3658925934

intellectual leader of anarcho-syndicalism, became an esteemed guide for the Action Française and
eventually for fascism.
The most important intellectual center of Cartesianism in the first part of the nineteenth century was
the Ecole Polytechnique. Established under Napoleon to apply the best scientific knowledge
available to the solution of military and engineering problems, it was not a large step to extend the
application of these same methods to social questions. Inspired by the heady ideas of Saint-Simon and
Auguste Comte that prevailed at the Ecole, students “ventured to create a religion as one learns at the
Ecole to build a bridge or a road.” 9 From the graduates of the school were recruited the major
disciples of Saint-Simon and Comte, and they suffused this mentality throughout the bureaucratic
institutions of the state and the bourgeois-dominated sectors of society.
Frequently opposing the Ecole Polytechnique in the first part of the century was the Sorbonne,
which, for many, was an embodiment of the outlook of Spontaneity. Its major spokesman was Victor
Cousin, whose creatively rhetorical style, and “supple,” individualistic philosophy left a deep stamp
on the institution through much of the Second Empire.
But after the demise of the Second Empire, seen as a defeat for loose living and unsystematic
thinking, the partisans of Cartesianism remade the old educational system into the “new University.”
Not for them the frivolous philosophy of Cousin; the reformers sought their ideals in the positivism of
Auguste Comte, the scientism of Hippolyte Taine and Ernest Renan, and the precision of Claude
Bernard. And they patterned the new institutions after the research-oriented universities of
disciplined, protestant Germany. Throughout the 1880’s and 1890’s, these men succeeded in placing
their representatives in influential positions, and when the young Emile Durkheim came to their
attention, they felt that they had found the man who could best extend the mentality and methods of
Cartesianism to the study of society. Durkheim’s works also perfectly suited the ideological demands
of the Republican government: to the anticlericals he contributed a philosophical basis for a secular
morality to replace the earlier Catholic dogmas; to the radical and radical socialist politicians of
“solidarity,” he offered a more systematic grounding for their political philosophy; for the
Dreyfusards he provided coherent intellectual guidance. After the turn of the century, in the Sorbonne,
in national university councils, and through his close contacts with the Ministry of Education,
Durkheim became one the most powerful university politicians in France. He enjoyed enormous
support from those sympathetic to his basic views, but was violently opposed by others. Some of his
strongest opponents found their inspiration in the tradition of Spontaneity.
Although the affluence of certain aristocratic supporters facilitated the creation of a considerable
number of ad hoc journals and teaching institutions around, and opposed to, the Sorbonne, partisans of
Spontaneity enjoyed no secure institutional niche. Among the established institutions, the Faculties of
Law, and to some degree the Collège de France, were perhaps the most hospitable.
Tarde, after his negative reaction to the Cartesian aspect of the Jesuits, had been exposed to a more
Spontaneous tradition at the Toulouse and Paris Faculties of Law, for although they were officially
part of the national university system, their students were not the Radicals who abounded at the
Sorbonne, but the more socially prominent young men who maintained an institutional culture
glorifying the ideology of Spontaneity. Then, later, when Tarde was considered by the Collège de
France, he could find there such men as the philosophers Paul Janet, who had forced Durkheim to
delete a chapter from his thesis that contained a complimentary reference to Auguste Comte, and Jean
Izoulet, who penned the widely-quoted assertion that “the obligation of teaching the sociology of M.
Durkheim in 200 Normal Schools in France is the gravest national peril that our country has known
for some time.” 10 Then, too, the successor of Tarde at the Collège was Henri Bergson, who was the