Descartes' Bones Read online

  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 aband
oned 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 Fle
mish 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.