On gift giving and Danish – French relations

When digitalization hit the institute library of the history department at UCPH several years ago, a lack of shelf space in the new building purpose-built to house the department meant that a huge number of books were discarded before the move. To both the chagrin and delight of book lovers. Among the wonderful finds was a copy of Lucien Musset’s seminal work, Les Peuples scandinaves au Moyen Âge, (1951) with a large number of its pages still uncut. It was read with great enthusiasm by my husband to whom I gave the book as a Christmas present later that year.

Lucien Musset (1922-2004), an expert in Norman history, was 29 years old when this book was published.  A look at his bibliographical sources attests to his knowledge of Scandinavian languages and the long research visit he made to libraries in the Scandinavian countries. His obituary by historian Francois Neveux mentions particularly his mastery of Danish.  Several of his primary sources, and some of the secondary ones were either produced under the aegis of, or written by, Danish philologist and archaeologist Lis Jacobsen,* a pioneer in furthering Danish Humanities in the 20^th century.

It was her long-dead maternal grandfather who imbued a love of Paris and French culture in the succeeding generations, and thereby lies a tale of gift giving. Salomon Davidsen a.k.a. Schlomo ben David (1803- 1866)  who had opened an upmarket lace and clothing store in 1841 in Copenhagen, visited the fashion houses of Paris once a year. In 1863 he took his eldest daughter Rose Mathilde (b. 1844) on a long visit to Paris, where in between doing business, showed her all what was best in French culture. When her sister Kaja’s daughter Elisabeth Rubin was born in 1882, she promised herself that she would take her niece to Paris when the girl was 12. By the time Lis was 10, her aunt had found her a French teacher who prepared her for the visit. And at the age of 11, Lis Rubin was taken to Paris by her aunt. They stayed with one of Salomon Davidsen’s other children, Meyer Joseph Davidsen.  He was an engineer and inventor living in Paris, hard at work experimenting on various devices for the cement industry. Among his patents are a tubular ball mill   for which he earned a gold medal at the World’s Fair in Paris in 1900, and which was later to be used worldwide, among others, by the Danish cement manufacturer F.L. Smidth.

The young Lis Rubin enjoyed her visit so much that she was to repeat it frequently throughout her life, and not surprisingly chose to study in Paris in 1910 after her higher doctoral degree.  Later in 1928 she was invited by another French Scandinavian expert, Paul Verrier, to hold a lecture in Paris.

Verrier himself had visited Denmark back in 1897 where he met, among others, Lis Jacobsen’s good family friend, scholar and literary critic Georg Brandeis who was quite well known in France at the time.

The Dane whose fame has lasted longer in French intellectual circles is Søren Kierkegaard whose work had a huge influence on an array of French philosophers, especially existentialists post-WWII.  Paul Ricoeur, another Frenchman with ancestral connections to Normandy, famously used Kierkegaard’s meditation on the Sermon on the Mount, The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air: Three Godly Discourses (1849) in the epilogue to his own magisterial tome, La Mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (2000).  In cases of difficult forgiveness, when we are too full of care, we ought to do as Kierkegaard suggests and forget our own selves in contemplating the birds and the lilies. Thereby reflecting on “how glorious it is to be a human being”.**

Memory, History and Forgetting is one of Ricoeur’s greatest works, and perhaps the one that is most accessible to the general reader. Ricoeur’s long-time friend, the Danish philosopher Peter Kemp once wrote, on the eve of Emmanuel Macron’s election as President of France, that it was thanks to Macron who in his youth worked for two years on the tome as an assistant editor that the work is so readable.

Paul Ricoeur visited Denmark on several occasions due to his friendship and discourse with Kemp. Before his recent death, Kemp was to publish a collection of Ricoeur’s works in Danish, Paul Ricoeur Danske Værker. A copy of which was a most welcome parting gift from my former employer Prof. Marie-Louise Nosch when my work as an editorial assistant on her publication projects was completed. Her other parting gift, a 5-month placement as a Visiting Scholar led to, among others, a talk on gift giving, an essay, and several blog posts here, and in my Danish blog.

