definitely not the religious, ideal of humanity and that it was through education,
and not violence or revolution, that the regeneration of humanity would be
secured.
Yet even here Littré gave positivism an unexpected (and not insignificant) twist.
As the 1870s drew to a close (and to great controversy) Littré published an article
entitled ‘Le catholicisme selon le suffrage universel’,127 in which he insisted upon
drawing a distinction between the Catholicism that was the moderate and lived
religion of ‘the great majority of the French’ and that of clerical Ultramontanism
and the Jesuits. The latter, he argued, was no less a threat to the former than the
rabid anticlerical secularism that had had its origins in the eighteenth century. The
political point he wanted to make was that the (Third) Republic would commit a
major error if it chose needlessly to provoke and antagonize ordinary French
Catholics, the Catholics of ‘universal suffrage’ who often voted for republican
candidates, by immediately pushing for the separation of Church and State and
by overturning the terms of the Napoleonic Concordat.128
and Theodore Zeldin, Politics and Anger: France 1848–1945 (1979), 241–75. Zeldin brings out well
the link between positivism and men such as Gambetta and Jules Ferry.
121 Conservation, Révolution et Positivisme, 314.
122 Ibid. 338–40.
123 Ibid. 123.
124 Ibid. 142.
125 ‘Discours de Réception dans la Franc-Maçonnerie’, Fragments de Philosophie Positive et de
Sociologie contemporaine (1876), 597.
126 For the 1868 edn. of Comte’s Principes de Philosophie Positive Littré provided a ‘Préface d’un
disciple’. For the 1877 edn., he provided a ‘second preface’ titled ‘Étude sur les Progrès du Positivisme’:
see Comte, Cours de Philosophie Positive (1877), pp. vi–lxvii. The second text was publ. separately by
Baillière in 1877.
127 De l‘Établissement de la Troisième République, 489–508.
128 Ibid. 495.
Positivism, Science, and Philosophy
363
Such a stance towards Catholicism, Littré maintained, did not denote either
indifference towards or an underestimation of the threats posed to the existence of
the Republic by the forces of clerical reaction but was rather to suggest that the way
forward was through a combination of what he termed ‘science and liberty’ and not
legal interdiction.129 The Republic should trust to time and to the benefits of moral
and educational suasion. To that extent, he argued, just as there should be no state
religion, so there should be no state irreligion. In effect, this was to be the policy
pursued by the Third Republic in its early years and these were the sentiments that
informed the major educational reforms proposed by Jules Ferry, measures broadly
supported by Littré from his position as a member of the upper house of the French
parliament but opposed by orthodox positivist opinion.130 It was only at the turn of
the century that the Republic decided to declare war on the Church.
Our second central figure in the history of positivism, Pierre Laffitte, had only a
marginally less impressive and influential career. He became interested in Comtean
ideas in the early 1840s and in 1848 was a founder member of the Société
positiviste. After Comte’s death, he became the effective leader of the positivist
movement and, despite considerable dissension and opposition,131 remained so
until his own death in 1897. In many respects he was the Engels of positivism,132
further developing Comtean ideas through a truly impressive number of books,
lectures (from 1892 he held the professorial chair in the histoire générale des sciences
at the Collège de France) and, from 1878, as editor of La Revue occidentale.133
Laffitte was less enthusiastic about the religion of humanity than many of Comte’s
orthodox disciples, but he, like other of his fellow positivists,134 sought to make
sense of Comte’s remarks, enunciated most forcefully in his Appel aux conservateurs
of 1855,135 on the need for republican dictatorship. In doing so he provided the
most authoritative positivist account of the Revolution of 1789.136
As might be expected, Laffitte located the Revolution within the broad sweep of
European history and, to that extent, saw it as the inevitable outcome of the
decomposition of the ancien régime and the progress of civilization. Nevertheless,
it had failed in its ‘abortive aspiration’ to reconstruct the modern order. Laffitte’s
argument became more interesting when he suggested that this outcome might
have been avoided had there come to the throne a monarch who would have
transformed the ‘retrograde dictatorship’ of Louis XIV and Louis XV into ‘a
progressive dictatorship’ governing with the support of ‘elements of the new
129 Ibid. 503.
130 Orthodox positivist opinion saw religious liberty as the equivalent of Catholic domination.
131 As an example of the sustained criticism Laffitte received see Jorge Lagarrigue, Le Faux et le Vrai
positivisme (1892). Laffitte faced opposition from outside France, esp. England.
132 For an example of how the ideas of Comte and Laffitte were merged together by other leading
positivists see Jean-François Robinet, La Philosophie Positiviste: Auguste Comte et M. Pierre Laffitte
(1885).
133 See Laffitte, ‘Nécessité de l’intervention du Positivisme dans l’Ensemble des Affaires Humaines’,
Revue occidentale, 1 (1878), 1–29, and De la Morale positive (1881).
134 See Nicolet, L’Idée républicaine, 239–42.
135 (Paris, 1855).
