1 - The Early Years

Summary

The Revolution is still operative.

Alexis de Tocqueville, 1856

THE CONTEXT: THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

On 16 Nivôse Year VI, the Directory sent an ordinance to the administrators of Montpellier, the former center of the royal province of Languedoc and now the capital of the newly created department of Hérault. The decree asserted that order was impossible to maintain in the town in view of the fanaticism of the people and their violent, vengeful acts. As one of the nineteen cities having the most difficulty with royalist agitation, Montpellier was immediately placed in a state of siege. It was amid such chaos that Isidore-Auguste-Marie-François-Xavier Comte was born on 30 Nivôse Year VI, more commonly known as January 19, 1798.

Although Comte's life began in the waning years of the French Revolution, the turbulent decade of upheaval left its imprint upon him as upon several generations of Frenchmen. In his famous “Personal Preface” to volume 6 of his Cours de philosophie positive, the only childhood experience that he discussed at length had to do with the Revolution. He explained that by age fourteen, he had gone “through all the essential stages of the revolutionary spirit.” Because of the Revolution — the “salutary crisis, whose principal phase [the Terror] had preceded my birth” — he “already felt the fundamental need for a universal regeneration” that would be both “political and philosophic.”