Descartes' Bones (15 page)

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:

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:

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:

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.

T
HE
T
ERROR, 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.