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In his patchwork treatise Le Roman de l’avenir (1834; tr. as The Novel of the Future), which attempted to establish a new prospectus for the fiction of the future—in both senses of the phrase—Félix Bodin wrote off all previous futuristic fiction as “utopias” or “apocalypses,” both of which forms he considered ripe for replacement. Because he wrote his (uncompleted) text before publication, it was out of date before publication. In 1833, Charles Nodier published two elements of an (uncompleted) text entitled “Perfectibilité” in the Revue de Paris, which was not a utopia but a subversive anti-utopia, and Edgar Quinet published excerpts from his epic Ahasvérus in the Revue des Deux Mondes (published in full in book form the following year), which is an anti-apocalypse, at least in the sense that it intended to make all past and future apocalypses redundant. As if to add insult to injury, the two works were initially published in the two principal organs of the French Romantic Movement, whose philosophical influence Bodin had come to deem pernicious and dangerous to his own quest for a rational future of social progress equipped with a fiction to match.
Ahasvérus borrows its central motif from a familiar legend, first written down in the thirteenth century but given a new lease on life after the advent of printing by a German pamphlet in 1605, translated into French in 1609. Most of the French reprints of the pamphlet added to it a complainte—a lyrical lament—that took on a subsequent life of its own and spawned many imitations, one of which was attached to an image d’Épinal, a popular print that sold in vast quantities via a network of colporteurs (wandering hawkers). A new ballad with the same subject was published in 1831 by Pierre Béranger, then France’s most popular songwriter. That was the year in which Quinet began to write his own Ahasvérus, although he had planned to write a novel on the same theme a decade earlier, which he had reluctantly reduced to a short story, “Tablettes du juif errant” [“Pages from the Wandering Jew’s Notebook”] (1823) when he could not interest a publisher in the larger project. The new Ahasvérus was, however, written to a very different prospectus; it was epic in dramatic form, not in the verse format that epics still adopted conventionally, but in prose.
The story told in Ahasvérus—preceded by a prelude in which the Eternal Father, his angels, and the saints are imagined to be conducting a critical review of his work—begins with the Creation of the world, here considered as the morning of a “First Day,” that extends to Christ’s birth and the visit of the Mage-Kings. With only two intermediate pauses for detailed examination, which are separated by a series of interludes extraneous to the text, it then proceeds to the traditional terminus of the Last Judgment, here represented as the greater part of “The Fourth Day.”
The Second Day of Quinet’s schema—which is the shortest—is entitled “The Passion,” and it deals with the cursing of Ahasvérus by Christ and the aftermath of the crucifixion, culminating in the fall of the Roman Empire. The Third Day, entitled “Death,” describes how Ahasvérus, temporarily becalmed in Worms following the death of his horse but not freed from the whiplash of the fatal exhortation “Further on! Further on!”, falls in love with Rachel, a fallen angel who was exiled from Heaven because she felt sorry for him when he was cursed and is now living with Death—here represented as an old crone named Mob—as her skivvy. Rachel does not recognize Ahasvérus immediately, having forgotten most of her past, and Ahasvérus does not recognize Mob as Death; all is melodramatically revealed, however, when Mob hauls the two not-so-young lovers off to Strasbourg Cathedral to be married, where they interrupt a dance of the dead; a pope co-opted from the dance cannot complete the marriage ceremony because Ahasvérus is incapable of saying his name and is outed by Christ, speaking from a stained-glass window.
The schema then skips directly to the Last Judgment, but Quinet does not stop there as previous literary visionaries of the Apocalypse had felt obliged to do. In his epic, the Last Judgment is no sooner complete than it is appealed and set aside. The collective verdict passed on the human race by the Eternal Father is supplemented by an individual judgment of Ahasvérus by Christ, which comes to a different conclusion when Christ, having forgiven Ahasvérus, asks him what he wants now that he is finally free to choose—but even that is not the end of the story. Having overturned the traditional Last Judgment and substituted a far less definite one, more in keeping with modern ideas, the author continued his narrative to provide a further coda, describing what was bound to happen after the revised Judgment.
