Pierre-Simon Ballanche was a French writer

Writer

A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....

 and counterrevolutionary

Counterrevolutionary

A counter-revolutionary is anyone who opposes a revolution, particularly those who act after a revolution to try to overturn or reverse it, in full or in part...

 philosopher, who elaborated a theology

Theology

Theology is the systematic and rational study of religion and its influences and of the nature of religious truths, or the learned profession acquired by completing specialized training in religious studies, usually at a university or school of divinity or seminary.-Definition:Augustine of Hippo...

 of progress that possessed considerable influence in French literary circles in the beginning of the nineteenth century. He was the ninth member elected to occupy seat 4 of the Académie française

Académie française

L'Académie française , also called the French Academy, is the pre-eminent French learned body on matters pertaining to the French language. The Académie was officially established in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister to King Louis XIII. Suppressed in 1793 during the French Revolution,...

 in 1842.

Early years

Born in Lyon

Lyon

Lyon , is a city in east-central France in the Rhône-Alpes region, situated between Paris and Marseille. Lyon is located at from Paris, from Marseille, from Geneva, from Turin, and from Barcelona. The residents of the city are called Lyonnais....

, Ballanche was seventeen when his imagination was marked for life by the horrors of the French Revolution

French Revolution

The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...

. In 1793, the city's royalist revolt against the authority of the revolutionary Convention

National Convention

During the French Revolution, the National Convention or Convention, in France, comprised the constitutional and legislative assembly which sat from 20 September 1792 to 26 October 1795 . It held executive power in France during the first years of the French First Republic...

 ended with guillotining

Guillotine

The guillotine is a device used for carrying out :executions by decapitation. It consists of a tall upright frame from which an angled blade is suspended. This blade is raised with a rope and then allowed to drop, severing the head from the body...

 or summary execution of about 700 people. This, and an unhappy love affair early in life, left him with an abidingly tragic view of life as sanctified suffering, a view that he embodied in his works, of which the best known was an unfinished multi-part work entitled Essais de palingénésie sociale ("Essays on Social Palingenesis"). "Palingenesis

Palingenesis

Palingenesis is a concept of rebirth or re-creation, used in various contexts in philosophy, theology, politics, and biology. Its meaning stems from Greek palin, meaning again, and genesis, meaning birth....

" was a term by which Ballanche referred to the successive regenerations of the society, and he incorporated a progressive

Progress (history)

In historiography and the philosophy of history, progress is the idea that the world can become increasingly better in terms of science, technology, modernization, liberty, democracy, quality of life, etc...

 or evolutionary vision of Christianity

Christianity

Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...

 in his work even as he insisted reverently that Christianity was forever immutable.

Career

Ballanche first earned his living as a printer. His first published work was Du sentiment considéré dans son rapport avec la littérature (1802), a work in the vein of Chateaubriand's recently published Génie du christianisme

Génie du christianisme

Génie du christianisme is a work by the French author François-René de Chateaubriand, written during his exile in England in the 1790s as a defence of the Catholic Christian religion, then under attack during the French Revolution...

. He made the acquaintance of Julie Récamier in 1812, and moved to Paris shortly thereafter, where he attended regularly her salon at l'Abbaye-aux-Bois.

In works like Antigone

Antigone

In Greek mythology, Antigone is the daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta, Oedipus' mother. The name may be taken to mean "unbending", coming from "anti-" and "-gon / -gony" , but has also been suggested to mean "opposed to motherhood", "in place of a mother", or "anti-generative", based from the root...

(1814), Essais sur les institutions sociales ("Essay on Social Institutions", 1818), Le Vieillard et le jeune homme ("The Old Man and the Youth", 1819), L'Homme sans nom ("The Man without a Name", 1820) and Élégie ("Elegy", 1820), he developed the idea that the French Revolution was endowed with a divine significance. Such a view was common enough in counterrevolutionary circles. But unlike religious thinkers who conferred upon the Church the task of interpreting this significance, Ballanche developed a theory of language

Theoretical linguistics

Theoretical linguistics is the branch of linguistics that is most concerned with developing models of linguistic knowledge. The fields that are generally considered the core of theoretical linguistics are syntax, phonology, morphology, and semantics...

