In autumn of 1925, the future French sociologist Henri Lefebvre (1901–91) wandered along a dust-covered path at the foot of the Pyrenees in the furthest reaches of southwestern France. Following the transhumant trails of shepherds, he often took to these well-worn chemins in obstinate solitude—a reprieve from his mother's puritan, almost Jansenist, morality and aunts whom he described as by turns scolding and sanctimonious. On this occasion, the twenty-four-year-old Lefebvre suffered from the pain of a recent breakup and news that his mother had fallen ill. Crestfallen and exhausted, he rested on an old stone pedestal under one of the distinctive crosses erected long ago on the paths that traversed the Basque and Béarn countryside. “The cross of Angous,” as he would later call it, loomed overhead. Common to the French Southwest, the Pyrenean symbol consisted of a disk whose center coincided with the meeting of the two arms of the cross. The disk was embellished with long, radiating points, believed to be the thorns of the crown by locals who had placed nails and other instruments of the Passion around its weathered base. After some time, Lefebvre rose from the pedestal and looked again at the cross. Slowly backing away from it, he repeated to himself, “They have crucified the sun!”Footnote 1 Filled at once with horror and awe, the young philosopher intuited what any historian of religion could have told him: to gain influence in this remote province, Christianity had grafted itself onto the local paganism of the Pyrenees. Later, Lefebvre would discover that ages ago his ancestors had in fact renounced their solar cults and used Christian crosses to nail down the circular disks of the Midi. “Seizing the sun and fixing it to their cross,” those who once worshipped a solar radiance had repudiated its warmth for passions of a more puritan variety, he wrote in his two-volume autobiography La somme et le reste (1959).Footnote 2 Henceforth the cross of Angous symbolized the long degradation of the solar principle and Lefebvre's project to restore it. The crucified sun did not represent a vain search for lost traditions; rather it expressed Lefebvre's confidence in the value of certain symbols and rhythms of days gone by and his optimism that they might be revived.
The intellectual journey initiated by the crucified sun was far from straightforward. It took Lefebvre from mysticism and Marxist philosophy to Nietzsche and the historical sociology of rural communities—the last of these leading to the most influential of his pursuits, the critique of everyday life in the modern world. With the archaic symbol looming in the background, Lefebvre became knowledgeable in a staggering range of topics and eventually authored a monumental oeuvre of more than sixty books on sociology, philosophy, and the social history of ideas. Today, Lefebvre is acknowledged for advancing Marxist theory and for his seminal writings on cities. Books like La révolution urbaine (1970) have had a tremendous influence in the fields of architecture, geography, and urban sociology, while milestones such as La production de l'espace (1974) have become essential reading for students of spatial analyses in every domain. Closer attention to Lefebvre's rural sociology and his writings on Nietzsche, however, reveals a more ambiguous intellectual portrait. Consider that just when Le matérialisme dialectique (1939) secured Lefebvre's intellectual credentials in Marxist circles, Nietzsche (1939) expressed his desire to rescue time's cyclical rhythms from a vulgarized Marxism. Likewise, when Lefebvre penned his landmark studies of urban space in the early 1970s, he was immersed in the Nietzschean themes of time, history, and recurrence.Footnote 3 Lefebvre was a committed Marxist who understood the limits of Marx's conceptions of time and progress; he was also an ardent Nietzschean who was acutely aware of Nietzsche's tendency to turn every social problem into a subjective trial. This article pursues Lefebvre's lesser-known adherences to the ideas of Nietzsche alongside Marx and to the verities of time as well as space. Under the symbol of the crucified sun, the Marxist sociologist reinvented Nietzsche's question: “Ought one pour the most precious salves and wines into the sea?”Footnote 4
The symbol of the crucified sun fostered a steady reevaluation of a Pyrenean culture Lefebvre once loathed. Born beneath the western Pyrenees in 1901, young Henri's distaste for French rural life did not abate when he attended the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris or when he studied philosophy under Léon Brunschvicg at the Sorbonne. In the early 1930s, when Lefebvre translated Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and introduced the humanistic concepts of alienation, praxis, and overcoming into the stream of French Marxism, neither achievement rendered rural life any less backward or banal.Footnote 5 It was only in the late 1930s and early 1940s when Lefebvre immersed himself in Nietzsche's southern esprit and in the Pyrenean communities of the Campan valley that the budding sociologist began to see French rural life anew. By the close of World War II, the reversal was complete: loathing had become reverence. No longer only worn or passé, provincial pathways transformed themselves before his eyes. As for the old stone ramparts of Navarrenx, la bastide of his mother, they no longer stood for a suffocating confinement but suggested a stubborn persistence. Lefebvre's about-face toward so-called archaic societies reveals a moment at mid-century when the adjectives “primitive” and “archaic” took on a sense “rather less pejorative than the meaning one generally attributes to them.”Footnote 6 There was reason for the nascent sociologist to be nostalgic and distraught by what postwar progress would make of the French countryside. But the dialectical nature of Lefebvre's thinking meant that for him wistful longing for the past only served to catalyze a critique of the present and an exploration of the possible. After the Liberation, Lefebvre grounded the long-standing French romance with radical social visions (traceable at least to Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau) in a robust sociology of a southwestern terroir that had become terribly important to him.
When Lefebvre bore witness to the value of supposedly archaic forms of life, he cast his efforts within the Romantic critical tradition. A diffuse movement in literature, ideas, and the arts, European Romanticism included such a variety of aesthetic theories, national compositions, and political orientations that it defies neat generalization. Since nineteenth-century Romantics held unconventional and often contradictory views, “Romantic” denotes in this article a sensibility that Lefebvre himself defined in a series of essays written in the late 1950s and early 1960s.Footnote 7 In “Vers un romantisme révolutionnaire” (1957), Lefebvre concluded that a century and a half later it was high time for a new incarnation of the old Romantic critique. Like early nineteenth-century Romantics, Lefebvre believed that most of what passed for modern life was unmoored and trivial. He also believed that it was a particular kind of Romantic sensibility—forcefully expressed in Stendhal's use of beauty and headstrong passions as potent categories of social criticism—that could return style to everyday life as much as to art. The “revolutionary Romanticism” Lefebvre put forward was a patchwork of ideas drawn from nineteenth-century critics and tailor-made to address the alienations of life after World War II. Lefebvre maintained that Romantic critiques of the banal decadence engendered by bourgeois society were too fertile to cede to right-wing reactionaries; “I shall not be able to sacrifice Romanticism wholesale,” the heretical Marxist admitted.Footnote 8 Enracinement, rootedness, and a deep attachment to the land, for example, were perennial sentiments best not left to one's political rivals. Regardless of how anachronistic or Romantic such declarations might appear, Lefebvre believed that there were aspects of archaic societies that could reenchant everyday life during France's long Reconstruction. This article shows that rather than sweeping the past away, Lefebvre wanted to selectively revive it. Thus I contend that Lefebvre's revolutionary Romanticism rested on both a reverence for an archaic style of life and a desire to overcome the conditions of the postwar present. The French sociologist believed this peculiar mixture complementary and creative and he sought, to the very end, to resurrect the archaic because of his radical commitments, not in spite of them. Lefebvre's revolutionary Romanticism was dialectical, ebbing toward archaic pasts in order to surge into possible futures.
