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Resurrecting the Archaic: Symbols and Recurrence in Henri Lefebvre's Revolutionary Romanticism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2019

Ryan L. Allen
Ryan L. Allen*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: rallen11@illinois.edu
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Abstract

Solar crosses were symbolic markers that once punctuated the rolling pathways at the foot of the French Pyrenees. For Henri Lefebvre, these “crucified suns” came to symbolize a number of time-tested traditions that could revitalize everyday life in the modern world. His efforts to resurrect the archaic confronted two contemporary contexts: the hypermodernization promoted throughout France's long Reconstruction and the degradation of provincial communities that attended it. A heretical Marxist, Lefebvre's social thought included a Romantic sensibility that was organically connected to southwestern France and Friedrich Nietzsche. Dialectical in nature, Lefebvre's revolutionary Romanticism repurposed age-old styles of symbolic expression and cyclical recurrence in order to transform everyday life and keep the deracinating forces of modernization at bay. The French sociologist's enduring interest in archaic traces, and his belief that they might one day be revived, reorients how we approach his landmark studies on space and time in the modern city.

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Modern Intellectual History , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , June 2021 , pp. 474 - 496
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

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References

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6 Lefebvre, Henri, Les communautés paysannes pyrénéennes: Thèse soutenue à la Sorbonne, 1954 (Bagnères-de-Bigorre, 2014), 109Google Scholar. Meantime Lefebvre was not alone in finding in so-called primitive cultures a revelation and a grandeur. Georges Bataille, Georges Devereux, and Mircea Eliade each recovered, revalued, and sought to resurrect aspects of the monde archaïque in their postwar studies of prehistory, ethnopsychiatry, and the history of religions. Whether their collective revaluation of the archaic marked a mid-century sea change in French primitivism is a weighty question that remains unresolved. Although outside the scope of this article, Lefebvre's work on archaic symbols and cyclical recurrence underscores the importance of an inquiry into the relationship between reevaluations of the “archaic” penned after World War II and interwar explorations of the “primitive” such as those delivered at the College of Sociology.

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15 Eliade, Mircea, “Eranos,” Nimbus 2/4 (1954), 57–8Google Scholar, at 58. Eliade, however, writing in a tradition closer to Carl Jung than to Nietzsche, spoke of transhistorical symbols, timeless paradises, and universal archetypes not to be found in Lefebvre's vast oeuvre.

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17 Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space, trans. Nicholson-Smith, Donald (Oxford, 1991), 233Google Scholar. As Edward Baring has pointed out, “the 1950s have too often been lost in intellectual histories between the golden age of existentialism and the structuralist invasion.” Baring, “Humanist Pretensions,” 609. The symbolic has received intelligent treatment of late; see, for example, Tarot, Camille, De Durkheim à Mauss, l'invention du symbolique: Sociologie et science des religions (Paris, 1999)Google Scholar; Breckman, Warren, Adventures of the Symbolic: Post-Marxism and Radical Democracy (New York, 2013Google Scholar); and Peden, Knox, “Untimely Hesitations,” Modern Intellectual History 13/3 (2016), 831–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Nietzsche anticipated Lefebvre's writings on symbols in at least three ways. Nietzsche expressed a profound distaste for those who played hide-and-seek behind a sphere of foggy symbols that were at once everywhere and nowhere. Nietzsche declared his own horror before the ghastly symbol of the holy cross, and he invoked an image of where the sea met the shore to symbolize an overflowing will. Marx, conversely, “tended to expel symbols and symbolism from the realm of knowledge, and to identify them with mystified consciousness,” Lefebvre wrote. Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, 331. See, respectively, Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Case of Wagner, trans. Kaufmann, Walter (New York, 1992), §10Google Scholar; Nietzsche, , On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Kaufmann, Walter (New York, 1967) Part 1, §8Google Scholar; and Nietzsche, , The Gay Science, trans. Kaufmann, Walter (New York, 1974), § 310Google Scholar.

19 Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, 587, 598; Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 135–7. Lefebvre's trenchant critique of structuralism continued in Lefebvre, Henri, Position: Contre les technocrates (Paris, 1967)Google Scholar; and Lefebvre, , Au-delà du structuralisme (Paris, 1971)Google Scholar.

20 Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, 95; Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, 580, 599, 614; Lefebvre, Pyrénées, 101.

21 Lefebvre, Pyrénées, 102. Before World War II, with National Socialism in mind, wrote, Lefebvre, “We can imagine a Celtic fanaticism that attacks Diderot, Voltaire, Montaigne, and Rabelais because they are too rational, too critical, too subversive; a Celtic fanaticism that proposes as its ‘spiritual’ aim to go in white robes to gather mistletoe on oaks. This madness is precisely that of the fascists.” Lefebvre, Henri, Le nationalisme contre les nations (Paris, 1937), 157Google Scholar.