That tripartite climax went far beyond all previous literary and theological ambition, and deliberately so. Quinet planned his endeavor from the outset as something uniquely far-reaching, and it was trumpeted as such even before its full publication. The Revue des Deux Mondes published a long review-essay of the book in December 1833, ahead of its publication, by the critic Charles Magnin: “Ahasvérus et de la nature du génie poétique” [“Ahasvérus and the Nature of Poetic Genius”]. Magnin’s essay was reprinted as a preface to the second edition of Ahasvérus in 1843 and again in the version included in Quinet’s Oeuvres complètes in 1858. The essay has thus remained firmly associated with it ever since, ensuring that the text has long been accompanied by a certification, not merely of its ambition but of its genius.
The work’s claim to literary genius was not endorsed by all the contemporary critics, and the tripartite climax made the work seem dangerously heretical to some religious believers. The work’s sheer peculiarity meant that many readers simply did not know what to think about it, finding it too alien for comfortable analysis. Even if it is considered to be merely bizarre, the extremity of Ahasvérus’ bizarrerie established it as a literary landmark, but had it been translated into English in the 1830s, it would have risked prosecution on a charge of “blasphemous libel”—the charge that suppressed the full version of Percy Shelley’s “Queen Mab,” one of the few works with which Ahasvérus bears some slight comparison. That avoidance extended throughout the twentieth century, long after the danger had passed.
Edgar Quinet was born on 17 February 1803 at Bourg-en-Bresse in the Ain. His mother’s family was Protestant, his father’s Catholic; although Quinet was received into the Catholic Church, taking his first communion, his personal beliefs seem to have been in conflict even then and remained conflicted throughout his life. His father was a fervent republican who had resigned his commission in the army after Napoléon’s coup in order to devote himself to scientific studies. In spite of his own resignation and although he had left Edgar almost entirely to the care of his mother previously, Jérôme Quinet wanted his son to go into the army after finishing his studies in Bourg and the Collège de Lyon. But Edgar wanted to go his own way, and was already nursing literary ambitions at the age of seventeen. The subsequent dispute soured his relationship with his father permanently and made Edgar’s previously close relationship with his mother increasingly awkward.
Jérôme Quinet initially accompanied his son to Paris in 1820 in order to enroll him in the École Polytechnique but was persuaded to compromise and allow him to study law instead. As soon as he was left to his own devices, though, Edgar began to neglect the narrow curriculum prescribed for law students in order to develop much wider scholarly interests and attempt to deploy his literary talents. Quinet became something of a wanderer himself after publishing the Tablettes—a circumstance whose irony did not escape him.
Quinet’s original intention in setting out on his travels was to go to America, but he went to England first with the plan of obtaining a passage from there to New York after a brief sojourn to perfect his knowledge of the English language. He was, however, obliged to return to France when his sister fell dangerously ill; he subsequently changed direction and went to Germany, where he spent a good deal of time in the late 1820s. That change of agenda was inspired by the fact that while he was in England, he read an English translation of Johann Gotttfried Herder’s Indeen zur Philosophie der Geschichte de Mensscheit [Outlines of the Philosophy of the History of Humankind], which struck him with the force of a revelation. Quinet began work almost immediately on a French translation, although he had to learn German in order to do it, and he went to Germany partly to secure that education and partly to track Herder’s work, as it were, to its source in German idealistic philosophy and the German Romantic Movement—or, as it was represented in Herder’s day, as the Sturm und Drang [Storm and Stress] movement.
Herder, born in 1744, had been a student of Immanuel Kant at the University of Königsberg but had become a protégé of Kant’s less famous colleague Johann Hamann, whose inclinations were far more mystical and who was more interested in the emotions than the “pure” and “practical” reasoning of which Kant produced his two epoch-making analyses. Herder did, however, retain enough Kantian influence to import a strong element of rational pretention into his analyses, whose initial target was German literature and its history. It was that interest which brought him into contact with Johann Wolfgang Goethe in 1770, and it was his crucial influence on Goethe’s literary endeavors that founded the Sturm und Drang movement and gave birth to German Romanticism. This conjuncture ensured the strong influence of Idealistic philosophy and a marked interest in national folklore as a key to the evolution of national identity. Although Herder insisted that history could and ought to be a science, he was also insistent that it was essentially the history of ideas rather than mere events and that ideas were the true actors in history. Human collectives were the embodiments of those ideas and individual humans merely microcosms reflecting the macrocosmic ideas of their religions and nations.
