Regimes of Historicity: presentism and experiences of time

UNLIKE ODYSSEUS, CHATEAUBRIAND HAD READ AUGUSTINE. Immersed as he was in a Christian experience of time, his one and only temporal reference was that of the Catholic monarchy. However, since he was born in 1768, he grew up in a period of profound crisis and conflictual relations to time. That is why he will be our guide here, he whose world was utterly shattered by the French Revolution. Yet many other names could rightfully figure between Augustine and Chateaubriand, between Alaric’s sack of Rome and the storming of the Bastille, not least Petrarch, Bacon, Montaigne, Perrault, and Rousseau; and several other experiences and crises of time between the fifteenth century and the revolutions of the eighteenth century would deserve analysis.¹

So why Chateaubriand, the youngest son of a family of Breton noblemen? Because this product and staunch supporter of what was fast transforming under his very eyes into the “ancien régime,” this traveler to the New World in search of the timeless age of the savage, this man so squarely on the losing side in the French Revolution nevertheless had a deeper understanding, when all is said and done, of the emergent temporal order of modernity than many of his contemporaries. And he managed to transform his experience of a break, rift, or breach in time into the very mainspring of his writing. Like Augustine before him, he was one of the “vanquished,” in Koselleck’s sense, for whom “if history is made in the short run by the victors, historical gains in knowledge stem in the long run from the vanquished.”2 Certainly neither Augustine nor Chateaubriand was a historian, but perhaps that was precisely because the genre of history as it existed at the time could not accommodate their experiences in all their radicality.

Toward the end of the preface to his extraordinary Memoirs, Chateaubriand wrote: “I found myself between two centuries as at the confluence of two rivers; I plunged into their troubled waters; regretfully leaving the ancient strand where I was born, and swimming hopefully towards the unknown shore.”³ These are the statements of an older man, looking back over his life and encapsulating it in an image he had used several times in his work. It is the start of this adventure that I shall examine first, before the confluence was even on the horizon. Then, through the comparison of two of Chateaubriand’s works, his first book, the Historical Essay (1797), and his Travels in America (1827), I shall delineate a quarter of a century of interaction between three key figures in the Western tradition: the ancients, the moderns, and the savages. I cannot broach their long and rich history here, nor even sketch a brief reminder; I shall simply explore their relations to time, paying particular attention to the temporalities conveyed or produced by the ways in which, during this troubled period, these three figures were linked together.

The Historical Essay is part of Chateaubriand’s vast body of writings on America. Having left for America in 1791, the young viscount returned to France in 1792, and briefly joined the Army of the Princes before going into exile in London. That was where the Historical Essay was written, as he struggled to make ends meet. He returned to London in 1822 as French ambassador, and revisited his old haunts, where he had spent time with his “companions in distress.”4 First published in 1797, the Historical Essay was republished in 1826, although Chateaubriand—who was always in dire need of money—was at the time already involved in preparing his Complete Works.⁵ Between those two dates, this unknown emigré had thus become ambassador in London—as well as in Berlin and Rome—and even minister for foreign affairs. But above all, he had become a famous writer: “Having set out to be a traveller in America, having returned to be a soldier in Europe, I did not follow up either of these careers: an evil genius wrested from me the staff and the sword, and put the pen into my hand.”⁶ An additional preface and foreword, as well as numerous critical notes, point to the (considerable) distance separating the author of 1826 from his original text, a work he considered to be “one of the most singular monuments” he had ever written.⁷ It can be read as a kind of palimpsest.

Unlike the Historical Essay, the Travels in America did not have a separate first publication, probably because it was not a written text before Chateaubriand started preparing his Complete Works. “With his Complete Works, Chateaubriand wanted to give the public hitherto unpublished texts. He had amassed citations and analyses over more than a quarter of a century, which constituted a vast reserve of documentation on which he drew for a whole range of works. In 1826, the remainder provided the basis for the penultimate writings on America, since the last word would be reserved for the Memoirs.”⁸ In these penultimate writings a quite different America from the one first visited takes shape before the eyes of the reader, a whole new journey to be undertaken.

Western civilization’s relation to time was profoundly and lastingly structured by the couple “the ancients” and “the moderns.” The many quarrels punctuating its history each time expressed the tension inherent in the pair.⁹ The notion of “the savage,” which figured already in the first travel writings from the New World, introduced a new term. Arguments no longer hinged on two elements but on three and, most often, on one-plus-two, that is, the moderns versus the ancients/savages. I will select from this long and complex history only two authors, who were important for Chateaubriand.

Rousseau is the first and most obvious figure, the matrix—aporias and all—for Chateaubriand’s Historical Essay and well beyond, right up to Claude Lévi-Strauss, another fine reader of Chateaubriand, in his Tristes tropiques. For Rousseau, the ancients both are and are not models. He holds them in higher esteem than the moderns, viewing them sometimes with nostalgia (as suggested, for example, by his lifelong reading of Plutarch) and sometimes as a utopia. Thus, for his (subsequently abandoned) history of Sparta, he had intended to collect “those precious monuments that teach us what men can be by showing us what they have been.”10 For Rousseau, the movement thus went from the past to the future, or rather toward a future yet to be brought into being, as a goal on which to set one’s sights. But even if, in the Social Contract, society had something of an ideal Greek polis about it, every society (including ancient society) was nonetheless a mutilation compared to the state of nature. Hence the figure of the savage, which the young Chateaubriand invoked and brought to life: “Oh man of nature, you alone make me proud to be a man! Your heart knows no dependence.”¹¹ For Chateaubriand, far from unrest and revolution, the savage resembled an island on which the shipwrecked traveler could find refuge;¹² Rousseau had been left far behind.

Both Chateaubriand and Rousseau were fascinated by the appeal of the savage, appeals to the savage, and the appeal of travel:

Let us suppose a Montesquieu, a Buffon, a Diderot…traveling in order to inform their compatriots, observing and describing as they know how to do.…Let us suppose that these new Hercules, back from these memorable treks, then wrote at leisure the natural, moral, and political history of what they would have seen; we ourselves would see a new world traced out by their pen, and we would thus learn to know our own.¹³

If he, who has been consumed by a thirst for knowledge, and has torn himself away from the enjoyments of affluence in order to go beyond the seas, to contemplate the grandest spectacle which can be offered to the eye of the philosopher, to meditate on free man in a state of nature and in society, placed near each other on the same soil;…if such a person, I say, deserves any confidence, readers, you will find him in me.¹⁴

The second significant author is Joseph-François Lafitau, whose work is one of the principal sources of the Travels in America. Lafitau, a Jesuit missionary in Canada, published Customs of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times in 1724. The Homeric flavor of Chateaubriand’s savages in the Travels largely derives from it. But with Lafitau, the comparison with the ancients served explicitly as a heuristic device, and its ultimate goal was not to develop a comparative anthropology and show, in Arnaldo Momigliano’s terms, that the Greeks were also savages, but rather to elucidate common origins. To this end, the savages no less than the ancients were witnesses to be examined and “traces” to be interpreted, in order to shed light on the remotest times of antiquity. The two did not figure for themselves, but rather for what lay beyond them, namely their common origin, which ultimately justifies the comparison between them. Lafitau intended to show atheists and modern skeptics that a primeval religion existed long before the laws of Moses, and that it was everywhere the same.16 But quite apart from this apologetic framework and its place in the work, Lafitau’s method of using parallels effectively “naturalized” the comparison between “the savages” and “the ancients.”

