Gaston Paris et la philologie romane (review)

All French medievalists recognize Gaston Paris as a preeminent early figure of their discipline: son of Paulin Paris and successor to him in 1872 as only the second medieval French scholar appointed to the Collège de France, cofounder of the seminal review Romania, tireless promoter of scientific method in textual edition and in literary criticism more generally. Beyond these basics, opinions diverge. Traditionalists concede the questionableness of some of Paris's methods by today's standards but applaud his achievements and decry the presumptuous judgments made by latter-day scholars who take for granted the research tools bequeathed by their nineteenth-century forebears. Skeptics, by contrast, sometimes designated as "New Philologists," deride Paris's career as the embodiment of a smugly sclerotic and wrong-headed positivistic approach to language and literary studies; a famous polemical salvo of 1989 even let fly the terms "dinosaurs" and "Monsieur Procuste."

In this meticulously researched and painstakingly presented work, Ursula Bähler seeks, most immediately, to correct the latter camp's mistaken impression of Paris (the S is pronounced) as a rote-fact killjoy philologist, insensitive to esthetic nuance and beauty, obsessed with sterile source-hunting – in a word, the Mr. Gadgrind of French medieval studies. She does so not by rehashing traditionalist arguments but by presenting immense amounts of new material culled from a close reading of archival sources and thousands of pages of Paris's published but understudied criticism. The ultimate goal of this highly ambitious work is to challenge the reader to leap beyond even the traditionalist camp's view of Paris and consider him and his contemporaries the real "New Philologists," for, startling as it may seem to many observers, Gaston Paris was an original thinker – a leading intellectual, even – of his day. Over the course of its 650 pages of exposition (the final 200 pages are composed of appendices and bibliography), the book gives the impression of a pyramidal form, with a vast and solidly unassailable base tapering upwards to a fine point that, it must be said, becomes more fragile and vulnerable the higher it reaches. Readers may quibble with the apex of the argument, but doing so in no way negates the validity and importance of the material it rests upon.

After a brief overview of recent scholarship on similar topics (Alain Corbellari's study of Joseph Bédier and Charles Ridoux's on medieval studies in France between 1860 and 1914 being the most salient), Bähler announces her choice of a biographical method as a necessary corrective to overly structural approaches that efface the individual from the historical record. One of the great strengths of this book is its attentiveness to method, and in an opening gambit that manages to be as clever as it is insightful Bähler meditates on history, evidence, narrative emplotment and the limits of interpretive knowledge through an anecdote about factual corrections a police inspector made to the subject's seemingly straightforward passport application. The first section ("Essai de biographie," 175 pages) embellishes on these meditations by bringing irrefutable epistolary evidence to bear on the post-facto story-telling engaged in by critics including Paris himself – in particular, that a self-assured late adolescent marched determinedly off to further his training in philology and medieval studies with the best scholars in Germany. The Paris who emerges from these pages – by turns angst-ridden and jovial, strongly anti-clerical and politically engaged to the degree his professionalism would allow – is a far cry not just from the conventional portrait of the no-nonsense, dry-as-dust establishment figure to which medievalists are accustomed but also from the public persona that Paris himself usually projected.

Part Two ("La Cité des sciences," 169 pages) reads as an extended reflection on the history of ideas in mid- to late nineteenth-century Europe. In great (and sometimes tedious) detail, Bähler places Paris in the context of the great philosophical currents and quandries of the day, notably the...