L'emergence des sciences de la religion: La Monarchie de Juillet: un moment fondateur (review)

Michel Despland, L'emergence des sciences de la religion. La monarchie de Juillet: un moment fondateur. Paris: L'Harmattan, 1999, 598 pages.

This voluminous tome impresses initially by its striking erudition.(Professor Frank Bowman is the only scholar known to me who seems to have similarly detailed knowledge on the same period and topic.) The number of works and authors consulted by Michel Despland (more than one completely forgotten by now, even by specialists) is staggering. The question soon asked by the reader is whether Despland's ideas do his data justice. The answer is yes, even though it takes a while to uncover the book's shaping ideas.

Despland's comparatist angle succeeds in placing squarely in context the rise of a science of myth and religion which matured in the 20th century with Frazer, Campbell, Eliade, and Kereny. In the same way that the biological sciences of the early 19th century (zoology, paleontology and many others) or even the social sciences (anthropology, early sociology) or history and linguistics had chosen the comparatist slant as their favorite methodology, so the many of the earliest scholars in religious studies used comparative lines of analysis to broaden their insights, avidly including non-European (or ancient) religions and myth systems in their studies.

A few years ago Despland produced a notable study about French literary aesthetics and Romantic religion as an "erased code." The implications of that earlier study are now recaptured (all-too-briefly in my opinion) toward the end of the present study (pp. 489-502): Despland writes about the "reprises litteraires" of the scholarly preoccupations that he had examined in the bulk of his study. This is a subject of high merit, all too rarely approached by other scholars.

Finally it is not without profit that we can follow the way in which Despland anchors the rise and growth of the discipline of religious studies in a historical context--the second Restoration, the Orleans monarchy (1830-1848)--while not ignoring earlier or later developments. Indeed the reader observes with some fascination the stubborn persistence of Catholic imagery and thought traditions inside the most various (and often adversarial) discourses: politically revolutionary, atheist and pantheist, and many others. On the other hand, Despland does not restrict himself to Catholic traditions--important as Montalembert, Ozanam, Lacordaire, Lamennais, the abbe Migne and a host of others may have been. Ample room is offered to Protestant (pp. 161-182) as well as to Jewish contributions. In fact the latter are shown by the author to come in two shapes: either as direct studies by Jewish scholars (or by others on Jewish traditions--pp. 183-197), or else by converted Jewish scholars inside Catholic or general fields of study (pp. 70-71 and elsewhere).

Despland's book is also valuable for its solid and extensive foundations. Precursors such as Benjamin Constant, Mme. de Stael, and particularly Chateaubriand (e.g. pp. 65-70, 57-60 and elsewhere) are extensively and insightfully discussed in the first few chapters. Despland shrewdly points out parallels and developments that usually go unnoticed. He is one of the few to venture the argument that, despite enormous ideological differences, there are structural similarities between Saint-Simon and Joseph de Maistre (pp. 46-49), growing out of their common (and symmetrically opposed) utopian aspirations. He also emphasizes the great influence of Chateaubriand's Les Martyrs (pp. 203-204); in fact, although this is overlooked today, the Viscount's "lyrical epic" literally created a sub-genre of the historical novel, of which we have abundant examples in the 19th and the early 20th centuries.

A durable merit of Prof. Despland's study will remain his meticulous analysis of the mode in which the general theories of symbols (in turn descended from comparatist religious studies) gradually gave birth to frameworks of the "civil religion" that loomed so large in the Third Republic, as well as to...