THE HISTORICAL ESSAY IS A PIECE OF TRAVEL WRITING, THE TALE of a journey to the New World, of course, but the journey is above all internal. For here we have a historical study of revolutions ancient and modern that begins with the question “Who am I?”¹⁷ Who am I indeed, given that the world into which I was born has collapsed? This was a question which Chateaubriand, the fledgling writer, would come back to time and again, pen in hand, on page after page. In the Notice to the 1826 edition, placed before the “Introduction,” Chateaubriand summarized his book as “a sort of regular diary” of his “mental excursions.”¹⁸ When he traveled for the first time alone through the “boundless” American forest, “a strange revolution took place in my sensations”¹⁹—as though the real revolution were not the one he had fled but the one he had come looking for. And while the reader is led from the ruins of the Old World to the deserts and forests of the New, ending one night in the American forest, the traveler Chateaubriand has in fact gone in exactly the opposite direction, traveling to the New World, and reflecting back on the Old and its history.

To guide him through the world of the ancients, Chateaubriand made extensive use of one of the bestsellers of his day, abbé Jean-Jacques Barthélemy’s Travels of Anacharsis the Younger in Greece (1788). The young Anacharsis, “unable to bear longer the wandering life” he had lived until then, had left Scythia to live in Greece, until freedom was dealt a deathblow there (by Philip of Macedonia at Chaeronea in 338 B.C.), and he ended up returning to Scythia;20 the young Chateaubriand left the Old World (where liberty had breathed its last) in search of the savages and their authentic freedom. But beyond the inverted itineraries of these two travelers, the Scythians occupy an important place in the economy of the Essay, to the extent that one can talk of a real Scythian paradigm.

Thus a note in the original version frames the three Scythian chapters as follows: “I am about to present to the reader the savage, pastoral, agricultural, philosophical and corrupted age, and thus [to] give him, without departing from my subject, an index of all societies, and an abridged, but complete history of man.”²¹ I shall briefly investigate these Scythians, who represent all three ages of civilization, from the state of the savage to that of corruption. They first came on the literary and philosophical scene in book IV of Herodotus’s Histories, and have attracted countless speculations and comments ever since.²²

Prior to figuring in Chateaubriand’s arguments, the Scythians had surfaced in a play of 1766 by Voltaire called, precisely, The Scythians [Les Scythes]: “What we have here is, in a sense, the state of nature set in opposition to the state of artificial man, as he is found in the big cities,” Voltaire wrote in the preface. And after the play flopped, he bluntly stated, in a letter to the king of Prussia, “The Scythians is a work of much mediocrity; it rather depicts the manners of the pretty Swiss cantons, and a French marquis, than the Scythians, and a Persian prince.” The Encyclopédie article “Scythe,” written by the indefatigable chevalier de Jaucourt, depicts the Scythians as noble savages. Their desire never went beyond their natural needs. As a consequence they experienced a happiness far greater than the Greeks ever knew. Anacharsis, Toxaris, and Zalmoxis (the trio of famous Scythians, to which one could add Abaris) were, at the end of the day, lawmakers rather than philosophers. Anacharsis, the most famous of them all, was a “man of worth” who lamented, as he perished under the arrows of his fellow countrymen, that “the wisdom which afforded me protection in Greece has been my downfall in Scythia.”²³

Such descriptions of virtuous Scythians actually go further back, and can all be found in abbé Rollin, who appeals to even older sources—the historian Justin and even Homer—while also introducing a discreet comparison with the lives of the Patriarchs. He nevertheless mentions out of honesty that a divergent and very ancient tradition also exists (dating back to Strabo and even further back to Ephorus, in the fourth century B.C.), according to which the Scythians were cruel and barbarous. But he hastily returns to Justin, who noted, as Jaucourt would later, that despite their ignorance the Scythians were wiser than the Greeks with all their statesmen and philosophers. Anacharsis is once again depicted as an entirely positive hero. In the light of all these elements, can we possibly, Rollin asks, “forbear to look upon them [i.e., the Scythians] with esteem and admiration?” Of course not. But, he continues, there came the time of corruption, brought about by “luxury.” How, and by whose agency? “Strabo…does not deny that this fatal change of manners was owing to the Romans and the Grecians.”24 Nothing could be clearer.

“The happy Scythians, whom the Greeks called Barbarians.” This is the opening sentence of the Historical Essay’s Scythian chapters. Chateaubriand begins by adopting the traditional vision of the Scythians, following Rollin (or Jaucourt), but he adds a parallel between the three ages of the Swiss and the Scythians, on the basis that the Greeks were to the Scythians what the French are to the Swiss: agents of corruption! However, the parallel is not rigorous, he says, and there are some differences. Thus “the Scythians of the old, and the Swiss of the modern world, attracted the eyes of their contemporaries by the celebrity of their innocence. The different employment of their lives, however, introduced some difference as to their virtues. The first were shepherds, and cherished liberty for her own sake; the last were agriculturists and loved her for the sake of their property. The first approached towards primitive purity; the last had advanced a step nearer to civil vices.”²⁵ In the wake of Rousseau, history could no longer be simple repetition.

Chateaubriand introduced two significant changes in relation to previous accounts. First, the Scythians are no longer assimilated to the Patriarchs, but quite simply to primitive man. The shift from Scythians to savages is thus not a problem or, more precisely, there is no difference between them since they are in equal measure men of nature. “Under the maples of the Erie I have seen this favourite of nature, who feels much and thinks little, who has no reasoning faculty beyond his wants, and who arrives at the results of philosophy like an infant, through his gambols and sleep.”26 Rollin before him had said nothing different, but Chateaubriand rewrites the comparison from the point of view of the savage. And as though further clarification were required, a note adds, “By depicting the mental savage of America, I supply a deficiency in Justinus, Herodotus, Strabo, Horace, etc. with regard to the history of the Scythians. People in a state of nature (some trifling differences excepted) resemble each other, and who has seen one, has seen all.” As a result, Chateaubriand can exclaim: “Good Scythians, why did you not exist in our days? I would have sought among you shelter from the storm.”²⁷ Scythia is thus depicted as a primitive America that no longer exists, that is, as a refuge. As such, quite unlike the young Anacharsis, the young Chateaubriand’s one wish is to flee Greece and reach Scythia.

The other, more striking change concerns Anacharsis: not Anacharsis the Younger, but his ancestor, whom Chateaubriand is the only author to portray negatively. Introduced to illustrate Strabo’s model of decadence, he is no longer represented as the wise man who traveled to Greece in order to drink in the wisdom of the Greeks, nor even as the “barbarian” who, in the tradition of the Cynics, came to poke fun at supposed Greek “wisdom.” Rather, he is simply the man of progress, the bearer of corruption, that is, the philosopher. “He imagined that his fellow countrymen were barbarians, because they lived according to nature.” So he undertook to enlighten them. Of course in no time at all he paid for his initiatives with his life, but the leaven “continued to ferment.” The Scythians, “disgusted with their innocence…drank the poison of civil life,” thus illustrating this “philosophical and corrupted age.”²⁸

So this was the Scythian paradigm, or the “abridged, but complete history of man.” Yet Chateaubriand dismisses it with a single stroke of the pen in a note from 1826: “These three chapters are no more part of the subject-matter of my Essay than is most of the work.”29 How come?! For Chateaubriand’s procedure conforms perfectly to the principles of historia magistra that organize the Historical Essay as a whole, and have informed his relation to time up until then. In the form used by Chateaubriand, this famous doctrine of historia magistra vitae dates back to Cicero.³⁰ It expresses the classical conception of history as source of examples (plena exemplorum): “everything around us abounds with lessons and examples,”³¹ Chateaubriand states in the Historical Essay. A summary of Koselleck’s remarks on the disappearance of the model of historia magistra will be useful at this point to help elucidate both Chateaubriand’s particular position and, more generally, the implications of a change in regime of historicity.

