CHAPTER ONE

The Society of Mutual Autopsy and the Liturgy of Death

On October 4, 1889, the Prefecture of Police of Sables-d’Olonne authorized the exhumation of the remains of Eugène Victor Véron so that they might be shipped to Paris for examination and preservation.¹ There was no suspicion of foul play, and this was by no means a fresh corpse: Véron had died on May 23.² Though Véron’s death certificate called him a journalist, it was his anthropological associations that led to his rather odd posthumous adventure in late 1889: years earlier, on October 19, 1876, in Paris, Véron and eighteen other men had pledged to dissect one another’s brains.

This pledge was the birth of the Société d’autopsie mutuelle—the Society of Mutual Autopsy. The society acquired over a hundred additional members in its first few years, including many notable political figures of the left and far left. From its heyday in the last two decades of the century until just before World War II, the society carried out many encephalic autopsies, the results of which were periodically published in scientific journals. This published material alerted historians to the formation of this unusual group, and works by Michael Hammond, Elizabeth Williams, and Joy Harvey all comment briefly on the society’s existence.³ An essay by Nélia Dias is the only analysis to extend beyond a few lines, and though it relies on published sources, it offers an insightful sketch of the society’s publicized anthropological, political, and freethinking concerns.⁴ What the society’s archives reveal, from their dusty box in the basement of the Paris Musée de l’homme (down a very dark spiral stairwell—one brings a flashlight) is a more tender and fascinating business.⁵ While founders and members all described their endeavor as profoundly secular, the society’s autopsies and ancillary rituals were modeled on religious behaviors. Indeed, the founders created a confessional, liturgical memorial system, and, in surprisingly self-conscious ways, members embraced this devotional system as a replacement for a spurned Catholicism. The anthropologists who created the Society of Mutual Autopsy were self-proclaimed atheists—freethinkers—who explicitly hoped that science could replace religion. In founding the society, the freethinking anthropologists were constructing an arena for atheist proclamations and celebrations, creating active, science-oriented rituals for a community that was otherwise united only by a rejection of metaphysics and a refusal to take part in the ceremonies of faith.

DEATH IN A SECULAR WORLD

It is a commonplace that for atheists the significance of life is greatly increased by the disappearance of an afterlife: the absence of an eternal life allows mortal life to bloom in importance. Since the Enlightenment, scientific progress has been imagined as a replacement for religious eschatology, with worldly utopia replacing heavenly bliss. The understanding of human existence maintained its narrative format but was given a new ending, and this time the whole thing took place on earth, among the living. In a very similar fashion, the various assumptions of inevitable progress inherent in the modern theories of history (specifically those of Voltaire, Condorcet, Hegel, Marx, and Comte) can be understood as reconfigurations of Christian eschatology.⁶ The Christian model is especially notable in Marxian ideology, because unlike more Fabian versions of gradual progress, the revolutionary event provides a parallel to Judgment Day. Atheist historical narratives give meaning to individual lives by making them part of a progressive march toward earthly paradise. In this schema, mortal life is not a mere test to get through on one’s way to paradise, because there is no paradise unless human lives are spent creating it. Yet if life is more meaningful, the end of a life certainly loses meaning in the new configuration.

For those who wanted God and all brands of metaphysics to be declared dead, death suddenly came alive as the most significant human problem.⁷ Even the most utopian notions of human history cannot fully replace the promise of a spiritual eternity in which all the faithful, irrespective of life span, take part in the eventual glory. Faithful Marxists or other utopians get to build a future paradise, but if they die before it is realized, they never have the chance to participate in its marvels. Worse yet, in anthropological terms, the true mode of progress was evolutionary, and paradise was at least partially conceived of as eugenic in its origins and its results. But evolution is an exceedingly gradual process that, in Darwinian terms, cannot be greatly altered by individuals. If a person is worthy, he or she can assist the progress of humanity by marrying well and reproducing prodigiously; having done so, he or she is not of much more use to the project. If a person is not particularly gifted or has an overriding heritable problem, then his or her contribution to evolution is to die childless and get out of the way. Since most random mutations are either inconsequential or negative (to any given schema, whether survival ability or some human standard of improvement), many individuals would find themselves in this compromised position. Even were evolution considered to be necessarily progressive, one would be hard-pressed to imagine a more wasteful system of improvement: thousands upon thousands of creatures are generated, and most of them are useless because they carry no valuable, heritable mutation.

That is why this was such a difficult doctrine to uphold. Whether a secularized, scientific paradise or the messianic expectations of modern historical narrative, utopian progress ends for you when you die. Even if you manage to add some genetic or social benefit to the human project, death still ends your part in it. The central project of the Society of Mutual Autopsy was to connect the individual’s death to progress and thereby to eternity, aggressively confronting the tragic nature of progress thus conceived. For people who rejected religion so strenuously that they saw burial as an abhorrent, cultish ritual but could not bear utterly disappearing, the society provided great comfort. There were never very many of them—a few hundred—but the Paris anthropologists eased the fears of solitary atheists in the provinces and gave succor to those French men and women who, in severing ties with the church, had lost their only confessor and their only friend in death.

While this chapter’s central concern is to elucidate this materialist reinvention of Christian last rites and liturgy, it also describes some of the more contentious intellectual and political issues of the early Third Republic. The history of the Society of Mutual Autopsy highlights the problems of early republican secularism as they were negotiated between citizens and scientists, men and women, government and academic institutions, and, last, healthy people, safe in their convictions, and those same people, later, on the brink of the abyss.

FORMATION OF THE SOCIETY

The foundation of the Society of Mutual Autopsy was suggested by the medical doctor Auguste Coudereau on October 19, 1876, at a meeting of the illustrious Société d’anthropologie de Paris, an institution widely acknowledged as the international center of anthropological studies. The pioneering anthropologist Paul Broca had created this society and added to it a laboratory, a school, a museum, and a library. It was within this institution that the Society of Mutual Autopsy was conceived. Along with Coudereau, the founding members included Louis Asseline, Yves Guyot, Louis-Adolphe Bertillon, Abel Hovelacque, Gabriel de Mortillet, Henri Thulié, Charles Letourneau, and Eugène Véron. The latter six were all professors at the Ecole d’anthropologie. Mortillet was also current president of the Société d’anthropologie, and several of the others would or had served as such. All served, by turns, as the chief officers of that body. Asseline was a man of letters, Thulié was a medical doctor, and Guyot was an important economist, while Bertillon, Hovelacque, Mortillet, Letourneau, and Véron were accomplished, prolific anthropologists with significant reputations: Bertillon was a famous and formative investigator of demography. Hovelacque published and professed linguistics. Mortillet founded the first archaeological journal and created a nomenclature for that science that is still in use today. Letourneau wrote copiously on “anthropological sociology,” through which he hoped to describe humanity in its essence by comparing attitudes and behaviors across cultures and across time. Véron specialized in the anthropological study of art and aesthetics. This prestigious company was marked not only by the anthropological accomplishments of these men but also by their politics: they were deeply anticlerical members of the political left wing. They advocated feminism and socialism and frequently invoked the notion that science would help deliver society from priests and dogma, from the inferior status of women, and from general inequality. Within days of Coudereau’s proposition, the statutes and membership of the new society were published in the Revue scientifique. Soon after, they appeared in the medical journal Tribune médicale and in the politically republican journals Les droits de l’homme and Le bien public.⁸ Attention from the press would continue throughout the project, becoming especially heavy when the society got hold of a particularly famous brain, such as that of Gambetta.

In public and private letters to potential members, the society leaders adopted a brash proselytizing style, asserting that “without question,” autopsies on brains were the soundest way of increasing knowledge about the functioning of the mind and the physical location of particular abilities and characteristics.⁹ The project was not often described as a revival of phrenology, but most people involved in it did not deny the connection—with good reason. Phrenology had been invented around 1800, by Franz Joseph Gall, an Austrian neuroanatomist who wanted to remove the metaphysical from psychology and ground it on a more material basis. In medical school Gall had somehow concluded that the smarter students generally had prominent, bulging eyes, and on the basis of this odd observation, he tried to figure out what else might be discernible from features of a person’s head. With his disciple, Johann Spurzheim, Gall decided that feeling the bumps on a skull could give information about some thirty-seven human attributes. As the two popularized the science on either side of the Atlantic, phrenology came to be associated with left-wing reform: phrenologists were for temperance, against corsets, and at least mildly feminist. Many people also associated practitioners with irreligion; indeed, because phrenology sited the mind’s functions in a material location, the Scottish philosopher Sir William Hamilton dramatically claimed, “phrenology is implicit atheism.”¹⁰

Gall’s science had been resoundingly rejected by midcentury, but the Paris anthropologists believed the ambitions of phrenology to have been replaced by a still more empirical interpretation of mind-brain relationships founded on Paul Broca’s work on aphasia. Broca was a doctor and the founder of French anthropology. Through clinical study and postmortem examination, he had famously established that the “third left frontal circumvolution’ was the area of the brain that controlled speech; a lesion there produces effects on speech that are still called Broca’s Aphasia today. Mathias Duval, professor at the Paris Faculty of Medicine, argued that the principles of the Society of Mutual Autopsy were “perfectly in accord . . . with the order of study that, since Broca, we have come to represent under the title of ‘aphasia.’”¹¹

Autopsies were routine in France by the late nineteenth century (in contrast to the contemporaneous situation in England) but were not concerned with relating brain morphology to human characteristics.¹² In its publications, the society explained that it was possible to perform research-oriented autopsies only on the “poor and unattached” elements of society—those that end up nameless and without resources, dying alone at the charity hospitals. The freethinking anthropologists believed this was a double tragedy: first, because only members of “the disinherited section of the population” were being autopsied and studied as examples of humanity; and, second, because the personalities of these specimens were unknown, making it impossible to find connections between mind and brain morphology.¹³ The solution was as simple as it was radical: the nineteen men donated themselves to one another and set out to recruit future corpses into the fold.

