new formations NUMBER 3 WINTER 1987

Jacques Ranciere

THE HOMEWARD PATH

FRAGMENTS OF JOURNEYS INTO NEW WORLDS

Translated by Chris Turner (Material Word Ltd) and Leslie Hill

THE STONE AND THE SINFUL WOMAN (An English poet's recollections of a holiday in France, 1790-2) In the great book of culture, he has remained the poet of lakes and daffodils. His was a prudent, unambitious journey. His younger contemporaries - Keats, Shelley, and Byron - went off to die in Italy or Greece between their twentysixth and thirty-seventh years. He, William Wordsworth, found the distant climes he was seeking on the shores of Lake Como. And he died in his eighties in his own country. Not that the passions of the age and the land that gave birth to the republic had always left this lover of flowers and lakes indifferent. He simply had the good fortune to be born before them and to be 20 years old at a time when, on a clear day, you could see the age-old home of liberty from the white cliffs of Dover. Twice then he visited the land of revolution. The first time, he was simply passing through and had no political objective. At most, it could be said that there was in the joy he evinced in a first student escapade far from the grey halls and the dried-up laurels of the college or in his desire to see mountains higher and lakes more vast than those of his native Cumberland a sign that he shared the great enthusiasm for new-found liberty. To travel right around the Alps and get back before winter, he and his companion landed at Calais on 13 July 1790. The next day was a feast day in Calais, as indeed it was throughout France. More exactly, it was the most important festival of the revolutionary age, the Festival of Federation, culmination of the great dream of peaceful, fraternal revolution. Everywhere then on their path the two friends encountered the actors and decors of this extended festival. It was pure chance or, as the poet himself said, good fortune. That was not why he had come. At that point nature alone was sovereign in his eyes. But was it not precisely that sovereignty that was being celebrated in those July days, mingling in the travellers' eyes the flowers and harvests of summer with those of the revolution? These tourist hikes, especially in this age of 59

country walking, were perhaps best suited to communicating revolutionary enthusiasm. They did so quite naturally; no propaganda was needed. How could you avoid feeling the tactile reality of the concept all around? How could you help but feel all the emblems of the festival brought together in a single emotion: the July sun shining down through the shade of the elms, the flowers of the triumphal arches or the garlands in the windows, the rustling of the leaves in the breeze, the freedom dances beneath a starry sky, the welcoming smile of faces lit up by a joy shared with millions of brothers - and in the most remote villages . . . benevolence and blessedness Spread like a fragrance everywhere, when spring Hath left no corner of the land untouched. 1 Student vacations spent among a festive people. The powerful, peaceful flow of happy revolutions. After reaching Chalon on foot, they slipped down now through the vine-laden hillsides towards the waters of the Saone. It was a pleasure just to be swept along at the same rhythm as a people on the march, to be strangers in a land where there were no longer any strangers but the enemies of human happiness: Clustered together with a merry crowd Of those emancipated, a blithe host Of travellers, chiefly delegates returning From the great spousals newly solemnized At their chief city, in the sight of Heaven . . . We landed - took with them our evening meal, Guests welcome almost as the angels were To Abraham of old. The supper done, With flowing cups elate and happy thoughts We rose at signal given, and formed a ring And, hand in hand, danced round and round the board; All hearts were open, every tongue was loud With amity and glee.2 It was the kind of communion one can feel on a summer's evening, a holiday. The next day, the two travellers left the delegates of the people on the march for the solitude of the convent of Chartreuse, the majesty of Mont Blanc and the 'Abyssinian' splendour of Lake Como. Then, via Switzerland, Germany, and Belgium, the poet returned to the benches of the university, skirting around this land of liberty which, he tells us, he had simply passed through 'as a bird/Moves through the air' or as a fish 'feeds in its proper element'. 3 Others were happy simply to do as much, but the following autumn the new graduate set out again for France. This was another kind of journey, relinquishing this time . . . the scrip and staff, And all enjoyment which the summer sun Sheds round the steps of those who meet the day.
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It was a linguistic journey. The young man had gone to improve his French, to become a guide and interpreter to upper-class tourists. This is doubtless why he chose to stay on the banks of the Loire. It was at the same time a social and political journey. At Orleans and Blois, he ran up against the rigidity of the old world (nobles, officers, and 'notables')- Learning the language and its idioms, he discovered the arguments and debates of that revolution which he had known only through its songs and garlands. He saw the suffering under the old order and the sacrifices of the new world, saw what was being fought against and what fought for, which proved to him that the cause was good and pure and that no one could stand up against [it], Who was not lost, abandoned, selfish, proud. 5 He saw the hunger-ravaged face of that pale girl of the common people, dragging herself along at the exhausted pace of the starving heifer attached by a rope to her arm; he saw the courage of the citizens and the tears the women held back when the cry went out that the fatherland was in danger. These were reasons made flesh and blood, marks of a truth that was . . . more than truth A hope it is, and a desire; a creed Of zeal, by an authority Divine Sanctioned, of danger, difficulty, or death. 6 But perhaps all that - the stigmata of oppression or the tones of parting counted for less than the fraternal hands that pointed them out to the foreign observers: that of the young officer, for example, a deserter from the aristocratic caste, who embodied the ancient virtues of the new world, but in whom were reflected also the fleeting emotions evoked by the landscapes previously travelled through by the holidaying students. This captain who, beneath the repression of his peers, breathes out its sweetness 'As aromatic flowers on Alpine turf, also traverses the great events of the day as though they were the pages of a picturebook, As through a book, an old romance, or tale Of Fairy or some dream of actions wrought Behind the summer clouds. 7 His was the face also of a strange cultural revolution: the transfer to the working, suffering people of the honours customarily accorded to people of quality. The homage this revolutionary addresses to 'the homely in their homely works' resembles in effect the 'passion' and 'gallantry' Which he, a soldier, in his idler day Had paid to woman. 8 Culture and nature are reconciled and it is thus possible for two people to live a noble revolution, a 'philosophic war/Led by philosophers', similar in nature to the voyage and the struggle which once caused the companions of Plato's royal disciple Dion to descend like the wind upon Syracuse. But what makes the stay a happy one also makes it dangerous. It seems that it
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only needed the man whose face reflected the landscape of the happy revolution to depart for the front for everything to come apart - words and images, reasons for fighting and reasons for loving, hazy political notions and the haze of midsummer . . . It was also a question of place. The poet had left for the capital. And in the Paris of the period after the September massacres, the autumn light did not have the same softness as that which bathed the banks of the Loire. The conquered Tuileries, the deserted Carrousel and the Temple prison with its royal captive are pictures in what is certainly a memorable book, though it is perhaps one that is closed to the comprehension of the foreigner.9 In the metropolis, the revolution, which in the provinces was clearly challenging the old order, was everywhere divided against itself. Should we blame foreign war for this and the fanaticism of sectarians who were pushing towards the Terror? Or was it rather the fault of this particular revolutionary urban space, where the sounds of words and factional agitation did not allow the people's achievement to be reflected in the landscapes and images of a new world? Already a year before, a traveller on his way to the Loire, making a pilgrimage to the ruins of the Bastille, had felt the inability of the new relics to equal the images of the old order that had been preserved: Where silent zephyrs sported with the dust Of the Bastille, I sate in the open sun, And from the rubbish gathered up a stone, And pocketed the relic, in the guise Of an enthusiast; yet, in honest truth, I looked for something that I could not find, Affecting more emotion than I felt; For 'tis most certain, that these various sights, However potent their first shock, with me Appeared to recompense the traveller's pains Less than the painted Magdalene of Le Brun, A beauty exquisitely wrought, with hair Dishevelled, gleaming eyes, and rueful cheek Pale and bedropped with everfiowing tears. 10 The comparison between the dumb stones of the people's victory and the eloquent tears on the face of the courtesan is too fine not have been invented after the event. There were some ten or fifteen years between these memories and the poet who had abandoned his youthful illusions and whose heart danced now only to the rhythm of hosts of daffodils. Returning at this stage to the question of the social order so imprudently contested involves first of all reaching that point where the poet, conscious of the sacred mission entrusted to him, parts company with the revolutionary tourist: knowing that there is no possible identification between the movements of clouds in a summer sky and the political hubbub of servitudes and liberations. Back home in a country that was soon to be at war with France, though tempted for a moment to transfer his waning enthusiasm for the armies of liberty become armies of oppression to the Godwinian project of individual liberation, the poet derived definitive lessons
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from a reinvented journey in a sort of English version of Schiller's Robbers: . . . we look But at the surfaces of things; we hear Of towns in flames, fields ravaged, young and old Driven out in troops to want and nakedness; Then grasp our swords and rush upon a cure That flatters us, because it asks not thought: The deeper malady is better hid; The world is poisoned at the heart. 11 Is not the Magdalene referred to above - here penitent, though more often provocative - the supreme token of this in her very compassion, when she spreads her long tresses and her silken raiment in the grand drama of redemption? A symptomatic image, without doubt. The biographers finally learned the secret carefully concealed by this 8000-line autobiography: namely the poet's love for the daughter of an upper-class Orleans family, an ardent supporter of counter-revolution, whom he sacrificed, along with the child of their liaison, for the peace and quiet of an honourable British marriage. But it is not particularly important to know whether it was the torment of the remorse of his betrayal which finally set the poet against political and moral revolution. What is essential is the set of images put in place. In the years to come, the face of the sinful woman will continue to stand in opposition to the pickaxe of the demolition men: hers is the eternally disturbing presence of a jouissance and an evil that are irreducible to the sufferings and redemptions of the political and social order. An image destined indefinitely to accompany the male images of the free people and reconciled nature. Return or transgression: woman as emblem of an impossible revolution or as pointer towards a revolution always beyond the pickaxe of the demolition men and the builders' trowel. The enigma of woman, the artist's mission . . .
H U N T I N G THE W H A L E

