by Edgar Quinet
Shortly after publishing Ahasvérus in 1834, Quinet married Minna Moré, whom he had first glimpsed at a concert in Germany some years before and with whom he had fallen in love at first sight, although their subsequent relationship had proved direly difficult because of parental opposition on both sides, partly occasioned by the fact that he was notionally a Catholic while her family was Protestant (they were eventually married in a Protestant ceremony).
Given the solipsistic quality of the project, it is entirely natural that Quinet’s relationship with Minna, and the problems surrounding it, should have had just as much influence on the drama’s contents as any of the historical and philosophical issues developed therein, and it is a much stronger work in consequence. The intensity of the relationship between Ahasvérus and Rachel, clearly reproducing essential sentimental elements of the relationship between Quinet and Minna, as he perceived it in 1831-33, is not merely a supplement to Quinet’s philosophical considerations regarding the pattern of human social evolution and the motor of history but is inextricably bound up with them.
It is important to bear in mind, while reading Ahasvérus—especially the scene in which Mob takes Ahasvérus and Rachel to Strasbourg to be married—that when Quinet wrote it, he did not know that he would eventually be able to marry Minna, and undoubtedly suspected and dreaded that he might not. The interlude between the third and fourth days, when Quinet appears in the text as “The Poet” is a frank expression of despair that he would ever be able to attain that goal.
It is worth noting, in this context, that the first edition of the text has a dedication that reads, in translation: “To Madame Sophie D., testimony of a pious respect. This book is dedicated to you. When it is forgotten, you alone will remember the man who wrote it.” Subsequent scholars contrived to expand the surname of the dedicatee as “Duvant,” crediting it to a young woman with whom, according to Albert Valès, Quinet had a brief “pure but dolorous” love affair in the late 1820s, although a more recent study by Willy Aeschimann claims that her surname was actually Duvault. The uncertainty is revealing in itself, as is the fact that the dedication was removed from all future editions.
Whatever the significance of that dedication was (and it might be deliberately misleading), it still needs to be remembered, in reading Ahasvérus, that when Quinet wrote the book he was deeply unhappy, and far from any confidence that he would eventually be cured of that unhappiness—as, in fact, he was, by his subsequent marriage—although the last phase of the narrative clearly expresses the hope that he might be. The epic quality of Ahasvérus inevitably invites comparison with Goethe’s epic drama of Faust, but there are also marked echoes in its more personal episodes of Goethe’s other Sturm und Drang classic, the maudlin sentimental melodrama Die Lieden des jungen Werthers (1774; tr. as The Sorrows of Young Werther).
Because the limited time Quinet spent in France during the late 1820s was largely absorbed by his family and the social contacts he made via Victor Cousin, his communication with the other literary figures who came to constitute the Romantic Movement in that period was limited. The one he knew best was Jules Janin, the pioneer of roman frénétique [frantic fiction], of whom he had twice been a schoolfellow, once at school in Lyon and then again while studying law in Paris. Quinet’s various biographers report that when Janin heard in 1831 that Quinet intended to begin work of a work of imaginative fiction he immediately volunteered to collaborate on it, but that Quinet refused.
By that time Quinet was certainly acquainted with Victor Hugo, with whose political ideas he had a good deal in common, but he does not seem to have attended the cénacle that Hugo hosted, at least not on a regular basis. Information is, however, a trifle sparse; when Quinet eventually began to write the autobiography on which most of his subsequent biographers relied for information—which he never finished, although he thought that he ought to include it in his Oeuvres complètes regardless, and which stops short of 1831 in its internal chronology—he titled it, perhaps inevitably, Histoire de mes idées [The History of my Ideas], concentrating entirely on his intellectual development and the influence thereon on his father, his mother and the books he read, and giving no details at all of his social life, beyond recording his debt to Cousin and Michelet, and none of his personal life, making only slight passing references to Minna. Although some further personal details were added to the record by two belated memoirs written by his second wife, Hermione Asachi, whom he married after Minna’s death in the 1860s, they are inevitably scant and skewed in their perspective.