At first glance, Coudereau’s idea was dangerously contrary to his political beliefs, flattering society’s elite in suggesting that they were more worthy of dissection than were the unclaimed bodies at the charity hospital. Indeed, there is a tendency to equate theories of biological determinism with social conservatism, and in general this has been a historically accurate association. The fact that these radical social progressivists were so interested in the body is partially explained by the French biological theory that the function makes the organ, as well as the related Lamarckian concept of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Both of these suggest that the life society forces you to lead might have a tremendous impact on your own physical morphology and on that of your children. Coudereau explained that the “disinherited part of the population” was only less interesting because the “defects of our social organization had not given them the means to develop the cerebral aptitudes that they possess in ‘germ.’”¹⁴ He believed that it would be easier to find direct relations between brain areas and specific human abilities in the “cultivated class . . . well-known people valued as scholars, writers, industrialists, and politicians, etc.” (2).¹⁵

This was the primary explicit goal of the society, but there was another, often articulated goal: the identification of hereditary diseases in the interest of protecting future generations. It was never directly explained how the postmortem identification of such illnesses (and this assumes they were not fully apparent during the subject’s life) was to “safeguard against their development” in future generations (2). While a eugenical project was implied, it was not stated. The assertion was merely that doctors ought to be informed about the diseases identified in an older, deceased generation of a patient’s family.¹⁶ Coudereau insisted, in inflammatory tones, that a family had an “incontestable right” to the autopsies of their departed members. He argued against the “numerous prejudices, which ha[d] their source in unthought-out sentimentality” and had created the general opposition to autopsies.¹⁷ Clearly, the whole enterprise was designed to be outrageous. The members were attempting to attract attention to their endeavor, and they were as eager to offend as they were to convert. But this was not mere provocation: they were deciding the fate of their own bodies. There is no place like the deathbed for a scorned religion to be refound; even the contemplation of the event is likely to give the fairweather atheist pause. That the anthropologists were willing to go so far exemplifies the depth of their freethinking convictions, and most civilians who joined the society referred to themselves as avid freethinkers as well. New members were each required to draw up a will leaving their brains to the society—they generally offered their bodies as well—and agreed to pay annual dues to cover the costs of running the society and performing their eventual postmortems. These dues also served to keep track of distant members and occasioned a yearly reconfirmation of their commitment. Members were also required to write a short essay detailing their physical health throughout their lives, as well as their intellect, character, sensations, and abilities. Such was the project. The first member to die was Louis Asseline, in 1878. Broca performed the autopsy with help from Drs. Coudereau and Thulié.¹⁸ The civil burial was something of an event, at which the entire Paris “scientific intelligentsia” was present and André Lefèvre delivered an ardent speech.¹⁹ Broca’s own brain came into the society’s hands two years later. The autopsies were all done in the Laboratory of Anthropology, which, for decades after Broca passed, was nominally under the control of the famous but generally absent doctor Jean-Baptiste Vincent Laborde and was actually run by the extraordinary young scientist Léonce Manouvrier.

Coudereau was dissected in 1882.²⁰ Gambetta’s brain was autopsied that same year.²¹ Most of the society’s founders and many involved members were eventually dissected, the results of which sometimes—as in the case of Gambetta—drew a great deal of popular interest. It is crucial to keep in mind that the anthropologists and some of the lay members were friends and colleagues. They worked, socialized, and even vacationed together, along with their families. Some of them were family: the demographer Louis-Adolphe Bertillon was followed into the society by his son Jacques, also a demographer and one of the most powerful forces behind the pronatalist depopulation scare that enveloped France from 1870 through most of the twentieth century. Many extrafamilial relationships will become clear later in the book; here, it is enough to note that these people were friends, and when they died they cut open each other’s heads and investigated the brains inside. This is uncommon behavior in modern Europeans and suggests that the anthropologists were seeking to maintain the nervous instability of their existential position, regularly stoking their own crisis. There could be no more direct way to contemplate the weird connection between the material self, on the one hand, and life, consciousness, feeling, and thought, on the other.

THE REPUBLICAN PUBLIC DONATES ITS BRAINS

The public was made aware of the society through a great number of articles that appeared over the years in the scientific and republican, nonscientific press, many of which were published soon after the journals’ editors became members of the society (though this was never mentioned in the articles).²² Many members referred to these articles in their letters of application; for instance, Aline Ducros, a Parisian woman, joined the society after reading an article in L’homme libre in 1877.²³ Another major source of publicity was the Paris World’s Fair of 1889, where the society held a detailed exhibit showing plaster casts of brains as well as charts, graphs, and attestations of the founders’ political positions and cultural contributions. Bursts of popularity were also brought on by the membership of such important political figures as Stéphen Pichon, one of Clemenceau’s close friends and the editor of the political daily La révolution française. Pichon later served lengthy terms as deputy, senator, and minister of foreign affairs.²⁴ Another important member was General Léon Faidherbe, who began his outspoken republican career under the Empire and remained both colorful and politically committed throughout his life. The general was a charismatic figure, and a number of popular books were written about him from 1871 to 1932.²⁵ When he joined the society, Faidherbe explained that his own corpse would be worthy of study because “I will furnish, when the time comes, the most beautiful case of ataxia that one could ever hope to see.”²⁶ For over a year after Faidherbe’s death, new adherents indicated that they had heard about the group via reports on the late republican general.²⁷

Most journals, such as L’echo de Paris, reported Faidherbe’s membership in the Society of Mutual Autopsy with relative equanimity. Some, however, like Le temps, were rather critical, and Le siècle stated that the information offered by the society was “singularly vague” and that the conclusions it proffered were “singularly arbitrary.”²⁸ Politics guided the various reactions to this scientific society, and strongly republican journals were generally very positive; but positive or negative, the press brought attention to the Society of Mutual Autopsy. Furthermore, the freethinking anthropologists published extensively, creating their own public image. They collaborated on several journals and largely controlled the Bulletin de la Société d’anthropologie. They also published a plethora of books with a variety of publishers. In many of these, mention was made of the society. For example, in Eugène Véron’s study of aesthetics, a lengthy footnote was devoted to the society’s work, promising that “such an institution cannot fail to furnish very useful data.”²⁹

Once interested, the potential members wrote to the society and received a template will and testament for their application. This stated that “the undersigned” desired to be of use, after death, to “the scientific idea” that he or she had upheld during life and therefore would donate his or her cadaver to the society. Later, an optional passage for freethinkers was added and published in several journal articles. It ran as follows: “The goal that I pursued during my life, and that I desire to contribute to after my death, is above all else scientific. All religion is, in its essence, extrascientific and hostile to the development of science. I therefore demand, as a logical consequence of my convictions, that the burial of the parts of my body that the laboratory does not keep for its studies will be done without any religious ritual and that the ceremony be purely civil.”³⁰ Most new members, like most of the group’s leaders, availed themselves of the model, spicing it liberally with their own opinions and experiences. Many also included a short section on why they had turned to the Society of Mutual Autopsy and why they had turned away from the Catholic Church. These documents lend tremendous insight into the distress of atheist French men and women—and there were more than a few women involved in this project—as they contemplated the meaning of death.

The testament of André Lefèvre is an excellent example. Lefèvre was a professor at the Ecole d’anthropologie and a founding member of the society. The essential passage of his will reads: “Freethinker, faithful to scientific materialism and to the radical Republic, I intend to die without the interference of any priest or any church. I leave to the Ecole d’anthropologie de Paris my head—face, skull, brain, and more, if it is useful. . . . The rest of me should be incinerated.”³¹ Many members of the society made a sharp distinction between the value they placed on parts of their body that could be of use to science and those that could not be of use. The virulence of their disdain for the latter, especially in comparison to their high esteem for the former, is only comprehensible when taken within the context of the issues involved. In leaving their bodies to the society, members were rejecting the power of religion to invest meaning in their death. At the same time, they were attempting to make an analogous investment of their own. Members negotiated this distinction by being harshly derisive of the nonuseful parts of their bodies (which might be buried or burned even if other parts were preserved), while requesting that the “scientifically useful” parts of their bodies not only be examined and discussed but also preserved and publicly displayed.

Claudius Chaptal, one of the first laymen to join the society, initially wrote to the group in April 1878 to say that he was “convinced that many of the singular events in the life of a man permanently mark the cerebral organ” and that he would like his brain to be examined in light of this notion.³² Along with his testament, Chaptal included a vita detailing his education and work as a mathematician and physicist. He also sent a list of publications so that the society would have an idea of his aptitudes and worth.³³ In the testament itself, Chaptal instructed the society to use what parts of him they wanted and to send the rest to a medical school.³⁴ It was rather common for professors who joined the society to express the desire that some part of their corpse be given, as a pedagogical device, to the school at which they had taught. Chaptal thus well represented his peers when he hoped that his skeleton might hang at the Lycée de Nîmes, where he had been a student and later served as a professor. He also mused that the lycée might make use of his heart, liver, and intestines for anatomy demonstrations.

