The End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Atheism, and Anthropology in France

The Society of Mutual Autopsy was not the only quasi-religious project enacted by the freethinking anthropologists of Paris. There were many, and each can be characterized as a translation of traditionally holy objects, events, ideas, and gestures into a scientific, materialist frame of meaning. The freethinking anthropologists translated not only funerals from the sacred to the profane but also human sexuality and reproduction, city buildings, street names, plots of land, government personnel, ritual feasts, holidays, animal and human remains, and every conceptual aspect of human culture, from aesthetics to marriage laws, from economics to a philosophy of mind. First, a brief survey of the religious and political world of France at the end of the nineteenth century will help situate their mission. Then a very quick tour of the history of anthropology in France will culminate with the strange and surprising manner in which the freethinkers came to anthropology and redesigned it to fit their needs.

By the last three decades of the nineteenth century, it seemed to many that church, dogma, authoritarianism, and social hierarchy were locked in a permanent battle against science, equality, republicanism, and progress. People felt that the battle was at least as old as the Revolution, but it was more complicated than that. In the revolutions of 1789 and 1848 the Catholic Church was seen as allied to the monarchy, but some clerics had also joined the rebels in both these uprisings and, in memorable and dramatic ways, had helped to dismantle ancient privilege. Catholicism has within it the conservative energies of the established church but also the emancipatory and egalitarian energies of the righteous preacher or prophet, and both these Christian responses to authority were in evidence in the great republican revolutions. Still, it is safe to say that the French Revolution began the separation of church and state: in 1792 the Legislative Assembly pointedly set itself up as a “civil” body and that same year authorized civil marriages, well in advance of most European countries. ¹ Even if the church had fully allied itself with republicanism early on and stuck with it, a process of state laicization would have been on the agenda, in defense of the principle of religious freedom for other faiths of the republic. The issue, however, might have stopped there.² In any case, the church did not consistently ally itself to the republic. In the Restoration, it was offered a position of prestige and control and took it, and again under the Second Empire the church emerged as a very privileged and socially conservative body, disdainful of the pleasures and pursuits of the common people and the bourgeois alike and cursing the revolutions. Bishops and priests railed against modernity, change, progress, and science, preached of hell and damnation, and, perhaps to satisfy their core audience of arch believers, they often refused communion to “former sinners.”³ When anticlerics listed their complaints against the church, it was common enough to find a refusal of this sort in the litany. Maurice Agulhon’s The Republic in the Village tells of the detailed civil ceremony that was arranged by the town council for anyone of the village to whom the church denied a religious burial: there were floral crowns and busts of Marianne, and one sung “The Marseillaise,” genuflecting at the last two lines.⁴

Napoleon III gave the church leave to expand its educational system enormously, and in this and other arenas the clergy used its power to silence and persecute its enemies. Though its place was secure, the church condemned modern society and held up the world of the Middle Ages as an ideal. The clergy responded to ideals of pluralism and secularism by growing defensive and panicky, trying to repress change rather than find a place within the changing world; in these years, clerical power seemed smirking and cruel to secular republicans, but there was also fear in it. At the same time, the republicans’ other grievances were many: everything from having been humiliated or beaten by Jesuit teachers, to being taught myth instead of science because one was female, to watching the clergy grow fat in pomp and circumstance while one’s family scrimped and saved, to being censored in public speech and in the press, to cursing users of contraception at a moment when the modern trend toward smaller families had clearly begun. These resentments mingled with a political objection to the large and privileged role the church had in government and education, such that many who were not really irreligious became fiercely anticlerical. The church took up the battle and for the most part, rather than seeking to address the religious needs of the nation, came to behave as a scolding political force, casting scorn on its enemies, cultivating ignorance of modern concerns, and demanding a great deal from the remaining faithful.

By the end of Napoleon III’s tenure, the sense that democracy and religion were deeply and inherently opposed to one another was well established and violently emotional. Now and again, under the Empire, there were individual attempts to form a leftist movement based on the revolutionary spirit of faith, and sometimes these drew a burst of support, but they never lasted long; there was just too much anger between church and republicans. Then, in the early Third Republic, the Catholic bishops and priests openly allied themselves with the legitimist party, who hoped to overthrow the republic and reinstate the monarchy. Meanwhile these clergymen actively and effectively participated in the parliamentary elections. Republicans were shocked to see the church willing to use all the democratic tools available in the new government—for the purpose of dismantling it. And once again, it seemed that though they had a good deal of control, the clergy’s strength did not calm them. Proudhon complained of the “tyranny of the priests” whose “avowed plan is to kill science, to snuff out all liberty and all enlightenment. Their anger increases in proportion to their power.”⁵ The clergy also tried to get the young republic to risk its life defending the pope against the forces of unification in Italy. This seemed wrong to republicans for a host of reasons, but perhaps the most important consequence was that it made the church seem hawkish in French government, and the association stuck.

The intellectual side of the struggle over religion and irreligion in French society may be the best known. Throughout the nineteenth century, philosophers and literary authors wrestled with the question, and many came down against religion in favor of science and rationalism; Auguste Comte, Hippolyte Taine, and Ernest Renan were among the most significant. Because science was so successful in so many ways in the nineteenth century, it can appear that its rise was indeed a large impetus toward the fervid rejection of religion. Yet serious scholars of anticlericalism have stressed that the attitude was fundamentally political: its proponents wanted clergy out of the government and out of the schools because the church had repeatedly proven that it was against the republic and its ideals. As Owen Chadwick wrote in his classic The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century, “This onslaught upon Christianity owed its force . . . not at all to the science of the nineteenth century. Its basis was ethical; its instrument the ethical criticisms of the eighteenth century. It attacked Christian Churches not in the name of knowledge but in the name of justice and freedom.”⁶ The present study is one of the histories of this drama—though it is precisely interested in the relationship between “the onslaught upon Christianity” and “the science of the nineteenth century.” It agrees that the latter did not cause the former but asks what their relationship was and argues that in some ways it was science that owed its energies to anticlericalism and atheism. Science was desperately embraced by people who had already lost their faith in religion. For many French men and women, political and moral grievances served to vilify the Catholic—and eventually the theistic—cosmology long before they had access to a persuasive alternative conceptual universe.

Again and again, throughout the period, there are conversion stories wherein atheist, republican men and women “find” science and then vehemently adopt its explanations. Theodore Zeldin, too, has written that the gist of the matter was political, not scientific. “There was . . . certainly more positive disbelief of religion in France than in either the USA or Britain. Why should the French, who saw less of the wonders of science than the Americans or the British, have been more convinced that science had disproved religions? Perhaps for that very reason, but perhaps also they were not convinced by science as might be supposed.”⁷ Some were shaken in the specifics of their faith because of scientific discoveries, but mostly science was the adopted doctrine of people who were already at odds with Christianity. Zeldin continues, “What was perhaps peculiar to France was that there was a whole combination of grievances against the Church, and therefore much more radical argument. The cause of science was eagerly seized on, as a result, by the enemies of Christianity.” Though stressing political, economic, and social reasons for irreligion, Zeldin also attests to the fact that many of the French men and women who left the Church in the nineteenth-century were “profoundly interested by religion, tormented by uncertainty, and sometimes heretics more than unbelievers”(1029). How that interest was manifested, and how that torment was handled, is a more problematic question. The constant and vociferous denial of religion is itself a profound interest in religion, and torment may not be due to uncertainty but to the consequences of an atheism that is itself quite certain. Though such extremists often denied interest in religion, they could not take their minds off the matter and fiercely wrestled with just those questions that had always fascinated the religious.

The political origin of anticlerical wrath is true for the freethinking anthropologists, too, and for their peers, but it is not the whole truth. Many people felt that in their youth the church had misled them about the real nature of the world and the real basis of morality, and now they knew better and were angry. Again, historians of anticlericalism have worked to describe the political, social, and economic sources of anticlericalism in order to correct the wrong impression one is prone to get at first glance: that powerful intellectual writers and scientists secularized the population and made it militant. But, in asides, these historians have also noted that within this broader world of anticlericalism, some people were very much animated by ideas and by real philosophical problems about existence. To continue with Zeldin’s comment that some early freethinkers were profoundly interested in religion: “The attitude of such men differed from that of the simply cynical, or of the wits who poured scorn on religion in what they believed to be the tradition of Voltaire, or of M. Homais, the village pharmacist, who had no doubts at all and derived considerable satisfaction from his position as the local philosopher. The party of Voltaire, when it comes to be analyzed, will be seen to have infinite variations in it” (1029).

M. Homais, the priest-baiting pharmacist of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, is famous for having thought he had all the answers, and we can learn something from attending to what he actually said. Homais’s most direct attestation of his anticlericalism was this: “I do have a religion, my religion, and I have rather more than that lot with their jiggery-pokery. I’m the one who worships God! I believe in the Supreme Being, in a Creator, whoever he may be, I care not who has put us on this earth to do our duty as citizens and fathers; but I don’t need to go into a church and kiss a lot of silver plate, paying out for a bunch of clowns who eat better than we do!” There were many who were both anticlerical and irreligious yet not really atheist; the ‘party of Voltaire” was witty or cynical about church and dogma but believed in a God of some sort and did not believe that jettisoning the church would require a profound overhaul in how human beings saw themselves or the universe. This book studies the experience of those who felt that a profound overhaul in how we saw ourselves was necessary. A bit more from Flaubert’s M. Homais shows that even he only barely fits his own category of dispassionate cynic:

“You honor him just as well in the woods, in a field, or even contemplating the ethereal vault, like the ancients. My God is the God of Socrates, of Franklin, Voltaire and Béranger! I’m one for the creed of the Savoyard Curaet and the immortal principles of ’89! I cannot, therefore, abide an old fogey of a God who walks round his garden with a stick in his hand, lodges his friends in the bellies of whales, dies with a loud cry and comes back to life three days later: things absurd in themselves and completely opposed, what is more, to every law of physics; it all shows, incidentally, that the priests have always wallowed in squalid ignorance, doing their utmost to engulf the population along with them.”

He paused, looking around him for an audience, for, in his effervescence, the pharmacist had briefly fancied himself at a full meeting of the municipal council. But the landlady had stopped listening to him; her ear was straining after a distant rumbling.⁸

There were others—the freethinking anthropologists, for instance—who cared very much about the question of “who has put us on the earth” and what it was all for and who were interested in replacing religion in a much more vigorous fashion. Yet even M. Homais was emotional about the intellectual problems of religions and truth. It is also of some significance, as I shall explore below, that the village woman to whom he was speaking so casually allowed her attention to wander back to the physical world.

The scientism of the important figures of the highest rungs of the intellectual world flourished a few decades in advance of popular agreement with that viewpoint. Auguste Comte had systematized a philosophical position called “positivism” that celebrated dogmatic faith in science, inevitable progress, and the rejection of all unempirical knowledge. Long before there was a stable republic, Comtian positivism was widely touted as the worldview of republicanism. But eventually Comte tried to fashion a religion of his own, believing that human beings have spiritual needs that must be met; he thought Catholicism did a good job but was annoyed at the mythic aspect. There is also the case of Ernest Renan, who wrote The Future of Science in 1848, claiming that science must be the source of all truth, but did not publish it until 1890, by which point he was not so sure. His readers were ready for the midcentury message; they missed the caution in his late-century introduction to the book. But, with clearly dampened expectations, Renan’s 1890 introduction still tells us something about the intellectual facet of irreligion: “Science saves us from errors more than it gives us the truth, but it is already something not to be a dupe.”⁹ Politics and social progress were both important, but so were science and ideas. Part of irreligion in France was about not being a dupe. Renan also wrote the profoundly influential Life of Jesus, a secular history of the origins of Christianity and the first of its kind. It was written in an accessible, novelistic prose and was widely read and debated. To get a hint of the secular tone here: Renan’s translator tells us in a preface to the book, “A young French lady put down the Vie de Jesus with the remark: ‘What a pity it does not end with a marriage!’”¹⁰ The book was answered by Dupanloup, bishop of Orleans—the same who scolded Louis-Adolphe Bertillon for the secular nature of Zoé Bertillon’s funeral—but Dupanloup’s Life of Jesus was a rehash of traditional quotations exhorting Christians to patience and resignation.¹¹ It had little impact. Still, even here we are not far from the political: Bishop Dupanloup was a senator under Napoleon III and a deputy in the early Third Republic.

Amid these intellectual revsions, there was a drift away from the church by ordinary people, the result of many factors of modernity, not least the rise of capitalism, the new variety in entertainment and leisure, and the increasing mobility of the population. Even before the French Revolution there had been a falling off of church attendance. By the second half of the nineteenth century it was still true that the vast majority of French citizens were baptized, and most seem to have believed in some kind of God and some kind of afterlife, but that was where agreement stopped.¹² In the 1860s through the 1890s there was a general dechristianization; baptism fell off a bit, and civil marriages and burials became more common. There were regions of France where religious practice was piously enacted, but for most of the country the mood was often indifference, sometimes hostility. The Paris Basin was particularly lax—urban workers, in general, tended to be hostile to the church—and there is much evidence that churches in rural France were increasingly ill attended in these years. John McManners has explained that official statistics of the 1870s record 35,000,000 people as Catholics and only 600,000 Protestants, 80,000 freethinkers, and 50,000 Jews; but, “convenient as these figure were for apologists, they had little significance. Many of the 35,000,000 accepted no obligation beyond making their Easter communion, many merely attended mass occasionally, or came to church to be married or were brought there to be buried. . . . The church’s influence was exercised over only a minority of citizens in some areas with the good will of the rest, in others (as, for example the Aube, the Corrèze, and part of the Creuse) there was a preponderance of anticlericals and unbelievers.”¹³ Much of France was never more than nominally converted to Catholicism, subscribing instead to the local flowering of superstition, astrology, and folktales and merely mouthing the words commanded by the priests.¹⁴ Jacques Gadille has shown that some French anticlericalism was generated by Christian believers who did not agree with the church’s interpretation of the religion.¹⁵

At the beginning of the new century several groups had considerable success championing the idea of Christianity as the spirit of equality, rebellious social justice, and generosity—Marc Sangnier’s Sillon movement stands out—but these experiments in Christian democracy did not hold up long against the continued sense on the left that religion was anathema to justice, and on the right that religion ought to support established authority. The bourgeoisie were inclined to be indifferent or hostile toward the church in favor of Enlightenment suspicion and the rationalism of modernity. Many were also disappointed with Pope Pius IX’s “Syllabus of Errors,” which specifically condemned “progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.” In fact, active anticlericalism, as opposed to mere lack of interest in the church, was so firmly associated with the middle class that some socialists argued that anticlericalism was being offered as a new opiate for the people; the real enemies were not those in robes and collars but those in furs and jewels.¹⁶ More often, like M. Homais’s landlady, workers simply did not see their interests represented in this conversation, and they did not attend to it.

