It is hard to imagine today that, in the years leading up to the First World War, the most famous person in the world was not an actor or a singer, but a philosopher. Henri Bergson’s name is now quite obscure, especially in the English-speaking world. But this ‘quiet French gentleman of kindly manners and charming personality,’ as the New York Times described him in 1911, was once so popular that his weekly seminar at the Collège de France in Paris saw up to 700 men and women attempt to squeeze into a space that could only seat 370. Outside the building, the philosopher’s most ardent admirers resorted to climbing onto window ledges to listen in, while inside the lecture theatre itself, the heat often became so unbearable that people fainted. This atmosphere of fandom went beyond the professor’s home country. Bergson’s works about time, memory, laughter and biological evolution were translated into multiple languages and sold in the thousands around the world. In 1913, a lecture he delivered at Columbia University in New York was in such high demand that it caused the first ever traffic jam on Broadway.

Bergson took on highly specialised debates, such as the metaphysical status of time, the relationship between memory and the brain, and the evolution of the eye in vertebrates. He illustrated his arguments with complicated examples taken from the contemporary cutting edge of psychology, neuroscience, biology, and physics. He never wrote with a broad readership in mind. Yet, Bergson’s lectures had become a weekly rendezvous for a who’s who of Paris’s trendiest literary, artistic, and political personalities.

At first glance, nothing about Bergson screamed avant-garde. At the peak of his fame, he was a peculiar little man in his fifties. It seemed that at any moment his frail body might be crushed under the weight of his massive forehead, which he usually covered in a high crown bowler hat. His light blue, highly expressive eyes, overhung by thick dark brows, gave him a perpetual air of mild astonishment. 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 20^th century, he was, at heart, a deeply private, almost timid person and he found the whole situation deeply embarrassing. Bergson preferred private, meaningful philosophical conversations to what he viewed as the empty chatter of social gatherings, and he despised the noise that came with celebrity. His wife Louise (a second cousin of Marcel Proust) and their daughter Jeanne devoted their lives to protecting the increasingly fatigued philosopher against the unceasing disturbances of the outside world. When a telephone was installed in the Bergsons’ home, Louise shared their number with no one, not even their closest friends. Fame, Bergson said, was ‘stupid’ because it distracted both he and his followers from what mattered the most: his philosophy.

It was a philosophy that celebrated the power of will, creativity and freedom. Like a snowball rolling down a hill — one way in which Bergson analogised time or as he called it durée — we are constantly growing and advancing. But, unlike the snowball, we can choose our path. Change is an essential feature of the human experience, and the very condition of our freedom. In other words, as Bergson put it, ‘to exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on endlessly creating oneself’. For Bergson ‘reality is mobility,’ everything is in constant flux, even things that appear immobile. The fabric of reality cannot be fully seized through the static concepts and symbols of science. Beneath the structured veil of logic and rationality, said Bergson, philosophical intuition can reveal the continuous change at work in the universe.

Bergson’s philosophy of durée was timely. At the turn of the 19^th century, European intellectual and cultural life was dominated by its newly industrialised cities and the harsh laws of Darwinian competition, a mathematised reality stripped of wonder and mystery with little room left for notions of free will and faith. Thousands were drawn to Bergson’s definition of life and consciousness as a story of freedom and creativity, and his criticism of the rigid symbolism of science. His work was interpreted as a much-needed antidote to what German sociologist Max Weber later called the ‘disenchantment of the world’.

This alone does not explain why Bergson was so incredibly popular. There was something about the way the philosopher presented his ideas that made him a rallying point for those who rejected the mechanised society. The crowds who flocked to listen to him speak left in a kind of trance, enchanted by the perfectly timed cadence of his speech, the melodic quality of his voice, and his masterful direction of his subject matter, bringing complex philosophical notions together in apparent harmony. The musical quality of lecturing style was perhaps inherited from his father, Michal Bergson, a struggling composer of Polish Hasidic origin, whose training under Chopin was not sufficient to afford him a fulfilling career. Like an artist who is able to show us what we, as individuals, have not yet been able to perceive for ourselves, Bergson was able to give form to the confused and all-consuming feelings of a generation.

