Local color in post-Enligthenment culture

Abstract

France, the heartland of the Enlightenment, was also home to pathbreaking thinkers who sought alternatives to the philosophes’ project of
universalizing rationalism and “top-down” civilizing, radiating out from Paris
to the rest of Europe. One of the most influential, wide-ranging scholars to
forge a post-Enlightenment synthesis was Claude Fauriel, whose contributions
include the publication of Europe’s first full-scale, scholarly collection of
modem Greek folk songs (1824-1825). In that collection Fauriel showed how a
Romantic appreciation of local color and cosmopolitan diversity could be
combined with an Enlightenment espousal of secular education, rational
government, and political liberty. Through the past two centuries, French
cultural and political spokesmen have continued to grapple with those postEnlightenment issues and the divergent legacies of Fauriel’s era. In a
mutating variety of ways, French regionalists and some French national
leaders have worked to defend and to promote heterogeneous cultural life
within France, Europe, and the world.