Ideology of the Systems Period (1800-1850)

Ideology refers to the philosophical movement that emerged from Çondillac, which long persisted in France despite powerful adversaries. The golden age of ideology began in 1795, with the creation of the Institute, whose second class was the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences. The Academy included the entire group of Condillacians: Volney, Garat, Sieyès, Guinguené, Cabanis, while Laromiguière, Destutt de Tracy, and Degérando were associate members; many were then supporters of Bonaparte and in favor of the coup d’état of 18 Brumaire; the consul appointed several of them to the Senate or the Tribunal. The meetings at Auteuil, in the Salon of Madame Helvétius, of which Maine de Biran speaks so often, further strengthened the party[1]. Everything changed as soon as the ideologues realized that Bonaparte was not the liberal and the continuator of the revolution that they dreamed of; he found them hostile to his bill on crimes against the security of the State; he had the “sulkers of Auteuil” excluded from the Tribunal and in 1803 he abolished the Academy of Moral Sciences. The decrees that founded the Imperial University were prepared by enemies of the ideologues: Fontanes, a friend of Chateaubriand, Cardinal de Bausset, Bonald. The ideologue party was entirely in opposition; it met in circles where the spirit of the 18th century was preserved against the invasive Genius of Christianity, in the salons of Madame de Condorcet or Madame Lebreton; he supported Moreau’s conspiracy in 1804, and, in an apostrophe to the Council of State in 1812, Napoleon accused him of being the responsible author of Mallet’s conspiracy: “It is to ideology,” he said, “to this dark metaphysics which, by subtly seeking the first causes, wants to found the legislation of the people on these bases, instead of appropriating the laws to the knowledge of the human heart and to the lessons of history, that we must attribute all the misfortunes which test our beautiful France”; it is reasoned analysis, opposed to romantic intuition; it is, against the spirit of Chateaubriand, the spirit of Stendhal, a fragment of whose comedy, published recently[2], presents the anti-Voltairians and the enemies of philosophy.

Ideology was particularly hostile to religious restoration: “Theology,” wrote Destutt de Tracy in his Analyse of Dupuis’s work, L’origine, de tous les cultes, is the philosophy of the world’s infancy; it is time that it gave way to that of its age of reason; it is the work of the imagination, like bad physics and bad metaphysics, which were born with it in times of ignorance and which serve as its basis, while the other philosophy is founded on observation and experience.”[3] Ideology, as we see, forms a link between the philosophy of the 18th century and positivism.