(1) See, for example, Gane, Mike, Baudrillard: Critical and Fatal Theory (London: Routledge, 1991)Google Scholar, Baudrillard's Bestiary: Baudrillard and Culture (London: Routledge, 1991)Google Scholar and The Radical Sociology of Durkheim and Mauss (London: Routledge, 1992)Google Scholar; Hollier, Denis (ed.), Le Collège de Sociologie, 1937–39 (Paris: Gallimard, 1979)Google Scholar; Heimonet, Jean-Michel, Négativité et communication: la part maudite du Collège de Sociologie, l'hégelianisme et ses monstres, Habermas et Bataille (Paris: J.M. Place, 1990)Google Scholar, and Politiques de l'écriture, Bataille/Derrida: le sens du sacré dans la pensée française du surréalisme à nos jours (Chapel Hill: U.N.C. Department of Romance Languages, 1987)Google Scholar; and Alexander's, Jeffrey introduction to his edited volume, Durkheimian Studies: Cultural Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

(2) Stoekl, Allan, Agonies of the Intellectual: Commitment, Subjectivity and the Performative in the Twentieth Century French Tradition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992).Google Scholar

(3) The lone source I have located which fleetingly suggests the possibility of the argument I make here is Nielsen, Donald, Robert Hertz and the Sociological Study of Sin, Expiation and Religion: A Neglected Chapter in the Durkheim School, in Monk, Richard (ed.), Structures of Knowing (Lanham: University Press of America, 1986), 7–50Google Scholar, who, in an article devoted to explicating Hertz's thesis on sin, hints in a footnote that he ‘hears more than one echo of Nietzsche in Hertz’(p. 36).

(4) Szakolczai, Arpad, in his Max Weber and Michel Foucault: Parallel Life-Works (London: Routledge, 1998)Google Scholar, uses this notion of the ‘life-work’, that is, an intellectual project which is intimately and dialectically intertwined in existential events and dilemmas in the thinker's life (see p. 33), as a methodological point of departure for understanding the œuvres of Weber and Foucault.

(5) Émile, Durkheim, Textes, edited and introduced by Karady, Victor (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1975), vol. 1, p. 439Google Scholar. This piece was originally written for the Annuaire de l'Association amicale des anciens élèves de l'École Normale Supérieure.

(6) Parkin, Robert, The Dark Side of Humanity: The Work of Robert Hertz and its Legacy (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996).Google Scholar

(7) Mauss, in his introduction to the published fragment of Hertz's thesis, indicates a different polarity which was increasingly developed in the work of Hertz; that is, the move from attention to the sacred/profane opposition to the binary right sacred/left sacred, or pure/impure sacred, in which the former consists of rites and regulations for participation in sacred spheres and the latter indicates the dangerous and mysterious liminal spaces incurred by transgressions of those rites and regulations (see Durkheim, Émile, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, introduction by Michel Maffesoli [Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1991], 681–690).Google Scholar

(8) Hertz was, like many other Durkheimians, a committed socialist, affiliated with the Parti socialiste S.F.I.O. (Section Française de l'Internationale Ouvrière) and Jean Jaurès, greatly influenced by the British Fabian Society, and creator and secretary of the Groupe d'études socialistes, a collective of socialist intellectuals working to enhance the connections between militants, technicians, and intellectuals and contribute methodical research skills to the socialist project (see Parkin, The Dark Side of Humanity, 4–8, 51–57 and Prochasson, Christophe, Les Intellectuels, le socialisme et la guerre, 1900–1938 [Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1993], 122–129).Google Scholar

(9) ‘Contribution à une étude sur la représentation collective de la mort’ was originally published in volume 10 of L'Année sociologique, while ‘La Prééminence de la main droite, étude sur la polarité religieuse’ first appeared in Revue philosophique. Both studies were included in the collection of Hertz's works published in 1928 by Mauss under the title Mélanges de sociologie religieuse et de folklore (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France)Google Scholar. The two works were translated and made available in one volume, Death and the Right Hand (Aberdeen: Cohen and West), by Rodney Needham in 1960, with an introduction by Evans-Pritchard.Google Scholar

(10) See Mauss, Marcel, In Memoriam. L'œuvre inédite de Durkheim et de ses collaborateurs, L'Année sociologique 1 (1925), p. 24.Google Scholar

(11) Only the former remains. Mauss apparently lost the chapter outlines and other notes, which he himself used to teach his own course on sin in the 1930s, although he did summarize their general thrust when he published Hertz's introduction. See Parkin, Dark Side, 125–6.

