Jan Goldstein - The Post-Revolutionary Self; Politics and Psyche in France, 1750-1850 (200

The Post-Revolutionary Self
The Post-
Revolutionary Self
Politics and Psyche in France,
1750–1850
Jan Goldstein
H A R V A R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
Copyright © 2005 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Goldstein.
p. cm.
France—History—19th century. 3. Cousin, Victor, 1792–1867. I. Title.
BF697.5.S65G65 2005
618.89Ј00944Ј09033—dc22 2005040206
Goldstein, Jan.
First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 2008.
The post-revolutionary self : politics and psyche in France, 1750–1850 / Jan
ISBN 978-0-674-01680-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-674-02769-5 (pbk.)
1. Self—Social aspects—France—History—18th century. 2. Self—Social aspects—
To my family, old and new
Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Preface xi
Introduction: Psychological Interiority versus Self-Talk 1
I THE PROBLEM FOR WHICH PSYCHOLOGY
FURNISHED A SOLUTION
1 The Perils of Imagination at the End of the Old Regime 21
2 The Revolutionary Schooling of Imagination 60
II THE POLITICS OF SELFHOOD
3 Is There a Self in This Mental Apparatus? 103
4 An A Priori Self for the Bourgeois Male:
Victor Cousin’s Project 139
5 Cousinian Hegemony 182
6 Religious and Secular Access to the Vie Intérieure:
Renan at the Crossroads 233
7 A Palpable Self for the Socially Marginal:
The Phrenological Alternative 269
Epilogue 316
Notes 331
Note on Sources 399
Index 403
Illustrations
1. Dutch broadside of 1720 satirizing the role
of imagination 49
2. Handbill advertising a private course in sensationalist
psychology 94
3. Diagram of the psyche by the young Sieyès 124
4. Victor Cousin, photographed by Gustave Le Gray 210
5. “The Interior of the Holy Virgin,” etching by Le Brun 244
6. “Le Cranioscope-Phrénologistocope,” 1836 cartoon
by Daumier 286
Preface
This book grew out of my earlier work on French psychiatry. In studying
the furor provoked in the first half of the nineteenth century by the diag-
nostic category monomania—one of the signal contributions of the new
medical specialty during its formative phase—I encountered a distinctive
and, from my perspective, decidedly odd mindset. I became aware of how
intolerable to many Frenchmen of that era was the notion of a mental ill-
ness that might affect only a single idea or emotion or behavioral propen-
sity, leaving the rest of the mind intact. Contemporaries offered a number
of explicit rationales for their horror. Monomania, they said, destroyed
moral responsibility by positing that a seemingly normal individual might
lapse unintentionally into criminal conduct when a discrete, circum-
scribed pathology was activated; indeed defense lawyers were calling psy-
chiatrists into court as expert witnesses to get their clients off the hook on
just those grounds. Monomania, they additionally said, was an offense to
religion because a mind divisible into healthy and sick portions had to be
a brute material substance rather than a spiritual entity or soul. Behind
these specific complaints, however, I detected a more general motif: a
strong distaste for psychic fragmentation and a zealous insistence on the
unity of the self. Indeed the fear of fragmentation and the fetishization of
a unitary self, or moi—repeatedly named as such—were the opposite
sides of the same coin. I had apparently stumbled on a historical moment
in which the self, ordinarily an elusive and intensely personal concept,
had come to the fore in no uncertain terms, announcing itself as an issue
for public discussion.
I have been pursuing that nineteenth-century French self, and its
eighteenth-century antecedents, for many years now, and it is hence with
a mixture of pleasure and relief that I have reached the point of consign-
ing the results of my quest to the pages of this book. Completing the book
also enables me, happily, to record my gratitude for the abundant support,
both material and moral, that I received along the way.
xii Preface
Financial support for leaves of absence from teaching to conduct the
research for the book was generously provided by a National Endow-
ment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers, a National
Science Foundation Scholars Award (Program in the History and Phi-
losophy of Science), a grant from the Spencer Foundation, and a John
Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. At a later stage in the
project, a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral
Sciences, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, provided an
ideal environment for writing. So did a stint as a visitor to the School of
Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, which I enjoyed in
the home stretch. The liberal leave policy of the Social Sciences Division
of the University of Chicago made it possible for me to benefit from
these other sources of largesse; it deserves special mention here as a
force powerfully su...