That approach to history was crucial to Quinet’s conceptualization of Ahasvérus and is essential to the understanding of it; the “characters” in the epic are ideas, which have their own evolutionary dynamic, and the material entities featured therein—which include cities and natural phenomena as well as human and unhuman individuals—are essentially symbolic expressions or representations of those ideas. Such eccentrically loquacious voices as the various cities, the Ocean, Strasbourg Cathedral, and “Mob” can all meet and converse on more-or-less equal terms within the framework of the drama, which is set in a hypothetical mindspace rather than scenes sketched in the backcloths of an imagined stage.
Although Herder and Quinet were not as extreme in their philosophical idealism as Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who argued that Kant’s notion of a “noumenal” world of things-in-themselves ought to be rejected, in accordance with the recognition that consciousness can have no reliable grounding outside its own contents (solipsism), there is a sense in which Ahasvérus is a thoroughly solipsistic work, set entirely within the consciousness of its author or reader, not merely in the inevitable and trivial sense that all literary works are essentially immaterial, but in a deliberate and methodical manner.
Because literary endeavor is a kind of “secondary creation” (as Alexander Baumgarten put it), no literary work can contain a “real world” and “God” can never be more, in any literary work, than a character enslaved to the author’s notion of him. None the less, most authors nevertheless insist on maintaining the pretense that they are writing about an external “primary creation,” which they are doing their utmost to represent accurately. Ahasvérus makes no such pretense; within Quinet’s work, the secondary world of his fiction is simply and manifestly a nexus of ideas, and God, like Ahasvérus, the sea and the stones in the road, is simply an idea within it, operating purely in relationship to other ideas. The question of God’s possible real existence outside the text is simply not an issue, any more than the question of whether there ever really was a Wandering Jew.
Quinet’s translation of Herder was brought to the attention, in advance of its publication, of the philosopher Victor Cousin (1792–1867), who was also famous as a great orator and educationalist. Although Cousin had by then rejected the Idealistic philosophy that had once fascinated him, he had retained a strong scholarly interest in it, and he saw Quinet’s philosophical pilgrimage to Germany—which had included meetings with Goethe, Ludwig Tieck, and other contemporary stars of the Romantic Movement—as the echo of one he had made himself, in order to meet Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Schelling. Cousin immediately took Quinet under his wing, and introduced him to other members of his intellectual circle.
The most important contact Quinet made via Cousin’s patronage was another ambitious young historian, Jules Michelet, with whom he formed a lifelong friendship of great importance to both writers. Cousin also introduced him to the famous salon-keeper Madame Récamier and her great friend René Chateaubriand, hailed by the members of the French Romantic Movement as their founding father and author of the influential Génie de Christianisme (1802; tr. as The Genius of Christianity), another work that Quinet had found inspiring, and on whose intellectual legacy he tried to build.
Cousin also brought Quinet into contact with Pierre-Simon Ballanche, another unorthodox historian attempting to develop a theoretical overview of human evolution. In that quest, Ballanche had given a crucial role to the notion of “palingenesis,” or successive regeneration, by means of which he tried to combine two theses then generally seen as competing rivals: the assertion that all civilizations went through a kind of life-cycle in which they were doomed to decadence once they had passed their peak, and the notions of continual social progress based on technological and scientific advancement.
Like Herder, Ballanche did not live long enough to finish his intended masterwork explaining the palingenetic history of humankind, but he did contrive to produce a sketch of it in literary form, La Vision d’Hébal (1931; tr. as Hébal’s Vision), with which Quinet must have been familiar and which might well have helped to prompt him to plan his own literary sketch of his very different thesis. Like Ahasvérus, La Vision d’Hébal begins with the Creation and proceeds to a futuristic Last Judgment, but the devout Ballanche’s last judgment really is final, providing a justificatory “explanation” of the vicissitudes of human history in which the continual rise and fall of civilizations is explained as a necessary epicycle with a progressive pattern that ultimately leads to a triumphant, Christ-assisted redemption. The argument of Ahasvérus is a flat contradiction of Ballanche’s thesis; in Quinet’s skeptical thinking, humankind does not stand in need of moral redemption but of imaginative liberation. In the final analysis, the idea of a determined divine judgment, however well-intentioned and useful it might once have been as a moral spur, is a shackle that would be better cast off and left behind in favor of an open, uncertain future.