Symbolic expression and cyclical recurrence were the twin pillars of Lefebvre's revolutionary Romanticism. Rooted in precapitalist communities and the rural world, archaic symbols and cyclical social rhythms contested the modernizing imperatives that prevailed in the age of economic growth that the French call les trente glorieuses.Footnote 9 This article explores a broad range of works in which Lefebvre sought to return to prominence the durable beauty of the locally forged and the homespun. More specifically, the French sociologist thought that the persistent symbols and rhythms of archaic societies could be put in the service of human flourishing and the search for less alienated ways of living, expressing, and relating. I argue that at the heart of Lefebvre's influential critique of everyday life was a clarion call to revive certain archaic social modalities as a bulwark against the deracinating effects of postwar modernization and its largely unquestioned logic of perpetual progress. Lefebvre's efforts to resurrect select aspects of archaic cultures coexisted with and complemented his steadfast commitment to a postcapitalist future. Any adequate understanding of Lefebvre's larger corpus needs to recognize his Romantic attachment to rural life, his enduring interest in the habits of “primitive” communities, and his belief that certain archaic forms of everyday life recurred even in the midst of hypermodernization. To understand Lefebvre's advocacy of the archaic, I examine how his efforts to resurrect symbolic expression and cyclical recurrence emerged from a Pyrenean symbol of the sun and a Nietzschean vision of the sea.
Scholars agree that Lefebvre's views were heterodox. Some attribute his unorthodox ideas to Hegelian and existentialist influences; others see an iconoclastic oeuvre reliant on utopian impulses and surrealist reversals.Footnote 10 But the source of Lefebvre's heterodoxy remains open, especially as it pertains to his social thought. The postwar sociologist's distinctiveness lay precisely in the revolutionary Romanticism that he defined, identified with, and promoted. It is this same Romantic sensibility that eventually rears its head and upsets attempts to square Lefebvre with existentialism, surrealism, structuralism, post-structuralism or any of the other molds that are commonly used to make sense of twentieth-century French thought. To grasp the revolutionary Romanticism that crystallized in Lefebvre's thinking after World War II, close attention must be paid to the wellsprings of his interest in the archaic—his two decades as a rural sociologist and his long encounter with Nietzsche. Yet Lefebvre's rural and Nietzschean influences have never been fully expounded, nor has their relationship to each other. This article addresses that gap by showing how a Pyrenean symbol of the sun and a Nietzschean vision of recurrence were essential touchstones in Lefebvre's social thought across les trente glorieuses. Lefebvre's towering oeuvre, highly theoretical and difficult to approach, more easily yields its riches when we recognize his experience of southwestern France and his reading of Nietzsche for what they were: enduring influences that were threaded throughout Lefebvre's better-known tomes.
The symbol of the crucified sun
“Le soleil crucifié” (1959) is a striking instance of revolutionary Romanticism. Lefebvre's essay on the crucified sun was short, wide-ranging, and generally in keeping with the moral and moving style established by Montaigne in the sixteenth century. A chapter from Lefebvre's autobiography La somme et le reste, the essay announced in Les Temps modernes the forthcoming publication of that voluminous glimpse into its author's intriguing intellectual life. If Lefebvre selected “Le soleil crucifié” because he thought it captured his intellectual journey up to that point, it was a remarkable, if somewhat deceptive, choice. Lefebvre's essay on the symbol of the crucified sun spoke very little of Marxism or the Parti communiste français (PCF), tracing instead a path from mysticism and a revolt against religion to Nietzsche and rural sociology. But more than anything else, “Le soleil crucifié” announced to the readers of Les Temps modernes how important Lefebvre's efforts to revive archaic symbols and “deliver the solar principle” were to his oeuvre. The themes of “Le soleil crucifié” said it all: Lefebvre's essay spoke of cosmological symbols, cyclical rhythms, and the operative categories of magic. Nowhere in “Le soleil crucifié” were the categories of la pensée primitive—evocation, participation, communion, resurrection, and the other a priori conceptions through which magical thinking understood sense impressions—dismissed as illusory fables (Marx) or fallacious acts upon nature (Frazer). As Lefebvre admitted elsewhere, it was Nietzsche who taught him that “the sacred and divine, religion and theology could not be reduced to superstructure, ideology, or the systematization of primitive illusions.”Footnote 11 On the heels of his expulsion from the PCF, “Le soleil crucifié” revealed that a Romantic sensibility had long guided his work. Moreover, Lefebvre confessed in the pages of Les Temps modernes to the rural and Nietzschean influences to which it was organically connected.