The three Frenchman mentioned above Lucien Musset, Verrier and Ricoeur all had Normandy in common. A recent attempt to genetically establish if Rollo the founder of Normandy was Danish or Norwegian , ended in failure,but new research may someday cast light on the subject.

It has, however, not been a one-way movement of Viking raiders,  medieval Danish university students and scholars (like the modist grammarian Martin de Dacia) in Paris; or Danish naval officers like cartographer Paul de Løvenørn serving in the French navy in the late 1700s.***

Frenchmen have fled over here too. Denmark provided the gift of asylum in 1685 to a small group of French Calvinist families fleeing their country after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Along with other German and Dutch Calvinist refugees, the few French refugee families in Copenhagen were permitted to worship in the newly built Reformed Church at the behest of king Christian V’s  wife queen Charlotte Amalie of Hessen-Kassel.

A later wave of French Huguenot families arrived in Denmark at the behest of king Frederik IV in the 1720s from Brandenburg to which they had initially fled.   Danish commerce and the military are studded with the names of their descendants who have contributed to Denmark over the centuries.

A personal favourite is Friedrich August Gandil (1815-1886) who was, among others, the inspector of the royal Danish maritime pilots service in Dragør from 1862-1885. His ancestor Pierre Gandil b. 1660 fled from his birthplace Bruniquel to the more protected Montauban, and thence in 1686 to Erlangen and later to Magdeburg where he married Marianne de la Mare, a widow who owned a weaving factory. It was one of their sons, also named Pierre b. 1697, who obtained a permit from Christian VI in 1736 to establish a textile factory in Østerbro, Copenhagen.****

Two Danes who were expelled from Denmark, due to their attempts to further freedom of speech, and who ended their days in permanent exile in Paris were writer and philologist Peter Andreas Heiberg (Pierre André) and the poet, journalist and geographer Malthe Conrad Bruun (Conrad Malte-Brun). Heiberg worked in the French foreign ministry translating for Talleyrand while the other contributed to geographical studies in France.

As to why they it was France they chose to spend the rest of their lives in exile needs no lengthy explanation. Ever since Descartes, French intellectual thought was considered a fount of inspiration. Danish astronomers like Longomontanus and Fromius had learned discourses and disputes with their French colleagues such as Jean Baptiste Morin.*****

One of the most influential writers in Denmark, the Norwegian-born Ludvig Holberg was for instance highly influenced by the writings of the Huguenot philosopher  Pierre Bayle.

The Age of Enlightenment (le Siècle des Lumières) continued this…

Thus, it should come as no surprise that Denmark would come to side with Napoleon. Nor that later, Christian IX (known as the father-in-law of Europe) whose children married into the royal houses of Europe also acquired a daughter-in-law from the French royal house (a great-grand daughter of Louis Philippe king of France 1830-1848). In Bismarck, Denmark  found an enemy in common with France, an aspect that coloured Danish-French relations well into the early 20^th century, not least over the issue of their respective borders with Germany. Paul Verrier’s visit and support to the Danish-speaking areas of Schleswig  is but a small example of this.

Later in the 20^th century, the marriage in 1967 of the then princess Margrethe, heir to the Danish throne to French diplomat Henri Marie Jean André de Laborde de Monpezat (1934-2018) considerably strengthened the future ties between Denmark and France. Among the greatest gifts humans can give one another is the promise of the continuity of generations.

Coming back to the UCPH history department’s library which inspired this post, it pleases me to report that among the books that the library chose to retain is the donation of the vast collection of books that formed the private library of one of Denmark’s pioneering statisticians and economic historians, National Bank director Marcus Rubin, who also happened to be the father of Lis Jacobsen mentioned above.

Among his innumerable writings,****** he published a few articles in Danish on France as well as French articles on Denmark. A history of  the Abolishment of the Sound Dues was translated into French in abbreviated form and published by the Royal Danish Academy of Science and Letters, as “Le rachat des péages du Sund”.

