Descartes' Bones

by Russell Shorto

  It’s curious, then, that with so much careful attention given to Ste.-Geneviève he failed to record the retrieval of Descartes’ remains in his log. He later insisted that he did indeed dig up the philosopher’s grave. Not only did he bring a container of Descartes’ remains—bones and bone fragments—down the hill from the church to his repository by the river, he declared, but he was particularly excited about its contents. Like Condorcet and other Enlightenment figures, Lenoir believed in the idea of progress: that with each generation, each passing century, humanity was evolving upward, toward happiness, freedom, equality, a higher state of civilization. The current generation, and in particular the Revolution in France, was the point toward which all of Western history had been evolving. For Lenoir, Descartes was not only one of the prime movers of history, he was “the father of philosophy” and “the first to teach us how to think.”

  Lenoir’s fascination with death and bones and graves went deep, so to speak. Along with rescuing tombs and monuments, he unearthed many human remains, including those of some other notable historical figures, including Molière, the famous medieval lovers Heloise and Abelard, and Descartes’ protégé Jacques Rohault. There are indications that Lenoir took to this aspect of his work with eerie relish. One colleague recollected him breathing in the perfume of a freshly opened coffin and reverently plunging his hands into its dank innards. After unearthing the corpse of King Henri IV he delighted in its excellent condition, writing, “I had the pleasure to touch these pleasant remains, his beard, his reddish moustache so well preserved.” He couldn’t stop himself from shaking the monarch’s petrified hand despite the fact that, as he felt the need to reaffirm, “I was a real republican.” In the case of Descartes, he later wrote that he went so far as to take a fragment of bone—“one very small piece of bone plate”—out of which he carved several rings. That is, Lenoir fashioned a bit of Descartes into jewelry. These rings, he wrote, “I offered to friends of the good philosophy.”

  Louche and creepy as this would have been both to someone from Descartes’ era and to someone of our own, Lenoir was not alone; the use of human bones and hair as trophies, ornament, tchotchkes was a feature of his day, a secularization of the Catholic cult of relics. As the Pantheon itself showed, the modernist need to distance society from religion didn’t obviate the human need to connect with the past, to come to terms with mortality. Just as religious buildings were co-opted for secular, humanistic purposes that were nevertheless somehow transcendent, the notion of certain human bones becoming conduits between the mortal and the divine was taken over and given new meaning. They may have been desacralized, symbolic of worldly achievement and advance, but the Enlightenment still had its relics. What’s more, the fetishizing of remains continued into the next generations. The nineteenth-century explorers who roamed the earth in search of specimens of one type or another assembled them into “cabinets of curiosities” with which to decorate homes and impress visitors, and these often included bits of famous somebodies. A supposed piece of Descartes’ skull sits today in the collection of the Historical Museum of Lund, Sweden, where it originally formed part of such a cabinet.

  Lenoir later said that when he dug in the church he found the remains of Descartes in a rotted wood coffin, so back at his depot he carefully transferred them to what he considered a fitting and permanent home: an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus made of porphyry that he had taken from the church of St.-Germain-l’Auxerrois. He placed it in the garden of the former convent, alongside his growing collection of statues and tombs—ultimately, thousands of artistic stone objects from all over France, dating from nearly every period of the country’s history.

  Meanwhile, the government committee considering pantheonization issued its report, which was promptly taken up by the entire body, and it is grounding—humbling, even—in an era that values speed over reflection to think of the revolutionary government pausing at length in the middle of its momentous work to consider such a matter—stopping history, in effect, in order to ponder its course and their place in it. The report was presented by Marie-Joseph Chénier, a playwright who had endured failure after failure until one of his plays with revolutionary overtones was mounted shortly after the storming of the Bastille and he became an overnight sensation—and then a member of the revolutionary government. His brother André was even more famous as a poet of the Revolution. In the course of studying Condorcet’s proposition, Chénier became enamored of the idea of Descartes as the first champion of reason, liberty, progress, equality—in short, as the father of the Revolution. Chénier was young, handsome, fearless, impassioned, and at present he and his brother were darlings of the Revolution (the following year André would succumb to the guillotine); he delivered a flowing discourse on behalf of the committee:

  Citizens,

  Your committee of public instruction has charged me to put before you an object that concerns the national glory and that offers you a new occasion to show to the eyes of Europe your respect for philosophy, the source of valid institutions and true popular laws. In the first centuries of the French empire, a villager from Nanterre was declared holy and was proclaimed patron of Paris. Today, Paris and all France have only Liberty as a patron. A temple was built to Geneviève: this temple, now as outdated as prejudice, is collapsing under the hand of time; but amid this religious rubble, near the sacred relics that, through the follies of man, the pious beliefs of our ancestors imbued with a sterile trust, amid altars enriched by fear, among tombs ornamented by pride, a narrow undecorated stone covers the mortal remains of René Descartes.

