Representation and presence. The image of religion

The recent publication of a book by Alphonse Dupront, entitled L'image de religion dans l'Occident chrétien (The Image of Religion in the Christian West), twenty-five years after its author's death, will allow us to revisit in this " Débat d'histoire " a historian undoubtedly too often forgotten today. In our time, it's not always easy to survive one's death through one's work. Alphonse Dupront's work deserves it. This book, published by Gallimard in the " Bibliothèque illustrée des histoires " collection, opens with a fine preface by Mona Ozouf, and should help to do just that.

Alphonse Dupront, who was a professor at the Sorbonne and then first president of the University of Paris IV, was a secretive, complex historian, reluctant to publish anything he didn't feel was finished. His major work, an imposing seven-volume doctoral thesis on the myth of the Crusade, was defended in 1956. It was not published by Gallimard in four volumes until 1997, forty years later. Alphonse Dupront was a man of oral transmission, of investigative work in seminars, of papers published in hard-to-find journals, of lectures too. Some of his friends and listeners published some of this great work after his death : for example, his 1962-63 agrégation lecture, published in Folio under the (Kantian) title Qu'est-ce que les Lumières ? with a preface by François Furet, or the collection of articles and papers assembled by Dominique Julia and Philippe Boutry under the title Genèses des temps modernes. Rome, the Reforms and the New World, published in the Hautes Études collection shared by Gallimard and Le Seuil.

Three years before his death, Alphonse Dupront had accepted Mona Ozouf and Pierre Nora's suggestion that he compile a number of his studies in a book entitled Du Sacré (published by Gallimard in 1987). Alphonse Dupront added a magnificent and immense text, over two hundred pages long, entitled " Itinéraire " which was, as he wrote, " the profile of a personal path of research ". In it, he presented the various themes of his interests : the crusade, pilgrimage and the image of religion. He explained his approach to the functions of Christian images, which are representations and symbols, but are also charged with sacred power, and proposed a first inventory of the themes, major or minor, perennial or short-lived, of the great Western Christian imagier. The work published today was intended to give a more complete form to this majestic investigation, and above all to accompany its deployment by the presence of the images themselves, at least many of those analyzed in the text. In Du sacré, there were none. In the book now published, seventy-two.

In this Débat d'histoire (a continuation of the previous one devoted to the iconographic tradition of the Good Thief and, more generally, of Calvary, studied by Christiane Klapisch-Zuber), it is with two historians of medieval and modern images, Patrick Boucheron (Collège de France) and Pierre-Antoine Fabre (École des hautes études en sciences sociales), that I would like to rediscover Alphonse Dupront's often dazzling intuitions, his way of understanding images and making them understood, and, in so doing, to penetrate into the reasons that have made Christianity, despite the Vetrotestamentary prohibitions(Deuteronomy V, 8 : " You shall not make an image of sculpture, or figures of anything that is either in heaven above, or on earth below, or that lives underground in the waters ") a religion in which images are innumerable, omnipresent, indispensable. " L'Occident sait mal prier sans images " says Alphonse Dupront. How can we understand him ?