The Alliance with Saint-Simon

In the summer of 1817 Comte was introduced to Henri Saint-Simon, then director of the periodical Industrie, a creative, fertile, disorderly, and tumultuous man who was to have a major and lasting influence on Comte's life and works. Saint-Simon, at this point nearly sixty years old, was attracted by the brilliant young man who possessed a trained and methodical capacity for work, which Saint-Simon so conspicuously lacked. Comte became his secretary and close collaborator.

The two men worked for a while in intimate conjunction. In the beginning Comte was paid three hundred francs a month, but when Saint-Simon again experienced those financial straits with which he was frequently afflicted, Comte stayed on without pay both for intellectual reasons and in hopes of future reward.

A number of scholars have argued the question of who benefited the most from the close collaboration, Comte or Saint-Simon. There is no need to take sides in this somewhat byzantine quarrel. It suffices to say that Comte was influenced in a major way by his patron, even though his close contact with Saint-Simon may have brought to fruition ideas that had already germinated in Comte's mind. It is certain, in any case, that the young Republican advocate of equality was converted to an elitist point of view soon after meeting Saint-Simon; one of Comte's first essays, written in July 1819, testifies to this fact. The elitist conception stayed with him throughout his career.

The sketches and essays that Comte wrote during the years of close association with Saint-Simon, especially between 1819 and 1824, contain the nucleus of all his later major ideas. One finds here not only the major scientific ideas he was to develop in his Cours de philosophie positive, but also, and this is often overlooked, the beginnings of his later conceptions concerning the need for a unifying communal order based on a newly instituted spiritual power.

In 1824 Comte finally broke with his master. The immediate cause concerned a somewhat involved and rather squalid fight over the form in which one of Comte's essays was to be published. Should it be under Saint-Simon's name as in the past? Or as Auguste Comte's Systeme de politque positive, first volume, first part? Comte was given one hundred copies of his work under his own name. At the same time, Saint-Simon put out one thousand copies entitled Catechisme des industriels by Henri de Saint-Simon, Third Installment, a work that included Comte's essay, with an unsigned preface written by Saint-Simon in which he found fault with his disciple. Comte now repudiated the master whose name became anathema to him during the rest of his life. The master once denied was rejected over and over again.

The quarrel had intellectual as well as material causes. To be sure, Comte had begun to chafe under the pretension of the old man who continued to treat him as the obedient pupil he had once been rather than as a member of a kind of competitive alliance. Comte had already begun to make a name for himself in the world of liberal journalism and among an elite of scientists. But the two collaborators now also diverged in regard to the strategy to be used for winning consent and influence among the public. Saint-Simon, ever the activist, wished to emphasize the need for immediate reform. What he wanted above all was to inspire the liberal industrialists and bankers who were his backers to take prompt steps for the reorganization of French society. Comet, in contrast, emphasized that theoretical work had to take precedence over reform activities, and that establishing the foundations of the scientific doctrine was more important for the time being than effecting any practical influence. Furthermore, and such are the ironies of intellectual history, Comte, the future High Priest of Humanity, objected strenuously to the religious cast that Saint-Simon now began to give to his doctrine.

And so, although he now basked in the glory of having received letters of admiration and encouragement for his last work from such eminent scientists as Cuvier and von Humboldt, as well as from a variety of liberal deputies and publicists, Comte again stood alone--a marginal intellectual, only tenuously connected with the Parisian world of letters and science. There was now a Comtean system, but its author was without position or office, without chair or salary.

In the meantime, Comte thought that he had at least found some security in his personal life. In February 1825, he decided to marry Caroline Massin, a young woman whom he had known for several years, more recently as the owner of a small bookstore and earlier as a streetwalker in the neighborhood of the Palais Royal. The marriage was a tempestuous one-- they separated several times and finally parted ways forever--but for a time Comte felt that he had found domestic anchorage, although he was still adrift in his search for professional recognition and social position.

Comte refused to accept a proffered position as a chemical engineer, continuing instead to eke out a meager living by giving private lessons. In this way he could devoted himself to theoretical rather than practical problems and was sometimes able to establish close ties with the high-born families whose sons he taught. For a while he also gained some additional income from writing, more particularly for the Producteur, a journal founded by the spiritual sons of Saint-Simon after the death of their master.

