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

The freethinking anthropologists of Paris had managed to earn the cultural authority to weigh in on the question of the human soul. They yearned to get the scent of the church off everything, public and private: to remove its claims to their own bodies, to the city in which they lived, and to the conceptual notions that structured their civilization. Their students and fellow travelers—the young Bertillons, Lapouge, and Manouvrier—continued to use the techniques and ideas of physical anthropology to struggle over the end of the soul and to search for new ways to understand human individuality, free will, accountability, personal meaning, and national identity. This chapter is not about the politics, irreligion, or materialist anthropology of Paul and Augustine Broca, Gabriel Mortillet and his son Adrien, Clémence Royer, Louis-Adolphe and Zoé Bertillon and their family, Eugène and Jeanne Véron, André Lefèvre, Charles Letourneau, and the rest, or of their students and fellow travelers. Instead, it follows some of the cultural reverberations of their theories and their claims about the end of the soul. I will first examine the three major contemporary responses to Lapouge and then show that two of the most important figures in France at the turn of the century, the philosopher Henri Bergson and the sociologist Emile Durkheim, were responding directly to the freethinking anthropologists’ idea of the soul in some of their most celebrated works.

In many ways, scientism was besieged in the 1890’s.¹ There was the Catholic revival, best marked by Brunetière’s “Après une visite,” Pope Leo XIII’s Ralliement, and the rise of the miracle cult. This same period saw a revival of metaphysics. Paul Bourget published a famously antiscientistic novel, Le disciple, in 1889, and a small flood of metaphysical Russian novels arrived in France throughout the 1880s.² The great scientistic philosophers Renan and Taine both died in the early 1890s, and though their late work was not fully consistent with their reputations, their deaths added to the sense that the ideology of scientism was passing.

In the academy, the metaphysical revival was heralded by a new journal, the Revue de métaphysique et de morale (or RMM) that was founded in 1893 by the philosophers Xavier Léon and Elie Halévy, with Léon serving as editor until his death in 1935. It was designed to take its place alongside the two other philosophical revues that had served France for twenty years: Critique philosophique (Renouvier’s neo-Kantian journal) and Revue philosophique (Théodule Ribot’s science, philosophy, and psychology journal), both of which are discussed in chapter 3. In the introduction to the first issue of RMM, the editors dismissed Critique philosophique by damning it with faint praise: “Whatever one thinks of the characteristic thesis of neocriticism—the foundation of a morality of imperatives on the basis of phenomenalism—one must conclude that the achievement of Renouvier . . . is considerable.” The Revue philosophique, for its part, was said to have offered the great service of publishing the works of both scientists and philosophers and thus introducing them to one another’s work.³

The Revue de métaphysique et de morale was created as a forum for all those who were not interested in either neo-Kantian philosophy or the intermingling of scientific, philosophical, and psychological ideas. It was intended to present doctrines of “philosophie proprement dite” (true philosophy), to put aside science and bring public attention to general theories of thought and of action, “from which the public has turned away of late and which have meanwhile always been under the currently discredited name metaphysics, the only source of rational beliefs”(2). In contrast to the stereotypical image of science as dynamic and progressive, the new journal charged that scientific morality was static and conservative, able only to describe truths found in nature. The contention was that French society was in crisis owing to an imbalance between intellectual and moral thought. In the absence of a strong, credible moral code, some members of society were returning to “a very simple, very sweet, very sad Christianity,” while others buried themselves in “specialized scientific projects.” Meanwhile, society was falling prey to “blind and terrible forces.”⁴ The light of reason, explained RMM, was “as weak and shaky as ever,” stranded in the middle of all these worries and lost “between positivism that stops at facts and mysticism that drives one to superstitions” (4).

As suggested by the reference to a “a very simple, very sweet, very sad Christianity,” the philosophers at the Revue de métaphysique et de morale were particularly frustrated by the debate between Brunetière and the scientific materialists. The philosopher Alphonse Darlu, the influential professor of Xavier Léon (and, famously, Marcel Proust), was a frequent contributor to RMM. He reviewed Brunetière’s “Après une visite” (1895) and made the journal’s position clear: “We would like to remind him that philosophy exists.” According to Darlu, Brunetière’s problem was that his intellectual education had been excessively shaped by positivism.⁵ He had been raised on Renan and Taine, and, following that, he had “read and reread Darwin, at that young age when one lives for intellect and at that moment in the century when M. France and M. Bourget were reading it at the same time, with drunken passion.” Royer’s translation and preface to the work were not mentioned but may well have contributed to the force of their conversion experiences. Darlu argued that Brunetière’s change of heart was by no means a unique experience. Rather, it represented a widespread phenomenon affecting men and women who had embraced positivism and evolutionism with too much faith and then, pulled by their strong senses of morality, eventually swung back to Catholicism with great force. “To stop midway,” explained Darlu, “requires a philosophical frame of mind and very deep moral beliefs” (248). Yet what would this “midway” look like?

The rejection of Lapouge among nonscientists took place within the political doctrine of solidarism, and, in fact, the reaction against Lapouge helped to create the doctrine. Solidarism has come to be known, in the historian J. E. S. Hayward’s terms, as “the ideology of the Third Republic.”⁶ The philosopher Alfred Fouillée formulated the doctrine beginning in the 1870s, and by the 1890s it dominated French political discourse. Léon Bourgeois was its most dedicated political champion, and after he became prime minister in 1895, he continued to articulate and popularize solidarist goals.⁷ The appeal of solidarism was its concerned moderation: it was a reaction against laissez-faire individualism, but it stopped short of socialism. Liberalism had once stood for a government that removed artificial economic barriers, such as guilds and noble privileges, contending that without these arbitrary rules the marketplace would become a just and fair field of competition. By the late nineteenth century it was clear that the new field had developed a new kind of viciousness. Very quickly, novel privileges and cruelties had appeared, based on family connections, wealth, and education, and these were keenly exacerbated by the excesses of capitalism, urbanization, and industrialization. This is how liberalism went from meaning government with its hands off (i.e., with its guild-and-privilege-ordaining hands off the market so that the average person would not be constantly blocked by preexisting networks of power) to meaning government with its hands on (i.e., using regulatory control over the market so that the average person is not constantly blocked by preexisting networks of power).⁸ But as much as proponents of the new kind of liberalism wanted to help out in a new, active way, their policies were more a stopgap against socialism than they were a path toward it. Solidarism marked the emergence of this new liberalism, equally anxious about the possible abuses of socialism and capitalism.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the extent to which solidarism’s theorists discussed political ideas in terms of Darwinian evolution. The penchant for using sociobiological rhetoric must not be taken as a mere borrowing of scientific jargon in order to increase the doctrine’s cultural authority. Rather, Léon Bourgeois and the theorists of solidarism plainly felt both burdened and blessed to be the first thinkers with access to anthropology’s stunning new information. It was with a sense of duty and resolve (and a sense that misinterpretation could be calamitous) that they brought natural science to the old questions of social contract, human character, general will, and a prepolitical “state of nature.” Solidarism’s concern about the political implications of evolutionary theory concentrated firmly on Darwinian, not neo-Lamarckian, theory. The current historical analysis of this period is that neo-Lamarckianism crowded Darwinism out of French political discourse. It is certainly true that the French revived, reformulated, and celebrated Lamarck even long after Darwinian evolution arrived on the scene. They did so partially in order to commemorate the origin of evolutionary theory in France and partially because with a few adjustments Lamarck’s “inheritance of acquired characteristics” served to support French republican theories of social amelioration. Historians do not argue that the French utterly ignored Darwin, but the way in which the French used neo-Lamarckianism has captured our attention, obfuscating the importance of Darwinian “struggle” in French political theory and debate.⁹

In fact, the social significance of Darwinian evolution was a central topic in many cultural and political debates. As it was understood, civilization’s moral goal of taking care of the “unfit” was preventing, even reversing, the work of evolution (which was supposed to function by killing off or at least limiting the reproduction of the unfit). And yet that goal could not be abandoned: to return to the political, social, and economic equivalent of the “state of nature” would lead to a brutal world. Solidarism was partially conceived of as a defense of civilization: a humane call for society to remain above nature’s base struggle. But it was also born of the notion that the natural world was more just (impartial, uncorrupted) than the world of human society, because human society creates artificial barriers (unequal wealth) and artificial hazards (war, machinery, and voluntary celibacy) to the survival and propagation of the most fit. Because of these conflicting interpretations, solidarism was, at first, sometimes described as the policy of a just society working to ensure that natural, cruel competition was tempered by human reason—I will call this “civil solidarism”—and sometimes described as an effort to return to a natural condition in which the “fittest” have the opportunity to succeed, regardless of their original social station—I will call this “natural-competition solidarism.” It further confuses matters that some solidarist theorists saw the natural world as more cooperative than competitive. This gave rise to a “natural-cooperation solidarism” that held that mutualism was a natural fact, either because animals were seen to be interdependent or because society was conceived of as a single organism with individuals and classes acting as cells and organs, respectively. All three forms had their champions from the beginning, but it is possible to discern a clear shift in emphasis over time: from the natural solidarism of the early years, wherein modern society was generally held to be the villain (indicted either for promoting artificial rather than natural inequality or for replacing cooperative nature with artificial competition), to the later civil solidarism wherein it was assumed that whatever evils could be found in society, nature was worse. In Hayward’s words, by 1908 Bourgeois “had (following Fouillée) recognized that natural solidarity, the fact of interdependence, was amoral and that it was only through the rational intervention of men that it could be made the foundation of social justice.”¹⁰ But to understand why Fouillée had come to rest, after much vacillation, on the idea of civil solidarism, one has to consider the battle that he was waging against Lapouge. The brutality of nature had once meant a lion killing a zebra and, further, a less apt lion dying of starvation. Now the brutality of nature might mean the erasure of morality from public life, European races dominating or even slaughtering one another, state-determined laboratory pregnancies, the end of the family, the end of democracy, and the elevation of race and the state above all.

By the time Lapouge published his first book, Fouillée had long been engaged in a fight against the naturalist politics articulated by Herbert Spencer. Fouillée held that an understanding of biological facts was necessary for the creation of an ideal state. Unlike Spencer, however, he believed that these biological facts argued for mutualism as strongly as for individualism and that human reason must, in any case, mitigate the harsh interpretation of “survival of the fittest” prescribed by Spencer and other Social Darwinists. From his doctoral thesis, “La liberté et le déterminisme,” of 1872 through his Humanitaires et libertaires au point de vue sociologique, which appeared posthumously in 1914, Fouillée published twenty-seven books that grappled with the relationship between biology and politics. He deliberated extensively on the morality of redirecting or accelerating Darwinian evolution and devoted considerable attention to anthroposociology.

