Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
nativity of Christ as the event marking history's beginning. Shortly after-
ward all of Paris' churches were closed.
Although Condorcet had participated in this process, he was not pres-
ent for the drama that brought it to this ironic climax. Denounced as an
enemy of the National Convention because of his opposition to the Jaco-
bin Constitution, he was in hiding just a short distance away, holed up
across the Seine in the house of the Paris landlady, Mme Vernet. Many of
his Girondist friends were already among the human cargo being loaded
onto death carts as part of the daily blood offering demanded by this god-
dess.
1
As a faithful disciple of Voltaire, Condorcet was certainly in favor of
crushing
l'inf
â
me
, but he would have winced at the obvious impersonation
of religion put on display by those who now wished to mingle his blood
with their sacrifices. Nevertheless, the historical sketch he was writing as
he distracted himself from these horrors celebrated in its own fashion the
arrival of this new deity. Condorcet's pageant may have played out in a
less ostentatious medium, one more worthy of a
philosophe
's reserve, but it
too imitated what it thought to attack. He possessed a genuinely visceral
hatred of religion, and in his thinking about how to remedy the world
of this nuisance he stood, at least in spirit, with the Jacobins. But in his
own way he was no less prone to imitate this enemy even as he actively
reproached it. We need only to translate the historical plot of his
Esquisse
into its thematic corollaries to recognize how much of the substance of
Chénier's poem it contains.
This bears witness to the guiding principle I have taken from Durkheim.
His theory proposes that religious meaning is the only kind of meaning that
can sustain social authority. Social authority is as abstract as it is vital, and
because abstractions are always susceptible of appearing to be mere asser-
tions of imagination or will, the greater stake individuals have in them, the
more they will strive to link these mental constructions to things eternal
and inviolable. As the merely verbal anticlericalism of the Enlightenment
gave way to the revolution's dismantling of the church, the vulnerability of
the emerging order became more apparent. The Enlightenment, we might
say, had been an effort to audition nature (now closely identified with rea-
son) for the role formerly played by God, and the revolutionary success of
this movement now required even stronger demonstrations of its adequacy
for this part. This, of course, accounts for the odd irony of the 1793 festival.
The best way to prove reason's fitness to perform the society-building work
formerly done by God was to demonstrate just how much like the church its
human representatives were.
