The mystical body of society: religion and association in nineteenth-century French political thought.

"It is not the case," Alasdair MacIntyre once wrote, "that men first stopped believing in God and in the authority of the Church, and then subsequently started behaving differently. It seems clear that men first of all lost any overall social agreement as to the right ways to live together, and so ceased to be able to make sense of any claims to moral authority."1 Religious faith and moral order thrive, MacIntyre tells us, on robust social bonds. This insight rests upon an implicit premise: to believe in religion-"in God and in the authority of the Church"-is to believe in society-that is, an "overall social agreement as to the right ways to live together." Though MacIntyre states this claim with particular succinctness, he is far from alone in making it. His fellow communitarians, who value religion for fostering social cohesion, frequently endorse normative versions of this argument, while sociologists of religion have employed it to explain, for instance, the impact of social differentiation on religious belief. Yet this assimilation of religion with its social function belongs to a much longer intellectual tradition-one in which the history of modern France has played a leading part. During the revolutionary decade that closed the eighteenth century, theocrats such as Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald excoriated the Jacobins' brazen anticlericalism, ridiculing the blindness with which they felled the pillar of faith upon which the social edifice rests. That conservatives daunted by revolution's satanic specter would insist that society-that is to say, their society, the estate-based order of the ancien regime-could not survive an assault on religion-in other words, their religion, Roman Catholicism-is understandable. The eagerness with which certain republicans and socialists, their most obdurate ideological opponents, emphasized the intimate bond between religion and the social order is, however, more puzzling.2 Yet in the 183Os, one finds, for example, Pierre Leroux, a philosopher of impeccable republican pedigree, lamenting, in terms that echo Maclntyre's, that "religious atheism has brought about social atheism."3 Over the course of the long nineteenth century, the Catholic republican Philippe-Joseph-Benjamin Buchez, the philosopher and moralist JeanMarie Guyau, and Emile Durkheim, the founder of sociology, made similar pronouncements. While generally sympathetic towards republican institutions, these thinkers nonetheless occupied a distinct ideological space on the French left, defined by the conviction that republicanism required a far denser conception of society than that which could be elicited from the social contract or individual rights alone. Leroux and Buchez, for example, unrelentingly proselytized for the idea of "association," while Guyau and Durkheim concurred in placing solidarity at the heart of their understanding of the social order. The belief that republicanism was in need of a sociological correction thus defines the identity of these thinkers as much as their efforts to persuade mainstream republicans to give religion a second look.4 Viewed together, their arguments reveal an alternative religious tradition within French republicanism, distinct from the anticlericalism embraced by many of their contemporaries, one deeply concerned with religion's modern fate-provided, however, that religion was grasped as a primordially social phenomenon.Why were these social republicans so eager to conflate "society" and "association" with "religion" ? These concepts, I argue, provided a vocabulary for conceptualizing the nature of social cohesion in a post-revolutionary world. In the social imaginary of the old regime, religion had been harnessed to the concepts of order and corps, a connection that underpinned its vision of society as an organism formed by unequal yet complementary estates. This organicism invoked the traditional Christian belief that Christ, in addition to a physical body, possessed a mystical body, a corpus mysticum constituted by the Catholic Church. …