Overall, religiosity was becoming increasingly feminine, because girls were generally given a much more religious and less scientific education than were their brothers. There is ample evidence that women did resent the church’s positions on such issues as birth control and abortion, and republican women often expressed disdain for the pretense of priestly authority, but the generalization still holds. Indeed, the common understanding of why, in this cradle of democracy, women did not obtain the vote until the end of World War II, is that republican men and women feared that the great bulk of Frenchwomen were Catholic monarchists and would vote the republic out of existence if given the chance. The relationship can be overstated, for churchgoing declined across the genders. Still, the effect of convent schools for girls and lay schools for boys was that denunciations of French priests almost always mentioned their destruction of family peace; among other things, priests counseled wives to insist that sex be a matter confined to efforts of procreation. In 1845 Jules Michelet wrote of confessors “seducing” wives, “flagellating” them with “spiritual rods,” and insisting that they confess details of their private experiences that they would never think of telling their husbands.¹⁷ It is understandable that Michelet might be jealous: the popularity the church had with women in this period has been understood, at least in part, as an effort by women to liberate themselves from the tyranny of their husbands.¹⁸

It must also be added that throughout the second half of the century, in a kind of answer to the thinning congregations, a significant miracle cult grew up around the Virgin Mary and the saints. This miracle cult was even more pronouncedly a women’s movement. The central gesture of the cult was making pilgrimage to miracle-producing shrines (the new railways made a trip to Lourdes, Paray-le-Monial, or La Salette inexpensive enough for most). Here, not only the authority of the husband was ignored, but neither were the authority of the priest nor the masculine image of God given much attention. Between 1871 and 1876, more than 50,000 people visited Lourdes to honor and petition the Virgin Mary.¹⁹ The reactionary stance of the church seems to have sent a great many people running from its rooms and from its clergy—even its most ardent believers and even those most dependent on the church as a social organization. To the skeptic, it seemed as if the newly secular society was bubbling with myriad new forms of superstition. In Owen Chadwick’s words, the shrine pilgrims “were warm, cheerful, expectant of miracle, emotional, brash; and they could be offensive to reasonable or un-Catholic passers-by” (124). Emile Zola visited Lourdes in 1892 and described it as a distasteful spectacle of humanity “hankering after the lie.”²⁰

As for the “un-Catholic,” the substantial Protestant minority in France was made up of a religiously conservative majority, accompanied by an outspoken intellectual elite that saw itself as liberal, modern, and free of religious dogma. This elite had considerable influence on the secularizing campaign of the early Third Republic, particularly for Ferry’s secularization of primary education. Ferry himself was raised Catholic by his devout elder sister (she was physically handicapped and was carried to mass every morning), but as John McManners has put it, “the males of the family were Voltairean free-thinkers.”²¹ He married into the Protestant world, and when he called for a revision of French education, of the ten in his cabinet, there were five Protestants. For these men the aim was to replace religion with devotion to science, progress, and country, but many Catholics and Protestants alike thought that Protestantism might be the answer for France, since it represented religion without such a historically problematic clergy. The smaller Jewish minority tended to be attached to the secular republic in a tradition of sympathy with the Revolution, through which they had been emancipated and granted citizenship. Through all these vicissitudes and variations in religion, class, and gender, the conviction persisted that religion and the political right were of a piece, opposed energetically by secularism and the political left. The history this book engages begins on the far left of that deep antagonism.

There existed in France, in the 1860s and 1870s, a population of materialist atheists who had lost their faith as part of a struggle against the authoritarianism with which that faith had been associated. Positivism was a well-entrenched ideology of republicanism in this period, but by the late 1860s a formidable rival doctrine, materialism, was gaining currency. Its differences from positivism were subtle but important. Positivism, in shunning all that was impossible to prove by empirical science, distanced itself from speculation on anything that was considered unknowable, such as the origins of life or the existence of God. In fact, as long as you kept it to yourself, you could believe in God and still be a good positivist. Materialists took secularism a step further and insisted that anything that smacked of the mystical or metaphysical simply was not true. So for materialists, even more than for positivists, the crucial criterion for so-called scientific work was the absence of supernatural causes. In this way, a lack of more meaningful criteria, such as experimental repeatability, empirical evidence, or even consistent methodology was sometimes ignored, so long as God was not invoked as a causal agent. There were, of course, excellent materialist scientists, but unlike positivists, late-nineteenth-century materialists had a strong motivation to fill in the gaps in human knowledge in order to lock out philosophy and religion—even when little evidence was at hand. Positivists and materialists both embraced evolutionary theory in the decades after Darwin published, but having an answer to the question of creation was particularly significant to materialists. They also tended to be much more hostile to philosophy than were positivists. They did find philosophy somewhat less insidious than religion, because it was not seen as wedded to either authoritarianism or dogmatic principles. Nevertheless, philosophy was attacked as fundamentally erroneous because it was concerned with questions that could not be experimentally adjudicated; philosophy was seen as opening a path for spiritualism. If we think of M. Homais, it is clear that the freethinking anthropologists’ vision of themselves was not the dull pharmacist, offering platitudes and palliatives, but the impassioned, investigative scientist, with a scalpel in one hand and a ruler in the other. By contrast, in comparison to any scientists who were not primarily motivated by hatred for the church, the scalpels and the rulers wielded by the freethinking anthropologists were remarkably unproductive. As Comte was the heroic figure behind positivism, the materialists lionized the philosophe Denis Diderot, one of the few Enlightenment figures to take the step past deism and present an atheistic picture of the world. The materialists also made great use of Diderot’s irreverent, quippish style, mocking the church and reveling in the freedom and pride of unbelief. Note that they did not choose a great scientist, but a great jester.

The freethinking anthropologists defined themselves through a loss of faith but experienced atheism as a tumultuous intellectual and cultural crisis, and they embraced anthropology as a response to it. The key figures of this original group would live to see the secularization measures of the 1880s but not the law of the Separation of Church and State of 1905. Secular, mandatory elementary schools were established in 1882; in 1884 the public prayers that began each parliamentary session were deemed inappropriate and abolished by the republican majority. The laicization of teachers in 1886 came down against any state-school teacher even teaching a single course in a religious school, let alone belonging to a religious order. Anticlerical passion died down for some at this point, but there were still fierce defenders of a more assuredly secular state. In 1904 a law actually banned any member of a religious order from teaching—a move that marked the beginning of sanctioned discrimination against the body that had previously discriminated against all others. In 1905 the final break was made: the republic would no longer recognize, subsidize, or pay ministers’ salaries for any religion at all. As René Rémond has written, “Without consulting the Holy See, France unilaterally annulled the treaty laboriously drawn up a century earlier between the papacy and the regime that had emerged from the Revolution.”²² Their students would carry their materialist concerns, in a modified fashion, into the next century. But anticlericalism was essentially over in 1905. By then, artists, writers, philosophers, and other social theorists had begun to reimagine a place for the spirit, mysticism, and ritual in non-Catholic and even secular lives, and the church was beginning to find ways to reconcile itself to modernity and to offer a version of Catholicism that could have a less conflicted appeal.

One more thing needs to be said about the mood of the times in the early Third Republic. In the two decades of the Second Empire, the considerable section of the French populace that was secular and republican harbored a notion of the republic that was mystical: the famous republican mystique. Contemplation of this mystical republic served spiritual and emotional needs. When the Second Empire ended, with the Franco-Prussian War, and the Third Republic began, republicans were delighted. The situation, however, was not the stuff of long-awaited republican dreams: the new democracy was in the power of various types of conservatives, monarchists, and Bonapartists who merely believed that a republic would “divide [them] the least.” For years, representatives of these forces vied with republicans for dominance in France, and there were moments when a return to monarchy or empire seemed imminent. Thus, though the Third Republic was proclaimed by Léon Gambetta in 1870 and established in 1871, it was not clearly in the hands of republicans for about a decade: the “republic of dukes” gave way with the abdication of its monarchist president Marshal MacMahon in 1879, ceding the terrain to the “republic of republicans.”

The two great republican leaders of this period, Léon Gambetta and Jules Ferry, were both secular and scientistic. Gambetta was much more charismatic, much more the bearer of the republican mystique, but when he won power in 1881 he tried to effect change in sweeping gestures and clashed with coalitions on both the left and the right. He was out of power in sixty-seven days, and he never got another chance: within the year his appendix burst, and he was dead at forty-four. His death shocked even his enemies and shook the nation: the funeral procession “wound through Paris like a mourner’s sash.”²³ For many, this was the end of the heroic age of the republic, but the group of politically like-minded men who had gathered around Gambetta and joined his brief government remained together and helped shape the nation in the coming decades. Gambetta’s brain continued to serve his scientistic France, but now as an artifact—material evidence of republican convictions.

Ferry took over in 1883. His was a duller personality, but his prudence helped him stay in power long enough to pass a host of republican legislation. Under his leadership, the French educational system, especially at the elementary level, was drastically overhauled to reflect the secular values of the republicans: students were going to forget class differences and old prejudices as they were inculcated with a “lay faith” in science and country.²⁴ As Ferry described it in the Revue pédagogique, laicization was, “the greatest and most serious of social reforms and the most lasting of political reforms. . . . When the whole of French youth has developed, grown up under this triple aegis of free, compulsory, secular education, we shall have nothing more to fear from returns to the past, for we shall have the means of defending ourselves . . . the spirit of all these new generations, of these countless young reserves of republican democracy, trained in the school of science and reason, who will block retrograde attitudes with the insurmountable obstacle of free minds and liberated consciences.”²⁵ Teaching French youth science and reason was thus explicitly understood as a republican “means of defending ourselves” through the creation of “countless young reserves” of democracy. René Rémond has written of this in the religious and military terms it deserves: asserting that the “great army” of primary school teachers would henceforth oppose the cleric of even the smallest mountain village, as an “apostle of the new religion, an officiate of the cult of reason and science,” in short, “a militant of the anticlerical ideology.”²⁶ As French republics had done in the past, the government also created civic festivals to support the new mood of science and reason, and these were enthusiastically celebrated in Paris and all over the nation. It had been illegal to sing the Marseillaise under the empire; the ban was lifted in 1870, and in 1879 the song became the national anthem. Later that year, Bastille Day was officially recognized as a national holiday.

The victory of the “republic of republicans” seemed to be the triumphant end of a long, exhausting, and heroic struggle. In a way, this was true. The Third Republic lasted until the end of the Second World War, and even then it was replaced by reconceived republics, not monarchies or empires. Yet in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, just as republicanism became mainstream in France, it was assailed from both the left and the right. This was not simply a product of republicanism’s new vulnerability as the status quo. Rather, specific and sometimes viable rivals assaulted the young republic, from the heroic nationalism of the Boulangist movement of the late 1880s, to the significant electoral gains of socialists in 1893, to the burst of anarchist violence in the mid-1890s. All these movements essentially agreed with the ideals professed by the republic, arguing only that the republic was not serving these ideals. There were also strong forces of antiparliamentarism and antifunctionarism among republicans by the turn of the century. A powerful resentment of the administrative and legislative bureaucracy of the republic existed among the working classes, the middle classes, and the academic intelligentsia. Furthermore, the regime seemed unstable and indecisive because of an almost constant shifting of ministries, despite the relative coherence of policy and of government personnel in general. As Jean-Marie Mayeur has written, “Because the regime did, in fact, last, we are liable to underestimate the discontent caused by the ‘ministry waltz’ and the consequent fears for the future of a regime that seemed, only a few years after its inception, so fragile.”²⁷ Because of the proliferation of functionaries, the republic’s image of instability was awkwardly accompanied by an image of the regime as bureaucratic and uninspired.²⁸ Political theorists struggled with the meaning of running a quixotic democracy wherein elected officials took brief turns overseeing a huge and relatively stable administrative machine.

To make matters worse for secular republicans, in the 1890s some cultural representatives of the Third Republic began making peace with Catholic ex-monarchists. This was partially a result of growing conservatism and the waning fear of the Catholic Church as a support for monarchist forces, and it was reinforced by Pope Leo XIII’s ralliement—a call for Catholic support of the Third Republic. In many cases French republicans were turning to an accord with Catholicism in the 1890s. Thus, for those dedicated to a republican mystique of perfect democracy and strict materialist anticlericalism, the period of the 1880s and 1890s was full of triumphs (the republic was consolidated; free, lay primary schools were established), but these were attended by distrust, fear, and even despair.

