Gossman Basle Bachofen and Critique of Modernity

Basle, Bachofen and the Critique of Modernity in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century Author(s): Lionel Gossman
Source: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 47 (1984), pp. 136-185 Published by: The Warburg Institute Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/751443 . Accessed: 18/05/2013 19:23
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BASLE, BACHOFEN AND THE CRITIQUE OF MODERNITY IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY Lionel Gossman
I
BASLE Une r6publiquesage ne doit rien hasarder qui ' l'expose a la bonne ou la mauvaise fortune:le seul bien auquel elle doit aspirer, c'est la perp6tuit6de son 6tat. etdicadence desRomains, IX. -Montesquieu, Grandeur BORDER CITY wedged between France, Germany and the rest of Switzerland, Basle has always had to defend its identity and independence against the designs of hostile or covetous neighbours - Habsburgs, Bourbons and Bonapartes alike. It has always served both as a meeting ground and place of exchange and as an obstacle, a limit to the influence and ambition of outsiders - a bulwark and a refuge at the same time. Because of its peculiar situation, the view of the world from the 'Dreilinderecke' of Basle was different from those which could be enjoyed from the great centres of European power - from Paris, London, Berlin or Vienna. It was not the dominating view of the hero and conqueror; but the cautious, questioning, mistrustful view of the prosaic antihero among giants whose dangerous games threaten his livelihood and his very existence. In the second half of the century of blood and iron, Basle emerged as a focus of resistance to the dominant progressivist trend of contemporary European, and especially German culture. The present essay is mostly concerned with aspects of the work ofJohann Jacob Bachofen, a Basle philologist still remembered for his comparative approach to the study of classical antiquity, his pioneering anthropological investigation of the so-called 'avunculate' or relation between mother's brother and sister's son in early societies, and his bold and imaginative rethinking of woman's place in the history of civilization.1
Alfred Baeumler, Das mythischeWeltalter:Bachofens - Bachofen unddie Nachwort mit einem DeutungdesAltertums Munich 1965 [apart from the 'Nach1 Bachofen's name appears in most of the standard Religionsgeschichte, histories of anthropology, but there has been no full- wort', this is the text ofBaeumler's 1926 Introduction to derAlten eineMetaphysik length study of him in English to date. Two shorter Der MythusvonOrientundOccident: von studies deserve mention - Joseph Campbell's Intro- Weltaus den Werken J.J. Bachofen]. Walter Benjamin, 'Johann Jacob Bachofen', Text + duction to the Bollingen volume, Myth, Religion, and MotherRight: SelectedWritings ofJ].]. Bachofen,Princeton, Kritik, 1971, xxxI-xxxII, pp. 28-42. Johannes D6rmann, 'War Johann Jakob Bachofen 1954, pp. xxv-lvii; and a slighter piece by Philipp Wolff-Windegg, 'C. G. Jung - Bachofen, Burckhardt, Evolutionist?', Anthropos,1965, LX,pp. 1-48. undEthnologe,1966 and Basel', in the Jungian journal Spring, 1976, Id., J. J. Bachofen:Religionsforscher pp. 137-47. See also Gossman, Orpheus Philologus, (Studia Instituti Anthropos, xxI). Anthropos, 1968-69, Id., 'Bachofen-Morgan', Philadelphia 1983. In German the literature is considerable. The following is a select bibliography: LXIII-LXIV, pp. 129-38. Translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.
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BASLE AND BACHOFEN 137 It is intended as a contribution to a larger projected study of nineteenth-century Basle.2 Among the Basle intellectuals four achieved particular renown. Two were natives of Basle and contemporaries - Bachofen himself and Jacob Burckhardt; and two, both younger men who received support and encouragement from the Baselers, were immigrants from Germany - Nietzsche, who came to Basle in I869 as Professorof Classical Philology at the University, and Franz Overbeck who was called, around the same time, to the chair of Theology.3 Though the character of their relations varied, all four men knew each other and followed each other's work. And all four were sharply critical of the optimistic modernist culture that had come to be the established culture of Wilhelminian Seen from Basle, Berlin, even more Germany just before and during the Griinderjahre.4 than Paris, appeared as the capital of the nineteenth century. In classical philology Theodor Mommsen was the prestigious Berlin professorwhom Bachofen identified as the incarnation of modernism and the object of his special loathing, while the bite noireof Overbeck, whose scholarly work was nothing less than a long, perpetually renewed critique of the very subject he had been engaged to teach, was Mommsen's colleague at the Prussian Academy, Adolf Harnack, a prominent liberal theologian highly regarded at Kaiser Wilhelm II's court and dedicated to working out an accommodation between religion and modern life.5 During his years as Professorof Philology at Basle, Nietzsche
Erich Fromm, 'Die sozialpsychologische Bedeutung der Mutterrechtstheorie', Zeitschriftfir Sozialforschung, 19341, I, pp. 196-227. Thomas Gelzer, 'Die Bachofen-Briefe: Betrachtungen zu Vision und Werk, Wirklichkeit und Leben J.J. Bachofens anhand von Band X der 'Gesammelten Werke', Schweizerische 1969, xIx, Zeitschrift fir Geschichte, pp. 777-869. Marielouise Janssen-Jurreit, Sexismus: iber die Abtreibungder Frauenfrage, Munich and Vienna 1976, ch. 6, pp.96-iii . Karl Kerenyi, Bachofenund die Zukunftdes Humanismus, Zurich 1945. Id., 'Johann Jakob Bachofens Portrat', in Tessiner Schreibtisch: Mythologisches Unmythologisches,Stuttgart 1963, pp. 21-3 1. Rudolf Marx, Introduction to his Mutterechtund Urreligion: eine Auswahl, Stuttgart 1927, repr. 1954, pp. vii-xxviii. Walter Muschg, Bachofenals Schriftsteller(Rectorial address, 25 November I949) Basle 1949. Gerhard Plumpe, 'Die Entdeckung der Vorwelt: Erliuterungen zu Benjamins Bachofenlektfire', Text + Kritik 1971, xxxi-xxxII, pp. 19-27. Adrien Turel, Bachofen-Freud, Bern 1939. In addition, the remarkable introductions and afterwords by Karl Meuli, Emanuel Kienzle, Johannes D6rmann and others, to the published volumes of the Gesammelte Werke,under the general editorship of Karl Meuli, Basle 1943- , publication interrupted at vol. x. See nn. 8 and I I below for further bibliography. 2 The project, on which Professor Carl Schorske and I are working together, grew out of a seminar we taught jointly in 1979, in the European Cultural Studies
Program at Princeton, of which Schorske was then director. I thank M. Charles Gillieron at the Swiss Consulate General in New York for his interest in the project and the Pro Helvetia Foundation in Ziirich for helping to finance some of the research associated with it. 3 These four were the most prominent and the bestknown. Later, it is hoped to include their teachers, colleagues and associates: Alexandre Vinet, Franz Dorotheus Gerlach, XW. M. L. De Wette, Karl Steffensen and others. 4 The opposition and contrast of Berlin and Basle was a topic developed by Friedrich Meinecke, especially in the aftermath of the Second World War, when it seemed finally incontrovertible that Burckhardt had, after all, been less deluded than Ranke. See his 'Ranke and Burckhardt' (orig. German 1948) in Hans Kohn, ed., German History: Some New Views, Boston i954, pp. I41-56. s 'One could call theology the Satan of religion', (Christentumund Kultur.: Gedankenund Anmerkungen zur modernen vonFranz Overbeck. Aus dem Nachlass Theologie, herausgegeben von C. A. Bernoulli, Basle 1919, P. 13). On Overbeck and Harnack, ibid., pp. 198-241. See also Karl Barth, 'Unsettled Questions for Theology Today', a 1920 review of Christentum undKultur,in his Theology and Church: Shorter l'Writings 1920-1928, trans. Louise P. Smith, London 1962, pp. 57-73; Karl Kupisch, Karl Barth, Hamburg 1971, PP. 46-49; Thomas F. Torrance, Karl Barth: An Introduction to his Early Theology9gio-Ig93, London 1962, pp.36-38, 42-43, 72-73; and Max Schoch, 'Die Entdeckung von Franz Overbeck', in his Karl Barth: Theologiein Aktion. Frauenfeld and Stuttgart 1967, pp. 58-68.
10
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also frequently expressed contempt for the 'philistine' scholars of his native Germany, notably those of Berlin.6 The stance of the Basle scholars and critics was a peculiar mixture of negativity and affirmation. In the face of the common nineteenth-century view of history as a story moving toward a happy ending - a 'romance', as Hayden White would say7- they came increasingly to stress the distinctiveness of history as a temporal category, with respect both to pre-history and to any possible transcendence or fulfilment of itself. Shut off from both origins and ends, history was not a directed movement, but a constant ebbing and flowing, a sphere of alienation and perpetual conflict, more or less favourable, at various times, to human well-being. All pretended historical solutions, all claims that history itself could definitively overcome the reality of alienation and the discomforts of culture, were bogus. The Baselers thus looked on the 'quick fix' offeredby premature pseudo-totalities such as the nation-state or the folk with suspicion and hostility. This did not mean that the ideal of totality and of a life undivided by competing and seemingly incompatible demands and impulses - individuality and community, selfcontrol and self-abandonment, morality and sensuality, rationality and affectivity- had to be relinquished. It meant that it had to be seen as something beyond all historical experience or reasonable historical expectation. In this way, in the midst of his scepticism and even pessimism about his own world, Bachofen kept alive the idea of a pre-historical world of heroic proportions, in which the sensual and the ethical had been briefly harmonized, and of which actual traces were still to be found in the 'primitive' cultures of Africa and America. Such cultures, however, were survivals, not models that historical man could hope to emulate. Similarly, the philosopher Karl Steffensen, an immigrant to Basle from Schleswig-Holstein, argued that German idealism was untenable and dangerous in so far as it claimed to account for the real historical world, but defended its ideals of totality and presence, as ideals, against the encroachments of an agnostic Anglo-French positivism. Historically, the work of the Basle critics not only contributed to the growing critique of liberal progressivism in the second half of the nineteenth century, it was also exploited by many who did not share their diffidence and distrust of all popular and populist movements. Burckhardt and Overbeck were least easily appropriated, in part no doubt because both deliberately eschewed those forms of writing, lyrical or oratorical, that aim
6 Nietzsche's biting attacks on Wilamowitz are notorious. Burckhardt presents a special problem. Always more temperate than Bachofen, who could not share his disengaged, aesthetic outlook - Bachofen at first called him 'familiaris meus et amicissimus antecessor Basiliensis' in a letter recommending him to the Italian scholar Gervasio (JohannJakob Bachofens GesammelteWerke, ed. Karl Meuli, Basle 1943-67, x [hereafter Bachofen, Briefe], letter 37, 21 March 1846) but later cooled notably toward him (Bachofen, Briefe, letters io9, i16)- Burckhardt was ready to enjoy what the new Prussian Weltstadthad to offer without fear of compromising his virtue (see Werner Kaegi, Jacob Burckhardt: eine Biographie,Basle 1947-77, Iv, p. 416, on Burckhardt in Berlin in 1882) and he never created a Berlin double as overwhelming and threatening as Bachofen's Mommsen. Nevertheless, when he was approached about succeeding Ranke in the chair of history at Berlin, he let it be known that he did not want to be considered (Kaegi, op. cit., IV, pp. 30-33). In addition, despite genuine admiration for Ranke, who had been his teacher, his attitude became increasingly reserved. Likewise, though he entertained courteous relations with nationalist historians such as Sybel and Treitschke, he was aware of the important difference between what he called ironically his 'dilettantism' on the one hand and their practice of historiography on the other. 'Ich werde nie eine Schule griinden', he wrote, not without a certain satisfaction (letter to Paul Heyse, 22 April 1862; also Kaegi, op. cit., iii, pp. 135-37). 7 Hayden White, Metahistory:The Historical Imagination in NineteenthCentury Europe, Baltimore 1973, pp. 8II, 150-52.
BASLE AND BACHOFEN 139 to seduce or transport the reader. Burckhardt'sstyle is marked by leaps and hiatuses: it is anything but soothing or reassuring. Overbeck's is dense, intricate and scholarly, rebuffing all but the most serious and committed readers. Bachofen and Nietzsche, however, could be and often were perceived as pointing beyond the courageous scepticism resolutely held to by Burckhardtand Overbeck, Bachofen by appearing at times, through a selective and tendentious reading of his work, to advocate a regressive retreat into religious myth and symbolism, Nietzsche by recommending a straining forwardto a more heroic form of myth. Bachofen was in fact richly exploited by ideologists of both the Left and the Right: in a generally leftward direction first by Engels himself, then to some extent by Erich Fromm and Lewis Mumford;8in a more right-wing and irrationalist direction by the members of the Kosmische an avant-garde artistic and philosophical movement in Munich at the Runde, end of the last century, which included the philosopher Ludwig Klages,9 and subseAlfred Baeumler. Baeumler, a Berlin professorof philosophy who in 1937 was appointed Director of the Nazi Institute for Political Pedagogy, contributed a long and immensely learned three-hundred-page introductory essay to his colleague Schr6ter's 1926 edition of reissued in 1956). Reviewing selections from Bachofen (DerMythus vonOrient undOccident, this publication, which marked the high point of the Bachofen revival in Germany in the Thomas Mann took Bachofen and Nietzsche as representative of the two 1920S,10 directions between which modern man, faced with the failure of nineteenth-century
quently in a distinctly fascist direction, in the 1920s and I930s, by Manfred Schr6ter and
8 Friedrich Engels, Originsof the Family (1884), ch. 2, exchange of critical views of his work. In 1923 Manfred Schr6ter put out the essay on Oknos der Seilflechter and Preface to 4th edn, New York 1942, pp. 8-Io, 28-50. Erich Fromm, op. cit. n. I above, IIi, pp. 196-227. Walls: (Leipzig: Beck) and the following year Das lykischeVolk Res Sanctae, Res Sacrae. A passage from 'Versuch fiber die (Leipzig: Haessel). In 1925 Ludwig Klages and C. A. Bernoulli saw the whole of the Grinbersymbolik der Alten'. Translated by B. Q. Morgan Graebersymbolik through the press in Basle. In 1926 Schr6ter and Baeumler and with a Note on J.J. Bachofen by Lewis Mumford, Lexington I961. That Mumford wroTeon Bachofen is published their 6oo-page selection of Bachofen texts known as Der Mythusvon Orientund Occident not surprising. His entire view of man and society, and (see also n. I above), and Philip Reclam published a 3-volume especially of early society, is very close to Bachofen's, notably in the contrast he establishes between the selection, running to over I500 pages, edited by C. A. Bernoulli - Urreligion und antike Symbole (1926). The feminine neolithic village community and the domineering, aggressive, male city that emerged later from what following year yet another selection, edited by Rudolf he sees as the fusion of neolithic and palaeolithic, as well Marx, appeared in the popular 'pocket editions' of the as that between the Orphic and the Promethean aspects Kr6ner firm in Leipzig under the title Johann Jakob und Urreligion(see also n. I above). of man. (See The Transformations ofMan, New York 1952, Bachofen:Mutterrecht 1927 also saw a new edition of Bachofen's Autobiography chapters 1-2, and The City in History, New York i961, (first published by Hermann Blocher in the Basler chapters 1-3). There is a link between Mumford and Bachofen in the person of Elie Reclus, the French Jahrbuchfor 1917), along with his inaugural lecture on Utopian, who was an admirer and correspondent of natural law and historical law, by Alfred Baeumler (Halle/Saale), and Georg Schmidt's edition of the Bachofen, and who also taught at the famous Edinburgh Reise (Heidelberg). It summer seminars of Mumford's mentor Patrick Ged- hitherto unpublished Griechische Eros was probably Ludwig Klages's Vomkosmogonischen des. Runde and Bachofen's relation to (Munich 1922) that launched the Bachofen revival. 9 On the Kosmische the George circle in Munich, see Claude David, Stefan This work went through a second edition in 1926, and a George et son ouvrepoitique, Lyons and Paris 1952, third edition in 1930. In 1924 two major studies bv C. A. pp. 196-209; Hans-Jiirgen Linke, Das Kultische in der Bernoulli appeared: Johann Jacob Bachofen und das DichtungStefan Georges,Munich and Diisseldorf I960, I, Natursymbol (Basle), and the shorter Johann Jakob zu demWerke Stefan Bachofen als Religionsforscher (Leipzig). The Zfirich pp. 6o-62; Ernst Morwitz, Kommentar Munich and Diisseldorf 1960, pp. 46, 309. philologist Ernst Howald responded to the rehabilitaGeorges, tion of Bachofen with an attack 'Wider Johann Jakob 1o This revival was marked by a number of republications of texts by Bachofen, as well as by an active Bachofen' in 1924 (repr. in his Humanismus und
LIONEL GOSSMAN liberalism, must choose: that of regression into the dark world of myth and the Unconscious (Bachofen) and that of progress, heroic transcendence of old fears and idols and courageous assumption of freedom (Nietzsche).11 There is nothing surprising, no doubt, about this popular use of Nietzsche. Bachofen's part in the debate, on the other hand, is somewhat unexpected. Nietzsche's repudiation of philology and his departure from Basle in 1879 markeda decisive breakwith the cautious, conservative, carefully masked criticism represented by Basle scholarship, and the later Nietzsche trod paths on which none of his colleagues at Basle was preparedto accompany him, not Burckhardt,not Bachofen, not even Overbeck, who remained personally loyal to the end. Nietzsche's relations with Burckhardt- the theme of a well known essay by Erich Heller in TheDisinherited Mindand of countless books and articles by German and Swiss historiansl2 - became more and more problematical as his challenge to traditional philology and traditional philosophy became more radical and more violent. Likewise Bachofen, who had befriended Nietzsche in his early years at Basle and who had welcomed The Birth of Tragedy with great interest, greeted his later writings first with reserve, then with dismay. Eventually, all communication between the two men ceased.13 Bachofen's historical role in the popular ideological struggles of the twenties in Germany is thus hardly in keeping with the character of the man or his work, for in the end, despite the vehemence of his attacks on contemporary scholarship, Bachofen himself always remained a respectable bourgeois of Basle, living quietly, seeking neither scandal nor notoriety, entertaining relations almost exclusively with other scholars, preferably wealthy private ones like himself, and pursuing his work in a recognizably scholarly manner. Above all, his outlook was profoundly Christian. No doubt the criticisms of contemporary culture that came from the pen of men like Nietzsche or Wagner evoked a sympathetic response from him, but he could have reacted only with consternation to the
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Europaertum[Zuirich and Stuttgart 1957], pp.63-77). Howald was among the first to suggest an opposition between Bachofen and Nietzsche. In 1926 Baeumler entered the fray with a massive 300-page introduction to his and Schr6ter's selection of texts, entitled 'Bachofen, der Mythologe der Romantik'. This publication prompted an important commentary by Thomas Mann in his Pariser Rechenschaft (1926), where Howald's contrast of Bachofen and Nietzsche is taken up again. In 1927 an article on 'Der Kampf um Johann Jakob Bachofen', by Werner Deubel, appeared in the Preussische Jahrbiicher (ccIx, pp. 66-75) and the year after K. E. Winter investigated what he termed the 'Bachofen-Renaissance' in the Zeitschriftfitr die gesamte Staatswissenschaft (Lxxxv, 1928, pp. 316-42), while the same year in Italy Croce was sufficiently intrigued by the revival of an author who had been neglected in his lifetime to inquire into the reasons ('I1 Bachofen e la storiografia afilologica', Atti della Reale Accademiadi Scienzemorali e politiche di Napoli, 1928, LI, pp. 158-76). 1929 saw the publication of Georg Schmidt's doctoral dissertation, and of an Johann Jakob Bachofens Geschichtsphilosophie; important article by Baeumler on 'Bachofen und Nietzsche', (repr. in his Studien zur deutschen GeisBerlin 1937, Pp. 220-43). tesgeschichte, '1 Mann's criticism of Bachofen grew out of his deep sympathy with him and reflected his concern at the use being made of Bachofen in the political climate of the mid-192os in Germany. Mann's own work shows the influence of Bachofen, and it was he who introduced the philologist Karl Kerenyi to the work of his predecessor, thus totally transforming the direction of Kerenyi's interests and the character of his scholarship. 12 Erich Heller, 'Burckhardt and Nietzsche', in his The Disinherited Mind, Cambridge 1952. See also C. A. Bernoulli, Franz Overbeckund Friedrich Nietzsche: eine Freundschaft,Jena 1908, 2 vols; Alfred von Martin, Munich 1942; and Edgar Salin, NietzscheundBurckhardt, undNietzsche,Heidelberg 1948. Jakob Burckhardt 13 See Baeumler, Studienzur deutschen Geistesgeschichte, 3rd edn, I943, pp. 220-43. In November 1871 Nietzsche was writing to his mother and sister that he had been invited to lunch at the Bachofens (Briefe, Berlin and Leipzig, 90oo-I909, v, I, n o107). On II November 19o9, however, Frau Bachofen wrote to C. A. Bernoulli: 'Then The Birth of Tragedyappeared. My husband was delighted with it and had high hopes for Nietzsche. But then came his subsequent writings, which my late husband judged quite unfavourably. Thereafter our pleasant association with Nietzsche became more and more clouded until finally all relations between us ceased' (quoted by Bernoulli, Bachofenunddas Natursymbol, op. cit. n. Io above, p. 593).
BASLE AND BACHOFEN
1'4
anti-Christian heroic ideal proposed both in the writings of his young friend and in those - the early ones at least - of the prophet of Tribschen. To some extent the Basle scholars can be considered 'cultural pessimists'. Despite the abusive exploitation of Bachofen in the i920os, however, they cannot rightly be lumped with popular cultural pessimists of the type studied by Fritz Stern in his Politics of Cultural Despair (Berkeley 1961). Attracted and fascinated at first by Lagarde, in whose writings they easily recognized themes and concerns similar to their own, Bachofen, Burckhardt and Overbeck all ultimately drew back from him.14 Though they were sharply critical of the civilization created by modern enlightenment, they distrusted every attempt to restore a way of life and a form of existence - whether represented by primitive religious faith (Overbeck), primitive matriarchal society (Bachofen) or the seamless culture of the early polis (Burckhardt) - that they saw as no longer possible or even, perhaps, desirable. Burckhardt's astringent reminder that the Greek polis was intolerant of all individual deviations from the communal norm contrasts strikingly, for instance, with the unrestrained enthusiasm of the author of 'Art and Revolution'. The historian's well known distaste both for Wagner's charismatic and manipulative personality and for his engulfing music, his abiding affection for Haydn and Mozart, seem more than incidental. Burckhardt was probably repelled by an art that he saw as subversive of hard won distinctions and orders and that may well have been associated in his mind with the demagogy of modern mass politics. The poet Carl Spitteler, who came from Liestal, near Basle, and was a student of Burckhardt's at the Basle Piidagogium, put his finger on an essential aspect of Burckhardt's relation to antiquity that is equally characteristic of Bachofen's relation to prehistory. 'Jacob Burckhardt's ideal', he noted, 'is not so much antiquity itself as the study of antiquity'.15 Not the original presence, in other words, but a religious attitude to irreparable absence and loss. In 1885 Mallarm6 observed that the proper attitude of the poet in the age of industrial capitalism was a kind of heroic abstentionism. The poet, he declared, is 'en grave devant la soci6t6': Au fondje considere l'Fpoque contemporaine comme un interiegne pour le poete qui n'a point a s'y meler: elle est trop en desuetude et en effervescencepreparatoirepour qu'il ait autre chose a faire qu'a travailler avec mystere en vue de plus tard ou dejamais ... Most of the Basle critics would have subscribed to this judgment. But they would probably have rejected the faint anarchist undercurrent in Mallarme's remarks, had they detected it. For their relation to their small city-state, which they saw at one and the same time as a microcosm of the modern world and as a haven from it, was more ambivalent than that of the French poet to the fin-de-siicle France of the Third Republic.16
14 On the relation of the Basle scholars to Lagarde, see the excellent pages in Robert W. Lougee, Paul de Lagarde, I827-9I, Cambridge Mass. 1962, pp. 226-31. On Burckhardt and Wagner, see Burckhardt's letters to Von Preen (New Year's Eve 1872) and Max Alioth (25August 1878) in The Letters of Jacob Burckhardt, selected, edited and translated by Alexander Dru, London 1955, PP. 157, 182-83. In the first of these Burckhardt associates Wagner and Bismarck as clever manipulators. 15 Carl Spitteler, 'B6cklin, Burckhardt, Basel', GesammelteWerke, Ziirich 1945-58, vi, p. 164.
