Counterfoil

Ellul, Charbonneau, and Illich

Illich called Jacques Ellul his master. Ellul said his best-known book belonged as much to Bernard Charbonneau as Ellul himself. What the two men from Bordeaux saw first, and what Illich did with their ideas.

Counterfoil takes its vision and method from Ivan Illich. Illich took one of his central ideas from Jacques Ellul and gave him credit for it. Ellul said that his own best-known book belonged as much to a friend whom almost no one outside France has read, Bernard Charbonneau. This note follows those lines of friendship and intellectual influence from Illich back to two men from Bordeaux who were asking the same questions about modern technology forty years before Illich.

“Existence in a society that has become a system finds the senses useless precisely because of the very instruments designed for their extension. One is prevented from touching and embracing reality. Further, one is programmed for interactive communication, one’s whole being is sucked into the system. It is this radical subversion of sensation that humiliates and then replaces perception. We submit ourselves to fantastic degradations of image and sound consumption in order to anesthetize the pain resulting from having lost reality.”

Ivan Illich, “To Honor Jacques Ellul” (1993)

The Bordeaux school

Ellul (1912–1994) and Charbonneau (1910–1996) were school friends in the southwest of France. In the early 1930s they joined the personalist movement around the journal Esprit and ran their own group, which met on camping trips in the Pyrenees. In 1935 they wrote a manifesto together, “Directives pour un manifeste personnaliste.” (It was reprinted in 2014, with three other early texts, in Nous sommes révolutionnaires malgré nous.) It called for what they named an ascetic civilization, set against both poverty and wealth. The historian Christian Roy calls it one of the first Western appeals to limit economic growth on purpose, for the sake of how people live.

Two years later, in “Le sentiment de la nature, force révolutionnaire,” Charbonneau wrote that a feeling for nature should be to their movement what class consciousness had been to socialism. They left Esprit in 1937, when it would not take up these positions.

After the war their paths looked different. Ellul became a professor, a lay Protestant theologian, and the author of La Technique ou l’enjeu du siècle (1954), translated as The Technological Society. Charbonneau taught school, stayed an agnostic, and published late and with difficulty. But Ellul dedicated La Technique to Charbonneau and his wife as a book that was their work as much as his, and Roy describes Charbonneau as the mentor of the two in social thought.

What each of them saw

Ellul’s subject was what he called technique. He did not mean machines. He meant the search for the one most efficient method in every field, from factories to schooling to propaganda. His claim was that technique had become the landscape people live in, that it grows by its own logic, and that the people inside it cannot steer it.

Charbonneau started from freedom and from the land. In Le Jardin de Babylone (1969) he argued that nature is a modern invention: people named it only once industry had begun to destroy it, and protecting it is a question of freedom more than of matter. Le Système et le chaos (1973) set out why endless growth is impossible in a finite world. It appeared in the same year as Illich’s Tools for Conviviality. In 1980 he published Le Feu vert, a critique of the ecological movement he had helped to start. His first large book, L’État, written in the 1940s and not published commercially until 1987, already has the tone:

“It is not a God who creates this world but a mechanic, who assembles piece by piece, from outside, what used to come into being of itself. […] He thinks he has a culture when he founds a ministry of culture. He thinks he has achieved social harmony when his police keep order in the street. He even thinks he is guaranteeing happiness when he raises the output of coal.”

Bernard Charbonneau, L’État (written in the 1940s; our translation from the French)

What Illich took from Ellul

Illich met Ellul’s work in 1965, in Santa Barbara, when the translator John Wilkinson handed him a copy of The Technological Society. On November 13, 1993, he spoke at a conference in Bordeaux held in Ellul’s honour, and addressed him as “Master Jacques.”

In that talk he said what he owed. Ellul’s idea of technique, he explained, let him find the threshold in schooling, transport, and medicine: the point where the person a tool was built for is absorbed into the tool. That is the second watershed of Tools for Conviviality, described in Ellul’s terms.

He took a second idea as well. Ellul argued in The Subversion of Christianity (1984) that the modern West is what the Gospel became once it was turned into an institution. Illich made this the centre of his late work, under an old Latin phrase for the corruption of the best, which becomes the worst. The Bordeaux talk ends in territory that is Illich’s own: what life among techniques does to the senses, and to friendship.

Where they differ

The difference is about limits. For Ellul, technique is autonomous. No vote or policy sets its course, and his sociology offers no programme. Illich in 1973 thought people could still set limits on their tools together, and Tools for Conviviality is a proposal for doing it. Charbonneau and Ellul had called for chosen limits in 1935, and Charbonneau never stopped. By the 1980s Illich had moved closer to Ellul. He began to speak of systems that absorb the people who use them, as we describe in Tools or systems?

Charbonneau and Illich

There’s no evidence that Illich read Charbonneau or was much affected by his work directly. Illich does not name him in the Bordeaux talk. The link runs through other people. Daniel Cérézuelle, who invited Illich to Bordeaux, also wrote the introduction to Charbonneau that the Ellul society publishes. And French writers on degrowth now list the three together, with André Gorz and Cornelius Castoriadis, among the movement’s forerunners.

The parallels are close all the same. Both men distrusted the state as much as the market. Both thought the defence of nature was a defence of freedom. Both wrote outside the university, for readers and not for a discipline. Very little of Charbonneau is in English. The Green Light, Christian Roy’s translation of Le Feu vert, is the place to start. For readers of French, La Grande Mue collects his texts, a full bibliography, and writing about him.

What this means for the catalogue

Three things carry over. From Ellul: a tool is never only the object. The records on compulsory schooling and hospital medicine are about methods and institutions, which is his sense of technique. From Charbonneau: limits are chosen for the sake of freedom, not only imposed for the sake of survival. From Illich: the threshold between the convivial and the counterproductive and inhumane can be found, case by case, and named.

Sources

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