Christina Stange-Fayos. Lumières et Obscurantisme en Prusse: Le débat autour des édits de religion et de censure (1788-1797). Bern: Peter Lang, 2003. x + 442 pp. $66.95 (paper), ISBN 978-3-906770-40-6.
Reviewed by Michael J. Sauter (Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, A.C., [CIDE], Mexico City)
Published on H-German (December, 2006)
The Empire Strikes Back
Over the past six years, a variety of books have appeared that, taken collectively, rethink traditional approaches to cultural debates in late-eighteenth-century Germany. A few examples: Timothy Hochstrasser has recovered the significance of Samuel Pufendorf and Natural Law Theory for the "Eclectic" school of German philosophy;[1] Ian Hunter has identified the neglected Christian Thomasius as the founder of a civic enlightenment that rivaled Kantian philosophy throughout the late eighteenth century;[2] and finally, John Zammito has reanimated the historiography of Kantian philosophy by arguing that the "pre-Critical" Kant was much more influential than most scholars have assumed. A central theme that emerges from this literature is that scholars must break with the inveterate reading of Enlightenment Germany as a prelude to Kant's Critical Philosophy, which, of course, defined Aufklärung.[3] As a result of these pioneering works, we can see a rich, varied German culture with important local aspects that worked independently of other national traditions. In short, the German Enlightenment has become interesting again.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of Christina Stange-Fayos's volume. This is a shame, since the book's subject matter alone should have made it a welcome addition to the literature on the German Enlightenment. Stange-Fayos's text analyzes the public debate that erupted in 1788 across the German states in response to the Prussian crown's promulgation of two companion edicts, the Edict on Religion and the Edict on Censorship. Promulgated by Johann Christoph Woellner, a conservative rural preacher and agronomist who became a powerful minister under Frederick William II, the edicts sought to control preaching and public debate in the name of maintaining religious orthodoxy. Part of a conservative shift in Prussian politics that accompanied Frederick William II's succession of Frederick II in 1786, these edicts have generally been seen as the Counter-Enlightenment's revenge on the Enlightenment.[4]
My most general critique of this volume is that its author merely retells the same morally inscribed tale of the Enlightenment's downfall that many historians have presented before.[5] For example, Paul Schwartz's classic work on the edicts had as its main title Der erste Kulturkampf in Preußen ( 1925), which tells us as much about Schwartz's view of Bismarck's legacy as it does the politics of the late Enlightenment. Given the tenor of his times, Schwartz can be excused for seeing the late eighteenth century through the same prism he used to understand Imperial German politics. Stange-Fayos has no such excuse, and her reliance on Schwartz's ideas, as well as those of the many who have cited him, severely limit the book's value. Consider these words from the conclusion: "Cela consitutait une revanche des idées et des hommes qui avaient jusque-là été tenus à l´écart. La Prusse, patrie des Lumières, était menacée d'obscurité, voire d'obscurantisme" (p. 361). Evidently, the Enlightenment did not know the power of the Dark Side.
I will now to turn to each of the book's three parts and discuss the arguments in detail. In part 1, "Les édits de religion et de censure de 1788," Stange-Fayos offers a close reading of the two edicts and, following the traditional literature, argues that the edicts represented the political goals of reactionary organizations such as the Rosicrucians, an allegedly counter-enlightened organization that competed with the more enlightened Freemasons for influence (pp. 73-81). Here we encounter two significant problems. First, an abundance of recent literature on the Rosicrucians and Freemasons breaks down the ideological barrier between them. Very little of this critical work is referenced in the text.[6] Second, and this is the truly big problem for Stange-Fayos' book, Woellner was both a Freemason and a Rosicrucian. How does one deal with this kind of historical ambiguity? What does this information tell us about the relationship between the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment? Stange-Fayos has a ready response: she holds Woellner to be an Aufklärer manqué (p. 73). This simple assessment cannot, however, explain the very complicated late-eighteenth-century situation, and it reveals that Stange-Fayos was not interested in critiquing the received historical wisdom, but in using it to justify her reading of the texts.
Part 2, "La réception des édits dans les brochures," covers the reaction in books and pamphlets to the edicts, of which there were over one hundred.[7] Here much could have been done to expand on previous treatments of this theme. Unfortunately, Stange-Fayos's historiographical commitments prevent her from bringing any nuance to this rich and varied debate. One could excuse this problem on disciplinary grounds, since the author is not a professional historian but a Germanistin, and there is little sense in having literary scholars re-invent the historiographical wheel. Nonetheless, one could rightly expect something new and interesting in the textual analysis, and here the book disappoints greatly.