replies to a questionnaire on the future of literature, by Jules Huret (1891), in Oeuvres completes de Stiphane Mallarmi, ed. Henry Mondor and G.Jean-Aubry, Paris 1951, p. 870; on the contemporary period as an interregnum, in a letter to Verlaine, 16 November 1885, ibid., p. 664. On Mallarme's anarchist sympathies, see James Joll, The Anarchists, New York 1964, PP. 133, di Dio e 167-69; Giampiero Posani, Mallarmi: il tramonto il mezzogiornodel Capitale, Naples 1975, PP. 75-111; George Woodstock, Anarchism:A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements, New York 1962, pp. 295, 305-06.
16 Mallarmi on the artist 'en grave devant la societe' in
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LIONEL GOSSMAN
From the time it joined the Swiss Confederation in 1501 until the second half of the nineteenth century, Basle was the largest, wealthiest and most important Germanspeaking town in Switzerland. A former Imperial City, the residence at various times of Erasmus and Holbein, the home of the Bernoullis and the Eulers, it was a centre of humanist scholarship and printing, art, science and letters as well as a thriving commercial place. Yet it was a compact, moderately sized town, even by the standards of an earlier age. Its population, entirely contained within the fourteenth-century walls, remained stable from the fifteenth to the early nineteenth century at about 15,000, which was a modest figure compared not only with new commercial and industrial cities like Liverpool or Philadelphia, but with many traditional trading centres, such as Frankfurt or Strasbourg. It owed its importance to its situation, at the head of the long navigable stretch of the Rhine and astride the main trading routes between Northern and Southern Europe, to the enterprise and resourcefulnessof its merchants and manufacturers,and to its political independence and republican traditions, which made it a preferredplace of refuge for many seeking asylum from religious or political persecution or from conditions of violence and unrest in the neighbouring lands or in the lands along its trading routes. As we shall see, the city's ruling elite was composed predominantly of immigrants and refugees. Prior to the Federal Constitution of 1848 the Swiss Confederationwas little more than a loose defensive alliance among communities that varied greatly in size, population, social and economic structure, and political organization, with virtually no central authority, let alone a common language or religion, common laws, or a common coinage. Unlike most other European states, Switzerlandowed its existence not to the unifying and acquisitive ambitions of a prince or princely house, but - on the contrary- to resistance to such ambitions. Even in the first half of the nineteenth century, the country had no capital city: the Federal Diet met at Zuirich,Lucerne or Bern. The obligations of the Diet, moreover, were still limited to protecting the independence and the rights of the member communities and to mediating in disputes that might arise among them. Though it was the largest city in the Confederation and its most important centre of trade, Basle was geographically the most eccentric and militarily the most vulnerable of the members of the Confederation. Trading relations, as well as the countless occasions of friction and cooperation, dispute and negotiation, that inevitably arise in a border city, bound it to France and Germany, Italy and the Netherlands as much as, and even more than, to the other cantons. Basle's trading connections in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries extended to Bremen, Hamburg, Lfibeck and Copenhagen in the North; Frankfurt-on-the-Oderand beyond (Poland, Russia, Turkey) in the East; Venice, Genoa, Milan and Marseilles in the South; and Paris, Nantes, Amsterdam, London and the Atlantic colonies in the West. In the early nineteenth century Basle merchants were active from Rio de Janeiro and New York to Africa and the Far East, and Basle capital was financing the industrialization of neighbouring Alsace. Basle's relation to the rest of Switzerland was tempered by these international connections, which contributed, along
with the city's history and the almost total political and institutional autonomy it continued to enjoy as a member of the Confederation, to preserve among its citizens a strong sense of distinctiveness and civic independence."7
17 On the history of Basle, see especially Paul bis zur Gegenwart, Basle 1957, 2nd edn; in addition der Stadt Basel von der Reformation Martin Alioth, Ulrich Barth, Dorothee Huber, Basler Burckhardt, Geschichte
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Basle's eccentricity as a member of the Swiss Confederation was highlighted and aggravated in the early nineteenth century when, alone among the populous and prosperous Protestant cantons, the traditionally enlightened and progressive city-state did not put a liberal government in power in the wake of the 1830 revolution in Paris. On the contrary, a bitter, protracted and - for Switzerland - costly struggle, both in economic terms and in terms of lives lost, between the city and its rebellious country districts ended in 1833, after the humiliating defeat of the city army at the village of Pratteln, with the division of the old city-state into the two independent half-cantons of Basel-Stadtand Basel-Land,and the consolidation rather than the overturning of the prudent, essentially conservative rule of the merchant elite. The Basle Wirren or 'Troubles' of 1830-33 increased the city's isolation in two ways. there was a sense of estrangement from the predominantly liberal Confederation, Firstly, which had intervened to mediate in the dispute and had helped negotiate a settlement that placed a heavy financial burden on the city. To the city fathers and to many of the leading citizens of the time it seemed that the Federal Diet had not been even-handed but had consistently favoured the rebels. As a result, after 1833, there was not much support left among the leaders of Basle society for projects to enhance the powers of the Diet and give the Confederation a more effective and centralized state apparatus. The Federal Constitution of 1848 was adopted by 66 votes to 5 in the city Council, but almost half the councillors had stayed away. Unwilling to reject it, they were not willing to vote for it
either.18
Secondly, the amputation of the country districts not only consolidated the power of Basle's ruling elite by removing the principal source of opposition to it, it strengthened the city's sense of its peculiarly urban and civic destiny. The country districts had demanded a more equitable distribution of representatives on the Council, one that would have accurately reflected the distribution of the population. While the regime had been prepared to make changes, it had balked at any arrangement, no matter how equitable, that would have deprived the city of its majority vote in Council. The city's destiny, the city fathers maintained, was urban and commercial and could not thereforebe entrusted to a majority of peasants and country squires. This reasoning was not peculiar to Basle. Sismondi spoke against extension of the suffrage at Geneva in i83 I on exactly the same grounds.19 There is nothing implausible about the claim made later by the liberal Schweizerische (which, as its name implies, strongly favoured the developNational-Zeitung ment of centralized state power in Switzerland) that the division of the canton had at no time been an objective of the country districts, which desired equitable representation, not autonomy, and that it had been proposed, and even secretly desired by the city.20 The amputation of the country districts from the city made clear the opposition of urban and rural interests at Basle and thus the essential differencebetween the nineteenth
Stadtgeschichte,ii, 'Vom Briickenschlag 1225 bis zur Gegenwart', Basle i98i, a volume put out by the HistorischesMuseum;and the richly documented articles by Carl Roth, August Burckhardt, Anton Haefinger, L. E. Iselin and Ernst Stihelin in Dictionnaire et historique de la Suisse, Neuchitel, 1921, I, pp. 522-55. biographique On Basle's trading connections, see especially Andreas Stiihelin, 'Gold aus Seide' and Carl Burckhardt-Sarasin 'Untergang und Ubergang' in SchaffendesBasel: 2000 Basle 1957, PP. I I5-I6, 122. Jahre Basler Wirtschaft,
18 Burckhardt, op. cit. n. 17 above, pp. 252-53; Dictionnaire historiqueet biographiquede la Suisse, n. 17 above, art. 'Bile', p. 536. 19 See William E. Rappard, La Carriere de parlementaire trois economistes genevois: Sismondi, Rossi, Cherbuliez, Geneva 1941, pp. i13-14. 20 SchweizerNational-Zeitung,20 October 1842, P. 497. See also Charles Andler, La jeunessedeNietzschejusqu' a la avecBayreuth,Paris 192 I, pp. I 13-14. rupture
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century city-state and the city republics of antiquity with which it liked to compare itself. Nevertheless, fbr most Baselers, the events of 1830-33 confirmed the city's traditional perception of itself as a polis, an autonomous Republic within the Confederation but with interests and connections extending far beyond Switzerland. The formula SPQB (Senatus basiliensis)which until the last century appeared everywhere in Basle, in populusque documents, on monuments, and on public buildings, conveys an idea of how the citizens, especially the well-to-do elite, thought of their city. When a Biirgermeisterwas described on medals struck to commemorate his term of office as Illustr.Reip.BasiliensisConsul Pater Patriae,the Patriathat was referredto was Basle, not Switzerland. From about the mid-seventeenth century until the mid-nineteenth Basle was effectively governed by an elite of some thirty or forty families drawn from the five hundred or so burgher families of the city.21 These families, most of which were in the silk-ribbon trade, the mainstay of the city's economy until the First World War, were closely linked to each other by an intricate web of marriages and business partnerships. Family name alone, however, was neither an indication nor a guarantee of social standing or influence at Basle - members of the less well-to-do branches of prominent families did not move in the same circles as their more successful cousins, as Jacob Burckhardt'scareer confirms and the term 'patriciate', which is often used to referto the elite, can be misleading. Whereas the ruling elite in other patrician cities, such as Bern or Fribourg, was a landed aristocracy, and at Lucerne, from the beginning, membership in the cantonal council or Rat could be bequeathed from father to son, the government of Basle was essentially, like that of Ziirich, in the hands of the guilds, the old nobility having abandoned the city completely by the middle of the sixteenth century. The concentration of power and prestige in a few families should not therefore be misinterpreted. The condition of distinction and prominence at Basle was wealth, not birth. The ruling elite, as the liberal National-Zeitung never tired of pointing out, was a 'Geldaristokratie'.22 In addition, from the seventeenth century on, this ruling elite was composed less and less of indigenous families, like the Iselins and the Faesch, and more and more of wealthy immigrants. The names of many of these - Battier, Burckhardt,De Bary, Sarasin, Socin figure prominently among the Biirgermeisters of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Most of the immigrants came to Basle as refugees from religious persecution in Italy, France and the Spanish Netherlands, or from the ravages of the Thirty Years' War in neighbouring parts of France, Germany and Eastern Switzerland. As the city did not welcome poor refugees, almost all those who immigrated to Basle were well-to-do merchants or skilled artisans in possession of some capital resources.23 Being used to more advanced business practices than those current in their adopted city - most of them, for instance, engaged in general merchandising rather than in a single craft activity, and it was they who introduced the putting-out system of
21 [Markus Lutz], BaslerischesBiirger-Buch,enthaltend alle gegenwtartig in derStadt Basel eingebiirgerten Geschlechter, Basle 1819, pp. 1-25. 22 SchweizerischeNational-Zeitung, 20 October 1842, P. 497. See also Alfred Biirgin, Geschichtedes GeigyBasle 1958, p. 16. According to Peter Stolz Unternehmens, (Basler Wirtschaftin vor- undfriihindustrieller Zeit, Zilrich 1977, pp. 147-48), at the end of the eighteenth century about 85% of the wealth of Basle was in the hands of
Io% of the population. Many of the Basle fortunes were considerable. In 1946 the personal fortune of the Merian family, to which Bachofen's mother belonged, was estimated at about 18 million Swiss francs, and up to that time the family had made gifts to the city of about 32 million francs. 23 On immigration to Basle, see A. Stfhelin, op. cit. n. 17 above, pp. 102-o6; Stolz, op. cit. n.22 above, p. 150.
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manufacture to Basle in place of the traditional artisan's shop - these men might have come into conflict with the city's powerful guilds. Instead, they did what they could to reach an accommodation with the guilds, avoiding as far as possible activities that would have placed them in direct competition with guild members. Indeed, they themselves sought membership in an appropriate guild and, in this way, instead of challenging the guilds, they came, because of their wealth, to dominate them and, through them, the city government which was organized around them. They thus gained control of the city without attacking its existing political and institutional structure. Moreover, their way of life, even in the golden years of eighteenth-century prosperity, did not alienate them excessively from the artisan class. Many of them maintained a patriarchal relation to their direct employees that was not incompatible with the temper of the old Basle of guildsmen and artisans. The wealthy ribbon manufacturer and capitalist Johann Rudolf Forcart-Weiss, for instance, was frequently godfather to the children of his employees, and as late as the early nineteenth century unmarried employees of the Bachofen firm lived under the same roof as their employer, above the firm's shop and offices in the palatial Weisses Haus.24 The Basle elite, in short, was not a real patriciate but a band of feisty and successful entrepreneurs and businessmen. In the course of the eighteenth century these men amassed immense fortunes which, in the pre-industrial age, were not easily invested. Inevitably a good deal of their money went into real estate, and this altered to some extent their style of life. The magnificent late baroque, rococo, neoclassical and Empire style hAtelsparticuliers as they were called which the ribbon manufacturers- the Biindelherren, had built for themselves in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are to this day silent testimony to the wealth, taste and aspirations of the ruling elite.25At the same time, however, the proprietors still lived 'over the shop', as artisans and merchants had Haus or of Johann traditionally done. The ground floor of the imposing baroque Weisses Rudolf Burckhardt's more austerely neoclassical Zum Kirschgarten (now part of the Historical Museum of the City of Basle) was occupied by the offices and store-roomsof the firm. In the same way, there may have been a prudent business side to the art collections - some of which, like the Bachofen and Faesch collections, were almost of the Biindelherren It has been princely. suggested that some of the Basle collectors were in fact also dealers and that this accounts for the otherwise mysterious movement of paintings in and out of their collections.26 It is as though these men were tradesmen to their fingertips. Even if they did not intend it from the beginning, everything they touched became potentially tradeable. Having gained control of the city, the merchants of Basle had only one ambition: to be able to pursue their business interests with as little interference as possible. To borrow Pareto's - or Machiavelli's - categories, they were 'foxes', not 'lions'. Indeed, their
24 Carl Burckhardt-Sarasin, op. cit. n. 17 above, p. 134. 25 Among the many still standing: the Blaues Haus and the WeissesHaus (both by Samuel Werenfels, 1763-70), for Lucas Sarasin and Jacob Sarasin-Battier; the rococo Haus on the Petersplatz (by Johann Jacob 14Wildt'sches Fechter, 1762-63), for Jeremias WVild-Socin;the Holsteiner Hof (modernized in 1743-52), for Samuel Burckhardt; the Ramsteiner Hof (by Johann Carl Hemeling, 1727-32), for Samuel Burckhardt-Zaeslin; the Rollerhof (1758), for Martin Bachofen. The Bandelherren also built themselves handsome retreats in the countryside, close to the city but outside the walls: the (1740) in Riehen and Sandgrube (1745-46, by Wenkenhof J.J. Fechter), on the present Riehenstrasse, are still standing. 26 A. Stihelin, op. cit. n. 17 above, p. I I7: Paul Burckhardt, op. cit. n. 17 above, pp. 87-88.
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interests and policies constantly brought them into conflict with the 'lions' around them. The protectionist economic policies of Napoleon, for instance, ruined the fledgling calico industry at Basle and created enormous difficulties even for the well-established ribbon manufacturers, who saw the condition of their prosperity - an intricate web of foreign connections and the ability to respond promptly to the opportunities of the international market - undermined by the Continental Blockade.27 The merchant-manufacturers responded by infringing the law wherever possible, and in 1809 nine of the most distinguished citizens of Basle were sentenced to prison for 'smuggling'.28 To the merchants, in short, the powerful states on Basle's doorstep, with their- to the Baseler's way of thinking - irrational ambitions, whether dynastic or nationalist, represented a constant menace, which was symbolized by the massive, supposedly 'defensive' fortress built by Louis XIV at Huningue or Hiiningen,just outside the city. As late as i86o, Bachofen still thought of Basle as 'bedroht' by the armed and haughty 'Franzmann' at her gates, and he compared the situation of the city on the Rhine with that of her sister city Geneva, similarly eccentric and similarly in danger of being swallowed up by 'annexationist' neighbouring powers.29Burckhardt's scathing account of the French occupation of Tahiti in the Basler Zeitungin 1844 probably reflects the attitude of a majority of the Basle elite to the policies and ambitions of the so-called Great Powers. 'It is not difficult to see that this battle of Mahahana was scarcely a heroic exploit on the part of the experienced French soldiers, who were almost equal in number to the natives and far better armed', Burckhardtwrote. 'This war could well go on until the harmless people of the island has been completely wiped out. In the Museum at Versailles, where so many underhand attacks and crimes have been immortalized alongside a few noble deeds, a Tahiti room will then no doubt be set up and fitted out with battle scenes as tall as houses commissioned from Horace Vernet'.30 The Basle elite, though conservative at home, was thus liberal in economic matters and even in international affairs.31 Similarly, though it looked suspiciously on every encroachment of Federal authority, it was not narrow-minded or provincial. The Basle merchants were cosmopolitan men of the world. They themselves travelled widely on business, and they sent their children abroad - to England, France, Germany and Italy - as part of their education. Bachofen, as we shall see, spent several years in France and England and attended university in Germany. His brothersCarl and Wilhelm, who took over the family ribbon business from their father, also spent time abroad: Carl in London and Paris, Wilhelm in New York, where he served an apprenticeship in a company with which the Basle firm had dealings.32J.J. Bachofen senior clearly intended that his sons
27 Carl Burckhardt-Sarasin, op. cit. n. 17 above, pp. I I9-2I. 28 Maurice LUvy-Boyer, Les Banques europeenneset l'industrialisationinternationaledans la premidremoiti6 du XIX"sidcle,Paris 1964, p. 45Iin. 29 'Das Musikfest in Basel' (Beilage of the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, II May 186o) in J.J. Bachofen, Gesammelte Werke,ed. Karl Meuli, Basle and Stuttgart 1943-67,1, pp. 443-45. 30 Basler Zeitung, 17 October 1844, quoted in Kaegi, op. cit. n. 6 above, ii, p. 431. 31 See Stolz, op. cit. n. 22 above, p. 153. There was no tradition of mercantilism at Basle such as there was at Bern. According to Stolz, the 'Honorationsregime', in which public service was virtually unremunerated, discouraged the pursuit of purely political careers. The Basle elite was opposed to a professional administrative bureaucracy, both for reasons of economy and because they wanted to keep the role and influence of government to a minimum. 32 R. Forcart-Bachofen, Chronik derFamilie Bachofenin Basel, Basle 1911. Wilhelm returned from New York in 1847 at the age of 22.
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should be personally familiar with the firm's principal customers and markets. In addition, members of leading Basle families had settled in the major trading centres of Europe and America, where they conducted their own businesses, often in close cooperation with their brethren in Basle. The Burckhardts, the Iselins, the Merians, the Vondermiihlls, the Weisses had family members in the French Atlantic port cities of Le Havre, Nantes and La Rochelle, as well as in Paris, London, Hamburg, Copenhagen, Vienna, Moscow and New York.33 In this way, Basle political conservatism was coupled with commercial flair and resourcefulness. The city's affinity was with Figaro, not Almaviva. In the early nineteenth century, for example, the ribbon manufacturerswere quickerto adopt modern production techniques than their French competitors and soon cornered all the major markets. Around the same time, Basle merchant capital was financing a wide range of industrial and commercial enterprises in Alsace.34The opportunitiesgiven by Basle businessmen to French and German chemists launched an industry which, starting as an adjunct to the manufacture of ribbons, has grown into the mammoth undertakingof today.35s The city's merchant bankers quickly realized that modern industrial and institutional borrowers required far vaster amounts of capital than any one of them individually could command - banking, for most of them, was only one of a range of commercial operations centred on the ribbon trade - and they soon banded together in syndicates. The old families thus moved as resolutely into the world of modern finance as they moved into the world of modern industry.36 The energy, skill, and enterprise of the Basle elite were also expended on behalf of the very Confederation that the city had welcomed so half-heartedly. Men from the great merchant families, such as Geigy and Laroche, were behind some of the most important
bankers represented in Paris in 1714, and by the end of the eighteenth century the city had become a significant Levy-Boyer, op. cit. n. 28 above, pp. 132-38. On Basle banking centre (August Piintener, Das schweizerische credit operations, see pp. 349-51. Basle merchants Bankwesen,Bern and Stuttgart, p. 14). In the nineteenth invested heavily in France, not only in land (a syndicate century distinguished families like the Laroches, the was formed in 1806 to acquire Church lands that were Iselins, the Heuslers, the Burckhardts, the Stihelins, up for sale [p. 450 n]), but in early industrial enter- the Merians, the Forcarts and the Passavants were all prises, such as those ofJ. P. Peugeot and F.Japy, and heavily involved in private banking. The French above all in the calico mills of Mulhouse. As of I8o6, the historian Jules Michelet relates that a Stihelin 'prohouse of Forcart, Weiss and Son, for instance, was fesseur de theologie, fort occupe des Hebreux et de la investing regularly in French enterprises and making dixieme dynastie des Pharaons' was not above lending loans to French clients (for the breakdown of their money (Journal, ed. P. Viallaneix, Paris 1959-62, I, operations cf. P. 455n), so that by August 1842 the p. 529). According to Levy-Boyer, op. cit. n. 28 above, contained to the value of company's portfolio holdings 'en 1837 Bile compte outre 200 maisons de gros, et 120 were in de detail, 82 banquiers' (P. 454n) and the city had 390,000 francs in France, of which 200,000 Alsace alone. Levy-Boyer describes the Basle activities become a major centre of capital for eastern France, as 'une veritable colonisation financiere' (p. 450). south-west Germany, and the rest of Switzerland 35 On the chemical industry, see L. F. Haber, The (PP. 349-50, 450-51, 454-55, 469, 471, 592, 705n; also Chemical Industry during the Nineteenth Century,Oxford Max Iklk, Die Schweiz als internationalerBank- und 1958; Paul M. Hohenberg, Chemicalsin Western Europe, Finanzplatz, Ziirich 1970, pp. 21-23). Until mid-cen1815-1914, Chicago 1967; Heinz Polivka, Die chemische tury, however, few of the Basle banking houses were Industrieim Raume von Basel, Basle 1974; The Societyof pure banks: they were commercial houses engaged in a ChemicalIndustryin Basle 1884-1934, Ziirich n.d.; above variety of business activities. But by 1854 several of the all Alfred Biirgin's outstanding company history old family banks had banded together to form the marking the bicentennial of the Geigy company, op. cit. Schweizerischer Bankverein, and in 1863 the Basler n. 22 above. Handelsbank was formed from a consortium of five 36 According to Polivka, the Basle ribbon manufacprivate banks. On banking in Basle, see also Hansrudolf turers were 'fabricants-marchands-banquiers' (op. cit. Schwabe, 'Neue Zeit, neue WVirtschaft',in Schaffendes n. 35 above), Basle bankers were among the 44 Swiss Basel, n. 17 above, pp. 136-53.
122.
34 On Basle's success in ribbon manufacturing, see
33Burckhardt-Sarasin, op. cit. n. 17 above, p.
