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(The story told in Ahasuerus (1834) begins with the Creati...)
The story told in Ahasuerus (1834) begins with the Creation of the world and moves rapidly to the Last Judgment. But it does not end there, as have previous literary visions of the Apocalypse, but goes beyond it, in order to pass judgment on the verdict. In this startingly original epic, the Last Judgment is not only appealed, but set aside, reweighed and found wanting. The verdict passed on the human race by the Eternal Father is supplemented by a very different judgment delivered by Christ, of a particular individual cursed to be a witness to the unfolding of human history: Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew. Having overturned the traditional Last Judgment and substituted one more in keeping with modern ideas, Edgar Quinet continues his narrative to provide a further vision, which passes judgment not on humankind, but on God himself in a curious and strangely poignant coda. Ahasuerus is an exceptional work, deserving of attention and admiration.
Edgar Quinet was a French historian and man of letters.
Background
Edgar Quinet was born on February 17, 1803 at Bourg-en-Bresse, in the department of the Ain, France. His father, Jerome Quinet, had been a commissary in the army, but being a strong republican and disgusted with Napoleon's usurpation, he gave up his post and devoted himself to scientific and mathematical study. Edgar, who was an only child, was much alone, but his mother (Eugenie Rozat Lagis, who was a person of education and strong though somewhat unorthodox religious views) exercised great influence over him.
Education
He was sent to school first at Bourg and then at Lyons. His father wished him on leaving school to go into the army, and then suggested business. But Quinet was determined upon literature, and after a time got his way.
Career
After moving to Paris in 1820, Quinet forsook the faith of his Protestant mother, became greatly attracted to German philosophy, and published in 1827–28, as his first major work, a translation of Herder’s monumental philosophy of history, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man). Soon, however, he became disillusioned with German philosophy and alarmed by the aggressive nature of Prussian nationalism. His literary reputation was increased by the publication of his epic prose poem Ahasvérus (1833), in which the legend of the Wandering Jew is used to symbolize the progress of humanity through the years. In Le Génie des religions (1842; “The Genius of Religions”) he expressed sympathy for all religions while committing himself to none, but shortly afterward his increasingly radical views alienated him finally from Roman Catholicism.
It was not until 1842 that he obtained what he had really wanted—a professorship in Paris. His lectures at the Collège de France attacked Roman Catholicism, exalted the French Revolution, offered support for the oppressed nationalities of Europe, and promoted the theory that religions were the determining force in society. Because his treatment of these topics aroused heated controversy, the government intervened in 1846 and, to the satisfaction of the clergy and dismay of the students, he lost his chair.
Quinet hailed the revolution of February 1848, but with Louis-Napoleon’s coup d’etat of December 1851 was forced to flee, first to Brussels (1851–58) and then to Veytaux, near Montreux, Switz. , where he remained until 1870. His faith in humanity shaken, Quinet’s optimism failed him for a while, and in La Révolution religieuse au XIXe siècle (1857; The Religious Revolution of the 19th Century) and La Révolution (1865) he sympathized with the use of force against an all-powerful church and even wistfully hoped that France might yet embrace Protestantism. In his last years the conquests of science fascinated him and restored his faith in the progress of humanity, as indicated in La Création (1870) and L’Esprit nouveau (1874; “The New Spirit”). He returned to Paris on the fall of the empire in 1870 and was elected to the National Assembly in the following year but exercised little influence over his fellow deputies.
His histories, political essays, and works on the history of religion are little read in the 20th century. It is in the educational reforms of the Third Republic, including the banishing of religious instruction from the schools, that his most lasting influence is seen.
Achievements
He made a significant contribution to the developing tradition of liberalism in France.
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Religion
He has the strongest attraction for the picturesque side of medievalism and catholicity, the strongest repulsion for the restrictions which medieval and Catholic institutions imposed on individual liberty. He refused to submit himself to any form of positive orthodoxy, yet when a man like Strauss pushed unorthodoxy to its extreme limits Quinet revolted.
Politics
As a politician he acted with the extreme radicals, yet universal suffrage disgusted him as unreasonable in its principle and dangerous in its results.
Personality
Quinet's character was extremely amiable, and his letters to his mother, his accounts of his early life, and so forth, are likely always to make him interesting. He was also a man of great moral conscientiousness, and as far as intention went perfectly disinterested.
As a writer, his chief fault is want of concentration; as a thinker and politician, vagueness and want of practical determination. His historical and philosophical works, though showing much reading, fertile thought, abundant facility of expression, and occasionally, where prejudice does not come in, acute judgment, are rather (as not a few of them were in fact) reported lectures than formal treatises. His rhetorical power was altogether superior to his logical power, and the natural consequence is that his work is full of contradictions. These contradictions were, moreover, due, not merely to an incapacity or an unwillingness to argue strictly, but also to the presence in his mind of a large number of inconsistent tastes and prejudices which he either could not or would not co-ordinate into an intelligible creed. His pervading characteristic, therefore, is that of an eloquent vagueness, very stimulating and touching at times, but as deficient in coercive force of matter as it is in lasting precision and elegance of form. He is less inaccurate in fact than Michelet, but he is also much less absorbed by a single idea at a time, and the result is that he seldom attains to the vivid representation of which Michelet was a master.
Connections
He married Hermione Asaky, the daughter of a Roumanian poet.
