0498
VICTOR BROMBERT
of fabricating doctrines to cover their narcissistic arrogance,
of undennining the highest virtues (such as love of country),
they were said to be a threat to the very existence of society.
The
philosophes-especially
at the hour of their triumph–
sometimes replied with rather excessive statements. In his
Essai
sur les regnes de Claude et de Nhon,
Diderot defines the role
of the philosopher as follows: "The magistrate dispenses justice;
the philosopher teaches the magistrate what is just and unjust."
Or, even less modestly: "The philosopher teaches the priest
what the gods are." Generally, however, the
philosophes
are
more measured in their pronouncements on themselves. In the
Encyclopedie,
for instance: "The philosopher does not con–
sider himself in exile in this world"-a lapidary but moving
statement of human solidarity.
Nothing could be more unfair and more unfounded than
to view the nineteenth century as the debaser of these ideals.
The Encyclopedists did not degenerate into the ludicrous
figures of Homais, Bouvard or Pecuchet. Their true heirs are
men such as Hugo, Michelet and Renan-and on a humbler
level, the underpaid, undernourished, but dedicated country
schoolteachers. Prophets and martyrs for the republican mysti–
que, pioneers of the New Regime, these
instituteurs
have shaped
generations of French minds, patiently propagating the gospel
of progress and civic virtues. Their figure-now already part
of a bygone age-has acquired a quasi-mythological stature.
"Saints without hope," Brice Parrain calls them in his dense,
moving book,
La Mort de Jean Madec.
Charles Peguy was fond
of referring to them as "the black hussars of the Republic": one
of the
Cahiers de la Quinzaine
he treasured most was that
given over to Antonin Lavergne's somber short novel about a
pathetic schoolteacher literally asphyxiated by poverty,
Jean
Coste.
As for Zola's
Vhite
(a too obvious fictional transcription
of the Dreyfus case), it attempted to sum up the virtues of the
instituteur
and raise him to the level of a tragic hero. Dedicated
to an apostolate of truth, isolated in his thirst for justice, suffer-
