Ernest Renan

Based on Wikipedia: Ernest Renan

In 1882, a French scholar posed a question that still haunts us: What makes a nation? His answer was startlingly simple. A nation, he said, is not defined by race, language, religion, geography, or economic interest. A nation is a daily plebiscite—a continuous choice by people to live together, bound by shared memories and shared hopes.

The man who offered this definition was Ernest Renan, and his life embodies one of the great intellectual dramas of the nineteenth century: a seminarian who lost his faith through studying Hebrew grammar, a romantic who became a racist, a pessimist who learned to love democracy. His story is a reminder that ideas have consequences—sometimes beautiful, sometimes monstrous.

A Breton Childhood

Ernest Renan was born in 1823 in Tréguier, a small town on the rugged northwestern coast of Brittany. His family had the sea in their blood. His grandfather made a modest fortune with a fishing boat, enough to buy a house and settle into respectable poverty. His father captained a small cutter and held passionate republican beliefs—this in an era when republicanism was still a revolutionary creed in France.

His mother came from the other side of politics entirely. She was the daughter of a Royalist tradesman, a supporter of the old order. All his life, Renan felt this tension within himself: the Gascon heritage from his mother's side pulling against the Breton from his father's. He would later describe these two natures as constantly at odds.

His father died when Ernest was five. His sister Henriette, twelve years older, became the moral center of the household. She was brilliant, ambitious, and fiercely devoted to her little brother's advancement. When her attempt to run a girls' school in Tréguier failed, she went to Paris to teach at a boarding school. It was a decision that would reshape Ernest's destiny.

The boy stayed behind, enrolled in the local ecclesiastical seminary. His school reports paint a portrait of the ideal student: "docile, patient, diligent, painstaking, thorough." The priests taught him mathematics and Latin. His mother taught him everything else. He won all the prizes in the summer of 1838.

The Awakening

Henriette, from her position in Paris, arranged for her fifteen-year-old brother to be noticed by Félix Dupanloup, an influential churchman organizing a new school called Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet. The school had an ambitious mission: to educate young Catholic nobles alongside the brightest sons of the seminaries, hoping to forge friendships between the aristocracy and the priesthood.

For a boy who had never left Brittany, Paris was a revelation.

"I learned with stupor," Renan later wrote, "that knowledge was not a privilege of the Church." He awoke to new words: talent, fame, celebrity. Religion itself seemed different in Tréguier and in Paris—the same doctrines, yet somehow not the same at all. Dupanloup became a father figure to him.

In 1840, Renan moved to the seminary at Issy-les-Moulineaux to study philosophy. He arrived burning with enthusiasm for Catholic scholasticism—the medieval philosophical tradition that sought to reconcile faith and reason. He read Thomas Reid, the Scottish philosopher of common sense. He read Nicolas Malebranche, who believed we see all things in God. Then he discovered the Germans: Hegel, with his vast system of dialectical logic; Immanuel Kant, who had demolished the old proofs of God's existence; Johann Gottfried Herder, who saw history as an organic unfolding of national spirits.

A crack appeared in his faith. He began to see a contradiction between the metaphysics he studied and the religion he professed. Yet his skepticism was held in check by something else: a hunger for verifiable truths, for certainty.

"Philosophy excites and only half satisfies the appetite for truth," he wrote to Henriette. "I am eager for mathematics."

But it was not mathematics that would settle his doubts. It was something far more unexpected: the study of Hebrew.

The Death of Faith

In 1844, Renan entered the college of Saint-Sulpice to study philology—the historical study of languages—before taking holy orders. Here he began learning Hebrew under Arthur-Marie Le Hir, a brilliant scholar.

What happened next was quietly catastrophic.

As Renan studied the original texts of the Hebrew Bible, he made discoveries that his faith could not survive. He realized that the Book of Isaiah was not a unified work—the second part differed from the first not merely in style but in date, written by a different hand in a different era. He saw that the grammar and historical references in the Pentateuch—the first five books of the Bible—pointed to a time much later than Moses, to whom tradition attributed them. Most devastating of all, he recognized that the Book of Daniel, which purports to record prophecies from the Babylonian exile, was clearly written centuries after the events it claims to predict.

The Bible, in other words, was a human document with a human history. It had been composed, edited, redacted over centuries. It was not what the Church claimed it to be.

At night, Renan read the new novels of Victor Hugo. By day, he studied Hebrew and Syriac, the ancient language closely related to the Aramaic that Jesus spoke. In October 1845, he left Saint-Sulpice. He tried one more religious institution, a lay college run by the Oratorians, but still felt too much under the domination of the Church. Reluctantly, painfully, he severed his last ties to religious life.

He became a schoolteacher at a boys' school run by a man named Crouzet.