Victor Cousin also used his social influence to further Quinet’s travels by obtaining an appointment for him in 1829 to accompany a government mission to Greece, which was then attempting to obtain independence from the Ottoman Empire. With that experience behind him, Quinet hoped to obtain a government post in France after the “July Revolution” of 1830, but the outcome of that upheaval—which replaced the superannuated Bourbon dynasty with the more liberal monarchy of Louis-Philippe—proved disappointingly slight to the staunchly republican Quinet, and his views were apparently considered far too radical for him to be given any further political appointment. He joined the staff of the Revue des Deux Mondes instead, immediately beginning to contribute substantial articles on various historical and political topics, including “De l’avenir des religions [“On the Future of Religions”] (1831) and “L’Avenir de l’art” [“The Future of Art”] (1832). He had already followed up his Herder translation with a book researched during his excursion to Greece, De la Grèce moderne, et ses rapports avec l’antiquité [On Modern Greece and its relationship with Antiquity] (1830), and he also produced De l’Allemagne et de la Révolution [On Germany and Revolution] (1832) before completing Ahasvérus.
Shortly after publishing Ahasvérus in 1834, Quinet married Minna Moré, whom he had first glimpsed at a concert in Germany some years before and with whom he had fallen in love at first sight, although their subsequent relationship had proved direly difficult because of parental opposition on both sides, partly occasioned by the fact that he was nominally a Catholic while her family was Protestant (they were eventually married in a Protestant ceremony). Given the solipsistic quality of the project, it is entirely natural that Quinet’s relationship with Minna and the problems surrounding it should have had just as much influence on the drama’s contents as any of the historical and philosophical issues developed therein, and it is a much stronger work in consequence. The intensity of the relationship between Ahasvérus and Rachel, clearly reproducing essential sentimental elements of the relationship between Quinet and Minna as he perceived it in 1831–33, is no mere supplement to Quinet’s philosophical considerations regarding the pattern of human social evolution and the motor of history but is inextricably bound up with them.
It is important to bear in mind while reading Ahasvérus—especially the episode in which Mob takes Ahasvérus and Rachel to Strasbourg—that when Quinet wrote it, he did not know that he would eventually be able to marry Minna and undoubtedly dreaded, even if he was not actually convinced, that he would not. The interlude between the third and fourth days when Quinet appears in the drama as “The Poet” is a frank expression of despair that he would ever be able to attain that goal. It needs to be remembered in reading Ahasvérus that when Quinet wrote the book he was deeply unhappy and very far from any confidence that he would eventually be cured of that unhappiness—as, in fact, he was, by his subsequent marriage. The epic quality of Ashavérus inevitably invites comparison with Goethe’s epic drama Faust, but there are also marked echoes in its more personal episodes of Goethe’s other Sturm und Drang classic, the maudlin, sentimental melodrama Die Lieden des jungen Werthers (1774; tr. as The Sorrows of Young Werther).
Because the limited time that Quinet spent in France during the late 1820s was largely absorbed by his family and the social contacts he made via Victor Cousin, his communication with the other literary figures who came to constitute the Romantic Movement in that period was limited. The one he knew best was Jules Janin, the pioneer of roman frénétique [frantic fiction], of whom he had twice been a schoolfellow, once at school in Lyon and then again while studying law in Paris. Quinet’s biographers report that when Janin heard in 1831 that Quinet intended to begin a work of imaginative fiction, he immediately volunteered to collaborate on it but that Quinet refused.
By 1831, Quinet was certainly acquainted with Victor Hugo with whose political ideas he had a good deal in common, but he does not seem to have attended the cénacle that Hugo hosted. Information is, however, a trifle sparse; when Quinet eventually began to write the autobiography on which most of his subsequent biographers relied for information—which he never finished although he thought that he ought to include it in his Oeuvres complètes regardless—he titled it, perhaps inevitably, Histoire de mes idées [The History of My Ideas]. He concentrated entirely on his intellectual development and the influence thereon on his father, his mother, and the books he read, giving no details at all of his social life beyond recording his debt to Cousin and Michelet and none of his personal life, making only slight passing references to Minna. Although some further personal details were added to the record by two belated memoirs written by Quinet’s second wife, Hermione Asachi, whom he married after Minna’s death in the 1860s, they are inevitably scant and skewed in their perspective.
