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      was the stimulant that reanimated men’s minds. The country found itself with the same question as at the beginning of the century. The organization, or rather the façade, which constituted the imperial system [under Napoleon III] had just collapsed; it was a matter of remaking another, or rather of making one which could survive other than by administrative artifice—that is, one which was truly grounded in the nature of things. For that, it was necessary to know what this nature of things was: consequently, the urgent need for a science of societies made itself felt without delay.²

      The stakes were high, not just for the survival of the French Republic, but also for the fundamental moral order and social cohesion of modern societies. Among others, Durkheim saw his age as one where, as he wrote in 1893, “our faith has been troubled; tradition has lost its sway; individual judgment has been freed from collective judgment … if this be so, the remedy for the evil is not to seek to resuscitate traditions and practices which, no longer responding to present conditions of society, can only live an artificial, false existence … [yet] it is not a new philosophical system that will relieve the situation.”³

      Durkheim believed that France required nothing less than a science that could in turn lead to a new ethic: for “our first duty is to make a moral code for ourselves.”⁴

      Many French intellectuals and political figures sought not only a new scientific and moral foundation for French education, but also a new emphasis upon learning of immediate economic and political utility. As Raoul Frary put it in The Question of Latin from 1885, in a democratic age when France faced a formidable military enemy across the Rhine, “The cult of the beautiful must not make us neglect the culture of the useful.”⁵

      Where utility and a new ethic was sought, a very broad educational, political, and ethical inheritance was assumed to be no longer plausible. With that assumption, a desire for distinction and novel thinking entered even elementary moral education.

      To trace this change, it is instructive to read two letters by two different ministers of education. Some forty years before the declaration of the Third Republic, in 1833, the education minister at the time, François Guizot, wrote a letter to teachers to accompany an educational reform law. In it, he takes for granted that these teachers will accept a given moral order distinct from but compatible with sacred order, founded upon “virtue and honor” that includes “faith in Providence, the sanctity of duty, submission to paternal authority, the respect due to the laws, to the prince, and to the rights of all.”⁶

      In 1883, the republican minister Jules Ferry wrote a similar and yet very different letter to teachers. He thinks it necessary to say that there must be a kind of moral instruction “common and indispensable to all,” drawn from the common ethical teachings of parents.⁷ But, he tells the teachers, in fact “some say” that “your task of moral education is impossible to accomplish,” while others say “it is banal and unimportant.” He finds himself compelled to warn them away from the cliffs of theory, philosophy, and dissertations, and to encourage them to share simple and edifying moral precepts and examples proven by the broadest experience.⁸

      Guizot writes an appeal to politically divided instructors who nonetheless cohere around a loose, eclectic moral and cultural consensus. Half a century later, Ferry writes to teachers who are tempted to introduce thoroughgoing forms of moral critique and innovation in primary and secondary schools, or simply to be indifferent to moral instruction as such.

      Ferry himself had no doubt what ethics and politics he wished not just for France but for the world. He dedicated himself to secular education and a new French Empire; he told the socialist leader Jean Jaurès that his ultimate purpose was “to organize humanity without God and without a King.”⁹ Republican leaders and authors repeatedly sounded similar themes and pressed for far-reaching reforms of French education, weakening its connections to classical languages, Christianity, and humanism in favor of a secular education connected to science, modern commerce, and industry.

      Not surprisingly, for Ferry and for others, the positivist Comte was a great influence; a fellow leader in the early Third Republic, Léon Gambetta called him “the most powerful thinker of the century.”¹⁰ In the same period, the positivist politician, lexicographer, and intellectual Émile Littré affirmed his support for a positivist science of humanity and society but renounced Comte’s “religion of humanity.”¹¹ As universities oriented toward specialized research flourished, in accordance with a pruned positivism in the manner of Littré, a statue to Comte was dedicated in 1903 in the Place de la Sorbonne.¹²

      It was certainly not the case that Comte stood as some singularly exalted prophet of the new order of things, in some alleged “positivist age.” Durkheim among others was well aware of Comte’s limitations, including his assumption that history would end neatly with his “positivist” stage.¹³ In fact, two other French thinkers loomed very large in the consciousness of those who aspired to create a new settlement for France and, in time, for other nations and peoples..

      The first of them was Ernest Renan, the scholar, ex-seminarian, and celebrated author of La Vie de Jésus. In the same year that Comte’s statue appeared, the town of Tréguier dedicated a statue to its native son Renan, with the novelist Anatole France as the featured speaker.¹⁴ In 1890, his The Future of Science had at last been published (Renan had written it in 1848, more than forty years earlier). For Péguy himself, Renan was a crucial figure; while Péguy expressed some early sympathy for him,¹⁵ he later became a sharp critic of Renan’s ambitions. For him, Renan was nothing less than “the leader, the boss, and the saint” of the “intellectual party” in modern universities, this party devoted to “modern superstitions” and the “superstition of science.”¹⁶ The Future of Science constituted the “very book of institution for the modern world.”¹⁷

      For Renan, science is the source of all real, nonimaginary knowledge: “Without science he [‘Man’] loves only chimeras.”¹⁸ Renan claims that the childhood of humanity—especially its ancient past, but for Renan, really any past prior to a modern skeptical, critical turn associated with the eighteenth century—is most powerfully expressed in its myths and religions, which can be beautiful and charming. But the modern scholar understands that they are not true, except as a portrait of humanity’s own projected desires and quandaries in a purely human, historical time. Hence “the beauty of Beatrice belongs to Dante, not to Beatrice, the beauty of Krishna belongs to the Indian genius, and not to Krishna, the beauty of Jesus and Mary belongs to Christianity, and not to Jesus and Mary.”¹⁹

      If until the eighteenth century it was “caprice” and “passion” that ruled the world, now “science contains the future of humanity.” In fact it will “organize humanity scientifically,” and with humanity, God.²⁰ “Science is therefore a religion … science alone can resolve for man the eternal problems for which his nature imperiously demands the solution.”²¹

      With its advance, modern criticism will “destroy every system of belief marred by supernaturalism.”²² While religious orthodoxy “petrifies” thought, science is open to constant progress. Words like “decadence” have no meaning, and absolute meaning is found only in reason and science.²³

      For Renan, the triumph of this “reason” will be accomplished neither by demonstrable proofs, nor by philosophical argument, nor by polemic in the manner of Voltaire, but by a kind of persistent indirection and suggestive rhetoric. He says,

      [When] I want to initiate young minds into philosophy, I start by any subject, I speak in a certain sense and in a certain tone, I take little care that they retain the positive information to which I am exposing them, I do not even try to prove it to them; but I insinuate a spirit, a manner, a turn; then, when I have injected [inoculé] them with this new sense, I leave them to look for what they please, and to build their temple following their own style. Here begins individual originality which it is necessary to respect supremely … there is a religious way to take hold of things, and that way is mine.²⁴

      If Renan’s manner of “scientific”

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