Koselleck’s by-now classic analyses have shown how the development in Germany of the modern concept of history (die Geschichte) around 1760–1780 gradually devitalized its understanding in terms of exemplarity and repetition.³² History in the singular (die Geschichte), understood as a process and conceived as history in itself, with its own proper temporality, abandoned the exemplum and redefined itself around the uniqueness of the event. A gap and a tension opened up between individuals’ space of experience and their horizon of expectation.³³ The modern concept of history enabled the production of this gap to be understood and explained, and it could even illuminate historical progress in general. Although these theories from the German historical school were already in circulation earlier in the century, they were really put to the test by the French Revolution, which many experienced as a time of acceleration forcing apart, to breaking point, the space of experience from the horizon of expectation.

Chateaubriand’s Historical Essay precisely faced this problem, and endeavored to reduce (as one reduces a fracture) this gap. He wanted not only to understand, but also to foresee events—with the intellectual tools available to him, namely the example and the parallel—by treating ancient and modern revolutions “in terms of their relations to the French Revolution.”

Accordingly, Chateaubriand started with the past to explain the present, and even hoped to be able to reveal the future. A whole series of declarations throughout the Historical Essay suggest this aim: “With the torch of past revolutions in our hand, we shall boldly enter into the darkness of future ones. We shall scrutinize the man of former times, in spite of his assumed character, and compel the Proteus to give us an undisguised view of future man.”34 The Proteus mentioned is Proteus of Egypt, a figure from Homer and an immortal, who is capable of assuming all manner of different shapes. Menelaus can find out how to return home only by pinning him down to prevent him escaping, while he cross-examines him. Proteus is a seer, like Tiresias, whom Odysseus consulted, and as such he knows both past and future.³⁵ For Chateaubriand, however, Proteus is not a third party, but none other than the “man of former times” himself, whom the investigator must corner and interrogate, to make him reveal “future man.” The past speaks to us, as long as we know how to question it. “Passing from the troubles of ancient times to those of modern nations I shall mount, by a series of calamities, from the first ages of the world to our own.” The path climbed starts in the past.³⁶ “He who reads history, is like a man travelling in a desert through the fabled woods of antiquity, which predicted the future.”³⁷ “If you wish to predict the future, consider the past. It is a sure datum which will never deceive you, if you proceed upon one principle-morality [les moeurs].”³⁸

Chateaubriand calls upon an array of classical references, from Proteus to sacred groves, in his attempts to persuade himself that the past really can still shed light on the future. But this is clearly wishful thinking. Since “the enlightened ages have always been the ages of slavery,” it follows that “judging from the data which history affords, I cannot but tremble for the future destiny of France.”³⁹ Then, in conclusion to this demonstration, Chateaubriand affirms an “important truth”: man is capable only of “incessant repetition”; he “moves in a circle, to pass beyond which all attempts are fruitless.”⁴⁰ The conclusion to be drawn arrives abruptly, but it is no less desired for all that: the French Revolution has almost nothing new to tell us.

This relation to time and history encourages comparisons and parallels between the ancients and the moderns, and justifies imitation. Since history is basically repetition, the practice of comparison (understood as the search for and ordering of similarities) with antiquity is a first and essential step in the production of a well-constructed prognosis. And when it comes to parallels, Chateaubriand is fearless and certainly not beset by doubt: he compares Athens with Paris, London with Carthage, the Austrians with the Persians, Cook with Hannon, Critias with Marat—and more. “What chaos” he says several times in the 1826 preface. This is of course a conceit and an affectation, but also more than that.⁴¹

He also does not hesitate to use Tacitus to his own ends, citing “Experti invicem sumus, ego ac fortuna” (“Fortune and I now know each other”; Tacitus Histories 2.47) as the epigraph to the Historical Essay as a whole, and repeating it in the chapter concerning “the unfortunate.”42 These were the words Othon uttered when bidding farewell to his troops before withdrawing to take his own life. Chateaubriand wrote the passage while lying ill in London, adopting the pose of the dying man, half-Othon, half-Tacitus. The Essay is thus presented to the reader as the author’s farewell to the world, his testament from beyond the grave, or at all events at death’s door.

Yet despite the countless quotations, the classical mannerisms, and the numerous parallels, both familiar and surprising, Chateaubriand firmly condemns the harmfulness of imitation: “The danger of imitation is terrible. That, which is wholesome for one nation, is seldom the same for another.”⁴³ This maxim is initially simply an acknowledgment of the variety and diversity of customs. But when it comes to the uses of antiquity, Chateaubriand does not doubt for an instant that the Jacobins are “fanatics in their admiration” of it and, because they are more “at home in Rome or Athens,” have tried to reinstate ancient customs. Chateaubriand’s stance here places him in the camp of the Thermidorian Reaction.⁴⁴ And he has just as little doubt that this imitation comes at the wrong time, due to a misrecognition of the “nature of things” (but he is not Thermidorian in his understanding of the “nature of things”). There follow some rather convoluted considerations which show that a maxim such as “other times, other customs” was not yet available.

This condemnation of imitation explains the terms in which Chateaubriand addresses the Revolutionaries: you seek to establish democracy just when “all nations are returning, from the nature of things, to monarchy, that is to say at the epoch of extreme corruption!”⁴⁵ Convinced that you are imitating Lycurgus, you “have inverted the motives of Lycurgus” (since Greece, at the time of Lycurgus, was in the process of abandoning monarchy). Furthermore,

One can almost hear Marx’s words on the French Revolutionaries dressed up in Roman costume.⁴⁷ Except that, for Chateaubriand, we have already left the domain of tragedy for that of farce and vulgar imitation, and at all events—Chateaubriand’s parting shot—the Revolutionaries chose the wrong parallels at the wrong time. This tirade against imitation proves, however, to be wholly compatible with a certain nostalgia for antiquity, since on the very same page of the Essay, in an echo of Rousseau, we find: “I myself would wish to pass my days under such a democracy as I have fancied, as forming the sublimest of governments in theory;…and I myself have lived as citizen of Italy and of Greece.”⁴⁸ So antiquity can still function as a utopia—accessible in the form of a reverie—but it must under no circumstances be imitated. Explanations in terms of “different times” do surface here and there, but they are counteracted by the schema of history turning back on itself, a situation worsened by the progress of corruption: the Swiss have become the modern world’s Scythians.

