Literature of Ideas and Paul Bourget's Republican Pedagogy

Literature of Ideas and Paul Bourget's Republican Pedagogy
   Leon Sachs

   French Forum, Volume 33, Numbers 1-2, Winter/Spring 2008, pp. 53-72 (Article)

   Published by University of Pennsylvania Press
   DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/frf.0.0024

       For additional information about this article
       https://muse.jhu.edu/article/252130

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Leon Sachs

Literature of Ideas and Paul Bourget’s
Republican Pedagogy
  On a oublié sur Bourget le quatrain de Becque:
  ‘Pour obtenir enfin la vogue
  J’ai pris des airs de pédagogue
  Je pontifie et j’épilogue
  C’est moi qui suis le psychologue.’
  Paul Léautaud.

Edgar Allan Poe would have accused Paul Bourget of heresy. He
would have vilified him for committing the most egregious literary
crime of all: the subordination of aesthetics to moral instruction. The
literary work must strive to be Beautiful, wrote Poe, and, accordingly,
one must judge it by its ability to satisfy the artistic standards of
taste, harmony and formal decorum. Writers concerned first with the
inculcation of a sense of moral duty commit an act of heresy—what
Poe called the “heresy of The Didactic.”1
    Critics and scholars since the late nineteenth century have treated
Bourget as a literary “heretic,” an enemy of l’art pour l’art, a prac-
titioner of that moralizing and oppressively artless genre: littérature
à thèse or thesis literature. As such, Bourget often falls victim to the
kind of ridicule typified in the few lines of doggerel above. He is re-
membered as a pédagogue in the worst sense of the term: an insuf-
ferable dogmatist, a “pontificating” pedant. In addition to Robert’s
Dictionnaire de citations sur les personnages célèbres, from which
the epigraph is taken, numerous critics and literary authorities have
helped memorialize this unfavorable view. Lagarde and Michard, for
instance, lament the “ton didactique et oratoire” of his novels.2 Ramon
Fernandez has described Bourget’s work as “une oeuvre législatrice.”3
Summarizing the critical consensus circa 1951, Jacques Laurent calls

54 / French Forum/Winter/Spring 2008/Vol. 33, Nos. 1–2

him “le type même du romancier à thèse.”4 More recent scholarship
corroborates this assessment of Bourget. In her 1983 study of the
roman à thèse, Susan Suleiman presents Bourget as an exemplar of
the “authoritarian,” didactic novelist, and Jacqueline Lalouette, writ-
ing in 1998, refers to his most famous novel, Le Disciple, as “son plus
célèbre roman à thèse.”5 The verdict among critics is (almost) unani-
mous: Bourget is a didactic ideologue, a literary pulpiteer.
   But Bourget, himself, vehemently condemned the very genre with
which his name was synonymous. He maintained that his novels were
not romans à thèse but rather romans à idées. “La différence est radi-
cale,” he said.6 In numerous essays written between 1886 and 1922,
Bourget commented time and again on what he considered a funda-
mental distinction. He accused thesis literature of privileging the au-
thor’s subjective opinion over the representation of objective reality.
“La littérature à thèse subordonne . . . la vérité de la peinture à une
démonstration posée a priori dans l’esprit de l’auteur.”7 It “demon-
strates” the author’s pre-established convictions, mere beliefs unsup-
ported by empirical observation; it thereby distorts reality. Littérature
à idées, on the other hand, has nothing to prove or demonstrate: “Son
premier caractère est le réalisme de la peinture.” It is first and fore-
most a literature of observation. “Elle constate, puis elle conclut.”8
The writer’s impartial study of positive facts precedes any assessment
of them. Whereas thesis literature sermonizes, literature of ideas, ac-
cording to Bourget, scrutinizes.
   Conceived of in these terms, Bourget’s literature of ideas remains
faithful to the main intellectual currents of the scientific nineteenth
century. Like so many writers of the time, Bourget believed he was
applying the principles of the new sciences to the literary enterprise.
Though a periodic friend and admirer of Zola, Bourget by and large
disapproved of the excessive sensualism and supposed debauchery of
the naturalist school. He turned his scientific gaze from the material
world to the intellect and states of mind.9 And his preferred science
was psychology. In his Essais de psychologie contemporaine as well
as in numerous novels, the “psychologist” Bourget tried to analyze
meticulously the subtle workings of the human mind, which he de-
scribed as a clockworks with gears, springs and flywheels.
   Uneasy with the amoralism of naturalism and with the moraliz-
ing of thesis literature, Bourget seems to have been seeking a kind of

