The Arcades Project - Operi

wake of these organic ages, two critical ages, of which one extends from the era of
Greek philosophy to the advent of Christianity, and the other from the end of the
fifteenth century to the present." [E. Barrault,] Au-x artistes: Du. Passe et de
l'ave"ir des bealtx-arts (Paris, 1830), p. 6. [U15a,4}
Universal history appears, to the Saint-Simonian Barrault, as the new work of
art: "Shall we venmre to compare the last of the tragic or comic authors of Rome
with the Ghristian orators intoning their eloquent serruons? No, Gorneille, Racine,
Voltaire, and Moliere will not come back to life; dramatic genius has accomplished
its mission . ... In the end, the novel will fail no less in respect of what it
has in common with these two genres as in its relations to the history of which it
is the counterfeit . ... History, in fact, will again take on a powerful charm ... ; it
will no longer be only a little tribe of the Orient that will make for sacred history;
the history of the entire world will merit this title. Such history will become a
veritable epic, in which the story of every nation will constitute a canto and the
story of every great man an episode;' [E. Barrault,] Aux artistes: Du Passe et de
I'avenir des beaux-arts (Paris, 1830), pp. 81-82. The epic belongs to the organic
age; the novel and drama, to the critical. [U16,l}
Barrault already has a vague idea of the inlportance, for art, of secularized cultic
elements, altllough he puts the emphasis on periods that are consolidated
through cult: "Although Greece never fostered a religious caste system like that of
the Orient, its epic represented nothing less than an initial separation of poetry
from cult . ... Should orthodox movements survive into the critical periods, the
course of these periods is imperceptibly drawn back into the bosom of orthodoxy."
[E. Barrault,] Aux artistes: Du Passe et de I'avenir des beaux-arts (Paris,
1830), pp. 25-26. [U16,2]
Saint-Simon points with satisfaction to the fact that predsely those men who
henefited humanity most decisively-Luther, Bacon, Descartes-were given to
passions. Luther, the pleasures of eat.ing; Bacon, money, Descartes, women and
gamhling. See E. R. Curtius, Balzac , p. 117. [U16,3]
With reference to Guizot, whose brochure, "Du Gouvernement de la France et
du ministere actue!" (Paris, 1820) presents ti,e accession of the bourgeoisie as the
centuries-old struggle of a class (of course, his work De Ia Democratie [paris, 1849]
sees in the class struggle, which has meanwhile arisen between bourgeoisie and
proletariat, only a misformne), Plekhanov portrays the visions of the socialist
utopians as, "theoretically no less than practically;' a great step backward. "The
reason for this lay in the weak development of the proletariat at that time;'
Georgi Plekhanov, "Dber die Anhinge del' Lehre vom Klassenkampf," Die neue
Zeit, 21, no. 1 (Stuttgart, 1903), p. 296. [U16,4]
Augustin Thierry, an "'adopted son" of Saint-Simon. Ae{ording to Marx, he descrihes
very wen how " from the first, or at least after the rise of the towns, the