The well-trodden path of parallels between the ancients and the moderns, which is at once unavoidable and condemned (even if through other parallels), points toward the conclusion of the first part of the Historical Essay: “In vain do we claim to be politically free.” Civil (or political) liberty “is nothing but a dream, a false feeling.”49 Adopting the point of view of the savage leads, in the last instance, to debasing the Classical model of political freedom as overvalued or even quite simply fraudulent. What, after all, does it mean to be a free man in Sparta? “A free man in Sparta, means a man, whose hours were regulated as completely as those of the school-boy under the rod.” He is constantly under surveillance, checked, and constrained. Were things so very different in Athens? Yes, they were, but still “no one could be admitted into the administration of state affairs, unless he possessed a certain revenue; and when a citizen had involved himself in debt, he was sold as a slave.” As for saying that citizens are slaves to the law, that is “pure verbal trickery. For what does it matter to me whether it is the Law or the King who drags me to the guillotine?”⁵⁰

The traveler’s only option, then, is to return to the life of the savage. And that is indeed the book’s conclusion, somewhat surprisingly given its explicit claim to be a historical essay on revolutions ancient and modern. It is over there, finally, in America, that the only authentic liberty, namely “individual independence,”⁵¹ can thrive. But the eventful course of the journey, with its twists and turns, indicates well enough its utopian nature: the crossing by boat, the shipwreck on the return journey, the “profound” sleep into which Chateaubriand sinks after his night of reverie in the forest are just some of the hallmarks of the utopian narrative. And, above all, the experience can be enjoyed only in the form of a memory.⁵² As such, far from being simply an appendix to the Historical Essay, the “Night Among the Savages of America” can be read as something like its vanishing point, and at the same time as the vantage point from which to view the work in its entirety, that is, the position from which it could be written in the first place. It is a chapter which creates a narrative mechanism of “viewing from afar” by which all parties may be shown to be equivalent, and all the erroneous and criminal parallels used by the Revolutionaries may be denounced and exposed, at the very same time as the author produces other (supposedly legitimate) ones, capable of elucidating the present and the future. Above all, it represents a refuge preserved from the action of time: a place in memory [mémoire d’un lieu].

In the Historical Essay, parallels are drawn predominantly between the ancients and the moderns. The savage is both central and yet outside the field of vision until just before the end (although he is prefigured by the Scythian, his double among the ancients). In the Travels in America, by contrast, the majority of the parallels concern the ancients and the savage; even the moderns (the Americans) are first apprehended as ancients, and judged by the yardstick of Roman Republicans.

When Chateaubriand himself arrived in Philadelphia, “full of enthusiasm for the ancients,” like “a Cato,” he imagined Washington as “of course Cincinnatus.” But the glimpse he got of him passing in a carriage “somewhat deranged my republic of the year of Rome 296.”53 He expressed through self-irony and “political disappointment” [désappointement] his discomfort at the discrepancy between the unassimilable reality of modern America and the image he had had of it. Fortunately everything fell into place when he met Washington, who had “the simplicity of the old Roman.”⁵⁴ Image and reality could coincide all the more easily on this occasion since, as a letter from Washington himself makes clear, the meeting never actually took place!⁵⁵

Still, he was impatient to leave this America, which “has no past,” where nothing is really old, and where the tombs “are of yesterday.” He wanted to push on to the Indian regions of an authentic, primeval America. On the way, a pilgrimage and a parallel nevertheless seemed called for: “I have seen the plains of Lexington; I have paused there in silence, like the traveler at Thermopylae, to contemplate the graves of those warriors of the two worlds who were the first to die in obedience to the laws of their country.”⁵⁶ This is the point, or rather layer, in the Travels where a large number of comparisons (often taken from Lafitau) are made between the Indians and the ancients. Like Homer’s heroes, the Iroquois Indians are at once physicians, cooks, and carpenters. Like them, they hurl abuse at each other in battle. Their war songs bring to mind the Spartans’, and there are other similarities, such as the role of dance, the cruelty of their initiation ceremonies, and their respect for age. As for their custom of integrating vanquished nations into their own, there the comparison with Rome is more apt, bespeaking “the genius of a great people.”⁵⁷ Chateaubriand also has no qualms in invoking the great names of Moses, Lucretius, and Ovid to characterize their fables.⁵⁸ All these classical, and above all Homeric, references must have seemed particularly appropriate or self-evident to Chateaubriand because they in fact matched his very first project on America, mentioned in the preface to Atala: that of composing an “epic on ‘The Man of Nature.’” That was why, “in imitation of Homer’s example,” it was necessary to “visit the tribes I was desirous of describing.”⁵⁹ The genre Chateaubriand chose thus encouraged Homerisms not only in content but also in form.

The “Journal without Date,” from Chateaubriand’s Travels (a title that adopts the Historical Essay’s viewpoint outside of time),60 concerns a period of unanchored time, where only the hours are signaled, not the days or the weeks. It recalls the last pages of the Historical Essay (“Primitive liberty, at last I have found thee!”), to the extent of reproducing whole sentences: “I followed no trace, but went from tree to tree, and indifferently to the right or left, saying to myself ‘Here there is not multiplicity of roads, not towns.’”⁶¹ As in the Historical Essay, there are scenes of reverie and utopia. However, unlike in the earlier work, which ended on the perspective of the soul “los[ing] itself amidst boundless forests,”⁶² the Travels stages a return. There is a “Conclusion” (“Fin du Voyage”) to the travels in America: “Wandering from forest to forest, I had approached the American settlements. One evening, I descried…a farmhouse.…I solicited hospitality and it was granted.”⁶³ This sudden change of scene has transported the reader from the wilderness of virgin forest to settled land. So another America did exist, with its farmers—and even its English newspapers. Chateaubriand, at the fireside, glancing over “an English newspaper which I had picked up off the floor,” sees the following words: “Flight of the King.”⁶⁴ Suddenly, the call of the savage is replaced by the “call of honour,” and Chateaubriand decides to return home. It is a turning point: he abandons the idea of being a “traveller in America,” does not become a soldier either, and ends up a writer, exiled in London. The writings on America, partially destroyed, mislaid for fifteen years but never forgotten, were finally found again in a trunk. They inspired Chateaubriand’s first writings, but also served as a resource and a reserve on which he would continue to draw. The Historical Essay—which could aptly bear the subtitle of Journey from Greece to America—was an integral part of these writings.

How do space and time interact here, or, more precisely, what effect does movement in space have upon Chateaubriand’s relation to time when, having returned from America and left the Army of the Princes, he begins writing the Historical Essay? Time is above all the time of getting older: “When I left France I was young; four years of misfortune have put years on me.”⁶⁵ Time’s ravages are such that, as we have seen, this travel diary of a self in search of himself is presented, via Tacitus, as the writings of a dying man, or even as writings from beyond the grave. Already here time is figured as a river, a theme that, with all its variations, will come back and back, from the Historical Essay to the end of the Memoirs.

That even defines our times, Chateaubriand suggests, times when some “are ahead of our age,” while others “want to be men of the fourteenth century in 1796.” But no one is squarely in the current, that is, between the two banks or two regimes of historicity. From the Historical Essay onward, however, Chateaubriand himself chose to be and to think in time, and to think about time, a thinking “shaped by the time which constitutes it, and incorporated into its order.”⁶⁷ Or, to use an image from Hannah Arendt, he chose to dwell in the gap in time.

What takes center stage is the way time has speeded up:

Time flies, swifter than the pen, and the craft caught in the storm is swept past an unrecognizable or unknown coastline, which races along. These remarks, from the 1826 preface, are crucial. They demonstrate what contemporaries were most struck by, namely, time’s acceleration and their resultant loss of bearings (the boat is swept away and the coastline races past). The present is ungraspable, the future is unforeseeable, and the past itself has become incomprehensible.