The relationship between anthropology and politics has long been recognized in modern scholarship: Nancy Stepan’s study The Idea of Race in Science offered an early and important history of scientific inequality, and her seminal article “Race and Gender: The Role of Analogy in Science” helped to set the terms of the discussion of the relationship between scientific racism and scientific sexism.²⁹ Pierre-André Taguieff and George Mosse have illuminated the relationship between racism and nationalism.³⁰ George Stocking’s many works on the history of anthropology have explored the scientific and political battles of the discipline over the past three centuries, especially in Great Britain and the United States.³¹ Works on the history of anthropology in France have endeavored to show the conservative subtexts of many scientific theories and have thus concentrated on the Broca period and the prejudicial assumptions inherent in his work. Steven J. Gould’s Mismeasure of Man, Cynthia Eagle Russett’s Sexual Science, Robert Nye’s Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France, and Susanna Barrows’s Distorting Mirrors have all centered on demonstrating the ways in which biological determinism has been used to reinforce cultural hierarchies and group stereotypes.³² Their concentration on the Broca period, however, has led to two difficulties: a slightly skewed understanding of Broca and a relative lack of knowledge about the fascinating period that followed his death. As I have said, some studies of the post-Broca period do exist: in French, Claude Blanckaert has written many articles on the subject, and Nélia Dias’s book on ethnography in the period also includes much about the late-century anthropologists; in English, two dissertations, one by Joy Harvey and one by Elizabeth Williams, are the major reports on the period. And the political nature of anthropology in this period in France was already the subject of inquiry in one of the earliest studies of the subject, Michael Hammond’s insightful article “Anthropology as a Weapon of Social Combat in Late-Nineteenth-Century France.” Specific investigations of the scientific debates in anthropology (particularly monogenism and polygenism) and their political components are to be found in the works of these five scholars.³³ My own dissertation considered the late-century anthropologists of Paris in terms of their utopianism and their atheist and anticlerical campaigns.³⁴ Most general histories of the period mention these anthropologists very briefly or not at all, though Philip Nord’s recent The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France includes four pages on “the human sciences” discussing Broca, Mortillet, Letourneau, Bertillon, Hovelacque, and Lefèvre, their republican convictions, and their materialist anthropology.³⁵

The Broca period is better known partly because of a late-twentieth-century interest in the conservative messages of science. In this context, it is interesting to note that the peculiar truth status accorded to science, and specifically to biological determinism, has been used to justify and naturalize progressivist egalitarian principles as well as conservative ones. Were scientists who held racist and sexist beliefs more likely to forgo the tenets of “good” science than scientists dedicated to egalitarian politics? The relationship has gone largely unquestioned, in part because of the common assumption that the revelation of empirical truth would support present-day notions of equality. It follows from this assumption that there would be no reason for egalitarian scientists to manipulate their theories or data in order to have their results accord with their politics. But this is belied by two notions: First, the human sciences are always a human art based on the ideas of the moment and the ideology of those who articulate them.³⁶ Second, when egalitarian scientists inherited a scientific theory and methodology with conservative implications, they did not always jettison the entire system but rather chose to twist and turn it so that its results accorded with their convictions. One should thus assume that there have been scientists whose relatively egalitarian political beliefs led them to formulate particular theories or, indeed, to manipulate data in ways as real (and sometimes as flagrantly self-serving) as those performed by politically conservative scientists. Of course, not all egalitarian science was consciously informed by political imperatives. Nevertheless, ideology does inform science on both ends of the political spectrum.

Before founding the Société d’anthropologie de Paris, Paul Broca was a physician with a special interest in neurology.³⁷ His innovations in brain surgery, such as using trepanation to treat abscesses of the brain, won him considerable prestige at a young age. In 1861 he demonstrated through human postmortems that the left, third frontal circumvolution of the brain controlled speech functions. As I have noted, this was the first clear confirmation of a relationship between specific areas of the brain and specific abilities, and it revolutionized the way many people thought about the brain. The discovery, and the assumptions that had led to it in the first place, gave birth to a whole range of suppositions concerning the relationship between brain morphology and human faculties, characteristics, and intelligence. Broca’s work pushed the boundaries of accepted medical practice. His relationship to authority was rebellious in other ways as well. In 1848, while still in medical school, he and his fellow students formed one of the first freethinkers’ societies. As Broca reported in an enthusiastic letter to his parents, “about a hundred people joined right away.”³⁸ This society does not seem to have lasted very long, but it does demonstrate the young man’s mindset. Furthermore, Broca was, under the authoritarian eyes of the Second Empire, an avid republican. He made explicit claims to scientific objectivity, so his political beliefs were not supposed to have anything to do with his scientific thinking. In an odd way, however, this republican objectivity was self-conflicting, because the powerful connection between scientific positivism and republicanism made Broca’s desire to keep science “pure” a republican act. But Broca was also being careful. There had been several false starts for French anthropology. All of them had distinct political leanings, and most had fallen prey to political censorship.

Anthropological societies in France had had their start in the Société des observateurs de l’homme, an anticlerical and politically left-wing association that was born in the French Revolution and died when Napoleon became emperor. The success of specific scientific theories also followed political fortunes: Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s progress-oriented, egalitarian vision of transformism brought him favor during the First Republic; under Napoleon and the Restoration, Georges Cuvier’s belief in the fixity of species and the fixity of the social strata reigned. Elizabeth Williams’s study of the French medical and anthropological “science of man” well demonstrates the deeply ideological content of the field in the century from 1750 to 1850.³⁹ After 1851 anthropology’s left-wing politics were attacked under the fledgling Second Empire when discussions on the origins of humankind, held in the Société d’ethnographie, were deemed politically dangerous, and the society was suppressed. Many of its members then joined the Société de biologie, this time studiously avoiding politically questionable topics.⁴⁰ Indeed, the president of this society, Pierre Rayer, had been a member of the now-defunct Société d’ethnographie and was particularly concerned when the young Paul Broca began a presentation on animal hybridity. Rayer stopped Broca midspeech and requested the withdrawal of the paper.⁴¹ Broca was probably not as surprised as his consequent indignation implied. Through his discussion of hybridity, he was clearly supporting polygenism—the idea that the human race had multiple origins (multiple “Adam and Eve” pairs)—a doctrine that ran counter to the Second Empire’s fervent Catholicism but seemed to many to be the only reasonable explanation for the variety of racial types.⁴² Broca was committed to rational explanation and the questioning of biblical truth and frustrated with the limitations of the Société de biologie. He founded the Société d’anthropologie de Paris on the night his presentation was cut short.

Broca’s new society was thus controversial and defiant from its inception. The conservative Second Empire did not give it official sanction for a full year, during which time it kept its membership to nineteen because there were no laws preventing associations of less than twenty people. The cause was probably not aided by the fact that sixteen of the members were connected to the Paris Faculty of Medicine, for as prestigious as that institution was, it was well known for its materialist and even atheist philosophy.⁴³ In any case, some of the original nineteen members were independently known for their materialism and free thought, such as Broca’s close friend, the doctor and demographer Louis-Adolphe Bertillon. Even after the government gave in and allowed the Société d’anthropologie to expand its membership, the empire ordained that a police officer be present at every meeting to ensure that nothing political was discussed.⁴⁴ In 1864 the society was declared to be “of public utility,” and the police surveillance was removed, but even before this there were subtle political implications to almost all the anthropological questions the group addressed.

Over the years, Broca led his society in supporting a number of scientific positions that had distinctly left-wing or anticlerical political implications. His belief in polygenism was one example. Another was his countering of the claims, most energetically made by Count Arthur de Gobineau, that any mixing of human racial groups would lead to degeneration. Gobineau’s stance was particularly antiegalitarian because his theory implied that social classes were actually distinct biological races. Broca argued that some racial “hybridization” could result in strong mixes, which suggested less biological difference between the classes at home and also served to temper fears of miscegenation in the colonies. People had worried that French men and women who entered into unions with colonial peoples would unleash a great destructive force on their own race; Broca argued that mixes could result in strong offspring who had tendencies toward the higher portion of their pedigree. The idea served to support the republican government’s new imperialism by dissipating one of the anxieties that had accompanied it.

Broca also argued that human beings became less religious as they became more educated, stating that in most cases religiosity was “nothing more than a type of submission to authority.”⁴⁵ In 1868 the French senate expressed extreme concern over the “atheism and materialism” being taught at the Paris Faculty of Medicine, and Paul Broca was singled out as one of the worst offenders.⁴⁶ Not only were there accusations of atheism and materialism and verbal hostility to church authority, but Broca actually pitched a fight over the issue that came to be known as the Broca Affair. He came from a Protestant family, and though we do not know much about them, we know that he was acceding to their wishes when he went looking for a Protestant wife. As one biographer tells it, “They would not let him marry a Catholic girl and pious Protestants would not give him their daughters on account of his undisguised lack of religious fervor.” He found a match with Augustine Lugol, a Protestant young woman with a scientist father (the inventor of the iodine treatment still known, and sold, as Lugol’s Solution).⁴⁷ That obedient Broca may have been, but in the 1860s he protested the fact that you had to come to the church in order to register as a voter on the Presbyterian Church’s electoral list. The church council required attendance. The church council wanted both to draw in people who otherwise would have stayed away and simply to lower the number of liberal voters. Broca wrote a pamphlet of over six thousand words as an open letter to the minister of justice and religious affairs, accusing his church council of intentional deceit and calling for registration by mail.⁴⁸

Broca was not the first to rally around the idea of Darwinian evolution, but he welcomed discussion on the subject and accepted it long before most of his French colleagues.⁴⁹ As early as the 1860s, he was certain that the variety of life on earth was to be explained by evolution, though he was not sure Darwin’s particular understanding of the process would win the day.⁵⁰ Reiterating the theme of Thomas Huxley’s famous speech at Oxford, Broca added the French emphasis on exchanging scientific visions of progress for religious visions of decline: “I would much rather be a perfected ape than a degraded Adam. Yes, if it is shown to me that my humble ancestors were quadrupedal animals . . . far from blushing in shame for my species because of its genealogy and parentage, I will be proud of all that evolution has accomplished, of the continuous improvement that takes us up to the highest order, of the successive triumphs that have made us superior to all the other species.” Broca lauded “the splendid work of progress” and made it clear that without much faith in Darwin’s natural selection, one could still come to a position that equally rejected the traditional model of species as created and fixed. Wrote Broca, “I will conclude in saying that the fixity of the species is almost impossible, it contradicts the pattern of succession and the distribution of species in the sequence of extant and extinct creatures. It is therefore extremely likely that species are variable and are subject to evolution. But the causes, the mechanisms of this evolution are still unknown.”⁵¹ This was radical in France at the time.

Also, despite his conviction that women were slightly less intelligent than men, he considered this to be a result of inherited effects of cultural inequality and believed that improved education could do much to redress the discrepancy. When Darwin’s first French translator, Clémence Royer, lamented that women were not allowed to join the Société d’anthropologie, Broca replied that he knew of no reason for such an exclusion and welcomed her to join. This was, by any standard, an extremely bold gesture, for women were largely barred from learned societies—even when she wanted to join the Freemasons, Royer had to find an “independent” Masonic lodge not directly affiliated with the Grand Orient, as did the well-known feminist Maria Deraismes.⁵² But Royer was a bold addition to the Société d’anthropologie for more reasons than gender: this particular woman had written one of the most radical and controversial anthropological texts that had ever been penned in France and would become one of the creators of freethinking anthropology. One more fact will add to an understanding of Broca’s worldview: among the active members of the women’s committee of the Paris Ligue de l’enseignement we find Madame Paul Broca—his wife, Augustine, was a modern woman engaged in republican campaigns (106).

While Royer was an extreme case, the inclusive nature of Broca’s society extended beyond any individual person or position: the Société d’anthropologie allowed antiestablishment scientists, along with not-yet-established scientists, to gather and debate in a relatively free environment. While the society’s welcoming attitude toward new ideas was always more explicitly extended to the left, during the Broca years conservatives were also welcome. So while the most celebrated living positivists, Emile Littré and Ernest Renan, joined the society in the early 1860s, adding to the society’s already explicitly positivist stance, other scholars were invited despite their opposition to several of Broca’s more unorthodox positions. Armand de Quatrefages, Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and Henri Milne-Edwards, three of the most illustrious French naturalists, all of whom held chairs at the Museum of Natural History and all of whom were strict monogenists, were invited to join the society as honorary members. Quatrefages remained active in the society over the coming years. He held the chair in anthropology (renamed for him) at the museum, which was the only establishment position devoted to anthropology, and came to represent the rearguard voice of the society.⁵³ The regular debates of the society were published with great detail in its two journals, the Bulletin de la Société d’anthropologie and the Mémoires de la Société d’anthropologie and involved the general public through annual anthropological essay competitions with significant monetary prizes.⁵⁴ Until the mid-1890s, the society’s membership rose steadily, reaching a high of nearly four hundred members. In short, Broca’s Société d’anthropologie became the most important center for anthropology in France while remaining outside of establishment scholarship, unattached to any university or state institution. Broca, who seems from his photographs to have been a smallish man, with round features and pronounced muttonchops, presided over it all with a good mixture of grace, scientific pomp, and light-hearted bonhomie.

The other Paris center for anthropological discussion was the Ethnological Museum at the Trocadéro, over which the Eiffel Tower would soon loom. It is worth noting that much less quantification went into the “science of man” there. This institution was dedicated to classifying the massive quantity of artifacts from Mexico, South America, and Africa that were being brought into France in the late nineteenth century.⁵⁵ Dominated by the value-laden classificatory systems of Edme-François Jomard and, later, Ernest-Théodore Hamy, these collections came to shape images of the colonies and of “new worlds” in the French imagination. A host of scholars in this period were fascinated with the cultures, bodies, and landscapes of “new” territories, but from those interested in racial anatomy to those interested in acclimatization (the variable ability of Europeans to survive in different climates and settings), these scientists were overwhelmingly concerned with the anthropological other. This was not true of Broca’s society, school, and museum of anthropology. Since its origin in 1859, this center—casually called “the institute” by those involved with it—had been dedicated to an anthropology that more frequently directed its gaze toward the French people, inquiring into their development over time and dividing them into any number of meaning-laden subgroups.

