Unholy Relics

OR A CENTURY AFTER THEIR SECOND BURIAL, IN Paris, Descartes’ bones rested undisturbed. But while they moldered and the church of Ste.-Geneviève, in which they were entombed, quietly crumbled into ruin (as it lost its long battles against both the French crown and the neighboring church of St.-Etienne, with which it shared a wall and ancient territorial rivalries), the world of the living transformed itself in unheard-of ways. If someone from any of the previous centuries could have revisited earth in the 1700s, it might reasonably have seemed that human beings had become drunk on invention. Nitrogen was discovered, electricity harnessed, the first appendectomy performed. The income tax came into being. The Hawaiian islands were discovered. The fountain pen was invented, and the fire extinguisher, the piano, the tuning fork, and the flush toilet. Clocks, microscopes, compasses, lamps, and carriages were refined. In the English city of Birmingham alone, the small group of men who called themselves the Lunar Society, epitomizing the passion for combining invention and industry, discovered oxygen, created the steam engine, identified digitalis as a treatment for heart ailments, and built the world’s first factories. Men caught in the grip of a mania for collecting and classifying roamed the earth and gathered spiders, minerals, fossils, and flowers. Museums, dictionaries, and encyclopedias came into existence. Surnames—Watt, Fahrenheit, Schweppe, Celsius, Wedgwood—became products or terminology.

To state the above is to state the obvious: the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution are part of every school curriculum. What is perhaps less obvious is how threads from these events ran backward in time. We are used to thinking of the Enlightenment as an eighteenth-century phenomenon, in which intellectuals urged changes across society based on a commitment to reason. But recently historians have cleared paths back through the previous century, revealing how networks of events and personalities—inventors and the rippling consequences of their inventions, explorers who wielded sails, microscopes or quill pens—rooted the ideas of Jefferson and Rousseau in the program of Descartes.

The link between Descartes and the ensuing decades of invention and discovery is not so apparent; less still is the link between Descartes and our own era of invention and discovery. Cartesianism isn’t exactly in the air these days. There are no university degrees in it. You don’t run into parents who say they want their children to grow up to be Cartesians. We tend to prefer “science” when we’re talking about a particular systematic way of exploring the natural world. Science—the word itself, coming from the Latin for knowledge—has been around since the Middle Ages, when it meant something like art or discipline, as in the science of war or the science of horsemanship. Its use in the sense that we mean today didn’t get fixed until around 1800. Meanwhile, “Cartesianism” faded away in the early 1700s.

What happened to the Cartesians is one of the subplots of modernity. In a sense, they were engulfed by a great wave that swept over Europe in the late 1600s and early 1700s, which went by the name of Anglomania. The center of gravity of the “new philosophy” shifted from France to England. This was partly fad, but at its core was an appreciation of English practicality. The French approach to knowledge—ornate, rational, abstract—had elegantly suited the medieval, Aristotelian edifice. Descartes—with his grand system, his effort to construct a holistic view of reality based on reason and the cogito, which would encompass everything from salt crystals to God’s grace, from human emotions to Jupiter’s moons—was part of that. The British looked at the new thinking as more of a toolbox. They tinkered; they came up with improved metal alloys and ceramic glazes and watch springs. If the French created a new philosophy, the English invented applied science. While the French developed their salons into ornate social institutions, English craftsmen employed apprentices and made them sign hard-nosed contracts such as the one in which young Josiah Wedgwood promised that “at Cards Dice or any other unlawful Games he shall not Play, Taverns or Ale Houses he shall not haunt or frequent, Fornication he shall not commit—Matrimony he shall not Contract.”

There was a political dimension as well. Where the French state tried to control the new thinking—in part by creating an academy of sciences that would officially bless or condemn proposed new avenues of study—the English were freelancers. They were thus more adept at innovation, so that inventors in Bristol or Birmingham, acting on their own initiative, raising capital and creating markets, became small-scale industrialists and began to reshape the way the world operated.

The individual most responsible for this change—the person who, it could be said, single handedly pushed Descartes into the past—was Isaac Newton. Newton’s laws of motion, work in optics, and development of the principles of gravitation formed a hard, practical base on which the scientific revolution would be built. The French themselves lauded Newton as the herald of a new age. Voltaire, the godfather of the French Enlightenment, wrote of “ la supériorité de la Philosophie anglaise” and praised Newton as “the destroyer of the Cartesian system”—that is, the man who brought science down out of the clouds of theory. This sort of nationalistic divide between thinking and doing crystallized in philosophy departments in the terms rationalism and empiricism. In this neat compartmentalization, Descartes is not only the father of modernity but the inventor of the “school” of rationalism, which perceives reality from a starting point in the human mind and whose leaders were all continental figures, and that of empiricism, whose main thinkers—John Locke, David Hume, and George Berkeley, English, Scottish, and Irish, respectively—began instead with the reality of the external world.

While there is truth in the shorthand, it is also misleading. Descartes’ career, his lifelong focus on medicine and dissection and observation, belies the rationalist label. More to the point, he was foundational to both the rationalist and the empiricist traditions, as well as to the Enlightenment’s political ideas. Beneath Newton’s principles and Voltaire’s maxims is the cogito. As a discipline, philosophy itself tends to forget this. As the present-day British philosopher Jonathan Rée puts it, Descartes “was the founder of the ‘new philosophy,’ whose work was carried on by Newton and later scientists. . . . The principles of the ‘new philosophy,’ and the theory of knowledge and the theory of human nature which go with it; the concepts of an idea, of mathematical laws of nature . . . are so fundamental to modern consciousness that it is hard not to regard them as part of the natural property of the human mind. But, in fact, they are a product of the seventeenth century, and above all the work of Descartes.”

Thus the essence of Cartesianism—its philosophical kernel, which encompassed much more than science—not only lived on but expanded into virtually every corner of human life, evolving and adapting and spawning new generations, each with its own characteristic traits but all of them linking back to their ancestor, even as the original Cartesians flickered into extinction.

“REASON VERSUS FAITH” may be the chronic fever of modernity, but if the Western world caught it in the period of the Enlightenment the division was not as clear as some today might like to believe. There seems nowadays to be an ingrained notion that people of that era set reason firmly against faith and the two have ever since been locked in a death struggle. Maybe this idea comes from our desire to simplify things, our hunger for sound bites and text crawls. Maybe it gives clarity to both hard-core believers and the antireligion faction, both of which are very much alive today. People who want to drive society and politics via the motor of their religious views—whether they are Muslims, American evangelicals, Roman Catholics, members of India’s nationalist Hindu party—have been particularly vocal in recent years. But the other side—political atheists, you might call them—are voicing themselves, too, as evidenced by the titles of recent books: The God Delusion, The End of Faith, God Is Not Great. The root of these atheist manifestos is the belief that society woke up three or four centuries ago to the realization that God doesn’t control the universe, that rather the blind forces of nature do, but that many people around the world are still caught in the trap of religion and are threatening, with violence and intimidation, to drag humanity down the drain. If the hard-core faithful have their ancient texts to rely on for foundations, the new atheists have the Enlightenment.

But the situation was never as simple as that. The fighting was more of a three-way affair, for the new philosophers were themselves split into two camps, each of which would have an enormous impact on modernity and each of which still exists, with representatives continuing their clashes on cable talk shows and in op-ed columns. The split began, as we have seen, with the first-generation Cartesians, with Malebranche et al. adapting the new philosophy to Catholic teaching while Rohault, Arnauld, and others kept the two apart. Over the next generations, the “moderates” continued to believe that reason would function alongside faith to increase human happiness and life span, end disease, reduce suffering of all kinds, and give people greater power over nature and greater freedom in their lives. These moderates worked with the church and within governments: many literally worked in either the church or the state apparatus. The moderate camp includes some of the most well-known figures of the Enlightenment: Montesquieu, Newton, Locke, Jefferson, Hobbes, Voltaire.

Then there was the other element. Two present-day historians of the period—Margaret C. Jacob of UCLA and Jonathan Israel of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton—have written nearly identically titled books giving a name to this more shadowy secularist camp. Jacob’s The Radical Enlightenment, which appeared in 1981, and Israel’s Radical Enlightenment, published in 2001, focus attention on thinkers of the period who looked to reason as a kind of new faith, who insisted that a necessary object of the thinking that followed from Descartes was to bring about the end of traditional religion—to end what they believed was the tyranny of superstition in which humanity had existed for millennia, a tyranny that, they argued, those in power, in church and state, had maintained for their own benefit. What’s more, in many respects these early Enlightenment radicals didn’t just pre-figure what was to come but fully developed the ideas that would lead to the world-historic changes of the later era. As Israel puts it, “It may be that the story of the High Enlightenment after 1750 is more familiar to readers and historians, but that does not alter the reality that the later movement was basically just one of consolidating, popularizing, and annotating revolutionary concepts introduced earlier.”

