thy death - university of north carolina at greensboro · 2014-05-09 · thy death 63. his will...

Thy Death

WESTERN ATTITUDES TOWARD DEATH

Thus far we have illustrated two attitudestoward death. The first, the oldest, the longestheld, and the most common one, is the familiarresignation to the collective destiny of the speciesand can be summarized by the phrase, Et moriemur,and we shall all die. The second, which appearedin the twelfth century, reveals the importancegiven throughout the entire modern periodto the self, to one's own existence, and can beexpressed by another phrase, la mort de soi, one'sown death.Beginning with the eighteenth century, man inwestern societies tended to give death a new mean-

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ing. He exalted it, dramatized it, and thought of itas disquieting and greedy. But he already was lessconcerned with his own death than with la mort detoi, the death of the other person, whose loss andmemory inspired in the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies the new cult of tombs and cemeteries andthe romantic, rhetorical treatment of death.

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A major phenomenon occurred between the sixteenthand eighteenth centuries, a phenomenonwhich we must touch upon here, even if we do notanalyze it in detail. This phenomenon did not occurin the world of real, acted -out events which thehistorian can easily collect and measure. It occurredin the obscure and extravagant world ofphantasms, and the historian studying it ought totransform himself into a psychoanalyst.At the end of the fifteenth century, we see thethemes concerning death begin to take on an eroticmeaning. In the oldest dances of death, Deathscarcely touched the living to warn him and designatehim. In the new iconography of the sixteenthcentury, Death raped the living.1 From the six-


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1 For example, the paintings by Hans Baldung Grien (d. 1545),"Rider with Death and a Maiden," in the Louvre, and "Death andthe Woman," in the museum of Basel.

teenth to the eighteenth centuries, countless scenesor motifs in art and in literature associate deathwith love, Thanatos with Eros. These are eroticomacabrethemes, or simply morbid ones, whichreveal extreme complaisance before the spectaclesOf death, suffering, and torture. Athletic, nude executionersstrip the skin from St. Bartholomew.When Bernini portrayed the mystic union of St.Theresa of Avila with God, he juxtaposed theimages of the death agony and the orgasmic trance.The baroque theater staged its love scenes intombs, such as that of the Capulets.2 The macabreliterature of the eighteenth century united theyoung monk to the dead beauty over whom he waskeeping watch.3

Like the sexual act, death was henceforth increasinglythought of as a transgression which tearsman from his daily life, from rational society, fromhis monotonous work, in order to make him undergoa paroxysm, plunging him into an irrational,violent, and beautiful world. Like the sexual actdeath for the Marquis de Sade is a break, a rupture.This idea of rupture is something completely

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2 J. Rousset, La littrature de Page baroque en France (Paris, 1954).3 An oft-quoted anecdote told by Doctor Louis, "Lettre sur l'incertitudedes signes de la mort," 1752, found in Foeder's article,"Signes de la mort," Dictionnaire des Sciences medicales (Paris,1818), Vol. Ll.

new. Until this point the stress had been on thefamiliarity with death and with the dead. Thisfamiliarity had not been affected, even for the richand the mighty, by the upsurge of individualismbeginning in the twelfth century. Death had becomea more important event; more thought hadto be given to it. But it had become neither frighteningnor obsessive. It had remained familiar andtamed.But from now on it would be thought of as abreak.4This notion of a break was born and developedin the world of erotic phantasms. It then passedinto the world of real and acted-out events.Of course, at that point it lost its erotic characteristics,or at least they were sublimated andreduced to Beauty. Death was no longer desirable,as in the macabre novels, but it was admirable in itsbeauty. This is what would be called the romanticdeath, found in Lamartine in France, the Brontefamily in England, and Mark Twain in America.We have many literary examples of this.Lamartine's "Meditations poétiques" are meditationson death. We also have a great number ofmemoirs and letters. During the 1840s a Frenchfamily, the de La Ferronays, was decimated by