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federal enterprises of the middle years of the nineteenth century: the customs union, the postal system, the currency and the Central Bank, and the building of a railway network intended both to knit the Confederation together and to ensure that Swiss commercial interests would continue to play a dominant role in trade between Northern and Southern Europe.37 It is true that not all the leaders of Basle society were consistently progressive or favourably disposed to the expansion of trade and industry. Though the elite's position rested mainly on its business success, it also supplied the city with most of its preachers, professors, and scholars, and this spiritual arm of the elite was not unequivocally in sympathy with the aims and ambitions of its commercial brethren. In addition, many artisans were now threatened by the free trade policies favoured by the elite. There was enough public concern about the possible deleterious effectsof the new chemical industry, for instance, to prompt Johann Rudolf Geigy to enter it with great caution, by first providing financial backing for an associate and only later engaging the reputation of the old-established family drysalters' firm.38 Similarly, the extension of the Strasbourg railway line into the city was hotly debated in the Council, where it met with opposition from a coalition of extreme conservatives and traditional artisans. These groups saw the steam locomotive as a Trojan horse that could only undermine what they valued most about Basle - the city's traditions and its autonomy - by introducing foreign goods, industrial spies, Catholic priests, and French morals. Even after the extension of the railway into the city had been approved, a new city gate was built at the point of entry, and this was closed and barred every night after the last train had passed through it. Nevertheless, most of the leading families were well aware that their own prosperity and that of the city as a whole rested on trade with the outside world and that Basle could not afford not to seize the opportunity offered by the extension of the Strasbourg line and proposals to build lines to Germany and central Switzerland of becoming, as the NationalZeitungput it, 'a city like no other on the Continent ... the terminus of the railways of three countries.'39 The conservatives had not been wrong when they sensed that the arrival of the railway would mean the end of the old Basle. Within fifteen years, the City Council yielded to pressure to permit the razing of the ancient city walls and the development of land previously occupied by the fortifications.Significantly, however, one of the two city officials most closely associated with the 'Entfestigung' of Basle was a member of the old 'patrician' family of Sarasin: Karl Sarasin, director of the sanitation department from 1850 to 1855 and head of the buildings department from 1858 to 1866. Just as characteristically, Sarasin tried to combine commercial enterprise with public service: it was he who was largely responsible for the gardens and open spaces that were included in the development plans. So far from being obstructed by the politically conservative ruling elite, the economic transformation of Basle and its entry into the modern world were thus in large measure the achievement of that elite. When a writer in the National-Zeitung complained in I842
38 Haber, op. cit. n. 35 above, pp. I8-19; Biirgin, op. 37 See Paul Burckhardt, op. cit. n. I above, pp. 258-61; Edgar Bonjour, 'Basels Anteil an der Entwicklung der cit. n. 22 above, pp. Io4-o8. neuen Schweiz', Die Schweiz undEuropa, vi, Basle 1979, National-Zeitung, i i December 1842, 39 Schweizerische pp. I33-233; Paul Siegfried, Basel im neuenBund, Basle 6 May 1843, II May 1843. Basler Neujahrsblatt, 1925; Albert Hauser, 1925. und Schweizerische WirtschaftsSozialgeschichte, Ellenbach-Ziirich iq6i, p. I93.
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that in the twelve years since I830 Basle had fallen further and further behind the other cantons - 'while they have progressed, Basle has stood still' - it was 'political development' alone that he was measuring. Basle's isolation, he had to acknowledge, had not hurt the city economically. 'We have tried to make our own home and conduct our own business, and it is true that from the point of view of material success we can do that without any sacrifice'.40 The 'reactionary' government of Basle, to sum up, was not a government of genuine patricians. It was not dominated by landed interests or by an old nobility or by traditionalist Catholics, as were most of the other cantons that banded together with Basle in the conservative Sarnen League. Above all, the ancien regime the Basle elite wanted to defend bore no resemblance to the absolutist regimes of the past. On the contrary, the most diehard Basle conservatives were still republicans- ardent republicans. They were unimpressed by nobilities and courts and they despised 'despotism'. Openly expressing his hatred of democracy, as he described with horror the events he witnessed at Rome in 1848, Bachofen did not fail to criticize the arbitrary,indifferentand improvident regime of Gregory XVI and to charge it with having created the conditions that Pius IX then proved incapable of curing. And after the debacle of 1870 he expressed the hope that at least it might teach the French the value of true republicanism.41Basle conservatism had more in common with the Whiggism of Burke, who was widely read in elite circles, both in the original and in the Gentz translation, than with the ideals of Metternich or of Prussian reactionaires such as Arndt and von Arnim. On some issues the Basle government even came into direct conflict with the more repressive regimes of Restoration Europe. In 1824, for instance, it resisted pressure from the Prussian and Austrian governments to extradite Wilhelm Snell and Karl Follen, two liberals who had been given appointments at the University and who were considered dangerous by Berlin and Vienna. Among the professors at the University there were several who had left Germany to escape political persecution. De Wette in theology and Carl GustavJung, the professor of anatomy, were only the most notable of these. The position of even the most conservative members of the Basle elite is well illustrated by an anecdote. In 1847 Andreas Heusler and Peter Merian, who were regarded throughout Switzerland as pillars of conservative Basle politics, paid a courtesy call on a couple of visiting Prussian dignitaries, Ludwig von Gerlach and Reinhold von Thadden-Trieglaff, both dyed-in-the-wool Junker reactionaries. 'Do you know', Merian is said to have remarked to Heusler afterwards, 'compared to these gentlemen, we are
arrant Jacobins'.42
Even at home, Basle conservatism was shrewd and pliant. The men of the so-called 'juste milieu' in particular - active and enterprising businessmen and men of the world like Achilles Bischoff and August Stfihelin knew how to hold on to power by making adroit and timely concessions. In 1846, and again in 1857, they succeeded in forestalling the plans of the liberals and radicals by themselves proposing a revision of the city
' haute voix qu'il n'y a rien de besoin de protester commun entre l'esprit des republiques et l'esprit des revolutions', Sismondi declared; 'que l'antique Geneve etait republicaine et non revolutionnaire' (quoted in Rappard, op. cit. n. 19 above, p. 35)42 Quoted in C. A. Bernoulli, Franz Overbeckund Friedrich Nietzsche: eineFreundschaft, Jena 1908, I, p. 41.-
40 Schweizerische National-Zeitung,27 August 1842. 41 'Die r6mische Staatsumwdilzung vom Tode Gregors XVI. bis zur Wiederherstellung Pius IX.' (supplement to the Augsburger AllgemeineZeitung, 24 and 25 August Werke, 1850), Gesammelte op. cit. n. 29 above, I, pp. 3974Io; Briefe, op. cit. n. 6 above, letter n' 283, 9 February 1871. For the Baselers, as for the Genevan Sismondi, republicanism had nothing to do with revolution. 'J'ai
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constitution and thus forcing their opponents to choose between settling for moderate reform or leaving themselves no cards to play except the risky one, in a city not given to precipitate action, of revolution.43 It may be that the peculiarities of the situation at Basle and the ambivalent view the citizens had of their city as both a progressive centre of commerce, industry and finance, and a last repository of rapidly vanishing republican virtues, gave to the criticism of modernity associated with the city's writers and artists a character that distinguishes it from that of French writers such as Flaubert, Baudelaire and Mallarme. For while Burckhardt, Bachofen and Bdcklin were to some extent marginalized in relation to the mainstream of their society, they were still in important respects integrated into the fabric of the little city. Burckhardt was a much admired and highly successful public lecturer. B6cklin received important civic commissions, even Bachofen continued to play his role in Basle society, and his withdrawal from the family business in favour of his brother appears to have had the full support ofJ.J. Bachofen senior, himself an ardent amateur scholar and connoisseur, so that it can in no way be construed as a gesture of rebellion. Above all, Burckhardt, Steffensen, Overbeck and Nietzsche, as professors at the University of Basle, all enjoyed the official approval and protection of the city, for it was part of the elite's image of itself that it took care not only of the city's material prosperity but of its cultural well-being too. In a free city-state, culture and learning could not be left to aristocrats and professionals any more than administration could be entrusted to bureaucrats or defence to a hired army of professional soldiers. The citizens of the virtuous republic, in contrast to the subjects of the powerful monarchies around them, intended to alienate none of the their privileges or responsibilities. Traditionally, therefore, the leading families of Basle had not only been merchants, they had provided the city's professors and preachers as well as its Biirgermeisters, civil servants and military officers. Like their Genevan counterpart Sismondi before them, however, the Basle critics came to question whether the values of the elite culture - material success and individual enterprise on the one hand, social cohesion and community well being on the other were compatible, and whether the elite's commitment to the development of commerce and industry might not be bound, sooner or later, to come into conflict with the ideals it professed and the mission by which it justified its rule: to protect the moral as well as the material well-being of the polis, and to preserve the traditions of the city republic. In I833, as we saw, the elite had accepted the loss of most of the country districts dependent on the city in order not to have to share power with landowners and peasants whose interests and outlook, they felt, were different from those of a city of international traders. Yet one effect of the loss of the country districts was the development of factory production in the city, especially after the introduction of steam-driven looms around the middle of the century.44 Large numbers of immigrant workers, many of them politically radicalized,
43 Paul Burckhardt, op. cit. n. I7 above, pp. 245-47, 279-80. 44 Ibid., p. 207; Schwabe, op. cit. n. 36 above, p. 142. According to Heinz Polivka, op. cit. n. 35 above, p. 32, the putting-out system dominated until 1833. The majority of the looms were in the country districts of Arlesheim, Sissach, Liesetal and Waldenburg (LivyBoyer, op. cit. n. 28 above, p. 135), but the 'division of the canton in 1833 forced the ribbon manufacturers to switch from the traditional putting-out system to factory
production' (ibid., p. 43; see also William E. Rappard, La Rivolution industrielleet les origines de la protectiondu travail en Suisse, Berne 1914, pp. 182-83). After about 1839 factory work increased markedly, and by 1844 one eighth of the looms employed by the ribbon manufacturers were in factories. By I88o, of a total of 7ooo looms, 2000 were steam-driven in factories in the city (La Suisse et sociale, Ouvrage publik par le Departement iconomique f6diral de l'Economie publique, Einsiedeln 1927, p. 27).
151 from other to arrive of and the erstwhile began Germany, France, parts Switzerland, half enjoyed burgher-rights. By i88o it had swollen to 6 i,ooo, but only a quarter of these were burghers.45At the same time, relations between employers and employees deteriorated, the workers resorted to strike action, and in 1869, after a particularly bitter industrial dispute, the city was selected as the site of the fourth Congress of the First Workers' International. The conflict of interest between manufacturers and workers which, in the putting-out days, had been an aspect of the conflict between town and a social conflict countryside had thus become, in part as a result of the Kantontrennung, within the town itself. The old frommesBasel, in which rich and poor, manufacturers, merchants, and artisans had lived together in relative harmony, had been made over into a modern industrial and commercial town. The Basle intellectuals, especially those who emerged from the elite, observed the transformation of their city and foresaw its consequences with dismay. Many of them had personally seen the social effects of industrialization in England, and in the considerable literature on that topic they could have read frightening accounts of the human degradation and the revolutionary situations 'Manchesterism' had produced. The price of 'progress' seemed to them unacceptably high, the two goals of the moderate leaders economic progress and political conservatism - incompatible. Yet most of these critics- whom we now think of, not without reason, as dyed-in-thewool conservatives, even 'reactionaries'- started out, in the years betwen 18I5 and I848, as moderates. In 1841 Burckhardt still saw Switzerland's future in a 'definite - though not political - Anschluss with Germany', that is, as part of a larger, culturally defined German 'Nation'.46 Correspondingly, he appears to have had, at this time, a fairly optimistic view of history. 'When I see the present lying quite clearly in the past', he declared, 'I feel moved by a shudder of profound respect. The highest conception of the history of mankind: the development of the spirit to freedom, has become my leading conviction'.47 In 1844, when he accepted the editorship of the Basler Zeitung,he did so not only to oppose the 'raucous Swiss radicals', but 'to exterminate ... the odious sympathy ... among the ruling clique here for absolutism of every kind'.48 It appears to have been the experience of radical volunteer bands attacking the canton of Lucerne in 1845 that soured Burckhardtirrevocably. 'Conditions in Switzerland- so disgusting and barbarous - have spoilt everything for me', he wrote in April 1845. 'The
45 The number of active burghers - those possessing both voting rights and the right to hold office - was, of course, far smaller, since it was restricted by an income qualification. The foreign population - largely drawn from neighbouring Baden - also increased - to 30% of the total by 186o - and was made up almost exclusively of factory workers and domestic servants. See Paul der Stadtgemeinde Dopper, Organisationund Aufgabenkreis Basel, 18o3-1876, Ingebohl 1933, p. 7; Paul Burckhardt, op. cit. n. 17 above, pp. 206, 284; William Rappard, op. cit. n. 44 above, pp. 182-88. 46 LettersofJacob Burckhardt, op. cit. n. 14 above, letter 65, 25 September 1841. 47 Ibid., letter 73, I9June 1842. 48 Ibid., letter 91, 21 April 1844. Fritz Blaser (Bibliographie der SchweizerPresse, Basle 1956, 2 vols), describes the Basler Zeitung as 'the organ of the now conservative "old liberals" of 1830'. UntilJune 1839 it was liberal-leaning but after that was described by its critics as the 'official organ of the conservative Basle establishment'. In 1844 Burckhardt was still expressing confidence that 'the liberalism of 184o-43 was only the first sour bloom which encloses the fruit and which is bound to fall away. A new liberalism and a broad public opinion will arise all the stronger and the purer of every kind of extravagance ... Only such a liberalism, grounded in the people, will gather strength and be able to put together a new Federation' (Briefe, ed. Max Burckhardt, Basle 1949-80, n, 78, letter of 28-29 January 1844 to Eduard Schauenburg).
BASLE AND BACHOFEN
country districts themselves. In 1779 the city population stood at I5,000, of whom about
LIONEL GOSSMAN word freedom sounds rich and beautiful, but no one should talk about it who has not seen and experienced slavery under the loudmouthed masses called "the people"'. The erstwhile moderately liberal critic of the local conservatives now declares that he knows 'too much history to expect anything from the despotism of the masses but a future tyranny', and tells his liberal friends in Germany that they are 'political children' who ought to 'thank God that there are Prussian garrisons in Cologne, Coblenz and other places, so that the first crowd of communized boors cannot fall on you in the middle of the night, and carry you off bag and baggage'.49By February 1846 he was announcing that he had turned his back on 'this wretched age' and on the historical world in general. 'I have secretly fallen out with it entirely, and for that reason am escaping from it to the beautiful, lazy south, where history is dead'. All that now remains is to stand up for human values in the private sphere. From the public sphere, the world of history, nothing is to be expected: 'I mean to be a good private individual, an affectionate friend, a good spirit ... I can do nothing more with society as a whole; my attitude towards it is willy-nilly ironical'.50The new nationalism and democracy will give rise, in the end, he predicts, to despotic and militarist regimes,s5 and the attack on private capital will be used to justify the most deadly philistinism and barbarism.52In such circumstances, in which 'I hope for nothing from the future', except perhaps 'a few half-bearabledecades, a sort of Roman Empire',53 there is nothing left for the virtuous republican to do but withdraw: 'We, on the contrary, are steadily becoming strangers to the world and its ways'.54 Though disenchanted politically and convinced there was no way of stemming the tide of 'barbarism', Burckhardt did not withdraw completely from all aspects of public life. Like other disappointed and disaffected talents, he retreated to Basle's cultural and educational institutions - the libraries, the Kunstmuseum, the various learned societies, the Music Society, above all the University - where he dug himself in, as it were, in order to uphold, in adversity and against the current, values he considered important.55'My business is simple', he wrote in 1874: 'it is to stay at my post even though I have had several attractive opportunities of leaving it'.56 Despite their pessimism and their caustic rejection of contemporary liberal and nationalist optimism, the Basle intellectuals resisted despair. Precisely because history could no longer be viewed by them as in itself a process of redemption, but was seen as a constant ebb and flow, offering more or less favourable conditions for the cultivation of timeless human values, they understood their task as that of holding out in evil times until the storm had passed. 'I want to debauch myself with a real eyeful of aristocratic culture', Burckhardt declared, 'so that, when the social revolution has exhausted itself for a moment, I shall be able to take part in the inevitable restoration.... I want to help save things, as far as my humble station allows'."7The old optimism was finished for good, however, and the historian's role was no longer to reconcile, to show how everything
152
49 Lettersofjacob Burckhardt, op. cit. n. 14 above, letter 93, i8 April 1845. 50 Ibid., letter 96, 28 February 1846. 51 Ibid., letter 1o7, September 1849. 52 Ibid., letter 97, 5 March 1846. 53 Ibid., letter Io7, September 1849. 54 Ibid., letter 1o5, 22 March 1847. ss For a good Marxist analysis of this strategy of withdrawal, see Heinz Schlaffer, 'Jacob Burckhardt
oder das Asyl der Kulturgeschichte', in Hannelore Schlaffer and Heinz Schlaffer, Studien zum asthetischen Historismus,Frankfurt 1975, PP. 72-III. 56 Letter to Bernhard Kugler, 9 August 1874, quoted by Kaegi, op. cit. n. 6 above, vII, p. 137. s7 LettersofJacob Burckhardt, op. cit. n. 14 above, letter 97, 5 March 1846.
BASLE AND BACHOFEN 153 contributed to the great design of history, as it had been in the great days of Restoration liberal historiography, but to criticize relentlessly: 'It is high time for me to free myself from the generally accepted bogus-objective recognition of the value of everything, whatever it may be, and to become thoroughly intolerant'.58ss The idea that the elite should serve as the guardian of a cultural heritage is often expressed by Burckhardt. 'If there is some happiness in the general misery of man', he 'it can only be a spiritual one, one that looks backward in order to wrote in the Fragmente, save the culture of a previous age and forward toward a joyful and uninhibited manifestation of spirit in a time that might otherwise fall completely prey to matter'.59 Similarly Bachofen, commenting on Mommsen's RomanHistory,which he saw as the epitome of modern philistinism: 'I do not hope to convince or to convert. But at least it should not be possible later, when humanity has recoveredits good sense, to say that our age had sunk so low that it did not even enter a protest'.60 If Bachofen and Burckhardt continually emphasized cultural, religious, and social values over material development, if they spoke slightingly of railways, credit banks 'and other swindles that go by the name of progress',61they were in part remaining true to the principles of their mentors of the 182os and 183os, few of whom were yet prepared to profess a thoroughgoing materialism. Benjamin Constant, it is true, had argued against Montesquieu that the economic conditions of modern life had far more influence on the conduct and the ideas of men than the political systems they lived under, so that 'citizens of republics and subjects of monarchies alike all desire material goods, and no one, in the present state of society, can avoid desiring them'. But the old civic ideals died hard, especially in Switzerland perhaps. Pellegrino Rossi, for instance - the refugee from Austrian repression in Italy who became a Genevan citizen and one of the leading lights of Genevan and Swiss liberal politics in the 182os - referred to economics, which he was called by Guizot to teach at the College de France, as the 'parties honteuses' of politics. Rossi always insisted that economics should not be confused with politics or ethics and should not be expected to take their place. The science of economics, he wrote, provides answers to economic questions, not to political or moral questions. 'The aim of society, like that of the individual, is not only to be wealthy. Indeed, that aim may, in certain cases, be subordinated to a higher one'.62The citizen, in short, was not completely reducible to the bourgeois, nor the body politic to society. It was because they appeared to him to have discarded even the remnants of idealism that Bachofen, for one, became severely critical, in the I85os, of those members of his own class who hoped to preserve their position by adroit concessions. It was the Roman senate, according to Bossuet, that 'preserved the ancient principles and the spirit, so to speak, of the republic'. But at Basle the senate itself had succumbed to corruption. The regime's
58 Ibid., letter i Ii, 15 August 1852. See the excellent account of Burckhardt's rejection of contemporary 'Fortschrittschwdirmerei' in Carl Spitteler's recollections of his teacher (GesammelteWerke,n. 15 above, vI, PP. 374-77, 385-86, 388-89). 59Jacob Burckhardt, Historische Fragmente,ed. Emil Diirr, Stuttgart 1957, P. 269. 60 Bachofen, Briefe, op. cit. n. 6 above, letter 143, 24January 1862. 61 Bachofen, Briefe, letter 152, 14 January 1863, on banks. Two years earlier (Briefe, letter 132) he had
extolled the modern 'achievements' of 'railways and Prussian criticism'. Burckhardt often expressed his displeasure at what the railways were doing to his native city (see Kaegi, op. cit. n. 6 above, vII, p. 136). 62 Benjamin Constant, 'De l'Esprit de conquete et de ed. Alfred Roulin, Paris l'usurpation', ch. vi, in Oeuvres, 1957, p. o047n; Pellegrino Rossi, Coursd'iconomie politique, Paris 1840, I, pp. 17-41 (second lecture). See also p. 285.
11
