Descartes' Bones Read online

  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 grea
t 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.