the emergency of modern time in nineteenth century

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History and Theory45 (February 2006), 51-71 Wesleyan University 2006 ISSN: 0018-2656

CHARTING THE TRANSITIONAL PERIOD: THE EMERGENCE OFMODERN TIME IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

GRAN BLIX

ABSTRACT

This paper seeks to chart a concept of historical experience that French Romantic writersfirst developed to describe their own relationship to historical time: the notion of thetransitional period. At first, the term related strictly to the evolving periodic conceptionof history, one that required breaks, spaces, or zones of indeterminacy to bracket off peri-ods imagined as organic wholes. These transitions, necessary devices in the new grammarof history, also began to attract interest on their own, conceived either as chaotic but cre-ative times of transformation, or, more often, as slack periods of decadence that possessedno proper style but exhibited hybrid traits. Their real interest, however, lies in their reflex-ive application to the nineteenth century itself, by writers and historians such as Alfred deMusset, Chateaubriand, Michelet, and Renan, who in their effort to define their own peri-od envisioned the transitional period as a passage between more coherent and stable his-torical formations. This prospective self-definition of the age of history from a futurestandpoint is very revealing; it shows not just the tension between its organic way of apprehending the past and its own self-perception, but it also opens a window on a newand paradoxical experience of time, one in which change is ceaseless and an end in itself.The paper also presents a critique of the way the term modernity has functioned, fromBaudelaires initial use to the present, to occlude the experience of transition that theRomantics highlighted. By imposing on the nineteenth-century sense of the transitory aheroic period designation, the term modernity denies precisely the reality it describes,and sublimates a widespread temporal malaise into its contrary. The paper concludes thatthe peculiarly modern mania for naming ones period is a function of transitional time,

and that the concept coined by the Romantics still governs our contemporary experience.

This paper seeks to chart a concept of historical experience that took off in thefirst half of the nineteenth century. I will examine texts by a number of writerswho use the term transitional period, most notably Alfred de Musset,Chateaubriand, Ernest Renan, and Jules Michelet, and will treat it as the namefor a specifically modern form of temporal experience. The term carries a dou-ble significance: first, it encodes a crucial aspect of the way the Romanticsunderstood the past, but second, and more importantly, it succeeds in capturing

the ages own understanding of itself as a transition. Given this self-reflexiveapplication, I suggest here that the notion of transitional period can serve as amore accurate description of the time-frame we usually call modernity. Thispervasive label, so ubiquitous and so seductive, yet so empty, has by all accounts


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worn thin and meaningless with use, but its life has been prolonged by a sort of critical automatism that incites us to use the term unsparingly, and to apply it asa euphoric label wherever an object of study needs an instant injection of pres-tige. The label has now become about as hollow as the medals awarded at thecomices agricolesin Madame Bovary, and a critical self-examination is in order.1To take one step in this direction, I argue that the term modernity, with its cel-ebratory overtones, is misleading not just because it lacks neutrality but morecritically because it occludes an experience of time that the term transitionalperiod might recover for us. Before speaking of transitions, however, it is nec-essary to say a few words about periods, since the concepts of period and transi-tion are inextricably linked: there could be no transitions without prior periods, just as, conversely, it would be impossible to identify periods without the inter-stitial zones that set them apart.

The Romantic era did not invent historical periods, but decisively trans-formed and sharpened this ancient concept, seeing the distinct traits of a peri-od as immanent features generated by the historical process itself.2 The a pri-ori scaffolding of earlier philosophies of history (whether of progress, decline,or the cyclical type) into a series of predetermined stages did not vanish, butwas refined into more detailed, supple patterns, in which the unique physiog-nomy of every period, as defined by its culture, customs, and institutions, occu-pies the foreground and defines its profile empirically. This internal derivationalso had a homogenizing thrust, in which the selected blocks of time, in prin-ciple arbitrary, were totalized as whole, organic, and internally coherent enti-tieszones bounded in time as countries were in space. Simultaneously, theyacquired a legitimacy of their own as unique life-worlds, regardless of theirtitle to possess any classical or normative status. Herders claim that each peri-od can only be justly appreciated with reference to its own cultural standards,rather than to the norms of antiquity or, later, the horizon of progress, inaugu-rates this mode of thinking, and foreshadows the historical relativism that willbecome a central tenet of Romantic aesthetics, notably in Stendhal, Hugo, and

GRAN BLIX52

1. For a recent Marxist critique of the terms abuse and vacuity, see Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (New York: Verso, 2002), and ChristopherPrendergasts subsequent discussion in Codeword Modernity, New Left Review23 (Novem-berDecember 2003), 95-112. Jameson observes that in much current usage the term modernity iscoterminous with the defense of free-market capitalism, and that any radical impulse the term oncedesignated is now perceived as distinctly un-modern (9-10). This slippage in contemporary politicaldiscourse need not be reflected, of course, in literary studies, which are still largely wedded to theideal of a radical aesthetic modernity. But when Prendergast comments on the degraded afterlife of the term modernity, and deems it empty, drained of all substantial meaning, a narcotic releasedby the incantatory repetition of the empty signifier (97), one senses inevitable parallels with its lit-erary-critical use. This raises the question: how complicit might the academic celebration of aesthet-ic modernity be with neo-liberalism? Could not the triumphalist narrative of modern arts negativ-

ity be read as a substitute, as it were, for the very progress whose bankruptcy much of itdenounces?2. The logic of history, still largely determined, in Vico, by an external Providence, also becomes

fully immanent in time in the late eighteenth century. Condorcets progress, Hegels Spirit, MicheletsPromethean desire for liberty, and Marxs modes of production are all internal engines of historicaldevelopment that underwrite new forms of periodization.


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Baudelaire.3 This new relativism differentiates the Romantic concept of peri-od from the earlier outlook of a Voltaire, who, while he did succeed in mold-ing the sicle de Louis XIV into a golden age of letters, only did so by erectingit into a new norm, or form of classicism. The nineteenth-century imaginationcan invest itself eclectically in the multiplicity of past periods, without callingunequivocally for their emulation, and has learned instead to appreciate themas unique timescapes. The Romantic turn to the Middle Ages is only the mostobvious example, but one could easily multiply them: Augustin Thierrys vividdepictions of Merovingian life, Huysmanss aesthetic investment in Romandecadence, Michelet and the Renaissance, the Goncourt brothers reinventionof the eighteenth century. Local color often belies nostalgia, but never pre-scribes an eternal norm immune to the flux of time.

This Romantic multiplication of distinct periods, and their imaginary closureas self-contained worlds, brings us back to the transitional period. This conceptis not just a modern invention, it is also a logical requirement of the Romanticconcept of period itself; if periods are both self-contained and radically dis-tinct, it becomes necessary to imagine, at their borders, a brief temporal span thatbridges the gap, a sort of gray zone that distributes the process of transformationover time, to avoid the impression of a sudden incomprehensible rupturetodaythe Middle Ages, tomorrow the Renaissance. The concept of the transitionalperiod fulfills this function of periodical spacing. Like the more modern para-digm shift (Thomas Kuhn) or historical mutation (Michel Foucault), butmuch more modest, it is the historiographical device that permits us to imagineperiods, mentalities, or discourses as coherent cultural spaces that possess a sortof homogeneity from one end to the next and that differ essentially from eachother. As key concepts in the modern grammar of history, transitions are the com-mas or spaces that make periods possible.

