“Savages Who Speak French”: Folklore, Primitivism and Morals in Robert Hertz

Abstract

Hertz’s analysis of the Alpine cult of Saint Besse apparently marks a break from his studies of death, sin and the left to folkloric studies. This analysis helps one to understand the personality of Robert Hertz. His sociological curiosity about folklore reveals his ambiguous position in social sciences at the beginning of the twentieth century. His text appears to be a variation from the Durkheimian norm, but another reading could suggest that Hertz continued and went beyond Durkheimian thought to something between sociology of the modern world and engaged socialism. Through this study, Hertz linked his political ideals, his work in ethnology and his desire for social involvement. The cult of Saint Besse perpetuated as much religious tradition as local identity. The Alpine people were presented in the text as wilful perpetuators of an ideal social order, whose loss for his contemporary city dwellers Hertz feared. The alpine Other, marked by a material and moral backwardness, represented for activist and socialist Hertz one of the paths of balanced social organization that stabilized the identity of a group across time if it fit rather well into the folkloric stereotypes of the beginning of the twentieth century. Finally, by linking events in Herz’s life (e.g., the accidental Alpine death of his father), this article suggests that the legend of Saint Besse embodied several recurring motifs in Hertz’ career: the accidental deaths of saint and father by falls, the military role of the saint and of Hertz himself.

Keywords:

• Robert Hertz
• French Sociology
• Folkloric Studies
• Social Order
• Saint Besse

Notes

[1] First published in Revue d’histoire des religions, Vol. 67, 1913. For a critical reading of this text, see Parkin (1996: 153–173); Belmont (2003). This text was long considered to be a secondary work by Durkheim and Mauss until its rediscovery by historical anthropology in the 1970s (e.g., Durkheim, 1975 [1916]: 441).

[2] FRH06.C.03.006, Douai, 20 September 1906. The archives of Robert Hertz (Fonds Robert Hertz = FRH) are available in Paris at the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale.

[3] FRH.06.C.03.007, Paris, 27 April 1907.

[4] FRH.06.C.01.048, Paris, 19 May 1912.

[5] FRH.02.C.05.0046, Cogne, 29 August 1912.

[6] Regarding Arnold van Gennep and the Alps, see Privat (2003).

[7] Lamberto Loria, founder of Italian folklore and ethnography, went from exotic ethnography (Caucasus, Papuasia and New Guinea) to the European field and in particular to Italian folklore around 1905 (Ciambelli & Jalla, 2003: 172). Louis Dumont offers the counter example (certainly a later one) of the passage from French folklore to the Indianist field with a constant back and forth movement between the two poles of his sociological interest (see Rousseleau, 2003). For uniquely Europeanist careers, see, e.g., the cases of Alessandro Roccavilla studied by Albera and Ottaviano (1989) or Paul Sébillot by Voisenat (2001–2002).

[8] In parallel, Hertz’ opening to folklore was not highly valued by Mauss because Saint Besse was always considered a work of distraction (Parkin, 1996: 153–154) when compared to Hertz’ serious work of compiling exoticism: “To distract himself from the serious work (his thesis), Hertz amused himself with folklore and mythology. By this we mean living folklore, where he could use his faculties, not only sociological, but also as an observer. His delicious ‘Saint Besse’, his ‘Notes on folklore’, observations made about ‘his people’ that he sent back to his wife, and that the Revue des traditions populaires published in 1915, were for him a way of passing the time” (Mauss, 1969b [1922]: 494–495). Durkheim had the same judgment: “On his way, a completely fortuitous incident occurred that distracted his thinking, for a moment, towards a new object [the cult of Saint Besse]” (Durkheim, 1975 [1916]: 441). Abry and Joisten (2003: 273–274) recently nuanced this Durkheimian interpretation of the European work of Hertz.

[9] The case of Stephan Czarnowski, a student of the same school, is relatively parallel to that of Hertz. His study of the cult of Saint Patrick in Ireland was strongly criticized by Henri Hubert in the introduction to the work of his student (see Czarnowski (1919) for the original text and Maître (1966: 64–65) for the analysis).

[10] A historian of art, known mainly for his monumental Iconographie de l’art chrétien (1957–1959). He dedicated his book about early German painters to Robert Hertz in 1910.

[11] FRH.06.C.05.010, Loctudy, La petite forêt, 1 August 1910.

[12] FRH.20.C.04.004, Loctudy, 11 September 1910.

[13] FRH.06.C.01.040, Paris, 2 July 1911, cited in Riley (2001–2002: 133).

[14] Brother‐in‐law of Robert Hertz, married to Cécile Hertz (see Besnard & Riley, 2002: 41).

[15] FRH.02.C.05.0046, Cogne, 29 August 1912. Letter partially cited in Belmont (2003: 79).

[16] FRH.02.C.05.0049, Abriès, 28 July 1913.

[17] For a view of the whole of these new kinds of dynamism on the part of inhabitants of mountain zones, see, in the field of migrations, Albera and Corti (2000); Granet‐Abisset (1994). For an exploration of the questioning of these stereotypes, see Pelen (2001).

[18] FRH.11.D.04, Témoignages d’informateurs et notes sur la fouillasse, 359, 360, 362, 363, 366, 368, 370, 381, 382, 391, 393/850.

[19] For a synthesis of these theories, see Van Gennep (1909: 17).

[20] In the scientific context of the beginning of the twentieth century, primitive Otherness appeared as a heuristic and moral concept: “What in the end guided ethnologists was research, the quest for another time, the quest for societies of another time, for the time the most distant from the one that seemed like ours, for a time close to the origin, for a disappeared time somehow miraculously conserved by certain groups miraculously preserved both from evolution and from civilization. Beyond space, the Other but the most Other, it is at the end of time that we seek this, and it is via the one farthest away that one looks for this” (Paul‐Lévy, 1986: 280).

[21] When he evoked Hertz’ pessimism (Parkin, 1996: 2).

[22] FRH.06.C.01.008, Paris, 26 July 1899.

[23] FRH.06.C.01.009, Les Petites Dalles, 10 August 1899.

[24] FRH.02.C.01.045, Les Petites Dalles, 14 August 1899.

[25] FRH.19.C.01 to 22.C.06, from c. 1904 to c. 1920.

[26] Hertz (1928: xii) and the archives files FRH.10.N.01.001 to 006.

[27] On the one hand, the advocates of sharing the general engagement in the 1914 conflict developed the notion of “culture de guerre” (Audoin‐Rouzeau & Becker, 2000; Audoin‐Rouzeau et al., 2002), although, following mainly Frédérique Rousseau (1999, 2003; Cazals & Rousseau, 2001), this notion was seen in a larger perspective.