The Man Who Lost Himself. Beaunier André
something of a cliché, but Beaunier’s attempt to use it as a diagnosis of a more general social malaise, and to make science itself, rather than excessive individual devotion to it, into a dire threat essentially inimical to human life, was much more extravagant than the argument’s routine course.
As a devout Catholic—and, more particularly, as a Catholic whose belief had wavered in adolescence and young adulthood before being reaffirmed, all more zealously in consequence—Beaunier was far from being alone in his resentment of the manner in which propaganda in favor of science had generally been closely interlinked in France with a particular hostility to Catholicism. From Voltaire’s scathing satires through August Comte’s philosophical championship of “positivism” to Ernest Renan’s skeptical analyses of Scriptural history, the two campaigns had marched in step. Renan’s book L’Avenir de la science: pensées de 1848 (1890; tr. as The Future of Science), which is cited as a significant negative inspiration in Beaunier’s dedicatory preface, was so widely considered as an anti-Clerical text that its proto-futurological aspects were largely ignored; the notion that future history would be shaped by progressive developments in science rather than by the moralistic authority of religion was debated as a blasphemy rather than an empirical hypothesis. Most of the defenders of the faith were, however, consciously handicapped by their awareness that the empirical hypothesis did have a good deal of persuasive evidence in its favor. Beaunier was exceptional in being willing to try, at least as an experiment, to reject that evidence and argue that, in fact, science was not only not progressive but not even relevant to human life, and that insofar as it was thought to be progressive and relevant, it was inimical.
It is difficult to believe that Beaunier actually believed that, or even that the narrative voice he adopted in L’Homme qui a perdu son moi really believes it, in spite of its insistent protests, but at the very least he tried it out for size. He was, at least temporarily, prepared to consider seriously the argument that because science calls religious faith into question, it is therefore completely “inhuman,” and thus intrinsically evil. His novel can be seen as a personal thought-experiment conducted to test that proposition, and from that viewpoint, its method and its result are interestingly confused.
What the novel calls “science” it represents as a relatively recent invention, and is, in fact, closely connected with the evolution of the idea of a “scientist”: a specialist professional practitioner of “science.” That notion had emerged along with the idea and evidence of the profession; in English the word “scientist” was coined in the 1820s by William Whewell, but it is arguable that the coinage was slightly belated, the idea dating back to the latter decades of the eighteenth century, when experimental chemistry conclusively replaced mystical alchemy and the modern theory of the chemical elements replaced Classical elementary theory. As soon as there were “scientists,” however, in reality and in literary representation, they quickly acquired a set of supposedly-typical characteristics, partly borrowed from traditional images of wizardy (all the great proto-scientists of the Renaissance tended to be stigmatized as sorcerers and suspected of having made real or metaphorical Faustian pacts with the Devil) but mostly based on wry empirical observation.
The supposedly typical psychology of the scientist was analyzed in France by early proto-psychologists, especially the pioneers of “retrospective diagnosis” François Lélut and François Leuret, who were keenly interested in the supposed relationship between genius and madness, and by scientists themselves, notably Henri Poincaré, another writer cited in Beaunier’s preface and footnotes. It was also, however, a key element of the early development of the French roman scientifique, which rapidly established a kind of standard portrait of “the scientist.” That stereotype is explicitly and carefully delineated in Samuel Henri Berthoud’s “Voyage au ciel” (1841; tr. as “A Heavenward Voyage”) and “Le Second soleil” (c1860; tr. as “The Second Sun”), which are essentially psychological case-studies cast as allegorical fiction, but it was given more relaxed and popular representation in the works of Jules Verne, notably in the characterization of Professor Lidenbrock in Voyage au centre de la terre (1864; rev. 1867; tr. as Journey to the Center of the Earth) and Professor Aronnax in Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1870; tr. as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea).
There is a remarkable unanimity about such fictional images, which represent scientists as people at least distracted and often completed isolated from the cares of social and domestic life by their cerebration, as obsessive in their quotidian habits as in their tireless research endeavors, so inattentive to formal etiquette that everyone around them is liable to regard them as eccentric, if not mad. Such characters are usually well-meaning, and often philanthropic, sometimes even beloved, but they are also seen as dangerous, to others as well as themselves, because of their negligence and lack of “common sense”—and they are seen as sadly vulnerable to more extreme forms of anti-sociality, as exemplified by Professor Aronnax’s bizarre counterpart, Captain Nemo.
Real scientists are, of course, very variable as individuals, and this image is a caricature, but like all caricatures, it does exaggerate something real and fairly typical. Enough actual scientists bear enough resemblance to the stereotype to support it. The literary image of the scientist that became standardized with remarkable rapidity, however, did not assert that the alleged psychological peculiarities of the scientist polluted his science—quite the contrary. Much is frequently made in romans scientifiques of the fact that these strange, inept, rather quaint individuals, who cannot button their waistcoats properly, nevertheless produce something sublime, magnificent and useful, sometimes without meaning to or even being conscious of it. Insofar as the nineteenth-century roman scientifique began to build a myth of science as well as an image of the scientist, that myth is one of beautiful order emerging out of droll confusion, and great boons out of side-effects, the cardinal historical examples being the applications of mechanics, optics and electromagnetism to locomotion, work and both literal and figurative illumination.
In the twentieth century, that dichotomy came to seem less manifest, especially during the Great War, when the applications of science to mass murder became very obvious indeed, and the supposed intrinsic vulnerability of scientists to moral oblivion and outright madness much more dangerous, but in 1911, that tide had not yet turned, and Beaunier was exceptional. His stance was unusual not so much because he was skeptical of the assumption that technological and social progress went hand in hand, but because he made no use whatsoever of the best argument available to support that case: the proposition that, in giving humans more power, the technological applications of science were enhancing the destructive potential of political oppression and conflict. Indeed, he did not even take advantage of the argument that the contributions so far made by science to medical efficacy were largely illusory, which would have seemed far more plausible in 1911 than it does now. Instead, he not only conceded but emphasized the claim that applied science can not only produce effective medical treatments but is potentially capable of producing quasi-miraculous cures.
This concession creates tremendous difficulties for the narrative voice of L’Homme qui a perdu son moi in its apparent assertion that the attempts by the protagonist’s mentor to argue that such effects are irrelevant—a position not even supported by the protagonist while he retains some semblance of sanity—are more than a mere psychological quirk, but somehow reflective of science itself and thus of a threat to the collective sanity of humankind. It is that strange confusion and conflict of ideas that makes the novel uniquely interesting as a specimen of the thought of its era.
Just as he was born a few years too late to participate in the heyday of Symbolism, Beaunier came into salon society a little too late to catch the days when scientists and littérateurs routinely mingled freely in Parisian salons. Even so, it is perhaps slightly surprising that his enormous list of acquaintances does not seem to have included Gustave Le Bon, who was a familiar face in several notable salons in the early 1900s and whose book L’Évolution de la matière (1905; tr. as The Evolution of Matter) is strikingly relevant to the theme of L’Homme qui a perdu son moi; its consultation might have enabled Beaunier to make his account of Michel’s theoretical development of the properties of sirium far less vague and considerable more interesting. Indeed, for a novel that is supposedly about science, in a determinedly serious fashion, L’Homme qui a perdu son moi manifests a remarkable near-total ignorance of what scientific work actually involves, what contemporary scientific