LIONEL GOSSMAN willingness to compromise, its clever playing at 'politics' and its own lack of principle made it as responsible, according to Bachofen, for what he considered the decay of political and social life as the liberals and radicals themselves. All were equally motivated, in his view, by greed and desire for power, equally indifferent to the well-being of the community as an enduring political entity. A constitution, Bachofen maintained in 1857 against the advocates of reformin the governing elite, must be based on principles whose validity does not vary from one decade to the next according to the interests or whims of different groups or individuals. Already, it seems, he was pondering the contrast between his own city, where the constitution was apparently to be subject to revision every ten years, and those ancient peoples whom he admired, like his contemporary Fustel de Coulanges, because they 'do not work for the day but have eternity in mind in all their activity', and to whom he devoted a lifetime of study.63 Even in the middle of the nineteenth century, the enduring model of any authentic human community remained, it seems, for Bachofen - notwithstanding Constant's assertion that it is unrealisable in modern conditions - something close to the virtuous city-republics of earliest antiquity or, at the very least, to the free cities of the Middle Ages. It was certainly not the modern nation state. In the end, he warned, continual tampering with the constitution destroys all political confidence: 'The revision of the constitution' - and for Bachofen the 'artificial' written constitutions of his day already marked a falling away from the original foundations of political life in 'Sitte und Gesinnung', the first step on the road to political ruin - 'is soon perceived by the people as what it truly is: an ambitious struggle for influence, favour and seats in the chamber. Convictions are put up for sale; egoism emerges completely naked.... The good of the state is not a goal but a pretext'. What has happened at Basle is typical. 'The government, forgetfulof its true obligations,joins with its assailants in order subsequently to share the spoils with them and win the reputation of liberalism. The old try to please the young, the men of the future'. But no one attends to the common people as they stand silently by, watching. 'So far, they are still waiting at the door, but they too have their desires, passions and reawakenedhopes that they would like to have fulfilled. Whoever speaks of revision, must truly deliver it. A minimum appeases only for a short time; soon the maximum will be demanded, and taken'.64 When renunciation and sacrifice are no longer the order of the day among the leaders, in short, it is only a matter of time before everybody demands the full satisfaction of his desires and social order dissolves in the chaos of class conflict. The fear is patent. At the end of the road of political reform lies the proletarian revolution, socialism, the regression- so Bachofen would have it - to barbarism. It could be argued that Bachofen's relentless criticism of Wilhelminian Germany, of of Prussian philology, and of the vulgarity and materialism, as he saw it, of the Griinderzeit, the brash new imperial Berlin of Bismarck, was actually directed at Basle and had simply been deflected on to a - for Bachofen himself - less problematic object. For Basle too, as The city of Geigy and Speiser, of railways, the art historians point out, had its Griinderzeit. chemical factories and banks, also expressed its optimism and prosperity, albeit on a
smaller scale, in sumptuous neo-Renaissance and neo-baroque buildings. About I850, according to a recent historian, 'the clear, sober, late classical building cubes produced
64 'Die Verfassungsrevision von Basel' 63 'Autobiography', in Myth, Religion, and Mother(Supplement AllgemeineZeitung, 31 October 1857), Right: Selected Writings of J.J. Bachofen, trans. Ralph to the Augsburger Gesammelte Werke, Manheim, Princeton 1967, p. 12. op. cit. n. 29 above, 1,pp. 436-39-
154
BASLE AND BACHOFEN
155
during the period of the Regeneration' by architects such as Burckhardt'sbrother-in-law Melchior Berri (the most austere) and Christoph Riggenbach (younger and more given to the picturesque), yielded to 'a striving after monumental representation, the expression through buildings of political success'.65 The chief exponents of the new style were the two Johann Jacob Stehlins, father and son. As Biirgermeisterand head of the city's department of buildingsJohannJacob senior presided over the final demolition of the fourteenth-centurycity walls and the implementation of a vast programme of urban expansion and development. Ambitious and clever, the two men succeeded in winning many contracts for major buildings from less astute rivals. They were also somewhat ruthless. Amadeus Merian, the city's Inspector of Buildings, recalls with bitterness, for instance, that when it was proposed to open up a square in front of the old Aeschentor he drew up a design which would have incorporated the familiar city gate into the new urban space. Stehlin, however, marched into his office threw out his plan and and, as vice-president of the Buildings Committee (Baucollegium), - a member of the of the Merian destruction one that the gate, telling imposed required concern to himself henceforward exclubranch of the younger distinguished family areas to him.66 with and leave all the the inner to sively development city Characteristically, Stehlin - whose family name should not be confused with Staihelin (the Stehlins were recent immigrants from Basel-Land,the Staihelins an old established city family) - was a leading member of the radical party and both his architecture and his politics earned him the hatred and contempt of Bachofen. I quote the latter's comment on him at the time of his election to the Swiss National parliament in i86o, because it sums up a series of changes and the response these evoked. It is a scandal, Bachofen wrote to a Ziirich friend, that the only likely candidates for Basle's seat in the Federal Parliament are 'der Bauer Stehlin, ein grober Zimmermann ... und der Mazzinist Klein, ein Schullehrer'.67 The contempt here is unbounded, and effectively expressed. The term Bauerconveys the idea of a builder who, unlike the humanistically educated architects of the 182os and 1830s, the Schinkels and the Berris, has no philosophy of architecture and builds without builder. This implication is reinforced by the second term, 'a crude principles - a mere mere mindless artisan, a practical self-made man, without a classical So a carpenter'. to that is education, say without an education in first principles.68In addition, of course, the word Baueralso means 'peasant', an allusion to Stehlin's modest family origins in the Basle countryside. In fact, Stehlin was no stranger to Bachofen. In 1825 he had been the builder employed to execute Melchior Berri's design for J.J. Bachofen senior's town house on the Sankt Alban Graben. Whatever the merits and education of this elder Stehlin, the younger had in fact received his training in Paris, and Burckhardt, for instance, thought highly of him. But facts do not concern us here as much as attitudes. To Bachofen, clearly, the chief architect of the new Basle that emerged in the 1850s, 186os
65 Joseph Gantner and Adolf Reinle, Kunstgeschichte der Schweiz, Frauenfeld 1936-62, IV (by Adolf Reinle), p. 4. 66 See Paul Siegfried, 'Basels Entfestigung', Basler Jahrbuch, 1923, pp. 81-146; Birkner Othmar, Bauen und Wohnenin Basel (185o-I1oo), Basle I98i (Neujahrsblatt, 159); Rolf Br6nnimann, Basler Bauten 186o-910o, Basle 1973, PP- 31-32 (on the Stehlins and Amadeus Merian). 67 Briefe,op. cit. n. 6 above, letter 124, 26 October 1860.
68 To Bachofen's teacher B6ckh, as to most of the strongly Platonic neohumanists, a classical education was above all an education in the first principles or origins of things before they had been corrupted and obscured by custom and convention (Encyklopiidie und ed. Ernst Methodologieder philologischen Wissenschaften, Bratuschek, Leipzig 1877, PP. 31-32).
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and i870oswas a crude parvenu, a man totally unschooled in the neohumanism that had inspired Schinkel, Berri and the other architects of an earlier generation, all of whom thought of architecture as the expression of the ideals and values of the polis. Stehlin had no ideals, no true knowledge, no sophia,only techne. He was just a builder, a Bauer. If the Basle critics of modernity had much in common with former liberals from the 182os and 30osin other parts of Switzerland and Europe, there was another respect in which, no doubt, they were not unique. Bachofen, Burckhardt, Bocklin and Carl Spitteler, each in his own way, no less than Nietzsche, were estranged not only from the materialism and the ostentatious vulgarity, as they experienced it, of the world around them, from a society dominated by economic ambition and indifferent to questions of culture, indeed incapable of conceiving culture as anything more than an aggregate of discrete, more or less pleasurable activities (theatres, concerts, art galleries and museums), they were also estranged from the restricted way of life that modernity threatened. They all dreamed, as Holderlin, Zoega, Humboldt and others of the neohumanist generation had done, of a more glorious, harmonious, generous and heroic existence, a return to nature and to a life more beautiful and also more bold and adventurous than that represented by the pious, repressed Calvinist Alt-Basel whose passing they might lament. Bocklin's great dream-like mythological and symbolic canvasses, as well as the frescoes he painted for that monument of Basle civic achievement in the period of the Regeneration, Melchior Berri's noble Schinkel-inspired Museum undEpimetheus, Bachofen's (1844-49) in the Augustinergasse, Spitteler's epic Prometheus evocation of prehistoric matriarchal cultures, and Burckhardt's portraits of the princes and artists of Renaissance Italy all bear witness to that longing. What seems to distinguish the Basle artists and writers from many others who, at the time, also imagined more exhilarating and richly human existences than that offered by the bourgeois society of the time, from Baudelaire and Flaubert to Wagner and Gauguin, is the particular strain of irony with which they tempered their idealism. While irony is also essential to Baudelaire or Flaubert, that of the Baselers is characterized by a distinctive, almost folksy, down-to-earth quality, a cautionary mistrustfulness, such as Dilthey observed - and was made uncomfortable by - in all the Baselers he met during his brief stint as professor of philosophy at the University in 1867.69 Irony and midisance were (and supposedly still are) second nature to the Baseler, for they were the instruments a small, bourgeois community was likely to use, both to exert its control over individual members and, where necessary, cut them down to size, and to deflate the pretensions of dangerous strangers and neighbours. Often it is a whole community that stands behind the defensively anti-heroic irony of the Baseler, and it is probably not fortuitous that many of of the astringent bonmots for which Burckhardtwas famous were spoken in Baseldytsch, which the eminent professorwas reputedly a master. The irony the Baselers used on their own high-flown fantasies thus reintegrated them, in a certain way, into their city and its culture. There was nothing contradictory in the praise they often gave to modest virtues
69 'Es liegt etwas so Enges in der Art der Menschen, zu denken und zu sein. In Berlin gibt jeder sich ganz gerade, offen, ohne besonderen Argwohn. Hier finde ich selbst bedeutende Menschen wie Burckhardt, sehr weltkundige wie die beiden Vischer misstrauisch, beobachtend, als wdire bei dem Gegeniiber auf verborgene Fangeisen irgendwo zu rechnen in die man
treten k6nne. Noch mehr fillt etwas andres auf: ein Mangel an Glaube, an Zuversicht aufdie Welt' (quoted in Kaegi, op. cit. n. 6 above, vii, pp. 198-99, from Der junge Dilthey: ein Lebensbild in Briefen und Tagebiichern i852-i870, ed. Clara Misch, Leipzig and Berlin 1933, pp. 237-38).
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and humble achievements. This may explain why they clung obstinately to their little city even as they denounced its pettiness, and why Burckhardt, for instance, chose to live a life that, as he put it himself, was 'as philistine as possible'.70 Again Dilthey's testimony is revealing. Taken aback by the scepticism and even pessimism of the leading Basle intellectuals - which he contrasted with the confident optimism of Berlin - put out by Burckhardt's outbursts about the ageing of Europe and the decadence of Western culture, Dilthey commented to his father in 1867 that 'only someone who had not lived through Berlin in the last year could attribute such notions to anything other than ignorance of one's own time'.71 To Dilthey's surprise and apparent annoyance, the Baselers were neither inspired by the victory of Sadowa nor inclined to hail modern Prussia as the herald of a new heroic age. Perhaps it was its peculiar combination of defiantly prosaic and anti-heroic realism with nostalgic memories of ancient republican virtue that made Basle, if not congenial, then at least less intolerable than most other places, both to its disaffected, yet still pious and unrebellious sons, and to outsiders like Franz Overbeck who were repelled by the pomp and sycophancy of Wilhelminian Germany and its capital, the brash Grossstadt Berlin.
II BACHOFEN Ich habe immer gehofftund hoffeimmer von neuem. Und iiber dem Hoffen bin ich ein Mann geworden, und nun leide ich mit stolzem Bewusstsein der Kraft. Aber unbegliickt ist noch nicht ungliicklich. Das Entbehren mit Bewusstsein weckt ein merkwiirdiges Vertrauen aufsich selbst, einen Stolz, wie ihn selbst das Bewusstsein gliicklich angewandter Krifte kaum geben kann ... - Bachofen, Griechische Reise Bachofen was in many respects a typical son of a very well-to-do Basle family of silk ribbon manufacturers. Though not as active in public affairs as the Burckhardts, the Bachofens were linked by marriage to most of the prominent families of the city. The philologist's mother, for instance, was a Merian - her father, Samuel Merian-Hoffmann, was a director of the highly successful international trade and banking firm that had caused Napoleon so much grief - and he himself married a Burckhardt. Johann Jacob Bachofen senior had inherited or acquired valuable properties in the city and the neighbouring countryside and it was in one of these, the palatial late baroque WeissesHaus on the Rheinsprung (I763-7o, by Samuel Werenfels), that his son spent his
70 Letter to Paul Heyse, 16 November I86o, quoted by Kaegi, op. cit., vii, p. 128. Burckhardt boasts ironically: 'I am as philistine as possible, I play dominoes with philistines, I go for walks with philistines and with
colleagues who also do their utmost to be philistines, I drink my pint sans pritentionand say my piece about the politics of the day ...' 71 Dilthey, see n. 69 above.
LIONEL GOSSMAN childhood years. Though the Weisses Hausremained the headquartersof the Bachofen firm until 1906, the Bachofens moved in the mid-twenties to the Dompropstei on the St Alban another old which house Bachofen-Merian had had Graben, elegant completely remodelled by Melchior Berri, the foremost neoclassical architect in Switzerland. As a child, however, Bachofen must often have returned to the Weisses Haus,where his grandparents continued to live, and he was probably also a frequent visitor to the handsome rococo Rollerhofon the Miinsterplatz, the original headquartersof the Bachofen firm, which had become the residence of his pious aunt Margarethe. Later still, after his marriage to Louise Elizabeth Burckhardt in 1865, Bachofen acquired his own house, the delicately
158
bach, which still graces the north-eastern corner of the Miinsterplatz. The interiors of these houses must have been as handsome as their exteriors, and the Bachofens were among the most assiduous and successful art collectors in a city of collectors. Among the paintings in their possession, for instance, were works by Giorgione, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Van Dyck and Poussin. Born in December 1815, at the end of a year in which the leading citizens of Basle celebrated their release from the danger of a new French occupation, Bachofen seems to have been destined by his family for public office in the city. He preceded his more famous fellow-citizen Jacob Burckhardt, his junior by three years, to the same infants' school then to the Gemeindeschule the reformed Gymnasium (1820), (1822), (1825), and finally the he it had had to make severe cutbacks in the time reached University, which, by (1834), of Wirren or Troubles of to financial the the the settlement stringency following response to aim of the at the Restoration had been reconstitute the The 1830-33. city government of in into to transform the lines of the new a it, short, University Berlin, University along citadel of contemporary neohumanism. After 1833, however, these plans had to be modified, and it became customary for students to spend only one or two years at Basle and to proceed thereafter to one of the larger German universities. Bachofen went to Berlin (1835-37) where, like Burckhardt after him, he studied under Ranke, B6ckh and Savigny. He also spent a year at Gottingen, during which he attended the lectures of B6ckh's favourite pupil, the great Romantic philologist, Carl Otfried Milller, to whom he carried a letter of introduction from his teacher and friend at Basle, Franz Dorotheus Gerlach.72 Though Bachofen's love was philology (as understood by the German neohumanists), he took a degree in law, almost certainly in response to his family's plans for his future career. He then spent a year apprenticed to a French lawyer in Paris, and another year in England studying English law in London and then at Cambridge. It is possible to reconstruct Bachofen's ideas in these years from his letters, his early writings and his own reminiscences, though the last, especially, must be handled with care. He comes across as a fairly typical Restoration moderate, essentially conservative, but with some liberal leanings.73 a national Swiss student As a young man, for instance, he hadjoined the Zofingerverein, in combat or parish pump spirit, founded to the so-called organization, 1819 Kantionligeist,
72 Carl Otfried Miller, Briefe aus einemgelehrtenLeben I797-i84o, ed. Siegfried Reiter, Berlin 1950, I, p. 322. (in the 73 On Bachofen's life, see his Selbstbiographie form of a letter to Karl von Savigny, 1854) in J.J. und Antrittsrede BachofensSelbstbiographie iiber das Naturrecht,ed. Alfred Baeumler (Halle/Saale 1927): see also n. io above. An abbreviated English translation in Myth, Religion, and Mother Right, Princeton 1954 (n. I above); see also n. 63 above. See also Karl Meuli, 'Bachofens Leben', Gesammelte Werke, op. cit. n. 29 above, III,pp. I o 2-79.
austere ZurJohanniskapelle(1839-41), by the prominent local architect Christoph Riggen-
BASLE AND BACHOFEN 159 and promote Swiss national unity, and in 1834, the year after his confirmation in the Cathedral by Jacob Burckhardt's father, he gave the memorial address to the Basle
Zofingia on the anniversary of the Riithli oath (1307) -
the Confederation. It is an interesting speech, in which Switzerland is praised, on the one hand, as one of a very small number of nations founded not on dynastic ambitions but on popular will, while on the other, this claim is tempered by the presentation of the original oath as a gesture calmly and reflectively undertaken, owing nothing to blind passion or impulse. Revolution is rejected, in other words, even as the principle of popular sovereignty is affirmed.74 Similarly, in later years Bachofen was critical of natural law theory, sympathetic to Burkean ideas as these were being propagated throughout Germany in Gentz's translation and commentary, respectful of common law (in both England and Switzerland) and of the 'spontaneous', 'natural' wisdom ofjudges deeply versed in it, and suspicious of legal codifications in the manner of the code civil,which, in his view, encouraged 'legalism' and time he was also critical of English law: never having the same Yet at sophistication. formulated its principles or achieved any conceptual understanding of itself, such as we find in Roman law, he argued, English law is totally dependent on a kind of natural creative practice that belongs to an earlier, pre-historical type of culture and that, with modern reliance on written legal compilations, has almost certainly gone out of it. It is thereforevulnerable to violent transformations,since it has nothing to resist them with, no philosophical understanding of its own principles to build on or to fall back on.'7 Pure rationalism and pure empiricism are both rejected, in short, in favour of a form of legal historicism which tries to reconcile them by seeking the axioms of law in the tradition itself. The intellectual context of these and similar ideas of Bachofen at this time is not hard to find: it is that of the scholars and philosophers of the moderately liberal Restoration - of Ranke, Schleiermacher, above all Karl von Savigny.76 In general, one might say, the young Bachofen was not ill at ease in the England of Melbourne or the France of Louis Philippe. In the late 1830s he was still expressing his admiration for the open, public character of all the state institutions in France and for the salutary effects of centralization - in contrast to the secretiveness of public administration at Basle and the jealously guarded local autonomies characteristicof Switzerland.77 It is consistent with his attitudes at this time that in Paris he became friendly with Edmond Laboulaye, the liberal legal and social historian, and that on a visit to Edinburgh he sought out Sir William Hamilton, the eminent Scottish philosopher whose liberal sympathies were well known.78
instinctive or 'natural' practice (p. 28: 'the common consciousness of the people is the seat of law'), and ch. 8 ('What are we to do when there are no codes?'). On Savigny and his milieu (relations with Creuzer, Schleiermacher, and Brentano) see Giuliano Marini, dellascienzagiuridica,Milan 1966. Savignye il metodo 77 Bachofen, Briefe, op. cit. n. 6 above, letter 3, 15June 1839. Bachofen here identifies 'Offentlichkeit' and 'ungeheure Centralisation' as the causes of the superiority of French political and cultural institutions. 78 On the friendship with Laboulaye, see Briefe,op. cit. n. 6 above, letter 188, 29 August 1864; on Sir William Hamilton, see the note from him in Basle Univ. Library, Bachofen-Archiv 272, item 292.
supposedly the founding act of
74 On the Zofingia, see Charles Gilliard, La Sociti ede Lausanne I199. Bachofen's speech Zofingue - 'Ueber819g--919, Herkommen und Zucht. Rede gehalten am Griitlifest von der Section Basel des Zofingervereins' is reprinted in Zofingia: Centralblattdes schweizerischen Zofingervereins, 1958, xcvIII, pp. I45-47. 75 Selbstbiographie,pp. 19-20 (passage omitted from English translation); see also n. 73 above. 76 See especially Charles von Savigny, Of the Vocation of trans. Abraham our Age for Legislation andJurisprudence, Hayward, London n.d., repr. New York 1975, especially ch. 2 ('The Origin of Private Law') on law as inseparable in the early stages of culture from the language and manners of a people and thus as an
I60
LIONEL GOSSMAN
The high regard in which Bachofen held Pellegrino Rossi provides another clue to his opinions in these years. After a brilliant career, first as an Italian patriot with Joachim Murat, the self-styled King of Italy, then as a professorof law and a liberal parliamentarian at Geneva, Rossi was called to Paris by Guizot in 1834 to fill the chair of political economy at the Collkge de France, and Bachofen attended his lectures. Rossi had a reputation in Switzerland as a political liberal and his advocacy of limited reforms moderate strengthening of the authority of the Federal Diet in response to modern needs and foreign dangers, some extension of the suffrage, public reporting of parliamentary or council deliberations - had won him the support of the Zofingerclubs.79That Bachofen carried a letter of introduction to him and that he wrote from Paris to his Basle friend Von Speyr in 1839 expressing his admiration for Rossi's course, which he claimed was the best at the Collkge de France, seems therefore to be not only an endorsement of Rossi's moderately liberal positions, but a confirmation of his own.80 Even the experience of the civil war at Basle, which had resulted in his family's selling off several properties in Basel-Land, seems thereforenot to have soured Bachofen unduly. In 1837 he wrote indignantly from Gottingen about the firing of the seven professorswho had protested against the suspension of the liberal Hanoverian constitution, at the same time suggesting, with typical Basle shrewdness, that the University of Basle should seize the opportunity to secure their services.81 Yet more than London or Paris or Cambridge, it was Berlin, where he was a student from 1835 until 1838, that filled Bachofen with idealistic enthusiasm. In view of the hatred and contempt he subsequently expressed for Berlin and all it had come to stand for, this may seem surprising. But even in the late thirties, the Prussian capital, with its young university, its handsome neoclassical public buildings, and its passionate pursuit of scholarship and learning, must have seemed like a new Athens to those who had been raised on the idealism of its early luminaries - men like Humboldt and Hegel - and who continued to see the role of Prussia as that of peaceful leader and centre of a revived German cultural nation, a role Austria was judged too effete, aristocratic, heterogeneous, and exclusively Catholic to play. Bachofen had indeed been thoroughly preparedfor Berlin. His own teachers had been brought to Basle - often from other German lands - to carry out the same kind of modernization of the University there that the neohumanists had carried through when they founded the University of Berlin in I8Io. De Wette in theology, Wackernagel in German literature, Vinet in French, were among the liberal minds of their time. Even the philology professor, Franz Dorotheus Gerlach, with whom Bachofen later collaborated on the ill-fated Geschichte der Romer,and who became, like his student, a byword for conservatism in scholarship because of his rejection of Niebuhrian criticism, had come to Basle as a young philologist, fired with the ideals of Berlin neohumanism, committed to Bildungand reform, and convinced of the regenerative, not to say redemptive power of
79 On Pellegrino Rossi, see Rappard, op. cit. n. 19 et Rossi, l'homme above, and Laszlo Ledermann, Pellegrino au l'iconomiste,1787-1848: unegrandecarriereinternationale XIXe siecle, Paris 1929. On Rossi and the Zofinger clubs, P. E. Schazmann, P. Rossi et la Suisse, Geneva 1939, PP. 55-57.
80 Bachofen, Selbstbiographie, op. cit. n. 73 above, p. 17; Briefe, op. cit. n. 6 above, letter 3, 15June 1839. 8s Bachofen, Briefe, op. cit. n. 6 above, letter 2, 15 December 1837.
