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History and Theory 45 (February 2006), 51-71 © Wesleyan University 2006 ISSN: 0018-2656

CHARTING THE “TRANSITIONAL PERIOD”: THE EMERGENCE OF

MODERN TIME IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

GÖRAN BLIX

ABSTRACT

This paper seeks to chart a concept of historical experience that French Romantic writers
first developed to describe their own relationship to historical time: the notion of the
“transitional period.” At first, the term related strictly to the evolving periodic conception
of history, one that required breaks, spaces, or zones of indeterminacy to bracket off peri-
ods imagined as organic wholes. These transitions, necessary devices in the new grammar
of history, also began to attract interest on their own, conceived either as chaotic but cre-
ative times of transformation, or, more often, as slack periods of decadence that possessed
no proper style but exhibited hybrid traits. Their real interest, however, lies in their reflex-
ive application to the nineteenth century itself, by writers and historians such as Alfred de
Musset, Chateaubriand, Michelet, and Renan, who in their effort to define their own peri-
od envisioned the “transitional period” as a passage between more coherent and stable his-
torical formations. This prospective self-definition of the “age of history” from a future
standpoint is very revealing; it shows not just the tension between its organic way of
apprehending the past and its own self-perception, but it also opens a window on a new
and paradoxical experience of time, one in which change is ceaseless and an end in itself.
The paper also presents a critique of the way the term “modernity” has functioned, from
Baudelaire’s initial use to the present, to occlude the experience of transition that the
Romantics highlighted. By imposing on the nineteenth-century sense of the transitory a
heroic period designation, the term “modernity” denies precisely the reality it describes,
and sublimates a widespread temporal malaise into its contrary. The paper concludes that
the peculiarly “modern” mania for naming one’s period is a function of transitional time,
and that the concept coined by the Romantics still governs our contemporary experience.

This paper seeks to chart a concept of historical experience that took off in the
first half of the nineteenth century. I will examine texts by a number of writers
who use the term “transitional period,” most notably Alfred de Musset,
Chateaubriand, Ernest Renan, and Jules Michelet, and will treat it as the name
for a specifically modern form of temporal experience. The term carries a dou-
ble significance: first, it encodes a crucial aspect of the way the Romantics
understood the past, but second, and more importantly, it succeeds in capturing
the age’s own understanding of itself as a transition. Given this self-reflexive
application, I suggest here that the notion of “transitional period” can serve as a
more accurate description of the time-frame we usually call “modernity.” This
pervasive label, so ubiquitous and so seductive, yet so empty, has by all accounts
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52 GÖRAN BLIX

worn thin and meaningless with use, but its life has been prolonged by a sort of
critical automatism that incites us to use the term unsparingly, and to apply it as
a euphoric label wherever an object of study needs an instant injection of pres-
tige. The label has now become about as hollow as the medals awarded at the
comices agricoles in Madame Bovary, and a critical self-examination is in order.1
To take one step in this direction, I argue that the term “modernity,” with its cel-
ebratory overtones, is misleading not just because it lacks neutrality but more
critically because it occludes an experience of time that the term “transitional
period” might recover for us. Before speaking of transitions, however, it is nec-
essary to say a few words about periods, since the concepts of period and transi-
tion are inextricably linked: there could be no transitions without prior periods,
just as, conversely, it would be impossible to identify periods without the inter-
stitial zones that set them apart.
The Romantic era did not invent historical periods, but decisively trans-
formed and sharpened this ancient concept, seeing the distinct traits of a peri-
od as immanent features generated by the historical process itself.2 The a pri-
ori scaffolding of earlier philosophies of history (whether of progress, decline,
or the cyclical type) into a series of predetermined stages did not vanish, but
was refined into more detailed, supple patterns, in which the unique physiog-
nomy of every period, as defined by its culture, customs, and institutions, occu-
pies the foreground and defines its profile empirically. This internal derivation
also had a homogenizing thrust, in which the selected blocks of time, in prin-
ciple arbitrary, were totalized as whole, organic, and internally coherent enti-
ties—zones bounded in time as countries were in space. Simultaneously, they
acquired a legitimacy of their own as unique life-worlds, regardless of their
title to possess any classical or normative status. Herder’s claim that each peri-
od can only be justly appreciated with reference to its own cultural standards,
rather than to the norms of antiquity or, later, the horizon of progress, inaugu-
rates this mode of thinking, and foreshadows the historical relativism that will
become a central tenet of Romantic aesthetics, notably in Stendhal, Hugo, and

1. For a recent Marxist critique of the term’s abuse and vacuity, see Fredric Jameson, A Singular
Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (New York: Verso, 2002), and Christopher
Prendergast’s subsequent discussion in “Codeword Modernity,” New Left Review 23 (Novem-
ber–December 2003), 95-112. Jameson observes that in much current usage the term “modernity” is
coterminous with the defense of free-market capitalism, and that any radical impulse the term once
designated is now perceived as distinctly un-modern (9-10). This slippage in contemporary political
discourse need not be reflected, of course, in literary studies, which are still largely wedded to the
ideal of a radical aesthetic modernity. But when Prendergast comments on the “degraded afterlife of
the term ‘modernity’,” and deems it “empty, drained of all substantial meaning,” a narcotic released
by “the incantatory repetition of the empty signifier” (97), one senses inevitable parallels with its lit-
erary-critical use. This raises the question: how complicit might the academic celebration of aesthet-
ic modernity be with neo-liberalism? Could not the triumphalist narrative of “modern” art’s negativ-
ity be read as a substitute, as it were, for the very “progress” whose bankruptcy much of it
denounces?
2. The logic of history, still largely determined, in Vico, by an external Providence, also becomes
fully immanent in time in the late eighteenth century. Condorcet’s progress, Hegel’s Spirit, Michelet’s
Promethean desire for liberty, and Marx’s modes of production are all internal engines of historical
development that underwrite new forms of periodization.
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CHARTING THE “TRANSITIONAL PERIOD” 53

Baudelaire.3 This new relativism differentiates the Romantic concept of “peri-
od” from the earlier outlook of a Voltaire, who, while he did succeed in mold-
ing the siècle de Louis XIV into a golden age of letters, only did so by erecting
it into a new norm, or form of classicism. The nineteenth-century imagination
can invest itself eclectically in the multiplicity of past periods, without calling
unequivocally for their emulation, and has learned instead to appreciate them
as unique timescapes. The Romantic turn to the Middle Ages is only the most
obvious example, but one could easily multiply them: Augustin Thierry’s vivid
depictions of Merovingian life, Huysmans’s aesthetic investment in Roman
decadence, Michelet and the Renaissance, the Goncourt brothers’ reinvention
of the eighteenth century. Local color often belies nostalgia, but never pre-
scribes an eternal norm immune to the flux of time.
This Romantic multiplication of distinct periods, and their imaginary closure
as self-contained worlds, brings us back to the “transitional period.” This concept
is not just a modern invention, it is also a logical requirement of the Romantic
concept of “period” itself; if periods are both self-contained and radically dis-
tinct, it becomes necessary to imagine, at their borders, a brief temporal span that
bridges the gap, a sort of gray zone that distributes the process of transformation
over time, to avoid the impression of a sudden incomprehensible rupture—today
the Middle Ages, tomorrow the Renaissance. The concept of the “transitional
period” fulfills this function of periodical spacing. Like the more modern “para-
digm shift” (Thomas Kuhn) or “historical mutation” (Michel Foucault), but
much more modest, it is the historiographical device that permits us to imagine
periods, mentalities, or discourses as coherent cultural spaces that possess a sort
of homogeneity from one end to the next and that differ essentially from each
other. As key concepts in the modern grammar of history, transitions are the com-
mas or spaces that make periods possible.

I. TRANSITIONS IN THE HISTORICAL IMAGINATION

Not surprisingly, then, the expression “transitional period” appears frequently in

the nineteenth century, but hardly at all, to my knowledge, before the French
Revolution. The earliest uses of the word “transition” in the historical lexicon
seem to denote large-scale changes, or what we might term tectonic shifts in
human civilization; “transition” is used in this sense by Benjamin Constant in his
work on religious history in which he speaks of “the transition from fetishism to
polytheism.”4 This broad sense of crossing from a simpler to a more complex
evolutionary stage occurs frequently, and may be the most primitive semantic
layer in the term from which all the others derive. François Guizot mentions the
“laborious transition from nomadic life to sedentary life” when speaking of how

3. See Johann Gottfried Herder, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der
Menschheit [1774] (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1990). He takes Winckelmann to task for disparaging
Egyptian art from the standpoint of Greek taste, and argues that every ideal is locally determined for
each people by “God, the climate, and the time and stage of the world totality” [Weltalters] (32).
4. Benjamin Constant, Journaux intimes (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2002), 145. Entry for
June 13 (24 prairial), 1804.
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54 GÖRAN BLIX

the Frankish invaders of Gaul gradually settled down and became feudal lords.5
Pierre Leroux regards the biblical Noah as a symbol of “humanity in transition,”
reading his 950-year lifespan (“the transitory period of Noah”) figuratively as the
border between antediluvian man and his regenerated heirs.6 The utopian Charles
Fourier, for his part, regards the present state of civilization as “a social abomi-
nation, a painful transition” en route to the bliss of phalansteric living: God tol-
erates it only as a “path of approach” leading to “the regime of the passionate
series.”7 Implicit in all these cases is a picture of the human condition as a series
of qualitative leaps between distinct historical blocks.
But it is generally to describe less seismic and universal transformations (these
retain a strong Enlightenment flavor), and to denote more concrete and subtle
shifts, that the term “transitional period” comes into use. A work of literary his-
tory from 1839, for example, studies Dante’s achievement in the context of thir-
teenth-century Catholic thought, and depicts this period as a renaissance in which
divine providence has intervened “to make all things new.” “These periods,” we
are told, “are called transitional periods.”8 The accent here is on renewal, ener-
gy, and invention, and transition euphorically designates the cultural rebirth that
Dante epitomizes.
However, although transitions testify to historical dynamism, they are not
themselves always viewed favorably; on the contrary, they usually denote a time
of chaotic changes, hybrid forms, and eclectic practices, a sort of transitory deca-
dence that drags on while an old world is vanishing and a brave new world is
slowly settling into place. Guizot’s remarks about the era prior to the establish-
ment of feudalism are a good example: “in this transition,” he writes, “everything
is muddled, local, and disorderly . . . every form of property exists helter-skelter,
at the same time . . . nothing is stable any more.”9 This negative picture of tran-
sitions as chaotic times, drawn in multiple directions, lacking orientation, and
thrashing about in place is a constant of the motif. This, of course, does not pre-
vent writers from also putting a positive spin on transitions, as chaotic times that
usher in a higher cultural stage. Guizot himself disparages the stretch from the
thirteenth to the sixteenth century as “a period without character, a period when
confusion continues to increase, . . . a period of movement without direction,”10
but he also notes that when it is viewed within a larger historical continuum, and
“considered . . . in relation to what followed it, as the transition from primitive
Europe to modern Europe, this period comes into clear and vivid focus; it
acquires contours, direction, and progress.”11
This retrospective placement of a period as a stage within a larger teleology
can lead to a new appreciation for its internal dynamism: anarchy becomes an
expression of energy, and confusion of creative ferment. Many texts therefore

5. François Guizot, Histoire de la civilisation en Europe (Paris: Pichon et Didier, 1828), 14.
6. Pierre Leroux, De l’Humanité [1840] (Paris: Fayard, 1985), 416.
7. Charles Fourier, Le Nouveau monde Industriel (1830), 73.
8. A.-F. Ozanam, Dante et la philosophie catholique au treizième siècle (Paris: Perisse Frère,
1839), 21.
9. Guizot, Histoire de la civilisation en Europe, 14.
10. Ibid., 139.
11. Ibid., 9.
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CHARTING THE “TRANSITIONAL PERIOD” 55

accent the invisible labor that goes on beneath the overall reign of confusion.
Guizot discerns a “slow and hidden labor” in the late Middle Ages.12 But the
image that most often expresses this idea is that of “new construction taking
place amid the ruins.” The liberal Catholic thinker Lamennais, for example,
admits that “transitional periods were always stormy periods,” but reminds us
that “already at the heart of the confusion produced by the overthrow of the pre-
vious order there appear elements of a newer and more perfect order.” He illus-
trates this double process of decay and renewal by pointing out how “Christianity
. . . raised the imposing edifice of medieval society . . . on the wreckage of the
Roman Empire.”13 Taking our cue from this imagery, we might picture transi-
tions as periods surrounded by scaffolding, and marked by placards reading
“closed for renovation.”
But the benign reading of transitions as renewals is overshadowed by the con-
sensus over their dismal character. Whatever Promised Land may lie beyond the
transition, it inevitably appears itself as a stretch of desert, an undefined no-
man’s land sandwiched between more substantial cultural formations. This is
especially true in the aesthetic realm, where such periods are generally thought
to produce forgettable art that has degenerated into bad taste and succumbed to
the vulgar charms of a hybrid, flamboyant, or decadent style. Sainte-Beuve pro-
vides a classic instance of this charge: in his Tableau de la poésie française au
XVIe siècle (1828), when he speaks of “that transitional period that links the
poetry of the reign of Louis XIII with that of the reign of Henri III” (the period
after Ronsard), he uses expressions such as “that exhausted school,” “those ener-
vated disciples,” and “symptoms of decrepitude.”14 Further on in the same text
he also associates “a slightly equivocal poetics” with the “transitional period”
during which Corneille’s Cid appeared.15 This kinship of dubious art with transi-
tions quickly becomes so self-evident that it begins to operate automatically.
Thus we see Baudelaire in the Salon de 1846 refer to what he calls the “shame-
less filth . . . proper to transitional periods,” after having derided Victor Hugo in
the same salon as “a decadent or transitional composer,” as if these two terms
carried identical meanings.16
But before accepting these value judgments, it is worth stopping to draw the
distinction between the thing and the name: what a specific culture ends up des-
ignating as a transitional period might itself become a period of its own depend-
ing on the viewpoint from which it is observed. The Middle Ages is the prime
example of such a phenomenon: named pejoratively for its parenthetical charac-
ter, it remained an arid period of slumber until the Romantics at last chose to
unearth their national and religious roots there. This leads to a historiographical
paradox: every apparent transition is at the same time a potential period that
awaits discovery. But this destabilization of time falls prey to a further irony: for
12. Ibid.
13. Félicité de Lamennais, Articles, Journal, L’Avenir [1831] (Paris: P. Daubrée et Cailleux,
1837), 209.
14. C.-A. Sainte-Beuve, Tableau de la poésie française au XVIe siècle [1828] (Paris: Alphonse
Lemerre, 1876), 196-198.
15. Ibid., 423-424.
16. Baudelaire, Salon de 1846, reprinted in Critique d’art (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 91 and 107.
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56 GÖRAN BLIX

every gray stretch of time lifted out of the historical continuum, and molded into
an autonomous period, new transitions necessarily emerge, and the fuzzy bor-
derline zones inevitably multiply as fast as the periods. One might conclude from
this that the “transitional period” is an evil inherent in historical thought, an
undesirable side-effect of the periodic imagination: the identification of periods,
styles, and movements will always perversely require the production of new gray
zones that are themselves subject to becoming new periods that require yet
another transitional period. No revisionism can ever hope to abolish these inter-
vals—indeed, efforts to do so will only multiply them. From this perspective, the
distinction between true periods and mere transitions threatens to break down,
and to bring down the entire edifice of historical periodization. Every moment
might be construed as the radiant center of a potential period—but could also
simultaneously be the pivot of an endless transition.

II. “MODERNITY”

However necessary the idea of transition is to nineteenth-century historiography,

it soon becomes clear that, far from only fulfilling an epistemological need, it
corresponds directly to contemporary anxieties. This is most evident from the
way the period itself desperately sought to identify itself as a period, and at last
found, after much fumbling, an appropriately euphoric label in Baudelaire’s
famous invention of “modernity.”17 This is by all accounts the most successful
self-description ever launched, since critics are still today invoking the term as a
magic mantra, and bestowing it solemnly upon writers, texts, and styles as an
inexplicable badge of distinction. By 1873, Rimbaud proclaimed it as a self-evi-
dent truth that “one must be absolutely modern.”18 The reigning dogma of liter-
ary studies is in perfect agreement: modernity remains the absolute value that can
be conferred on a work, and it is distributed so generously that it may well be the
academic equivalent of the “two thumbs up” of contemporary film reviews. The
label “postmodern,” in this context, is less a negation of “modern” than its hyper-
bolic inflation, just as “premodern” marks a deferential nod to the aesthetic hege-
mony of post-revolutionary culture. In these circumstances, however, one is
tempted to ask: comment ne peut-on pas être moderne?19 The term has so suc-
cessfully colonized the discourse on culture that it has lost all specificity, content,
and meaning.
It would seem, at first sight, as if a neutral period-designation has been dis-
torted into a form of valuation, and that dating has been confused with praising.
But then we recall that Baudelaire’s initial use of the term served, precisely, to
confer value upon the contemporary world, a vulgar world of dark suits and sti-
fling morals that Baudelaire uncompromisingly deplored, but nonetheless urged
“the painter of modern life” to paint in all its vulgarity. The self-designation

17. The celebration of modernity is implicit already in the Salon de 1845, but attains its full-blown
development only in Le Peintre de la vie moderne [1863], where Baudelaire famously defines
“modernity” as “the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent” (Critique d’art, 355).
18. Rimbaud, Une saison en enfer [1873] (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 204.
19. “How can one not be modern?”
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CHARTING THE “TRANSITIONAL PERIOD” 57

“modernity,” then, operated from the outset as a value-laden term, for it was
enlisted by disenchanted artists to boost their somber historical self-image: to be
a genuine period was to possess character, color, personality, and identity, and
this is what modernity promised to those in the nineteenth century. When
Baudelaire points out “how great and poetic we are in our ties and polished
boots,”20 what we discern beneath the self-inflicted irony is the desperate desire
to mold a shapeless present into a visible historical formation. The concept of
“period” operates here as a way to confer identity and selfhood on a time that
perceived itself as transitory; it functions as a mask of coherence—what some
call ideology—imposed on the contradictions of experience. One might even
argue that the entire Romantic project of carving history up into neatly packaged
periods merely deflects an anxiety over the fluidity of the present. Periods would
be the ideal images that transitions project over their own experience of flux, the
dreams of selfhood fashioned by a civilization thinking it is on the move. The
term “modernity” itself neatly encapsulates this contradiction; it succeeds in
uniting the dynamism of change with the reassuring constancy of a stable term.

III. THE FACELESS PRESENT

It is easy to show that the Romantic invention of periods ultimately rests on its
own experience of transitionality. There is a striking contrast in Romanticism
between the colorful pictures it proposes of the Renaissance, the Middle Ages,
and the Ancien Régime, and the litany of complaints it issues over the faceless
character of the present. This is what Victor Hugo says of modern-day Paris after
completing the famous survey of the fifteenth-century city in Notre-Dame de
Paris: “The Paris of today has no . . . overall physiognomy. It’s a collection of
samples from several centuries, and the most beautiful have vanished.” From the
euphoria of Hugo’s organic vision of late-medieval Paris, the reader falls into an
eclectic hodge-podge of clashing buildings, into an ocean of ephemeral architec-
ture “which gets rebuilt every fifty years.”21
The word that Hugo uses here, physionomie, denotes the visual identity of a
thing—a person, a street, a city, a period—and is a key term in the Romantic
vocabulary of description, the cornerstone, one might say, of romantic ontology,
since beings are grasped through their physionomie. Balzac employs the term in
a satirical article from 1830, in which he attacks his own time: “we have no man-
ners, if by that word one should understand the unique habits of a people, a
national physionomie.”22 Hugo’s charge of historical eclecticism surfaces here,
too, for Balzac is quick to denounce the cacophony of “fashions, manners, and
ideas” that can be observed in the street, where remnants of the ancien régime
coexist with more recent relics of the Revolution and Empire. This threatening
20. The expression occurs already in the Salon de 1845: “That one will be the painter, the true
painter, who succeeds in wrenching from contemporary life its epic aspect, and who makes us see
and understand, by use of color or of lines, how great and poetic we are in our ties and polished
boots.” (Critique d’art, 67).
21. Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris [1831] (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), 188.
22. Balzac, “Complaintes satiriques sur les moeurs du temps présent” [1830], in Oeuvres divers-
es (Paris: Gallimard-Pléiade, 1996), 2: 744.
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58 GÖRAN BLIX

multiplicity strikes Balzac as a lack rather than a healthy excess: “these traits
don’t give us any physionomie. France wears a harlequin outfit.”23
Balzac is of course ideologically invested in such claims, given his reactionary
attachment to church and crown, but this certainly does not pertain to Alfred de
Musset, whose indictment of the times in La Confession d’un enfant du siècle
(1836)—the text that will be my central exhibit here—stands out as the classical
diagnosis of the age. In this novel, the troubled romantic hero, Octave, mirrors
his internal disorder in the confusion of the times: “our century has no forms,”
he complains. “We have left the stamp of our times neither on our houses, nor on
our gardens, nor on anything else.” Musset, like Balzac, finds the residual debris
of more “genuine” periods everywhere in his surroundings, and scoffs that “the
apartments of the rich are chambers of curiosities; the antique, the gothic, the
style of the Renaissance, and that of Louis XIII, it’s all mixed up.” In conclud-
ing that “eclecticism is our style,” Musset confirms that the opposition between
transition and period lies at the root of his disillusion. Modernity is in this sense
the first non-period—at the same time that it is the period that invented periods;
paradoxically, the more it multiplies its allusions to various coherent pasts, the
more it appears stripped of any distinct personality: “we have things from every
century,” Musset writes, “except our own, a thing never before seen in any pre-
vious period.”24

IV. MODERNITY AS TRANSITION

Depictions of le mal du siècle are a dime a dozen, but Musset’s novel stands out
as a quintessential text on “modernity” not only because it depicts the faceless
character of his time, but also because it closely links disenchantment with the
experience of transition. Its central thesis is that Musset’s own “lost generation”
has been condemned to live through a historical transition. Born during the hero-
ic days of the Empire, and raised on memories of the great Revolution, the “chil-
dren of the century” have come of age during the prosaic Restoration, and soon
come to realize that their fate will be to form the bridge between a glorious past
and the future Republic. “The whole sickness of the present century stems from
two causes,” Musset writes: “everything that was is no more; and everything that
will be is not yet.”25 In a famous image, he imagines his generation stuck in a
limbo between two worlds, and derives its social malaise from the long and
painful transition between an old and a new regime: “Behind them lay a past for-
ever destroyed, still writhing on its ruins, along with all the fossils of the cen-
turies of absolutism; before them lay the dawn of an unbounded horizon, the first
lights of the future; and between these two worlds . . . something resembling the
Ocean that separates the old continent from youthful America.”26

23. Balzac also writes: “we have lost tremendously in terms of physiognomy” (ibid., 2: 740).
24. Alfred de Musset, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle [1836] (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 48-49.
25. Ibid., 35.
26. Ibid., 24.
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CHARTING THE “TRANSITIONAL PERIOD” 59

The chronology of this analysis is rather sketchy, and the generational aspect
easily stretches out into a more grandiose perspective: it is not just Musset’s own
generation that has fallen into the abyss between the Empire and the regime that
will succeed the restored monarchy, but the entire nineteenth century that must
serve as a buffer between the ancien régime and the future: “[it is] the present
century, in a word, that separates the past from the future.”27 This oceanic gap,
either way, is a time of pure negativity, an agonizing time of limbo wasted drift-
ing between two solid land masses; it is captured in a dramatic image that echoes
Chateaubriand’s sense of crossing a historical abyss: “I found myself between
two centuries, as if at the meeting of two rivers . . . regretfully leaving behind the
shore on which I was born, and swimming with hope toward an unknown
shore.”28
Striking in Musset’s diagnosis of his own time is his assessment of it as a tran-
sitional period. The disquiet he pinpoints has neither religious, nor psychological,
nor strictly political roots, but is here conceived historically, as if grasped from a
future vantage point that could situate the present in a larger continuum. The mal
du siècle appears through the prism of historical consciousness, and is explained
ex post facto as a temporal disorder. Musset articulates the paradoxical experi-
ence of occupying the gap between periods, of living in an interim state of pas-
sage, transition, and between-ness, perversely ascribing to his own time what the
Renaissance humanists had so felicitously attributed to their predecessors.
This historical self-analysis can of course appear questionable in view of our
current grid of periods—itself a debatable formation—but its historiographical
“accuracy” is irrelevant; what matters is the innovative, self-reflexive use of
“transition” as an experiential category. Musset’s account is much more persua-
sive, to my mind, than Baudelaire’s canonical reflections, and reframes the lat-
ter’s cryptic remarks about distilling eternal beauty out of the transitory shapes
of fashion into a strategy to repress an anxiety that still remains visible in Musset.
To link the transitory flux of impressions, as Baudelaire does, to a sort of Platonic
form of beauty is a desperate way to exorcize the incoherence of experience.
Musset bravely resists the temptation to transubstantiate his spleen, and thereby
also refrains from idealizing the transitory and denying his own alienation. His
dysphoric embrace of transition instead projects the utopian impulse into a van-
ished past and an inaccessible future. These forms of idealization—the nostalgic
and the messianic—are not without their problems, but they arguably echo the
transitional experience more directly, and they make no concession to the artis-
tic “culture of redemption” whose champions will be Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and
Proust.29
But why prefer one poet to another (and the lesser one at that), pitting Musset’s
whim against Baudelaire’s fancy? What makes Musset’s account so compelling
is its clear articulation of a widespread collective perception of the present itself
as a “transitional period.” As early as 1783, we find Louis-Sébastien Mercier

27. Ibid.
28. Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’outre-tombe (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1973), 1794.
29. For a skeptical view of this tendency, see Leo Bersani’s The Culture of Redemption
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).
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60 GÖRAN BLIX

summing up the Enlightenment as a transitional period. In a chapter from the

Tableau de Paris, entitled “Du siècle littéraire de Louis XIV,” where Mercier
takes issue with Voltaire’s canonization of that age (and quips that “never has the
prostitution of wit been pushed so far as at the feet of Louis XIV”), he makes the
case that contemporary literature is in fact much more “enlightened” because it
has taken on the useful function of policing the government.30 Yet even amid this
ode to “the progress of universal reason,” there can be no room for complacen-
cy: “our century,” Mercier cautions, “despite its advantages, should nevertheless
be considered less as the century of truths than as the century of transition toward
more important truths.” Using a rhetoric that anticipates the impatience of the
Romantics, Mercier wishes he might have been born in the future: “I wish that
my birth could have occurred in five to six hundred years,” for by then the arts
and the printing press “will have completed the enlightenment of the universe.”
This attitude of future-envy heralds the gradual shift from the past to the future
as the ground of social legitimacy, but still it differs in one crucial respect from
the nineteenth-century sense of transition: there is as yet no comparable disen-
chantment with the present. For Mercier it is only the rosy forecast of indefinite
progress that valorizes the future, but not the intolerable character of his own age.
The belief in progress and perfectibility may relativize the present, but in no way
saps it of value as a wasteland between periods; the notion of transition here is
not yet yoked to a periodizing imagination, and denotes a perpetual steady
progress rather than a ladder of ages interrupted by chaotic gulfs. Mercier’s sim-
ple progressive scheme, however, remains the primitive layer on which history,
in the nineteenth century, will be experienced as an unhappy transition between
states.
A tragic sense of insubstantiality is what most marks this modern experience
of transition. Coming from Musset, Sand, and Chateaubriand, this is to be
expected, but less so when the upbeat Jules Michelet succumbs to such melan-
choly: “today, we have too much a sense of passage,” he writes in his journal.
“We only feel too clearly that we’re nothing but a means, a transition.”31 This
perception evidently implies that both future and past stand out as more solid for-
mations. The sentiment is even less plausible in Flaubert, who writes to a friend
in 1850 that “we will have undergone both the most difficult and the least glori-
ous thing: the transition.”32 In this letter, Flaubert at first seems to echo Mercier’s
hopeful anticipation, since he fancies that “the man of the future will perhaps
enjoy immense pleasures—he’ll travel through space, with pills of air in his
pocket.” But this lighthearted fantasy, undercut by irony, merely serves as a pre-
lude to the Mussetian lament for the fate of the present generation. Flaubert
launches the complaint that “we’ve come either too early or too late,” and sug-
gests that the present lacks the stability he ascribes to both past and future peri-
ods: “to establish something durable you need a stable foundation,” he insists,

30. Louis-Sébastien Mercier, “Du siècle littéraire du Louis XIV” (Ch. 634), Le Tableau de Paris
(Amsterdam, 1783), T. 5, A 8, pp. 180-182.
31. Jules Michelet, Journal (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 1: 397. Entry for May 1, 1842.
32. Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance (Saint-Genouph: Nizet, 2001), 1: 750. Letter to Louis
Bouilhet, from Athens, dated Dec. 19, 1850.
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CHARTING THE “TRANSITIONAL PERIOD” 61

but “the future torments us—and the past holds us back. That’s why the present
escapes us.”
Lamartine also sounds this motif when he worries about the quality of modern
literature, and has the depressing revelation of his own poetic mediocrity. He
then generously wishes upon France a greater poet than himself,33 but concedes
that neither he nor, unfortunately, the times, contain enough substance to merit
glory: “as for myself, I feel it profoundly, I am nothing but a man without a mon-
ument, from a faded and transitional period . . . I’ll maybe sketch a few scenes,
I’ll murmur a few melodies, and all will be said: on to others.”34 This passage
illustrates that the association of aesthetic decadence with transitional periods
has spilled over into the self-description of modernity. This is already so self-evi-
dent to Flaubert that he cites it as a bourgeois cliché in the Dictionnaire des idées
reçues, where under the rubric of “period” (époque) he writes “thunder against
it” and “call it ‘period of transition—of decadence!’”35 By mid-century, the idea
that contemporary art might traverse a period of decadence even forms the cen-
terpiece of a poetic manifesto. Leconte de Lisle then writes a fierce critique, in
the programmatic preface to his Poëmes antiques (1852), of the subjective indi-
vidualistic poetry of the day. Disappointed with “this time of malaise,” which
suffers from feverish action, constant movement, and a radical breakdown of
temporal orientation, de Lisle calls for a return to more archaic verbal forms, and
for the adoption of an impersonal form of lyricism.36 While “the most informed
minds” draw back cautiously in contemplation, “the rest know neither where
they come from nor where they are headed, and succumb to the current of fever-
ish agitation.” Poetry has abandoned its age-old mission to forge new ideals and
to glorify heroic deeds, because now, as in “every period of literary decadence,”
its only ambition is to express “petty personal impressions.” De Lisle’s advice to
artists is to withdraw into the ivory tower until the climate improves, but he rec-
ognizes that it is only a select elite of contemplative spirits “[who] are aware of
their transitional period.”

V. TRAITS OF THE TRANSITIONAL PERIOD

The term “transition” denotes a loose experiential category, and constitutes an

umbrella-term encompassing a broad range of sub-themes, images, and varia-
tions. Among the most important are the following: the shock of the past and the
future; the undecidability between decadence and renewal; the painful nature of
the passage; and the figure of pregnant time.
To begin with, the chaos and confusion that mark the transition are often fig-
ured as the result of a fateful collision between past and future, as if the present
were a battleground, the historical junction where a dying and a nascent society
33. Cf. Hugo’s claim that “I am the man of a period, I’ll found an era. I can pull off an eighteenth
Brumaire in literature,” quoted in the diary of Charles Julien Lioult de Chênedollé (1769–1833),
Extraits du Journal de Chênedollé [1833] (Caen: E. Domin, 1922), 132. Entry of Feb. 19, 1830.
34. Alphonse de Lamartine, Souvenirs, impressions, pensées et paysages pendant un voyage en
Orient [1832–1833] (Paris: Hachette, 1859), 25. Entry for July 11, 1832.
35. Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard et Pécuchet (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), 513.
36. Leconte de Lisle, Poésies complètes (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1974), 3: 206.
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62 GÖRAN BLIX

confront each other head-on. Chateaubriand probably penned the canonical ver-
sion of this imagined collision when he depicted French society during the
Revolution: “In a society that is dissolving and reforming, the battle of two spir-
its, the shock of the past and of the future, the blend of old manners and new
manners, forms a transitory combination that leaves no room for boredom.” He
then fleshes out this idea by noting the surreal juxtaposition, in the street, of “a
man in French dress, his hair powdered, a sword at his side” walking beside “a
man with cropped hair and no powder, wearing an English jacket and an
American tie.”37 Such contrasts are of course the very stuff of the Mémoires
d’outre-tombe, whose author never tires of stressing the ironic fracture that
divides his life and transforms his own body into the space where the old and
new regimes clash.38
Chateaubriand’s experience has its analogue outre-Rhin, where Friedrich
Schlegel wonders “whether the period really is an individual” (that is, whether it
can be regarded as a coherent period), and suspects that it might only be “the
point of collision of other periods.”39 His fellow Jena Romantic, Novalis, explic-
itly evokes the trope of the “period of transition” [Übergang] in his essay on Die
Christenheit oder Europa (1799), and deplores the present war-torn condition of
Europe as a spiritual and political nadir between the unified Christianity of the
Middle Ages and the dream of a future cosmopolitan state. When he turns to
address “the political drama of our age,” he sees a combat between alien periods
that is waged across the temporal threshold of the present: “the old and the new
world are engaged in battle.”40 This military rhetoric of confrontation is an intri-
cate figure that encodes a complex construction of temporality that in some ways
anticipates the Marxist couple of residual and emergent forms. But while the idea
of a “transition” clearly presupposes the existence of the new and the old, these
two need neither coincide nor collide—one could also imagine an insensible gra-
dation—so their encounter in “battle” bespeaks an intense experience of tempo-
ral crisis in which incompatible outlooks openly confront each other. The July
Revolution of 1830 brings a resurgence of this open rhetoric of conflict: shortly
before it, Balzac records the tangible tension between the old and the new as a
visible “conflict of fashions, manners, [and] ideas,” and goes on to note the hos-
tile coexistence of republican, imperial, and monarchical ideologies in one space:
“there results [from this] a society in which life and death, new interests and old
interests ceaselessly commingle and wrestle.”41

37. Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’outre-tombe, 172-173.

38. “And so,” he writes in an earlier chapter, “I have been placed strangely enough in life to have
witnessed the games of the Quintaine and the proclamation of the Rights of Man; to have seen the
bourgeois militia of a Breton village and the national guard of France, the banner of the lords of
Combourg and the flag of the Revolution” (52).
39. Friedrich Schlegel, Athenäums-Framente [1798], in Kritische und theoretische Schriften
(Stuttgart: Reclam, 1978), 136. More philosophical than most of the authors cited here, Schlegel sees
that this question can only be answered in hindsight: “how could it be possible to understand and
gloss the present period of the world properly, without being able to anticipate even just the general
character of the following period?” (136).
40. Novalis, Die Christenheit oder Europa [1799] (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984), 84-85.
41. Balzac, “Complaintes satiriques,” 2: 740.
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CHARTING THE “TRANSITIONAL PERIOD” 63

As overt conflict recedes, an attenuated version of the motif emerges in which
transition is seen as a time of chaos and confusion, of eclectic forms and hybrid
styles; the world is then less torn or embattled than vague, fluid, and inconsis-
tent. Mercier had already noted “something arbitrary and fluid . . . in our opin-
ions,”42 and Musset had pictured the passage in 1836 as a trans-Atlantic voyage,
likening the amorphous limbo of the present to “something ineffably vague and
fluid, a wavy sea full of shipwrecks.”43 Michelet, slightly more upbeat, still con-
siders “the beautiful and terrible period in which we happen to live” as one
marked by the inexorable dissolution of forms: “a period of destruction, of dis-
solution, of decomposition, of analysis and of criticism.”44 The impression of
moral confusion leads George Sand’s Lélia to denounce these “times of transi-
tion,” in which the collapse of stable value systems suggests a sort of “monastic
withdrawal.”45
This sense of disorientation will soon crystallize into a more concrete formu-
lation and will form a new leitmotif. This involves the paradoxical juxtaposition
of progress and decadence; these twin ideas, ancient structuring devices of his-
torical thought, obviously do double duty in the nineteenth century. What is inter-
preted as progress in the mainstream is read as proof of decadence on the mar-
gins. But the order that these concepts confer retrospectively for the historian is
less accessible in lived time, during which, to be sure, many do interpret the flux
around them in terms of progress or decadence, but as a rule less on rational
grounds than on ideological faith. The concept of transition brings these two vec-
tors together, and ascribes progress and decadence simultaneously to the same
time. Both processes are at work at once: to be in transition means to experience
rebirth and decay indistinguishably.
Chateaubriand said it best: “it is not clear whether one is present at the creation
or at the end of a world.”46 The difference between decay and rebirth becomes
undecidable during the transition, and the wild energies that are unleashed may
just as well be the death throes of an old world as the birth pangs of a new one.
Musset formulates this imbrication of decay and growth as follows: “[in] the pres-
ent century . . . it is uncertain whether, with each step one takes, one is walking
on seeds or decay,” and personifies the spirit of the age as an ambiguous “angel
of twilight, . . . half mummy, half fetus,” poised between birth and death.47 This
irresolvable overlap of categories defines transitional time as more primary than
progress or decadence, the two terms required to name this experience, and which
would later be renamed—and silenced, tamed—under the rubric of modernity.48

42. Mercier, “Du siècle littéraire de Louis XIV.”

43. Musset, La Confession, 24.
44. Jules Michelet, Introduction à l’histoire universelle [1831], in Oeuvres complètes (Paris:
Flammarion, 1972), 2: 255.
45. George Sand, Lélia (Paris: Garnier, 1960), 477.
46. Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’outre-tombe, 201. This quotation refers to a polar landscape, but
the rhetoric of natural depiction is inevitably social. This is also Chateaubriand’s first encounter with
the New World, quite literally, since his ship is here sailing past Newfoundland.
47. Musset, La Confession, 25.
48. Cf. also Hugo, in Notre-Dame de Paris, who turns the contemporary image of the renaissance
on its head by calling it “the inevitable decadence of architecture” (159). He is, of course, having fun
with words, but the very fact of undoing the renaissance / decadence distinction is itself telling.
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64 GÖRAN BLIX

The hardships of the passage are often given biblical colors: the transition is a
crossing of the desert—or, more often, an ocean; an equally proverbial promised
land awaits future generations. The discomforts of the desert (thirst, longing,
monotony, waiting, and emptiness) are transfigured into the spiritual void of the
transition: “they gazed at the earth, the sky, the streets and the roads,” writes
Musset of his generation, “and all of that was empty.”49 For once, he resists
grandiloquent lament and the plenitude of disenchantment, and depicts the cross-
ing in La Confession instead in purely prosaic terms as a long deadly spell of
ennui: “it’s comforting to think that one is miserable,” he admits, “when one is
really only empty and bored.”50 No less an intellect than the sober Tocqueville
echoes this transition fatigue a decade later, in response to the 1848 Revolution
that reopened the historical breach he had hoped closed for good after 1830.
Tocqueville’s frustration with the irremediably revolutionary nature of his time
is palpable in his Souvenirs: “after each of these successive mutations, it was said
that the French Revolution, having achieved what was presumptuously called its
work, was finished.”51 But this illusion of arrival was just wishful thinking:
“there is the French Revolution, starting out afresh, yet one more time.” This last
expression highlights the essential ennui of transitional time, which despite its
tumultuous forward movement appears strangely empty and homogeneous. In a
paradoxical formulation worthy of Chateaubriand, he undercuts the hope that any
apparent progress would authorize: “the further we go, the more the goal grows
dim and withdraws. Will we arrive,” he wonders, “at a social transformation
more profound and complete” than the one anticipated, “or will we just simply
end up in a state of sporadic anarchy?”52 This last question points to a crucial
truth of transitional time (to which I will return): its open-ended nature.

VI. THE POLITICS OF TRANSITIONAL TIME

The picture of a “crossing of the desert” may be misleading, then, insofar as it

portrays the transition as an active exodus into the future, whereas it often
induces a patient resignation to history and an attitude of radical quietism. It is
not just Musset’s sense of emptiness and ennui that paralyzes the will, but more
profoundly the structure of modern time itself, now perceived as historical des-
tiny. As an integral part of the fabric of history, the “transitional period” can nei-
ther be hastened nor slowed, but only observed, traversed, and endured. The log-
ical attitude to adopt is one of waiting—this was Leconte de Lisle’s recommen-
dation—hence the frequent theme of contemplative withdrawal, and its later aes-
theticist avatars. “I once had great ambitions,” writes Sand’s Lélia, “[but now] I
wait in silence, with a broken heart.” Morally torn between “their old law, and
my new law,” between the antiquated law of duty and her own liberal vision of
love, she senses that her conscience “has outpaced humanity,” and feels com-
pelled to withdraw to await more enlightened times: “Marriage, as I conceive it,

49. Musset, La Confession, 22.

50. Ibid., 33.
51. Alexis de Tocqueville, Souvenirs [1850–1851] (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 89.
52. Ibid.
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CHARTING THE “TRANSITIONAL PERIOD” 65

as I would’ve required it, did not yet exist in this world. I had to withdraw into
the wilderness to wait for the designs of God to reach their maturity.”53 Musset’s
lost generation still has faith in the future, but stands before it impotently as
before some ideal unrealized artwork: “they liked the future, but what of it? only
the way Pygmalion liked Galatea.” Unlike the mythical Greek sculptor, howev-
er, these modern dreamers tragically lack the desire to breathe life into their own
vision: “she stood before them like a lover of marble, and they waited for her to
grow animate, for blood to color her veins.”54 They adopt the powerless attitude
of waiting before the advent of the longed-for future, and thus indirectly espouse
Karl Löwith’s idea that Weltgeschichte (the history of the world) merely presents
a secular form of Heilsgeschichte (the history of salvation).55 The ancient pattern
of religious expectation (Saint Paul’s “the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in
the night”56) thus prolongs itself in the passive dream of the coming society.57
Waiting, however, is not just an aberrant private outlook, adopted out of lazi-
ness or indifference by the sullen “children of the century.” It is also the politi-
cally expedient outlook that society would like to imprint on the impatient young
idealist. Musset makes this clear in La Confession when he mimics its slightly
schizophrenic injunction to the “child”: “wait, he is told . . . take hope, work,
charge ahead, step back.”58 In this context, one might suggest that the function
of transitions is to instill a healthy quietism before the planetary transformation
undertaken on behalf of interests that are never acknowledged or discussed.
Politically, then, to cede to the current of the times is paradoxically a close
equivalent to monastic and aestheticist withdrawal. This ideological kinship
between contrasting responses to transitionality can be seen clearly in Ernest
Renan. Writing after the failed Revolution of 1848, and addressing the disquiet
provoked by the transformations of the age (“the analytical state we are passing
through”), he exhorted his contemporaries “to march upright like men . . . and
pursue the rough path that will lead us without fail to an infinitely better place,”59
rather than succumb to the dangerous sirens of socialism. The promise of a
brighter future pre-empts any discussion about what direction change should
take, and turns even active participation in the work of progress into a form of
passivity. “To seek a stable equilibrium and repose in such a period,” Renan
writes, “is to seek the impossible,”60 yet paradoxically to participate in the for-
ward movement, as Renan suggests, may lead nowhere except to the perpetua-
tion of transition itself. The specter of indefinite progress functions here as a way

53. Sand, Lélia, 477-478.

54. Musset, La Confession, 25.
55. See Karl Löwith’s Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of
History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957).
56. 1 Thessalonians 5:2.
57. François Hartog, in his recent Régimes d’historicité: présentisme et expériences du temps
(Paris: Seuil, 2003), has described the temporality instituted by Christianity in terms of transition.
The birth of Christ produced “a cleavage of time into two parts through the decisive event of the
Incarnation,” inaugurating an intermediary time of transition before the Second Coming: “this par-
enthetical, intermediary time is one of waiting” (71).
58. Musset, La Confession, 36.
59. Ernest Renan, L’Avenir de la science [1848–1849] (Paris: Flammarion, 1995), 333.
60. Ibid., 389.
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66 GÖRAN BLIX

of concealing the social goals that ground it, and provides an ingenious alibi for
the eclipse of its own justification.
The ideological quid pro quo that progress performs stands out clearly in
Renan’s defense of “inequality” as a necessary evil during the “transition.” While
he admits that “inequality is revolting” from a purely private and legal perspec-
tive, the overall teleology of the state as a “machine for progress” overrides such
petty qualms: “inequality is legitimate every time that inequality is necessary for
the good of humanity,”61 even if this “good” itself has no other content than
equality. The young Renan is of course already too conservative to say this,
despite his flirtation with socialist ideas, but he does admit that “the goal of
humanity . . . is to attain the highest possible human culture,” and concedes that
“the goal would be missed” if this culture were restricted to an elite, and “were
accessible only to a few people.”62 Renan agrees, then, that the rainbow of
progress should lead to a utopia of universal access, and asserts that, “the goal
will only be attained when all men have access to this veritable religion and when
all of humanity is cultivated.”63 The problem is that this inclusive ideal serves
only to justify an incoherent ideology that we might term “progress for progress’s
sake.” The indefinite prolongation of transition is now an alibi for not undertak-
ing true social reform, and progress, like contemporary art, becomes self-refer-
ential: “What is right is the progress of humanity: there is no right over against
this progress; and conversely, progress is sufficient to legitimize everything.”64
That is how the future community promised by progress is sacrificed to the very
process of achieving it, how the means eclipse the ends. Renan agrees that
“inequality” may appear “revolting,” and may not even be “the fatal law of soci-
ety,” but insists that “it is natural and just when one considers it as the transitory
condition of social perfection.”65 The experience of transition, then, has here been
hijacked and made to buttress a disingenuous progressive ideology. It underpins,
in the end, two distinct forms of political quietism, one marked by the paralysis
of withdrawal and waiting (Musset), and the other a grudging endorsement of
“progress” as the irresistible force carrying us toward the future utopia (Renan),
but an endorsement that neither requires any political action nor supports it.

VII. THE LABOR OF THE FUTURE

But quietism is not the only response to transitional time: it can also provoke a
creative and active interpretation. There is a strand of imagery in the motif that,
even while acknowledging the pain of transition, regards such suffering as the
birth-pangs of a newly emerging world. Transition becomes labor—(pro)creative
labor—the production and gestation of the future. Guizot had already noted the
“laborious transition” from nomadic to sedentary life, and Leconte de Lisle was
hopeful that “the regeneration of forms” would occur “within a century or two,”

61. Ibid., 394.

62. Ibid., 382.
63. Ibid.
64. Ibid., 396.
65. Ibid.
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CHARTING THE “TRANSITIONAL PERIOD” 67

provided that “the genesis of the new age doesn’t require a slower gestation.”66
It is Michelet, however, who most clearly interprets the pain of passage as the
historical gestation of a new society brought about by human effort. Early on in
his Histoire de la révolution française, he laments the failure of the National
Assembly, at first too deferential to the king, to “abbreviate this painful passage
during which France remained between the old order and the new order.”67 This
image of national rebirth as a “painful [mortel] passage” illustrates the pain of
renewal well enough; elsewhere he depicts the revolutionary passage as “the
turning point in a tragedy in which the victim is an entire world,” and stresses the
“cruel effort” required when “man passes from one system to another.”68
Michelet then goes on to imagine the modern advent of liberty precisely in terms
of a child leaving its mother: “But it is not without . . . a painful rupture that
[man] tears himself free from the fatality in whose embrace he has remained so
long suspended; this separation also makes his heart bleed. However, it must
happen, the child must leave its mother; must walk on his own; must move
ahead.”69 Faithful to his conviction that humanity forges its own destiny (“man
is his own Prometheus”70), Michelet here sees transition as the creative process
of learning and growth by which the child wins its autonomy.
He considers rest and tranquility, moreover, like Renan, to be impossible
options, and refuses to lament with Leconte de Lisle that “the character . . . of
this age is . . . that it seeks neither peace nor quiet.”71 If the restlessness of the
transition is indeed a plague, Michelet consoles his readers that “amidst the uni-
versal agitation which surrounds us, I believe in a tranquil future.”72 And if all
this turbulence is unsettling, it is also a sign of vitality, a reign of “creative dis-
order” rife with possibilities. To the incurable nostalgics who regret “the beauty
of Paris in its organic form” and the Hugolian admirers of medieval Paris,
Michelet offers this pre-Haussmannian apology for urban renewal: “beauty is
greater in becoming than in being.” The moving spectacle of progress, the sight
of a civilization on the march, overshadows the static beauty of an intact cultur-
al heritage; once that truth is admitted, Michelet suggests, “you will no longer
accuse modern Paris,” but will instead recognize “[that it] is, in truth, in a tran-
sitional stage, after a period of great architecture expressing religious associa-
tion, before a period of great architecture that embodies political and industrial
association.”73 The question raised by Michelet’s euphoric reading, however, for
all its radical overtones, is whether it can avoid becoming an unwitting apology
for directionless change.
The same radical revaluation of change is in fact also present in Renan, who
reverses the ancient hierarchy of being and becoming despite his own conserva-

66. De Lisle, Poésies complètes, 211.

67. Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française [1847] (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1979), 1:
208.
68. Michelet, Introduction à l’histoire universelle, 2: 255.
69. Ibid.
70. This phrase occurs in Michelet’s famous “Préface de 1869” to his history of France. See Le
Moyen âge (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1981), 17.
71. Michelet, Introduction à l’histoire universelle, 2: 207.
72. Ibid., 255.
73. Michelet, Journal, 1: 290. Entry for Feb. 1839.
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68 GÖRAN BLIX

tive instincts. The reassuring repose for which all of Musset’s lost souls had clam-
ored is at last denounced as a juvenile pipe-dream. Renan insists that, though “the
tumultuousness appears to stem from a regrettable transition; repose appears to
be the goal,” this is a mistaken belief because “the goal of humanity is not repose
. . . and order itself is not desirable except insofar as it serves progress.”74 Order
and rest, the peacefulness of a stable state, so long upheld as a political ideal in
the Western tradition, must finally be renounced for a program of interminable
progress, which retains only the thinnest fiction of a final term. The modern
philosopher is instead encouraged to espouse movement and to admit that
“humanity will only come to rest in perfection.” Renan, in the end, lucidly casts
off the illusion of a goal, and rejects the reassuring fiction of a transition linking
any real masses of terra firma. The tumultuousness of becoming thereby replaces
the serenity of being as the supreme value, and the prospect of perpetual change
that had once so frightened Musset must now be stoically adopted. “The human
spirit,” Renan declares, “has passed from the absolute to the historical; from now
on it considers everything in the category of becoming.”75

VIII. TOWARD A PERPETUAL TRANSITION?

Renan’s analysis points to a deep latent contradiction within the transitional

experience itself. Musset, Chateaubriand, Michelet, Flaubert—all the writers
cited here—understood the experience as the promise of some future resolution,
as a passing evil to be endured until a stable state is reestablished. The transition
is temporary: its hardships are acceptable as an exception to the norm. What hap-
pens, then, if the transition goes on and on, prolonging itself indefinitely, with no
end in sight? What if the exceptional state endures, and affirms itself instead as
the new historical norm, thereby blurring the distinction between periods and
transitions on which the concept of transition rests? A transition that has ceased
to be transitory is indeed a paradoxical type of time. And yet, as Renan sees it,
his own “transitional period” has ushered in a new metastable state in which
change is the norm: “life is nothing but a transition,” he writes, “a long, contin-
uous, intolerable stretch.” The belief in a terminus is a useful fiction designed to
console humanity caught in the whirlpool of change: “there is no moment under-
way at which one finds a stable resting place; one dreams of arriving there, and
thus one still keeps on going.”76 Tocqueville arrived at a similar insight after the
Revolution of 1848, in a passage worth quoting at length: “As for me, . . . I don’t
know when this long voyage will end; I’m tired of repeatedly mistaking mis-
leading vapors for the shore, and I often ask myself whether the terra firma that
we have sought for so long really exists, or whether our destiny might not rather
be to ply the seas eternally!”77
But why speak any longer of transitions, when the fiction the term presuppos-
es has been exploded? The word, in fact, remained in use long after what the

74. Renan, L’Avenir de la science, 437.

75. Ibid., 396.
76. Ibid., 390.
77. Tocqueville, Souvenirs, 90.
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CHARTING THE “TRANSITIONAL PERIOD” 69

Romantics believed to be an interim period had been unmasked as a permanent
state. Renan himself retains the expression even as he undoes the metaphysical
opposition of periods and breaks on which it rests: “it is superficial to regard his-
tory,” he states, “as composed of periods of stability and of periods of transition.”
But then he offers a paradoxical formula to describe the new contradictory time:
“it is transition that is the normal state.”78 The terminus that Musset predicted has
not entirely vanished, but instead of lying twenty years off, or a century away,
the future utopia has receded into a remote horizon. It operates only as a struc-
turally necessary fiction—one that no one expects to see fulfilled, but which sub-
tly orients a time that risks seeming directionless. The hypothetical end of histo-
ry, as a secular form of last judgment, remains indispensable to progress as its
ultimate ground of legitimacy.

I have argued that Musset’s picture of the nineteenth century as a period of tran-
sition offers a more accurate image than that suggested by the term “modernity,”
and I have stressed its exemplarity by showing how it resonates through a large
body of texts in the first half of the nineteenth century. The term “transitional
period” arguably names the contemporary experience of time, and names it, pre-
cisely, not as a period, but as an anti-period, a passage, an interim, an interstitial
state devoid of a proper identity. The canonical vision that sees the period in
terms of the concept of modernity, a vision inspired by Baudelaire, does stress its
transitory character—grasped chiefly in terms of the fleeting appearance of fash-
ions, styles, and trends—but does so only to reaffirm a stable and eternal realm
of beauty, whose final function must be to dispel the anxiety of transition.
Baudelaire’s influential branding of a new heroic age transforms into a cultural
totality precisely what many of his contemporaries saw purely as a passage. This
sense of passage arguably better captures temporal experience than the spurious
triumphalism implicit in the notion of modernity and the view of time it propos-
es. It also goes some way to explaining the ongoing obsession with periodization
and our irrepressible need to label our historical moment. Period designations—
modernity, postmodernity, the information age, the new world order, and so on,
down to the style markers that carry the names of decades—are less coherent
concepts, on this view, than they are the ironic symptoms of a “transitional” time
that has lasted at least two centuries—a time that requires stable labels more than
ever in order to metamorphose time into identity. The “transition” that began
around 1800 is still in full swing.
There is a risk here of stretching a strictly Romantic experience into the pres-
ent age, but I would argue that Romanticism offered a prescient diagnosis of the
modern temporal condition. The ceaseless repetition and longevity of the motif
confirm this. So allow me to conclude by citing one last example, one taken from
the twentieth century. By this time, the motif has become a commonplace, as
Gobineau’s use already testified in 1874 (“to use a common phrase, we are in a
transitional period”79), such that it surfaces virtually unchanged in a text by Paul
Valéry a hundred years after Musset’s novel. In “Le Bilan de l’intelligence” [The
78. Renan, L’Avenir de la science, 392.
79. Arthur de Gobineau, Les Pléiades [1874] (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 246-247.
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70 GÖRAN BLIX

State of Intelligence] (1935), written during the unruly interim period between
the two world wars, Valéry resorts to the motif to diagnose the current situation.
He begins by noting that “a disorder with no apparent end in sight is currently
visible in every domain,”80 confirming that for him the time is still out of joint,
and that the roots of this disorder lie in a deep social transformation: “we have
the privilege—or the very interesting misfortune—to be present at a profound,
rapid, and irresistible transformation, touching every aspect of human action.”81
There is no intrinsic need to frame this experience of change in periodic terms,
invoking a clash of eras, but Valéry here repeats Chateaubriand’s inaugural self-
description as a universally valid truth, affirming that even now “every man
belongs to two eras.”82 These two eras may clash on the intellectual battleground
of the present, but they also recede, as they did for the Romantics, into the rela-
tive distance of an enchanting past and an inaccessible future; the current “over-
all impression of impotence and incoherence” is only exacerbated by the mag-
netic pull of these two temporal poles, “on the one hand, a past that has neither
been abolished nor forgotten . . . and, on the other, a totally faceless future.”83
The promise embodied by the future also appears suspiciously hollow here, if
only because Valéry, unlike the professional futurologists who would multiply in
the wake of Jules Verne, refuses to confuse wishful prophecies with probabilities,
and to project a comforting utopia.84 The current chaos “evidently points to a cer-
tain future, but a future that it is absolutely impossible for us to imagine.”85
These remarks by Valéry all echo the Romantic diagnosis of time, and though
the point is not that nothing has changed, they do testify to the longevity and
solid basis of the Romantic cliché. The sense of transition that Michelet, Musset,
and Renan identified has endured and engraved itself on consciousness as a cul-
tural norm. Valéry’s text itself comments on the normative status the concept has
attained: “one of my friends,” he writes, “made fun one day, in front of me, of
the well-known expression: ‘transitional period,’ and he told me that that was an
absurd cliché.” But Valéry’s friend, far from rejecting the figure as false or inap-
plicable, only takes issue with the naïve belief that the transition might be tran-
sitory; like Renan, he critically unpacks the image, and bluntly states his belief
that endless becoming is the historical norm, and that “every period is transi-
tion.” Valéry, however, seems to cling unhappily to a classic periodical vision of
history, in which transitions remain bounded events, destined to end when some
future harbor floats into view. He thus grasps for another image, and falls back
on the metaphor of history as pregnancy that Michelet had also invoked. Just as
child-bearing is necessarily a passing state, so he argues are the inhabitual hard-
ships of the current time: “do you think that a woman expecting a baby doesn’t

80. Paul Valéry, “Le Bilan de l’intelligence” [1935], in Variété III (Paris: Gallimard, 1936), 253.
81. Ibid., 258.
82. Ibid., 259.
83. Ibid., 260.
84. Eric Hobsbawm comments wryly that “arguments about prediction tend to concentrate, for
obvious reasons, on those parts of the future where uncertainty appears to be greatest, and not on
those where it is least. Meteorologists are not needed to tell us that spring will follow winter.” In
“Looking Forward: History and the Future” [1981], in On History (London: Abacus, 1997), 51.
85. Valéry, “Le Bilan de l'intelligence,” 254.
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CHARTING THE “TRANSITIONAL PERIOD” 71

feel she is in a state rather different from the one she was in before, and that she
couldn’t call this period of her life a transitional period?”86 Some future offspring
must reward future generations for the pains of the present—that is, if history and
pregnancy can legitimately be compared.
Can we judge, in the end, between Valéry and his friend, between perpetual
transition and organic periods, between non-stop labor and labor ending in birth?
In trying to answer this, one thing seems to be clear: as contestable as the grids
of periodization that we apply to the historical continuum may be, they are
charged with meaning, both ideological and experiential, both real and imagi-
nary. It is a necessary task to disentangle these layers in order to write genuine
history. The destruction of the mantra of “modernity” is a good place to start to
do this. In this skeptical spirit, I would offer the oxymoronic “transitional peri-
od” as the term that best names the regime of perpetual change in which we now
live, and which best captures its ambivalent, hopeful, dreadful, final, open-ended
character. Valéry and his friend are both plausible: we often hear the messianic
claim that the “end of history” is near, accompanied by the apocalyptic trumpets
of the “clash of civilizations.” But this prophetic rhetoric announcing the advent
of a new world order competes with the rousing neo-liberal promise of infinite
growth, which invites us to celebrate the endless growing pains of capitalist
expansion. Both of these competing views—imminent closure and endless
expansion—rely, in the end, on our current experience of time as a “transitional
period.” The concept thereby remains as relevant now as when the Romantics
first invented it, and the task of interpreting it anew, in ways that differ from
these two narratives, has become more urgent than ever.

Princeton University

86. Ibid., 258.