Materialism in Nineteenth-century France

Abstract

Discussion in English of nineteenth-century French philosophy today must necessarily begin with the work of Donald Charlton. His studies of positivism, of religious thought, and of the philosophy of Romanticism remain the authoritative works in English on their subject. It is remarkable, however, that so few scholars have ventured to follow his masterly analyses, and sought to match his knowledge of those complex and ambiguous intellectual movements. The lack is also apparent in France itself. Writing in 1959, the same year as Charlton’s Positivist Thought in France was published, the French Marxist philosopher Lucien Sève commented that:

There is in our philosophical literature an almost forgotten century, whose great names have for the most part been neither read nor studied for a very long time, a century which makes even the scholar who wishes to restore some essential moment or aspect of it feel like a pioneer setting out in some entirely unknown land, a century three-quarters covered in that thick dust which settles in libraries on the books that no one ever asks for — a century, however, which is the closest to us in all respects: I refer, of course, to the nineteenth century.¹