. In Ballanche's view, to name something was in some way to participate in creation. For Ballanche, this creative power of speech had the same essence as poetry, and he developed a poetics of the symbol that played a role in the thinking of those who gave birth to a new vision of the poet and of poetry

Poetry

Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...

 that soon came to be known as romanticism

Romanticism

Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...

.

Ballanche's life work, never finished, is generally known as Palingénésie. The idea of this "great work" germinated in him in the 1820s, and he announced what was intended to be a vast philosophico-poetic epic of the past, present and future in its opening volume, Prolégomènes, published in 1827. There he described his ambition to write "the true history of the human race". The first volume dealt with Greece

Greece

Greece , officially the Hellenic Republic , and historically Hellas or the Republic of Greece in English, is a country in southeastern Europe....

 in Orphée ("Orpheus

Orpheus

Orpheus was a legendary musician, poet, and prophet in ancient Greek religion and myth. The major stories about him are centered on his ability to charm all living things and even stones with his music; his attempt to retrieve his wife from the underworld; and his death at the hands of those who...

", 1829), and the second, never finished, with the Roman Republic

Roman Republic

The Roman Republic was the period of the ancient Roman civilization where the government operated as a republic. It began with the overthrow of the Roman monarchy, traditionally dated around 508 BC, and its replacement by a government headed by two consuls, elected annually by the citizens and...

 in Formule générale de l'histoire de tous les peuples appliquée à l'histoire du peuple romain ("General Formula of the History of All Peoples Applied to the History of the Roman People"), fragments of which were published in reviews from 1829 to 1834. The third and final volume, which was never finished, was first announced to be La Ville des expiations ("The City of Expiations"), though Ballanche published La Vision d'Hébal ("Hébal's Vision", 1831). Because Ballanche's thought continued to develop in the 1830s and 1840s he changed plans for the work many times, and the history of his works is enormously complicated and confusing.

In a sense, this was because of Ballanche's awareness of the difficulty of the task he had set himself. He never worked out his system to his own satisfaction. The turbulence of nineteenth-century French history constantly gave him new food for thought. It is possible, however, to sketch the elements of his fundamental vision.

Philosophy

Ballanche's highly original system was a working out of the notion of progress through ordeals. In a sense, his thought is a secular version of Fall and Redemption, adapted to an evolutionary progressivism – an "optimistic theory of original sin and its consequences", in the words of Paul Bénichou

Paul Bénichou

Paul Bénichou, was a French writer, intellectual, critic, and literary historian.Bénichou first achieved prominence in 1948 with Morales du grand siècle, his work on the social context of the French seventeenth-century classics...

, who has written extensively on Ballanche's historical importance in Le Sacre de l'écrivain (1973), Le Temps des prophètes (1977) and "Le Grand Œuvre de Ballanche", Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France (Sept.-Oct. 1975), collected in Variétés critiques (1996).

For Ballanche, a particular form of political authority – Louis XVI

Louis XVI of France

Louis XVI was a Bourbon monarch who ruled as King of France and Navarre until 1791, and then as King of the French from 1791 to 1792, before being executed in 1793....

, for example – could be doomed to fall without being contemptible. The historical vision that he was developing, and which he expressed in a symbolic language that many found difficult, was one in which a past epoch could possess its own rightness and legitimacy, even as it had lost the right to continue.

Ballanche compared himself to Janus

Janus (mythology)

In ancient Roman religion and mythology, Janus is the god of beginnings and transitions, thence also of gates, doors, doorways, endings and time. He is usually a two-faced god since he looks to the future and the past...

, the two-headed god of mythology, because he looked simultaneously in two different directions. His tragic view of history embraced change, while regarding the means by which it was accomplished as the source of an endless need for future expiation.

Legacy

Ballanche occupied – and continues to occupy – an uneasy borderland between progressive and counterrevolutionary camps. He dreamed of himself, timidly, as the one who could reconcile them. But this was not to be: his view of the social order as supernatural in character was not intelligible (or not acceptable) to those on the left

Left-wing politics

In politics, Left, left-wing and leftist generally refer to support for social change to create a more egalitarian society...

, and his willingness to acknowledge the legitimacy of radical change did not endear him to those on the right

Right-wing politics

In politics, Right, right-wing and rightist generally refer to support for a hierarchical society justified on the basis of an appeal to natural law or tradition. To varying degrees, the Right rejects the egalitarian objectives of left-wing politics, claiming that the imposition of equality is...

.