Republicans had a vision of France as democratic, scientific, and secular, but even if everyone had been a republican and eager for these changes, to create this new world out of an ancient monarchy and eldest daughter of the church would be no mean feat. Between 1880 and 1905, republicans undertook a great number of ideological reform projects, radically transforming the educational system so it was secular and scientistic and so that more people went to school, for a longer time. In a massive, purposeful reeducation project for a very old culture, the new generation of students was taught to love democracy, science, and France. In 1905 the republicans also managed to separate church from state in a land where no state had existed before the church, a land that had remained loyal to the pope through the Reformation and, after a brief hiatus in the Revolution, had returned to him. The republicans ousted the Society of Jesus from France and made seminary students serve in the army—both initiated by the same man who authorized the Society of Mutual Autopsy.
It is in this context that we find the freethinking anthropologists purging the ghoulishness from the dead human body. Broca’s finding about the third left frontal circumvolution of the brain gave the freethinkers their greatest “fact” against the soul, and while they looked for more, they did not really need more. What they were up to was more a deconsecration of the human mind than a quest for neurobiological information. Clémence Royer’s combative image of Darwinian evolution as a weapon against the church also had a dynamic career: the “scientific fact” of (what was taken to be) progressive evolution became the other major authority source for the freethinking anthropologists’ great translation project. This deconsecration took place in myriad ways, on myriad once-sacred things, concepts, and persons: the convents became secular schools for boys and girls; religious words and symbols were removed from cemeteries and street signs; human “monsters” were reclassified as natural and possessed of their own natural law within the human taxonomy; marriage was given a natural history, as were economics, aesthetics, the family, infanticide, the role of women, and moral law. The freethinkers even conjured prehistoric unbelievers so as to ruin the theistic argument of proof by universal consent. They called on book editors to delete the prayers from The Swiss Family Robinson and other novels, and they published naturalist, laic educational books of their own. They invented secular feasts and holidays, burial ceremonies, and memorials and wrote scientific psalms to the wonder of the universe and the passing of the gods. Atheist scientists affiliated with or adjacent to the freethinkers also deconsecrated the hospitals and took over the monitoring of reproduction and the status of women. In both these latter cases, the message was mixed, but the scientism was consistent. The identification of bodies was translated into the secular; the criminal went from sinner to aberration of natural law; demonic possession and the rapture of nuns became hysteria and neurosis. Historians have observed that science did not, on its own, lead to atheism. I must agree and add that, sometimes, atheism led to science. Science was ardently embraced by people who had already lost their faith in religion, so sometimes the science was secondary. Contemporaries often mocked the freethinking anthropologists’ ideas, but because the work presented a version of the world without God, editors and reviewers consistently covered the freethinker’s projects, attended to their claims, and sometimes praised them. The freethinker’s books sold well, their classes were full, and an appreciative government augmented their salaries. Meanwhile, throughout this period, anthropologists all over the world were putting together an argument about human origins on the basis of fossil bones and new ideas about evolutionary models. Mortillet actually helped establish the great antiquity of humanity, but, in general, the core freethinking anthropologists’ influence on this important argument was merely the climate created by their tremendous enthusiasm for the idea of materialist evolution. They certainly wrote more about their own idea of cultural and social evolution than they did about the biological evolution of species.
As the freethinkers did their work of grounding the world in secular terms, they used their science to provide a meaningful community for themselves. As it developed over the end of the nineteenth century, French anthropology came to function as an atheist religion. It was communal, idealistic, and abounded with priestlike leaders, burial ceremonies, sanctified heroes, answers to existential questions, primer books for the children, and utopian goals located far in the future. The anthropologists enjoyed scientific paradox, contemplating eternity, infinity, and accident. There were moody, ritualized, relic-laden dinners; the mail brought intimate confessions from the far-flung flock. In this way, for these people, science actively assumed religious roles and took on the eschatological, sacerdotal, and soteriological tasks of modernity. These tasks became even more important as the real Third Republic failed to live up to the almost religious, mystical fantasy of republicanism cherished by many throughout the periods of monarchy and empire. Ideas and emotions were articulated in anthropological theories, which were all adamantly atheistic and antiphilosophical, despite having been invented in direct reaction to spiritual and philosophical crises. Anthropology functioned in this capacity by providing materialist explanations of human origins and characteristics, so that a secular worldview was no longer beset by ruinous unknowns. For some, anthropology also served to assuage the losses of materialism by providing a secular framework in which to experience communal ritual and imagine and work toward a real-world utopia.