(Journey of a Savoyard proletarian to the South Seas, 1831-5) Not everyone can be called Ishmael. There was nothing either biblical or metaphysical, it seems, in the adventures of the Savoyard, Claude Genoux, between the Bering Strait and Cape Horn. It was neither destitution as the son of a family fallen on hard times, nor the seductive powers of the Leviathan, nor a Narcissus-like fascination at being upon the mirror of the ocean, that drove him to the ends of the earth. What then was it? Somewhere in Brazil, he was asked that question by a slave, a man who had once been king of an African tribe. Was he not there like all the whites to exploit the enslaved populations? No, replied the traveller: 'I had the same reasons for coming here as I have had for going anywhere else. I seek to live and to educate myself and I find my happiness roving far and wide throughout this world.' 12 This is not exactly the truth. The young man in fact left Marseilles to do business. His time there had been spent working as a stonemason's labourer and
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as a boot-catcher, and writing ballads for pedlars to sell or mysteries for village festivals. One evening as I was coming home from the building site, dining on a piece of bread and reading Seneca's Essays, I found in the allees de Meilhan an unsealed letter, written by a merchant in Rio de Janeiro. The postscript of that letter was fashioned thus: 'One article that would be of unquestionable value would be leeches; if you could send me twenty thousand of them this July, I give you my word I can sell them for at least 300 rei each.' Three hundred rei for a leech! I exclaimed in astonishment; three hundred rei!!! I did not know what a real was worth, but what matter. Since it was good business for another, it seemed to me that it could be good business for me too. 13 No sooner said than done. The young man convinced two men from Piedmont, sellers of strings for musical instruments, who shared lodgings with him. They bought three Bordeaux casks, cut them in half and lined them with sheets of lead. By this means, they managed to transport a hundred thousand leeches to Rio 'in comfort'. Lucky enough to find a buyer for his goods on arrival, the young Savoyard had the benevolent aid of a shark and a cayman to thank for ridding him of his two partners and leaving him the sole beneficiary of the profits from the operation. Thanks to which he was now pursuing the trade of hawker of musical boxes and other assorted frippery alone on the roads of Brazil. He was, then, a trader. He or another, here and there, after the fashion of the commodity, which has no country, and gold, which renders all things equivalent. But is it not precisely a mistake always to wish to separate things out: vagrancy from business, tourism from work, school from life? Did Claude Genoux do anything but live out the non-distinct nature of these opposites from that childhood in which in the company of adults - master chimney-sweeps or fairground stallholders - he frequented the farms, fairs, and markets of Bresse, sharing the fate of the children whose time was devoted to carrying goods, chimney-sweeping or begging, according to their differing degrees of strength? Since slipping away from the troupe in the vicinity of Chalon, he had been an acrobat at Auxerre, a chimney-sweep at Joigny, a compulsory internee in a Paris children's home, a domestic servant at Romorantin, a 13 year-old tourist in Rome, a cabin-boy in the Sardinian fleet, a shepherd, a seller of countermarks in Paris, a pedlar in the Languedoc, and a cook during the Algiers expedition. . . . It was an adventurous existence, but the form of the adventure was ceaselessly routinized and its results maximized. Everything was, in its various ways, made to pay: the ballads sold at three francs whatever their length or quality, the mystery plays paid for in performance rights, but also the imprisonment at the children's home recompensed by his being made to learn the alphabet and life as a domestic servant more compensated by the master's library than by the gilding on his livery, or the post of street-sweeper, paid for a contrario in self-respect. It was a logic of accumulation in which the profits in gold, in instruction, or in enjoyment (jouissance), are accumulated and balanced in a single account book:
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At eighteen, I had seen three-quarters of the old continent; the little bit of education I possessed I had gained for myself; and the best part of things was that, by keeping back an apple for my thirst, as my compatriots say, I had managed to sew into my belt a thousand francs' worth of gold coins.14 It had been profitable wandering then. But the risks taken had been necessary ones if he was to fulfil the distant dream of retirement to a little cottage in the countryside. For that, a thousand pieces of gold were not enough; that was why the poet-cum-street-sweeper was, in Marseilles, still awaiting the opportunity to make his fortune, a fortune that it was quite logical to go and seek on an as yet unknown continent. He therefore set sail for Rio with his leeches and a little smuggled private cargo of trinkets and baubles. It was this private cargo which was the cause of everything else. Unsaleable in the capital, it forced Genoux to prolong his journey. He had to go and hawk it around in the interior, across mountains, torrents, and forests; he reinvested the profits from its sale in a joint venture with a man from Milan, rid himself of this crooked associate during a shipwreck which took their fortune with it, was washed up on what had been Robinson's island and had now become a Chilean penal colony, was forced to take part in an uprising in Peru, become a cook on an American whaler in the Arctic Circle, hunted the whale on a French whaler in the southern seas. . . . And throughout this drifting course, a figure was always carefully put on things: three girls met at the fountain on one of the Juan Fernandez islands, a peak ioo metres high scaled to gain a vast panoramic view of the Pacific and the Andes, which is itself also judged to be some fifty leagues in extent and is studded with twenty little islands; ten gourds to be earned in Valparaiso to pay for a wedding to a fiancee who, during that time, died of leprosy; four whaling boats and twenty-four oars beating through the waves in an attack upon a whale whose blood spurted up in columns some fifteen to twenty feet in height; five inches of snow covering the hill from which the traveller attempted to view - with the temperature at 150 Centigrade - the Kamchatka landscape which was still plunged in the boreal night; four big black dogs pulling the funeral cortege of a native to the top of the same hill, four ship's biscuits shared by this sailor on shore leave for the funeral meal on the dead man's tomb; four kilometres covered in a dizzy five-minute downhill sleigh-ride to catch up with the unleashed dogs that had set off three minutes before; the yourt 100 square metres in volume his companions took him back to - a phalanstery with soot hanging in black stalactites where bear and otter-meat and grilled fish mingled with the odours of men, women, children, foxes, and dogs; eighteen Polynesian canoes coming alongside the ship to propose the unacceptable barter of a cargo of coconuts for the kitchen utensils it was carrying; the exchange - this time accepted - of a French sailor picked up by an American whaler for an American sailor picked up by a French whaler; 467 francs brought back to Granville as a prize for four years' peregrinations and reduced in one night to 13 francs by the obligatory coup de parlance. The respectable reviewers of L'Atelier greeted these Memoirs of a Native of Savoy with a somewhat confused mixture of praise and criticism. They did find most laudable the author's uplifting demonstration of the virtues of hard work