Claudius Chaptal was also representative of many adherents in his denigration of his own corpse outside its scientific usefulness, ardently repudiating the traditional Catholic notion upholding the sanctity of the body after death. From religious training and tracts, as well as from contemporary public debates over civic funeral laws, nineteenth-century French men and women were quite familiar with the Catholic doctrine of material continuity.³⁵ This doctrine held that the resurrected self would be a translated version of actual bodily remains. Destruction of one’s corpse was not simply sinful; it was self-annihilating. Given this, there is profound commitment in Chaptal’s statement that his unwanted body parts should not even be buried, because he “attach[ed] no importance whatever to such rotting garbage.”³⁶ Georges Laguerre’s request was along the same lines. Laguerre joined the society in 1883, perhaps largely motivated by his far-left politics; several years later he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies and soon after became one of the eleven members of the general staff of General Boulanger’s “national party” (all but three of whom had come from the radical or socialist extreme left). Laguerre specifically requested that the scientifically interesting parts of his body be placed on public display at the Musée d’anthropologie and consigned the rest of his body to any convenient, casual disposal.³⁷ A more virulently anticlerical expression of this is to be found in the testament of Eugène Véron. Anthropologist, journalist, and founding member of the society, Véron asked that there be no ceremony after his death and that his remains not be buried. Wrote Véron, “I attach no type of importance at all to that assemblage of decomposing matter which has lost the ability to feel and to think and of which the elements now do nothing but increasingly disassociate from each other.” Véron provided for the possibility that he would be buried despite his request by appending the instructions that any such burial should be extremely simple. “I do not want,” he explained, “after my death, to contribute, even a little, to the accumulation of the wealth of the clergy, against which I have combated all my life and that never ceases to do to France and to the Republic all the evil in its power.”³⁸

Paul Robin also expressed anticlericalism through derision of his future corpse, writing that if for any reason his dissection was impossible, he wanted “to be put into a hole, naked or in a cloth or a basket; ‘to be buried like a dog’ following the charming expression of the priests.”³⁹ Robin elsewhere wrote an impassioned letter to the society, asserting that people have no control of their own bodies during life, citing “military service, industrial service and marriage” as his examples, and arguing that French citizens had no control over their own bodies after death, either, citing “funeral rites, still under control of the Catholic clergy, even in the City of Light.”⁴⁰ Robin was a freethinker and an anarchist who would become quite well known for founding the Ligue de la régénération humaine, a group dedicated to the instruction of birth-control practices.⁴¹ The euphemism of the day was “neo-Malthusianism.”⁴² It should not be surprising that pronatalist Jacques Bertillon and neo-Malthusian Paul Robin joined the same society: they were both concerned with bodies and with translating the pastoral duties of the church into concerns of science and the state.⁴³ Like any other new member of the Society of Mutual Autopsy who had a favorite cause, Robin used his last will and testament to promulgate his beliefs:

As for those people who would come by affection or by routine to take part in the spectacle of a burial of the contemporary fashion—obstructive for masses of passersby, terrifying for the simpleminded, and grotesque for thinkers—with its waste of flowers and crowns, I ask you to please usefully consecrate the time and money that you would have wasted. Spend that time, instead, on the propaganda and on the practical undertaking of the humanitarian ideas and works that are dear to me: good birth, which is to say not produced by chance but obtained by scientific selection, by liberated mothers, reasoned and voluntary; good integral education (I have created a specimen and many times explained the principles); and good social organization (easy to create and to maintain by and for people who are well born and well educated). My idea on this last point can be summed up in these words: society without money or masters.

While most testament writers did not express such extensive political platforms, most did mention their love of science and the Republic and their hostility toward superstition and religion. For some members, participation in the society was their only opportunity to proclaim unbelief and to express elaborate convictions in place of lost Christian catechisms. Yet to fathom these new convictions required ritual and practice, just as the old had. While Catholics and cosmopolitan scientists could proclaim, practice, and act on their beliefs, the solitary atheist of a family or rural community was stuck in a position of silence and inaction. The Society of Mutual Autopsy helped to define atheism by the things that one did, rather than the things that one refused to do. It was the group’s extremism—from their provocative name, to their general public demeanor—that attracted its members, and in reading their testaments one senses that these men and women each harbored a ferocious desire to demonstrate their convictions actively.

Many people felt unworthy of scientific interest and sought to justify themselves as valid specimens. The young Paul Robin was relatively sure of himself, writing that “since my mental development is a bit removed from average banality, the study of my brain might be of interest to anthropologists.”⁴⁴ But his need to make this justification was shared by many others who were less confident. Léonce Harmignies, a twenty-six-year-old Parisian, wrote plaintively, “I hope, sir, that this unknown who you so courteously welcome will return one day this favor through works dignified of the scientific idea which you inspire.”⁴⁵ Barbe Nikitine, a writer for the journal La justice, voiced a common concern when he wrote that he had hesitated in joining the society only because he “surmised from the names of its founders and its first members that only remarkable brains of an extremely well established value were deserving of study and investigation.” What had emboldened him to send in his testament and dues in 1883 was the greatly increased membership of the society, along with the decision that there would be interest in the “cerebral organization of all men and women who, born and raised in the milieu of our old society, break away from it so much as to enter onto the path of an intellectual and social revolution.”⁴⁶ The autopsy testament was thus a site for proclaiming one’s republicanism, and at the same time one’s republicanism became the justification for the autopsy. Many new members mirrored Nikitine in presenting themselves as worthy of dissection in their “quality as a humble champion of the grand cause of human emancipation” (2).

The one exception to this was Georges Vacher de Lapouge, the famous antirepublican anthropologist and the founder of scientific racism in France. Lapouge spent the majority of his life conceiving and proselytizing a version of biological determinism that divided the human race into two basic racial groups based on head shapes. The dolichocephalic, or long-headed, race was Aryan and superior, the brachycephalic, or round-headed, race was hardworking and good but inferior. Modernity had stirred up the proper social roles, and now the brachies (as he called them) had too much power and were ruining everything. Worse, Lapouge thought Jews were a venal version of the higher race who might at any time dupe the brachies and, disastrously, take the helm of civilization. He even predicted that the twentieth century would see vast exterminations conducted in the name of racial dominance. But he, too, donated his brain to the deeply republican, egalitarian Society of Mutual Autopsy. In April 1897 he contracted typhoid fever. Quite sure that he was near death, Lapouge wrote to the professors at the Ecole d’anthropologie in Paris to offer them his brain for dissection after his death.⁴⁷ This is not surprising if one considers that Lapouge based his whole racist ideology on skull measurements. He believed profoundly in the direct relationship between brain morphology and human characteristics, he was deeply interested in his own mind, and there was no other autopsy group to which he could turn. These ideological enemies were so dedicated to their separate agendas (the school desiring a brain to dissect, Lapouge desiring his brain to be thus honored) that they rallied to work together. Only Lapouge’s physician fought against the arrangement, taking umbrage at the implication that he could not save his patient.⁴⁸ The society asked for frequent reports on the patient’s progress and were eventually informed, to their reserved pleasure, that Lapouge would indeed pull through.

Many people were simply excited to have an arena in which to share their beliefs. A brief selection from a rather long poem illustrates the point well. Victor Chevalier included this piece of verse along with his testament in 1889. He wrote it just after visiting the Society of Mutual Autopsy’s anthropological exhibit at the Paris World’s Fair of 1889. The following translation renders into English the general (rather lamentable) cadence of the original, though the extraordinary enthusiasm is difficult to recapture.

UNDER THE DOME OF THE FOYER OF INSTRUCTION—SITE OF THE AUTOPSY EXHIBIT

prehistoric man emerged from natural selection

humanity was excusable, it looked for its path

it remained partly animal, there was no trick for its election

man kept, alas, his cruel instincts intact

but Anthropology is instructing us, man is marching toward progress

its slow work that is marked off by the centuries

the future race will march toward justice and reason

under the guidance of science our perfect goal we will address

where beings are equal in the universal formation

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

my goal is liberty, equality, fraternity

in the eternal, just, and reasoned love of nature, the only divinity.⁴⁹

Calling nature “the only divinity” was strong stuff, but it was understood that the Society of Mutual Autopsy stood not for deism or agnosticism, but for atheism. A newspaper article on the society, unsigned but written by one of the founders, claimed that much had been learned from the brains of the illustrious donors. “We would have really liked to have the cranium of Victor Hugo,” he added. “The society did all that it could to get it. But Victor Hugo was a deist!”⁵⁰ There had been no previous mention in the article that one had to be an atheist to be interested; it was assumed.

For most members, the Society of Mutual Autopsy was their only link to a specific doctrine of utopian progress. The society gave people a chance to connect their death, and not only their life, with eternity. The anthropologist Charles Letourneau’s obituary included a quotation from his own work which exemplifies this notion. It reads:

This perspective of unlimited progress is the modern faith: and to our advantage this new belief replaces the mirage of a lost paradise; it sustains and consoles us in our public and private trials. Encouraged by it, we regard ourselves as laborers in an always unfinished work, but a work to which all men great and small, obscure and celebrated, can and may lend their hands. As cruel as may be the miseries, injustices, and calamities of the present, we may regard them as but mere accidents in the long voyage of humanity toward a better life and accept them with patience, all the while seeking remedies.⁵¹

The stretch of time into the future is what seems most impressive here—the “perspective of unlimited progress,” the “long voyage of humanity toward a better life”—but it is wonderfully bittersweet: humanity needs to be sustained and consoled, we suffer public and private trials, our labor toward a better world is “always unfinished,” the present is overrun with cruel miseries, injustices, and calamities, and we must accept them with patience while seeking remedies. It is this bittersweet, brave resignation that distinguishes these freethinkers from the stereotype of the self-satisfied, almost patronizingly calm scientist who dismisses religion and never gives it another thought. The Society of Mutual Autopsy was an arena for aggressively confronting formerly religions questions and for further translating these questions into the secular world—with something of their mood intact.