Durkheim wrote that no religions are false because they are not really supposed to be generating true information about the world. To the extent that science performs religious functions, that is, to the extent that it serves emotional and philosophical needs, it, too, can survive beyond its ability to inform. Good science gets us close-up pictures of Mars and stops our dying of tuberculosis. But that is not all it is doing. It is powerful, but it is also a social endeavor: it has rules and tendencies (and fashions and patterns of celebration) that seem integral to its stated projects but are actually extraneous or counterproductive (how could it not?). Following Durkheim, when we think about the Society of Mutual Autopsy, if we overcome our tendency to dismiss as “inborn aberration” such seemingly bizarre acts as, for instance, cutting up the brain of a dead friend, measuring thousands of colonial noses, or correlating head measurments with personality types, we may still call it bad science. As I read Durkheim, the “most bizarre or barbarous” scientific rites and the strangest scientific myths translate some human need and some aspect of life, whether social or individual. The reasons the scientists and their following settle for in justifying those rites and myths may be mistaken, but there is reason in their behavior, and it is the business of history to uncover it.1
The amazing Bertillon family was entrenched in the emotional and ideological matter of the freethinking anthropologists, but they transformed what Manouvrier called the anthropological stockpiles of useless numbers into active artillery. They made death visible in the population: one could watch it rise and fall. They brought the secrets of sex into the numerical modern world. They made criminals memorable, made silent bodies speak, and assigned to each of us the onus and possibility of a fixed identity. They helped invent the detective. All this happened in the context of a passionate atheism: Louis-Adolphe Bertillon was writing freethinking articles for Libre pensée and Pensée nouvelle in the 1860s, in 1866 his wife, Zoé, had a civil funeral, and by 1883 his own skeleton was hanging in the Laboratory of Anthropology. When their son, Alphonse, died in 1914, his brain went to Manouvrier at the Laboratory of Anthropology to be weighed and analyzed. It was thirty-one years after the same room, and perhaps the same scales, had held his father’s brain. The cult was that vibrant over more than half a century. Georges Vacher de Lapouge was also entrenched in the freethinking anthropologist’s emotional worldview and well representative of its most desperate mood. Like the Bertillons, Lapouge seems to have had a considerable influence on the world, also in the field of categorizing people with measurements. The inventors of these numerical techniques of seeing the body politic and making it visible for manipulation were all living in the framework of the end of the soul. There is something extraordinary about Manouvrier’s place in all of this. An early and influential believer in evolution, he was able to make a lasting contribution to how scientists glean information from ancient skeletons, to influence innumerable students—most significantly, the American anthropologist Aleš Hrdlička—and also to be an enthusiastic fellow traveler to the freethinking anthropologists. His brilliant battles against sexism, the idea of biological criminality, and racism are not widely known today, perhaps because he so thoroughly trounced his specific opponents that the matters seemed solved and were forgotten. In his own day, his work on these subjects made him famous as a good anthropologist and a subtle student of humanity; it was this work that took him as far as the Collège de France and almost got him a chair in philosophy there. He, too, explained that his work was in direct response to the decline of religion, as theological insults about the soul were exchanged for anthropological insults about the brain.
