In November 1899 Léonce Manouvrier was nominated for the chair of modern philosophy at the Collège de France. He lost, but only to Henri Bergson, one of the most prominent and respected French philosophers of the era, and Gabriel Tarde, who rivaled Emile Durkheim as a founder of sociology. (There were two empty posts.) Léonce Manouvrier, on the other hand, was an anthropologist with no conventional philosophical training, who had spent his entire career measuring bones and skulls and weighing brains. Manouvrier got as far as he did because he pitched himself as a scientist who could police the discipline. Where others turned away from science toward religion, mysticism, or vitalism, Manouvrier persisted in his attempt to marry anthropology to philosophy. His application for the chair of modern philosophy was the culmination of that. It was given a hearing at the Collège de France not because it was positivist and scientific but because it represented a critique of the grandiose claims of scientific positivism while promising to generate a rationally based morality. He stressed that the character of social and political proposals made “in the name of the law of evolution” had deeply enhanced “the immense social importance of making it well known just up to what point the law applies to humans, biologically and socially.’
“What’s all this talk about the failure of science?” wrote Manouvrier. “As if it were from science that Morality has, up until now, asked for illumination!” Though he made it perfectly clear that he did not believe that science could become capable of resolving all “the extremely complicated problems of Sociology and Morality,” he implied that it was capable of profoundly influencing these disciplines. Manouvrier proclaimed that in a not-too-distant future, the scientific study of human beings would be an integral part of the program in all the écoles supérieures concerned with the direction of humanity. But, until then, he wrote, “it is in the Collège de France that Anthropological Philosophy would seem to have its natural place.” Manouvrier closed his address with the warning that, unless anthropology were systematically consulted and appreciated, it would continue to be used in a piecemeal and irresponsible manner and eventually lead to disaster. He wrote that a tremendous movement was under way and growing every day, that it was carried by a multitude of books, journals, learned societies, and congresses where “the lack of competence in the study of anthropology is acutely felt and the utilization of scientific facts without their being appreciated or supervised has already delivered a plethora of veritable aberrations.” In a companion essay summarizing his life’s work, Manouvrier cataloged his many struggles against the reductionist anthropological “moral and social movement.”1 The use of anthropology in other fields of knowledge had, conceded Manouvrier, yielded some “occasionally brilliant theories,” but, he added, when they are concerned with “the direction of men, the reformation of laws or of morals, or of orienting social aspirations,” they have been at least as dangerous as they have been brilliant. “It is not to be doubted that, from this point of view, the teaching proposed here responds to an urgent necessity. The movement of which I have just spoken could be fertile, but in the absence of a critique that is both scientific and philosophical, it risks becoming nothing more than a sterile agitation that is more of a retardant than a boon to the progress of morality.”2
Manouvrier did come to work at the Collège de France, in two capacities. First, the physiologist and professor at the Collège de France, Etienne-Jules Marey, set up a photographic laboratory in the Bois de Boulogne, where he studied the movement of animals and people, using all sorts of innovative techniques. He had seen Eadweard Muybridge’s famous images of running horses in 1879 in La nature and went further with the idea—with much funding by the Paris municipal council and the Ministry of Public Instruction. In 1908 he created the position of assistant director just for Manouvrier, and, at what came to be known as the Station physiologique, the two formulated and carried out a great variety of photographic experiments with horses, birds, and people. Their movement studies attracted the attention of the government and influenced methods of training French soldiers.3 Manouvrier also came to teach at the Collège de France, as a substitute in the chair of histoire générale des sciences. The creation of this chair had been requested by August Comte in 1832. It became a reality for his disciple, Pierre Laffitte, but slowly: in 1882 Ferry set him up in a history of science cours libres, in 1888 Liard arranged another, and in the French parliament, in 1892, Léon Bourgeois championed the creation of the chair in the history of sciences at the Collège de France especially for Laffitte. Bourgeois argued that ‘there is no higher education worthy of its name that does not have a scientific philosophy at its summit.”4 When Laffitte died, applicants for the chair included Léonce Manouvrier, Paul Tannery, and Grégoire Wyrouboff, and in the end it came down to a competition between the latter two scholars.5 Tannery, a widely known historian of science, was elected by a large majority. In an almost unprecedented act, however, the minister of public instruction, Joseph Chaumié, decided to override the professors’ votes and give the position to Wyrouboff.6