I. TRANSITIONS IN THE HISTORICAL IMAGINATION

Not surprisingly, then, the expression transitional period appears frequently inthe nineteenth century, but hardly at all, to my knowledge, before the FrenchRevolution. The earliest uses of the word transition in the historical lexiconseem to denote large-scale changes, or what we might term tectonic shifts inhuman civilization; transition is used in this sense by Benjamin Constant in hiswork on religious history in which he speaks of the transition from fetishism topolytheism.4 This broad sense of crossing from a simpler to a more complexevolutionary stage occurs frequently, and may be the most primitive semanticlayer in the term from which all the others derive. Franois Guizot mentions thelaborious transition from nomadic life to sedentary life when speaking of how

CHARTING THE TRANSITIONAL PERIOD 53

3. See Johann Gottfried Herder, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit [1774] (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1990). He takes Winckelmann to task for disparagingEgyptian art from the standpoint of Greek taste, and argues that every ideal is locally determined foreach people by God, the climate, and the time and stage of the world totality [Weltalters] (32).

4. Benjamin Constant, Journaux intimes(Tbingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2002), 145. Entry forJune 13 (24 prairial), 1804.


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the Frankish invaders of Gaul gradually settled down and became feudal lords.5Pierre Leroux regards the biblical Noah as a symbol of humanity in transition,reading his 950-year lifespan (the transitory period of Noah) figuratively as theborder between antediluvian man and his regenerated heirs.6 The utopian CharlesFourier, for his part, regards the present state of civilization as a social abomi-nation, a painful transition en route to the bliss of phalansteric living: God tol-erates it only as a path of approach leading to the regime of the passionateseries.7 Implicit in all these cases is a picture of the human condition as a seriesof qualitative leaps between distinct historical blocks.

But it is generally to describe less seismic and universal transformations (theseretain a strong Enlightenment flavor), and to denote more concrete and subtleshifts, that the term transitional period comes into use. A work of literary his-tory from 1839, for example, studies Dantes achievement in the context of thir-teenth-century Catholic thought, and depicts this period as a renaissance in whichdivine providence has intervened to make all things new. These periods, weare told, are called transitional periods.8 The accent here is on renewal, ener-gy, and invention, and transition euphorically designates the cultural rebirth thatDante epitomizes.

However, although transitions testify to historical dynamism, they are notthemselves always viewed favorably; on the contrary, they usually denote a timeof chaotic changes, hybrid forms, and eclectic practices, a sort of transitory deca-dence that drags on while an old world is vanishing and a brave new world isslowly settling into place. Guizots remarks about the era prior to the establish-ment of feudalism are a good example: in this transition, he writes, everythingis muddled, local, and disorderly . . . every form of property exists helter-skelter,at the same time . . . nothing is stable any more.9 This negative picture of tran-sitions as chaotic times, drawn in multiple directions, lacking orientation, andthrashing about in place is a constant of the motif. This, of course, does not pre-vent writers from also putting a positive spin on transitions, as chaotic times thatusher in a higher cultural stage. Guizot himself disparages the stretch from thethirteenth to the sixteenth century as a period without character, a period whenconfusion continues to increase, . . . a period of movement without direction,10

but he also notes that when it is viewed within a larger historical continuum, andconsidered . . . in relation to what followed it, as the transition from primitiveEurope to modern Europe, this period comes into clear and vivid focus; itacquires contours, direction, and progress.11

This retrospective placement of a period as a stage within a larger teleologycan lead to a new appreciation for its internal dynamism: anarchy becomes anexpression of energy, and confusion of creative ferment. Many texts therefore

GRAN BLIX54

5. Franois Guizot, Histoire de la civilisation en Europe(Paris: Pichon et Didier, 1828), 14.6. Pierre Leroux, De lHumanit [1840] (Paris: Fayard, 1985), 416.7. Charles Fourier, Le Nouveau monde Industriel(1830), 73.8. A.-F. Ozanam, Dante et la philosophie catholique au treizime sicle(Paris: Perisse Frre,

1839), 21.9. Guizot, Histoire de la civilisation en Europe, 14.10. Ibid ., 139.11. Ibid ., 9.


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accent the invisible labor that goes on beneath the overall reign of confusion.Guizot discerns a slow and hidden labor in the late Middle Ages.12 But theimage that most often expresses this idea is that of new construction takingplace amid the ruins. The liberal Catholic thinker Lamennais, for example,admits that transitional periods were always stormy periods, but reminds usthat already at the heart of the confusion produced by the overthrow of the pre-vious order there appear elements of a newer and more perfect order. He illus-trates this double process of decay and renewal by pointing out how Christianity. . . raised the imposing edifice of medieval society . . . on the wreckage of theRoman Empire.13 Taking our cue from this imagery, we might picture transi-tions as periods surrounded by scaffolding, and marked by placards readingclosed for renovation.

But the benign reading of transitions as renewals is overshadowed by the con-sensus over their dismal character. Whatever Promised Land may lie beyond thetransition, it inevitably appears itself as a stretch of desert, an undefined no-mans land sandwiched between more substantial cultural formations. This isespecially true in the aesthetic realm, where such periods are generally thoughtto produce forgettable art that has degenerated into bad taste and succumbed tothe vulgar charms of a hybrid, flamboyant, or decadent style. Sainte-Beuve pro-vides a classic instance of this charge: in hisTableau de la posie franaise au XVIe sicle(1828), when he speaks of that transitional period that links thepoetry of the reign of Louis XIII with that of the reign of Henri III (the periodafter Ronsard), he uses expressions such as that exhausted school, those ener-vated disciples, and symptoms of decrepitude.14 Further on in the same texthe also associates a slightly equivocal poetics with the transitional periodduring which CorneillesCid appeared.15 This kinship of dubious art with transi-tions quickly becomes so self-evident that it begins to operate automatically.Thus we see Baudelaire in theSalon de 1846 refer to what he calls the shame-less filth . . . proper to transitional periods, after having derided Victor Hugo inthe same salon as a decadent or transitional composer, as if these two termscarried identical meanings.16

But before accepting these value judgments, it is worth stopping to draw thedistinction between the thing and the name: what a specific culture ends up des-ignating as a transitional period might itself become a period of its own depend-ing on the viewpoint from which it is observed. The Middle Ages is the primeexample of such a phenomenon: named pejoratively for its parenthetical charac-ter, it remained an arid period of slumber until the Romantics at last chose tounearth their national and religious roots there. This leads to a historiographicalparadox: every apparent transition is at the same time a potential period thatawaits discovery. But this destabilization of time falls prey to a further irony: for


12. Ibid.13. Flicit de Lamennais, Articles, Journal, LAvenir [1831] (Paris: P. Daubre et Cailleux,1837), 209.

14. C.-A. Sainte-Beuve,Tableau de la posie franaise au XVIe sicle[1828] (Paris: AlphonseLemerre, 1876), 196-198.

15. Ibid ., 423-424.16. Baudelaire,Salon de 1846 , reprinted inCritique dart (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 91 and 107.


