Revolution and the Republic
Page 76
essential moral superiority of a philosophy that binds each one of us to the whole
existence of humanity.’86 Positive morality, he continued, ‘will tend to present each
man’s happiness as dependent on the extension of benevolent acts and sympathetic
emotions to our species as a whole’.87 More than this, in the work that Comte
himself always regarded as his ‘fundamental opuscule’, the Système de politique
positive, he openly conceded that the philosophical truth of positivism would never
‘impassion the mass of men’ unless it was presented ‘as a vivid picture of the
improvements’ it would bring to ‘the human condition’. This, he stated, was ‘an
order of works in which the imagination must play a predominant role’.88
80 Ibid. 635.
81 Autobiography (Oxford, 1969), 127.
82 Quoted in ‘Introduction’, Jones, Auguste Comte, p. x.
83 Œuvres de Saint-Simon, ix. 23–4.
84 Le Producteur, 1 (1825), 596–616, 2 (1825), 314–29, 358–76.
85 Ibid. 315.
86 Andreski, Auguste Comte, 220.
87 Ibid. 221.
88 Œuvres de Saint-Simon, ix. 136–8.
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At this stage Comte equated such works of the imagination with the fine arts and
gave to artists the role of inducing ‘the universal adoption’ of the new system. There
was no mention of a new religion or of a new clergy. However, if Comte’s intention
from the outset was to bring an end to the societal crisis made manifest in the
French Revolution, so too it can be seen that his concerns were never exclusively
philosophical and that he always had in mind the need for a spiritual reorganization
of society as a whole. Why the emphasis within his work shifted—as it undoubtedly
did and to the dismay and shock of some of his most loyal disciples—was the cause
of considerable speculation. Much was made of Comte’s fragile psychological
condition,89 especially after the death of Clotilde de Vaux (with whom he had
fallen passionately in love in 1844).90 But the fact of the matter was that, in
developing his ideas in the direction of a religion of humanity, Comte was to a
considerable degree following a path taken by many social reformers of his day.91 As
we have seen, Pierre Leroux was one case in point.
The fascinating details of the Comtean religion—itself recalling Robespierre’s
cult of the Supreme Being—have been well documented.92 Nothing was left to
chance. Each and every aspect of its ceremonies, sacraments, and organization was
the subject of minute description. The positivist calendar alone—with each day and
each of its thirteen months named not after a saint but a great figure of the past
(Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and so on), each month of twenty-eight days, ‘a
universal festival of the dead’ to mark the last day of the year, and an additional
festival in leap years—represented a considerable feat of intellectual ingenuity and
one that received lengthy clarification from Comte himself.93 There were to be
festivals celebrating both the static and dynamic aspects of humanity.
For all their undoubted importance to Comte, these were not among the four
essential features of the new religion.94 The first was that it claimed to regulate all
aspects of both our private and public existence and thus subordinated politics to
morals. Second, the ‘proven religion’ of humanity—‘the one true Great Being’—
was taken to supersede the revealed religion of a Christian God and thus of the
Catholic Church. It was ‘the only complete, real and true religion’95 because this
‘new Great Being’ was not ‘a purely subjective abstraction’ but the result of ‘exact
objective judgement’.96 Third, the superiority of the positive morality was demon-
strated by its substitution of the love of humanity for the love of God. ‘To love
89 See Émile Littré, Auguste Comte et la philosophie positive (1863), 580–91.
90 See Comte, Discours sur l’ensemble du postivisme (1848), 261–3.
91 See Edward Berenson, ‘A New Religion of the Left: Christianity and Social Revolution in France,
1815–1848’, in François Furet and Mona Ozouf (eds.), The French Revolution and the Creation of
Modern Political Culture, iii. The Transformation of Political Culture 1789–1848 (Oxford, 1989),
543–60.
92 See Andrew Wernick, Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity: The Post-Theistic Program of
French Social Theory (Cambridge, 2001). See also ‘Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity’, in
Bernard M. G. Reardon, Religion in the Age of Romanticism (Cambridge, 1985), 207–36.
93 Comte, Le Calendrier positiviste ou système générale de commémoration publique (1849).
94 In addition to the texts already cited see Discours sur l’ensemble du positivisme (1848), 315–93.
95 Ibid. 324.
96 Ibid. 328.
Positivism, Science, and Philosophy
359
Humanity’, Comte wrote, ‘truly constitutes all that is best in morality.’97 Altruism
would prevail over egoism, sociability over personality. ‘Live for others’ was
positivism’s golden rule. Finally, Comte attributed a central role in the new religion
to women.98 In part this disclosed an increasing disillusionment with the proletariat
during the Second Republic, but more substantially it reflected his conviction that
social regeneration would depend upon the subordination of masculine reason to
feminine sentiment. The positivist religion, Comte wrote, was but ‘a systematic
consecration of what women feel instinctively’99 and in conjugal love they provided
a model of the ‘universal love’ to come.100 Accordingly, women would act as the
‘priestesses of Humanity’101 and it was to be through ‘the cult of women’ that men
would be prepared for the worship of humanity. The parallels with the Catholic
cult of the Virgin Mary are self-evident.
