French Literature Reviews - 2026
Azélie Fayolle, Ernest Renan: Knowledge of Nature and the Philosophy of History
Philosophy, Anthropology and Ideas
Review published on Acta Fabula (May 2025, vol. 26, no. 5): “Renan, une embryogénie de l’esprit humain”, by Morgane Leray
Natural sciences constitute a blind spot and yet a central pillar of Ernest Renan's work. Although he asserts in his Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse that he would have “arrived at several of Darwin’s conclusions” had he dedicated himself to those sciences, no trace of this appears in his vast historical compendiums: one must look back to his early training. A foundational figure in classifying sciences between the “human sciences” and the “natural sciences,” Renan was a scholar attentive to the dialogue between disciplines undergoing differentiation in the 19th century. For him, the natural sciences served as a methodological reservoir, leading him—following the model of comparative anatomy and embryology—to become a historian of origins, which he traced back through analogy and induction. This model of thought surfaces in naturalist imagery and questions the status of the historian's written text, which is nourished by conjectures and hypotheses. Renan develops a historical and scientific epistemology that interrogates the status of fiction, positioned in his Dialogues philosophiques between “certitudes,” “probabilities,” and “dreams.”
Azélie Fayolle, holder of the agrégation in modern letters and a Ph.D. in French literature, is currently a research fellow (FNRS). Her research falls within the field of epistemocriticism, focusing on the study of the natural sciences and the idea of nature at the crossroads of the natural and human sciences in the 19th century. The dissertation upon which this book is based was awarded the Paris-Est Prize by the Cultures and Societies Doctoral School.
The 19th century witnessed profound transformations in the classification of knowledge, particularly through the growing differentiation between the human sciences and the natural sciences. Scholars and thinkers of the period increasingly grappled with methodological exchanges across disciplinary boundaries, utilizing biological and comparative models to rethink historical and social developments. Within this intellectual landscape, the relationship between empirical inquiry and historical speculation became a central concern for writers seeking to articulate new forms of authority and knowledge. Readers interested in the history of science, epistemology, and 19th-century French intellectual culture may find this volume relevant.