Pining for the Belle Époque period, when philosophers like Henri Bergson were essentially celebrities: filling lecture halls with aristocratic it girls and idealistic students, going on international tours and causing traffic jams in NYC…

From Emily Herring’s excellent and narratively enthralling biography of Bergson:

In the years leading up to World War I, Henri Bergson’s lectures were the most popular in all of Paris. In his books, he took on highly specialised debates, such as the metaphysical status of time…and he never wrote with a broad readership in mind. Yet week after week, more and more people tried to squeeze inside his Collège de France lecture theatre to hear him speak. The wealthiest members of the audience had started sending their valets to save them a spot. The unsuccessful resorted to climbing onto window ledges to listen in, and inside the room the heat often became so unbearable that people fainted.

By his fiftieth birthday, Bergson had managed what most public figures can only hope to achieve in death: he had become an icon…His fans believed that he had already earned his place in the philosophy hall of fame, alongside such royalty as Plato, Descartes, and Kant. Pilgrimages were organised to his summer home in Switzerland, and locks of his thinning hair were stolen from his barber…

He held as a principle that “there is no philosophical idea, however profound or subtle, that cannot and should not be expressed in everyday language,” and that philosophers should “not write for a restricted circle of initiates; they write for humanity in general…”

Bergson’s lectures had become a weekly rendezvous for a who’s who of the capital’s trendiest literary, artistic, and political personalities. Week after week, philosophers and philosophy students sat (or stood) next to mathematicians and poets, suffragettes and priests, actors and engineers, socialists and socialites, artists and journalists, aristocrats and anarchists, curious bystanders, and politicians. The countess and poet Anna de Noailles could often be found in the lecture theatre, adorned in feathers and silk, trailing a flock of devotees…Scattered across the room and listening intently, these trendsetters absorbed and transformed Bergson’s words.

Unfortunately, Bergson hated being a celebrity (even though he was so good at chasing fame!) and was embarrassed by his fandom:

At first glance, nothing about Bergson screamed avant-garde…He spoke softly and moved slowly, with the calculated agility of a large insect or small bird. Although his lectures entranced the most fashionable crowds of the early twentieth century, he was, at heart, a deeply private, almost timid person. Acclaim and flattery left him uncomfortable, and he found the whole situation embarrassing and inconvenient.

On one occasion, Bergson entered the lecture theatre to find his desk entirely covered in flowers. Mortified, he cried: “But…I am not a ballerina!” He found celebrity “stupid” because it distracted both his followers and him from what mattered the most: his philosophy. Fame, he said, had rapidly become “odious” to him.

I really enjoyed Herald of a Restless World; Herring describes Bergson’s ideas and their impact in very elegant and easy-to-understand prose.