Biological and Social New Orders: Charles Robin (1821­1885) and Comteanism in the Third Republic

Dr Marion Thomas Lecturer in history of science at the University of Strasbourg, France E­mail: [email protected]

ABSTRACT: In this paper, I examine the intertwined links between the science, politics and religion of a major figure of nineteenth­century French biology, the Parisian professor of Charles Robin (1821­1885). In the context of the development of cell theory, I show how Robin answered the questions of biological organization and biological individuality not only by applying the precepts of Comte’s positive biology, but also by incorporating empirical and philosophical considerations. Like Comte, Robin was convinced of the necessity of anchoring the new science of sociology in biology, but, unlike Comte, no trace of a genuinely “socio­biological” approach can be found in his writings. Similarly, Robin’s political activity (marked by his late tenure as senator) may initially appear disconnected from his scientific writings. However, I argue that Robin’s approaches to different areas of knowledge (biology, sociology, politics, and ) were mutually authoritative, especially in the parallel structure of their discourses. Robin’s radical materialism was the link between these different realms of knowledge, serving an alternative authority to which Robin appealed in his fight against clerical powers, and also as a way of departing from Comte’s “religion of Humanity”. Crucially, I seek to demonstrate how Robin’s radical materialism expressed itself not only in his biological view of (including “his” cell theory) but also in his anti­clericalism and Republicanism, which were just as much a part of his political engagement as his role as a senator. For instance, the materialism Robin promoted in his medical lectures incurred the wrath of the clerics, making him a political agitator during the Second Empire. Similarly, I show that Robin’s support of secular, mixed, and mandatory schooling, a core tenet of Third Republic politics, tied in with his views on women’s nature and on their role in society. Ultimately, I demonstrate that Robin’s biological materialism, combined with his outspoken anti­clericalism, constitutes a political stance, and how the concept of “solidarity” helped him to cast a new light on the relations between the parts and the whole, both in biology and sociology.

INTRODUCTION Charles Robin (1821­1885), who occupied the first chair of histology in in 1862, was a leading figure in the 19th­century French scientific community. His international historical reputation has been established thanks to his outspoken opposition to cellular theory, including Theodor Schwann’s idea that the cell is the basic unit of every living being and ’s view that every cell has it origins in another cell. Retrospectively, cellular theory as it was developed between 1830 and 1850 is now seen as a major scientific discovery on a level with Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection (which Robin also opposed). In a recent article, the French historian Laurent Loison has reconstructed Robin’s scientific program and explored the reasons for his opposition to both Schwann’s and Virchow’s cell theories. According to Loison, Robin’s rejection of cell theory was largely due to the influence of Comtean positivism on his biology. Like , Robin never

1 relinquished his hostility towards what was perceived in France as a new incarnation of German Naturphilosophie. In this paper, I propose to go beyond this historiography, which explains Robin’s biology by his adherence to Comte’s positivism and a reaction against German idealism, an approach that places him on the losing side of history and suggests that he is responsible for obstructing the progress of French biology. I will present not only the convergences between the thought of Robin and Comte, but also the divergence between the two men’s visions of the organism and society. Indeed, based on Comte’s thought, Robin’s biology raises the question of the individual organism and the relationship between the parts and the whole while articulating this reflection with his social thinking. The other chief aim of this paper, then, is to examine the interwoven links between science, politics and religion in Robin’s works. I will analyze Robin’s research agenda in light of the political ideas he defended, as a republican and staunch anti­clerical, in the context of the emergence of the Third Republic. At first sight, Robin’s political activity may initially appear disconnected from his scientific agenda. However, I argue that Robin’s approaches to different areas of knowledge (biology, sociology, politics, and metaphysics) were mutually supportive and lent one another authority, especially through the parallel structure and shared vocabulary of their discourses. Robin’s radical materialism was the link between these different realms of knowledge, serving as an alternative authority to which Robin appealed in his fight against clerical powers, and also as a way of departing from Comte’s “Religion of Humanity.” Finally, I show how Robin’s anti­clericalism, materialism, and political action all came together in a rather unexpected place: a report on education, which championed a secularized and mixed educational system. I show how the apparently quite remote topic of women’s education embodies many of Robin’s commitments. The examination of this report, which redefined the role of women in republican society, is not an add­on, but the the culmination of my argument, showcasing as it does Robin’s blend of biological materialism, anti­clericalism and republicanism, as well as his views of women.