Sachs: Literature of Ideas and Paul Bourget’s Republican Pedagogy / 55

middle ground with his literature of ideas, a balance between scien-
tific impartiality and moral instruction. The distinction between thesis
literature and literature of ideas, therefore, is perhaps not as radical as
Bourget claims: both present themselves as educational, as seeking to
impart some kind of lesson. They do so, however, in different ways. If
thesis literature, as Susan Suleiman puts it, “seek[s] to demonstrate the
validity of a political, philosophical, or religious doctrine,” Bourget’s
literature of ideas aspires to remain less dogmatic, less insistent and,
consequently, as we shall see below in our discussion of Le Disciple,
its message remains more ambiguous.10 Thus, in his insistence on the
distinction between thesis literature and literature of ideas, Bourget
tries to define a literature that, while seeking to instruct, would remain
less categorically didactic than what has been typically identified as
thesis literature.
    The full significance of this distinction can only be appreciated if
we keep in mind that Bourget, the son of a math professor, was writing
at the height of what historian Theodore Zeldin has dubbed the “Age
of Education”—a time when the topic of education reform occupied
a central place in French politics and public debate. In addition to the
famous lois Ferry, institutionalizing free, obligatory and secular pri-
mary education, a main objective of republican reform was to modern-
ize education by implementing pedagogical methods in the classroom
modeled on those of the empirical sciences. In general terms, this new
pedagogy with its emphasis on inductive learning sought to increase
student autonomy by granting the student a more active role in his
or her own learning process. Similarly, as a literature that presents
itself as instructional while attempting to avoid the heavy-handed di-
dacticism of thesis literature, Bourget’s literature of ideas also seems
to respect the reader’s autonomy and perhaps even fosters his active
engagement in the search for meaning. In other words, Bourget’s em-
phasis on an educational literature that is less authoritarian because
more “scientific” translates into literary terms some of the basic tenets
of modern pedagogical thought. In sum, and as I will argue in these
pages, Bourget, albeit unwittingly, champions a literature that exhib-
its certain fundamental principles of republican pedagogy.
    This argument should strike one as unusual. Most commonly re-
membered as a monarchist, ultra-catholic and inveterate traditionalist,
Bourget is perhaps the least likely of French writers to be associated

56 / French Forum/Winter/Spring 2008/Vol. 33, Nos. 1–2

with republican politics or policies. The young Bourget, devotee of
the determinist theories of Hippolyte Taine and defender of scientif-
ic neutrality regarding questions of morality (“Le psychologue,” he
wrote in 1882, “ne s’inquiète guère du bien et du mal”11) would over
time adopt conservative positions on religion and revise the amor-
alism of his youth. Not only did he increasingly let his reactionary
opinions show in his literature, but, as many critics have noted, his
works became platforms from which he proclaimed his views. And
yet, his ideological conversion would never entirely eclipse his sci-
entism; he would never let go of the idea that his work conformed to
the exigencies of realist objectivity. Torn between an abiding commit-
ment to scientific rationalism and a renewal of traditional moral and
religious values, Bourget embodied the ideological conflicts of turn-
of-the-century France.
    Therein lies the interest of his case. It is precisely because Bourget’s
ideological sympathies are not neatly aligned with those of republican
education reformers that his concept of literature of ideas deserves
greater attention. It is a measure of the extent to which a scientifico-
pedagogical discourse in France spilled beyond the institutions of ed-
ucation and republican politics and had an impact on literary produc-
tion more generally. Bourget’s literature of ideas thus serves as a lens
for assessing the broader cultural impact of education reform. This
impact is seen most obviously in the profusion of late nineteenth-
and early twentieth-century plays and novels depicting teachers, stu-
dents and professors as well as scenes from the educational milieu.
The particular interest of Bourget’s literature of ideas, however, is that
it leads us beneath the surface of thematic questions to address the
ways in which changing ideas about education and pedagogy affected
(and perhaps continue to affect) literature’s didactic function. With
Bourget, in other words, we turn our attention from literature with
teachers to literature that teaches.
    A number of critics have seen in Bourget’s claims of objectivity the
obstinacy of someone who is deluding himself, and, if they mention it
at all, they typically dismiss Bourget’s littérature à idées as a flawed
and somewhat disingenuous concept.12 The critics may be right. With
the important exception of Le Disciple notwithstanding, the case can
be made that the champion of literature of ideas did, in fact, produce
more moralizing, heavy-handed stuff than anything truly resembling

Sachs: Literature of Ideas and Paul Bourget’s Republican Pedagogy / 57

his cherished genre. Furthermore, though Bourget himself would ar-
gue in 1912 that his “theory” of the “roman à idées” was widely ac-
cepted, one must admit that the notion lacks the coherence of a true
theory of literature. He develops the concept in piecemeal fashion
through various essays spanning a period of almost forty years and
his inconsistent terminology frustrates one’s efforts to arrive at a sta-
ble definition.13 Nevertheless, in their cursory rejection of this perhaps
flawed literary concept, the critics overlook the fact that Bourget’s
attempt to define such a concept serves as a valuable focal point for
observing the triangulation between scientific discourse, educational
imperatives and literary production at the turn of the twentieth centu-
ry. While the relationship between literature and science already con-
stitutes a vibrant subfield of scholarly research, and there exist several
notable contributions to the study of the relationship between litera-
ture and education for the period of France’s Third Republic,14 there
has been relatively little scholarly attention paid to the juncture of all
three—a juncture that may be a more faithful reflection of a complex
cultural moment, a time when all of these topics commingled in the
overlapping intellectual, political and artistic spheres of fin-de-siècle
France.
    We gain a particularly succinct view of this triangulation by con-
sidering in greater length the passage already cited above in which
Bourget insists on the “radical difference” between thesis literature
and literature of ideas:

  Balzac n’a pas écrit un seul roman à thèse. Son oeuvre tout entière n’est qu’un
  immense roman à idées. La différence est radicale. Le romancier à thèse est celui
  qui part d’une conviction a priori et qui organise sa fable en vue d’une démonstra-
  tion; le romancier à idées est celui qui part de l’observation et qui par delà les faits
  dégage les causes. Il aboutit ainsi ‘à ces décisions sur les choses humaines’ dont
  parle le maître. C’est dire que tout grand roman devient par définition un roman
  social. L’analyse psychologique est le procédé par excellence pour ce dégagement
  des vérités profondes. On ne saurait trop désirer que les romanciers contempo-
  rains pratiquent ainsi leur art. Ce dont la France actuelle a le plus besoin, c’est
  d’éducateurs de sa pensée, je n’ai pas dit de sermonneurs. La prédication n’a rien
  à voir avec la littérature d’imagination. Mais cette littérature, qui n’imagine bien
  que ce qu’elle observe bien, a le droit, disons mieux, le devoir, de suggérer des hy-
  pothèses sur les faits humains qu’elle a enregistrés. Ces hypothèses elles-mêmes
  sont des suggestions pour le lecteur à qui elles apprennent à mieux se comprendre
  et à mieux comprendre son pays. Voilà notre service à nous. La Comédie humaine,
  à laquelle il faut toujours revenir, est là pour nous prouver que ce service est com-

58 / French Forum/Winter/Spring 2008/Vol. 33, Nos. 1–2

  patible avec toutes les franchises de la peinture. Une telle manière de compren-
  dre l’art du roman, non seulement n’est pas une diminution de la puissance de
  l’artiste, elle en est une exaltation.15

One first notices, of course, Bourget’s reiteration of his longstanding
admiration for Balzac as the greatest exemplar of the “école de
l’observation”16 and prototype of the novelist of ideas (Balzac is also,
as we shall see, a background presence in Le Disciple, serving as a
symbolic reminder of the inextricability of science and literature).
More significant, however, is the two-part organization of this passage,
the first part asserting the scientific objectivity of literature of ideas
and the second part attempting to tease an educational function out
of such scientificity.17 Such education, the passage insists, must not
be confused with predication: it has nothing to do with a teaching as
absolute or categorical as that which emanates from a pulpit or other
tribune. The particular emphasis Bourget places on the “suggestion
d’hypothèses” betrays a reticence, a desire to communicate a lesson
but with restraint, by means of understatement. And it is by hewing
to the language of science that Bourget articulates this distinction.
“The hypothesis,” he wrote in 1912, “is the scientific technique par
excellence.”18 Comparing the novelist to the clinician, he explains that
the diagnostic made by the latter is nothing less than a “hypothèse de
cause,” in other words a provisional conjecture explaining that which
has given rise to the phenomena under study.19 The novelist of ideas
proceeds similarly: his work “dégage . . . une hypothèse explicative
des faits observés.”20 Thus, according to Bourget’s logic, that which
one might be tempted to identify as the “lesson” in the novel of ideas
should be understood instead as only a hypothetical conclusion, which
by its very nature—its very scientific nature, insists Bourget—is less
categorical and demonstrative than the lesson of a thesis novel.21
   It is worth repeating the point that this suggested hypothesis is no
less pedagogical. As evidenced in his word choice above, Bourget
very much conceives of the reader as a student. But, as the passage
also shows, the reader-student to whom one suggests a hypothesis
is faced with a quite different task than the reader-student presented
with a ready-made thesis. The necessary inconclusiveness of the hy-
pothesis ensures that the literary lesson remain incomplete. The work
thus enlists the reader’s own effort; it summons him to continue on his
own an investigation that it has only begun.

Sachs: Literature of Ideas and Paul Bourget’s Republican Pedagogy / 59

   One could even say that Bourget’s literature of ideas is pedagogi-
cal in the truest sense of the word. Etymologically, after all, the term
refers to the paidagôgos, or slave, in ancient Greece who accompa-
nied a boy to and from school but was not, strictly speaking, a teacher,
or didaskalos. In this light, a literature that educates not so much by
imposing its lesson but by guiding, or accompanying, the reader in
his search for meaning could be said to be more pedagogical than
didactic. This may appear to be mere word play, a minor distinction
between terms so often treated as synonyms. And yet, it is a distinc-
tion that both brings into focus the particularity of Bourget’s literary
project and gets to the heart of what Émile Durkheim referred to as
the “pedagogical revolution” in late nineteenth-century France.22

France’s Pedagogical Revolution
Republican education reformers contrasted the new pedagogy
with traditional methods of education that, they claimed, relied too
heavily on learning by rote memorization and mindless imitation.
The traditional “maître” was accused of imparting, or handing down,
an already whole or complete body of knowledge to a passive,
docile student. In contrast, reformers hoped to produce more active,
autonomous, and rational learners. One might say, building on the
distinction above, that they wanted to replace outdated didacticism
with modern pedagogy. The new student, resembling the scientific
researcher, was expected to learn according to inductive methods
of inquiry, by careful observation and analysis. One finds efforts to
implement the new, scientistic pedagogy at all levels of instruction.
In elementary education, it lies at the heart of the famous leçon de
choses, or “object lesson,” in which the pupil was meant to manipulate,
handle, observe, describe and analyze “real things” on his own. In
the secondary schools, we find this pedagogy in the new exercises of
expository writing and the explication de texte. In higher education,
it is the driving force behind the creation of the advanced research
seminars, in which, at least in theory, students would engage in active
dialogue with one another and the professor.
    In all of these practices, there is the common theme of handing
authority over to the student, of according the student greater control
over his own learning process. Marie Pape-Carpantier, who played an
instrumental role in the introduction of the leçon de choses in French

60 / French Forum/Winter/Spring 2008/Vol. 33, Nos. 1–2

primary schools, insisted on this point in her explanation of the suc-
cess enjoyed by the new pedagogy:

  . . . cela tient à une grande loi, terriblement méconnue, qui ne veut pas qu’il y ait
  de patient en éducation; qui veut que l’élève soit un agent actif, aussi actif que le
  maître; qu’il soit son collaborateur intelligent dans les leçons qu’il en reçoit, et
  que, selon l’expression du catéchisme, il coopère à la grâce!23