In spite of the lack of any close social relationship, however, Quinet can certainly be seen as a key member of the Romantic Movement as it took wing in the early 1830s, and was definitely seen as such at the time by virtue of his association with the Revue des Deux Mondes. Quinet and Michelet can be considered to have formed the hard core of the “historical wing” of the movement along with Hugo’s close friend Paul Lacroix, who signed his most of his books “P. L. Jacob, Bibliophile.” Although there was probably little direct communication between the writers during the process of composition, it is of some significance that, as well as following hot on the heels of Ballanche’s Vision d’Hébal, Ahasvérus was approximately contemporary with Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris—1482 (1832; aka The Hunchback of Notre Dame) and Lacroix’s Danse macabre (1833) and has echoes of both of them, especially in the scene in which a cathedral becomes a key symbolic location, playing host to the dance of the dead. As an item of Romantic prose, Ahasvérus was a key contribution to the sudden and spectacular flowering of activity in that regard, outstripping the rest in narrative bizarrerie as well as philosophical ambition.
Although he was not unsympathetic to the historical role played by religions, which he considered to be vitally important to social evolution, Quinet’s hostility to certain aspects of Catholic faith won him even more enemies than his political radicalism; Ahasvérus can be read as an atheistic and anti-Christian work although that is probably not the right way to read it. Anyone inclined to suspect the work of anti-Christian inclinations would not, however, have been reassured by the author’s subsequent exploits as a polemicist, and there must have been a temptation to tar him with the same brush as Alphonse de Lamartine and Victor Hugo, both of whom eventually took skepticism to the extreme of producing literary works explicitly sympathetic to Satan’s rebellion against divine authority, in La Chute d’un ange [The Fall of an Angel] (1838) and La Fin de Satan [The End of Satan] (incomplete; written 1854–62; published 1886) respectively.
That temptation would have been greatly increased by the obvious debt owed by Quinet’s characterization of the fallen angel Rachel to Alfred de Musset’s classic sympathetic depiction of a female fallen angel in the long poem “Eloa” (1824). It is, however, worth stressing that one symbolic character conspicuous by his absence from the ideative schema of Ahasvérus is Satan. Although one of the interludes features a devils’ dance in which Lucifer takes part, he remains firmly outside the story, confined to that insignificant annex; he comments dismissively on the plot from without, but that only serves to emphasize his lack of involvement in it. Quinet’s imaginary history pays no attention to any War in Heaven and does not equip God with an adversary. Ahasvérus is not a rebel against divine authority, although he is a victim of it, and the historical schema of which he is an element features no active evil but only a failure to live up to the highest standards of good—a failure of which Christ is arguably just as guilty as the man he curses. Unlike Eloa and many other fallen angels featured in Romantic literature, Rachel does not fall from Heaven out of mistaken sympathy for a handsome rebel angel but by virtue of innocent sympathy for a wretched human being.
The “hypothetical theology” of Ahasvérus is, in fact, radically un-Christian in that it ignores the entire facet of Christian mythology related to active diabolism; it contains not the slightest hint of Manichaeism. Human sins, in this schema, are purely human, not occasioned by any deliberate external temptation and not to be subject to any demonic punishment. That not only separates Ahasvérus from the mainstream of the Romantic Movement as it was to continue in such masterworks of literary Satanism as Gustave Flaubert’s La Tentation de saint Antoine (1874; tr. as The Temptation of Saint Anthony) and Anatole France’s La Révolte des anges (1914; tr. as The Revolt of the Angels) but also from the entire Christian epic tradition prior to the evolution of the movement, extending from Dante’s Divina Comedia (written c. 1308–1321) through Joost van den Vondel’s Lucifer (1654), John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) and Friedrich Klopstock’s Der Messias (1748–73) to Goethe’s Faust (Part I 1806; Part II 1832). That uniqueness is sufficient in itself to entitle the work to a special interest from readers, literary historians, and philosophers alike.