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every gray stretch of time lifted out of the historical continuum, and molded intoan autonomous period, new transitions necessarily emerge, and the fuzzy bor-derline zones inevitably multiply as fast as the periods. One might conclude fromthis that the transitional period is an evil inherent in historical thought, anundesirable side-effect of the periodic imagination: the identification of periods,styles, and movements will always perversely require the production of new grayzones that are themselves subject to becoming new periods that require yetanother transitional period. No revisionism can ever hope to abolish these inter-valsindeed, efforts to do so will only multiply them. From this perspective, thedistinction between true periods and mere transitions threatens to break down,and to bring down the entire edifice of historical periodization. Every momentmight be construed as the radiant center of a potential periodbut could alsosimultaneously be the pivot of an endless transition.

II. MODERNITY

However necessary the idea of transition is to nineteenth-century historiography,it soon becomes clear that, far from only fulfilling an epistemological need, itcorresponds directly to contemporary anxieties. This is most evident from theway the period itself desperately sought to identify itself as a period, and at lastfound, after much fumbling, an appropriately euphoric label in Baudelairesfamous invention of modernity.17 This is by all accounts the most successfulself-description ever launched, since critics are still today invoking the term as amagic mantra, and bestowing it solemnly upon writers, texts, and styles as aninexplicable badge of distinction. By 1873, Rimbaud proclaimed it as a self-evi-dent truth that one must be absolutely modern.18 The reigning dogma of liter-ary studies is in perfect agreement: modernity remains the absolute value that canbe conferred on a work, and it is distributed so generously that it may well be theacademic equivalent of the two thumbs up of contemporary film reviews. Thelabel postmodern, in this context, is less a negation of modern than its hyper-bolic inflation, just as premodern marks a deferential nod to the aesthetic hege-mony of post-revolutionary culture. In these circumstances, however, one istempted to ask:comment ne peut-on pas tre moderne?19 The term has so suc-cessfully colonized the discourse on culture that it has lost all specificity, content,and meaning.

It would seem, at first sight, as if a neutral period-designation has been dis-torted into a form of valuation, and that dating has been confused with praising.But then we recall that Baudelaires initial use of the term served, precisely, toconfer value upon the contemporary world, a vulgar world of dark suits and sti-fling morals that Baudelaire uncompromisingly deplored, but nonetheless urgedthe painter of modern life to paint in all its vulgarity. The self-designation

GRAN BLIX56

17. The celebration of modernity is implicit already in theSalon de 1845, but attains its full-blowndevelopment only in Le Peintre de la vie moderne[1863], where Baudelaire famously definesmodernity as the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent (Critique dart , 355).

18. Rimbaud,Une saison en enfer [1873] (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 204.19. How can one not be modern?


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modernity, then, operated from the outset as a value-laden term, for it wasenlisted by disenchanted artists to boost their somber historical self-image: to bea genuine period was to possess character, color, personality, and identity, andthis is what modernity promised to those in the nineteenth century. WhenBaudelaire points out how great and poetic we are in our ties and polishedboots,20 what we discern beneath the self-inflicted irony is the desperate desireto mold a shapeless present into a visible historical formation. The concept of period operates here as a way to confer identity and selfhood on a time thatperceived itself as transitory; it functions as a mask of coherencewhat somecall ideologyimposed on the contradictions of experience. One might evenargue that the entire Romantic project of carving history up into neatly packagedperiods merely deflects an anxiety over the fluidity of the present. Periods wouldbe the ideal images that transitions project over their own experience of flux, thedreams of selfhood fashioned by a civilization thinking it is on the move. Theterm modernity itself neatly encapsulates this contradiction; it succeeds inuniting the dynamism of change with the reassuring constancy of a stable term.

III. THE FACELESS PRESENT

It is easy to show that the Romantic invention of periods ultimately rests on itsown experience of transitionality. There is a striking contrast in Romanticismbetween the colorful pictures it proposes of the Renaissance, the Middle Ages,and the Ancien Rgime, and the litany of complaints it issues over the facelesscharacter of the present. This is what Victor Hugo says of modern-day Paris aftercompleting the famous survey of the fifteenth-century city in Notre-Dame deParis: The Paris of today has no . . . overall physiognomy. Its a collection of samples from several centuries, and the most beautiful have vanished. From theeuphoria of Hugos organic vision of late-medieval Paris, the reader falls into aneclectic hodge-podge of clashing buildings, into an ocean of ephemeral architec-ture which gets rebuilt every fifty years.21

The word that Hugo uses here, physionomie, denotes the visual identity of athinga person, a street, a city, a periodand is a key term in the Romanticvocabulary of description, the cornerstone, one might say, of romantic ontology,since beings are grasped through their physionomie. Balzac employs the term ina satirical article from 1830, in which he attacks his own time: we have no man-ners, if by that word one should understand the unique habits of a people, anational physionomie.22 Hugos charge of historical eclecticism surfaces here,too, for Balzac is quick to denounce the cacophony of fashions, manners, andideas that can be observed in the street, where remnants of theancien rgimecoexist with more recent relics of the Revolution and Empire. This threatening


20. The expression occurs already in theSalon de 1845: That one will be the painter, the truepainter, who succeeds in wrenching from contemporary life its epic aspect, and who makes us seeand understand, by use of color or of lines, how great and poetic we are in our ties and polishedboots. (Critique dart , 67).

21. Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris [1831] (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), 188.22. Balzac, Complaintes satiriques sur les moeurs du temps prsent [1830], inOeuvres divers-

es (Paris: Gallimard-Pliade, 1996), 2: 744.


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multiplicity strikes Balzac as a lack rather than a healthy excess: these traitsdont give us any physionomie. France wears a harlequin outfit.23

Balzac is of course ideologically invested in such claims, given his reactionaryattachment to church and crown, but this certainly does not pertain to Alfred deMusset, whose indictment of the times in La Confession dun enfant du sicle(1836)the text that will be my central exhibit herestands out as the classicaldiagnosis of the age. In this novel, the troubled romantic hero, Octave, mirrorshis internal disorder in the confusion of the times: our century has no forms,he complains. We have left the stamp of our times neither on our houses, nor onour gardens, nor on anything else. Musset, like Balzac, finds the residual debrisof more genuine periods everywhere in his surroundings, and scoffs that theapartments of the rich are chambers of curiosities; the antique, the gothic, thestyle of the Renaissance, and that of Louis XIII, its all mixed up. In conclud-ing that eclecticism is our style, Musset confirms that the opposition betweentransition and period lies at the root of his disillusion. Modernity is in this sensethe first non-periodat the same time that it is the period that invented periods;paradoxically, the more it multiplies its allusions to various coherent pasts, themore it appears stripped of any distinct personality: we have things from everycentury, Musset writes, except our own, a thing never before seen in any pre-vious period.24

IV. MODERNITY AS TRANSITION

Depictions of le mal du sicleare a dime a dozen, but Mussets novel stands outas a quintessential text on modernity not only because it depicts the facelesscharacter of his time, but also because it closely links disenchantment with theexperience of transition. Its central thesis is that Mussets own lost generationhas been condemned to live through a historical transition. Born during the hero-ic days of the Empire, and raised on memories of the great Revolution, the chil-dren of the century have come of age during the prosaic Restoration, and sooncome to realize that their fate will be to form the bridge between a glorious pastand the future Republic. The whole sickness of the present century stems fromtwo causes, Musset writes: everything that was is no more; and everything thatwill be is not yet.25 In a famous image, he imagines his generation stuck in alimbo between two worlds, and derives its social malaise from the long andpainful transition between an old and a new regime: Behind them lay a past for-ever destroyed, still writhing on its ruins, along with all the fossils of the cen-turies of absolutism; before them lay the dawn of an unbounded horizon, the firstlights of the future; and between these two worlds . . . something resembling theOcean that separates the old continent from youthful America.26

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23. Balzac also writes: we have lost tremendously in terms of physiognomy (ibid ., 2: 740).24. Alfred de Musset, La Confession dun enfant du sicle[1836] (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 48-49.25. Ibid ., 35.26. Ibid ., 24.