CHARLES ROBIN, PARISIAN PHYSIOLOGIST AND OUTSPOKEN COMTEAN Like Claude Bernard, who had moved out of his Beaujolais home to try his luck in Paris, Robin left his native region of Bresse to pursue medical studies in Paris, where he also ended up making a career. The Latin Quarter was his home turf: he lived and worked there all his life. He was a prolific author, with some 300 publications to his name during his scientific career. In Paris, where he arrived in the autumn of 1839 to begin his medical studies, Robin quickly made friends who would end up playing a key role in his career. These included Émile Littré, who introduced him to Comte and positivism. Fresh out of his immersion in Comte’s lectures, in 1848 Robin helped engineer the foundation of the French Society of Biology, which would be one of the most active centers of French biology throughout the late nineteenth century. The speech given at the unveiling of this new institution, written by Robin, was “a full­blown positivist manifesto for the life sciences,” and expressed Robin’s vision of these sciences as rooted in an original positivism that implied the wholesale dismissal of all forms of speculative (theological or metaphysical) thinking. Robin and Littré stayed faithful to the early Comte, rejecting his subsequent construction of positivism , from 1852 on, as the “Religion of Humanity,” and becoming, after

2 Comte’s death in 1857, a leader of an atheist faction, showcased in his journal La Philosophie positive and the Dictionnaire de médecine, de chirurgie, de pharmacie, des sciences accessoires et de l’art vétérinaire de P.­H. Nysten (Dictionary of Medicine, , Pharmacy, Accessory Sciences and Veterinary Art of P.­H. Nysten) which Robin and Littré edited after 1855. Like Comte, Robin considered that biology had to be rooted in chemistry – albeit not reduced to it. He pursued the plan of basing a general on a chemical definition of the phenomena of life. More precisely, drawing on ideas published in 1822 by the naturalist Henri­ Marie Ducrotay de Blainville, Robin argued that life must be understood at a chemical level, and saw it as a perpetual movement of successive assimilation and dissimilation. In 1866, in his inaugural lecture as holder of the chair of histology, Robin dismissed all forms of , and reiterated the importance of a chemical understanding of life. While in theory, Robin’s biology was rooted in Comte’s biology, in practice it diverged radically from it regarding one aspect: the use of the to examine natural phenomena. Unlike Comte and Xavier Bichat, who trusted only observation with the naked eye, Robin very quickly saw the microscope as an indispensable ally in the development of scientific anatomy and became an expert in the art of microscopy. Robin made eclectic choices of empirical materials and “explored a wide array of anatomical structures, plant and animal species” to account for the diversity of life. As we will see, both his discerning use of the microscope and his encyclopedic approach contributed to steering him away from a unitary and universal view of life.

BIOLOGICAL ORGANIZATION AND SOCIAL ORDER Robin’s theory on the organization of life was complex. While he admitted the existence of cells, he refuted the idea that the cell could be the main unit of life. Not only did life inhere in activities at the molecular level, but other structures besides cells were also involved: the so­ called “formed anatomical elements” such as the fiber, the tube, and the canal accounted as well for the construction of an organism. While Robin rejected the universal dimension of Schwann’s cell theory (and subsequently Virchow’s), he did propose a theory of the genesis of “formed anatomical elements” that partly converged with Schwann’s blastema theory. Like Schwann, Robin thought that these elements were created by a spontaneous generation system, itself derived from a crystallization system. But unlike Schwann, Robin did not see the blastema as solely a “cytoblastema,” i.e., a creator of cells. By making the molecular level – not the cellular level – the basic level of life, Robin was also led to define the upper level accounting for the integrity of life. For him, it was the organism, which was produced through the interactions of its parts. In his theory of the organization of life, body fluids were no longer understood as accessory parts but as the main loci of the molecular exchanges between “formed anatomical elements” and what Robin called the “interior milieu.” As Mirko Grmek noted, Robin coined this phrase, which would later be made famous by Bernard, to stress the role of fluids, not only solids, in organisms. In he wrote Robin in a treatise in 1853: “[…] it is impossible to conceive an organized being living without a milieu from which it draws and to which it discharges; one is the agent, and the other provides the

3 conditions for activity. The agent is in turn divided into several equally indispensable groups of parts: first, the solids, which act, and second, the humors, which maintain the former in a position to act [...]. If the general milieu disappears or is altered, the agent stops acting; if the humors (this interior milieu) are altered, everything stops in the solids, just as if the agent disappeared or if they were destroyed.”