136 La Révolution Française (1789–1815) (1880).
364
Positivism, Science, and Philosophy
society, the industrialists, the philosophers, and the scientists’.137 This had not
occurred and thus the National Assembly, ‘despite its ardent desire to secure the
total regeneration of French society’, was torn apart by its own contradictory policy
of proclaiming the sovereignty of the nation whilst establishing a constitutional
monarchy. This allowed Laffitte to justify both the insurrection against the monar-
chy of 10 August 1792—‘a coup d’état or an insurrection’, he argued, ‘is legitimate
when legality, being no longer in harmony with the spontaneous condition and
natural development of society, threatens the public interest’138—and the execu-
tion of the king on the grounds that the new government had to demonstrate that it
could break ‘the prestige of theocracy’ and that raison d’état had to prevail over the
‘quibbles of jurisprudence’.139 A similar argument applied to the putting to death
of the Girondins who, had they remained in power, would have precipitated ‘the
triumph of federalism’ and therefore the defeat of France at the hands of her
enemies.140 France had had to be defended against herself and this could only
have been done through the imposition of ‘an inflexible dictatorship’ on the part of
‘a minority’ who alone understood the demands of ‘necessity’.
Could the actions of this minority be described as having been illegitimate?
Laffitte’s reply was unequivocal. ‘Legitimacy in politics’, he wrote, ‘derives no
more
from number than it does from birth, no more from popular sovereignty than it
does from the divine right of kings.’ Rather it existed when ‘the conduct of those
who govern’ was in accord with ‘the natural laws of social phenomena, with the
force of circumstances and the universal order’.141 Where people still went wrong,
he insisted, was in ‘their determination to retain and to apply democratic theory
despite the lessons of history’.142 Thus, in Laffitte’s opinion, the reign of Terror was
as inevitable as it was indispensable,143 and he found himself agreeing with Joseph
de Maistre’s ‘paradox’ that only Jacobinism could have saved France.144
In line with Comte’s own views, this argument disclosed the name of the real
hero of the Revolution: Danton.145 He, more than anyone else, had been able to
‘raise himself above all the theoretical prejudices of his day to arrive at what was
true, useful, and indispensable’.146 Through instinct he had grasped the nature of
the ‘real legality’ demanded by the terrible circumstances. Moreover, he had
understood that revolutionary government should only have been ‘provisional’
and that it should have been brought to a close once the threat from France’s
external enemies had ceased. Accordingly, Laffitte had only praise for the achieve-
ments of 1793 but he also believed that, with the death of Danton, the Revolution
had gone into decline. ‘Suddenly’, he wrote, ‘France, via the confusion of the
spiritual and the temporal, via legal deism, and via the divine right of a single
individual, fell back into the theocracy of Rousseau: Robespierre prepared the
way for Bonaparte.’147 Napoleon, Laffitte continued, re-established the ‘absolute
137 La Révolution Française (1789–1815) (1880), 15.
138 Ibid. 45.
139 Ibid. 58.
140 Ibid. 61.
141 Ibid. 75.
142 Ibid. 76.
143 Ibid. 84.
144 Ibid. 83.
145 See Émile Antoine, ‘La Théorie positiviste de la Révolution Française’, Revue occidentale, 7
(1893), 253–90. This article was a response to criticisms made of Comte’s account of the role of
Danton by Alphonse Aulard.
146 La Révolution Française, 85.
147 Ibid. 141.
Positivism, Science, and Philosophy
365
monarchy’ and this ‘criminal’ and ‘imbecilic’ act had subsequently produced the
Restoration and the July Monarchy, the most ‘corrupt’ of regimes. Since Napoleon,
he concluded, France had oscillated between ‘anarchy’ and ‘retrogression’, through-
out the course of which the positive principles required for social regeneration and a
new industrial regime had gradually come into existence. After a century of turmoil,
the ‘organic’ phase of the Revolution had begun.
Laffitte published La Révolution Française in 1880. Nine years later, with
considerable enthusiasm,148 the positivists joined the celebrations of the Revolu-
tion’s centenary, most notably through a joint commemoration with their English
colleagues marked by numerous speeches, a ‘civic pilgrimage’ to Versailles, the
laying of wreaths, and a formal banquet attended, we are told, by over 100
guests.149 All the familiar positivist themes made their appearance, not least the
refrain that the Revolution had marked the beginning of the modern era and that
positivism alone would be able to bring the revolutionary period to a close. ‘The
French Revolution’, Laffitte announced at the former home of Auguste Comte,
‘put forward an ideal which, in metaphysical form, prefigured the positive ideal
which one day, and as a result of a slow process of evolution, will unite the whole of
Humanity around a demonstrable faith.’150 Despite the usual positivist disclaimers
with regard to the rights of man and the merits of popular election,151 there was
general approval of the fact that the Republic was the ‘normal’ and ‘definitively
established’ form of government in France—Laffitte characterized the Second
Empire as an ‘unfortunate but temporary aberration’152—and that ‘a socially and
territorially homogeneous’ country was governed not only by a State that was
‘strongly centralized’ but one that made no reference either to kings or to
God.153 From a political point of view at least, the official representatives of the
positivist movement in France, with Laffitte at their fore, seemed only too willing to
embrace the cause of the Third Republic and to cast themselves as ‘the sons and
heirs of the Revolution’.154 For the most part, their master’s authoritarian procliv-
ities had been quietly put to one side.