Since Lefebvre's crucified sun was joined to his rural sociology, it is unsurprising that Pyrénées (1965) contained some of the most important pages written on the symbolic marker once common to the French Southwest. Although it appeared after “Le soleil crucifié,” Lefebvre's 1965 travel guide was derived in large part from his 1954 thesis on Pyrenean rural communities. In keeping with the aims of the collection in which it appeared, “Atlas des voyages,” Pyrénées included little of the picturesque and generally avoided the kind of local color common to les guides bleus. Instead, the French Southwest was seen through the eyes of an “ideal travel companion,” a historically minded sociologist with literary sensibilities. Pyrénées brims with the same analytical acumen that today draws readers to La production de l'espace. It shows that Lefebvre's knack for unraveling the secrets behind symbols, monuments, city streets, and social practices was born far from any metropolis. Lefebvre used the opportunity to guide his readers toward a certain art de vivre that persisted in the symbols and social practices of this mountainous borderland. Here, as throughout his sociology, Lefebvre drew attention to an art of living at once ancient and alive. In this sense, the volume's many illustrations captured how this region combined a glacial civilization with a radiant cultural life.Footnote 12
Ever attuned to the past, Lefebvre provided a brief history of his cherished symbol. He explained that it was only at the end of the seventeenth century that Christianity had finally subdued the heretics and solar cults of the French Southwest. Affixing its rigid arms to the solar disk, the cross eclipsed the sun at the same time as urban societies and les propriétaires triumphed over agro-pastoral communities and les peuples archaïques. Ravaged by Christianity, capital, and centralized state power, many believed that archaic symbolism had become a dead form that no longer spoke to those who lived in the modern era. Indeed, one could read Lefebvre's lamenting the sun's fall from grace as yet another object lesson in loss.Footnote 13 Interpreted in this way, Lefebvre offered only a bleak elegy that fueled a debilitating disillusionment and was essentially, perhaps even dangerously, nostalgic. But, Lefebvre countered, weren't solar symbols not lost but still before our eyes? As Lefebvre saw it, neither Christianity nor capital's long reign had eliminated the radiant symbol of “life and vitality per se.” Nor had solar symbols disappeared with the great schism that men like Hegel and Marx thought divided the modern era from the archaic. With its racines millénaires, the enduring symbol continued to express not only an archaic art of living, but its confinement, its degradation, and, of course, the failed attempts to eradicate it.Footnote 14
While Lefebvre's effort to resurrect archaic symbols was remarkable, he was not entirely eccentric. There were others who wanted to recast symbolic expression during les trente glorieuses. “It is beginning to be realized,” one of their number wrote, “that the rediscovery of symbolism is perhaps the most important discovery of our age.”Footnote 15 Lefebvre and a coterie of intellectuals who were born around 1900 and formed by the French human sciences argued that the value of “primitive” symbols lay in their power to break open immediate reality and recall more distant mores and moralities. For example, the sociologist Georges Gurvitch (1894–1965) associated symbols with archaic societies, cyclical time, and a whole series of aesthetic, affective, and erotic values. Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) argued that since symbols elicited a remembrance of things past and a quest for things immemorial, they were surrounded by a host of emotions that breathed new life into everyday exchanges, which explains why the ethnographer lamented how the spread of industrial civilization led to the demise of archaic symbols. The historian of religions Mircea Eliade (1907–86) described how symbols such as the solar disk initiated passage into reflective moments and sparked “the fire of intelligence.” Archaic symbols were like grand palimpsests on which “traces of the old writing can still be seen under the new,” and Eliade believed that just as religious symbols did not entirely erase the cosmic symbols that preceded them (the cross confined the sun but could not eliminate it), magico-religious symbols would persist amid the erasures of postwar Reconstruction.Footnote 16
Yet Lefebvre's Romantic preference for symbols stood apart from the great vogue for signs, semiotics, and “the symbolic” in postwar French thought. Structuralism, with its enthusiasm for the duality of the linguistic sign and the formal order of language, and all its talk of signs and significations and symbolic functions, gave Lefebvre pause. “Symbols and symbolisms,” he once wrote, “are much-discussed topics, but they are rarely discussed intelligently.”Footnote 17 Lefebvre sharply criticized his contemporaries for not understanding that symbols were a concrete, material reality one lived before they were an abstract representation to be read. A catch-all, signification suppressed the great variety of the semantic field and was thus ill-suited to unravel the meaning of actually existing symbols. By bringing the symbolic and the linguistic under the same umbrella, the fonction symbolique missed how symbols were emotionally effective in ways signs were not. For this reason, what Lefebvre took seriously was not a nebulous sphere that went by the name “the symbolic,” but the qualitative expressions of concrete symbols that were locally forged and lived. Symbolic expression, he argued, is intimate and emotional; it is a thing of flesh and blood that struggles against the iciness of signs and signals; “mobile and unexpected, it is forever breaking through the barriers of signification.” Like Nietzsche, Lefebvre conceived of symbols as more affective, poetic, and life-affirming than one could find in any science of discourse.Footnote 18 One reason symbols expressed more than they signified was because they contained content of les origines archaïques. “Archaic symbolism,” Lefebvre added, “is constantly intervening, creating confusions and tearing through the fabric of signs and of coherent discourse.” He insisted that language was not, as many of his contemporaries believed, a privileged and sacred site. Lefebvre reserved that honor for archaic symbols like the crucified sun.Footnote 19
One reason Lefebvre's study of symbols merits attention was that it was concerned with societal developments just as much as with intellectual currents. Lefebvre's social thought was habitually double-edged, with one side sharpened for the history of ideas and the other keen to contemporary everyday life. In this case, Lefebvre recognized that in rebuilt cities and new towns and all along the paved routes in between, a colossal network of signs and signals had spread across postwar France. Signs and signals were now as ubiquitous as symbols had once been in the archaic village—where everything from tilling the soil to slicing bread had symbolic import. The proliferation of signs and signals had effectively cordoned off symbols, excluding them from everyday life and confining them to what would come to be called lieux de mémoire. For example, as traffic signals increasingly conditioned social life, older monuments became ensnared in an infernal circulation. Lefebvre thought that since embracing the “works” of a civilization—its symbols, monuments, and festivals (to name the pantheon of Lefebvre's preferred works)—meant accepting the mores associated with it, the deterioration of a symbol announced a decline in the values, practices, and ways of knowing lodged in it. Thus corroded crucified suns were an indication that the archaic art of meridional life was on the verge of vanishing.Footnote 20
In the early 1960s, the story of the crucified sun took an interesting turn. The twist came not long after the publication of “Le soleil crucifié.” Within the year, the symbol that Lefebvre had spoken of so effusively in the pages of Les Temps modernes began to appear across Paris. Walking the city streets between 1959 and 1962, you were bound to encounter its mark—a thick black circle overlaid with perpendicular black lines. No longer erected only atop stone pedestals on ancient Pyrenean paths, the symbol now appeared hastily scrawled on the walls of rebuilt Paris. The archaic symbol had been revitalized, resurrected even, but not in the way Lefebvre had wished. Parisians on the political right—a crowd of young fascists, Lefebvre called them—had taken to the symbol and made it their own. Like many, these young men who traced a circle and a cross on the walls of the city sought a sense of continuity amid the upheavals of hypermodernization and imperial decline. In this way, their conservative aspirations were not all that dissimilar from some of the nostalgic dissatisfaction described here. But, unlike Lefebvre, these members of a new far right found solace in a certain idea of Frenchness, in an identity rooted in the soil of ancient Gaul and the bonds of the Christian Church. “Some attribute the solar cross to the Celtic race and make it the symbol of a sort of Gallic chauvinism,” Lefebvre noted.Footnote 21 Their solar cross symbolized a reactionary defense of Christian values and a xenophobic resistance to perceived racial and cultural decline. During the final years of the French–Algerian War, the French far right did not turn to provincial shopkeepers or the endangered traditions of la France profonde, as Poujadism (that false dawn for the French far right) had in the mid-1950s. Instead they turned to a politics of racial and religious identity and did so under the very symbol Lefebvre had called the crucified sun.Footnote 22
It was an extraordinary situation. Having publicly identified with the solar cross, Lefebvre seemed to be in quite a predicament. Yet this latest appropriation confirmed a number of things Lefebvre had professed about the nature of symbols. There, on the walls of Paris, was a clear demonstration of the plasticity of symbolic meaning. Shot through with meanings manifest and latent and borne across millennia, symbols were forever open to reinterpretation. Further, since “human beings feel linked by symbolism,” a new political formation had cohered under the symbol of the solar cross. In “Que dit le soleil crucifié?” (1962), Lefebvre let it be known that he disagreed with those who saw in this latest appropriation more evidence that it was high time to leave these symbolic relics to right-wing reactionaries. Echoing the notion of cultural survivals put forward by the English anthropologist Edward B. Tylor, Lefebvre imagined them saying, “What a load of stupid, pathetic rubbish! You're living in the past with all that nineteenth-century stuff. We've left all that behind, things are different for us modern men!”Footnote 23 For many, the postwar period was not the time to renew Romantic sentiments or dramatize the deep past. But, Lefebvre asked, just because some petits fascistes have exploited an archaic symbol, should we not contest its appropriation? Just as he had refused to renounce Nietzsche in the late 1930s, Lefebvre refused to surrender the fertile symbol to the French far right.Footnote 24 If the symbol of the crucified sun was “worthy of this drama” in 1925, then it was still worth contesting in 1962. Despite its degradation and the “jokes of those who criticized or laughed at him,” the French sociologist continued to plead for the crucified sun. In 1925, he had stood in front of the Pyrenean symbol and spoken to it; in 1959, he confessed of the crucified sun's importance to the readers of Les Temps modernes; and now, in 1962, after the far right's appropriation of the solar cross, he let the symbol narrate its own message: “By piling yet more filth on me,” the Pyrenean symbol proclaimed, “people are confirming my message, confirming what I am and what I have yet to say.”Footnote 25 As it turns out (unsurprisingly, perhaps), the crucified sun that Lefebvre animated was a Nietzschean that criticized those on the far right who filled the city streets to voice their ressentiment.