To Robin, a living being was thus a product of reciprocal biochemical activities residing in all “formed anatomical elements,” whether they are cells or not. In other words, the harmony that existed on the level of an organism was not the result of an aggregate of potentially autonomous individual , but rather of an exchange between solids and liquid interior milieus. Additionally, the interior milieus served as the guarantor of an organism’s individuality, ensuring the cohesion of the whole from an anatomical standpoint, and allowing for the functional integration of parts from a physiological standpoint. The organism was a genuine biological individual on its own right. Thus, to Robin, two hierarchical levels of life coexisted: the organized substance (formed of molecules) and the organism. The cell did not have a privileged place in either of those levels. While anatomy and the life sciences were the main foci of his career, Robin, as a loyal disciple of Comte, regularly showed interest in the social question. Along with Littré, in 1872, he founded the Society of Sociology for the application of the positive and scientific method to the study of social doctrines. This society was short­lived and Robin did not devise a program for the development of sociology as he did for biology.

In the following I identify connections between Robin’s theory of the organization of life and Comte’s thoughts on biological and social organization. In particular, I highlight their common use of the concept of solidarity, used by Comte to address the relationships between the parts and the whole. In Comte’s classification of the sciences, sociology came right after biology. Indeed, in his Système de politique positive (System of Positive Polity, 1851­1854), Comte had established partial analogies between the living organism and the body social, defining both the social organism and the biological organism by a combination of functions. Therefore it was possible to draw parallels between them, and to study the organization of society as a living organism. Early on in his theorizing, Comte had identified the basic unit of life in – not in what he called the “organic monad” described by Lorenz Oken, which would later be assimilated to the cell by Parisian physiologists. From an understanding of the organization of life that favored tissue over cell, Comte had moved on to society. In his words:“human society is made up of families, not individuals […]. A society can no more be broken down into individuals than a geometrical surface can be broken down into lines or a line into dots.” Thus, the basic unit of society could not be a simple element like the individual (whose biological equivalent would be the “organic monad” or cell), it could only be a complex element, the family – a microcosmic society. Additionally, if a society was structured as an organic whole, this meant a distinctive relation between the parts and the whole. To Comte, a society was more than the sum of its components: it was a whole that unified its parts and gave them functional meaning. More

4 precisely, the parts efface themselves for the benefit of the whole, in the name of a principle of solidarity. Along with the concept of solidarity, Comte used the term consensus to further specify this arrangement. This implied continual mutual actions and reactions between the parts, as well as “evident spontaneous harmony” within the organism. Robin picked up these ideas in his biology. In his theory on the organization of life, he claimed that “[the] solidarity between all the constituting parts on the one hand, and between all acts on the other, is the fundamental problem of biology.” As noted above, Robin reckoned that the whole was greater than the sum of the parts, and the harmony that existed at the level of the organism resulted from an exchange between solids and interior fluids (or humors). Likewise, in very Comtean fashion, he used the terms solidarity and consensus to account for the connections between the parts making up a human being. While Comte gave credit to a “socio­biological” form of thought, Robin did not. In his writings, no organicist vision of society appears. Robin’s vision of society is, however, showcased in another text: the report on education he wrote towards the end of his life. In the last section of this paper, we will see how many of Robin’s commitments appear in his work on the seemingly far removed topic of women’s education. I will show how Robin integrated the Comtean view of social organization in his reflection on education and the key role of mothers in the education of children and the perpetuation of family solidarity – and by extension social solidarity.