(12) Hertz, Robert, Sin and Expiation in Primitive Societies, translated by Parkin, Robert, Occasional Papers, British Centre for Durkheimian Studies 2 (1994), p. 108Google Scholar. I am grateful to Dr. Parkin for sending me a copy of the translation with his introductory essay.

(13) Hertz distinguishes here this mode of treating death in primitive society and our modern, overly psychological and medical mode, in which death is instantaneous, a merely physical event, and the liminal period, if it exists at all, is significantly reduced (Hertz, R., Sociologie religieuse et folklore [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970], p. 2)Google Scholar. His implication though, and this is along the same lines as Durkheim's argument on the elementary forms of religion, is that the real origins of the institution are best observed in their pure forms in primitive societies and that, however different our understanding and treatment of these matters might seem, at root our own processes of thought and collective representation are profoundly shaped by these origins and in fact this complex sequence of social recognition of contamination and subsequent expiation makes up a ‘permanent social necessity’ (Sociologie religieuse, p. 71).

(14) Both are recognized as social spaces, that is, communities: the former, the visible society of the living; the latter, the invisible society of dead ancestors (ibid., p. 83).

(15) Sociologie religieuse, 79–81.

(16) Ibid., p. 73.

(17) Ibid., 50–69. He notes as well that this joyous healing celebration sometimes also calls for a human sacrifice, for which prisoners of war and slaves are most often designated—the male relatives of the deceased generally act as the executors of the sacrifice, inasmuch as they stand to benefit significantly from its results (p. 52).

(18) Hertz here cites Broca, who proposed that we are right-handed because we are left-brained (Sociologie religieuse, p. 85).

(19) Ibid., 90–3. The brevity of his case here only adds to the difficulty of convincingly conglomerating all these very different varieties of binary conceptual schemas. Evans-Pritchard (in the preface), among numerous others who have commented on this essay, notes some of the main problems with Hertz's argument.

(20) Ibid., 98–106.

(21) Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the Genealogy of Morals /Ecce Homo (New York: Vintage, 1967), translation by Kaufmann, Walter, p. 17.Google Scholar

(22) Hertz, Sin and Expiation in Primitive Societies, p. 59.

(23) One can hardly expect Hertz to have been exhaustive in the single paragraph he devotes to explication of Nietzsche's position, and Mauss indicates in a footnote to the text that Hertz fully intended to fill out his reading of Nietzsche (Hertz, Sin and Expiation in Primitive Societies, p. 119); he also names specific texts which Hertz had consulted (e.g. The Twilight of the Idols, The Anti-Christ, Human all too Human).

(24) Hertz, Sin and Expiation in Primitive Societies, 78–80. It is important to note that Hertz's position is thoroughly at odds with that of liberal Christian modernists who were at the same time endeavoring to construct their own middle way between orthodox faith and secular reason, as he makes clear in his vigorous attack of them (64, 76, 80; see also W.S.F. Pickering's preface to this same document, 5–14). In an unpublished letter of 2 July 1911 to an English friend, Hertz made clear which side of the modernist/orthodox debate in Christianity he found more attractive: ‘I think more and more that if one has to be religious, it is better to take it all in—l mean, no rationalism, no secularization of the divine, no mean adaptation of the grand absurdity of true religion to our petty intellectualist scruples. If I was a Roman Catholic, I would certainly be With Pie X against the modernists. Those People are ashamed of having a religion—they try to beg their pardon from the intellectual people and the freethinkers—they take as humble and ‘reasonable’ an attitude as they can—and they lose what is the essence of religion, the emotional power, without winning intelligibility’ (original letter in English, Fonds Robert Hertz, Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale, Paris, see note 29 below).

(25) Nietzsche, Friedrich, Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ, translated by Hoilingdale, R.J. (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 189Google Scholar, emphasis in original.

(26) Ibid., 187, 189.

(27) Nietzsche, Friedrich, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, translated by Hollingdale, R.J. (London: Penguin, 1990)Google Scholar, section 61, 86–87. The entire section on ‘The Religious Nature' offers good ammunition for Karl Jaspers’ thesis that Nietzsche is far more conflicted on Christianity than some of his readers would have it (Jaspers, K., Nietzsche and Christianity, translated by Ashton, E.B. [Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1961]).Google Scholar

(28) Parkin, Dark Side, 2–3.