  It is of course conceivable that in the confusion of the times Chénier and his committee were unaware that Lenoir had already retrieved those mortal remains from the old church. There is another possibility, however, which we will consider later. Chénier went on to place Descartes at the forefront of the line of thinkers whose work had formed the backbone of modernity—“Locke and Condillac, . . . Newton, Leibniz, Euler, Lagrange”—and summarized his committee’s finding: “We have thought that a nation that becomes free through the beneficial effect of the Enlightenment must collect with veneration the ashes of one of its prodigious men who advanced the scope of public reason.” He decried the wayward life of the philosopher, who was forced by “despotism” to wander Europe, and concluded with a flourish: “To you, republicans, belongs the task of avenging the contempt of the kings for the remains of René Descartes.”

  The government agreed, and crafted a decree:

  DECREE

  OF THE

  NATIONAL CONVENTION

  Dated the 2 and 4 October 1793, the second year of the one

  and indivisible French Republic,

  Who accord to René Descartes the honors of the

  great Men, and order the transfer of his body to the

  French Pantheon, and his Statue made by the

  celebrated Pajou.

  1. On October 2.

  THE NATIONAL CONVENTION, after having

  heard the report of its Committee of Public Instruction,

  decrees the following:

  ARTICLE ONE.

  René Descartes has merited the honors of the great men.

  II.

  The body of this philosopher will be transferred to the French Pantheon.

  III.

  On the tomb of Descartes will be engraved these words:

  In the name of the French People

  The National Convention

  To René Descartes

  1793, second year of the Republic.

  IV.

  The Committee of Public Instruction will consult with the Ministry of the Interior to fix the date of the translation . . .

  2. On October 4.

  The National Convention decrees that the statue of Descartes, made by the celebrated Pajou, and which is found in the hall of antiques, will be removed to be placed in the Pantheon the day when the remains of this great man will be transferred there; and authorizes the Ministry of the Inte
rior to make all the arrangements necessary to carry out this work.

  It was a grand, official, full-on acknowledgment not only of the place of Descartes in French history but of the forces at play in history and of the idea of progress. It was in a way a perfect moment for society to acknowledge these forces—but in another sense it may have been too perfect, for the Revolution was reaching its bloody summit. The monarchies of Europe—in league with aristocrats and churchmen inside France—were trying to stop the dangerous revolt against the political status quo, which had led to a succession of wars against the revolutionary regime. The wars and intrigue in turn worsened living conditions among the people, and hunger inclined the populace toward the most radical elements among the revolutionaries. Robespierre took control of the government and introduced institutional terrorism as a way to deal with perceived threats to the new republic. The guillotine became a symbol of the bloody excesses of the Revolution. Heads rolled—tens of thousands of them—including, most famously, that of Marie Antoinette and ultimately that of Robespierre himself. More pointedly, Condorcet, too, had become ensnared in the Terror. As a result of certain unrevolutionary tendencies—he had opposed the execution of the king, for one—a warrant was issued for his arrest the day after Chénier gave his talk in support of Condorcet’s appeal for pantheonization, and he was forced to flee. It was while he was in hiding that he wrote his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, the book in which he summarized his belief in the Enlightenment and its values and in which he singled out Descartes’ contribution. He was eventually captured and died in prison, under dubious circumstances.

  Thus, if the pantheonization of Descartes during the French Revolution—arguably modernity’s most sharply honed act of self-expression—was fitting, the fact that the decision to honor modernity’s founding father came on the eve of the Reign of Terror was doubly so. Liberty, equality, democracy—all were offspring of the cogito and the orientation of humanity around reason. But already in 1739 the Scottish philosopher David Hume had argued that it was a mistake to think that reason is the basis of moral principles: reason, he knew, could be put to the most unreasonable pursuits. As a tool it can build a new society, but it can also kill and maim, and misusing it—through naïve belief or duplicity—is one of the tropes of modern history. Historians have long looked at the Reign of Terror—the state’s suspending laws and putting violence to official use for supposedly noble and rational purposes—as the forerunner of many recent evils, from Stalin’s purges to the infamous “We had to destroy the village to save the village” logic of the Vietnam War. “ ’Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger” was how Hume derisively characterized reason’s negative application. In the very same year that the Reign of Terror broke out in France, Kant, from the isolation of his German village, pondered the conundrum that while reason was now identified as the first principle of modern society, humanity’s “propensity to evil” was undeniable. His conclusion is still our conclusion:

  Man himself must make or have made himself into whatever, in a moral sense, whether good or evil, he is or is to become. Either condition must be an effect of his free choice; for otherwise he could not be held responsible for it and could therefore be morally neither good nor evil. When it is said, Man is created good, this can mean nothing more than: He is created for good and the original predisposition in man is good; not that, thereby, he is already actually good, but rather that he brings it about that he becomes good or evil, according to whether he adopts or does not adopt into his maxim the incentives which this predisposition carries with it.

