Fernand Baldensperger (1871–1958). A look back at an ambition

F. Baldensperger (1871–1958), first director of the RLC, wrote some interesting memoirs. Une vie parmi d’autres (1940) contains many interesting details. His first foreign experiences were formed in around 1880–1890, in Saint-Dié and Zurich, by and against Wilhelminian Germany. On the other hand, Baldensperger criticized a certain intellectual myopia of the time. His career developed thanks to political support (L. Liard, S. Charléty, M. Barrès), and his academic positions (Strasbourg, more particularly, when the review was founded) were calculated choices. His conception of "interrelations littéraires" was part of Taine’s historicist tradition; it differs, without excluding it, from the formalist and aestheticizing one, of its Germanic contemporaries (Walzel, Jolles).