ROBIN ON WOMEN’S EDUCATION AND WOMEN’S NATURE Like many of his academic peers, Robin was asked to run for political office. In 1875, after the new regime of the Third Republic was fully established, he became a senator in his native department of Ain (1876­1878). Robin was an unassuming presence in the Senate, and did not have the talent for oratory or writing that usually characterizes the greatest politicians. Yet personal motivations were not entirely absent from his political work, for Robin’s life and work were characterized by his longstanding opposition to the Catholic Church and the power of its clergy, which accompanied his materialist stance on nature. Robin’s anti­clericalism took many forms, from the most private—his will stated that he did not want to be buried in Church, and he thought nothing of feasting on Good Friday—to the most public—for instance, his participation in the Nysten’s Dictionary, denounced by members of the clergy as a materialist tract, or his lectures at the Faculty of Medicine, which were accused of promoting materialist ideas. Finally, as senator, he worked to reduce the role of the church in state matters and heralded major education reforms—primarily the creation of secular, free, and mandatory primary schools, set up by Jules Ferry in the early 1880s. In L’Instruction et l’éducation (Instruction and Education) published in 1877, Robin supported a mixed secular education system, aiming at making men, but particularly women, overcome the prejudices they carried from superstition or religion, and teach them “true” knowledge—positive knowledge in the sense of Comte. We might expect that an anticlerical republican biologist would advocate equality for women. However, Robin’s goals for this education rested more on a traditional division of labor among men and women than on a goal of true gender equality. Far from challenging the idea of an ahistorical, immutable motherly nature of women, the core objective of this “positive” education was to turn women into good mothers, fully dedicated to the education of their future children and also good spouses.

5 According to Robin, women were “physiological destined to raise both boys and girls during childhood.” As she nurtured her child, the mother would teach him or her to develop positive social feelings, particularly those of continuity and solidarity. Robin argued that being with their parents, and their mothers in particular, gave children “a sense of continuity that developed before that of solidarity.” This choice of words was not innocent, as they were drawn from the Comtean vocabulary, as we have already seen with solidarity in the biological context. In this context, solidarity referred to mutual assistance between humans in contemporary society, humanity being forged by the shared awareness of belonging to the same species, while continuity referred specifically to the historical link between the generations. The concept of solidarity was taken up by the ‘solidarist’ political movement (in French solidarisme) championed by Léon Bourgeois in the late nineteenth century; it would become the credo of radicals and radical socialists in the years leading up to the First World War. In his most important book, Solidarité (Solidarity), Bourgeois argued that the individuals within a society are just like living cells “connected” to one another by a “tight solidarity.” Backed up by a quotation from Comte, Bourgeois also argued that solidarity went hand in hand with continuity, based on the idea that from his birth, man had a debt to society, including past generations. This logic also applied to Robin’s philosophy of education. Robin’s treatise on education shows clearly how his assumptions about women’s lesser biological status supported the limitations he assigned to their “new” role in republican society. Though women would benefit from a new form of education, the latter was in no way a means to nurture high level intellects and lead them to pursue professional studies. The support of mixed education should not be confused with support of female emancipation; it was mostly a means to free women from the shackles of the clergy. In their effort to inscribe women within the new cosmology of the Third Republic, the republicans ascribed them a role that paradoxically changed very little. The republican woman had to obey her nature, which consisted in feeding and educating her children to ensure the reproduction of future generations and, by extension, the future of the republic. If both men and women were to express solidarity and “Live for others” in the Third Republic, they were to put these precepts into action in strikingly different ways. A woman’s destiny was to “Live for others” above all for her children and family—a goal she was expected to pursue to the point of sacrificing herself. In a way, this republican justification of women’s willing sacrifice replaced the biblical justification of female suffering, rooted in the original sin.

CONCLUSION While Comte had a considerable influence on Robin’s scientific and social thought, Robin diverged from him in some crucial respects. While Comte had sought to establish theoretical connections between the biological and the social, for example, Robin did not take such direct steps. Yet Robin’s biggest departure from Comte’s thought lies in his blend of radical materialism and anticlericalism. Beyond the idea of emancipation from Comte’s mentorship, I have attempted to demonstrate that this metaphysical stance influenced Robin’s scientific and socio­political thought. Crucially, I have sought to demonstrate how Robin’s radical materialism expressed itself not only in his biological view of life (including “his” cell

