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Bellantone Andrea . Hegel en France . Paris : Éditions Hermann , 2011. 2 Vols. Vol. 1: ISBN 978-2-7056-8012-1 (pbk). Pp. 458. 48[euro]. Vol. 2: ISBN 978-2-7056-8013-8 (pbk). Pp. 288. 34[euro].
Reviews
Hegel en France masterfully reconstructs the changing fortunes of French Hegelianism from the 1820s until World War II, providing detailed and nuanced portraits of minor as well as major Hegelian interpreters from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Originally published in Italy in 2006 ( Hegel in Francia, Rubbettino), Bellantone's book came out in French in 2011 (with a new preface by J.-L. Vieillard Baron). The large amount of literature already produced on the French reception of Hegel teems with similar titles: Georges Canguilhem's article 'Hegel en France' (1948), Kelly's Hegel in France (1992), his two previous bibliographic articles 'Hegel in France to 1940' (1981) and 'Hegel in France Today' (1986), and Salvadori's Hegel in Francia (1974). However, in joining this classic research field, Bellantone's two volumes do not fail to introduce some new elements. As Stuart Barnett remarks in his introduction to Hegel After Derrida, 'The story of the French reception of Hegel has been told often' (Barnett 1998: 13). Hegel en France tries to tell a slightly different story, although it engages with--and takes advantage of--previous works that cover a similar theme (Baugh 2003, Jarczyk and Labarrière 1996, Kelly 1992, Roth 1988, Salvadori 1974, Valentini 1958).
An interesting aspect concerns the chronological range of Bellantone's reconstruction, which stretches from 1817 (the year of Victor Cousin's first philosophy course after his journey to Germany) to 1941 (when the second volume of Jean Hyppolite's translation of the Phenomenology of Spirit was published). The choice of this 120-year-long historical trajectory is premised on the assumption that the 1940s saw the final decline of the theoretical paradigm of Neoplatonic inspiration in which Hegel had been inscribed since the earliest days of his reception in France.
For Bellantone, the 1940s mark the start of 'another story' of French Hegelianism (1: 17); a story freed from the earlier Neoplatonic constraints and built in the limelight of Hegel's Phenomenology and Jena writings--at the expense of the Encyclopaedia, privileged up until then; and, above all, a story at last loud and proud after the long 'conspiracy of silence' (Dufrenne...