Though we do not know exactly what the phrase meant to him, we do know that Broca considered himself to be on “the extreme left” politically. In a private note to Carl Vogt, the Swiss materialist anthropologist, Broca wrote that “one cannot hide the fact that if, in the history of progress, movement is provoked by the extreme left, it is actualized gradually by men less advanced and less logical but more in accord with the masses.”⁵⁶ The quotation demonstrates Broca’s equation of the political left with scientific ability and rationality in general. As he hinted, Broca was not exactly “in accord with the masses.” In 1868 conservative members of the French senate called for a petition against the materialist interpretations of the mind that were being taught in the Paris Faculty of Medicine.⁵⁷ They were particularly incensed by Broca’s materialist approach to the mind-body question, but the senatorial outcry, led by Cardinals Donnet and Bonnechose, generally warned that at the “lectures of MM. Vulpian, Sée, Broca, Axenfeld, [Charles] Robin and others,” one can “look at the jammed hall” and see “1,500 young men eagerly listening . . . all determined adepts and defenders of science, i.e., materialism.”⁵⁸ In response, a petition against such lectures was circulated and eventually signed by two thousand religious and political leaders across France.⁵⁹ The conservatives were right to be concerned. Robin alone directed the theses of such soon-to-be-eminent republican leaders as Paul Bert, who would help perform the autopsy on Gambetta’s brain, Emile Combes, and Georges Clemenceau—this last having included in his thesis a proof of the impossibility of the existence of the soul.⁶⁰ Broca died just after the government had finally come into the hands of committed republicans and was honored posthumously with the title of Unremovable Senator. The archives reveal that he knew it was in the works. Just before his death, Broca wrote the following note to Victor Hugo: “The unexpected honor of being considered for the Republican Union of the senate filled me with great pride, but this pride grew to arrogance when I learned in what terms you had promulgated your adhesion to my candidacy. Let me then tell you that your vote is for me the most precious of all. I may be beaten in the second vote, but I will have had Victor Hugo on my side.”⁶¹ Thus Broca was unquestionably republican if taken at his word, he was recognized as an important republican by his peers, and his values were equally republican if understood within the context of his historical moment.

There was, however, room to his left: Scientifically, Broca was responsible for guiding French anthropology into the quantitative study of human bodies and away from ethnology and linguistics. His studies led French anthropology into a deep preoccupation with numbers and measuring devices. In the journals and archives of the Société d’anthropologie, stacks and stacks of paper list the measurements of thousands upon thousands of people’s bodies. The sheer quantity of recorded numbers can hardly be overestimated; speaking of statistics in the nineteenth century, rather than particular measurements, Ian Hacking has referred to “the avalanche of printed numbers,” and it is an apt description of anthropology as well.⁶² Broca, of course, did not take the great cascade of measurements himself, though his output was quite impressive: he trained hundreds of “amateurs” to perform the calibrations. The preoccupation filled thousands of books and articles and thousands of hours. This immense collection of now meaningless numbers had tremendous cultural consequence, buoying up an array of sociobiological assumptions. Thus, despite his left-wing ideals, the physical anthropology that Broca championed blossomed, both during and after his life, into a frightening array of racist and sexist theories. An interesting balance emerges. Broca created a doctrine with deeply conservative tendencies but was himself a supporter of the republic and of mild social reform. Further, though he did not run his life and his science as a great campaign against theism, his moderate free thought led him to create a welcoming place for such a campaign—and for those who would devote their lives to an impassioned cult of radical unbelief.

In the 1880s the Société d’anthropologie de Paris underwent what amounted to a pirate takeover by a group of leftist freethinkers dedicated to materialist atheism. The balance of power in the society had been shifting from positivist (and ostensibly objective) to materialist (and actively political) for some time, but with Broca at the helm the change had been modest. Now the shift accelerated, and the freethinkers took over. In fact, Broca’s Société d’anthropologie came to embody the most cohesive freethinking movement in nineteenth-century France. Considering the importance of the freethinking movement—booklength bibliographies have been compiled on the subject vis-à-vis England and the United States—it is surprising that so few historical studies have taken as their subject the French contribution. Jacqueline Lalouette’s recent La libre pensée en France, 1848–1940 is the first comprehensive study, admirably covering an extraordinary number of ways in which freethinking manifested itself over almost a hundred years.⁶³ Lalouette isolates three “first” freethinking societies in the Second Republic—the one formed by Broca and his medical student colleagues is among them—and reports that all were very short lived and that “none of them were preoccupied in the least with civil burials, those ceremonies that constituted the first and principal raison d’être of other freethinking societies.”⁶⁴ Though Lalouette finds a tremendous amount of activity in this regard over the next few decades, the movement seems generally limited to concern with burial laws and never appears to be as sustained, organized, and substantial as the movement in other countries in the same period. I would argue that a cohesive movement existed, but in a covert form. One of the first and most active freethinking groups in France operated as Broca’s society of anthropologists. Between the early 1860s and the First World War, these French freethinkers infiltrated and transformed Broca’s society, by his invitation. There, they created an anthropology that spoke to their own preoccupations and, with it, drew other freethinkers into the new science. They also managed to further the practice and prestige of anthropology and to create some of the classificatory and thematic procedures that would define the discipline in the early twentieth century.

A brief perusal of any copy of the Bulletin de la Société d’anthropologie de Paris from the 1880s or 1890s demonstrates that several figures overshadowed all others in terms of the number of articles published and positions held. The core group comprised André Lefèvre, Eugène Véron, Gabriel de Mortillet, Charles Letourneau, Abel Hovelacque, and Henri Thulié. While most of the society’s over three hundred members merely attended meetings, this handful of men published numerous anthropological books and articles, taught anthropology at the School of Anthropology, edited the journals, filled posts at the society, laboratory, and museum, and, except for Lefèvre, served at least once as the president of the Société d’anthropologie. In 1860, however, most of them gave no sign of knowing what anthropology was. Letourneau was a doctor working among the poor of Paris, Hovelacque was a lawyer, Lefèvre was a poet and translator, and Thulié was part of the “realist coterie,” hanging around with the artists Courbet, Bonvin, and Champfleury, and founding the journal Le réalisme (soon suppressed by the empire).⁶⁵ Véron was an author, publishing passionate prosocialist works such as Les associations ouvrières.⁶⁶ Mortillet, who was already engaged in archaeological research, was in exile for having written socialist pamphlets in violent opposition to Louis Napoleon’s empire.⁶⁷

What brought these politically like-minded men together was their friendship and intellectual sympathy with the freethinkers Louis Asseline, a lawyer and writer, and Auguste Coudereau, a medical doctor. Their intellectual roots were solidly in Enlightenment rationalism, especially that of the Encyclopedists. Asseline would later come to be known for his highly praised history of Austria and for the publication of a two-volume collection of Diderot’s works.⁶⁸ As Lefèvre later described, in the early days of the group, these were angry young men. They were furious at their lack of opportunity under the empire and felt that they had been born at the wrong time. Their anger was primarily directed against the people their own age who were “ralliés,” young men and women who would have preferred a republic but opted for reform rather than revolution. As Lefèvre reported, they asked, “Why not perfect our institutions and thus hasten the coming of the liberal Empire?” These “detestable ralliers” laughed at the “absolutist dreamers,” who believed in “all or nothing.” Overall, Lefèvre’s sense of his early years and those of his colleagues was deeply mournful. “These intransigents,” he wrote of himself and his friends, “these irreconcilables, entered into life at the moment when the coup d’état cut off the road under their steps.” As outcasts they found communities in cafés and bars where people, brought together by a common “hate for the empire and love for liberty,” would speak of art and science between games of billiards, dominoes, or chess. In Lefèvre’s memory, such gatherings were the “happy moments of sad years.”⁶⁹

These were not the frustrated accusations of underachievers. Many young republicans refused positions in academia because of its connections with the imperial state. The future anthropologist Eugène Véron, for example, like many republican-minded graduates of the illustrious Ecole normale supérieure, resigned his post because of his frustration with the empire.⁷⁰ In a series of articles that ran in the Revue des cours littéraires (a temporary name of the Revue bleue) in 1865, Véron explained that he left academia because of the empire’s educational policies.⁷¹ He claimed that in the contemporary university one could work only within the “official science, which had the state, the ministers, the budget, and sometimes even police and tribunals behind it” (436). Véron wrote that despite general claims to French educational freedom, any student who expressed minority opinions at his university exams would fail. In a long and impassioned list of such possible opinions, he asked his readers to imagine that a student “dared to regret that in the long struggle against feudalism, monarchy has triumphed” or to imagine that a student would risk “the assertion that the eighteenth century, taken as a whole, seemed to him superior to the seventeenth and that he found more genius, more grandeur, and a more noble use of human faculties . . . in the Dictionnaire philosophique or in the Esprit des lois and in the Histoire naturelle than in the compilation of the maxims of theocratic politics.” Véron claimed that any one of these heresies would suffice to enrage the university orthodoxy (449–450).

The disappointments of the group’s earlier years help clarify their behavior in the 1880s and 1890s: their wild dedication to a cause—the establishment of a secular republic—which was already essentially won, and the radicalization of that cause. To be sure, in the 1880s and 1890s there were many signs that the Catholic Church was regaining some of its social and cultural prestige, and the freethinkers were reacting against this. But the passion of their commitment originates in their frustration with the empire years earlier. As a group, they felt that the empire had robbed them of their youth, their vigor, and their glory. Under the republic, having finally established prominent, respectable positions for themselves, they tried to reclaim that vigor and that glory, though youth was gone. As Lefèvre wrote of those who would not rally to the empire: “They arrived at maturity without having exercised their strength, without having lived; and life will not begin again. History may well honor them, as a group, with a benevolent glance; but ‘time, which always marches on’ will not bring to them, or at least not to most of them, the compensation that is due to them for their long sacrifice. Their hour has passed.” Despite this lament, he claimed they had done a great deal for the cause, even by merely avoiding “the shame of manifest complicity” and “the moral diminution of profitable collaborations.” They were partly responsible for the “slow return of universal suffrage,” and “they [were] the ones who would have made the republic if the terrible year had not done it.”⁷²

Napoleon III’s empire entered a liberal phase in its final years. According to the future anthropologists, it was the war in Italy that first began an open revival of public discussion of politics. “Under the pretext of temporal power and the French occupation,” it reopened public debate on “the grand discussion of clericalism and religion.” Lefèvre saw the coming of the liberal empire not as a new period of freedom but rather as a Machiavellian ploy: the government, he argued, had decided to let some freethinkers talk and publish in order to control the church. “To let a few unbelievers speak was to remind the church of its need for official protection.” Most prominent among the journals published in this new climate was Philosophie positive, run by two of Comte’s most prominent disciples, Emile Littré and Grégoire Wyrouboff. It was dedicated to questions of secular morality, psychology, and physiology, but Lefèvre and his group rejected the Comtean method, which they saw as “not without a certain systematic and grim mechanism that alienated outsiders.” The new generation was not at home among the rationalists of the old school or among the “excessive admirers” of Germany (Lefèvre liked to stress that French materialism was of French origin), or among the positivists, who “despite being heretical” were “faithful to a philosophy that had already been surpassed on the path it had opened.” The new generation “wanted certainties, not systems.” They wanted “the secret of the universe and of organisms,” and it was just at this time that “translators popularized in France the views of Lyell on the slow formations of the earth and of Darwin on the origins of species” (120).

If Asseline and Coudereau’s freethinking had brought the group together, it was Clémence Royer’s writings on evolution that brought them to anthropology and gave them a doctrine. In Lefèvre’s view, those French thinkers who celebrated Darwin in the first hour were already profoundly materialist, and they immediately set out to use evolutionary theory as a political weapon. It is useful to note that until they found a scientific credo, most of what the freethinkers stood for was renunciatory. They did not have a full doctrine of their own until they discovered anthropology, and when they did, they turned the new science into a profoundly cultish endeavor. It was Royer’s translation and preface of Darwin’s Origin of Species that drew them in. In Lefèvre’s words: “All those whose hate of the imperial regime had thrown them easily against all received ideas sanctioned by the government and the official bodies used all their wits to take from evolutionary theory the meanings that were the most hostile to religion and to metaphysics.” Still, they considered Darwin to have been “surpassed before he was even fully understood,” for while Darwin was essentially silent on religious questions, the preface to the French translation of his work insisted on an antireligious interpretation. Indeed, they scolded Darwin for having disavowed “the remarkable preface into which Madame Clémence Royer condensed all the significant substance of the Origin of Species. The translator had seen more clearly and farther than its author” (125).⁷³

Lefèvre’s description of Darwin’s French translator, Clémence Royer, was astute: while Darwin’s evolutionary mechanism impressed her, she credited Lamarck with the discovery of evolution. She was already an evolutionist before reading Darwin, and she was also much more of a materialist than he would ever claim to be. Again, confusion about the relationship between religion and scientific knowledge has led historians to caution that the blunt truths of evolutionary anthropology did not shock people out of their faith in God; many factors of modernization changed people’s relationship to traditional ways of behaving and believing. But the intellectual issues did have some meaning. “The argument from design”—the idea that the world’s intricate wonder proved God’s existence—was dealt a considerable blow by Darwinian evolution’s alternative explanation. Yet Darwin’s text respectfully and admiringly mentions the work of “the Creator.” As Peter Bowler has argued regarding the English case, for religious people the notion of divine creation was quite comfortably replaced by a notion of divinely ordained, purposeful evolution, and Darwin’s evolutionary theory was read in this light.⁷⁴ By contrast, agnostic or atheist republicans were eager to find an alternative cosmology when evolutionary theory turned up with some answers. For them, the new respectability of a mechanism for natural development was a real windfall.

