ABSTRACT
Auguste Comte himself, after his early flirtation with Saint-Simon, had become a conservative defender of social hierarchy and a firm supporter of the Second Empire. By the end of the Second Empire, the Catholic church, which had at times seemed open to an alliance with the democratic movement during the July Monarchy, had defined itself in clear opposition to the new ideas associated with the Revolution of 1789 and the rise of modern science and thought. The government’s treatment of men such as Emile Littre and Ernest Renan seemed to argue that support for the Second Empire was incompatible with independent, critical thinking. The Fifth Republic created by Charles de Gaulle in 1958, a government with a powerful president elected by universal suffrage, appeared in some ways to be a reversion to the traditions of the Liberal Empire. The national parliamentary elections held in 1863 showed that the main beneficiaries of this evolution were the government’s opponents.
