In this slow news week—yes, I am being ironic--and with the Princeton Commencement now behind us, I find myself reflecting a bit on the state of American higher education. I did find myself rather dispirited by some of the Gaza sit-ins for the ease with which they reduced agonizing complexity to a spurious moral clarity of virtue signaling. Education can and perhaps must lead to passionately held opinions; but without reflection, discrimination, and the nuanced differentiation of alternatives, those opinions seldom lead to enlightenment. There is a reason that famous quotations become famous, as is that of John Stuart Mill: “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.” I have been thinking about the nature of higher education from a rather old-fashioned perspective—considering its potential for social utility as perhaps opposed to social advancement. And I have been pondering with increasing admiration the Grandes Écoles of France, often regarded as insufferable bastions of elitism. These “Great Schools” of advanced study have essentially created the bureaucratic and intellectual elite of a major nation. I’ll get back to them, or at least one of them, in a moment.
It is a little more than a year ago that I was so immersed in studying the works of the late medieval French poet François Villon (1431-1463?) that I wrote a blog essay about him. There are many things to be said about him. He is a unique figure in the history of European poetry, and as a documented “bad boy”—indeed a capital criminal!—he has seemed especially attractive to those who enjoy a streak of the transgressive in their favorite artists. What is perhaps most remarkable about him is that—given his social obscurity—we know so much about him.
It is not surprising that the documentation of a figure like Chaucer is voluminous enough to require a heavy book (Chaucer Life Records.) That is mainly to be explained by the fact that he was a prominent man in what we call the real world; only some of his fame and reputation derived from his poetry. Chaucer even had a legal document attesting that he had not raped Cecily Chaumpaigne, as confirmed by Cecily herself. (Naturally such a curious document has encouraged scholars of a certain bent to conclude that Chaucer was a rapist—or at least a kidnapper, as the Latin raptus might mean either.) On the other hand, William Langland, Chaucer’s great contemporary, the author of Piers Plowman, is obscure almost to the vanishing point. We are not even entirely sure that the name is right.
But how is it that we know so much about Villon, a citizen much less prominent than Chaucer? And why does so much of that knowledge date precisely from the decade of the 1870s—just in time to make Villon a kind of “culture hero” for a number of the more edgy writers of the French Third Republic and in the high Victorian era in Britain? Part of the answer is that nasty always seems more interesting than nice. Villon was not exactly nasty, but he was certainly wicked. He was a violent felon (homicide) and habitual criminal (thief). And among the most thorough bureaucrats in late medieval France, and probably in most other places and periods, were the police authorities. They kept voluminous records. But it is one thing for the police to write things down. It is quite another for scholars to be able to find them four hundred years later. This where Napoleon and the Grandes Écoles enter the picture.
For such a bad man, Napoleon had a remarkable number of good ideas. He was in his own peculiar way an heir of the Enlightenment. Perhaps because he was so convinced of his own historical importance, he saw the desirability of carefully conserving all the national records of France. He was very keen on the preservation of archives, beginning with his own. He was also aware of the tremendous damage inflicted on the “national patrimony” by the Revolution, the destruction or dispersal of so many monastic libraries and royal offices, and the looting and vandalism of the seats of aristocrats. He thought that there ought to be a special branch of study that would train scholars in the discovery, decipherment, exploitation, and preservation of old documents. This aspiration was achieved by Louis XVIII—quite without reference to Napoleon of course, a couple of months before Napoleon’s death in 1821—with the establishment of the École Nationale des Chartes (The National School of Charters). The French word charte, deriving from Latin carta as in Magna Carta, came to be applied to all manner of old legal documents. So the province of the chartist institution was, and is, the study, decipherment, and publication of historical records of all sorts, not just charters. Naturally a school of documentary studies required of its small and highly select group of students and professors serious linguistic skills (especially in Latin), wide historical knowledge, and paleographic expertise. It makes these same demands today. The description of a “chartiste” may sound like Professor Dry-as-Dust on steroids, or at the very best Melville’s “sub-sub librarian,” and I have heard some hip contemporary scholars speak of it in those scornful tones, but its achievements have to dazzle any medievalist.
In any event, in the 1870s a chartist named Auguste Longnon published two breakthrough books about Villon. One was mainly about the historical figures who feature in Villon’s most famous poem, his semi-mock, but only semi, last will and testament. Here was a window on a seldom viewed life of the medieval Parisian demi-monde. The other book was entitled “A Biographical Study of F. Villon Based on Unedited Documents in the National Archives.” These were preparatory studies for a major edition of Villon’s poems that Longnon published in 1892. Of course scholarship is mostly tentative and dated. Only a few scholarly books have an indefinite shelf life. Such books (Darwin’s Origin of Species, say) then often are culturally upgraded and move on to become the objects of intense scholarship themselves. Longnon’s biographical studies have long since been left behind. I had to appeal to one of my own indispensable sub-sub librarians—a priceless if too often unsung asset category in any serious university--to search it out in a rarely visited depository annex. But not one of the many biographies that have superseded Longnon’s could have been written without his work and that of others like him, scholars trained at the École des Chartes or in institutions molded by its spirit. For me as a scholar it is rather exhilarating to know that, for some moments, even I myself have briefly carried the baton in some worthy effort or other, to attempt some small increment, the grand totality of which is what Francis Bacon called “the advancement of learning.” It is only since our own daughter became the chief executive of one of one of America’s major institutions of cultural curation that I have begun to appreciate some of the wider implications, challenges, and ambiguities of our difficult but essential accommodations of the past to the present. Institutions dedicated to this subtle but crucial task deserve the admiration and support of all thoughtful people.
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