Here was a religion that was to be ‘thoroughly human’ and which, for all its
imitation of the organizational and doctrinal principles of the Catholic Church, was
unambiguously intended to secure the ‘irrevocable’ elimination of Catholicism. But
this religion, as much as Comte’s overtly positivist sociology, was equally intended
to bring the Revolution to a close. Under the guidance of the new religion, politics
was to be transformed into the ‘active worship’ and ‘service’ of humanity.102
Moreover, the most important part of this transformation was to be the ‘substitu-
tion of duties for rights’. ‘The word right’, Comte wrote, ‘should be as much
excluded from the proper language of politics as should the word cause from
the language of philosophy. Both are theological-metaphysical concepts; and the
former is as immoral and anarchical as the latter is irrational and sophistical.’103
In the positive state of the future, individual rights would disappear and everyone
would have duties towards others. Whatever security the individual might require
would be achieved through the general recognition of reciprocal obligations.
Submission to government, Comte asserted, was not the foundation of virtue.
Rather, ‘true liberty’ consisted in ‘obedience to objective laws’ capable of scientific
demonstrat
ion.
Writing in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution of 1848, it was Comte’s
view that society was not yet ready to attain to the positivist state but he did
nevertheless believe that the negative phase of the Revolution—characterized by the
slogan of Liberty and Equality—was over and that the reconciliation of Order and
Progress was now possible. Accordingly, he set out a provisional programme for the
transitional period ahead which, with typical thoroughness, included detailed
specifications for an occidental navy, international coinage, and a flag for the new
western republic proclaiming ‘universal love’. Comte, as he made expressly clear in
his last major work, Système de politique positive, was convinced that the triumph of
positivism would entail the decomposition of the nation-state, the idea of a polity
97 Ibid. 352.
98 See Discours sur l’ensemble du positivisme, 198–267.
99 Ibid. 203.
100 Comte believed that the family was to be the principal sphere of action for women. He likewise
believed in monogamy and the indissolubility of marriage, even beyond death: ibid. 226–36.
101 Ibid. 253.
102 Ibid. 357.
103 Ibid.
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Positivism, Science, and Philosophy
or political society being progressively evacuated of content. Likewise, Comte
believed that his positivist religion would be universal and that, over time, it
would come to unify not only France but the entire globe. It would first embrace
the other monotheistic religions of the world, then the polytheistic creeds of the
East, before finally replacing the fetishist faiths of Africa.
I I
Most churches are subject to schisms and the Comtean religion was no exception.
The first, and probably most significant, occurred as early as 1852 when Émile
Littré, future editor of the Dictionnaire de la langue française and member of the
Académie Française, found himself unable to follow his master’s deduction of a
positive politics from his earlier positive philosophy.104 The flame of orthodoxy was
kept alive under the leadership of Pierre Laffitte, but not even his undoubted
abilities as a Comtean exegete could prevent further splits in the 1870s and
1880s.105 However, both men merit our attention, if only briefly, because each,
in their different ways, illustrates the political direction that positivism was to take
in the final decades of the nineteenth century.106
Littré never disguised his immense debt to Comte—‘the work of Comte trans-
formed me’, he wrote107—and thus the break was all the more painful.108 Never-
theless, he was incapable of seeing Comte’s later writings as anything other than a
betrayal of the original positivist philosophy. The charge was sustained and wound-
ing, and in essence amounted to the judgement that Comte ‘changed his method-
ology’, that as he developed the religion of humanity he passed from ‘the objective
method’ to the ‘subjective method’, from the mind to the heart, from evidence to
imagination, and with disastrous consequences.109 The result, Littré stated unam-
biguously, was a ‘return to the theological state’.110 Yet it is clear that Littré’s
disquiet also arose from mounting political differences, especially after the demise
of the Second Republic, an eventuality broadly welcomed by Comte.
The political trajectory followed by Littré is most clearly seen through the lens of
the 1879 edition of his Conservation, Révolution et Positivisme.111 In this text Littré
republished a wide selection of his articles from the years 1849–51 but to each he
104 These views were most clearly expressed in Littré, Auguste Comte, 517–681.
105 See Emile Corra, Pierre Laffitte: Successeur d’Auguste Comte (1923).
106 On positivism in France after Comte’s death see W. M. Simon, European Positivism in the
Nineteenth Century: An Essay in Intellectual History (Port Washington, NY, 1963), 19–171.