In general, as the atheists reported it, theirs was an intellectual, “philosophical” movement. It was not always very sophisticated, but, as they understood it, they were running toward truth, not from religious guilt or the terror of hellfire. The Catholic Church could hardly be outdone in purple ritual, brimstone, and bleeding imagery, and atheists spoke of cruelty at the hands of priests and nuns. But in the atheist discourse, nineteenth-century Catholicism was about comfort, submitting to authority, and averting one’s eyes from the abyss with thoughts of wingéd angels. The debate over Darwinism was frequently described in terms of fear: the church held fast to the comforting idea that humanity was special; the anthropologists bravely asserted that we are accidental, and brutes to boot. As atheists of the period saw it, science made terrifying and bizarre announcements; religion functioned as a palliative or an opium. Anthropology offered stunning truth that could hardly be reconciled with daily life; religion was mundane. Certainly, there were devout Catholics in France in the 1880s who were stunned by the difference between their daily lives and the mystery of the Trinity, but for a whole range of people the Trinity was no longer true in the same way that this other mystery was true, the mystery of accidental creation. For many people, learning of Darwinian evolution was remembered as the great epiphany of their lives. With a seriousness that is almost hard to imagine now in relation to such matters, late-nineteenth-century theorists tried to figure out humanity’s place among the animals. With no souls, should we take nature as our model or define ourselves in opposition to the natural world? Should we attempt to accelerate further biological distinction from the animals, or should we essentially stop evolution by ensuring the survival of everyone? In the nineteenth century and part of the twentieth, anthropological theory was the most powerful way to approach these questions. By the new millennium, some of the most important, far-reaching, broadly popular, and intense philosophical inquiries are taking place in the arena of genetics—especially the contested biological features of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity—as well as abortion, animal rights, reproductive technology, the science of evidence and identity, and euthanasia; these are the new locations of debate about biology and truth and the many ways to imagine the dignity of human beings. What we are in relation to the animals is a constant background theme in these debates, and it is no wonder, as the discussion has its origins in nineteenth-century anthropological discourse. These doctrines respond to very distinct ideas about God, death, eternity, individual versus collective value, and the difference between human refuse and human beings. The early story lends perspective on the present.
The primary task of this study has been to re-create the experience, worldview, and context of an enclave of late-nineteenth-century French atheism, with particular attention to the real emotional purview of materialist philosophy and ideology—its joys and terrors—and how these emotions were negotiated through science. In short, I have asked the Society of Mutual Autopsy to tell us about the battle against the church in turn-of-the-century France. The other major task has been to demonstrate that the pastoral state and the social sciences—sociology, demography, anthropology, psychology, and criminology—all came into the twentieth century profoundly engaged in questions of belief and unbelief. Doctrines that still shape our lives were created in response to the experience of the end of the soul and in the hope of finding some other way to account for ourselves. There were political hostilities being expressed therein, but there were also judicious and insightful contributions to the philosophy of the human experience and useful provisos for cultivating a rich, even spiritual life in a secular state. Modern politics and much modern language and technique for understanding and manipulating populations still bear the marks of these issues. It is useful to remember the roles that atheism and religiosity played in these dramas and the varying mutability of their alliances with other causes.
It is not surprising that people who believed themselves to be the first generation of fully responsible human beings—that is, human beings who were not at all relying on Providence—would have come up with aggressive new ways for humanity to monitor and keep track of itself—to get milk to the babies, to punish the criminal, absolve the innocent, and generally to increase the suddenly visible sectors of health, peace, and prosperity. Neither is it strange that painful, atheistic, materialist nihilism raged at the source of one doctrinal source of Nazi ideology. Outside these historically specific relationships, however, I do not think atheism is innately linked to either of these impulses. Rather, this study seems to be a witness to the way that ideologies calcify in their coalitions with other ideologies and behaviors but then, to some degree, come apart again. Still, as it happened, religion and irreligion forced each other into some extraordinary positions at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, and these extraordinary positions shaped the world that came after. Even in the most specific terms, we have carried the theories of science and public policy of the late nineteenth century into the turn of the millennium somewhat divorced from the debate over spiritualism and naturalism that defined their original context. Extreme materialism and naturalism are well understood as major forces of the period, but the extent to which they shaped the conceptual armature of Léon Bourgeois, Alfred Fouillée, Célestin Bouglé, Henri Bergson, and Emile Durkheim—and Sigmund Freud, for that matter—is hard to overestimate and not sufficiently appreciated. Through Emile Zola and Hamlin Garland, literary realism was particularly influenced by the anthropological materialism of Véron and Letourneau. Materialist anthropology and the atheism of its proponents also significantly shaped the literary work of Arthur Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker and were important to the social and political battles of Maria Montessori, Jules Ferry, and Margaret Sanger. Charles Richet and Paul Bert also shared the materialist concerns and a great many of the specific dramas of the freethinking anthropologists. Valéry measured hundreds of skulls with Lapouge, Verlaine’s journal published profiles of the freethinking anthropologists. Broca and Gambetta gave their very heads to the cause. Indeed, Broca and Gabetta emerge as tremendously important figures in the history of freethinking and brain science. Broca performed the first autopsy of the Society of Mutual Autopsy, and his own brain was dissected soon after, in 1880; Gambetta encouraged Constans’s anticlericalism, Constans authorized the Society of Mutual Autopsy, and Gambetta’s brain was dissected soon after, in 1882. Both Broca and Gambetta had already done a great deal to establish freethinking and science in France, and the scientism of the next several decades would be fundamentally determined by the ideological positions Broca and Gambetta had championed, the groups they had formed, and the people they had helped to get jobs. There could be no better symbol for this grand posthumous campaign than the image of their material brains, sketched and labeled.