The changes taking place in the late 1600s and early 1700s weren’t confined to gears and pulleys. Something more than mere inventiveness was involved. The idea of making reason the ground to thought and behavior had almost immediate consequences in the social sphere. As early as the 1660s, the Dutchman Franciscus van den Enden was advocating a radical new approach to society that included equal education for people of all classes, joint ownership of property, and democratically elected government. Van den Enden actually drew up a charter for a utopian community that would be based in the Dutch New World colony of New Netherland, with its capital of New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island. A group of settlers went so far as to establish a base for the community on Delaware Bay, but within months the English took over the Dutch colony (changing New Amsterdam to New York) and the scheme—perhaps the first attempt to enact a society based on the modern principle of democracy—ended. In the 1720s, Alberto Radicati—an Italian nobleman turned radical philosopher—similarly argued that natural philosophy showed that democracy was the only proper form of government. He also dismissed most biblical teaching and said that people should enjoy the pleasures of life but that, if life was really awful, suicide was reasonable. (As a true radical, he could only have been pleased when Italy’s chief law officer called his principal work “the most impious and immoral book I have ever read.”)

Even among the first generation of Cartesians the idea had arisen that, strictly based on reason, there was no justification for social rules subordinating women. Particularly in Paris, women began taking an active part in salons and advancing philosophical discussions. As if to confirm the worst fears of those who criticized such attempts to level society based on sex, erotic literature—novels as well as instruction manuals—began to appear. The thinking behind them, according to one of the most enthusiastic promoters of the new sexual freedom, was that society had denied women the right to understand and express their sexual pleasure as a way to keep them under control. The writer, Dutchman Adriaan Beverland, altruistically devoted himself—both in his personal life and in his work—to freeing women of their sexual inhibitions.

This sexual enlightenment mirrored the path of the wider Enlightenment, with a small number of books in the late 1600s gradually growing into a full literature, of which the marquis de Sade’s works—in which sex is a vehicle for exploring notions of radical individual freedom—are the ultimate expression. Indeed, just as much as Jefferson or Rousseau, de Sade was a figure of the High Enlightenment; you might think of him as the Thomas Jefferson of sex. The connection to the new philosophy was also right on the page. Much of the literature of sexual freedom that came out of the post-Cartesian decades had a frankly philosophical cast, with authors undergirding their scenes of women masturbating and cloistered nuns in coital embrace with references to Descartes, Spinoza, Ovid, and Petronius.

As transformative as the threatened sexual revolution promised to be, it was minor compared to the impact of the new philosophy on religious institutions and the religious beliefs of individuals. Before Descartes, religion was the language in which the most basic ideas about life and the world were discussed. Philosophical debates were religious debates: they took place between Catholics and Lutherans, or Lutherans and Calvinists, or Catholicism and Protestantism, or they were doctrinal disputes among members of a particular sect. Beginning around the time of the reburial of Descartes’ remains in Paris, the emphasis shifted. Reason applied outside the boundaries of theology—“free thinking”—caught fire and swept across the Continent with a speed and force that bewildered churchmen. As far as the radical philosophers were concerned, Christianity sat on one side of the scale and secular thinking on the other. An English philosopher named Anthony Collins sounded the trumpet of the new thinkers, stating in his best-selling (but anonymous) 1713 treatise, A Discourse of Free Thinking: “By Free-Thinking then I mean, The Use of the Understanding, in endeavouring to find out the Meaning of any Proposition whatsoever, in considering the nature of the Evidence for or against it, and in judging of it according to the Seeming Force or Weakness of the Evidence.” And he declared expansively that “if I vindicate Man’s Right to think freely in the full extent of my Definition, I not only apologize for my self, who profess to think freely every day de quolibet ente, but for all the Free-Thinkers who ever were, or ever shall be.”

Philosophers held real sway in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They wrote in newspapers, manned presses and printed their own tracts, thundered in parliaments and councils, debated church leaders, and otherwise molded popular opinion. As a result, the new secularism began to make inroads among ordinary people, and quite soon after the time of the first Cartesians. In the early 1700s, travelers to the Low Countries noted that, as a people, the Dutch seemed to have lost the popular belief in witches and demons; Anthony Collins reported that “the Devil is intirely banish’d [in] the United Provinces, where Free-Thinking is in the greatest perfection.” The modern French scholar Michel Vovelle studied eighteenth-century archives in southern France and found that starting right around the time of the first Cartesians French people began giving less money to religious organizations and the use of pious language began to drop off in wills and other official writings. Where wills were once replete with pleas to the Virgin Mary and local saints to look after the soul of the departed, by 1750 as many as 80 percent contained no religious references. Of course, Europe remained Christian, but secularism was now a force in society. Gysbert Voetius—who had so vigorously opposed Descartes in Utrecht, saying that his philosophy would lead to atheism and wanton individualism—was right.

In the early 1700s, writers in every European country made names for themselves by advancing the argument that magical thinking—believing in the powers of amulets, in warding off evil, in Satan himself—was nonsense. Some veered toward the forbidden territory of atheism, though almost no one actually espoused it, since professing that God didn’t exist was a crime throughout Europe. What arose instead was either deism—belief in God based on reason rather than religious tenets—or “materialistic pantheism,” which holds that God and the world, meaning all the physical forces in the universe, are one. Radicati outlined such a view in 1732: “By the Universe, I comprehend the infinite Space which contains the immense Matter. . . . This Matter, modified by Motion into an infinite Number of various forms, is what I call NATURE. Of this the Qualities and Attributes are, Power, Wisdom, and Perfection, all of which she possesses in the highest Degree.”

Power, wisdom, and perfection are, of course, attributes that were formerly assigned to God, and playing fast and loose with definitions in this way did not fool churchmen who were on the lookout for attempts to circumvent their worldview and their authority. In 1708 a German theologian created a guide to enable his colleagues to thwart the kind of thinking that “calls God Nature,” which he characterized as “the most systematically philosophical form of atheism.”

Most radical Enlightenment figures—Collins, Radicati, Van den Enden, and others—don’t have the same star power as moderate Enlightenment players. But not all have sunk into obscurity. Jonathan Israel makes a case that the main force behind the radical wing, its intellectual godfather (and one of the most influential philosophers in history), was Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza used many of Descartes’ categories and applied them more ruthlessly—to religion, among other things. Like Descartes, he “proved” that God exists, but he also “proved” that God cannot have human properties and does not perform miracles or otherwise intervene in human affairs. The Bible contains much wisdom, Spinoza wrote, but shouldn’t be trusted when it comes to tales of seas parting or water being turned into wine. He ridiculed popular belief in supernatural beings, reacting to a debate about whether spirits can be female or male by saying, “Those who have seen naked spirits should not have cast their eyes on the genital parts.”

The three-way debate among the radical and moderate secularists and the theologians ranged over nearly every conceivable issue, but it was centered on the notion of God. The charge of atheism was seemingly constantly in the air in the late 1600s and early 1700s, and not because its targets professed not to believe in God but because they defined God in ways that did not require a church as mediator. A conception of God that did not rest on scripture was considered a danger to church and state. Far from seeing himself as an atheist, Spinoza believed that God must exist, for he defined God as infinite substance and reasoned that “a substance consisting of infinite attributes . . . necessarily exists.” In his view God was synonymous with nature, meaning not merely the natural world but the totality of all things. He went so far as to upend the medieval notion of substances by defining God as the one and only substance existing in the universe: everything else was some subpart of God.

Spinoza insisted that there is such a thing as religious truth, but he also insisted that religious institutions were largely concerned with protecting their own position. At times Spinoza’s thinking about superstition and the manipulation of it sounds not only modern but ultramodern; streamline the language of his Theologico-Political Treatise and it could appear in a twenty-first-century antireligion best seller: “The human mind is readily swayed this way or that in times of doubt. . . . Anything which excites their astonishment [people] believe to be a portent signifying the anger of the gods or of the Supreme Being, and, mistaking superstition for religion, account it impious not to avert the evil with prayer and sacrifice. Signs and wonders of this sort they conjure up perpetually, till one might think Nature as made as themselves, they interpret her so fantastically.” Religious institutions, Spinoza held, in a passage that has set many people in the centuries since nodding in agreement, prey on this collection of insecurities: “Immense pains have therefore been taken to . . . [invest] religion, whether true or false, with such pomp and ceremony, that it may rise superior to every shock, and be always observed with studious reverence by the whole people.”

Spinoza’s form of pantheism was reviled by Christians and Jews of his time and later (he was expelled from his Amsterdam Jewish community at the age of twenty-three), but it has fit well in the modern era. Einstein, when challenged to state his own religious beliefs, famously aligned himself with Spinoza, saying, “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.”

Genuine atheism—a belief that there is no deity involved in the universe or its creation, that we are alone—would, of course, be a major outcome of the modern turn that occurred in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But it would be wrong to imagine that the Enlightenment was antireligion. Its mainstream thinkers, as well as many if not most of the radicals, were antichurch, not antifaith. Their problem with religion was that it kept individual humans from exercising their own minds and applying their innate reason to understanding the world and their place in it. This criticism applied not only to Catholicism but also to Protestant theology. It’s true that Protestantism was a movement on behalf of the individual. It came into being in large part because its leaders felt that individual Christians needed to have their own relationship with God, unmediated by the church. Luther reviled the Catholic Church for making people slaves to the clergy. But at the same time he wrote On the Enslaved Will, which argued that individuals must prostrate their intellect and will to the God of scripture. As the marquis de Condorcet, a leader of the French Enlightenment, said of such Reformation figures as Luther, “The spirit that animated the reformers did not lead to true freedom of thought. Each religion allowed, in the country where it dominated, certain opinions only.” The Protestant churches were no more willing to accept the God-equals-nature argument than was the Vatican.