Fouillée’s acceptance of some degree of Social Darwinism made him particularly sensitive to Lapouge’s claims. In one of the earliest articles to take up the discussion of Lapouge, Fouillée complained that “the ‘struggle for life’ among the whites, blacks, and yellows was not enough; some anthropologists have also imagined a struggle for life between blonds and brunettes, longheads and short-heads.” He argued that Lapouge had grossly exaggerated the biological aspect of psychological differences between the Germans and the French, and he cited Léonce Manouvrier as an anthropologist who denied the significance of the cephalic index.¹¹ Though Fouillée objected strongly to Lapouge’s “fanaticism,” he still quoted him consistently and, in general, with approval. Fouillée maintained that, if used prudently, inquiries into the national physiological differences among Europeans could help to establish their psychological differences. He would devote much of his large oeuvre to defining the characteristics of various nationalities.

Fouillée is remembered as one of the most important late-nineteenth-century French philosophers, but he should also be known as a central figure in what might be termed “fin-de-siècle national character studies.” This phenomenon seems best explained by the coincidence of discussions of evolutionary heredity with the moment at which Western Europe became a solid bloc of nation-states. After 1871 character studies of these states proliferated, fetishistically describing the natural likes and dislikes, virtues and failings, and friends and enemies of each national group. French works of this sort generally claimed several high virtues as inherently French, but the national character studies were also sites of anxiety and self-doubt. As authors attempted to reimagine the nations of Europe in the light of shifting political balances and new anthropological data, they considered not only the strangeness of others but also how strange (or decadent) their own nation seemed in others’ eyes. They even exported this imagined criticism.¹²

Fouillée was certain that nationalities had biologically determined intellectual and social characteristics, but he firmly objected to many of Lapouge’s larger claims. For example, in his study of the psychology of the French people, Fouillée cited Lapouge’s national characterizations but found his pragmatic suggestions distasteful. Wrote Fouillée, “This ethics of breeding studs founded on naturalist hypotheses and on the dreams of utopians is not really human morality.”¹³ In any case, Fouillée doubted Lapouge’s belief that “one could obtain any desired psychic type, on an intellectually uniform level ‘the same as that of the highest minds of today’s society’”(281). He also ridiculed Lapouge’s suggestion that one could create races of naturalists, fishermen, farmers, and blacksmiths. He found this last notion particularly amusing: “A race of naturalists! As if the quality of naturalist follows a cerebral formation distinct from that of a fisherman or a farmer! What audacity it would take to want to intervene in the creation of men, on the basis of information as vague as that of the forms of skulls and of their problematic relationship to mental superiority!” (281–282). Perhaps most important, he noted that “we have no idea of the real cerebral causes of intellectual superiority or inferiority; we do not know if, in suppressing this or that individual carrying some vice, we would be also suppressing, in the same stroke, the seeds of beautiful and important qualities” (282).

It is surprising that Fouillée was so amused by the notion of a race of naturalists, because the gradations he did endorse were almost as precise. In fact, such characterizations were the whole point of his book, and though he intended them to be used to help the nationalities understand one another, he offered scientific explanations as to why any given group was more or less nervous, imaginative, prone to dreaming, sexually energetic, and so on. For this reason, Fouillée was sometimes referred to as an anthroposociologist, though he himself strictly rejected the appellation within his published works, in his correspondence with Lapouge, and in reported conversations with Lapouge’s disciples.¹⁴ Fouillée never rejected the idea that national character types were based in heritable biological traits, but the years he spent arguing against Lapouge’s antimoralist naturalism shifted his thinking toward civil solidarism. He found himself codifying solidarism as civil protection against natural law precisely because Lapouge’s natural laws were so convincingly nasty.

In 1903 Fouillée published a lengthy attack on anthroposociology. The work was, as he described it, a study of the various psychological profiles of European nations, but while the central chapters of the book kept to a sociobiological agenda, the introduction and conclusion were devoted to combating anthroposociological ideas. “The real law of human societies,” asserted Fouillée, “is not natural selection and the struggle for life but rational choice and cooperation for life.”¹⁵ He had argued in the past both that mutualism in human society was scientifically based in natural models and that the competition that did exist in nature was preferable to the corrupted competition of human society. Now, he characterized solidarism as distinctly human. Modern society might be brutal and amoral, but, if Lapouge was even partially correct, natural forces were even less humane. Human beings must then create a world based neither on religious dogma nor on natural science. Only “rational choice” could serve as the “real law of human societies” (529).

In fashioning his notion of solidarism, Léon Bourgeois drew heavily on the work of Fouillée, increasingly promoting the idea that human logic and morality dictated mutual assistance. As he explained at the Ecole des hautes études conference on solidarity (1902), Bourgeois believed that “humanity, according to the ingenious image by M. Fouillée, is not comparable to an archipelago of small islands of which each has a Robinson. Every group of men . . . is, voluntarily or involuntarily, a solidarist ensemble, the equilibrium, conservation, and progress of which is obedient to the general law of universal evolution.”¹⁶ Though anthroposociology was herein rejected, anthropological ideas such as “the general law of universal evolution” were accepted as significant, indeed paramount, to the proper formation of the state. Though civil solidarism triumphed in the last decade of the century, notions of natural-cooperation solidarity and natural-competition solidarity never entirely disappeared from the arguments of Fouillée and Bourgeois. Solidarism’s other central theorist, Célestin Bouglé, substantially altered the debate by explicitly rejecting science as a viable means of arriving at sociopolitical truths.

Célestin Bouglé was one of Durkheim’s primary disciples and closest collaborators. Having written a doctoral thesis entitled “Les doctrines égalitaires,” he went on to teach at the Faculté des lettres de Toulouse, and in 1901 he began teaching social philosophy at the Sorbonne. In 1920 he was named the director of the Centre de documentation sociale at the Ecole normale. In his many works, Bouglé expressed a position on egalitarianism and solidarism that respected the validity of scientific information on humanity but increasingly considered it to be inconsequential to society. In his 1897 article “Anthropologie et démocratie,” Bouglé argued that whether or not science could prove the existence of biologically based differences in the capabilities of races or individuals, these differences should have no effect on the philosophical decision to maintain political equality.¹⁷ He directly attacked anthroposociology and Lapouge, whom he recognized as the French founder and leader of this movement.¹⁸ He would later use the same arguments to refute a wider range of anthropological, racist doctrines, but in “Anthropologie et démocratie,” Bouglé’s argument aimed squarely at Lapouge, claiming that his descriptions of inequality might be factual but they should be functionally insignificant to the republic. Indeed, he suggested that the republican attachment to notions of natural equality may have been no more than a necessary but transient stage. Thus “a morality suffused with the idea of solidarity may not need to consider the idea of equality as anything more than provisional. . . . If it is true that, in declaring men to be equal, we deliver a judgment not on the way nature made them but on the way society must treat them, well then, the most precise craniometry could not prove us right or wrong” (461). Although Bouglé questioned whether human capabilities could be deduced from physiological measurements (citing Léonce Manouvrier’s scientific argument), his invective against Lapouge was largely based on the assumptions that anthroposociology made concerning the significance of the biologically based inequality of human beings.

Even after Manouvrier had dismissed the scientific validity of Lapouge’s claims, Bouglé continued to write refutations of anthroposociology. For whether or not brachycephalics constituted a distinct race, Lapouge had put forth a profoundly disturbing challenge to liberal democracy and laissez-faire capitalism. A crucial aspect of that challenge was that it provided a way of referring to the nation’s less capable, less intelligent members as a distinct group. Bouglé believed that the essence of Lapouge’s questions (if not their particular formulation) was, in fact, extremely important. When anthropologists claimed, through the erroneous method of comparing cephalic indexes, that human beings differed in their capabilities, they were, explained Bouglé, pronouncing “a truth as old as the world”; people’s abilities differed whether or not they were commensurate with cephalic indices (457). However, Bouglé concluded, that fact should have no bearing on their political, judicial, or economic rights. Yet even amid his plea for a revival of political philosophy, Bouglé demonstrated the importance of the issue of Darwinian struggle in this period. “Darwinian anthropologists,” he wrote, insisted that the facts of nature condemn democracy, “but . . . the suppression of struggles is not one of democracy’s goals; democracy only wants—and this is totally different—to regulate the struggles. By opening the same field to all individuals without distinction, does democracy annihilate competition in any way? One could not even say that it attenuates it” (459). If indeed there is a superior race, he argued, “its natural superiority will triumph just as well in a fair fight” (458).¹⁹

Bouglé published “Anthropologie et démocratie” in the Revue de métaphysique et de moral, and the journal’s hostility toward scientism was echoed in the article: while he did consistently point to Vacher de Lapouge’s anthroposociology as the primary offense, he seemed to include all of anthropology, and many anthropologists, in his indictment.²⁰ Indeed, despite the fact that Bouglé depended on Manouvrier for his dismissal of anthroposociology, he wrote of Manouvrier’s contribution as if it were an almost accidental betrayal of all anthropology. “The anthropologists themselves,” wrote Bouglé, with a footnote citing several of Manouvrier’s antireductionist articles, “have observed that, if the anatomical constitution of an individual implies certain very general aptitudes, it is the social milieu that determines them. The anthropologists have also observed that, because of this, it is a chimera to try to deduce from an examination of purely biological characteristics, the necessity of sociologically defined acts” (450).²¹ In future works, Bouglé would give much more credit to Manouvrier as a critic of anthropology’s claims, but it is important to see that Bouglé and many other writers tended to issue strong critiques of all science and all anthropology (and not sociology) when they began to critique anthroposociology.

