Chapter 2 - Breaking the glass and striking the rock

Summary

The early career of Roger Bastide was the predictable one of a graduate of the aggrégation de philosophie: he taught in the senior years of a sequence of provincial colleges. One of his earliest available texts is an address to the award-winning 1926 graduates in Lorient (Britanny). His topic was regionalism and tradition and this leads him, as the genre requires, to direct exhortation.

His choice of topic, we can see now, and what he did say are indicative of life-long concerns. It was also rooted in crucial debates of the decade in France. It has been noted that from the end of the nineteenth century, memory became a central topic for a whole range of authors: psychologists, historians, philosophers—and novelists. Suffice to mention two monumental works: Matter and Memory (1896) in which Henri Bergson developed a contrast fundamental to his whole subsequent work, and Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust (1913–1927). The issue of memory became socially and politically important because of the notion of tradition. Solidarity and tradition were at the core of the agenda of early sociology on France. That the individual is born into a pre-existing social whole and subsequently shaped by it was the basic premise that led to fertile inquiries. Traditionalism however, quickly became the rallying point of political anti-modernity movements (first led by persistent royalists and staunch Catholics).