BASLE AND BACHOFEN 161 philology.82 Opposition to Niebuhr, it should be remembered, was more widespread among the neohumanists than we might imagine. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, Hegel - a close friend of Creuzer's and an admirer of his symbolic philology had been sharply opposed to what he considered Niebuhr's pedantic criticisms of the traditional histories of Rome. There was more truth, according to Hegel, in the literary narratives of the ancient historians than in all the arbitrary constructions of modern philologists. In resisting Niebuhr and the even more sceptical Mommsen, Gerlach and Bachofenwere in part remainingfaithfulto the humanistphilologyof the i82os and 183os.83 The years in Berlin left a deep mark on Bachofen. Much later, in a eulogy of a friend and fellow-Baseler who had also studied in the Prussian capital, Bachofen recalled 'the Wilhelmsuniversitat exercised on sensitive and magical enchantment that the Friedrichardent young minds' and the exhilaration of studying, as he and his friend had done, under teachers such as Ranke, Karl Ritter, Savigny, or B6ckh, 'alongside young people from all the lands where the German tongue is spoken'. It was, he declared, a time of optimism and faith, when intellect and feeling, hope and realism seemed reconcilable. 'Streuber', he wrote of his friend, 'was blessed in Berlin with what no later period of life ever brings back' - a feeling of harmony with the present and the past and confidence in the future.84 Other Baselers also remembered that time of Restoration and Regeneration - of the optimistic, unifying doctrines of writers as differentas Ranke, Schleiermacherand Hegel - with a mixture of nostalgia and bitterness. Burckhardt, like Bachofen and Streuber, had also been a student at Berlin and his enthusiastic letters to his friends from these years bear out Bachofen's account of Streuber's- and indirectly of his own - experience. In these decades, when he was growing to manhood, Burckhardt later recalled, it was possible to believe that the Revolution was something that had happened and was now over, and that old and new could be reconciled and harmonized in the form, for instance, of constitutional monarchies. The highpoint of these 'illusions was the spirit of 1830. At that time books appeared [Burckhardt seems to be alluding maliciously to Ranke here], very well written, albeit not quite classics, which, though not beyond party, yet aimed to provide in a spirit of moderation and calm persuasion, a general view of the years from know, however, that we too are swept up in the very same storm that carried men away
after 1789'.85
82 Gerlach's Verschiedene Ansichteniiber hihere Bildung, Basle 1822, is a programmatic defence of the neohumanist goals of the newly founded Basle Padagogium, or preparatory college, against both the pietists, critical of all secular learning, and the revolutionary and Napoleonic preference for professional schools, such as Institut. According Christoph Bernoulli's Philotechnisches Basel aus to Andreas Staehelin (Professoren der Universitat finfjahrhunderten, Basle I960, p. 120), Gerlach 'gilt als der erste Verkiinder des Neuhumanismus in Basel'. He opposed the critical 'Wortphilologie' of Hermann and his school and subscribed to B6ckh's 'Altertumswissenschaft'. See also Edgar Bonjour, Die UniversitatBasel, 2nd edn, 1971, pp. 35o-68. 1466-196o, Basle, 83 See my Orpheus philologus, Philadelphia 1983, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, LXXIII, part 5. 84 Dr. Wilhelm Theodor Streuber. Nekrolog., Basle 1857, pp. vi, viii. Fragmente, op. cit. n. 59 above, p. 270. Cf. 8s Historische the strikingly similar comment by Tocqueville in a letter of 28 April 1850: 'Ce qui est clair pour moi, c'est qu'on s'est trompi depuis soixante ans en croyant voir le bout de la revolution ... II est evident que le flot continue A marcher, que la mer monte. Ce n'est pas d'une modification, mais d'une transformation du corps social qu'il s'agit' (Oeuvres complites, Paris 1861-66, v, pp. 46o-61, in Koenraad W. Swart, TheSenseofDecadence in NineteenthCentury France,The Hague 1964, p. 92).
Now we 1789 to 1816 as if they were a closed and autonomous period [ein Abgeschlossenes].
162
LIONEL GOSSMAN
Bachofen's rude awakening from the Humboldtian dreamworldof the liberal Restoration, the Basle Zofingia and the University of Berlin, appears to have begun almost immediately after he got back from his travels to Basle, where the natives struck him as quite unlike the ideal creatures in the books of his mentors. Even years later, when he had learned to accept what he referred to as his 'exile' in his 'highly uninteresting old native forbearance, his letters still convey the narrowness, the boredom and the deadly provincialism of life in the largest German-speaking city in Switzerland in the middle of the nineteenth century. 'An enormous centrifugal force dissipates everything and nothing significant happens', he wrote to his friend, the philologist Meyer-Ochsner, in Ziirich.'... The good folk of Basle cherish unconditional peace. What little spirit there is is expended on credit banks and other swindles that go by the name of progress.'87 On another occasion, he told of receiving a young man from Frankfurt who had already passed through Ziirich and who spoke highly of the dancing assemblies there: 'He will have to forgo all that sort of thing here. I do not recollect ever hearing of any one dancing in Basle, except at the vile popular balls at Carnival time. ... With the best will in the world, I have nothing to offer the young man except the advice that he not stay too long here. The natives go to bed early and discipline themselves from early youth to have as few needs as possible. A lecture, an interminable symphony concert, and a sermon by Peter Hebich, voil' tout'.88 Bachofen's unsparing account of cultural life in Basle in the i86os is borne out by announcements in the local press. Public lectures on popular religious and scientific topics by professors at the university, concerts by the local orchestra, a thesis defence at the university, a sermon by a revivalist preacher, these were the staples of cultural life for the Baseler. Nothing that happened in Basle in the course of the nineteenth century - neither the city's emergence as a nodal point of the European railway system, nor its steadily increasing prosperity, nor its physical transformation from a small, crowded, not very sanitary town, imprisoned within its medieval walls, into a moderately large modern city with well laid out public gardens and promenades, nor even the expansion of its cultural institutions, altered Bachofen's view of life 'in dem langweiligen Museen- und Fabriksitz Basel'. 'Nothing new is to be found either on the Gerbergasseor on the Barfiisserplatz',he wrote his niece Anita in I886. 'One day here is very much like another. We get up in the morning, consume four meals, then go to bed again. If the sun shines, we go out, if it rains we take our umbrellas along like everybody else. One day I begin my walk with the Sankt Alban Vorstadt, next day with the Aeschenvorstadt, the day after with the great Gerbergasse. Every morning I drink cocoa, every evening tea. wie intressant Wie intressant, Schweizerland!'89 0 du, meinherrlich
86 Bachofen, Briefe, op. cit. n. 6 above, letter 162, ioJune 1863; letter 69, 25January 1851. 87 Bachofen, Briefe, letter 152, I4January 1863. 88 Bachofen, Briefe, letter 140, November 1861. Hebich was a Swabian revivalist, active in Basle around 186o. His preaching at the Leonhardskirche had caused an uproar. The freethinkers hated him, and those within the Church who had been influenced by German idealism and advocated a more rational, philosophical theology would have liked to see him banned from the
city' -
Basilea terraasperaet horrida,as he liked to say, adapting Tacitus86 -
with ironical
pulpit, but he was defended by the Pietists and their sympathizers. The men of the 'juste milieu' - including many merchants and academics - were inclined toward neither philosophical theology nor popular revivalism. (See Paul Burckhardt, op. cit. n. 17 above, p. 290). Bachofen's politely expressed but obvious disdain is consistent with his contempt for all forms of populism, whether political or religious. 89 Bachofen, Briefe, op. cit. n. 6 above, letter 333, 15 April 1886; letter 336, 8 April 1887.
BASLE AND BACHOFEN 163 Bachofen's disenchantment with the prosaic banality of life in Basle had been immeasurably deepened by the collapse of his political and civic aspirations. His appointment to a chair of Roman law at the University in 1841had been sharply criticized in the Neue Basler Zeitungwhich, as its subsequent title, Schweizerische National-Zeitung, suggests, was the liberal-radical counterpart of Andreas Heusler's Basler Zeitung,the organ of the elite. The point of the criticism was that the ruling elite was squandering limited resources on unnecessary appointments in the traditional fields of theology, philology and law, in which there were often more professors than students, while the more modern subjects that interested the growing middle class - the natural sciences, political economy, foreign languages - were being starved of the minimum funding needed to keep them alive. Though Bachofen was not attacked personally, the large salary attaching to what was already viewed as an unnecessary appointment was judged abusive, especially in light of the notorious wealth of the Bachofens, the young professor'sinexperience, and the hand-to-mouth existence of several dedicated and deserving teachers of practical subjects at the University.9o Bachofen reacted to the criticism, as he was to do again and again, not by fighting back, but by withdrawing. After teaching for a time without drawing his salary, he Rat, or resigned his post altogether in 1844. A year later he also withdrew from the Grosser Cantonal Parliament after serving for only a year. He continued to be consulted on university affairs, especially on appointments, not least perhaps because he was a generous contributor to the academic treasury,9' but in 1858 he resigned from the threeman Board of Regents or Curatel, claiming he had been insulted by an 'ungewaschener Neuschweizer'.92 In addition he served for some twenty years, from 1845 until 1866, in a part-time capacity, as an appeals judge. His participation in the political life of Basle had been drastically curtailed, however, by the radicals' opposition to his University appointment and by his own response to it. Moreover, it was clear from the way the political winds were blowing that he would never play the significant public role that he had hoped and expected to play. His withdrawal from public life and his general disaffectionwere probably aggravated his awareness that even in his own circles there were many who did not share his by single-minded dedication to humanist learning and his disdain for the new, modern, practical subjects. It is apparent, as we observed earlier, that substantial elements of the old ruling elite were willing and eager to swim with the tide of modernity. Already, in the early years of the century, they had supported Christoph Bernoulli's experimental or technical college, and had enrolled their sons in it.93Without the cautious Philotechnion, but continued support, both political and financial, of the ruling elite, Basle could not have become the communications, banking and industrial centre it in fact became in the nineteenth century. For railways and banking operations, however, Bachofen never disguised his contempt, just as he always let it be known that he valued humanistic study, the study of ideas and the reconstruction of the past, far more highly than the study of
material nature and the construction of the future. He was probably still smarting from
90 Neue Basler Zeitung, I8 March 1841; 23 March 1841; for teachers and a scholarship fund for native Basle students. Io April 1841; 17 April 1841; 27 April 1841. 91 A letter of 28 February 1877 (Briefe, op. cit. n. 6 92 Bachofen, Briefe, letter 129, 30 December 186o. Institut, see 93 On Bernoulli and his Philotechnisches above, letter 290) outlines the terms of a gift to the Piidagogiumto support sickness and retirement benefits Biirgin, op. cit. n. 22 above, pp. 46-47.
LIONEL GOSSMAN 164 the arguments used to criticize his appointment in 1841 when he referredin later years to the materialist champions of science and technology as 'die Ritter des Drecks' ('the knights of filth').94 Through his teaching and his immensely popular public lectures- to the preparation of which he devoted enormous care - Burckhardtmaintained an active, living relation to his native city. He did what he could to preserve its civic culture and what he believed to be the best of its civic traditions, even after the revision of the Federal Constitution in 1874 had drastically diminished its autonomy, effectively ending a history of many centuries. Bachofen, on the other hand, lived in almost total retirement. Not surprisingly, when Burckhardtdied in 1897 his passing was mourned as a public and civic loss. The NationalZeitungpaid tribute to him, above all, for not keeping his knowledge to himself but sharing it instead with his fellow-citizens.95On Bachofen's death, in contrast, there was no more than the usual brief announcement, inserted by the family, in the Schweizer between 186o and 1888). The more Volksfreund (which took over from the National-Zeitung conservative BaslerNachrichten, the editor of which was a member of the distinguished academic family of the Wackernagels, did publish a short obituary notice of some thirty lines, but the contrast with Burckhardt is striking. The writer of the obituary notes that Bachofen was hardly known in the city of his birth and residence, and that he had 'for years lived in seclusion, devoting himself entirely to his studies and to the fine arts'.96 Bachofen himself had said as much. 'My life revolves around my family, my studies, and some close friends', he wrote to Meyer-Ochsner in 1867. 'I do not seek anything beyond these. The rest is worthless anyway'.97 Offended by the politically inspired public criticism of which he had been made the target, embittered by the setback to his civic career, appalled, like Burckhardt, by the official support the radical cantons gave to the Freischaren, or bands of radical volunteers which had been organized to harass the conservative Catholic government of Lucerne, and horrified by his experience of the 1848 revolution in Rome, Bachofen grew increasingly hostile to political liberalism and increasingly pessimistic about the future of Switzerland and of Europe in general. He himself was in Rome when Pellegrino Rossi was assassinated as he descended the steps of the chancellery for the opening of Parliament. In a last attempt to restore his authority amid the deepening chaos of revolution, Pius IX had prevailed upon Rossi, as a man of moderately liberal views, to assume the reins of government in the Papal States. His fate must have seemed emblematic to Bachofen, and there is a significant change, after 1848, in the latter's attitude to the eloquent cosmopolitan figure he had once admired. Whereas in 1839 Rossi's course at the College de France had won high praise from the young Baseler, Bachofen now claims that his great expectations of Rossi had been disappointed, and that the latter's lectures on constitutional law had been worthless and trivial. Above all, he claims retrospectively that what he now characterizes as Rossi's hypocritical concessions to the revolutionary catchwords of the day - trial by jury, constitutionalism, freedom of the press, Polish independence - were distasteful to him.
94 Briefe, op. cit. n. 6 above, letter 132, 6 February is now dominated by 'certain elements' whose orienta1861. In a later letter (no 229, 8 May 1867) he tells tion in the direction of'filth' ['Dreck'] is not to his taste. Meyer-Ochsner that he stayed away from a dinner 9 National-Zeitung,10 August 1897. 26 November 1887. marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Naturforschende 96 BaslerNachrichten, (Society for Scientific Research), because it GesellschafJ 97 Briefe, op. cit. n. 6 above, letter 229, 8 May 1867.
BASLE AND BACHOFEN 165 Rossi now appears as a somewhat slippery figure, without firmness, honesty or depth of conviction, too much of an actor and an orator to be a genuine statesman or scholar.98 With this revised portrait Bachofen established his distance from the moderately liberal positions he had espoused in his youth. The misguided efforts and policies of liberals had in the end opened the floodgates to the forces of chaos. Democracy, nationalism and socialism now seemed to Bachofen three evils that were about to plunge the world back into a new age of barbarism. 'None of the peaceable burghers of Basle knows how things really stand with Switzerland', he wrote in 1850. 'But my inner voice tells me that grave events are on the way. They are coming because they must come. Man - and, in the same way, a people - is free to choose the first step; not so the last. We have reached the final stage of demagogy and nothing now remains but to plunge into the abyss'.99Referringto France, about the same time, he was more specific: 'The abyss is open and ready to devour its victim. Everything is ripe for despotism'.100He summed up his new position in his autobiography in a lapidary phrase worthy of Sismondi: 'It is because I love freedom that I hate democracy'.101 Bachofen's position was difficult. He disliked the direction he saw the world moving in and he was deeply afraid of socialism and of the rapidly growing workers' movements, which he was able to observe at first hand in Basle and which he saw as destructive not only of property and family, the two foundations, in his mind, of social order, but of culture and of freedom.102Democracy, to him, meant - sooner or later - demagogy and despotism,103 and he came to look on his own earlierliberalism with bitterness as the first false step on the road to ruin. 04 The decay of culture and freedom, however, was not the
Selbstbiographie, op. cit. n. 73 above, pp. 17-18. 99Bachofen, Briefe, op. cit. n. 6 above, letter 57, 3 March 1850. See also Selbstbiographie, p. 36: 'Since the victory at Lucerne, the doctrine of popular sovereignty and the irresistible force of democracy have developed into the practical foundation of our public affairs. I have no doubt that it will continue to advance until it embraces all its consequences, including the most extreme, if the pattern of European affairs permits, and unless great disasters lead the people back to the true foundations of healthy life for the State'. 100 Bachofen, Briefe, op. cit. n. 6 above, letter 59, 21 May 1850. op. cit. n. 73 above, p. 37. l01 Selbstbiographie, 102 In a letter to Meyer-Ochsner, Bachofen refers to the Basler Nachrichten for 13 October 1869, where a member of the Federal Parliament and of the Board of Education was reported to have announced at a meeting of the Swiss Teachers' Association that God, property and family were things of the past (Briefe, letter 264, October 1869). In the same letter he expresses outrage that the Fourth Congress of the Socialist International had been given permission to hold its sessions in Basle the previous month. A year earlier in the midst of a campaign by the ribbon workers, supported by the International Workingmen's Association, to get a factory law enacted for Basle, he had commented sardonically and without compassion on the local workers' association's affiliation with the international movement and on its resort to violent protest. The period was one of crisis in the ribbon industry, and the workers had already been forced to accept cuts of 25%
98
in their wages (see Paul Burckhardt, op. cit. n. 17 above, pp. 299-309). 103 See Briefe, op. cit. n. 6 above, letter I23, 26 September I86o: 'I find any association with the demoseven more unpleasant than the most oppressive Fihn [a debilitating wind, similar to the mistral of Southern France or the chamsunof the Eastern Mediterranean]'. Later (n' 243, 7 February 1868), he predicts that the Italians will soon recognize that of all possible governments, the Austrian was not the worst. Switzerland is an example of what happens under democracy: 'No State can survive universal suffrage at the service of a handful of demagogues ... Our contemporary history is identical to that of the declining free states of ancient Greece'. Similarly, letter n 188 (29 August 1864) on the Napoleonic regime in France: 'Under Louis Philippe, a parliamentary France, with people making all kinds of speeches about freedom; today, the consequences of that: an emperor who holds down dangerous elements with a firm hand and is therefore praised by the majority of the people as the saviour of the country'. See also Selbstbiographie,pp. 36-37: 'Perfect democracy is the undoing of everything good. Republics have most to fear from it. I am fearful of its spreading, not out of concern for m, goods and chattels, but because it drags us back into barbarism ... I hate democracy because I love freedom'. 104 Briefe, letter 256, 27 December i868: 'Every present is determined by a past. And what do we find in the past, since 1830, but revolution after revolution, and a succession of governments each one of which represents a lower level of morality than the preceding one'.
LIONEL GOSSMAN i66 work of the proletariat alone, but of the new middle classes themselves. The 'much touted civilization' of modern industrialism was anathema to him and he despised the 'demiculture which is being fostered by newspapers and popular lectures'.105 On the one hand, therefore, he was convinced that 'without chassepots the order and security of persons and property rests on shaky foundations';106 on the other, the society that is protected by these chassepots is itself vulgar and worthless. In Paris, in 1864, he relates, he looked up his old friends the legal and social historian Laboulaye, the librarian Michelant, and Auguste Durant, the publisher of the Revue historiquedu droitfranpais et etranger.The conversation turned to the contrast between the time of their early association under Louis Philippe and the present imperial era. 'The French say openly that the present situation is a golden age compared to the previous one. May God preserve us, they say, from a return to freedom'. Their chief worry is about the cost of annuities. 'Not a soul is interested in political freedoms ... Spiritual decline, blatant adoration of material pleasures, vulgar display, conspicuous consumption, and immorality in most social milieux. ... That is Paris today. Who will think of freedom there? Such people need despotism and are happy in it'.107 In the end, 'the age of mother-right now seems less barbarous to me, a golden age, compared with the century of the chassepot'.108 The Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars left Bachofen completely disenchanted. 'Europe is devouring itself', he wrote in September of 1870, 'and every one feels that the former western provinces of the Roman Empire will know no peace but the peace of total exhaustion'. Now the time of revolution was about to reach its climax. Everything that had seemed established was going to be put in question, and no matter what the outcome was, no lasting good could come of it. 'The principles of 1789 are too deeply rooted now in men's minds for any power to root them out. ... In Germany, the people will demand free democratic institutions in return for the blood it has given; as in 1815, Prussia will not grant them; and hence, disappointed and frustrated, the people will become dissatisfied and will turn to revolution. Victors and vanquished are about to experience a hangover from this war, the like of which no one has seen before'.109 Meanwhile race hatred among the peoples, notably the Germans and the French, will spawn new wars.110 The Germans especially will do nothing but thirst for more wars - so much, Bachofen notes bitterly, for the years of peace the Second German Empire was supposed to bring. 'For years to come honest Fritz will have nothing to do but Boom! Boom! Boom! ... and any other sound coming from him will be pursued as high
treason'.111
Bachofen's decision to abandon the fight for an active role in the civic life of his native city after 1844 thus reflected a political disillusionment that subsequent experience did nothing to alleviate. For most of his life he could accept none of the options effectively available in the historical world; instead he stood, like Burckhardt but even more so, on the sidelines, commenting bitterly and sardonically on them all - which in effect meant that he was almost invariably on the extreme conservative side in all practical issues112 History, from which, as a young man carried away by 'the illusions of 1830', he
l05 Briefe, letter 256, 27 December 1868.
106
Ibid.
109
107 Briefe, letter 188, 29 August 1864. lo8 Briefe, letter 278, 2 December 1870.
110
Briefe, letter 275, 15 September 1870. Ibid., and letter 279, 5 December 1870.
111 Briefe, letter 280, 26 December 1870. 112The Bachofen-Archiv at the University of Basle contains information showing that he subscribed to the most conservative newspapers of the time, Catholic as well as Protestant.