Chaumié was part of the extremely anticlerical Combes government of 1902–1905. Tannery was a devout Catholic. He belonged to the Catholic Scientific Society of Brussels, which was dedicated to the compatibility of science and Christian faith and published Questions scientifique, the Catholic science journal that covered the freethinkers’ work so minutely.7 Yet Tannery’s history of science betrayed no sign of his religious beliefs. Indeed, he was deeply influenced by Comte. Tannery’s work was internationally lauded and used as a model for years to come. In 1903, at a congress on historical sciences in Rome, he was made president of a permanent committee on the history of science. It was in that year that he received forty of forty-seven votes for the chair of the history of science at the Collège de France, as well as the support of the Academy of Sciences. Wyrouboff, for his part, was arguably the foremost living representative of the positivist school. He had trained in science but was also deeply concerned with politics and social questions. In 1867 he founded Philosophie positive with Emile Littré, and for seventeen years he edited and wrote for that journal. Two years after the death of Littré, Wyrouboff gave up working on the journal and devoted himself to working in the field of crystallography and physicochemistry (considered extremely progressive at the time). He was reputed to be a competent scientist, but he was not known as a historian of science. Indeed, as it was expressed by George Sarton, the eminent twentieth-century historian of science and founder of the journals Isis and Osiris, “Wyrouboff . . . was not a trained historian of science and contributed nothing whatsoever to the subject, neither before his election nor after.”8 Sarton was harsh because his intent was to cry foul: though no admission of privileging politics over competence was ever made by Chaumié, it was assumed by contemporaries (and all future historians of the event) that this very rare choice to override the professors’ decision was the result of the government’s affinity for positivism and hostility toward Catholicism.
The event rather dramatically demonstrates that the French government understood its fundamental ideological standpoint to be fiercely positivist well after a new antideterminist mood was beginning to take hold at the Collège de France. There were other cases of republican prejudice against Catholic scientists. The geologist Albert de Lapparent was forced to choose between his part-time work as a state mining engineer and his chair of geology and minerology at the Catholic Institute of Paris.9 The physicist, philosopher, and devout Catholic Pierre Duhem was kept from advancing from Bourdeaux to Paris by the violent opposition of Marcellin Berthelot and Louis Liard.10 The marquis de Nadaillac (the archaeologist who sided with Paul Topinard against the strict materialism of the freethinking anthropologists) also experienced difficulties in his political and scientific career because of his opposition to republican scientism and his outspoken critique of materialist rationalism.11 Topinard himself was ousted from his professorial chair at the School of Anthropology, twice convened a governmental hearing in his defense, and saw his plea twice rejected. As Henri Brisson, then president of the Chamber of Deputies, wrote, in defense of republican positivism: “The formula ‘the bankruptcy of science’ is, above all, a phrase of the political order.”12 The notion that materialist, anticlerical science was the only means to republican progress was equally political. Topinard was not publicly religious; his breach with the anticlerics came because he tried to stop anthropology from becoming actively antireligious. But Tannery, Duhem, and de Nadaillac must have presented a significant conceptual problem to republicans who had essentially defined science as “that which is in opposition to religion.” The prejudice they met should be understood as having its origins not only in an ideological opposition but also in the confusion engendered by shifting ideological alliances.
It was the prejudice against Catholic scientists that allowed Manouvrier eventually to teach at the Collège de France, for when Wyrouboff was in ill health in the academic years 1909–1910 and 1912–1913, Manouvrier was asked to step in and teach his courses. This is especially ironic because, even more than in the past, Manouvrier had presented himself to the professors as the scientist who questioned science. Indeed, this time around, he actually mentioned religion, and though his remarks are those of an unbeliever, they were conciliatory in tone. In this job application, Manouvrier suggested that religious morality would be preferable to no morality at all. “The morality associated with religion,” he mused, “certainly possess precepts that seem to have no need to be further perfected.” He even suggested that science should support religion, because, though religion had created an almost perfect moral code, it had not sufficiently convinced people that they ought to abide by that code, partially because people no longer believed in supernatural sanctions. Also, moral decisions were not always clear, and science could help. Wrote Manouvrier: “The role of science consists in making precise what is good and what is bad in a plethora of cases wherein this is not known and thus to second or to replace faith with the positive demonstration of general precepts and their natural sanction.” He was thus comfortable with the notion that science and “natural sanction” might serve to “second” faith, but he gave more attention to the idea of science replacing faith. Either way, wrote Manouvrier, “thus would appear the veritable ‘positive religion,’ which is none other than science herself.”13
THE TURN OF THE CENTURY MOVE toward indeterminism on the left took many forms. Historian Thomas Kselman has demonstrated that spiritualism persisted throughout modern France, and he invoked Charles Richet as evidence, writing that “even in the decades when positivism was fashionable the influential scientist . . . continued to take spirit manifestations seriously.”13 As proof of this, Kselman cited only one article by Richet, from 1880.14 In fact, this article was one of Richet’s paeans to hypnotism, and it was utterly materialist: he argued that somehow the phenomenon was real and that science would eventually understand it. The arguments Richet used to prove that hypnotism existed were about the ability to repeat the experiments and to predict accurately their general course, that is, they were perfectly in line with scientific protocol. Since hypnotism was not as predictable as chemistry, he made an analogy to disease (which also follows a varying course despite scientific reality), and because people cannot be trusted as one can trust chemicals, he asked if the doubting reader could really believe that the fifty or so people he had seen hypnotized were all liars (“without exception, without a single exception”), and all in on the hoax (340). The reports he had heard from his “very own closest friends and relatives” would also have to be lies.