    One of the most famous calls for greater student activity and auton-
omy is expressed by Jules Simon, the minister of Public Instruction,
in his oft-cited 1872 Circular addressed to secondary school princi-
pals. Criticizing the current curriculum’s overemphasis on Latin trans-
lation exercises (“thème”), Simon advocates activities that will give
the student more intellectual freedom: “je voudrais que l’intelligence
de l’écolier pût se mouvoir, comme son corps, un peu plus à l’aise;
qu’elle eût aussi ses excursions et ses promenades; que le livre prît un
peu plus souvent la place de la plume, et que la recherche personnelle
succédât aux pratiques routinières du dictionnaire latin ou grec.”24
In contrast to the unimaginative “routine” of written translation (“la
plume”), Simon proposes reading as an exercise that will do more to
stimulate the student’s mind. There is no mistaking the Rousseauist
echoes in Simon’s words: the intellectual “excursions” and “prom-
enades” promoted by Simon evoke Emile’s adventures out-of-doors
and his discovery of the natural world. Simon’s point is that the mind,
too, must have its outings, journeys, and peregrinations.
    The intellectual freedom to explore not only frees the student from
the confining “pratiques routinières” of traditional education but also
from the educator’s firm control. Later in the Circular, Simon explic-
itly argues for a new, more balanced relationship between teacher and
student:

  Les professeurs ne sauraient trop s’appliquer à faire que la classe soit pour les
  élèves un exercice actif, plutôt qu’un exercice passif. Dans nos facultés, le pro-
  fesseur parle tout seul, les élèves ne font qu’écouter; mais ils doivent parler dans
  la classe. La leçon y doit être un dialogue. [ . . . ] C’est quand le maître enseigne
  trop par lui-même, au lieu de provoquer les observations et les découvertes, que
  l’écolier tient les choses en méfiance, sans qu’il y paraisse. Le maître alors a des
  auditeurs, non des disciples.25

This call for more active learning, which would become a kind of
mantra for republican education reformers, is here expressed as a call

Sachs: Literature of Ideas and Paul Bourget’s Republican Pedagogy / 61

for a more give-and-take relationship between teacher and student.
While it would be an exaggeration to say that Simon recommends an
egalitarian relationship between teacher and student, he does envision
a dynamic that renegotiates the traditional hierarchy and promotes
the elevation of the student’s relative authority. Again, the student’s
participation is expressed in terms of “observation” and “discovery,”
language that evokes the empiricist imperative underlying education
reform.
   In anticipation of our discussion of Bourget’s novel below, the last
line above is particularly suggestive. The paratactical opposition be-
tween “auditeur” and “disciple” gives the latter term new meaning.
The teacher who wants real students, a true disciple, will not be con-
tent to have mere auditors, or passive listeners; he will want to engage
with active learners. Whether Paul Bourget was consciously recep-
tive to what at the time were viewed as “revolutionary” ideas about
pedagogy is uncertain; what is certain, however, is that his novel, Le
Disciple, gives these ideas literary form.

From Simon’s Disciple to Bourget’s Disciple
Le Disciple touched off a rancorous public debate within months
of its publication, producing what a recent critic has described as
“l’effet d’une bombe dans les milieux littéraires.”26 At the center
of the “Querelle du Disciple” was a contest between two literary
colossi: Ferdinand Brunetière, chair of literature at the École normale
supérieure, and Anatole France, erudite novelist and literary critic for
Le Temps (and future Nobel laureate). Other members of the scientific
and literary intelligentsia, such as Paul Janet, Édouard Rod, Charles
Bigot and Augustin Filon, participated in the Querelle as well. If
they agreed on little else, the critics unanimously recognized the
contemporary relevance of a novel that addressed in detail the most
recent and vexing trends in philosophy, science and moral education.
It raised the question of whether certain philosophical doctrines—
namely, positivism and other materialist doctrines—are in and of
themselves harmful to society and whether the teacher who expounds
such doctrines can be held responsible for any resultant “misdeeds”
committed by his students.27 “These are topical questions if ever there
were,” wrote Brunetière, “and as such, we must debate them.”28
   The novel recounts the relationship between the disciple, a student

62 / French Forum/Winter/Spring 2008/Vol. 33, Nos. 1–2

named Robert Greslou, and his intellectual mentor, or maître, the phi-
losopher Adrien Sixte, an impassive, recluse with one interest only:
science. When the story begins, Greslou stands accused of murdering
a young noblewoman, Charlotte de Jussat-Randon, in whose home
he has been employed as the preceptor for her younger brother. Both
the deceased’s family and the court suspect the determinist, scientific
theories of Greslou’s teacher of being ultimately responsible for the
young man’s crime. Approximately two-thirds of the novel takes the
form of a memoir addressed to the positivist philosopher that Greslou
has written from prison while awaiting trial. In it, the eponymous dis-
ciple describes the lurid affair of how he seduced the young wom-
an, dishonored her, and, he admits, drove her to commit suicide. He
has not, however, poisoned her. He is thus innocent of the crime of
which he is accused. Greslou explains his seduction of Charlotte in
terms of scientific research, as an application of his master’s psycho-
logical theories for the purpose of studying the human passions. He
also presents the memoir itself as a kind of psychological self-study
in which he, the disciple, has applied to himself, to his own psyche,
the methods of observation and analysis learned from his master. The
reading of the memoir transforms the philosopher. The once apathet-
ic and asocial thinker discovers a sentimental bond uniting him with
Greslou and acknowledges his own duty to intervene in the trial on
behalf of the young man whom he now, for the first time, recognizes
as his disciple.
    Though the critics agreed on the seriousness of the novel’s themes,
they could not agree on its message. Anatole France praised Bourget
for raising “lofty moral questions” and yet leaving them unresolved;
it is not literature’s task, he said, to provide solutions to such prob-
lems.29 Brunetière, on the other hand, applauded the novel for its clear
denunciation of scientific arrogance; the story, he believed, unam-
biguously portrayed the triumph of moral duty over intellectual ef-
feteness.30 Paul Janet, chair of philosophy at the Sorbonne, praised
Bourget’s novel as a welcome sign of change in contemporary French
thought, symbolizing a general malaise with the atheism, decadence,
and positivism of recent years and a return to the traditions of “meta-
physics and morals.”31 However, Janet, an eclectic philosopher in-
clined to favor an attack on positivism, conceded that Le Disciple did
not clearly impugn the questionable doctrines.32 The Swiss psycholo-