Royer’s famous, lengthy preface to her translation of the Origin of Species (and the translation of Darwin’s text itself) gave the work a vigorously antireligious character that was not present in the original.⁷⁵ Royer wrote with brash iconoclastic fervor, claiming that the power of the book lay in its support for a materialist worldview. Her preface began dramatically, as if she had been asked Do you believe? “Yes,” wrote Royer, “I believe in revelation, but a permanent revelation of man to himself and by himself, a rational revelation that is nothing but the result of the progress of science and of the contemporary conscience, a revelation that is always only partial and relative and that is effectuated by the acquisition of new truths and even more by the elimination of ancient errors. We must also attest that the progress of truth gives us as much to forget as to learn, and we learn to negate and to doubt as often as to affirm.”⁷⁶ The thirty-seven pages of preface dealt almost entirely with the relationship between religion and science and mentioned the specifics of evolution and the method of translation only in passing. Quoting Diderot more than Darwin, she specifically wrote of Jesus as an “incomparable man,” the “rabbi of Nazareth” who “is more of a God today than he was in his century.” She also indicted mysticism in general, calling it a “sickness of exhaustion” and writing that wherever it appears it “brings weakening and moral torpor” (128–129). Perhaps most important, she wrote that Darwin’s theory “despite its eminently pacific character” will be “exposed to attacks from the great and immobile Christian party,” but she promised that it would also be “a powerful weapon in the hands of the opposition, that is, the liberal and progressive party” (136). The freethinkers would take up this “powerful weapon” with great enthusiasm.

Royer also used her preface to discuss eugenics—quite remarkable considering that Darwin’s text only mentioned the development of humanity in a single enigmatic sentence in the final passages: “Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.”⁷⁷ Her particular interest, moreover, was the development of women. Evolution had weakened them, made them beautiful and docile. “In order to hasten the rapid progress of the race in all senses, we must ask of women a part of what up until now we have only asked of men, that is to say, strength united with beauty, intelligence with gentleness.” She believed that intellectual women like herself were biological anomalies who had “men’s brains.”⁷⁸ Her belief in biological hierarchy—despite a profound desire for general equality—was consistent: she also wrote about the natural inequality of individuals and races and insisted that an egalitarian regime would breed out these differences. Indeed, she claimed that the theory of evolution proved this and, in general, that the theory had in it “an entire philosophy of humanity. . . . One could say it is a universal synthesis of the laws of economics, the quintessential natural social science, and the code for living beings of all races and of all epochs.” The preface also called Darwinism a “scientific revelation” and asserted that it teaches us “more about ourselves than any sacerdotal philosophy about original sin by showing us, in our brutal origins, the source of all our bad tendencies.” It also shows us “our continual aspirations toward the good or the better,” as a function of “the law of perpetual perfectibility, which rules us.” These ideas—that evolutionarily informed anthropology was now an entire philosophy of humanity, a universal code of living, and a replacement for ethical monotheism—would have tremendous impact on French freethinkers, particularly those who turned to anthropology as their lifework. In the closing of her preface, Royer set the terms of French anthropology for the next several decades: “The doctrine of M. Darwin, which is the rational revelation of progress, is set in a logical antagonism to the irrational revelation of the fall. These are two principles, two religions at war. . . . For me, my choice is made: I believe in progress.”⁷⁹ The combination of the freethinkers’ passion with Royer’s political anthropology was especially potent because Royer had so clearly articulated the religiosity of her opposition to religion. Darwin, as Lefèvre hinted above, seems to have been amused by Royer’s work at first, but a few years later he had a new translation done by someone else—without the combat mood.

Royer had been raised as a Catholic and a monarchist; her schooling concentrated on the religious and the domestic and afforded her little contact with science. A brief period spent in convent school had terrified her with notions of original sin and eternal damnation. Years later she came upon a library of books that had been forbidden to her—Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot—and underwent a profound and angry transformation away from all religious dogma and to a simple belief in God—deism.⁸⁰ She grew fascinated with science and later wrote that it was after ten years of studying natural history that she embraced an “absolute negation” of God (39). Along the way, Royer earned the rigorous qualifications to become a secondary school teacher and worked as such for a few years. The Second Empire, however, abolished secondary school for girls, as well as teaching by lay teachers. As Joy Harvey demonstrates in her intellectual biography of Royer, the young scholar left France for Switzerland feeling betrayed by the church and the empire (40–41). In Switzerland and later in Italy, she augmented her small inheritance by giving lectures on natural history, some even touching on Lamarckian evolution. It was while abroad that she translated Darwin’s book, and when she returned to France it was with some small renown.

Royer soon became a very active participant in the late-nineteenth-century French scientific community. A photograph of her from this period shows her longish brown hair pulled back over her head in rolls that ended in two long, tidy curls that she drew in front of each shoulder; her face is round, with small features, and she wears tiny earrings and a round brooch at the neck of her black shirt and fur collar. As well as being a member of the Société d’anthropologie, Royer was a member of the Association française pour l’avancement des sciences, and she contributed regularly to the science column of Gambetta’s newspaper La république française, edited by Paul Bert.⁸¹ She took part in a number of conferences on women’s rights, as well as on science and free thought, published many feminist articles, and in the last years of her life wrote a regular science column for Marguerite Durand’s feminist (and adamantly Dreyfusard) daily newspaper La fronde. As a woman and as a scientist of strong opinions, her situation was difficult. To some extent, the relative egalitarianism of the freethinking movement did open doors for her, but it would probably be more accurate to speak of her as having helped to create the respect for female intellectuals that existed in the movement. The Second Congress on Free Thought, for example, was dedicated to “The Rights of Woman,” but that was in 1893; Royer was already sixty-three years of age and as well established as she would ever be.⁸²

It should be mentioned that at midcentury a materialist wind blew into France from the general direction of Germany. It was most associated with the works of Karl Vogt, Jacob Moleschott, and Ludwig Büchner. Vogt was a professor of geology who had been exiled from Germany to Switzerland after his part in the Revolution of 1848; Moleschott was a lecturer in physiology in Heidelberg; and Büchner lectured in medicine at the University of Tübingen. All freethinkers, they wrote books to this effect and toured Europe giving rabble-rousing lectures—especially after Darwin had provided such wonderful ammunition in 1859. The world they described was a hard-edged, meaningless accident, and, worse, their materialist determinism left no room for free will or moral feeling. The reasons for their enthusiastic, stark materialism were surely as complex and context-bound as those of the French freethinking anthropologists and lie outside my project here. What needs to be noted is that this profound materialism was not original to the Paris group, but it seems they came to it on their own, through their own development. They certainly took it in new directions, as I will demonstrate. Here, it is enough to note that they consistently credited their science and philosophy to the French woman rather than the Germanic men. They may have done so even if both sources of materialism had been an influence: many French intellectuals considered the extremes of positivist determinism to be essentially French. They had understood Germany, by contrast, to be the country of mystical philosophy: Kant was not much read in France until the late nineteenth century, but the French were aware of his critique, and they saw it as strange, mystical stuff. In Owen Chadwick’s words:

Frenchmen were surprised to see Büchner and Vogt. They thought atheism particularly French and Germany the home of idealism and mysticism. Accustomed to deride Germans for imagining matter not to exist, they were astonished to find Germans who maintained that the mind did not exist. . . . French positivism was far more agnostic, and far more reverent, than the materialists. Positivist utterances could be as interesting as when Littré and [Charles] Robin used a dictionary to define soul as: “anatomically, the sum of functions of the neck and spinal column; physiologically, the sum of functions of the power of perception in the brain.” Still, the French were surprised at German materialism, and the surprise is a little piece of historical evidence about the nature of influence.⁸³

The French freethinking anthropologists did not much refer to these Germanic materialists; they had their own system of thought and were concerned to fix their own doings to the Enlightenment in one seamless narrative of French antireligious genius. Their tolerance, even celebration, of a woman scientist was rooted in this nationalist pride and in their respect for Royer in particular.

Royer and Mortillet did have some contact with Vogt. At roughly the same time that Royer was abroad, Gabriel de Mortillet was living in exile for having published socialist pamphlets opposing Louis Napoleon’s coup. He was from a noble family, supporters of monarchy and Catholicism, that had sent him off to be educated by Jesuits. A pamphlet he wrote in 1849, Les jésuites, describes the humiliating physical and emotional punishments he suffered at their hands.⁸⁴ By the time he was nineteen he was a wanted man, in exile, working as an engineer, building railroads in Switzerland. Already interested in prehistory, Mortillet collected a wealth of artifacts turned up by this railroad work and used them to argue against the biblical explanation of life on earth. It was here that he met Vogt and began a professional friendship that was to last many years. (Royer may have met Vogt here as well.) After a while, Mortillet was deemed politically undesirable in Switzerland, too, and was again exiled. He continued to assert his antibiblical position in Italy, where he found more work engineering the construction of railroads. In 1864 Mortillet began publishing the first journal of prehistoric archaeology, Matériaux pour l’histoire positive de l’homme, in which he advertised Royer’s Italian lectures. He continued to produce this journal after returning to Paris later that year.

By now, Lefèvre and his cohorts had begun publishing their own journals. The first was a radically anticlerical journal called Revue encyclopédique. In 1866 they started a new one, boldly titled Libre pensée, which was dedicated “to free the human spirit from all hypotheses, all superstitions, and all irrational doctrines.”⁸⁵ In its seventh issue, Libre pensée ran an article on anthropology, which it celebrated as the science of the perfectibility of human beings.⁸⁶ When Mortillet returned to Paris, he began submitting essays to these freethinking journals, displaying his own brand of scientific materialism.⁸⁷ Libre pensée soon became intolerable to the Second Empire, despite Napoleon III’s new liberality, and the journal was suppressed in 1867. Undaunted, the freethinkers began publishing Pensée nouvelle in 1868. According to Lefèvre, these journals gave the freethinking movement its name, and they do appear to have been the first in a long line of journals to use those titles. In its origins, the group of freethinkers included Asseline, Lefèvre, Letourneau, and Coudereau. It grew to include Royer, Mortillet, and Thulié, who had spent most of the 1860s in medical school because his realist “literary theories [had] led him to natural science.”⁸⁸ The future government minister Yves Guyot was also very much involved, as was Broca’s freethinking friend and colleague, the demographer Louis-Adolphe Bertillon. These journals published a few pieces by Büchner and Vogt and a number of articles by future sociologists and philosophers of the Third Republic, but the core group of freethinkers wrote the vast majority of the articles and reviews themselves.⁸⁹ The content was strictly limited to the defense of atheism, attacks on the church, and, in this spirit, discussions of the Enlightenment, natural history, the nature of morality, and philosophy in general. When Pensée nouvelle was suppressed in its turn, many of these writers began contributing anthropological essays to Mortillet’s Matériaux and to the positivist La philosophie positive.⁹⁰ They were becoming a cohesive group of anthropologically minded, outspoken atheists.

This group joined the Société d’anthropologie to use it as a base for their evangelistic atheism. As Lefèvre explained it: “Mortillet, I think, by a masterstroke, led us to Broca; and we entered—without ourselves dissolving—into the Société d’anthropologie de Paris, which furnished us with precious recruits, scientists rightfully attached to their specialized studies but who adhered, without equivocation or bashfulness, to these grand principles: that incredulity is the first step toward science, that the experimental method is the mother of all philosophy, and that absolute secularism is the sine qua non of all teaching.”⁹¹ Letourneau and Mortillet became members first and were soon joined by Coudereau, Thulié, Asseline, Lefèvre, Hovelacque, and Royer. These inductions were not always without some resistance from the society. Royer’s entrance was certainly the most dramatic. As Letourneau would later write, her entrance into the society was “doubly revolutionary as a woman and as Darwin’s translator.”⁹² True enough. Yet to the more traditional members of the society, many of the freethinkers seemed a bit revolutionary, and they actively encouraged this image of themselves. When Mortillet founded a new anthropological journal, L’homme: Journal illustré des sciences anthropologiques, in 1884, he bluntly described it in its first issue as “an intermediary between science and politics.”⁹³ This claim should not be misread: the journal hardly ever weighed in on any specific political question of the day.⁹⁴ What its authors understood by “politics” was fierce atheism combined with general attestations of feminism, socialism, and egalitarian democracy. Indeed, L’homme was so explicitly antireligious that defenders of the church soon came to call it L’homme mal élevé.⁹⁵

Yet by 1886 the freethinkers had so long cloaked their atheism in science that they began to worry about their legacy. They were sensing that the subterfuge had succeeded a bit too well: now they were known as anthropologists but not as originators of the freethinking movement. “Now,” in republican France, wrote Lefèvre, “everywhere the avant-gardes carry the flag of free thought. This flag is ours.” He claimed that the journals Libre pensée and Pensée nouvelle “were and remain one of the philosophical monuments of our age,” and he collected his own articles within his book La renaissance du matérialisme, under the subtitle “Militant matérialism.”⁹⁶ Letourneau likewise collected and published his essays from this period as Science et matérialisme, referring to them as his “combat articles.”⁹⁷ Still, the freethinkers complained that they were successfully using anthropology to argue atheism “and meanwhile, all around us, freethinking societies have been growing up from the ground in crowds in Paris and in the provinces, ignorant, perhaps, of their origins, heedless of their older sister.”⁹⁸ Because, of course, she was in disguise. As a result of this rather odd confluence of events, it becomes clear that Broca’s creation of one of the first freethinking societies had considerable impact. It was a youthful public gesture expressing what seems to have been a more private belief in the mature man. Yet he went on to create a scientific society that was attractive and comfortable for the brazen group of freethinkers who would take it over. As such, Broca’s freethinking society may be seen as the beginning of a coherent scientific-atheist movement that lasted into the following century.

The doctors and other professionals who had joined the Société d’anthropologie under Broca’s stewardship were by no means unanimously willing to agree on atheism. Though the freethinkers would be even more dramatic in their rejection of positivist objectivity after Broca’s death, they campaigned against religion from the moment they became members. Broca may have even encouraged this; at the least he winked at it, for Mortillet was surely among the most outspoken, and Broca always spoke of the School of Anthropology as cofounded by himself and Mortillet. It was Broca’s society, and he had tremendous prestige. He need not have collaborated with anyone whose politics or behavior gave him pause, and while he may have been an intellectually generous man, this project was the central teaching institution of the science he had created.⁹⁹ It is a good indication that Broca enjoyed the freethinkers’ antics. As early as 1867, one can find brazen attacks on the very notion of religion, and there are important signals that the freethinkers had considerable opposition within the Société d’anthropologie. Wrote Coudereau of some of his colleagues, “They want religion, which is a banality for some of them and a sacred institution for others of them, to be always placed outside of the subject of debate. I afford it neither that much respect nor that much suspicion.”¹⁰⁰ Quite to the contrary, Coudereau insisted that the Société d’anthropologie ought to study religion because it had exercised an immense negative influence on the progress of civilization. “Since time immemorial, society has tossed about between two worlds: ‘science’ and ‘religion.’ Science embraces all . . . religion . . . is a synthetic system exploiting its monopoly on the circle of the unknown” (591).

