CHAPTER THREE

Scientific Materialism and the Public Response

The freethinking anthropologists grew into the roles they had taken on: they became scientists and were well respected among the scientific community at home and abroad. They wrote and published an extraordinary amount of material on their own and found several publishers for their scores of books. A great many of these books went into second and third printings. Their writing was blatantly, even evangelistically, materialist. As I will show, some of their audience celebrated this, some ignored it, and some spent a terrific amount of effort deriding it. Yet before entering into an analysis of their work and the professional response to it, I must touch on the question of the general public. Clearly, people were consuming all this literature, purchasing books and journals, and reading the professional reviews. But did the general public agree with the anthropologists? Those who joined the Society of Mutual Autopsy did, but what about everyone else? Were they fellow travelers? Were they being converted?

It seems that, despite their book sales, the materialism of the anthropologists never represented anything like a majority of French men and women. Instead, they were supported by the newly secular French government and also by a broad swath of the population that was eager to have a few materialist arguments in their personal arsenal and a bunch of materialist titles on the bookshelf. When a people seeks to describe its own moment, especially if it feels striking in its particularity, they cast about to name the quintessence of the new ideas that, in some attenuated form, have affected their lives. The freethinking anthropologists were kept in the public eye by both friends and enemies of their ideals, because they brought the hottest issues in France at that time to a thrilling extreme. They served as a sort of North Star of irreligious materialism: you did not have to go to Polaris, or even get close, or even be going north, to find the star an immense service in navigating the cultural terrain. The men and women who joined the Society of Mutual Autopsy were bundling up for the frozen North Pole of materialism. Even most other devout republicans were not going to follow the doctrine that far, but republican or not everyone seemed to check its position now and again and to refer to it as a reliable beacon in a complicated field of thought.

SOLDIERS OF ANTHROPOLOGY

The freethinking anthropologists often wrote that they intended to change the world through anthropology. They eventually developed a plan for doing this, but at first, and in a sense always, the idea was that knowledge about human beings had heretofore been mediated through religion and social hierarchy and was therefore corrupt. Philosophy had made some inroads in reinvestigating human nature from a secular and egalitarian standpoint, but it was mere conjecture, weak against enemies because it had no material proofs. What’s more, its mere existence seemed to condone religious thinking because both availed themselves of feelings and unempirical concepts. Anthropology was going to do better. Without metaphysics or prejudice, anthropologists would collect facts about humanity. These facts might be taken from a very wide range of subjects: contemporary Parisian bone lengths, flint shards from an archaeological dig in North America, breastfeeding practices in Tunisia—any objective thing or behavior that could be described, sketched, or measured. The freethinking anthropologists did some traveling and digging themselves, they borrowed a lot from published sources, and they also deputized many amateur travelers. Before setting off on a voyage—on holiday, in the army, or in some other colonial enterprise—many people would come by the Anthropological Institute in Paris to be outfitted with extensive questionnaires to be put to the natives, as well as measuring devices and a list of what to measure. This may seem a strange way to collect scientific data, but back in 1865 Broca had said that “man . . . is not any more difficult to observe than a plant or an insect; any doctor, any naturalist, any attentive and persevering traveler can measure him, describe him methodically, without having to prepare by special studies, because the information to be gathered has to do with exterior characteristics that anyone can ascertain.”¹ The freethinkers wrote a bunch of these questionnaires with Broca in the 1870s and without him in the 1880s. Most were published in journals as well as singly, in pamphlet form.² The travelers mailed in specimens and data, and the anthropologists published whatever they considered to be of interest. The measuring must have been fun—it certainly allowed for a good deal of otherwise unlikely human interaction and an odd intimacy. It seems to have felt like important work to everyone involved, but there was often no real attempt at synthesis or any interpretation that went beyond the most localized question.

Other sciences, astronomy, for instance, had collected innumerable facts that served later syntheses, so it seemed reasonable to keep amassing details even when there was no apparent point. Now and again the anthropologists articulated this, but they tended to claim more caution than was actually employed. Wrote Letourneau, “Social science is still in its infancy, to formulate laws is beyond its power, but scientific laws do not burst forth by spontaneous generation, one must prepare for them by pulling out of the chaos of details a few general facts—we hope to have succeeded in this.”³ What they really did was to turn “the chaos of details” into orderly piles of detail, without much rigorous sense to the piles. In fact, just before the positivist Eugène Dally rejected the materialists in the society as “trying to found a kind of church council,” he railed against a committee-written questionnaire that followed Letourneau’s classificatory system. As Dally put it, “I can’t accept these divisions, not because they come from him but because they don’t come from everyone, because they are not current, because if they were true they are not in our intellectual usage, but above all else because they are not true.”⁴ In the questionnaire to which Dally was referring, for instance, religion was grouped with dance and music, and we can understand Dally’s frustration with this. He was explicit in his desire to standardize a single, international model upon which scientists everywhere could agree; the freethinkers, by contrast, were trying to change the way people saw the world.⁵ Still, this work did process the material for general consumption, and it drew attention for a host of reasons. Some of it was rather titillating: sketches of a woman with a second left breast, tucked beneath the first; a lengthy description of a man who fathered children though he had lost his penis in an accident; accounts of cannibalism, hermaphrodites, the sexual practices of “savages.” Articles about such things might be only a few paragraphs or a few pages, and though some were very long, the aggregate effect was a great crowd of singular, essentially disparate materials.

The freethinking anthropologists did, however, develop a theory into which some of these facts and descriptions could be pressed. The idea seems to have come independently from Mortillet working in archaeology and Letourneau working in anthropological sociology. As Michael Hammond demonstrated in his article comparing Cuvier’s conservative politics and belief in the fixity of the species with the politics and ideas of these late-century anthropologists, the freethinking anthropologists believed progress was unilinear and followed the same stages in all places and cultures.⁶ As atheists, they thought of themselves as the pinnacle of the history of religion and figured that the history of the rest of culture was also a story of sloughing off the primitive en route to an enlightened, utopian future. Mortillet had found a lot of evidence that pointed to a material culture at a time in prehistory when, according to his colleagues, human beings did not yet exist. He spent much of his life arguing that we must have already been around, and in the end he prevailed. But meanwhile he had to classify all his finds, and he settled on a notion of absolute progress in all places at all times and grouped the items accordingly, showing continuity between tools found unaccompanied by human remains and tools found near such biological evidence. Letourneau’s situation was a bit less bleak and more overtly political. He wanted to write an anthropology of society, and his only theoretical claim was absolute progress toward his group’s vision of human perfection; he rather straightforwardly lined his facts up to form an arrow pointing wherever it was he wanted to go. Mortillet and Letourneau both favored an animalistic vision of human beings in which various “hungers” determine human behavior, yet their understanding of the story of the human race extended into a triumphant and romantic future.

The other freethinking anthropologists followed this model. Whatever aspect of the field they studied, they classified what they termed early behaviors (specific to either prehistoric human cultures or to contemporary nonindustrial societies) as being natural and thus to be defended in modern French culture or as savage and therefore to be repudiated. The model was very similar to what Royer had suggested in her preface to Darwin’s Origin of Species. The freethinking anthropologists determined whether a behavior was natural (good) or savage (bad) as follows: natural human behavioral characteristics were increasingly developed and perfected as a society progressed. Savage qualities, on the other hand, decreased with the passage of time.⁷ It would be hard to think of a more manipulable system, and the freethinking anthropologists really just made their decisions by preference. In 1881 Abel Hovelacque wrote that through anthropology,

we learn our origins and we see that our moral amelioration is tied intimately to the continuation of our organic evolution. We know all that is still present of the savage and barbaric in our modern civilizations: the priesthood, belief in gods, militarism, the subjugation of the weak and poor, the inferior condition of women, the cult of authority, respect for functionarism, suspicion of individual liberty, and social inequality. Such are the surviving traits from which the development of anthropological science is called upon to liberate us. (314)

Not all the freethinkers agreed with his list of barbarisms—some were more concerned with class struggle than with women’s rights, for example—but this is still an accurate depiction of the incredible list of charges they laid to the young social science.⁷

One item noticeably missing from the freethinkers’ list of barbarisms was racism, and anti-Semitism in particular. The texts they wrote were often full of assumptions and claims about what they believed to be the temporary, but nevertheless real, biological limits of various non-European human groups. Still, they consistently defended the notion that all human groups, if encouraged or if simply no longer held back, could uphold the responsibilities of legal, economic, and political equality. As early as 1865 Eugène Véron wrote that he did not want to “imprison the entire possible development of a people in racial considerations,” and this appeal to progress and possibility generally guided the freethinkers’ approach to race.⁹ Sometimes, though rarely, they went further. Mortillet, for example, argued strenuously against anti-Semitism, using anthropological arguments when he could think of any and otherwise simply trying to work out the socioeconomic origins of the prejudice.¹⁰ The lacuna is still a bit odd. It is best explained in two ways: first, the timing—many members did not even live to see the Dreyfus Affair, let alone incorporate its issues into their work. Second, as I have mentioned, the written work of the freethinking anthropologists rarely mentioned concrete political questions of the day, despite many references to feminism, socialism, and egalitarian democracy.

Over all this reigned the freethinking anthropologists’ notion that thought and emotion were physiological products, like sweat and urine, and that intellectual, emotional, and artistic desires were best understood as biological processes, exactly like hunger for food. This may sound like the naturalist literary movement championed by Emile Zola toward the end of the century, and, as I noted early, in the 1850s Thulié was part of a “cénacle réalist” and founded a journal called Le réalisme. (Naturalism and realism were distinguished primarily by the naturalists’ devotion to objective description and their rejection of the moral commentary common to realism.) In fact, the connection is more profound even than that: Zola specifically credited Letourneau as having given him the information he needed to write his “natural history of a family,” the Rougon-Macquart series. Among Zola’s extensive early notes for the series are résumés of only two science books; Letourneau’s Physiologie des passions of 1868 is one of them. Included in these pages are quotations from Letourneau that stand as singular elements of the materialist credo: “I sense, therefore I am”; “Of this vague formula is born the illusion of free will. Man, constantly solicited by numerous and simultaneous desires, obeys the strongest while being conscious of the others, and that is why he feels as if he were free” (The emphasis is Zola’s).¹¹ Indeed, Zola reviewed Letourneau’s book in Le globe and celebrated it for these qualities, writing, “Here we are fully in materialism, fully in experimental science. [Letourneau] has medically studied the passions, showing them to be born in the organs of the body and finding their cause to be in these same organs.” Further explicating Letourneau, Zola related that what poets, philosophers, and theologians called “the unfathomable mystery of life” is nothing but a “phenomenon of organic assimilation and disassimilation.” Humanity, “envisaged sanely and not through the tinted glass of metaphysics, is, like all other organized beings, nothing but an aggregation of histological elements, fibers, or cells, forming a living ‘federal republic’ directed by the nervous system and constantly renewing itself.”¹²

The Zola-Letourneau connection is well known and often cited by literary scholars, but since they have heretofore had little or no information on Letourneau, the connection has not meant much. Still, one Zola scholar states that “[Zola] was particularly impressed by Letourneau’s doctrine that man’s moral and intellectual needs are as organic as his need for food, and that the need for food is the most imperious and indispensable of them all. He decided to make his novel [the Rougon-Macquart series] to a great extent a novel about different sorts of hunger—hunger for food, wealth, power, all the benefits of modern civilization.”¹³ Another Zola scholar notes his reliance on Letourneau and adds that the novelist voraciously read “the works of Darwin, recently translated into French,” which suggests that Zola was under the influence of Clémence Royer as well.¹⁴ It is surprising, from our present vantage point, to see that not only did Zola rely on Letourneau on a conceptual level, but he also saw him as capable of lending prestige and delivering a faithful and enthusiastic audience. In 1868 Zola exchanged a few letters with the naturalist author Joris-Karl Huysmans with whom he was planning to start a new journal. A note he received from Huysmans read, “Dr. Letourneau, a man well respected in philosophy, will cover scientific developments. This is good, I believe, as he can bring us the clientele that buys books at Germer-Baillière and Reinwald.”¹⁵ But the Zola-Letourneau conceptual link was strong in its own right, sales and clientele aside. In Zola’s notes to himself in the Bibliothèque nationale, he mused that great novelists are supposed to have a philosophy; he resisted the idea but concluded that “the best one would perhaps be materialism.”¹⁶

Not everyone was as positive as Zola, but in general the work of the freethinking anthropologists was highly esteemed. For the two decades between 1880 and 1900, anthropology in France was significantly defined by the journals attached to the Société d’anthropologie, the teaching at the Ecole d’anthropologie, the Dictionnaire des sciences anthropologique, and the books that were published in the various “Bibliothèques.” These included a “Bibliothèque matérialiste,” a “Bibliothèque anthropologique,” and a “Bibliothèque des sciences contemporaines.”¹⁷ In order to map the science and politics of these works, I begin with a brief discussion of the Dictionnaire des sciences anthropologiques, followed by a look at the Bibliothèque des sciences contemporaines (the collection discussed with such rancor by Topinard), and finish up with a discussion of exemplary pieces from the Bibliothèque matérialiste and the Bibliothèque anthropologique. At the same time, I will consider the response these works generated from the scientific press. An analysis of the response from the philosophy and literary journals and the popular press follows thereafter.