The Enlightenment figures wanted people to be utterly free to use their minds, to apply the light of reason. This included applying reason to faith: evaluating and valuing the underlying substance of life—the universe, God, nature—with clear eyes, and without necessarily employing the tools of organized faith. You might say, in fact, that the whole thrust of the Enlightenment was not an attempt to diminish God at all but, on the contrary, an insistence on expanding God, broadening the scope of the word to include all that the new forms of learning encompassed. The enemies, in this view, were two: authority—any power or organization that dictated how and what to believe—and fuzzy thinking.

All of this went directly back to Descartes, whose turn to philosophy began when, after his studies, he found himself “saddled with so many doubts and errors that I seemed to have gained nothing in trying to educate myself unless it was to discover more and more fully how ignorant I was.” “Clear and distinct ideas” would be the goal—of Descartes, and of the thinkers of the next century. Thus Spinoza lashing out at superstition. In the 1740s, Denis Diderot, the force behind the famous Encyclopédie and one of the intellectual fathers of the French Revolution, put the zeal for clarity in the form of a maxim: “Superstition is more harmful than atheism.”

HISTORICAL PERIODS DON’T USUALLY name themselves. People walking around circa 1300 did not greet each other with “It’s a lovely morning here in the Late Middle Ages.” The Enlightenment—whose leaders were nothing if not self-conscious—was an exception. Aufklärung, les lumières, ilustración, illuminismo, verlichting: across Europe, in whatever language, there was an awareness on the part of individuals of somehow having different minds from earlier generations, and everywhere they expressed the idea with the metaphor of light invading what had been darkness. One of the clearest expressions of it came from the tiny, introverted German philosopher Immanuel Kant, part of whose grand project was to identify the “transcendental” foundation of religion—to ground faith not in a church or a holy book but in the human mind, the world, and the relationship between the two. Kant was a mousy, homebody sort who never strayed farther than one hundred miles from his Prussian hometown, and his writings are as dense as any philosopher’s, but he could on occasion rise to the soaring plane of the propagandist. “Enlightenment,” he declared when asked to define the force that he and his contemporaries were caught up in, “is man’s exodus from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is the inability to use one’s understanding without the guidance of another person. . . . ‘Dare to know’ (sapere aude)! Have the courage to use your own understanding; this is the motto of the Enlightenment.”

The “motto” was put into practice politically in two dramatic and very different ways in the eighteenth century. In the 1770s, there came a metaphorical lull in the frenzy of invention and scientific activity as everyone paused to witness the birth of a whole new arena of modernity. Across the ocean, the inhabitants of the former British colonies in North America decided to throw off their mother country and give a real-world test to the ideas about representative government that had been nurtured over the century in the theories of men like John Locke. Americans are used to thinking of their country’s revolution as the climax toward which the century of European intellectual ferment was building. As the great American scholar Henry Steele Commager wrote in 1977, “The Old World imagined, invented, and formulated the Enlightenment, the New World—certainly the Anglo-American part of it—realized and fulfilled it.” Europeans see it differently. To them, the American Revolution was a sideshow, while the French Revolution, in all its gore and glory and tragedy, its titanic upending of church and state, was the ultimate expression of the Enlightenment and of the long process of transformation that began with Descartes’ cogito.

Of course, both revolutions are intimately conjoined to the century of transformation that preceded them. The American leaders—Jefferson, Madison, Adams, and the rest—swam in the same current of ideas the Europeans did. They were steeped in the political philosophy of Locke, who argued that societies are held together by a “social contract” between rulers and the ruled and that if power is abused the people have a right to revolt. Jefferson wrote that his political philosophy derived from Newton, Bacon, and Locke, especially the idea of bringing scientific questioning and observation into the political realm—the cogito, you might say, taking a seat in government. But there was another side to the American revolt. Henry May’s 1976 study, The Enlightenment in America, argues that religion was so much a part of the American fabric that the issue in America was not “the Enlightenment and religion” but “the Enlightenment as religion.” In the 1730s and 1740s, an evangelical fervor gripped the American colonies; the first so-called Great Awakening gave a spiritual cast to the political drama that would follow. At the same time, many in the American elite were deists, who essentially turned Newton’s science into religion. Jefferson made deism part of the nation’s fabric with the Declaration of Independence’s appeal to “the laws of nature and nature’s God.” No churches were burned at Bunker Hill or Yorktown. The American Revolution, seen in this light, was the full expression of the moderate wing of the Enlightenment, which stressed order, harmony, and a balance of faith and reason.

But the other Enlightenment, the radical version, would have its own, very different political expression. In 1789, when the people of Paris took to the streets intent on winning a constitution from their king, the scientists and inventors, the cogitators and pamphleteers of Europe paused again and took note, for here was an effort to extend the political ideals of their Enlightenment to one of the old, established nations. Completely unlike what happened in America, the French Revolution was a systematic breakdown of the old order and its representatives, not only the monarchy but the Catholic Church. What had begun in the minds of a small number of intellectuals—antipathy toward both the king and the church for shackling people in cages, for controlling their lives, their minds, their purses—spread to every level of society, with the ferocity and face-to-face, breath-to-breath stench of an unprecedented collision of forces.

If modernity ultimately required a complete break from existing structures—of human thought, belief, society, everything—then what happened in France in the 1780s and 1790s had terrible necessity. It would also demonstrate something that had not been understood by Descartes when he reoriented his worldview around reason but that would become depressingly familiar in the coming centuries. As an organizing principle or a battle cry, reason doesn’t necessarily lead to peace and order but can just as well spawn inhuman violence on an epic scale.

It was in the midst of this world-historic lesson that Descartes’ bones once again returned to the realm of the living.

HE HAD A FACE THAT COULD BEST be described as angelic. If that word suggests purity, it also hints at things like otherworldliness and ghostliness, and all of these qualities applied to the strange, impassioned, vigorous, meticulous, and ethereal man named Alexandre Lenoir. He was born in Paris in 1761, nearly a century after the remains of René Descartes were buried in the French capital. In a portrait painted when he was thirty-five, Lenoir looks creepily like a teenager. His skin shines alabaster, the lips are mauve and womanish and curled into a slight, freakish smile, the eyes into which the viewer’s are drawn are round and black like portals onto the dark. On his head is a foppish broadrimmed black hat; a gold scarf is knotted around his neck.

He was a lover of art. He studied painting. He married a painter. He was also, seemingly from birth, obsessively fascinated by death, images of death, effigies, and human remains. He came of age in an ideal time in which to exercise such a preoccupation; the French Revolution gave his curious life its context. In 1763, when Lenoir was an infant, King Louis XV levied a series of new taxes. In the past such a move might have caused only raucous grumbling, but over the previous decade half of what would be thirty-two volumes of Diderot’s Encyclopédie had appeared. Diderot and his coauthors had tried to collect in it all the new knowledge that was proliferating in Europe, and it proffered not an objective stance but frank beliefs about, for example, the connection between a commitment to reason and the moral necessity of obtaining the consent of the governed. Over the years the volumes, and their underlying logic, had worked their way into the mental fabric of the country. The parlements of France banded together to voice opposition to the taxes. Some of the parlements (which were not legislative bodies but rather regional judicial councils) arrested the king’s governors; graffiti appeared on government buildings demanding the king’s head. As the matter escalated, the parlements declared for the first time that together they represented the will of the people and that taxes could not be assessed without their consent. The king reacted with a suddenness dramatically out of keeping with decorum. He rode directly from his palace in Versailles to Paris (pausing at the Pont Neuf when he came upon a religious procession, before which he dismounted and knelt in the mud as it passed), strode into the Palais de Justice, and unleashed what has gone down in French history as the séance de la flagellation—the whipping session, one might say. It was a violent rebuff of the idea of elements of government uniting in opposition to the head of state, and about as decisive an assertion of kingly power as is possible to imagine: “In my person only does the sovereign power rest. . . . From me alone do my courts derive their existence and authority. . . . To me alone belongs legislative power. . . . By my authority alone do the officers of my courts proceed.”

Thus began the struggle that would lead to the fall of Europe’s most autocratic monarchy. In 1770, the king dissolved the parlements, but in a sense the damage had been done. Pamphleteers had broadcast the reasoning of the parlements; it resonated with the people and continued to do so through the following years. In 1788, a restored Parlement of Paris warned a new King Louis (the XVI) that they would not stand for royal despotism; now the parlements were using phrases like rights of man and confirmed by reason. The following year, representatives of the Third Estate (going back to the Middle Ages society was divided into a First Estate, comprised of the clergy, a Second, the nobility, and a Third, commoners) took the new language further, declaring that they were not an estate at all—not a third-rate advisory council to those in power—but “the people.” In fact, they were a National Assembly. The king locked them out of the meeting hall. They gathered instead at a nearby tennis court and took an oath to remain united until the king agreed to a constitution. Soldiers marched into Paris. In one stroke, the National Assembly “abolished feudalism,” then issued a Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.

Alexandre Lenoir grew to maturity during the tumult leading up to the Revolution, and the waifish artist was part of the fervor. And yet his interests soon parted in one crucial way from the objectives of the revolutionaries. His mentors included the artist Gabriel François Doyen, who made a name for himself with florid large-scale religious paintings in the manner of the Italian Renaissance, and the polymath Charles-François Dupuis, who besides being one of the inventors of the telegraph wrote a wildly successful book called The Origin of All Religious Worship, in which he argued that Christianity was merely an updating of ancient cults of sun worship. Bathing in the lush influences of Doyen and Dupuis, as well as Freemasonry (which itself sprang from the minds of freethinkers as a ritualized theologizing of nature), and steeped in his own exotic personal mysteries, Lenoir developed a private universalist belief system that centered on reason, history, religious art, and architecture.