More broadly, the anthropology-versus-metaphysics debate was crucial to theorists of sociology, philosophy, clinical psychology, and politics, and all this took place within the explanatory context of an overt and violent crisis of unbelief. The three most significant conclusions I have to offer along these lines have to do, first, with politics, second, with the social sciences, and third, with the idea of race.
The meaning of political right and left changed in the translation to the secular. The rise of anthropological theories of human inequality in late-nineteenth-century France created a schism between Enlightenment empirical scientism and Enlightenment egalitarian ideals. The relationship between scientific authority and politics began to shift, and the resultant changes contributed to the development of a new right and new left. Broadly, the old right can be said to have relied on monarchical tradition and revealed religion, while the left looked to science and the concomitant vision of historical progress. Between 1880 and 1914, the right began to employ science and numbers to support its social hierarchies, and the left saw that, in some instances, the preservation of leftist political ideals required a rejection of science. A significant aspect of this reconfiguration was precipitated by antidemocratic biological theories, particularly Lapouge’s anthroposociology. For Fouillée, Bouglé, Finot, and even Bergson and Durkheim, the turn toward relativism and indeterminism was effectuated, in part, because the version of humanity offered by biological determinism had turned out to be as dangerous and demeaning as the one offered by the Catholic Church. The new right (somewhat scientistic) and the new left (somewhat relativist, sometimes spiritual) are revisions of the old right and old left (which, of course, still exist). Lapouge’s route to a better future welcomed an interim period of homicidal social science. Once only the superior people were left, true liberal democracy would be both possible and effectively indistinguishable from total egalitarianism, exactly because a ‘state of nature’ of equality would have been created. The ‘state of nature’ was thus reconfigured as the end point rather than the starting point of sociopolitical history—a trick that is only possible if history becomes the story of repopulating the garden with creatures of an improved and consistent quality.
In these terms, Lapouge always saw himself as a republican. But people could tell the difference. The seriousness with which Alfred Fouillée, Célestin Bouglé, and Jean Finot took Lapouge’s physical anthropology pushed them into a difficult position: they found themselves upholding an egalitarian legal and political system despite the possibility that inequality was a “natural fact.” They had no reason to expect a material, empirical justification for political equality in the near future, and so, because they were committed to democracy, they had to drop any allegiance they might have had to pure materialism. Materialism now had to be married to secular, but sometimes metaphysical, political philosophy. The soul was back, even if just as a metaphor, “a cloud chased by the wind.” Durkheim and Bergson made a similar gesture because they found they could not speak meaningfully about the human individual and community while denying that certain aspects of life feel unempirical, unpredictable, inexplicable, and wild with subjective passion. The world does not feel like rank mechanism. Bergson and Durkheim announced that this “spiritual” feeling was legitimate, deserved to be cultivated, and yet belonged to the knowable world. Durkheim, in particular, kept his study allied to the phenomenal world. They both created a conceptual space in which human consciousness was magical enough: it had to be recognized as wondrous strange, but it was knowable. There was room on the right for science now and room on the left for some kind of indeterminacy, mystical experience, and social “spirit.” France had been divided by allegiances to clergy and tradition, on the one hand, and science and equality, on the other. The fight over unegalitarian science cut across that primary division, so that some of the right took on the mantle of science, and some on the left took it off. The new right cherished much that the old right stood for—the mystique of land itself, the idea of a biological social hierarchy—but it could accommodate greater numbers: racist science democratized superiority for the common European. This nineteenth-century drama may add to our understanding of the deep political divisions that became visible under the Vichy regime and that were explored as homegrown issues, rather than Nazi impositions, in the work of Robert Owen Paxton and now many others.2