Sachs: Literature of Ideas and Paul Bourget’s Republican Pedagogy / 63

gist and writer, Édouard Rod, pointed to the striking contrast between
the clear message of the novel’s preface and the ambiguity in the rest
of the story.33
    One is tempted to take the critics’ divergent reactions as proof
alone that the novel is something other than thesis literature, given
that it apparently fails to communicate an unambiguous, authorita-
tive lesson. Such range of opinion among readers, however, does not,
in and of itself, disqualify the novel as a roman à thèse, for even the
most authoritarian literature, Susan Suleiman reminds us, cannot pre-
vent a reader from resisting its lessons or reading against the grain.34
The disagreement over Le Disciple’s message, however, is different
because of the way in which the novel’s particular formal properties
demand that it be read “scientifically,” thereby explicitly encouraging
a degree of active analysis and interpretive autonomy on the part of
the reader. Such autonomy ignites debate.
    The novel’s famous preface, entitled “A un jeune homme,” lends
credence to those who have viewed le Disciple as thesis literature. It
is still read to this day as one of the most clarion denunciations of the
nineteenth century’s scientific spirit. Decrying the excesses of positiv-
ist and naturalist thought, it apparently marks a break with the domi-
nant intellectual fashions of the day—in particular, with the material-
ist doctrines associated with Ernest Renan and Hippolyte Taine, i.e.,
with the intellectual “maîtres” of Bourget’s own generation. A paean
to traditional religious values, the preface calls for the spiritual revival
of the nation’s youth and entreats other writers to provide moral guid-
ance to their young readers. Writers, in other words, are educators;
readers, their disciples. “[T]u vas [] cherchant dans nos volumes,”
Bourget says to the preface’s young reader,

  des réponses aux questions qui te tourmentent. [. . .] Qu’auras-tu recueilli,
  qu’aurez-vous recueilli dans nos ouvrages? Pensant à cela, il n’est pas d’honnête
  homme de lettres [. . .] qui ne doive trembler de responsabilité . . . .35 (3)

And the preface concludes by putting the reader on guard against
those alluring intellectuals, teachers and “maîtres” who disseminate
said pernicious philosophies.
   As Édouard Rod rightly observed, however, things are not so clear
in the novel proper. In the first chapter, the reader is immediately in-
troduced to the “modern philosopher,” Adrien Sixte, the embodiment

64 / French Forum/Winter/Spring 2008/Vol. 33, Nos. 1–2

of the very intellectual traits that Bourget decried in the preface. Yet,
the fictional portrait is ambiguous. On the one hand, Sixte is present-
ed as a strange recluse, an emotionless freak of nature who avoids
contact with others and leads an obsessionally routinized existence.
But, for all of his awkwardness, the novel also likens Sixte, in almost
adulatory terms, to Immanuel Kant, René Descartes, Herbert Spencer,
Ernest Renan and, above all to Hippolyte Taine. Such “recurring im-
ages and comparisons,” observes Victor Brombert, “even [take] the
form of mild hagiolatry,” thereby producing a “paradoxical exaltation
of the very personage whose life, thoughts and influence Bourget on
one level explicitly disapproves of. . . .”36
    There is one image in particular that succinctly captures the novel’s
(and Bourget’s) ambivalence toward the figure of the positivist philos-
opher: that of Sixte standing before the monkey cage at the Jardin des
Plantes. In what is an unmistakable allusion to Balzac’s Comédie hu-
maine, Sixte laughs to himself “misanthropically” as he compares the
“simian comedy” before his eyes to the “human comedy.” On the one
hand, the scene puts the reader on guard against this derisive natural-
ist who identifies man with apes. On the other hand, the evocation of
Balzac likens Sixte, as we have seen, to one of Bourget’s own intellec-
tual and literary heroes and the forerunner of literature of ideas. In other
words, at the very moment that Sixte’s scientific musings seem most
insidious, he simultaneously calls to mind the archetypal practitioner
of the scientifico-literary genre to which Bourget, himself, aspires.
    A similarly ambiguous evocation of Balzac appears later when
Greslou describes in his memoir how he had used Eugénie Grandet as
a tool in his seduction of Charlotte. He would read aloud to the entire
Jussat-Randon family from the novel with the ulterior goal of destabi-
lizing Charlotte’s emotions, awakening her passions and providing her
with a sentimental model to emulate. Charlotte’s father, however, the
hypochondriacal and unrefined Marquis, like Flaubert’s Pécuchet, tires
of the novel’s “interminable descriptions, analyses and statistical cal-
culations” and prohibits any further reading of Balzac. “Mais quand je
lis un roman, moi,” says the Marquis, “c’est pour m’amuser” (145).
    The Marquis, despite his noble pedigree, is as boorish as Greslou
is wicked. His naïve reduction of fiction to mindless entertainment
expresses an attitude that is roundly rejected by both Bourget’s story
and the didactic preface that exhorts fellow writers to assume their

