Last week, French radio channel France Culture republished on its website a short 1913 recording of Emile Durkheim, currently housed in the archives of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The site added a nice video reproducing the recording, complete with crucial subtitles.
The site also provided some interesting information about how this recording came about. In 1911, linguist Ferdinand Brunot had undertaken to create an audio archive (Archives de la parole) with the help of one of the Pathé brothers (behind the production company bearing this name). Emile Pathé provided the relatively new technology necessary to “make human speech eternal”, as Brunot is reputed to have said. With a recording studio at the Sorbonne, he made about 600 recordings of such speech. While it was driven by a popular impetus to create a kind of French “sound encyclopedia of languages”, his university colleagues were also enrolled as contributors. Among those who comprised this “living library” was Emile Durkheim, then a professor at the Sorbonne.
Durkheim’s 1913 audio is likely him reading from a manuscript which was published in the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale in 1911. This manuscript, “Value judgments and judgments of reality”, is a version of a talk he gave some months earlier in Bologna at the International Congress of Philosophy.
In this video made a few months ago, I attempted to isolate Durkheim’s voice a little more amidst the surrounding noise. I also added some English subtitles, adapting the translation made by David Francis Pocock in Sociology and philosophy (1974). Unfortunately Durkheim’s rapid delivery and peculiar rhythm thwart any attempt at providing smooth and readable subtitles.
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