In the foreword to his Historical Studies, published in March 1831, Chateaubriand returns to this theme, but from a different angle: time keeps accelerating, and ruins keep piling up:

Here Chateaubriand stages the gap between the daily grind of the historian and the speed at which history advances. Try as he may, by withdrawing daily for hours at a time, he simply tires himself out attempting—in vain—to catch up with contemporary events; his efforts are laughable and increasingly doomed to failure. Besides, who can take an interest in the “collapse of the old world” when one is living the “collapse of the new”?

Be that as it may, whether Chateaubriand was writing a history of France’s present (as in the Historical Essay), or its past (as in the Historical Studies), he seemed always to miss the moment, to be out of step: always, ineluctably, too late. So what other option was there but to go on writing nonetheless, to exploit this gap as the mainspring or even the motive of his writing? When he began writing the Historical Essay he was not yet at that stage; he had simply experienced the impossibility of escaping the maelstrom of time. And, having crossed the Atlantic again, from West to East this time, the New World’s island-in-the-storm and its untouched forests reverted to nothing more than utopias, which could be visited only in memory or in writing.

Time occupies a prominent place in the Travels in America, published thirty-six years after the real journey. Far from being a straightforward piece of travel writing, the book in fact imaginatively revisits and reflects upon America. “The thirty-six years which have elapsed since my travels,” Chateaubriand writes, “have made great additions to our stores of knowledge, and produced many changes both in the Old World and the New World.”70 Time is absolutely central to the work. Before the reader can even reach the beginning of the narrative “taken from the original manuscript of The Natchez” (that American trunk again), there is a foreword, a preface, and an “Advertisement” (an introductory “Address to the Reader”). One could easily be reading the last pages of the Historical Essay, except that there is yet another perspective superimposed on the text: the older Chateaubriand, in 1826, as though reading over the shoulder of the young traveler of 1791, makes statements such as “I shall now let the manuscript speak for itself,” “the sequel of the manuscript contains…” or “the manuscript states that…,” or even “here is a main chasm in the manuscript.” The repeated use of “at the time” and “today” introduces a further distancing effect.

This supplementary viewpoint is particularly evident in the preface, which contains a history of journeys from Homer to 1826, with the result that the young traveler in search of the Northwest Passage is utterly dwarfed. Whereas “formerly, when a man had quitted his home like Ulysses, he was an object of curiosity,” nowadays, in a world where everything has been discovered, where everything is mapped out, and distance counts for nothing, Chateaubriand, as the “obscure traveler” he was at the time, has in fact seen “no more than every body has seen.”⁷¹ So what difference does it make that he hadn’t seen, or hadn’t seen in its entirety, what he nonetheless claims to have seen? Why nitpick! Chateaubriand here ruins his authority as a travel writer, but he regains it precisely through the passage of time. Time transforms him into “the last historian of the nations of the world of Columbus, of those nations whose race will ere long be extinct.” It is “the register of their deaths” that he is about to open,⁷² a phrase reminiscent of Michelet’s definition of the historian as a go-between for the dead and the “administrator of the property of the deceased.” The shift from traveler to historian also endorses the nineteenth century’s self-representation as the century of the historian—understood as the memory of what is no longer and the harbinger of what is yet to come. Chateaubriand may well have seen what everyone else saw, but today there remain only traces of it, which will soon disappear completely. This distinction qualifies him as the “last historian.” The “last” traveler is also the last historian, who is equally the first: he has seen what no one will ever see again.

The effect of the passage of time is above all that it brings to light another America, which is not a primeval territory and a utopian wilderness. This other America is not only caught up in time and grappling with it, but it is actually saturated with time. And this applies as much to the “America of the Savages” as to “Civilized America,” which is consequently no longer viewed as an “Ancients’ America,” a limping Roman Republic forever out of step (with its Cincinnatus in a coach and four).

What clearly emerges is the older America of indigenous populations.73 In the Historical Essay, the Indians appear abruptly, out of nowhere and within the space of a single sentence.⁷⁴ In the Travels, by contrast, the “introduction to the savage life” occurs in a comic scene, led by a Monsieur Violet, the “dancing-master to the Savages,” who was “a little Frenchman, powdered and frizzed in the old fashion.”⁷⁵ What is one to make—and, above all, what is a disciple of Rousseau to make—of these Iroquois dancing to the strains of a violin? However, what strikes Chateaubriand above all is an “Indian ruin” (which is almost a contradiction in terms).⁷⁶ So the deserted wilderness has its ruins too! It is as though the major organizational categories of the Record of a Journey from Paris to Jerusalem had momentarily crossed over into the Travels. Our traveler also dwells upon the monuments of Ohio (which had genuinely interested Chateaubriand). For indeed, what a remarkable archaeological ensemble, comprising bastions, entrenchments, and tumuli, which can only have been the work of a “much more civilized people than the present Savages of America.” What?! Grandeur et décadence already then? So there were Indians before the Indians in this place? When can this have been? What nation was this? Where did it come from?⁷⁷ Suddenly America had a history, and a natural history too: Chateaubriand notes that a mammoth’s skeleton had recently been unearthed in Ohio.⁷⁸

Likewise for the political realm. People imagine, says Chateaubriand, that the native Americans had no form of government, but they are simply mistaking the savage state for the state of nature. There, too, the time factor was neglected. In actual fact, one can find in savage populations the “type,” in the strict sense, of all governments known to “civilized nations”—from despotism to republicanism, via monarchy—but in their natural state. Chateaubriand proclaims, in passing, the grand principle that “[t]he extent of their wilds [leur désert] had done for the science of their governments what excessive population had produced for ours.”79 Besides, he adds, had one but cared to recall the history of the Greeks and the Romans, this error could or should have been avoided, since “at the origin of their empire, [they] had very complicated institutions.” This remark is interesting for the double historicization it effects, of the native Americans and the ancients, and thus the double distancing it brings about. America, it evolves, is neither a pure state of nature, nor a utopia outside of time, but rather an “incipient civilization.” And we shall never know what it might have become because European civilization came along and destroyed it.⁸⁰

Without this attention to the changes occurring over a long period, Chateaubriand continues, one will inevitably end up with two “equally faithful and unfaithful” ways of depicting the savages. Either one describes only “their laws and manners,” in which case one will see nothing but Greeks and Romans; or else one describes only their “habits” and “customs,” in which case one “perceive[s] nothing but smoky and infectious cabins, the haunts of a sort of apes who possess the gift of speech.”⁸¹ The introduction of a time factor can alone enable one to move from “either…or” to “both…and.” The savages are at once a sort of ape and they are Greeks and Romans—but was this principle not valid already for the Romans? Did Cato the Elder’s modest dwelling appear much cleaner to Horace than the hut of an Iroquois does to us?

This America of native populations is not only old, it is dying out. The Indians, who in their Iroquois language called themselves “men of always,” Ongoue-onoue, have “passed away.”⁸² Today, the savage is no longer a warrior, but an “obscure herdsman”; he no longer dwells in his forests, but has become a “beggar at the door of a trading-post.”⁸³ He has swapped his grandeur for guile. All is decline and decay in this funereal portrait, which is reminiscent of Victor Segalen’s A Lapse of Memory [Les Immémoriaux].⁸⁴ In it, people of mixed race, called “burnt wood,” are accused of actively spreading corruption since, as interpreters and intermediaries, they have “the vices of both races,” and are “bastards of civilized nature and of savage nature” selling themselves to the highest bidder.