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and perseverance in facing up to and overcoming adversity; and they particularly welcomed the blunt conclusion that all good-for-nothings of his ilk and all dreamers who claimed they had no place in society should be re-educated by being set to work digging roads. But the book would have been much improved, they thought, if it had had in it rather more of the 'suffering worker' and rather less of the poet, 'if the hero had dwelt rather less on his poetic impressions (impressions which are echoed by each and every vulgar tourist) and paid more attention to detail and told us more about the tribulations of his wandering existence'. 'If the various love episodes', they added, 'which are retold in a somewhat too unrestrained manner, and could easily be mistaken for chapters out of a novel, were toned down or simply cut out, the book would surely lose nothing.' 15 This is possible, but arguably not the case. For in fact, this poetic licence of the firebrand was necessary to give a practical demonstration of the moral outlook which the workers' monthly advocated and which, being based on the belief that hard work was both necessary and freely accepted, gave all situations equal value and conferred equal dignity on all types of labour. It is not hard to see how these virtuous and sedentary critics failed to understand what the final lesson of the journey was: that the noble abstraction of duty was perhaps identical to natural law in a world where everything had its price, was bartered and exchanged, from the work of men and the possession of women, to the truth and falsity of stories. Like the final pirouette which dispatches him from the pen to the pickaxe, the licences of the poet established the endless reversibility of the morality of work and the immorality of life. His thoughts may well have been turned in that direction as he watched the albatrosses swooping down on to the dead whale. Unlike Baudelaire, he did not marvel at them soaring freely through the heavens of the ideal; nor did he pity them awkwardly waddling on the planks of reality. In the poetic glow of the moonlight and the ships' flares he saw them embody as one the aerial perfection of flight and the earthbound sense of reality, vying with the sailors for the remains of the dead animal till it was left to sink back into the sea and be shared between them and the condors. No doubt he was reminded of the scene again during the stop-over in Chile, where the sailors rested from their heroic fishing expedition to the spectacle of the fandango: There is nothing more indecent than this dance, especially when, face to face with his partner, the man, dressed in his poncho, wearing one of the high sombreros of Guayaquil, makes lascivious gestures at every step, to which the lady replies with even more lascivious movements! At that point, four thousand leagues from the mountains of my homeland, at the sight of these things which were so new to me, my thoughts returned to the so modest dances that as a child I would see every Sunday in the meadows near my village. What a difference there was! But being still only twenty and a whaler to boot, it would have been ridiculous for me to avert my eyes. This was what I did not do. I turned towards the table, and after a general free-for-all during which our sailors danced a French quadrille amongst themselves, I soon found myself in a state of excitement similar to that of our crew, who not so long ago I had called savage beasts because, never having known misery, I
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could not feel pleasure, and because, never having been bored, I did not know how to dispel boredom. 16 'These things which were so new to me . . . I did not know how to . . .' writes the native of Savoy. And, indeed, the pedlar whose mechanical organs had played Meyerbeer and Rossini in the Brazilian fazendas, the adventurer who had found his Nausicaa on Robinson's island and his phalanstery on Kamchatka, perhaps deserved to find something at the end of his odyssey. And, in reality, he had found something: the boredom, the joys and sufferings, the unglamorous work and uncouth pleasures upon which the hazards and wanderings of proletarian lives still turn and which they ceaselessly still strive to elude. At the end of these adventures, marked with the poetical, touristic, and commercial law of equivalences, he recognized what it is which founds universal equivalence: the enclosure within the circle of mindless exertion and pleasure which is the lot of labour without expression. It was the hell of the proletariat, which he had fled to the other end of the world to escape, only to find it exemplified in the figure of the rootless mariner and the adventurous hunter of whales. The proletarian comes face to face with himself: from leeches to whales, from the wanderings of commodities to the indigence of the proletariat, from the indifference of the adventurer to the mirror of Narcissus. . . . It was not so easy as it seemed to break out of metaphysics, or to elude the dereliction of disinherited childhood, or the fate of those who incautiously identified the mirages of poetry with the positive realities of whale-hunting. The one succumbed from being recognized only as a reporter of life at sea, while the other vainly pretended to give up the extravagant claims of adventurers and poets. Claude Genoux could always prefer the glory of the men with pickaxes in their hands. If he became a writer, it was also in order to stop being a sweeper of leaves and to be a setter of pages, an author even. He did not abandon writing. Nor did he accept death in his bed in some workhouse for old labourers. Forty years after his return from the South Seas, the native of Savoy, a boot-catcher once again, wandered off to stroll in the forest of Fontainebleau. That was where some time later his body was found.

