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c h a p t e r f o u r Science, Philosophy, and the Culture of Secularism ... Recent scholarship has made it difficult to see science as the main cause of the tide of secularization that traversed western Europe during the mid and later nineteenth century . Notions bred of the works of J. W. Draper and A. D. White, who interpreted the relations between science and religion in terms of relentless warfare or conflict,1 have given way to analyses that emphasize diversity and the importance of local context. Among modern authors, John Hedley Brooke has made a particularly important contribution with his nuanced demonstration of the difficulty of establishing any general thesis about the ways in which science and religion have interacted and still interact today. As he has said, the real lesson arising from his classic study of key episodes at the shifting interface between scientific thought and religious belief since the sixteenth century is one of complexity.2 For Brooke, there is “no such thing as the relationship between science and religion”; historical inquiry about such a relationship, as he argues, bears its richest fruits when it focuses on “what individuals and communities have made of it in a plethora of different contexts.”3 This statement rings resoundingly true in the case of nineteenth-century France, which shows a predictable mixture of general pan-European trends and the particular characteristics of a Catholic country in which confrontation between, on the one hand, the forces of social as well as religious conservatism, broadly represented by the Church, and, on the other, those of secularism, drawing on a deep well of predominantly republican sentiment, was endemic. While science was not the cause of the confrontation, it became inextricably involved. Supporters of secularism made consistent appeals to scientific modes of thought as the symbol of a progressive, modern body of knowledge that was to be contrasted with the static teachings of Catholicism. In response, some modernizing voices within the Christian tradition struggled to show that faith had nothing to fear from science, provided that science was correctly pursued. But generally the exchanges served only to heighten the divisions, which became more clearly marked than ever under the resolutely anticlerical Third Republic and culminated in the separation between church and state in 1905. With respect to the period of the Second Empire and early Third Republic, with which this chapter is mainly concerned, it is striking how many scientific issues became involved in exchanges that were essentially political in nature. From the 1850s, French opinion was racked by profound cleavages on the moral issues raised by evolution, as Science, Philosophy, and the Culture of Secularism 139 happened in many other countries. But passions were aroused no less by the topics of spontaneous generation, polygenetic beliefs about the diverse ancestry of the human race, and (perhaps most profoundly) the challenge of philosophical materialism of the kind that Karl Vogt, Jakob Moleschott, and Ludwig Büchner unleashed from Germanspeaking Europe. Individually, these were not beliefs that necessarily set scientific against faith-based modes of thought. When bundled together in what can properly be described as a “radical synthesis,” however, they became a powerful weapon in the hands of those whose aim was victory not just in a scientific battle but also in higher struggles, either to legitimate their own secular worldview or to rid France of the incubus of religious or political conservatism, or in many cases both of these. Hence, in the way Brooke has suggested, their historical significance lay less in their logical incompatibility or otherwise with traditional beliefs than in the way in which they were deployed on a far broader stage of public debate—in this case the profoundly divisive debate that accompanied France’s passage from monarchy to empire and on to republic—with the traumas of the revolution of 1848 and the defeat of 1870 along the way. The Midcentury: Conformity and Dissent in French Philosophy During the Bourbon Restoration, the leaders of the scientific community in France adopted a predominantly conformist stance in religion as well as in politics. The Protestant Georges Cuvier worked hard to portray his strong personal faith as perfectly compatible with science, maintaining that faith and science belonged in separate realms, only tenuously connected in his case by a belief in nature as a very general manifestation of God’s providence.4 Among Catholics, Pierre-Simon Laplace’s famous statement that his system had no need of a god carried a...

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