The Revue de métaphysique et de morale was a natural home for Bouglé’s more theoretical work, but he worried that those who were awed by Lapouge’s scientific data would be moved only by a scientific, data-laden rebuttal. He thus straddled several different academic fields as he progressed from his early critique of bad science to a later, more general indictment of the natural-science-as-politics enterprise as a whole, always remaining true to an antireligious secular republicanism. Despite his strict rejection of the pragmatic “return to religion,” he gingerly approached Brunetière on the subject of combining their resources in a struggle against anthroposociology. In a private letter now in the archival collection of the Bibliotèque nationale, Bouglé candidly admitted to Brunetière that he had “combated several of your ideas and methods with all possible vigor.” But he went on to say that, in light of an earlier conversation, he was sure Brunetière would be eager to fight the “pretensions of anthroposociology.” Bouglé proposed to discredit anthroposociology by writing a study of the caste system in India and apparently hoped that Brunetière would publish sections of it in his Revue des deux mondes. He asserted that the work would show that Indian marriage rules had not given the results predicted by anthroposociology and that “it is impossible to find, even in this land, a true parallel among social differences, physical differences, and mental differences.”²² We do not have Brunetière’s response, but it seems that he turned down the proposal. Bouglé went ahead with his study nonetheless; it was published in sections in L’année sociologique and La grande revue and as a book entitled Essais sur le régime des castes.²³ This work was explicitly aimed against anthroposociology (especially the section on race), and it came to be one of Bouglé’s most influential sociological studies. In the words of historian of sociology Don Martindale: “More than any other single study, this essay laid the basis for the modern theory of caste.”²⁴

In 1904 Bouglé, who was now a professor of social philosophy at the Sorbonne, sharply criticized all attempts to describe history through natural history. In La démocratie devant la science, he divided such attempts into Social Darwinism, organicism, and anthroposociology. To the extent that he could, he countered each of these notions with anthropological, “scientific” arguments, resisting the idea that Enlightenment ideals might have to be divorced from Enlightenment methodology. He was no longer naming Lapouge as his primary opponent, but he still referred to him when articulating the philosophical problem of science and political equality: “Anthropology, according to M. Vacher de Lapouge, victoriously refutes the errors of the eighteenth century, ‘the most fantasy-believing, the most antiscientific of centuries,’ and demonstrates that a democratic regime is ‘the worst condition in which to make good [hereditary] selection.’”²⁵ Denying the scientific validity of antidemocratic anthropology was not a sufficient reaction to Lapouge’s critique. Bouglé made it clear that if he were forced to choose between Enlightenment political ideals and Enlightenment trust in science, he would choose the ideals: “Even when it is established that solidarity exists within the best organized animal societies, this animal solidarity does not seem to approach the human ideal: respect for the equal dignity of each of society’s members. Democratic societies recognize from this that they are attempting to go above and beyond nature. . . . At times acquiescing and at times resisting nature, society seems to say to natural science both: ‘I will apply your laws’ and ‘Your laws do not apply to me’” (288). It was a deft solution to the problem of humanity’s place in nature. The disavowal of the authority of science inherent in this idea clearly went beyond the mere negation of unpleasant scientific findings. Bouglé insisted that neither naturalism, nor logic, nor rationality would ever manage to make society “lift its smallest finger” toward equality and social cohesion unless they were joined by sentiment. “In other words, the indispensable condition of moral efficacy of these sociological inferences [of solidarity] is the preliminary existence of a ‘social spirit’” (301).

Though Bouglé called for a return to a philosophical justification of democratic ideals that lay beyond scientific discovery, he did occasionally argue that a truly objective science would demonstrate that natural laws dictated a solidarist society. He was arguing not that science would discover equality but that it would discover that human societies should be run on principles of equality. He acknowledged that if science were ever able to do that, there would be no need for philosophy. Indeed, he hoped that in the distant future science would “relegate all moral philosophy to the frontiers of society as totally useless.” But until then, he mused, France should concentrate on the revival of moral philosophy. Even those who are most dedicated to science should stop assaulting philosophy as an unempirical and thus unnecessary discipline, because until science was able to fulfill its promises, philosophy would be needed. Bouglé warned that

if it is true that the most objective scientific observation cannot yet suffice to demonstrate to human beings that they must work for the coming of a just city, of which the members aid each other to rise; if right up until the new order it will be necessary to come to this by a sort of rational choice, then maybe it would be imprudent (and in a democracy more than in any other society) to denigrate moral philosophy, which is the art of rational choice and of methodically ordering the purpose of a human life in terms of a universal purpose.

Here again we see a late-nineteenth-century scholar in the explicit expectation of a revolutionary “new order” that will be based on unfathomable new information and forever end the need for moral philosophy. In the meantime, the ineluctable mystery of human interaction was referred to consistently, sometimes in somewhat spiritualist language, and the act of becoming civilized was explicitly contrasted to the natural world. “In a democracy, more than in any other society, it is important that the culture is widely spread out so that a communal consciousness becomes the point of the spiritual life and, learning to surpass nature, literally humanizes itself” (302).

Bouglé hoped that someday there would be an objective, egalitarian, “scientific morality,” but he was quite sure that contemporary scientific morality was unacceptable. Anthroposociological doctrines were wrong, he argued, because of the society they imagined. “Against these we can propose, according to experience, our firm conclusions. Henceforth, we will know them by their fruit.” Bouglé knew it was very unscientific to dismiss a methodology because it drew unpleasant results. He was uncomfortable with the position and worried that others would disagree with him and argue that egalitarian principles are impossible to employ and that “it would be dangerous to try; it would be much better to listen to the lessons of nature.” According to Bouglé, this was an “adroit effort to put into conflict the two great contemporary ideas; to exploit the prestige of science against the attraction of democracy,” but he felt content that this effort had been paralyzed by his analysis. Admitting that he offered no positive proofs, Bouglé was able to declare that he was correct, anyway. “Our conclusions,” wrote Bouglé, “if not imperative, are at least emancipatory. They liberate our society from its naturalist obsession. They remind it that no one has the right to discourage the ambitions of the spirit in the name of a so-called scientific morality. The way is clear” (303).

Several years later, Bouglé came back to these ideas in his Qu’est-ce que la sociologie? no longer sure that science, even sociological science, would ever furnish a true moral code. “Sociology,” he wrote, “does not seem to us to be ready—if, in fact, it will ever be ready—to substitute itself for morality.”²⁷ Further on in the same work Bouglé emphasized this idea more broadly, writing that “so far as morality is concerned we have recognized that sociology is in no way ready to supplant it, and we have denounced the error of those who propose the example of organisms when dictating the laws of societies” (160). Like Fouillée, Bouglé had moved from an investigation of natural law to a rejection of naturalist political science. Neither “ran back into the citadel of clericalism,” to quote Lapouge,²⁸ but both came to reject the terms of scientific materialism and explicitly to welcome feeling and sentiment back into the discourse.

Despite the bold calls for equality among Bouglé’s statements, he issued no direct denunciation of racism. In a political sense, Bouglé had gone beyond the question, because he insisted that society should be blind to natural differences among groups. Again, in a sense, this is the ultimate answer to sociobiological claims, whatever they may be: each human being is assumed to be different from all others and is responded to on the basis of his or her particular characteristics (again, this is not a call for total equality; it is a call for a truly fair meritocracy). No differences between human groups are to be recognized. In a sense, the central issue in La démocratie devant la science was that “the attentive study of the laws of heredity do not at all prove that professional qualities are transmitted from father to son.”²⁸ But this is a rather limited claim for biological indeterminism. That is why Bouglé had to have recourse, in the end, to the position that he summed up as noli me tangere: natural science cannot touch human values. Even if racialist science were correct, human dignity and the resulting claim to equal treatment must be set above scientific pronouncements of inequality between human groups (288). Had he been able to discredit not bad race science but all race science—that is, had he been able to announce that the search for objective natural racial laws was inherently fallacious—he would not have needed this elegant intellectual device.

Jean Finot’s work demonstrates that such a critique of race science was, in fact, conceivable. Finot, born Finklehaus, was a Polish journalist who became a French citizen in 1897. In his adopted country he founded a journal, La revue des revues, which he edited and to which he contributed numerous articles.²⁹ This work put him in close contact with many of his most illustrious contemporaries. His correspondents included writers as diverse as Zola, Tolstoy, Brunetière, and Lombroso, who all published essays and other writings in La revue des revues.³⁰ Finot was himself very well known in his time. When he died in 1922, the sociologist René Worms eulogized him as an eminent “philosopher, philanthropist, patriot, hygienist, feminist, and sociologist.”³¹ Above all, however, Worms praised Finot for having fought against the whole “school” whose doctrine is “generally known under the name anthroposociology” (229).³²

Finot’s greatest fame came from his Le préjugé des races and from his later Le préjugé et problème des sexes.³³ Both these works put forward lively, witty arguments against the existence of innate, biological character traits and intellectual abilities. Finot, too, drew on Manouvrier’s work for its scientific clout.³⁴ His own arguments against racism concentrated in part on debunking scientific race theory and in part on considering the sociopolitical origins of perceived racial differences. His indictment of “race prejudice” was broadly conceived, including discussions of American racism, animosity between the English and the French, and the idea of Aryan supremacy. He often cited obsolete racial categories as evidence of the transience and historical specificity of such delineations. In the foreword to the 1906 English translation of Le préjugé des races, Finot pleaded for the “indulgence” of his readers by reminding them that he had claimed, as early as 1901, that, contrary to popular belief, there was no innate, immutable hatred between the English and the French races.

When my first works appeared in 1901 on that subject, mocking voices were raised to show the impossibility of an entente between two races which were so inherently different and, presumably, antagonistic. . . . The Times, in a remarkable article on my efforts in this direction (November 1st, 1902), was right in maintaining that it is often sufficient to breathe on the subjects of our discord to see them vanish. The union of a few men of goodwill has succeeded in overcoming the stupidity of the theory of races and of age-long prejudices!³⁵

Finot held that the salient differences among human beings were only individual, and though he criticized Fouillée for his racialist thinking he made use of the philosopher’s notion of solidarism on behalf of international peace.³⁶ Le préjugé des races began with a discussion of English and American eugenic theorists, and, though Finot dismissed them, he did so without anger, explaining that they were simply trying to ameliorate the public health. “In France and Germany,” he added, “the gospel of human inequality has taken on even stranger aspects. It is Vacher de Lapouge who is the most authoritative representative of the new doctrine. Loyal to his principles, convinced of their truth, he defends them in his work with a keenness and a talent worthy of esteem.” Finot had so much respect for Lapouge’s scholarship that he cited him as the quintessential opponent, writing that “in M. Vacher de Lapouge, the new doctrine finds a defender of the greatest eloquence and it suffices to examine his books for one to know all the weapons that are taken up by his coreligionists, adepts, and students” (27). Finot bemoaned the uncritical acceptance that anthroposociology had found among journalists, politicians, literary writers, artists, and the greater public and noted with disgust that the doctrine was finding its way into manuals of history and pedagogy. He assured his reader that “without doubt, this doctrine will some day take a place of honor in the history of human errors,” but he lamented that, for now, “out of any one thousand educated Europeans, nine hundred and ninety-nine are persuaded of the authenticity of their Aryan origins” (356–357).