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4 G. Bataille, L'érofisme (Paris, 1957).

tuberculosis. One survivor, Pauline Craven, publishedthe intimate diaries and correspondence ofher brothers, sisters, and parents, most of whichwere narratives of illnesses, death agonies, deaths,and thoughts about death.5Of course, in many ways these memoirs recallthe old customs. The ceremony of death in bed,presided over by the dying person surrounded by acrowd of relatives and friends, persists and still providesthe framework for the setting. But it is atonce obvious that something has changed.In the past death in bed was a solemn event, butalso an event as banal as seasonal holidays. Peopleexpected it, and when it occurred they followedthe rituals laid down by custom. But in the nineteenthcentury, a new passion stirred those present.Emotion shook them, they cried, prayed, gesticulated.They did not refuse to go through the activitiesdictated by custom; on the contrary. But whileperforming them they stripped them of their banaland customary character. Henceforth these activitieswere described as if they had been invented forthe first time, spontaneously, inspired by a passionatesorrow which is unique among sorrows. Certainlythe expression of sorrow by survivors isowing to a new intolerance of separation. But

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5 P. Craven, Recit d'une soeur (2 vols.; Paris, 1867).

people were troubled not only at the bedsides ofthe dying or by the memory of the deceased. Thevery idea of death moved them.One of the La Ferronays' granddaughters, a"teenager" of the Romantic era, wrote thoughts ofthis sort: "Dying is a reward, since it is Heaven.The favorite idea of my entire life [as a child] isdeath, which has always made me smile ....Nothing has ever been able to make the word deathlugubrious for me."An engaged couple in this same family, not yettwenty, were walking in the marvelous gardens ofthe Villa Pamphii in Rome. "We talked," notedthe boy in his secret diary, "for an hour on religion,immortality, and death, which would besweet, we said, in these beautiful gardens." Headded, "I will die young, I have always wanted to."He would be proven right. A few months after hismarriage the plague of the century, tuberculosis,carried him off. His wife, a Protestant German, describedhis last breath: "His eyes, already staring,had turned toward me . . . and I, his wife, I feltwhat I would never have imagined, I felt that deathwas happiness." One hesitates to read aloud such atext in America today. How morbid the LaFeronnays family must seem!And yet, were things much different in the Am-.erica of the 1830s? A contemporary of the little La


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Ferronays girl, the fourteen year old EmmelineGrangerford whom Mark Twain described inHuckleberry Finn, also lived with the same obsession.She painted "mourning pictures," ladiesweeping over tombs or reading a letter bearing thesad news. She also kept a secret diary, in which shecopied down the deaths and fatal accidents aboutwhich she read in the Presbyterian Observer, and tothis she added the poems which all these misfortunesinspired in her. She was inexhaustible: "Shewarn't particular; she could write about anythingyou choose to give her to write about just so it wassadful," observed Mark Twain, laughing behind hismoustache.6

One is tempted to explain this overflowing ofmacabre affectivity by religion, the emotional religionof romantic Catholicism and 0f pietism, ofMethodist Protestantism. Religion is certainly afactor, but the morbid fascination for death is asublimation, a religious one it is true, of the eroticomacabrephantasms of the preceding period.Thus complaisance toward the idea of death isthe first great change which appears at the end ofthe eighteenth century and which has become one0f the characteristics of Romanticism.

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6 S. L. Clemens, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (New York:Reinhart Editions, 1948), chap. XVII, p. 103.

"Memorial to Washington" (nineteenth -century embroideryand watercolor on silk), from the Eleanor andMabel Van Alstyne Folk Art Collection, Smithsonian Institution.Photo from the Smithsonian Institution.


