50
PARTISAN REVIEW
Things began to change in the mid-eighteenth century as priests lost
their traditional role and their places went vacant. For the period that follows
we are able to take advantage of the exemplary work of Benichou, who first
took this subject up in
Le
sacre de
/'errivain,
then in
Le
temps des prophetes
(1977) and
Les mages romantiques
(1988). He has shown how this
"coronation of the writer," already prepared by the Enlightenment, was
fi–
nally achieved by the Romantics. One might even narrowly define
Romanticism to be precisely this elevation of art to the summit of human ac–
tivities, and the attribution to the poet of the role of prophet and ppiritual
guide. To establish their doctrine the Romantics borrowed from diverse
sources - from liberals as well as from counter-revolutionaries, from both
mystics and philosophical rationalists. Perhaps the most remarkable change in
relation to this last group was that the poet actually replaced the philosopher.
Benichou's inquiry unfortunately stops around 1850, yet to consider
the role of intellectuals we must also treat the more recent past. Looking
back, one now sees that the poets' attempts to play the same sacerdotal role
was doomed from the start because the script had already changed. The
poets aspired to be the priests of the modern age; but, as Benichou notes,
"they had been promoted only precisely because there was no longer room
for a real authority in the spiritual realm." One saw instead "the clerisy of an
age that no longer believed in priests, that accepted the divine only on
condition of doubt and liberal critique." Is it really surprising under such con–
ditions that the ambition of the Romantics was never really realized? The
bourgeoisie - that is, the readers of the Romantics - had its own concerns
and priorities. The events of 148 in particular, and the disappointments that
followed, sounded the death knell of a great number of hopes. A new phase
in the history of this "coronation" thus began: since no one listened to the
prophet, one might say (extending the biblical metaphor) that he then trans–
formed himself into a "smiter." The emblematic figure here is not Victor
Hugo but Flaubert, who found evel-ything "execrable." Society no longer in–
carnated the writer's ideals and did not respond to his appeals. Offended, he
decided to stigmatize it ("philistines!"), or to condemn it as a whole, even to
reject it in principle. Or he decided to ignore it and to cultivate instead the
garden of pure art, the disinterested pursuit of the beautiful. This second pe–
riod was almost the inverse of the first, and its bitterness was proportional to
the hopes of the previous generation. The writer still saw himselfat the top
of the human pyramid, but now he rejected society, whereas before he
hoped
to
be its guide.
Things changed once again at the end of the century, at least in France,
because of the Dreyfus Affair. Moreover, this is the moment when the term
"intellectual" came to replace "man ofletters," since "letters" and "literature"