ANTHROPOLOGIST AS CONFESSOR

A testament-donation to the Society of Mutual Autopsy was, however, more than a platform for self-flattery, political propaganda, the venting of anger against Catholicism, or a pledge of faith in science. As a considerable number of letters and wills attest, the relationship between lay adherents of the society and its anthropologist leaders reproduced a priest-parishioner relationship in some unexpected ways. The scientist was already conceptually connected to the priest because, in many senses, the one had taken over the authority of the other on matters of truth, human origins, the origins and age of the universe, the meanings of illness and health, and so on. But, except in the case of physicians, this conceptual link did not often produce a transference of responsibilities. For many members of the society, however, the notion that this group would be handling their bodies after death was profoundly meaningful. The anthropologists of the society had convinced their adherents that an autopsy would be truly revealing, and this belief led members to write to the anthropologists with great candor. Also, the project demanded valid personal information, and if one did not have a particularly accomplished brain to offer, one could at least excel in intimacy, telling all in order to merit inclusion. They wrote, it would seem, both because they wanted to confess and because they expected that their suffering would somehow be marked on their brains.

Johann Joyeux, who joined the Society of Mutual Autopsy after visiting its display at the 1889 Exposition Universelle, wrote repeatedly to the society’s leaders in the years that followed. His testament made it clear that he had repudiated all aspects of Catholicism. He asked that any part of his body not useful to science should be thrown into a communal grave and hoped that his skeleton might hang in the Collège Rollin.⁵² In 1892 he wrote to the society lamenting his beloved wife’s alcoholism, saying, “I have shown you my completely naked soul.” His long missive gave wrenching details of his wife’s transformation from “the sweetest and best of women” to “a violently maddened fury” and from the “most honest person” into “a miserable wretch who doesn’t know the difference between mine and yours.” Joyeux expressed all of this scientifically, writing that his wife was the “daughter of an alcoholic father who died ruined, almost crazy with chagrin. My poor wife had in her the fatal germ of an ignoble and terrible passion.”⁵³ After Joyeux’s death, Manouvrier decided that his skeleton was too decrepit to hang at the Collège Rollin and kept it, instead, in the Laboratory of Anthropology.⁵⁴

Such sorrowful stories as that of Joyeux, explained to the anthropologists with confessional ardor, were not rare. In another example, on April 6, 1881, Paul Monnot, a Parisian civil engineer, wrote a brief note to the Society of Mutual Autopsy saying, “I am going to die tonight by asphyxiating myself in the little closet of the antechamber of my apartment.”⁵⁵ Along with this note, Monnot sent several confidential pages to the anthropologists, one of which told the long and detailed story of a wife who no longer loved him (so much so that when she lost a suit of separation she “was still obstinate and went to live in a convent”) and a son whose military career had taken him far away. In the same envelope, Monnot sent a résumé of the story of his life, the range of his aptitudes, and the history of his health—including everything from scarlet fever at ten years of age, to typhoid fever at eighteen, and ending with death, “by his own will,” at forty-six. Monnot was successful in his suicide attempt. The society obtained his brain for study, but not before sending a telegram to Monnot’s son informing him that his father proscribed any religious ceremony. The telegram also threatened the young man, explaining that according to Monnot’s testament, if this aspect of his will were contested, half the estate would be given to the city of Paris.⁵⁶

Although the confessional relationship was generally enacted between the society’s leadership and a deeply troubled or dying society member, there were instances when it occurred between the anthropologists and a member of the deceased’s family. This was the case with Jeanne Véron, the wife of Eugène Victor Véron. Véron had vehemently requested that his corpse be autopsied, that his remains not be buried, and that there be no ceremony after his death. The best-laid plans, however, are difficult to carry out after one’s own demise. Véron died, far from Paris, in May 1889. Because his death had left his wife and daughter “absolutely without resources,” the widow Véron did not have the funds required to convey his whole body to Paris.⁵⁷ Deeply regretful that she would not be able to carry out the entirety of her departed husband’s wishes, the widow Véron arranged, after “many formalities and numerous difficulties,” to have a brief autopsy performed locally and for the doctor who performed this service to remove her late husband’s brain, put it in alcohol, and send it to the anthropologists in Paris.⁵⁸ Months later, she obtained official authorization for the exhumation of her husband’s skeleton, which she also shipped to Paris.⁵⁹ She then waited for someone, the local doctor or the Paris anthropologists, to tell her something about her husband. But no one had very much to say. The doctor who had performed the cursory autopsy, Dr. Gaudin, offered no information on his own. When the widow Véron requested an autopsy report, he wrote that he would only discuss the results of the autopsy (“description of the tumor, among other things”) with another doctor, and he requested that he be put in touch with one of the doctors of the Paris autopsy society.⁶⁰ At this point, Véron began writing what was to become a long series of plaintive letters to the “venerable anthropologists,” letters that were never satisfactorily answered because, of course, the anthropologists had promised much more than they could deliver. The widow Véron’s confidence and interest, however, did not wane significantly. In 1891 she herself joined the Société d’anthropologie de Paris, and though she did not live in Paris, she kept up a lively correspondence with that society’s leadership.⁶¹ Véron was one of the first women in the Société d’anthropologie de Paris. The Society of Mutual Autopsy, however, included female members from its beginnings.

Many articles on the society commented on the group’s female members. As reported by the Morning News, the Society of Mutual Autopsy included “ten or twelve women, a princess, and the wife of a senator who himself is a member.”⁶² Beyond the generally feminist attitude of the freethinking anthropologists, one significant reason for the presence of women in the society was the participation of the well-known female anthropologist Clémence Royer.⁶³ Royer had gained a wide reputation for the very atheistic, Lamarckian, sociobiological essay with which she prefaced her translation of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. She had written a great deal on the subject since. She participated actively in the meetings of the Société d’anthropologie de Paris, represented it at international scientific conferences, and published frequently in its journal. In 1880 she and the prominent philosopher Charles Renouvier were named the French representatives to the Fédération Internationale de la Libre Pensée founded in Brussels (Charles Bradlaugh and Herbert Spencer were the representatives from England).⁶⁴ Her work was path-breaking and inspirational, as is clear from the widow Véron’s letter of condolence at Royer’s death:

I did not have the honor to know Mme. Clémence Royer personally. But one does not need to be in direct contact with someone to appreciate their moral value and their high intellectual faculties. But beyond that, as a woman, I believe that Mme. Clémence Royer has rendered an invaluable service to our sex. She demonstrated with a remarkable talent, conscience, and high-mindedness that, contrary to common prejudice, woman can—by a rational culture and through the influence of a clear-minded milieu, along with native predisposition—usefully approach the collection of questions that had been envisioned, up to then, as the exclusive domain of men.⁶⁵

Given the ardor of this sentiment, it would seem likely that Royer’s membership in the Société of Mutual Autopsy diminished the social barriers that otherwise discouraged women from joining such enterprises.

Some women were courted to join the society. Jacques Bertillon wrote to the society in 1878 stating that the princess de la Tour d’Auvergne had expressed the opinion that the autopsy of all French men and women ought to be enforced by law. What her reasons for this were Bertillon did not say, but he did counsel the society against stressing materialism, as the princess “is not devoted to it, nor to monarchism, nor to republicanism.”⁶⁶ The princess, who was reported to be fatally ill, joined soon after. Such courtships were rare, however. Most women were surprised and delighted to be admitted.

It certainly cannot be said that women joined the society along with their husbands, as a kind of default way to spend eternity together—on a shelf if not in heaven—for married memberships were extremely rare. Often, however, the women involved were the widowed wives of men who had been involved in anthropology. Their husbands had not become members—perhaps they were not interested in doing so, or perhaps they had died before the society was founded. In either case, it seems likely that the husbands’ interest in anthropology had brought the appropriate journals into the wives’ homes, and, widowed, the wives continued to read these journals. In any case, women seem to have joined the society “in the interests of science” and with the same basic notions as the male members. Some men followed their materialist wives to the civil grave. Ten years before the Society of Mutual Autopsy was founded, Zoé Bertillon, wife of Louis-Adolphe, mother of Jacques, caught a fever she could not shake and died at thirty-four. She had been “a great reader of sociology” and was “actively concerned with a group of young Parisian women who interested themselves in education, for the sake of both knowledge and citizenship. They were regarded as progressive and even dangerously so.”⁶⁷ When she died, her husband followed her instructions and saw to it that she had a civil burial. These were prominent citizens, and when the famously proactive (though moderate among his peers), bishop of Orléans, Dupanloup, heard of the burial arrangements, he “wrote an Episcopal charge concerning the scandal and social dangers of burial without the benefit of the clergy” and sent it to Zoé’s bereaved husband. Louis-Adolphe responded as follows: “I do not wish to give offense, much less to scandalize anyone. But my wife was a liberal and had ceased to believe in the Catholic faith. The scandal would have been if I had allowed her to be buried with religious ceremonies she did not believe in” (42). Zoé Bertillon’s granddaughter, Jacques’s daughter, Suzanne, would later write that Zoé came to her marriage young, having received a solid religious instruction. As a result, she was a practicing Catholic, but her family was progressive and republican and after she was married, Zoé “was quickly won over by the liberal and philosophical theories of her husband and henceforth stopped practicing her religion.” Indeed, “for the period, she professed very advanced ideas.”⁶⁸ In another discussion, Suzanne Bertillon wrote of Zoé Bertillon’s feminism and noted that it was “judged audacious and provocative” but that “Louis-Adolphe shared all the opinions of his wife and often supported them with the weight of his erudition and his statistics” (33). Her parents and siblings supported her being given a civil ceremony; the radical opinions between Zoé and Louis-Adolphe surely passed in both directions (36).

