Church, in his second lecture Montalembert went so far as to argue that liberty of
thought should include the toleration of heresy and error.
For his pains Montalembert was reprimanded by the Church and did not appear
at the next Malines conference the following year. Three months after that
Congress, Pope Pius IX promulgated his encyclical Quanta Cura, to which was
appended the Syllabus Errorum detailing the Holy See’s objections to the secular
state, freedom of conscience and religion, freedom of the press, popular sovereignty,
and much else. Six years later, in 1870, the Vatican Council affirmed the doctrine
of papal infallibility. The papacy, to all intents and purposes, had turned its back,
rightly or wrongly, upon the modern world. Yet not even these measures could put
an end to what was a genuine and profound disagreement about how the Christian
religion could best be protected. On the one side stood the traditionalists, con-
vinced of the incompatibility between faith and reason and that dogmatic intoler-
ance required political and civil intolerance; on the other were the liberals, intent on
remaining sincere and loyal Catholics, but determined to effect a reconciliation
between the Church and modern society and learning. The Church in France had
made a remarkable and unexpected recovery in the nineteenth century and now
stood in a stronger position than might ever have been imagined, but the renewal of
hostilities was not far away. The anticlerical Third Republic awaited.
262 Montalembert, L’Église libre dans l’État libre (1863). An important part of the context here was a
discussion of moves towards Italian unification. To Montalembert’s displeasure Cavour took up his
slogan.
8
Positivism, Science, and Philosophy
I
On 24 January 1861 an event took place in Paris that no other country could
replicate and that also provided a fine illustration of the complicated arguments
that had divided liberal opinion on religious matters during the first half of the
nineteenth century. On that day Henri-Dominique Lacordaire, follower of
the Ultramontane Lamennais, was received as one of the forty members of the
Académie Française. The person he replaced was the Jansenist and Gallican Alexis
de Tocqueville. The formal welcome to Lacordaire was given by the Protestant
François Guizot.1 As befitted the occasion and the demands of tradition, Lacor-
daire’s speech in honour of Tocqueville was as generous as it was uncritical.2
Coming from a priest, it made repeated mention of Tocqueville as a Christian,
concluding that Tocqueville had seen the truth of Christianity and of ‘an active,
living, personal God’, and had served both ‘with no sense of shame’. ‘It was death’,
Lacordaire announced to his fellow immortels, ‘that brought him the gift of love. He
received the God who visited him as an old friend and, touched to tears by his
presence, at last free of the world, he forgot what he had been, his name, his
services, his regrets, and his desires . . . keeping in his soul only the virtues he had
gained from his passage here on earth.’3
From what we know of Tocqueville’s last, desperate days in Cannes this
reassuring picture of a man secure in the bosom of the Church seems far from
accurate. It also glosses over the complexities of Tocqueville’s religious beliefs and
makes no mention of his profound doubts on religious matters. In a (now well-
known) letter to Madame Swetchine, a woman who had herself been instructed by
Joseph de Maistre in Russia, he wrote that ‘I believe firmly in another life, since
God who is supremely just has given us the idea of it; in this other life, I believe in
the remuneration of good and evil, since God has allowed us to distinguish between
them and given us the freedom to choose; but beyond these clear ideas, everything
beyond the bounds of this world seems to me to be surrounded by shadows which
1 Lacordaire’s election was secured through a coalition of Catholics (including Montalembert),
Protestants, supporters of Eclecticism (Victor Cousin), and Voltaireans (in this case, Adolphe Thiers):
see Tocqueville, Œuvres complètes, xvi. Mélanges (1989), 312 n. 1.
2 ‘Discours de M. Lacordaire’, ibid. 312–31. See also ‘Réponse de M.Guizot’, ibid. 332–45.
3 ‘Discours de M. Lacordaire’, 326.
Positivism, Science, and Philosophy
345
terrify me.’4 The cousin of the author of Le Génie du Christianisme, it is clear
that Tocqueville lost the severe Augustinian faith imparted to him in his youth by
the devoted Abbé Le Sueur and that, for all his lifelong reading of Pascal, he was
never fully to recover from this early religious crisis. Yet Tocqueville remained
convinced that religion was ‘as natural to the human heart as hope itself ’.5 And,
just as importantly, he understood that religion would not die with the advent
of democracy. ‘The philosophers of the eighteenth century’, Tocqueville wrote,
‘had a very simple explanation for the gradual weakening of beliefs. Religious zeal,
they said, was bound to be extinguished as enlightenment and freedom spread.
It is tiresome that the facts do not fit the theory at all.’6 Disbelief, he argued, was
the exception.