For Stange-Fayos, those people who opposed the edict were "enlightened." Those who supported it were "counter-enlightened." The strain of this position becomes obvious later in the book, when the Stange-Fayos considers an issue in desperate need of review: the intertextuality of the debate about the edicts. In some cases authors wrote only one book and bowed out of the discussion. In other cases, however, a series of books was published, with each text responding directly to its predecessor. Hence, we can trace entire conversations in print, and even consider how those conversations were received in other books or reviews. Nonetheless, the author limits the power of her analysis by reading each text through the writer's political position vis-à-vis the edict. For example, her view of the oppositional literature comes under the sub-chapter headline: "Motifs récurrents typiquement obscurantistes" (p. 173). As a result, we learn that progressives, people who opposed the edict, had certain positive ways of expressing themselves that opened debates, rather than closed them (pp. 192-193). In addition, we are informed that the people who supported the edict used a fundamentally exclusionary rhetoric that closed down all debate. It is not clear what we are supposed to derive from this analysis. Isn't it obvious, after all, that someone who opposes the status quo would want debate to continue, while someone who favors it would wish it to end?
Beyond the superficiality of this analysis, three serious problems plague Stange-Fayos's approach to the pamphlet war. First, in her telling, there was no real intertextuality at all, as the two sides just talked past each other, each asserting the significance of its respective value structures. We know, of course, which side she favors. Second, the author misses the historical change that the ensuing rhetorical battle itself represents. Martin Gierl, whose work Stange-Fayos unfortunately does not cite, has detailed how German academics in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries struggled to remove the polemical tone from academic debate.[8] Hence, by the early eighteenth century, most academics had become downright civilized in their writings. If there was a change in tone with the edict, and I believe there was, then the reasons for the change need to be explored, rather than judged. Finally, the evidence does not support Stange-Fayos's basic premise, which holds that opponents of the edict were more likely to use ridicule as a rhetorical strategy. Carl Friedrich Bahrdt's publication of a scandalous play on the edict, as well as the palpable shock that it engendered among many enlightened intellectuals, should have been included more fully in her analysis.[9]
Part 3, "La réception des édits dans la presse," shows much greater flexibility in the analysis and approach. Stange-Fayos begins by informing us how important the public sphere had become to eighteenth-century Europe. This assertion is not new, of course, though a fresh look at public debate through the Edict on Religion could tell us something new about the problems that publicity itself created in the late eighteenth century.[10] Stange-Fayos assumes correctly that the periodical press was subject to more constraints than the book or pamphlet press (pp. 272-273). A book could be published out of state, and under a false name, and still be sold in Prussia. Journals were, however, another story, since they were tied to one place, and the state could easily shut them down. An important historical insight could have emerged here: given the difficulty of a journal publisher's situation, we would expect to find a more ambiguous discussion and fewer open polemics against the edict. The best approach would then be to discuss the sources of the ambiguity and consider how they interacted with the ideological elements of the debate. Unfortunately, Stange-Fayos does not pursue this avenue.
Still, to her credit, Stange-Fayos notes the tensions that were fundamental to the journal debate and provides the reader with a useful discussion of the production that resulted. Her analysis of the journal articles and book reviews reveals that many "enlightened" institutions were suffused with a deep social unease. She rightly notes that many of the writers were as concerned about irresponsible "enlightened" publications as they were about a government crackdown. The reason for this sentiment was the concern that public intellectual disorder could lead to a more general uprising among the people (pp. 352-353). Here Stange-Fayos is on solid ground, though she tends to give more credence to official "enlightened" writers than to the edicts' obscurantist supporters. As a result, she fails to ask a few simple questions that could have enriched her analysis. For example, why could both sides in the debate not have been afraid of popular unrest? Why could this controversy not have been a debate about the proper limits of state power, rather than an existential fight over the Enlightenment? Seen from this perspective, the edicts could have been a response to social concerns that many in eighteenth-century Germany's elite, even some among the "enlightened," shared. Regardless, the point remains that Stange-Fayos does not use the contrary evidence that she presents to historicize her own critique against the so-called obscurantists.