The widows who joined the autopsy society seem to have had an interest in anthropology while their husbands were still alive, but most of them joined no societies until they were widowed. This does not necessarily mean that their husbands had impeded their prior membership, though that is certainly one explanation. More likely, they saw no need to join on their own until their husbands’ deaths broke their contact with a society’s proceedings and publications. That was certainly the case for Jeanne Véron, who did not join the Société d’anthropologie until two years after her husband’s death. The widow Véron finally joined the Society of Mutual Autopsy in 1906, when a distressed budget forced her to quit the rather expensive Société d’anthropologie. Her biographical essay and her testament both displayed extraordinary commitment to the cause.⁶⁹ Véron explained that although her mother had received a decent education, her father was barely literate and did not believe education was necessary for girls. Still, at what she described as a “very young age,” she demonstrated “a taste for the natural sciences,” and in adolescence she occupied herself by writing impassioned speeches “in favor of the victims of monarchical oppression.” After her marriage, at twenty-two, she learned some Latin and some Greek from her husband and later wrote articles and book reviews for the Musée universel and other journals. In the early eighties she wrote a large number of zoological books for young people as well as some general children’s fiction, all of which the anthropologists put out with one of their publishing ventures: the Librairie d’éducation laïque (Library for laic education).⁷⁰ “Social, political, and religious questions,” she explained, interested her as passionately as “the discoveries of chemists, biologists, ethnographers, and anthropologists.” Like several other members, she detailed her abilities with some embarrassment, stating that she had been complimented on her writing many times but that she mentioned this “only as information for your researches . . . and because you will not read these notes until I have ceased to live.”⁷¹ Instead of copying the model testament that the society provided, Véron wrote her own:

Desiring to contribute to the diffusion of scientific ideas which I have professed for the last thirty-five years, I leave my body, and especially my brain, to the Société d’anthropologie de Paris. I insist, thus, that my autopsy will immediately follow my death, if I die either in Paris or in the Department of the Seine, and that the cost of this will be paid by my inheritors.

If my death takes place in another area, then I charge my daughter-in-law, Eugénie Véron, to accomplish my will by arranging for a doctor (preferably the one that assisted me during my final illness) to extract my brain, place it in alcohol, and send it to the rue de l’Ecole de médecine—the location of the society. Later on, an exhumation can be effectuated in order to remove my skeleton.

This posthumous gift is made so that one or several members of the society can make a comparative examination of my brain and my bones, in order to make a progressive and exact (if possible) determination of the location of the mental faculties and their relationship to the anatomical constitution of the human being.⁷²

For the widow Jeanne Véron, as for so many others, the Society of Mutual Autopsy performed a wide range of functions. It offered a political platform, an opportunity to write her own eulogy, a forum for the demonstration of her faith in science, a means for her to preserve herself, physically, for posterity, and a chance to contribute to the utopian scientific project. Perhaps most important, through the society Jeanne Véron found a functional replacement for the confession, viaticum, and extreme unction of Catholic last rites. Echoing the detail of liturgical speech, she was able to list what would happen at her death with precision and solemnity.

THE AUTOPSY REPORTS

It seems that autopsies were performed on the cadavers of all members in good standing. For the most part, however, the anthropologists only wrote up and published reports of the autopsies that had been effectuated on one of their own. This was another of the crucial lines between the priestly anthropologist and the lay members of the group. Lay members had access to the anthropologists as experts, leaders, and as somewhat anonymous confessors. Here, the anthropologists served and did not receive. Their role was sacerdotal, regulating the details, issuing text, creating doctrine and liturgy, and, of course, preserving relics. Their rewards were sacred if not beatific: when their autopsies and eulogies were published, they each entered into the canonical text of their cult.

The highly symbolic nature of the autopsy and attendant published report becomes clear in the progression of the reports from the bold interpretive pronouncements of the early years to a later style of noninvestigative description. Consider Louis Asseline’s autopsy. In the original report, published in the Bulletin de la Société d’anthropologie de Paris in 1878 and written by Henri Thulié, there was a great deal of biographical detail stressing Asseline’s leftist politics.⁷³ The report stated that for a man of his age Asseline possessed a particularly heavy brain. Thulié explained, however, that “it [was] not a delicate brain; the circumvolutions are thick, almost fat.” For Thulié, this was “a remarkable thing, because what most characterizes the intelligence of Asseline was an exquisite delicateness, to the point of subtlety” (164). The remark demonstrates that some of the society’s members had an almost unbelievably simplistic understanding of the kind of connections to be found between mentality and brain morphology, but it also demonstrates a commitment to derive some inductive conclusions from these procedures. Several years later, in 1883, the doctor Mathias Duval opened another discussion of Asseline’s brain after having presented a paper to the Société d’anthropologie describing his further studies.⁷⁴ Duval was a member of the society, taught at several Parisian schools, and two years later would be appointed to the extremely prestigious chair of histology at the Paris Faculty of Medicine. The 1883 paper did not insist on a direct linkage between morphological features of the brain and character features of Asseline’s mind. Duval did, however, mention that Asseline’s brain had certain simian features. This drew an attack from one of the members of the Société d’anthropologie, a M. Foley, who protested that, after hearing Duval’s essay, “there is no need for any other argument against such a society and its immorality” (273). Foley went on to say that he could not condone a society that made “these kinds of discoveries.” The anthropologist and medical doctor Eugéne Dally defended Duval’s analogy, saying that further recognition of the kinship of animals and humans might stop the exceedingly prevalent cruelty to animals. Another interesting reply came from Paul Topinard, an anthropologist who considered himself Broca’s primary disciple and who had expected to take over the helm of the Société d’anthropologie when Broca died. Topinard was a generalist; his best-known work was simply called Anthropology, and though he is better known in America today than the freethinking anthropologists, that is largely because he lived in New York for periods of his life, both as a child and later. He thus had social and professional ties here and a facility with English uncommon among his French peers. In France in the 1880s he was a bit out of favor—partially because he disapproved of the increasingly political climate of the society. “We seek the truth and nothing else,” he insisted. “It does not much matter to us if we grow more like animals, or less like them. The only way to become less like animals, however, is to see clearly and not to nourish illusions and preconceived ideas. The Société d’anthropologie sides with no sect, neither in one sense nor in another” (274). In any case, the discussion did not much pertain to the society’s stated intentions. Later still, in 1889, Asseline’s brain was featured at the society’s exhibit at the Paris World’s Fair.⁷⁵ The literature at the fair made absolutely no claims regarding the relationship between Asseline’s personality and the morphology of his brain. Indeed, it conceded that very few such discoveries had been made at all (104).

Somewhat stymied by the task they had set for themselves, the anthropologists soon began merely to describe the brains. Those writing the autopsy report on Coudereau’s brain (the brain that had devised the entire scheme) barely mentioned his character.⁷⁶ Certainly, much scientific work is but description and data. In this case, however, the descriptive texts were functioning as fully realized monuments, a final contribution to the journal. The endeavor had become more ritual than investigation; more a sectarian memorial service than a science. This pattern was only broken in 1886, when the society was given the brain of the great French statesman Léon Gambetta. In this case, a much wider public was interested in the society’s findings, and so some findings had to be offered. Also, Gambetta’s brain posed a troublesome conundrum that set the anthropologists to rethinking one of the most fundamental tenets of their discipline.

We do not know exactly how Gambetta came to donate his brain to the Society of Mutual Autopsy, but it is not too odd that he did. Gambetta was essentially the head of political anticlericalism in France in these years. His famous proclamation, “Clericalism, that’s the enemy!” of 1877 represented the culmination of decades of republican frustration, and it launched decades of active struggle against the church.⁷⁷ Gambetta’s speeches hailed France as the country that “inaugurated free thought in the world,” and he cursed clericalism as “the enemy of all independence, all light, and all stability,” because it was the enemy of all the healthiest and most beneficent aspects of modern society (180, 177). He spoke in political terms—of progress, social justice, and effective education—but he also spoke of truth. Since the rise of Napoleon, announced Gambetta, there had been a struggle between two groups: “those who pretend to know everything through revelation, in an immutable manner, and those who march, thinking and progressing, to the suggestions of science, which every day accomplishes progress and which pushes back the boundaries of human knowledge”(179). It was, in his words, “a civil war.” Did he see the new, secular world in terms of anthropology? In a private letter, Gambetta once wrote, “Could it be for peoples, as for animal races, the struggle for existence and authority periodically brings the disappearance of the weakest, most ignorant, most heedless, by the aggression of the most strong, most learned, most wise? Could it be that politics is only a branch of human physiology? Perhaps.”⁷⁸ He must have strongly indicated to someone, at some point, that when he came to die he wanted to continue to serve the anticlerical campaign.

The anthropologists extracted Gambetta’s brain at Ville-d’Avray, where he had died, and carried it by train to Paris, holding it aloft “carefully suspended from the hand,” and then took it by car from the Saint-Lazare railroad station to the Laboratory of Anthropology.⁷⁹ Their first report on the autopsied cerebellum was considerably longer than any previous report on a brain, encompassing some twenty-three pages and covering every aspect of the organ—except its weight.⁸⁰ This lacuna was remarked upon during the discussion following the presentation, but the report’s author, Dr. Duval, refused to comment, dramatically withholding the information for his special report on the subject: “The Weight of Gambetta’s Brain.”⁸¹ It was here that Duval let it be known that the great man’s brain weighed in at only 1,160 grams—light enough to convince the scientists who had weighed it, Jean-Baptiste Vincent Laborde and Paul Bert, that an error had been made.

It should here be mentioned that Laborde and Bert were extremely important, well-known figures of the Third Republic: Laborde headed up the department of physiology at the Faculty of Medicine and was editor in chief of La tribune médicale; Bert was professor of physiology at the Sorbonne, edited the science section of the left-wing newspaper La république française, and served jointly as minister of public instruction and minister of religion in Gambetta’s government. In his political capacity, Bert made rabble-rousing speeches against the church and in particular against Catholic education in France, which, he said, “understood nothing of natural laws” and saw the world as dominated by the “caprice of supernatural powers,” while “laic education encourages a man to work and gives him confidence in his own abilities, in personal progress, social progress, [and] humanitarian progress.”⁸² Religion, he asserted, was a mess of “grotesque superstitions” that denied that people had an inner ability to make moral decisions, saw marriage as an inferior state, and had no place in the country of Molière, Rabelais, and Voltaire. Both Laborde and Bert were members of the Société d’anthropologie. Though neither had officially joined the autopsy society, they clearly wanted to be part of the project and were willing to lend their names to it. Especially in Bert’s case, because he worked so closely with Gambetta, it is notable that they were willing to hold, weigh, feel, poke, and dissect the brain of their recently deceased friend and colleague.

