René Girard in France

The reception of René Girard’s work in France deserves book-length treatment to fully describe the heated debates, conflicting expectations, and controversy that it inspired before its lasting importance was eventually recognized. We must keep in mind that, although he lived in the US and became a citizen in 1956, he always kept his sights on his native land. He watched the transformations of French thought from the other side of the ocean; he forged his own writing strategies in response to French thought; and it was within the context of French debates that he chose to formulate, through the conjoined hypotheses concerning mimetic desire, the scapegoat, and Judeo-Christian writing, the founding event of his return to Christianity in 1959. The shock caused at a personal level by this event, which, by his own admission, relieved him from “existential despair,”¹ informs all of his work, which tries to capture the effects of the Christian revelation in history in the languages of the human sciences (in particular psychology and anthropology). Everything in his work develops as if in constant dialogue with French thinkers. But it is equally true that the postwar climate was itself such that it obliged Girard to stand back a bit in order to meditate on the future of Europe. America offered him comfort, security, far from the mimetic battles of the “capital of luxury and thought.”

No one is a prophet in his own country. This is true of René Girard, who was able to become a prophet by reason of his exile. His passionate head-on engagement of crucial issues and his desire to reach the greatest number of readers by forsaking academic jargon explains the phenomenal impact in the public media that his work aroused in France, as excessive as would be the unjust dismissive reactions that sometimes greeted his work starting in the mid-Eighties. But Girard didn’t care. After the exposition of the first three parts of his hypothesis, he confided to his friend Michel Serres in 1979 that “his work was completed,”² and the risks of a stormy reception became even less important to him. Now his work was part of the French intellectual landscape, and no one could dislodge it. After the publication of subsequent important books, such as Le Bouc émissaire (1982; The Scapegoat, 1986), Shakespeare: Les feux de l’envie (1990; A Theatre of Envy: William Shakespeare, 1991), Je vois Satan tomber comme l’éclair (1999; I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 2001) or Les Origines de la culture (2004; Evolution and Conversion, 2007); the climate of post-9/11; and the publication of Achever Clausewitz (2007; Battling to the End, 2009) offered him a last round of honors, which he completed with great elegance and detachment. By his own admission, the reception of this very apocalyptic book repeated the media success of his first book of interviews in 1978, Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde (Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 1987). Thus we see two great periods in the reception of his work: one extends from 1961 to 1978, which corresponds to the general exposition of the Girardian hypothesis (mimetic desire, the institution of sacrifice, Judeo-Christian writing), the second extends from 1979 to 2007, where Girard returns, by means of numerous interviews and brilliant variations, to an already well-established theory. The triumph of Things Hidden marks a high point, beyond which each new book buttresses the edifice of his thought; at the very least it does not weaken it. At this moment, when he has just left us, we can say with confidence that René Girard is not out of fashion in France.

I will limit myself in this study to the reception of René Girard in the press, French magazines and journals, and French media.³ His growing influence, and the quantity of research that his work inspires after 1980, prohibits one from pushing beyond these first echoes, which are already very numerous by themselves. Thus I set myself a double restriction, since I dedicate this present study...