Revolution and the Republic

by Jeremy Jennings

  in the physical and mental condition of the population at large. Science promised

  health, comfort, and prosperity; and—no less importantly—an end to ignorance.

  To a large extent, science delivered on those promises, contributing significantly to

  the attainment of better standards of living and increases in life expectancy

  witnessed in the early decades of the Third Republic. However, among many of

  France’s cultural spokespersons faith in the beneficial and progressive capacities of

  science began to decline considerably as the century drew towards its end.

  The response here took a variety of forms. Most commonly, the material

  prosperity and ease proffered by science was equated with the ascendancy of the

  bourgeoisie and, by extension, with a culture of philistinism and mediocrity. Fin-

  de-siècle France had no shortage of expressions of such cultural pessimism244 but no

  better perhaps was it given voice than in the decadent aestheticism of the protago-

  nist of Huysmans’s famous novel of 1884, A Rebours.245 The ‘jolly bourgeois’,

  according to the sublime Duc Jean Floressas des Esseintes, ‘lorded it over the

  country, putting his trust in the power of his money and the contagiousness of

  his stupidity’. Could it be, he asked, ‘that this slime would go on spreading until it

  covered with its pestilential filth this old world where now only seeds of iniquity

  sprang up and only harvests of shame were gathered?’246 Arguably more profound

  was the damage done to the idea of progress by science itself. France in the early

  decades of the Third Republic was haunted by a sense of racial decline. This had

  many sources, but one of them was Arthur de Gobineau’s Essai sur l’Enégalité des

  races humaines, published in four volumes between 1853 and 1855. Gobineau’s

  text gave a scientific veneer to the claim that many of France’s (and, more generally,

  European civilization’s) ills derived ultimately from the miscegenation of the white

  race. His theory of racial determinism predicted an inevitable degeneration into

  243 See Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale (1966). On Bernard see Charlton,

  Positivist Thought, 72–85; Reino Virtanen, Claude Bernard and his Place in the History of Ideas

  (Lincoln, Neb., 1960); and Paul Q. Hirst, Durkheim, Bernard and Epistemology (London, 1975).

  244 K. W. Swart, The Sense of Decadence in Nineteenth-Century France (The Hague, 1964).

  245 See Winock, Les Voix de la liberté, 575–87.

  246 In translation see Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature (Harmondsworth, 1973), 218–19.

  Huysmans was no minor figure: he was e.g. president of the Académie Goncourt.

  Positivism, Science, and Philosophy

  377

  mediocrity and, finally, nothingness, for which there was no cure. Ever the

  disillusioned elitist, Gobineau believed that the last stages of man’s domination

  of the earth had already begun.

  This sentiment of physical decay was accompanied by a broader sense of moral

  and societal decline, often attributed to the consequences of greater social mobility

  and urbanization. Among these supposed evils were crime, alcoholism, venereal

  disease, low birth rates, suicide, and mental illness. The huge literature on these

  problems generated by the French medical and hygiene professions only served to

  intensify public anxiety about the nation’s declining vitality. It is no accident that

  these years saw the emergence of criminology as a distinct, if controversy-bound,

  discipline.247 The same years also coincided with the development of what pur-

  ported to be the science of crowd psychology and mass behaviour. In this burgeon-

  ing debate the crowd was always seen as being capricious, feminine, impulsive,

  destructive, and bordering on the bestial. Insatiable in its desires and a vehicle for

  the expression of a primitive and savage mentality, it was governed by instinct

  rather than by reason, acting in an almost hypnotic state. Inspired by Taine, given

  scientific validity by the likes of Gabriel Tarde, and popularized in particular by

  Gustave Le Bon,248 whose La Psychologie des foules of 1895 was an instant best-

  seller, such theories generated a profound fear of social dissolution and disorder.

  The barbarians, it seemed, were waiting at the gates.249

  It is difficult to pinpoint the precise moment when the mood began to change

  and the critical reaction against science set in, but it could already be felt by the

  1870s. This was something of a Europe-wide phenomenon, a generation of

  European intellectuals casting off the ‘spiritual yoke’ of their predecessors, but it

  took a particularly aggressive and pervasive form in France. Nor was it a reaction

  limited only to the philosophical profession. To no insignificant degree, the cause

  can be located in a mounting antipathy towards the positivist pretensions of

  Comte, Renan, and Taine. Their aspirations to provide a new morality and social

  ethic had ultimately come to nothing, a fact abundantly illustrated by their own

  espousal of differing versions of anti-democratic and reactionary conservatism at the

  end of their careers. Moreover, it was one of the paradoxes of positivism that a

  doctrine which had begun by professing a belief in reason and science ended up as a

  thinly disguised form of anti-intellectualism, condemning society and those who

  comprised it to a form of scientific fatalism, the potentialities of human action

  being outweighed by an invasive social and psychological determinism. As the

  reign of science drew to a close, these presuppositions were countered by what

  D. M. Eastwood, in a remarkable book devoted to the revival of interest in Pascal

  during this period, described as ‘an insurrection of personality’.250

  247 See Robert A. Nye, Crime, Madness and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of

  National Decline (Princeton, NJ, 1984).