According to Duval, when Laborde and Bert found such a low weight for Gambetta’s brain they assumed they had erred. A second try gave the even more lamentable result of 1,150 grams. Duval went on to offer a plethora of reasons as to why this exemplary man’s brain could have been so light. Most of them stressed that, had the brain been handled in some different way, it would have retained more of its water. There followed a number of complicated calculations, at the end of which Gambetta’s brain weight was altered to a more respectable heft. In the end, Duval listed a number of other great men with light brains and threw the subject open for discussion.

Léonce Manouvrier, who elsewhere waged an energetic and often successful campaign against biological determinism, here cautioned that brain weight did determine some aspects of intelligence but not all of them.⁸³ Manouvrier suggested that the talents with which Gambetta had been most gifted were perhaps unrelated to brain weight.⁸⁴ This implied, he realized, that Gambetta had some deficiencies, but, “after all, one can be a lawyer, orator, governmental minister, patriot, skillful man, etc., without being perfection itself” (409). Nevertheless, most newspaper reports maintained that Gambetta’s brain was considerably heavier than indicated by the first published numbers.⁸⁵ The confusion did not stop certain anthropologists from writing a great deal about the subject. For example, in 1898 Dr. Laborde published a full-length book on Gambetta’s brain, dramatically claiming that Gambetta’s donation had rendered a tremendous service to science. Laborde wrote that Gambetta’s brain gave scientists the final proof they needed about the relationship between the brain organ and function, for Gambetta, “one of the greatest orators, if not the very greatest,” also had a “third left frontal circumvolution” (Broca’s speech area) that was “the most developed and most complete that had ever been witnessed.”⁸⁶ Laborde may have exaggerated a bit to make this more dramatic, but he did not claim to have found any new relationships between brain morphology and function.

By the time they were done with Laborde’s own brain in 1903, most of the anthropologists no longer believed there existed any relationship between brain weight and intelligence, a shift that seems to have been caused in great part by what they referred to as the “embarrassing case” of Gambetta’s light brain, coupled now with the “embarrassment” of Laborde’s case—for his brain was light, too.⁸⁷ Here, again, they fell back on the third left frontal circumvolution, stating that, “Dr. Laborde possessed a faculty of elocution that, without reaching the eloquence of Gambetta, was nonetheless one of the dominant characteristics of his personality. . . . This very interesting result gives proof of the invaluable service the autopsy society can offer to Science” (423).

In truth, nothing substantive had been added to Broca’s original findings, but that did not seem to bother anyone very much. The fact that they would joyfully confirm the significance of Broca’s aphasia and the “third left frontal circumvolution” for thirty years would be staggering, in fact, if their project had been limited to discovering links between the mind and the brain. Instead, it would seem that the “invaluable service” they had provided was in the realm of memorial, revelation, judgment, and immortality. At the funeral of Louis-Adolphe Bertillon, whose brain had been removed for study and whose whole skeleton would soon hang in the society museum, Charles Letourneau gave an oration on behalf of the Society of Mutual Autopsy.⁸⁸ Beginning his speech with a discussion of the society, Letourneau said that sometimes, in order to serve progress, “one must go against our customs and, to a certain degree, our laws” (188). “For Bertillon,” continued Letourneau, “to brave those who are prejudiced for the sake of a superior interest was a commonplace, and to devote himself to science and to social progress was a necessity.” After a lengthy discussion of Bertillon’s work, Letourneau returned to the subject of the society, explaining that Bertillon had been ill for some time, had known very well that he was dying, and had never wavered in his resolve:

One night . . . in one of those moments of physical anguish wherein most men almost cease to think, Bertillon found the strength to renew, by letter, his adhesion to the Society of Mutual Autopsy. He did this in several touching lines that began as follows: “To be useful has always seemed to me to be the most beautiful goal of life,” and finished with these words, “It is one o’clock in the morning, and I believe I am on the point of death.” . . . Along with his friends, who I have the honor to represent, Bertillon did not entertain the least illusion on the subject of the hereafter. For him, as for them, the only possible survival was that which resulted from acts and from works. Like us, he knew that the only means of not dying entirely was to disperse to the four winds all that one could of the fire of one’s heart and the light of one’s mind.

(191–192)

The speech was published in the same journal that would later carry Bertillon’s autopsy report, and its importance lies in the strikingly self-conscious way in which it refers to the search for a “means of not dying entirely.” Equally significant, however, is the liturgical structure of Bertillon’s final attestation. Letourneau praised Bertillon for his steadfast commitment to materialism even in the face of physical anguish. This was not just any physical anguish—it was the kind in which most people “almost cease to think,” the kind of pain that makes rational creatures abandon logic and fall into a sweet, emotional piety. Why would Bertillon gather his waning strength in order to renew his membership—and why would Letourneau make so much of it? The dying man had already made out his will, kept up his dues, and furthermore (in contrast to many members who knew their relatives would fight a sacrilegious will) Bertillon’s own son was also a member of the society. The act can only be understood as a purely symbolic gesture of commitment, based squarely on the Christian deathbed scene and the public description of a “good death” that followed such a scene. The final pronouncement of faith was the central feature of the Christian death ritual, serving as a crucial sign of peace and certainty for the dying and for those about to mourn. Bertillon and Letourneau surely witnessed these rites many times throughout their lives, and, despite nominal iconoclasm, their solace depended on the tradition of ritual. It should also be noted that for a member whose family was religious, failure to issue a final materialist attestation might mean a religious burial. As discussed above, many members placed threatening clauses in their wills in order to ensure that their wishes would be respected after death. The deathbed scene carried with it a liturgical context, re-created because it offered comfort but also because of the solemnity and inviolable covenant implicit in liturgical speech.⁸⁹

There was also a concern that one might betray one’s own convictions at the fearsome moment of death. Tales of a good materialist death helped to make the appropriate behavior into a second nature—just as religious authors recommended the frequent reading of illustrative descriptions of a good Catholic death. Indeed, members of the Society of Mutual Autopsy present a fascinating inversion of the classic distress. Traditionally, it is a weak believer who agonizes over sins committed and desperately hopes that a life of faithlessness will be redeemed in a pious deathbed scene. Life’s final moments were crucial. According to Catholic doctrine, sinners and saints could both change their status on the basis of a good or a bad death. John McManners’s study of death in Enlightenment France highlights the importance accorded to one’s frame of mind at the moment of death—and the intense anxiety that this produced among the faithful.⁹⁰ However, in the late nineteenth century, many atheists were haunted by the notion that they might convert on their deathbeds, thus invalidating a lifetime of materialist conviction. As Thomas Kselman has pointed out, priests in this period were feared and reviled for the pressure they brought to bear on the unrepentant dying—and for the taunting public spectacle they made of any well-known atheist’s deathbed conversion.⁹¹ One thus finds men and women desperately hoping that they would have the presence of mind to die a bad death (in the eyes of the church). This late-nineteenth-century anxiety was based on how one would be remembered rather than on fear of damnation, but it was no less intense for that. Whether faithful to Catholicism or materialism, people hoped for sobriety at the capricious hour of death.

Letourneau’s speech also gives insight into the cathectic purpose of these reports and eulogies. Letourneau expansively honored the whole group, including himself, by showcasing Bertillon’s purity of commitment: he “did not entertain the least illusion.” This was an inspirational tale for the reader of the journal who was not likely to find such praise elsewhere, but, especially for the anthropologists, there was also a cautionary subtext here. Continued dedication to the group’s doctrine was supported by communal pressure, which each member propagated and received. This pressure was surely private in many of its guises, but for the anthropologists it was exacerbated by the promise (and fear) of publication and the sense of permanence and remembrance that publication represented in an otherwise ephemeral world.

SCIENCE, CHURCH, AND STATE

The Society of Mutual Autopsy’s struggle to obtain state authorization nicely demonstrates the way in which the government mediated, rather haphazardly, between religious and antireligious forces in France. The application for official authorization first went to the prefect of police of Paris in 1880. Feeling that the subject matter in question lay “outside the limits of [his] competence,” the prefect wrote to Jules Ferry, then the minister of public instruction, asking him to make the decision.⁹² For his part, the prefect of police added, he thought it would be all right to authorize this odd association. The group was, the prefect commented, “occupied at this moment with the study of Broca’s brain.” He further added that, “though [the society] is composed in large part of men dedicated to politics, it seems to me that such questions are not raised in the meetings of the society, of which the object is purely scientific.” Despite his republican, anticlerical politics (he would soon radically secularize the French educational system), Ferry was understandably a bit hesitant about granting a group of politicians the authorization to dissect one another. He decided to get some insider opinions. In September 1880, Ferry wrote to Jules Gavarret, inspector general of medical instruction, asking his opinion.