In spite of the lack of any close social relationship, however, Quinet can certainly be seen as a key member of the Romantic Movement as it took wing in the early 1830s, and was certainly seen as such at the time, by virtue of his association with the Revue des Deux Mondes. Quinet and Michelet can be considered to have formed the hard core of the “historical wing” of the movement, along with Hugo’s close friend Paul Lacroix, who signed his most of his books “P. L. Jacob, Bibliophile.”
Although there was probably little direct communication between the writers during the process of composition, it is of some significance that, as well as following on the heels of Ballanche’s Vision d’Hébal, Ahasvérus was closely contemporary with Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris—1482 (1832) and Lacroix’s Danse macabre (1833)2, and has echoes of both of them, especially in the scene in which Strasbourg Cathedral becomes a key symbolic location, playing host to a dance of the dead. As an item of Romantic prose, Ahasvérus was a key contribution to the sudden and spectacular flowering of activity in that regard, outstripping the rest in narrative bizarrerie as well as philosophical ambition.
Although he was not unsympathetic to the historical role played by religions, which he considered to be vitally important to social evolution, Quinet’s hostility to certain aspects of Catholic faith won him even more enemies than his political radicalism; Ahasvérus can easily be read as an atheistic and explicitly anti-Christian work, although that is probably not the right way to read it, and the apologetic ambiguity with which it is carefully dressed is genuinely representative of a theological uncertainty on Quinet’s part. Anyone inclined to suspect the work of anti-Christian inclinations would not, however, have been reassured by the author’s subsequent exploits as a polemicist, and there must have been a temptation to tar him with the same brush as Alphonse de Lamartine and Victor Hugo, both of whom eventually took skepticism to the extreme of producing literary works explicitly sympathetic to Satan’s rebellion against divine authority, in La Chute d’un ange [The Fall of an Angel] (1838) and La Fin de Satan [The End of Satan] (incomplete; written 1854-62; published 1886) respectively.
That temptation must have been greatly increased by the obvious debt owed by Quinet’s characterization of the fallen angel Rachel to Alfred de Musset’s classic sympathetic depiction of a female fallen angel in the long poem “Eloa” (1824). It is, however, worth noting that one symbolic character conspicuous by his absence from the ideative schema of Ahasvérus is Satan. Although one of the interludes—all of which are extraneous to the narrative—features a devils’ dance in which Lucifer takes part, he remains outside the story, confined to an insignificant annex; he comments dismissively on the plot from without, but is not involved in it. Hell is peripherally featured, and has one crucial line in a brief and terse dialogue with Heaven, but this imaginary history pays no attention to any War in Heaven and Lucifer does not assume the role of God’s adversary.
Unlike Eloa, and the many other fallen angels featured in Romantic literature, Rachel does not fall from Haven out of mistaken sympathy for a handsome rebel angel, but by innocent sympathy for a wretched human being, and she is entirely unique. Quinet’s theology is, in fact, radically un-Christian is ignoring the entire facet of Christian mythology related to active diabolism; it contains not the slightest hint of Manicheism. The belated Christian insertion of Satan into the story told in Genesis is flatly ignored, and although the account of the Creation features a symbolic Serpen
t, it is a serpent, not a devil in disguise; humans sins, in this schema, are purely human, not occasioned by any deliberate external temptation, and not to be subject to any demonic punishment.
This move not only separates Ahasvérus from the mainstream of the Romantic Movement as it was to continue in such masterworks of literary satanism as Gustave Flaubert’s La Tentation de saint Antoine (1874; tr. as The Temptation of Saint Anthony) and Anatole France’s La Révolte des anges (1914; tr. as The Revolt of the Angels), but from the entire Christian epic tradition prior to the evolution of the movement, extending from Dante’s Divina Comedia (written c.1308-1321) through Joost van den Vondel’s Lucifer (1654), John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) and Friedrich Klopstock’s Der Messias (1748-73) to Goethe’s Faust (Part I 1806; Part II 1832). It is essential to the work that Ahasvérus is not an adversary but a victim, and that the historical schema of which he is an element features no active evil, but only a failure to live up to the highest standards of good—a failure of which Christ is arguably just as guilty as the man he curses, and for which even God may be judged when his own Judgment is called into question. That uniqueness is sufficient in itself to entitle the work to a special interest, from readers, literary historians and philosophers alike.
