Jacques Ranciere
THE HOMEWARD PATH
FRAGMENTS OF JOURNEYS INTO NEW WORLDS
Translated by Chris Turner (Material Word Ltd) and Leslie Hill
THE STONE AND THE SINFUL WOMAN
(An English poet's recollections of a holiday in France, 1790-2)
In the great book of culture, he has remained the poet of lakes and daffodils. His
was a prudent, unambitious journey. His younger contemporaries - Keats,
Shelley, and Byron - went off to die in Italy or Greece between their twenty-
sixth and thirty-seventh years. He, William Wordsworth, found the distant
climes he was seeking on the shores of Lake Como. And he died in his eighties
in his own country.
Not that the passions of the age and the land that gave birth to the republic
had always left this lover of flowers and lakes indifferent. He simply had the
good fortune to be born before them and to be 20 years old at a time when, on a
clear day, you could see the age-old home of liberty from the white cliffs of
Dover.
Twice then he visited the land of revolution. The first time, he was simply
passing through and had no political objective. At most, it could be said that
there was in the joy he evinced in a first student escapade far from the grey halls
and the dried-up laurels of the college or in his desire to see mountains higher
and lakes more vast than those of his native Cumberland a sign that he shared
the great enthusiasm for new-found liberty. To travel right around the Alps and
get back before winter, he and his companion landed at Calais on 13 July 1790.
The next day was a feast day in Calais, as indeed it was throughout France.
More exactly, it was the most important festival of the revolutionary age, the
Festival of Federation, culmination of the great dream of peaceful, fraternal
revolution.
Everywhere then on their path the two friends encountered the actors and
decors of this extended festival. It was pure chance or, as the poet himself said,
good fortune. That was not why he had come. At that point nature alone was
sovereign in his eyes.
But was it not precisely that sovereignty that was being celebrated in those
July days, mingling in the travellers' eyes the flowers and harvests of summer
with those of the revolution? These tourist hikes, especially in this age of
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country walking, were perhaps best suited to communicating revolutionary
enthusiasm. They did so quite naturally; no propaganda was needed. How
could you avoid feeling the tactile reality of the concept all around? How could
you help but feel all the emblems of the festival brought together in a single
emotion: the July sun shining down through the shade of the elms, the flowers
of the triumphal arches or the garlands in the windows, the rustling of the leaves
in the breeze, the freedom dances beneath a starry sky, the welcoming smile of
faces lit up by a joy shared with millions of brothers - and in the most remote
villages
. . . benevolence and blessedness
Spread like a fragrance everywhere, when spring
Hath left no corner of the land untouched.1
Student vacations spent among a festive people. The powerful, peaceful flow
of happy revolutions. After reaching Chalon on foot, they slipped down now
through the vine-laden hillsides towards the waters of the Saone. It was a
pleasure just to be swept along at the same rhythm as a people on the march, to
be strangers in a land where there were no longer any strangers but the enemies
of human happiness:
Clustered together with a merry crowd
Of those emancipated, a blithe host
Of travellers, chiefly delegates returning
From the great spousals newly solemnized
At their chief city, in the sight of Heaven . . .
We landed - took with them our evening meal,
Guests welcome almost as the angels were
To Abraham of old. The supper done,
With flowing cups elate and happy thoughts
We rose at signal given, and formed a ring
And, hand in hand, danced round and round the board;
All hearts were open, every tongue was loud
With amity and glee.2
It was the kind of communion one can feel on a summer's evening, a holiday.
The next day, the two travellers left the delegates of the people on the march for
the solitude of the convent of Chartreuse, the majesty of Mont Blanc and the
'Abyssinian' splendour of Lake Como. Then, via Switzerland, Germany, and
Belgium, the poet returned to the benches of the university, skirting around this
land of liberty which, he tells us, he had simply passed through 'as a bird/Moves
through the air' or as a fish 'feeds in its proper element'.3
Others were happy simply to do as much, but the following autumn the new
graduate set out again for France. This was another kind of journey,
relinquishing this time
. . . the scrip and staff,
And all enjoyment which the summer sun
Sheds round the steps of those who meet the day.
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