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The second great change concerns the relationshipbetween the dying person and his family.Until the eighteenth century death was a concernfor the person threatened by it, and for himalone. Thus it was up to each person to express hisideas, his feelings, his wishes. For that he had availablea tool: his last will and testament, which wasmore than simply a legal document for the disposalof property. From the thirteenth to theeighteenth century the will was the means bywhich each person could express-often in a verypersonal manner-his deep thoughts; his religiousfaith; his attachment to his possessions, to the beingshe loved, and to God; and the decisions he hadmade to assure the salvation of his soul and therepose of his body.But the purpose of the pious clauses, whichsometimes constituted the greatest part of the will,was to involve publicly the executor, the financialdirectors of the church (la fabrique), and thecurate of the parish or the monks of the monastery,and to oblige them to carry out the wishes 0fthe deceased.Indeed, the will, in this form, revealed a distrustof or at least an indifference to the heirs, the closerelatives, the family, and the church. By an actdeposited with the notary, most often signed bywitnesses, the individual making the will imposed

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his will upon those around him, which means thathe was afraid of not otherwise being listened to orobeyed. It was to the same end that he had a stoneor metal plaque placed in the church, bearing anexcerpt from his will concerning the religiousservices and the legacy which endowed them.These permanent inscriptions on the walls and pillarsof the church were a protection against beingforgotten or neglected by both the parish and thefamily. They had more significance than the gravemarker with its "Here lies ......But in the second half of the eighteenth century,a considerable change occurred in wills. We canassume that this change was common throughoutall of the Christian West, both Protestant andCatholic. The pious clauses, the choice of a tomb,the funding of masses and religious services, andthe giving of alms all disappeared; the will was reducedto the document we find today, a legal actdistributing fortunes. This is a very importantevent in the history of mentalities, and one towhich a French historian, Michel Vovelle, has giventhe attention it merits.7

Thus the will was completely secularized in theeighteenth century. How can we explain this


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7 M. Vovelle, Pjét baroque et déchristianisation (Paris, 1973). Seealso, by the same author, "Vision de la mort et au deli en Provence,"Cahiers desAnnales, No. 29 (1970).

phenomenon? It has been thought (and this isVovelle's thesis) that this secularization was one ofthe signs of the de-Christianization of society.I would like to propose another explanation: adistinction was made by the person drawing up thewill between his wishes concerning the distribution0f his fortune and those wishes inspired by hisfeelings, his piety, and his affection. The formerwere still included in the last will and testament.The latter were henceforth expressed orally tothose close to him, to the family, spouse, or children.We must not forget the great changes whichoccurred in the family and which in the eighteenthcentury ended in new relationships based onfeelings and affection. From that time on the sickperson on his deathbed would express a confidencein those close to him which had generally beenrefused them previously. It was no longer necessaryto bind them by a legal act.We are thus at a very important moment in thehistory of attitudes toward death. In trusting hisnext 0f kin, the dying person delegated to them apart of the powers which until then he had jealouslyexercized. Certainly he still retained the initiativein the ceremonies surrounding his death. Heremained, in romantic narratives, the principal andmost apparent personage in the activity over whichhe was presiding, and he would continue to be so

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until the first three decades of the twentieth century.Even more, as we have just said, romanticcomplaisance added emphasis to the words andgestures of the dying person. But the attitude ofthose present is the most changed. Though thedying person kept the leading role, the bystanderswere no longer the passive, prayerful walk-ons ofthe past, and, at least from the thirteenth to theeighteenth century, they no longer expressed thegreat grief of the days of Charlemagne or KingArthur. Indeed, since approximately the twelfthcentury, the excessive mourning of the Early MiddleAges had become ritualized. It only began afterdeath had occurred and it was manifested in thegarments and manners and had a specific duration,precisely fixed by custom.Thus from the end of the Middle Ages to theeighteenth century mourning had a double purpose.On the one hand, it constrained the family ofthe deceased to demonstrate, at least for a certainperiod, a sorrow it did not always feel. A hurriedremarriage might reduce mourning to a bareminimum, but its observance was never completelyeliminated. On the other hand, mourning served toprotect the sincerely grieving survivor from the excessesof his grief. It imposed upon him or her acertain type of social life-visits from relatives,neighbors, and friends-which was due him and in


