In 2004, in Le Temps moderne (Gallimard), I tried to show that the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, which took place at the Académie Française in 1687, was in fact the last quarrel about the supremacy of the past over the present. This famous Querelle had brought about, decisively and irreversibly, the objectification of the past (and its dissociation from present time); the past, which continued to live in the present in the form of devotion ("a past that weighs on the present by shaping it"), was no longer a reliable master or guide for the obscure meanderings of the future. The Moderns had begun to reject all forms of imitation of models from the past, and the old Ciceronian formula, historia magistra vitae, had ceased to function as the Moderns took pride in their own models. According to François Hartog, this marked the arrival of the modern regime of historicity, and Philippe Descola saw in it an unprecedented originality: "Yes, especially since in the West, since the quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns, the new has been positive. It's linked to a transformation of the temporal scale, in which we project ourselves into the future, because we consider that the present is the product of past activities, and that it is perfectible. Once again, this is a highly original idea, absolutely not shared in the rest of the world, where temporalities tend to be either cyclical or devoid of depth." (Le Monde, Sciences, 11/11/2013). The past was no longer a reservoir of examples from which to draw lessons.
In fact, the Querelle of 1687, the latest and most famous of the many quarrels in Western literary history, was not a dispute between Ancients and Moderns. It was a dispute between the Moderns and another faction of the Moderns (a faction that would later bear the title of Conservatives). But the latter debate highlighted two opposing conceptions of time: infinity (left to astrophysicists and theologians) and mundane, earthly time(irdischen, as Auerbach would put it); the time of cities and men. Modernity emerged from this very specific dichotomy.