To his horror, as the Revolution escalated mobs of his fellow revolutionaries took literally the calls from their leaders to tear down the structures of the old regime. Crowds attacked churches and palaces. Buildings were looted, paintings and sculptures destroyed; monks’ cloisters became stalls for horses. One by one, many of the country’s most ancient religious structures—the Abbey of Cluny, the church of St.-Denis, burial site of the French monarchy—were ransacked. Once-precious relics, including the bones of formerly revered kings, were paraded through the streets. The body of Louis XIV himself, still in a state of semi-preservation, was unearthed and hacked with knives, to cheers. It was madness, but with a method. The developing ideology of the Revolution emphasized the values of liberty, equality, and fraternity, with their roots firmly embedded in seventeenth-century “new philosophy.” This ideology rejected all symbols of the past that put “mysticism” over reason, that “did not bear the stamp of utility,” and that were “contrary to good morals.” The government not only egged on crowds but carried out an official “dechristianization” program that resulted in the destruction or desacration of religious buildings in virtually every town in France, from village churches to Notre-Dame de Paris, where the sculptures of biblical figures on the façade were defaced.

The revolutionary leaders were not entirely rabid in their zeal, however. As the ideological vandalism escalated, some people within the revolutionary committees fretted. In fact, it was in a report from the Committee of Public Instruction to the National Convention despairing the loss to the country that the word van-dalismewas coined, referring to the fifth-century Germanic tribe that became infamous for sacking Rome.

It happened that the painter Doyen was on one such committee. Lenoir, his disconsolate pupil, approached him with an idea. What if the government, while not rescinding the call to tear down the old order, nevertheless chose someone to sort through the revolutionary debris for works of art that might have historical value? Surely there was a balance to be found between destruction of symbols that carried the poison of slavish obedience to king and church and the obliteration of a nation’s memory.

Doyen brought the idea to the mayor of Paris, who in turn presented it to the revolutionary government. Perhaps to his own astonishment, Lenoir found himself being offered the job of making order out of the artistic and architectural disorder of the revolution. He was given a broad mandate, two assistants, and a salary. A location was chosen as a repository for the items he saved for preservation: one of the Catholic holdings that had been commandeered by the government, the former convent of the Petits-Augustins, on the bank of the Seine.

Lenoir set to his work with (take your pick) religious or revolutionary zeal. Word would come to him of an assault on a monastery or church or chateau; through the scarred streets of war-torn Paris he and his assistants would rush. Arriving at the scene, he would brandish a writ from the Committee of Public Instruction or the Committee of Alienation of National Goods, demanding, in the name of the revolutionary government, that certain items not be harmed. The crowd would fall back; Lenoir and his men would haul the spoils into wagons and transport them to his depot on the river. Part of a weekly log ran as follows:

Wednesday.—An angel from the tomb of Bérulle; the mausoleum of Louvois.

Thursday.—Marbles from the Oratory of the Capuchins.

Friday.—A Cybèle and a Méléagre.

Saturday.—A philosopher, in the antique manner.

Sunday.—The statue of Cardinal Bérulle from the Oratory of St.-Honoré. The statue of Cardinal de Richelieu from the Sorbonne.

At times revolutionaries refused to acknowledge Lenoir’s official sanction. During the last-named appropriation, he struggled with soldiers who were in the process of destroying the tomb of Cardinal Richelieu and was wounded in the process. An engraving shows him similarly fending off sansculottes armed with pikes and axes as he protected the tomb of Louis XII.

Of the hundreds of religious sites seized by the state during the Revolution, one had a unique story. The church of Ste.-Geneviève, dedicated to the patron saint of Paris and occupying the highest point in the city—which also happened to be the burial place of René Descartes—had been in poor condition as far back as 1744, at which time Louis XV made a vow to build a new church. His architect, Jacques-Germain Soufflot, a lover of classical Greece and also of Gothic design, conceived of the new building along the lines of a Greek temple, with a massive portico of columns in front and a soaring central dome, as well as medieval elements. It took decades to create the structure, which went up just across the plaza from the old church. As the Revolution broke out it was finally nearing completion—just in time to be condemned by the revolutionary government as a temple of feudalism and mysticism, two isms that were nearly equated with evil.

The building was taken over by the state and, perhaps partly because its spare classical structure fit with the artistic ideals of the Revolution, was dechristianized and converted into what is arguably the purest expression of the “radical” Enlightenment in stone: the Pantheon. The Pantheon was dedicated not to gods in the usual sense but to the great men of France—or, as it was phrased in the histrionic spirit of the time, “to fame.” Like a church, it would be a place of reflection, but this would be a hall devoted to rigorously secular reflection. Like a church, it would house human remains—but rather than indicate a link between the physical body and the immaterial soul it would sing the connection between physical remains and the great work done on earth by the living, work in the service of the march toward human freedom and equality. It would be a secular temple, a shrine to human reason and human progress, stripped of religion and “superstition.”

In redesigning it so, architecturally replacing faith with reason as a source of worship, the revolutionaries created a unique monument, and visiting it today gives a feel not only for their motivation but for its naïveté and hollowness. The strangeness comes sweeping over you the moment you enter: the vastness is almost as laughable as the idea of dedicating a building to “great men” and “fame.” It sounds lampoonable, vacuous. Scenes from myth and French history are painted on the walls, but there is nothing in between. It’s yards and yards of empty space, with columns standing like trees in a desert of marble. And downstairs, in the crypts, the tombs of the great men (and, these days, a few women) are lit with such dramatic relief you would swear you were on a film set. Maybe the oddest thing is the unyielding lack of adornment, the painstaking absence of religious motif in a sanctuary devoted to the dead. In a place like this the idea is driven home to you that reason alone is an empty vessel.

The secularization of the building, its associations with science and order, extended in a variety of directions. The cross at the top of the dome was replaced with a globe (which was later replaced by a statue and ultimately a cross again). The top of the dome, being the highest point in the city, also served as a platform from which, as the Revolution raged on, Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre, the great French astronomer, did his calculations of the earth’s size to determine the new, scientifically based unit of measure—the meter—that would replace the old feudal mishmash of systems. The building’s attraction as a hall of modernity would continue into the nineteenth century, when the physicist Léon Foucault would hang his pendulum from the top of the dome, offering proof of the rotation of the earth and giving thousands of people who came to see it a tangible sense of science.

The Pantheon symbolized an entire approach to modernity. Dechristianization became an official component of the modernizing program of the French Revolution, and it spread into every facet of life. The calendar—built around the Catholic holy days—was scrapped in part for being tainted by religion, and a new one was created based on the scientific observation of nature: the sun, the moon, the season, the turning and revolution of the earth. Names of streets and towns were stripped of religious associations: St.-Jacques, St.-Louis, and St.-François vanished, while republican heroes both local and imported—not just Danton and Mirabeau but Cato, Brutus, and Benjamin Franklin—sprang up on signs and maps. So thoroughly did the Revolution equate religion with superstition that as it moved into its most radical phase a ceremony was held at Notre-Dame cathedral in which religion was denounced, atheism was proclaimed, and a “Cult of Reason” was declared, with an actress playing the role of Liberty prostrating herself before the burning fire of Reason.

To appreciate the difference between the French and American revolutions, you might try to imagine the American founding fathers, egged on by a mob, stripping a church in Philadelphia of its religious overtones and converting it into a temple of reason. That such an image seems preposterous makes a point not only about history but perhaps also about present-day realities. At least some of the problems that the Western world confronts today, as it grapples with such forces as militant Islam, have to do with the fact that the modern Western world has a split personality: it is confused and divided over the relationship of reason and faith, whether there can be a relationship or whether the one supplants the other. In simplistic form, the United States, where religion is still a strong force in both public and private life, maintains the moderate Enlightenment tradition—a moderate modernity—and Western Europe, which has largely abandoned organized Christianity, has tended to follow the radical path. That split runs straight back to the difference between what happened in 1789 and what happened in 1776—and, of course, back to Descartes.

While the new Ste.-Geneviève was being radically secularized, the old, ruined church still stood. It contained dozens of tombs, monuments, and statues of saints, and thus, in 1792, it became a target of revolutionary zeal. After the government closed it to religious worship, its abbot appealed to the guardian of the “dépôt des monuments”—Lenoir—to save what could be removed before the building was destroyed.

Among the tombs and monuments, of course, was that of Descartes. One hundred and forty-two years after his death, Descartes was now seen as part of France’s legendary heritage. He was a “great man,” and the revolutionaries—some of them—wanted to recognize him as such. The year before Lenoir was asked to rescue the remains from the old Ste.-Geneviève, Descartes’ bones became part of a debate in the revolutionary government over the conversion of the new church into the Pantheon—and, more than that, over what the Revolution itself meant. The building was to be a temple to greatness, but who was great? How to decide whose remains would be given the honor of “pantheonization”? The debates, carried on in the midst of the upheaval and vituperation of the Revolution, were at times heated to the point of viciousness, and the history of the first few “great men” to be selected—and deselected—for pantheonization says a thing or two about the flaws inherent in the idea that reason could be a purely objective force.