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the course of which the sorrow might be dissipatedwithout, however, allowing its expression to exceeda level fixed by social conventions. Now, andthis is a very important point, in the nineteenthcentury this level was no longer respected;mourning was unfurled with an uncustomarydegree of ostentation. It even claimed to have noobligations to social conventions and to be themost spontaneous and insurmountable expressionof a very grave wound: people cried, fainted, languished,and fasted, as the companions of Rolandor Launcelot had once done. It was a sort of returnto the excessive and spontaneous demonstrationsorapparently spontaneous demonstrations-of theEarly Middle Ages, after seven centuries of sobriety.The nineteenth century is the era of mourningwhich the psychologist of today calls hystericalmourning. And it is true that at times they almostreached the point of madness, as in the story byMark Twain, "The Californian's Tale," dated 1893,in which a man who after nineteen years had neveraccepted his wife's death celebrated the anniversarydate of her death by awaiting her impossiblereturn in the company of sympathetic friendswho helped him maintain his illusion.This exaggeration of mourning in the nineteenthcentury is indeed significant. It means that survivorsaccepted the death of another person with

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greater difficulty than in the past. Henceforth, andthis is a very important change, the death which isfeared is no longer so much the death of the self asthe death of another, la mort de toi, thy death.

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This feeling lies at the origin of the modern cultof tombs and cemeteries. It is a question of a phenomenonof a religious nature, unique to the contemporaryera. Its importance might pass unnoticedby Americans of today, as by the inhabitants0f industrial-and Protestant-northwesternEurope, because they would consider it foreign totheir culture. An Englishman or an Americanwould not fail to show his repugnance for thebaroque excess of the funerary architecture inFrance or Italy. Yet the phenomenon, though lessprevalent, does exist in their cultures. We shall returnto this point because it is interesting to seewhat they have accepted or rejected in a religion ofthe dead which has been given free rein in Catholic,orthodox Europe.First let us say that the nineteenth- andtwentieth-century cult of tombs has nothing to dowith the classical, pre-Christian cults of the dead,nor with any persistence of these observances infolklore. Let us recall what we have already said


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about the Middle Ages, about the burial ad sanctosin churches or against the walls of churches. Therewas a great chasm between the attitudes of Antiquityconcerning the dead and those of the MiddleAges. In the Middle Ages the dead were entrustedto or rather abandoned to the care of the Church,and the exact location of their place of burial wasof little importance, most often being indicatedneither by a monument nor even by a simple inscription.Certainly by the fourteenth century andespecially since the seventeenth century, one candiscern a more pronounced concern for markingthe site of the tomb, a good indication of a newfeeling which was increasingly being expressed,without being able to impose itself completely.The pious or melancholy visit to the tomb of adear one was an unknown act.In the second half of the eighteenth century,things changed, and I have been able to study thisevolution in France.8 The accumulation of thedead within the churches or in the small churchyardssuddenly became intolerable, at least to the"enlightened" minds of the 1760s. What had beengoing on for almost a millennium without arousingany scruples became the object of vehement criti-

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8 Arias, "Contribution l'étude du culte des morts l'époquecontemporaine," Revue des travaux de l'Académie des Sciencesmorales etpolitiques, Vol. CIX (1966), pp. 25-34.