Since Lefebvre wasn't afraid to appear outdated or old-fashioned, his advocacy of archaic symbols was susceptible to charges of primitivism. When questions of le romantisme de l'archaïque arose, Lefebvre countered such accusations by reaffirming the presence of the deep past in the postwar era. Even now, he wrote, “we are sustained by ancient symbols, affective nuclei which have come down to us from a distant past, symbolizing the direct and immediate interpersonal relations of primitive societies.” Because the symbols of so-called primitive cultures were present and prestigious, and spoke to us still, their revival had nothing to do with rediscovering a lost paradise or returning to some state of pure nature.Footnote 26 To transform the present, Lefebvre kept one eye on the horizon and the other on the hallowed ground of humanity's past. It is telling, then, that Lefebvre drew on the recently uncovered evidence at Lascaux. The discovery of prehistoric painted caves near Montignac in the autumn of 1940 caused some to declare that if Reconstruction brought mostly surface and ephemera, then the caverns at Lascaux revealed the depth and persistence of symbolic expression.Footnote 27 Turning to Lascaux, Lefebvre was on familiar ground. After all, it was in the Franco-Cantabrian region of southwestern France that the Paleolithic Age had left its deepest impression. Having crossed millennia, prehistoric friezes were paragons of durable expression—which is why, Lefebvre explained, we often called upon archaic works “to give us a sense and a style.”Footnote 28 By mid-century, parietal art and the social practices it suggested “no longer represent only social survivals.” Instead, painted caverns like those at Altamira, Niaux, and Lascaux were living proof that archaic societies had invented a style of life both durable and expressive. There—deep in the soil, directly before one's eyes, and close enough to touch (if only illicitly)—was evidence of a culture whose aesthetics and mores were rooted in natural and cosmological worlds. In Les communautés paysannes pyrénéennes (1954), Lefebvre maintained that there was a strong connection between the agro-pastoral communities he had studied in the Pyrenees and the prehistoric civilizations of the Magdalenian period.Footnote 29 Twenty years later, in La production de l'espace, Lefebvre reiterated that though the meaning of these shadowy symbols may be any one of a hundred things, Lascaux's painted walls nonetheless had magical effects that intensified life.Footnote 30
After two decades studying agro-pastoral societies, Lefebvre recognized that the new primacy of the urban demanded a change of scholarly terrain. But the questions Lefebvre now asked, as he transitioned from le terroir to la grande ville, were those he had cultivated in southwestern France: will urban housing developments revitalize symbolic expression or degrade it? Will technological progress bring a shared sense of belonging or thwart it? Will new towns bring communities closer together or drive them apart? Written in 1960, “Notes sur la ville nouvelle” is an impressive short work that compared the new cité of Mourenx to Navarrenx, the sleepy old bourg of Lefebvre's youth.Footnote 31 Comparisons between timeworn rural communities and recent urban phenomena were a staple of Lefebvre's social thought after World War II, and “Notes” recorded the alienations of Reconstruction France by pitting the new town against the French countryside. For Lefebvre, Navarrenx epitomized how thousand-year-old communities were sites of symbolic meaning; one need only listen to “the song of the craftsmen and their hammers and the shrilling of the carpenters’ planes” to know that Navarrenx was no wasteland one crossed only to get from point A to point B.Footnote 32 But, after only half of les trente glorieuses, Navarrenx was no longer a place where “life was lived in slow motion.” It was beginning to resemble so many other ancestral villages that were dying under the wheels of postwar modernization. New towns, with their exhausting congestion and “machines for living in,” seemed designed to dismember and uproot all that had hitherto been “organically united.” Lefebvre concluded that in Mourenx, “All those things which have made up the interwoven texture of the spontaneous places of social living since the Neolithic village have been hurled one by one into time and space.” Despite such criticisms, “Notes” makes two things clear: first, while the old pathways of Navarrenx were increasingly degraded and despised, they retained a rich parfum de terroir.Footnote 33 Second, Lefebvre was just as passionate about possible futures as he was about bygone eras of rural well-being. Taken together, “Notes” reveals that at the heart of Lefebvre's social thought was a Romantic vision of a postcapitalist future rooted in the organic unities and expressive styles of an archaic, precapitalist past. When Lefebvre confronted the new urban age, he did so in light of his experience in the French Southwest and the knowledge he had acquired there. The result was not simple nostalgic resignation but reverence for an archaic past coupled with a commitment to a postcapitalist future.