BASLE AND BACHOFEN 167 had hoped for much, had failed, and the sense of that failure, not only of his own ambitions, but of history itself, was one of Bachofen's most enduring experiences. In his eulogy of Streuber he evokes it indirectly. Streuber, he said, had known at Berlin a kind of passionate idealism: he had seen how learning was honoured and viewed as part of the State and of life. He had embraced optimism with enthusiasm and devoted himself to his studies 'as one new-born'. But on his return to Basle this experience of 'a present full of contentment and satisfaction and a proud and confident anticipation of the fruits of the future' withered, and for the rest of his life he suffered 'the double pain of memories full of melancholy and longing and of a future without help ... He had girded himself up for life as for ajoyful festivity, but he had hardly begun to drink from the cup when the last lamps were extinguished and the last notes fell silent'.113 Once again, in the account he wrote for some friends of hisjourney to Greece (1851) optimism and the dashing of his hopes on his return to Basle in the 184os: 'Can any one who feels himself called to exercise a certain office be afflicted by anything more deeply than when it becomes impossible for him to undertake that One Thing?' In such circumstances, he continued, 'when practical activity and effective action in the world have become impossible, we must assume that the life's task that is being pointed out to us is that of striving for ever greater personal perfection',114In many passages that recall Humboldt and Schopenhauer and anticipate the young Nietzsche Bachofen reiterated again and again the individual's obligation of self-cultivation.115 It must be emphasized, however, that, as Bachofen understood it, self-cultivation was a vocation, not a personal indulgence. One of the persistent themes of his autobiographical writing is his scrutiny of his own experience for the signs in it of the will of Providence. 'In the decisive moments of our lives', he once observed, 'we seldom freely determine our own actions. What appears to be our work has its ultimate origin in a higher design. We believe we choose our vocation, but in fact we are chosen by it. Therein lies its higher justification, therein the source of thejoy with which we carryit out and the blessing that it brings to us'.116The mishaps attending his public career were read by Bachofen as a sign that Providence had other designs for him and that he was being called to a different service from that of the state. The acuteness of his disappointment was in itself the best proof of that. When Providence calls, 'nothing is left to us but the inner core of things. What was dearest to us is most often the thing that is affected'.117 The autobiographical letter to Savigny of 1854 offers an account of the evolution of Bachofen's ideas that is slightly at variance with the one given in the Griechische Reise. Bachofen implies here that he did not regret the turn taken by his affairs since he had never truly wanted to play a public role but had always been drawn to a life of study and
113Streuber.Nekrolog., op. cit. n. 84 above, pp. vi, viii, xxxvi. Already on his return to Basle from Italy in 1848, he had written to an Italian colleague of his feeling of isolation in a Switzerland torn apart by the Sonderbund war: 'Quanta nunc rerum mutatio! Civilibus armis patria absumpta, coelum horridum, terra aspera, sine amicis quos longinquos habeo omnes domi ut ita dicam exul' (Briefe, op. cit. n. 6 above, letter 50, 6June 1848). 114JohannJakob Bachofen, Griechische Reise, ed. Georg Schmidt, Heidelberg 1927, p. 8; see also n. Io. 115 'Autobiography' in Myth, Religion, and Mother-Right, op. cit. n. 63 above, p. 17. See also Briefe, op. cit. n. 6 above, letter 77, io August 1854: 'In the end, the highest goal is to perfect oneself'; letter 82, 18 May i855: 'In the life of the soul, egoism is justified; indeed, it is an obligation'. On this tradition in Germany, see W. H. Bruford, The GermanTraditionof Self-Cultivation,Cambridge 1975. 116Streuber. Nekrolog.,op. cit. n. 84 above, pp. vi-xii. See also Griechische Reise, op. cit. n. I 14 above, pp. 7-8. 117 Griechische Reise, pp. 7-8.
published only in the 192Os -
Bachofen referred elliptically to the withering of his
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reflection. Even when he had been mistakenly pursuing another one, in short, he had always been obscurely impelled toward a vocation that had now been revealed as his true one. It was thus with relief that he turned aside from the narrow and limited opportunities of a present that was inadequate to his imagination and his deepest convictions in order to devote himself to his true calling. Whether it was accompanied by disappointment or a feeling of relief, Bachofen's turning away from the day-to-day life of Basle should probably not be read as a defection. For Bachofen himself it was a duty he had no right to refuse and he may well have seen it as, paradoxically, the only way left to him of serving the true interests, as he conceived them, of his community. Such sentiments may well have motivated many of the champions of modern art and literature in the second half of the nineteenth century. In Bachofen's case, they appear to have been sustained by an intensely religious sense of vocation, which bound him to the traditions of his native city even as it obliged him to estrange himself from it. The figure of the faithful exile was not unfamiliar at Basle or in Switzerland. There were emigr6 Basle merchants in the chief trading cities of Europe, and large numbers of Swiss had traditionally supported their families by serving in the armies of foreign princes. A more striking case from Bachofen's own early years was that of the explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, a distant relative, Bachofen's paternal aunt Margarethe having married Burckhardt's half-brother Gedeon. In the early years of the century this son of one of the wealthiest ribbon manufacturers in the city had left Basle to undertake various journeys of exploration in Arabia and Upper Egypt on behalf of the London Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior of Africa. Burckhardt's mission required him to talk, dress, live and look like an Arab; he was generally taken for one; and when he died of dysentery in Cairo in I8I 7, he was buried as a Muslim at the Bab el Nasr cemeteryjust outside the city gates. In all his letters home, however, 'Sheikh Ibrahim', as he was called, remained a devoted son and brother, touchingly loyal to his family and to the city he always said he hoped to return to one day. In one letter he responded with resignation to his mother's decision to sell the country house at Erndthalden in the Basle countryside, which more than anywhere else represented the happiness and security of home and childhood to him. 'It is possible to find contentment in the silence of the desert', he wrote. 'There is no spot on this earth which happiness has marked as its permanent abode. Every one may find it in his own heart and he can treasure it there whether he finds himself in the most civilized nation in Europe or among half-savage Arabs'.118
118 Letter to his parents, from Aleppo, 15January 181 1, in Scheik Ibrahim (Johann Ludwig Burckhardt):Briefe an Eltern und Geschwister, ed. Carl Burckhardt-Sarasin and Hansrudolf Schwabe-Burckhardt, Basle 1956, p. 127. Burckhardt's attachment to his family in Basle, his longing to return to his mother, and his unquestioning acceptance of the many tasks that providence had given him to fulfil before that homecoming could be achieved emerge from the closing lines of a letter to his mother, dated 3July 1815, from Cairo: 'Und nun lebe wohl, liebe Mutter. M6ge Dich eine gfitige Vorsehung noch lange Jahre Deinen treuen Kindern schenken, deren Verlust durch den Hinschied ihres Vaters Du allein ersetzen kannst. M6ge es mir verg6nnt seyn, Dich noch einmal zu umarmen. Wie oft flehe ich um dieses Gliick!
Es ist mein heissester Wunsch, ohne dessen Erffillung ich mich stets ungliicklich schatzen werde. Ja, gewiss, meine heissen Thrinen werden dann zeugen, dass keine, auch nicht die lngste Abwesenheit mein Herzje verdndern kann, welches von allen anderen Banden losgerissen, allein fur Dich und Dein Glfick, liebe Mutter, jetzt schldgt. Doch entfernt ist noch jener Zeitpunkt. Manche Schwierigkeiten muss ich noch fibersteigen, um ihn zu erreichen. Froh hoffe ich, dass mich Standhaftigkeit und Muth nie verlassen werden. Zu sch6n ist mein Ziel, um ihm nicht jedes Opfer zu bringen, dessen ich fihig bin. Gottes Segen mit Dir, liebe Mama. Ich bin und bleibe zeitlebens unverdindert Dein Dich mit innigster kindlicher Liebe ehrender and liebender Sohn' (p. 150).
BASLE AND BACHOFEN
169
Throughout his correspondence, Burckhardtunaffectedly signalled his submission to the will of Providence and he appears to have interpreted his own exile as a calling. In the eagerness to recognize and respond to the call of Providence that led his celebrated kinsman from the Eden of Erndthalden to the deserts of Arabia, and in the intensity with which Burckhardtlived both the Christian experienceof man's rootlessness in the world and the Baseler's attachment to his native city, it is possible to discern something of the spirit that later moved Bachofen to abandon the busy life not only of a citizen but of a professionally successful philologist and to accept the inner exile of a lonely journey of exploration among peoples knowing nothing of modern ways. As a philologist, Bachofen expressed his rejection of modern liberal culture and politics in sustained and violent attacks on the most celebrated and influential modern philologist of his day, Theodor Mommsen. What he objects to most strenuously is what he calls Mommsen's modernising of Roman history, which he saw, not altogether incorrectly perhaps, as a justification of Realpolitikand of the aggressive, bureaucratic modern nation-state. Mommsen and Bismarck are frequently associated in Bachofen's writing. To protest against 'this kind of history', was, he declared, 'an absolute necessity', a And Bachofen did find himself standing virtually alone against the 'Prussians'. Though many in Basle were with him - Burckhardt,for instance, was also enraged by Mommsen's RomanHistory120 - his reports of the isolation to which he had been condemned because of his attacks on 'Prussian criticism' were not exaggerated. Along with his old teacher Gerlach, he had discredited himself among academic philologists by his refusal to accept Niebuhr's critical evaluation of the traditional accounts of early Roman history and his insistence that all myths contain a kernel of historical truth. As a result, his work was virtually ignored by the philological profession.121Moreover, he himself stopped attending the professional meetings of the German Society of Philologists and Orientalists, and refused to set foot in the aggressive new Prussia of Bismarck .122 Paradoxically, however, in combatting 'modernisation', it was he, in the end, who proved to be modern and who pointed classical studies in a new direction. Against the growing power of the professionals he gradually put together a counter-association of independent-minded students not simply of antiquity but of all prehistorical cultures,
119 Briefe, op. cit. n. 6 above, letter 270, 4 April 1870; also letter 144, i6 March 1862: 'For me, registering my protest against this kind of history is an absolute necessity'. 120 The testimony is that of Carl Spitteler, op. cit. n. 15 above, vI, p. 387. 121 He himself noted that his work 'had received absolutely no attention in Germany' (Briefe, op. cit. n. 6 above, letter 288, 13 December 1885). See also letter 242 (Alexis Giraud-Teulon, a young professor at the University of Geneva, who had become interested in Bachofen's work, writing to his own former teacher): 'He hopes that through me his studies, which have gone practically unnoticed in the scholarly world, will finally enter the domain of public discussion. This, he believes, has been deliberately prevented in Germany by the calculated silence of the philologists'. Mommsen had der Rimer written a devastating review of the Geschichte (1851) of Bachofen and Gerlach in the Literarisches
'duty ... even if I must stand quite alone'.119
Centralblatt (repr. in Theodor Mommsen, Gesammelte Schriften,Berlin 1905-13, vi, pp. 653-54) and Bachofen's reputation never recovered from it. 122 He refused to attend the 25th anniversary meeting of the Verein von Altertumsfreunden im Rheinlande at Bonn in 1866 because 'I have discovered in myself a deep inner revulsion against Prussia that would make the sight and the society of that robber people extremely distasteful to me' (Briefe, op. cit. n. 6 above, letter 225, September 1866). In 1871 he told Hornung in Geneva: 'I no longer touch any German newspaper. Nothing is more loathsome than the cynicism of slaves' (letter 283, 9 February 1871). The only German paper he appears to have continued to subscribe to was, uncharacteristically, the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung,no doubt because of its anti-imperial stance. The Bachofen-Archiv at the University of Basle contains a collection of newspaper articles critical of Prussia and of German imperialism (item 301).
12
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whether past or present. The circle of correspondents he built up over the years included few professional or academic philologists. Mostly they were pioneering figures in the still undefined areas of sociology and anthropology, such as Elie Reclus in Paris, GiraudTeulon in Geneva, Josef Kohler in Berlin and Lewis Morgan at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. The balm for Bachofen's isolation and disappointment was Italy. Where life in Basle - and Basle stood for the entire modern world - was stunted, cramped and trivial, Italy still offered the image of a life that was whole, of a paradisiac land where man had lived in innocent union with his physical environment and in harmony with his own nature. Bachofen's Italy, which he loved in the maternal body of the living Italian landscape, was not, however, the Italy of his own time. Though his descriptions of the Italian countryside are among the most powerful parts of his work, he always contrasted its unchanging beauty and strength with the degradation of its modern human offspring.123In his vocabulary Garibaldi was a term of abuse.124 Nor was it the Renaissance Italy that delighted Burckhardt,or the Italy of Imperial Rome. It was a much earlier, pre-historical 'Italia ieratica e sacerdotale', as he himself put it, which had its roots not in classical Greece, but in the world of origins, the Eternal Orient.125This Italy Bachofen sought and found, as before him Georg Zoega, the strange Danish friend of Humboldt and Welcker, had sought and found it, not in the triumphant architecture of Imperial Rome, but in tombs and burial sites. Here he believed he had come upon the traces and memories of a way of life corresponding to those Dionysian religions which in his scholarly writings shared first place in his affections and admiration with early Demetrian religious cults, a way of life in which the contrariesof the world and the spirit, life and death, paganism and Christianity seemed still almost unformed- 'abandonment without reserve to the most luxuriant life of the senses and fidelity to that best Hope that reaches beyond the grave' and in which 'no idea of struggle, of self-discipline, of sin and repentance disturbs the harmony of a life at once sensual and transcending sensuality'.126'All those necropolises are beside streams', he wrote in his autobiographical letter to his old teacher Karl von Savigny. 'The lapping waters seem to intone the eternal praise of the dead'. Here, in short, in the fantasmatic Italy produced by the scholar's imagination, the earth and the waters of life buried deep inside it, the female and the male life forces, mother and son, matter and spirit, vital fluids and tears, are still in harmony with each other. History means nothing
123 See especially his contribution to the Geschichte der Rimer, written in collaboration with F. D. Gerlach, op. cit. n. 121 above (Gesammelte Werke, op. cit. n. 29 above, i, pp. 79-388), especially the description of west central Italy (pp. 88-104), of the Campagna (pp. I18-27), and of the Alban Hills (pp. 127-28). In the early life of a people, according to Bachofen, man and nature live in intimate union: 'Wherever we find him, he is a phenomenon of a specific place, his history being, to a varying but predetermined degree, the natural history of his country, while his development is determined at each step by the totality of the geographical conditions of his existence' ('Die Grundgesetze der V61kerentwicklung und der Historiographie', in Gesammelte Werke,vi, p. 417). Man, in such circumstances, is truly the child of his mother nature. Similar views were expressed by other Romantic writers; see, for instance, Michelet's Tableaudela France,in vol. ii of his HistoiredeFrance,Paris 1833-
124 'Garibaldi-Literatur' is the uncomplimentary term with which he describes a commentary on Homer that he considered mediocre and uninspired (Briefe, op. cit., n. 6 above, letter 123, 26 September I86o). 125Briefe, letter 257, I8 February 1869. Though Bachofen was not attracted by Renaissance Italy, Italy did mean something similar to the two Baselers. To both Saturnia it was the Saturnian land - magnaparensfrugum, tellus, as Burckhardt, citing Virgil, called it (Jacob Burckhardt, Briefe, op. cit. n. 48 above, vII, 267, letter of So August 188I) - the physically present image of an original harmony of man and nature, as well as of a possible, far off, unforeseeable return of that original harmony. See Heinz Schlaffer, art. cit. n. 55 above, p. 103. 126Das Mutterrecht,in GesammelteWerke,op. cit. n. 29 above, III, p. 593-
BASLE AND BACHOFEN 171 the have in since these 'do work for but mind in all not here, day eternity early peoples It seems likely that Bachofen had projected the ideals that had informed his youthful experience of Berlin and that subsequent events had revealed to be illusory on to the culture of these ancient peoples. Now, however, the ideal was not in any historical present or future ('a present full of contentment ... and a confident anticipation of the fruits of the future'), but irrevocably in the past, indeed on the other side of historical time, in prehistory. It could be the object of a passionate search and a passionate contemplation, but no longer of any possible historical experience. Nevertheless, it is still that moment of confidence and fulfilment that is evoked again and again, as a consolation for the disappointments and horrors of the present,128in the moving descriptions of Demetrian or 'matriarchal' cultures - the cultures that, according to Bachofen, lie between the original unbridled hetaerism on the one hand and repressive patriarchal legalism on the
their activity'.127
as well as the later accounts of 'primitive' societies still surviving in Africa and America. It is not surprising that these societies, as described by returningtravellers,missionaries and poets, took their place alongside ancient Italy both in Bachofen's imagination and in his scholarly writing. Making allowance both for the variety of early cultures and for some poetic licence, he declared, he still found that the account of life on Nukuheva in Melville's Typee justified his admiration for prehistoric societies, and he fully agreed with Melville that the ties of love and trust binding the fierce inhabitants of the Typee valley, the unanimity of feeling and judgment among them, and the absence of conflict either between or within individuals offered the image of a culture that we, who call ourselves 'civilized', are in no position to despise or to condemn as immoral.129 Bachofen's 'discovery' of Italy in 1842 was a shattering experience, comparable only - in his retelling of it at least - to a religious conversion.130 As a result of it, he wrote, he
127 Myth, Religion, and MotherRight, op. cit. n. 63 above, p. 12. In the magnificent description of the Campagna in the Geschichte der Rimer Bachofen again emphasizes the abundance of spring water. This marked the Campagna as a divine land, sacred to the Gods. 'In the cool groves, through which the waters flow, the leaders of the people come together to take counsel, as by the aqua Ferentina in the Vale of Alba, or beneficent divinities decipher the secrets of his future to the troubled mortal' (Gesammelte Werke, i, pp. IO2-03). 128 More and more, especially after 1848, the study of the past came to serve as a refuge, for Bachofen, from a disturbing and hated present. A long account of the moral and political decline of France and of its collapse into despotism ends with the comment: 'I would rather turn now to the objects of the past' (Briefe, op. cit. n. 6 above, letter 59, 21 May 1850). In 1856, after a visit to Berlin, where he enjoyed some interesting scholarly discussions: 'On the whole, I conversed more agreeably with the dead, and I have to confess I would not gladly exchange them for the living' (letter 84, 2I June 1856). In the brilliant Paris of Napoleon III, on the eve of Napoleon I's birthday, amid the frenzied, milling, celebrating throngs: 'How wretched all that imperial glitter seemed to me. But the Campana Museum was there, and so, in the year 1864, I was able to spend many
other - which illuminate the pages of the History of the Romans (185 1-52), the Essay on Ancient MortuarySymbolism(1859), Mother-Right (86 I ), and the Legendof Tanaquil (187o),
a day among the Etruscans' (letter 188, 29 August 1864). In 1869 he acknowledges his extreme pessimism: 'That is why antiquity is so precious to me; because I am on the worst possible terms with our glorious modernity - as bad as the Papacy itself!' (letter 259, io May 1869). If his melancholy is a little less black than it might be, it is 'because I concern myself very little with the present, but spend my life rather among the objects of the motionless world of historical study' (letter 264, October 1869). Finally, in the aftermath of the FrancoPrussian war: 'I have never felt as intensely as I do today the value of an occupation that distracts my thoughts from day to day events and stills the melancholy reflections that would otherwise be inspired by the lugubrious spectacle of contemporary civilized Europe' (letter 278, 2 December 1870) On Burckhardt's similar evasion from an an unappealing present, see Heinz Schlaffer, op. cit. n. 55 above. 129 Bachofen, Gesammelte Werke, viII, Nachlass, pp. 495-96. Cf. Melville, Typee,London 1846, chapters 17, 27. 130 A conversion experience was the common Romantic way of describing the historian's discovery of his vocation. Both Augustin Thierry and Jules Michelet describe their coming to history as an illumination.
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was unfitted for ever for the contemporary world, and in his imagination the world of Italy, full of light and beauty, limpid with the waters of its many springs, came to stand for a longed-for fulfilment, for that transparency, immediacy and presence 'where one feels everything more deeply, pain and joy and the true meaning of things', 31 while Basle and still more 'das eckelhafte Berlin', which had been transformed from a city of philosophers into the monstrous capital of a domineering and bureaucratic imperialism - came to represent the obscurity of the Platonic cave, the world of musty book-learning and physical and spiritual alienation. References to 'the smoke-filled study rooms of the cold North', to 'smoky study rooms, with their rancid smell of tallow candles and oil lamps', to Hyperborean fogs, and obscured or artificial light, recur again and again in Bachofen's writing in connection with Northern scholars and contemporary scholarship in general,132 and especially in connection with Mommsen who invariably appears, in a conflation of sexual, political and philosophical imagery, as the booted, cigar-smoking Prussian, the bad interpreter who is unworthy to wield the historian's pen, since he uses it not to love the past but to violate it, not to go out towards it respecting its strangeness and difference, but to pull it roughly to himself in a vain attempt at appropriation.133 Bachofen's entire conception of scholarship and interpretation is structured by this opposition between the North and Italy, between modern pygmies overreaching themselves in despair at their estrangement and impotence and that glorious Southern landscape of the past where 'nature, by the warmth and richness of her sensuous manifestations, invites mortal man to yield to her charms and to enjoy the life of the senses under the guidance of a religion which hopes to elevate him not by repressing, but on the contrary by developing and educating his sensuality, to which the law of struggle is foreign and in which the distinction between this life and the other life is not an absolute one'.134 It also recurs in a new version as the opposition between Bachofen himself and Mommsen. Like so many nineteenth-century scholarly endeavours since the disputes over the hieroglyphs and the competition between English and French explorers and archaeologists for the ancient stones and temples of Egypt and Assyria, it often assumes the aspect of a struggle between rivals for the possession of the female body of the past. Significantly, Bachofen's attacks on Mommsen, which had come to a head in I861, the year the latter's Roman History (1854-56) was officially consecrated by the award of the Bavarian Academy's Gold Medal to the author, reached a second climax in 1870. In the journal Hermes for that year, shortly after the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war, Mommsen published an article questioning the authenticity of the Coriolanus story, in which a leading role is played by Valeria, the sister of Publicola. (It was she who organized the Roman matrons to intercede with the general on behalf of the beleaguered city.) Bachofen appears to have taken Mommsen's criticism not only as a rejection of his own ideas about the early matriarchal culture of the Italians, of which, in his view, the
131 Selbstbiographie, op. cit. n. 73 above, p. 29. See also Geschichteder Rilmer, op. cit. n. 123 above, Gesammelte Werke, I, p. 104, on 'the relation between man and nature in the youthful age of peoples ... so intimate and so richly woven, as if both were still aware of their common origin'. 132 See 'Autobiography' in Myth, Religion, and Mother Right, op. cit. n. 63 above, p. Io; Briefe, n. 6 above, letter
18, 9June 1844; letter 199, 4June 1865; letter 264, October 1869; letter 304, 29 October i88o. 133Briefe, letter 144, i6 March 1862: 'der Griffel der Geschichte geh6rt nicht in seine Hand'. 134 Mutterrecht,in GesammelteWerke, n. 29 above, III, p. 587.