The conclusion to Stange-Fayos's text offers an opportunity to weave together all of the criticisms I have made above. What we find in the conclusion is a rehash of the old "Party of the Enlightenment" rhetoric that undergirded works such as Ernst Cassirer's Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1932) and Paul Hazard's The European Mind, 1680-1715 (1935).[11] In late-eighteenth-century Germany, following Stange-Fayos, the intellectual world was divided between "les Aufklärer et leurs adversaires" (p. 362). She adds some nuance to this position by noting that some among the enlightened, such as Bahrdt, were getting out of hand. Nonetheless, she returns to the basic ideological commitments with which she began the text, holding that those who supported the edict were obscurantists and those opposed it were on the right side of history, because they were precursors to the tradition of nineteenth-century liberalism. In the end, the forces of light brought down this Empire, too.
Notes
[1]. T. J. Hochstrasser, Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
[2]. Ian Hunter, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early-Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
[3]. John H. Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
[4]. See, for example, Steven Lestition, "Kant and the End of Enlightenment in Prussia," Journal of Modern History 65 (1993): 57-112.
[5]. The classic work is Paul Schwartz, Der erste Kulturkampf in Preußen um Kirche und Schule (1788-1798) (Berlin: Weidmann, 1925); Paul Schwartz, "Die beiden Opfer des preußischen Religionsediktes vom 9. Juli 1788: J. H. Schulz in Gielsdorf und K. W. Brumbey in Berlin," Jahrbuch für Brandenburgische Kirchengeschichte 27 (1932): 102-155 and 28 (1933): 96-112. See also Martin Philippson, Geschichte des preußischen Staatswesens vom Tode Friedrich des Großen bis zu den Freiheitskriegen (Leipzig: Veit, 1880).
[6]. Missing from the index are the following essential works: Karlheinz Gerlach, "Die Berliner Freimaurer 1740-1806. Zur Sozialgeschichte der Freimaurerei in Brandenburg-Preußen," in Europa in der frühen Neuzeit. Festschrift für Günter Mühlpfordt, vol. 4, ed. Erich Donnert (Weimar: Böhlau, 1997); idem, "Die Freimaurer im Mittleren Brandenburg-Preußen 1775-1806 - Geschichte und Sozialstruktur," in Fridericianische Miniaturen, vol. 3, ed. Jürgen Ziechmann (Oldenburg: Edition Ziechmann, 1993); Peter Christian Ludz, ed., Geheime Gesellschaften, vol. V/1 (Heidelberg: Verlag Lambert Schneider, 1979); Christopher McIntosh, The Rose Cross and the Age of Reason: Eighteenth-Century Rosicrucianism in Central Europe and Its Relationship to the Enlightenment (Leiden: Brill, 1992); Monika Neugebauer-Wölk, Esoterische Bünde und bürgerliche Gesellschaft: Entwicklungslinien zur modernen Welt im Geheimbundwesen des 18. Jahrhunderts (Wolfenbüttel: Lessing-Akademie, 1995); Monika Neugebauer-Wölk and Holger Zaunstöck, eds., Aufklärung und Esoterik. Studien zum achtzehnten Jahrhundert (Hamburg: F. Meiner Verlag, 1999).
[7]. See the indispensable microfilm collection: Dirk Kemper, ed., Mißbrauchte Aufklärung? Schriften zum preußischen Religionsedikt vom 9. Juli 1788: 118 Schriften auf 202 Mikrofiches (Hildesheim: Olms Verlag, 1996).
[8]. Martin Gierl, Pietismus und Aufklärung. Theologische Polemik und die Kommunikationsreform der Wissenschaft am Ende des 17. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997).
[9]. Bahrdt's text is available in Carl Friedrich Bahrdt, The Edict of Religion: A Comedy and the Story and Diary of My Imprisonment, tr. John Christian Laursen and Johan van der Zande (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2000).
[10]. See, for example, the articles in Hans Erich Bödeker, Histoires du Livre: Nouvelles Orientations: Actes du Colloque du 6 et 7 Septembre 1990, Göttingen (Paris: IMEC Editions; Maison des sciences de l'homme: Distribution Distique, 1995).
[11]. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), originally published as Die Philosophie der Aufklärung (Tübingen: Mohr, 1932); Paul Hazard, The European Mind, 1680-1715 (London: Hollis & Carter, 1953), originally published as Paul Hazard, La Crise de la Conscience Européenne (1680-1715) (Paris: Boivin, 1935).
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Citation:
Michael J. Sauter. Review of Stange-Fayos, Christina, Lumières et Obscurantisme en Prusse: Le débat autour des édits de religion et de censure (1788-1797).
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
December, 2006.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=12656
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