Quinet’s reputation and that of Ahasvérus were considerably affected in his lifetime by his subsequent exploits. Although he continued to devote the bulk of his effort to his non-fiction, he did try to follow up the literary debut he had made in Ahasvérus, writing two additional epics in a more orthodox poetic form: Napoléon (1835) and Prométhée [Prometheus] (1838). Their reception was, however, muted, and they failed to confirm the reputation for “poetic genius” that Charles Magnin had claimed for him. The former, dealing with real events and personalities, inevitably relegating ideas to a background role, proved less conducive to the particular character of Quinet’s thought, and although the second restored a mythological framework, employing Greek theodicy as a kind of stand-in for Christian theology, much as Percy Shelley had done in Prometheus Unbound (1820), the exercise was bound to seem more limited as well as a trifle second-hand. It is worth remembering that, having married Minna and being happy with that outcome, Quinet no longer had the well of lachrymose desperation on which to draw that had provided so much sentimental fuel for the poignant heart of Ahasvérus.
After the relative failure of Prométhée, Quinet decided to concentrate entirely on his scholarly endeavors. In 1839, he obtained a professorship of foreign literature at the Université de Lyon, which he was able to relocate two years later to the College de France, thus moving back to Paris and the heart of French culture. He found it impossible to confine his interests and concerns to the specific subject he was supposed to be teaching, however, and used his lecture courses as a pulpit for the oratorical development of his ideas regarding history in general, French history in particular, and the specific role therein played by the Christian religion and the Catholic Church.
Partly by virtue of his close association with Jules Michelet, who was by then ten years into the monumental history of France that would eventually take him thirty years to complete, Quinet became interested in and incensed by the role played in the history of Christendom by the Jesuits, whom he began to criticize scathingly in a very public manner. The substance of his lectures on the subject was eventually integrated into a book co-signed with Michelet, Des Jésuites, published 1843, which caused such a fierce reaction that he was eventually sacked from his professorship in 1846. That simply relegated his polemicizing from the academic context to a more general political arena; like Victor Hugo and Alphonse de Lamartine, Quinet became an active revolutionary endeavoring to put an end to Louis-Philippe’s monarchy and institute a new republic.
After the 1848 Revolution, Quinet, like Hugo and Lamartine, was appointed to an office in the short-lived Second Republic, to which Louis-Napoléon’s 1851 coup put an abrupt end. Like Hugo and many other prominent Republicans, Quinet went into exile, initially in Brussels and then in Switzerland. He continued to write copiously and while in Switzerland he organized the publication of the first version of his Oeuvres complètes in the late 1850s. The set subsequently had to be increased by several more volumes to accommodate, among other works, his fourth major literary endeavor, the long, philosophical, Arthurian romance Merlin l’enchanteur [The Enchanter Merlin] (1862).
Like Hugo, Quinet refused to take advantage of the amnesty offered by the new emperor that allowed a number of other prominent writers, including Alexandre Dumas, to return to Paris and resume their careers there; he insisted on delaying his return to France until the collapse of the Second Empire in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. He was, however, prompt in returning after the Battle of Sedan, arriving in time to play an active role in the subsequent siege of Paris about which he published a book in 1871. His academic position was then returned to him, but he was no longer the firebrand he had been twenty years earlier, and the remainder of his career was relatively quiet and sedate. He died in Versailles in 1875.
The relevance of Ahasvérus to the arguments put forward by Félix Bodin in 1834 for the necessity of a new kind of futuristic fiction would not have been immediately obvious to their contemporary readers although it would surely have given Bodin pause for thought. It would not even have been obvious to Quinet’s readers that Ahasvérus was a work of futuristic fiction any more than it had been obvious to readers of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound that it was a work of futuristic fiction. Because both works use mythological materials, it would have been easy enough to consider them as taking place entirely in some kind of parallel world, rather than in a mindspace that, although an elaborate secondary creation, was nevertheless linked to a particular moment in time. In fact, both works do look forward, albeit somewhat obliquely, from the moment of their own creation to possible futures.