Jules Gavarret had become well known after his youthful rise to the post of professor of medical physics at the Paris Faculty of Medicine in 1843. His work in both medicine and physics had earned him membership in the Academy of Medicine in 1858, and he would become its president in 1882.⁹³ He was a member of the Société d’anthropologie as well, had served a short term as its president, and for a while directed the Revue d’anthropologie. It was in light of his high standing in the medical and scientific community and in particular in his capacity as inspector general of medical instruction that Gavarret was asked to judge the Society of Mutual Autopsy.⁹⁴ Gavarret’s reply was a harsh critique of the society and a recommendation that it not be awarded any kind of official recognition.⁹⁵ He reported that authorized representatives of the biological sciences had refused to join the society, and he provided a breakdown by profession of the original membership: only eleven were medical doctors, five were men of letters, there were two municipal councillors, one civil engineer, one employee of public assistance, and one archaeologist. Whether these men considered themselves anthropologists above all else, Gavarret did not mention, but it is hard to fault him for recognizing the political tendencies of the group. He railed: “Among these founding members there exists, in reality, nothing other than a community of very advanced political opinions” (emphasis in original). He also reported that the general membership (which he estimated as numbering over a hundred), had been “recruited from among artists, men of the world, and even women” (2). Gavarret warned that the society was bound to upset people, stating that the “privileges” conferred on its members in the statutes were of a nature that would “hurt feelings and trouble the peace of families.” He also claimed that the nine members of the Society of Mutual Autopsy who were also members of the Société d’anthropologie had “often created serious difficulties in this association of men dedicated to the cult of science.” Furthermore, he declared, their goals were purely political and “not at all to work for the advancement of science” (3). In fact, he concluded his evaluation with the assertion that the Society of Mutual Autopsy should not be given authorization because to do so would somehow jeopardize the venerable Société d’anthropologie.

It should be noted that Gavarret was by no means an arch conservative. As we learn from Joy Harvey’s intellectual biography of Clemence Royer, in the late 1860s Gavarret invited Royer to give a talk on evolution to his class at the Paris School of Medicine. Madeleine Brès, the first French woman to be admitted to the school and to become a doctor, was in the audience and remembered Royer’s impact vividly—both for the ideas of Darwinism she presented and for the fact that her classmates applauded her lecture, showing that they were able to “render homage to all that is good, beautiful, and true, even when it concerns a woman.”⁹⁶ Gavarret had also been one of the four men who sponsored Royer’s membership into the Société d’anthropologie de Paris. So Gavarret’s concern seems to have been localized to this group of freethinkers rather than prompted by its general ideals. He must have changed his mind, because, in the years that followed, Gavarret came to work quite closely with the freethinking anthropologists on a number of projects, including the Society of Mutual Autopsy, though there is no testament in his name.

Ferry then wrote to Armand de Quatrefages, professor of anthropology at the Muséum d’histoire naturelle de Paris, asking about possible friction between the new Society of Mutual Autopsy and the long-standing Société d’anthropologie, and also asking if there was reason to doubt “the scientific authority and perhaps the morality” of the group involved (2). Quatrefages was arguably the most established and conservative anthropologist in France, holding what was the oldest and most esteemed position in anthropology, namely, the chair at the museum. He published extensively on race, evolution, and anthropology in general, his best-known works being L’unité de l’espèce humaine and Rapport sur le progrès de l’anthropologie.⁹⁷ He had played conservative foil to Broca’s avant-garde notions of evolution and polygenism and was quite well known internationally. Explaining that he had heard a good deal about the society and felt qualified to give an opinion on it, he also made it quite clear that the Society of Mutual Autopsy “could be understood from many different points of view” and that he would only concern himself with “scientific considerations.” As far as science went, Quatrefages thought there would be “incontestable” scientific merit in the dissection of the brains of “intelligent and cultivated” men, “gifted with diverse aptitudes” that had been for years appreciated by those who would do the dissecting. Quatrefages assured the minister that such work “could lead to positive results of a very great scientific importance.” That is, he entirely agreed with the scientific premise of the society that knowledge about a personality could help one to locate that personality’s characteristics in the physical structure of the brain and that those characteristics would be more recognizable or interesting if the subject had been educated, talented, or accomplished. Quatrefages assured the minister that such work “could lead to positive results of a very great scientific importance,” warning only that the new society should not be annexed to the Société d’anthropologie in any way, lest the “great and legitimate authority” of the “older sister” association be jeopardized by the new group, which had not yet proven itself. Indeed, he rejected any solidarity between the two groups “with all his strength” and insisted that they be “absolutely distinct.”⁹⁸ Quatrefages understood that some tension was building in the Société d’anthropologie as a result of the freethinking anthropologists’ increasingly outspoken politics. It is important that despite his awareness of the situation, he still gave his support to the freethinking anthropologists’ autopsy project. Ferry took Quatrefages’s caution against linking the two societies to heart. But he also noted Quatrefages’s appreciation of the scientific merit of the adventure along with Gavarret’s complete dismissal of it.

Confused, and perhaps overburdened (while remaining minister of public instruction, he had ascended to the position of prime minister of France only four days after writing to Gavarret), Ferry sent the whole file to the minister of the interior. Repeating, in his cover letter, Gavarret’s description of the society as a “community of very advanced politics,” Ferry seemed most concerned with protecting the older Société d’anthropologie, which he described as a glorious institution, “an entirely French creation” and “unique in the world.”⁹⁹ Ferry had good reasons to believe this. A few months earlier, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had written to Ferry recounting for him the events at a recent anthropological conference in Moscow. The letter included several published reports on the conference, one of which, appearing in the Télégraphe, reads as follows:

While most States lack even one chair of Anthropology, Paris possesses a veritable Faculty of Anthropology, composed not of one chair, but of a great number of diverse courses that are all about anthropology. This is the result of the work of the creator of the Ecole d’anthropologie, the illustrious Doctor Broca and his colleagues Bertillon, de Mortillet, Topinard, Hovelacque, Dally, Bordier, etc. One would have to have seen the esteem in which the Russian scholars hold French Anthropological instruction in order to really realize the value of what we have in Paris.¹⁰⁰

So it is not surprising to find Ferry both interested and concerned as he described the situation to his colleague. “We must be proud of this entirely French creation,” he told his minister of the interior, “and protect it against all attacks”¹⁰¹ Interestingly, this did not convince the minister of the interior. Ferry had become the prime minister of the Republic on September 23, 1880, because the previous prime minister, Freycinet, had resigned along with two of his ministers. The actions of his minister of the interior, Jean Constans, had prompted the resignation. It had been Freycinet’s policy to negotiate amicably with the clergy and to enforce anticlerical laws with some moderation. Constans, however, was an intransigent anticleric, who would later be responsible for making seminarists serve a year in the military, just like other students and anyone who wanted to teach. Here, as Gambetta had encouraged him to do, he had issued a decree stating that all unauthorized religious orders now had to ask for state authorization and further requiring the dissolution and expulsion of the Society of Jesus.¹⁰² As a result, the government changed hands—Freycinet resigned and Ferry took over—but Constans remained minister of the interior. So it was to Constans that Ferry had sent the file, an extreme anticleric who did not look unkindly on the Society of Mutual Autopsy. Thus, despite the threats posed by the new society—as a rival to the Société d’anthropologie, which was lauded as a source of national pride, as very likely to disrupt family peace, as possibly being incompetent in practice, and, most of all, as being an extremist political group—it was authorized on December 29, 1880.¹⁰³

The difficult time Ferry had deciding on the character of this group could only be redoubled by considering their own description of the project:

They concede to us that physics and chemistry render perfect explanations of the functions of all the organs. Meanwhile, they say, it is not the same for the brain, which the soul commands. Religion and philosophy prohibit us from studying it as the location of thought. Ah well! Unbelievable! The majority obeys this prohibition. It took the audacity of the anthropologists to attempt several timid experiments on the physiology of the brain hemispheres. How much more audacious were the sensualist and materialist philosophers of the eighteenth century! If they had had our knowledge about the nervous system, the question of the soul would have been resolved a long time ago.¹⁰⁴

At the beginning of this statement, the anthropologists seem devoted to science, while priests and philosophers seem overly defensive. By the end, it is clear that the anthropologists have an impassioned agenda of their own: to prove the nonexistence of the soul.

The French government again confronted the society when civil burial laws came under discussion in the Chamber of Deputies.¹⁰⁵ In March 1886, Yves Guyot and Gabriel de Mortillet spoke before the chamber, of which they were both members, proposing an amendment to the law on the liberty of funerals.¹⁰⁶ Their amendment was a mandate for the free disposition of the body. The Catholic Church noted the threat and issued a counterattack. In 1886 cremation was specifically and completely prohibited by the church. The freethinking anthropologists republished portions of this prohibition in their most political journal, L’homme, concentrating attention on the prohibition against membership in any “society of which the goal is to spread the practice of the incineration of cadavers.”¹⁰⁷ The war was afoot. Guyot and Mortillet were not successful in adjoining their amendment, but the law itself was passed in 1887, despite its being characterized by Archbishop Freppel, a deputy of the chamber, as representing “a materialist paganism that no longer recognizes in the human body the abode of an immortal soul.”¹⁰⁸ In 1889 another law was passed, extending secular burial rights so that they allowed for cremation. Guyot soon changed the instructions in his testament from a request to be buried in a common grave to a request for cremation.¹⁰⁹ One of the unique insights betrayed by the Society of Mutual Autopsy is that the desire for a civil burial was not merely a last swipe at the Catholic clergy. Rather, French men and women had internalized the church to such a degree that they could not merely ignore its injunctions. The Catholic Church claimed that bodies were sacred and so, in a furious rejection that nonetheless took quite seriously the equation between church and body, these ex-Christians begged for the right to have their own bodies mutilated, discarded, and burned. Infantilized by religion and enfranchised by science, they hacked at the church within.

