Descartes' Bones (16 page)

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:

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:

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

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.