It was the death of Honoré Mirabeau, one of the universally revered heroes of the Revolution, on April 2, 1791, that gave rise to the idea of turning the new church into a secular mausoleum, so it seemed at first that the factions within the National Assembly would unite in support of the pantheonization of Mirabeau himself. But shortly after he was buried in state in the bowels of the vast building it was discovered that he had been making concessions to the monarchy as the king sought to stay in power (and stay alive). Robespierre argued that Mirabeau had betrayed revolutionary ideals and should be disinterred and removed from the Pantheon. He was—quietly, embarrassingly, by a side door.

While that debate was being carried on, the leaders united around the idea of moving the remains of Voltaire into the Pantheon. It was a popular choice—one of the very few that came without rancorous debate. Voltaire had at times been reviled as an atheist; he had been imprisoned in the Bastille. Now he was considered the (secular) patron saint of the Enlightenment. On his death thirteen years earlier he had been buried quietly, but the procession to rebury him in the Pantheon became one of the great events of the Revolution. One hundred thousand people lined the streets to see the parade, which included a full orchestra pulled by twelve white horses, a gold box bearing the complete ninety-two-volume library of Voltaire’s literary output, a phalanx of ordinary citoyens who had proudly taken part in the attack on the Bastille, and a flag-draped, triple-tiered sarcophagus containing the remains of the man himself.

But Jean-Paul Marat—the revolutionary who was one of the forces behind the Reign of Terror and who is best remembered today for the painting of him by Jacques-Louis David, slumped dramatically dead in his bath after being knifed—suffered a fate similar to Mirabeau’s. Barely a year after he was chosen as one of the new republic’s secular saints, sentiment swung against him, and his remains were hauled back out of the Pantheon.

On April 12, 1791, just ten days after Mirabeau’s death launched the matter of pantheonization, the National Assembly had the case of Descartes put before it. The original petition was brought forth by a descendant of Descartes’ elder brother, Pierre, but it was taken up by Condorcet, one of the leaders of the Revolution and, along with Voltaire, one of the men whose work most fully embodied the spirit of the Enlightenment. The several hundred men ranged in a circle of tiered benches around him in the central government chamber all knew of his wide-ranging energies. Condorcet had for years been active in working to bring a scientific perspective to bear in politics, economics, and education, to reform all of society around the principle of reason. As a mathematician, he identified what became known as Condorcet’s paradox, a mathematical discrepancy in majority rule voting. Politically, he was an unusually early proponent of total equality who argued in favor of granting women and minorities full rights.

Condorcet identified the source of the great change that he and his contemporaries were living through. In the century before, he wrote elsewhere, Europe had been in “the shameful slumber into which superstition had plunged her.” It was Descartes who “brought philosophy back to reason,” for “he had understood that it must be derived entirely from those primary and evident truths which we can discover by observing the operation of the human mind.” Now Condorcet put before his fellow revolutionaries the case of one of their countrymen who had been more fundamental even than Voltaire in leading to the extraordinary events in which they themselves were now participants. “Descartes, who was forced from France by superstition, died on foreign soil,” he began theatrically. “His friends, his disciples, wanted at least that he have a tomb on his own soil. His body, transported through their cares, was deposited in the old church of Sainte-Geneviève. . . . They had prepared a public elegy, but superstition forbade praise to a philosopher, pride did not allow honor to fall to an individual who was merely a great man. . . . But this long wait can perhaps be repaired. By breaking the bars restraining the human spirit, he prepared the eternal destruction of political constraint, and deserves to be honored in the name of a free nation.”

Condorcet made a persuasive case. The assembly agreed to send the petition to the Committee of the Constitution. But events on the ground threatened to overtake the politicians. While the committee was considering moving Descartes’ bones from the old Ste.-Geneviève across the plaza to the new Ste.-Geneviève (that is, the Pantheon) Lenoir got the news from the abbot of the old church that it was in the process of being ransacked; he was appealed to rescue its precious objects. This was a particularly chaotic stretch of months in the life span of the French Revolution. Fears (and expectations) that the Revolution would spread beyond the country’s borders led to the outbreak of war with Austria in April 1792. In August radicals took over the Paris Commune and pushed the national body to revoke the king’s powers once and for all and usher in a true republic. Dechristianization reached a climax in September, when crowds, convinced that Catholic priests were undermining the revolutionary effort, stormed Paris prisons (priests who had continued to say Mass having been rounded up in the previous months) and murdered 230 priests and more than 1,000 other prisoners. That same month the monarchy was dissolved; in January, the thirty-nine-year-old Louis XVI—bookish, earnest, regal, out of his depth—had his head removed from his body, and the Revolution was well and truly consummated.

Lenoir collected feverishly through all the upheaval and carefully logged the items he gathered:

From St.-Etienne-du-Mont, the epitaph in white marble of Blaise Pascal . . .

From the church of Notre-Dame, two kneeling statues, by Coustou and Coyzevox, representing Louis XIII and Louis XIV . . .

From St.-Chaumont, a statue, in plaster, of la Ste.-Vierge; another of St.-Joseph, and a bas-relief representing Jesus in the tomb, also in plaster, by Duret.

From St.-Benoît, the epitaph in white marble of Winslow, the celebrated anatomist.

He also later admitted that it was personally an unhappy time for him—which suggests that he was not quite himself—though we don’t know what the source of his unhappiness may have been. Still, over the course of several trips that he and his assistants made to the old Ste.-Geneviève he meticulously recorded numerous items that he detached from the church and hauled back to the safety of his storehouse on the Seine:

Four female figures, sculpted in wood, by Germain Pilon . . .

The reclining statue, sculpted in stone, of King Clovis I . . .

Two columns from Verona; two more in Flemish marble . . .

Two small columns in gray granite . . .

The kneeling statue in white marble of Cardinal de la Rochefoucauld, accompanied by an angel holding the back of his coat . . .

Two ancient black columns coming from the lower chapel. . . . A black marble table that supported two terra cotta works by Germain Pilon, representing “Jesus in the tomb” and “his Resurrection”. . . . Two other small columns that also came from the lower chapel.

Lenoir made a careful diagram of the layout of Ste.-Geneviève showing the placement of every coffin that lay beneath its floors, as well as meticulous sketches of many of the coffins, some of which included gruesome renderings of corpses in states of semi-preservation.

In addition, on New Year’s Day of 1793, he took pains to record an accident. He had given his assistant, a carpenter named Boucault, the job of removing the “richly ornamented” marble tabernacle of the church. Boucault hauled it onto a sleighlike structure that was harnessed to eight horses, which would pull it to the depot, but when the horses strained the sleigh collapsed and the tabernacle broke into pieces. So meticulous was Lenoir in his tallying that he even indicated how he disposed of the fragments: by selling the copper-gilt bases and capitals to the Hôtel de Nesle in the rue de Beaune.

It’s curious, then, that with so much careful attention given to Ste.-Geneviève he failed to record the retrieval of Descartes’ remains in his log. He later insisted that he did indeed dig up the philosopher’s grave. Not only did he bring a container of Descartes’ remains—bones and bone fragments—down the hill from the church to his repository by the river, he declared, but he was particularly excited about its contents. Like Condorcet and other Enlightenment figures, Lenoir believed in the idea of progress: that with each generation, each passing century, humanity was evolving upward, toward happiness, freedom, equality, a higher state of civilization. The current generation, and in particular the Revolution in France, was the point toward which all of Western history had been evolving. For Lenoir, Descartes was not only one of the prime movers of history, he was “the father of philosophy” and “the first to teach us how to think.”

Lenoir’s fascination with death and bones and graves went deep, so to speak. Along with rescuing tombs and monuments, he unearthed many human remains, including those of some other notable historical figures, including Molière, the famous medieval lovers Heloise and Abelard, and Descartes’ protégé Jacques Rohault. There are indications that Lenoir took to this aspect of his work with eerie relish. One colleague recollected him breathing in the perfume of a freshly opened coffin and reverently plunging his hands into its dank innards. After unearthing the corpse of King Henri IV he delighted in its excellent condition, writing, “I had the pleasure to touch these pleasant remains, his beard, his reddish moustache so well preserved.” He couldn’t stop himself from shaking the monarch’s petrified hand despite the fact that, as he felt the need to reaffirm, “I was a real republican.” In the case of Descartes, he later wrote that he went so far as to take a fragment of bone—“one very small piece of bone plate”—out of which he carved several rings. That is, Lenoir fashioned a bit of Descartes into jewelry. These rings, he wrote, “I offered to friends of the good philosophy.”

Louche and creepy as this would have been both to someone from Descartes’ era and to someone of our own, Lenoir was not alone; the use of human bones and hair as trophies, ornament, tchotchkes was a feature of his day, a secularization of the Catholic cult of relics. As the Pantheon itself showed, the modernist need to distance society from religion didn’t obviate the human need to connect with the past, to come to terms with mortality. Just as religious buildings were co-opted for secular, humanistic purposes that were nevertheless somehow transcendent, the notion of certain human bones becoming conduits between the mortal and the divine was taken over and given new meaning. They may have been desacralized, symbolic of worldly achievement and advance, but the Enlightenment still had its relics. What’s more, the fetishizing of remains continued into the next generations. The nineteenth-century explorers who roamed the earth in search of specimens of one type or another assembled them into “cabinets of curiosities” with which to decorate homes and impress visitors, and these often included bits of famous somebodies. A supposed piece of Descartes’ skull sits today in the collection of the Historical Museum of Lund, Sweden, where it originally formed part of such a cabinet.