A FINAL GASP

For a brief period, the autopsy society was directed by an anthropologist from outside the immediate ranks of the freethinkers, namely, Jean-Baptiste Vincent Laborde.¹¹⁰ Laborde was director of the Laboratory of Anthropology and may well have permitted the performance of autopsies at the lab contingent on his being named president of the society. As Nélia Dias pointed out in her essay on the society, this marked an important shift.¹¹¹ Laborde served as director from 1892 to 1903, and during this time the degree of political fervor in the stated goals of the society dropped appreciably, though the membership continued to represent the more extreme anticlerical republicans. On the occasion of his ascendancy to the presidency, Laborde called for a revision of the society’s statutes. Some of the more inflammatory passages were excised, such as the identification of various religious ideas as “numerous prejudices that have their source in an unconsidered sentimentality.”¹¹² It was decided that the rather provocative word mutuelle would be dropped from the society’s name, giving it a significantly more scientific air.¹¹³ In another change from the original statutes, French society was nowhere accused of “disinheriting its poor” or of allowing them to be so profoundly underdeveloped that they were useless as scientific specimens. The justification for the Society of Autopsy was now simply that, without it, almost all brain autopsies were performed on people about whom the scientists knew nothing, which made it impossible to find correlations between brain morphology and the deceased’s former aptitudes.

When Laborde died in 1903, the society returned to the hands of its freethinking founders. Thulié was elected president. In an attempt to revitalize the society, three thousand circulars were sent out to the members of the Société d’anthropologie, encouraging them to join the Society of Autopsy. The circulars demonstrate that the general concerns of the autopsy society had overtly returned to those of the early years: radical, atheist, and distinctly political. Designed specifically to attract anthropologists into the fold, the circulars lament that the society had not yet managed to recruit substantially from its colleagues at the Société d’anthropologie. Essentially, the members of the Société d’anthropologie were taken to task for their “absurd prejudices, which inhibit them from leaving their own brains to the very laboratory where they have examined the brains of others. Their acts are in contradiction to the science that they cultivate and give moral support to religious societies that jeopardize science by propagating the idea that autopsies stamp the dead with a degrading mark.” In a further reflection of the return to overt antireligious proclamations, the 1903 circular defined the intention of the Society of Mutual Autopsy as being “to contribute to social education . . . by destroying the prejudices and the superstitions that are still very prevalent.”¹¹⁴ The officers of the society discussed the idea of rewriting the statutes again or of just returning to the original wording as conceived in 1876. “The present printed statutes,” read one meeting’s minutes (there are very few extant), “are not in accord with those that had motivated the authorization of the society.”¹¹⁵ But nothing came of this.

Instead, in 1904 the society printed up personal history questionnaires for its members, in order to standardize their information. In this way, the society’s leaders intended to create a collection of “psycho-physiological documents” that would be “unique in the world.”¹¹⁶ The questionnaire included such queries as: “Do you have any special aptitudes (music, drawing, poetry, eloquence, etc.)?; Are you happy or sad, calm or violent?; At what age did you learn to walk?; Can you voluntarily move your scalp, your ears, your scrotum?; Do you have a good memory of smells and tastes?; What is your religion?; Carefully indicate all the maladies that you have had, both during and after childhood: rickets, infantile convulsions, serious fevers, short- or long-term paralysis, nervousness, etc.”¹¹⁷ A copy was published in the Revue scientifique in 1905.¹¹⁸ Completed questionnaires were returned to the society with some regularity until 1914, and a few continued to trickle in until 1930.

The answers to questions on religion generally included a rejection of Catholicism. Felix Blachette wrote, “Catholic by my parents, baptized at seven years old, and a nonbeliever since the age of ten because the chaplain at school divulged my confession.”¹¹⁹ The simple strangeness of losing God because of the minor betrayal of one priest, made stranger by the young age reported, suggests a mythic and oft-repeated story; the intellectual, social, and political issues subsumed in the experience of hurt feelings and having another option. That was in 1905. By 1913 some, like Clara Chérin, simply noted that they were Catholic. Others made it clear that they wanted an autopsy to be sure they would not be buried alive—a strangely common fear of the period. As always, some members were brief with their information, others were exhaustive and confessional. Dr. Regnauth Perrier, for example, aptly titled his personal health history, “a complete museum of pathologies,” while Dr. Alfred Guéde wrote only that having lived by the “republican formula” he had maintained an imperturbable health.¹²⁰ By this late period in the life of the society, however, the fact that so many detailed questions were being posed was much more intriguing than the answers. Despite the total lack of meaningful discoveries over thirty years of operation, the society was still publicly championing the ambitious project that it had set for itself in 1876.

STRANGE ENDINGS

Things rarely turn out as planned. Georges Papillault had proclaimed, “My corpse can be used as is desired—conserve, dissect, hang up my skeleton, place it in a public area, museum, etc. But I refuse any religious ceremony before, during, or after these manipulations.”¹²¹ Georges Montandon, who did the autopsy, however, decided that the skeleton of Papillault was “of limited anatomical interest.”¹²² Clémence Royer was buried intact.¹²³ Her will explicitly forbade the removal of any part of her body, including head or skull, but it also included an express refusal of a deathbed conversion. The nuns who were looking after her in her final illness had been counseled that Royer wanted to die with her freethinking beliefs undisturbed, and friends stood by to protect and console her. Among her last words, Royer murmured, “No conversion, not Catholic.”¹²⁴ As requested, she was buried in a wooden box, lined with sand. Vacher de Lapouge survived his battle with typhoid fever in 1897 and managed to outlive the entire society. He died in 1936, pleased with the “selectionist” revolution taking place in Nazi Germany. Oddly enough, he was given a full Catholic burial. The brain of Laborde, who had often impinged on the time and workspace of his nominal underling, the brilliant Léonce Manouvrier, was tastefully insulted by the latter in the scientific press.¹²⁵ Whatever may have happened to Jeanne Véron, her bold testament and proud yet modest biographical notes (including her instructions for the disposition of her body) remained sealed in the society’s archives until they were opened in my research for this book.

Paul Robin, the freethinking neo-Malthusian who had used his testament as a political platform, revoked his will in 1904. In doing so, he attested that he had joined the society “in the interests of science” and in the “battle against religion.” When he learned that freethinking anthropologist Dr. Papillault had been initiated into the Freemasons (June 1903) and had “married the daughter of his colleague, Dr. Hervé, vice-president of the Ligue des droits de l’homme . . . at the Church of the Trinity!”¹²⁶ it drove Robin from the ranks. Jacques Bertillon took exception to the description of his father’s brain and personal characteristics that was published in the Bulletin de la Société d’anthropologie de Paris. Letourneau had suggested that the late Bertillon’s speech difficulties had verged on aphasia. He later retracted the statement, as “requested by the family,” but the damage was done. Jacques left the Society of Mutual Autopsy soon after.¹²⁷ Perhaps the spectacle of his father’s skeleton hanging in the society’s museum was a disturbing and determining factor. As for Gambetta, the autopsy on his brain significantly added to the corporeal disfigurement of his death. There was not enough left of him to be buried properly in the Pantheon—the French burial shrine for national heroes. That is why, among the full tombs of illustrious compatriots, a simple monument there reads, “Here lies Gambetta’s heart.”

Toward the end of its active existence, the Society of Mutual Autopsy set up what the members referred to as a museum but was, in fact, no more than several glass display cabinets within the Musée d’anthropologie maintained by the Société d’anthropologie.¹²⁸ In this shrine was a bust of Gillet-Vital and a cast of a death mask of Louis-Adolphe Bertillon. There were brains in jars, including those of Coudereau, Asseline, and Bertillon, whose jars were labeled “intellectual”—these were the saints of the scientific cult. Bertillon’s skeleton was there, too, along with a large collection of brain casts and skulls, including those of Gambetta, Bertillon, Coudereau, and Eugène Véron. At this writing, there is a collection of skulls on display in the Muséum d’histoire naturelle de Paris whose only identification is a label that reads “intellectuals.” I suspect it is them.

OUR UNDERSTANDING OF ANTICLERICALISM may suffer from our own complacent reaction to atheism. The intention of this study of the Society of Mutual Autopsy has been to demonstrate the emotional distress experienced by late-nineteenth-century men and women who had made the decision to live without belief in God. Surrounded as they were by believers, these early atheists looked on processions, prayers, priests, and rituals and felt bereft. When the Society of Mutual Autopsy proposed an alternate, secular version of these comforts, they embraced it with zeal. The raving virulence of the anticlerics becomes comprehensible when antireligion is understood as an alternative ritualized belief system—especially one powerful enough to steward lives into death. In the beginning, the founders believed that “the intellectual future of humanity depends entirely on our possession of more or less precise information on the cerebral functions and on the localization of the diverse faculties.”¹²⁹ This conviction may not have been shared completely by all those who joined in the endeavor, but clearly all wanted to believe in something—as opposed to spending their lives ardently not-believing. The something in which they came to believe became, over time, increasingly untenable. The attendant rituals, however, remained useful, and so, for several decades, the society endured.

These anthropologists attacked the very notion of religion and attempted to take over one of its most crucial roles in human life: the rites of death. Anthropology served as a devotional system entrusted to sort out and preserve the “useful” parts of the body and to dispose properly of the rest, the “rotting garbage” that came to represent the Catholic Church. It created textual and material monuments, kept relics, and listened to the confessions of the afflicted. It forced moments of existential contemplation by creating a ritual in which people actually poked around in the brains of men and women who had only lately been their friends, colleagues, and correspondents. In these endeavors and in the society’s general evangelical manner, nominally antireligious behavior was based on religious models. Though political figures of the far left were disproportionately represented in the society, membership was not a status symbol: members did not tend to brag of their involvement. Instead, it was a very personal association built on a complex reaction to modernity: fear of meaninglessness and faith in the human ability to create meaning; a passionate belief that rationality, not passion, is the means to all good ends. The group was not concerned with decadence or degeneration but rather with progress. It spoke of neither power nor despair but rather of “being of use,” and of “living on.” In its vision for the individual members, it was both mundane—offering eternity in the guise of a brief report and a collection of specimens—and wildly exotic, allowing the individual to climb up onto the altar of science, and suggesting that this act might change the world.