THE FRENCH ORIENT (1833 - In the steps of the Saint-Simonian missionaries) The New World had, perhaps, once and for all, already identified its own special sites as well as the times for its festivals: a horse-drawn barge floating down from Chalon to Lyons, the grapes ripening in the first warmth of summer, the plucking of violins, or the songs and dances which, in the evenings or on Sundays, in the taverns or barns of Burgundy, brought together those whom the hazards of birth had set apart. These were images which spoke of love, of fertility. During this month of June 1833, the Saint-Simonian companions of the 'Mission of the East' were living in a world of dreams. From their earlymorning chores or marches to their evening sermons and songs, each one of their acts or encounters was an event and a symbol in itself, each one of their
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words found its echo in the harmonies of the day or the night. That is what it meant to be an apostle: not just to preach and to work for the good of the toiling and suffering people, but to sanctify each one of its labours and pleasures, the instruments and actions of its endeavours, the earth made heavy with its sweat, as well as the heavens which made the land fertile. . . . Assuredly, travelling had not before been as idyllic as it was now, since, during the previous autumn, the first detachment of the 'Workers Peace Army' had taken the road to Lyons. The itinerary was a symbolic one. At the very moment when the prison gates were closing on Father Enfantin, the idea was to leave behind the city of bourgeois prostitution for the model city of workingclass labour and struggle. To recruit soldiers to the peace army, the missionaries needed to go and commune with the workers. They had to transform, in reality, the habits and thoughts endlessly reproduced by the privileged lives of the bourgeois professors, and to make known, in concrete ways, to the workers, caught as they were between the self-centred struggle for survival and the appeal of revolutionary violence, the doctrine of love and industry. This was how they set about their task of 'becoming part of the proletariat'. Their aim was not only to work with their hands, as in their Menilmontant community where, even though they had dismissed their servants, they none the less carried on, in bourgeois fashion, supporting themselves from the inheritances of the wealthier members amongst them, but, in addition, to live from the work of their hands, and to receive the 'baptism of labour' which was a sacrament of a different order to a simple bourgeois initiation into the conditions of working-class life. Desloges, a former butcher's boy, who had tried his hand at everything before the apostles employed him as a labourer in Le Globe and then as a concierge in Menilmontant, had, just like Hoart, an engineer, Roge, a musician, or Mangin, a student, to receive this baptism of a new life in which words became flesh only on condition that work became itself word and witness. Even Augier, a Lyons silk worker, was, in symbolic fashion, to leave the city in which he had always worked, and which others were now discovering, to go and testify to the new endeavour on a work site in Grenoble. This journey of and through labour was both a self-transformation and a witness to others. The whole problem was in the relationship between the two. To choose to work in Lyons was also to choose the element in which baptism would take place: the water of circulation or the fire of production. To choose water was to carry forward into the realm of work the mission entrusted to the travellers on the road from Paris to Lyons; it was, by word of mouth, but also by songs, shows, and costume, by wearing the red beret, or the medallion of Father Enfantin, to keep circulating the murmur, the refrains, and the images of the New World. To achieve this, it was necessary 'to engage in conversation with coach-drivers, postilions, boatmen, and postmen or women', even to choose 'one or two lads who would travel with the Chalon or Rhone ferrymen', in order constantly to be in contact with 'those people who are in touch with others and spread information'. 17 It was a whole enterprise of travel and communication, tempering people's characters in the cold waters of winter and placing the missionaries at the heart of the hidden networks and dark forces of the country at large.
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Naturally enough, Cayol, the Republican firebrand who was head of the Fourth Detachment and had been a cabin-boy and trader in Marseilles, chose the world of the bargees and made ready to pilot a procession of rafts towards Aries. 'I have till now', he wrote, 'only sailed on salt water, so a trip on the Rhone . . . will give me a practical idea of what it is like to travel on the river. This is an excellent thing for an apostle to know.' 18 He had already set one member of his troop to the task of building rafts with the bargees. And he in turn could well have hired others to do the same. But here the conflict between the elements became apparent: 'in his role as depute for Perrache . . . ,' it was said, 'he only comes in contact with men who prefer fire to water'. These men of fire, just as naturally, were followers of the two artillery captains, Hoart and Bruneau. These officers of the Ecole poly technique, though they had solemnly resigned their commissions, had not for all that given up their grand ideas of a military democracy, in terms of which they envisaged the initiation of the classes and their baptism by fire. 'To organize workers one has to be one of them,' wrote Hoart to Picard, 'just as to organize an army one has to have been under fire and have known the smell of grapeshot.' 19 They needed to inspire confidence in the workers they sought to enlist, and to this end the candidate-officers had to demonstrate their practical abilities to workers who, even though they were a willing audience of the Saint-Simonians, none the less still thought they were in the workshops 'just for show'. 20 But above all, for their own sakes as well as for the sake of the workers watching them, they needed to consolidate and transform this motley crew made up of bourgeois men giving up their leisure hours in the cause of the people and of workers attracted by a sense of adventure which distracted them from the drudgery of their condition. All had to learn or relearn the constraints and routines of daily manual work and cast off the parasitic ideologies discreetly fostered by the irregular devotions and common ownership of property existing within the family-like activist community. This fire of production, of battle and purification, the captains sought, for their own benefit as well as that of their troops, in the world of the forge, and strove thereby, in the eyes of the workers, to testify to the glory of the new vocation. Their aim was not to re-educate themselves by proletarian discipline and to merge into the anonymity of the working masses, which made the workers easy victims of propaganda. In order to rehabilitate labour in the eyes of the bourgeois and to give the workers the awareness of their peaceful strength, the apostle, dressed in his Saint-Simonian costume and with his name emblazoned on his chest, had, on the contrary, to display his own dual character and the miracle of his transfiguration: 'To see bourgeois men changed into workers, what a unique transformation! Who can deny the power of love of the one who inspired this! Who can deny that the hand of God is at work in all this?' 21 But the proof of the existence of God was one thing, the miracle of his living presence was another, as the apostles quickly discovered. It wasn't all that difficult to become a proletarian. It was just a question of habit. 'After turning my lathe for several days,' wrote Terson, 'I felt my body, once it had been broken to this mechanical task, could carry on and on.' 22 But this habit which bent the body to the demands of work made the apostle unable to represent his