6 theory) but also in his anti­clericalism and republicanism, which were just as much a part of his political engagement as his role as a senator. While the concepts of solidarity and consensus helped Robin to forge links between biology and sociology, some of his contemporaries developed further connections between science and politics in order to legitimize the young Third Republic. The politician Bourgeois, the marine zoologist Edmond Perrier, but also Georges Clémenceau, a radical socialist and Robin’s former student, promoted solidarity and gave it the status of the social bond par excellence. This approach formed part of the argument behind the “Live for others” slogan of the young Third Republic, aligning it with the principles of solidarism. In La Mêlée sociale (The Social Melee, 1907), Clémenceau continued to amalgamate biological and political language, making an analogy between the relationship of cell to organism and that between citizen and the social body in order to encourage mutual aid in human societies rather than the struggle for life. Deploying these analogies, metaphors, and an associated vocabulary that blended biology with the social, Bourgeois, Perrier, and Clémenceau quite actively and openly heeded Comte’s call by advocating what could be considered a form of “sociobiology”. Although less visible than the others, Robin merits a place in this group promoting a form of sociobiology. Robin’s goal was to provide a scientific and therefore legitimate foundation for the new Republic, which remained fragile throughout this period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Like his contemporaries, but in the name of a materialism and anticlericalism that sometimes led him to adopt provocative stances, Robin strove to be the architect not only of a new biological order, but also of a new social order.

Acknowledgments: Special thanks to Florence Vienne, Lynn Nyhart, and Ariane Dröscher. This research was founded by the Franco­German ANR­DFG project “POLCELL ­ Politics of the Living. A Study on the Emergence and Reception of the Cell Theory in France and Germany, ca. 1800­1900”

References: ­ Accampo, Elinor, Blessed Motherhood, Bitter Fruit. Nelly Roussel and the Politics of Female Pain in Third Republic France, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. ­ Bourgeois, Léon, Solidarité, Paris: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 1998 (1896). ­ Braunstein, Jean­François, La philosophie de la médecine d’Auguste Comte. Vaches carnivores, Vierge Mère et morts vivants, Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 2009. ­ Canguilhem, Georges, « La théorie cellulaire », in Georges Canguilhem, La Connaissance de la vie,Paris, Vrin, 1992 (1965). ­ Clémenceau, Georges, La Mêlée sociale, Paris, Fasquelle, 1907. ­ Comte, Auguste Cours de philosophie positive, vol. 3, Paris, Bachelier Imprimeur­Libraire, 1838. ­ Comte, Auguste, Cours de philosophie positive, vol. 4, Paris, Bachelier Imprimeur Libraire, 1839. ­ Comte, Auguste, Système de politique positive ou Traité de sociologie, instituant la Religion de l’Humanité, vol. 2, Paris, L. Mathias, 1852. ­ Fédi, Laurent, Comte, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 2000. ­ Fox, Robert, The Savant and the State. Science and Cultural Politics in Nineteenth­Century France, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. ­ Genty, Victor, Un grand biologiste Charles Robin (1821­1885). Sa vie, ses amitiés philosophiques et littéraires, , Imprimerie A. Rey, 1931.

7 ­ Littré, Émile et Robin, Charles (eds), Dictionnaire de médecine, de chirurgie, de pharmacie, des sciences accessoires et de l’art vétérinaire de P.­H. Nysten, 10ème édition, Paris, J.­B. Baillière, 1855. ­ Laurent Loison, “Pourquoi refuser la théorie cellulaire? Le projet d’une anatomie chimique chez Charles Robin (1821­1885),” Revue d’histoire des sciences 2015, 68 (1), pp. 23­45. ­ Pouchet, Georges Charles Robin. Sa vie et son œuvre, Paris, Félix Alcan, 1887. ­ Robin, Charles et Verdeil, François, Traité de chimie anatomique et physiologique normale et pathologique ou des principes immédiats normaux et morbides qui constituent le corps de l’homme et des mammifères, vol. 1, Paris, J. B. Baillière, 1853. ­ Robin, Charles, « Principes généraux d’histologie », Revue des cours scientifiques de la France et de l’étranger, 1868, 5, no. 26, pp. 409­415. ­ Robin, Charles, Anatomie et physiologie cellulaires ou des cellules animales et végétales du protoplasma et des éléments normaux et pathologiques qui en dérivent, Paris, J. B. Baillière, 1873. ­ Robin, Charles, « De l’appropriation des parties organiques et de l’organisme à l’accomplissement d’actions déterminées. Deuxième article », La Philosophie positive, 1869, no. 5, pp. 5­38. ­ Robin, Charles L’Instruction et l’éducation,Paris, Decaux & Dreyfous, 1877. ­ Robin, Charles, préface à Eugène Bourdet, Principes d’éducation positive, 2ème ed., Paris, Librairie Germer­Baillière et Cie, 1877.

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