READING HEINRICH HEINE

Scheherazade’s snapshots: Lutetia 205
The circumstances of the day must be considered with intelligent deference whenever
the recent past is discussed. It is an alarming task to describe the storm we
have survived while we still have not reached harbour. (B 5, 369)
The image of safely reaching harbour is parallel to the freebooter of the
French preface, which designates Heine’s own attention to the immediate
situation in dealing with the recent past. While Mignet may claim
that modern conditions (‘moderne Zustände’) have achieved a sure foundation,
Heine reads the threat in Thiers’s smile as he listens to the lecture
in the Academy. More than ever, modern conditions call for wise
circumspection.
However, Heine also offers a glimpse of a second model for his own
contemporary historiography in Lutetia: not Mignet’s archive but Diderot’s
Encyclopédie. Diderot first appears, in the ‘Addendum 1833’ ofFranzösische
Maler,torepresent what is progressive and critical in modern art (B 3, 75);
and readers have often found Heine’s work reminiscent of Diderot, both
intellectually and stylistically. Alexander Jung’s contemporary review of Zur
Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie recalled Le Neveu de Rameau (B 3,
927, 931), and a possible source for Die Bäder von Lucca may be Jacques
le fataliste. 23 More substantially, the conception of Heine’s series of Salon
volumes, designed to accommodate the critical work written in Paris but
not published in book form, clearly derives from Diderot’s Salons. 24 Lutetia
hints at a further parallel.
The first part of the text ‘Communism, Philosophy and the Clergy’,
which appears in the appendix to Lutetia, deals with the work of Pierre
Leroux and Victor Cousin. Compared to Cousin’s philosophical eclecticism,
which confines itself to the metaphysical realm, Leroux’s Encyclopédie
universelle is greeted as ‘a worthy continuation of his predecessor . . . that
colossal pamphlet in thirty quarto volumes, in which Diderot summarized
his century’s knowledge’ (B 5, 498). Heine had been on friendly terms with
Leroux, and in many respects his development from Saint Simonianism to
socialism is similar to Heine’s own path. Heine too extends the encyclopedia
to resume the knowledge of the age. In the divagations of his style,
however, it is the Encyclopédie’s trick of deferred critique that is suggestive
for Heine’s writing.
Diderot’s own definition of ‘Encyclopédie’ – ‘ce mot signifie enchaînement
de connaissances’ – gives some indication of the interplay
possible within an apparently formal (alphabetical) arrangement. By the
repetitions of his figurative discourse, Heine manages the same kind of
‘enchaînement’ across his own texts, within the formal chronology of the
calendar. The obelisk of Luxor, Vernet’s camel, the piano virtuosi of the Paris