapable of "spontaneously
grouping around a common interest." Very probably - and of this we may
judge by two sketches of a plan undoubtedly provisional but the
ideas of which were long settled in his mind - M. Taine would have
first described this legislation and defined its principles and
general characteristics. He meant to show it more and more systematic
deliberately hostile to collective enterprise considering secondary
bodies not as "distinct special organs" endowed with a life of their
own "maintained and stimulated by private initiation" but as agents
of the State "which fashions them after a common pattern imposes on
them their form and prescribes their work." - This done this defect
pointed out the author was to enumerate the consequences flowing from
it the social body entirely changed "not only in its proportions but
in its innermost texture" every tendency weakened by which
individuals form groups that are to last longer than themselves each
man reduced to his own self the egoistic instinct enhanced while the
social instinct wastes away for want of nourishment his daily
imagination solely concerned with life-long aims incapacitated for
politics as he is "lacking spheres of action in which he may train
himself according to his experiences and faculties" his mind
weakening in idleness and boredom or in a thirst for pleasure and
personal success - in short an organic impoverishment of all
faculties of cohesion leading to the destruction of the natural
centers of grouping and consequently to political instability.[2]
One association of special import remains the most spontaneous the
deepest rooted so old that all others derive from it so essential
that in any attack upon it we see even the substance of the social
body decaying and diminishing. On the nature of the Family; on its
profound physiological origins; on its necessary role in the
prolongation and "perpetuation of the individual" by affording him
"the sole remedy for death"; on its primitive constitution among men
of our own race; on its historic organization and development "around
the family home"; on the necessity of its subsistence and continuance
in order to insure the duration of this home; on its other needs M.
Taine with his knowledge of man and of his history had given a good
deal of thought to fundamental ideas analogous to those which he has
consecrated to the classic spirit to the origin of honor and
conscience to the essence of local society so many stones as it
were shaped by him from time to time and deeply implanted as the
foundations of his criticism of institutions. Having set forth the
proper character and permanent wants of the Family he was able to
study the legislation affecting it and first "the Jacobin laws on
marriage divorce paternal authority and on the compulsory public
education of children; next the Napoleonic laws those which still
govern us the Civil Code" with that portion of it in which the
equality and leveling spirit is preserved along with "its tendency to
regard property as a means of enjoyment" instead of the starting-point
and support of "an enduring institution." - Having exposed the system
M. Taine meant to consider its effects those of surrounding
institutions and to describe the French family as it now exists. He
had first studied the "tendency to marriage"; he had considered the
motives which in general weaken or fortify it and appreciated those
now absent and now active in France. According to him "the healthy
ideal of every young man is to found a family a house of infinite
duration to create and to rule." Why in modern France does he give
his thoughts to "pleasure and of excelling in his career"? Why does he
regard marriage "without enthusiasm as a last measure as a
'settling-down' and not as a beginning the commencement of a
veritable career subordinating all others to it and regarding these
pecuniary and professional as auxiliary and as means?" - After the
tendency to marriage "the tendency to paternity." How does the
shrunken family come to live only for itself? In what way in default
of other interests - homestead domain workshop lasting local
undertakings - how does the heart now deprived of its food by the
lack of invisible posterity fall back on affection for visible
progeny?[3] In a country where there are few openings where careers
are overcrowded what are the effects of this paididolatry[4] and to
sum up in one phrase in what way does the French system of to-day
tend to develop the most fatal of results the decline in the birth
rate?
Here the study of institutions on a grand scale terminated. Formerly
M. Taine had contemplated a completion of his labors by a description
of contemporary France the product of origins scrutinized by him and
of which he had traced the formation. Having disengaged his factors he
meant to combine them to show them united and acting in concert all
centering on the great actual facts which dominate the rest and which
determine the order and structure of modern society. As he had given a
picture of old France he aimed to portray France as it now is with
its various groups - village small town and large city - with its
categories of men peasants workmen bourgeois functionaries and
capitalists; with the forces that impel each class along their
passions their ideas their desires. Besides the numerical statistics
of person he meant to have set forth the moral statistics of souls.
According to him psychological conditions exist which render the
social activity of men possible or impossible. And especially "in a
given society there is always a psychological state which provokes
the state of that society." It was his aim to seek out in the novel
in poetry in the arts since 1820 that is to say in all works that
throw light on the various and successive kinds of the reigning ideal
- in philosophy in religion in industry in all branches of French
action and thought - the signs of the psychological tendencies of
modern Frenchman in this or that social condition. What would this
book have been? M. Taine had sketched it out so far back he had
abandoned it for so long a time and never alluded to it that nothing
remains by which we can form any idea of it. But in this undertaking
demanding so much science so much intuition so much experience of
accurate observation of general views and precise generalization - in
this vast study requiring such profound knowledge not alone of France
but of societies offering points of comparison with her we may be
certain that the author of Notes sur Paris Notes sur l'Angleterre of
the Ancien R?gime the critic accustomed to interpret civilizations
literature and works of art the thinker in fine who to prepare
himself for the greatest tasks he undertook traveled five times over
France studying its life with the eyes of an artist in the light of
history and of psychology ever preceding his philosophic study with
visual investigation would have been equal to the task.[5]
Already for several years M. Taine aware that his time was short
had narrowed the limits of the work he was engaged upon. But what his
work lost in breadth and in richness of detail it would have gained in
depth and in power. All his master ideas would have been found in it
foreshortened and concentrated. Always seeking in this or that group
of them what he called his generators intellectual and moral as well
as political he would have described all those which explain the
French group. Unfortunately here again the elements are wanting which
allow one to foreshadow what this final analysis and last construction
might have been. M. Taine did not write in anticipation. Long before
taking the pen in hand he had derived his most significant facts and
formed his plan. He carried them in his brain where they fell into
order of themselves. Ten lines of notes a few memoranda of
conversations - faint reflections to us around him of the great
inward light - are all that enable one to attempt an indication of the
few leading conceptions were to complete "Les Origines de la France
Contemporaine."
"Le Milieu Moderne" was to have been the title of the last book. The
question here is how to discover the great characteristics of the
period into which European societies entered and about were to live.
Rising to a higher point of view than that to which he had confined
himself in studying France M. Taine regarded its metamorphosis as a
case of transformation as general as the passage of the Cit? antique
over to the Roman Empire over to the feudal State. Now as formerly
this transformation is the effect of a "change in the intellectual and
physical condition of men"; that is to say in other words in the
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