(29) Parkin, Dark Side, 9–10. Alice Hertz née Bauer was, from 1910 until her death in 1927, a professor at the Collège Sévigné in Paris where she was a member of the Union froebélienne française (named for the German pedagogical theorist Friedrich Froebel), which had established the first French program of pedagogical training for pre-primary (kindergarten) teachers (the Collège Sévigné was the de facto École normale for such instructors). A large collection of letters Hertz wrote her, both before and during his period on the war front, is maintained in Paris in the Fonds Robert Hertz at the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale, and the majority of these letters read as intellectual correspondence; that is, Hertz speaks to her not simply as a husband to a wife, but as an intellectual speaking to another intellectual, discussing his own work and asking for commentary and criticism, commenting on books of philosophy or literary works, engaging in dialogues on music, art, politics, religion, etc. Hertz, in this and other ways, seems something of a man of the future in a fin-de-siècle France still very much imbedded in more traditional notions of gender roles.

I take the opportunity here to profoundly thank Françoise Héritier, who gave me permission to view the contents of the Fonds Robert Hertz; Marion Abélès, the head archivist at the Laboratoire who went to great lengths to aid my research; and Philippe Besnard, who alerted me to the existence of the collection in the first place and helped me in innumerable other ways, both intellectually and logistically.

(30) Robert Hertz, letter to Alice Bauer, undated, Fonds Robert Hertz (hereafter FRH), Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale, Paris.

(31) Hertz, undated letter to Alice Bauer (FRH). The phrase ‘le psychologue de la musique’ was originally ‘le psychologue de l'émotion’, but Hertz crossed out the latter.

(32) This is the famous speech Bergson delivered in December 1914 at the public meeting of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques (of which he was president), in which he equates French and German civilizations to his own philosophical categories of life and matter, respectively, in order to argue for the moral vibrancy of the former and the static brutality of the latter. Hertz read it in the French newspaper Le Temps.

(33) Hertz, letter to Alice Hertz, 15 December 1914 (FRH).

(34) Hertz, letter to Alice Hertz, 16 September 1914 (FRH), emphasis in original.

(35) The precise phrase is Alice's, from a letter of 2 January 1915 (FRH).

(36) Hertz, letter to Alice Hertz, 3 January 1915 (FRH).

(37) He discusses him frequently enough in the letters that his widow would try, unsuccessfully, to contact him on Hertz's death in order to inform him of the fact, and perhaps also in order to meet this man for whom her husband had such a glowing admiration.

(38) In addition to the correspondence cited, there are notes Hertz took on Bergson's course and writings among the papers in the Fonds Robert Hertz.

(39) Clark, T., Prophets and Patrons: The French University and the Emergence of the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

(40) Fabiani, J.-L., Les Philosophes de la république (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1988), 91–97Google Scholar. We should note that, although Fabiani only claims to be speaking of the structure of the philosophical field, his analysis clearly resonates with efforts to schematize the intellectual field generally in the Third Republic, including that of Clark.

(41) On Nietzsche's connection to Schopenhauer, see, e.g. ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’ in Untimely Meditations; on Bergson's, see, e.g. Alexandre Baillot, who in discussing Schopenhauer's influence on French thought, describes Bergson as one of the most careful French readers of Schopenhauer (see Baillot, Alexandre, L'Influence de la philosophie de Schopenhauer en France, 1860–1900 [Paris: J. Vrin, 1927], p. 117).Google Scholar

(42) Benda, Julien, La Trahison des clercs (Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 1975), p. 171Google Scholar, note 63. Interestingly, Benda classes Durkheim with the ‘bad clerks’ in so far as he, like Maurras and Barrès, rejects universal and eternal morality in favor of cultural and moral relativism (162–3). Durkheim himself addressed pragmatism in a series of lectures given in 1913–14 and similarly observed the connection of Bergson to Anglo-Saxon pragmatism (e.g. James, Dewey), but placed Nietzsche apart, noting that the latter actually has a deeper metaphysical force, the will to power, to undergird a theory of truth while the pragmatists simply rest on an equation of truth and utility (Durkheim, É., Pragmatism and Sociology [Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 1983], translated by Whitehouse, J.C., edited by John Allcock, p.4).Google Scholar

(43) Pinto, Louis, Les Neveux de Zarathoustra. La réception de Nietzsche en France (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1995)Google Scholar argues that, while both figures appealed to roughly the same kind of French intellectual reader. Bergson was clearly seen as significantly more respectable, especially within the increasingly professionalized ranks of philosophy itself (38–45).

(44) It is difficult, in what follows, to avoid thinking of Nietzsche's discussion of the Kulturphilister (see, for example, Strauss, David, the confessor and the writer, Untimely Meditations [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983], translated by Hollingdale, R. J., 7–9).Google Scholar

(45) Hertz, letter to Alice Hertz, 15 January 1915 (FRH).