Sachs: Literature of Ideas and Paul Bourget’s Republican Pedagogy / 65

responsibility as educators, to be more than mere entertainers. The
Marquis’s comical obtuseness points up, by contrast, the very function
of the novel as something other than pure amusement, as a tool, say,
for scientific investigation, or the pursuit and acquisition of knowl-
edge, for learning.
   The idea that literature is something more than a source of diver-
sion, that it may be a tool of scientific inquiry, pervades the novel. The
reader is repeatedly reminded that his undertaking is also scientific.
This question becomes most explicit when Sixte is summoned before
the magistrate to discuss his relationship with the accused. Literature,
we learn, actually occupies a surprisingly central place in Sixte’s own
research. The philosopher explains how the difficulty of reproducing
moral phenomena frustrates efforts to establish psychology as a true
experimental science. Literary and other documents thus compensate
for the limitations of the nascent science: “Avec des mémoires, avec
des oeuvres de littérature ou d’art, avec des statistiques, des dossiers
de procès, des notes de médecine légale, nous [les psychologues] pos-
sédons un monde de faits à notre service” (42). In a word, Sixte, the
positivist philosopher and experimental psychologist is also a read-
er, and not only a reader of arid, technical documents but also works
of art and literature. It would be hard to overstate the implications
of Sixte’s view of literature for Bourget’s own reader. The idea that
memoirs, literary works and other texts contain scientific data draws
immediate attention to the very work that the reader of Le Disciple
holds in his own hands. The reader is thus alerted that the novel dou-
bles as a scientific document, a collection of psychological data, and
he is thereby invited, indeed encouraged, to read with a rigor and cir-
cumspection worthy of a scientist.
   Sixte’s comment to the magistrate neatly foreshadows the delivery
in the next scene of the disciple’s memoir, all one hundred and sixty
pages of which are inserted in the center of the novel and that Sixte
peruses as does Bourget’s reader. The reader reads the entire memoir
as if he were looking over Sixte’s shoulder. He is almost literally oc-
cupying the place of the scientist examining this documentary data.
Two-thirds of Le Disciple is composed of this pseudo-scientific docu-
ment. Greslou boasts of the methodological austerity with which he
has composed the “monograph” of his own psyche, comparing it to
both a dissection and a geometrical problem: “Je me suis prouvé la

66 / French Forum/Winter/Spring 2008/Vol. 33, Nos. 1–2

vigueur persistante de ma réflexion en reconstruisant ma vie depuis
son origine, comme je résoudrais un problème de géométrie par syn-
thèse” (64).
    It is clear from the “detailed exposition” of the hereditary and en-
vironmental causes behind his present psychological condition that
Greslou has organized his study according to the criteria of “race,
milieu and moment”—the “three primordial forces” that Hippolyte
Taine, in his five-volume Histoire de la littérature anglaise (1863),
presented as the determining factors of how a people or nation de-
velop over time (and that could be detected, Taine argued, through
the careful study of a nation’s literature). The Tainian determinism
directing Greslou’s self-study requires that he explain in detail his re-
lationship with each of his parents, his early experiences at school
and church, the influence of classmates, his first sexual encounter, the
changing political winds in a democratizing France, his discovery of
literature and philosophy, and, of course, the work of Sixte. The ex-
cess of these determinants, however, confounds the reader’s efforts to
privilege any particular cause for Greslou’s behavior. The complexity
of his waywardness, in other words, serves to mitigate Sixte’s respon-
sibility in the affair.
    This was, in any case, how at least one critic reacted to the novel.
“Suffit-il que Greslou s’appuie sur les ouvrages du maître pour que le
maître soit incriminé?” asked an anonymous reviewer in the August
17 issue of the Revue Scientifique (Revue Rose).

  M. Bourget n’a pas osé trop insister sur ce point délicat, et même il semble qu’il
  n’ait pas d’opinion bien nette à ce sujet, puisqu’il insiste sur le côté maladif, mo-
  bile, maniaque, presque vicieux dès l’enfance, qui caractérise le triste héros de ce
  drame.37

The critic’s explicit evocation of the deep-seated “pathological” and
“almost depraved” aspects of Greslou’s character underscores that it
is the evidence, the abundance of data, provided by Greslou’s own
meticulous self-analysis that justifies the downplaying of Sixte’s
responsibility. The point to retain here is that this reader’s freedom
to interpret the novel in ways that mitigate the anti-scientific charges
leveled in the preface stems directly from his first-hand examination
of the scientific treatise. To put it another way, it is because this reader
is put in the position of a scientist—quite literally, since he peruses the

