Revolutions in Time: Chateaubriand on the Antiquity of the Earth

In his Philosophy of History, Hegel writes of the French Revolution as a key moment in the intellectual history of civilization that effected a major shift in the human race's epistemological perspective of the world and its ability to shape that world. In his attempt to convey the magnitude of this "glorious mental dawn,"¹ Hegel refers to an earlier intellectual breakthrough, which similarly caused humans to reevaluate their place in the universe. He writes:

Never since the sun had stood in the firmament and the planets revolved around it had it been perceived that man's existence centers in his head, that is, in thought, inspired by which he builds up the world of reality.²

With this comparison to the Copernican Revolution, which interestingly enough evokes both the astronomical acceptation of revolution as a cyclical orbit in order to describe the more modern connotation of revolution as a radical change that marks a clear and perhaps even destructive break with the past, Hegel equates the French Revolution with what was not only a key moment in the history of science but perhaps more importantly an intellectual shift that marked "the rise of the world-view of modern European culture."³

Another epistemological shift had also developed over the course of the eighteenth century, one that, like Hegel's "mental dawn," prompted questions about human kind's perspective on history. As Paolo Rossi has pointed out in his work The Dark Abyss of Time, when Robert Hooke studied those "figured stones" that we now call fossils at the beginning of the eighteenth century it was commonly accepted that the Earth's past, as was evidenced by the Scriptures, spanned only six thousand years, whereas by the end of the century, contemporaries of the French Revolution could look back on a past that was by then regarded as consisting not of thousands but rather of millions of years. This shift was no less comparable to the establishment of the heliocentric heavens:

The difference lies not only between living at the center or at the margins of the universe, but also between living in a present relatively close to the origins (and having at hand, what is more, a text that narrates the entire history of the world) or living instead in a present behind which stretches the "dark abyss" (the term is Buffon's) of an infinite time.⁴

This shift in the conceptualization of the natural world is a direct consequence of what has been dubbed the "discovery of time," in other words, the understanding of the temporal dimension of natural processes that meant that Nature—which was now perceived as having a history—was "no longer opposed, as the reign of the immutable, to history, which [was] the reign of becoming and change."⁵

In this article I will examine how René de Chateaubriand, one of the most important literary figures of the post-Revolutionary era, dealt with the "discovery of time" in his reflections on history. It is clear from the amount of space devoted to the subject of the antiquity of the earth in such early works as L'Essai sur les révolutions and Le Génie du christianisme that Chateaubriand was struggling with the issues raised by new geological evidence. But perhaps more importantly, notwithstanding his position on the age of the earth, Chateaubriand's historical vision, much like the great naturalists of his time, portrays a universe in which the evidence of multiple past revolutions only proves that European man does not stand at the center of the historical system but rather as a diminished figure on history's margins. It is in this sense that Chateaubriand, who so staunchly argues against the antiquity of the earth, seems to have felt the shock waves not only of political revolution but also of his era's new Copernican revolution.

Before discussing the place of this epistemological revolution in Chateaubriand's historiography let us first briefly examine some of the works that formed the backdrop to Chateaubriand's writing on this subject. This survey includes the works of the...