Finot’s critique of racist anthropology held that the science began with certain assumptions about racial difference; he described it as “teleological” and thus without value (491). The anthroposociologists, he claimed, were “hypnotized by their primordial idea,” which they supported by bringing together, “without examination, everything that seems propitious to their theory, a theory that is more political than scientific” (312). Finot’s conclusions were far-reaching. He argued that character traits were specific to individuals and that even if, indeed, a trait could be found in one human group more than in another, that was due to environment and culture. Beauty, he argued, was a purely social convention, and no single standard could be set for all human beings. Neither a language type nor any system of government could be established as a native capacity of any single racial group. Finot was remarkably suspicious of racial reasoning, going so far as to assert that “the term ‘race’ is but a product of our mental gymnastics, the workings of our intellect, and outside all reality. Science had need of races as hypothetical groupings, and these products of art . . . have become concrete realities for the vulgar. Races as irreducible categories exist only as fictions of our brains” (501).

His analysis of the work of Manouvrier confirmed his own conclusion that “craniological measurements teach us almost nothing concerning the mental capacity and the moral value of peoples” (109). Ridiculing anthropology’s “instruments of precision,” he declared their data “fantastical” and meaningless. Having dismissed the scientific validity of classing people according to their cephalic indexes, Finot asked, “What is left to the anthroposociologist once the cephalic index is gone?” and answered, “Only analogy” (110). As he stated elsewhere: “Analogy does not constitute identity” (74). Still, Finot was not entirely free of the prejudices of his age, and once in a while, very rarely, came out with some bizarrely racialist descriptions. For example, though he argued equality of intelligence, he agreed that the psychologies of “primitive” peoples, “especially of Negroes,” resembled the lesser classes of Europe and cited the following behaviors as common to them both: narrow-mindedness, a love for noisy knickknacks, and a penchant for gossiping among the women (456). Even here, however, in his least impressive moment, he argued that the existence of these traits was due, in both cases, to a lack of exposure to civilized culture. As he elsewhere wrote:

The science of inequality is emphatically a science of white people. It is they who have invented it and set it going, who have maintained, cherished, and propagated it, on the basis of their observations and their deductions. Considering themselves above human beings of other colors, they have elevated into superior qualities all the traits that are peculiar to themselves, commencing with the whiteness of their skin and the pliancy of their hair. But nothing proves that these vaunted traits are real traits of superiority. (490)

Finot may not have avoided all the conceptual traps of his era, but what he did was extraordinary. He certainly recognized the folly of racial typing even when accompanied by the most left-wing politics. Consider his analysis of Alfred Fouillée: “Optimist by nature, leaning toward skepticism in regard to the exaggerations made by anthropology, he brings reserve and scruples there where his coreligionists have only global condemnations or benedictions to pronounce.” So he was one of the better ones. “However, it suffices to examine his Psychologie du peuple français . . . or his L’esquisse psychologie des peuples européens to realize just how far the aberrations of this new science can go. Carried along by his subject, he, too, distributed honors and reproach, hereditary and innate virtues and vices, onto the mysterious aspirations of peoples” (298).³⁷ In this and many other statements, Finot was able to speak directly to an issue that his contemporaries generally dealt with by blustering avoidance. There was something mysterious in the aspirations of peoples. For Finot, it was okay not to know exactly what that was, without feeling compelled to give it a religious name or define it out of existence.

Consider the last words of Le préjugé des races: “As the differences among men are thus only individual, theoretically there will be no more room for internal and external hatreds, as there will be no more room for the social and political inferiorities of classes. On the ruins of the lie of race, solidarity and true equality will be born, both based on the rational sentiment of respect for the dignity of human beings” (505). One strand of materialist anthropology had led to anti-morality and, separately, to an argument for a racialist state marked by controlled breeding and compulsory sterilizations. In defense of republican ideals, Finot rejected the republican dedication to science and championed “rational sentiment” instead. For Finot, progress was not aiming toward an endpoint of utopian stasis but rather toward a kind of plateau on which human beings could endlessly change in an environment of peace and equality. “The character of a people,” wrote Finot, “is thus nothing but an eternal becoming. The qualities of our soul and its aspirations remain as mobile as clouds chased by the wind” (345). In this nice formulation, the “character of a people” is indeterminate because it is ever-changing. Here, what is mysterious and inimitable in human identity, the “soul,” is seen neither as an objective supernatural entity nor as a bodily secretion nor as the product of advanced animal instinct. Instead, it is described with the naturalist metaphor of a cloud chased by the wind: ever changing, unpredictable, delightful, and patently real.

Like Bouglé, Finot struggled his entire life to strike a balance among science, philosophy, and the religious needs of the masses. Later in life he wrote several books on longevity, a theme that grows in significance in an atheist context. Finot’s longevity theories all carried a wistful optimism that he maintained in the explicit absence of God. It was this balanced optimism that the philosopher Henri Bergson celebrated when he presented Finot’s Progrès et bonheur to the Académie française in 1914.³⁸ Two months before the beginning of the war, Bergson stood before the Académie praising Finot for discussing morality without erring either on the side of the “abstract deductions of the old metaphysics” or on the side of “pure empiricism” and, instead, balancing between the two, “for a knowledge that is clearly of the philosophical order but, without pretending to embrace the totality of the real, concentrates its attention on human activity” (1093).

Finot’s other major work on longevity, La science du bonheur, also struggled against the dogmas of science and of religion.³⁹ In dealing with the issue of morality, Finot insisted on the priority of rational expectations over religious ideals, refusing to be “intoxicated by the religion of self-sacrifice . . . and especially by that of future existence. . . . We have wrapped it carefully in a purple shroud, there where the dead gods rest” (20–21). Yet following such comments, issued always with a combination of spite and sadness reserved for lost deities, Finot similarly lamented the lost prestige of science: “Nature, we are told, knows only the species. She neglects and dooms the individual. Nature is calumniated. Science is libeled in the same way” (21). The gods are really dead, while science is merely libeled. In any case, there was still philosophical drama in this matter of religion and sciences and, to varying degrees, the loss of faith in both.

Finot proceeded to devote a large portion of this book on happiness to the rehabilitation of science, albeit of a modest ilk. Certainly, science is fallible, he concluded, and much of what we now believe will be overturned, but “science endures, like the famous session of the Chamber of Deputies, which did not cease for an instant after the anarchist outrage.” We may take this to mean science endures and so does democracy and civil behavior. Proclaiming that the eternally reoccurring conflict between scientific conclusion and revision is itself “beautiful, fertile, and profitable,” Finot chided the pessimists, especially Brunetière and the like-minded novelist Paul Bourget (97). Finot chose a quotation from Bourget to indict scientific pessimism (and simultaneously point out that believers were in a panic): “In the presence of the final bankruptcy of scientific knowledge,” wrote Bourget, “many souls will fall into a state of despair akin to that which would have seized Pascal, if he had been deprived of faith. Tragic rebellions whose equal no age has ever known will then burst forth.”⁴⁰ Finot wanted his readers to note the existence of this frightened element of culture. He never abandoned science but constantly reminded his readership of its fallibility. Science and religion both preached that human beings were regressing, but, according to Finot, “the religions and the sciences are equally mistaken.”⁴¹ To the extent that both were pessimistic, both were wrong. In the struggle between science and religion, or “free-thought against the dogmas,” he believed that science would and should prevail, but not to the exclusion of a devotion to human solidarity and love (234–240). Finot rebuked scientists who pretentiously dismissed metaphysics: “Science does not cease to progress, but the paths through which it leads us are not always infallible. If in every truth there is a portion of falsehood, in every falsehood there is a fragment of truth. From the scientific standpoint, nothing authorizes the logic of the sectarian mind violently rejecting everything that is not in harmony with its comprehension” (242). Conversely, he warned spiritualists to stop mocking secular moralists. “Dogmatic religions are also wrong in seeking to struggle against lay morality. The latter takes the place of religious morality when the other weakens or disappears. Social harmony requires their mutual respect. Mankind can exist only upon moral foundations. Why discredit those of science and of experience, if a portion of the nation must live by these latter?” (244). Despite such calls for tolerance, Finot tended to treat the religious as rather backward. He believed that many people could not manage to be pure materialist atheists, but to argue this he invoked the human need for spiritualism rather than its truth (242, 246). He believed that human beings long for some participation in eternity and crave a connection to something absolute: “The most positive rationalists,” he wrote, “now admit the existence of spiritual needs and eternal aspirations toward the infinite” (248). He also wrote that in the future human beings would experience in a more useful way what will forever be the “same awe of and the same longing for the Infinite”(257).

In The Science of Happiness, Finot devoted some three hundred pages to the demise of two major models for human happiness—scientific materialism and religion—and then outlined his proposals for the well-being of humanity. They included such things as avoiding anger and envy, believing in human dignity, and respecting one’s physical health. These were modest, realistic ideas that he thought could have a big impact on individuals and society. Ultimately, Finot argued that happiness would “transform the moral universe” (331). Indeed, it was already at work, perhaps most notably in the strides that women were making toward equality. In his conclusion, Finot outlined the reasons for his optimism about the progress of the world:

The Infinite, subjected to rigorous laws, seems to be more friendly. At any rate, it is less threatening. . . . Discounting, in advance, the duration of our stay on earth, we desire it to be equitable. . . . We are daily more respectful toward one another. Our dignity is ascending step by step, as well as our sentiments of justice and of truth. . . . Someday mankind will shelter in its bosom, with the same love, the children of every color and of every creed. Meanwhile, half the human race, namely the women, are profiting by more equity. From the ranks of the slaves of man, or of inferior beings, we behold them elevated to the level of his equals. The State is multiplying its duties and performing them in a more satisfactory manner. It is becoming reconciled to the principle of equality. It is more attentive to the voice of Justice. It is urging, in any case, a more and more equitable distribution of burdens and duties.

(331–332)

Finot, too, like Fouillée and Bouglé, stayed out of the citadel of clericalism, but he managed to reject scientific materialism without rejecting science as a basic worldview. This science, however, had to be guided by the very unscientific concepts of sentiment. What had so thrown Lapouge and other attentive contemporaries was that the worldview of science had its own terrors. These scared Finot, too, but he got over it: the Infinite had become easier to think about and less harrowing: “more friendly” and “less threatening.” Life, he seemed to sigh, was brief and limited, but, let us do a decent job of it anyway.

Finot was a powerful adversary. When Lapouge complained, publicly or privately, about his detractors, he blamed Finot more than any other nonscientist for the general repudiation of his theories. In his final work, Race et milieu social, Lapouge attacked the intelligence, honesty, and education of Manouvrier, Bouglé, and others, with Finot bearing the worst of Lapouge’s vitriol: he revealed Finot’s real name, Finklehaus, with much anti-Semitic drama.⁴² Lapouge was so angry because Finot was so effective. He made this explicit in a letter to Madison Grant, the famed American racist and author of The Passing of the Great Race.⁴³ The year was 1919, and Lapouge was explaining that he had not written much on race in the past few years: “Jews like Finklehaus (called Jean Finot) have so excited public opinion against the theory of races that it would be as dangerous as it would be useless to try to do anything.”⁴⁴ Lapouge continued his campaign until his death in 1936, but not in France.

