Descartes' Bones (13 page)

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.

H
E 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-dalisme
was 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:

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.