As Bergson’s influence grew, so did the mountain of correspondence, tasks, and obligations. In 1911, he wrote to his friend Salomon Reinach: ‘I haven’t taken a single day – I’d almost say not a single hour – off this year, and I’m afraid I probably won’t next year either.’ He would later pay a steep price for years of uninterrupted work. In his drawn-out final decades, his joints would become swollen and his fingers deformed. A simple meal would take him hours to finish, and the energy required to think and write would come to him only in short and increasingly rare bursts, scattered throughout the day.

Bergson even experienced some of the most deranged aspects of what we now call celebrity culture. His fans organised pilgrimages to his summer home in Switzerland and stole locks of his thinning hair from his barber. Fights broke out in the corridor outside his increasingly packed lecture theatre, and not a day went by without his name being mentioned in the newspapers, where he was hailed as the father of movements as disparate as futurism, symbolism, anarcho-syndicalism, Catholic modernism, and feminism. Bergson did not recognise himself in any of these trends and he told one journalist that he preferred genius to manifestoes.

In the headlines of reporters, in second-hand accounts of his lectures written for the general public, in dinner-party conversations, and in the noisy chatter of tearooms, Bergson’s complex ideas were reduced to catchphrases and stripped of their context and intended meaning. In these caricatures and distortions, his enemies found ammunition, most famously Bertrand Russell, who, in a 1912 article (later reproduced in his own bestselling opus History of Western Philosophy), represented Bergsonism as a dangerous assault on rationality and characterised by a lack of rigour and clarity. What Russell failed to consider was that just because Bergson found limitations in the methods of science did not mean that his understanding of these methods was limited, nor that he rejected them through and through. The same misunderstanding occurred once more a decade later in 1922 when Einstein scathingly and publicly told Bergson, who had proposed a thoughtful, considered and, philosophical, interpretation of relativity, that ‘the time of the philosopher does not exist!’.

Despite his legions of admirers, Bergson had also managed the impressive feat of inspiring fear on both the right and the left, in secularist rationalists as well as in the official representatives of the Catholic Church, who put three of his books on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the list of publications deemed heretical by the Vatican. The worst of the vitriol came from the antisemtic nationalist group L’Action Française, who accused Bergsonism of contributing to the downfall of French culture best represented, according to them, by Cartesian rationalism and so-called masculine values. Bergson, the Jewish philosopher of intuition who counted so many women among his admirers, was, they said, ‘feminine’ and a ‘barbarian’.

Bergson never dignified these attacks with a response. Perhaps, as his friend the writer Charles Péguy claimed, Bergson’s reluctance to take part in the culture wars in which he was a central figure stemmed from a fear of repercussions. It is also possible that his silence was a matter of principle. He often repeated that he would only talk about the things he had had the time to properly think about and that of these, there were perhaps three or four, and that none of them could be applied to modern political problems. Bergson only broke this rule once, in the early stages of the First World War, when he delivered a series of speeches, nationalistic in tone, claiming that in its very essence France was driven by a kind of internal creative, self-replenishing force, something akin to the ‘élan vital’, his metaphysical image for life. On the other hand, Germany he said, throughout its history, had come to embody ‘savagery’ and ‘barbarism,’ a ‘mechanisation of spirit’.

After the war’s conclusion, the special kind of optimism that had once moved Bergson’s followers evaporated. Bergsonism had been a philosophy of hope, of transgression, of freedom, but after 1918 the very meaning of those terms had changed. In the late 1920s and 1930s Bergson received the most prestigious honours of his life (not least the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927). At the same time, the philosopher had lost most of his influence. By the late 1920s, he was seen as an embodiment of the philosophical orthodoxy, a defender of the status quo, a relic from a lost time. In the words of the French philosopher Raymond Aron, Bergson had become a ‘classic’, that is, ‘someone that everyone knows, that a few read, that almost no one sees as a contemporary’. Bergson’s fame had evaporated almost as rapidly as it had come into being.

In recent years there has been a kind of Bergson revival in the anglophone world. Could it be because there is a need for a return to his ideas? In many ways, popular concerns at the beginning of the 20th century echo our 21st-century anxieties, and Bergson might offer some solutions. In his final book, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, Bergson wrote about the need to inject more spirit – meaning more humanity – into our technology, which, he believed, was progressing too fast for our sense of the ethical dimension to keep up. He also wrote about our need to find ways to open up societies that close in on themselves and retreat into increasing authoritarianism and xenophobia. The thinker of the durée still has a lot to say to the present moment.

This article is adapted from Emily Herring’s forthcoming biography of Bergson, Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People (2024 Basic Books).