  248 See Benoit Marpeau, Gustave Le Bon: Parcours d’un intellectuel, 1841–1931 (2000), 95–130.

  249 See Susanna Burrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century France

  (New Haven, Conn., 1981) and Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, 1848–1918

  (Cambridge, 1989), 37–106.

  250 The Revival of Pascal: A Study of his Relation to Modern French Thought (Oxford, 1936), 17.

  378

  Positivism, Science, and Philosophy

  It was in this atmosphere of mounting pessimism and anxiety that the critical

  reaction against science gathered strength. It had many diverse and varied mani-

  festations, by no means all of them limited to philosophical and theological

  speculation. It was evident, for example, in the move away from literary naturalism

  to the symbolist poetry of Mallarmé, Rimbaud, and Verlaine, in the vogue for the

  Russian novel, the cult of Wagnerism during the 1880s and 1890s, the enthusiasm

  for the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche among the intellectual avant-garde, and even

  the passing fashion for Buddhism and oriental mysticism.251 For our purposes we

  need look no further than the celebrated article by Ferdinand Brunetière entitled

  ‘Après une visite au Vatican’, first published in January 1895.252 For some years,

  far-sighted Catholics had been making headway in their search for a convincing

  response to the challeng
e of positivism but few could have expected that the most

  audacious rejoinder of all would come from the editor of the leading periodical of

  the day, the Revue des Deux Mondes.253 Brunetière had made his name as a literary

  critic and such was his reputation that, in 1893, he was elected to the Académie

  Française. In the following year he was accorded an audience with Pope Leo XIII

  and it was upon his return from Rome that he penned the text with which talk of

  the ‘failure’ and ‘bankruptcy’ of science has since been notoriously linked.

  Brunetière’s central claim was that the physical and natural sciences had not

  delivered on their claim to rid life of ‘mystery’. Not only had they not done so, he

  wrote, ‘but today we can see that they will never throw light on it. They are

  powerless, I do not say to resolve but even to ask the questions which matter: those

  that touch upon the origin of man, his conduct, and his destiny.’254 We were, he

  continued, surrounded and enveloped by the ‘unknowable’ and no laws of physics

  or physiology could facilitate its comprehension. A similar failure afflicted science

  with regard to questions of morality. ‘If we were to ask Darwinism for lessons on

  behaviour’, Brunetière argued, ‘it would give us only loathsome ones.’255 Morality,

  he affirmed, could not be separated from religion. In brief, he wrote, ‘science has

  lost its prestige whilst religion has recovered some of its own’.256 In point of fact,

  Brunetière’s overall conclusion was more nuanced than this might lead us to

  believe: he called not for a complete rejection of science but for a recognition of

  the fact that, when properly conceived, science and religion spoke of different

  things. Each, in his view, had its own ‘kingdom’.257 In the clamour accorded to the

  reception of Brunetière’s article, however, the subtleties of the message tended to be

  lost. What stuck in the public’s mind was Brunetière’s return to Catholicism.

  It would be wrong to suggest that the end of the nineteenth century was marked

  by a wholesale rejection of science. This was far from being the case. Émile Zola

  251 See F. W. J. Hemmings, Culture and Society in France 1848–1898: Dissidents and Philistines

  (London, 1971), 209–53, and Christopher E. Forth, Zarathustra in Paris: The Nietzsche Vogue in

  France 1891–1918 (DeKalb, Ill., 2001).

  252 ‘Après une visite au Vatican’, Revue des Deux Mondes, 127 (1895), 97–118.

  253 See Antoine Compagnon, Connaissez-vous Brunetière? Enquête sur un antidreyfusard et ses amis

  (1997).

  254 ‘Après une visite au Vatican’, 99.

  255 Ibid. 104.

  256 Ibid. 105.

  257 Ibid. 110–11.

  Positivism, Science, and Philosophy

  379

  continued to write ‘experimental’ novels directly inspired by the scientific method-

  ology of Claude Bernard.258 The mathematician and physicist Henri Poincaré, first

  in La Science et l’Hypothèse259 and then in La Valeur de la science,260 led the way in

  reformulating science as a series of conventional hypotheses, thereby establishing

  that scientific propositions were to be regarded as true to the extent that they were

  convenient, useful, or even possessed aesthetic appeal. It made no sense, Poincaré

  observed, to ask if one system of geometry was more true than another. Our choice

  was limited only by the necessity of avoiding contradiction. If Poincaré was less

  naïvely empiricist than many of his positivist predecessors, he nevertheless re-

  mained committed to the objectivity of science.261

  Even more noteworthy were the continuing efforts to reconcile science and

  biblical criticism. This emerged in the form of the so-called Modernist controversy

  and was principally associated with the work of Alfred Loisy, formerly Professor of

  Holy Scripture at the Institut Catholique, France’s premier Catholic University.262