Lenoir later said that when he dug in the church he found the remains of Descartes in a rotted wood coffin, so back at his depot he carefully transferred them to what he considered a fitting and permanent home: an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus made of porphyry that he had taken from the church of St.-Germain-l’Auxerrois. He placed it in the garden of the former convent, alongside his growing collection of statues and tombs—ultimately, thousands of artistic stone objects from all over France, dating from nearly every period of the country’s history.

Meanwhile, the government committee considering pantheonization issued its report, which was promptly taken up by the entire body, and it is grounding—humbling, even—in an era that values speed over reflection to think of the revolutionary government pausing at length in the middle of its momentous work to consider such a matter—stopping history, in effect, in order to ponder its course and their place in it. The report was presented by Marie-Joseph Chénier, a playwright who had endured failure after failure until one of his plays with revolutionary overtones was mounted shortly after the storming of the Bastille and he became an overnight sensation—and then a member of the revolutionary government. His brother André was even more famous as a poet of the Revolution. In the course of studying Condorcet’s proposition, Chénier became enamored of the idea of Descartes as the first champion of reason, liberty, progress, equality—in short, as the father of the Revolution. Chénier was young, handsome, fearless, impassioned, and at present he and his brother were darlings of the Revolution (the following year André would succumb to the guillotine); he delivered a flowing discourse on behalf of the committee:

Citizens,
Your committee of public instruction has charged me to put before you an object that concerns the national glory and that offers you a new occasion to show to the eyes of Europe your respect for philosophy, the source of valid institutions and true popular laws. In the first centuries of the French empire, a villager from Nanterre was declared holy and was proclaimed patron of Paris. Today, Paris and all France have only Liberty as a patron. A temple was built to Geneviève: this temple, now as outdated as prejudice, is collapsing under the hand of time; but amid this religious rubble, near the sacred relics that, through the follies of man, the pious beliefs of our ancestors imbued with a sterile trust, amid altars enriched by fear, among tombs ornamented by pride, a narrow undecorated stone covers the mortal remains of René Descartes.

It is of course conceivable that in the confusion of the times Chénier and his committee were unaware that Lenoir had already retrieved those mortal remains from the old church. There is another possibility, however, which we will consider later. Chénier went on to place Descartes at the forefront of the line of thinkers whose work had formed the backbone of modernity—“Locke and Condillac, . . . Newton, Leibniz, Euler, Lagrange”—and summarized his committee’s finding: “We have thought that a nation that becomes free through the beneficial effect of the Enlightenment must collect with veneration the ashes of one of its prodigious men who advanced the scope of public reason.” He decried the wayward life of the philosopher, who was forced by “despotism” to wander Europe, and concluded with a flourish: “To you, republicans, belongs the task of avenging the contempt of the kings for the remains of René Descartes.”

The government agreed, and crafted a decree:

DECREE
OF THE
NATIONAL CONVENTION
Dated the 2 and 4 October 1793, the second year of the one
and indivisible French Republic,

Who accord to René Descartes the honors of the
great Men, and order the transfer of his body to the
French Pantheon, and his Statue made by the
celebrated Pajou.

1. On October 2.

THE NATIONAL CONVENTION, after having
heard the report of its Committee of Public Instruction,

decrees the following:

ARTICLE ONE.

René Descartes has merited the honors of the great men.

II.

The body of this philosopher will be transferred to the French Pantheon.

III.

On the tomb of Descartes will be engraved these words:

In the name of the French People

The National Convention
To René Descartes
1793, second year of the Republic.

IV.

The Committee of Public Instruction will consult with the Ministry of the Interior to fix the date of the translation . . .

2. On October 4.

The National Convention decrees that the statue of Descartes, made by the celebrated Pajou, and which is found in the hall of antiques, will be removed to be placed in the Pantheon the day when the remains of this great man will be transferred there; and authorizes the Ministry of the Interior to make all the arrangements necessary to carry out this work.

It was a grand, official, full-on acknowledgment not only of the place of Descartes in French history but of the forces at play in history and of the idea of progress. It was in a way a perfect moment for society to acknowledge these forces—but in another sense it may have been too perfect, for the Revolution was reaching its bloody summit. The monarchies of Europe—in league with aristocrats and churchmen inside France—were trying to stop the dangerous revolt against the political status quo, which had led to a succession of wars against the revolutionary regime. The wars and intrigue in turn worsened living conditions among the people, and hunger inclined the populace toward the most radical elements among the revolutionaries. Robespierre took control of the government and introduced institutional terrorism as a way to deal with perceived threats to the new republic. The guillotine became a symbol of the bloody excesses of the Revolution. Heads rolled—tens of thousands of them—including, most famously, that of Marie Antoinette and ultimately that of Robespierre himself. More pointedly, Condorcet, too, had become ensnared in the Terror. As a result of certain unrevolutionary tendencies—he had opposed the execution of the king, for one—a warrant was issued for his arrest the day after Chénier gave his talk in support of Condorcet’s appeal for pantheonization, and he was forced to flee. It was while he was in hiding that he wrote his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, the book in which he summarized his belief in the Enlightenment and its values and in which he singled out Descartes’ contribution. He was eventually captured and died in prison, under dubious circumstances.

Thus, if the pantheonization of Descartes during the French Revolution—arguably modernity’s most sharply honed act of self-expression—was fitting, the fact that the decision to honor modernity’s founding father came on the eve of the Reign of Terror was doubly so. Liberty, equality, democracy—all were offspring of the cogito and the orientation of humanity around reason. But already in 1739 the Scottish philosopher David Hume had argued that it was a mistake to think that reason is the basis of moral principles: reason, he knew, could be put to the most unreasonable pursuits. As a tool it can build a new society, but it can also kill and maim, and misusing it—through naïve belief or duplicity—is one of the tropes of modern history. Historians have long looked at the Reign of Terror—the state’s suspending laws and putting violence to official use for supposedly noble and rational purposes—as the forerunner of many recent evils, from Stalin’s purges to the infamous “We had to destroy the village to save the village” logic of the Vietnam War. “ ’Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger” was how Hume derisively characterized reason’s negative application. In the very same year that the Reign of Terror broke out in France, Kant, from the isolation of his German village, pondered the conundrum that while reason was now identified as the first principle of modern society, humanity’s “propensity to evil” was undeniable. His conclusion is still our conclusion:

Man himself must make or have made himself into whatever, in a moral sense, whether good or evil, he is or is to become. Either condition must be an effect of his free choice; for otherwise he could not be held responsible for it and could therefore be morally neither good nor evil. When it is said, Man is created good, this can mean nothing more than: He is created for good and the original predisposition in man is good; not that, thereby, he is already actually good, but rather that he brings it about that he becomes good or evil, according to whether he adopts or does not adopt into his maxim the incentives which this predisposition carries with it.

Just as it was grimly appropriate that Robespierre and other instigators of the Terror themselves fell victim to it, it fits modernity’s taste for irony that the purges and violence in 1793 and 1794 derailed the effort to pay homage to one of the progenitors of the modern world. With so many fresh bodies to bury, with so many of its own members facing arrest or execution, the National Convention found that it had more pressing things to do than fix a date for the transfer of one decayed set of human remains. Descartes’ bones stayed in Alexandre Lenoir’s depot.

THE TERROR, HOWEVER, WAS good for Lenoir’s business. As the mayhem mounted, so did his collection. It elegantly littered the interior and the grounds of the lovely former convent by the Seine, creating a sonorous cascade of sculpted and chiseled effects, beauty alternating with violence, the stately flow of the past jumbled by a deforming present. It was at this time of world-historic change and chaos that Lenoir got an idea. What, eventually, was to be done with the glorious rubble—with all of these mementos of a nation’s past—that he had salvaged? Again, progress was uppermost in his mind. He thought of past eras as building to the current moment—the age of reason and enlightenment. Those eras were represented and reflected in their art. Was it all to fade? Faced with the destructive forces that were upon them, would people forget it all? Memory of the past could be wiped away in a generation—would that not be terribly wrong? Should history, its lesson, its forward march, not be imprinted on the minds of citizens of a democracy?

What if he were to bring the force of reason—the same force that had brought about this violent wholesale change—to bear on this dislodged material, impose order onto it, give people a clear representation of history as having an underlying purpose? His idea was to create a space for history and art, an educational forum, a place that would show humanity’s noblest sentiments at work. He would create a temple to the muses: a museum.

A striking thing about the people who handled Descartes’ bones through the centuries is how nearly all of them embodied in some way one of the aspects of modernity that Descartes is credited with bringing into being. When, in 1796, with government backing, Lenoir transformed his depot into the Museum of French Monuments, he created possibly the first-ever history museum and became one of the first people to bring a social-scientific approach to art and history. Using reason and progress as guiding principles, he took debris from the destruction caused by revolutionary war and built something new: a public institution that told the story of the nation and its evolution.

There was already a national museum under way, and the minister of the interior stipulated in his letter of authorization to Lenoir that the institution would technically be a branch of the new Louvre. Lenoir bristled—the Louvre, in his estimation, was a mishmash. He was determined that his museum would have an organizing principle.