In the late nineteenth century, French theorists had to revise their understanding of science and republicanism as innately joined in the struggle against authoritarianism and dogma. Lapouge’s vision of a scientifically engineered society jolted republicans into a realization that science had the potential to be extraordinarily antirepublican. Fouillée, Bouglé, and Finot each struggled to maintain the connection between republicanism and naturalist scientism. They devoted large sections of their many works to arguing that anthroposociology was bad science. What is striking, however, is that they each managed to step outside the scientific argument and question its relevance. Brunetière had revived religion, declaring that we must willfully remove ourselves from animality. Fouillée, Bouglé, and Finot made similar claims without turning to religious dogma. For them, there was no soul, but there was something—something in the paradox of human consciousness and community that justified the elevation of our ideals. Each of their positions required a certain philosophical bravery. For a long time, republicans had based their political ideologies and their public rhetoric on the conviction that scientistic empiricism was the sole road to truth. In the battle against religious and political dogma, they had used this empirical conviction as both weapon and shield: it gave mettle to their public polemics and supported them in their private existential malaise. Abandoning a commitment to empiricism without returning to religion meant a nerve-racking submission to relativism and uncertainty. This experience defined a generation of theorists and deserves our attention.

The common idea that it took Nazi eugenics to silence racialist genetic science may have to be reconsidered. That interpretation harbors the notion that, were it not for those cataclysmic excesses, today’s genetic science would be unencumbered by the burdens of politics. The ability of these late-nineteenth-century thinkers to dethrone science and insist that it be treated as a mere servant of moral philosophy is deeply significant to this question. Tensions between present-day scientists and the academic left are also illuminated by this history. Given the tenor of late-twentieth-century debates on the nature of scientific truth, it is useful to note that the relativism at which these earlier theorists arrived was not an abandonment of the pursuit of objective truth in favor of a valueless universe. It was, instead, an appreciation that scientific theories of humanity are, inherently, in eternal flux. These theorists argued that some intuitive moral wisdom must be held above science. They gave themselves license simply to “know” what is right and to assert that some scientific proclamations are wrong, despite indices, bell curves, Latin names, and calibrated tools. Henceforth, they hoped, we should know them by their fruit.

When Fouillée, Bouglé, and Finot rejected Georges Vacher de Lapouge’s materialist anthropology, they did so for essentially pragmatic reasons: their goal was to defend the republic and its ideals. They persisted in connecting democracy with scientism but insisted that scientific authority had to be monitored by humanist feeling. But in referring to this humanist feeling, which was not at all scientific, they bent over backward to keep it from sounding religious. At the turn of the century, two left-wing theorists came to propose grand visions of humanity that were based on the same quest for scientific indeterminism: Henri Bergson and Emile Durkheim. Both of them explicitly formulated their theories in a response to the scientific materialism of late-century anthropology.

Henri Bergson was born in 1859, the son of Jewish parents, his father from Poland and his mother from England. He studied philosophy at the Ecole normale from 1878 to 1881, taught at a series of lycées, and eventually found a place for himself teaching philosophy at the illustrious Collège de France. From early on, his lectures at the college were a standing-room-only sensation. His philosophy was vitalist. It proposed that life and consciousness consisted of an élan vital, or life force, something beyond the material world and beyond the ken of traditional science. The study of life, Bergson insisted, required a profoundly different kind of science than did the study of the material world. In one of his many conceptual illustrations, Bergson asked his readership to imagine that Western science had been created in order to study life—paying no attention at all to material technology or theory—and that it had been doing so these several millennia. Further, he asked, imagine that sometime in the nineteenth century a great steamship were to approach Europe from an unknown place. Would not the mechanics of the ship be utterly inexplicable to these hypothetical life scientists? The real Western world had so dedicated itself to the study of material stuff that any attempt it made to understand the nature of the life force would require an equally alien methodology.

The basic idea of vitalism is that the phenomena of life and consciousness are not explicable through physics, chemistry, and biology: something sort of spiritual is going on. Vitalism instead posits the idea that some natural force is responsible for all life and suggests that we speculate about its nature from the facts at hand. All living things tend to be understood by vitalists as meaningfully united in this force, so our individual solitude in this life is either a mistaken impression or a temporary exile from our place within the universal life force. Generally, vitalism holds that no separate consciousness will survive death as a self-aware entity but that we will nevertheless continue to exist as part of the unified force. The notion of a life force had been in discussion since the ancient world, yet a significant reason for the success of Bergsonian vitalism was that it was profoundly unexpected, appearing as it did at the end of a century of increasing materialism. Philosophical vitalism was not antiscientific in its stance, stating only that a new science was going to have to be created in order to deal with the questions of life, consciousness, and free will. Vitalism could thus be entertained by people who considered themselves rationalist republicans. Without having to reintroduce the notion of the individual soul, republicans could regain the sense that they were not entirely alone and that life did not really end with death.

Bergson’s ideas clearly had something in common with religious spiritualism, but they were seen as threatening to the ideology of the Catholic Church. In fact, in 1914, the same year that Bergson was elected to the Académie française, his writings were put on the Catholic index of prohibited material. Any attempt to pinpoint the nature of Bergson’s followers, however, founders against the enormity of the category. According to Charles Péguy, an author on whom Bergson had a profound influence, Bergson’s classroom auditors—so numerous that they regularly spilled out into the street—included “elderly men, women, young girls, young men, . . . Frenchmen, foreigners, mathematicians, naturalists, . . . students in letters, students in science, medical students, . . . engineers, economists, lawyers, laymen, priests, . . . poets, artists, . . . well-known bourgeois types, socialists, [and] anarchists.”⁴⁵

Bergson’s early works had concentrated on vitalist-materialist questions, as his titles Time and Free Will and Matter and Memory suggest. In 1907 the publication of Bergson’s great work L’évolution creatrice (Creative Evolution) brought the philosopher terrific fame, earning him a Nobel Prize in 1927. Bergson’s work is well known today for its attack on science and for the tremendously enthusiastic popular response with which that challenge was met, yet the attack was not on all science or on the scientific method itself. Rather, it was leveled quite specifically at anthropology. Creative Evolution was fundamentally, as its name implies, a critique of the pure materialism of Darwinian evolution. It sparked the imaginations of his generation because of its rationalist insertion of a non-Catholic, creative, purposeful life force into the discussion of the biological progress of human beings. Bergson argued that evolution was not accidental; it was guided by the life force, it was creative. It is worth mentioning that such a self-directed version of evolution does not need human help, hence Bergson’s élan vital functions as an argument against eugenics. Yet its great attraction was that it combined into one doctrine the most comforting aspects of religion and the most emancipatory aspects of empirical science. His philosophy allowed for the questioning of dogma and the increasing manipulation of the environment (that is, the power of science) and the belief in progress (rather than the fall of humanity), while at the same time the élan vital provided generational continuity, a sense of partaking in eternity, and even a possibility of overcoming the finality of death. Consider, for example, the final paragraph in Bergson’s chapter “The Meaning of Evolution” in Creative Evolution:

But such a doctrine does not only facilitate speculation; it gives us also more power to act and to live. For, with it, we feel ourselves no longer isolated in humanity, humanity no longer seems isolated in the natural world that it dominates. As the smallest grain of dust is bound up with our entire solar system, . . . so all organized beings, from the humblest to the highest, from the first origins of life to the time in which we are, and in all places as in all times, do but evidence a single impulsion, . . . itself indivisible. All the living hold together, and all yield to the same tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and in time, is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death.⁴⁶

Bergson got the attention he did because his work spoke to the crisis engendered by materialist, atheist anthropology. Indeed, all of this emanated not only from a critique of the accidentalism of Darwinian evolution but also from a direct critique of the established interpretation of Broca’s aphasia. Bergson devoted two chapters of his Matter and Memory to the argument that damage to the brain inhibits physical action but not mind. The brain merely translates spirit or mind into action. He claimed to have reached this conclusion in a way remarkably similar to the way Broca reached the opposite conclusion. Broca found that damage to a certain part of the brain coincided with certain inabilities of speech. Bergson studied Broca’s work and concluded that damage to the brain could disable a body’s physical action, which could inhibit the communication of thought and memory, but that there was no evidence that thought or memory themselves had been damaged. As long as an absolute parallel between mind and brain did not exist, Bergson saw room for any amount of dualism, and it was this that allowed the possibility of immortality. Perhaps consciousness and ego were wholly independent of the body and could thus exist long after corporeal demise.

As late as 1911, Bergson was still using Broca’s work as his central foil, as is clear from a Times summary of one of Bergson’s extended conferences. The Times reported that a primary section of Bergson’s lecture was entitled “Lessons from Pathology” and that Bergson used the observations of Broca to contend “that the doctrine of parallelism [of mind and brain] was contradicted by the facts.”⁴⁷ This connection between Broca and Bergson is essentially absent from histories of the period, and yet the intellectual contributions of these two men are vastly more meaningful when seen in relation to one another. Broca’s anthropology seemed republican and avant-garde at midcentury, because the enemy was the church, but by the time Bergson’s philosophy dominated the scene, many saw biological politics and mechanistic determinism as the republic’s chief foe. Broca stood for democracy in the decades after 1860, and Bergson stood for democracy in the decades after 1900. But into the twentieth century, even though Bergsonianism depended on a rejection of Broca’s central work, the two names coexisted as champions of emancipatory, progressive, republican science. The opposition noted the republican significance of Bergson. For example, the ultra-right-wing Action française tried to keep him out of the Académie française in 1913. Yet old issues die hard: later in the twentieth century, antirepublicans would also use Bergson as a bludgeon against Broca’s republican scientific materialism. In his 1928 study of Bergson, Jacques Chevalier presented an interesting version of this. Wrote Chevalier:

Forty-five years after the famous “observation” made by Broca in 1861, someone took it into his head to re-examine the two brains of the aphasics in the Dupuytren Museum upon which he had “demonstrated” the lesion of the third frontal convolution of the left cervical lobe, and it was found—a thing which seems scarcely credible—first of all that these two brains had never been dissected, and then that their frontal lobes bore the marks of many other lesions besides that of the third frontal one. . . . Until 1906 nobody had ever thought of getting at the facts . . . no one dared call [the theory] into question. When Bergson first laid a hand upon it in 1897, physicians treated his action as a nonsensical move, even as “pure madness.”⁴⁸

Chevalier was the son of an army general, Marshal Pétain’s godson, and a professor of philosophy at Grenoble. In 1940, twelve years after his study of Bergson was published, the Vichy regime made him minister of education; in December of that year, he reinstated religious instruction in all state schools.⁴⁹ After the war he was put on trial as a collaborator and sentenced to prison, losing his property and his civil rights, including the right to vote. The above version of the Broca-Bergson debate was thus fashioned by a voice of the far right. Despite Bergson’s left-wing convictions, he could still be called in as an antidote to the powerful republican icon that Broca remained well into the twentieth century. Bergson was a republican, but he was not also a materialist.

