Der französische Nietzsche by Giuliano Campioni (review)

According to an old but no longer current prejudice—resulting from the ideological exploitation of his works—Nietzsche represents German culture at its most nationalistic. Considered in this way, the cosmopolitan character of his thought and the various influences he received from other cultures are often forgotten. Against the background of this once widespread notion, Giuliano Campioni seeks to remind us that Nietzsche was a thinker who embraced France and the Latin spirit, not only influenced by the French moralists and French classicism, but also always keeping a surprisingly close eye on his contemporary France. Indeed, Nietzsche read everything French he could lay his hands on, from philosophy and literature to newspapers and influential journals such as Journal des Débats and Revue des deux mondes.

Thus, it is not difficult to imagine what a Herculean task it was to reconstruct these primary and—mostly—secondary sources and, most important, to weigh and assess the interactions between them in Nietzsche’s thought. As one of the editors of the published catalogue of Nietzsche’s personal library, Campioni has been skillfully performing this task for many decades. Der französische Nietzsche is both an exemplary result and a celebration of his lifelong studies, comprising contributions to seminars and conferences, mostly between 1990 and 2000. This is the German translation of a book first published in French in 2001 under the title Les lectures françaises de Nietzsche,¹ a title that perhaps better captures its content—it is not an overview of the topic “Nietzsche and France,” as the German title might suggest.

The “French Nietzsche” unfolds in six chapters, in which Campioni presents important new material on Nietzsche’s French sources. In the first chapter, he criticizes the prejudice according to which Nietzsche was the intellectual antipode of Descartes. Earlier scholarship from both sides of the Rhine was based on a contrast between esprit français and esprit allemande—between French logical clarity, represented by Descartes, and the German heroic mysticism proclaimed by Nietzsche. Campioni insists that such a contrast misrepresents Nietzsche’s intellectual development by focusing merely on The Birth of Tragedy and ignoring his reception and use of Descartes as the model for developing his philosophical method from Human, All Too Human onward. Furthermore, Campioni shows how much Nietzsche’s understanding of Descartes owes to secondary sources, and in particular his readings of contemporary French writers such as Henri Joly, Lefebvre Saint-Ogans, and Ferdinand Brunetière.

The second chapter presents Nietzsche as the antipode of Ernest Renan. Here, Campioni underlines the parallels and differences between Nietzsche’s “overman” and Renan’s notion of “devas (divinities)” as aristocratic responses to the crisis of modernity. Beneath the structural resemblance between the overman and the deva, Campioni argues, there is a substantial difference: while Nietzsche’s idea of the overman is a postulate for experimentation and for widening perspectives in a strictly immanent context, Renan’s concept of devas remains bound to a metaphysical teleological model with Gnostic elements. Moreover, this chapter clearly demonstrates how important not only Richard Wagner and Jacob Burchardt but also writers such as Ximenès Doudan and Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly were for Nietzsche’s reception of Renan.

The third chapter treats the differences between German culture and French civilization in terms of the estrangement between Nietzsche and Wagner. Campioni shows here how decisive Nietzsche’s attraction to French culture was for his gradual emancipation from Wagner, a fierce opponent of French culture who was, of course, very displeased by the growing Francophile tendencies of his former disciple.

The fourth chapter shows how Nietzsche’s concern with the Renaissance—taken as the inception of the Latin spirit—began with Burckhardt, and further strengthened his bond with French culture. Here, Campioni gives a detailed account of how the Renaissance provided Nietzsche with a historical role model for his cultural criticism of the nineteenth century. The conservative philology of the nineteenth century, in which a stark cultural pessimism was predominant...