Europe: Early Modern and Modern
Macquart series) were sufficient to explain the full
range of human experience. The renouveau catholique
was first and foremost a quest for timeless principles,
meaning, and order in an apparently meaningless
world, a rejection of both nihilism and determinism.
The “Catholicism” of the renouveau catholique was in
many ways quite unorthodox. Few, if any, of Schloess-
er’s protagonists came from anything that might be de-
scribed as a traditionalist Catholic upbringing. On the
contrary, Maritain and his childhood friend Ernest Psi-
chari were the grandsons of republican icons Jules
Favre and Ernest Renan, respectively; Maritain was
raised in a liberal Protestant home. Rouault hailed
from the radical egalitarian district of Belleville in
Paris, and Tournemire came from a family of artisans
of Bordeaux. Maritain’s wife Raissa, who played a piv-
otal role in her husband’s intellectual evolution, was a
Russian Jewish refugee and, like him, a Catholic con-
vert. Moreover, the artists of the 1920s renouveau and
their fin-de-siècle predecessors took decidedly uncon-
ventional paths to Rome, whether through occultism
(as was the case with Joris-Karl Huysmans and Josephin
Peladan) or through the modern philosophy of Henri
Bergson (as with Maritain and his fellow philosopher
Gabriel Marcel). Renouveau artists also embraced mo-
dernity in ways that more traditionalist Catholics found
disturbing: through breaking with traditional Catholic
aesthetics, building friendships with secular, even scan-
dalous modern artists like Jean Cocteau, and engaging
in unusual forms of religious outreach, such as Leon
Bloy’s efforts to redeem prostitutes or Maritain’s “mis-
sion” to homosexuals, whom he tried to win over to his
ideal of celibacy within committed relationships. In a
variety of ways, to paraphrase an advertising slogan,
this was not their fathers’ Catholicism.
Schloesser is to be commended for the wide range of
interdisciplinary erudition he demonstrates in this
work, as he successfully integrates substantive analysis
in the fields of philosophy, art history, literary criticism,
and musicology, discussing the artists he examines
within the technical criteria of their arts as well as
within the cultural environment that fostered them.
This primarily aesthetic orientation, however, means
that the political, and even religious, views that in-
formed the work of these artists are relatively unex-
plored—we only rarely glimpse how Catholicism
guided other facets of their lives. I would have liked for
Schloesser to have gone into more depth with regard to
the political implications of the renouveau, as the evi-
dence he provides on this score is intriguing. Maritain,
in particular, was far from a straightforward reaction-
ary, as he defended the Vatican’s condemnation of Ac-
tion Française in 1926 and became an outspoken critic
of antisemitism and an advocate for the Jews after
Adolf Hitler’s 1933 rise to power. The book also ends
rather abruptly at the final chapter, without a conclu-
sion, although Schloesser’s introduction makes clear
the points he wants his readers to take away from this
study. These concerns aside, this is a well-written, er-
udite, and persuasive book, which should be of interest
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
1263
to all scholars of religion, culture, and the arts in mod-
ern France.
DAVID ALLEN HARVEY
New College of Florida
ETHAN KLEINBERG. Generation Existential: Heidegger’s
Philosophy in France 1927–1961. Ithaca: Cornell Uni-
versity Press. 2005. Pp. x, 294. $39.95.
Ethan Kleinberg’s history of the reception of Martin
Heidegger’s thought in France from 1927 to 1961 is a
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compelling account of the peaceful invasion of contem-
porary French theory by the German existentialist
whose legacy remains tainted by his support for Na-
tional Socialism. Kleinberg’s account unfolds through
individual portraits of the intriguing personalities—
Emmanuel Lévinas, Alexandre Koyré, Alexandre
Kojève, Raymond Aron, Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Beaufret, and Maurice Blan-
chot—whose interrogation of subjectivity and alterity,
ontology and historicity, and freedom and responsibil-
ity were powerfully influenced by Heidegger’s thinking.
Kleinberg’s rigorous examination of the translation of
Heidegger’s concepts and questions into the French
context explores how the “generation of 1933” became
“generation existential.”
Born between 1900 and 1910 but intellectually com-
ing of age in the fateful year when Adolf Hitler became
chancellor of Germany, this was a generation for whom
a Whiggish view of history was bludgeoned in the
trenches of World War I and trampled under the jack-
boots of fascists on the move. Neither the neo-Kantian-
ism of the French academy, entrenched in science, rea-
son, and the drive for objectivity that dominated
intellectual life in the early Third Republic, nor its key
rival in the fin-de-siècle subjectivism of Henri Bergson
proved palatable to them. The contingencies and con-
flicts of a world on the precipice demanded a new vo-
cabulary and perspective. Phenomenology from across
the Rhine provided it.
The agents of philosophical translation were Eastern
European Jews operating on the margins of French aca-
demia, many of them students of Edmund Husserl who
were discovering Heidegger as an avenue of critique.
The seminal role played by Lévinas frames Kleinberg’s
book, which then proceeds to demarcate three readings
of Heidegger in this phase of his Gallic adventure. The
first interpretation of Heidegger emerged out of the
weekly seminar on Hegel at the École des Hautes
Études led by Kojève from 1933 to 1939, which Vincent
Descombes’s Le Même et l’autre: Quarante-cinq ans de
philosophie française (1933–1978) (1979), Michael
Roth’s Knowing and History: Interpretations of Hegel in
Twentieth-Century France (1988), and Judith Butler’s
Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-
Century France (1999) have already established as a
central crucible of twentieth-century French thought.