A New Faith

If Renan lost his Catholic faith, he found another. Call it the religion of science, or the religion of the cosmos.

In 1846, one of his students at Crouzet's school was an eighteen-year-old named Marcellin Berthelot, who would become one of France's greatest chemists. The young man introduced Renan to the certitudes of physical and natural science. Their friendship would last until Renan's death—a friendship between the man who had given up God and the man who could synthesize molecules.

Renan became ravished by what he called "the splendor of the cosmos." Near the end of his life, commenting on the introspective journals of the Swiss philosopher Henri-Frédéric Amiel, he wrote: "The man who has time to keep a private diary has never understood the immensity of the universe."

His days fell into a productive rhythm. He worked as an usher only in the evenings, freeing his days for research in Semitic philology. In 1847, he won the Volney Prize, one of the principal honors awarded by the Academy of Inscriptions, for his manuscript on the "General History of Semitic Languages." The same year, he earned his qualification as a university fellow in philosophy and was offered a teaching position at a prestigious school.

The former seminarian had arrived.

Life of Jesus

In 1856, Renan married Cornélie Scheffer, the daughter and niece of Dutch painters who had settled in France. They would have two children: a son, Ary, who became a painter, and a daughter, Noémi, who married a philologist.

But the work that would make Renan famous—and infamous—was born in tragedy.

In the early 1860s, Renan traveled to Ottoman Syria and Palestine with his beloved sister Henriette. She had shaped his life more than anyone. Now, struck by a sudden fever in that ancient land, she died.

Alone with his grief, possessing only a New Testament and a copy of the ancient Jewish historian Josephus, Renan began to write.

The result was the Life of Jesus, published in 1863. It became an immediate sensation—translated into English the same year, and continuously in print for over a century and a half. The book did something that seemed simple but was, in fact, revolutionary: it treated Jesus as a historical figure whose life could be studied like any other life from the past.

Renan depicted Jesus as a man, not as God. He rejected the miracles of the Gospels. He believed that by humanizing Jesus, he was restoring a greater dignity to him—making him admirable as a moral teacher rather than incredible as a wonder-worker.

But the book contained something else, something darker.

Renan argued that Jesus had "purified himself of Jewish traits" and essentially became an Aryan—a member of what nineteenth-century racial theory considered the superior white race. Christianity, in Renan's telling, emerged purified of Jewish influences. Judaism itself he depicted as foolish and illogically absurd.

The book enraged Christians who could not accept a Jesus stripped of divinity. It enraged Jews who could not accept a Judaism stripped of dignity. Albert Schweitzer, in his famous study The Quest of the Historical Jesus, lavished it with ironic praise—admiring the scholarship while skewering the assumptions.

The Shadow of Race

Renan's racism was not incidental to his work. It ran through it like a dark thread.

He was among the first scholars to advance what is now called the Khazar theory—the claim that Ashkenazi Jews, the Jews of central and eastern Europe, were not descendants of the ancient Israelites but of the Khazars, a Turkic people who converted to Judaism in the medieval period. Modern genetic research has thoroughly debunked this theory, but in Renan's time it served a purpose: it allowed him to argue that Jews were "an incomplete race."

The American historian George Mosse, in his study of European racism, showed how Renan's thinking worked. In Renan's view, intolerance was a Jewish rather than Christian characteristic. Biblical Judaism had lost its importance even among Jews themselves as civilization progressed. Therefore—and here the logic takes a strange turn—modern Jews were no longer disadvantaged by their past and could make important contributions to progress.

This was racism dressed in liberal clothing. It offered acceptance to Jews on the condition that they abandon their Jewishness. It praised their potential while denigrating their heritage.

What Is a Nation?

In 1870, everything changed for Renan and for France.

Prussia, under Otto von Bismarck, provoked France into war and crushed her armies with terrifying efficiency. Napoleon III's Second Empire collapsed. Paris was besieged. The provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, with their mixed French and German populations, were annexed by the newly unified German Empire.

For Renan, this was more than a national humiliation. Germany had been his intellectual home. German scholarship had shown him how to study languages, how to approach ancient texts historically, how to think critically about religion. Now the land of his ideals had destroyed the land of his birth. The German, once a priest in the temple of knowledge, had become an invader.

In the aftermath, Renan wrote his Intellectual and Moral Reform of France, proposing how his defeated country might recover. But even in this moment of national crisis, his prescriptions bore a German stamp: a feudal society, a monarchical government, an elite supported by the laboring masses, an ideal of honor imposed by the few on the many.

The Paris Commune of 1871—the brief, bloody experiment in working-class government that ended in massacre—confirmed Renan in his aristocratic reaction. His writing from this period is brilliant but bitter, disenchanted and skeptical.