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The chronology of this analysis is rather sketchy, and the generational aspecteasily stretches out into a more grandiose perspective: it is not just Mussets owngeneration that has fallen into the abyss between the Empire and the regime thatwill succeed the restored monarchy, but the entire nineteenth century that mustserve as a buffer between theancien rgime and the future: [it is] the presentcentury, in a word, that separates the past from the future.27 This oceanic gap,either way, is a time of pure negativity, an agonizing time of limbo wasted drift-ing between two solid land masses; it is captured in a dramatic image that echoesChateaubriands sense of crossing a historical abyss: I found myself betweentwo centuries, as if at the meeting of two rivers . . . regretfully leaving behind theshore on which I was born, and swimming with hope toward an unknownshore.28

Striking in Mussets diagnosis of his own time is his assessment of it as a tran-sitional period. The disquiet he pinpoints has neither religious, nor psychological,nor strictly political roots, but is here conceived historically, as if grasped from afuture vantage point that could situate the present in a larger continuum. Themaldu sicle appears through the prism of historical consciousness, and is explainedex post facto as a temporal disorder. Musset articulates the paradoxical experi-ence of occupying the gap between periods, of living in an interim state of pas-sage, transition, and between-ness, perversely ascribing to his own time what theRenaissance humanists had so felicitously attributed to their predecessors.

This historical self-analysis can of course appear questionable in view of ourcurrent grid of periodsitself a debatable formationbut its historiographicalaccuracy is irrelevant; what matters is the innovative, self-reflexive use of transition as an experiential category. Mussets account is much more persua-sive, to my mind, than Baudelaires canonical reflections, and reframes the lat-ters cryptic remarks about distilling eternal beauty out of the transitory shapesof fashion into a strategy to repress an anxiety that still remains visible in Musset.To link the transitory flux of impressions, as Baudelaire does, to a sort of Platonicform of beauty is a desperate way to exorcize the incoherence of experience.Musset bravely resists the temptation to transubstantiate his spleen, and therebyalso refrains from idealizing the transitory and denying his own alienation. Hisdysphoric embrace of transition instead projects the utopian impulse into a van-ished past and an inaccessible future. These forms of idealizationthe nostalgicand the messianicare not without their problems, but they arguably echo thetransitional experience more directly, and they make no concession to the artis-tic culture of redemption whose champions will be Baudelaire, Mallarm, andProust.29

But why prefer one poet to another (and the lesser one at that), pitting Mussetswhim against Baudelaires fancy? What makes Mussets account so compellingis its clear articulation of a widespread collective perception of the present itself as a transitional period. As early as 1783, we find Louis-Sbastien Mercier


27. Ibid .28. Chateaubriand, Mmoires doutre-tombe(Paris: Librairie Gnrale Franaise, 1973), 1794.29. For a skeptical view of this tendency, see Leo BersanisThe Culture of Redemption

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).


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summing up the Enlightenment as a transitional period. In a chapter from theTableau de Paris, entitled Du sicle littraire de Louis XIV, where Merciertakes issue with Voltaires canonization of that age (and quips that never has theprostitution of wit been pushed so far as at the feet of Louis XIV), he makes thecase that contemporary literature is in fact much more enlightened because ithas taken on the useful function of policing the government.30 Yet even amid thisode to the progress of universal reason, there can be no room for complacen-cy: our century, Mercier cautions, despite its advantages, should neverthelessbe considered less as the century of truths than as the century of transition towardmore important truths. Using a rhetoric that anticipates the impatience of theRomantics, Mercier wishes he might have been born in the future: I wish thatmy birth could have occurred in five to six hundred years, for by then the artsand the printing press will have completed the enlightenment of the universe.

This attitude of future-envy heralds the gradual shift from the past to the futureas the ground of social legitimacy, but still it differs in one crucial respect fromthe nineteenth-century sense of transition: there is as yet no comparable disen-chantment with the present. For Mercier it is only the rosy forecast of indefiniteprogress that valorizes the future, but not the intolerable character of his own age.The belief in progress and perfectibility may relativize the present, but in no waysaps it of value as a wasteland between periods; the notion of transition here isnot yet yoked to a periodizing imagination, and denotes a perpetual steadyprogress rather than a ladder of ages interrupted by chaotic gulfs. Merciers sim-ple progressive scheme, however, remains the primitive layer on which history,in the nineteenth century, will be experienced as an unhappy transition betweenstates.

A tragic sense of insubstantiality is what most marks this modern experienceof transition. Coming from Musset, Sand, and Chateaubriand, this is to beexpected, but less so when the upbeat Jules Michelet succumbs to such melan-choly: today, we have too much a sense of passage, he writes in his journal.We only feel too clearly that were nothing but a means, a transition.31 Thisperception evidently implies that both future and past stand out as more solid for-mations. The sentiment is even less plausible in Flaubert, who writes to a friendin 1850 that we will have undergone both the most difficult and the least glori-ous thing: the transition.32 In this letter, Flaubert at first seems to echo Merciershopeful anticipation, since he fancies that the man of the future will perhapsenjoy immense pleasureshell travel through space, with pills of air in hispocket. But this lighthearted fantasy, undercut by irony, merely serves as a pre-lude to the Mussetian lament for the fate of the present generation. Flaubertlaunches the complaint that weve come either too early or too late, and sug-gests that the present lacks the stability he ascribes to both past and future peri-ods: to establish something durable you need a stable foundation, he insists,

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30. Louis-Sbastien Mercier, Du sicle littraire du Louis XIV (Ch. 634), Le Tableau de Paris(Amsterdam, 1783), T. 5, A 8, pp. 180-182.

31. Jules Michelet, Journal (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 1: 397. Entry for May 1, 1842.32. Gustave Flaubert,Correspondance (Saint-Genouph: Nizet, 2001), 1: 750. Letter to Louis

Bouilhet, from Athens, dated Dec. 19, 1850.


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but the future torments usand the past holds us back. Thats why the presentescapes us.

Lamartine also sounds this motif when he worries about the quality of modernliterature, and has the depressing revelation of his own poetic mediocrity. Hethen generously wishes upon France a greater poet than himself,33 but concedesthat neither he nor, unfortunately, the times, contain enough substance to meritglory: as for myself, I feel it profoundly, I am nothing but a man without a mon-ument, from a faded and transitional period . . . Ill maybe sketch a few scenes,Ill murmur a few melodies, and all will be said: on to others.34 This passageillustrates that the association of aesthetic decadence with transitional periodshas spilled over into the self-description of modernity. This is already so self-evi-dent to Flaubert that he cites it as a bourgeois clich in the Dictionnaire des idesreues, where under the rubric of period (poque) he writes thunder againstit and call it period of transitionof decadence!35 By mid-century, the ideathat contemporary art might traverse a period of decadence even forms the cen-terpiece of a poetic manifesto. Leconte de Lisle then writes a fierce critique, inthe programmatic preface to hisPomes antiques(1852), of the subjective indi-vidualistic poetry of the day. Disappointed with this time of malaise, whichsuffers from feverish action, constant movement, and a radical breakdown of temporal orientation, de Lisle calls for a return to more archaic verbal forms, andfor the adoption of an impersonal form of lyricism.36 While the most informedminds draw back cautiously in contemplation, the rest know neither wherethey come from nor where they are headed, and succumb to the current of fever-ish agitation. Poetry has abandoned its age-old mission to forge new ideals andto glorify heroic deeds, because now, as in every period of literary decadence,its only ambition is to express petty personal impressions. De Lisles advice toartists is to withdraw into the ivory tower until the climate improves, but he rec-ognizes that it is only a select elite of contemplative spirits [who] are aware of their transitional period.