By the end of her life, Clémence Royer had shifted toward monism, a doctrine related to vitalism: both saw life and consciousness as other than physics, and both were free from the baggage of ordinary metaphysics and religion. Still, most of the freethinking anthropologists dramatically challenged themselves to live without a whole range of religious comforts and certainly without hope of an afterlife. Bergson re-created these comforts. His lectures and texts had a rousing, impassioned quality that spoke directly to the atheist crisis of the era, and he wrote and lectured about what he considered to be a philosophical foundation for real immortality. Emile Durkheim’s new antideterminism did not offer immortality, but it did translate and revive a range of religious comforts and ideals. Durkheim, too, labored to find a midway between scientific materialism and religious dogma but concentrated his investigation on human behavior. Bergson returned indeterminacy to the questions of our existence, our thought, and our disappearance at death. Durkheim concentrated on a different aspect of religious work: community, belonging, and an educated devotion to a shared moral field.

Durkheim was born in 1858 at Epinal in Lorraine. His father was the chief rabbi of the region, and his grandfather and great-grandfather had also been rabbis. He entered the Ecole normale a year after Bergson and Jean Jaurès, the future socialist leader and historian, and he was much in their company. These two seem to have influenced him in his rejection of religion and dedication to science.⁵⁰ He passed his agrégation in philosophy in 1882 and went on to teach philosophy in two provincial lycées. Late in 1885 (possibly 1886) his career plan was changed by an important meeting with Louis Liard, then director of higher education. Liard held that the clergy-bound educational system of the Second Empire was holding France back and that it partially explained the French defeat by the Prussians in 1870. By the end of the meeting it was decided that Durkheim would be sent on a fellowship to Germany in order to study how philosophy and moral science were taught there. After taking the fellowship, Durkheim came back convinced that the role of the philosophy teacher was to arouse “in the minds entrusted to his care the concept of law; of making them understand that mental and social phenomena are like any other phenomena subject to laws that human volition cannot upset simply by willing and therefore that revolutions, taking the word literally, are as impossible as miracles.”⁵¹ It was an appealing message for the republican government, both as a comment on the ideological work of indoctrinating youth in science and as a caution against proposals of excessively swift social change. In 1887 Liard created a post for Durkheim at the Bordeaux Faculty of Letters: chargé de cours of social science and pedagogy. He became chargé de cours for a chair in the science of education in 1902, winning full professorship for that chair in 1906.

All these titular references to pedagogy were meaningful. One of Durkheim’s main points was that an individual’s moral sense and personal well-being were products of social cohesion—of the numerous social ties, celebrations, and interactions in which the individual is enmeshed. In his famous study Suicide, he concluded that there were not enough social groups beyond the family and the state in France; people were lost and atomized in the interim space and the rise in suicide was a result of this individualization. As W. Paul Vogt has pointed out, the murder rate had declined in the same period; Durkheim knew it and never said the suicide rate was more meaningful than the murder rate, but he preferred to concentrate on the bad news.⁵² The cure for this social atomization was to be created in the republic’s secular primary and secondary schools, as teachers learned to inculcate republican values in the new generation. In the 1880s Ferry had secularized the schools in an articulated attempt to instill “the scientific spirit” in French youth; in the decades that followed, this goal was advanced by further curricular changes, particularly those of 1902 relating to secondary education. For the students taking the teaching degree at the Ecole normale supérieure (almost all were), there was only one required course: Durkheim’s pedagogy. It began in 1904, was made mandatory in 1906, and was taught by him every year thereafter. As Vogt concluded, “Obviously, his message was considered an important one” (65). The message he had for the new schoolteachers was that moral education had one central goal: to instill “respect for reason, for science, for the ideas and sentiments which are at the basis of democratic morality.”⁵³ The position was secular and scientistic, but it referenced sentiment and ideas.

Durkheim was not the only sociologist on the scene. There were a few ideological camps, and the one that rivaled Durkheim’s for a while was led by Gabriel Tarde. ⁵⁴ The two had a lot in common. Both scorned any deviation from scientific materialism. Yet though Tarde and Durkheim both declared that sociology was an empirical science, they both went on to suggest ideas that their strictly materialist contemporaries found extremely metaphysical. Because groups of people behaved in ways very different from individuals, it seemed as if some force took over whenever people functioned collectively. The social group has moods, fads, outbreaks, and tension. When you are in action with the crowd, you do and feel things you would not ordinarily do and feel. The company of a sympathetic crowd—a crowd with whom you have an authentic connection—is a powerful thing, as peculiar as hypnotism. Colossal group efforts, personal conversions, and many atrocities are thereby explained. Sociology was billed as an expansion of scientific fact-finding into this particular moral world—the social world, the world of the nation. But right from the beginning, Durkheim and his followers found it useful to refer to the mystical weirdness of popular moods and public outbreaks as aspects of the collective soul. They used religious language for something that was not religious when they explained it, and the reasons they did so will become apparent.

Both Tarde and Durkheim had formulated systems for understanding social cohesion and social change, and both sounded quite determinist at times; Tarde had “laws of imitation,” Durkheim had “social facts,” “scientific morality,” and a world mapped out with social and institutional “coercion” and “constraint.” Against critiques that they had left no room for free will, both Tarde and Durkheim argued that individuals were significantly in control of their actions and were capable of making choices between the finite options available to them. Durkheim stated, in the conclusion to his Règles de la méthode sociologique, that his sociology would not come down on either side of “the metaphysician’s great division.” It supported neither determinism nor liberty. Individual people were determined by the mind’s material conformation and by society. But society itself possessed a mind, free of any material construction and thus capable of maintaining the fundamental character of the republican public. “In joining together,” wrote Durkheim, “the individual souls give birth to a being, a psychic being, if you will, but one that constitutes an individuality of a new genre.”⁵⁵ The religious tone of this was not lost on contemporaries.

French philosophers and sociologists shared social space for a long time: almost all the Durkheimian sociologists trained in philosophy and taught philosophy in the lycée before getting college posts, sometimes in moral education or social science but usually in pedagogy. Furthermore, the grand new journal for “truly philosophical” philosophy, Revue de métaphysique et de moral, made itself into a welcoming home for the Durkheimians, and a few philosophers also published their work in L’année sociologique. The editor of the RMM, Xavier Léon, certainly found Durkheim’s work exciting; so did Liard, who also trained and published in philosophy; and so did Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, a philosopher who was considerably influenced by Durkheim and argued with him on a number of points over the years. But many philosophers were less enthusiastic. In defense of their own discipline, French philosophers repeatedly accused Durkheim of both scientism and spiritualism. Philosopher Alphonse Darlu, Léon’s philosophy professor and a regular contributor to RMM, took Durkheim to task for engaging in scientific morality and for suggesting that definitive truths were forthcoming. “Durkheim is pursuing, I am convinced,” wrote Darlu, “this chimera of one day causing moral facts to emerge from the crucible, in a pure state, immune forever from the revisions of conscience and reason.”⁵⁶

Durkheim had a more nuanced description of his position that well recognized the intermediary stance he had taken. “It is thus,” expressed Durkheim, “that this spirituality by which we characterize intellectual facts, and which seemed in the past to be either above or below the attentions of science, has itself become the object of a positive science and that, between the ideology of the introspectionists and biological naturalism, a psychological naturalism has been founded.”⁵⁷ This meant that theorists should stop fighting over whether to discuss spirituality because the thing that we call spirituality is an actual thing that must be discussed, though it is not really spiritual. Science can never win by saying humanity has no spiritual feelings, Durkheim would say, because, obviously, it does. So theorists must make these feelings the subject of science. When Durkheim said “between the ideology of the introspectionists and biological naturalism, a psychological naturalism has been founded,” he meant that he was defining sociology as secular, pragmatic, and rationalist, and yet he insisted that it think about spirit (knowing that it is not really spirit) and even try to reproduce spiritual feeling (knowing that it is not really spiritual). Durkheim was locating sociology between philosophy and anthropology. Consider the language and the tense precision of the following passage from the same article:

Beyond the ideology of the psycho-sociologist and the materialistic naturalism of the socio-anthropologist there is room for a sociological naturalism which would see in social phenomena specific facts, and which would undertake to explain them while preserving a religious respect for their specificity. Nothing is wider of the mark than the mistaken accusation of materialism which has been leveled against us. Quite the contrary: from the point of view of our position, if one is to call the distinctive property of the individual’s representational life “spirituality,” one should say that social life is defined by its hyper-spirituality. By this we mean that all the constituent attributes of mental life are found in it, but elevated to a very much higher power and in such a manner as to constitute something entirely new. Despite its metaphysical appearance, this word designates nothing more than a body of natural facts which are explained by natural causes. It does, however, warn us that the new world thus opened to science surpasses all others in complexity; it is not merely a lower field of study conceived in more ambitious terms, but one in which as yet unsuspected forces are at work, and of which the laws may not be discovered by the methods of interior analysis alone. (34)

Durkheim here articulated a position that was crafted as a middle ground among “science,” “fact,” “naturalism” and “spirituality,” “religion,” and “metaphysics.” In his reference to the “socioanthropologist,” he was also loudly distancing himself from the anthroposociologist Lapouge and his like. Again, Durkheim was claiming that he was not a materialist since he was interested in the spiritual, which, of course, was not really spiritual but does exist. Human communities have an amorphous something that creates, invents, and acts in ways that seem alien to the material world and the materialist explanation of things. But Durkheim did not want to concoct a fictitious explanation for this quality, and neither did he want to accept anyone else’s fictitious explanation. The credo was: no metaphysics and no miracles, but especially no miracles. He endorsed the term “metaphysics” only insofar as it “warns us” that in social life something is happening that surpasses everything else in its complexity, something guided by “as yet unsuspected forces” that will require a new method of analysis to discern. Truth is not to be found in materialism because it is stranger than materialism could yet allow.

