Hegel en France masterfully reconstructs the changing fortunes of French Hegelianism from the 1820s until World War II, providing detailed and nuanced portraits of minor as well as major Hegelian interpreters from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Originally published in Italy in 2006 (Hegel in Francia, Rubbettino), Bellantone’s book came out in French in 2011 (with a new preface by J.-L. Vieillard Baron). The large amount of literature already produced on the French reception of Hegel teems with similar titles: Georges Canguilhem’s article ‘Hegel en France’ (Reference Canguilhem1948), Kelly’s Hegel in France (Reference Kelly1992), his two previous bibliographic articles ‘Hegel in France to 1940’ (Reference Kelly1981) and ‘Hegel in France Today’ (Reference Kelly1986), and Salvadori’s Hegel in Francia (Reference Salvadori1974). However, in joining this classic research field, Bellantone’s two volumes do not fail to introduce some new elements. As Stuart Barnett remarks in his introduction to Hegel After Derrida, ‘The story of the French reception of Hegel has been told often’ (Barnett Reference Barnett1998: 13). Hegel en France tries to tell a slightly different story, although it engages with—and takes advantage of—previous works that cover a similar theme (Baugh Reference Baugh2003, Jarczyk and Labarrière Reference Jarczyk and Labarrière1996, Kelly Reference Kelly1992, Roth Reference Roth1988, Salvadori Reference Salvadori1974, Valentini Reference Valentini1958).
An interesting aspect concerns the chronological range of Bellantone’s reconstruction, which stretches from 1817 (the year of Victor Cousin’s first philosophy course after his journey to Germany) to 1941 (when the second volume of Jean Hyppolite’s translation of the Phenomenology of Spirit was published). The choice of this 120-year-long historical trajectory is premised on the assumption that the 1940s saw the final decline of the theoretical paradigm of Neoplatonic inspiration in which Hegel had been inscribed since the earliest days of his reception in France.
For Bellantone, the 1940s mark the start of ‘another story’ of French Hegelianism (1: 17); a story freed from the earlier Neoplatonic constraints and built in the limelight of Hegel’s Phenomenology and Jena writings—at the expense of the Encyclopaedia, privileged up until then; and, above all, a story at last loud and proud after the long ‘conspiracy of silence’ (Dufrenne Reference Dufrenne1948: 396).
The five chapters of Bellantone’s book are mainly devoted to telling the story of an absence: the long story of what seems at first sight to be Hegel’s marginalisation in the French academic context. The author investigates the symptomatic valence of that absence and stops where the latter turns into a visible and explicit presence that deserves to be questioned and interpreted differently.
The first volume, De Cousin à Vera, begins with an emblematic date, 1817, the year of Victor Cousin’s first encounter with Hegel, in Heidelberg. For many years the possibility of actually reading Hegel’s texts was the privilege of a few Germanist scholars. Thanks to Cousin, though, the history of the reception of Hegel in France could start well before his works became available in translation (that would happen mainly in the 1860s thanks to the work of August Vera), through an abundance of comptes rendus, summaries and surveys. Chapter 1—Hegel in the age of eclecticism (1817–1836)—illustrates the origin of Cousin’s eclectic philosophy, which led to the introduction of Hegel’s oeuvre at the Sorbonne and the École Normale, and seeks to uncover ‘the specific nature of Cousin’s Hegelianism in its historical materialization’ (1: 50), which has often been disqualified as ‘seduction and incomprehension’ (Jarczyk and Labarrière Reference Jarczyk and Labarrière1996: 19). Cousin found in the author of the Encyclopaedia an essential ally in his endeavour to relaunch an ontology capable of counterbalancing the alleged subjectivist setting of Scottish and Kantian psychology that prevailed in France in his day. However, his project to create an alliance philosophique between empiricism and idealism through the medium of German rationalism (1: 24) was doomed to be shelved after Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’état (1852), which also put an end to Cousin’s political career. Yet his eclecticism—Neoplatonic on the theoretical plane and moderately liberal on the political plane—long remained a synonym for Hegelianism in the French cultural landscape.