107 Littré, Auguste Comte, 662–3.
108 See Sudhir Hazareesingh, Intellectual Founders of the Republic: Five Studies in Nineteenth-
Century French Political Thought (Oxford, 2001), 23–83. Specifically upon Littré’s engagement with
Comte see D. G. Charlton, Positivist Thought in France during the Second Empire 1852–1870 (Oxford,
1959), 51–71.
109 Littré, Auguste Comte, 527–37.
110 Ibid. 570–9.
111 The distance travelled can also be appreciated by looking at a document written by Littré,
Laffitte, and Fabien Magnin, Rapport à la société positiviste par la commission chargée d’examiner la nature
et le plan du nouveau gouvernement révolutionnaire de la république française (1848).
Positivism, Science, and Philosophy
361
added a commentary from 1878. Time and time again, in a display of unflinching
honesty, Littré admitted his earlier mistakes and naivety.112 He had been wrong to
believe that the separation of temporal and spiritual powers was anything more than
a utopia.113 He was mistaken in his appraisal of the political situation of the Second
Republic, believing, like Comte, that the republic was now ‘definitively estab-
lished’.114 As the violence and destruction of the Paris Commune had demon-
strated, the ‘pretension’ to marry socialism to positive philosophy had been
‘chimerical’.115 It was out of ‘puerile enthusiasm’ and ‘dogmatic blindness’ that
he had imagined that there would be only peace between European nations.116 The
most substantive set of errors, however, related to the provisions for revolutionary
government set out in the heady days of 1848–9. Littré’s proposals had envisaged,
first, ‘the continued preponderance of central power’ in Paris in order that ‘pro-
gressive tendencies’ should predominate and ‘material order’ should be maintained;
the ‘strict limitation’ of local power and a ‘considerable reduction’ in the attributes
of the Chamber of Deputies; and, thirdly, ‘the placing of power in the hands of
eminent proletarians’ and its removal from the ‘incompetent’ members of the
‘classes supérieures’. An element of counter-balance to executive power was to be
attained through freedom of speech and the press, the regular publication of
government projects, and the existence of political ‘clubs’. The duration of a
government’s mandate would not be set by a limited term but by the use that
was made of it.117 Thirty years later Littré recognized that he had been in error in
believing, like Comte, that a period of transition to a positive political order had
begun, that the proletariat were in a condition to wield power, and that the
socialists were ‘half-positivist’. ‘These three factual errors’ he wrote, ‘removed any
possible chance of the application of this project for revolutionary and transitional
government, not to mention the obstacles that would have arisen from the opposi-
tion of the provinces to the domination of Paris, from the bourgeoisie to the
preponderance of the proletariat and from the peasantry to the systems of the
socialists and others.’118
In the interim France had seen the coup d’état of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte—
‘the 2nd December has been the ruin of Franc
e’, Littré wrote119—the traumas of
foreign occupation and the Paris Commune. For want of any other alternative,
therefore, Littré was left with the conservative republic of Adolphe Thiers and
the politics of opportunism.120 Littré could not abandon his distaste for the
112 See e.g. Conservation, Révolution et Positivisme (1879), 266–7.
113 Ibid. 64–5.
114 Ibid. 75.
115 Ibid. 454.
116 Ibid. 481–2.
117 These views were most clearly expressed in an article entitled ‘Révision de la Constitution’,
237–45 and Rapport à la société positiviste par la commission chargée d’examiner la nature et le plan du
nouveau gouvernement révolutionnaire de la république française.
118 Conservation, Révolution et Positivisme, 248.
119 Ibid. 142.
120 See Littré’s reflections on the early years of the Third Republic in De l‘Établissement de la
Troisième République (1880). See also Claude Nicolet, L’Idée républicaine en France (1994), 187–248
362
Positivism, Science, and Philosophy
bloodletting of the Revolution,121 nor could he overcome his deep antipathy
towards the republican slogan of liberty, equality, and fraternity,122 but he was
now convinced that a moderate, parliamentary republic was the best guarantee of
the Comtean maxims of order and progress,123 that it alone could provide the
mixture of ‘wisely conservative’ and ‘widely progressive’ measures that would make
genuine improvements possible and secure the confidence and stability of the
nation. ‘Peaceable legality’,124 achieved through participation, representation, dis-
cussion, education, and gradual reform, was to be the watchword. The succinct and
novel phrase Littré used to describe this regime when he became a Freemason in
1875 was ‘the conspiracy of toleration’.125
What now remained of Littré’s Comteanism, stripped as it was of the religious
paraphernalia of his master’s final years? The ‘disciple’ did not hesitate to provide an
answer.126 Above all, there endured a vehement opposition towards all theological
and metaphysical conceptions of the world, combined with an unshakable com-
mitment to the philosophy of positivism as a form of proven and provable scientific
knowledge. So too Littré continued to believe in the terrestrial, although quite