  Just as it was grimly appropriate that Robespierre and other instigators of the Terror themselves fell victim to it, it fits modernity’s taste for irony that the purges and violence in 1793 and 1794 derailed the effort to pay homage to one of the progenitors of the modern world. With so many fresh bodies to bury, with so many of its own members facing arrest or execution, the National Convention found that it had more pressing things to do than fix a date for the transfer of one decayed set of human remains. Descartes’ bones stayed in Alexandre Lenoir’s depot.

  THE TERROR, HOWEVER, WAS good for Lenoir’s business. As the mayhem mounted, so did his collection. It elegantly littered the interior and the grounds of the lovely former convent by the Seine, creating a sonorous cascade of sculpted and chiseled effects, beauty alternating with violence, the stately flow of the past jumbled by a deforming present. It was at this time of world-historic change and chaos that Lenoir got an idea. What, eventually, was to be done with the glorious rubble—with all of these mementos of a nation’s past—that he had salvaged? Again, progress was uppermost in his mind. He thought of past eras as building to the current moment—the age of reason and enlightenment. Those eras were represented and reflected in their art. Was it all to fade? Faced with the destructive forces that were upon them, would people forget it all? Memory of the past could be wiped away in a generation—would that not be terribly wrong? Should history, its lesson, its forward march, not be imprinted on the minds of citizens of a democracy?

  What if he were to bring the force of reason—the same force that had brought about this violent wholesale change—to bear on this dislodged material, impose order onto it, give people a clear representation of history as having an underlying purpose? His idea was to create a space for history and art, an educational forum, a place that would show humanity’s noblest sentiments at work. He would create a temple to the muses: a museum.

  A striking thing about the people who handled Descartes’ bones through the centuries is how nearly all of them embodied in some way one of the aspects of modernity that Descartes is credited with bringing into being. When, in 1796, with government backing, Lenoir transformed his depot into the Museum of French Monuments, he created possibly the first-ever history museum and became one of the first people to bring a social-scientific approach to art and history. Using reason and progress as guiding principles, he took debris from the destruction caused by revolutionary war and built something new: a public institution that told the story of the nation and its evolution.

  There was already a national museum under way, and the minister of the interior stipulated in his letter of authorization to Lenoir that the institution would technically be a branch of the new Louvre. Lenoir bristled—the Louvre, in his estimation, was a mishmash. He was determined that his museum would have an organizing principle.

  And so it did. His first determination was that the visitor would experience history as a progression from lower to higher orders of civilization. In walking through the museum, one would move from century to century, chronologically following the advance. As he worked, he exhibited a great flair for design, and he gave each room an atmosphere he thought suited its historical era—as well as its own funereal aura. He described the first room, devoted to art of the thirteenth century, this way:

  Sepulchral lamps hang from the vaults. The doors and windows. . . were designed by the celebrated Montereau according to the taste of the architecture revived by the Arabs. The window glass also bears the stamp of that style. . . . The somber light that pervades this hall is also an imitation of the time . . . [representing] the magic by which men maintained in a perpetual state of weakness human beings whom superstition had struck with fear.

  Lenoir’s views about history and progress show up in his description of the use of light in churches of various eras: “I have observed that the farther one goes toward the centuries which approach our own, the more the light increases in public monuments, as if the sight of sunlight could only suit educated man.” Until, presumably, one gets to the Revolution, when roofs were literally ripped off churches, exposing the dark interiors to the full light of day.

  Lenoir’s Museum of French Monuments marks not only the beginning of museums but the beginning of a familiar complaint with museums: that they dislocate objects from their source and purpose and original me
aning and force them into a new, alien structure. Museums squeeze new meanings out of objects, ones their creators never imagined. The carved Virgin that for centuries stood next to an altar in a Provençal village church, to which generations had prayed—so that it was their Madonna, an object that blended their reverence for a woman of first-century Palestine with all the heartfelt and commonplace aspects of their daily existence, an object that was as much a part of their lives as the mountains framing the landscape—now occupied a wall alongside other dissociated items from roughly the same century and helped to tell the story of the development of realism in art, which, for Lenoir, showed the evolution of humanity.

  If this is a complaint of modernity, of modern life, of the force of reason—that it takes things out of the organic pattern in which they evolved, breaks them into analyzable bits, reconstructs them in new ways that may shed new light but that, for many people, have a chilly, inhuman glow—it’s all the more interesting that Lenoir’s museum became the single most popular cultural site in Paris in the years of the Revolution. Strange to say, tourists actually came to the city in the midst of the upheaval, and the Museum of French Monuments was on everyone’s itinerary (an English Sketch of Paris published in 1801 devoted fourteen pages to it), so much so that Lenoir published a catalog, which was later translated into English, which people bought (for five francs) and strolled with as they conducted themselves through the sepulchral gardens and rooms. Lenoir began the catalog by trumpeting the underlying theme of the project: “The French cherish this famous revolution that took place through them and by them. This revolution established a new order of things founded on reason and justice.” The catalog also contained, in front, a notice of such impeccably humdrum practicality that it could serve equally to signal modernity: “The Museum of French Monuments is open to the public Thursdays from six o’clock to two and Sundays from six until four in the summer and until three in winter.”