THE DICTIONNAIRE

The Dictionnaire des sciences anthropologique was intended as a compendium of anthropological information, with individual entries written by the most qualified expert—so long as he or she was a freethinker (or close). For the Dictionnaire was also intended as an ideological manifesto in the tradition of Diderot’s Enlightenment Encyclopedia. The work reflected Diderot’s in significant ways. It was full of factual information, but many of its entries were deeply political, and some of these communicated their politics through a rather giddy sarcasm. Mortillet had been warned not to push this mood too far. The advice came from a very interesting quarter: Carl Vogt, the German materialist naturalist in exile in Switzerland with whom Mortillet had worked during his own exile. Mortillet had asked if Vogt would contribute to the project, and, in a private letter to Mortillet written in the spring of 1880, Vogt declined, explaining that he had not written any anthropology in years and that even were he to do so, the French press did not pay nearly as well as the German. Still, he took the time to warn his French colleague strongly against indulging his usual ebullient atheism when putting together the Dictionnaire. Vogt was no less a materialist, but he felt that the Dictionnaire would not make any money if it were too insistent on the nonexistence of God and the soul. As he warned Mortillet:

If you want to be recompensed for your work on the Dictionnaire, do not make it too exclusively representative of our point of view. . . . If you want the dict. to be purchased, do not shake anything up, or leave anyone out, especially anyone who has real merit but who does not go as far as you do, and do not be extreme in your manner of presenting things. We are in an intimate minority, it is incontestable, and except for a few rare exceptions, the majority is in control. Thus if you want to sell them your merchandise, do not print on it: Poison, prepared by several personal enemies of God. Otherwise you risk having your merchandise never leave the store. The nomination of M. Bertrand to the Conseil supérieur has proven to me that things have not changed as much as you like to say they have, that the Ac. des Sciences is still the same and the resistance of the Faculty of Medicine against pathological anatomy shows me that even in the groups that are said to be advanced, there is still an unshakable prejudice. So do not take the second step before you have taken the first.¹⁸

Perhaps Mortillet took heed of this advice; the Dictionnaire may have been originally conceived in an even more overtly atheist form than that of its final realization. As it was, the progressive ideology and anthropological methodology of the work were set out in a preface stating that “social evolution” was consistent in all societies as they progressed from tribes to castes to absolute monarchy. After that, the preface explained, “little by little the chains loosen, privileges attenuate or disappear, social inequalities increasingly raise public indignation.” This pattern, exclaimed the anthropologists, “releases a great and powerful idea, the idea of progress, always necessary, always increasing in speed, despite the roadblocks it often meets.”¹⁹ Some entries stressed this notion more than others.

Letourneau’s entry entitled “Femmes” is an excellent representation of the general approach (476–478). He discussed women in general and then moved on to a description of society’s progressive stages regarding the relations between the sexes. Letourneau’s understanding of these stages was as follows: women historically pass from being treated as domestic animals to being treated, progressively, as slaves, servants, and minors. “This gradation,” he wrote, “is instructive; it obviously marks a direction, a slow work of emancipation and movement toward equality, which is not to be thought of as finished” (478). In his booklength study of the evolution of marriage, Letourneau had written that this movement had been hampered by the reversals “caused by Catholicism” and its submission of wife to husband. With the onset of atheism, “progress resumes its course.”²⁰ In the Dictionnaire, some ambivalence about feminism showed through: he stated that he did not think women should be given political equality immediately, because they needed more education before they could handle the commensurate responsibilities. Despite his concerns, Letourneau wrote that he hoped and expected that “little by little, civil equality will be recognized, and a little later, political equality must follow.”²¹ He concluded by tipping his hat to women such as Royer, who had moved faster than the rest of society by pursuing careers in fields that had previously been forbidden to women.

This juxtaposition of the capabilities of all women and the achievements of Royer was by no means casual. As freethinkers, this group of men was already inclined to champion the emancipation of women. As anthropologists, the inclination was significantly encouraged by their professional relationship with Clémence Royer. Letourneau’s ambivalence about women’s intelligence as well as his profound respect for Royer are evident in an address given at a banquet in Royer’s honor in 1897. In it Letourneau elaborately praised Royer and admitted, with apologies to “the distinguished women” in the audience, that he had originally believed that “Cl. Royer” was a “pseudonym disguising a man and not an ordinary man but a philosopher, doubling as a vigorous writer.” Letourneau went on to say that it was rare for either a male or female scientist to possess such a “virility of expression, rigorous logic, clarity of thought, and courageous penetration” as was demonstrated in Royer’s famous preface to Origin of Species.²² This language—from “virility” to “penetration”—demonstrates a strong desire to retain intelligence as a masculine feature, but it also ascribes that feature to Royer—and, by extension, to all women. As Joy Harvey tells us, Ernest Renan once praised Royer as “almost a man of genius,” to which her friends and admirers replied, “Why almost? Why a man?”²³ The “distinguished women” in the audience probably included the several female scholars who had joined the society in the 1880s and 1890s.

Royer wrote the Dictionnaire’s extensive entry on evolution, which explained Lamarckian evolution and emphatically stated the French origins of the notion before discussing Darwin’s contribution to the idea. Despite the Social Darwinism that Royer championed elsewhere, in the Dictionnaire she was rather leery of Herbert Spencer’s assumptions regarding the application of Darwin’s theory to human society. The entry amounts to a sober survey of the idea of evolution according to Clémence Royer, the most political aspect of it being the simple fact that a woman wrote it. Some entries took matters a good deal less seriously. Writing on fairies (the entry “Fées”), Lefèvre mentioned that in Christianity “one plays around with supposed apparitions of a Jewish girl who has been dead for eighteen hundred years.”²⁴ Vogt’s fear that the freethinking anthropologists would scrawl “Poison, prepared by several personal enemies of God” on the book was not far-fetched. Aside from Lefèvre’s jokes, which were an obvious emulation of Diderot’s (under “ANTHROPOPHAGY:” Diderot put “see EUCHARIST”), most entries were serious and scholarly. Many experts outside the inner circle of freethinking anthropologists had been called upon and had delivered dense, impartial definitions and descriptions. The freethinkers’ entries, however, often followed their anthropological progress formula. Consider the entry on infanticide: “Today, the principal causes of infanticide are the shame attached to maternity outside legal marriage and the prohibition on searching out paternity. . . . Infanticide evolved like everything else. At first it was bestial, infanticide from need, then it became religious, as at Carthage, or social as at Sparta. As for infanticide in modern-day Europe, one could call it moral or legal, because it has as its principal causes the misunderstanding of public opinion and the injustice of the law” (610–611).²⁵ Hovelacque’s entry “Nationalism” clearly placed it as a surviving form of a waning savage behavior rather than simply a bad modern development; in any case, it was a problem. He held that its suppression was one of “the practical goals of the anthropological sciences” (795). In one of the more obnoxious entries, Lefèvre described “apparitions” as “nothing more than hoaxes and simpleton traps, good for the little shepherds of La Salette or for the idiot of Lourdes” (108–109).

From his post at the Laboratory of Anthropology, Manouvrier was a fellow traveler of the freethinking anthropologists and was invited to write on many anthropological subjects for the Dictionnaire. Staunchly republican, materialist, and egalitarian, Manouvrier was also an excellent material anthropologist. He figured out a lot about the trick to deciphering fossil bones—that is, how behavior, conditions, and body size can affect a skeleton. Also, when people started finding bones that seemed to be from a missing link between apes and humans, Manouvrier was very early in his cautious but firm support for the theory of evolution. When Eugène Dubois showed up with a femur, discovered in Java, that seemed neither ape nor human, Manouvrier helped him measure four hundred human femora so that a careful comparison could be made. Manouvrier championed aspects of both Darwinism and Lamarckianism and brought much positive attention to the theory of evolution in general. He also pioneered the whole practice of estimating total height on the basis of individual bones. Unlike the more combative freethinkers, Manouvrier tended to be extremely cautious, considering anthropology to be politically useful but recognizing that it could be dangerously abused. As chapter 6 will show, he was very conscious of the political meanings of anthropology and never claimed to hold the science above social and political concerns. Still, of the many articles that he wrote for the Dictionnaire, only in one did he join the others in their combat stance. That was for the article entitled “Sexe,” in which Manouvrier categorically dismissed female intellectual inferiority. “One can conclude,” he wrote at the end of a lengthy analysis, “in sum, that there is no known anatomical fact indicating an inferiority of the female sex having to do with intelligence” (1000).

Mixed in with mainstream descriptions of phenomena and history were definitions that spoke of “universal atheism” as the goal of science (“Athée,” 144–145), or explained that the family was progressively being phased out in favor of communal child rearing (“Famille,” 469–472), or assured readers that within a half century, and without violence, workers would be in control of the means of production (“Industrie,” 607–610). Positivism was accused of religiosity (918–920). The Société d’anthropologie was described and celebrated (1014). Thus the dictionary did serve as a manifesto of the freethinkers’ “anthropology of combat,” as promised. It also provided a generally scholarly compendium of contemporary ideas on the science of humanity. This is how its late-nineteenth-century readers responded to it, as is demonstrated by discussion of the dictionary in the Revue scientifique. This journal—also known as the Revue rose, for its pink cover—was the main science journal of the period, covering a range of applied and pure sciences and many other related topics (history of science and science teaching, as well as industry and “the military arts”). Each issue carried original articles as well as reviews of scientific books, conferences, journals, and exhibitions. Occasional contributors included Darwin, Pasteur, Marcellin Berthelot, Galton, Lombroso, and Vogt, as well as Broca, Quatrefages, Letourneau, Manouvrier, Royer, and Duval.

Book reviews in the journal were generally penned by its editor. In 1884 that was the doctor and medical researcher Charles Richet, who would later win the Nobel Prize for his work in serum therapy.²⁶ The dictionary’s review in Revue scientifique was extremely positive, asserting that the “considerable importance of anthropology” was “increasing every day” and that its “numerous discoveries” had long demanded a source book such as this. Richet attested that the Dictionnaire des sciences anthropologique had been published under the direction of a “group of distinguished scholars and with the collaboration of a great number of anthropologists of the highest authority.” The only problem with the work (aside from too many entrees that “really belonged” in a medical dictionary) was that the “tone of certain articles seem marred by a tendency to introduce politics—blatantly—into questions that absolutely must hover above politics and not leave the domain of pure science.” Still, Richet cited no examples of this and quickly recovered his tone of praise, writing that, “this reservation aside, a great number of the terms have been magisterially treated . . . with all the developments that truly belong to them.” The book was recommended for scholars and the general public, and readers of Revue scientifique were assured that anyone interested in the current research “will certainly rewardingly consult the dictionary on a great host of questions.”²⁷ Within the scientific community, this was a very typical response to the freethinking anthropologists’ writing in general: it was important work and good science, despite being problematically spotted with left-wing politics and evangelical atheism.

THE BOOKS

The Bibliothèque des sciences contemporaines was a great success. By 1883 eight volumes had appeared, and many had gone into a second printing. These included Letourneau’s La biologie and La sociologie d’après l’ethnographie, Hovelacque’s La linguistique, Topinard’s L’anthropologie, Véron’s L’esthétique, Lefèvre’s La philosophie, Guyot’s La science économique, Mortillet’s Le préhistorique. In each case, physical anthropology—the biological nature of human beings—was the predominant focus and the source of all information. The soul was everywhere denied.