When La production de l'espace announced a new dawn in urban sociology, archaic symbols like the crucified sun were by no means jettisoned. Throughout the volume, concrete symbols continued to play a critical role in Lefebvre's social thought. Spatial orientation by means of locally forged symbols pre-dated the abstract, geometric organization of space: “It should not be supposed that ‘primitive’ people—seasonally migrant herders, let's say—formed abstract representations.” Rather, Lefebvre continued, “their markers remained purely qualitative in character.”Footnote 34 Lefebvre surely had the symbol of the crucified sun in mind when he described in La production de l'espace how the qualitative markers that oriented archaic societies were linked to everyday life, invested with affective powers, and created to evoke cosmic rhythms. By 1974, however, hypermodernization had all but cleared away the kind of symbolic expression encouraged by agro-pastoral societies. Lefebvre described how “abstract space,” state capitalism, and the logic of circulating signs and commodities had restricted the realm of archaic symbols. As the French sociologist told it, abstract space was built upon the demise of archaic societies and the razing of what Lefebvre called “absolute spaces” of expenditure, sacrifice, and symbolic expression. Yet, invariably, Lefebvre reminded his readers that at the end of les trente glorieuses the symbolic spaces of agro-pastoral societies neither had disappeared, nor did they “survive only in churches and cemeteries.”Footnote 35 One reason archaic spaces were so hardy and persistent was because everyday life in capitalist society was so vacuous that people, as a matter of habit, turned from abstract spatial systems to the homegrown demarcations that had oriented and sustained communities for centuries. But this was not all. According to Lefebvre, archaic spaces also endured because most of what dominated agro-pastoral societies was qualitative and life-enhancing. Thus he believed that ancient monuments, country homes, and rural villages—those precious residues of the past—afforded the best glimpse of how the appropriation of space could be an expressive work of art.Footnote 36 As true in 1974 as it was in 1944, the qualitative manner in which agro-pastoral societies erected boundaries and established limits appealed to those who had lived through the vicissitudes of quantitative growth and violent upheaval that defined the first half of the twentieth century. That Lefebvre's grand constellation of symbolic expression, cosmic rhythms, and qualitative values can still be read in the pages of La production de l'espace is evidence of a sustained effort to resurrect the symbolic markers of an older type of space.
Lefebvre's writings on the crucified sun are an explicit case of revolutionary Romanticism. Stated in bald terms, the French sociologist hoped that symbols would once again punctuate everyday life in a manner reminiscent of societies of old. Because symbols expressed the most fundamental rhythms, those of the human body and the cosmos, they appealed to the senses, aroused obscure emotions, and fostered more qualitative kinds of social practice. And since symbols like the crucified sun crossed great distances of time and space as if by magic, Lefebvre deemed their revival possible. “There are some very ancient symbolisms,” he wrote, “which alone are able to restore some strength to gestures and actions which have been robbed of all meaning.”Footnote 37 Responding to a long season of displacement and disintegration, Lefebvre championed the enduring remains of archaic societies. In an era when novelty and technical rationality reigned, it was contentious indeed to demand that certain premodern modes of expression be recognized and revived. Yet Lefebvre was a passéiste who looked backward not to reach regressive conclusions but to seize upon an art of everyday life before the age of capitalism. Archaic symbols became a touchstone for intellectuals like Lefebvre who wanted to radically reevaluate contemporary society. Evocative, participatory, and profound, symbols were the expressive level of revolutionary Romanticism par excellence.
From a vision of the sea to a typology of repetition
There are striking similarities between Lefebvre's writings on the crucified sun and his portrait of the sea in “Une vision.” In August 1953, at the height of his rural sociology, Lefebvre described his vision of the sea near Saint-Pabu.Footnote 38 Like “Le soleil crucifié,” “Une vision” told the story of an epiphany that came to the sociologist when a sense of inquietude met a moment of physical exhaustion. “Une vision” was also an experience at the furthest reaches of the French Hexagon: only this time Lefebvre's moment of clarity occurred not along a dusty Pyrenean path, but amid the rolling waves at the western edge of Brittany. If “Le soleil crucifié” was bound to the religious fervor of his austere Béarnaise mother, then “Une vision” owed more to the wit of his Breton father—who was stocky, licentious, Rabelaisian and not at all austere.Footnote 39 Where “Le soleil crucifié” spoke of symbols, “Une vision” was a lesson in recurrence. But, as we shall see, the symbol of the crucified sun and Lefebvre's vision of recurrence were intimately related. Together they demonstrate the depth of Lefebvre's revolutionary Romanticism.
Lefebvre reviled how often rivers were used to represent time's continuous advance. Modern thought is full of metaphors about the progressive stream of time penned by observers on the riverbank.Footnote 40 The problem was that everyday life after World War II raised questions that overwhelmed unidirectional images of progress. The shores of the sea, however, offered an image of rhythmic time and a vocabulary of ebbs, floodtides, harmonics, and swells. At the same time, the contours of the rocky coast testified to the force of millennial repetition and provided a glimpse of imperturbable motion crashing against its limits. Hence Lefebvre preferred visions of provincial seas to views from the banks of the Seine. Above all else, the sea made clear that time included involution. “The idea of the nonlinearity of time has never ceased to be important to me,” he wrote.Footnote 41 In the 1950s, Lefebvre and social thinkers such as Georges Bataille and Mircea Eliade discovered in archaic ideas of involution an alternative to modern notions of progress. Nonlinear temporality lay at the heart of Lefebvre's critique of orthodox Marxism as well. Even when Marxism avoided an absolute determinism, it tended to cast time in progressive terms and explain events as though they were so many stages in an epic of socioeconomic destiny. For Lefebvre, run-of-the-mill Marxism had a poor handle on temporality, especially when it bore the stamp of Party approval. Lefebvre's vision of the sea helped him see the “pseudo-dialectics” that guided the work of many of his contemporaries.Footnote 42 In the end, “Une vision” provides a vivid glimpse into what Lefebvre meant when he used the term “dialectic.”
In “Une vision,” Lefebvre showed how the experience of where the ocean met the shore provided the metaphors most appropriate to the temporal experience of archaic societies. For the sea—with its eddies, undertows, and other metaphors of involution—sketched a marvelous tableau of time's contours and confluences and offered the best approximation of time's cyclical realities.Footnote 43 According to Lefebvre, among the waves, the past is visible in waves whose arcs can still be seen rushing toward the shore. These waves-gone-by “cannot be dismissed as mere memory,” for they remain alive and active even at great distances. And when their shape disappeared in the drama of the shore, these shattered waves slowly and imperceptibly returned. As for the future, it was evident in the waves slowly gathering force on the horizon. These waves-to-come “cannot be reduced to some kind of uncertainty”; they might include the contingent and ephemeral, but their size and shape were determined by much larger, more cosmic forces. Anticipated and repeatedly assessed, waves that once appeared far off suddenly seem imminent. Finally, the present is more than a mere succession of instants. Among the waves, one is both master and prey: sometimes waves seem to bend to your will, other times you can do no more than be tossed about. “For a little while,” Lefebvre recalled, “I saw the sea like the men of long ago, the hunters, shepherds, magicians, and shamans saw the animals and stars.”Footnote 44 Oscillating between terrifying tempests and tranquil swells, the sea offered the French sociologist a vision of recurrence befitting cultures of old.