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transfiguration. In place of the speech and communion he had been promised, he found merely the loneliness of expressionless labour: 'I would get up at 4.30 in the morning,' wrote Bruneau, 'and go to bed at 9.00 in the evening, quite often without speaking to anyone. I did my job, earned my wage and was happy with myself.'23 Faced with the routine of proletarian existence, apostolic communion reverted to being a self-satisfied preoccupation with self-perfection, except when it corresponded to the necessity for material survival: 'Hoart,' said Ollivier, 'had emptied the endeavours of the proletariat of all poetry, and had adopted the exclusive standpoint of production; according to him, everybody should be turning their lathes because it brought in 40 sols per day.' 24 The canonic opposition between words and acts changed its meaning. Work could not double up and serve as material for its own representation. The new man could not come forth in any industrial undertaking. He could only be heralded, presaged in song, or depicted as in a play. It was thus up to the artist, the harbinger of the unity of opposites, of fire and water, work and travel, male and female, to resolve the contradiction inherent in the masculine one-sidedness of industrial labour and to prefigure the reign of 'the Mother', who would restore poetry to the proletarian endeavour. The impossible edification of the peaceful army had to give way to the 'criss-crossing of France by mobile columns of workers and bands of singers, travelling from workplace to workplace, ceaselessly enlisting recruits to the workshop and to the festivities'.25 The result, then, was work as a form of art. Organized journeys, with their tattoo-like processions, were judged more apt than individual re-education, which was subject to all the hazards of different types of employment, to bear witness to the religious fraternity and the strict discipline of the soldier-priests of the future; their formal marches were so many events, and the coming and leaving of the apostles, heralded by the murmurs of sightseers, were glorified by the enthusiasm of their supporters, made more sublime by the restrained bravery with which they answered the jibes and missiles of fanatical opponents. There were meals in taverns packed with crowds observing the missionaries and listening to their songs; their sermons were more grandiose against the background of the still night. But there were also all the incidents or encounters which contained so many symbolic moments: the wind rising at the preordained time to send the travellers on their way, forced halts in cabins belonging to fishermen who, rather than leave their nets, gave them to the apostles for blankets to put over their beds made of reeds. . . . At every moment, the space of the journey gave artists the possibility of holding a performance, of conferring on the new labour the visibility and clarity of meaning which were impossible in the narrow confines of the workshop. In this way, on a hill overlooking Montereau, the Saint-Simonian tailors, under the leadership of a worker-poet, assembled a costume which, for once, was not designed to conceal the work of their hands: There where Napoleon gave the last signs of his military power, we shall work; there where he destroyed we shall produce. . . . With this, my companions began to make the hose and red waistcoat of Delas. The populace, who viewed us from every corner of the town, came running. . . .
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As they watched my brothers working, not leaving any room spare, I, for my part, not knowing how to sew, began to read aloud, and the people listened religiously to the profession of faith of Dessessart and Michel's epistle to Lyons. 26 Many key elements are present here: there was one single scene visible from every vantage point; there was an evangelical symbol and a Napoleonic symbol; there was an end and a beginning; there were actors-cum-workers making for the poorest amongst them a costume which was another symbol; and there was the narrator whose words accompanied the speech of gestures. No point in space was to be left unoccupied, nor any moment in time left empty: what could not be acted could still be said, what could not be seen could still be recounted. It was in journeying and not in industry that nothing was lost. . . . This principle of saturation was what governed the unfolding of the Mission of the East. The chosen itinerary lent itself well to this process. All the cultured spirits of the time knew there were two nations of France, the benighted France of religious fanaticism and guild rivalry in the west and the south, and the enlightened France in the north and the east. It was in the former of these two that Captain Hoart had first led his Saint-Simonian troops, perhaps with the secret intention of steeling them in the fire of persecution and convincing them by their experience of the superior efficiency of the Lyons endeavour of production. It was towards the north-east that the mission of the artists turned, and they were an egalitarian troop who acknowledged the musician Roge merely as an 'elder brother'. This 'artistic mission' which was 'meant especially for women' still had the task of binding work (and the work of the day-labourer) to its words and songs. It was a work which corresponded to their feminine calling ('The earth,' they said, 'is the realm of the Mother'), but also was a response to the requirement for utmost visibility: The land around us was immense and we worked on a daily basis. The June sun was rising. Armed with our hoes and pickaxes, our troop cleared the breach. At 8.30 in the morning, we were brought our meals in the fields, and ate reseda from our billy-cans, and bread and pork fat with our fingers. Our backs arched over, we could feel the weight of the day. At sunset the day was over; we had to return home. The order rang out, COMPANIONS, march; and on your shoulders, the tools of the producer, the tools of the future. And we crossed through surprised and emotional villages, singing of the coming of the MOTHER and the glory of the worker. 27 There is little point in wondering what exactly it was they were working at with their hoes and pickaxes, for what master or for what crop. It was the parade which constituted the army's prestige, not the details of their service. The question remains, however, of whom the parade was meant for. No doubt the villagers, 'surprised and emotional' at the passing of the troop, came to admire its work: 'experienced old men say openly that ordinary day-labourers would not get more work done than we do nor do it any better'. But obviously praise for their ordinary capacities was not enough to proclaim the apostles' glory, or rather, if it was, it gave them glory only in the eyes of others, in the eyes, for
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instance, of those members of the bourgeoisie who, not so long ago, had scoffed at the cartoons of the apostles working as boot-catchers or kitchen boys in Menilmontant: Arrogant denigrators of our faith, come hither, come hither and see how doctors, lawyers, poets, musicians, mathematicians, men of distinction whose talents the old society rewarded with reputations and respect, stand bent over to the ground, working with their hands. This is no frivolous game, nor a pastime for amateurs. . . . Ah! we know now what the daily work of a proletarian farmer is like. Advocates of all the parties who claim the confidence of the people, can you say as much for yourselves? Over and beyond the people, with whom they were in communion, the relationship of visibility at bottom brought into contact with each other the travellers who played at being soldiers and kept their log-books and the absent spectators for whom the daily narrative was intended. In one instance, the opportunity for an almost paradigmatic fiery baptism was given to the apostles as a result of the misfortune of the peasants. 'One morning,' we read in the Mission de l'Est, 'a companion noticed, far off, on the other side of a forest, a large plume of smoke.' Fires, more than working in the fields, were the occasion, of which they spoke time and again, for them to demonstrate the fundamental nature of their commitment: while the bourgeoisie took flight, the people sacrificed themselves. In the same way the troop rushed off towards the fire, which was three leagues distant: We cut across fields and woods and, as there were no regular paths to follow, tore our feet to pieces. . . . We got to a large pond which blocked our way, but crossed it with water up to our waists. . . . Thirty houses were ablaze, and we rushed forwards. The red berets, the Saint-Simonians, are at hand! Take courage! . . . We formed a human chain, from the water pump to the heart of the fire, in every direction. At 1:00 in the morning we were still putting out the last embers. 28 Despite their fervour, their narcissistic pleasure at winning the obstacle race and their display of heroic solidarity with the villagers weighed less in their eyes, once again, than the symbolism of their actions and the lesson they contained for those who were not there to see them: You who have peddled and broadcast so many slanderous allegations against us, you who accuse us of wanting to destroy property, come hither, come hither and see us amidst the flames of Brazay, come and see how we have defended property against fire and saved from burning goods that we respect because they are the fruits of the labours of men. It is no longer with words that we answer your accusations, but with acts. 29 That was the true baptism of fire: not in the hardening for battle of young men in love with the people, but in the capacity to make each concept correspond to a point in reality, and make each argument coincide with an itinerary on the centralized map. If modern Utopia has a meaning, it is by no means in the myth of the island which exists nowhere, but in the possibility of