Chapter 2—Hegel between revolution and reaction (1838–1848)—analyses how the Hegelian vulgate promulgated by commentators became the bone of contention in a battle for hegemony between progressive and conservative forces in 1840s France. This decade witnessed the gradual erosion of Cousin’s eclecticism and the sudden fall of Hegelian philosophy into disrepute, as it was increasingly linked to the spectre of a socialist revolution. A few major publishing events led to this shift. Firstly, Quinet’s review of Strauss’s Leben Jesu (1835) in the Revue des deux mondes (1838), and the French translation of the book which appeared in 1839, revealed the subversive theological implications permeating Hegel’s system which were to be further exploited by the Left Hegelians. Secondly, the publication of the Jugement de Schelling sur la philosophie de M. Cousin (1835) warned against the primacy accorded by Hegel to the abstraction of the logic at the expense of everything that is alive and real, and aroused anti-Hegelian criticism. These events inaugurated trends that were soon to become persistent. In the Saint-Simonian circles and the socialist circuits that flourished thanks to the presence of German exiled intellectuals (Heine, Ruge, Marx, Engels), Hegel’s notions—of development, progress and change—were drawn close to the revolutionary horizon.
At the same time, the advent of French spiritualism countered the circulation of Hegel’s works. The chapter then reconstructs the theoretical manoeuvres of Felix Ravaisson, head of the spiritualist cohort, who charged Hegelian philosophy with determinism, atheism and quietism. Ravaisson urged the introduction in France of Schelling’s philosophy, invoking against Hegel the primacy of Being over Thought, and, against Cousin’s Neoplatonism, a return to Aristotle. By widening the gap between experience and reason, and placing Hegel arbitrarily on the side of reason, spiritualism contributed to his systematic ostracization, a task in which Neo-Kantianism and Catholic philosophies participated too. Therefore, from then on, ‘Hegel’s thought was disseminated in France simultaneously with the dissemination of a negative image of him’ (1: 161)—either reactionary or revolutionary—and it came back into favour at a later time when French intellectuals, after two world wars, were seeking for a paradigm that would offer new concepts and frames to the understanding of history.
Bellantone’s third chapter is devoted to the Hegelians in the Fifties (1848–1862). Outstanding among them were Vera, Taine and Renan, who despite having the merit of making translations of Hegel’s works finally available to the French public—the Logic, the Aesthetics and the Encyclopaedia—were unable to rescue him from the sidelines.
The second volume of the book, De Vera à Hyppolite, comprises two chapters, the first of which narrates The political eclipse and the rebirth of Hegelianism over a span of six decades (1866–1927). As Bellantone recalls, the Franco-Prussian War and France’s defeat at Sedan in 1870 opened a harsh phase in the relations between the two countries which led to a violent removal of Hegel’s philosophy and to his demonization as a Prussian pan-Germanist. The chapter gives an account of the research done in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by a restricted number of intellectuals (the socialists Herr and Andler, and also Noël, Berthelot, Delbos, Meyerson and Basch). Their attempts to provide alternatives to Vera’s Neoplatonic and panlogist canonization of Hegel’s system by reactivating the dynamic and concrete force of the dialectic were largely unsuccessful. The logic as a philosophy of becoming (2: 125) catalyzed the attention of few scholars (such as Noël, Delbos and Berthelot) who sought to extend the boundaries of French Neo-Kantianism so as to fit Hegel into them. However, their efforts were pitilessly rejected by Léon Brunschvicg, leader of the Neo-Kantians, in his Progrès de la conscience dans la philosophie occidentale (1927).
The fifth chapter reviews the many trends of Hegelianism that proliferated in the first half of the twentieth century. The philological work done in the 1920s—the publication of Dilthey’s Jugendgeschichte Hegels (1921) and the edition of the Jena writings by Lasson (1923) and Hoffmeister (1931–32)—paved the way for the new Hegelian hermeneutics of the 1930s. Bellantone maintains that the latter merely constituted a prelude to the Hegel Renaissance that was to occur in the following decade, and claims that the rehabilitation of Hegel could not have been accomplished before the translations of his principal works were completed, something that did not occur until the 1940s (Gibelin’s Leçons sur la philosophie de l’histoire appeared in 1937, Lefebvre and Guterman’s Morceaux choisis in 1939, Hyppolite’s Phénoménologie de l’esprit in 1939 and 1941, Kaan’s Principes de la philosophie du droit in 1940 and Jankélévitch’s Esthétique in 1944).