cism. An entire body of literature bears witness tothis. On the one hand, public health was threatenedby the pestilential emanations, the unhealthyodors rising from the common graves. On the otherhand, the flooring of the churches and the groundof the cemeteries, which were saturated withcadavers, and the exhibition of bones in the charnelhouses all constituted a permanent violation of thedignity of the dead. The Church was reproachedfor having done everything for the soul and nothingfor the body, of taking money for masses andshowing no concern for the tombs. The example ofthe Ancients, their piety toward the dead as shownby the remnants of their tombs as at Pompeii andby the eloquence of their funeral inscriptions, wascalled to mind. The dead should no longer poisonthe living, and the living should form a veritable laycult to show their veneration of the dead. Theirtombs therefore began to serve as a sign of theirpresence after death, a presence which did notnecessarily derive from the concept of immortalitycentral to religions of salvation such as Christianity.It derived instead from the survivors' unwillingnessto accept the departure of their loved one.People held on to the remains. They even went sofar as to keep them visible in great bottles ofalcohol, as in the case of Necker and his wife, theparents of Madame de Staël. Naturally such ob-


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"Interior of a Church," by Emanuel de Witte, in theMuseum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Photo A.Frequin, Photographic d'Objets d'Art, The Hague.

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servances, though they were advocated by certainauthors of plans for sepulchers, were not adoptedin a general fashion. But the common desire waseither to keep the dead at home by burying themon the family property, or else to be able to visitthem, if they were buried in a public cemetery.And in order to be able to visit them, the dead hadto be "at home," which was not the case in thetraditional funeral procedure, in which they werein the church. In the past one was buried beforethe image of the Virgin or in the chapel of theHoly Sacrament. Now people wanted to go to thevery spot where the body had been placed, andthey wanted this place to belong totally to thedeceased and to his family. It was at this time thatthe burial concession became a certain form ofproperty, protected from commerce, but assured inperpetuity. This was a very significant innovation.People went to visit the tomb of a dear one as onewould go to a relative's home, or into one's ownhome, full of memories. Memory conferred uponthe dead a sort of immortality which was initiallyforeign to Christianity. From the end of the eighteenthcentury and even at the height of the nineteenthand twentieth centuries in anticlerical andagnostic France, unbelievers would be the most assiduousvisitors to the tombs of their relatives. Thevisit to the cemetery in France and Italy became,


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and still is, the great continuing religious act. Thosewho no longer go to church still go to the cemetery,where they have become accustomed to placeflowers on the tombs. They meditate there, that isto say they evoke the dead person and cultivate hismemory.Thus it is a private cult, but also from its veryorigins, a public one. The cult of memory immediatelyspread from the individual to society asa result of one and the same wave of sensibility.The eighteenth-century authors of cemetery planswanted cemeteries to serve both as parks organizedfor family visits and as museums for illustrious persons,like St. Paul's Cathedral in London.9 Therethe tombs of heroes and great men would be veneratedby the State. This was a different conceptionfrom that of the dynastic chapels or crypts such asSaint-Denis, Westminster, the Escorial, or theCapuchins of Vienna.A new concept of society was born at the end ofthe eighteenth century; it developed during thenineteenth century and found its expression inAuguste Comte's positivism, an intellectualizedform of nationalism. It was thought, and even felt,

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9 Plans submitted to the procureur général of the Parlement of Parisin accordance with the royal decree of 1776 closing the old cemeteriesand ordering their transfer outside the city, papers of Joly deFleury, Bibliothèque nationale, ms. fr. 1209, folios 62-87.

that society is composed of both the dead and theliving. The city of the dead is the obverse 0f thesociety of the living, or rather than the obverse, itis its image, its intemporal image. For the deadhave gone through the moment of change, andtheir monuments are the visible sign of the permanenceof their city.Thus the cemetery once again gained a place inthe city-a place both physical and moral-which ithad lost in the early Middle Ages, but which it hadoccupied throughout Antiquity. What would weknow about ancient civilization without theobjects, the inscriptions, and the iconographyfound by archeologists while excavating tombs?Our tombs are empty, but much can be learnedfrom our cemeteries, the size of which speaks eloquentlyabout our mentality. Indeed, the piety andthe new respect shown for tombs resulted in anextension of the surface area of cemeteries, becauseit had become intolerable and forbidden topile up corpses as in the charnel houses of the MiddleAges. Thus the place reserved for the dead becameincreasingly intrusive, which soon arousedconcern among the authorities. But public opinionresisted attempts to end the propagation of cemeteries.During Napoleon III's reign, the administrationwanted to deconsecrate the Parisian cemeteries,