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pointing at every moment to the equivalence between text and reality. The houses ablaze were the property defended by the Saint-Simonians, while that of which bourgeois language spoke was merely a word. Between the words of the doctrine and the actions of the little band, there was no 'room left spare', no gaps through which doubts or the possibility of refutation could find their way. That is what it meant to journey: to establish, at every step, between the order of discourse and that of reality, the immediate matching of the broken lines of the map with the rolling spread of the landscape. The time-honoured idea of the correspondence of microcosm with macrocosm re-emerged thus alongside the science which claimed it had disposed of it. The transmutation of flesh into word was immediate and perpetual and made of each episode in the little troop's travel diary a message which was written unmistakably on to the landscape of social reality. Let's go! Come hither and see! Everything was already contained in these twin imperatives, in the act which sent the troop marching on its way and addressed itself to witnesses, who, of course, would not come, but by their very absence designated - and disqualified - themselves as men who refused to journey, who were not prepared to leave their homes to pick the perilous bloom of popular labour, life, and festivities: it was a magical flower which virtually transposed into the realm of miracle the affection they felt for the everyday experience of the people: Sunday has come. . . . Dance, dance, good men of the village, pleasant women of the town! After sharing your exertions, the COMPANIONS wish to share your pleasures . . . and, far from breaking, like Christian priests, the strolling player's fiddle, in our hands the instrument of the dance will sing out. . . . In the middle of the dance, a circle of men and women formed. Our songs stunned the air, and made our message resound. While they all listened attentively to our speaker, the wandering clouds in the atmosphere merged together, and grew larger. A few moments later, rain began falling. Hurrah! Hurrah! For two months no rain had fallen and the corn was wilting in the fields and the vegetables dying in the ground. Earth and air were in communion together just as we joined in harmony with these good tillers of the soil.30 Communion was achieved through earth and air, fire and water. But the account remains definitively closed upon itself. The bourgeois mockers are no longer cited here: they could only have sniggered at the story of these sermons bringing rain. From this point on, the apostles spoke only to themselves. It was as though the journey had been retold in advance, anticipating the fact that it had no other purpose than to be written down in the Livre des Actes published in Paris by Marie Talon. Who were to have been its readers? Were they to be Father Enfantin and his companions who were getting ready for the journey to Egypt but were already having copies made of the archives of the Doctrine? Or was it meant for the other missionaries travelling up and down France, like the tailor Delas, somewhere between Auch and Rodez (but it wasn't clear whether he knew how to read . . . ) , or like the unfrocked priest, Terson, who had had a convict's uniform made for him for going to bear witness to the distress of the disinherited in the remote villages of the 'desert' of the Landes, or amongst the
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coal-workers of the Ariege who mistook him for the Wandering Jew? Or was it addressed to the typographer Biard, who had left to 'establish labour' in Angers or Nantes, or even for the lawyer Duguet who was evangelizing the Massif Central? Or was it intended for those who hadn't left, like the workers Vincard called together on Sundays in Menilmontant or at the Amandiers toll-gate, who cared little for the perils of the journey but felt grateful towards those who journeyed to poeticize their drab existence; or for the bourgeois of the Bordeaux or Toulouse 'churches' or those in Castelnaudary or Castres . . . who had returned to their senses but remained happy that others were still losing theirs for their sakes and who were nostalgic for these stories which made some imperceptible difference to their remorseless lot as regional worthies . . .? Whether they were journeying along the roads of the future, visiting nostalgic landscapes, or reliving holiday memories . . . the travellers, from this point on, were to traverse only the world of their own discourse, which had already been written in some other time or place: as, for instance, on that Auxerre night during which their religious chants fell upon the ecstatic people like the waves of some celestial harmony, or in Saint-Jean de Losne, which had welcomed them 'with a temple, and a canopy of green chestnut trees lit up as though for a celebration', or in Lons-le-Saulnier, filled with flowers for Corpus Christi, where, in the cool of the evening, beneath a dais of greenery they proclaimed the coming of the Mother, flooding with tears and filling with fresh hopes the eyes of all the women present, who were insatiable for the new love: These women want to see us, hear us still. Groups gather, and conversations begin, and till eleven o'clock at night the copses in the park resounded with animated discussion, religious lectures in which women spoke as equals with men. . . . A whole city was reborn to the new life. We were there only one day and we were loved as though we had always lived in its bosom. 31 Such were the passing loves, the supreme pleasures, and the deadly risks of a journey which was already completed but which still could not come to an end. The east, however, was already beckoning: The following day . . . we climbed up the hill from which one can see the town nestling at the bottom of the valley. God be with you, Lons-le-Saulnier! Rest in peace amidst your slopes covered in green vine branches, like a young sultan's wife surrounded by her cool cushions. 32 But it was also this that forced them on: Farewell, we leave you with hopes for happiness and affectionate feelings for the future. A GIRL from the East will come to fulfil them and your good wine will soon flow for fresh nuptials. Nothing was more difficult for them than to return from these journeys where, in fact, they were already everywhere at home. Soon they were to set off for Egypt. There the sculptor Alric and the postmaster Marechal, searching for the 'GIRL from the East', died of the plague in the self-same way as Captain Hoart, who had left to accomplish the male endeavour of damming a river. The
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worker-poet Mercier was more circumspect altogether. He was content to return to Paris and throw himself in the Seine. Such was the price they paid for their presumptuousness. They had claimed they could walk apart from the well-worn paths of politics. What they didn't know was that, amid all the futilities which science teaches and undertakes, there is one thing it offers which is indispensable: the ability to finish journeying. Their nephews were not to be so short-sighted.

