Kathleen
Kete, Borden W. Painter, Jr., '58, H'95 Associate Professor of
European History
Making Way for Genius: The Aspiring Self in France from the
Old Regime to the New
Yale University Press
Reporter: What is Making Way for Genius about?
Making Way for Genius is a history of ambition – or how people thought
about ambition – before, during, and after the French Revolution. What
it tells us is how individuals negotiated the transition from a
traditional culture where the group (the family, the state) was
paramount, to our modern world where the self and self-fulfillment
reigns. It asked the question, “What are the ethics of achievement?”
Reporter: What contributions to this field of study do you
hope to make with this book?
I want people to see how much the tension between liberty and
equality—the modern principles which speak to the freedom of the
self—and the no less exigent demands of fraternity and community define
lives in France after the Revolution of 1789-99, and perhaps even our
own sensibilities.
Reporter: How did you become interested in the subject?
I was influenced by my graduate school adviser and mentor, Patrice
Higonnet. His work on the French Revolution explains Jacobinism as an
attempt to reconcile individual and communitarian aims. I wanted to see
how these two impulses might work themselves out in individual lives and
after the failure of the Republic of Virtue when individualism seemed to
triumph. Competition was inscribed in the Napoleonic Codes and
opportunism defined the First Empire, yet doubts about the effects of
ambition lingered. How could the privileging of individual over
community needs not lead to social disarray?
Reporter: What kind of research did you do in order to
prepare for the publication?
I centered my research on the experience of three iconic figures,
Germaine de Staël (1766-1817) Stendhal (1783-1842), and Georges Cuvier
(1769-1832), whose lives and works were magnets for contemporary debate
on the problem of reconciling competition and ethics in everyday life. I
read what they wrote about ambition and I read about how they came to
terms with ambition in their own lives, by reading their memoirs and
auto-biographies. I found that the stress of coping with traditionalist
views of ambition in the midst of a new regime of competitive
individualism was resolved in some very familiar ways. Staël positioned
herself as the epitome of romantic genius, Stendhal emphasized the power
of his (secular) vocation, and Cuvier stressed how his life (and
glittering success) was ruled by destiny. In each of these cases,
success was understood as will-less, that is, shaped by forces outside
the individual’s control, and altruistic, for the common good.
Reporter: What would you like readers to take away from this
book?
If readers could discover how interesting these people in the past are,
and how relevant their concerns still are, I would be very pleased.
Reporter: Now that this book is finished, what are your plans
for future publications?
My new project is ‘A History of the Alps in the Age of the French
Revolution’. A book is taking shape as I conduct research in Chamonix,
Geneva, and Lausanne and begin to present papers at international
conferences on mountains. I want to explain how the Alps ‘became
visible’ to eighteenth –century people and what role they played in the
cultural imaginary of the age. It’s a lot of fun to conduct research in
the field by climbing in the Alps as I follow in the footsteps of some
of the early explorers of the Alps.
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