(46) Ibid.

(47) Hertz, letter to Alice Hertz, 28 November 1914 (FRH). For details on the concerted effort during the war to condemn Nietzsche and others as part of the ‘la pensée pangermaniste’ seen as responsible for German militarism, see Prochasson, Christophe et Rasmussen, Anne, Au Nom de la Patrie, les intellectuels et la Première guerre mondiale 1910–1919 (Paris: La Découverte, 1996)Google Scholar. Hertz's reference is perhaps to the section ‘Of the Adder's Bite’ in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (‘When, however, you have an enemy, do not requite him good for evil: for that would make him ashamed. But prove that he has done something good to you’, p. 93 of the translation by R.J. Hollingdale, [London: Penguin, 1961]), or to Ecce Homo, ‘Why I am so Wise’ (‘Equality before the enemy: the first presupposition of an honest duel. Where one feels contempt, one cannot wage war; where one commands, where one sees something beneath oneself, one has no business waging war’, p. 232 of Kaufmann's translation of On the Genealogy of Morals/Ecce Homo, [New York: Vintage, 1969]).Google Scholar

(48) Hertz's father was a native German-speaker, and we know Hertz's German was good enough for him to interview for a position as interpreter during the war (although he was not given the position, a failure due, in Hertz's opinion, to his relatively weak knowledge of technical and military German, which he discusses in his letter of 29 December 1914 [FRH] to Alice). There are also many references to Wagner, Goethe, and other great figures of the German cultural world in his correspondence both before and during the war.

(49) Hertz, letter to Alice Bauer, 4 September 1903 (FRH). In this same letter, he gives a very critical reading of none other than John Stuart Mill, one of Nietzsche's own foils, concluding that he had succeeded in rousing himself from the slumber induced by Mill by turning to Nietzsche.

(50) Durkheim, Textes, vol. 1, 444–5.

(51) François Isambert (At the frontier of folklore and sociology: Hubert, Hertz and Czarnowski, founders of a sociology of folk religion, in Besnard, Philippe (ed.), The sociological domain: The Durkheimians and the founding of French sociology [Cambridge and Paris: Cambridge University Press and Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 1983])Google Scholar notes this complexity in Hertz (‘his personality was many-sided, even contradictory’, p. 166), as does Parkin in citing Isambert (Parkin, Dark Side, p. 14), but neither really explores it in any detail.

(52) Hertz, letter to Alice Hertz, 16 September 1914 (FRH).

(53) Hertz, letter to Alice Hertz, 3 October 1914 (FRH).

(54) This is discussed in a letter from Hertz to Pierre Roussel, dated 27 April 1907 (FRH). Roussel, an old friend from ENS days, was himself a specialist in Greek antiquity who spent a number of years in Athens.

(55) Hertz, letter to Alice Hertz, 5 December 1914 (FRH).

(56) We should add here that there are competing interpretations of Nietzsche on the question of asceticism (see, for example, the accounts by Camus, L'Homme révolté [Paris: Gallimard, 1951])Google Scholar, Deleuze (Nietzsche et la philosophie [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962]Google Scholar), and Kaufmann (Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950]Google Scholar, for an idea of the variation on this issue), and in fact his position here is significantly more complex than is sometimes acknowledged. In On the Genealogy of Morals, he refuses a categorical condemnation of ascetic practice, finding it healthy in a certain (philosophical) constitution, harmful in others (the priestly, the artistic), and, although his attack on Christian morality and its emphasis on mortification and asceticism is devastatingly fervent in works written after the Genealogy, he nonetheless connects the capacity to suffer, to experience ‘painful tragedy’, to greatness in man (see Twilight of the Idols /The Antichrist [London: Penguin, 1968], translation by Hollingdale, R. J., p. 88Google Scholar, and Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future [London: Penguin, 1973], translation by Hollingdale, R. J., p. 209).Google Scholar

(57) Hertz, letter to Alice Hertz, 24 November 1914 (FRH). Despite the renunciatory imagery of Hertz's position, we can find here again a startling parallel in Nietzsche; see, for example, the latter's consistent line on the irreconcilability of the philosophical life and marriage (e.g. ‘Woman and Child’, 426, in Human, All Too Human) and his frequent derogatory remarks on the ‘beer hall’ thinking of too many of his German contemporaries and German ‘beeriness’ generally (e.g. ‘Why I am so Clever’, section 1, in Ecce Homo).