However, the author does not fail to recognize the importance of the 1930s. Indeed, he recalls that in 1931—the annus mirabilis of French Hegelianism (2: 177)—two prestigious journals, the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale and the Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, devoted special issues to the hundredth anniversary of Hegel’s death and gathered articles from leading Hegelian specialists such as Wahl, Koyré, Croce and Hartmann. Moreover, in the same year Koyré published in the Revue d’histoire de la philosophie his famous ‘Rapport sur l’état des études hégéliennes en France’, the first systematic presentation of the state of the art of French Hegelian studies. Accordingly, the sixth chapter explores the Hegelian laboratories of the 1930s (1929–1941). By investigating the writings of the young Hegel and pushing Hegelian philosophy to interact with the works of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Marx, Husserl and Heidegger, these pioneering experiences relegated eclectic Hegelianism once and for all to the past. Yet according to Bellantone the ‘Hegelian laboratories’ merely announced a phenomenon that would bloom only in the forties (2: 129).
The author devotes a great deal of space to repositioning the works of Jean Wahl in the context of those years. Wahl’s influential Malheur (1929) succeeded in shifting the centre of gravity from Hegel’s Berlin writings to those of Frankfurt and Jena, from logic to life, and from the system to dialectics conceived as experiential and lived contradiction. However, as Bellantone highlights, Wahl did not unveil the tragic node of Hegelian philosophy merely to give it an irrationalist twist. Instead, he emphasized the concrete universal that lies at the core of Hegel’s dialectic and epitomizes the unification of the rational and the irrational.
Lastly, the chapter revisits the most classical interpretations elaborated by the ‘Holy Trinity’ of French Hegelianism (Koyré, Kojève and Hyppolite), not without offering original insights. While underlining the well-known forced character of their reading, Bellantone credits Koyré and Kojève, who shared a major concern with the issue of temporality, with allowing the most original transpositions and the most syncretic hybridizations of Hegel’s thought. Hyppolite, known to be a more faithful and prudent interpreter, is said instead to have had the merit of passing Hegel down to posterity, thanks to especially his Genèse et structure de la Phénoménologie de l’esprit de Hegel (1946). These three commentators, alike in adopting an innovative ‘speculative and textual’ strategy (2: 200), began unprecedented investigations of the themes of negativity, immanence, consciousness, life and history, which were thus established as canonical topoi of contemporary Hegelian studies.
The author provides an interesting reading of Kojève—following Vegetti’s interpretation (Reference Vegetti1998) and opposing those of Jarczyk and Labarrière (Reference Jarczyk and Labarrière1996) and Descombes (Reference Descombes1979)—by relocating his anthropological reading of the Phenomenology of Spirit within an ontological frame and subordinating the former to the latter. He remarks as well that due to the subsequent radicalization of Kojève’s anthropological register, some of his students—Sartre, Bataille and Lacan first and foremost—were to produce that hyperbole of the negative which was soon to occupy a position of fundamental importance in French philosophy.
The book ends at the point where the new history of Hegelian posterity begins. As Bellantone remarks, because of a sort of ‘heterogenesis of ends’, ‘the Hegelian Renaissance of the 1930s provided a totally opposite philosophical trend with methodological tools that ended up dismantling the last chance of any logic and any philosophy’ (2: 126–27). More precisely and more controversially, according to Bellantone the debacle of the Hegel Renaissance—with the existentialist reversal of Hegelianism and its subsequent overcoming at the hands of the post-structuralists in the 1960s—was already implicit in its premises, namely in the fragile attempt of Hegelians in the 1930s to make of Hegel’s philosophy a logic of life. But was this really an attempt to generate ‘a logic of the irrational’ which after 1950 Neo-Bergsonism, deconstructionism and the philosophies of difference were merely to take to their extreme consequences to unhinge Hegelianism (2: 127)?
One cannot criticize a book that covers so long a time span for stopping too soon. Yet the argument that the Hegelianism of the 1930s contained the seeds of its later removal would deserve a deeper discussion. Unfortunately the tortuous genealogies that connect the Hegelian flowering of the1930s to Hegel’s later heirs and critics remain excluded from Bellantone’s valuable reconstruction. Some scholars—for instance Butler (Reference Butler1999), Schneider (Reference Schneider2007) and Rametta (Reference Rametta2012), besides the aforementioned Roth (Reference Roth1988) and Baugh (Reference Baugh2003)—have already partially embarked on the task of investigating how Hegelianism generated its contemporary detractors. Yet a comprehensive account of the intermediate links in the chain of transmission—the Hyppolite of Logique et existence (1953), Bataille and Lacan, as well as Sartre, Althusser and Lefebvre—who handed on Hegel’s intellectual legacy to the next generation of anti-Hegelians (Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida) still needs to be provided.
