the dictatorship of Napoleon III, degrees in history and philosophy were
eliminated in 1854, and the medieval trivium and quadrivium were reinstituted
in the university curriculum. In primary education, the trend toward secular
schools in the 1840s was reversed again by the 1860s, when the majority of
schools were again religious. Catholic militancy in turn stiffened the secular-
izers in the government defending the supremacy of their own administration.
The struggle broke out in full force under the Third Republic in the 1870s.
Secularists won the upper hand with the reforms of 1881, which excluded
clergy from the university and from the right to confer degrees and established
a centralized system of public and compulsory primary schools. Final separa-
tion of church and state did not occur until 1905, in the wake of the Dreyfus
affair and in the face of popular counter-demonstrations, taking elementary
teaching from the religious congregations and removing education entirely
from the hands of the church.
Upsurges of quasi-vitalist philosophy occurred in conjunction with those
moments when the secularizing movements had just peaked and receded.
Heilbron (1994) points out that the salons of the ancien regime, which had
promoted an anti-technical and literary style in intellectual life, collapsed with
the dispossession of the aristocracy; simultaneously, the abolition of the ancient
theology-dominated universities and the founding of governmental scientific
bodies created a new orientation toward specialized disciplines. There was a
reversal of intellectual hierarchies; instead of allying with aristocratic literature,
philosophers now sought connections with the new elite, the natural scientists.
The first approach to French vitalism was the will-philosophy of Maine
de Biran. Maine began in the circle of Idéologues around Cabanis and the
comte Destutt de Tracy, a direct offshoot of the main circles of French intel-
lectual life since the Encyclopedists and the Auteuil circle of Condorcet and
Mme. Helvétius (see Figure 14.1). The Idéologues continued the main themes
of the secularizing movement, associationism radicalized by the politics of the
1790s. Cabanis (1796–1802) held that Lavoisier’s chemical analysis can be
applied to ideas; Destutt (1798–1815) coined the term Idéologie for the zoo-
logical science which analyzes ideas into sensory elements. Since Destutt re-
garded his method as a means of undermining belief in religion, he and his
supporters opposed Napoleon when the latter brought about the return of state
religion. In this period virtually all the notable philosophers were political
activists, and philosophy was taken explicitly as a weapon of politics.^2 It was
as a member of the Chamber of Deputies and subsequently of the Institute that
Maine de Biran, a moderate Royalist and opponent of Napoleon, became
connected with the Idéologues.
Maine began in 1802 with a treatise on the influence of habit on thinking.
By 1812 he had broken with the banned Idéologues, reversing their themes in
758 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths