Christophe Verbruggen

Ego and the International: The Modernist Circle of George Sarton

The early years of Isis are examined in the light of George Sartons connection with Paul Otlet (1868–1944) and Henri Lafontaine (1854–1943), founders in 1895 of the International Office of Bibliography and in 1907 of the Union of International Associations, both in Brussels. Otlet, known as one of the fathers of the Information Age, invented the science of information, which he called, in French, documentation. Lafontaine, a socialist senator in Belgium, won the 1913 Nobel Prize for Peace. Sarton shared Otlet and Lafontaines views about pacifism, internationalism, and rational bibliography; he designed Isis to fit with the modernist goal, expressed by Otlet and Lafontaine, of using information to generate new knowledge.

Beyond the Metropolis: French and Belgian Symbolists between the Region and the Republic of Letters

In 1892, the editors of the journal La Jeune Belgique – the bell-ringer of Belgian modernism –made a claim that seemingly contradicted the publication’s central role in the country’s so-called ‘literary renaissance’.1 They asserted that their periodical had ‘never promoted a national literature, that is to say, “Belgian literature”’.2 Instead, they portrayed themselves as French writers, comparable to authors in Brittany and the South of France:

Elements of the modernist creed in henri pirenne and george sarton

As a humanistic discipline, the history of science has evolved, over the past century, in the way of its academic cousin, the history of art, by powering through a number of disorienting controversies, both abstract and political. Just as the history of art swept from Wõfflin through Panofsky to Schama, so the history of science swept from Tannery, Heiberg, and Merz through Koyré, Dijksterhuis, and Neugebauer, to Needham, Merton, Price, Kuhn and beyond; the great editions of the works of scientists past, beginning in the nineteenth century, led to significant harvest today; large compendia grew in sophistication and diversity; and persuasive, even great, treatises continue to appear which could have been read with profit and admiration by historians of science on the eve of the First World War. Disciplines, however, are subject to mutation. In the twilight of the modern world, a time of dramatic changes in the structures and the sentiments behind intellectual creation, it is of interest to ask why the discipline of history of science remains very much with us, while a number of other fields have been either radically transformed (notably, the disciplines of psychology, physics, and library science) or dramatically attenuated (for example, the disciplines of tropical medicine, journalism, and decorative arts). That the principality of history of science has retained a measure of independence is striking because it has generally bowed before neighbouring monarchs, whether philosophers (at the beginning of the twentieth century), political economists (during the middle of the twentieth century), sociologists (toward the end of the twentieth century), or semioticians (in our own time), all the while taking care not to alienate the scientists and their sources of funding. Indeed, historians of science today are not infrequently trained by card-carrying philosophers or sociologists, and scientific credentials are still bona-fides for significant academic positions in the field. In its resilience, however, the discipline of history of science resembles the discipline of history itself, which has been pulled this way and that, since its institutionalization at the dawn of the modern age, by philosophers, political economists, sociologists, and literary critics. The ontogenic resemblance is reinforced by a certain mutual sympathy, for historians of science have been lodged, for a century, among their ecumenical historian colleagues. In the following pages, we consider the extent of the sympathy between two academic fields at the beginning of the twentieth century. We explore the interrelation

Schrijverschap in de Belgische belle époque. Een sociaal-culturele geschiedenis

This book studies literary sociability during the belle epoque (1890-1914) by comparing and relating organizations of authors with intellectual sociability in general. Drawing on a combination of methods including social network analysis, existing histories of Dutch and French speaking literature are questioned. This study shows, for instance, how author’s societies and literary journals were functional in the symbolic struggle between ‘dilettante’ writers on the one hand and self declared ‘professional’ authors on the other. It concludes that Belgian authorship was shaped within a social space that was much broader than the national social space, especially as far as the social construction of the Belgian author-intellectual was concerned. As such, being an intellectual became an important category of personal identity.

Hoe literair internationalisme organiseren? De 'vervlochten' geschiedenis van de Belgische PEN-club (1922-1931)

This article focuses on prevailing views on literary internationalism and the way it was institutionally organised and developed in the Belgian PEN Club. The organisation of the Belgian PEN and the way internationalism was set up there cannot be discussed independently of developments in the rest of the international intellectual field. It was a ‘entangled history’. I have limited myself to a comparison with other countries and literatures where it was hard to implement the original PEN model with a single coordinating branch for each nation state. What arguments were used to mark off autonomous entities from each other in an international intellectual world that became increasingly institutionalised between the wars? The Belgian case was interesting when it came to answering these questions. It was only in 1930 (formally in 1931), after lengthy discussions reflecting on these issues, that the Dutch-speaking and French-speaking authors in Belgium went their separate ways. In an article he wrote about the PEN Club in L’Europe in 1926, Stefan Zweig offered an interesting analysis of the difference between internationalism and cosmopolitanism. In Zweig’s opinion, the aims might have been more focused. The members of the club did well to opt decisively for genuine internationalism: ‘ce qu’il nous faut, c’est un internationalisme sincere, pret a yous les sacrifices, une fidelite durable et indissoluble a la seule veritable patrie, qui est pour nous la communaute de l’esprit europeen’. Has the PEN Club ever come anywhere near the ideal that Zweig outlined, the achievement of a sincere internationalism loyal to only one native land, ‘la communaute de l’esprit europeen’? In fact to a certain extent it has, in that it was initially a chiefly European affair, but in other respects it has not at all. Previous research has already pointed out that, in spite of the noble aspirations of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation and the related International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, it has never been possible to become detached from the power politics of governments and from affinities with such categories as race, nation, religion, class and so on. In addition, it was all too easily assumed that resourceful institutions with complex information networks and equally complex decision-making processes would smooth away any differences. Another of the principles of the PEN Club was to encourage intellectual cooperation and in this way it expressed the cultural internationalism that first saw the light in the shadow of the First World War. Such equally ingenious constructions as the voting procedures used in the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation regulated the balance between the large and small PEN centres with their proportional expectations. There are nevertheless also major differences between the PEN Club and the ICIC. In the first place there were few indications of direct political involvement in PEN by the great powers (the symbolic significance of PEN was too small to warrant it). Another difference is that in the view of the protagonists in PEN the cultural world order was not defined by a dialogue between major ‘civilisations’. There was little or no talk in the PEN Club of any ambition to mediate between civilisations. The literary world order was defined by dialogue between autonomous literatures. The basic entities involved in the organisation of literary internationalism were literatures and cities. These were supplemented by such additional entities as (native) countries, nations, world empires and regions, but the basic foundations consisted of a metropolitan literary culture. The world’s literary system is more complex than any economic world system with its clearly identifiable dominant centre and peripheral (or semi-peripheral) areas. The PEN Club does not fit into a model that takes Paris as its absolute centre. Between the wars, Paris was at most just one of several centres. If we nonetheless persist with the centre-periphery model, the PEN Club symbolises the loss of the French centralist model of culture that applied to the old nation states of the nineteenth century. The PEN never clearly defined what autonomous literatures were, though the Belgians (and others), with August Vermeylen at the forefront, requested a vague definition. What we see here at a macro level are the same mechanisms as those for determining who could be recognised as a ‘real’ writer: everything occurred in the form of co-option. ‘Real’ writers determine who the other ‘real’ writers are by means of all sorts of mechanisms and media for consecration. Representatives of ‘autonomous’ literatures within PEN determined what the other autonomous literatures were. In accordance with this organic process, the regulations under which it was hoped to organise literary internationalism were repeatedly discussed in the course of the 1920s. It was not until the congresses in The Hague and Amsterdam in 1931 that consensus was reached. The unitary Belgian branch of the PEN Club ceased to exist at the end of the 1930s too, at the same time as the end of the discussions on the organisation of the international club. The broad, interwoven view of the Belgian PEN Club demonstrates that the Belgian compromise, with alternating chairmanship and peaceful coexistence, can also be seen as a choice made out of sheer necessity, determined in part by centrifugal literary forces in other countries. The French-speaking Belgians were especially uncomfortable with the self-confident Flemish writers in their ranks. There was never any doubt about the autonomy of French and Dutch literature in the international PEN Club. But Belgium was by no means the only country where it was hard to implement the original PEN model with its single coordinating branch in each nation state. The organisation of a Yiddish PEN (a literature without territory) saw to it that for a long time two separate branches were not tolerated in a single city. This was compounded by the fact that the problems with national and regional attachment and the urge for independence always manifested themselves together with and building on other fault lines, including those between generations and political persuasions. This was the case in Germany even before the breakthrough of fascism. It was not easy to organise literary internationalism, let alone define it.

An entangled history of ideas and ideals: feminism, social and educational reform in children's libraries in Belgium before the First World War

This article examines one of the first children’s libraries in continental Europe, founded by Belgian feminists in Ghent around 1910. The transnational cultural transfer and transformation of the American children’s‐library paradigm is studied from the perspective of “entangled history”. The authors reveal a history entangled in transnational processes and partially overlapping intellectual networks of feminists, social and Lebens‐reformers and progressive educationalists. It is contended that the American notion of children’s libraries served the founders’ feminist, educational, social and Lebens‐reformist views. Discussion includes both national and transnational resonances, notably the interconnections with the Heures Joyeuses in Brussels and with similar Dutch initiatives.