In both cases, the futures to which the authors look forward are futures without God, in Shelley’s case because Prometheus’ heroic silence has permitted Jupiter to be killed by Demogorgon and in Quinet’s because God’s Last Judgment is appealed and overturned. In each case, the authors take the view that humans would be better off without divine guidance and predetermination, committing themselves instead to the idea of independent moral and social progress. In Ahasvérus, when Christ asks what Ahasvérus wants, the latter immediately demands to continue wandering even though his wandering to date has been a terrible torment from which only Rachel has given him any relief. The mere fact of being able to wander freely, to search for anything that takes his fancy rather than obsessively focus on seeking forgiveness for his sin, has the potential to transform his journeying from a torment into a joy: the delight of open-minded intellectual curiosity. The fact that Rachel decides to accompany him is a bonus, although perhaps a necessary one.
Shelley’s Prometheus did not do that but retired to his cave with his beloved Asia, to live in private domestic bliss. That had been, until the crucial moment came, exactly what Ahasvérus had always wanted to do with Rachel, but whereas Prometheus was able to leave humankind in the care of the Spirit of the Earth to aim and strive for perfection in the study of nature, Ahasvérus did not have that option. Indeed, it is not Ahasvérus but the Eternal Father who decides that, instead of removing humankind to his “new city,” as his initial Judgment had ordained, he will instead send them to follow Ahasvérus, who is thus not only free to be a second Adam but is promoted to the rank of Messiah. This might be reckoned a dubious judiciary revision because it is not obvious that the Eternal Father is right to conclude so rapidly once Ahasuerus has expressed his preference that all men are like him. Had he actually taken a vote, one suspects that a considerable fraction of humankind might have proclaimed that they wanted nothing better than to live in the paradisal new city and might have felt somewhat put out to be told that they would have to follow Ahasvérus instead. Nevertheless, that is what Quinet opted to have the Eternal Father decide.
Even though it does not stop there, the story told in Ahasvérus does not show or tell us anything at all about what happens to the human race as it marches forth into its gloriously uncertain future, to explore and progress as it can. What it does instead is to describe what happens to the Heavenly Host, now liberated from the whiny element of Creation, as it is gradually reclaimed by an avid Eternity that cannot find room even for le Néant [“Nothingness” or “Oblivion”] in spite of the protest of the idea in question that it really doesn’t take up that much room. The curious poignancy of that coda is not the least remarkable feature of the text.
Those of Quinet’s readers who did realize that it was their own future that the author was looking forward to might, of course, also have deemed it a trifle unfair of the Eternal Father to deprive them of the paradise they longed for, expected, and perhaps almost attained, and they might have wondered what would become of them if they really were to be all alone in that future with no supernatural authority to lay down the law for them. Modern readers, however, have the advantage of a much clearer idea of what that would be like even though some are still looking forward to the Last Judgment, stubbornly unwilling to accept that it might already have happened and been overturned. Inevitably, too, modern readers have a far clearer idea of what might be entailed in a further future than anyone could possibly have envisaged in 1834.
Modern readers know full well that Félix Bodin was ahead of his time and that even writers who were very well aware of the failure of utopias and apocalypses were not then up to the task of writing futuristic fiction that would cast off those shackles entirely. In the early 1830s, it was only possible to get away from utopias and apocalypses by turning them inside-out, writing anti-utopias and, if not anti-apocalypses, at least apocalypses that could be appealed and set aside. The kind of open-minded, futuristic fiction that Bodin envisaged and which Quinet’s Ahasvérus set out to live, in which the future would not merely be a canvas on which hopes and fears could be painted and exaggerated but a vast realm for the honest exploration of extrapolated possibilities, did not become possible for another thirty years. Jules Verne wanted to attempt it, but his publisher would not allow it, and the man who did post the first significant signpost in that direction, Hippolyte Mettais, in L’An 5865 (1865; tr. as The Year 5865), suffered the fate of all great pioneers in being ignored and unappreciated, but the crucial groundwork was eventually laid, and, in the fullness of time, the humankind symbolized by Ahasvérus, the new Adam and new Messiah, did contrive to step up the pace and move further and further on, with a veritable legion of novelists of the future to keep him company.
Brian Stableford’s translation of Ahasvérus will shortly be available from Black Coat Press, as Ahasuerus, as will his translation of Paul Lacroix’s Danse Macabre. His translations of Félix Bodin’s The Novel of the Future, Charles Nodier’s “Perfectibility,” Pierre-Simon Ballanche’s Hébal’s Vision and Hippolyte Mettais’s The Year 5865 are already available. He intends to translate The Enchanter Merlin next year, should he live that long.
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