André Lefèvre’s Philosophie, for example, was presented in two parts: one a history of thought from the earliest civilizations to the contemporary, the other Lefèvre’s explanation of all things material and immaterial. The whole served the cause of science and progress with sedate, neat arguments and relatively controlled optimism. Only briefly did Lefèvre call attention to freethinking as such, and in doing so he did not mention that this was his project. Instead, in his history of philosophy, he wrote that:

When, close to the end of the empire, an independent group, without anyone’s backing, and without any compromises of any sort, raised up the flag of the Libre pensée, they were not walking in the steps of Virchow, Moleschott, Buchner, or Vogt (with whom there was, however, an alliance); they rescued a patrimony that had almost fallen into foreign hands. The disaster of 1870 and the lamentable discord that had followed it interrupted their work, at least apparently. The Pensée nouvelle did not live two years; the Encyclopédie générale has only three volumes. But, without a journal and without a visible corps, the doctrines that were represented in these two memorable publications continue to exist today as the only living doctrines standing out against vulgar metaphysics and refined idealism. Positivism, which is, by degrees, absorbed into this doctrine, will have the honor of having served to pave the way from the naturalism of the eighteenth century, to the materialism of the nineteenth.²⁶

Letourneau’s books were equally clear in their passionate materialism, often in the context of his insistence on the animality of human beings. This issue had become rather important in secular culture at the end of the century. That Judeo-Christian ideology had so clearly and meaningfully separated humanity from everything else in the universe (including beasts and fish and fowl, over which humans had been given dominion), meant that Western atheism demanded a new formulation of the issue. The intimate relationship between anthropology and atheism heightened this demand because it suggested that the natural world of animals would be the primary source of new truths. Yet there was little consensus on whether humanity should distinguish itself from other animals (and if so, on what basis) or model itself on their “more natural” communities and behaviors. (This issue will resurface throughout the present study.) Letourneau’s approach in La sociologie left little room for debate: “Man has long deceived himself with the idea that he was made in the image of the Divinity. It is now more than time to say and to repeat to this poor creature that he is animal in every fiber and in every particle of his being.”²⁹ The pathos displayed in the epithet “poor creature” should not be overlooked.

La sociologie had a very clear projected telos. Throughout Letourneau’s eighteen full-length books and innumerable articles he examined the evolution of morality, of marriage and family, of religion in various human races, and a plethora of other evolutionary tales including those of law, war, slavery, and the condition of women. In all these projects Letourneau aimed to show the development of human beings by systematically following “the progress” of human traits and behaviors from their “early” forms upward toward their attenuated or enhanced versions in “advanced” Western society. Letourneau mostly occupied himself with comparing past and present-day societies and merely suggested that certain traits and behaviors were on the wane. However, in La sociologie, his linear description of social evolution was projected into the future in a particularly detailed prediction. Letourneau wrote that “if, as in a fairy tale, some magician could display before us the tableau of the future, and maybe not too distant in the future, we would see the superior human races constituted into republican federations having profoundly modified their social organization.” His vision of that social organization was sweetly tribal and democratic. “Confederated ethnic unions will then be little groups that administer themselves, by themselves, in everything that does not manifestly deal with the general interests of the republic. In each of these groups, social activity will be entirely absorbed by useful occupations.” We will thus be delivered from fooling around and wasting time. The almost goofy optimism, the transformed nature of individuals, and the primordial feel of small, self-administered ethnic unions all combine to cast an eschatological tint on his predictions. In Letourneau’s imagined future, “the greatest care will be given to the physical, moral, and intellectual education of the young generations; a great effort will be made, through appropriate training, to lessen organic inequalities, which will be the only ones that exist in this happy time.”³⁰

In order to facilitate the realization of this future, Letourneau wrote copiously, collecting and recording facts. He did not always claim to have an appropriately rigorous analytical methodology, and this humility led him to record endless data in the hope that future scientists could use it as the basis for their analyses. But no Kepler ever appeared. This did not much bother his scientist contemporaries. Charles Richet’s review of La sociologie for the Revue scientifique was extremely positive, calling it original and profound and proclaiming that Letourneau “takes on, without prejudice and with an often happy audacity, the boldest and—if one may say it—the most frightening issues of the study of society.” Richet was not kidding; he went on to explain that Letourneau’s mastery was in demonstrating that “our society and this civilization, of which we are so proud, should not inspire such pure arrogance. Our costumes, our wars, our religions, our morals are compared without pity to those of savages.” Like the Enlightenment writers who took readers back to the “state of nature,” continued Richet, Letourneau was no less fearless in describing our faults. “It leaves one a bit disenchanted, even aggrieved, to see this tissue of folly and of cruelty that is the past and the present of man. Let us hope the future will be better.” Letourneau may not have established a theory of sociology that would long outlast him (indeed, when Durkheim reviewed the history of sociology in 1900, he had little more to say than that Letourneau had “written voluminously”),³¹ but he clearly did some important work in weakening the cultural arrogance of nineteenth-century Europe and helping its intellectuals to conceive of their culture as one among many historically specific and changeable discourses. Richet was also convinced by Letourneau’s argument that “everything, or almost everything, is convention.” Race eventually bowed to convention; more important for Richet, there were no transcendental absolutes, either. He also praised Letourneau’s style as precise, elegant, and irreproachable. His only critique was that the anthropologist seemed rather casual in accepting travelers’ descriptions as sufficiently perceptive and scientifically exact.³²

The task that Abel Hovelacque set for himself in his contribution to the Bibliothèque, La linguistique, was to argue that the study of linguistics was the only means of differentiating between human beings and the rest of the animal kingdom. Like Letourneau, he saw humanity as fully animal. Hovelacque, however, asserted that humanity was distinct among the other animals but rejected the idea that religion or metaphysics was the distinguishing factor. He was also interested in elevating the importance of linguistics and confirming a materialist, progressive interpretation of the natural world. He claimed that anatomical differences could not separate humans from animals because some of these were more substantial between various apes than between apes and human beings. He also argued that the “inferior animals” were possessed of memory, imagination, shame, reason, pity, admiration, and so on.³³ As a result, he claimed, people had been forced to distinguish humanity by inventing “the argument of religiosity and the argument of morality. Their success has been poor” (24). Hovelacque explained that religiosity was just fear of the unknown and that morality was present among many animal communities (26). He then found a way simultaneously to support freethinking beliefs, defend scientific materialism, glorify Broca’s memory, and promote the importance of his own specialization: he claimed that the only thing that truly separates human beings from the other animals is that the human brain has a speech section (21–37).

The Revue scientifique covered that book as well. At this point, the editor was Odysse Barot, and instead of a standard book review, the journal published a full-length article entitled “La linguistique moderne,” subtitled “d’après M. Hovelacque” (according to M. Hovelacque).³⁴ Right at the outset, the article stated that Hovelacque claimed to have written his book to demonstrate the place of linguistics in the natural history of man but that “the author clearly had another goal, and that was to draft not a manual but a work disengaged from theological and metaphysical prejudice, composed following the principles of the current free scientific methods, as complete as possible and intelligible for all readers.” Had he succeeded? “We think so,” continued the review, “and we believe that this new science, linguistics, which bristles with so many difficulties and which had been reserved for only a few rare adepts, has never been more clearly put forward for the cultivated public. Hovelacque’s book is a pleasing and interesting read; the views it contains are very clear and explained without the least bit of pedantry” (424). After a detailed discussion of Hovelacque’s themes and arguments, the review resumed this paean to the book’s elegance and the “inestimable service” it provided. What made the work so extraordinarily useful was that it was written in an “expansive, progressive spirit, disengaged from extrascientific prejudice” (428). Thus what some saw as the freethinking anthropologists’ extrascientific prejudice against religion was here seen as a necessary and irreproachable defense: “We have here a book as learnedly drafted as it is freely thought; this is a double advantage for the reader, especially in an epoch when certain books on the science of language, coming from a noisy and overrated Anglo-Germanic personality and penetrated with a spirit of conciliation between the things of faith and the truths of science, serve as a kind of manual for everyone who begins to initiate themselves into linguistic studies” (428).

Eugène Véron’s study for the Bibliothèque des sciences contemporaines was on aesthetics, a subject that may seem decidedly ill suited to the free thinkers’ anthropological project. For this reason, Véron’s work is particularly revealing of the extent to which these anthropologists subscribed to reductive materialism. Véron began his inquiry with the comment that “no science has suffered more from metaphysical dreaming than that of aesthetics” and asserted that throughout history art had been dealt with as “an amalgam of quintessential fantasies and transcendental mysteries.”³⁵ His project was to tear down this “chimerical ontology” and replace it with the idea that “art is nothing other than a natural result of human organization, which is constituted so that man finds particular pleasure in certain combinations of forms, lines, colors, movements, sounds, rhythms, and images.” Under this thesis, the principles of aesthetics could be explained, in large part, through optics and acoustics. Véron realized that the “explanation of the cerebral phenomena” was not sufficiently advanced for this, so until aesthetics could be a real science, it would have to content itself with “the statement and registration of facts, and to their classification in the most reasonable order” (vi). Véron also discussed the Society of Mutual Autopsy, the freethinker’s greatest attempt to study the mind empirically. Here, too, he could not help admitting that “a large number of problems still remain unsolved” (vi).³⁶ This was the predicament of these champions of materialism. Given the example of the extraordinary advances in hard sciences in this period, they seem to have assumed that any empirical study would eventually pay off in some dramatically new, definitive construct. As for subject matter, Véron insisted that all art had to offer was the truth of its descriptions and the personality of the artist, so the only topic to choose was whatever small world one knew best.

This had an interesting consequence. In the United States, the naturalism literary movement took off after Theodore Dreiser published Sister Carrie in 1900, but there were a few major precursors, and one of them, Hamlin (Hannibal) Garland, was tremendously influenced by Eugène Véron. He touted Véron’s call for authors to stick to realistic descriptions of their own corner of the world. Garland scholar Lars Ahnebrink tells us: “Garland’s much thumbed copy of Véron’s Aesthetics is full of annotations, comments and marginalia. Before the word, ‘Introduction’ (p. v), Garland had written in pencil: ‘This book influenced me more than any other work on art. It entered into all I thought and spoke and read for many years after it fell into my hands about 1886. Hamlin Garland.’”³⁷ Quite a remarkable endorsement. Garland was, by the way, a “confirmed evolutionist” and an admirer of Darwin and Spencer. He called himself a verist, which he took straight from Véron’s call for truth—and which also echoes the scientist’s name.³⁸ As Garland explained, “Not being at the time a realist in the sense in which the followers of Zola used it, I hit upon the word verist which I may have derived from Véron.”³⁹ Why did Garland reject Zola? As he put it, “I thought to get away from the use of the word realism which implied predominant use of sexual vice and crime. . . . For the most part, the men and women I had known in my youth were normal. . . . Their lives were hard, unlovely, sometimes drab and bitter but they were not sexual perverts” (139). Elsewhere he wrote that the American followers of Zola seemed “sex-mad.”⁴⁰ So verism was realism without the smut. Anyone who found that distinction unimportant did not have much use for the new term, and Garland became known as a realist. In 1928 the literary critic Régis Michaud wrote that realism was put to the American people as against sentimentalism, and that the choice had been theorized by Garland, who was citing Véron. Michaud tells us realism triumphed in American fiction until 1927, when Edith Wharton, tired of its provincialism, published a protest against what she called “the twelve-mile limit” in the Yale Review.⁴¹

What of Topinard’s study for the Bibliothèque, L’anthropologie?⁴² It is difficult to analyze considering Topinard’s protestation that the freethinkers had edited it for political heresy before its publication. As it stands, L’anthropologie is a straightforward attempt at a physiological examination of the races of human beings. It presents some anthropological theory but is largely comprised of descriptive and quantitative racial portraits. Broca wrote the preface stating that Topinard’s work was written as “an elementary treatise on anthropology—a systematic résumé” (viii). He explained that the need for a popular study of anthropology had long been felt but that an anthropologist “devoting himself to original research . . . is generally little disposed to employ his time in writing a work of a popular character” (ix). It does seem as if Broca, too, had a limited opinion of Topinard. The unilinear progressivism that was evident in all the other Bibliothèque volumes was absent from the book, but L’anthropologie did not contradict the ideals of the freethinkers. In its conclusion, in fact, it flattered these ideals enough to suggest that some lines had been added by the group. The text states that man’s “spirit of inquiry is the most noble, the most irresistible of his attributes; and as M. Gabriel de Mortillet said at the meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Science, his special characteristic is here, and not in religiosity” (534).⁴³ Like La linguistique, L’anthropologie was reviewed in Barot’s Revue scientifique, but this review was more sedate.⁴⁴ The work “does not disappoint our hopes: it is an exclusively scientific book.” In describing the text, Barot took the time to list the amazing variety and number of skull measurements utilized by Topinard. He also reported the author’s contention that there were at least three human species, more unlike each other than were dogs, jackals, wolves, and foxes. This was surprising enough to be repeated a few times in the review, but no commentary was offered on what this implied about race (334).⁴⁵ The ebullient response to scientific materialism was withheld in response to Topinard’s neutrality on the question.

