propaganda were hardly possible in other European countries. France
had been too long used to regulation alike under the monarchy and
under the empire to permit of open promotion of unbelief in the early
years of the Restoration. Yet as early as 1828 we find the Protestant
Coquerel avowing that in his day the Bourbonism of the Catholic clergy
had revived the old anti-clericalism, and that it was common to find
the most high-minded patriots unbelievers and materialists. [1702]
But still more remarkable was the persistence of deep freethinking
currents in the Catholic world throughout the century. About 1830
rationalism had become normal among the younger students at Paris;
[1703] and the revolution of that year elicited a charter putting
all religions on an equality. [1704] Soon the throne and the chambers
were on a footing of practical hostility to the Church. [1705] Under
Louis Philippe men dared to teach in the Collège de France that
"the Christian dispensation is but one link in the chain of divine
revelations to man." [1706] Even during the first period of reaction
after the restoration numerous editions of Volney's Ruines and of the
Abrégé [1707] of Dupuis's Origine de tous les Cultes served to maintain
among the more intelligent of the proletariat an almost scientific
rationalism, which can hardly be said to have been improved on by such
historiography as that of Renan's Vie de Jésus. And there were other
forces, over and above freemasonry, which in France and other Latin
countries has since the Revolution been steadily anti-clerical. The
would-be social reconstructor Charles Fourier (1772-1837) was an
independent and non-Christian though not an anti-clerical theist,
and his system may have counted for something as organizing the
secular spirit among the workers in the period of the monarchic and
Catholic reaction. Fourier approximated to Christianity inasmuch as he
believed in a divine Providence; but like Owen he had an unbounded and
heterodox faith in human goodness and perfectibility; and he claimed
to have discovered the "plan of God" for men. But Fourier was never,
like Owen, a popular force; and popular rationalism went on other
lines. At no time was the proletariat of Paris otherwise than largely
Voltairean after the Revolution, of which one of the great services
(carried on by Napoleon) was an improvement in popular education. The
rival non-Christian systems of Saint-Simon (1760-1823) and Auguste
Comte (1798-1857) also never took any practical hold among them;
but throughout the century they have been fully the most freethinking
working-class population in the world.
As to Fourier see the OEuvres Choisies de Fourier, ed. Ch. Gide,
pp. 1-3, 9. Cp. Solidarité: Vue Synthétique sur la doctrine de
Ch. Fourier, par Hippolyte Renaud, 3e édit. 1846, ch. i: "Pour
ramener l'homme à la foi" [en Dieu], writes Renaud, "il faut lui
offrir aujourd'hui une foi complète et composée, une foi solidement
assise sur le témoignage de la raison. Pour cela il faut que la
flambeau de la science dissipe toutes les obscurités" (p. 9). This
is not propitious to dogma; but Fourier planned and promised
to leave priests and ministers undisturbed in his new world,
and even declared religions to be "much superior to uncertain
sciences." Gide, introd. to OEuvres Choisies, pp. xxii-xxiii,
citing Manuscrits, vol. de 1853-1856, p. 293. Cp. Dr. Ch. Pellarin,
Fourier, sa vie et sa théorie, 5e édit. p. 143.
Saint-Simon, who proposed a "new Christianity," expressly guarded
against direct appeals to the people. See Weil, Saint-Simon et
son OEuvre, 1894, p. 193. As to the Saint-Simonian sect, see an
interesting testimony by Renan, Les Apôtres, p. 148.
The generation after the fall of Napoleon was pre-eminently the period
of new schemes of society; and it is noteworthy that they were all
non-Christian, though all, including even Owen's, claimed to provide
a "religion," and the French may seem all to have been convinced by
Napoleon's practice that some kind of cult must be provided for the
peoples. Owen alone rejected alike supernaturalism and cultus; and
his movement left the most definite rationalistic traces. All seem
to have been generated by the double influence of (1) the social
failure of the French Revolution, which left so many anxious for
another and better effort at reconstruction, and (2) of the spectacle
of the rule of Napoleon, which seems to have elicited new ideals of
beneficent autocracy. Owen, Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Comte were all
alike would-be founders of a new society or social religion. It seems
probable that this proclivity to systematic reconstruction, in a world
which still carried a panic-memory of one great social overturn, helped
to lengthen the rule of orthodoxy. Considerably more progress was made
when freethought became detached from special plans of polity, and
grew up anew by way of sheer truth-seeking on all the lines of inquiry.
In France, however, the freethinking tradition from the eighteenth
century never passed away, at least as regards the life of the great
towns. And while Napoleon III made it his business to conciliate the
Church, which in the person of the somewhat latitudinarian Darboy,
Archbishop of Paris, had endorsed his coup d'état of 1851, [1708]
even under his rule the irreversible movement of freethought revealed
itself among his own ministers. Victor Duruy, the eminent historian,
his energetic Minister of Education, was a freethinker, non-aggressive
towards the Church, but perfectly determined not to permit aggression
by it. [1709] And when the Church, in its immemorial way, declaimed
against all forms of rationalistic teaching in the colleges, and
insisted on controlling the instruction in all the schools, [1710]
his firm resistance made him one of its most hated antagonists. Even
in the Senate, then the asylum of all forms of antiquated thought and
prejudice, Duruy was able to carry his point against the prelates,
Sainte-Beuve strongly and skilfully supporting him. [1711] Thus in
the France of the Third Empire, on the open field of the educational
battle-ground between faith and reason, the rationalistic advance
was apparent in administration no less than in the teaching of the
professed men of science and the polemic of the professed critics
of religion.