  The context was again one of a perceived need for doctrinal reform, to adapt the

  Gospel, as Loisy put it, ‘to the changing condition of humanity’.263 To this was

  added a desire to find a coherent response to the influential writings of liberal

  Protestants such as Adolf Harnack in Germany and Auguste Sabatier in France, and

  so much so that Loisy’s L’Évangile et l’Église amounted to an attempted detailed

  refutation of Harnack’s Das Wesen des Christentums.264 There is little need to dwell

  upon the details of what occurred and the issues that were at stake—at one level it

  could be read as yet another story of sincere and loyal Catholics finding themselves

  condemned at the hands of an uncomprehending papacy265—but, in essence,

  Loisy sought to recover the substantive content of Christianity through the aban-

  donment of traditionalist assumptions of biblical inerrancy and the application of a

  critical historical methodology. In so doing, he believed himself able to show that

  there was no fundamental disjunction or discontinuity of principle or of practice

  between the Gospel and the Roman Church, that the Church, as he expressed it,

  was as necessary to the Gospel as the Gospel was to the Church.266 In effect, the

  ambition was to turn historical science against the liberal Protestants, and thereby

  to beat them at their own game.

  258 See Zola, Le Roman expérimental (1880)

  259 (1902).

  260 (1905).

  261 Ideas similar to those of Poincaré were also developed by Pierre Duhem (1861–1916) and

  Édouard Le Roy (1870–1954). See Yenima Ben-Menahem, Conventionalism: From Poincaré to Quine

  (Cambridge, 2006).

  262 See Loisy, L’Évangile et l’Église (1902) and Autour d’un petit livre (1903). In French see Pierre

  Colin, L’Audace et le soupcon: La Crise du modernisme dans le catholicisme français 1893–1914 (1997)

  and Yves Palau, ‘Le Modernisme comme controverse’, Mil Neuf Cent, 25 (2007), 75–90; in English see

  A. R. Vidler, The Modernist Movement in the Roman Church (Cambridge, 1934) and A Variety of

  Catholic Modernists (Cambridge, 1970), and B. M. G. Reardon, Roman Catholic Modernism (London,

  1970).

  263 Loisy, L’Évangile et l’Église, 234.

  264 First publ. in 1900, Harnack’s text appeared in French in 1902.

  265 The theses of modernism were formally condemned by Pope Pius X in the encyclical Pascendi of

  1907.

  266 Loisy, L’Évangile et l’Église, 95.

  380

  Positivism, Science, and Philosophy

  The most striking illustration of the ‘positivist remainder’,267 however, must be

  Émile Durkheim, founder of the modern discipline of sociology268 and holder of

  the first chair of social science in France.269 Throughout his career Durkheim made

  little effort to disguise his aversion to what he termed a ‘renascent mysticism’270 and

  he had little time for anything that fell short of the rigorous demands of scientific

  inquiry. He saw himself as living in a world threatened by the forces of irrational-

  ism. ‘Sociology’, he wrote, ‘does not need to choose between the great hypotheses

  that divide metaphysicians. . . . All that it asks is that the principle of causality be

  applied to social phenomena.’271 If these methodological guidelines were set out in

  Les Règles de la méthode sociologique,272 they were exemplified in
Durkheim’s

  detailed empirical studies of suicide273 and the division of labour.274

  Durkheim’s guiding principle was that of the objective reality of social facts275

  and his subject was the nature of social solidarity. By extension, it was also

  Durkheim’s opinion that the study of religion could be approached ‘sociological-

  ly’.276 This, it appears, came as something of a revelation to him in 1895 but from

  then on—as is testified by Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse277—the

  sociology of religion became one of his central preoccupations. Durkheim’s basic

  assumption was that ‘all the essential elements of religious thought and life ought to

  be found, at least in germ, in the most primitive religions’278 and it was this thesis

  that directed him towards the investigation of totemic religions (especially those of

  aboriginal Australia). More important from our perspective was Durkheim’s con-

  clusion that, when viewed sociologically, ‘there are no religions that are false’. All

  were ‘true in their own fashion’ and ‘all corresponded, although in different ways,

  to given conditions of human existence’.279 For Durkheim, therefore, the crucial

  object of inquiry was not whether the explanations and justifications provided by

  the faithful of their beliefs and practices were correct or erroneous but what

  function was performed by religion. And here his answer did not waiver: if religion

  was itself socially determined, its function was to create and reinforce the ties which

  bound the individual to the society to which he or she belonged.280 The challenge

  for the ardently republican Durkheim was to provide a scientifically grounded form

  of secular education and morality that, in replacing religion, would perform a

  similar function.281

  267 Hughes, Consciousness and Society (New York, 1958), 278.

  268 See Durkheim. ‘La Sociologie’, in La Science française (1915), i. 39–49.

  269 See Steven Lukes, Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work (London, 1973).

  270 Les Règles de la méthode sociologique (1895), p. viii.

  271 Ibid. 172–3.

  272 Ibid.

  273 Le Suicide (1897).

  274 De la division du travail social: étude sur l’Organisation des sociétés supérieures (1893).

  275 Les Règles de la méthode sociologique, 175.