As for “civilized” America, which had first seemed to be a land without a past (with its tombs dating from yesterday), it has paradoxically preserved the Old World’s abandoned or ruined past because it is a land of exile. Athens, Marathon, Carthage, Sparta, Memphis, Versailles, and Florence are just some of the famous names carried over and transplanted. “The glory of all countries has placed a name in these same wilds where I met with Father Aubry and the obscure Atala.”85 And all the exiles who have found refuge there can, miming the gesture of Baudelaire’s Andromache, revive the memory of their homeland from the banks of a false Simois. Furthermore, and as though to complete the transformation of the United States into a memorial to the Old World, Chateaubriand introduces a comparison with the famous Villa of Hadrian. The presence in America of all those famous European places is “like that garden in the Campagna of Rome, in which Adrian had models of the different monuments of his empire erected.”⁸⁶ They are sites of memory, but simulated ones: the tombs are cenotaphs.

So the America of Chateaubriand’s travels no longer exists, and the dreams of his youth have evaporated. He did not discover the Northwest Passage, French influence was eclipsed, and the savage is dying a slow death. Yet suddenly, at the end of this requiem for a dead America, the reader is presented with “a wonderful spectacle,” painted in the glowing colors of modern freedom.⁸⁷ The Historical Essay ended on a hymn to the freedom (or independence) of the savage, as the only authentic freedom (in relation to which all others, including the freedom of the ancients, appear false). The Travels ends on the recognition and celebration of modern freedom: the United States’ discovery of a representative republic is “one of the greatest political events that ever occurred.” From this assertion Chateaubriand is led back to the familiar pair, ancient and modern freedom. The case of the United States has proved that there are

two practicable types of liberty; the one belonging to the infancy of nations, the offspring of manners [fille des moeurs] and of virtue, the liberty of the first Greeks and the first Romans, and the liberty of the Savages of America; the other born in the old age of nations, the offspring of knowledge [fille des lumières] and reason, the liberty of the United States, which has superseded the liberty of the Savage. Happy country, which in less than three centuries has passed from one liberty to the other, almost without effort, and by means of a contest which lasted only eight years!⁸⁸

Liberty as the “offspring of manners” “perishes when its principle deteriorates, and it is in the nature of manners to deteriorate with time,” whereas liberty as the “offspring of knowledge” “advances with the principle which preserves and renews it,” and knowledge increases with time.89 Here again, time is an agent. But unlike Benjamin Constant, who theorized these two freedoms as ideal types,⁹⁰ Chateaubriand is giving a rough outline of a history of ancient and modern freedom. The principle of historicization he introduces (freedom as “offspring of manners” leading to freedom as “offspring of knowledge”) situates the United States not only as the birthplace of a new sort of freedom, but also as the place where “almost without effort,” and at great speed, the former gave way to the latter.⁹¹ The Scythians had embodied an “abridged, but complete” history of the three ages of humanity. Here, the United States achieve a similar synthesis, but of their own past with their own present: they embody a historical development.

In the Historical Essay, the “Savages of America” represented both the vanishing point and the vantage point (outside of time) from which the work could be interpreted. In the Travels, the astonishing picture of freedom represented by America in its revisited version constitutes the vantage point (now anchored in time) from which to reconsider the real journey made. This is the place from which the Travels can be rewritten, or even written, and it is also the perspective from which the Essay can be reread and reviewed (but not rewritten, since that would effectively destroy it). The first and perhaps the most visible trace of this rereading, but by no means the most interesting or the most persuasive, is the distance Chateaubriand puts between himself and Rousseau, who is more or less excommunicated. The Essay’s Rousseauist leanings had been the pretext for sometimes violent attacks on Chateaubriand. So the notes in the later edition, largely composed of Restoration commonplaces on Rousseau, should be read primarily as a reply and a defense.⁹²

Above all, the American discovery of modern freedom ruins the whole system of parallels on which the Historical Essay has been constructed. In the 1826 preface, Chateaubriand writes: “I have always based my reasoning in the Essay on the Ancients’ republican system of liberty, liberty the offspring of manners; I had not sufficiently reflected upon that other sort of liberty, liberty offspring of knowledge and a perfected civilization: my discovery of a representative republic has changed the whole matter.”93 This preface, which undermines the whole edifice of the Historical Essay, can be found almost word for word in the conclusion to the Travels. And every time this new principle is mentioned in the Essay’s 1826 notes, in which it occurs regularly, it unravels the book’s arguments. The whole system of parallels comes out of it heavily compromised, and the very use of parallels as a heuristic device is effectively invalidated. When the gap between the ancients and the moderns is so great, we can no longer “with the torch of past revolutions in our hand,…boldly enter into the darkness of future ones.” Historia magistra has had its day; it can teach us nothing about the present.

The “first” Essay conceives the development of humankind as an unendingly repeated cycle; the later edition describes the movement of history as, rather, “concentric circles—ever-widening, in an infinite space.” According to this later model, the present can no longer be modeled on the past, nor measured against it: the movement no longer goes straightforwardly from past to present (but Chateaubriand, in his attempts to understand the past, is not yet ready to move in the opposite direction, from the present to the past).⁹⁴ Hence the Historical Essay, both through the relation to time constitutive of it, and through the relation it institutes, occupies a unique position, both reliant on the topos of historia magistra and challenging it. The principle of historia magistra continues to be applied while at the same time its inadequacy is demonstrated. The Historical Essay thus represents that fleeting moment when the Revolution has rendered this topos obsolete, while at the same time it cannot yet be discarded. It is a text between two centuries, between the ancients and the moderns, or between the two banks of the river of time, a book which to all intents and purposes is impossible—a monster. Yet Chateaubriand (who without this would not be who he is), far from abandoning the work, preserves it more or less intact, taking it up again and simply subjecting it to a slight displacement.

What he does is stage the work’s impossibility and exploit this. The book’s non-self-coincidence becomes its true meaning. Chateaubriand abandons neither the principle of historia magistra, nor the exemplum, nor the role of citation, but rather goes back over them, constantly introducing the dimension of time, displacing them, setting them in motion, undermining them, and putting them in perspective by putting himself in perspective. The topos of historia magistra is no longer possible, and yet it is equally impossible to relinquish it—at least for the time being. In its final form, the book displays a twofold impossibility: it belongs neither to the ancient nor to the modern regime of historicity, but lies between the two. In 1841, as he was completing his Memoirs, Chateaubriand returned for the last time to this experience, which he generalized as a hallmark of the times. The modern world, he claimed, is stretched between two impossibilities: that of the past and that of the future.95 This was the first formulation of the gap in time.

Beyond the Essay itself, this double movement can be seen as typifying a rule of Chateaubriand’s writing, with its wavelike movement constantly throwing out and taking back, preserving and reworking. It is fundamentally historical writing, obsessed by time and the discovery of history as a process. But whereas nineteenth-century academic historians separated the past from the present, Chateaubriand always sees the past in the present, the dead coming back to haunt the living. As such, his writing has a memorial rather than a historical character. His mania for dates also suggests this, for example in his feverish compilations of whole catalogues of dates and of the dead. Juxtaposing, or rather superimposing, two dates not only highlights their difference, their ineluctable noncoincidence, it also establishes relations between them, setting off echoes and producing effects of contamination.