Just before the war, Lefebvre hinted at his Romantic sensibility in Nietzsche (1939). Lefebvre found in Nietzsche an idea of recurrence that resonated with his intrigue before the “calm splendor” of cultural continuity over the longue durée. Like Nietzsche, Lefebvre scoured the past in search of sociocultural alternatives. “Surely,” Lefebvre wrote elsewhere, “if the word culture has any meaning at all, it is that someone can cross the centuries and maybe discover his cultural fellows in the past.”Footnote 45 Lefebvre's reading of the second Untimely Meditation, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” (1874), helps clarify the point.Footnote 46 In 1939, Lefebvre emphasized that the German philologist—whose knowledge and inquiries traversed the centuries—was concerned not just with discontinuity but with the various ways the past persisted in the present. Lefebvre learned from Nietzsche that renewal, renaissance, and regeneration (call it what you will) depended upon an enormous repository of vestiges du passé that might interrupt the crushing sameness of the capitalist present.Footnote 47 It was a lesson that increasingly informed Lefebvre's writings on social practice and everyday life. Lefebvre's postwar oeuvre, including his prized La production de l'espace, often advocated for a peculiar sort of persistence over the longue durée, yet this is often lost on readers who associate the author of L'irruption de Nanterre au sommet (1968) and Le droit à la ville (1968) mainly with the swift and anarchic manifestations of May 1968. Nietzsche, who saw a profound continuity in all that was creative and higher in the world, provided the model for Lefebvre's efforts to revive an art de vivre that stood in stark contrast to the antinomian impulses swelling at mid-century.Footnote 48 After the Second World War, when many a jeune âme wanted to radically change life by removing all its limits, Lefebvre used the theme of recurrence to speak of the enduring genres necessary for human creativity and community.
Lefebvre found in Nietzsche's doctrine of eternal recurrence what he was looking for: a nonlinear temporality that transformed the arrow of time into “an involution of all the past.” It was Nietzsche who impressed upon Lefebvre that repetition need not be banal and that even becoming was cyclical: “spirit is born, it develops, dies, and surges anew.” Often what Nietzsche and Lefebvre meant by development entailed a subtle resurrection of a more archaic style of life. For them, there was an important difference between rekindling ancient fires and returning to some blessed isle of yore. The vestiges of the former remained alive in the present; if the latter had ever existed, it had surely vanished by 1950. It was Nietzsche's great merit to have made this fine distinction time and again.Footnote 49 At the same time, Lefebvre's evaluation of Nietzsche's grandiose theory was tempered. He criticized the German poet–philosopher for disparaging life in the modern world through his personal trials alone. Forgoing the social realities of repetition, Nietzsche's lyrical soliloquies contemplated nothing more than his own relationship with the universe. “Nietzsche never sees and never will see any issue other than a metaphysics of identity between the cosmos and the individual,” Lefebvre wrote.Footnote 50 Since Nietzsche never crossed sociology's discipline-defining threshold between the individual and the social, what the French sociologist admired most was the more prosaic applications of Nietzsche's doctrine of eternal recurrence. That things were cyclical had real implications not just for philosophy, science, and poetry, but for everyday life.Footnote 51 Beginning with a theory of “moments,” Lefebvre's critique of everyday life would expound on precisely this.
Lefebvre's theory of moments, which came to fruition in La somme et le reste and the second volume of Critique de la vie quotidienne (1961), is a beautiful example of his work on recurrence. Lefebvre was emphatic that moments—both the experience of them and his inquiry into them—were more sociological than subjective. They were “an examination of reality,” he wrote, “which first presents itself on the sociological plane, where the individual is not separate from the social.”Footnote 52 Theorized with his own moment of the crucified sun in mind, Lefebvre showed how moments stood apart from the perplexing admixture of boredom and uncertainty that characterized les trente glorieuses. In an age of rapid transformation when “nothing was clear” and everything seemed an “amorphous muddle of triviality,” moments ordered the chaos and confusion. Lefebvre did not hesitate to describe a moment as a spiritual duration that interrupted the prosaic unfolding of everyday life. In this theory, creative license flourished not because of absolute liberty but by means of a stylized order akin to the festive sequence of a magico-religious ceremony. Because they were aligned with cosmic and corporeal rhythms, moments were a higher form of renewal and reappearance, a noble type of repetition. Yet Lefebvre also admitted that festive moments “only make sense when their brilliance lights up the sad hinterlands of everyday dullness.” Reflecting on the relationship between moments and the fabric of everyday life, Lefebvre concluded that while moments carved a space and a time out of daily life, they were also born of it. “Everyday life,” he concluded, “is the native soil in which moments germinate and take root.” Thus the nobility of moments had nothing to do with aristocracy or aesthetic purity. After all, “There are men who are not artists or philosophers, but who nevertheless emerge above the everyday, in their own everyday lives, because they experience moments of love, work, play, etc.”Footnote 53 Lefebvre's theory of moments was an optimistic contribution to the human and social sciences, but he understood that the much-maligned image of repetition still needed some serious sharpening.
Couched in metaphors of the sun and the sea, the second volume of Critique de la vie quotidienne contained an apologia for cyclical timescales. Lefebvre's writings on Nietzsche and his theory of moments helped him to define a temporality typical of archaic societies. Lefebvre wanted to understand—and he wanted other social thinkers to recognize—repetitions according to their type and their specific social modality. He argued that all that repeats was not of the same order. He isolated two types of repetition in the second Critique: quantitative linear repetitions and qualitative cyclical ones. Cyclical timescales, which had long governed human life and were the subject of magico-religious symbols, were the essence of archaic temporality. Their opposite, linear timescales, were born of the demands of economic growth and technological progress and were firmly embedded in the signs and signals of France's postwar Reconstruction. Arrhythmic and antinature, these linear currents had pernicious effects on natural and corporeal rhythms. As head of a team of sociological researchers at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Lefebvre was well aware of the extent to which linear time prevailed: “Most people find it overwhelmingly difficult to accustom themselves to the rational and abstract kind of time implied by money and credit. They lie awake thinking about it. All they want is to get it over with.”Footnote 54 It was in the second Critique that Lefebvre's work on recurrence transitioned from Nietzschean musings on a vision of the sea to a sociological typology of repetition. Insisting on the social importance of cyclical rhythms, Lefebvre moved beyond Nietzsche's subjective vision of recurrence.
An unmistakable message of the second Critique was that cyclical rhythms needed to be reintegrated into everyday life. Having reevaluated repetition in “Une vision,” Lefebvre argued in Critique that while cyclical rhythms were vital to all eras, their resurrection was especially urgent in an age of rapid acceleration and growth. He attested to the fact that though disrupted by urban expansion and technological advance, cyclical rhythms had not disappeared. Because quantitative linear time was so affectively impoverished, a large part of physiological and social life remained rooted in cyclical rhythms. In other words, like the solar disks of the French Southwest, cosmic and corporeal cycles lived on. Lefebvre illustrated the difference by comparing a farmer in a “rather backward region” whose life was governed by cyclical rhythms with a worker in “modern industrial society” whose life was regulated by linear time. It was the supposedly backward peasant, Lefebvre argued, who experienced cultural continuity, human community, and the integration of the cosmic and the quotidian, while the modern worker lurched between the linear timescales of work and the cyclical life of hearth and home.Footnote 55 Herein lies the interest of Lefebvre's appreciation of an archaic type of repetition: it offered a still visible alternative to the modernizing imperatives that increasingly governed everyday life after World War II.