Of all of the studies for the Bibliothèque, Mortillet’s La préhistorique had the most lasting effect on the discipline.⁴⁶ This is not too surprising, as it took part in the most enduring line of inquiry of nineteenth-century anthropology—does the fossil record prove evolution?—and argued, early, that it did. First published in 1883, La préhistorique summed up the theoretical picture for which Mortillet had been becoming famous since the late 1860s. Mortillet had argued the existence of “pre-Quaternary man,” an earlier form of human being than had yet been conceded even by those who accepted the idea of human evolution. Mortillet called this precursor of humans “Anthropopithecus” and went on to divide his construct into further subdivisions. He also expanded on the notion of the Three Ages (Stone, Bronze, and Iron) with an original set of subdivisions for the Paleolithic period. Each was named for a French archaeological site (the Chellean, Mousterian, Solutrean, and Magdalenian), with the assumption that the types of flintwork found at each site were somehow limited to the era that the site represented. Mortillet saw these eras as necessarily successive: he expected all societies, all over the world, to follow the same course. There were those who had trouble with this notion, but many more simply rejected his work because they did not believe in this degree of human antiquity, and they would not accept material culture as proof without the further evidence of human remains. Mortillet’s position gained acceptance as further archaeological finds were made, and, eventually, as further bones were unearthed. Mortillet was vindicated on the matter of human antiquity, and his fame grew. Yet, in the end, the greatest service this work provided was its formulation of a system for artifact classification. It was not, as I have hinted, a very good system, but it got things started. The archaeologist and anticlerical historian of religion Salomon Reinach was one of Mortillet’s most critical eulogists, and he summed up the matter well:⁴⁷ “Mortillet efficaciously served the cause of truth, not only by his discoveries, which have remained perhaps less well known than his errors, but by his persevering—and, as a whole, fruitful—efforts to introduce order into an infant science that had been lost in confusion.”⁴⁸ Reinach did not think much of Mortillet as an intellect but wrote that he had managed to create a discipline against great opposition. “After the cause of truth is won,” offered Reinach, “let us not forget those who fought for it” (12). Mortillet’s general construct was maintained by archaeologists for decades, and his nomenclature remains in use today though his terms have completely new meanings now.⁴⁹

When possible, other freethinking anthropologists worked in support of Mortillet’s ideas—sometimes without sufficient grounds. As Glyn E. Daniel writes in his classic A Hundred Years of Archaeology (1952), while Mortillet argued for pre-Quaternary man “very cogently” and with great conviction, “Abel Hovelacque, in an amazingly irrelevant argument, supported Anthropopithecus on linguistic grounds.”⁵⁰ Though Daniel rightly critiques some of the conceptual flaws of Mortillet’s system of classifying prehistoric human stages, he notes that “the de Mortillet system . . . became the orthodox system of prehistory until well into the twentieth century” (109). Daniel’s work was in no way aimed at finding political meanings embedded in scientific theories. I quote it at some length below because it demonstrates how blatantly progressivist were Mortillet’s conclusions:

Its triumph was so complete because archaeology seemed to prove once and for all, and in an entirely unexpected way, the widely held doctrine of progress. The evidence of the geological and archaeological sequences seemed to show that man’s story on the earth had been one of gradual progress from the primitive chipped flints of Chelles . . . to the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Assyria, Greece and Rome. “Impossible,” declared de Mortillet, after conducting his tour around the Exposition, “de mettre en doute la grande loi du progrès de l’humanité.” And this progress was clearly revealed in the archaeological stages: “Pierre taillée à éclats, pierre polie, bronze, fer, sont autant de grandes étapes qu’a traversé l’humanité entière pour arriver à notre civilization.”⁵¹ (116)

Mortillet’s Le préhistorique was also eager to disprove the classic “argument of universal consent” that suggested that God existed because every culture believed, in one way or another. Without mentioning the specific argument, Mortillet contended that “paleolithic man . . . lived in peace, free and more or less wandering, completely without religious ideas.”⁵²

Along with the Bibliothèque des sciences contemporaines, the freethinking anthropologists produced an extraordinary number of books (some within other joint-venture series, some not) and articles (hundreds for their own various journals and an additional myriad for various other scientific, political, and literary magazines). Lefèvre’s La renaissance du matérialisme, published with the Bibliothèque matérialiste, was reviewed by the Revue scientifique though the book was not really written for the scientific community (it was, as will be recalled, a compilation of Lefèvre’s articles from Libre pensée and Pensée nouvelle). This was not lost on the reviewer. “Several times,” he comments, “M. Lefèvre uses the expression: militant materialism. That is, in effect, the character of this work: it is a work of combat, made more for the public at large than for the scientific public.” A few critiques were offered regarding the level of the science discussed, but the reviewer’s overall attitude displayed great tolerance for this sort of endeavor: “Despite these critiques, one reads with pleasure this witty, alert book in which the talent of the author succeeds in couching hypotheses. We cannot, in any case, make it a crime that M. Lefèvre has not written a pedantic book. The greatest fault of an author is to be boring and that fault has been completely avoided.”⁵³

The scientist Charles Richet’s review of Letourneau’s L’évolution de la morale was less equivocal in its praise, claiming that the book, which was a résumé of Letourneau’s courses at the Ecole d’anthropologie, was “certainly destined to hold one of the premier places in the work of reconstitution that will soon substitute itself for the old crumbling edifice of classical philosophy.”⁵⁴ The review then offered a detailed and undisputed account of the author’s system as it brought humanity from prehistoric savagery to present-day confusion, concluding with the wistful observation that “the ethic of the past no longer has any authority, and that of the future has not yet been formulated.” Richet was unquestioning in his report that the “law of human evolution” indicates that “narrow egoism” will be bred out of humanity and concern for the whole society will take the place of concern for the self. The “goal” of this “law of human evolution” is “to create tendencies that are compatible with the greatest possible public and private happiness, which is to say, to make man more robust, better, and more intelligent.” A big claim. Richet followed Letourneau in explaining away present-day criminal savagery by citing the effect of atavism, “immoral inclinations that are veritable specimens of the stone age.” He further agreed with Letourneau in his claim that “every society has superior men within it, disrupters of the established order, contemporaries of the future, whose role is to prepare and hasten access to the next, superior, social level.” As for the present “state of anarchy,” Richet said there was no need to despair because evolution is most rapid in times that seem bad. “Letourneau’s beautiful book ends with this consoling conclusion . . . everything confirms and affirms the existence of a great law: the law of progress” (536). It is a marvelous construct: criminals, Catholics, and metaphysicians are throwbacks from the savage, foolish past; materialist scientists are “contemporaries” of the wise and happy future.

Before moving on from the Revue scientifique, we must look at an extremely interesting and rather uncharacteristic review of Charles Letourneau’s La physiologie des passions, a later edition of the book Zola had so admired.⁵⁵ The review was written in 1878, when the journal was under the care of two prominent liberal journalists, Eugene Yung and Emile Algave. As its title implies, La physiologie des passions was a naturalist explanation of all human passions, sometimes concentrating on physiology, sometimes on evolutionary development. The review began by taking the work on its own terms, arguing with the specifics of its biological explanations—of music, for example, and of patriotism. But about midway through, the authors mentioned that “the philosophical system of M. Letourneau is materialism,” and, after a few more biological discussions, the authors started to take issue with this general stance (1168). Letourneau, they wrote, “obviously cannot see in idealism anything but a fantasy of the imagination and an aberration of the mind. The theory of knowledge does not seduce him, he sees all discussion of the exterior world as a ‘metaphysical refinement’ and adopts the system that we call naive realism.” Here Yung and Algave quoted Letourneau saying that if we do not trust our senses as “honest and sincere,” we will be thrust into the “void of doubt,” so trust them we must. Then they hit Letourneau where it would most hurt—and in a fashion rather strange for a journal of science:

M. Letourneau is here much too much the metaphysician, he does not take into account the fact, and it is an obvious fact, not a sophist dream, that we know things only by our consciousness. . . . The workings of our consciousness always present themselves through the form of a rapport established between the subject and the object. The object could be either the not-me or an interior phenomenon, and we cannot conclude anything on the nature “in itself” of the subject or the object. Matter is nothing but an abstraction, like spirit; further, the word matter is an abstract term designating a specific part of our consciousness; the word spirit is another abstract term designating another part, equally determined by our consciousness. The materialists only attribute an objective reality to the abstraction called matter, the pure spiritualists objectify only the abstraction that is called spirit, and the great majority of people objectify both. Experience contradicts both these systems because it teaches us nothing of substances, not even of their existence or their nonexistence, and positive idealism, experimental and phenomenal, seems to be, in sum, the most supportable theory. (1169)

This is fantastic not only because someone has found a way to call Letourneau a metaphysician but also because it was an odd leak from the neo-Kantian philosophical school into the world of professional science. What the reviewers were talking about here is Kant’s notion that our sensory apparatus and our inductive logic are both devices extremely peculiar to humanity and that it is unlikely in the extreme that a real world exists out there that somehow corresponds exactly to the kind of information that we are capable of gleaning. Anticipating the twentieth-century revolution in physics, Kant saw that our senses and our logic must also be responsible for the creation of time and space, and that suggests that time and space do not exist in “the real world,” which he called the noumenal world, the world outside our perception. This implies that this noumenal, real world is totally different from our world, so no experiment could possibly give us any information about it. All this leaves for science to study is the entire world as we know it, the phenomenal world. Since that is where we live, it is a very worthwhile project. Kant was not saying to forget about science—quite the contrary—but he was insisting on the limits of its possible knowledge. As for religion, Kant figured that since consciousness and moral feelings are so different from most stuff of the phenomenal world, they may be emissaries from the noumenal.⁵⁶ Since we cannot know the noumenal, we are free to believe that it is the realm of God, if we so choose. Kant did believe. His division of the world was logical, rational, scientific; his religion subjective. Kant was being championed in France by Charles Renouvier, Durkheim’s philosophical mentor, who, like other rationalist followers, made a big point of the fact that Kant’s claim that the world we know is unreal was not a metaphysical claim, though it felt like one.

