Concerning the Year in France
After the two years in America, the Rockefeller Foundation was kind enough to extend the Laura Spellman Rockefeller Memorial Fellowship for another year to continue my studies in France. I accepted the opportunity with the idea of enlarging my horizon by living in France for a year and finding out firsthand what points in French culture were relevant for a political scientist. The field for studies was wide open. I attended courses in the law school, especially with a French economist named Albert Aftalion, and I attended the lectures of the famous Léon Brunschvicg, the Pascal scholar. In the beginning my studies were somewhat hampered because I had a reading knowledge of French but not a really good knowledge of a more complicated vocabulary. I remember reading the Trois Contes by Gustave Flaubert, which was quite an ordeal because Flaubert’s vocabulary is enormous, and I had to use a dictionary in practically every sentence. But reading authors who have a large vocabulary is the only way of building up a knowledge of a language.
At the time, there was an irresistible attraction in Paris—that is, the flood of Russian refugees. I happened to get acquainted with quite a few of them and understood the necessity of learning Russian in order to have access to the political materials. So I started on it with Konstantin V. Mochulski and G. Lozinski as teachers. The work with these two excellent philologists continued practically through the whole year, and I got far enough to be able to read Dostoevsky. Unfortunately, I have forgotten most of what I learned because in the practice of my work I had later too little occasion to deal with Russian sources.
But the main area of studies, of course, was French literature and philosophy. Good guides for introducing myself to the problems of these fields were the works of Albert Thibaudet on Mallarmé and Valéry, and of René Lalou on the history of French literature in general and on the history of the novel in particular. I acquired in this year in Paris a practically complete set of the important French prose literature from La Princesse de Clèves by Madame de La Fayette to the work of Marcel Proust, whose last volumes of A la Recherche du temps perdu were coming out at the time. Marcel Proust, like Flaubert, was an inestimable source for enriching my French vocabulary. René Lalou’s De Descartes à Proust was of fundamental importance for my understanding of the continuity of French intellectual history. Here I found the French history of consciousness that runs parallel to the history of consciousness in English and American philosophy from the eighteenth century to the present.
Through both Thibaudet and Lalou my attention was directed especially to Mallarmé and Valéry. At this time I assembled my almost complete collection of the works of Paul Valéry, several of them in first editions that now have become valuable. I had occasion to see Valéry when he gave an after-dinner talk at some meeting connected with the League of Nations. What interested me most about him at the time, besides the fact that he was a great artist, was his Lucretian philosophy, which I understood as a parallel phenomenon to the Lucretianism of George Santayana. The poem with which I fell in love particularly was the “Cimetière Marin.”
The opportunity of spending a year in Paris of course was also used, so far as means permitted, to see the surroundings. I remember my first great impression of Chartres and a trip in summer to the remnants of the monasteries in Normandy.
In the background, of course, were my studies in the French theory of law, especially of Léon Duguit. At that time I got my first acquaintance with the French problem of solidarité. Curiously enough, I was not yet attracted to the work of Henri Bergson, though I was already familiar with his Matière et Mémoire and his Essai sur les données immediates de la conscience. My real interest in Bergson only grew with the publication of his Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion in 1932. A special area of interest became the French mémoires literature. I remember reading with fascination the memoirs of the Cardinal de Retz, which gave me an introduction to the politics of the seventeenth century. Perhaps because of their size the memoirs of Saint-Simon interested me somewhat less. The Retz memoirs were to me especially important because they described one of the great conspiracies that were characteristic of the seventeenth century. I studied the parallel cases of the Wallenstein conspiracy, of the conspiracy of the Fiesco in Genoa, and of the conspiracy of the Spaniards in Venice. One of the mémoires I read at the time were those of the duc de La Rochefoucauld, which gave me the transition to the philosophy of the moralistes. In addition to La Rochefoucauld, I read the marquise de Vauvenargues and found out about the line of influence that goes from the French moralistes to Nietzsche.
I was again in Paris in 1934 for several weeks. At this time I was interested in the French sixteenth century and especially in the work of Jean Bodin. I collected materials for a comprehensive study of Bodin’s work and in fact wrote it later to form part of the History of Political Ideas, but it has never been published.1 At that time, I worked through the catalogue of the Bibliotheque Nationale on French publications on the history and politics of the sixteenth century. So far as I remember, I had every single item in the catalogue in hand at least once, and on this occasion I became aware of the enormous influence that the Mongol invasions and the events of the fifteenth century, especially the temporary victory of Tamerlane over Bayazid I, had as a model of the political process in the sixteenth century. Practically every author of importance dealt with these events, which were completely outside the normal experience of politics in the West and introduced an inexplicable rise to power, which affected the very existence of Western civilization, as a factor into world history. This experience of the Turkish Ottoman threat and its temporary interruption through the victory of Tamerlane were observed by the humanists and entered into the conception in Machiavelli’s Prince of the man who can rise to power by his own virtue. Some of the voluminous materials gathered at the time I published in an article on “Das Timurbild der Humanisten” in 1937, which I later had reprinted in my Anamnesis of 1966.2 The influence of these events on Machiavelli, and especially on his fictitious biography of Castruccio Castracani, I published in my article on Machiavelli’s background in the Review of Politics in 1951. But considerable piles of materials and the connection with the work of Bodin have never been published.3
In the same year, 1934, I spent some weeks in London exploring the resources of the Warburg Institute, which had already moved there from Hamburg. This was my first contact with alchemy, astrology, and the complicated gnostic symbolism of the Renaissance. The materials collected on that occasion were incorporated in a chapter on “Astrological Politics” for my History of Political Ideas, which, as I said, has not been published.4 This first acquaintance was the basis for my further interest in astrology and alchemy that developed much later and helped me to gain some understanding of certain continuities in Western intellectual history from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance into the present.
1. For this text see CW, vol. 23, chap. 6.
2. English translation in CW, vol. 6.
3. Cf. CW, vol. 22, chap. 1.
4. See CW, vol. 23, chap. 5, for the text mentioned.