There was to be one further and improbable twist to the story of Comtean
positivism at the fin-de-siècle. In 1891, a young Charles Maurras,155 not yet the
principal theoretician of the monarchist Action Française,156 published an article
entitled ‘L’Evolution des idées sociales’.157 To this point Maurras’s interests had
148 See Laffitte, ‘Le Centenaire de 1789’, Revue occidentale, 22 (1889), 241–70.
149 ‘Célébration positiviste du centenaire de la Révolution’, Revue occidentale, 23 (1889), 353–441.
150 Ibid. 422.
151 Ibid. 429–30. See also Laffitte, ‘De la Souveraineté’, Revue occidentale, 23 (1889), 31–85.
152 ‘Célébration positiviste du centenaire de la Révolution’, 442.
153 Ibid. 432.
154 Ibid. 363.
155 See Pierre Boutang, Maurras: La Destinée et l’œuvre (1984) and Victor Nguyen, Aux origines de
l’Action Française (1991). In what follows I am indebted to Michael Sutton’s Nationalism, Positivism
and Catholicism: The Politics of Charles Maurras and French Catholics 1890–1914 (Cambridge, 1982).
156 See William Curt Buthman, The Rise of Integral Nationalism, with Special Reference to the Ideas
and Activities of Charles Maurras (New York, 1939); Eugen Weber, Action Française (Stanford, Calif.,
1962); Edward Robert Tannenbaum, The Action Française (New York, 1962).
157 La Réforme sociale, 21 (1891), 125–31, 200–98, 277–85.
366
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been largely literary and aesthetic but, in writing for the leading publication of the
school of conservative sociologist Frédéric Le Play,158 he made one of his first forays
into the world of politics. Written in three parts, this article was to disclose many of
the themes that Maurras was to make familiar over the next fifty years and more.
Above all, he lambasted ‘the most famous revolutionary sophisms’—liberty, equal-
ity, and fraternity—and condemned the ravages of individualism upon French
society. Nonetheless, Maurras, with cautious optimism, believed that he discerned
a ‘slow’ and ‘subterranean’ evolution of ideas—dated from around 1857159—away
from the naïve ‘romantic’ faith in ‘l’État Dieu’, the ‘Revolution’ and the ‘People’,
towards social discipline and stability, hierarchy and continuity, and a sense of
solidarity engendered by the family, ‘le milieu social’, and ‘la patrie’. In this
evolution, Maurras—no doubt to the surprise of the journal’s largely Catholic
readership—attributed a central role to none other than . . . Auguste C
omte! ‘The
dominant trait of this philosophy’, Maurras wrote, ‘is its extraordinary lucid
perception of all that is illogical and ridiculous in modern individualism; in
contrast, it binds men to their fellows across time and space through the carnal
embrace of race and blood as well as through respect for the law of continuity’.160
To this Maurras added that ‘even the most timorous Catholic could not take
exception to the philosophy of Comte to the extent that it relates to earthly
matters’.161
In the years that immediately followed—years that saw his conversion to
monarchism following a visit to Athens to report on the Olympic Games in
1896—Maurras continued to explore the pertinence of Comte’s ideas in a series
of short, journalistic pieces and it was not therefore to be until 1902 that he
published an essay specifically devoted to Comte himself.162 When he eventually
did so, there could be no doubting Maurras’s immense admiration for the ‘master’.
‘I know of no other name’, he wrote, ‘that should be pronounced with a greater
sense of gratitude.’163
Why was this so? At the heart of Maurras’s thought lay the firm conviction that
the nineteenth century had been an age of intellectual anarchy. No one, in his view,
had better appreciated this than Comte and no one had made greater effort to
restore order and hierarchy to our intellectual (and therefore moral) universe.164
Moreover, Maurras saw that Comte had understood that, to be convinced of the
discoveries of positivism, the people would need convictions, a faith, a dogma, and
that this would demand ‘an ensemble of daily practices’ constituted by a religion.
Nor did Maurras hesitate to describe the guiding article of faith of this new religion.
158 See Michael Zachary Taylor, Le Play, Engineer and Social Scientist (London, 1970).
159 1857 was the year of Comte’s death.
160 ‘L’Evolution des idées sociales’, 128.
161 Ibid.
162 ‘Auguste Comte’, Romantisme et Révolution: L’Œuvre de Charles Maurras (1922), iii. 91–130.
This volume contains the texts of L’Avenir de l’Intelligence (1905) and Trois Idées Politiques (1898). In
addition, the introductory preface is a reworking of the earlier essay entitled ‘Idées françaises et idées
suisses’ (1899).
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