Normally, one could protest that experimental or descriptive scientists are so fully concerned with the phenomenal world that it is quite unfair to chastise them for ignoring our ultimate inability to know things-in-themselves. But Letourneau’s brash materialism and utter disdain for Kant’s transcendental idealism was awfully provocative when coupled with his tone of total mastery and unwavering conviction. Furious that Letourneau “willfully confounds la critique [Kantian idealism] with metaphysics,” the review suggested “it would do him a great deal of good to be a little more skeptical.” Letourneau’s insistence on explaining the nature of thought and desire was particularly irksome. Yung and Algave’s review insisted that “we do not gain anything by calling intelligence, thought, memory and will a property of the nerve cell instead of calling them faculties of the soul.” The difference implied by the two names was conceded: “the soul” suggests that thought is an aspect of the workings of our consciousness while using the term “the cell” affirms “an intimate liaison between a psychic phenomenon and a physical action: a vibration of the molecules that compose the cell,” but one can see how small a difference this was in contrast to Letourneau’s claims. It is interesting to note that whereas physiologists might agree with this definition of their term (nerve cells produce thought), theologians would likely balk at such a rationalized description of the soul. That should remind us that despite this harsh review of materialism, the reviewers had more completely dismissed religion and the supernatural: soul was retained as an empty term to point out the weakness of the claims made in the name of cell. “The two expressions are legitimate to the same degree if one takes them to mean what I have just indicated, and they are illegitimate to the same degree if one attributes to the soul or to the cell an occult faculty or power, incomprehensible power, which explains thought.” Thus, summing up, the review praised Letourneau for his abundant facts and his “occasionally original, often bold, always sincere” ideas but returned to the rather cruel accusation of metaphysics: “M. Letourneau doesn’t use subterfuge. He’s a declared partisan of the theory of evolution and of materialism, he defends his convictions ardently and endeavors to make them triumph. His greatest fault is to conserve the habits of his adversaries and to be still too imbued with the metaphysical spirit that he combats” (1170). What was being called metaphysical was empiricism itself: since sensory information is gleaned and processed by consciousness, it is less reliable and more of a phantom than conceptual reasoning—the earth does, after all, revolve around the sun, not the other way around, as sensory information would imply. As remarkable as this commentary was, coming from within the scientific community, it was par for the course among philosophers, as I shall discuss. Here, let me merely note that within my Polaris metaphor, Richet’s Revue scientifique was located due north, though not actually lifting toward the stars. By looking to the freethinking anthropologists, Richet’s readers could orient themselves on the cultural terrain, regardless of how far toward materialism they were personally interested in going.

RESPONSE FROM OUTSIDE THE IMMEDIATE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY

In France in the 1870s and 1880s, there were three major periodicals concerned with philosophy: Ribot’s La revue philosophique, Renouvier’s neo-Kantian La critique philosophique, and the short-lived L’année philosophique.

Théodule Ribot founded La revue philosophique in 1876, when he was first making his name as an important positivist philosopher. His primary interest was psychology, which he wanted to base on scientific principles, “independent of all metaphysics,” and he was frequently explicit in his insistence that “discussions of the ‘real nature of the soul’ have nothing to do with psychology.” As late as 1926, general commentaries on intellectual life in France could claim that “Ribot’s influence on present-day psychology in France is incalculable. Almost all the psychologists, in varying degrees, begin with his teaching.”⁵⁷ Today he is often called the founder of French scientific psychology. The mission of the Revue philosophique was to create a forum wherein philosophers and scientists of the mind could exchange ideas and work toward synthesis. In the 1880s it published work by a range of philosophers, scientists, and other writers, including Darwin, Alfred Binet, Eduard Buchner, Henri Bergson, Pierre Janet, Georges Sorel, Cesare Lombroso, Francis Galton, Gabriel Tarde, Paul Tannery, Jean-Marie Guyau, Charles Richet, Havelock Ellis, and Léonce Manouvrier.

On the face of it, this would have been a good place for the freethinking anthropologists to publish, for despite their horror of it, they wrote about philosophy a great deal, and they were purposefully trying to take over all questions ever conceived as philosophical. As for the materialist component of Ribot’s project, the anthropologists fit right in. In psychologist Frédéric Paulhan’s first review of a book by Letourneau for the Revue philosophique (there were three), Paulhan wrote that the work “was part of a collection [the Bibliothèque] already well known to the public interested in the progress of science and of philosophy and is destined . . . to popularize the results obtained by scholars in diverse branches of human knowledge.”⁵⁷ Paulhan’s reviews of Letourneau covered his Evolution du mariage et de la famille, Evolution de la morale, L’évolution de la propriété, and Sociologie d’après l’ethnographie. They generally recommended the works to the readers of the review, but with a good deal of reserve. Letourneau “wrote with erudition” and “offered an abundance of facts,” but, warned Paulhan, “one may wish that there were fewer of them and that they were always well chosen.” Paulhan also cautioned that the anthropologists seemed ready to understand all of psychology through biology, and, furthermore, “the theories presented by M. Letourneau were pretty much completely known before him.” He expressed shock at Letourneau’s claim that evolution would dispense with the family, religion, and property and with the anthropologist’s evident desire for this to take place. “The state will eventually take the place of the family,” Paulhan quoted, and this was good because “one would have to be blind to not see how many children are tortured there in their bodies or in their souls.” Paulhan responded that while “it is possible that there is truth in all these claims, it is difficult to make a categorical pronouncement on such subjects.” At the end of an extensive discussion of L’évolution de la morale—mostly critical, but respectful, and willing to discuss morality from a naturalist standpoint—Paulhan summed up by “recommending the book as a rich source of facts, well grouped and well organized, if too artificially, and as an interesting illustration of evolutionary materialism.”⁵⁹ That is how it reads today. The fact that Ribot had Paulhan review the book, however, shows that Letourneau’s book was more successful as an ideological work. What La revue philosophique did was to call attention to it while criticizing its particular manifestation.

Paulhan thought Letourneau’s study on the family to be one of his best works (“the facts are abundant and well classified, the read is easy and interesting”), but it was still indicted for a lack of originality and a tendency toward unreasonable arguments.⁶⁰ Beyond the many small questions that Paulhan was willing to debate, he consistently took issue with the way Letourneau organized his facts by fiat. He was unconvinced that contemporary aboriginal peoples were “living fossils” of European prehistory. He also seriously doubted that evolution was necessarily progressing toward utopia: “Persuaded that evolution follows its course and emancipates man, Letourneau declares himself relatively satisfied, ‘To dare deny progress, you would have to be blind or trapped in some chimerical system.’ . . . It seems to me that Letourneau does not understand the question of pessimism.”⁶¹

The journal’s review of L’évolution de la propriété was furnished by Gustave Belot, a philosopher who would become well known for countering the socially based morality of Durkheim and Lévy-Bruhl with a defense of the traditional individual conscience. Belot shared Paulhan’s frustration with Letourneau, for much the same reasons. In describing Letourneau’s method, he assured his readers, “Don’t fear, to attain his results [he says he relies on] the accumulation of facts and remains (at least in appearance) very sober in his generalizations and hypothesis,” but in practice “the work rests on presupposed principles and hypotheses. The order in which we are presented the savage tribes, having nothing of the properly historical, is precisely determined by the same ideas that are advanced by his social evolution.”⁶² It should be noted that Belot still saw Letourneau’s work as “important” and struggled with its individual issues and claims, but the piles of facts were really problematic. “We cannot but thank him for the abundance of his information, and if a few mistakes have managed to slip into this multiplicity of details, it would be puerile to make too much of it. But it does seem like one could wish that the facts could speak more precisely and more quickly to the point” (646).

La revue philosophique covered Thulié’s La femme: Essai de sociologie physiologique by simply reporting its uncompromising—and for the freethinking anthropologists, totally uncharacteristic—claim that political duties would render women sterile and that their only function should be motherhood. The fact of “physiological sociology” was not itself a problem for the reviewer.⁶³ The journal was less sympathetic to Lefèvre’s La philosophie, choosing not to go through, “one by one, all the arbitrary and hardly scientific affirmations that M. Lefèvre boldly produces in the name of science” and instead limiting itself to “remarking that [Lefèvre] had not understood the importance and the place of the problem of knowledge. Everyone who has worked on the thinking subject, from Socrates to Kant, incurs his critique.”⁶⁴ To Lefèvre’s surprisingly extreme empiricism, the review responded, “So be it!” happy to do battle with empiricism in this particularly simple form. It then proceeded to walk Lefèvre’s contention through Hume’s critique of sensory information and dismissal of the scientific “law.” No amount of observation of particular phenomenon or causal relation can ever stand in for all observation. The reviewer then demonstrated the progressive failure of empiricism’s claims, as described by Kantian critique, and concluded, “We thus arrive at a system more or less the same as neocriticism, the idealist phenomenology of M. Renouvier, which is to say, at a point of view of which we recognize the high value but which certainly is a far way from M. Lefèvre’s materialism” (457).

It was again Paulhan who reviewed Véron’s La morale, and he began by saying that Véron was so afraid of accidentally writing like a metaphysician that he never got beyond generalizations. He went on to specify that this was an “application of the theory of transformist and utilitarian materialism to the question of morality.”⁶⁵ Véron’s central point in this book was that morality is but an outgrowth of intelligence and that as humans evolve a higher intelligence, our morality will also improve. Paulhan did not tolerate this well, writing that he did not have to review the book systematically, since “readers of the Revue can easily see what a precise mind can glean from ‘evolutionism, utilitarianism, and materialism’” (476), but he did caution against Véron’s overweening reliance on intelligence as the seat of morality. Paulhan also managed to critique Véron’s logic as suffering from “a certain number of metaphysical tendencies, which do not accord well with the general spirit of his book” (477). The problem was that “the notion of law, the subject of so much objection in the spiritualist and critical theories, does not gain much in passing into a materialist theory” (477). Véron’s conception was so “purely superficial” that it never entered into the real philosophical problems of law.

Among all these bad reviews, a rather interesting development was taking place. Ribot’s Revue philosophique began publishing coverage of the Société de psychologie physiologique, which was presided over by the famous psychologist Jean-Martin Charcot. These essays were all penned by a key member of the Société de psychologie physiologique: Léonce Manouvrier.⁶⁶ Manouvrier also wrote independently for the Revue philosophique, generally on descriptions of brains that he had autopsied at the Laboratory of Anthropology. He was always careful to claim very little for these studies, repeatedly giving caution against making too much of (even his own) contemporary brain studies. In his detailed study comparing the brains of Louis-Adolphe Bertillon and Léon Gambetta, Manouvrier explained that the brains suggested two different kinds of intelligence; among other things, as we might guess, one was talkative and gregarious, the other quiet and reserved.⁶⁷ But Manouvrier concluded by writing that “all these findings have their interest, but we must insist that they do not suffice to permit us to formulate a scientific judgment on the absolute or relative general value of the two men, each illustrious in his various titles. Imagine, in fact, a science sufficiently advanced that the preceding comparison could be done on fifty points rather than on four or five; it is impossible to say in how many points one brain might prove superior to the other or to the general average.” He warned his readers that if they found “this or that psychological opinion” of either man confirmed by the study, they should realize that it was all “hypothetical.” Manouvrier explained that, so far, scientists like himself were just trying to get the questions right: “The principal interest of isolated comparisons of this genre consists in the contributions they make to the precision of anatomo-physiological questions that are now able to be studied, to guide the investigations, and to raise new questions” (461).⁶⁸ He also took a moment to praise the Society of Mutual Autopsy. His work suited the Revue philosophique: it was cautious in its physiological claims but offered a good deal to think about and, especially in the above-cited case, it offered exciting peeks into the skulls of prominent Frenchmen. Like almost all the freethinking anthropologists, Manouvrier was an excellent writer, but, unlike them, he was not blinded by zeal. His work may have influenced Ribot (who was only about a decade his senior); in any case, it is clear Ribot admired the work. Articles that Manouvrier published in one of the Société d’anthropologie’s journals were sometimes summarized and enthusiastically discussed in the Revue philosophique. Of his article “Analyses et comptes rendus: Manouvrier, Sur l’interprétation de la quantité dans l’encéphale et du poids de cerveau en particulier” (On the interpretation of the quantity of the encephalon and the weight of the brain in particular), the Revue philosophique reviewer concluded that “it is because he opens a large path of work of this type that M. Manouvrier’s memoir will count among the most useful in the progress of positive psychological studies, while rendering an equal service to anthropological anatomy, in view of which it was specially created.”⁶⁹

With such praise, it is not surprising that, along with his special monographs and reports, Ribot welcomed Manouvrier to write reviews for the Revue philosophique. He reviewed his freethinking anthropologist friends’ books almost exclusively. His efforts stood in sharp contrast to the reviews offered by psychologists and philosophers, but not because Manouvrier gave his friends that much credit; he simply wrote of these works as if they were primers of materialist science. As such, there was no need to chastise their lack of originality or their narrow, fervent materialism. Manouvrier even knew how to sell these works to people who might see themselves as beyond elementary books; he had an excellent understanding of the emotional component of the matter. Manouvrier treated his peers as serious believers of evolutionary science, not raised in the faith, who might very well regret the lost passion of their youthful conversions. They would welcome a revival. Further, he seemed to understand that many transformist coreligionists had never really read Darwin and never would; they had gleaned what they needed for belief from the cultural environment. They might now be too shy to buy a book called Darwinism, thinking that such a purchase would expose their ignorance and might prove too difficult to digest. These fears were easily alleviated by a deft pen. Manouvrier began his review of Mathias Duval’s Le Darwinism as follows:

Our generation was not brought up in the doctrine of transformism. Those of us who felt it was like a torch that we could not do without will not be unhappy to go back now and again to resubmerge their philosophical belief in the source from which they had drawn it. It is not that this new faith, which enlightens every day, is in risk of being shaken, like so many other opinions that have come later in life. But one only vaguely remembers the innumerable facts that, once given, had swept away and captured one’s conviction, because more than anything one is impregnated with the general truth of what it expressed. One loves to reencounter these facts, from time to time, like a traveler loves to go back to see the stream where he once quenched his thirst. In any case, you will always find, in the enormous pile of proofs of transformism, a few facts that strike you in a new way, according to the present orientation of your mind, such that it feels like you are learning it for the first time again.⁷⁰

Manouvrier went on to say that the old readers of Darwin, “still keeping his admirable books at hand,” are always pleased to see published “the work of the master in a new form, generally less grim and forbidding than the first.” Thus the theories of evolution and transformism “are henceforth going to penetrate young minds earlier, so that the ideas can be even more fruitful.” Duval’s book rendered an “especially grand service” in both reminding and teaching. What is more, Manouvrier asserted that in this new book “the proofs of transformism become much more striking thanks to their condensation and to the way they are organized. . . . They are corroborated by the addition of the latest scientific finds and made unassailable by the refutation of contrary doctrines. . . . That is why we do not fear to say that it will be able to convince certain stubborn spirits much more effectively than even reading the works of Darwin” (399). Duval’s book was a compilation of his lessons at the Ecole, and Manouvrier did not fail to promote the school a bit in his review.