Notes: * Lise Bender Jørgensen, The State of Denmark: Lis Jacobsen and other women in and around archaeology, in: Magarita Díaz-Andreu, Marie Louise Stig Sorensen (eds)   ; and Kristian Hvidt, Forsker, furie, frontkæmper – en bog om Lis Jacobsen, Gyldendal, 2011.

**Memory, History, Forgetting, p. 505.

***For scholars, see Sten Ebbesen, Dansk Middelalderfilosofi (Gyldendal, 2002),esp. ch. 4. For naval officers, see entry for 19th July 1778; Løvenørn was also influential in the development of the royal maritime pilotage service in Dragør.

****Gandil, C. (1936) Nogle Meddelelser om Slægten Gandil. I Anledning af 200-aaret for Pierre Gandils Indkaldelse til Danmark. Personalhistorisk Tidsskrift, 57(10_3_2), 137-140. Hentet fra https://tidsskrift.dk/personalhistorisk_tidsskrift/article/view/78981

*****1. Helge Kragh and Henrik Kragh Sørensen, Longomontanus og Descartes: Et Møde i København 1631. Meddelelser fra Ole Rømers Venner. 2007, 15(1). 57-69. 2. Helge S. Kragh (2015) Georgius Frommius (1605-1651) and Danish astronomy in the post-Tychonian era. Acta Baltica Historiae et Philosophiae Scientiarum, 3(1), 43-66.

******see link to Lis Jacobsen’s complete list of her father’s works at the end of the Wikipedia article on Marcus Rubin.

 

On history and the fabric of life

Paul Ricoeur ends his magisterial work on history philosophy, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli with a reference to Søren Kierkegaard’s discourse on the biblical birds in the air and lilies in the field (2000, p. 656). Why does he do so?

The works of his compatriot, Albert Camus, may hold a clue. Camus, too, similarly to Ricoeur endeavoured to make sense of the history of the 20^th century which they were born into. While their beliefs were unalike, Camus contrasts the fates of his characters against the sun, the light, and the sea.

What does this have to do with history philosophy, one may wonder. Many years ago, I followed a university course on history philosophy with a brilliant teacher, where we read the classical 19^th and 20^th century works of history philosophers. While I failed the actual exam, my readings and reflections left me with a vague glimpse into how human beings considered their relationships to the divine and to nature. Over the course of history up until today, it is our changing views of this threefold relationship that constitutes our thoughts on history. At times, we treated the forces of nature with awe, as being divine. At other times, we have believed that the divine had given us lordship over nature or that we had raised ourselves above nature. That humankind was progressing to a higher form of development.

It took a Freud to remind ourselves that we too are a part of nature. The muddy trenches of WWI shattered forever our dreams and visions of mastery. In the Shoah or Holocaust of WWII, we tasted its bitter dregs. In the Cold War threats of nuclear annihilation, very much current in Camus’ lifetime (he died on the 4^th January 1960), we foresaw what destruction humanity was capable of. Ricoeur who lived into the 21st century and had time to reflect on both the Truth and Reconciliation commission at the end of Apartheid and the wars in ex-Yugoslavia before his death on the 20^th May 2005, endeavored to find a way for human beings to live together with truth, justice and reconciliation.

What our present generation of human beings can leave to the future generation is thus, according to Ricoeur, in Kierkegaard’s words, for the human in distress to contemplate the birds and lilies, and see how glorious it is to be a human being, thereby releasing their worldly cares. Ricoeur proposes: “…in opposition to this ruinous competition … the possibility of a work of forgetting, interweaving among all the fibres that connect us to time: memory of the past, expectations of the future, and attention to the present.” (Memory, History, Forgetting, 2004, p. 504; á l’inverse de cette ruineuse compétition…le possible travail de l’oubli, tissé entre toutes les fibres qui nous rattachent au temps: mémoires du passé, attente du futur et attention au présnt-original French version, 2000, p. 654-655).