And so it did. His first determination was that the visitor would experience history as a progression from lower to higher orders of civilization. In walking through the museum, one would move from century to century, chronologically following the advance. As he worked, he exhibited a great flair for design, and he gave each room an atmosphere he thought suited its historical era—as well as its own funereal aura. He described the first room, devoted to art of the thirteenth century, this way:

Sepulchral lamps hang from the vaults. The doors and windows. . . were designed by the celebrated Montereau according to the taste of the architecture revived by the Arabs. The window glass also bears the stamp of that style. . . . The somber light that pervades this hall is also an imitation of the time . . . [representing] the magic by which men maintained in a perpetual state of weakness human beings whom superstition had struck with fear.

Lenoir’s views about history and progress show up in his description of the use of light in churches of various eras: “I have observed that the farther one goes toward the centuries which approach our own, the more the light increases in public monuments, as if the sight of sunlight could only suit educated man.” Until, presumably, one gets to the Revolution, when roofs were literally ripped off churches, exposing the dark interiors to the full light of day.

Lenoir’s Museum of French Monuments marks not only the beginning of museums but the beginning of a familiar complaint with museums: that they dislocate objects from their source and purpose and original meaning and force them into a new, alien structure. Museums squeeze new meanings out of objects, ones their creators never imagined. The carved Virgin that for centuries stood next to an altar in a Provençal village church, to which generations had prayed—so that it was their Madonna, an object that blended their reverence for a woman of first-century Palestine with all the heartfelt and commonplace aspects of their daily existence, an object that was as much a part of their lives as the mountains framing the landscape—now occupied a wall alongside other dissociated items from roughly the same century and helped to tell the story of the development of realism in art, which, for Lenoir, showed the evolution of humanity.

If this is a complaint of modernity, of modern life, of the force of reason—that it takes things out of the organic pattern in which they evolved, breaks them into analyzable bits, reconstructs them in new ways that may shed new light but that, for many people, have a chilly, inhuman glow—it’s all the more interesting that Lenoir’s museum became the single most popular cultural site in Paris in the years of the Revolution. Strange to say, tourists actually came to the city in the midst of the upheaval, and the Museum of French Monuments was on everyone’s itinerary (an English Sketch of Paris published in 1801 devoted fourteen pages to it), so much so that Lenoir published a catalog, which was later translated into English, which people bought (for five francs) and strolled with as they conducted themselves through the sepulchral gardens and rooms. Lenoir began the catalog by trumpeting the underlying theme of the project: “The French cherish this famous revolution that took place through them and by them. This revolution established a new order of things founded on reason and justice.” The catalog also contained, in front, a notice of such impeccably humdrum practicality that it could serve equally to signal modernity: “The Museum of French Monuments is open to the public Thursdays from six o’clock to two and Sundays from six until four in the summer and until three in winter.”

As concerned as he was to instruct the public, Lenoir also organized his museum around his macabre tastes. At its center was a garden filled with historic tombs. This was his pride and joy, a jardin élysée—named for the arena of the afterlife in ancient Greek mythology reserved for the noblest souls—in which a visitor was meant to ponder beauty and death. His description of it in his catalog shows his special savor for things sepulchral: “In that calm and peaceful garden one sees more than forty statues; tombs set here and there on a green lawn rise with dignity in the midst of silence and tranquility. Pines, cypresses, and poplars accompany them; death masks and cinerary urns placed on the walls combine to give this pleasant place the sweet melancholy which speaks to the sensitive soul.”

The importance of the jardin, according to Lenoir’s sensibility, lay in its concentration of the bones of distinguished men and women of the past—philosophers, poets, painters, playwrights—who contributed to the glory of France. His belief was “that their reunion in one place only concentrates that glory in order to spread it abroad with even greater brilliance.” Contemplating this public “reunion” sends him over the top in his reverie:

May one imagine these inanimate remains receiving a new life, being seen and heard, enjoying a common and unalterable bliss? Is the picture of the antique Elysium more seductive than that offered us by such an imposing gathering? . . . I am pleased to say that I feel a new and sweet emotion every time I step into this august enclosure; I would add that the reward dearest to my heart would be to pass on to the souls of my readers and those who visit this élysée the holy respect with which I was imbued, while creating it, for the intelligence [of those resting here], for their talents, and for their virtue.

The garden was where Lenoir placed the stone coffin containing Descartes’ bones, which he described (and duly numbered) in his catalog:

No. 507. Sarcophagus, in hard stone, and hollowed in its interior, containing the remains of René Descartes, died in Sweden in 1650, supported on griffins, an astronomical animal composed of an eagle and a lion, both sacred to Jupiter—and the emblem of the sun, which represents the home. The poplars, which climb nearly to the top of the clouds, the yews, and the flowers shade this monument, erected to the father of philosophy, to him who was the first to teach us how to think.

But how long would Descartes’ bones rest in the shade of the yews and poplars? France now had yet another new revolutionary government—the Directory, in which five directors formed the executive branch, which governed with two legislative chambers—and just as Lenoir’s museum opened its doors, the Council of the Five Hundred, the lower house of the newly formed legislature, took up the matter of pantheonization once more. Again, it’s remarkable, sitting today in the postmodern cloister of the National Library in Paris, poring over the original pages of the council’s legislative record—weathered, sepiaed, spotted with mold, the alternating of bold Roman serifs and plaintive italics typographically signaling the charged times—to realize that in the midst of so much vital activity the legislators could become completely absorbed in a debate about so seemingly arcane a topic. Over a period of a few days the council debated the status of refugees, the matter of “defendants charged with assassinations and massacres committed at Lyon and in the departments of the Rhone and the Loire,” property taxes, “the conservation of our manufacture of silk, linen, and wool,” “the reestablishment of officers of the peace in Paris,” and “the means to vivify the public spirit.”

In the midst of which, on May 7, 1796, Marie-Joseph Chénier once again addressed his colleagues. The matter was supposed to be simple—finally carrying out the order to transfer the remains to the Pantheon—but so symbolic an event had now become politically charged. “Citoyens répresentans,” he began, using the revolutionarily correct form of address, “the remarkable question that your commissioners were called to examine and that the legislative body has to resolve today, relative to René Descartes, is to know if the translation of his remains to the Pantheon should take place the 10th of Prairial, the day of the Fête de la Reconnaissance, conforming with the invitation made to you by the executive directory.” He made grim note of the irony that since the decree of October 1793 authorizing the transfer of the remains to the Pantheon, Condorcet, who had promoted the idea of Descartes as founding father of the Revolution, had himself been cut down by its violence. As Chénier’s talk goes on it becomes clear that there is a rupture in the chamber over the pantheonization of Descartes, and to some extent lines are drawn with reference to how people view the Revolution.

The radicals, leaders of the Terror—“anarchistic tyrants,” Chénier calls them—represent a deformity in the reason that underlay the Revolution, and these same people now wanted to deny modernity’s forefather his rightful honor. “The persecutors of Condorcet in life do not want to honor Descartes in death,” Chénier charged. He reminded his colleagues again of the “numerous services that Descartes rendered to humanity.” He rolled out the list of names of men who had contributed to the transformation of knowledge of which they were the beneficiaries—Locke, Newton, Leibniz, Galileo, Kepler—and asserted Descartes’ primary place among them. He then tolled instances of the “ignominy of the hereditary French government” toward their compatriot of a century and a half earlier and concluded with a plea to carry out the previous decree and transport the remains of this “great man” to the Pantheon on the agreed-upon date.

Chénier apparently expected opposition, and it came in the person of Louis-Sébastien Mercier, one of the most prolific and opinionated writers of the day. At fifty-six, he had published volumes in virtually every literary form, but his greatest renown was from two works that were themselves cutting-edge examples of literary modernity. Le tableau de Paris and Le nouveau Paris were guidebooks, compendiums of everything about the city and its inhabitants that warned readers about stray animals and fog, advised on how to properly instruct a coachman, and digressed into impressionistic observations of Paris at each hour of the day (at two in the afternoon “those who have invitations to dine set out, dressed in their best, powdered, adjusted, and walking on tiptoe not to soil their stockings”). Mercier also wrote a bizarre proto– science fiction novel called L’an 2440, a sensational best seller in which he envisioned the city in that fantastically distant year.

When he was young and churning out prose by the bushel, Mercier had composed a series of éloges—formulaic encomiums to famous men, one of whom was Descartes. But he had since changed his mind. He now rose and, evoking Chénier’s florid delivery, began, “I, too, made an eloge to Descartes in my youth.” But he said that he hadn’t yet realized that “the greatest charlatans in the world have sometimes been the men most celebrated.” Mercier chose to avoid combating Chénier’s political argument. Instead he railed against “the history of profound evil that Descartes has done to his country.” Descartes, he declared, “visibly retarded progress by the long tyranny of his errors: he is the father of the most impertinent doctrine that has reigned in France. This is Cartesianism, which kills experimental physics and which puts pedants in our schools in place of naturalist observers.”

