French Literature Reviews - 2026
A. Boureau, De vagues individus. La condition humaine dans la pensée scolastique.
Philosophy, Anthropology and Ideas
De vagues individus - La condition humaine dans la pensée scolastique
Alain Boureau
Published on: 04/11/2008
Publisher: Belles Lettres
Series: Histoire
ISBN: 978-2-251-38093-3
EAN: 9782251380933
Number of pages: 364 pages
Publisher's price: 33.00€
Yet another study on the subject and its medieval emergence, one might say! Always the individual! Always the person! How can one hope to bring anything new to the history of the medieval philosophy of the subject? The question should be turned on its head: how can one speak of anything other than the human condition? Thousands of years of literature, history, and philosophy have never exhausted the unfathomable.
Nor will they ever. This book offers a fresh variation, hoping to graze, along its own path, some heavy core of meaning. The thought of the central Middle Ages represents one of those rare moments when humanity, striving for order while buckling under various and contradictory frameworks (ancient, Jewish, Arabic, and Christian thought), felt the need for unrestricted, detailed, and free inquiry.
How can a human being be one, both in the present moment and across time? How to house a mind within a body? Why do we never stop thinking? No line of questioning was ever so rich and radical before psychoanalysis. This work is also intended as an account of a struggle against self-alienation, against the doubles that ceaselessly suffocate the individual. *De vagues individus* constitutes the third volume in the *La Raison scolastique* series, following *La Religion de l'État* (2006) and *L'Empire du livre* (2007).
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Le Monde des livres published an interview with A. Boureau on March 5, 2009:
Alain Boureau: "Exalting the historian's free imagination" LE MONDE DES LIVRES | 05.03.09
Like any good anthropologist investigating a foreign world, the American Paul Rabinow used local "informants" in Morocco during the 1970s to better understand his fieldwork. Little did he know that one of them, a student in Fez, was discussing and joking with Alain Boureau, his university professor, about the most appropriate answers to feed the researcher—either as a gentle tease or as a way to preserve the "subject's" autonomy from the investigator. And thus the two cronies would weigh one reply—"that'll please him"—against another piece of information—"that'll look good"...
To Alain Boureau, this anecdote is not mere farce: it illustrates one of the medievalist historian's firmest stances, one that keeps him at a distance from certain aspects of anthropology. In his view, the researcher's subjects, the actors of history, are never simply "locked" into a universe governed by codes that merely need to be deciphered. In a work of striking originality—both in its thematic variety and its drive to dismantle received ideas—Boureau has thus guarded against overly "fixist" models: "We too often treat others as simpletons," the researcher insists.
This attention to the plurality of contexts developed through a twofold foundational experience for someone who was then a young literature teacher. Boureau first left for Egypt as part of a cultural cooperation program during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. This native of Lyon, who had never experienced Africa or Asia, lived through an "extraordinary and overwhelming" time there, learned Arabic to converse with locals, and observed his surroundings intently. When his military service cooperation came to an end, Boureau wanted to extend his stay—this time through civilian cooperation in Morocco, where the open-mindedness of the Fez students captivated him. By listening to oral traditions and observing how they circulated, the professor, hitherto without precise plans, began to envision new horizons: "We knew our time as cooperation volunteers was provisional," he confides. "That's where I acquired a taste for research."
Before Egypt and Morocco, indeed, this son of teachers who had been "pushed toward good grades"—especially in the sciences—had followed a literary and philosophical path. For a time a Maoist militant and holder of the *agrégation* in classics, he first taught in Valence, without trouble but also without passion. It was during a dictation exercise that he experienced a moment akin to an epiphany: "I felt a sense of the absurd," he recounts. "It was impossible to spend my life doing this." And then came cooperation, foreign lands, and the urge to go elsewhere, further afield.
Two figures then steered the literature scholar toward medieval history: Claude Bremond, a specialist in formal analysis, and Jacques Le Goff, the preeminent medievalist. He promptly began a doctoral thesis on Jacobus de Voragine's famous 13th-century collection of saints' lives, The Golden Legend (La Légende dorée), deconstructing its narrative logics geared toward "human salvation."