THE C R O S S I N G OF P A T H S

(The meeting at Strasburg between a French idealist writer and a German materialist writer) What one had to do then was to regain one's senses. But what senses were those? The question no doubt can be asked of a certain German student who, one day in May in Strasburg, came across a lost soul of the Mission of the East, the apostle Rousseau, who had volunteered to go and share the lot of the hardlabour convicts in Siberia, but who had been turned back at Augsburg: If, a few days ago, the weather had been clear, and you could have seen as far as the cathedral, you would have found me sitting by the side of a long-haired bearded young man. He was wearing a red beret, with around his neck a cashmere shawl, and on his body a short German coat; the name 'Rousseau' was embroidered on his waistcoat, and he also had on a pair of narrow trousers with understraps and was holding a fashionable small stick. As you can see, the caricature is made up of elements from several different ages and continents: Asia around his neck, Germany about his body, France on his legs, 1400 on his head and 1833 in his hands. He was a cosmopolitan - or rather, he was a Saint-Simonian. . . . Rousseau, together with a companion (neither of them speaking a word of German), was searching for la femme in Germany, but the authorities had had the stupid intolerance to turn them back. I said to him that he had not lost much in women, but that they had lost much in him. . . . He is staying now in Strasburg, with his hands in his pockets, preaching work to the people, but he is well paid for his endeavours and he is marching vers les femmes, as he puts it. Moreover, his lot is quite an enviable one, and he enjoys a most comfortable life, and out of pure idleness I would quite like to become a Saint-Simonian.33 The student Georg Biichner had three reasons to mock the Compagnon de la Femme. First, he was studying medicine, in particular the nervous system, and his scientific mind was unimpressed by the mystical Utopia of the new love. Secondly, he was a young man, with little sympathy for the revolution in customs, who was writing to his family and he never lost the opportunity, in the circumstances, to speak in a disabused manner on the subject of political unrest or subversive ideas. But most of all, he was a revolutionary. If he was to return to the homesteads of his native region, it was not to play at being a fireman or a fiddler, but to cany the torch which would inspire the peasants to rise up in
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revolt against the palaces of their lords and masters who grew fat on the sweat of their labours. Buchner's commitment was to scientific materialism and to revolution by the popular masses. Far from the solipsistic rambling of those who professed their love for the people but simply came up against the barriers of the repressive state, the path Buchner travelled was the royal road leading from knowledge to revolutionary action. Things began with what was said to be the fundamental principle of modern science: with the measurement of mass, the laws of movement, and calculation of forces. 'If ever the revolution is to be achieved in any meaningful way,' Buchner is reported as saying, 'it can and should only be through the mass of the people whose numerical superiority and weight will overwhelm the military.' Buchner's problem, however, was how to set the masses into motion. 'In spite of all the natural support one might have for the people,' he said, it had to be conceded that 'their attitude was a fairly mercenary one and, sad though it may seem, they can really only be reached through their pockets'. He was disappointed, but realistic: all one had to do was to add up the sums and to show, on the basis of these calculations, 'that they are part of a state for which they bear the heaviest burden while others take all the profits; and that the major part of the taxes are levied on their lands, the upkeep of which is crippling enough for them already, while for their part the capitalists get away scotfree'. 34 These were the first discomfitures of science. The statistics of the Hessian Messenger, which the student had carefully annotated, proved nothing to the peasants of Hesse except that the whole business smelt of conspiracy and that it would be more prudent to inform the police than to wait for them to make their own inquiries. With his companions in prison, the young Buchner, in the spring of 1835. returned to Strasburg, more discreetly, certainly, than the apostle Rousseau, but just as promptly. It was arguable that his conception of science was too mechanistic, too arithmetical in its analysis. But his mistake was perhaps to want to insert between the statistics of oppression and the strength of the army the unpredictable element of consciousness. . . . Buchner was perhaps right from then on just to confine himself to the natural sciences. This marked an initial divorce between science and revolution. It was not that the revolution was finished, or that science had thrown it into question. But what was finished was the idea that science could achieve anything for the revolution. 'The relationship between the rich and the poor,' he wrote in a letter, 'is the sole revolutionary element in the world.' 35 In other words, it was the relationship which was important, not science or the awareness of the relationship, which were the usual object of journeys amongst the people. If something, other than poverty, could set the masses in motion, it was, on the contrary, religious fanaticism: 'Our age', he wrote, 'needs iron and bread - and then a crucifix or something of that sort.' 36 It was impossible to say what the intellectual class could do for the revolution, only what it could do against it. 'Only a Moses sending us the seven plagues of Egypt could become a Messiah. Fatten up the peasants and the Revolution will die of apoplexy!'3'
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Was there nothing more to be accomplished, then? One possible alternative, by writing Danton's Death, was to go on to study and depict the France of the Terror of 1793 in order to discover and proclaim that revolutions are about as reasonable, or as insane, as haphazard, or as ineluctable, as the movements on a seismograph. Another course was to go on dissecting barbels or frogs with the aim of extending our knowledge of the nervous system. Another possibility again was to prepare for a future career as a scientist and philosopher in Switzerland, that land of exile of revolutionaries, but also the land of the wellfed peasantry and of the superfluous revolution: already on the journey here you come upon, in every direction, pleasant villages with fine houses, and then, the nearer you get to Zurich, and all along the side of the lake leading up to the town, you cannot help but be struck by the spectacle of solid prosperity. . . . The streets here are not full of soldiers, of unpaid assistants, and idle state officials. . . . For all that, you find all over a healthy, strong people, and, for not much money, a simple, kind, purely republican government. 38 But the scientist's scalpel was like the labourer's tools. Once routine had taken over, it left too much free time to the poet's imagination. And then there was the law, which was difficult to explain scientifically, but was confirmed by every traveller to Switzerland, which stated that the happier people become, the less they want to sing. This was no doubt in the background of Buchner's plea to his fiancee in Strasburg that she should bring him some music. 'Between now and Easter,' he asked her, 'won't you learn some popular songs? You don't hear any singing here, the people don't sing.' 39 This insistence that his fiancee should learn to play popular songs as proof of her love is a strange one. Was it possibly some lingering nostalgia for 'Woman', which Buchner had ridiculed not long since, and which guided the apostles in their journeys amid the people? In reality, the apostle Rousseau had just published in Paris a book under the title La Magdeleine, which was a mixture of hymns dedicated to the sinful woman and the Virgin. In it the son of a Roman senator is distressed at the lack of skill shown by the poet he has engaged to write festive songs for his courtesan. This poet had been, it seems, a poor traveller, or one who had perhaps not journeyed enough: You passed before the world without the world reflecting itself in you, without it impressing itself on you in living words. There is nothing in your work of the drama, the dreams, the labour, or the festivities of life. There is no earth there and no heaven, no seas, no mysterious or airy exhalations, no imperial triumphs or village weddings, none of the thousandfold occupations of the labouring people, none of the thousandfold religious or popular ceremonies of the various peoples, none of the thousandfold joys and griefs which make their hearts pulsate. . . . In this case you cannot make the music I require. . . . We shall content ourselves with these simple and unsophisticated songs which the people of every nation sing in their griefs and in their joys, at war and during their celebrations, without knowing when or how they learnt them. My beloved knows a few of these songs. 40
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This imaginary ethnomusicology was worthy, indeed, of this traveller who was inexhaustible on the subject of the vanity of journeys never undertaken. Buchner the doctor was naturally more methodical. He had the good fortune already to have at his disposal the songs of Des Knaben Wunderhorn and, instead of writing long dissertations on the sources of the Ganges and the ruins of Palmyra, gave his attention to deciphering the eyes of the children encountered in the fairs and festivals of Alsace: 'I have just come from the fair of the Child Jesus,' he wrote, 'and everywhere to be seen were crowds of frozen children, dressed in tatters, who looked with gaping eyes and sad faces at the marvels made out of flour and water, cheap tinsel and gold-coloured paper.' 41 What Buchner sought to discover, no doubt, was how these dreams and grievances would go on to become, for instance, the feverish but undiscriminating desires of plebeian Magdeleines who, like the grisette Marion in Danton's Death, made no distinction between carnal sensuality and the pleasure of looking at holy images,42 or like the character Marie, in Woyzeck, to whom everything was indifferent, but not, however, the fine appearance of drum-majors or the sparkle of an earring in a sliver of broken mirror; no doubt, too, Buchner was obsessed by how they would grow, for instance, into the superstition and dread felt by the soldier Woyzeck in his desperate attempts to come to terms with his 'dual nature', with the noises he heard underground and thought were perhaps made by Freemasons, or with the shapes he saw mushrooms make in the grass, or with the world itself as it seemingly went up in flames; and Buchner saw them at work, too, in the stories which idiots told, or which were passed on by grandmothers, repeated in the patter of the fairground or in the barrel-organ tunes and entertainments of those artisans who 'pissed cross-wise so a Jew might die'. 43 In all this, though unnoticed by those who were working for the revolution or by those who went on journeys in the name of love, one puzzle remained constant, which was that of the 'true' people, who had just as many reasons to rise up in revolt as to bend in submission, just as much interest in the revolution as in the counter-revolution. It was they, the people, who were the prime subject of study for whoever wanted to find reasons to despair of them or sought some way of pushing them in the right direction. As it happened, Buchner's course was neither of these last two: it was neither a second home-coming of a man disenchanted with revolution, nor the roundabout path of a superior strategist; it was rather a descent into the abysses which surrounded the land of prosperity and those which were eating away, too, at the foundations of science. 'I feel ever closer to the people and to the Middle Ages,' wrote Buchner; 'with each day that passes I can see more clearly.'44 It was equally the journey without home-coming of a man who had lived through the initial divorce between the paths of consciousness and of revolution, and who had discovered that the reason of history was strictly equivalent to its madness. One can only speculate on what might have happened if typhoid had not taken his life at the age of 24. He would no doubt have been better advised to settle down to the wise folly of the apostle Rousseau who, having returned to his lands around Anjou, concerned himself, while doing some useful work for the