This style of argument may seem provincial to the twenty-first-century science reader, but it does not sound spiritualist. Richet could attest that many enlightened people believed in hypnotism, but that was not enough. “In science,” he proclaimed, “one does not persuade a few people: one has to persuade everyone” (338). This article, by the way, says more about how easy it was reduce a variety of women to tears and offers a further indication that the problem was Richet. An example is of interest and will demonstrate his mood (though this was one of the more colorful moments in the piece). He reported that he often hypnotized women and then informed them that he had cut off their arms and legs or was about to do so—remarkably cruel and irresponsible behavior. All screamed and wept, some searched wildly for their lost limbs, and one went into so profound a state of shock that her heart stopped and she did not breathe: “This state lasted about half a minute, a century of anguish for me; then a deep breath announced the return of the phenomena of life. Some might say this was an act. In any case, at the risk of sounding naive, I would not repeat the experience for any price” (343). That “risk of sounding naive” was as interesting a part of this phenomenon as anything else: sounding scientific all the time was tricky. Twelve years later, in 1892, Richet reaffirmed his scientism in a book called Dans cent ans (In a hundred years), predicting that “metaphysics will probably be abandoned altogether. . . . Philosophy properly so-called will cease to exist, its metaphysical side will become the sphere of the astronomer, the mathematician, and the physicist, while the psychological side will be the physiologist’s portion.”16 Richet’s scientistic beliefs were intact.
Yet it is true that Richet became interested in spirits. In the 1890s a young medium named Eusapia convinced the Italian criminal anthropologist Lombroso that she was the real thing. As one modern scholar has put it, “Lombroso’s imprimatur opened the intellectual doors of Europe to Eusapia,” but “Richet soon took over.”17 Having been overwhelmed by hypnotism, Richet had concluded that the phenomenon was real and had gone on to convince France and then the world of it. In view of this, he was rather predisposed to believe and champion unusual claims about the human mind. Richet went so far as to start an Institut de Métapsychique in Paris to study Eusapia and others, and he was joined there by the Curies and a host of other European scientists.18 There were carefully studied seances where the mediums would seem to speak with the dead, sometimes move objects without touching them, and emit from their mouths a sort of ghost goo that the scientists took as a physical proof that something real was taking place here. Richet struggled against the absurdity of the claims being made but was eventually convinced, along with many of his colleagues. Richet even coined the word “ectoplasm” for the goo (which explains why ghost movies still tend to show victims slimy after a ghostly encounter). In a period when Röntgen was discovering X rays, the Curies were making discoveries in radioactivity, and Freud was proposing the theory of the subconscious, it seemed likely that strange new discoveries were liable to follow. Richet conducted many of his studies with Sir Oliver Lodge, a physicist knighted for his work in electromagnetic radiation, who would later be an early champion of the radical theories of atomic structure advanced by Rutherford and others. In Lodge’s words:
As far as the physics of the movements were concerned, they were all produced, I believe, in accordance with the ordinary laws of matter. The ectoplasmic formation which operated was not normal; but its abnormality belongs to physiology or anatomy—it is something which biologists ought to study. It was something Richet, as a physiologist, found repugnant and was very loath to admit, but the facts were too much for him. He often said, “C’est absolument absurde, mais c’est vrai”—or words to that effect.19
Richet began to use precisely the same language he had used to convince Europe of the reality of hypnotism, this time to convince Europeans of the reality of ectoplasm and related manifestations of the psychic world. His discourse remained scientistic.