Manouvrier’s concern with getting access to the next generation while they were young and with furnishing retorts and refutations further indicates that in 1887, in France, evolutionary doctrine was still serving as a point of honor and personal ideology for members of his own generation. The point is particularly striking in an issue of the Revue philosophique wherein Manouvrier reviewed the work of the venerable rearguard of anthropology, Quatrefages, as well as a book coauthored by two freethinking anthropologists. In discussing Quatrefages, Manouvrier did not actively disagree with the older man, but he gave his readers the information they would need to disagree on their own. Quatrefages argued that human beings formed a separate kingdom, outside that of the animal, marked off by our morality and religiosity, which he argued was nonexistent among beasts. Further, he discussed the human soul as opposed to the animal soul—both of which Manouvrier put in italics for effect. He then simply said that he would limit himself to registering these doctrines, “of which the readers of the Revue philosophique must have already read many discussions.”⁷¹ The review was not negative, but it was immediately followed by a review of Hovelacque and Hervé’s book Précis d’anthropologie. This one, Manouvrier wrote, “seems destined . . . to present to the public doctrines absolutely opposed to those followed for ages by the wise professor of the Museum [Quatrefages].” Here were monogenism against polygenism (one primordial couple for all humanity verses one for each race) and species fixity opposed to transformism. Again, Manouvrier generously affirmed that such basic anthropological ideas would not be unknown to the reader of the Revue philosophique, but still, “many of them would not mind finding condensed, in a relatively short book . . . correct and clear, and well-written, matters treated in a great number of specialized works.”⁷² One of the problems Manouvrier rather charmingly pointed to in both works was that though Quatrefages would not admit transformism, he insisted that the single Adam-and-Eve couple was sufficiently malleable by environment to explain the various present-day races. Hovelacque and Hervé, on the other hand, were transformists who nevertheless insisted that no amount of transforming could have changed humans from one general race into the variety now available. Manouvrier did not say it, but the whole problem here was that one side of the argument was being faithful to the Bible (which has one Adam and Eve and no transformism—leaving the fact of human variation a bit of a mystery), while the other side was actively contradicting it. With his characteristic light touch, Manouvrier dispensed with the controversy by saying that “very happily, the solution to the problem is not very urgent, and we are allowed a little more time to make our choice between monogenism and polygenism. In any case, the first of these, it seems to us, has the upper hand for the moment” (326). In the end, he recommended Hovelacque and Hervé’s book energetically and that of Quatrefages not at all.⁷³

Such was the response to freethinking anthropology in Ribot’s journal of science and philosophy: more critical than the purely scientific press but still very much interested in engaging materialists in discussion. The journal even welcomed into its ranks the most cautious and vigilant of the anthropological school, Léonce Manouvrier. The neo-Kantian Critique philosophique could not be expected to have so much interest or even tolerance. If the Revue philosophique was headed north by northeast, it can only be said that the Critique philosophique was headed out straight along the equator, steering clear of both materialism and religion. Even so, frequent, precise calculations regarding the position of our Polaris seem to have been necessary to guide their way.

Kant was a figure of the German Enlightenment, but in the first half of the nineteenth century his work had not been given much attention in French culture. It was Charles Renouvier who championed Kant’s ideas, in a revised form, beginning in the 1870s. Renouvier had been an active member of the short-lived Second Republic, and when it was crushed by Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état, he retired from public life and devoted himself to philosophy. During these years he grew famous for his Critical Essays, largely based on Kantian critique, and his Science of Morals, which attempted a logical, philosophical framework to establish morality on new grounds. It had to be outside both Catholicism, which he despised and understood as “an extremely organized absolutist international association, a threat to liberty, common rights, and public order,” and outside materialism, which he liked no better because, for him, it could not support free will and innate moral feeling.⁷⁴ He rejected the term metaphysics, too, saying it stood for pre-Kantian philosophy in all its lack of rational rigor. Instead, he wanted to create a “republican philosophy in France [which would be] free from the speculations of an exhausted metaphysics.”⁷⁵ Like Kant, Renouvier believed that the unknowability of the noumenal world allowed for the possibility of God’s existence and that the human sense of morality and free will both emanated from the noumenal and were therefore real, natural facts. The phenomenal world was thus independent of God and ruled entirely by scientific laws: it was deterministic except in the case of humanity, which had free will. Unlike Kant, who held that the moral act was performed only for its morality, Renouvier conceived of a reward of immortality for those who led moral lives and a God who represented moral perfection. Unlike the positivists, the neo-Kantians were eager to discuss God, feelings, moral sensations, and free will and to rail against materialism with all the fervor of the spiritualist. In 1872, with the empire finally at an end, Renouvier founded the Critique philosophique with his friend and collaborator François Pillon, and in 1890 Pillon began publishing the Année philosophique. The journals were very similar, and the two men contributed heavily to both. One might not expect such reviews to have given any attention at all to a group of rowdy, materialist anthropologists, but apparently, they were too good a foil to forgo.

The two journals did not discuss the anthropologists as frequently as Ribot’s Revue philosophique, and they certainly were not as patient in their response, but they did engage with them. A brief look at a piece published in the Critique philosophique in 1876 further clarifies its position. The piece is a halfpage “prehistoric dialogue” (signed “X”—either Renouvier or Pillon had written it) between Darwin and God, in which an apparently noncorporeal Darwin requests that God create a cell:

GOD: Why? To put you in?

DARWIN: Me and all the others. I’ll explain later.

GOD: Voilà. Is that all, can I go?

DARWIN: Well, it would be a gesture of your goodness if you would add the ability to produce, genealogically and by the struggle for existence, all the others who will be born down here.

GOD: I don’t understand, and you ask a lot. In any case, I can’t refuse you anything. It’s done.

DARWIN: Now I don’t need you anymore, you can go: as for the rest, indeed, I’ll do it myself.⁷⁶

And that was that. It seems an awfully silly piece for this sort of journal, but it was not silly then: it was a useful shorthand for the journal’s complex position on philosophy, religion, science, and personal identity. Fervently against Catholicism, the editors were by no means against belief. Neither did their attack on materialism imply any disavowal of scientific power. They were also taking a middle road in genre, committed to explicate transcendental idealism and also to weigh in on matters of politics and policy. In 1880 the Critique philosophique published an article by Pillon entitled “La lutte contre le cléricalisme, ce qu’elle ne doit être et ce qu’elle droit être: Il ne faut pas que la politique anticlérical soit une politique d’irréligion” (The struggle against clericalism—what it must be and what it must not be: Anticlerical politics must not be a politics of irreligion). The reason it must not be was primarily because of the needs of “a numerous part of the population who do not know the ideal . . . and can only taste it in the form of Catholicism.”⁷⁷

André Lefèvre’s La renaissance du matérialisme was taken somewhat seriously because the title alone was a threat to this audience. As the reviewer mused, the simple fact that anyone had created a “bibliothèque matérialiste” suggested that such a renaissance might actually be taking place.⁷⁸ Nothing about the book was praised; the review was essentially an alarm signaling Lefèvre’s complete disposal of God and religion and his claim that materialism is “as well as the superior doctrine, the emancipatory doctrine.” To the reviewer’s distress, it was “a very easy read for someone who had never opened a book of philosophy. In writing it, the author—out of modesty no doubt—kept himself from showing the philosophical intelligence that he has; he rarely brings up the important problems, and, when he does, he doesn’t discuss the arguments presented. He merely bats around the authors who are his adversaries, and then he formulates the truths that one must believe” (398). In the end, the review managed several times to liken Lefèvre’s self-certainty to the dogmatic attitude of the Catholic Church (399). The insult is reminiscent of other journals’ fun in calling the anthropologists metaphysical.

Hovelacque’s Les débuts de l’humanité was also panned but given a bit more argument.⁷⁹ The “new faith” to which Hovelacque wished to convert his reader was—and here the review quoted Letourneau (a rare confirmation that the group was identified as such by others)—“morality is purely training” (399). This was important because the idea of a transcendental morality was basic to French criticism. The reviewer worried about the readers who might take all this at the word of the author “because it satisfies their rancor against the clergy and because it is a ‘scholar’ who explains the work of other ‘scholars,’ speaking of facial angles and cephalic indices” (399–400). A reasonable concern. Also quite reasonably, the reviewer insisted that Les débuts de l’humanité was ethnology, having nothing to do with prehistory, but he did then proceed to argue with the anthropologists in a rather naive way: both Lefèvre and Hovelacque insisted that some primitive people did not believe in God, but Hovelacque had written that these irreligious “savages” were just barely human, and the reviewer countered with the possibility that they were irreligious because they were not yet quite human after all. Anyway, “if universal consent cannot prove the existence of God, the lack of universal consent can’t prove his nonexistence any better” (400).

Eugene Véron’s La morale received a similar treatment: the reviewer was horrified by his claims that morality was hereditary, like any other instinct, and merely fortified by education.⁸⁰ He reported that, to Véron’s mind, devotees of religion and of metaphysics were “both equally mystics and believers in fantasy.” In this review and in the two aforementioned, the reviewer occasionally reminded the anthropologists that utilitarian doctrine simply did not explain all of morality: what about the difference between individual and public utility? What about freedom versus responsibility? What about group morality? But the reviewers knew that antireligion was the central issue here, not moral philosophy, and they pitched their criticism accordingly. It was also a matter of turf: Véron’s potential reader was caustically instructed to “see, on the first page, the prospectus announcing the sale of volumes of the Bibliothèque des sciences contemporaines published with the cooperation of the most distinguished scholars and writers” (239).

The anthropologist who was given the most attention by the Critique philosophique was Clémence Royer.⁸¹ In her book Le bien et la loi morale and elsewhere, she had introduced a new doctrine, “substantialism.” It had a history: Spinoza’s belief that the universe and God were identical had long been understood as atheism in light disguise (a God that is the universe itself, with nothing added, cannot intervene, or do or choose anything), but the formulation served some religious doubters as a way of visualizing life and the universe as unified and self-animated. Hegel’s “world spirit” later arose as a potent source of secular explanations of life and the universe that still spoke in terms of overall unity and intelligence. By the late nineteenth century, “monism” was the most common term for such ideas (the term denies any duality of life, thought, and spirit on one hand and the material world on the other). Royer’s substantialism was understood as a version of monism: everything takes part in the same energy and same moral law. As far as she was concerned—and they loved to quote her saying it—this ended the big feud between materialism and spiritualism: matter and thought are all there is in the universe and they are made of the same stuff, moving atoms; therefore, the universe thinks. La critique philosophique devoted considerable space to the rejection of these ideas, claiming both that Royer had not, in fact, invented this system (a technique that did not mark their dealings with the other anthropologists) and that she was wrong because she was stirring together the phenomenal and the noumenal. It was a full dismissal, and yet they devoted page upon page to the project.