Dates discriminate. That is why they are seen as the surest sign of history writing, given its attention to sequence and differentiation. However, juxtaposing and multiplying dates and deriving effects of meaning from the construction of seemingly arbitrary series amounts to methodically practicing anachronism, which was to be branded a cardinal sin by modern historians.⁹⁶ In Chateaubriand’s practice, it is never one or the other, one then the other, but always one and, one in the other. As Chateaubriand states, “the varied events and changing forms of my life thereby involve one another.”⁹⁷ Not in order to conflate them, but, on the contrary, in order to bring out their differences, the distance of “nevermore,” of course, but first and foremost the distance between self and self.⁹⁸ Beyond Saint Augustine, Chateaubriand can thus be viewed as a close relative of Odysseus, but whereas the latter could only weep, wordless, on discovering this distance between self and self, this his radical historicity, Chateaubriand acknowledges it from the start and is forever reexamining it. In his writing and rewriting of the Memoirs, over a period of more than forty years, Chateaubriand makes of this fracture in time, this irremediable distance between the old and the new regime of historicity, the (reality and pleasure) principle of his writing.

In the case of autobiographical writing, ellipses and chronological parataxes convey an experience of the self as affected by a necessary and necessarily repeated lack of self-coincidence. Or, to put it another way, they are the realization and expression of the historicity of the world and of the self. Memory is the medium of this “writing of time, producing an infusion of the self into time by means of language.”99 Chateaubriand would in a certain sense be the first ego-historian! As he reminds the reader in a striking sentence from the Life of Rancé, “My first work was written in London, in 1797, my last in Paris, in 1844. Between these two dates there have elapsed no less than forty-seven years, that is, three times the span which Tacitus called a large part of a human life: ‘Quindecim annos, grande mortalis aevi spatium.’”¹⁰⁰ Tacitus is the author of the epigraph to the Historical Essay, Chateaubriand’s first book, and he reappears in the preface to the work declared to be his last.

Above all, in the Life of Rancé, Chateaubriand talks of himself as though he were already no longer there. The work of time is what draws the self away from itself, until the final absence; it is alteration, the other insidiously taking the place of the same.¹⁰¹ Chateaubriand notices some “marks of indecision” in Poussin’s last painting, The Flood, and observes that “these imperfections of time embellish this masterpiece of a great painter.”¹⁰² One could suggest that Chateaubriand in his writing is likewise seeking to render something like these “marks of indecision.” Hence the switching between time and place, in order to express time and its “imperfections”: the recurrent patterns of returning to familiar places that have remained the same and yet not so, the theme of pilgrimage, the shifts from wilderness to ruins (and the wilderness itself revealing ruins), and so forth. Hence also the fact that Chateaubriand’s writing is always on the move, but always also out of step or even untimely, with duration experienced as dissociation. The writer-traveler represents himself as always about to set sail again after a brief pause: “I always regard myself as a captain who will shortly board his ship again.”¹⁰³

Finally, I shall play the game of dates a little myself. In April 1791, Chateaubriand had left behind an Old World in ruins, dreaming of a refuge in the forests of the New, from which he returned a few months later and wrote his Historical Essay on Revolutions, in exile. We have seen that this work, which fell between two regimes of historicity, was profoundly involved in questions of time. In September of the same year, 1791, Volney published his Ruins; or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires—still or already a question of ruins—but ruins in the ancient Near East this time.104 Prior to this, on his return from his travels in Egypt and Syria between 1783 and 1785, he had published an account of his journey, which was particularly well received because of its wealth of observed detail and its denunciation of despotism. “Syria, especially, and Egypt, both with a view to what they once have been, and what they now are, appeared to me a field equally adapted to those political and moral observations with which I wished to occupy my mind.” The question was thus the relation between their present and past state, yet the direction chosen was “to judge from their present state what was their situation in former times.”¹⁰⁵ Volney’s inquiry thus moved from the present to the past.

The Ruins, by contrast, which opens with a lengthy meditation among the silent tombs of Palmyra on why there are ruins in the first place, goes in the opposite direction. Why, asks Volney, are so many cities, which in former times displayed such opulence, now nothing but “desolation” and “solitude”? “Whence proceed such fatal revolutions?”¹⁰⁶ Volney then leaps from the ancient past to a distant future: who knows, he muses, if on the abandoned banks of the Seine, or the Thames, some traveler shall not sit and weep one day, just as he is doing now in what was once Palmyra? The traveler confronted with what seems to be the work of “blind fatality” cannot but feel a “profound melancholy.” Humanity itself does no more than go from ruin to ruin.

At this point the Genius of ruins appears, to teach him how to “read the lessons” that ruins contain.107 Man himself, it evolves, is at the root of such calamities, and not some vengeful God. It is his “self-love” (which is natural to man) which is to blame, a self-love perverted by “ignorance” and by “cupidity.” The traveler’s rejoinder is that if it is true that man is the source of his own ills, then the “lesson” is only the more dispiriting. To which the Genius replies with questions: are men “still in their forests” as in primitive times, and have societies “made no progress towards knowledge and a better state?”¹⁰⁸ “Embracing in one glance the history of the species, and judging the future by the past, hast thou shown that all improvement is impossible?”¹⁰⁹ Or else do you claim that “the human race is degenerating” and seek to prove a supposed “retrograde progress from perfection”?¹¹⁰ But the course of history shows quite the opposite: “Especially in the last three centuries knowledge has increased and spread.” And the Genius ends his paean to progress on a vision of a “prodigious movement” detected “at the extremity of the Mediterranean,” ushering in a “legislative people” eagerly awaited by all humanity, and holding out the promise of a “new age.”¹¹¹ However, Volney cautions, along this path one will first have to overcome the obstacle of religion, since each religion claims to have a monopoly on the truth.

Volney’s Ruins are, in fact, a direct response to the Revolution—give or take a few years (or centuries). The opening meditation is presented as taking place in the course of Volney’s journey, before 1789 therefore, but its contents are entirely dictated by the Revolution. The Genius of ruins is in fact a retrospective prophet, with Volney, now a deputy at the Constituent Assembly, in the role of prompt. The lessons to be drawn from ruins, in a movement from past to present which seems to follow the pattern of historia magistra and its cycle of repetition (chapter 12: “Lessons of Times Past repeated on the Present”) are suddenly suspended. The “prodigious movement” heralded by the Genius and revealed to the traveler for encouragement—for “the past is, perhaps, too discouraging”—sheds new light on the ruins of the past. The book’s conceit is evidently to present as yet to come something that has already occurred or is taking place. Volney does not get bogged down in trying to reconcile repetition and progress, nor in examining whether the Revolution is a culmination or a break, and he does not attempt to rewrite history in the light of it either. It is too early for that, and his goal is elsewhere. The future does not yet illuminate the past. One is left, therefore, with the model of historia magistra, while at the same time the latter is rendered inoperative by the advent of the new age. Volney would later criticize excessive and misguided uses of this model.

In 1795, while Chateaubriand was still piling up parallels with which to foretell what the Revolution would bring, Volney set off again on his travels, but headed west this time, to America, where he spent three years. In the interval, he had been imprisoned and released again in the wake of the 9th Thermidor, and appointed to teach at the École normale, where he gave a series of lectures called Lectures on History, in which he sought to characterize the type of certainty proper to history, while denouncing its perverted uses. He condemned with particular vigor the imitation of the ancients, seeking to “shake that respect for History which has become a dogma.”112 These Lectures on History are first and foremost an attack on the lessons of history as ordinarily understood: they are a critique of historia magistra.