But what sort of religion was this to be?7 One of the first things that the young
Tocqueville had noticed was that ‘Men of religion combat freedom, and the friends
of freedom attack religion.’8 This was perplexing because, as he had seen in
America, Catholicism was no enemy of democracy. Indeed, one of the most
surprising conclusions he reached during his visit was that Catholicism, rather
than Protestantism, thrived in a democratic and republican environment.9 More-
over, he had seen that religion could perform the key function of regulating the
‘overly ardent and overly exclusive taste for well-being that men feel in times of
equality’.10 Viewed ‘from a purely human point of view’, religion curbed the
potential excesses associated with the materialism and individualism of democratic
man.
Yet Tocqueville also saw that democracy would change the nature of religious
experience, and specifically that the act of worship would be less bound by external
forms and practices. Religion in the United States, he observed, ‘presents ideas
more clearly, simply, and generally to the human mind’.11 This was a tendency
with which Tocqueville had some sympathy and he saw that it was only to be
expected in a mobile society that the ‘external and secondary’ dimensions of
religious observance would themselves change. However, with equal conviction
Tocqueville thought that ‘men cannot do without dogmatic beliefs’ and therefore
that ‘general ideas about God and human nature are, among all ideas, the ones it is
most fitting to shield from the habitual action of individual reason and for which
there is most to gain and least to lose in recognizing an authority’.12 The danger was
4 Tocqueville, letter of 26 Feb. 1857, in Olivier Zunz and Alan S. Kahan (eds.), The Tocqueville
Reader: A Life in Letters and Politics (Oxford, 2002), 336.
5 Tocqueville, De la Démocratie en Amérique, Œuvres complètes (1951), i/1. 310.
6 Ibid. 308.
7 See Agnès Antoine, L’Impensé de la démocratie: Tocqueville, la citoyenneté et la religion (2003).
See also Joshua Mitchell, ‘Tocqueville on Democratic Religious Experience’, in Cheryl B. Welch
(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville (Cambridge, 2006), 276–302; Agnès Antoine,
‘Démocratie et religion: le point de vue tocquevillien’, Tocqueville Review, 27/2 (2006), 121–32;
Pierre Gilbert, ‘Tocqueville et la religion: Entre réflexion politique et confidences épistolaires’,
Tocqueville Review, 27/2 (2006), 133–48; Frank M. Turner, ‘Alexis de Tocqueville and John
Stuart Mill on Religion’, Tocqueville Review, 27/2 (2006), 149–72; and Larry Siedentop,
Tocqueville (Oxford, 1994), 96–112.
8 Tocqueville, De la Démocratie, 10.
9 Ibid. i/2. 35–6.
10 Ibid. 33.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid. 28.
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Positivism, Science, and Philosophy
that, divested of its ‘general and eternal truths’, Christianity would be reduced to an
unmediated personal religious experience. The outcome, as Tocqueville correctly
sensed, would be pantheism.13 Religion, as we now know to our cost, would
amount to little more than tree hugging.
But Tocqueville had a further point of considerable significance to make. Men,
he believed, required ‘very fixed ideas’ about God, their souls, and their general
duties towards their Creator. Few were they, in his opinion, who could ‘let their
minds float at random between obedience and freedom’14 and the consequence of
complete religious independence was a generalized sentiment of doubt throughout
society. With that came confusion and the sense that all actions were delivered up
to chance. Men, Tocqueville wrote, were condemned to ‘a sort of disorder and
impotence’.15
It is possibly only a slight exaggeration to say that a large proportion of
the literary and philosophical output of the French nineteenth century was a
commentary upon and response to that feeling of disorder and impotence. As
D. G. Charlton remarked some years ago,16 the characteristic temperament of the
age was one of ‘honest unbelief ’, of religious sensibility estranged from Christian
belief. This took a variety of forms, not the least being a profound distress and
regret for lost faith, but included in these responses was the very frequent theme
that, if it was no longer possible to accept the literal inerrancy of the Bible or the
truth of Christian doctrines, a religious ethic of some kind was still indispensable
to the well-being of society as a whole. The nineteenth century therefore saw a
remarkable proliferation of alternative creeds (many both bizarre and exotic), each
designed to offer a substitute for a discredited and outmoded Christianity. One of
these was science itself, raised to the level of a guide to the future of humanity.
Others took a more prophetic and messianic form. Quite commonly, however,
there was a shared aspiration to put an end to the epistemological and metaphysical
uncertainties associated with what continued to be seen by many as the destructive
and sceptical philosophy of the eighteenth century. In its place there was to be
provided a new intellectual synthesis appropriate to the conditions of the new
century. The irony was that, not infrequently, these spiritual offerings came clothed
in the regalia of the old religion. Ecclesiastical orthodoxy simply reappeared in
novel (if less convincing and less aesthetically pleasing) garb.
