仏蘭西学会の設立と伝統主義論争

―エミール・エックと太宰施門の第一次世界大戦―

抄録

　The so-called debate on traditionalism, one of several large-scale literary disputes in 1910’s Japan, was set alight by Emile Louis Heck, the first professor of French literature at Tokyo Imperial University, and his erstwhile student Dazai Shimon. Heck and Dazai founded the France Society in 1916, introducing French traditionalist literature into Japan.

　The study of French literature in Japan was still in its infancy. This debate involved not only Heck, a Marianist priest and hired foreigner, and Dazai, later the first professor of French literature at Kyoto Imperial University, but also Naito Aro (translator of The Little Prince), Honma Hisao (professor of literature at Waseda), Mitsui Koshi (a nationalist poet) and Eguchi Kan (a socialist). Why did this debate achieve prominence in the middle of the First World War?

　A major factor was certainly the declining status of “France” in Japan's academic domain during the Meiji period. This is why Heck was so insistent on the usefulness of French literature at the national level. Elsewhere, however, the Japanese literary world was embarking on a new search for Japanese “tradition.” This research, in the long run, was reduced to giving a cultural veneer to the status quo and the ideology in power (although only a handful of socialists actually pointed this out). Eventually, Japanese “tradition” was realized as “Japanese spirit (Nihon Seshin)” and the “national polity (Kokutai),” those stalwarts of fascism.

Against the background of current attempts to legislate “tradition,” I propose to reconsider the original use of “tradition” as an ideological keyword.