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which had in the early nineteenth century beenplanned outside the city but which had beenenveloped by urban expansion. They could evoke aprecedent for this: at the end of Louis XVI's reignthe old Cemetery of the Innocents, which had beenin use for more than five centuries, had been razed,plowed, dug up, and built over, to the great indifferenceof the population. But in the second halfof the nineteenth century the mentality hadchanged. Public opinion rose against the government'ssacrilegious projects, a unanimous publicopinion in which the Catholics united with theirpositivist enemies. Henceforth the cemetery appeareda necessary part of the city. Today the cultof the dead is one of the forms or expressions ofpatriotism. Thus in France the anniversary of thevictorious conclusion of World War I is consideredthe feast-day of dead soldiers. It is celebrated atthe Monument to the Dead, to be found in everyFrench village, no matter how small. Without amonument to the dead the victory could not becelebrated. In the new cities created by recent industrialdevelopment, the absence of a monumentto the dead thus created a quandry. The problemwas solved by virtually annexing the monument ofa nearby, deserted little village.10 For this

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10 This is what occurred at Lacq, near Pau, where the exploiting ofnatural gas resulted in the creation of a new industrial city.

ment is indeed a tomb, an empty one of course,but it perpetuates memory, a monumentum.

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We now reach a point in this long evolution atwhich we should pause and introduce a new factor.We have followed variations in time, a long but stillchanging time. We have scarcely, except for a fewdetails, considered variations in locations. Wemight say that the phenomena which we are studyinghere were approximately the same through allof Western civilization. But, in the course of thenineteenth century this similarity in mentalitieschanged and important differences appeared. Wesee North America, England, and a part of northwesternEurope break away from France, Germany,and Italy. What does this differentiation involve,and what is its meaning?In the nineteenth century and until World War I(a great revolution in mores) the difference wasscarcely apparent either in the protocol of funeralsor in mourning customs. But this difference can beobserved in cemeteries and in the art on tombstones.Our English friends do not fail to point outto us continentals how extravagantly baroque ourcemeteries are-take the Campo Santo of Genoa orthe old (nineteenth-century) cemeteries of our


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major French cities with their tombs surmountedby statues writhing, embracing one another, andlamenting. There is no doubt that at that time agreat transformation occurred.At the end of the eighteenth century, cemeterieswere similar throughout the Western world; in England,North America, and parts of northwesternEurope the same model persists today. The Englishcemetery of today closely resembles what theFrench cemetery had been until the end of theeighteenth century, when burial in churches andeven within the city limits was forbidden. We findit intact in America, for example in Alexandria,Virginia: a bit of countryside and nature, a prettyEnglish garden in a setting of grass, moss, and trees,sometimes but not necessarily still adjacent to thechurch.The tombs of this period were a combination ofthe two elements which until then had generallybeen used separately: the horizontal flat tombstone,and the "Here-lies" type of stone establishinga bequest, a stone which was vertical becauseit was to be affixed to a wall. In France, inthe few late-eighteenth-century cemeteries that arestill extant, the two elements are juxtaposed. Incolonial America the vertical element was generallythe only one kept. A stone stele was erected at thehead of the grave, which was itself merely covered