I have endeavored to keep the focus of this study on France, but a few words on Freud’s relation to these issues will not be out of place. First of all, Freud’s first book, predating his full development of psychoanalysis, was entitled On Aphasia.20 In it, Freud disagreed with Broca’s one-to-one correlation of morphological location and psychic function, presaging the more complicated relationship that we hold to be true today.21 Second, having studied at Salpêtrière, Freud returned to Vienna eagerly citing Charcot’s idea that medieval demonic possession was hysteria under another name. Freud extended this to all neuroses, writing: “In the Middle Ages neuroses played a significant part in the history of civilization, they . . . were at the root of what was factual in the history of possession and witchcraft. Documents from that period prove that the symptomatology has undergone no change up to the present day. A proper assessment and a better understanding of the disease only began with the works of Charcot. . . . Up to that time hysteria had been the bête noire of medicine.”22 Following Charcot, Freud also preferred the hereditary concept of hysteria over the one that had to do with overexcited female sexuality. Wrote the young Freud, “As regards what is often asserted to be the preponderant influence of abnormalities in the sexual sphere upon the development of hysteria, it must be said that its importance is as a rule over-estimated” (1:50).
In the early 1890s Freud began to change his mind about the hereditary root of hysteria, a change he described as dependent on two cures by hypnotism that he had effected. But in one scholar’s estimation, “Freud drew his supporting evidence from medieval religious history.”23 Wrote Freud, “It is owing to no chance coincidence that the hysterical deliria of nuns during the epidemics of the Middle Ages took the form of violent blasphemies and unbridled erotic language.”24 Freud cited Charcot for the observation but offered his own new conclusion: the nuns were repressed. This was apparently a crucial leap into his mature theory, and he republished several times the connection between convent deleria, hysteria, and repression.25 The debate over science and religion was thus the specific context of Freud’s discovery. A commitment to scientism led, in the early twentieth century, to the formulation of a new kind of invisible world: as Durkheim turned to society as the real source of religious feeling, Freud insisted that there were no religious feelings, only psychological needs. Freud argued that religion ought to be replaced by a “more mature” alternative that could help to meet the needs of the individual.26 Durkheim was interested in shoring up the community and strengthening moral bounds, also for the sake of the individual. These are big differences, but relating to either Freud or Durkheim, the scientistically derived invisible world (neither material nor religious) has continued to be associated and most energetically supported by members of the political left.
I offer two final object lessons: First, one of Charcot’s best friends, the well-known author Alphonse Daudet, had a son who studied with Charcot in the 1880s, Léon Daudet. In 1891 he married Jeanne Hugo, the granddaughter of the great republican author and a vivacious and prominent social figure in her own right. The civil ceremony “provoked cries of scandal by conservative journals and triumphal cheers by liberal anticlerics.”27 But Léon could not find a place for himself in medicine; he came to resent Charcot and his politics and began drifting to the right. Jeanne Hugo divorced him (and later married Charcot’s son), and by 1905 Daudet had become a devout member of the right-wing, anti-Semitic Action française. In 1908 his new wife gave him the money to finance a journal for the group, the Revue de l’Actionfrançaise. Daudet was its editor-in-chief, and his wife edited the fashion section.28 By then, Daudet looked back on the mild Charcot and remembered a zealot: “Not only was he an agnostic, he often was overtly hostile to Catholicism, which he considered as reactionary. . . . Charcot considered Our Lord Jesus Christ, a bit like his personal enemy.”29 The issue was still hot.
Second, the ideological work accomplished by Alfred Fouillée’s wife had a tremendous effect on strengthening a new republican nationalist ideal. Fouillée’s concerns with the relationship of biology and politics were marked by his analyses of the works of the philosopher Jean-Marie Guyau, who became Fouillée’s son-in-law when Fouillée married Augustine Guyau.30 Yet her work was the best known of the three: under the pseudonym Bruno she was the author of the famous children’s book Le tour de France par deux enfants, which sold 7.4 million copies between its publication in 1877 and 1914. As one history has explained it, the pseudonym charmingly, “paid homage to the free-thinker Giordano Bruno.”31 Subtitled “Duty and Country,” the book followed two youngsters around France as they interacted with various role models and learned to take pride in their nation. In schools, republican homes, and nurseries, Le tour de France served as a primer for civic and moral virtue, extending the ideology of the newly envisioned state to its smallest citizens.