Given scholarly interest in Lefebvre's analysis of urban space, it is worth tracing the theme of recurrence across his transition from rural to urban sociology. When, in the late 1960s, the French sociologist devoted his energies to a critique of urban life, his vision of recurrence and his reading of Nietzsche continued to exert an influence. Just as there were no more blessed isles of yore, Lefebvre believed that answers to the great urban challenge were not to be found in the “non-city.” By 1970, he felt confident enough to write, “any contradictions that occur no longer take place between city and country. The principal contradiction is shifted to the urban phenomenon itself.”Footnote 56 As Lefebvre explored this new urban terrain, a Romantic sensibility and an enthusiasm for a particular type of repetition continued to light his path. Bear in mind the notion of habiter, the quotidian act of inhabiting or “habiting” the world, featured in Lefebvre's La révolution urbaine. Central to Lefebvre's idea of habiting was the belief that human beings, modern urban dwellers included, “cannot do anything but inhabit as poets.” A poetic practice of giving style to one's life, as Nietzsche put it, does not disappear, even when urban existence is at its most derisive. Lefebvre wrote in laudatory terms of a poetic form of habiting that remained attached to the land and took into consideration use value, qualitative development, and social need. That is to say, Lefebvre heaped praise on precisely the old poetry of living he had known in the French Southwest, where woodcutters and shepherds gave a sustainable style to their lives. Like his Romantic predecessors, Lefebvre asked, “How can we create a habiting that gives form without impoverishing, a shell that enables the young to grow old without premature foreclosure?”Footnote 57 It was a question in which the temporal dimension and the problem of repetition took center stage. For the sociologist who founded the Institut de sociologie urbaine, time was the site of values, and recurrence the means by which to revive all those “natural particularities” degraded by postwar urbanism.Footnote 58 Lefebvre never wavered in his opposition to an urban order determined by commodification, capitalist exchange, second-order abstractions, linear timescales, and a will to prefabrication and exact repetition; he was horrified at the thought of human beings reduced to circulating and functional “users.” But Lefebvre's opposition to urban chaos was just as consistent. Absolute liberty—that rather adolescent divesting of all habit and form—proved a baseless way to give everyday life style and a poor solution to the contradictions of urban society. Future possibilities, at least as Lefebvre envisioned them, emerged out of the way human habiting reappropriated older unities and styled the repetitions of everyday life.
Lefebvre sought to revive certain older stylistic constraints, not explode them. Instructive in this regard are the differences between Lefebvre and Guy Debord (1931–94), the leading figure of the situationist movement and Lefebvre's student at the Université de Strasbourg. Debord's review of Lefebvre's La proclamation de la Commune (1965) clarifies a decisive difference between the libertarian spirit of the situationist and the Romantic inclinations of his teacher. Hidden amid accusations of plagiarism and purposeful misspellings was a revealing critique of Lefebvre's advocacy of the old-fashioned and time-honored.Footnote 59 Debord may have regarded Lefebvre's La proclamation de la Commune as a hastily copied rendition of the situationists’ thesis that the Commune was “the greatest festival of the nineteenth century,” but there was a crucial difference between the interpretations of former student and teacher. The crux of the matter lay in Lefebvre's assertion that the Communards had transformed everyday life not by eliminating older forms of festival and drama, but by taking them up once again. For Lefebvre, the creation of “works” required stable conditions and stylistic constraints and was not primarily a matter of disintegration or détournement.Footnote 60 For Debord, however, Lefebvre's emphasis on the ancient forms of expression resurrected in the Paris uprising had “impoverished” the urban festival of 1871. As Debord saw it, Lefebvre's social thought was hypnagogic, and the only thing induced by Lefebvre's desire to recycle something so antiquated was the state of sedation one feels just before falling asleep. In essence, Debord accused Lefebvre of archaism, and the complaints he lodged against his former teacher reveal the (ironic) affinities between situationist subversion and a hypermodernization that tended to exceed all bounds and uproot all belonging. In this view, inheritance, long-standing practice, and customary genres of life were only so many obstacles standing in the way of pure beginnings and unfettered movements. Debord, the highwayman and professional provocateur, gave expression not to recurrence but to the rule of total emancipation that defined the events and slogans of May 1968. He concluded that Lefebvre “absolutely did not appreciate that the liberated life can exceed these forms and possess its own uniquely subversive drama and lyricism.”Footnote 61 The problem with projecting Debord's irreverence back into Lefebvre's social thought is that a libertarian surrealism is attributed where a peculiar Romantic sensibility was at work.
The global extension of urban society altered time as well as space. The primacy of linear timescales in the pursuit of modernization, economic growth, and technological progress wreaked havoc on other kinds of lived time. In La révolution urbaine, Lefebvre showed how new networks of exchange and “urbanistic rationality” alienated city dwellers from natural and corporeal rhythms. However, in spite of this progress, he observed that much of everyday life clung to more archaic rhythms, even in the grand postwar city. Though they were often masked, Lefebvre affirmed that there were indeed “polyvalent ways of living in urban society.”Footnote 62 With recourse to older rhythms and styles of life, metropolitans were not as confined to urbanism's iron cage as some believed: “Our everyday life remains bound to the cycles of the hours and the days, the months and the seasons, the years, youth and old age. While technological time unleashes its attack on the cosmos, everyday time remains cyclical. This is a remarkable case of uneven development,” Lefebvre concluded elsewhere. “But this lagging behind of the everyday in relation to technology is not simply negative. Far from it. For is it not thanks to this uneven development that there are still sensual delights?”Footnote 63 Lefebvre's social thought was replete with cases being made for the value of selective uneven development. Time and again, Lefebvre asserted the merits of preserving and reviving certain supposedly archaic traditions, with the cyclical rhythms of everyday life receiving special attention. In a deracinated era always on the move, the designation “lagging behind” need no longer be pejorative. Rather, like l'archaïque, to selectively lag behind might be a fertile source of overcoming alienation.