In 1898 Durkheim had not yet dedicated himself to the establishment of a factual morality—his central project from about 1906. Still, the endeavor is present in his earlier works, and the factuality of moral law appears in the terms quoted above, as “natural facts” that are “manifestations of social life.” Of these facts, wrote Durkheim in 1898, “all are expressly obligatory, and this obligation is the proof that these ways of acting and thinking are not the work of the individual but come from a moral power above him, that which the mystic calls God but which can be more scientifically conceived” (25). That was what he instructed a generation of teachers to teach: morality is obligatory even “without God” (pace Lapouge), because all those strange internal yet external forces that had always seemed to be the properties of God were all, really, the properties of society. Durkheim’s “collective soul” and his notion of “that which the mystic calls God” were set out in such religious language because he wanted to bring attention to the spooky quality of something very real and almost mundane: “there are ways of behaving, of thinking, and of feeling that possess this remarkable quality: they exist outside of individual consciousness.”⁵⁸ In a way, he was announcing that we get to keep God because we never had him, that is, we get to keep what we had all along taken to be him: the phenomena of our collectivity.

Durkheim handled such difficult negotiations with intellectual grace, but these ideas could get clunky, especially in other hands. As Durkheim transformed the collective mind into a somewhat spiritual more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts, sociologists as diverse as Gabriel Tarde, Gustave Le Bon, and Célestin Bouglé all argued that the collective mind was less than the sum of its parts. They all believed, to varying degrees, that any group of people (be it a parliament or a committee, an academy or a gathering in the street) is more impulsive, irritable, credulous, and intolerant than any of the group’s individual members. “Such,” asserted Bouglé, “are the hard truths that sociology delivers regarding democracy.”⁵⁹ Le Bon even believed (and to this Bouglé took exception) that because of this phenomenon, a group of intelligent men would have the same intellectual abilities as would a group of fools. This notion was not easy to integrate with democratic ideals.

Materialists and metaphysicians alike balked at both Bouglé’s and Tarde’s negative image of the group mind and Durkheim’s positive image of the group mind. The common critique was well expressed by the philosopher Charles Andler in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale, when he simply stated that “these words, ‘popular intelligence’ and ‘popular will,’ are not intelligible. They are metaphors.” Critics agreed that democracy embodied a host of profound contradictions, but many insisted that sociology had no business approaching the question. It was too metaphysical, Andler contended, more literary than scientific and, in general, a pseudoscience.⁶⁰ When Bouglé responded to these critiques, he cited the great physiologist Claude Bernard, arguing that just as society is more than the sum of its individuals, a living being is more than the sum of its parts.⁶¹ Bouglé turned this around and argued that just as a living being is more than the sum of its parts, a society is more than the sum of its individuals. Social ideas prove natural laws by analogy, and then the natural law proves the social idea was true.

A lot of this was rather sloppy, but it is nice to see Durkheim offer an apology for Tarde’s awkward steps into spiritualism in the criminal anthropology debates of the 1880s and 1890s. Wrote Durkheim in 1915: “In order to understand its full significance, it is necessary to place it in the epoch in which it was conceived. This was the time when the Italian school of criminology exaggerated positivism to the point of making it into a kind of materialist metaphysics that had nothing scientific about it. Tarde demonstrated the inanity of these doctrines and reemphasized the essentially spiritual character of social phenomena.”⁶² Durkheim and Tarde had their differences, but just as the fight against anthroposociology brought Bouglé to treat with Brunetière, the biological determinism of Lombroso served as a unifying common enemy among the founders of sociology. In any case, Durkheim’s turn-of-the-century and early-twentieth-century work came to revitalize and reorganize the conceptual field.

Durkheim’s magnum opus of 1912, Elementary Forms of Religious Life, is particularly interesting because, in a way, Durkheim was speaking directly to the freethinking anthropologists and their followers.⁶³ One of the main points of Elementary Forms is that “there are no religions that are false. All are true after their own fashion: all fulfill given conditions of human existence though in different ways” (2). By this Durkheim did not mean to imply that all were equal: some religions “bring higher mental faculties into play” or are “richer in ideas and feelings” (2), and we might add, without betraying Durkheim’s type of value judgment, that some religions are more egalitarian and generous as well. The fact that they all do a certain kind of work—and Durkheim said they could not have survived if they did not do this work—does not mean that they are all good. I make a point of this because in the late twentieth century, arguing against what came to be known as Durkheim’s functionalism, scholars have suggested that his mode of thought beckons us to respect anything that exists in society—racism, for example—because if it has managed to survive it must be fulfilling an important function. This misunderstanding can only happen if one forgets what Durkheim was arguing against. He was telling Christians that non-Christian religions were not false and telling atheists that no religions were false. Unlike most human arts, religions make truth claims and pretend to have physical power. A rival doctrine of truth and physical power, science, had grown up alongside religion and was much better at these particular tasks. Those seduced by science turned back to view the religion they had left and found it to be wrong in its knowledge of the world and in its promise to manipulate that world through prayer and ritual.

Durkheim’s point was that explanations of the world and the ability to manipulate it were false claims for religion but that these claims were pretty much beside the point.⁶⁴ Instead, the point of religion was to create order in the human group and the physical world of that group, and this on the most profound level. Durkheim was offering an origin for Kant’s “categories” and agreeing that human beings do live in a dreamworld: a socially defined, communally agreed-upon mirage. For Durkheim, however, this dreamworld of shared meaning first comes into human purview as religion (the primary expression of human culture) and later takes the forms of philosophy, science, and other human arts. As with Kant’s categories, the common dreamworld generates such basic aspects of perception as our belief in the reality of time and space, but Durkheim localizes these phenomena in the social world. Of space, for instance, “in itself it has no right, no left, no high or low, no north or south, etc., . . . and since all men of the same civilization conceive of space in the same manner, it . . . implies almost necessarily that they are of social origin” (11). There was room here to take human relativism rather too far, but it was still an exciting and useful thesis. The epistemological explanation doubled as a description of social control: “Does a mind seek to free itself from these norms of all thought? Society no longer considers this a human mind in the full sense and treats it accordingly. This is why it is that when we try, even deep down inside, to get away from these fundamental notions, we feel that we are not fully free; something resists us, from inside and outside ourselves. . . . This is none other than the authority of society, passing into certain ways of thinking that are the indispensable conditions of all common action” (16). This may be disturbing, noted Durkheim, but there is not much that can be done about it. In a slightly different context, he explained: “Of course, the mental habits it implies prevented man from seeing reality as his senses show it to him; but as the senses show it to him, reality has the grave disadvantage of being resistant to all explanation” (239). Since Durkheim’s study was about a totemic religion of the Australian aboriginal, he was easily able to show the extent of this: here, individuals of a particular tribe said they were the same as the white cockatoo. That sameness might escape us, but it is essentially just as good as insisting on the similarities of a pencil and a pen: there are no real similarities, and each society creates a system of similarity and difference that is so grounded in their order of things (it is the origin of their order of things) that it feels right to all its members. These divisions and likenesses may be totemic (complex but not equipped with intrasubjectively verifiable proofs) or scientific (complex and equipped with such proofs), but they begin as a single division. “All known religious beliefs display a common feature: They presuppose a classification of the real or ideal things that men conceive of into two classes . . . sacred and profane. . . . Such is the distinctive trait of religious thought” (34).

Durkheim added to this the notion that collective action, a group engaged in a common behavior, creates powerful feelings in its members: a “collective effervescence.” The feelings are elevated, they seem to come from outside oneself, and to the extent that one participates at all, but especially if one participates noticeably, collective action creates deep feelings of power and pride. These may be utterly incommensurable with the individual’s usual self-image. Durkheim calls it a fact that, “Nowhere can a collective feeling become conscious of itself without fixing upon a tangible object” (238). Thus these feelings get projected onto a totem and seem to emanate from it. Gods later derive from the totems. Our moral life is socially determined, but because we are ignorant of this, we locate the dualism of individual and society as a personal duality: “To make this duality intelligible, it is by no means necessary to imagine a mysterious and unrepresentable substance opposed to the body, under the name ‘soul.’ But in this case, too,” cautioned Durkheim, “as in that of the sacred, the error is in the literal character of the symbol used, not in the reality of the fact symbolized. It is true that our nature is double; there truly is a parcel of divinity in us, because there is in us a parcel of the grand ideals that are the soul of collectivity” (267).

Durkheim was secularizing God and the soul in a way that not only preserved and validated them but also made their concepts meaningful and useful in new ways. “In sum, belief in the immortality of souls is the only way man is able to comprehend a fact that cannot fail to attract his attention: the perpetuity of the group’s life. . . . Since it is always the same clan with the same totemic principle, it must also be the same souls” (271). Immortality was equally explained through social feeling, in a way that spoke directly to the issues raised by Lapouge, and in a broader sense, by the idea of the nation-state, with its personality, memory, and continuity over time. As Durkheim continued: “Thus, there is a mystical sort of germinative plasma that is transmitted from generation to generation and that creates, or at least is held to create, the spiritual unity of the clan over time” (271–272). Durkheim thus allowed himself to talk about soul (a social phenomenon) and immortality (another social phenomenon) and even God: “gods are only the symbolic expression” of society (351). “Thus if the totem is the symbol of both the god and the society, is this not because the god and the society are one and the same?” (208). We feel as if we were being acted on by a force outside ourselves, “a moral being upon which we depend.” Wrote Durkheim, “Now, this being exists: It is society” (352). There was no reason to argue against religion anymore.

In this way, religion acquires a sense and a reasonableness that the most militant rationalist can not fail to recognize. The main object of religion is not to give man a representation of the natural universe, for if that had been its essential task, how it could have held on would be incomprehensible. In this respect it is barely more than a fabric of errors. But religion is first and foremost a system of ideas by means of which individuals imagine the society in which they are members and the obscure yet intimate relations they have with it. Such is its paramount role. And although this representation is symbolic and metaphorical, it is not unfaithful. It fully translates the essence of the relations to be accounted for. It is true with a truth that is eternal that there exists outside us something greater than we and with which we commune. (227)

These conclusions offered French republicanism an amazing package of solutions to its most pressing problems. To Lapouge’s nihilist lament that the universe had no “up nor down” without God, Durkheim responded that the functions of the old conception of God were easily filled by society, because that is who God had always been, anyway. To the crisis over mortality and Lapouge’s solution of heredity, Durkheim responded that what had been mistaken for the immortal soul had always been, in reality, the simple fact of group continuity. We need not worry about how to create group continuity in the absence of soul, because group continuity is more real than the notion of soul, which was a secondary, fully dependent idea. Neither was morality troubled by the loss of God. The freethinkers had tried to demonstrate that morality was only habit strengthened by heredity, and they argued this in order to defeat the idea that our moral sense was either a metaphysical manifestation of the noumenal or an invisible law made sensible to us by God. For Durkheim, this secularizing effort was no longer necessary, because morality was a real thing that came from the place we had always thought it came from, we just had the name wrong: it was society, not God. Long before Durkheim came up with this conception, he was deeply engaged in revitalizing morality, belonging, commitment, and community through the manageable, midsized collectivity of educational institutions. This was a practical, pragmatic behavior, and now it had a rather dramatic and all-inclusive theoretical meaning. Merged with the new character studies of the nation-states and the growing pastoral power of the natalist welfare state, the result was a potent, romantic conception of the modern national community.