By the time he sets off for America he harbors no more illusions. “Sorrowful at the past” and “anxious for the future,” he sets out “with distrust to a free people, to try whether a sincere friend of that Liberty, whose name has been so profaned, could find for his declining years a peaceful asylum, of which Europe no longer afforded him any hope.”¹¹³ 1789 had lost its seductive brilliance, plunging past and future alike into darkness. No Genius will appear again. Volney returned from America with no new meditation or prophecy on the freedom and future of humanity, but, more prosaically, with a View of the Climate and Soil of the United States of America. After temporarily rallying to Napoleon, who made him a senator and a Count of the Empire, he retired to the country to devote himself to works of erudition on Oriental languages and ancient history. The Genius of ruins had forever fallen silent.

In March 1831, as we have seen, Chateaubriand was putting the finishing touches on his Historical Studies. While he was writing ancient history, modern history came knocking at his door, sweeping everything away. Charles X had been forced into exile by the July Revolution, and Chateaubriand felt like those historians who, as the Roman Empire collapsed around them, spent their time “rummaging in the archives of the past in the midst of the ruins of the present.”114 So it was ruins again, even more of them, and yet more revolutions, ancient and modern, unremittingly. Despite this, the foreword paradoxically presents the book, which is also the first major text on historical studies in France, as a farewell to history. In the end, he laments, he did not write the history of France he had so long planned on writing; the Studies are but the “building blocks” of an edifice he would never complete. He lacked time, or, rather, he did not have life enough for it.¹¹⁵ Above all, this work, “the longest and the last,” the one for which he had paid the highest price, was to be published at a time when “there were no more readers for it”! Here again we have that affected pose, reminiscent of the misfortunes of René, who is forever out of step and swimming against the historical tide. And now he is contractually obliged to finish and publish his Complete Works—nothing but money worries, as always! But there is worse to come. For who, today, could feel even remotely concerned by the fate of Constantine and Julian, the Vandals and the Franks? “It is a fine thing indeed to be interested in the collapse of the old world, when we are living the collapse of the new!”¹¹⁶ This glaring untimeliness utterly invalidates the work: parallels are simply no longer operative.

Yet this final farewell to history cannot be explained solely by circumstances. Was Chateaubriand not aware, at heart, that the history-writing of his time was not for him? He acknowledged that France “must compose its Annals afresh, to make them conform to the progress of reason,” and must reorganize them “according to a new plan.”¹¹⁷ He also had no difficulty recognizing that the nature of history “changes from age to age.” And that, consequently, “nineteenth-century historians did not invent anything; they simply had a new world before their eyes, and they used it as a revised scale by which to measure the old.”¹¹⁸ But this was something Chateaubriand neither wished nor was able to do. His writing followed a logic of memory, zigzagging between the old and the new world. He was between the two banks of the river, swimming from one to the other, and as such he could write his Memoirs but not a history of France streamlined through the use of a “revised scale.” Chateaubriand wrote on the gap in time and as from that point. Placed between two regimes of historicity, he continued using parallels, while conscious that they were unworkable, and he kept piling up and erasing dates, producing palimpsests.

1831: ruins once more. Tocqueville was a young man at the beginning of his career, when he set sail with his friend Beaumont for America, on the pretext of studying the penitentiary system there. He was from a long line of Norman nobility and, like Chateaubriand (to whom he was related) found himself on the side of the vanquished in the Revolution, in Koselleck’s sense. He too was between the ancien régime and the Revolution, aristocracy and democracy. And it was precisely from the “archaism of his existential position” that he managed to derive the “modernity of his conceptual questioning.”119 As with Chateaubriand in 1791, it was the Revolution that brought him to America, but the circumstances were quite different. He was only there on an assignment, which he could additionally use to put some distance between himself and the Legitimists, and return “free of partisan engagement toward anyone at all,” having acquired “among such a celebrated people” the acquaintances that “put the finishing touch on your being set apart from the crowd.”¹²⁰ It was of course a full forty years since his young Breton precursor had set out to find the Northwest Passage with Rousseau under his arm. And Chateaubriand’s uncharted forests, in which he sought to lose himself, were not those of Tocqueville: attempting to explain to a correspondent that everything in America derives from a single principle, Tocqueville compared America to “a big forest, cut through by a multitude of straight roads which end at the same point. One only needs to find that point of convergence, and everything becomes clear at one glance.”¹²¹ So it was a forest à la française! There is even a moment when Chateaubriand seems to pass the torch to the younger man: in a note written to Tocqueville to thank him for sending him Democracy in America, he says: “People were already talking about me a little when I saw you as a child in Verneuil. In your turn, you will see me in infancy: people will talk of you and I will be forgotten.”¹²²

If America is no longer a “refuge,” then what is it? It is not so much a “New World” as a laboratory of a “World of the New,” of what is yet to come. As observed by Tocqueville, America is like the Proteus “of former times” whom Chateaubriand had attempted to question, or like the Genius of ruins unveiling a revolutionary future to the marveling traveler. The interplay of regimes of historicity is absolutely central in Tocqueville. And, once again, everything starts with ruins, in the midst of which one can see “this irresistible revolution, which for centuries now has surmounted every obstacle.”¹²³ These are not ancient ruins, but recent ruins produced by the Revolution, and “we seem ready to go on living complacently amid the rubble forever.”¹²⁴ “The world that is on the rise remains half buried beneath the debris of the world that is in collapse, and in the vast confusion of human affairs no one can say what will remain of old institutions and ancient mores and what will ultimately disappear.”¹²⁵

Visiting America is the way to give voice to these ruins and dispel the confusion. Over there, the great social revolution—the long march toward equality of conditions—“seems almost to have attained its natural limits.” America can thus provide the traveler with a vantage point from which to reconsider Europe: “Then I began to think again about our own hemisphere, and it seemed to me that I could make out there something quite similar to what I saw in the new world.”126 It is no utopia outside of time, as it was for Chateaubriand (at least in his first version). It is already caught up in the current of time and the future of Europe. At all events, it allows one to see further ahead, even beyond America itself: “I confess that in America I saw more than America. I sought there an image of democracy itself…if only to find out what we had to hope from it, or to fear.” Aspiring to bring back from his trip “lessons from which we might profit,”¹²⁷ Tocqueville scans the horizon, looking beyond the political factions who “busy themselves with tomorrow only.” What he wants to do is to “think about the future.”¹²⁸ It is again a question of viewing from afar, but practiced differently, in the form of viewing from the future.

In short, Tocqueville preserves the model of historia magistra, but inverts it; the lesson to be learned comes from the future, not the past. He himself explicitly recognizes this, toward the end of his work: “Although the ongoing revolution in man’s social state, laws, ideas, and sentiments is still far from over, it is already clear that its works cannot be compared with anything the world has ever seen before. Looking back century by century to remotest Antiquity, I see nothing that resembles what I see before me. When the past is no longer capable of shedding light on the future, the mind can only proceed in darkness.”¹²⁹ One can no longer, as Chateaubriand still thought possible in 1794, “with the torch of past revolutions in our hand,…boldly enter into the darkness of future ones.” The previous regime of historicity, in which the past precisely illuminated the future, was over for good. A world which is “totally new” requires a “new political science.” This was precisely what Tocqueville set out to develop from his vanguard position, perched in his lookout to scrutinize the future.¹³⁰