From then on, a wealth of rich and diverse books followed. The historian tackled common-sense myths and legends just as readily as academic scholarship. He demonstrated that the lord's *"droit de cuissage"* (jus primae noctis) never existed as a formalized right, while tracing the genealogy of the beliefs surrounding it. Similarly, he refused to overstate the sacrality of the royal body, which remains "despairingly simple." He also investigated the legend of Pope Joan—supposedly seated in disguise on the papal throne in the 9th century—and affirmed the crucial role of medieval monks in the legal processes that built the English nation.
Such a list, far from exhaustive, should not lead one to mistake these for simple scholarly monographs. Boureau's work is an incessant methodological quest underpinned by bold propositions. Two volumes in particular exemplify this concern for methodological renewal. One, a collective effort, is a veritable manifesto: Alter Histoire (Les Belles Lettres, 1991). The aim was to "exalt the historian's free imagination, intervene to increase disorder, [and] make the past play within the present"—for instance, by establishing a link in Brittany between a medieval land tenure system and voting patterns for the Communist Party in contemporary elections, or by utilizing an anecdote without preliminary questioning, contrary to standard methodology.
The *Alter Histoire* experiment was "not peaceful at all": "We were terribly naive," Boureau reflects in hindsight. "In the academic milieu, people were looking for controlled renewal, but not that..." Yet the result remains stimulating, much like the short book he wrote at the same time on Ernst Kantorowicz, the major German-Jewish historian and admirer of eternal Prussia. Far from a conventional biography, Histoires d'un historien, Kantorowicz (Gallimard, 1990) partakes in the spirit of *Alter Histoire*, playing with multiple narrative figures.
Such a body of work also gives rise to anxieties, notably the fear of not being "taken seriously" by one's peers. Fortunately, there are friends: Daniel Milo, an iconoclastic Israeli historian and co-instigator of *Alter Histoire*; Michel Gribinski, who nurtured Boureau's interest in psychoanalysis; and Michel Desgranges, long-time CEO of Belles Lettres, who involved him in directing the major "Histoire" series where Boureau's later works—those of the "scholastic turn"—are published.
For over the past decade, Boureau and his students have developed a passion for the works of the scholastic masters, particularly those of the 13th and 14th centuries, such as Saint Thomas Aquinas and Peter John Olivi—a consuming passion aimed at reconstructing a "scholastic anthropology," understood as the vision of man held by these great theologians. Volume after volume, they scrutinize texts to establish their conceptions of knowledge, governance, and the person, highlighting their inherent "creativity" at every turn. The most recent book, just out, examines how the scholastics debated the powers of the soul, the autonomy of its elements, and the unprecedented issues raised by these discussions (1).
Naturally, some might feel that this textual analysis, however profound, drifts somewhat from the methodological and critical adventures of the earlier Boureau, or regret that the "scholastic turn" sometimes resembles a return to old-fashioned history of ideas. Boureau does not deny the shift, which goes hand in hand with editing texts and is claimed as "a pledge of seriousness." "After spending your time destroying, you had to build," he says hesitatingly, without sounding entirely convinced himself. He corrects himself, however: "I flatter myself that the experiments of *Alter Histoire* continue to guide me." In *La Religion de l'État* (Les Belles Lettres, 2006), did he not establish a novel model, an idea still iconoclastic in nature—namely, the birth of the "State-Republic" within scholastic thought? Clearly, all these debates are as rich as they are arduous. But rest assured: Boureau is currently preparing a volume that will serve as a form of "Scholasticism for Dummies."
(1) De vagues individus. La condition humaine dans la pensée scolastique. Les Belles Lettres, 365 p., €33.
This compelling volume examines the intellectual history of the central Middle Ages, a transformative epoch when thinkers navigated ancient, Jewish, Arabic, and Christian frameworks to pursue rigorous inquiry. Alain Boureau explores fundamental questions regarding personal identity, bodily unity, and the enduring nature of human thought long before the advent of modern psychoanalysis. As the third installment in the La Raison scolastique series, following earlier reflections on the state and the book, the work investigates how medieval philosophy conceptualized the individual against pervasive forces of self-alienation and social constraint.
Scholars of intellectual history, medieval philosophy, and the human sciences will find this study particularly valuable for its methodological originality and refusal to reduce historical actors to rigid cultural models. Boureau challenges conventional academic narratives by treating medieval thinkers as active agents of free inquiry rather than passive products of their environment. This book will appeal to readers seeking to understand the deep historical roots of the human condition and the complex intellectual traditions that continue to shape modern conceptions of the self.