173 Coriolanus story preserved significant traces, and an indirect justification of Prussian militarism, but as a desecration of his own mother, to whom the Mutterrechthad been posthumously dedicated, and who, as Valeria Merian, bore the name of the Roman heroine and was thus indissolubly associated, for Bachofen, both with her and with the theory of primitive mother right.135 III BACHOFEN AND MOMMSEN Whence, whither, whereforeall this science, if it do not lead to culture?Belike to barbarity?And in this direction we already see the scholar caste ominously advanced. - Nietzsche, 'David Strauss'. Bachofen's opposition to Mommsen concerned three related aspects of his work as a student of antiquity. The first was institutional: the opposition of the private scholar from the city-republic of Basle, where the leading families were expected to fill University chairs, to the professional Prussian scholar and Imperial academician, whose influence on university appointments had begun to extend throughout Germany and into Switzerland, even to Basle itself. To Bachofen, study is a vocation and an obligation, not to say a prerogative, of traditionally distinguished families; its object is Bildung, understood as the transmission of moral, civic and - in the broadest sense - religious values which, for the historian and philologist, are associated with ancient societies, that is, with societies less far removed than our own from man's 'original' condition. To Mommsen, the organiser of great collective enterprises, philology is a professional activity, the object of which is Wissenschaft,or the progress of scientific knowledge, and whose practitioners receive a rigorous and highly specialised technical training. Compare the following two statements. Here is Mommsen in 1890, receiving Adolf Harnack into the Prussian Academy: 'Like the large-scale modern state [der Grossstaat] and large-scale modern industry [die Grossindustrie], so too large-scale modern scholarship [die Grosswissenschaft], carried out by many but directed by a single commanding mind, is a necessary element of the development of our culture'.136 And here is Bachofen in his autobiographical letter to Savigny, written in the mid 50s: 'A time must come when the scholar seriously asks himself what the relation of his studies is to the highest things'.137 Burckhardt, we may recall, fully shared his compatriot's hostility to the modern state and to the bureaucratic organisation of Wissenschaft,though he may have had rather less
135See Bachofen, Briefe, letter 270, 4 April 1870. The attack on Mommsen developed into TheMythof Tanaquil (Die Sage von Tanaquil), but Bachofen did write a biting Mommsens Kritik derErziihlungvon Cn. pamphlet, Theodor Marcius Coriolanus,1870, which was also published in a French translation by his friend and disciple Alexis Giraud-Teulon at Geneva in the same year. 136Theodor Mommsen, 'Antwort auf Harnacks Antrittsrede' at the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences, 3July 189o, in RedenundAufsiitze, Berlin 1905, p. 209. The German text is more effective: 'Wie der Grossstaat und die Grossindustrie, so ist die Grosswissenschaft, die nicht von Einem geleistet, aber von Einem geleitet wird, ein notwendiges Element unserer Kulturentwicklung'. 137 'Autobiography', in Myth, Religion,andMother-Right, op. cit. n. 63 above, p. 15. Again I give the original German text: 'Es muss die Zeit kommen in welcher der Gelehrte seine Studien fiber ihr Verhiltnis zu den hochsten Dingen ernstlich zur Rede stellt'.
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LIONEL GOSSMAN sympathy with Bachofen's idea that learning is not only the responsibility but the prerogative of a social elite. As is well known, Burckhardt turned down a tentative invitation to succeed Ranke in the most prestigious chair of history in Europe, at the University of Berlin, preferring to remain in Basle and to devote himself to his teaching and his students.'38 In the later part of his career he was increasingly indifferent to scholarly colloquia, publication and all the other institutionalized activities of the world of professional scholarship, even to writing itself. Instead he chose to reaffirm, by his that had guided him emphasis on teaching, the traditional humanist dedication to Bildung since his youth. The one thing about which it is not permitted to doubt, he once said, is the absolute value of the University of Basle.139 Burckhardt's outlook seems to have been characteristic of Basle scholars and academics. The philosopher Karl Steffensen, for instance, had a tremendous reputation as a teacher and lecturer, but he wrote very little and what remains was put together from notes after his death.140 On his arrival in Basle in 1867 to assist the ailing Steffensen, Dilthey was surprised and dismayed by the indifference of the local scholars to writing and the enormous importance they attached to their teaching, the loving care they expended on their lectures.141 Burckhardt'sobituary in the National-Zeitung expressed, as we saw, the appreciation of the citizens of Basle for the civic spirit and dedication shown by the eminent men at the University. In general, it seems, the notion of what culture and scholarship mean that prevailed at Basle was different from the one that obtained at Berlin. The Basle scholars apparently wished to serve Bildung not Wissenschaft, the culture of the individual and the community, not an objective body of knowledge, not 'science', and to be appreciated and judged by the citizenry of Basle rather than by an anonymous body of professionals. In a short essay on B6cklin's preference for classical rather than 'mediocre patriotic' themes in his painting, Carl Spitteler, who had been a student of Wackernagel's and of Burckhardt's, recalled the important place the study of classical antiquity occupied in the general culture of Basle. Students were less well prepared technically and grammatically in the ancient languages at Basle than at most of the German universities, Spitteler relates - or so, at least, he has heard it said by professors- but their studies 'produced different results, results not measurable by examinations, results for living'. Baselers in general consider the study of antiquity part and parcel of their own civic culture. 'The entire citizenry, including bankers and rich silk merchants, takes part in it; Latin words have infiltrated the local dialect, even as it is spoken by the ladies; the richest gentlemen from the oldest families take pride in being associated with the University, which they all love and revere, as professors, as occasional lecturers, or as honorary doctors; humanistic dilettantism is common and every millionaire is proud when he can correct some howler in his child's Latin exercises. The popularity of classical studies penetrates the entire educational system, vigorously reinforcing its effect'.142Again and again, Spitteler emphasizes the humaneness of the instruction he received from his teachers, the absence 174
141 Letter of 1867, quoted by Kaegi, op. cit. n. 6 above, Kaegi, op. cit. n. 6 above, Iv, pp. 30-33. See James Hastings Nichols, 'The Man and his vi, pp. 198-99. 142 Mission', in J. Burckhardt, Forceand Freedom:Reflections Spitteler, op. cit. n. 15 above, vi, pp. 163-65. See on History,New York 1943, PP. 13-15, 20-21. also Kaegi, op. cit. n. 6 above, iv, pp. 120-26. 140Karl Steffensen, Gesammelte Aufsiitze, mit einem Vorwort von Rudolf Eucken, Basle I89o, p. v. 138
139
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of harsh discipline, the concern with the total education of the person rather than technical virtuosity. Bachofen's idea of philology was thus by no means unique or even exceptional. On the contrary, it appears to have been fairly representative of opinion in the old humanist city-state. Even if we must make allowance for the differencein genre between private recollection and anecdote on the one hand and formal public address on the other, the familiar, witty, self-deprecatory tone of Spitteler's memories of his education and his teachers forms a striking contrast to the pompous rhetoricofWilamowitz-Moellendorf's speeches, around the same time, to the students at the Universities of Greifswald and G6ttingen. The talk here is all of dedication to science ('die Wissenschaft'), the glory of the Kaiser, and the privilege of laying down one's life for 'die Ehre des Vaterlandes'.143Mistrustful ('misstrauisch') as they were, in Dilthey's words, the Baselers were unlikely to be taken in by the idols Wilamowitz held up before the young men of Imperial Germany. Bachofen's position, as we suggested earlier, was more extreme than that of Burckhardt or Steffensen. In his case, the polis had ceased to have much reality as the guardian or repository of values threatened everywhere else. These could now be and the collective effort, preserved only through the cultivation of the individual (Bildung) not of a polis, but of a handful of dedicated individual scholars scattered throughout many lands. It is symptomatic of Bachofen's isolation from the dominant professional currents and influences of his day that he ceased to attend scholarly meetings and published his work privately in ridiculously limited editions that made it virtually an intimate communication with a select few. The Unsterblichkeit derorphischen for instance, appeared Theologie, in 1867 in an edition of fifty copies.144Equally symptomatic is the form of Bachofen's writing. Arguably the best of it is in the confessional mode, like the great autobiographical which were written for close friends or for private circulation. His scholarly work in general is often marked by a disturbing discontinuity between long arid stretches of - a kind of wanderingin the desert- and accumulatedevidence, quotation and reference sudden irruptionsof highly imaginativeand poetic prose, momentsof illuminationor grace. The second ground of opposition to Mommsen concerns substance. Bachofen argued for the persistence at Rome of primitive Italic religious beliefs throughout the period of the Republic and the Empire, and subscribed to the theory that the Etruscans had preserved essential features of the original oriental - and, for him, 'matriarchal' culture - more faithfully than the Greeks. The flowering of otherworldly religions in the Imperial period was not, therefore, for him, the introduction of an alien element into Roman life; on the contrary, it marked the re-emergence of an attitude to nature, history, and the state that had always been there but that the Romans had tried to repress.145 Similarly, he believed that Niebuhr's rejection of the early books of Livy was far too radical. Though legendary, that early history, properly interpreted, could yield valuable insights into the prehistoryof Rome, the history the patriarchal Roman state had tried to suppress and distort. In
143Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Reden und Vortriige,3rd edn, Berlin i913, PP- 30-36 ('Von des attischen Reiches Herrlichkeit', an address marking the birthday of the Kaiser given on behalf of the University of Greifswald, 22 March 1877); pp. 67-85 ('Basileia', an address marking the Kaiser's 25th Jubilee given on behalf of the University of G6ttingen, 5June I886); and pp. 86-90 (an address to the students at G6ttingen on the 15oth anniversary of the founding of the University). 144 K. Meuli, 'Bachofens Leben', in Bachofen, Gesammelte Werke, op. cit. n. 29 above, iI, p. 10o75. 145 Introduction to Mother-Right,in Myth, Religion, and Mother-Right, op. cit. n. 63 above, pp. 75-76. Also introduction to Tanaquil,ibid., pp. 214-19.
letter to Savigny of 1854, or the journal of his travels in Greece in 1851 -
esoteric texts
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general, Bachofen was strongly critical of the common academic idea of classical antiquity - 'so-called classical antiquity', as he liked to call it - as a privileged, unique, and in some sense normative moment in human culture. (The notion that classical antiquity had somehow escaped the common fate of humanity was no doubt unacceptable to him as a Christian.) Instead, he advocated a radically comparative, anthropological approach to the Greeks and Romans, using the findings of research into other early peoples and into contemporary 'non-civilized' peoples to elucidate the character of ancient society and culture.146His concern, on the whole, was not with the state, but with early cultures, with myth, with religion, and with the problematical relation of myth to history and of early prehistorical cultures to historical cultures. Mommsen, on the other hand, dismissed Livy without discussion, had nothing but contempt for the Etruscans, considered the Romans an ideally sensible, practical people, with a correspondingly sensible, practical and rationalist religion, viewed the later Oriental religious cults, and especially the worship of the various Eastern Mother Goddesses, as absurd and as corrupting alien influences on Rome, and in general interpreted Roman history in political, social and economic terms - in terms, one might The focus of Bachofen's interest was early Italic culture, say, of Bismarckian Realpolitik. which he believed to be both matrilinear and 'matriarchal', and its remnants in the patriarchal Roman state; the focus of Mommsen's was the power and well-being of the state, and hejudged everything in relation to that. Broadly defined, the political ideal that informs his History seems to have been something similar to the modern social democratic state, with an intelligent and productive middle class, an educated, diligent and contented working class, and a bureaucracyof highly skilled professionalsrunning the show. Rome's problem, according to Mommsen, was that it did not have such a professional bureaucracy, and could not therefore successfully manage the transition from city state to world empire within the framework of its republican institutions.147To the patrician scholar from Basle, on the other hand, the absence of a professionalbureaucracyin Rome was one
ingly of the narrowness and the tyranny of academic classical philology: 'Independent research has gone completely out of fashion. In order to pass for smart, one has to blow the horn of the modish scholar-stars of the day and may not permit oneself the slightest deviation from the line of the Royal Prussian Academy' (Briefe, letter 244, 12 March 1868). 'Of all worlds the learned world likes least to be disturbed in its status quo. Oh, how pleasant it is to sit comfortably in one's armchair and dream of some edition of an author who has already been edited and corrected a thousand times over, or of adding to the Corpus inscriptionumfrom some newly discovered stone, whose only value is to be the occasion of a publication' (Briefe, letter 309, 7June I881; see also letters 199, 242, 257). Through his association with Lewis Morgan, Bachofen was encouraged in a comparative, anthropological approach to the study of antiquity, by which he anticipated Jane Harrison and the Cambridge School; see Briefe, letter 304, 29 October i88o, to Morgan: 'I place the phenomena of so-called classical antiquity alongside corresponding phenomena in other cultures, be they those of other vanished
146 From about 1850 on, Bachofen complained unceas-
civilizations or those of presently existing barbarian tribes, and by comparing the two I try to elucidate and render intelligible what has been found puzzling about the former'. In classical studies, however, this is a difficult enterprise, because German scholars, especially classical philologists, are 'sadly one-sided, and hardly allow their gaze to travel beyond the confines of the ancient world ... Greeks and Romans pass for a kind of elect who can never be compared with uncivilized tribes'. Similar views are found in a letter to MeyerOchsner of a decade earlier, when he had begun to read the work of Africanists like Munsinger and Heinrich Barth (Briefe, letter 276, 10oNovember 1870; also letter 288, 13 December 1875). 147 On Mommsen's contempt for the Etruscans, see especially Roman History, I, ch. 9, 15; on his view of Roman religion, ibid., I, ch. 12; on his dislike of oriental cults, especially that of the magnamater,ibid., mi, ch. 13; Iv, ch. 12; on his conception of the well-run state, ibid., IIm,ch. 9; on the transition to Empire, ibid., v, ch. Ii. The social and economic interpretation of Roman history is essential to the entire book; see especially, however, MI,chs I I, 13, and Iv, ch. 2.
177 of its positive features.'48 If Mommsen was fascinated by the Imperial moment in the was dominated by the passage to the Empire at the history of Rome, so that his own History end of it, Bachofen was drawn to the most ancient ages of Rome - those during which the various aspects of existence that historical cultures distinguish from each other (cosmology or 'science', religion, law and social relations) are still inextricably entwined. At this stage in its life Rome, as Bachofen looked on it, was not yet the lawgiving, model state of the West, but still participated in a common human culture shared with many other early peoples and races throughout the world. Finally, the opposition concerned the very character of scholarship. To Bachofen himself, his struggle with Mommsen was above all a struggle between two competing conceptions of scholarship: the priestly and the scientific; and in a larger sense this involved an opposition between two rival principles: that of hierarchy, or sacred order, favoured by the patrician, and that of professionalism, favoured by the democrat Mommsen in every aspect of his work, methodological and institutional as well as thematic. Though Bachofen often claimed that his guiding principle was that of empirical observation, and though he liked to draw a contrast between the cautious sailor hugging the shoreline, sticking as it were, to the external contour of the sea - or, one might want to say, of the maternal body - and the temerarious adventurer who strikes out into the unknown,149he also acknowledged the temptation to vagari,as he put it, in himself, and thus implicitly, within his own Romantic terms, the potentially transgressivecharacter of his own scholarly research.'50 For the prehistoric past, the object of his study and his desire, is for him none other than the sacred body of the Mother Goddess. Antiquam quaerite matrem was the motto he himself adopted from Virgil.s5' The question was: how should this transgression be carried out? Transgression, as Bachofen sees it, is necessary in order to rebind the two worlds of the sacred and the profane, to bridge the gulf separating the original or extra-historical and the historical, the female and the male in his symbolising - and to reaffirm, maximus view of them - the Roman priest, he liked to recall, is pontifex in the face of historical alienation and division, the primitive and essential unity of man and nature in the cosmos. This is the kind of sacred transgression, he held, that is carried out by legendary figures such as Oedipus or Orpheus. bridge-builder,mediator, is a Underlying Bachofen's notion of the scholar as pontifex, into different as divided of the world view conservative orders, each of which has its deeply fact that its various orders the of the and ultimate The world, unity original proper place. constitute a totality, must not be forgotten, and it is the task of the scholar-priestto ensure that it is not; to show that 'nature is a living temple', in the well-known words of
148 In his Historische Fragmente, op. cit. n. 59 above, (p. 24) Burckhardt quotes Mommsen on the absence of a professional bureaucracy at Rome, but in order to approve this situation, and in implicit contrast to Prussia, praise Rome for not having made education 'with the help of an examination system, into a monopoly, and little more than the foundation of the state bureaucracy'. 149 The image occurs both in the Autobiography and in see Myth, Religion, andMother-Right, Mother-Right; op. cit. n. 63 above, pp. 13, 76. The same image is used by Michelet (La Mer, 1861, ed. Pierre Loti, Paris 1898, PP. 3, 6). 1so Bachofen, Briefe, op. cit. n. 6 above, letter 85, 31 July I856: 'I cannot bring myself to leave the harbour again. There is a constant danger, with me, that once the anchor has been weighed finally, the shoreline very quickly disappears from view, and the ship moves out more and more boldly and rashly toward new lands'. Similarly, letter 144, 16 March 1862: 'I cannot tell you what a desire to vagariis storming within me'. 1s1 'Das Naturrecht und das geschichtliche Recht' (inaugural address at Univ. of Basle, 7 May 1841), Gesammelte Werke, op. cit. n: 29 above, i, p. 18.
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LIONEL GOSSMAN 178 Baudelaire's poem, and that the natural, the historical and the spiritual worlds are in correspondence with each other. But it is also the scholar-priest's task to combat all attempts to establish a specious unity and totality by overthrowing the orders altogether and abolishing every distinction. Such attempts invariably involve denial of what to the Christian Bachofen was the incontrovertible human reality of the Fall and of sin, of differentiation and alienation, and the reduction, by pure fiat, of the entire universe to either pure matter or pure spirit. Bachofen's keen, conservative sense of different orders within the totality of the universe and the importance he attached to respecting them, even while constantly reaffirming the unity and totality underlying and sustaining them, led him to define his goal as a scholar and interpreterin terms that deviate somewhat from those used by many Romantic historians. In contrast to Michelet, for instance, who contains in himself both 'Mommsen' and 'Bachofen', both the Promethean and the Orphic, Bachofen does not define his aim as that of giving words and a language to those who had none, or of giving the past a self-understanding it never had. He sees it rather as that of attending to the way the past itself understood itself and trying to recover its categories of understanding .152 The past - woman, nature - is not dumb for Bachofen. On the contrary, its language has been suppressed or distorted, he claims, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes deliberately, by later generations to which it had become unfamiliar, incomprehensible, even disturbing or frightening.a53The past, correspondingly, is not superseded by the present, and there is no reason to look with condescension on cultures seemingly more primitive than our own. He would have subscribed fully to Burckhardt'sopinion that the present may not imagine it can pronounce superior judgement on the past simply 'because at the present moment it is we who have the power to speak'.154 Melville's account of how he came upon a gentler, kinder society than his own among the cannibals of the Marquesas had struck a responsive chord in Bachofen and he, in turn, maintained that neither primitive 'promiscuity' nor 'polyandry'could bejudged from the standpoint of our own arrangements for propagating the species. 'When new laws are introduced, what is virtue comes to be called sin and following the path of duty is branded as error'. But 'there is no sin in polyandry, none in promiscuity. Generations of human beings who saw in one or the other of these social arrangementsthe rule of conduct of their lives and in the religious observance of traditionalways the fulfilmentof their highest duty carry no burden of guilt. ... Depravity does not lie in the principles themselves but in men's attitude to them'.'ss55 All cultures, in other words, have ideas of good and evil, laws and moral principles; and morality is an attribute of human subjects, not of their actions. It is thus not at all self-evident that 'later' cultures are better than 'earlier' ones. It may even be that some 'early' forms of society - societies that are still not yet fully engaged in the world of history - have retained, amid their seemingly barbarous customs, more of the original unity of the cosmos, more of its inherent lawfulness, than societies with elaborate legal codes and developed ethical systems. The scholar's task is not, therefore,
152 See Myth, Religion, and Mother-Right,op. cit. n. 63 above, pp. 72-75, 82-83, 217, 245 (Introductions to Mother-Right and Tanaquil); also Briefe, op. cit. n. 6 above, letter 63, 6 October 1850, letter 67, 16 January 1851, letter 271, 8 April 1870. 153 Myth, Religion, and Mother-Right,p. 230 (Introduction to Tanaquil). 154 Reported by Carl Spitteler, Gesammelte Werke,op. cit. n. 15 above, vi, p. 376. 155 From the Nachlass, Gesammelte Werke,op. cit. n. 29 above, vIII, pp. 493-94.