L’année philosophique generally covered the more historical works of the freethinking anthropologists: Lefèvre’s Histoire: Entretiens sur l’évolution historique, Letourneau’s Evolution de l’éducation dans les diverses races humaines, Evolution de l’esclavages dans les diverses races humaines, Evolution du commerce dans les diverses races humaines, and Evolution religieuse dans les diverses races humaines.⁸² These books were all taken to task for their blind materialism, their outrageously oversimplified versions of historical change, and their wild claims about the utopian future to which they would deliver humankind. And yet, once again, the aggregate was that the philosophers at L’année philosophique gave these anthropological works a great deal of attention and devoted to them considerable time and effort. They did it because the freethinking anthropologists represented an idea to which these philosophers were opposed, in a version that was rather easy to attack. In response to Letourneau’s history of religion, Pillon wrote, “Materialism is wrong to speak in the name of science; it is not science; it is a philosophy, but a primitive and inferior philosophy that one cannot take seriously when one has understood that the phenomena called material reduces to sensations, that is, to modes or products of spirit.”⁸³

A few more stops are necessary to round out this portrait of the contemporary response to materialist anthropology. First, the Scientific Society of Brussels published a journal called Revue des questions scientifique that tended to run five to ten original articles, a similar number of book reviews, and a rather extensive review of contemporary scientific journals. The section on anthropology was covered by Adrien Arcelin, a respected Belgian naturalist. But this was no ordinary scientific journal: it had been founded specifically to demonstrate that science and religion could happily coexist, indeed, many of its scientist contributors were also members of the clergy. Because it was their particular goal to show that religion did not get in the way of good science, their work was essentially positivist in temper, and the most common reminder of their special project was that the table of contents was studded with abbés, priests, and the occasional bishop. Another indication of their philosophy was their mild obsession with the enemy. Arcelin devoted tremendous attention to the materialist anthropologists of Paris. Granted, they were in charge of the oldest and most extensive anthropological institute in the world; they produced several anthropological journals and a storm of books. So they may have been hard to ignore. Still, Arcelin plainly both respected these anthropologists’ work and enjoyed their materialist antics. A review of Mortillet’s Matériaux pour l’histoire primitive et naturelle de l’homme in 1879 occasioned a rare articulation of the journal’s attitude. Having called Matériaux an “indispensable source for anyone who wants to follow the movement of archaeological and anthropological researches,” Arcelin wrote that “assuredly, the spirit that presides over the direction of Matériaux is not that of the Revue des questions scientifique. One there professes a great disdain for dogmatic discussions, and the cause that we defend here, the accord between science and faith, there provokes an undisguised hostility.”⁸⁴ Further, Arcelin articulated what seemed to be genuine wonder that the famed scientists would mar their work in this way, since nothing could be easier than a religiously neutral discussion of archaeological finds (319). In general, Arcelin endlessly described and (usually) offered sober praise for the work of Mortillet, Véron, Royer, Letourneau, Lefèvre, and the Bertillons. When, however, the group began dissecting one another’s brains, Arcelin reported it with a kind of mystified glee and rarely failed to mention these exploits to his readers. Even here, however, Manouvrier came off well and was celebrated for his rationality and nonpartisan approach.⁸⁵ There were times when Mortillet, in particular, was treated rather harshly, but he was always taken as an expert—which, of course, he was. Even the original articles in the journal treated him as such: An essay on the recent find of a prehistoric skeleton, written by the abbé E. Vacandard, cited Mortillet extensively and on almost every page.⁸⁶ The abbé did not mention Mortillet’s take on the religious nature of this ancestor but himself claimed that for the specimen’s “almost immediate descendants . . . religious sentiment was already rooted in their souls, and belief in a future life . . . already oriented their lives” (122).

A few more mainstream journals also occasionally covered the freethinking anthropologists. First, there was the Revue politique et littéraire, also known as the Revue bleu for its blue covers (it was put out by the same publisher as the Revue scientifique, or Revue rose). This was supposed to be a review of politics and literature, but such articles as “La moral de Darwin,” by Lévy-Bruhl, were not at all uncommon; morality and evolution were the questions of the day.⁸⁷ Equally of the moment, Alphonse Bertillon took the front page in 1883 with an article on recidivists and the anthropology of the born criminal.⁸⁸ Here I will focus only on a particularly savvy article by the well-known historian of religion Jean Réville. The article, entitled “Une histoire des religions par un adversaire de la religion: M. Eugène Véron,” explained that only a few years earlier, the “history of religions” had become a part of the upper level curriculum; “this egalitarian rubric did not fail to cause a certain scandal among those who find it natural to submit the religions of others to critical and historical investigations” but who would not thus subject their own religion, because of its “sacred character.”⁸⁹ Réville did not mention it, but he was deeply involved in this “scandal,” having written several important naturalist histories of religion. Indeed, before Durkheim wrote The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) he attested to being “unqualified to speak” on the question of religion and “inclined to accept the naturalist hypothesis of Albert Réville.”⁹⁰ Here, Réville explained that this problem of resistance to the history of religion had been resolved because the religious started publishing their own histories; “unable to keep it from existing,” they adopted the subject themselves. “In any case, the church, in making a history of religions in its own image, should not be astonished if its adversaries create an alternative version, conforming to their principles and impregnated with their attitude.”⁹¹

That, explained Réville, was what Véron was up to, but he found it a bit much “to baptize the history of religions with the name ‘natural history’ if one is not going to use the same impartiality with which one describes an animal or a vegetable.” But Réville knew this was no oversight: “M. Véron has a holy horror of religion, and he doesn’t hide it. . . . The alpha and the omega of these two volumes is ‘religion is absurd.’ Véron is convinced that he could not do a greater service for humanity than to demonstrate the inanity of every type of religion. He has antireligious faith” (15). For Réville, there was no crime in this, but he did wonder whether such an attitude would not necessarily get in the way of an appreciation of religious events. “What kind of history of art would we get from a man who had a horror for art and who was inaccessible to all aesthetic sentiment?” (15). It was an excellent question, and it pertained equally to the anthropologists’ forays into philosophy. Yet it was not a perfect metaphor for the anthropologists. In human history, some people have enjoyed thinking about the mysterious weirdness of life; some people have enjoyed proposing an explanation of this weirdness and repeating it in catechism; some people prefer to ignore the whole thing whenever possible. The freethinking anthropologists cannot be accused of ignoring the paradox of human existence or of being numb to the delicious pain and wonder that it can engender: they indulged in it all the time. So the best metaphor for them may not have been art haters writing about art but rather zealots of a modern form of art cantankerously deriding all the “mistaken” art that had come before them. After all, as Réville noted, Véron had “antireligious faith.”

Véron’s utter disdain for all religion or spiritualism, and his particular hatred for Catholicism, began to wear on the otherwise anticlerical Réville: “Certainly the church, in the past and in the present, offers ample cause for critique, even the most severe, but it seems strange to us that in all the Gospel and in the whole history of the church one cannot find a single point, not even a single one, that we do not have to condemn. Done in this way, anticlerical history does not merit more confidence that clerical history, for which everything that happens in the church is admirable” (15). This was the central point, the primary use to which people put the freethinking anthropologists: the materialist extremism of their work allowed their audience to occupy a middle ground, that hallmark of the reasonable, sober humanist. Réville went on to point out Véron’s gravest errors in assessing history, indicating that the war between the supernatural and the natural was a recent intellectual development and not at all stable and also suggesting that no religion can be understood as a “bloc” unchanging throughout history (16). Réville closed by worriedly mulling over how Véron would see him, were he to read this review. Réville wrote that according to Véron, “everyone who has not yet decided to intone the alleluia of atheism” refrains only because he is “obeying the intellectual habits that are imposed on him by atavism and reinforced since infancy by an education closed to the progress of science.” Réville concluded that there would likely be no agreement between one who so completely believed religion to be dead and himself, “one who maintained its legitimacy so long as it progresses,” and he conceded that they might as well each blame the other’s “error” on his ancestors. “On that point, at least, no one will argue” (17). For his part, Réville was eventually rewarded for his careful secularism with a chair, created for him, in the history of religions at the illustrious Collège de France.⁹²

AN ENGLISH QUARTER HEARD FROM

In 1879 Lefèvre’s La philosophie appeared in English translation, under the title Philosophy: Historical and Critical and with a strange introduction by the translator, A. H. Keane.⁹³ Keane began by explaining that the author had not himself provided an introduction because the book’s plan was so simple, its exposition so clear and so exhaustive, that the book could be allowed to speak for itself. It was so straightforward because the author was “a materialist of the most advanced modern school and as such, expresses his opinion in the most outspoken and uncompromising manner.” What is more, “there are no abstract and but a few concrete matters that he has not had occasion to deal with, more or less fully, from the atheistic point of view.” And yet Keane thought an introduction necessary, writing: “But this very circumstance would seem to call for a few words of warning to the unwary,” particularly because its English incarnation was part of a popular series and “must necessarily fall into the hands of many readers who are apt to be carried away by a certain speciousness of reasoning, and who are not always possessed of a ready answer to a line of argument undoubtedly urged with great vigor and cogency” (xi) So the introduction set out to prepare the reader to reject the text. Lefèvre’s head must have spun.

Given his proclaimed project, the translator asked the obvious question: “Why then publish such things at all?” The answer was the standard liberal notion of a free exchange of ideas, the notion of an index of forbidden books being “now everywhere happily abolished except, for obvious reasons, in the case of books injurious to the public morals.” Keane’s other argument was that since this sort of materialism could be found in many current educational works on the sciences, there was no reason to be more strict “merely because it calls itself Philosophy.” He even pointed out that these scientific works were “freely placed in the hands of young students, [and] notoriously find favor with the promoters of ‘the higher education of women.’” Of course, these were not the reasons at all: Keane, like many of those whom I have already quoted, was a man more often to be found arguing against churchmen and for the scientific side. After all, he translated and published Lefèvre! But neither could he go as far as the freethinkers. Once again, we find someone building an ideological nest for themselves by calling attention to the materialist extreme:

Meantime, evolution, or as expressed by the distinguished French naturalist Prof. Charles Martins of Montpellier “the theory of evolution binding together all the problems of natural history, as the Newtonian laws bind together the motion of the heavenly bodies,” is the great intellectual fact of the day and whether favorable or not to our personal views, cannot possibly be excluded from any intelligible treatment of philosophy. Indeed evolution, in some form or other, may now be taken as an established and almost universally accepted truth, being practically identical with that “progress from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous,” . . . from the simple to the complex, from unity to differentiation of functions and physiological division of labor, justly regarded by Herbert Spencer as the great law of nature.

At the same time it cannot be too often repeated that there are various theories of evolution. (vi)

So, Keane first told his readers that the theory of evolution is a gestalt explanation for all natural history, and then he said we have to consider it even if we do not like it. Here we may read: you have to consider it even if you do not like it—because, after all, he can not really share in this first-person plural when he goes on to assert that it “is an established . . . truth” and, further, that it explains not only bodies but social life as well. His back securely up against the churchmen, Keane could now attend to the present adversary. What he did was to argue that there were many ways to imagine evolution, and he listed several. In this list, there was no hint that the one he called “Wallace and Darwin’s natural selection” was in any way the front runner. The final choice was “lastly, the crude materialist conception utterly eliminating the supernatural and preternatural elements, effacing soul and the Deity, . . . in short, the theory advocated in the present work” (vii). Keane then proceeded to argue a transformism that was guided by the Creator. Nothing in science, he argued, came close to explaining the transition from nonlife to life or from matter to thought. Nor did it seem possible that “matter alone, with the requisite amount of light, heat, moisture, electricity, &c., thrown in par dessus le marché [under the stairs]” could have possibly made a “single step” toward organizing and advancing life (x).