Quinet’s reputation, and that of Ahasvérus, were considerably affected in his own lifetime by his subsequent exploits. Although he continued to devote the bulk of his effort to his non-fiction, he did try to follow up the literary debut he had made in Ahasvérus, writing two more epics in a more orthodox poetic form: Napoléon (1835) and Prométhée [Prometheus] (1838). Their reception was, however, muted, and they failed to confirm the reputation for “poetic genius” that Charles Magnin had claimed for him. The former, dealing with real events and personalities, inevitably relegating ideas to a background role, proved less conducive to the particular character of Quinet’s thought, and although the second restored a mythological framework, employing Greek theodicy as a kind of stand-in for Christian theology, much as Percy Shelley had done in Prometheus Unbound (1820), the exercise was bound to seem more limited as well as a trifle second-hand. It is worth remembering in this context that, having married Minna, he no longer had the well of lachrymose desperation on which to draw that had provided so much sentimental fuel for the poignant heart of Ahasvérus.
After the relative failure of Prométhée, Quinet made the decision to concentrate entirely on his scholarly endeavors. In 1839 he obtained a professorship of foreign literature at the Université de Lyon, which he was able to relocate two years later to the College de France, thus moving back to Paris and the heart of French culture. He found it impossible to confine his interests and concerns to the specific subject he was supposed to be teaching, however, and used his lecture courses as a pulpit for the oratorical development of his ideas regarding history in general, French history in particular, and the specific role therein played by the Christian religion and the Catholic Church.
Partly by virtue of his close association with Jules Michelet, who was by then ten years into the monumental history of France that would eventually take him thirty years to complete, Quinet became interested and incensed by the role played in the history of Christendom by the Jesuits, which he began to criticize scathingly in a very public manner. The substance of his lectures on the subject was eventually integrated into a book co-signed with Michelet, Des Jésuites, published 1843, which caused such a fierce reaction that he was eventually sacked from his professorship in 1846. That simply relegated his polemicizing from the academic context to a more general political arena, and, like Victor Hugo and Alphonse de Lamartine, Quinet became an active revolutionary endeavoring to put an end to Louis-Philippe’s monarchy and institute a new republic.
That endeavor helped to bring about the 1848 Revolution, and Quinet, like Hugo and Lamartine, was appointed to an office in the short-lived Second Republic, to which Louis-Napoléon’s 1851 coup put an abrupt end. Like Hugo and many other prominent Republicans, Quinet went into exile, initially in Brussels and then in Switzerland. He continued to write copiously, and it was while in Switzerland that he organized the publication of the first version of his Oeuvres complètes in the late 1850s, although the set subsequently had to be increased by several more volumes to accommodate, among other works, his fourth major literary endeavor, the long philosophical Arthurian romance Merlin l’enchanteur [The Enchanter Merlin] (1862). Some commentators also place La Création (1870), which attempted to set the 19th century revolution in “natural history” in the more general context of the history of the human mind, in the category of literary works because of the ambition and eccentricity of its attempt to reconstitute a narrative prehistory of the Earth, and the human species, on the basis of paleontological and anthropological evidence that inevitably seems woefully thin today’s standards, but it is better regarded as an offbeat exercise in popular science.
Like Hugo, Quinet refused to take advantage of the amnesty offered by the new emperor that allowed a number of other prominent writers, including Alexandre Dumas, to return to Paris and resume their careers there; he insisted on delaying his return to France until the collapse of the Second Empire in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. He was, however, prompt in returning after the Battle of Sedan, arriving in time to play an active role in the subsequent siege of Paris, about which he published a book in 1871. His academic position was then returned to him, but he was no longer the firebrand he had been twenty years earlier, and the remainder of his career was relatively quiet and sedate. He died in Versailles in 1875.