The second observation that I would like to highlight is a general one about the nature of modern social science, based on its origins. Just like other gospels, the “good news” of atheism seemed magical and somehow suggested that once all humanity came to understand and (dis)believe, some vital change would take place. Of course, nineteenth-century atheists had examples of vast, momentous change all around them; they lived in a time of technological, industrial, democratic, and scientific revolution. Because everything seemed to be accelerating, it seemed as if the next century would be marked by even more tumultuous and transforming leaps of progress. It was in this context that the social sciences were born. In his essay “The Genesis of the ‘Final Solution’ from the Spirit of Science,” Detlev Peukert argued that social scientists had reason to expect big changes, they had reason to trust science to deliver revolutionary results, and they were supported by the state both as promoters of republican ideology and as technocrats of the unwieldy body politic.3 The state and the social sciences claimed once-pastoral tasks as their own, and their normative logic caused them both to identify social problems and popularize them as acute and solvable. The social sciences invented solutions for these newly identified problems—the rise of technology and the resources of the nation-state helped to make all sorts of new, vast social experiments conceivable—and the solutions worked marginally at best. When they failed, the social scientists and governors had two choices: back away from their hubristic claims or redouble their efforts using ever more radical means. Peukert demonstrated that this escalation of claims and solutions in the social sciences took place in the sphere of social welfare education in Germany, and he identified the ‘good and ill inherent in the human and social sciences’ as the “central common factor” in “the tangle of causes leading to the Final Solution.” Along these lines, he also suggested that the Nazi crimes were but “one among other possible outcomes of the crisis of modern civilization in general” (236). I am arguing that even though France produced an important progenitor of racist theory, French social theorists negotiated this crisis toward another of the “possible outcomes.” For the most part, in France, the social sciences managed to scale down their claims, rein in their excesses, and dramatically defend human dignity. They forged instead a secular scientism, humanized by a political and ethical philosophy that was sometimes based more on urgent pragmatism—gut feelings of what was right—than on any logically derived argument. The social sciences, and their relationship to government policy, have a terrific potential for good and for ill, and exploring the history of these interactions seems crucial to the health of a democracy.
The third observation is about the history of scientific racism. Science is neither always emancipatory (as was suggested by positivists and materialists alike) nor always devoted to control, classification, and domination (as is often part of the contention of postmodern theory). Furthermore, science dedicated to equality and justice is not necessarily methodologically “pure.” The notion that, in late-nineteenth-century France, anthropology was deeply racist and that this racism was based on the shock of confrontation with the colonial other also seems to be in need of revision. In its most prestigious center, the Société d’anthropologie de Paris, late-nineteenth-century French anthropology represented the more egalitarian tendencies of contemporary French society. This egalitarianism was primarily concerned with socialism and feminism in French society, was not always aggressively pursued in actions, and was not consistently extended to other societies or to other races. Still the anthropologists who dominated the Société d’anthropologie in the final decades of the century consistently supported the notion that progress should be understood as the measure of increasing egalitarianism.
The common narrative about racism is that in the period after Darwin published there arose a widely accepted pseudoscience of racism that sought to explain history and the future in terms of clashes between human types. This way of thinking grew into a huge eugenics movement that included endless pages of advice for those deemed to be the good people and enforced sterilization for many of those deemed to be the bad. As the narrative continues, Nazi excesses shocked the world out of this behavior, and after the war important individuals and groups, such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) declared the term “race” scientifically meaningless, and the whole misshapen drama came to an end. The problem is, of course, that it did not. Brash racialist theories are published every few years, and they do not differ appreciably from their nineteenth-century forebears. Also, population studies, the genome project, and other modern inquiries revive many preoccupations with “type” that were supposed to have been left behind.
