The movement of history.

In memoriam Jean Pierre Faye (1925-2026)

Leonore Bazinek est philosophe à l’Université de Rouen Normandie, Laboratoire ERIAC, EA 4705).

“The working men have no country.”  Karl Marx / Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848 [manifesto of the communist party pdf], 25 [consulted 06/05/2026].

“I will say where I am and people will know who I am.” Jean-Pierre Faye, Langages totalitaires. Critique de la raison narrative (1972), Paris 2004, 465.

In general, I don’t face the “terror of the white page”, but in preparing this present essay, I found myself confronted with a surprising form of this terror: the impression that it is nearly impossible to start writing about an end. We are overwhelmed by memory; we are heavily loaded with different emotions. This becomes even more complicated if the disappeared person was also a writer and as such interested in our writings. We have, in fact, to cope with the loss of a reader; we have to carry on our work without his kind, yet also corrective, regard.

But texts remain. Thereof, at this level, the dialogue can continue; therefore, I had to search in this direction. As a matter of fact, we shared an interest in German Nazism and in Napoleon; and we both also enjoyed simply strolling through history. And we agreed on the decisive role of language in human life.

Now I had a starting point and a general frame. But I still had to find a theme. Finally, I decided to examine a particular hypothesis which Jean-Pierre Faye raised up nearly every time when we met, for exploring history and searching together possible explanations. The intriguing point is that, even if the historical truth of this hypothesis is highly improbable, it carries undeniably psychological truth. So, this hypothesis can, in a certain manner, help us to face the behaviour of politicians.

Let us take a short look at two hypotheses of Faye operating with his usual methodology: mixing up, or thinking together, all possible and impossible implications of a word or an expression as starting point for long chains of simultaneous reasoning on different levels. Both of them concern European history. The first tries to explain why the ancient Romans sought to conquer North-Eastern Germany, and the second, why Eastern European pipelines follow the route they actually do. I will take up only the first hypothesis. After a short presentation of the problem, I bring up........

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