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with grass, while the foot was occasionally indicatedby a small marker. In both cases the inscriptionwas placed on the vertical headstone. The inscription,both biographic and elegiac, was the onlyluxury of these sepulchers, which made a show ofsimplicity. This simplicity was only disregarded incases of famous persons whose destiny had providedan example for the national necropolis, ordramatic or extraordinary deaths. This cemeterywas the end product of a search for simplicitywhich can be followed in its different formsthroughout all of Western civilization, in thesecond half of the eighteenth and throughout thenineteenth century, even in papal Rome, wherebaroque customs persist.This simplicity did not imply a disloyalty to theloved one; to the contrary. It fitted in very wellwith the melancholy of the romantic cult of thedead. This cult found its first poet in England:Thomas Gray, author of "Elegy in a CountryChurchyard." The Elegy! It was translated intoFrench, one particular version being by AndreChénier, and it served as a model for others.It is in America, in Washington, D.C., even morethan in the Panthon of Paris, that we find the firstmajor manifestations of the funeral cult of thehero. In a city filled with commemorative monu-


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ments, such as those to Washington, Jefferson, andLincoln-which are "tombs" without sepulchers-atwentieth-century European encounters an evenstranger phenomenon: Arlington Cemetery. Here,despite its public and national character, thegarden of the Lee-Custis House has preserved itsappearance of a private estate.Although astonishing to a European of today,the civic and funerary landscape at Arlington andalong the Mall sprang from the same sentiment thatcaused a multiplicity of monuments to the wardead in the France of the 1920s, monumentswhich are doubtlessly today quite incomprehensibleto the descendents of those who created Arlingtonand the center of Washington.Thus, regardless of religious differences, simplicityand the romantic, hero cults formed the commondenominator throughout Western civilizationin the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.And it is here that we find the point ofdeparture. The United States and northwesternEurope were to remain more or less faithful to thisold model, while continental Europe strayed awayand constructed for its dead monuments which becameincreasingly complicated and figurative.A careful study of an American custom wouldperhaps help us find an explanation for this:

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"mourning pictures." These lithographs or embroideredpanels, now found in museums, were intendedto decorate the home. They played the roleof the tomb, of the memorial, a sort of portabletomb adapted to American mobility-if this mobilityis not at that time an anachronistic myth. Likewise,in the museum of York, England, we findVictorian funeral announcements which are reproductionsof neo-gothic funeral chapels, those verychapels which served as models for the Frenchtomb builders of the same period. It is as if theEnglish and the Americans of the day were committingto paper or silk-ephemeral substanceswhatthe continental Europeans were portrayingon tombstones.One is obviously tempted to attribute this differenceto the contrast between Protestantism andCatholicism. This explanation appears suspect tothe historian, at least at first glance. Indeed, theseparation of the churches by the Council of Trentoccurred much earlier than this divorce in funeralattitudes. Throughout the seventeenth centurypeople were buried in exactly the same fashion(with variations in the liturgy, of course) in Pepys'England, in the Holland of those genre painterswho specialized in church interiors, and in Frenchand Italian churches. The mental attitudes were thesame.


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Yet there appears to be some truth in the religiousexplanation when we realize that during thenineteenth century Catholicism developed sentimental,emotional means of expression which ithad avoided in the eighteenth century, after thegreat baroque rhetoric: a sort of romantic neobaroquism.That type of Catholicism, especially inFrance, became a quite different thing from that ofthe seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Nevertheless, we must not forget what we weresaying a short time ago: that the exalted and emotivenature of the cult of the dead did not have aChristian origin. It had a positivist origin, and theCatholics rallied to it and assimilated it so perfectlythat they thought it indigenous to their religion.Should we not instead implicate the nature ofthe socio-economic revolution 0f the nineteenthcentury? More than religion, the rate of industrializationand urbanization intervened. Neo-baroquefuneral attitudes developed in cultures in which,even in towns and large cities, economic growthwas less rapid and rural influences persisted. I haveput the question before you. I think it should bean interesting one for the historians of Americanmentalities.In any case, a fault line became evident, and thecrack would widen toward the middle of thetwentieth century. The great twentieth-century re-

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fusal to accept death is incomprehensible if we donot take this fault line into account, for this refusalwas born and developed on only one side of thatfrontier.


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