Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-16T20:19:58.283Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

7 - The Last Years: Politics and Propaganda

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 January 2010

Mary Pickering
Mary Pickering
Affiliation:
San José State University, California
Get access

Summary

Man always aspires to achieve unity on both a personal and a social level, for there reside his duty, happiness, and even his health. Because this permanent concentration of our existence can no longer be related to God…, it can henceforth entail no other source but Humanity, which at first created gods to guide itself before being able directly to guide its servants.

Comte to Tholouze, January 4, 1856.

FLOUNDERING BETWEEN REVOLUTION AND REACTION

Recent historians have remarked that during the early years of the Empire, at least until 1857, “political life appeared as if it had stopped” in France. With the Second Empire formally established in December 1852, Napoleon III was in firm control. Life at the court seemed to set the national agenda. The intense police activity and censorship of the press reinforced the feebleness of the republicans. Comte was struck by the fact that mental and moral anarchy had spawned mediocre leaders “in every genre.”

He became increasingly disdainful of leaders on the left when they did not cozy up to him after repeated efforts to get their attention. In 1853, he sent volume three of the Système and the Catéchisme to Caussidière in New York, where he now lived. Nothing came of that effort. Yet Comte believed he was coming closer to fulfilling his dream of attracting prominent leftists when in mid-1854 the mother of Blanqui and one of his friends visited him and told him that the great revolutionary had become a positivist ready to recognize Comte as his spiritual leader.

Type
Chapter
Information
Auguste Comte
An Intellectual Biography
 , pp. 394 - 473
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Merle, Roger, Armand Barbès: Un Révolutionnaire romantique (Toulouse: Privat, 1977), 214–16Google Scholar
Blanqui, Auguste, Instructions pour une prise d'armes. L'Eternité par les astres, hypothèse astronomique et autres textes (Paris: Société encyclopédique française/Editions de la Tête de Feuilles, 1972), 103Google Scholar
Darriulat, Philippe, Les Patriotes: La Gauche républicaine et la nation 1830–1870 (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 248CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bagchi, Jasodhara, “Le Positivisme dans l'imagination scientifique du Bengale colonial,” Auguste Comte et l'idée de science de l'homme (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2002), 239–53Google Scholar
Forbes, Geraldine Hancock, Positivism in Bengal: A Case Study in the Transmission and Assimilation of an Ideology (Calcutta: G. H. Forbes, 1975)Google Scholar
Comte, Auguste, Appel aux Conservateurs (Paris, 1855)Google Scholar
Sauvigny, Guillaume Bertier, The Bourbon Restoration, trans. Case, Lynn M. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1966), 143CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Buzon, Christine, Henri V, Comte de Chambord ou le “fier suicide” de la Royauté (Paris: Albin Michel, 1987), 156–8Google Scholar
Kale, Steven D., Legitimism and the Reconstruction of French Society, 1852–1883 (Baton Rouge: Lousiana State University Press, 1992), 68, 264–75, 291Google Scholar
Cherni, Zeïneb Ben Saïd, Auguste Comte, posterité épistémologique et ralliement des nations (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2005), 140, 162–4Google Scholar
Littré, Emile, “Procès de Mme Comte contre les exécuteurs testamentaires de son mari,” La Philosophie Positive, 3 (March–April 1870): 372Google Scholar
Three Generations of Englishwomen: Memoirs and Correspondence of Mrs. John Taylor, Mrs. Sarah Austin, and Lady Duff Gordon, ed. Ross, Janet, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1888), 2:3
Leblais, Alphonse, “A. Comte et le Positivisme,” Revue Moderne 1 (November 1857): 372Google Scholar
Laffitte, Pierre, “Commemoration funèbre de M. Auguste Hadery,” La Revue Occidentale 13 (1884): 284Google Scholar
McCabe, Joseph, Life and Letters of George Jacob Holyoake, 2 vols. (London: Watts, 1908), 1:296Google Scholar
“Nécrologie: Jean-Séraphin Bazalgette: Discours prononcé par M. Pierre Laffitte aux obsèques de M. le docteur Bazalgette,” La Revue Occidentale 7 (1881): 112–15
Martineau, Harriet, preface to The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, Freely Translated and Condensed by Harriet Martineau (New York: Calvin Blanchard, 1855), 1–11Google Scholar
Martineau, Harriet, trans., Social physics: From the Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte (New York, Calvin Blanchard, 1856)
Allen, Joseph Henry, “Comte's Religion of Humanity,” Christian Examiner, July 1857, 18–36Google Scholar
O'Connell, Joseph, Vestiges of Civilization: or, The Aetiology of History, Religious, Aesthetical, Political, and Philosophical (New York 1851), 181Google Scholar
Gillespie, Neil C., The Collapse of Orthodoxy: The Intellectual Ordeal of George Frederick Holmes (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1972), 146Google Scholar
Holmes, George Frederick, “The Positive Religion, or the Religion of Humanity,” Methodist Quarterly Review 6 (July 1854), 329–59Google Scholar
Wartelle, Jean-Claude, “Charles Sauria (1812-1895) ami d'Auguste Hadery (1818–1884): Itinéraires du fourierisme au positivisme,” Patrimoine polinois, no. 20 (2005): 111–29Google Scholar
“Correspondance de Fabien Magnin,” La Revue Occidentale, 3d. ser., 6 (January 1914), 5–13
Carneiro, Paolo Estevão de Berrêdo, ed., Auguste Comte et Mme Nísia Brasileira (Correspondance) (Paris: Albert Blanchard, 1928), 8
Ferreira, Ligià Fonseca, “Itinéraire d'une voyageuse en Europe: Nísia Floresta (1810–1885),” Cahiers du Brésil Contemporain, no. 12 (1990)Google Scholar
Hahner, June Edith, Emancipating the Female Slave: The Struggle for Women's Rights in Brazil, 1850–1940 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990), 14–15Google Scholar
Palmer, R. R., From Jacobin to Liberal: Marc-Antoine Jullien, 1775–1848 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 200Google Scholar
The Roman Empire of the West by Congreve, Richard (London, 1855)Google Scholar
Lombrail, A. Mieulet, Aperçus généraux sur la doctrine positiviste (Paris, 1858), i–iiiGoogle Scholar
Laffitte, Pierre, ed. “Matériaux pour servir à la biographie d'Auguste Comte: Une Lettre d'Auguste Comte à André-Alexandre Erdan,” La Revue Occidentale 8 (March 1882): 237
Erdan, Alexandre, La France Mystique: Tableau des excentricités religieus de ce temps, 2 vols., 2d ed. (Paris, 1858), 1:266–7Google Scholar
Raflan, Numa, “Variétés: Les Rapports d'Antoine Etex avec Auguste Comte (Fin),” La Revue Occidentale, 2d ser., 32 (November 1905): 393–4Google Scholar
Nord, Philip, The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 22Google Scholar
Moses, Claire Goldberg, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), 162, 211Google Scholar
Harp, Gillis J., Auguste Comte and the Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865–1920 (University Park: Pennsylvania State Press, 1994), 26Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×