There were many direct attacks on anthropologists who were not freethinkers. In 1884 Lefèvre included such an indictment after asserting that “it is anthropology that will give the final assault and will bring the supreme blow to metaphysics, which is already on its last legs.” As Coudereau had done before him, Lefèvre made it clear that some of his critics were religious believers but that a good many were positivists, that is, they thought that such questions should be left to religion and philosophy. “Many anthropologists,” conceded Lefèvre, “whether themselves inclined to some of the doctrines or superstitions being menaced, or whether they have mistaken the character and the utility of philosophy, find this militant role repugnant.” These people were not openly hostile, they simply “tried to stay outside the debate.”¹⁰¹ For the freethinkers, however, silence was a political act, and they expressed real surprise that people possessed of this powerful information could even imagine keeping it to themselves. For them, materialist science had finally been born and was poised to deliver humanity from millennia of superstition. In her preface to Origin of Species, Royer made it clear that she saw the advance of science as dependent on a direct confrontation with religion. Marveling at the very idea of creationism, Royer mused that “one might well ask oneself how a doctrine that necessarily involves supernatural intervention could have remained so long established in science, to the point where it reigned without rival.” The answer she offered was that “in science, the supernatural retreats to whatever degree that the natural gains ground, and that the amount of direct action attributed to God has always been the same as that of our ignorance of the real laws of the universe.”¹⁰² The freethinkers took this as their credo and were shocked that all scientists did not see it as their duty to bring the discovery to the wider society. Some scientists, they marveled, did not even agree that the fight against religious dogma was inseparable from the rest of science. “They sincerely believe,” wrote Lefèvre, “in distancing themselves from a struggle that disturbs their work and could compromise the serene dignity of science.” The great positivist error, according to materialists, was that they desired to limit the influence that science had on questions of spirit, origins, and other unknowns. According to the freethinking anthropologists, “this influence itself is the mark and the measure of progress.”¹⁰³

Jean-Louis Fauvelle’s attack on philosophy in L’homme in 1885 was just as scathing. As far as the freethinking anthropologists were concerned, there were no philosophical questions, just as there were no religious questions; there were only materialist answers. “Philosophy,” wrote Fauvelle, “is dead and well dead.” The anger apparent in that “well dead” comes from the belief that philosophy, by accepting and promoting a division of the world between the material and the ethical and metaphysical, creates the space in which religion functions. Asserting that there are some things whose truth or falsehood are not amenable to proof, positivists also protected religion from scientific scrutiny and dissection. “The partisans of philosophy,” he asserted, “in the effort to save the principles of religions, would do well to make an alliance with the positivists, their worst enemies: the method of Francis Bacon has made its entry into the domain of the natural sciences, and even were our adversaries to have recourse to a manu militari, as in the time of Galileo, this conquest by free thought is most definitive.”¹⁰⁴ In another article, entitled “Il faut en finir avec la philosophie” (We must finish with philosophy), Fauvelle reiterated these points, confidently adding that the philosophy of psychology must be replaced by physiology and the study of logic replaced by the scientific method.¹⁰⁵ On the subject of materialist morality, Fauvelle was much less self-assured, managing to do little more than suggest an approach to individual rights and responsibilities.

The war between the freethinking anthropologists and the church was neither discreet nor one-sided. On the first page of L’homme of October 1887, Mortillet reviewed a Catholic conference on evolution, writing that “while free thought, in the name of the liberty of conscience, has sought to separate the church and the state, the Catholic Church has made vigorous efforts to monopolize science.”¹⁰⁶ Indeed, the Catholic conference had specifically derided Clémence Royer, Broca, Vogt, Virchow, Darwin, and, among others, Mortillet himself (611). It does seem that Broca felt the heat. On at least one occasion he actively suppressed a scientific essay that he considered to be dangerously political. In 1875 he refused to publish an article by Clémence Royer on the grounds that it could lead to political trouble outside the society. The article held that all assumptions regarding the causes of the falling birthrate in France were wrong: this was no decline in national vigor or anything of the sort. French women were limiting the sizes of their families on purpose, for pragmatic social and economic reasons. Broca wrote to Royer saying that the society would be unable to publish her article because they were already under attack by the Catholic press as a “school of freethought.”¹⁰⁷ For the annals of slow but dogged justice, one of Royer’s historians, Claude Blanckaert, published Royer’s “On Natality” in the still-running journal of the Société d’anthropologie in 1989, a hundred and fourteen years after Broca had turned it away from the same journal.¹⁰⁸

In 1889 the freethinkers solidified their control of the Société d’anthropologie by successfully expelling Paul Topinard from his chair at the Ecole. They locked him out of his office, rerouted his students, and publicly accused him of mischief. After his expulsion, Topinard published a pamphlet explaining his situation. His estimation of the events that led to his dismissal was, no doubt, skewed in his favor, but in light of analogous statements from within the ranks of the freethinkers, the basic narrative appears to be reliable.

In his pamphlet, Topinard argued that the Société d’anthropologie and the School of Anthropology were created as two “absolutely distinct institutions . . . that nevertheless presently have in common that they are governed by the same majority.” He went on to say that this majority was “materialist and in all points of view intransigent. They do not deny it, they have made overt professions of this and call themselves, alternately: Dinner of Free-Thought, or Dinner of the New Thinking; Society of Mutual Autopsy, Group of Scientific Materialism.”¹⁰⁹ For Topinard, “the first cloud” appeared while Broca was still alive. Hovelacque had invited Topinard to a dinner for “friends of the Société d’anthropologie.” Topinard accepted the invitation and was surprised to find a considerable number of people there who were not members of the society. At a later dinner, the group proposed to publish a series of books under the title “Bibliothèque des sciences contemporaines.” They requested that Topinard write the text on the subject of anthropology, while other volumes would be prepared on biology, linguistics, archaeology, philosophy, and so forth. Topinard was pleased with the commission and signed a contract with the publisher Reinwald along with Asseline, Mortillet, and Lefèvre. When Topinard submitted his completed manuscript, “the committee gave it to one among them to correct any ideas that might be found therein that were not in accord with the ideas of the group” (15). Still, he continued to believe that the dinners he was attending were for “friends of anthropology,” until he received a written invitation that identified the event as a “Dinner of Free-Thought.” At that point, asserted Topinard, it became clear to him that anthropology was being taken over by a fiercely polemical group with only secondary interest in anthropology as such. “Once my eyes were open,” he wrote, “it became evident to me that anthropology was nothing but a screen and that a sort of systematically materialist confederacy, at once political and social, was disguising itself behind that screen—a confederacy that had other concerns than those of science” (16).

The freethinkers, he reported, then began to found new societies, like the Society of Mutual Autopsy. They also began to create new events such as the Lamarck Dinner, which regularly gathered to raise money for a statue of the famous French evolutionist, and the Voltaire and Diderot Dinners, which gathered to raise money for the republication of the work of these authors. The freethinkers also began to take over the Société d’anthropologie’s essay contests and to organize the memorials for deceased members. According to Topinard, “the moment one dies, they organize a subscription to raise a monument, a medallion. All civil burials were a triumph. Medallion, procession, autopsy—they were all connected” (16). Further, in the late 1870s the freethinkers proclaimed their intention to create a dictionary of anthropology. It has served as a reference guide ever since (it still graced the shelf of scientific dictionaries at the Bibliothèque nationale when last I checked). In Topinard’s account, this work had its beginnings at a freethinkers’ meeting when one of the members said “that anthropology has not yet given anything; that it was necessary that we affirm our ideas.” It was time, they agreed, to start an “anthropology of combat” by creating a dictionary and asking Broca to write a preface. Topinard wrote that he resigned from the group when he heard this, “but Broca, ignorant of the facts that I could not reveal to him, let them put his name on the cover, as did Quatrefages, so I let them do the same with mine” (16).¹¹⁰ A photograph of these men from this period—to my knowledge the only photograph of them together—shows Broca looking relaxed in a bow tie and tuxedo, a comb-over, a small smile, and white muttonchops. Quatrefages sits more erect and posed, also very soberly dressed, with a little scowl on his face, white hair, and a white beard running from ear to ear under his chin. Mortillet wears light pants with his black tuxedo jacket. He is the only one in a long tie and sports a full white beard. Topinard is a larger man than all of them, tall and a little heavy, still dark of hair, wearing the master’s muttonchops and a pair of wire glasses. The sides of his mouth turn down, as if he were pouting.¹¹¹

Lefèvre’s statement that the freethinkers joined the Société d’anthropologie “without ourselves dissolving” is complemented by Topinard’s assertion that freethinkers, “so totally ignorant of anthropology that they hardly knew what the word meant,” were often brought into the Société d’anthropologie and then shuffled “one year later, after a strictly regulated delay,” into the central committee. Charles Issaurat fits the description: in the 1860s he wrote for Libre pensée and Pensée nouvelle; he joined the Société d’anthropologie in 1874, and though the most anthropological writing he ever did was to popularize his colleagues’ work in other journals (he was still calling himself a “man of letters” in 1893), he served as vice president of the society and was a member of the central committee until the end of his life.¹¹² His son became a member of the society in 1888. This last bit of information both highlights the significance of the society for Issaurat and explains Topinard’s sense that a tide was rising against him. Topinard claimed that he had on his side “the older members; against him, the entire group”—and the older members were rapidly dying off.¹¹³ As this happened, the freethinkers gained more and more control. In Topinard’s estimation, they did not consider themselves the new stewards of anthropology; rather, they saw anthropology as ground for plunder. “In brief,” wrote Topinard, “the group had but one objective that became more and more evident: to become the complete masters of the society and to dispose of it, at their will, for their own particular designs” (22).

This interpretation of the events was shared by Eugène Dally, a medical doctor and anthropologist who had been a close friend of Broca and had penned the first French translation of Huxley’s writings in 1868. Huxley’s popularization of Darwin’s work and his explorations of evolution’s religious and social implications were radical in France under the empire, so Dally was not an archconservative. The freethinkers recognized this, and his work had been several times celebrated in Libre pensée and Pensée nouvelle back in the 1860s.¹¹⁴ But in the 1880s Dally found his extremism both outdone in temper and betrayed in theory. “Some of our colleagues,” wrote Dally in 1882, “would very much like to transform us into a sort of church council and have us promulgating the truth, which they, as much as their adversaries, believe themselves to have accessed completely. But the absurdity of such a role could escape no one: we have not gotten out of creeds only to reenter them from the other direction.”¹¹⁵ Frustrated, Dally broke with the society soon afterward and was accused of positivism by the freethinkers.

Struggles between the freethinkers and the rest of the society decreased rapidly as the rest of the society became smaller and smaller throughout the 1880s. Still, tension was obvious. In 1888, for example, the marquis de Nadaillac, one of the dwindling group of more conservative members, attacked Mortillet for writing, in a study of cannibalism, that it was religion that led human beings to eat human flesh.¹¹⁶ De Nadaillac protested, saying that, “if perverted religious sentiment” led man to cannibalism, it was a rare exception. He explained cannibalism by “hunger, cruel hunger, and the madness that it engenders” and “a depraved taste for it, the bestial sentiment that is in us and neither education nor the progress of civilization manages to destroy completely” (27). Mortillet counterattacked with the insistence that aside from a few cases “occasioned by accidental or habitual lack of food” cannibalism was the result of “religious perversion.” In case anyone should think he was only speaking of “savage” religions, Mortillet pointedly cited the Christian Eucharist as proof of the intimate connection between eating human flesh and belief in God (43).

It is worth noting that modern opinion gives this one to Mortillet. Mortillet took several positions for antireligious reasons that seemed extreme at the time but are now in accord with dominant scientific theories. To take one important example, before Louis Pasteur, fermentation and mold were frequently assumed to be the result of some form of spontaneous generation. Materialists’ explanations of life happily likened its origins to these effervescent physical phenomena. When Pasteur boiled a beaker of liquid and then melted the top closed, everyone could see that nothing grew, and spontaneous generation was dealt a serious blow. Because that seemed to mean that life required God to get it started (Pasteur was a member of the Catholic Scientists Association and would not mind this interpretation), Mortillet railed against it, going so far as to argue that it had been faked.¹¹⁷ Again, present consensus leans toward Mortillet: current theories seek to isolate how chemical systems that show less self-replication than a virus develop into chemical systems with as much self-replication as a virus or more—perhaps under conditions such as the extreme pressure and heat of our younger planet or, continuously, near volcanic spigots at the bottom of the ocean.

