Le Disciple Reading Order

Le Disciple (1889) by Paul Bourget is the novel that defined the terms of the French philosophical and moral debate of the 1890s, a narrative about the consequences of philosophical determinism when it is adopted as a practical guide to life. The philosopher Adrien Sixte, a reclusive Parisian intellectual whose systematic scientific psychology has eliminated the concepts of free will and moral responsibility, is confronted with the fact that his disciple Robert Greslou has applied his master's philosophy to the seduction of a young aristocratic woman — Charlotte de Jussat — with devastating consequences. Bourget's argument is direct and polemical: a philosophy that denies human freedom and moral responsibility produces the conditions for moral catastrophe when taken seriously, and the intellectual who constructs such a philosophy bears a moral responsibility for its consequences that his system itself cannot acknowledge. The novel was immediately recognized as a conservative Catholic response to the positivist and determinist traditions that had dominated French intellectual life since Taine and Renan: Bourget was arguing for the social necessity of religious morality against the dangerous freedom of scientific materialism. The novel provoked a furious debate: Zola, Anatole France, and others responded that moral responsibility did not require religious foundations. Le Disciple is simultaneously a roman à thèse (a novel with an explicit philosophical thesis to prove) and a psychological novel of considerable sophistication, and its portrait of Robert Greslou's seduction — told through Greslou's own confession — is genuinely compelling independent of its polemical context.