To explain the Week in Review story by Elaine Sciolino in the NY Times this morning, I recalled the Rutgers graduate course in intellectual history where I was assigned reading a work by Auguste Compte.  Writing during the French Revolution, Compte tried to create a state religion that was completely secular leaving out all references to religion.

His book was a compendium of many ideas of a perfect “French” society without religious coloration and without the baggage of rituals and worship that the Catholic Church historically imposed upon local and national governments.  By excising religious practices and substituting themes based on achievements in science, Compte pictured a “Sociology” that had not yet been perfected but was preferred by intellectuals who were writing about the intellectual ferment bubbling out of the freeing of the human mind that really was the crux of the French Revolution.  You may talk about pulling down the government by aristocrats, instituting a government “of the people, by the people and for the people”. In France, at the end of the eighteenth century, this meant freeing people from the ideas of a stultifying religion and an elite privileged by birth and place in “society”.

A sizeable portion of the French populace were repressed Protestants. A small, but important group of intellectuals whose writings were not read but whose ideas were talked about incessantly, were anti-clerical tinkerers with ideas of government based on constitutionalism and science. Compte provided a blueprint that was difficult to read based on his garbled idea of “Positivism”. This can be best described by the example of his new calendar that began with year one of the Revolution and disposing of the French Monarchy. Saint days were absent in this calendar.  Instead there were days celebrating inventors and ordinary people who made contributions to science and industry.

I read his work and tried very hard to go through the entire lengthy mess looking for inspiration for my own ideas about what socialism meant for the mid-20^th century world. I found a great deal of inspirational stuff but little that was relevant to today from the first years of the world of 19^th century France.

Such ideas like Compte’s erasure of religion and substitution of a completely secular society was indeed “utopian”. This is just one “utopia” perceived by secularists in France. The French attempt to remove religious symbols of dress in the public schools will backfire surely and who knows what revolution might follow. No one remembers Auguste Compte today and few dream of perfect worlds.