Also in 1888 the freethinking anthropologists came into conflict with one of France’s best-known popularizing social scientists, Gustave Le Bon. Le Bon has figured prominently in several studies of late-nineteenth-century French social sciences because of his extremely low estimation of the innate intelligence of women and of various races.¹¹⁸ But though he had worked with Broca and had been a member of the Société d’anthropologie since the 1870s, Le Bon was never representative of contemporary French anthropology. In 1879 Broca had approved Le Bon as the winner of the society’s Godard Award for his essay on brain size and intelligence, but it was recorded in the minutes of the society’s central committee that Broca “did not approve of all its views.”¹¹⁹ Indeed, Broca used Le Bon’s data on the inferior brain size of women to argue that girls’ education needed be more rigorous to correct for this socially created deficiency—which was not at all what Le Bon had in mind.¹²⁰ Letourneau’s reaction to Le Bon’s prize-winning essay in the Bulletin’s notes on the prize was even more strongly negative, and toleration of Le Bon did not long outlast Broca’s lifetime.¹²¹ By 1882 Le Bon’s work was being boldly attacked in the Revue anthropologique, and the Bulletins recorded a sharp polemic between the anthropologist Léonce Manouvrier, who argued that women’s brains were proportionately equal in size, if not larger than the brains of men, and Le Bon, who insisted they were comparatively puny. By 1888 Le Bon recognized that the Société d’anthropologie was completely opposed to his views, and he resigned his membership. As he wrote in one of his several letters of resignation, “I am much too independent for this society, which now, having its completely settled doctrines, its official science, and its certainties, has need of benevolent auditors and has no need at all of scientists or of researchers. It is in the conviction that I have as little need of it as it has of me that I have decided to resign from it.”¹²²

While such squabbles continued to ruffle feathers, it was Topinard’s expulsion from the Ecole that confirmed the freethinkers’ dominance. Topinard’s supporters within the Société d’anthropologie were few—his only active support came from de Nadaillac and Dally—and when he brought a legal suit against his accusers he was quickly defeated.¹²³ Topinard’s best argument was simply that he had been Broca’s right-hand man and that this entitled him to succeed Broca as the conceptual, if not titular, leader of the society. The freethinkers generally ignored this notion, but in any case they did not see Broca’s attachment to Topinard as a reflection of the latter’s worth. In Fauvelle’s words,” Our illustrious founder, with the authoritarian character that seeks to accomplish a determined end by any means, chose to surround himself only with persons on whose docility he could depend absolutely.”¹²⁴

One gets the sense that the freethinkers did not like Topinard much but also had some real and substantive problems with his work. For one thing, it seems that his works of synthesis did not adequately credit the original scholars for their contribution.¹²⁵ A larger problem had to do with his adamantly narrow definition of anthropology. Whenever the question of anthropology’s role arose, Topinard took the position that only the most strictly physical—that is, biological—interpretation of anthropology would be admissible. One of the many showdowns on this issue took place at the 1889 Congress of Criminal Anthropology, where Topinard insisted that anthropology define itself as a physical science of the human races, completely devoid of a political agenda or, indeed, any application to the workings of society.¹²⁶ In Topinard’s estimation, anthropology was, “the zoology of man.” He claimed that Broca and Quatrefages allowed no infiltration of ethnography, sociology, or psychology into the science of anthropology (491). “In anthropology,” wrote Topinard, “one must separate pure truth from its applications to medicine, social economy, politics, and religion. . . . The zoology of man must be able to work without the slightest worry over the consequences drawn from the truths it discovers; it must work above the passions that it awakens” (492). This definition was in complete conflict with the freethinkers’ idea of anthropology, but it was also at variance with the vision of the more sedate Léonce Manouvrier. For Manouvrier, anthropology was the science of human beings in all their aspects. As he discussed in “L’atavisme et le crime” (1891) and “L’anthropologie et le droit” (1894), Manouvrier refused to have artificial limits set on the study of humans.¹²⁷ In defense of this position, he quoted Broca at length, showing him to have been significantly concerned with the study of society and not shy about it, writing, for instance, that “the condition of women in society must be studied with the greatest of care by anthropologists.”¹²⁸ In any case, suggested Manouvrier, anthropologists were not honor bound to uphold Broca’s conception of the science.

Conservatives outside the society understood Topinard’s predicament as decidedly political. The newspaper of the Ligue de la patrie française, La patrie, which identified itself as an “organ of national defense,” ran an article entitled “Un coup d’état à l’école d’anthropologie.” In it, the Ecole was described as being “governed by a materialist and intransigent majority among whom we find the names Mortillet (you know, the Mortillet who fought against the cemetery cross at Saint-Germain), Mathias-Duval [sic], Fauvelle, Hovelacque, etc.” (Mortillet’s attack on Christian symbols at the local cemetery will be discussed below.) The article went on to say that Topinard had been evicted because the materialist leadership of the Ecole could not bear to associate with someone who “refused to make anthropology into a weapon of social and political combat.” Indeed, the article expressed the sense that the materialists were attempting to take control of French culture in general: “The materialists want to be our masters these days. It is already more ferocious than in the Rabagas cafés where whoever speaks the name of God has to pay a fine. Still, one must pronounce the name of God. Nowadays this costs more than fifty centimes, and one has to pay a fine if one is even suspected by the sectarians of entertaining, within oneself, an idealist or deist sentiment. When will it be: atheism or death?”¹²⁹ The struggle that was taking place in the Société d’anthropologie clearly reflected concerns and struggles in the society at large.

The role that anthropology had assumed was by no means lost on the defenders of the Catholic Church. Indeed, the “anthropology question” became increasingly important as the century drew to a close. For example, at the Congrès scientifique international des Catholiques (of Belgian origin, held in Paris in 1888), Canon Duilhé spoke on “le problème anthropologique et les théories évolutionnistes.” This was no mere explication of the contradictions between evolutionary theory and biblical narrative. Rather, it was a specific indictment of the attitude of French anthropological institutions, with specific attention to the Ecole. “The Ecole d’anthropologie,” asserted Duilhé, “seems to have only one goal: to efface the irreducible characters that make the human soul a special creation of God in nature.”¹³⁰

That the freethinking anthropologists were functioning according to a dogma as narrow as that of any religion was put forward not only as a critique by the Catholic Church but also with appreciation by Littré’s positivists at the Revue occidentale. In an 1885 article on the positivist delegation to the Congress of Freethinkers (1884), Charles Jeannolle made clear the positivist understanding, and acceptance, of the limited freedom involved in freethinking.¹³¹ He wrote jubilantly that “freethinking, too, is a religion, because it reproaches, because it inspires devotion, and because it proclaims rules of conduct to which its adherents must submit or else risk exclusion, such as to have a civil marriage, not to confess, etc. . . . [Freethinking] has a dogma, as it is not content to banish old chimeras from the human mind but rather intends to substitute them with science” (241).

The freethinking anthropologists did not see their doctrine as dogma, but they recognized that theirs was a passionate position and were quite clear in their hostility toward the unenlightened. They believed themselves to be the representatives of the future, and, to a significant degree, they were—despite the fact that they were too passionate about their subject to be accepted as champions of reason once the specific issues of their day had faded. Their own estimation was almost ecstatic: “More than ever,” they proclaimed, “the fetishists . . . these mastodons of thought, seek to conspire against the progress of science and reason. We walk among future fossils. Was it not the same in ancient times for those who live on today? Didn’t they have representatives of imperceptibly disappearing races as companions and as adversaries? In the same way that this comparison comes to the aid of hypotheses in paleontology, the successive discoveries of our archaeological digs strengthen the case of free thought.”¹³² It is hard not to smile at the hubris of such a claim. Ethnological studies of religion centered on fetishism and totemism in the second half of the century, so this jibe at the religious in France specifically compared believers to savages, before advancing the metaphor so that believers were mastodons. It should further be noted that, in the above passage, the important notion for the anthropologists was that science helped free thought, not that free thought strengthened science. The purpose to which they would put anthropology was equally clear. Hovelacque’s Les débuts de l’humanité claimed that anthropology “teaches us . . . that all religious disciplines being essentially intolerant and cruel, it is useful and moral to peacefully deliver humanity from them . . . and it teaches us how we can and how we must achieve the goal of civilization: social equality.”¹³³ In a book marvelously entitled Plus les laïques sont éclairés, moins les prêtres pourront faire du mal (The more the laity is enlightened, the less priests will be able to do harm), Hovelacque wrote that “we live in an epoch where the battle between the revolution and the counterrevolution is engaged on all sides at all times. . . . Clericalism is certainly not the only enemy of modern society, but it is the common link of all the elements hostile to the republic and to social progress.”¹³⁴

Church dogma and ritual were clearly the enemy, but dogma and ritual themselves were by no means anathema to the anthropologists, and the dogma and ritual they chose was concentrated on the macabre. One point of religion had always been to focus the congregation’s attention, in a carefully controlled way, on the terrors of the abyss, the meaning of it all, and the nature of our most authentic selves. Anthropological mystery was just as earthshakingly strange as church mystery and just as effective at drawing attention to difficult meditations: death and cosmic abandonment, the insignificance of individuals, and the burden of carrying a dizzying new truth to the unenlightened. In this sense, the freethinking anthropologists, while rejecting Catholicism for ethical, political, and intellectual reasons, were religious personalities. They thought about life-and-death issues a great deal. Skulls sat on their desks and filled cabinets. One cannot help thinking of the medieval monastery’s memento mori (reminder of death): a human skull placed in view to keep the monk’s attention where it should be. At the Laboratory of Anthropology, the freethinkers were surrounded by tokens and representations of death, of the material stuff of which humanity is composed, and myriad reminders of our animal nature. Thousands of human and anthropoid skulls lined the walls and tables. In the archives, irregular, handwritten meeting notes speak of strange arrivals in the mail: a box came from a Madam Masmenier who was presenting the society with “twelve Negro heads, massacred after a revolt. They are in the same box in which they had arrived [when she acquired them], and which contains several indications of their origins. Also, there is an inscription on each head.”¹³⁵ A Constantin Snow sent a large collection of Russian men’s and women’s hair.¹³⁶ The municipal councillor Charles Gras sent pottery shards and bones from the Grotto of Salpêtrière and asked what the anthropologists would like him to bring them from his next trip.¹³⁷ Assorted bones and skulls were delivered to the anthropologists frequently and usually without much background: a full skeleton arrived on February 4, 1895, with the singular indication that it was “from the Canary Islands.”¹³⁸ Of course, some of the skulls, brains, and other body parts were the remains of friends, colleagues, and lay members of the autopsy society.

Jacques Bertillon described the Museum of Anthropology adjoining the lab to his readers in La nature, saying the place had “around four thousand skulls of diverse races, a considerable number of bones and other anatomical pieces, a series of forty skeletons, in brief, several thousand objects of ethnography and prehistoric archaeology.”¹³⁹ There was a tone of pride and wonder as he described it: “The museum contains a great number of skeletons of large animals. The most precious are three complete skeletons of gorillas and some fifteen gorilla skulls, as well as a mannequin very exactly representing the muscles and other organs of this remarkable animal.” There were also “collections of Parisian skulls dating from more or less ancient periods” that Broca had dug up and measured and upon which he had based many of his anthropological conclusions, as well as “thirty or so microcephalic and partially microcephalic skulls accompanied by a complete skeleton of an adult microcephal.” The museum also possessed “a beautiful series of artificially deformed skulls,” which Bertillon described with considerable relish, adding that “what makes the study of the skull so important is that it contains the brain, the organ of thought. But how much more interesting still is the study of the brain itself!” (40–41). He then proceeded to delight his readers with a description of the museum’s “rich” collection thereof, which included “desiccated brains as well as plaster models” (141). They also had the skeleton of a giant, from Burgundy, two meters fourteen centimeters tall (around seven feet), who had lately worked the fairs for his living.

That essay was written by Jacques Bertillon in 1878; after 1883 his own father’s full skeleton and preserved brain would make up part of the exhibit. The composite effect was that when the freethinkers went to do anthropological work they walked out of modern Paris, with its celebrations of the civilized, the mechanical, the literate, and the orderly, and into a rather macabre environment. They created the environment themselves, without the institutional backing and rigorous, methodical training that would today separate a museum of natural history from, say, a private citizen’s enthusiastic collection of human remains. Add the biological anomalies, and the dyad is medical museum versus freak show. Add the passionate atheism, and we are reminded that such strange collections would have once been understood in terms of miracles and demonic monsters. Jacques Bertillon’s four-part article “Monstrosities” for La nature began by arguing that Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and his son, Isidore, had elevated teratology, the natural history of monsters, to the rank of a real science by “showing that one could press monsters into a Linnaean classification and submit them to a scientific nomenclature, demonstrating that one could formulate laws about their configuration, and, above all, by establishing the importance of their study in the eyes of embryologists and in the eyes of philosophers.”¹⁴⁰

The phrase “eyes of philosophers” is a giveaway that Bertillon and his colleagues were interested in odd bodies for metaphysical reasons. Up to the mid-seventeenth century, Bertillon explained, monsters were understood as either sent by God or “made in the image of the devil.” He characterized the period as representing “vague, incomplete observations, recorded by chance; the grossest errors, the most absurd prejudices admitted without hesitation and obstinately upheld; and explanations made childish by superstition and dignified only of a childish origin—these are the sad characteristics of this clumsy period of teratological science” (209). Since he mentioned his disdain for absurd prejudice, it is fair to note his claim that most giants are indolent, that dwarfs are not usually very intelligent and that they are so often sterile that the case of a dwarf named Borwilaski, who married a normal woman and had two normal-sized children, “raises real doubts about the true origin of these children” (244–245). Casual prejudice and unkind assumption were a matter of course, but here the point is that Bertillon and his colleagues were deconsecrating “monsters” and using the opportunity to think about what they meant about humanity. The article brimmed with anecdotal detail, arbitrary classification spoken of as law, and careful descriptions of a very wide range of anomalies.¹⁴¹

There were lurid engravings of a foot with eight toes, a headless baby (monstre acéphale), a Cyclops baby with a horn, a harelip, a baby with fused legs, a gruesomely monstrous portrait of a normal embryo face at thirty-five days, and several conjoined twins. Some of them shared limbs, some were connected together by a tube of flesh, or sternopage, and Bertillon mentioned that a “remarkable sternopage is conserved in alcohol at the museum.” There was also a woman with a full-sized head growing out of the back of her own. It was upside-down, chin pointing up toward the sky. The anthropologists did not have much more to say about these abnormalities than did anyone else, but they spent a good deal of effort discussing and cataloging such wonders. Preserved, tattooed skin was also a favorite in their collection. A note in the archives mentioned the preserved, tattooed head of a Maori from New Zealand.¹⁴² From all over France and from the wider world, people sent the Société d’anthropologie sketches, descriptions, and specimens of physical oddities, suggesting that many people felt the need to register the amazing, stimulating productions of the natural world.