A key early protagonist in these (and many other) developments was Claude-
Henri de Rouvray, Comte de Saint-Simon.17 Few men could have had as varied
and as eventful life as Saint-Simon and few could have been as influential.18 Having
narrowly escaped both death and financial ruin during the Revolution, he pub-
lished his first text, Lettres d’un habitant de Genève à ses contemporains, in 1802 and
13 Tocqueville, De la Démocratie, 37–8.
14 Ibid. 36.
15 Ibid. 27.
16 Charlton, Secular Religions in France 1815–1870 (London, 1963), 1–12.
17 See Frank E. Manuel, The New World of Henri de Saint-Simon (Cambridge, Mass., 1956);
Manuel, The Prophets of Paris (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), 103–48; Jack Hayward, After the French
Revolution: Six Critics of Democracy and Nationalism (Hemel Hempstead, 1991), 65–100.
18 See Antoine Picon, Les Saint-Simoniens: Raison, imaginaire et utopie (2002) and Christophe
Prochasson, Saint-Simon ou l’Anti-Marx (2005).
Positivism, Science, and Philosophy
347
from then on he did not cease in his endeavours to establish a set of doctrines
outlining the principles required to effect the complete reorganization of society
and the creation of a new terrestrial morality. Moreover, as an admirer of Con-
dorcet, Saint-Simon developed this analysis within the framework of an account of
the development of the human mind.
History, Saint-Simon argued, could be divided into three distinct periods: the
Greek and Roman; the Christian and medieval; and the scientific or ‘positive’. At
their height, each of these periods was characterized by a moral or intellectual
system that bound society together as a unified whole and by a set of political
institutions in conformity with existing ideas and circumstances. The Christian
period, for example, had imagined that everything could be explained in terms of
‘one universal and unique intelligence’, had been held in concert by the ‘passive
link’ of the Catholic religion and the ‘active link’ of the clergy, and had formed ‘a
confederate society united through common institutions and subject to a common
government’ under the direction of the papacy. As such, it had lived at peace with
itself.
According to Saint-Simon, there were two principal phenomena that explained
the disintegration of the social and political organization of the Christian period.
The first was the emergence of science, which from the thirteenth century onwards
began to dislodge theistic explanations of the world. Consequently, over time, it
came to be seen that ‘the relations between God and the universe were incompre-
hensible and unimportant’.19 Nothing, it was now established, was to be accepted
as true unless it was confirmed by reason and experience. The heroes of this process
were the very same thinkers who had been lambasted by Maistre—Bacon, Des-
cartes, Newton, and Locke—as it was they who had masterminded the ‘scientific
revolution’ that had come to fruition with the Enlightenment. They had revealed
‘the most essential faults’ of the old ‘religious system’ and ‘constructed the first
scaffolding for the erection of the new system’.20 Manifestly, Saint-Simon had
considerable sympathy for this exercise—the philosophers of the eighteenth centu-
ry had been right to overturn the ‘edifice that the clergy had taken centuries to
construct’21—but he also saw that, when developed with greater boldness by
Condillac and Condorcet, the result had been to formulate a ‘general anti-theology’.
In summary, the Encyclopedists had succeeded in destroying the theological
system but they had not been able to fashion a new system to repla
ce the one
they had torn down. ‘The philosophy of the eighteenth century’, Saint-Simon
concluded, ‘was critical and revolutionary; that of the nineteenth will be inventive
and constructive.’22
The second phenomenon serving to undermine the feudal and Christian order
was the emergence of industry and of an industrial class. Saint-Simon wrote at great
19 ‘Introduction aux Travaux scientifiques du XIXe siècle’, Œuvres de Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon
(1966), vi. 155.
20 Ibid. 25.
21 ‘Saint-Simon à Chateaubriand’, Œuvres de Saint-Simon (1868), ii. 216.
22 ‘Sur l’Encyclopédie’, ibid. i. 92.
348
Positivism, Science, and Philosophy
length upon this theme and many of his numerous (and often short-lived and
unread) publishing initiatives were designed to convey the message that les indus-
triels, as the most useful class in society, should assume its direction. This was the
argument to be found in Catéchisme des Industriels, written in 1823.23 Saint-
Simon’s point was that the aristocratic, military, and religious classes that had
dominated feudal society had lost their raison d’être, for the simple reason that they
no longer had any useful function to perform. Similarly, this was the force of the
parable sketched out in the opening pages of L’Organisateur, where Saint-Simon
asked his readers to contemplate the loss of ‘all the great officers of the crown, all
Ministers of State, all the Councillors of State, all chief magistrates, all its marshals,
all its cardinals, archbishops, vicars-general, and canons’.24 Apart from distress from
a purely sentimental point of view, Saint-Simon suggested, no harm would be
caused. Indeed, a hindrance to the progress of society would have been removed.
Les oisifs, as Saint-Simon derogatively described them, were no more than parasites.
The first major political expression of this fundamental change in the structure of
society, Saint-Simon argued, had been the English Civil War. It was, however, to
France that ‘the natural order of things and the advance of civilization’ had reserved
‘the glory of ending the great European Revolution’.25 ‘When the French Revolu-
tion broke out’, Saint-Simon argued, ‘it was no longer a matter of modifying the
feudal and theological system which had already lost almost all its force. It was a
Revolution and the Republic Page 73
