ABSTRACT
With Edgar Quinet we encounter a thinker fully engaged with the reality of his time, a writer who consistently drew upon an understanding of the past in support of his political values. Liberal in the 1820s, republican under the July Monarchy, deputy in 1848, exiled after the coup d’état of 1851, Quinet is representative of the French Left's anchorage in the founding moment of the Revolution. He is usually best remembered for two things: first, the lectures he delivered at the Collège de France between 1842 and 1845 which challenged government policy and the dominance of the clerical party; second, the publication in 1865 of a controversial history of the French Revolution in which he argued that, in the light of the sad condition of France under the Second Empire, the time had come to reconsider what the Revolution had actually achieved, to learn from past mistakes and develop policy accordingly. La Révolution has been exhumed in the 1980s by French historians and philosophers such as François Furet and Claude Lefort, and has been elevated to the status of a central text of the revisionist canon. 1 This concentration on La Revolution has unfortunately tended to obscure the importance and value of Quinet's other and varied writings. Unlike his great friend Michelet, almost all of whose work was either strongly historical or broadly philosophical in character, Quinet tried his hand at epic poetry, travel writing, literary criticism, political polemics and aesthetic theory, as well as religious, cultural and intellectual history. All of this work was informed by a particular sense of the nineteenth century's relation to the past. Like Thierry and Guizot, Quinet placed the foundation of truth in a developmental theory of history. However, in his work the Romantic themes of regeneration and renewal are more prominent. Quinet identified 140the national will with the energies of history and the Revolution with a moment in the self-revelation of the Absolute. In Quinet we are dealing with a Romantic author with a religious sensibility who turned to history in search of something more than a foundation for political authority. Like other literary figures of his generation he suffered from the mal du siècle; he felt isolated, disconnected, alienated from nature and from society. The Romantic consciousness countered this sense of dispersal and discontinuity by seeking within nature a divinely instituted pattern of meaning which mysteriously underpinned human reality; the Romantic consciousness likewise united with the past in such a way as to allow history to confirm the status of the self and underwrite its moral integrity.
