A Charter Revised: France after the Revolution

The ninth volume completes the history by narrowing to a single national tradition and then, in the same motion, spilling past its own stated limits. Copleston records in the preface that the earlier volumes had been drifting beyond the nineteenth century — the eighth had already treated Moore, Russell, and Dewey, men born in the nineteenth century but active well into the twentieth — and that the present volume carries the tendency further still. It was first intended to cover French philosophy between the Revolution and the death of Bergson; in fact it includes a fairly extensive treatment of Sartre, a briefer outline of Merleau-Ponty, and some remarks on the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss. The price of that extension is stated plainly: the plan to include nineteenth-century thought in Italy, Spain, and Russia has had to be abandoned. Copleston is careful, too, about what “French” means here. He has treated of French philosophers rather than of philosophy in France as a geographical area, declining to annex Russian exiles such as Berdyaev who lived and wrote on French soil but belong to another tradition. The volume is thus not a geography but the tracing of a line of thought, held to one country across nearly two centuries.

Part I — From the Revolution to Auguste Comte

The first part follows French thought as it reacts to the Revolution and then builds a science of society upon its ruins. It opens with the traditionalist reaction — De Maistre and De Bonald, Chateaubriand and Lamennais — for whom the Revolution’s appeal to abstract reason had to be answered by authority, tradition, and the Church. From there Copleston turns to the ideologists and to Maine de Biran, whose philosophical development moves inward from sensationalist psychology toward the levels of human life and the felt sense of effort and will. Eclecticism follows in Royer-Collard and above all Cousin, whose position in the academic life of his country made him impossible to omit. The part then gathers the early social philosophies — the utopianism of Fourier, Saint-Simon on the development of society, Proudhon’s anarchism and syndicalism, with a note on Marx’s judgment of the French socialists — before arriving at Auguste Comte, whose law of the three stages, classification of the sciences, and eventual religion of humanity with its Great Being give the positivist impulse its first full system.

Part II — From Comte to Bergson

The second part traces what became of that impulse and what rose against it. Positivism in France is followed through Littré’s criticism of Comte, Claude Bernard on experimental method, Renan on positivism and religion, Taine on the possibility of metaphysics, and Durkheim’s founding of sociology, with Lévy-Bruhl on morals. Against this current Copleston sets the counter-movements: the neo-criticism and personalism of Renouvier, Cournot’s inquiry into basic concepts, and the idealist metaphysics of Hamelin and Brunschvicg; then the spiritualist movement, in which Ravaisson, Lachelier on the bases of induction, Boutroux on contingency, Fouillée on idées-forces, and Guyau restore an inner and dynamic principle to a nature the positivists had flattened. The part culminates in two chapters on Bergson — his idea of philosophy, duration and freedom, the relation of memory and perception between spirit and matter, the interplay of instinct, intelligence, and intuition, and finally the two sources of morality and religion, the closed and the open, static defense and dynamic mysticism.

Part III — From Bergson to Sartre, Camus, and Lévi-Strauss

The third part carries the account into the twentieth century and its dominant existential and structuralist currents. It begins with the religious and scholastic responses — Blondel’s way of immanence and the question of modernism, the Thomist revival in Maritain, Gilson, and Maréchal — and with the philosophy of science in Poincaré, Duhem, Meyerson, and Bachelard, and the philosophies of value and personalism in Le Senne, Lavelle, and Mounier. Two religious thinkers, Teilhard de Chardin and Marcel, are set against each other before the volume gives Sartre its most sustained attention: pre-reflective and reflexive consciousness, being-in-itself and being-for-itself, the freedom of the for-itself and the problem of other minds, and then the later Sartre of the Critique, who reintegrates that freedom into an individual praxis caught in the practico-inert and the dialectic of the group. The closing chapter sets Camus’s absurd and philosophy of revolt beside Merleau-Ponty’s body-subject and his quarrel with Marxism, and ends on Lévi-Strauss, whose structuralism — with its emphasis on synchronic form beneath conscious life — Copleston reads not as a system but as a current of thought, a new naturalism opposing Sartre’s absolute freedom with structures that condition it.

For this library the volume closes a long arc and marks a threshold. It records the tradition in which the modern language of freedom, the absurd, lived time, and the unconscious structure was forged — experience turned inward in Maine de Biran and Bergson, freedom raised to an absolute in Sartre and then bent back under history, and, at the end, the claim that man is patterned by forms he does not choose. These are the terms in which one philosophical culture tried to say what a person is and how far a life is its own.