“Kojève captivated students with his ability to make
connections,” Kleinberg writes, presenting “a reading
of Hegel that drew from Einstein’s physics, Bergson’s
OCTOBER 2006
1264 Reviews of Books
intuitionism, Husserl’s phenomenology, Heidegger’s
ontology, and Marx’s politics” (p. 67). The participants
in the seminar, especially Jean André Wahl, Jacques
Lacan, Aron, and Merleau-Ponty, then disseminated
the insights they garnered to a wider philosophical
cadre, producing an anthropocentric, teleological, and
humanist existentialism (p. 17), one that “conserved the
Cartesian subject and thus presented a domesticated
Heidegger” (p. 109) concerned with human agency in
history (p. 281). Sartre’s meteoric rise to popularity in
the aftermath of World War II popularized this under-
standing of Heidegger in France and around the world.
The second reading emerged from Heidegger’s re-
sponse to his French readers in the form of his “Letter
on Humanism” written to Beaufret in 1946, set against
the background of the concurrently brewing scandal
concerning his relationship to Nazism splayed out in the
pages of Les Temps modernes in 1945–1946. For a new
generation of captivated students, here was a Heideg-
ger who had turned toward language and in so doing
was more radical than Sartre in developing the anti-
subjectivist tendencies of Being and Time by insisting on
rethinking the philosophical tradition outside the ego
cogito (pp. 184, 191). Moreover, “Heidegger’s critique
of technology and traditional metaphysics spoke to the
young intellectuals” (p. 200) taught by Beaufret at the
most prestigious preparatory schools in Paris, even as
Beaufret echoed Heidegger’s party line defense of his
affiliation with Hitlerism. Beaufret’s reading thus
helped to whitewash the Heidegger who had acclaimed,
“The Führer himself and he alone is the present and
future German reality and its law.”
A third interpretative constellation shaped the de-
constructive philosophy of the generation rising to
prominence after Lévinas’s Totality and Infinity: An Es-
say on Exertiority (1961). They were inspired by Blan-
chot and Lévinas reading against the grain of Heideg-
ger’s critique of the Western philosophical tradition in
order to forge an ethical response to the horrors of the
twentieth century, especially the Holocaust, about
which Heidegger would remain almost totally silent. An
astute and lucid writer, Kleinberg works carefully
through Blanchot’s early texts, but this chapter remains
hermetically sealed in Blanchot’s dense and paradox-
ical formulations and uncanny literary works. Kleinberg
also never satisfactorily explains the shift in Blanchot’s
oeuvre from the 1930s to the postwar period. In his con-
servative nationalist writings in the 1930s, for example,
Blanchot claimed that Léon “[Blum] represents exactly
what is contemptible to the nation . . . His is a backward
ideology, an antiquated mentality, a foreign race” (p.
211). But his post-Shoah ruminations shared the Levi-
nasian urgency to expose the deficiencies of the West-
ern metaphysical tradition and open it to an ethical in-
terrogation and encounter with the Other. Explaining
this turn is pivotal because Blanchot’s itinerary (similar
to that of Paul de Man) continues to stain the history
of deconstruction.
Regardless, Kleinberg’s study helps to elucidate the
leading lights of postwar French thought. But its weak
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
point is the failure to contextualize the philosophers he
explores within the broader cultural and political field.
We get a taste of the institutional history of these think-
ers. But the oft-repeated claim that the generation of
1933 was concerned with literature and philosophy to
the exclusion of politics until after World War II (pp.
57, 104, 129, 149, 209) is based on a failure to read re-
ciprocally the politics of culture and the culture of pol-
itics. Indeed, the book would be richer if Kleinberg ex-
plained how responses to Heidegger’s thought were
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coded within the social and political (rather than nar-
rowly philosophical) issues that France faced, from the
rise of fascism to the end of the colonial empire. None-
theless, he offers a work that for historians is more fruit-
ful than Tom Rockmore’s Heidegger and French Phi-
losophy: Humanism, Antihumanism, and Being (1995)
because his chronological rather than thematic orga-
nization and his insightful vignettes clarify why Heideg-
ger had such a definitive impact on contemporary
French thought.
JONATHAN JUDAKEN
University of Memphis
MARIA GREVER and BERTEKE WAALDIJK. Transforming
the Public Sphere: The Dutch National Exhibition of
Women’s Labor in 1898. Translated by MISCHA F. C.
HOYINCK and ROBERT E. CHESAL. Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press. 2004. Pp. xi, 305. Cloth $84.95, paper
$23.95.
Dutch feminist historians have long been aware of the
importance of the 1898 National Exhibition of Wom-
en’s Labor in the history of the Dutch women’s move-
ment, and they have used its extensive archive—kept in
the invaluable International Information Center and
Archives for the Women’s Movement in Amsterdam—
for a variety of projects. Yet until recently the National
Exhibition of Women’s Labor itself was never the topic
of extensive research. On occasion of its centennial in
1998, historians Maria Grever and Berteke Waaldijk
published a book-length study of the exhibition, which
in 2004 appeared in a revised English edition.
Exhibitions, both on a national and an international
scale, were a well-known and influential phenomenon
in the Western world in the nineteenth century. Grever
and Waaldijk show that especially the Woman’s Build-
ing at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in
1893 and the 1895 Danish national Women’s Exhibition
from Past to Present inspired Dutch feminists. Their
reason for staging a women’s exhibition in 1898 was that
Wilhelmina, heiress to the Dutch throne, would turn
eighteen and become the first female monarch of the
Netherlands. This, feminists realized, was a perfect mo-
ment to show the nation what women could do, and to
argue that all positions should be opened to them. The
exhibition, held from July 9 to September 21, 1898, in
the dunes between The Hague and the North Sea and
attracting 90,000 visitors, by all accounts was a huge
success. Objects and activities showed many aspects of
Dutch women’s labor. There was a reading room where
OCTOBER 2006