Sachs: Literature of Ideas and Paul Bourget’s Republican Pedagogy / 67

memoir along with Sixte—that he has the liberty to interpret based on
his direct observation and analysis of the facts. (While this may be a
characteristic of the reader’s role in all realist and naturalist literature,
there is, nevertheless, a qualitative difference between the reading of
a “standard” realist work and a work like Le Disciple, two-thirds of
which is presented as a simulacrum of a scientific treatise.)
   I privilege this one critic’s interpretation because it is corroborated
at a crucial point in the novel. A similar reticence to accuse the philos-
opher or his science in any peremptory way reveals itself at the very
moment of Sixte’s transformation, at the very moment, in other words,
when Sixte acknowledges his part in the Greslou affair. Having read
and reread the memoir, Sixte, in the end, cannot help but recognize
that his philosophy is not entirely exempt from responsibility. “Avec
sa magnifique sincérité, le philosophe le reconnaissait: le caractère
de Robert Greslou, déjà dangereux par nature, avait rencontré, dans
ses doctrines à lui, comme un terrain où se développer dans le sens
de ses pires instincts. . .”(219–220). But in this moment of truth, so to
speak, we can hear, as did the Revue Rose’s critic, Bourget’s reserve.
Not only does Sixte’s “magnificent sincerity” now outshine his odi-
ous qualities, but also, and more importantly, his own avowal of re-
sponsibility is offset, twice, in the same sentence, by the reminder that
Greslou was “already dangerous by nature.” In other words, Sixte’s
careful study of Greslou’s memoir produces an ambiguous reading:
he assumes a responsibility for his disciple, but that responsibility re-
mains, nevertheless, partial. At the novel’s core, then, Bourget cannot
imperatively pronounce on the philosopher’s guilt. By both accusing
and excusing Sixte and his philosophy in the same breath, the novel’s
lasting message remains ambivalent.
   To return to our earlier discussion of literature of ideas, one could
say that the novel only “suggests a hypothesis,” a tentative kind of les-
son that grants the reader considerable leeway to draw his own con-
clusions. (This was, we should recall, Anatole France’s assessment.)
If the novel “suggests,” as it does, that Sixte and his science bear a
certain responsibility in the Greslou affair, it does not, as we have
seen, insist on that conclusion. Here we encounter once again the key
distinction presented earlier between literature of ideas and thesis lit-
erature: instead of imposing a manifest message, literature of ideas
imparts its lesson in a more even-handed way, one that enlists the

68 / French Forum/Winter/Spring 2008/Vol. 33, Nos. 1–2

reader’s participation in the production of meaning. More significant
still is that, in Le Disciple, this occurs in large part through a formal
device, the disciple’s memoir, which likens the act of reading to sci-
entific inquiry. The novel’s reluctance to communicate an unequivo-
cal message is part and parcel of its fidelity to a scientific mindset.
    We are better able at this point to perceive the silhouette of Jules
Simon’s ideal disciple—that is to say, the principles of republican
education reform—in the background of Bourget’s Disciple. The dis-
ciple, or student, now in question, however, is no longer the fictional
Greslou but rather Bourget’s student-reader, the ‘jeune homme’ ad-
dressed in the preface, “who goes looking in the volumes of his el-
ders, of his maîtres, for answers to his burning questions.” As I have
argued, the answers provided in the pages of the novel remain incon-
clusive. But therein lies the education. Just as the minister of Public
Instruction entreated teachers to engage their students more active-
ly in their lessons, to stimulate their independent research, so, too,
does Bourget’s novel accord a significant interpretive autonomy to
its reader-student. In his avoidance of the monologic sermon of the
thesis novel, Bourget seems to heed Simon’s injunction that “la leçon
doit être un dialogue.” As in Pape-Carpantier’s leçon de choses—“qui
veut que l’élève soit un agent actif, aussi actif que le maître; qu’il
soit son collaborateur intelligent dans les leçons qu’il en reçoit”—
Le Disciple’s reader also actively “collaborates” in the production
of meaning, i.e., in the novel’s lessons. In sum, the active, autono-
mous student and the more egalitarian teacher-student relationship
envisioned by republican education reformers and promoted through
scientifico-pedagogical innovations find their literary analogue in the
pedagogical relationship that Bourget establishes between the writer-
teacher and reader-student of Le Disciple, Bourget’s most effective
novel of ideas. If Durkheim was right that a pedagogical revolution
took place in late nineteenth-century France, then one of the mea-
sures of that revolution should be the extent to which it reached be-
yond the walls of the republican classroom, spread throughout cul-
ture and society, and affected even those who were not among the
republican faithful. Bourget’s literature of ideas may be seen as a
sign of its reach.