It is probably appropriate to add to this introduction a brief account of the legend on which the eponymous hero of is based, and its previous literary uses. According to
George K. Anderson’s admirably comprehensive account of The Legend of the Wandering Jew (Brown University Press, 1965) the story was first written down in the 13th century; as to how long it had flourished as an item of oral tradition before then we can only guess. It is a Christian adaptation of a much older idea; eternal restlessness is inflicted as a punishment for offences, in various Classical myths, and examples of accursed wanderers appear in both Judaic and Islamic mythology. Cain is sent into exile in the fourth chapter of Genesis, while the twentieth chapter of the Quran, parallel to the thirty-second chapter of Exodus, relates that Al-Sameri, the maker of the golden calf that lured the followers of Moses to apostasy was similarly cursed. In neither of those cases is it explicitly stated that the sinners are made immortal in order to suffer longer than a normal lifetime would permit, but it would have been easy enough for anyone familiar with the eternally tedious punishments inflicted in the Greek Underworld to add that inference.
The gospels of the New Testament are more preoccupied with the idea of immortality than the older writings they set out to overlay with a new faith, and there are passages in them that can construed as implying that Jesus decreed that certain individuals would not die until he returned. In Matthew 16:28 Jesus says to his disciples: “Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom” and in John 21:20-22, Jesus replies to a question by Peter with words similar to those he was later credited with addressing to the accursed wanderer: “If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?” It is not entirely clear from the text whether Jesus is referring to John or to Judas, and some accounts of the Wandering Jew assume that he is, indeed, Judas.
The first surviving record of the legend as it became familiar dates from 1223 and appears in a Latin chronicle from Bologna; it tells of a Jew encountered by pilgrims in Armenia, who had taunted Jesus as he was going to his martyrdom and was told “I shall go, but you shall await me until I come again.” It is alleged that ever since, the man in question had been rejuvenated to the apparent age of thirty at hundred year intervals. In referring to waiting rather than moving—thus echoing the passage from John—this version stresses the immortality of the Jew rather than his restles
sness, an emphasis that was to cause some later writers to wonder whether his punishment was really so terrible. This doubt was re-emphasized five years later by a more extensive account of the same story, recorded at St. Albans by the English monk Roger of Wendover.
Roger claims that St. Albans had been recently visited by an Armenian archbishop, who was questioned on the subject of rumors about an immortal man named Joseph. The archbishop replied that he had actually met the man in question, who had been a hall-porter in the service of Pontius Pilate, named Cartaphilus. This Cartaphilus had slapped Jesus on the back as he was being removed to be crucified, urging him to move faster, whereupon the fateful words—again referring to waiting rather than walking—were spoken to him. The report further adds that Cartaphilus was later baptized by the same man who baptized St. Paul, and had become a penitent ascetic.
Roger of Wendover’s account was reproduced by his successor as chronicler at St. Albans, Matthew Paris. In later versions of the chronicle Matthew supplemented the story with endorsements by other supposed witnesses who had visited or come from Armenia. Various version of the St. Albans chronicle were copied and distributed abroad, Matthew Paris’s ultimate version being widely circulated and translated. Its distribution was, however, subject to the limitations of the manuscript medium; the next important stage in the popularization of the legend came, inevitably, after the advent of printing—a technology whose destruction of the Church's virtual monopoly on the reproduction of ideas became part and parcel of the Reformation and the subsequent wars of religion.
The St. Albans chronicle was translated into German for a printed version in the 1580s; in 1602, about fifteen years after publication of the pamphlet that popularized the legend of Faust, a pamphlet printed in German appeared entitled Kurtze Beschreibung von einem Juden mit Namen Ahasverus. The story it tells is attributed to Paul von Eitzen, Bishop of Schleswig, who is said to have encountered “a very tall person” in a church in Hamburg in 1542, and to have learned from him that his name was Ahasuerus. Ahasuerus had been a shoemaker in Jerusalem and had cried out in anger when Jesus, carrying his cross, had stopped for a moment to rest against the wall of his house—whereupon Jesus replied: “I shall stand here and rest, but you must walk.” After this, Ahasuerus was compelled to follow Jesus and witness his execution, and then to leave Jerusalem and wander about the world unceasingly, miserably but reverently certain of the truth of Christ’s power and teaching. The pamphlet adds that Ahasuerus had been seen in Danzig as recently as the year 1599.