Scholars have focused on how the new, modern racism works, now that racism is no longer publicly condoned and scientifically argued. Ann Laura Stoler has offered the insight that this commonly accepted paradigm overstates the ways that racism was publicly condoned and scientifically argued in the past, suggesting that it was always largely propagated in more domestic and more culturally fluid ways.4 She suggests that when we take such “high-profile racists as Gobineau, Madison Grant, or Vacher de Lapouge” as the templates of racialism, we are fooled into thinking racism once had a more clear-cut meaning and a plainly acceptable place in society (195). What the present study suggests about the standard narrative is that, first of all, the most numerically conscious anthropologists in France were on the left politically. Lapouge went the other way, but the left-wing anthropologists themselves, and the philosophical and political culture around them, pulled themselves out of the tailspin. Lapouge was beaten, in his time, by the fact that his left-wing teachers dominated Paris, by the sharp wit and keen sense of justice of Léonce Manouvrier, and by the philosophical imaginations of contemporary intellectuals who were willing to shift around some notions previously deemed fundamental. As glad a story as this is, perhaps it should be understood as one of racism’s most long-lived patterns in a democracy: something rating some group’s intelligence or character is sent out into the marketplace of ideas; it receives a tremendous amount of negative attention; and the experience confirms a noisy kind of triumph over unjust social hierarchy, while bringing a lot of attention to the idea that equality of citizenship is always up for theoretical renegotiation. It is important to note that Finot knew that in the future we now occupy Lapouge’s ideas would seem laughable. Furthermore, for the history of racism, it seems useful simply to note how contentious all these issues were, how dependent they were on the specific issues of the day, how much they were wrapped in particular social circumstances, and how affected they were by tangential ideological alliances. There was no original moment of straightforward, uncontested scientific racism. Even if one looks precisely at one of the most obvious, high-profile nineteenth-century scientific racists, one finds a diffuse pileup of very historically specific public and private concerns, the end result of which looked odd and distasteful to contemporaries but still crucially helped shape the way people thought about human potential and human difference.
There were many impulses for those who, in a manner of speaking, responded to the loss of God’s gaze by learning to watch humanity in his stead. A whole range of issues once confided to religion—from the fates of unpunished sinners to the size of the average family—would now be aggressively managed by someone, sometimes with the best of intentions. Along with all the horror and oppressive social control that have sprung from such techniques, there has arisen a society that can see itself and that can make attempts to ameliorate its sorrows. It seems best to end on a note of optimism, for the freethinking anthropologists were surely marked by high hopes for the future, if only we all keep trying. Looking at “savages” but talking about modernity, Durkheim used the term “the soul of collectivity.”5 Michel Foucault, looking at modernity, identified the network of social power and knowledge as “the real noncorporeal soul.”6 Consider his discussion of the soul in Discipline and Punish. Wrote Foucault: “It would be wrong to say that the soul is an illusion, or an ideological effect. On the contrary, it exists, it has a reality, it is produced permanently around, on, within the body by the functioning of a power that is exercised on those punished—and, in a more general way, on those one supervises, trains, and corrects. . . . This real noncorporeal soul is not a substance; it is the element in which are articulated the effects of a certain type of power and the reference of a certain type of knowledge”(29). Durkheim and Foucault called this social thing “soul” because they were filling a soul-shaped hole in their understanding of human society. These definitions imply that human behaviors, the way we order ourselves and others, create feelings that account for past claims of individual souls and presently create the world of mutual meaning in which we live. In this schema, the younger Bertillons, for instance, were engaged in creating the new “soul” of late modernity. The freethinking anthropologists were involved in a transitional behavior: exorcising traces of the past and clearing out the conceptual terrain to make room for the secular assumptions of the new scientific state. The Bertillons, Lapouge, and Manouvrier were all engaged in creating those new secular assumptions. By the time they were done—though surely not by their efforts alone—it seemed perfectly reasonable to turn to science for pastoral needs and to expect traditional religion to stand as but a subset of modern public life.
Nineteenth-century atheist materialism was powerful. Its proponents were driven, proud, and intent on changing the world. Several of the major revolutions that have taken place over the past century and half have been generated by atheist men and women who specifically understood their projects in terms of the twilight of the gods, the opiate of belief, and the future of an illusion. For many atheists, all the arrangements that human beings had made throughout history suddenly demanded revision: we were on our own for the first time, beholden to no one, with recourse only to ourselves. The freethinking anthropologists shared the moment and the mood, and they let us know more about what it was to be an atheist at the turn of that century: from their romantic cult of science to their dynamic effort to translate all French public and private life from religious to secular. Through attention to their behaviors and to the emotions expressed in their public and private speech, this study has tried to describe the experience of unbelief for the freethinking anthropologists of Paris and to detail some of the uses and meanings of their work for their famous students, their philosophical, artistic, political, and scientific associates, and the wider audience that attended to their claims.