Then something shifted.

France did not follow Renan's prescriptions. The Third Republic muddled along with its democratic institutions, its messy politics, its bourgeois compromises. And it worked. France grew stronger. Renan watched with interest the struggle for justice and liberty in a democratic society. He reconciled himself with democracy, even with the moral beauties of the Catholicism he had abandoned.

It was in this mellower mood, in 1882, that he delivered his famous lecture: "What Is a Nation?"

German thinkers like Johann Gottlieb Fichte had defined the nation by objective criteria: a race or ethnic group sharing common characteristics like language. Renan rejected this entirely.

A nation, he argued, is not a race—races have mixed too thoroughly for that. It is not a language—Switzerland has four languages and is one nation. It is not a religion, a geography, or an economic interest. A nation is a spiritual principle, composed of two things.

One is the past: a rich legacy of memories, shared glories and shared griefs. The other is the present: the desire to live together, the will to continue valuing the heritage received in common.

A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things which, properly speaking, are really one and the same constitute this soul, this spiritual principle. One is the past, the other is the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present consent, the desire to live together, the desire to continue to invest in the heritage that we have jointly received.

He summarized it with a phrase that has echoed through the century since: a nation is "a daily plebiscite"—a vote renewed every day by people who choose to remain together.

But Renan added something often forgotten. A nation requires not only shared memories but shared forgetting. "Every French citizen," he wrote, "must have forgotten the night of Saint Bartholomew"—the massacre of Protestants in 1572—"and the massacres in the thirteenth century in the South"—the brutal Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars.

To be a nation, in other words, is to agree on what not to remember.

The Twilight

Renan's definition of nationhood has proved enormously influential. The twentieth-century theorist Benedict Anderson, in his landmark book Imagined Communities, built extensively on Renan's insights. The idea of the nation as a daily plebiscite, a continuous choice, remains central to liberal nationalism.

Yet Renan himself had no illusions about permanence. "Nations are not eternal," he wrote. "They had a beginning and they will have an end. And they will probably be replaced by a European confederation."

This prophecy, made in 1882, would wait seventy years to begin coming true, with the first steps toward what would become the European Union.

In his final years, Renan returned to his childhood. He was nearly sixty when he published his Memories of Childhood and Youth in 1883, a book that remains, after Life of Jesus, his most beloved work. It revealed to modern readers that a world as poetic and primitive as anything in ancient Christianity still existed within living memory on the coast of Brittany. It had, as he put it, "the Celtic magic of ancient romance."

He also continued to think about politics in the form of philosophical dramas. In these late works, he imagined democracy as Caliban—the bestial servant from Shakespeare's Tempest—who proves, against all expectation, an adequate ruler once educated to responsibility. Prospero, the aristocratic principle of mind, accepts his dethronement in exchange for greater liberty in the intellectual world. Caliban makes an effective policeman and leaves his superiors free to work in the laboratory.

It was an aristocrat's reconciliation with democracy: the masses can govern as long as they leave the intellectuals alone.

Renan died in 1892, having lived long enough to see France stabilize under the Third Republic, long enough to watch the sciences flourish, long enough to enjoy the freedom of thought he prized above all else.

A Complicated Legacy

How should we remember Ernest Renan?

He was a great writer—one of the finest prose stylists in the French language. He was a pioneering scholar who helped establish the historical study of religion as an academic discipline. His definition of nationhood remains one of the most humane and liberal ever offered, a rebuke to ethnic nationalism and a foundation for civic belonging.

He was also a racist whose ideas about Jews and Aryans fed into streams of thought that would culminate, decades after his death, in genocide. His portrait of Jesus as somehow purified of Jewishness was not merely wrong but actively harmful. His promotion of the Khazar theory provided ammunition to antisemites for generations.

The contradiction was real. The same mind that insisted a nation must be based on consent rather than blood also insisted that some races were superior to others. The same thinker who celebrated the spiritual principle binding a people together denigrated the spiritual heritage of the Jews.

Perhaps this is the lesson of Ernest Renan: ideas do not come in neat packages. A profound insight about nationalism can coexist with contemptible theories about race. A beautiful prose style can express ugly thoughts. A man can lose his faith through honest scholarship and replace it with the dishonest pseudo-science of racial hierarchy.

We can learn from Renan's best ideas while repudiating his worst. We can admire his courage in following evidence where it led—out of the seminary and into secular scholarship—while condemning where his prejudices led him instead.

A nation, he taught us, is a daily plebiscite. Each generation must choose whether to continue living together, must decide what to remember and what to forget. The same might be said of our relationship to thinkers like Renan himself. We inherit a rich and troubled legacy. The question is what we choose to do with it.