(58) Hertz frequently alluded to the social evils of alcoholism from a position informed by his radical politics. He saw the abuse of alcohol as an unhealthy manifestation of a natural impulse to recreation on the part of the working man and saw it as an important part of a socialist movement to provide ‘healthier and purer’ alternatives to alcoholism. Marcel Granet (another socialist member of the Année sociologique team) presented an action paper to the Groupe d'Études Socialistes in 1911 on the ‘problem of alcohol’ which in all essentials echoed Hertz's position.

(59) Hertz, letter to Alice Hertz, 2 February 1915 (FRH), emphasis in original. In this same letter, Hertz says he has been reading Tennyson's ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ and ‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’, and he celebrates their ‘bel et grand lyrisme.’

(60) Hertz, letter to Alice Hertz, 18 December 1914 (FRH).

(61) See, e.g. Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, section 25.

(62) Hertz, letter to Alice Hertz, 19 September 1914 (FRH).

(63) For example, his letter to Alice of 28 March 1915 (FRH), only a few weeks before his death. As Parkin indicates, we can be less than certain of whether or not his death was the culmination of a deliberate plan of self-sacrifice, as we simply do not know enough about the events leading up to the action of April 13 in which he lost his life along with 21 other members of his unit (see Parkin, Dark Side, 13–16).

(64) Hertz, letter to Alice Hertz, 28 September 1914 (FRH).

(65) His letter to Alice of 14 February 1915 (FRH) is exemplary here. He recounts an episode in which he encamped at a deserted farm with three enlisted men who proceeded, in the midst of a rather dismal and less than secure situation, to pass the time in amusing themselves in the most riotous manner, seemingly above the objective difficulty and danger of their circumstances. Hertz, in glowing terms, points to the admirable capacity to ‘saisir le côté drôle des choses, les travers des gens et rire, rire, parce que c'est sain et que ça fait du bien et qu'on est au monde pour ça.’

(66) Louis Pinto, Les Neveux de Zarathoustra, 22, 29–32.

(67) The correspondence contained in the Fonds Robert Hertz is indeed a rich source not only into Hertz's thought and life and thereby into the origins of French Durkheimian sociology, but in a certain sense into a particular and much broader French and even European intellectual moment just before and during the Great War.

(68) Indeed, Hertz sometimes spoke of his socialism in decidedly religious, even mystical terms; in a letter to Roussel (11 February 1906, FRH), for example, he characterized his socialism as a ‘mysticisme de la “foule”’.

(69) Hertz, letter to Alice Hertz, 22 September 1914 (FRH). We might note in passing that Péguy, a Catholic socialist, had once been a political ally of the Durkheimians, during the heated period of the Dreyfus Affair, but had turned against the Dreyfusards because of their anti-clericalism; after this break, it is nearly impossible to find any remark from the Durkheimian group on Péguy which are not condemnatory (Mauss, for example, spoke of him as ‘un fou dangereux’ [Fournier, Marcel, Marcel Mauss (Paris: Fayard, 1994), p. 205])Google Scholar, save this one from Hertz.

(70) Here we note Hertz's numerous references in the war correspondence to his Jewish identity and his perceived need to prove himself authentically French through exemplary service in the war; e.g. in a letter to Alice dated 3 November 1914 (FRH), he writes that ‘Il n'y aura jamais assez de dévouement juif dans cette guerre, jamais trop de sang juif versé sur la terre de France’, and in another letter of 2 April 1915, he speaks of his great desire to ‘être Français, mériter de l'être, prouver que je l'étais, et je rêvais d'actions d'éclat à la guerre contre Guillaume. Puis ce désir “d'intégration” a pris une autre forme, car mon socialisme procédait de là pour une large part.’

(71) See Parkin's introduction in Robert Hertz, Sin and Expiation in Primitive Societies, p. 17 and 39.

(72) See, for example, Jean Jamin, Un Sacré collège, ou les apprentis sorciers de la sociologie, Cahiers internationaux de sociologie 67 (1980), 20–24, where we see clearly the manner in which the members of the Collège explicitly set about an investigation of the left or impure sacred.

(73) It is clear though that they knew Hertz's work through Mauss, as the latter, who assumed possession of Hertz's manuscripts at Hertz's death, utilized Hertz's work as a basis for seminars at the EPHE from 1932 to 1937 (see Mauss, M., œuvres, vol. 3 [Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1969], 513–516)Google Scholar. There are also explicit references in the work of all the central members of the Collège (Bataille, Caillois, Michel Leiris) to Hertz, so they clearly were aware of his published work as well.

(74) Besnier, Jean-Michel, La Politique de l'impossible : l'intellectuel entre révolte et engagement (Paris: La Découverte, 1988).Google Scholar