Durkheim was specifically saying that the freethinkers’ style of studying religion in order to eradicate it was wrong; it was based on thinking that those who believed in God, or in the totems, or in their own status as cockatoos, were marked by “a kind of thoroughgoing idiocy,” and this was simply not admissible (177). We hear echoes of Réville’s answer to Véron, but Durkheim went further. Indeed, he specifically asked, “How could this amazing dupery have perpetuated itself through the whole course of history?” (66) and “What sort of science is it whose principal discovery is to make the very object it treats disappear?” (67). The first question is rhetorical. The answer to the second is that this “sort of science” is itself very religious. Its intent was not to understand religion but to mark it off as profane. In a way, Durkheim was speaking directly to the freethinking anthropologists and their followers and also, less consciously, describing them. The following passage begins with Durkheim chastising the freethinking anthropologists and their ilk for the anthropological dismissal of religion:

To grant that the crude cults of Australian tribes might help us understand Christianity, for example, is to assume—is it not?—that Christianity proceeds from the same mentality, in other words, that it is made up of the same superstitions and rests on the same errors. . . . I need not go into the question here whether scholars can be found who were guilty of this and who have made history and the ethnography of religions a means of making war against religion. In any event, such could not possibly be a sociologist’s point of view.

At this point, it is interesting to apply Durkheim’s next comment to the institution of freethinking anthropology, taking the behaviors of science as our object of study where Durkheim takes the behaviors of religions. The text continues (with no breach):

Indeed, it is a fundamental postulate of sociology that a human institution cannot rest upon error and falsehood. If it did, it could not endure. If it had not been grounded in the nature of things, in those very things it would have met resistance that it could not have overcome. Therefore when I approach the study of primitive religions, it is with the certainty that they are founded in and express the real. . . . No doubt, when all we do is consider the formulas literally, these religious beliefs and practices appear disconcerting, and our inclination might be to write them off to some sort of inborn aberration. But we must know how to reach beneath the symbol to grasp the reality it represents and that gives the symbol its true meaning. The most bizarre or barbarous rites and the strangest myths translate some human need and some aspect of life, whether social or individual. The reasons the faithful settle for in justifying those rites and myths may be mistaken, and most often are; but the true reasons exist nonetheless, and it is the business of science to uncover them. Fundamentally, there are no religions that are false. (2)

By contrast, historically, there are sciences that are false. But in Durkheim’s terms their longevity suggests that, while they are false as sciences, they “translate some human need and some aspect of life.” The idea that perfectly reasonable people did bizarre science for long periods of time is not only explained by the scientiests’ social and political agendas, but also by their emotional and philosophical needs. Durkheim described religion as a function, that is, he claimed that ritual works: “The essence of the cult is the cycle of feasts that are regularly repeated at definite times” (353). His emphasis was on behavior over doctrine, experience over knowledge. When “preachers undertake to make a convert, they focus less upon directly establishing . . . the truth of some particular proposition . . . than upon awakening the sense of moral support that regular celebration of the cult provides” (364). As Durkheim continues, “In this way they create a predisposition toward believing that goes in advance of proof, influences the intellect to pass over the inadequacy of the logical arguments” (365). A further thought recalls the dinner celebrating Mathias Duval: “One is more sure in one’s faith when one sees how far into the past it goes and what great things it has inspired. This is the feature of the ceremony that makes it instructive” (379). For Durkheim, in religion, “the sacred is thrown into an ideal and transcendent milieu, while the residuum is abandoned as the property of the material world” (36); the “rotting garbage” of the Society of Mutual Autopsy is again called to mind.

Durkheim read religion as centrally about the same kind of separating project (between the sacred and the profane) as enacted by the freethinkers (between science and religion). Durkheim wrote: “A society whose members are united because they imagine the sacred world and its relations with the profane world in the same way, and because they translate this common representation into identical practices, is what is called a Church” (41). And further: “There is religion as soon as the sacred is distinguished from the profane, and we have seen that totemism is a vast system of sacred things” (185). We have seen that late-nineteenth-century French anthropology was a vast system of unsacred things. They raced around the physical and intellectual landscape claiming things for the profane and converting the sacred: every concept they could think of was translated through evolution and materialism, to the point of dividing up the pieces of their own bodies.

In this great work on religion, Durkheim offered very little intentional commentary on his own country’s religious experience, but there was some. In a brief paragraph in the middle of the massive Elementary Forms and then for a sentence or two in the book’s conclusion, Durkheim referenced the way this worked in “modern” Europe, though he never brought it fully into the nineteenth century:

Nowhere has society’s ability to make itself a god or to create gods been more in evidence than during the first years of the Revolution. In the general enthusiasm of that time, things that were by nature purely secular were transformed by public opinion into sacred things: Fatherland, Liberty, Reason. A religion tended to establish itself spontaneously with its own dogma, symbols, altars, and feast days. It was to these spontaneous hopes that the cult of Reason and the Supreme Being tried to give a kind of authoritative fulfillment. Granted, this religious novelty did not last. The patriotic enthusiasm that originally stirred the masses died away and the cause having departed, the effect could not hold. But brief though it was, this experiment loses none of its sociological interest. In a specific case, we saw society and its fundamental ideas becoming the object of a genuine cult directly—and without transfiguration of any kind. (215–216)

That was in the middle of the book. Some two hundred pages later, Durkheim returned to the theme:

If today we have some difficulty imagining what the feasts and ceremonies of the future will be, it is because we are going through a period of transition and moral mediocrity. The great things of the past that excited our fathers no longer arouse the same zeal among us. . . . Meanwhile, no replacement for them has yet been created. . . . We have already seen how the Revolution instituted a whole cycle of celebrations in order to keep the principles that inspired it eternally young. . . . Everything leads us to believe that the work will sooner or later be taken up again. (429–430)

So he did not quite see it as being taken up again by himself, by the freethinking anthropologists and other scientific materialists, and by the whole team of secularizing republicans who changed the entire school system, wrote a flood of books and articles, ran conferences, founded journals, financed scientific evangelists, threw parties to celebrate Voltaire and Diderot, donated their own bodies for dissection, pulled down crosses, changed street names, turned convents into secular schools, wrote atheist psalms, kicked the nuns out of the hospitals, and banished the church from the bedroom. By the second decade of the twentieth century, Durkheim saw that eradicating all religion in order to win an old grudge match with authoritarianism and factual error did not make sense; society simply lost too much in the divorce.

Science is said to deny religion in principle. But religion exists; it is a system of given facts; in short, it is a reality. How could science deny a reality? Furthermore, insofar as religion is action and insofar as it is a means of making men live, science cannot possibly take its place. . . . Faith is above all a spur to action. . . . Science is fragmentary and incomplete; it advances but slowly and is never finished; but life—that cannot wait. Theories whose calling is to make people live and make them act, must therefore rush ahead of science and complete it prematurely. They are only possible if the demands of practicality and vital necessities, such as we feel without distinctly conceiving them, push thought beyond what science permits us to affirm. In this way, even the most rational and secularized religions cannot and can never do without a particular kind of speculation which, although having the same objects as science itself, still cannot be properly scientific. The obscure intuitions of sense and sensibility often take the place of logical reasoning. (432–433)

Durkheim never stopped scolding people like the freethinking anthropologists who argued that religion was not scientific and therefore was useless, evil, and wrong. Yet in a way they had created an example of the vital, ideal collectivity that he was describing. Indeed, Durkheim’s own era was unusually marked by just what he seemed to long for: passionate, effervescent movements that sought to realign modern mentality and that, along the way, provided a rich religious community for their members. He himself may be said to have led such a movement. Durkheim was not only talking about what would be good for society; he wanted a real answer to the tremendous problem posed by the freethinking anthropologists: for many people, the idea that there was no soul was uncomfortable, counterintuitive, and silenced more questions than it answered. Durkheim found a way to open those questions again. To listen to Durkheim one last time:

In this way, there really is a part of us that is not directly subordinate to the organic factor: That part is everything that represents society in us. The general ideas that religion or science impresses upon our minds, the mental operations that these ideas presuppose, the beliefs and feelings on which our moral life is based—all the higher forms of psychic activity that society simulates and develops in us—are not, like our sensations and bodily states, towed along by the body. . . . The determinism that reigns in that world of representations is thus far more supple than the determinism that reigns in our flesh-and-blood constitution, and leaves the agent with a justified impression of greater liberty. The milieu in which we move in this way is somehow less opaque and resistant. In it we feel, and are, more at ease. In other words, the only means we have of liberating ourselves from physical forces is to oppose them with collective forces. (274)

Such a claim is dependent on the thought-as-material-product idea that the freethinkers championed, and it provides a wonderfully creative way out of the problem. It was the collectivity, much maligned though it was, that had given us the idea of the soul. In fact, it was the soul. The problem of religion had risen with the flowering of the sovereignty of the people, as it seemed that human authority had to be recognized as the true description of reality and the final word on justice. With the republic well established and in need of its own language of values and feelings, Durkheim found the “true” soul and the “true” God emanating from the people, and not only in the republic: “the people” had always been the reality of the sensations of God, soul, and immortality.

From the 1890s to the First World War, despite persistent scientism in the political world and despite a popularist revival of Catholicism, the intellectual and cultural trend was toward new theories of scientific mind-body indeterminacy: “clouds chased by the wind,” bad science that you “know by its fruit,” vitalist philosophy, and the sociological “collective soul.” For Finot, the infinite was growing “more friendly” and mortality less threatening, and the vehicle was humanity’s increasing mutual respect, dignity, and sentiments of justice and of truth. Similarly, for Durkheim, an understanding of “collective forces” justified a general impression of greater liberty and existential comfort. The emblematic ideas of the period were those that eased the strain between science and mystery, and rehabilitated “spirit” and “soul” for defenders of secularism and science. Freethinking anthropology—with its determinism, its head measuring, its materialist aesthetics, and its mutual autopsy—could not hold the same cultural space in the new century as it had in the last. In the beginning of the twentieth century, it seemed like a good idea to stop bludgeoning religion, which seemed sufficiently marginalized and toothless to be tolerated, and instead to try to speak rationally about the passion of the human experience and the variety of once-religious human needs.