During these years Comte's major preoccupation was centered in the elaboration of his positive philosophy. When the work seemed advanced enough to be presented to a wider audience, Comte, having no official chair from which to expound his theories, decided to offer a private course to which auditors would subscribe in advance and where he would disclose his summa of positive knowledge. The course opened in April, 1826. Some illustrious men graced the audience. Alexander von Humboldt, several members of the Academy of Sciences, the economist Charles Dunoyer, the duc Napoleon de Montebello, Hippolyte Carnot, the son of the organizer of the revolutionary armies and brother of the great scientist Sadi Carnot, and a number of former students of the Ecole Polytechnique were in attendance.

Comte gave three of his lectures, but when the audience came for the fourth, they found the doors closed. Comte had fallen ill, having suffered a serious mental collapse. For a while he was treated for "mania" in the hospital of the famous Dr. Esquirol, where this author of a Treatise on Mania attempted to cure him by cold-water treatment and bloodletting. When Madame Comte finally decided to bring him back to their home, Esquirol objected. The register of discharge of the patient had a note in Esquirol's hand, "N.G." (Non Geuri--not recovered.)

After returning home, Comte fell into a deep melancholic state, and he even attempted suicide by throwing himself into the Seine. But in the course of the year 1827, and after an extended trip to his native Montpellier, the patient slowly recovered. In August 1828, he symbolized his victory over the illness by writing a review of a book entitled Irritation and Folly.

The course of lectures was resumed in 1829, and Comte was pleased again to find in the audience several great names of science and letters. Yet, the small reputation he enjoyed proved a fragile support. A number of eminent men continued to stand by him, but as time went on he gradually became an object of ridicule in the scientific community. Specialists of every field united in condemnation of a man who seemed to have the promethean ambition to encompass the development of all the sciences in his encyclopedic enterprise.

Comte now resumed his wretched life in neglect and isolation. During the years 1830-1842, when he wrote his masterwork, the Cours de philosophie positive, he continued to live miserably on the margin of the academic world. All attempts to be appointed to a chair at the Ecole Polytechnique or to a position with the Academy of Sciences or the College de France were of not avail. He only managed in 1832 to be appointed "repetiteur d'analyse et de mecanique" at the Ecole; five years later he was also given the positions of external examiner for the same school. The first position brought a meager two thousand francs, the second little more. He also taught mathematics at a private school, and these three positions, together with unused per diem fees paid him as a traveling examiner for the Ecole, allowed him to live just above the margin of poverty.

During the years of intense concentration when he wrote the Cours, he not only was troubled by financial difficulties and continued academic rebuffs, but by increasing marital difficulties. Slowly Comte withdrew further and further into his shell. The system he elaborated began to dominate the man. For reasons of "cerebral hygiene," he no longer followed the current literature in all the many fields he wrote about. In fact, he decided in 1838 that he would no longer read any scientific work, limiting himself to the reading of fiction and poetry. In his last years the only book he read over and over again was the Imitation of Christ.

Yet despite all these adversities, Comte slowly began to acquire disciples. Perhaps more gratifying than the conversion of a few remarkable French disciples, such as the eminent scholar Emile Littre who became his close follower, was the fact that his positive doctrine now had penetrated across the Channel and received considerable attention there. Sir David Brewster, an eminent physicist, welcomed it in the pages of the Edinburgh Review in 1838 and, most gratifying of all, John Stuart Mill became a close admirer and spoke of Comte in his System of Logic (1843) as "among the first of European thinkers." Comte and Mill corresponded regularly, and Comte told his British correspondent not only of his scientific work but of the trial and tribulations of his marital life and the difficulties of his material existence. Mill even arranged for a number of British admirers of Comte to send him a considerable sum of money to tide him over his financial difficulties.

Soon after the Cours was finally finished, Comte's wife left him forever. Lonely and isolated, he continued to assail those scientists who refused to recognize him. He complained to ministers, wrote quixotic letters to the press, needled his enemies, and taxed the patience of his few remaining friends. In 1844, having created too many enemies at the Ecole Polytechnique, his appointment as examiner was not renewed. Hence, he lost about half of his income. (He was to lose his other position with the Ecole in 1851.)