Cartesianism, Mercier said, had taken root in schools and, with its focus on theorizing rather than experimentation, had allowed the English to vault into the lead in science. But he insisted his wasn’t a nationalistic tirade. “We do not take offense at the superiority of an Englishman,” he said. “Newton belongs to all humanity.” But Descartes had led the French down the wrong path in all the natural sciences—only in mathematics did Mercier allow that he had made a contribution. Mercier recounted the previous burials of Descartes: in Stockholm, supervised by Queen Christina, and in Paris, under the eyes of members of the church and the Sorbonne. “I believe that these honors are sufficient for the memory of Descartes and that his ghost has been entirely satisfied,” he said. “The Pantheon is a republican temple that we reserve for the heroes and martyrs of the Revolution.”

Mercier had a point—one that some would say is still valid. The French have long had a cultural propensity to abstraction, which they themselves have at times decried as counterproductive. Beyond national borders, there is that side of modernity that prefers to ponder rather than act. Whole fields—sociology, literary and art criticism, history itself—have been accused of creating self-perpetuating academic cults whose members talk exclusively to one another without engaging the real world. Then there is the irony that Mercier’s diatribe against Cartesianism—its having rooted itself in schools and blocked progress—is precisely the charge that Descartes and his followers leveled against the Aristotelian system.

While there was truth in Mercier’s criticism, it was also myopic. Another member stood up to express puzzlement. “Nature has ordered events so that the French Revolution came toward the end of the eighteenth century,” he said. “However, I confess that, having heard this discourse, one has to ask oneself whether we are indeed moving toward the nineteenth century or if we find ourselves going backwards toward darkness.” This member of the legislature saw the course of Descartes’ life as following a pattern that had traced itself again and again since his time—more recently in the life of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had also traveled in many foreign countries as he fled criticism for his writings. Rousseau had been pantheonized two years earlier. “It will be enough to remember the career of Descartes to judge his genius and the homage to which he is due,” the member said. “He was persecuted by kings and by priests; he was banished. . . . These persecutors, you find them persevering in pursuit of another celebrated writer of whom the memories are more recent. . . . The same men, I say, persecuted Descartes and Jean-Jacques.” These were half-truths: Descartes had not exactly been persecuted by kings and priests, he hadn’t been banished. But the desire to pinpoint historical precursors for the revolutionary struggle was irresistible.

The chamber was wavering now; apparently Mercier’s points had resonated with some. Chénier took the floor again and addressed his colleagues in anger. “With regard to the project that I have presented in the name of the commission,” he began, “I believe that the legislative body would cover itself in disgrace—” The rest of his sentence was drowned out by “violent murmurs,” as the secretary noted in his minutes. “I cannot otherwise express my thoughts,” Chénier continued after a moment. “I believe that the legislative body would compromise its glory and the national glory if, in ceding to the inclination that some persons seem carried away by, it denied today the solemn promise made to the memory of Descartes by the national convention.”

The debate grew; Voltaire was brought into it, and members began to compare the revolutionary credentials of Voltaire, Descartes, and Rousseau. A member rose to clarify the differences between the contributions of Voltaire and Descartes. “Voltaire enlightened all classes of the people,” he declared. “He employed, to be understood by each, the language suitable to them. The works of profound philosophy don’t carry to all the world. As for Descartes, I have read part of his works, and I avow that never have I known so great a genius. I have read also Newton, but I have more veneration for Descartes, because he was first, and maybe also because he is French. I ask that the project of Chénier be instantly adopted.”

There was too much disagreement, however. Someone suggested postponing the matter. Chénier said he would agree to a postponement, but he insisted that if the pantheonization of Descartes was attacked a second time, “I ask that nothing be decided until we have heard, at this platform, from all those who want to defend the Enlightenment and philosophy.”

THE POSTPONEMENT PROVED FATAL to Chénier’s cause. Years passed, and Descartes’ bones stayed in the garden of Lenoir’s museum. The museum itself continued successful, but much else changed. France’s wars against the monarchies of Europe brought about the end of its revolution—not through losses to foreign powers but through the rise of one of the revolutionary government’s own military commanders. From victories in Italy and Egypt, Napoleon Bonaparte returned in 1799 to conquer his own country, upending the weak government of the Directory and installing himself in power. The most notable change he enacted as “first consul” was to grant the Catholic Church some of its former status. Then, in 1804, having consolidated power, he changed his title. He was now emperor. The democratic republic—and, seemingly, the whole raft of dreams and ideals based on the reorientation of society around reason, science, and the individual—was finished.

If Napoleon represented a grand problem for France, and for Europe, he was a particular problem for Alexandre Lenoir. Lenoir now found himself in an awkward position. His was a “revolutionary museum,” born out of the chaos of the Revolution, dedicated to the values of the Revolution. He tried to resell it to the new regime, pitching it no longer as offering a vision of history building to a climax with the Revolution but rather as celebrating the French past. He focused his efforts on Napoleon’s wife, Josephine, and managed to get her to pay a visit to the museum along with members of her entourage. She came in the evening, and Lenoir had the building and gardens tricked out with flaming torches, the better to show off the sepulchral charms. Napoleon himself visited once as well and remarked that the exotic gloom—stony figures recumbent beneath a blue ceiling stippled with painted stars—reminded him of Syria.

To some extent Lenoir’s effort worked: the museum endured through Napoleon’s reign. But after Elba and Waterloo, with Napoleon’s passing and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1814, Lenoir’s luck ran out. Completing one of the most notable of the many pendulum swings between secularism and religion that have characterized the modern centuries, the Catholic Church came back into power alongside the monarchy, with renewed force. As one aspect of its return, individual churches around the country demanded to have their property back. Lenoir tried to appease churchmen and keep his collection together by proposing to add a religious focus to the museum. His idea was to group the tombs together in a chapel that he would design and to offer masses there. But it didn’t play. In 1816, Louis XVIII issued a decree that religious property in the Museum of French Monuments be returned to its originating institutions; the same year, the museum’s grounds were given to the national art institute. The Ecole des Beaux-Arts continues to occupy the site today.

Lenoir oversaw the dismantling of the collection he had personally amassed. Many objects went back to the churches from which they had been taken. Others went to the Louvre, where they remain to this day. The statues of French kings were returned to the Basilica of St.-Denis—and with them, too, went Lenoir. In recognition of his work in preserving so much of the nation’s and the church’s patrimony, he was given the position of conservator of monuments at the basilica. He spent the rest of his life there and continued to catalog art and artifacts until his death in 1839. His son Albert picked up where he left off, becoming a founder of the new field of architectural history and spending twenty-seven years compiling his massive three-volume Statistique monumentale de Paris.

When the Museum of French Monuments closed, the question of what to do with the tombs of so many French notables excited some popular interest, and various officials weighed in. One idea concerned the vast cemetery of Père-Lachaise. It had been organized under Napoleon but was so far from the city center it got little business. The idea involved transferring the famous remains from Lenoir’s former establishment to the cemetery and making the occasion a public event in which the ancient, historic remains would give the new cemetery on the far eastern fringes of the city some attention and cachet. In March 1817, the city’s conservator of monuments wrote to the minister of the interior and the prefect of the Seine proposing that the tombs of Descartes, Abelard and Heloise, the poet Nicolas Boileau, and the scholars Bernard de Montfaucon and Jean Mabillon be included, saying that “all these illustrious personages merit the same homage and the same religious treatment.” The officials agreed, tombs were transported en masse, and the plan worked. The presence of the tombs of the great Molière, the poet La Fontaine, and especially the doomed lovers Abelard and Heloise—whose tragic love affair took place in the context of a twelfth-century version of the clash between faith and knowledge—excited morbid interest and encouraged cultured Parisians to buy plots. Today Père-Lachaise—whose more recent residents include Chopin, Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, Edith Piaf, and Jim Morrison—is one of Paris’s most popular tourist sites.

But Descartes wasn’t part of the mass migration to Père-Lachaise. Once again, it seems, a group of “friends of philosophy” took a particular interest in his bones and exercised their influence. The cemetery was too remote. If the church of the patron saint of Paris had once housed the remains of the father of modern philosophy, another site, equally symbolic, had to be found. They settled on the church of St.-Germain-des-Prés, on the left bank of the river. It was the oldest church in Paris, founded in the sixth century, and the intertwining of its history with that of the city extended right to its partial destruction during the Revolution. On February 26, 1819, yet another formal religious ceremony—the third—was held over the remains. In the presence of the commissioner of police, the mayor of the Tenth Arrondissement, and delegates from the prefect of the Seine, the remains of Descartes, together with those of Mabillon and Montfaucon, were taken from the garden of the former museum. They were “extracted” from their tombs “avec une religieuse attention” and placed in fresh oak coffins. A party consisting of numerous members of the French Academy of Sciences processed with the coffins the short distance along the left bank from the former convent to the church. Here they were buried, and three black marble plaques erected, in a chapel on the right side of the nave.

The plaques can still be seen in the church today; Descartes’ gives a fusty lineup of Latin platitudes extolling his immortal accomplishments. But exactly what lies beneath the plaque bearing his name is a matter of contention. When the porphyry box was opened, the members of the academy who peered into its ancient recesses were confused and dismayed at what they found—as well as at what they did not find. Something was wrong. Things were not as they had been led to believe.

Eventually the learned gentlemen set about doing what, as good, modern scientists, they were trained to do: analyze information, sound old theories, and construct new hypotheses. The bones of Descartes were about to leave history and enter science. Or, to reference another modern construct—a literary one—that was just being invented, they were about to become the subject of a detective story.