V. TRAITS OF THE TRANSITIONAL PERIOD

The term transition denotes a loose experiential category, and constitutes anumbrella-term encompassing a broad range of sub-themes, images, and varia-tions. Among the most important are the following: the shock of the past and thefuture; the undecidability between decadence and renewal; the painful nature of the passage; and the figure of pregnant time.

To begin with, the chaos and confusion that mark the transition are often fig-ured as the result of a fateful collision between past and future, as if the presentwere a battleground, the historical junction where a dying and a nascent society


33. Cf. Hugos claim that I am the man of a period, Ill found an era. I can pull off an eighteenthBrumaire in literature, quoted in the diary of Charles Julien Lioult de Chnedoll (17691833), Extraits du Journal de Chnedoll [1833] (Caen: E. Domin, 1922), 132. Entry of Feb. 19, 1830.

34. Alphonse de Lamartine,Souvenirs, impressions, penses et paysages pendant un voyage enOrient [18321833] (Paris: Hachette, 1859), 25. Entry for July 11, 1832.

35. Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard et Pcuchet (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), 513.36. Leconte de Lisle,Posies compltes(Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1974), 3: 206.


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confront each other head-on. Chateaubriand probably penned the canonical ver-sion of this imagined collision when he depicted French society during theRevolution: In a society that is dissolving and reforming, the battle of two spir-its, the shock of the past and of the future, the blend of old manners and newmanners, forms a transitory combination that leaves no room for boredom. Hethen fleshes out this idea by noting the surreal juxtaposition, in the street, of aman in French dress, his hair powdered, a sword at his side walking beside aman with cropped hair and no powder, wearing an English jacket and anAmerican tie.37 Such contrasts are of course the very stuff of the Mmoiresdoutre-tombe, whose author never tires of stressing the ironic fracture thatdivides his life and transforms his own body into the space where the old andnew regimes clash.38

Chateaubriands experience has its analogueoutre-Rhin, where FriedrichSchlegel wonders whether the period really is an individual (that is, whether itcan be regarded as a coherent period), and suspects that it might only be thepoint of collision of other periods.39 His fellow Jena Romantic, Novalis, explic-itly evokes the trope of the period of transition [bergang] in his essay on DieChristenheit oder Europa(1799), and deplores the present war-torn condition of Europe as a spiritual and political nadir between the unified Christianity of theMiddle Ages and the dream of a future cosmopolitan state. When he turns toaddress the political drama of our age, he sees a combat between alien periodsthat is waged across the temporal threshold of the present: the old and the newworld are engaged in battle.40 This military rhetoric of confrontation is an intri-cate figure that encodes a complex construction of temporality that in some waysanticipates the Marxist couple of residual and emergent forms. But while the ideaof a transition clearly presupposes the existence of the new and the old, thesetwo need neither coincide nor collideone could also imagine an insensible gra-dationso their encounter in battle bespeaks an intense experience of tempo-ral crisis in which incompatible outlooks openly confront each other. The JulyRevolution of 1830 brings a resurgence of this open rhetoric of conflict: shortlybefore it, Balzac records the tangible tension between the old and the new as avisible conflict of fashions, manners, [and] ideas, and goes on to note the hos-tile coexistence of republican, imperial, and monarchical ideologies in one space:there results [from this] a society in which life and death, new interests and oldinterests ceaselessly commingle and wrestle.41

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37. Chateaubriand, Mmoires doutre-tombe, 172-173.38. And so, he writes in an earlier chapter, I have been placed strangely enough in life to have

witnessed the games of theQuintaine and the proclamation of the Rights of Man; to have seen thebourgeois militia of a Breton village and the national guard of France, the banner of the lords of Combourg and the flag of the Revolution (52).

39. Friedrich Schlegel, Athenums-Framente [1798], in Kritische und theoretische Schriften(Stuttgart: Reclam, 1978), 136. More philosophical than most of the authors cited here, Schlegel seesthat this question can only be answered in hindsight: how could it be possible to understand andgloss the present period of the world properly, without being able to anticipate even just the generalcharacter of the following period? (136).

40. Novalis, Die Christenheit oder Europa[1799] (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984), 84-85.41. Balzac, Complaintes satiriques, 2: 740.


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As overt conflict recedes, an attenuated version of the motif emerges in whichtransition is seen as a time of chaos and confusion, of eclectic forms and hybridstyles; the world is then less torn or embattled than vague, fluid, and inconsis-tent. Mercier had already noted something arbitrary and fluid . . . in our opin-ions,42 and Musset had pictured the passage in 1836 as a trans-Atlantic voyage,likening the amorphous limbo of the present to something ineffably vague andfluid, a wavy sea full of shipwrecks.43 Michelet, slightly more upbeat, still con-siders the beautiful and terrible period in which we happen to live as onemarked by the inexorable dissolution of forms: a period of destruction, of dis-solution, of decomposition, of analysis and of criticism.44 The impression of moral confusion leads George Sands Llia to denounce these times of transi-tion, in which the collapse of stable value systems suggests a sort of monasticwithdrawal.45

This sense of disorientation will soon crystallize into a more concrete formu-lation and will form a new leitmotif. This involves the paradoxical juxtapositionof progress and decadence; these twin ideas, ancient structuring devices of his-torical thought, obviously do double duty in the nineteenth century. What is inter-preted as progress in the mainstream is read as proof of decadence on the mar-gins. But the order that these concepts confer retrospectively for the historian isless accessible in lived time, during which, to be sure, many do interpret the fluxaround them in terms of progress or decadence, but as a rule less on rationalgrounds than on ideological faith. The concept of transition brings these two vec-tors together, and ascribes progress and decadence simultaneously to the sametime. Both processes are at work at once: to be in transition means to experiencerebirth and decay indistinguishably.

Chateaubriand said it best: it is not clear whether one is present at the creationor at the end of a world.46 The difference between decay and rebirth becomesundecidable during the transition, and the wild energies that are unleashed may just as well be the death throes of an old world as the birth pangs of a new one.Musset formulates this imbrication of decay and growth as follows: [in] the pres-ent century . . . it is uncertain whether, with each step one takes, one is walkingon seeds or decay, and personifies the spirit of the age as an ambiguous angelof twilight, . . . half mummy, half fetus, poised between birth and death.47 Thisirresolvable overlap of categories defines transitional time as more primary thanprogress or decadence, the two terms required to name this experience, and whichwould later be renamedand silenced, tamedunder the rubric of modernity.48


42. Mercier, Du sicle littraire de Louis XIV.43. Musset, La Confession, 24.44. Jules Michelet, Introduction lhistoire universelle[1831], in Oeuvres compltes (Paris:

Flammarion, 1972), 2: 255.45. George Sand, Llia (Paris: Garnier, 1960), 477.