Lefèvre’s determinist dismissal of free will and his use of the term “the thinking mechanism” also frustrated Keane, who wrote that “the writer here is at issue with the most profound thinkers of all ages” (though, of course, on similar issues, so was Keane) (xvi). Responding to these questions, Keane wrote, “How easily all these questions are answered from the idealist’s point of view!” and, of course, “how impossible to solve them satisfactorily” when the mind is a machine and no guiding force maintains the universe (xv). Keane even took up the challenge of the third left frontal convolution of the brain and countered that even if a lesion there results in aphasia, “are we therefore in this case to say that the patient has ceased to be a human being? Assuredly not, because it is not the faculty of articulate speech that he has lost, but only the power of exercising that particular faculty” (an argument crucial to Bergsonian philosophy) (xvi). “The moral sense” also suggested God to Keane. Given all this, Keane concluded that “the dualists, the believers in mind and matter, have some grounds for holding that none of their strongholds have yet fallen . . . consequently that their conception of man and the universe is at least quite as philosophic as that of their opponents” (xviii). That “yet,” coupled with his comment that this was the most “modern” materialism, suggests that he saw his position as rather more beleaguered than he was willing to admit. In the main, he was defending his right to see himself as a philosopher and as a brave and rational thinker. But he was also defending the things he wanted to believe:

Hence the belief in a deity, in creation, in spirit as distinct from material substance, even in immortality, may continue to be entertained without rendering ourselves liable to the charge of superstition, prejudice, mental obliquity of vision, blind or inveterate anthropomorphism, and the other hard epithets flung about, often somewhat wildly by the eloquent and exuberant writer. As this belief is, further, quite as satisfactory, moral, and conservative of the social order, besides being a trifle more consoling, there can be no great harm in still upholding it against the atheistic theory of evolution. Evolution itself, as already seen, in no way necessarily excludes the theory of creation. . . .

With these remarks it is hoped the present treatise—admirable in most other respects, and especially in its historical and critical survey of the philosophies—may be perused by the ordinary reader without much danger to the “faith that is in him.” The religions, doubtless, receive some very rough handling, but they can probably bear it; and in any case, as the writer says of metaphysics, they must look to it. All of them, however, have made themselves at one time or another responsible for so many inanities in dogma and morals—belief in an impossible cosmogony; in a puerile astronomy; in the objectivity of certain Assyrian myths; in witchcraft; the efficacy and justice of the rack and the stake; intolerance, suppression of dogmatic error by fire, sword, and massacre of man, woman and child, predestination as understood by Augustine and Calvin; a personal devil presiding over an everlasting realm of material fire and brimstone; divine right of kings and the like—they could scarcely expect to escape without a few hard knocks in a work of this sort. (xviii–xix)

A remarkable sentence. The point of it, even the point of condensing all that critique in one sentence, was to contain, fiercely, the rejected authoritarian religion, on one side, and the rejected, mocking materialism, on the other. This did not leave Keane with much room in the middle, because both his opponents were likely to pounce on any phrase that might be used against the other. But note the tone of his separate arguments: it was as if he were begging victorious materialism to let him retain the “trifle more consoling” notion of God and yet still be modern, rational, and brave. In contrast, he spoke of Catholicism in a mood of vengeful triumph after a long siege.

MEN OF TODAY

My last source for contemporary response to the anthropologists is a rather odd one. In the 1880s the poet Paul Verlaine edited a biographical journal called Les hommes d’aujourd’hui. Each issue was four pages: the first being a caricature portrait of a famous personage, the rest, a biographical sketch. There were many such journals in France in the second half of the nineteenth century, but Les hommes d’aujourd’hui was easily the biggest and best known.⁹⁴ Subjects were drawn from the worlds of art and politics: the first featured was Victor Hugo; later issues were devoted to such figures as Stéphane Mallarmé, Jules Verne, General Boulanger, and Alexander Dumas fils. The paper had several editors, before and after Verlaine, but through them all, its politics leaned generously to the left: the republic was celebrated, the Second Empire resented, “decadent” artists were encouraged, and anticlericalism jubilantly supported. Over the years, Les hommes d’aujourd’hui featured Mathias Duval, Abel Hovelacque, Yves Guyot, Henri Thulié, and Clémence Royer.

Duval’s portrait showed him at work hatching eggs—a reference to his research on the beginnings of life—but on the ground behind his figure stood an immense pile of skulls.⁹⁵ Guyot’s illustrious political and journalistic career was detailed, including mention of a journal he had started with Louis Asseline, one of the freethinkers who had first drawn the future anthropologists together. His portrait showed him with a giant pen and bottle, the latter labeled “Democratic Ink.”⁹⁶ Hovelacque’s portrait showed him hanging a sign that read “Municipal Property” on a building that bore the word “convent” above its door. The text admiringly discussed his successful campaign to turn two Paris convents into secular schools. The Society of Mutual Autopsy was mentioned as well.⁹⁷ Much of the essay on Hovelacque was quoted (with attribution but no specifics) from something Lefèvre had written of his friend, and herein Hovelacque was praised because though “he had been raised in an ecclesiastic institution,” he left it “not a skeptic but not a believer. . . . You say that this is not rare: happily! But neither is it so common that we can pass over it in silence.” Again, these were Lefèvre’s words, but the text quoted them with approval. The church, it continued, tortured and deformed many peoples’ minds, and its powers of persuasion were not only negative; it could have made things very easy for Hovelacque. “Nothing could have been more simple for Abel Hovelacque, in the middle of the empire, to follow the regular channels to places and to magistratures. He could have been, today, one of the sweethearts of the moral order, fabricators and exploiters of social peril.” But not Hovelacque. “Let us say that we are happy for him that he escaped . . . and he is no less happy for us that we may count among our ranks one more member. With no other incentive than the love of truth and of science, the young student of the church knew how to get out of the trap.” All he kept from that education were “a few precious scraps of theology, which he would need to combat against it.” Two “auxiliary powers” brought him his “emancipation”: linguistics and anthropology (2). He learned Sanskrit and began attending the Société d’anthropologie.

Thus by two parallel or, rather, convergent paths, he entered into the movement of contemporary thought. To analyze the elements of language is to grasp the mechanism of intelligence by the facts, to examine anatomical conformations, to measure the forms of skulls and cerebral capacities of diverse races, to follow from the prehistoric ages the progress of industries, of arts, of civilizations; it is to mark man in his place in the living series and to determine all the phases of his moral and social development. In both linguistics and anthropology, it is to apply to all objects of knowledge the experimental method. . . . But in habituating the spirit to rigorous processes and neat solutions, linguistics and anthropology did not dry his heart, they did not close it to love of beauty, to sympathy for suffering, to an enthusiasm for justice. Much to the contrary. There are hardly any sciences more large-hearted, because they embrace all of man with his physical and intellectual faculties in their rapport with the universe and with their fellows. They made of Hovelacque a philosopher and a citizen. (2)

That’s no ordinary science. After the quotation from Lefèvre, the text went on to mention Pensée nouvelle, Asseline, Letourneau, Thulié, and Lefèvre, and more of their doings, but we have the idea. Lefèvre’s biography of his friend reads like a spiritual conversion story in every point.

Thulié’s portrait in Les hommes d’aujourd’hui showed him engaged in what looks like an autopsy.⁹⁸ He was generously praised for his “struggle against church and empire” in a manner that recalls the freethinking anthropologist’s own lament over lost youth:

He spent twenty years of his life in this deaf struggle without applause and without any other honor than that of having done the right thing. He believed, earlier than most, and rightly—and we have seen the proof—that the religious question was the Gordian knot of the political question and that clerical power was one of the most efficacious forces supporting the empire. He was one of the editors of a valiant newspaper, La pensée nouvelle, a courageous organ of freethinking that could not be very well supported by freethinkers, of which the number, at that time, was very small and which the doctor Thulié sees with joy to be so numerous today. (3)

There is a marvelous economy to these narratives: conversions and clawing to the truth or knowing the truth early and holding out, overcoming traps and prejudice, and teaching others.

On the cover of one last Homme d’aujourd’hui, Royer gazes out over a desk piled with books. She is wearing a high-necked, white, ruffle-collared shirt, cinched at the neck with a cameo brooch, and a black skirt and jacket. The books’ spines before her say things like: “Theory of Evolution,” “Maternal Heredity,” and “Paternal Heredity,” but the one she has in her hand, with her name on the cover, is called “The Philosophy of Hope.” The text tells us that her childhood education was cut short at age eleven but that “reading our great poets and our modern novelists opened up new horizons for her,” and a few scientific works provided revelations. Then, when she was eighteen, there was a political awakening: “The explosion of the Revolution of 1848 put before her a whole crowd of problems and doubts that she has felt the need to resolve ever since. Discovering she knew nothing, she recommenced her elementary education and quickly took her exams and got her diplomas.” The few paragraphs left managed to sketch an extraordinary life of social and intellectual engagement, including a public essay contest on taxation in which she tied for first place, sharing the prize with Proudhon. The reader was also told that she had taught a course in 1859 that “defended the evolutionary theory of Lamarck against the Cuvier school just at the moment when Darwin revived it in England” and in 1864 had published a philosophical novel in Brussels that was banned from entering France. She had also “preceded [Ernst] Haeckel” and “had developed, even before Darwin himself, the consequences of the theory of selection relative to man and his mental faculties.” A list of her publications and conferences was over a page long.⁹⁹

So the freethinking anthropologists were famous enough to merit coverage in a popular one-person-per-issue biographical newspaper. They had become reasonably well known figures of republican politics, anticlericalism, and anthropology. They were a feature on the cultural spectrum, notable in part because they had lost so much of their lives waiting out the empire and in part because of their titillatingly gruesome preoccupations and their larger-than-life anticlericalism. What is clear from these portraits is that they were also beloved characters on the Parisian scene.

THE NORTH STAR

In the preceding chapter I reported how the freethinking anthropologists assigned new naturalist names and materialist meanings to buildings, bones, stationery, cemeteries, government personnel and their children, municipal conferences, anatomical miracles, funeral rites, and their own bodies. This chapter has shown how they worked to make mundane the previously metaphysical details of morals, marriage, philosophy, aesthetics, economics, linguistics, history, prehistory, and passion. The wider academic audience and general public at large may not have joined the anthropologists in all these deconsecrating efforts, but they did entertain the claims and support the work. Conceptual, epistemological work was getting done that was more interesting to contemporaries than any specific theory being proposed. Likewise, from our present vantage point, this secularizing work was more lasting than any individual argument the freethinkers presented. The anthropologists wrote well and in a casual style that seems to have charmed anyone not predisposed to hate it. They were seductively amusing, iconoclastic, and easy to read. What is more, they made some enduring—if impermanent—contributions to the development of their science.

In their moment, the scientific community (even its Catholic subset) respected the work of the freethinking anthropologists. Apart from the insistence that the whole project of anthropology added up to atheism, the scientific community accepted the work on the terms offered by the freethinkers, that is, everyone seemed to agree that this was important work that would become more meaningful as the facts were slowly and patiently gathered. In any case, much of it was interesting, peculiar, and unsettling and seemed worth the time to peruse. The greater part of the philosophical community was naturalist and scientific in temper, and, with a good deal more criticism, its members responded in a similar fashion. The members of the idealist philosophical community, by contrast, were rather scandalized by this stuff being called philosophy, aesthetics, and history, but even they did not ignore it: this work was neither below their dignity nor out of their cultural sights. In popular literature, reviewers also had problems with the anthropologists’ more extreme claims, but they, too, found such claims to be a useful orientation point from which to announce their own, no longer extreme, position.

In the general culture, faith was advertised as stationary and science progressive, in a particularly tense formulation of modernity. The freethinking anthropologists helped people to question this dyad by taking it to an extreme. Also, it is clear that people felt an ethical need to register their disapproval of church malfeasance and cruelty and that a tacit agreement with the anthropologists served that need. In fact, the sheer presence of such white-hot hatred of the church may have given people the sense that their moral indignation was indeed being represented. Through the freethinking anthropologists served as a catalyst or inspiration for some, for others they likely served as a steam valve. Most people who read and discussed the Paris freethinking anthropologists were surely not materialist atheists, but the changing role of religion in France was a major factor of their lives, and we may suppose they wanted that fact symbolized on their bookshelves and in their conversation. Of course, they also wanted to understand this change as well as they might, and reading this anthropology did shed light on the matter, whether one agreed or did not. To use the metaphor again, the freethinking anthropologists were a sort of North Star: some of those who referenced them were headed north—though perhaps not going all that far—and some were headed elsewhere; in any case, it was a wonderful beacon.