22 Henri Lefebvre, “Que dit le soleil crucifié?”, in Lefebvre, Introduction à la modernité, 101–6.

23 Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, 98–9; Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, 613; Lefebvre, Pyrénées, 103. On survivals in culture see Tylor, Edward B., Primitive Culture (New York, 1958; first published 1871)Google Scholar.

24 In the late 1930s, exceptions to the belief that Nietzsche was a prophet of National Socialism were few and far between. In France, they were Nicolas, Marius-Paulin, De Nietzsche à Hitler (Paris, 1936)Google Scholar; Bataille, Georges, “Nietzsche et les fascistes,” Acéphale 2 (1937), 3–13Google Scholar; and Lefebvre, Henri, Nietzsche (Paris, 1939)Google Scholar. See Rider, Jacques Le, Nietzsche en France: De la fin du XIXe siècle au temps présent (Paris, 1999)Google Scholar.

25 Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, 99.

26 Ibid., 329; Lefebvre, Pyrénées, 103–4; and Lefebvre, “Le soleil crucifié,” 1021. On the primitivistic residue that stuck to French social thought see Lefebvre, Henri, “Problèmes de sociologie rurale: La communauté paysanne et ses problèmes historico-sociologiques,” Cahiers internationaux de sociologie 6 (1949), 78–100Google Scholar; and Lévi-Strauss, Claude, “La notion d'archaïsme en ethnologie,” Cahiers internationaux de sociologie 12 (1952), 3–25Google Scholar. For primitivism in the arts and tourism of postwar France see Sherman, Daniel, French Primitivism and the Ends of Empire, 1945–1975 (Chicago, 2011)Google Scholar.

27 Lefebvre, Henri, “Accumulation et progrès,” Cahiers de l'Institut de science économique appliquée: Série M. Recherches et dialogues philosophiques et économiques (1961), 51–4Google Scholar. Compare with Bataille, Georges, La peinture préhistorique: Lascaux, ou la naissance de l'art (Geneva, 1955)Google Scholar; and Eliade, Mircea, “Rencontres à Ascona,” in Corbin, Henry and Eliade, Mircea, À propos des Conférences Eranos (Ascona, 1960), 16–23Google Scholar.

28 Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, 616.

29 Lefebvre, Les communautés paysannes pyrénéennes, 86, 94. Lefebvre drew on the work of Max Raphaël, who argued that the elaborate symbols in the prehistoric caves of southwestern France supposed a civilization with aesthetic mores, social differentiation, and a sustainable style of life. Raphaël, Max, Prehistoric Cave Paintings, trans. Guterman, Norbert (New York, 1945)Google Scholar. On Lefebvre's friendship with the German art historian see Latour, Patricia and Combes, Francis, Conversations avec Henri Lefebvre (Paris, 1991), 44–5Google Scholar.

30 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 254.

31 Henri Lefebvre, “Notes sur la ville nouvelle,” in Lefebvre, Introduction à la modernité, 121–30. Born in Hagetmau in 1901, Lefebvre lived in Navarrenx until age thirteen. He returned to the Pyrenean region regularly in the decades that followed. Years later, Lefebvre's involvement in the Resistance drew his attention to the communities of the Campan valley. Just as World War II had initiated a shift from philosophy to the sociological study of rural societies, the height of postwar modernization would spur a second transition, from rural to urban sociology. On the Campan valley see Lefebvre, Henri, La vallée de Campan: Étude de sociologie rurale (Paris, 1963)Google Scholar.

32 In “La lumière du sud-ouest,” Roland Barthes compared slow walks beneath the Pyrenees that fostered memories of an ancient practice with newly constructed roads that were no more than overprivileged means of communication. When Barthes described modernization's effect on the French Southwest his metaphors shifted, as did Lefebvre's, from dusty old pathways to feedback loops and rapidly circulating networks. Barthes, Roland, “La lumière du sud-ouest,” L'Humanité (1977), 330–34Google Scholar.

33 Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, 117, 120, 124.

34 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 192.

35 Ibid., 234, 251, 332.

36 Ibid., 137, 166, 192.

37 Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, 616.

38 “Une vision” appeared nearly a decade later in Lefebvre, Introduction à la modernité, 131–4. In letters to Norbert Guterman, Lefebvre described writing “Une vision” while on vacation at his cousin's home in Saint-Pabu, near Erquy on Brittany's northwestern coast. Henri Lefebvre, “Letters to Guterman, 1939–49,” Norbert Guterman papers, Butler Library, Columbia University.

39 Lefebvre, La somme et le reste, 242–3; Latour and Combes, Conversations avec Lefebvre, 98–9.

40 See, among many others, Tylor, Primitive Culture; and Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris, 1945)Google Scholar.

41 Lefebvre, La somme et le reste, 236.

42 See ibid., 233–50. Compare with Smith, Douglas, Transvaluations: Nietzsche in France, 1872–1972 (Oxford, 1996), 82Google Scholar: “What seems to start as a Marxist critique of Nietzsche gradually develops into a Nietzschean critique of Marxism.”