46. Chateaubriand, Mmoires doutre-tombe, 201. This quotation refers to a polar landscape, butthe rhetoric of natural depiction is inevitably social. This is also Chateaubriands first encounter withthe New World, quite literally, since his ship is here sailing past Newfoundland.

47. Musset, La Confession, 25.48. Cf. also Hugo, in Notre-Dame de Paris, who turns the contemporary image of the renaissance

on its head by calling it the inevitable decadence of architecture (159). He is, of course, having funwith words, but the very fact of undoing therenaissance / decadence distinction is itself telling.


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The hardships of the passage are often given biblical colors: the transition is acrossing of the desertor, more often, an ocean; an equally proverbial promisedland awaits future generations. The discomforts of the desert (thirst, longing,monotony, waiting, and emptiness) are transfigured into the spiritual void of thetransition: they gazed at the earth, the sky, the streets and the roads, writesMusset of his generation, and all of that was empty.49 For once, he resistsgrandiloquent lament and the plenitude of disenchantment, and depicts the cross-ing in La Confessioninstead in purely prosaic terms as a long deadly spell of ennui: its comforting to think that one is miserable, he admits, when one isreally only empty and bored.50 No less an intellect than the sober Tocquevilleechoes this transition fatigue a decade later, in response to the 1848 Revolutionthat reopened the historical breach he had hoped closed for good after 1830.Tocquevilles frustration with the irremediably revolutionary nature of his timeis palpable in hisSouvenirs: after each of these successive mutations, it was saidthat the French Revolution, having achieved what was presumptuously called itswork, was finished.51 But this illusion of arrival was just wishful thinking:there is the French Revolution, starting out afresh, yet one more time. This lastexpression highlights the essential ennui of transitional time, which despite itstumultuous forward movement appears strangely empty and homogeneous. In aparadoxical formulation worthy of Chateaubriand, he undercuts the hope that anyapparent progress would authorize: the further we go, the more the goal growsdim and withdraws. Will we arrive, he wonders, at a social transformationmore profound and complete than the one anticipated, or will we just simplyend up in a state of sporadic anarchy?52 This last question points to a crucialtruth of transitional time (to which I will return): its open-ended nature.

VI. THE POLITICS OF TRANSITIONAL TIME

The picture of a crossing of the desert may be misleading, then, insofar as itportrays the transition as an active exodus into the future, whereas it ofteninduces a patient resignation to history and an attitude of radical quietism. It isnot just Mussets sense of emptiness andennui that paralyzes the will, but moreprofoundly the structure of modern time itself, now perceived as historical des-tiny. As an integral part of the fabric of history, the transitional period can nei-ther be hastened nor slowed, but only observed, traversed, and endured. The log-ical attitude to adopt is one of waitingthis was Leconte de Lisles recommen-dationhence the frequent theme of contemplative withdrawal, and its later aes-theticist avatars. I once had great ambitions, writes Sands Llia, [but now] Iwait in silence, with a broken heart. Morally torn between their old law, andmy new law, between the antiquated law of duty and her own liberal vision of love, she senses that her conscience has outpaced humanity, and feels com-pelled to withdraw to await more enlightened times: Marriage, as I conceive it,

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49. Musset, La Confession, 22.50. Ibid ., 33.51. Alexis de Tocqueville,Souvenirs[18501851] (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 89.52. Ibid .


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as I wouldve required it, did not yet exist in this world. I had to withdraw intothe wilderness to wait for the designs of God to reach their maturity.53 Mussetslost generation still has faith in the future, but stands before it impotently asbefore some ideal unrealized artwork: they liked the future, but what of it? onlythe way Pygmalion liked Galatea. Unlike the mythical Greek sculptor, howev-er, these modern dreamers tragically lack the desire to breathe life into their ownvision: she stood before them like a lover of marble, and they waited for her togrow animate, for blood to color her veins.54 They adopt the powerless attitudeof waiting before the advent of the longed-for future, and thus indirectly espouseKarl Lwiths idea thatWeltgeschichte(the history of the world) merely presentsa secular form of Heilsgeschichte(the history of salvation).55 The ancient patternof religious expectation (Saint Pauls the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief inthe night56) thus prolongs itself in the passive dream of the coming society.57

Waiting, however, is not just an aberrant private outlook, adopted out of lazi-ness or indifference by the sullen children of the century. It is also the politi-cally expedient outlook that society would like to imprint on the impatient youngidealist. Musset makes this clear in La Confessionwhen he mimics its slightlyschizophrenic injunction to the child: wait, he is told . . . take hope, work,charge ahead, step back.58 In this context, one might suggest that the functionof transitions is to instill a healthy quietism before the planetary transformationundertaken on behalf of interests that are never acknowledged or discussed.

Politically, then, to cede to the current of the times is paradoxically a closeequivalent to monastic and aestheticist withdrawal. This ideological kinshipbetween contrasting responses to transitionality can be seen clearly in ErnestRenan. Writing after the failed Revolution of 1848, and addressing the disquietprovoked by the transformations of the age (the analytical state we are passingthrough), he exhorted his contemporaries to march upright like men . . . andpursue the rough path that will lead us without fail to an infinitely better place,59rather than succumb to the dangerous sirens of socialism. The promise of abrighter future pre-empts any discussion about what direction change shouldtake, and turns even active participation in the work of progress into a form of passivity. To seek a stable equilibrium and repose in such a period, Renanwrites, is to seek the impossible,60 yet paradoxically to participate in the for-ward movement, as Renan suggests, may lead nowhere except to the perpetua-tion of transition itself. The specter of indefinite progress functions here as a way


53. Sand, Llia, 477-478.54. Musset, La Confession, 25.55. See Karl Lwiths Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of

History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957).56. 1 Thessalonians 5:2.57. Franois Hartog, in his recent Rgimes dhistoricit: prsentisme et expriences du temps

(Paris: Seuil, 2003), has described the temporality instituted by Christianity in terms of transition.The birth of Christ produced a cleavage of time into two parts through the decisive event of theIncarnation, inaugurating an intermediary time of transition before the Second Coming: this par-enthetical, intermediary time is one of waiting (71).

58. Musset, La Confession, 36.59. Ernest Renan, LAvenir de la science[18481849] (Paris: Flammarion, 1995), 333.60. Ibid ., 389.


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of concealing the social goals that ground it, and provides an ingenious alibi forthe eclipse of its own justification.