University of Kentucky

Sachs: Literature of Ideas and Paul Bourget’s Republican Pedagogy / 69

Notes
    1. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Poetic Principle,” The Complete Tales and Poems (New York:
Vintage Books, 1975) 892.
    2. André Lagarde and Laurent Michard, XXe Siècle (Paris: Bordas, 1973) 99.
    3. Jacques Rivière and Ramon Fernandez, Moralisme et littérature (Paris: R.–A. Corrêa,
1932) 92.
    4. Jacques Laurent, “Paul et Jean-Paul,” La Table ronde 38 (1951): 23. This famous article
is a mercilessly satirical portrait of Bourget and Sartre that exposes the latter’s littérature en-
gagée as merely another incarnation of littérature à thèse.
    5. Susan Rubin Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary
Genre (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1983). Jacqueline Lalouette, “La querelle de la foi et de la
science et le banquet Berthelot,” Revue historique CCXCIX, 4 (1998): 827.
    6. Paul Bourget, “Note sur le roman français en 1921,” Nouvelles pages de critique et de
doctrine (Paris: Plon, 1922) 129.
    7. ———. Pages de critique et de doctrine (Paris: Plon, 1912) 143.
    8. Ibid.
    9. See Albert Feuillerat, Paul Bourget, histoire d’un esprit sous la Troisième République
(Paris: Librairie Plon, 1937), passim. For a discussion of the relationship between “psycho-
logical writers” and naturalism in terms of Bordelian categories of symbolic capital, see Rémy
Ponton, “Naissance du roman psychologique: capital culturel, capital social et stratégie litté-
raire à la fin du 19e siècle,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 4 (1975): 68–81.
    10. Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre, 7.
    11. Cited in Feuillerat, Paul Bourget, histoire d’un esprit sous la troisième république, 79.
    12. See Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre,
3–4.; Frederick Charles Green, French Novelists from the Revolution to Proust (New York:
Appleton, 1931) 309; Albert Léon Guérard, Five Masters of French Romance: Anatole France,
Pierre Loti, Paul Bourget, Maurice Barrès, Romain Rolland (New York: C. Scribner’s, 1916)
211; René Lalou and Georges Versini, Le Roman français depuis 1900, Que sais-je? No. 49
(Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1969) 9–10.
    13. In 1892, for example, he rejects the term “roman à idées” (but will use it again later),
preferring instead that of “roman d’analyse,” less confusing a term, he says, than the closely
related “roman psychologique.” In each instance, he seems to be describing essentially the
same kind of literary project. See Paul Bourget, La Terre promise. Oeuvres complètes, vol. IV
(Paris: Plon, 1902).
    14. See, for example, M. Martin Guiney, Teaching the Cult of Literature in the French
Third Republic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), and Denis Pernot, Le Roman de so-
cialisation 1889–1914 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1998).
    15. Bourget, “Note sur le roman français en 1921,” 129–30.
    16. Paul Bourget, “Réflexions sur l’art du roman,” Études et portraits (Paris: Lemerre,
1889) 264.
    17. The passage thus captures the underlying dual nature of Bourget’s own thought, a ten-
sion between the disinterested psychologist and the moralist. This is also a tension that one
finds in Émile Durkheim’s lectures on education and morality at the base of morale laïque.
    18. Bourget, Pages de critique et de doctrine, 126.
    19. Ibid., 126–28.

70 / French Forum/Winter/Spring 2008/Vol. 33, Nos. 1–2

    20. Ibid., 115–16.
    21. Space does not permit a more thorough discussion of the word ‘suggestion,’ which had
numerous and divergent connotations both in psychology and education in turn-of-the-century
France. From a purely etymological point of view, the word connotes a kind of communica-
tive act that is subtle, nuanced, the very opposite of didactic. This is the way the word is used,
for instance, in a conference given by Emile Faguet in 1913, in which “education suggestive”
is used to describe a form of instruction that is non-authoritarian, in which the teacher antici-
pates the student’s own investigations. “On va devant lui légèrement, ou observe dans quelle
mesure il vous suit, et, sans enseignement proprement dit, sans enseignement didactique, on
l’excite légèrement à observer un peu plus et à questionner davantage.” (Emile Faguet, Autour
de Montaigne [Genève, Paris: Slatkine Honoré Champion, 1999] 270.) And yet, in the psy-
chological language of the day, ‘suggestion’ would bring to mind the work of H. Bernheim
in Nancy, in which psychological suggestion constituted an almost authoritarian transmission
of an idea from psychologist to patient. For a discussion of Bernheim, see Jacqueline Car-
roy, Hypnose, suggestion et psychologie: l’invention de sujets (Paris: Presses universitaires
de France, 1991).
    22. Émile Durkheim, “La Morale laïque,” L’Education morale (Paris: Presses universi-
taires de France, 1992) 3.
    23. Cited in Pierre Kahn, La Leçon de choses: naissance de l’enseignement des sciences
à l’école primaire (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2002) 48–49.
Italicized in the original.
    24. Jules Simon, “Instruction relative à l’institution de réunions périodiques des professeurs
dans les lycées et aux réformes que semble réclamer le système d’éducation et d’enseignement
suivi dans les établissements d’instruction secondaire, le 17 septembre 1872,” Circulaires et
instructions officielles relatives à l’instruction publique (Paris: Delalain Frères. L’Université
de France, 1878) 221–22.
    25. Ibid.
    26. Pascale Seys, Maîtres ou complices? la philosophie de Taine dans le Disciple de Paul
Bourget, ed. Bruno Curatolo (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996) 35.
    27. Anatole France, La Morale et la science, vol. 3, La Vie littéraire (Paris: Calmann-
Lévy, 1949) 70.
    28. Ferdinand Brunetière, “A propos du Disciple,” La Revue des deux mondes 94.3 (1889):
223. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.
    29. France, La Morale et la science, 71.
    30. Brunetière, “A propos du Disciple,” 215.
    31. Paul Janet, “De la responsabilité philosophique, à propos du Disciple, de M. Paul Bour-
get,” Séances et travaux de l’Académie des sciences morales et politiques 34.2 (1890): 6.
    32. Ibid.: 14.
    33. Édouard Rod, “Les idées morales du temps présent, M. Paul Bourget,” La Revue bleue
XLVI, 9 (1890): 257–62.
    34. Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre, espe-
cially chapters 5 and 6.
    35. Paul Bourget, Le Disciple. Oeuvres complètes, vol. III (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1901) 3.
All future page references to this edition will appear in parentheses in the text.
    36. Victor H. Brombert, The Intellectual Hero (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1961) 63.
    37. “Causerie Bibliographique.” Revue scientifique (Revue rose) 26.7 (1889): 214.

Sachs: Literature of Ideas and Paul Bourget’s Republican Pedagogy / 71

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