“The Mountain” (2)

Continued: a walk around a once-famous historian’s riff on the Alps.

La Montagne is hard to categorise. It’s partly a travel book, in which the Michelets jointly write up their visits to various mountain resorts and hot springs. Then again, they sally forth into geophysics and botany, along the lines of what we’d now call nature or science writing. 

Amphitheatre of the forests.
Illustration from La Montagne. 

Here and there – see the chapter entitled “The Amphitheatre of the Forests" – they anticipate what we’d term ecological thinking. And some of their insights have gained mightily in resonance since they were first put on paper: this one, in particular, hits for distance:

It is on the brow of Mont Blanc, more or less overhung with ice, that we may read the future destiny and fortunes of Europe, the seasons of serene peace, and the abrupt cataclysms which overthrow empires and sweep away dynasties. (Part 1, Chapter III)

Mont Blanc and its glaciers.
Illustration from La Montagne.

Logically enough, the next chapter broadens the focus to “The European Water Reservoir”. Four of the great rivers of Europe, the Po, the Rhine, the Rhone and the Inn (the true Danube) are brothers, says Michelet, “springing from one and the same mass, the heart of the system, the heart of the European world”. In these Alps of Switzerland:

Water is life begun. The circulation of life, under an aerial or a liquid form, takes place upon these heights. They are the mediators, the arbiters of sundered or antagonistic elements. They make their harmony and peace. They accumulate them in glaciers, and then equitably distribute them among the nations.

The watershed of Europe.
Illustration from La Montagne.

Lunch is life sustained, I like to think. This one, comprising a belated cheese butty, is taken beside the Lai Grond, a little lake that on a windless day would reflect Piz Ela. 

The Lai Grond under Piz Ela.

As it is, a cold wind sends cats’ paws ruffling over the water, driving me smartly onwards. The mountain keeps frowning down, as if to chastise the arrogant thought of circumambulating him in a day.

The lake of Lucerne.
Illustration from La Montagne.

Switzerland's lakes and rivers get a chapter all to themselves in La Montagne. “No other country,” Michelet writes, “possesses these superb mirrors in such magnificence.” As you’d expect, the historian’s perspective breaks through here and there. The Danube, he notes, “formerly interposed its furious floods between us and Turkish despotism”.

A landscape in the Pyrenees.
Illustration from La Montagne.

The next few chapters draw on the personal experiences of the Michelets in their visits to hot springs in the Pyrenees and Apennine Italy. Then follows a kind of geophysical interlude with chapters surveying the state of nineteenth-century knowledge about the continents, the polar regions and volcanoes, before the couple revert to relating their holiday excursions, this time in the Swiss Engadine district. It’s all a bit of a hodgepodge…

The volcano of Taal.
Illustration from La Montagne.

So what is this book actually about? Labouring up the second pass of the day, I have little energy left to consider the question. Like the Michelets themselves when they put pen to paper, we must admit to being, if not clean past our youth, then with some smack of age in us…

The Tinzenhorn from the Pass d'Ela.

At 3pm, I haul myself up onto the Pass d’Ela (2,723m). Already the sun is leaning tendentiously towards the west, and I take a moment to appreciate how its slanting rays throw into razor-sharp relief the crumbling cliffs of Piz Ela and its neighbour the Tinzenhorn.

Piz Ela from the west.

The crumbling cliffs … now there’s a clue to the mystery of La Montagne. On their way to the high valley of the Engadine, the Michelets travel over the “The Pass of the Grisons”, better known today as the Julier. Throughout the journey, Michelet records – and one infers this has to be Jules himself, complete with capitals and an exclamation mark – “one idea was constantly recurring to my mind – THE DEATH OF THE MOUNTAIN!”

These thoughts, he explains, were triggered by the landslides and rubble chutes that abound along the high mountain roads. They are called lapiaz in the local dialect or, more picturesquely, the “cemeteries of the devil”. But it soon becomes clear that slope stability or otherwise is the least of the historian’s concerns. Rather, it’s the rot at the heart of the body politic that troubles him:

But what will be the end if this devastation, from the lower grades of and the vulgar lapiaz of egotism and moral barrenness, should extend further, and if the process of erosion gain upon the immense masses of the people, indifferent to all things, and deficient both in the desire and capability of good? There are moments when one dreads that such will be the case. 

Despairing cries are uttered from century to century. About 1800 Grainville wrote “The Last Man”. Sénancourt, Byron, and others, believed in the approaching end of the world. But, for my part, I think it immortal. At unforeseen points, and by unsuspected fibres which prove to be still youthful, it resuscitates itself. Wavering between so many objects in this present age, it still presses firmly forward in the path of science, and hence secures for itself another great chance of renovation. It will refresh its heart at the well-springs of Mind, and revive its moral flame at the source of Intellectual Light.

Late afternoon at the Piz Ela hut. 

Our own daylight cuts off abruptly as I cross over the base of Piz Ela’s north ridge. From here, it’s all downhill through the yellowing and umbrageous larch forests. It's a good thousand metres down to Bergün and its station. At least the fallen larch needles on the path will cushion the knee-jarring descent...

Now there’s time to think about where Jules Michelet was coming from. Born in 1798, at the apogee of the Directorate’s power, he dedicated much of his life to writing a book that a modern scholar has called “the cornerstone of revolutionary historiography”. So he was a republican born and bred. By the same token, his career prospered after the July Revolution of 1830, also known as the Second French Revolution, but faltered when Napoleon III came to power in 1852.

These vicissitudes echo through La Montagne. Reflecting on the various theories of mountain-building, Michelet points out that the French savants tend to favour “catastrophist” explanations while their English counterparts are mostly “uniformitarians”. The difference, he muses, must be down to the regular upheavals experienced in France, as compared with England’s relative social and political stability.

Mountain-building: A Himalayan landscape.
Illustration from La Montagne.

Nevertheless, Michelet is not wholly pessimistic about his continent’s future. In his final chapter, oddly entitled “Will our Era Succeed in Regenerating Itself?”, he opines that “our decay cannot be compared to the rottenness of some peoples of the past, such as the Byzantine, of whom sterility was the conspicuous and distinctive sign…”

Against such decadence, he holds up Switzerland as the “ever memorable cradle of European freedom”, whose past battles “prepared the liberty of the world”. As for the mountains, they have helped him “develop the heroic capabilities which we derive from Nature”.

Bergün/Bravuogn in autumn.
Image courtesy of Alpine Light & Structure.

By the time I stumble down into Bergün, my own capabilities feel as if they’re flat-lining. On the way to the station, as the few street lights start to flicker into life, I’m still thinking about Jules and Athénaïs Michelet. After a century and a half, their literary collaboration still has the power to charm. But, no, their writing style won’t soon come back into fashion. Nor can their book be described as anything other than a gallimaufry.

Yet even a gallimaufry can incorporate some rich ingredients. And the cantankerous old republican can sound surprisingly contemporary when he prognosticates about the future of Mont Blanc's glaciers, or frets about Europe’s political culture. If there were ever a time to take another look at his writings, would that not be now, I wonder….

But as Michelet says in his own final chapter, this is surely “enough for the day, enough”.

References

Jules Michelet, La Montagne (1868), translated by W H Davenport Adams as The Mountain, London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, Paternoster Row, 1886. My copy came from Chris Bartle at Glacier Books in Pitlochry, Scotland. If you ask nicely, he might even be able to find another one for you.