The ideological quid pro quo that progress performs stands out clearly inRenans defense of inequality as a necessary evil during the transition. Whilehe admits that inequality is revolting from a purely private and legal perspec-tive, the overall teleology of the state as a machine for progress overrides suchpetty qualms: inequality is legitimate every time that inequality is necessary forthe good of humanity,61 even if this good itself has no other content thanequality. The young Renan is of course already too conservative to say this,despite his flirtation with socialist ideas, but he does admit that the goal of humanity . . . is to attain the highest possible human culture, and concedes thatthe goal would be missed if this culture were restricted to an elite, and wereaccessible only to a few people.62 Renan agrees, then, that the rainbow of progress should lead to a utopia of universal access, and asserts that, the goalwill only be attained when all men have access to this veritable religion and whenall of humanity is cultivated.63 The problem is that this inclusive ideal servesonly to justify an incoherent ideology that we might term progress for progressssake. The indefinite prolongation of transition is now an alibi for not undertak-ing true social reform, and progress, like contemporary art, becomes self-refer-ential: What is right is the progress of humanity: there is no right over againstthis progress; and conversely, progress is sufficient to legitimize everything.64That is how the future community promised by progress is sacrificed to the veryprocess of achieving it, how the means eclipse the ends. Renan agrees thatinequality may appear revolting, and may not even be the fatal law of soci-ety, but insists that it is natural and just when one considers it as the transitorycondition of social perfection.65 The experience of transition, then, has here beenhijacked and made to buttress a disingenuous progressive ideology. It underpins,in the end, two distinct forms of political quietism, one marked by the paralysisof withdrawal and waiting (Musset), and the other a grudging endorsement of progress as the irresistible force carrying us toward the future utopia (Renan),but an endorsement that neither requires any political action nor supports it.

VII. THE LABOR OF THE FUTURE

But quietism is not the only response to transitional time: it can also provoke acreative and active interpretation. There is a strand of imagery in the motif that,even while acknowledging the pain of transition, regards such suffering as thebirth-pangs of a newly emerging world. Transition becomes labor(pro)creativelaborthe production and gestation of the future. Guizot had already noted thelaborious transition from nomadic to sedentary life, and Leconte de Lisle washopeful that the regeneration of forms would occur within a century or two,

GRAN BLIX66

61. Ibid ., 394.62. Ibid ., 382.63. Ibid .64. Ibid ., 396.65. Ibid.


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provided that the genesis of the new age doesnt require a slower gestation.66It is Michelet, however, who most clearly interprets the pain of passage as thehistorical gestation of a new society brought about by human effort. Early on inhis Histoire de la rvolution franaise, he laments the failure of the NationalAssembly, at first too deferential to the king, to abbreviate this painful passageduring which France remained between the old order and the new order.67 Thisimage of national rebirth as a painful [mortel] passage illustrates the pain of renewal well enough; elsewhere he depicts the revolutionary passage as theturning point in a tragedy in which the victim is an entire world, and stresses thecruel effort required when man passes from one system to another.68Michelet then goes on to imagine the modern advent of liberty precisely in termsof a child leaving its mother: But it is not without . . . a painful rupture that[man] tears himself free from the fatality in whose embrace he has remained solong suspended; this separation also makes his heart bleed. However, it musthappen, the child must leave its mother; must walk on his own; must moveahead.69 Faithful to his conviction that humanity forges its own destiny (manis his own Prometheus70), Michelet here sees transition as the creative processof learning and growth by which the child wins its autonomy.

He considers rest and tranquility, moreover, like Renan, to be impossibleoptions, and refuses to lament with Leconte de Lisle that the character . . . of this age is . . . that it seeks neither peace nor quiet.71 If the restlessness of thetransition is indeed a plague, Michelet consoles his readers that amidst the uni-versal agitation which surrounds us, I believe in a tranquil future.72 And if allthis turbulence is unsettling, it is also a sign of vitality, a reign of creative dis-order rife with possibilities. To the incurable nostalgics who regret the beautyof Paris in its organic form and the Hugolian admirers of medieval Paris,Michelet offers this pre-Haussmannian apology for urban renewal: beauty isgreater inbecomingthan in being. The moving spectacle of progress, the sightof a civilization on the march, overshadows the static beauty of an intact cultur-al heritage; once that truth is admitted, Michelet suggests, you will no longeraccuse modern Paris, but will instead recognize [that it] is, in truth, in a tran-sitional stage, after a period of great architecture expressing religious associa-tion, before a period of great architecture that embodies political and industrialassociation.73 The question raised by Michelets euphoric reading, however, forall its radical overtones, is whether it can avoid becoming an unwitting apologyfor directionless change.

The same radical revaluation of change is in fact also present in Renan, whoreverses the ancient hierarchy of being and becoming despite his own conserva-


66. De Lisle,Posies compltes,211.67. Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Rvolution franaise[1847] (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1979), 1:

208.68. Michelet, Introduction lhistoire universelle, 2: 255.69. Ibid .70. This phrase occurs in Michelets famous Prface de 1869 to his history of France. See Le

Moyen ge(Paris: Robert Laffont, 1981), 17.71. Michelet, Introduction lhistoire universelle, 2: 207.72. Ibid ., 255.73. Michelet, Journal, 1: 290. Entry for Feb. 1839.


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tive instincts. The reassuringrepose for which all of Mussets lost souls had clam-ored is at last denounced as a juvenile pipe-dream. Renan insists that, though thetumultuousness appears to stem from a regrettable transition; repose appears tobe the goal, this is a mistaken belief because the goal of humanity is not repose. . . and order itself is not desirable except insofar as it serves progress.74 Orderand rest, the peacefulness of a stable state, so long upheld as a political ideal inthe Western tradition, must finally be renounced for a program of interminableprogress, which retains only the thinnest fiction of a final term. The modernphilosopher is instead encouraged to espouse movement and to admit thathumanity will only come to rest in perfection. Renan, in the end, lucidly castsoff the illusion of a goal, and rejects the reassuring fiction of a transition linkingany real masses of terra firma. The tumultuousness of becoming thereby replacesthe serenity of being as the supreme value, and the prospect of perpetual changethat had once so frightened Musset must now be stoically adopted. The humanspirit, Renan declares, has passed from the absolute to the historical; from nowon it considers everything in the category of becoming.75

VIII. TOWARD A PERPETUAL TRANSITION?

Renans analysis points to a deep latent contradiction within the transitionalexperience itself. Musset, Chateaubriand, Michelet, Flaubertall the writerscited hereunderstood the experience as the promise of some future resolution,as a passing evil to be endured until a stable state is reestablished. The transitionis temporary: its hardships are acceptable as an exception to the norm. What hap-pens, then, if the transition goes on and on, prolonging itself indefinitely, with noend in sight? What if the exceptional state endures, and affirms itself instead asthe new historical norm, thereby blurring the distinction between periods andtransitions on which the concept of transition rests? A transition that has ceasedto be transitory is indeed a paradoxical type of time. And yet, as Renan sees it,his own transitional period has ushered in a new metastable state in whichchange is the norm: life is nothing but a transition, he writes, a long, contin-uous, intolerable stretch. The belief in a terminus is a useful fiction designed toconsole humanity caught in the whirlpool of change: there is no moment under-way at which one finds a stable resting place; one dreams of arriving there, andthus one still keeps on going.76 Tocqueville arrived at a similar insight after theRevolution of 1848, in a passage worth quoting at length: As for me, . . . I dontknow when this long voyage will end; Im tired of repeatedly mistaking mis-leading vapors for the shore, and I often ask myself whether the terra firma thatwe have sought for so long really exists, or whether our destiny might not ratherbe to ply the seas eternally!77

But why speak any longer of transitions, when the fiction the term presuppos-es has been exploded? The word, in fact, remained in use long after what the

GRAN BLIX68

74. Renan, LAvenir de la science, 437.75. Ibid ., 396.76. Ibid ., 390.77. Tocqueville,Souvenirs, 90.


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Romantics believed to be an interim period had been unmasked as a permanentstate. Renan himself retains the expression even as he undoes the metaphysicalopposition of periods and breaks on which it rests: it is superficial to regard his-tory, he states, as composed of periods of stability and of periods of transition.But then he offers a paradoxical formula to describe the new contradictory time:it is transition that is the normal state.78 The terminus that Musset predicted hasnot entirely vanished, but instead of lying twenty years off, or a century away,the future utopia has receded into a remote horizon. It operates only as a struc-turally necessary fictionone that no one expects to see fulfilled, but which sub-tly orients a time that risks seeming directionless. The hypothetical end of histo-ry, as a secular form of last judgment, remains indispensable to progress as itsultimate ground of legitimacy.

