Paul Bénichou facts for kids

Paul Bénichou (born September 19, 1908 – died May 14, 2001) was a French writer, thinker, and historian of literature. He was born in Tlemcen, which was then part of French Algeria.

Bénichou became well-known in 1948 with his book Morales du grand siècle. This book looked at the social world of famous French writers from the 1600s. Later, he started a huge research project. He wanted to understand why many writers in the mid-1800s felt very pessimistic and disappointed. This led to several important books, starting with Le Sacre de l’écrivain, 1750-1830 (published in 1973, and translated into English as The Consecration of the Writer, 1750-1830 in 1999). Another book, Selon Mallarmé (1995), continued this series. Together, these works helped us understand French romanticism in a new way. Paul Bénichou's work also showed how writers fit into the modern world and how they helped shape society's ideas and values.

Early Life and Education

Paul Bénichou was born in Tlemcen, French Algeria (now Algeria), into a Jewish family. His intelligence was clear from a young age, and he soon moved to Paris to study. He won a top national award for Latin writing in high school in Oran. After finishing high school in 1924, he went to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris. There, he prepared for the École normale supérieure, a very famous school. He got in in 1926. Some of his classmates there included famous thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Raymond Aron. He earned his first university degree in 1927 and became a certified teacher in 1930.

During his student years, Bénichou was interested in radical politics and the surrealism art movement, even writing poetry. However, he became known more for his work as a scholar and teacher. He had almost finished his first major book, Morales du grand siècle, when World War II began. After France was defeated in 1940, a new government called Vichy France took power. This government was very anti-Jewish. Because he was Jewish, Bénichou was not allowed to teach in French schools. As an Algerian Jew, he also lost his French citizenship.

In 1942, Bénichou and his family were able to leave France and move to Argentina. He was offered a teaching job at the university in Mendoza. Later, he taught in Buenos Aires. While in Argentina, he joined literary groups and met the famous writer Jorge Luis Borges. Bénichou and his daughter later translated some of Borges's works. He also became interested in medieval Spanish literature and wrote important studies on Spanish folk poems called romancero.

His book Morales du grand siècle was published in 1948 and was a big success. It helped him become known as a respected scholar. The book has always been available and has sold over 100,000 copies. However, it had been rejected as a doctoral thesis, so Bénichou couldn't become a university professor in France right away. He returned to Paris in 1949 and got a job teaching at the well-known Lycée Condorcet, where he taught until 1958.

Understanding "The Consecration of the Writer"

In the early 1950s, Bénichou started his most important research project. He had always been curious about why great French writers of the mid-1800s, especially Charles Baudelaire, seemed so pessimistic. He wondered why they felt this way during a time when many people felt hopeful and believed in progress. For 20 years, Bénichou studied the history of ideas about how writers related to society. This research led to a series of major books that tried to answer this question.

These books, which Bénichou started publishing when he was 65, form a deep study of French literature and ideas from 1750 to 1898. They explore the spiritual challenges of modern France and help us understand literature in other Western countries and even today's global issues. The main books in this series are:

• Le Sacre de l'écrivain (1973; English translation The Consecration of the Writer, 1999)
• Le Temps des prophètes (The Time of the Prophets, 1977)
• Les Mages romantiques (The Romantic Magi, 1988)
• L'École du désenchantement (The School of Disenchantment, 1992)
• Selon Mallarmé (According to Mallarmé, 1995)

After he passed away, the first four books were re-published together in two volumes called Romantismes français (2004).

While working on this huge project, Bénichou was invited to teach at Harvard University in the United States. He taught there one semester a year from 1959 until he retired from teaching in 1979. He was also chosen as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1976.

In his later years, Bénichou remained active and healthy. He continued to write and publish from his apartment in Montparnasse, Paris. When he died in Paris at the age of 92, he was working on a commentary about the mysterious poems by Gérard de Nerval called The Chimeras. He is buried in Paris’s Cimetière du Père-Lachaise.

Bénichou's Key Ideas

Bénichou believed that modernity came about because societies that were once very religious started to lose faith in their old religious ideas. This happened at the same time that people began to believe more in the power and independence of human beings. This belief in human freedom was a key idea of the Age of Enlightenment. The Enlightenment also brought a hope that a special group of leaders would help create a new, fairer society.

The idea of "the consecration of the writer" grew from these two trends between 1760 and 1789. During this time, many people thought that writers had a special job: to guide humanity towards this new, better world.

The difficult experience of the French Revolution changed this idea. Before the Revolution, some ideas were against religion, while others were more religious. After the Revolution, these ideas started to come together. For example, some Enlightenment ideas became more open to religious thoughts, as seen in the works of writers like Germaine de Staël. At the same time, the Revolution's struggles led to a religious revival, seen in writers like Chateaubriand. Bénichou called this a "deep convergence." This coming together of ideas led to the "consecration" of the poet-thinker during the peak of French romanticism after 1820.

Bénichou explained that these changes happened because a "new group of intellectuals" gained importance and social standing. After the Revolution, this group claimed "spiritual authority." For Bénichou, "spiritual authority" was a very important idea. He believed that people deeply need to believe in something and have a social system that guides society. In France, the Catholic Church traditionally filled this role. But in the 1700s, a "new spiritual power" emerged as the old Church lost some of its influence. This new "philosophic faith" (also called "modern faith" or "secular faith") started the challenges of modernity.

Bénichou and the Challenges of Modernity

For Bénichou, the main challenge of modernity is about what people believe. He saw romanticism as the first big step in a longer story that continues today. He also described it as the ongoing debate between free thought and traditional beliefs. This debate really began in the 1500s.

Bénichou thought that the weakening of the West's traditional "spiritual power" was key to this story. Modernity, he argued, is a long period where different groups try to figure out what this spiritual power should be in the future. In this situation, independent writers offered a new place for a non-religious kind of "spiritual authority." Bénichou believed that historians who only focus on social, economic, or political aspects miss this crucial point. He said that the Romantic period was a huge effort to fix the ideas of the Enlightenment after the terrible events of the Reign of Terror.

However, the agreement on the writer's role didn't last long. After the July Revolution of 1830 and especially after 1848, the poet-thinker was no longer seen as a reliable spiritual guide by the middle class. In France, the Church regained its status as the official spiritual power. Modern conservatism began to appear, and people started to disapprove of the ideas of the 1700s. But poets, writers, and artists didn't give up their claims to spiritual authority. Instead, they became "disenchanted." This feeling of disappointment has continued to the present day and is even a common part of many art forms.

Bénichou's Way of Thinking

Paul Bénichou's way of analyzing literature focused on what he called plausibilité (meaning 'plausibility' or 'credibility'). This meant that any interpretation of a work should, in theory, be acceptable to the author who wrote it. He was skeptical of ideas like structuralism and post-structuralism, and he didn't like too much focus on literary theory in literary criticism.

He believed that these approaches were flawed because they tried to simplify a work of literature too much. Bénichou, instead, insisted that a work of literature is always complex and has many different parts. His dislike for single-minded ways of looking at criticism and his lack of interest in popular critical ideas of his time meant that his work wasn't always appreciated right away. However, this has actually helped his work remain important and relevant for a long time.