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.
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