I have argued that Mussets picture of the nineteenth century as a period of tran-sition offers a more accurate image than that suggested by the term modernity,and I have stressed its exemplarity by showing how it resonates through a largebody of texts in the first half of the nineteenth century. The term transitionalperiod arguably names the contemporary experience of time, and names it, pre-cisely, not as a period, but as an anti-period, a passage, an interim, an interstitialstate devoid of a proper identity. The canonical vision that sees the period interms of the concept of modernity, a vision inspired by Baudelaire, does stress itstransitory charactergrasped chiefly in terms of the fleeting appearance of fash-ions, styles, and trendsbut does so only to reaffirm a stable and eternal realmof beauty, whose final function must be to dispel the anxiety of transition.Baudelaires influential branding of a new heroic age transforms into a culturaltotality precisely what many of his contemporaries saw purely as a passage. Thissense of passage arguably better captures temporal experience than the spurioustriumphalism implicit in the notion of modernity and the view of time it propos-es. It also goes some way to explaining the ongoing obsession with periodizationand our irrepressible need to label our historical moment. Period designationsmodernity, postmodernity, the information age, the new world order, and so on,down to the style markers that carry the names of decadesare less coherentconcepts, on this view, than they are the ironic symptoms of a transitional timethat has lasted at least two centuriesa time that requires stable labels more thanever in order to metamorphose time into identity. The transition that beganaround 1800 is still in full swing.

There is a risk here of stretching a strictly Romantic experience into the pres-ent age, but I would argue that Romanticism offered a prescient diagnosis of themodern temporal condition. The ceaseless repetition and longevity of the motif confirm this. So allow me to conclude by citing one last example, one taken fromthe twentieth century. By this time, the motif has become a commonplace, asGobineaus use already testified in 1874 (to use a common phrase, we are in atransitional period79), such that it surfaces virtually unchanged in a text by PaulValry a hundred years after Mussets novel. In Le Bilan de lintelligence [The


78. Renan, LAvenir de la science, 392.79. Arthur de Gobineau, Les Pliades [1874] (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 246-247.


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State of Intelligence] (1935), written during the unruly interim period betweenthe two world wars, Valry resorts to the motif to diagnose the current situation.He begins by noting that a disorder with no apparent end in sight is currentlyvisible in every domain,80 confirming that for him the time is still out of joint,and that the roots of this disorder lie in a deep social transformation: we havethe privilegeor the very interesting misfortuneto be present at a profound,rapid, and irresistible transformation, touching every aspect of human action.81There is no intrinsic need to frame this experience of change in periodic terms,invoking a clash of eras, but Valry here repeats Chateaubriands inaugural self-description as a universally valid truth, affirming that even now every manbelongs to two eras.82 These two eras may clash on the intellectual battlegroundof the present, but they also recede, as they did for the Romantics, into the rela-tive distance of an enchanting past and an inaccessible future; the current over-all impression of impotence and incoherence is only exacerbated by the mag-netic pull of these two temporal poles, on the one hand, a past that has neitherbeen abolished nor forgotten . . . and, on the other, a totally faceless future.83The promise embodied by the future also appears suspiciously hollow here, if only because Valry, unlike the professional futurologists who would multiply inthe wake of Jules Verne, refuses to confuse wishful prophecies with probabilities,and to project a comforting utopia.84 The current chaos evidently points to a cer-tain future, but a future that it is absolutely impossible for us to imagine.85

These remarks by Valry all echo the Romantic diagnosis of time, and thoughthe point is not that nothing has changed, they do testify to the longevity andsolid basis of the Romantic clich. The sense of transition that Michelet, Musset,and Renan identified has endured and engraved itself on consciousness as a cul-tural norm. Valrys text itself comments on the normative status the concept hasattained: one of my friends, he writes, made fun one day, in front of me, of the well-known expression: transitional period, and he told me that that was anabsurd clich. But Valrys friend, far from rejecting the figure as false or inap-plicable, only takes issue with the nave belief that the transition might be tran-sitory; like Renan, he critically unpacks the image, and bluntly states his belief that endless becoming is the historical norm, and that every period is transi-tion. Valry, however, seems to cling unhappily to a classic periodical vision of history, in which transitions remain bounded events, destined to end when somefuture harbor floats into view. He thus grasps for another image, and falls backon the metaphor of history as pregnancy that Michelet had also invoked. Just aschild-bearing is necessarily a passing state, so he argues are the inhabitual hard-ships of the current time: do you think that a woman expecting a baby doesnt

GRAN BLIX70

80. Paul Valry, Le Bilan de lintelligence [1935], inVarit III (Paris: Gallimard, 1936), 253.81. Ibid ., 258.82. Ibid ., 259.83. Ibid ., 260.84. Eric Hobsbawm comments wryly that arguments about prediction tend to concentrate, for

obvious reasons, on those parts of the future where uncertainty appears to be greatest, and not onthose where it is least. Meteorologists are not needed to tell us that spring will follow winter. InLooking Forward: History and the Future [1981], inOn History (London: Abacus, 1997), 51.

85. Valry, Le Bilan de l'intelligence, 254.


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feel she is in a state rather different from the one she was in before, and that shecouldnt call this period of her life a transitional period?86 Some future offspringmust reward future generations for the pains of the presentthat is, if history andpregnancy can legitimately be compared.

Can we judge, in the end, between Valry and his friend, between perpetualtransition and organic periods, between non-stop labor and labor ending in birth?In trying to answer this, one thing seems to be clear: as contestable as the gridsof periodization that we apply to the historical continuum may be, they arecharged with meaning, both ideological and experiential, both real and imagi-nary. It is a necessary task to disentangle these layers in order to write genuinehistory. The destruction of the mantra of modernity is a good place to start todo this. In this skeptical spirit, I would offer the oxymoronic transitional peri-od as the term that best names the regime of perpetual change in which we nowlive, and which best captures its ambivalent, hopeful, dreadful, final, open-endedcharacter. Valry and his friend are both plausible: we often hear the messianicclaim that the end of history is near, accompanied by the apocalyptic trumpetsof the clash of civilizations. But this prophetic rhetoric announcing the adventof a new world order competes with the rousing neo-liberal promise of infinitegrowth, which invites us to celebrate the endless growing pains of capitalistexpansion. Both of these competing viewsimminent closure and endlessexpansionrely, in the end, on our current experience of time as a transitionalperiod. The concept thereby remains as relevant now as when the Romanticsfirst invented it, and the task of interpreting it anew, in ways that differ fromthese two narratives, has become more urgent than ever.

Princeton University


86. Ibid ., 258.

the emergency of modern time in nineteenth century

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