Lefebvre's vision of the sea also pulsed between the lines of La production de l'espace. Consider the contrast between Lefebvre's discussion of the capitalist commodification that had progressed up and down the coast and the conditions of his own vision of recurrence near Saint-Pabu. The differences were plain enough. In La production de l'espace, Lefebvre described those who gazed passively at the distant spectacle of the sun and sea from the security of the shore. Lefebvre saw in their leisurely looks an image of how the pressures of the world market had commodified nature's cycles and produced interchangeable and instantly communicable spaces. Lefebvre's 1974 depiction recalls its opposite: the vision of recurrence that came to Lefebvre when he was exhausted, immersed in the sea, and struggling to stay upright amid the rhythms of the waves. Just as Nietzsche had buoyed himself against the chaos of the infinite, Lefebvre maintained that the realm of becoming stood not with the instantaneous flux of time but against it; “every defined form, whether physical, material or social, struggles to establish and maintain itself,” wrote the author of La production de l'espace. By dint of habit and creative recurrence, the forces of continuous change were kept at bay. For decades, Nietzsche had provided Lefebvre with a conception of time that had nothing in common with chaotic flux or with the notions of linear progress advanced by most Marxists and state capitalists. The result of a real knowledge of how social space was produced, to which Lefebvre devoted 485 dense pages, was the rediscovery and revaluation of cyclical time. If there was a hero in the highly theoretical Production de l'espace, ready to rescue space from the ravages of capitalist exchange and urbanist abstraction, it was rhythmic (nonlinear) time—the “supreme form of wealth.”Footnote 64 In Nietzsche's wake, the urban sociologist sought to resurrect the kind of recurrence typical of archaic societies, where difference was preserved within a certain type of repetition. It was a matter, Lefebvre wrote, of time “retrieving its use value” and rhythms “reclaiming their rights.”Footnote 65
Lefebvre's Romantic sensibility nurtured a time more contoured and cyclical than discontinuous and contingent. Indeterminacy, uncertainty, and changes one after another—these were the temporal registers of hypermodernization. And, indeed, time's multiplicity and limitless flux were given nuanced expression by the generation that came of age with les trente glorieuses.Footnote 66 But the temporal register proper to Lefebvre's revolutionary Romanticism was different. It was purposefully out of tune with the ever-accelerating age in which it was written. Like the rhythms of the sea, it stood between the extremes of culture as a vicious circle and a culture devoid of all cycles. Unlike the automated repetitions of signs and signals, the periodic regenerations of archaic societies never returned in exactly the same fashion. Like the sun at daybreak, “no genuine cycle returns exactly to its point of departure or reproduces itself exactly.” Thus, for the author of Critique de la vie quotidienne, cyclical recurrence had an attraction that never dimmed.Footnote 67 Thanks to his long encounters with Marx and Nietzsche, Lefebvre argued for the social importance of cyclical rhythms during the deracinating decades after the Liberation. He believed that an archaic type of repetition created a climate conducive to recovering a more genuine human community. It was through the archaic that Lefebvre achieved a degree of distance from the postwar present, whose progressive imperatives had seeped into even the most radical of social critiques. On the crest of the deep past, the French sociologist won a vantage point from which he could perceive the horizons of the possible.
* * *
Lefebvre's revolutionary Romanticism marks a fascinating episode in the history of modern ideas. Across les trente glorieuses, it drew attention to the value of cultural pathways long thought obsolete. It did not look for beauty in cybernetics, technological objects, and sensational instants—new technical literacies would not quell the malaise that pervaded postwar life. Nor did it look for deliverance in the dark forest of primordial origins—there would be no turning back the clock. Lefebvre rejected, in no uncertain terms, the reactionary pursuits of Romantics who searched for redemption in opaque origins, in the purity of childhood, or in the simplicity of “primitives.”Footnote 68 Since archaic ways of living were still ingrained in the rhythms, sentiments, and expressions of everyday life, the remains of precapitalist cultures were neither inaccessible nor destined to disappear. Speaking quite literally of archaisms, Lefebvre asked, “How can we speak without borrowing a thousand metaphors from a remote past?” At mid-century, Lefebvre argued that such enduring remains not only were avenues to understanding older ways of living, they also crystallized a poetic practice of everyday life vital to those eager to rebuild in the wake of World War II. “As far as I'm concerned,” Lefebvre wrote, “I once got to know some archaic ways of life or the last traces of them, in a peripheral area of provincial France, and that is something I will never forget. It taught me a lot.”Footnote 69 Certainly, Lefebvre was not the first French intellectual to celebrate a distant epoch or a remote region. Both had been valorized many times before—by theologians, philosophers, modernists, and armchair anthropologists—with questionable results, to say the least. But French intellectuals’ long-standing attraction to radical social visions found a truly dialectical expression in Lefebvre's revolutionary Romanticism. Interestingly, as Lefebvre sought to overcome what H. Stuart Hughes called the obstructed path, he did so not by uprooting all that stood in his way, but by reaffirming the importance of archaic social practices, whose radiance might be reinvented in the present.Footnote 70
One of Lefebvre's most significant contributions to French social thought was to show that the royal road to reenchanting the modern world was a junction of social praxis and an older poetics of everyday life. In most circles, Romantic critiques of industrial civilization and urban life were dismissed as nostalgic laments, the moaning of misguided reactionaries. In Lefebvre's hands, however, what appeared to be a cleaving to an idealized past turned out to contain something foundational to the effort to remake everyday life. No credulous partisan of progress, Lefebvre demonstrated that restoration and cultural husbandry need not be the privileged preserve of the political right. He distinguished three lessons hard-won over two decades of studying southwestern France and Friedrich Nietzsche: the importance of restoring works and their use values, of reviving natural elements and the symbols that evoked them, and of resurrecting cycles that were closely bound to nature and the cosmos. At its most distilled, Lefebvre's defense of archaic traces stemmed from the view that “at the heart of ancient and archaic societies, everyday life was not separate from what was ‘highest’ and ‘greatest’ in culture and ideas.”Footnote 71 Lefebvre championed these archaic traditions, but he did not reject modernity tout court. He was convinced that in order to be viable and up-to-date his Romantic mode of judging and reevaluating needed to confront the growing urban phenomenon and the breakneck pace of modernization head-on. Lefebvre's revolutionary Romanticism was significant not because it harked back to archaic origins, but because its call to resurrect enduring social rhythms and styles was “firmly anchored in the here and now.”Footnote 72 Sharpened and rendered dialectically, the consecrated symbols and cyclical rhythms of archaic societies confronted the unprecedented alienation that defined the epoch. If Lefebvre's work on recurrence taught him anything, it was that what was currently en arrière, may yet be en avant. The point then, and perhaps now, was that archaic societies had something to teach a modern civilization whose blistering pace and labored breath eventually desecrated everything that stood in its path.
Acknowledgements
I thank Choi Chatterjee, Jean-Philippe Mathy, Mark Micale, Nir Ben-Moshe, Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, and Peter Thompson for their valuable suggestions. The critical commentary of Darrin McMahon and the anonymous reviewers for Modern Intellectual History helped sharpen my early conceptions, and I am grateful to them for it. Special thanks to Tamara Chaplin, whose encouragement and thorough appraisals have been indispensable.