78

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people, with his own musical education. It is even said that he undertook a journey to Switzerland to get the people to sing. One may wonder whether, on his way, he stopped at the cemetery in Zurich. Who can say? T r u t h to tell, he still had not learnt any German.

NOTES 1 W. Wordsworth, 'The Prelude', VI, lines 357-9, Poetical Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 532. 2 ibid., VI, lines 393~46, P- 5333 ibid., VI, lines 770-2, p. 537. 4 ibid., IX, lines 36-8, p. 556. 5 ibid., IX, lines 284-5, p. 559. 6 ibid., IX, lines 404-7, p. 560. 7 ibid., IX, lines 300-2, p. 559. 8 ibid., IX, lines 312-3, p. 559. 9 (Translator's note) The reference is to Louis XVI who was imprisoned in the medieval keep of the Temple prison from 13 August 1792 until his execution on 21 January 1793. 10 'The prelude', IX, lines 67-80, p. 556. 11 W. Wordsworth, 'The borderers', lines 1030-5, Poetical Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923), 56. 12 (C. Genoux) Memoires d'un enfant de la Savoie, ecrits par lui-meme (Paris: 1844), 206. 13 ibid., 182. 14 ibid., 166. 15 L'Atelier, September 1846. 16 Memoires d'un enfant de la Savoie, 230. 17 Michel Chevalier in a letter to Hoart and Bruneau, 26 November 1832, Bibliotheque de l'Arsenal, Fonds Enfantin, Ms 7646. 18 Cayol to Michel Chevalier, 20 December 1832, ibid., Ms 7647. 19 Hoart to Picard, 9 January 1833, in d'AUemagne, Les Saint-simoniens (Paris: 1930), 367. 20 'Memoires de Terson', Arsenal, Fonds Enfantin, Ms 7787. 21 Hoart to Picard, 9 January 1833, in d'Allemagne, op. cit., 366. 22 'Memoires de Terson', op. cit. 23 Bruneau in a letter to Ollivier, Arsenal, Fonds Enfantin, Ms 7647. 24 Ollivier in a letter to Enfantin, ibid. 25 Barrault to Enfantin, 21 February 1833, ibid. 26 Mercier to Galle, Livre des Actes (Paris: 1833), 35. 27 Mission de I'Est, 18-19. 28 ibid., 20-2. 29 ibid. 30 ibid., 23. 31 ibid., 30. 32 ibid., 31. 33 Georg Biichner in a letter to his family, dated after 27 May 1833. 34 Buchner quoted by his friend August Becker in the latter's deposition to the court in Darmstadt at the time of Biichner's trial for high treason for writing the Hessian Messenger. Cit. Nollner, Aktenmdfiige Darlegung des wegen Hochverrats eingeleiteten

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35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44

gerichtlichen Verfahrens gegen Pfarrer Dr. Friedr. Ludwig Weidig . . . (Darmstadt: 1844), 420 ff. Biichner in a letter to Gutzkow, written from Strasburg, 1835. Buchner in a letter to Gutzkow, written from Strasburg, 1836. Buchner to Gutzkow, written from Strasburg, 1835. From a letter from Buchner to his family, written from Zurich, 20 November 1836. From a letter to his fiancee, written from Zurich, 20 January 1837. Rousseau, La Magdeleine (Paris: 1835), vol. 1, chapter V. Buchner, from a letter to his family, from Strasburg, 1 January 1836. (Translator's note) See Buchner, Danton's Death, a new version by Howard Brenton, from a new translation by Jane Frey (London: Methuen, 1982), act 1, scene 5, p. 15. (Translator's note) See Buchner, Woyzeck, translated by John Mackendrick (London: Methuen, 1979), scene 1: open country, and scene 12: a tavern. (Translation modified.) Buchner in a letter to his fiancee, written from Zurich, 20 January 1837.

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