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to interpret the past from his own supposedly privileged position; it is not to grant speech to something that in itself is dumb, infans; but to discover and attend humbly to the language in which the past actually did speak. What Bachofen's priestly mediator and translator communicates, in the end, is closer to what we might call wisdom (sapientia) or sacred knowledge, than to science (scientia) or profane knowledge. It is not something that can be held at arm's length and inspected in a spirit of detachment. On the contrary, it is a living voice which is reduced to silence the moment we attempt to translate its language into our own and to substitute our words for its. If we would understand it, in short, we must expect to be moved by it and to respond to it as an I, in Buber's terms, is moved by and responds to a Thou.To understand it, indeed, is to be transformed by it. As this is a risk many prefer not to take, it is only a select few who will ever be able to understand the message of the past. The past for Bachofen, one might say, is an Other, and to hearken to it is to lay oneself open to it. Historical research thus acquires something of a religious character, providing illumination or insight in the manner of divine grace. Correspondingly, Bachofen's own text is in its deepest nature not a translationof the ancient myths and symbols it purports to interpret, but rather another version,a renewal of those myths, a poetic text, requiring for its interpretation skills or talents strictly analogous to those that the interpreter himself used in the first place.156 'To expound the mystery doctrine in words', Bachofen wrote in the Essay on MortuarySymbolism,'would be a sacrilege against the supreme law; it can only be represented in terms of myth'.'57 It is not an object to be possessed, in other words, but an inexhaustible force or energy that calls up a similar energy in the reader or viewer. Mommsen, on the other hand - as Bachofen represented him - is the translator/ traitor par excellence. He kills the living word, the marvellous poetry of ancient symbol and myth, and transforms them into the dead concept, the modern prose of economics and class conflict. The work he does is scientific, we might say, rather than poetic. In Bachofen's eyes, however, what the jackbooted Mommsen 'translates' and delivers over to his readers is not the lover's knowledge of the 'Goddess herself' - the object of Bachofen's quests58 - but the anatomist's knowledge of a cadaver. As a mature philologist, Bachofen, it turns out, had remained remarkably faithful to the Romantic lessons he had learned from his old French teacher at the Basle Piidagogium in the early 3os of the century. In a passage on historiography in his Chrestomatie, Alexandre Vinet develops a traditional distinction between two modes of knowledge: In every reality, in every factual event, there are two distinct and, so to speak, concentric elements: the essence of the fact, and its formula. The fact can be known by either one. Knowledge by way of the second is science (savoir);knowledge by way of the first is vision (voir).To know by science (savoir)is to know the formula, which is always more general than the fact; to know by science is thus to classify. To know by vision (voir)is to penetrate through the envelope of the formula to the innermost reality of the fact and thus to its individual being. It is not to classify but to name. One of these acts belongs to the intelligence, the other is the exclusive privilege of the soul. The intelligence knows only abstractions and forms; the soul sees beings and substances; the intelligence knows
156 See Ernst Howald's highly critical 'Wider Johann Jakob Bachofen' (1924) in his Humanismusund EuroZiirich and Stuttgart 1957, p. 70: 'Suddenly one pidertum, realizes that Bachofen himself is only a continuator of the religious syncretism of the Ancients'. 157 Myth, Religion, and Mother-Right, op. cit. n, 63 above, p. 48. 158Selbstbiographie, cit. n. 73 above, op. p. 34.
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the soul sees.Is that not to only genera and species, the soul sees individuals; the intelligence knows, historian is also a poet, can in as the as much is the And that it is the soul that complete say poet? one not say that for him too, as for the poet, to know is to see? In all this, we understand by the word see that second sight, that superior vision of which we spoke at the beginning, and which for the historian takes the place of the eyes and of contact with reality. 59
IV
BACHOFEN AND THE THRESHOLD OF HISTORY Alles gegenwiirtigeTrachten nach religi6ser Reaction, nach Wiedereinsetzungdes alten Glaubens in sein friiheresAnsehen ist vergeblich ... Der Verrath am Alten, der Abfall davon ist unsiihnbar ... Wir stehen eben vor demselben &~6vtaTov wie die alten Christen. Franz Overbeck, Bekenntnisse. Between the two conceptions of historical scholarship outlined by his former teacher the 'symbolic' and the 'philological', as Croce would later call them - Bachofen never hesitated. His idea of what was required to achieve understanding seems, however, to have undergone a change in the course of his career. The aim was always to grasp the inner being of the object or the Other, but in the early part of his career - the time of his liberal optimism - he appears to have shared the confidence of the teachers of his generation, of Humboldt and Schleiermacher and Ranke, in the correspondences uniting man and nature and men among each other across time. To look into oneself was at the same time to discover the Other. seems The collapse of Bachofen's political confidence along with 'the illusions of 1830o' to have had something of the character of an ontological disaster, a second Fall, opening up an abyss between the present and the past, the Self and the Other.Just as the present in its incurable wretchedness now seemed totally cut off from the glorious prehistorical past of Bachofen's philological imagination and research, so the scholar could no longer count on discovering the key to that past by examining his own heart and his own experience. On the contrary, the reverse was closer to the truth: for the student of antiquity, as for the Christian, it was the past that was the key to the present and to the human soul. Increasingly, in Bachofen's comments on the practice of philology, the accent fell on the distance between the Other and the Self, the past and the present; increasingly the chief danger to true understanding was identified as 'modernization', the denial of a rupture between present and past and the tendency to infer from the former to the latter.'60 As
159 Alexandre Vinet, Milanges littiraires, ed. Pierre Kohler, Lausanne 1955, pp. I56-58, quoted from the 2nd edn, Basle 1836, p. 78. The first edition of the Chrestomatie appeared at Basle in I829-30, and there were frequent editions and revised editions throughout the nineteenth century. 160 On 'modernisation' as 'the handmaiden of current interests', see Myth, Religion, and Mother-Right,op. cit.
n. 63 above, pp. 82, 85, 245. (Introductions to MotherRight and Tanaquil);also Briefe, op. cit. n. 6 above, letters 63, 67, 150, 271. This was also Nietzsche's objection to Mommsen and the burden of Fustel de Coulanges's argument in La Citi antique,Paris 1864.
BASLE AND BACHOFEN 181 Wilhelm Henzen of German the Instituto in to di as a letter Correspondenza early 1850, of reaching the past, the Archeologica in Rome, he had begun to stress the difficulty distance separating it from the present: he is now convinced, he wrote, 'that it is high time to follow a new path and to set historiography on a different foundation from that on which it has rested so complacently since Niebuhr. He who would understand a people must place himself in the position in which it stood and he who would write the history of that people must write it in its spirit, not in his own. Ways of looking at the world that belong to the nineteenth century must not be allowed to determine his vision; instead, he must try to acquire those of the Romans and to see through their eyes'.161 Throughout the polemic against Mommsen this idea was consistently hammered home. The confidence in the possibility of passing with ease from the present to the past, in the continuity between them, which had been an 'illusion' in 183o, had now, in the age of the chassepot, become a dangerous deception and an instrument of ideological manipulation. The 'soi-disante [sic] critique allemande', he wrote, discredits whatever 'does not easily enter a head formed on the currently fashionable Berlin model'. He, however, 'would sooner find something to laugh at in our smug moderns, who are so full of themselves, than in the ancient writers, to whom we are indebted for the little we do know of antiquity... We study history to know what earlier ages of the human spirit have been, not to remake them after the ideas of today'.162The pertinence of Bachofen's comments in the context in which he made them can easily be ascertained by even a casual glance at some embarrassing essays by Wilamowitz, in which praise of the Kaiser and glorification of the Empire is justified by implicit and explicit comparison of late nineteenth century Wilhelminian Germany with ancient Greece. The increasing emphasis in Bachofen's idea of historical research and understanding on the scholar's need to lose himself in order to find the past, rather than to seek the past within himself, can be compared with the increasing disenchantment in the circles of the Basle critics, whether believers or not, with liberal and pietist theology and the legacy of Schleiermacher. To Bachofen's idea of understanding in history corresponds the strict Calvinist doctrine of election and grace. The easy liberal road from man's consciousness leads in the end not to God, according to the critics of liberal theology, but simply back to man, and the true way, on the contrary, is from God to man, from the Other to the Self. It is not surprising that understanding of the past, for Bachofen, is in large measure a matter of grace.163It may, and no doubt should, be preceded by serious empirical investigation, as grace may be preceded by earnest prayer, but it provides an illumination or insight that is of a totally different order from any that can be obtained by building outward from our own experience. Nevertheless, Bachofen's position is not free of perplexing ambiguities. His own 'priestly' conception of the scholar's task requires that the knower alienate himself from the contemporary world in order to embrace the criteriaand the point of view of his object. This inner alienation, which places the scholar in a state of receptiveness to the Other in Bachofen's case, equivalent to both the past and the Divine - thus preserves him from
161 Bachofen, Briefe, letter 63, 6 October I850. Niebuhr, as is well-known, claimed that it was the events of his own age that opened his eyes to the understanding of the past (see his History of Rome, London 1828, I, pp. x, xii-xiii). 162 Bachofen, Briefe, letter 271 (in French), 8 April 163 In the Selbstbiographie,op. cit. n. 73 above, he observes of the Duc de Luynes: 'The man has not chosen his scholarly work; it has chosen him' (p. 29); and in the eulogy of Streuber: 'What seems to be our doing is ultimately a higher guidance, We think we choose our calling and in reality we are chosen by it' (pp. vi-vii).
I870.
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ever identifying with the world. Bachofen's own loving relation to a prehistorical 'maternal' past placed him in a critical position with respect not only to his own present, but to any historical world. Yet Bachofen never rejected this world absolutely. On the contrary, especially in his later works, he tried to justify the paternal rule of law and reason as part of a necessary development both in the life of the individual and in that of the race.164 Not surprisingly, there are two seemingly contradictorystrains in his work:an almost hymnal praise of the divine prehistorical world of the mothers, and a stoic acceptance of the historical civilization of reason and law that has succeeded it, provided the latter does not attempt to deny its origins. Readers have almost invariably emphasized one of these two strains to the detriment of the other. To Klages, for example, the authentic meaning of Bachofen's text lay in the love and longing for the old maternal and religious culture, and he considered the philosophy of cultural history that appealed to a Lewis Morgan merely superficial, added on, the part of Bachofen's work that is least original and most ideological.'65 In general, it has been Bachofen's evocation of a fuller, richer, bolder and more beautiful life than the cramped and constrained conditions of nineteenth-century bourgeois society anywhere afforded, of a life in which sublimation occurs without
164 In 1850 Bachofen could write to Wilhem Henzen in Rome that 'the golden age of Italy' was in his view before the founding of Rome, and that in his studies of ancient history, it was 'das mdichtige albanische Reich' that was closest to his heart (Briefe, op. cit. n. 6 above, letter 65, II November i85o).On the other hand, the idea that there is no going back and that it is man's destiny (in the sense of a telos) to pass from savagery, by way of barbarism, to civilization - or from hetaerism and the domination of matter, nature and the female (the world of the Swamp), to monogamous marriage, the rule of spirit and the law of the Father (the solar world) informs almost all Bachofen's writing. It is an idea he shares with many other nineteenth-century writers, a powerful version of what Adorno and Horkheimer have identified as the Myth of Enlightenment. It often receives programmatic expression from Bachofen, most strikingly in the Introduction to Mother-Right,op. cit. n. I above, and, with speci'fic reference to the cultural and historical mission of Rome, in the Introduction to Tanaquil. The principal themes of the latter text were given an airing in December 1864 in a paper to the Basle Historical Society, entitled 'Welche Auffassung der Geschichte ist die richtige? Einleitung zu einer DarstelWerke, lung Roms' (published in the Gesammelte op. cit. n. 29 above, in a later version found in the Nachlass and entitled 'Die Grundgesetze der V61kerentwicklung und der Historiographie'). Bachofen argues here that the movement of history is no less than to elevate 'das kleine Gemeinwesen des sumpfumflossenen Palatin' to 'die sittliche Idee des Staates'. In this struggle the role of Rome is exemplary. First it combats the enemy in itself - the principle of its own natural religion, which constantly rises up to oppose the idea of the State and can never be completely subordinated. This is the meaning of Rome's struggle against Alba, Carthage, Corinth and Etruria, in all of which the natural, 'oriental' principle was predominant. Etruria, in
particular, contributed much to Rome, but could not overcome the deeper 'Asiatic nature principle in itself'. But while the occidental principle conquers with the sword, it fails to resist the blandishments of the soft, luxuriant Orient. The Roman idea of the State is corrupted as oriental nature cults, fertilizing old seeds anew, poison the sources of life in the West. At this point, mankind is saved by the incursions of the noble and pure Northern barbarians ('Die Grundgesetze der V61lkerentwicklung und der Historiographie', Gesammelte Werke, vI, PP.435-37). Despite appearances, however, Bachofen's law of development seems not to be an evolutionary determinism, but an ethical prescription for the conduct of political societies (see J. D6rmann, 'War J.J. Bachofen Evolutionist?' Anthropos, 1965, LX,pp. 1-48), a warning that man must resist the easy solution of sinking back into conditions of identity and repose. To the deeply religious Bachofen, the resolution of conflict and the end of struggle and sacrifice could occur only at the end of historical time, which it is not man's task - or in his power - to bring about. In the meantime, the law of our nature in history is struggle and sacrifice ('Entbehrung'). Rome - the City of Man, the World-historical City - was not built, Bachofen emphasises, in the lush lands of the Campagna or on the heavy, rich soil of Etruria (Gesammelte Werke,vI, p. 420). 'We see the awakening of life and of our own consciousness always connected with the struggles of opposing forces. This is the magical stroke that breaks the stagnation of insular idiocy. Let us hear no more, then, the foolish complaint about the thousand interruptions of a happy repose, through which history took on the aspect of a wildly tossing sea. These are indispensable for the attainment of our highest ends' (ibid., pp. 411-12). 165 Ludwig Klages, Vom Eros, 1922, in his kosmogonischen Siimtliche Werke,ed. Ernst Frauhiger, Bonn 1974, III, PP. 494-97.
BASLE AND BACHOFEN 183 repression, that has been the single most influential feature of his writing. Through it, moreover, his work is related not only to that of many other writers and artists closely associated with Basle - Burckhardt, Bocklin, Nietzsche, the poet Carl Spitteler- but to the entire artistic and intellectual world of late nineteenth century Europe. I myself tend to believe, however, that both strains - the longing and the resignation, the glorification of the mythical origins of humanity and the acceptance of the repressive ethical order of the present - are essential to the specific meaning ofBachofen's work. As an ideal, totality must never be forgotten- this is a constantly reiteratedlesson - but it is presumptuous and even sacrilegious to attempt to break down the barriers between the different orders of existence, between the human and the divine, the historical and the eternal. History itself is the mark of our alienation from the divine, and to attempt to restore withinthehistorical worlda unity and totality that can only be beyond it is a quixotic, even dangerous enterprise, a denial of our human - that is, of our historical - nature. For Bachofen, the attempt to break out of the iron cage of history and destroy traditional hierarchies was associated above all with the political Messianism, the popular democratic movements and the wild communism of his time. 'Those who advocate the abolition of private property and the monogamous family, the two foundations of modern society, certainly do not suspect that their ideal was the real condition of the human species during ages whose duration we can barely determine', he wrote in 1881. 'To try to bring back such a condition without being able to bring back the humanity that created it is the most disastrous of all stupidities'.166Though Bachofen signalled his condemnation of the middle class culture of his own commercial age by contrasting it with the greatness of early prehistorical cultures, in other words, he at no time aligned himself with the proletariat. Quite the contrary. Nevertheless, he would have had to reject, as equally ruinous illusions, the right-wing myths of race, blood and soil; and if he is less explicit about them than about democracy and communism, it may be only because these myths were still embryonic in his day. In principle, his conception of historical existence, which derived no doubt from a variety of sources- the Calvinism of his family and society; their actual experience of migration and uprootedness, however remote it may have been by the nineteenth century; his economic and affective dependency on a society he could not approve or admire- was opposed to any idea of a natural rootedness of historical man or of an unalienated historical community. 'The first phenomenon of history, the most permanent and the most general', he wrote in 1864 in a paper he read to the Historical Society at Basle, 'is wandering, migration ... and wandering will [continue to] be the lot of every thing for as long as life itself endures'.167 Bachofen's position, in sum, is that it is man's lot, indeed his obligation - like that of the wandering children of Israel - always to remember a past of wholeness and unity, prior to history, and to yearn for its restoration beyond history. It is the sacred task of the scholar who has reflected- as Bachofen says he must - on the relation of his work 'to the highest things' to keep alive the memory of this prehistorical past, to dedicate himself, in the midst of the historical world, to patiently preserving the faint traces of a different,
superseded existence, and to reaffirm the ideal of totality as something never to be abandoned, even if its recovery can and should never be attempted by alienated man in
Bachofen, Briefe, op. cit. n. 6 above, letter 309, 7June i881. 167 'Die Grundgesetze der V61kerentwicklung und der 166 Werke, Historiographie', Gesammelte op. cit. n. 29 above, VI, p. 412.
184
LIONEL GOSSMAN
the fallen world of history. 'The supreme aim of archaeology ... I believe', he wrote in the Foreword to Ancient 'consists in communicating the sublimely beautiMortuary Symbolism, ful ideas of the past to an age that is very much in need of regeneration'.168 Ultimately, the prehistorical past does also offer the image of a New Age to come, beyond the current historical age. There is a muted eschatological strain in Bachofen as there is in Burckhardt. The transcendence of the historical is not, however, something historical man himself can or should attempt to bring about. Remembrance of another, kinder life, of a lost paradise, may and should moderate the rigours of the patriarchal order, but neither requires norjustifies its overthrow. On the contrary, far from desiring or hoping for its overthrow, Bachofen appears to hold that historical man not only must accept the patriarchal order of law and property, with its limits, boundaries and prohibitions, as his inevitable lot, but should treasure the protection it affords from the disorder and chaos that would inevitably follow its destruction. No one appreciates better the value of the refuge patriarchal societies offer than the scholar-priest who dwells on the edges of the world of history and risks his physical wellbeing and his sanity by making forays into the lost and forbidden world of origins, of the sacred, and the Mothers, in order to keep alive among his fellows the memory, which the present in its pride always tries to obliterate, of another life, other generations, another humanity. In one of his letters Bachofen tells of falling deathly ill in Montpellier from over-exposure to the heat and sun of the South, where he had been investigating ancient funerary inscriptions, and of getting back to cool, rainy Basle as to a 'liebes ... Schiitzenvaterland'.169
in Bachofen's civil societies,the oldestarecertainly, view, the best, Amongprotective the closestto 'nature'.(This was also a view oftenexpressed another Swiss Calvinist by it The ancient Swiss are to the Jean-Jacques.) republics, follows, great preferable centralizedand militaristnationstatesof modernEurope.And thoughall civil societies areof necessitytemporary, becauseof theverynatureofhistorical existence,thewise man will do his utmostto preservethose that are least incompatible with our humannature, whichis - in a famousphraseof Pascal'sthat Bachofen mustoftenhave heardfromhis teacherAlexandreVinet - to be 'ni ange, ni bate'. Historicalexistence,in sum, will always be alienated;civil society will always offeronly a provisionaland precarious beyondit; but his effortsto satisfy refuge;manwill and shouldalwayslongforsomething thatlongingwithinhistorywill produce inhuman Manwill not succeedin tyrannies. only an in the beasts. The modernnation but he well succeed becoming angel, outdoing may and for Bachofen Bismarck's Second the socialistUtopia are Reich, state, exemplified by thereby jointly rejected. of historyfor the individual At best, Bachofenenvisages a partial transcendence in orderto worshipat the of historical world out of the capable withdrawing temporarily tomb of a deeply buriedpast which can not be restored- only longed for, faithfully and ecstaticallycontemplated. To the individualtouchedby this transhisremembered, torical grace an intimationof redemptionmay be vouchsafed.The 'estheticism'with
which Baeumler not unfairly charged Bachofen may be not only compatible with but inseparable from the latter's acknowledged Christian piety.
168Myth, Religion,and Mother-Right,op. cit. n. 63 above, p. 23.
169
12July
Bachofen, Briefe, op. cit. n. 6 above, letter 134, 1861.
185 A final comment about a work that I have found deeply moving and engaging. The modern reader may want to ask himself whether Bachofen's dichotomies - especially the traditional dichotomy of sagesseand science that looms so large in all his work - do not involve two sides of a single coin; whether both the poetic or symbolist historiography of Bachofen and the scientific or philological historiography of Mommsen do not equally strain, in the end, to overcome the historicity of the investigator: in Bachofen's case through a kind of passionate identification and submission that he felt would enable him to pierce momentarily the shell of the historical world, in Mommsen's through a neutral but controlling vision of the historical process itself. Our present ideas, on the other hand, prohibit any thought of transcendence or breakingout, and our conception of our relation to the past tends to be constructivist. In some remarks on putting on the classics today the contemporary French director Antoine Vitez, who has been responsible for several remarkable recent productions of seventeenth-century tragedies, has clearly marked out the distance that separates most modern scholars from the late Romanticism of Bachofen. 'I am most irritated', Vitez writes, 'by the term "dusting off" [of classical works] ... since it conveys something I a layerof reject: the idea that these works are intact, gleaming, polished, beautiful, beneath dust, and that if that dust can be removed, they will be discovered in their pristine integrity. Whereas in fact the works of the past are broken fragments of architecture, sunken galleons, and we bring them to light, piece by piece, without ever reconstituting
them
-
BASLE AND BACHOFEN
for ... we have lost the use of them, but instead make other things with the
pieces'.170
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
170
'Theorie/pratique
theatrale',
Dialectiques, 1976,
XIV, 9.
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Gossman Basle Bachofen and Critique of Modernity

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Basle, Bachofen and the Critique of Modernity in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century Author(s): Lionel Gossman

BASLE AND BACHOFEN

16 Mallarmi on the artist 'en grave devant la societe' in

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34 On Basle's success in ribbon manufacturing, see

33Burckhardt-Sarasin, op. cit. n. 17 above, p.

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austere ZurJohanniskapelle(1839-41), by the prominent local architect Christoph Riggen-

supposedly the founding act of

Basilea terraasperaet horrida,as he liked to say, adapting Tacitus86 -

published only in the 192Os -

Bachofen referred elliptically to the withering of his

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'duty ... even if I must stand quite alone'.119

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letter to Savigny of 1854, or the journal of his travels in Greece in 1851 -

146 From about 1850 on, Bachofen complained unceas-

BASLE AND BACHOFEN

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Bachofen, Briefe, op. cit. n. 6 above, letter 134, 1861.

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