By collecting specimens and publishing analyses of these remains, the anthropologists were transforming these items and ideas from objects of awe to objects of knowledge. This is one function of measuring and classifying. Ritual and orthopraxy sanctify mundane things; measuring makes the sacred profane. The objects were being used in a kind of religious way: they were not relics nor yet mundane things but highly charged not-relics. Measurement, then, transformed objects from sacred to profane on their way to becoming mundane. The anthropologists exemplified this in myriad ways. To take an example from outside their group: in 1878 the freethinker (and future deputy to the chamber) Jean-Marie De Lanessan expressed fury that a Catholic medical school had been founded in France. Yet Lanessan was not too worried, because as he saw it, “observation kills faith.”¹⁴³ Observation does not, on its own, kill faith, but measuring and reordering can remove objects from the altar (or the imagined “black mass”) and place them, labeled, in the medical museum and textbook. An object that inspires fear or deferential care changes meaning when it is grabbed in a matter-of-fact manner and held up to a ruler. That is what the expression “matter of fact” is all about: it refers to a scientific, objective attitude and claims its own truth status.

In this context, the “rotting garbage” jettisoned by the Society of Mutual Autopsy takes on further meaning, for the gesture turns out to be part of a very large project. The freethinking anthropologists deconsecrated a lot of things. As I will discuss, many of the anthropologists held political positions. When Mortillet was deputy and mayor, his radical anticlericalism was minutely cataloged in a running report and article repository in the Paris police headquarters.¹⁴⁴ According to these reports, Mortillet mounted a campaign to change the monarchical or theistic street names in Paris. In one instance, he wanted to change rue Saint Louis to rue Diderot, but when this met with too much resistance he settled for rue Louis IX. He also insisted that all government stationery bear the words “République française.” More seriously, he fired a government employee because the man had sent his child to be educated in a Catholic school, and, in an act that made him both infamous and, in many circles, a bit ridiculous, he had the main cross pulled down in the local cemetery. Many of his decisions were appealed and overturned. A sense of the notoriety of Mortillet’s doings may be gleaned from a police department list of the journals and newspapers that reported them. They include Le figaro, Le monde, Le dix-neuvieme siècle, Le petit corporal, Le matin, L’autorité, La justice, L’univers, Le français, Le moniteur universel, La patrie, La défense, La liberté, Le gaulois, Le temps, Le soleil, Le petit moniteur, Le national, L’industriel, and L’instransigeant, among others.¹⁴⁵

Abel Hovelacque was also a deputy and president of the Paris municipal council. Like Mortillet, he, too, went looking for battles with the sacred. It may be remembered that Hovelacque started out as a lawyer. He was taking a variety of courses while studying for the law exam and thus came under the influence of two well-known scholars: the pioneering linguist Honore Joseph Chavée, with whom he founded the Revue de linguistique, and Broca, whose anthropological society he joined in 1867, at the age of twenty-four. He spent the next decade measuring skulls in the lab, writing essays, and teaching linguistic ethnography at the Ecole. In 1878 he was elected municipal councillor and from this post he organized a petition to claim two Paris convents for the city.¹⁴⁶ The buildings were communal property but Napoleon’s Empire and the Restoration had allowed the Sisters of Saint-Vincent and the Sisters of Ignorantins to use the buildings, and they had been there ever since. Hovelacque argued that the arrondissement needed buildings for secular schools, and he collected enough signatures to kick the poor nuns out. One convent was transformed into a vocational school for boys, the other into an upper-level primary school for young girls.

Thulié, the freethinker who had begun life in Paris as a founding member of the realist art movement, had gone on to earn a medical degree specializing in mental illness. Just after serving as a surgeon in the Franco-Prussian war, he was elected to the municipal council of Paris and the general council of the Seine. He was secretary of this latter when it voted for free, obligatory secular education, so his report was published “by the entire republican press.” Thulié then began an energetic anticlerical campaign in the manner of his colleagues. In the words of an outside observer, “Considering clericalism as the union of all the enemies of the Republic, [Thulié] began his anticlerical conferences, which became his specialty.” We do not know exactly what these anticlerical conferences were, but we have got a sense of the thing. He had ample opportunity to put on such events, for in the following decade he was four times elected president of the Paris municipal council. He was chosen by this body to create a conference on Voltaire’s centenary anniversary—quite likely on his own suggestion, as this was a major preoccupation of the freethinking group. From this post he also wrote “combat brochures,” such as his 1875 La coalition cléricale, which apparently sold out at 200,000 copies.¹⁴⁷

The freethinking anthropologists thus worked to deconsecrate human remains, wonders of nature, government stationery, government personnel, several buildings, a city cemetery, and burial rites in general. They also worked to create popular secular education and festivities, such as antireligious lectures, conferences, and celebrations of Enlightenment heroes. This work was about revising the epistemic setting, the worldview, for the new secular democratic era they were planning. Government and populace alike were willing to support the project—financially and otherwise. The Société d’anthropologie had invented and ritualized so many activities that it was beginning to parallel the heavily marked calendar of Catholic worship. The group had long been meeting once a month for a Freethinker’s Dinner, which was retitled the Dinner of Scientific Materialism to suit their new affiliation. In addition, they met for the Lamarck dinners, and the dinners for Voltaire and Diderot. There were elaborate parties held to welcome new members, to celebrate the accomplishments of old members, and to raise money for the group’s many related endeavors. To examine these festivities is to see a group actively forming its members’ identities, reinforcing its perception of the social and political world, and cajoling group uniformity and loyalty.

For instance, on January 7, 1886, the freethinking anthropologists held a dinner for Mathias Duval on the occasion of his ascendance to the chair of histology at the Faculty of Medicine. He was replacing the famed Charles Robin, who had essentially founded French histology, creating a lab to study it “at a time when the microscope was an object of derision for most doctors.”¹⁴⁸ Robin was also famed as a freethinker. As I mentioned earlier, he was singled out along with Broca as one of the most dangerous materialists at the Paris Faculty of Medicine. So, at least in terms of his freethinking, it was not extraordinary that the respected Dr. Mathias Duval would replace Robin. Still, for a member of the Paris anthropological coterie, this was an extremely prestigious post at an illustrious institution. The anthropologists wanted to celebrate this step into legitimacy, but they also wanted to claim it for themselves and use it as an occasion for materialist ritual. Consider their own description of the feast and the decor at Duval’s dinner: “The menu, which was most fantastic, was presented by a human skeleton and a skeleton of a gorilla. Below that could be found the bust of Duval surrounded by symbols of science and of the arts. The hors-d’oeuvres were served in prehistoric pottery. Some of them were even to be found in the cavities of skulls. The grand piece mounted at the center of the table was an immense nougat representing a group of human skulls.”¹⁴⁹

With celebrations like this, the society was bringing its deconsecrating project into the realm of religious ritual. The food was served inside the cavities of human skulls! We may assume they had a professional confectioner shape the “immense nougat” group of skulls, at a cost of much time, money, and effort, and the simple fact of having thought of it and deciding to act on the thought is remarkable. Consider that they then ate the nougat human skulls. These are, we should remember, the same people who argued that cannibalism is always religious. That they were also handling each other’s brains and skulls, year after year, makes this display more significant still. How might it have felt to look across a dinner table laden with skulls and raise a toast with someone who would likely, someday soon, lift your own brain out of its shell of bone and heft it to the light? What expressions were there exchanged? For that matter, there must have been some widened eyes and purposeful glances traded over the autopsy table as well. Sitting down to a feast table full of skulls charged the atmosphere. These men and women, intimate friends, were symbolically enacting an antireligious rite together.

The human and gorilla skulls displaying the menu for the feast were potentially disturbing on two levels: they reminded one of death, of course, but, because of their juxtaposition and given the context, they were also a reference to the animal nature of humanity. The human skeleton was dramatically being treated as just another object, as if there were nothing special in it or in its living counterparts. But remember that Jacques Bertillon said the gorilla skeletons were the most precious things in the Museum of Anthropology. The anthropologists could still get a rise out of dining with a gorilla skeleton, but the point was to treat such wonderful objects as if they were no longer wonders. Even the casual respect that one might pay this remarkable item was actively undermined by the silliness of having it display a menu card. The effect was disturbing, and that was the point. The freethinking anthropologists wanted their celebration to be upsetting to the uninitiated, and at least a bit unsettling to themselves. As they reported, “Some people found this decor to be depressing, but that did not hinder the most frank gaiety from reigning throughout the meal” (25). In their eyes, all this was cheerful because they had exchanged the comfort of authority (of the priest and of God) with the pleasure of rebellion, the pride of independence, and the delight of existential courage in the service of truth. But we must also see that they themselves could not avoid mentioning that the decor was depressing. They had purposefully gone rather far in recreating the spooky atmosphere of religious ritual, communion, and feast. This points to a curious paradox of the freethinking anthropologists: what they said was that they wanted the power of science and that they did not need the comfort of religion, but they created a science that gave them no power (capable of curing nothing, predicting nothing, moving nothing) but was able to fulfill the social roles of religion, to move them and comfort them.

After the meal, there were toasts and testimonials. Lefèvre’s speech was described as containing a “very faithful” history of the freethinking dinners. The speech was preserved and is worth an extended look (26–28).

At the moment when one of us receives the much merited recompense for his work, and the title that consecrates his talent, at the moment when our learned friend Mathias Duval managed to bring into higher education, like a fresh breeze, the free spirit—the freethinking that animates us all—isn’t it natural that one of the oldest members of our group give a little history and show the line that attaches the foundation of this modest dinner to the happy success that we celebrate tonight?

Assuredly, if the doctor Mathias Duval has a place at the Ecole de médecine, it is not at all because he is one of ours; it is not the fraternity with which he honors us that could recommend him to the choice of the minister [of public instruction] and of his new colleagues. It would be truer to say that, because he is one of ours, his merit and the renown of his biological discoveries would be thrown into the shadows, while the places he frequented were made suspect, and that he would have to force open the doors of the microcosm of officialdom. And yet, we all feel it, I know, our dinner is not a stranger to the event that brings us together tonight. For was it not this dinner that brought together, for the past almost twenty years, the partisans of a common doctrine?

A little shout, among the indifferent and the hostile, in the disarray of opinions, has given, so to speak, a body to our ideas. It has contributed to creating the intellectual milieu that formed and affirmed the scientific convictions of Mathias Duval himself, and it has been a motivating center—the hidden, discreet origin of an unseen movement—the germ of an evolution, very slow for our taste and constantly being blocked but necessary and already fecund.

We should not overstate the significance of Lefèvre’s comment that the regularly meeting dinner “has given, so to speak, a body to our ideas.” We do not really know if that “so to speak” meant he was winking about scientifically measured human bodies embodying their ideas. Still, given the decor, the accomplishment being honored, and the company in general, it is a comment worth noticing because it suggests an interesting hint of self-consciousness. Lefèvre then gave a history of the dinner, which began with the founding of the freethinking journals and their suppression under the empire. He quickly passed to the role of Royer: “Madame Clémence Royer had just interpreted Darwin and, whether he liked it or not, she had pushed the master’s doctrine to its final consequence. Moleschott and Büchner, also recently translated, had reanimated among us the memory of the French precursors of scientific materialism and transformism: d’Holbach, Diderot, Lamarck, and passing above the fictions of the concordat and the bastard eclecticism [of the empire], we came to seize again the heritage of our eighteenth century.” This crediting of Moleschott and Büchner, even in the small role of “reanimators” of memory was extraordinarily rare. From the earliest days of Libre pensée and Pensée nouvelle, and their myriad articles on materialism, through to the freethinker’s anthropological writing, when the Germans were mentioned, or included, it was generally as esteemed colleagues, not leaders. Even here, that tendency is well evident. To continue with Lefèvre’s toast:

Such was the object of our efforts. It was in order to sustain us in our goal and in our hopes that several of our colleagues, dead and alive, Coudereau, Asseline, Assézat,¹⁵⁰ Letourneau, Thulié, Yves Guyot, de Mortillet, Issaurat, Hovelacque—but we would have to name them all. It was to search for modes of propaganda and to prepare our next campaigns that we took on the habit of meeting together every month in a relatively secret room. . . . The terrible year did not separate us, we refound almost all our number at the Ligue des droits de Paris, between the victors and the vanquished.¹⁵¹

Let us move on.

The truly admirable energy of Asseline reformed the group and extended it. Without an organ of our own title, we spread our ideas in journals and reviews, and the dinner returned to its regular meetings.

It was at this point, Lefèvre explained, that the freethinking group joined the Société d’anthropologie and began publishing its scientific journals and several series of books. He also reminded his listeners of the great role they played in the organization of the centennial celebrations of Voltaire and Diderot.

These results and the personal successes of our friends, aren’t these the sure gauge of life for a dinner, where one meets with professors, councilmen, deputies, doctors, writers, linguists, and scholars who honor our country? A little joy is well permitted to us in these days of doubt and worry.

Permit me to bring us together in a fraternal toast, our faithful quaestors Gillet-Vital and Issaurat; our profound moralist whose success gives all his friends a reason to rejoice, Letourneau, president of the Société d’anthropologie; and, finally, the hero of this party, the doctor Mathias Duval, professor at the Faculty of Medicine of Paris.

Friends, I drink to you all.

There were cathectic bonds being formed here. The power to forward the various life goals of the group’s members was imputed to the doctrine itself, yet a sense of secrecy and danger was made to adhere to the group as well. That speech along with the menu and its deceased presenters and understood within the context of the work in which these anthropologists were engaged, and their “profaning” behavior in particular, we are left with an elaborate description of a religious enterprise. It translated the individual’s needs for community and for identity—needs that had once been mediated by religion—into a nominally antireligious project, but it met those needs through religious behaviors. Years later, Clémence Royer would look back on the passion and ritual of the society with great affection and with strikingly explicit reference to the religiosity of the endeavor: “We were a little church. I love little churches; they are life and liberty. . . . In our little church we worked with fervor, we struggled valiantly, shoulder to shoulder, hoping to discover great truths, founded on ever more numerous facts and more general laws.”¹⁵²