MONUMENTS OF TEXT, STONE, FLESH, AND BONE
The freethinking anthropologists did not live to see much of the new era. Most of them died in the last decade of the nineteenth century or soon after. Yet the “little church” they built held up well—long enough to support them in their final hours and, further, to carry their memories into the future. When we see that the “Hovelacque” listed among the members of the Société d’anthropologie in 1900 was “Madame the widow Abel Hovelacque” we are reminded that for all the members, participation served some combination of intellectual, sacerdotal, and emotional needs. Gabriel Mortillet died in 1898, and by 1905 a monument was erected to him. It featured a tall column with a bronze bust of Mortillet on top; around the capstone beneath him were carved the names of the four prehistoric periods Mortillet had established, each accompanied by a portrait of a homonid depicted to look less apish by degrees. Leaning against the column was a marble sculpture of a young woman reading a book; as the inauguration notes explained, “she personifies the young student of prehistory, the future scrutinizing the past.”32 At the time of the monument’s inauguration, the president of the Society of Anthropological Conferences was Dr. Arthur Chervin, who had once been the energetic young disciple of Louis-Adolphe Bertillon. His address on the occasion of the monument’s dedication spoke of the “scientific trinity: Broca, Bertillon, Gabriel de Mortillet.”33 Thulié was still around and was one of the few to mention Mortillet’s contribution to “the evolution of free thought.”34 In 1936 the secretary general of the Société d’anthropologie welcomed a new member, “Mme Grunevald de Mortillet, ethnographer [and] niece of our once and much-missed colleague, Adrien de Mortillet, whose warm and excellent memory she revives among us.”35 She was still a member in 1965, one hundred years after her grand-uncle, Gabriel de Mortillet, had first joined.
When Manouvrier died in January 1927, he had served as the secretary general of the Société d’anthropologie for twenty-five years. He had taken over the post from Letourneau, who himself inherited it directly from Broca. The 1927 funeral addresses referred to Manouvrier as “Broca’s distinguished successor.” The discourse by Dr. Raoul Anthony, on behalf of the Société d’anthropologie noted that it was rare for scientific research to have so much of an effect on the social world, but Manouvrier’s works seemed to do it all the time: “Sometimes they were freeing us from dangerous social errors, be they the Lombrosian theory of innate criminality or the reveries of Gobineau and Lapouge. Sometimes they led to the overthrow of opinions and tendencies that forced open the barriers of our institutions that one would have believed the most definitive: in rehabilitating the female brain, considered inferior until him, he was manifestly one of those who did the most to open scientific, artistic, liberal, and administrative careers to women.”36 Anthony also wrote that it was “beyond doubt” that Manouvrier would one day be seen as one of the most profound thinkers of the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth (3). Eulogies were read by representatives of the Laboratory of Anthropology, the Collège de France, and several scientific societies, all of whom agreed that “since the death of Broca, [Manouvrier] had contributed the most to establishing the worldwide reputation of the Société d’anthropologie” (2). In the name of the Washington Academy of Science, Manouvrier’s former student Aleš Hrdlička and two other important American anthropologists, J. Walter Fewkes and Walter Hough, sent their condolences and spoke of Manouvrier as “unquestionably the dean of Physical Anthropology in France” (12). They also wrote of him as “a man of great talent and one of utter unselfishness, with sterling honesty and character. Men of such qualities are born but rarely” (12). A glance at the Bulletins et mémoires de la Société d’anthropologie de Paris from, say, 1974 yields further memorials: six monographs were advertised on the back cover, their authors including Hovelacque, Chudzinski, Papillault, and Manouvrier.37 Several studies in that volume referenced Manouvrier’s work or declared themselves to be “following his methods. And the names of the other freethinking anthropologists were peppered throughout the texts.38 Just after the death of Louis-Adolphe Bertillon, his sons Jacques and Alphonse set up a memorial essay prize in his name at the Société d’anthropologie. It was awarded every three years, but the memorial was more constant than that: every issue after 1885 carried the announcement of the existence of the Prix Bertillon adjacent to the announcement of the Prix Broca. A further memorial is, of course, the display of skulls labeled “intellectual” at the Paris Museum of Natural History. Then there is Paris itself. While researching for this book, I lived near enough to the museum that my address was rue de Candolle, named for the Swiss naturalist, and I regularly walked rue Broca and rue Bertillon. Over in the thirteenth arrondissement there’s rue Abel Hovelacque. In the medieval town of Annecy, there is a rue Gabriel de Mortillet; there’s a rue Clémence Royer in Nantes and a rue du Docteur Manouvrier in his hometown of Guéret.