43 The importance of Lefebvre's temporal vision for historians is explored in Guha, Ranajit, History at the Limit of World-History (New York, 2002)Google Scholar. See also Hunt, Lynn, Measuring Time, Making History (Budapest, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, 128–34. The link between human creativity and the evocative visions of shamans was to be a theme of “La conscience privée.” Henri Lefebvre, “Plan,” Norbert Guterman papers, Butler Library, Columbia University.

45 Just before this decisive statement, Lefebvre asked, “Archaism, did you say? So culture is one big job lot, take it or leave it? Does it come down to us as a single bequest?” Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, 373–4. See also Lefebvre, La somme et le reste, 256–64.

46 On the transitional nature of Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations see Williamson, George S., The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche (Chicago, 2004)Google Scholar; and Emden, Christian, “Toward a Critical Historicism: History and Politics in Nietzsche's Second Untimely Meditation,” Modern Intellectual History 3/1 (2006), 1–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 Lefebvre, Nietzsche, 49.

48 Lefebvre, Henri, L'irruption de Nanterre au sommet (Paris, 1968)Google Scholar; Lefebvre, , Le droit à la ville (Paris, 1968)Google Scholar. On the theme of an antinomian ethos that culminated in and after May 1968 see Bourg, Julian, From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought (Montreal, 2007)Google Scholar.

49 The thin line between returning to a lost past and rekindling vestiges of the past in the present ran like a tense thread throughout twentieth-century primitivism. For Nietzsche's views see Nietzsche, Friedrich, “On Redemption,” in Nietzsche, , Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Kaufmann, Walter (New York, 1995), 137–42Google Scholar; and Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Part 1, §17.

50 Lefebvre, Nietzsche, 51, 133–5. Lefebvre, Henri, L'existentialisme (Paris, 1946), 153, 236–7Google Scholar.

51 Lefebvre, Nietzsche, 84, 125–30.

52 Lefebvre, La somme et le reste, 642–3.

53 Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, 650–51; Lefebvre, Nietzsche, 125; Lefebvre, “Le soleil crucifié,” 1018–19; Lefebvre, La somme et le reste, 234–6.

54 Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, 348, 630.

55 Ibid., 342–4, 642.

56 Lefebvre, Henri, The Urban Revolution, trans. Bononno, Robert (Minneapolis, 2003), 94, 170Google Scholar.

57 Ibid., 82–4.

58 Ibid., 179.

59 Debord quoted three paragraphs from Lefebvre's La proclamation de la Commune that closely resembled an article written by the situationists. From this, Debord concluded that a situationist specter haunted Lefebvre's 496-page study of the Paris Commune. For the paragraphs in question, see Internationale situationniste 7 (1962), 12. As for purposeful misspellings, the first printing of Lefebvre's La proclamation de la Commune contained an acknowledgment to a mysterious “Guy Debud.” Intentionally misspelled or not, “Debud” was removed from further printings within the year. A correctly spelled Debord, however, did not replace the erasure. See the first printing of Lefebvre, Henri, La proclamation de la Commune: 26 mars 1871 (Paris, 1965), 11Google Scholar. In the juvenile tit for tat, Debord concluded his review with a couple of misspellings of his own. Debord wrote that “the Thinker of Nanterre Henri Lelièvre” had mastered the subject of the Commune by his “brilliant dialectoque.” Debord, Guy, “L'historien Lefebvre,” Internationale situationniste 10 (1966), 73–5Google Scholar.

60 Lefebvre, La proclamation de la Commune, 40–41. See also Lefebvre, Henri, “Qu'est-ce que le passé historique?”, Les Temps modernes 161 (1959), 159–69Google Scholar.

61 Debord, “L'historien Lefebvre,” 74.

62 Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, 167, 178.

63 Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, 156.

64 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 393.

65 Ibid., 384–5.

66 See, especially, Deleuze, Gilles, Différence et répétition (Paris, 1968)Google Scholar. On the other extreme, Lefebvre shuddered at Fernand Braudel's own aqueous image—which opposed contingency and flux by rendering in the near stillness of the ocean's depths a remorselessly repetitive and crushing sediment of culture built up over the longue durée. Braudel, Fernand, “Histoire et sciences sociales: La longue durée,” Annales 4 (1958), 725–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67 Lefebvre, La somme et le reste, 653; Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, 342.

68 Lefebvre, “Vers un romantisme révolutionnaire,” 665.

69 Lefebvre, “Le soleil crucifié,” 1021; Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, 374.

70 Hughes, H. Stuart, The Obstructed Path: French Social Thought in the Years of Desperation, 1930–1960 (New York, 1968)Google Scholar.

71 Lefebvre, “Accumulation et progrès,” 42, 52–3.

72 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 201.