The year 1844, when he had been publicly humiliated by not being reappointed at the Ecole, was also, it turned out, the year of his greatest elation. He fell in love with Clothilde de Vaux, an upper-class woman not yet thirty years old, who had been abandoned by her husband, a petty official. He had absconded with government funds and gone to Brussels, leaving her, as well as his gambling debts, in Paris. Comte met her at a young disciple's house and fell passionately in love with her. Suddenly the cool and methodical mask that Comte had presented to the outside world seemed to dissolve. Comte in love was a Comte transformed. All the previously repressed passionate elements of his nature now came to the fore. The encounter with Clothilde, short as it was to be, proved as important to the middle-aged Comte as the encounter with Saint-Simon had been to the young man.

The grande passion never led to physical fulfillment. Clothilde resisted all his entreaties and kept the affair on a lofty platonic and romantic plane. And, only a few months after they had exchanged their first love letters, Clothilde took to her bed, stricken by that most romantic of illnesses, tuberculosis. Almost a year after the beginning of the affair she died.

Comte now vowed to devote the rest of his life to the memory of "his angel." The Systeme de politique positive, which he had begun to sketch in 1844, was to become a memorial to his beloved. In its pages, Comte now hailed the primacy of emotion over intellect, of feeling over mind; he proclaimed over and over the healing powers of warm femininity for a humanity too long dominated by the harshness of masculine intellect.

When the Systeme finally appeared between 1851 and 1854, Comte lost many, if not most, of those rationalist followers he had acquired with so much difficulty over the last fifteen years. John Stuart Mill and Emile Littre were not willing to concede that universal love was the solvent for all the difficulties of the age. Nor could they accept the Religion of Humanity of which Comte now proclaimed himself the High Priest. The multiple ritual observances, the special calendar, the whole elaborate rigmarole of the cult now unveiled appeared to them a repudiation of Comte's previous message. The prophet of the positive stage seemed to fall back into the darkness of the theological stage. The intimation of things to come, which can already be found in his earliest writings, had not commanded their attention.

Comte was undismayed by the loss of disciples. Let them go; he would attract others to the bosom of the new Church. Comte decided that he would henceforth sign all his circulars "The Founder of Universal Religion, Great Priest of Humanity." From the seat o the new pontiff now poured letters to the powerful of the world--the Czar Nicholas, the Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire, the head of the Jesuits--trying to convert them to the new order. And at home, Comte now lectured to diverse audiences, more particularly the working class, to convert them to the new creed. He wrote appeals to the workers, a Positive Catechism, Appeals to Conservatives--in fact, appeals to anybody and everybody who seemed at all disposed to listen.

In 1848, a few days after the February Revolution, he had founded the Societe Positiviste, which became in the early fifties the main center of his teaching. The members tithed themselves to assure the livelihood of the master and vowed to spread his message. Comte now sent weekly messages to his disciples in the provinces and abroad, which he compared to Saint Paul's epistles. Missions functioned in Spain, England, the United States, and Holland. Every evening, from seven to nine, except on Wednesday when the Societe Positiviste had its regular meeting, Comte received his Parisian disciples at home. Former polytechnicians and future politicians, intellectuals and manual workers, here intermingled in their great love for the master. He who had been denied so often finally found rest in the knowledge that he had at last found disciples who, unlike the former false friends, did not come together admiring his intellect alone, but basked in the emanation of his love and loved him in return.

Comte had travelled far from the republican and libertarian enthusiasms of his youth. The rebellious student from Montpellier now preached the virtues of submission and the necessity of order. The twin motto of the Positive Church was still Order and Progress, but in these last years ten need for order assumed ever greater weight in the eyes of its founder. Revulsion from the bloody events of the June days of 1848 had finally brought Comte into the camp of Napoleon III, and it was this rage for order that now made him see Czars and Grand Viziers, even the head of the Jesuits, as brothers under the skin.

On the seventeenth of June, 1857, Comte, for the first time in eleven years, failed to visit the grave of Clothilde at the Pere Lachaise cemetery. The early symptoms of an internal cancer kept him at home. The illness progressed swiftly, and he died on the fifth of September. The following Tuesday, a small group of disciples, friends, and neighbors followed his bier to the Pere Lachaise. Here his tomb became the center of a small positivist cemetery where, buried close to the master, are his most faithful disciples.

From Coser, 1977:15-20.

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