Freethinkers in Europe: National and Transnational Secularities, 1789-1920s 311068716X, 9783110687163

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Notes on Contributors
Abstracts
Freethinkers in Modern Europe’s Secularities: Introduction • Carolin Kosuch
Freidenkerei, Libre-pensée, Szabadgondolkodás – Concepts of Freethinking during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries • Daniela Haarmann
I Secularities: National Perspectives
Garibaldi and Mazzini: Anticlericalism, Laicism, and the Concept of a National Religion • Laura Fournier-Finocchiaro
Group Portrait with Freethinker: Jacob Moleschott, Risorgimento Culture, and the Italian Nation-Building Process • Costanza D’Elia
Secularity in the New State: The Case of Poland • Barbara Wagner
Friends and Foes: Two Secularisms in late Nineteenth-Century Sweden • Anton Jansson
II Organized Freethought in National, International, and Transnational Entanglements
Integration through Science? Nationalism and Internationalism in the German Monist Movement (1906–1918) • Christoffer Leber
“The Most Advanced Nation on the Path of Liberty”: Universalism and National Difference in International Freethought • Daniel Laqua
Socialist Secularism between Nation, State, and the Transnational Movement: The International of Proletarian Freethinkers in Central and Eastern Europe • Johannes Gleixner
III Freethinkers’ Networks and Projects Critically Revised
A Movement That Never Materialized: The Perception of Scientific Materialism as a Secular Movement in Nineteenth-Century Germany • Claus Spenninger
Politicizing a (Non)Religious Act: The Secularist Church Exit Propaganda of the Komitee Konfessionslos (1908–1914) • Katharina Neef
A Secular Avant-Garde? About the Unknown Freethinker Roots of Today’s French Civil Baptism • Antoine Mandret-Degeilh
Illustrations
Index of Names
Index of Places
Index of Subjects

Citation preview

Freethinkers in Europe

Religion and Society

Edited by Gustavo Benavides, Frank J. Korom, Karen Ruffle and Kocku von Stuckrad

Volume 86

Freethinkers in Europe National and Transnational Secularities, 1789−1920s Edited by Carolin Kosuch

ISBN 978-3-11-068716-3 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-068828-3 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-068832-0 ISSN 1437-5370

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020935138 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Table of Contents Notes on Contributors Abstracts

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Carolin Kosuch Freethinkers in Modern Europe’s Secularities: Introduction

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Daniela Haarmann Freidenkerei, Libre-pensée, Szabadgondolkodás – Concepts of Freethinking 35 during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

I Secularities: National Perspectives Laura Fournier-Finocchiaro Garibaldi and Mazzini: Anticlericalism, Laicism, and the Concept of a National 87 Religion Costanza D’Elia Group Portrait with Freethinker: Jacob Moleschott, Risorgimento Culture, and the Italian Nation-Building Process 109 Barbara Wagner Secularity in the New State: The Case of Poland

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Anton Jansson Friends and Foes: Two Secularisms in late Nineteenth-Century 155 Sweden

II Organized Freethought in National, International, and Transnational Entanglements Christoffer Leber Integration through Science? Nationalism and Internationalism in the German Monist Movement (1906 – 1918) 181

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Daniel Laqua “The Most Advanced Nation on the Path of Liberty”: Universalism and National Difference in International Freethought 203 Johannes Gleixner Socialist Secularism between Nation, State, and the Transnational Movement: The International of Proletarian Freethinkers in Central and Eastern 235 Europe

III Freethinkers’ Networks and Projects Critically Revised Claus Spenninger A Movement That Never Materialized: The Perception of Scientific Materialism as a Secular Movement in Nineteenth-Century Germany

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Katharina Neef Politicizing a (Non)Religious Act: The Secularist Church Exit Propaganda of the Komitee Konfessionslos (1908 – 1914) 297 Antoine Mandret-Degeilh A Secular Avant-Garde? About the Unknown Freethinker Roots of Today’s 331 French Civil Baptism Illustrations

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Index of Names

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Index of Places

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Index of Subjects

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Notes on Contributors Costanza D’Elia Costanza D’Elia teaches modern and contemporary history at the Università di Cassino e del Lazio Meridionale (Italy). Her most recent research is devoted to European cultural history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular attention to the role played by Francesco De Sanctis in national and transnational contexts. She is founder and editor of Visual History: Rivista internazionale di storia e critica dell’immagine and authored several books, among them Il fantasma della libertà: Figure dello stato e forme del potere fra Otto e Novecento (Naples: L’ancora del Mediterraneo, 2009); and Il codice della rivoluzione: L’introduzione del nuovo diritto nell’Europa napoleonica (Naples: Consiglio nazionale delle ricerche, 2012). Laura Fournier-Finocchiaro Laura Fournier-Finocchiaro is Maître de Conférences (Associate Professor) in Italian Studies at Paris 8 University (France). Her research focuses on the political and cultural construction of Italian national identity (nineteenth and twentieth centuries). Her latest works are dedicated to Mazzini’s literary oeuvre: Giuseppe Mazzini: Un intellettuale europeo (Naples: Liguori, 2013); to the republican idea in Italy: Republic in Italy 1848 – 1948: Legacies, Models, Speeches, Laboratoire italien 19 (2017) (edited together with Jean-Yves Frétigné and Silvia Tatti); to political exiles from Southern Europe during the nineteenth century: Les Éxilés politiques espagnols, italiens et portugais en France au 19e: Questions et perspectives (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2017); and to French-Italian intellectual networks in the nineteenth century: Entre France et Italie: Échanges et réseaux intellectuels au XIXe siècle, Transalpina 21 (2018) (edited together with Mariella Colin and Sylvia Tatti). Johannes Gleixner Johannes Gleixner is a Researcher at Collegium Carolinum, Research Institute for the History of the Czech Lands and Slovakia, currently working at its branch office in Prague. He earned his Doctorate from LMU Munich in 2015. His main research interests include the history of political ideas and (anti‐)religion in Central and Eastern Europe, the history of socialism, the history of planned economies, and digital methods in historiography. Amongst others, he has published a monograph on intellectual religions (“Menschheitsreligionen”: T. G. Masaryk, A. V. Lunačarskij und die religiöse Herausforderung revolutionärer Staaten [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016]). Daniela Haarmann Daniela Haarmann studied history, ancient history, and musicology at the University of Vienna. In the years 2012 to 2015 she was Research Assistant for the history of veterinary medicine in the Habsburg Empire at the University of Veterinary Medicine of Vienna, and from 2015 to 2018 Prae-Doc and Research Assistant at the Institute of Classical Studies, University of Vienna, supported by the Doctoral Fellowship Program of the Austrian Academy of Science. In 2019, she held a Post-Doc scholarship of the Austrian Academy of Science. Beginning in autumn 2019, she is supported by a FWF-Schrödinger-scholarship at the Hungarian Academy of Science. Her research interests comprise the history of knowledge and science, the history

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of ideas, historical epistemology, and the sociology of knowledge in the Habsburg Empire, with a special and comparative focus on Austria, Hungary, and Transylvania. Anton Jansson Anton Jansson is a Swedish intellectual historian, who gained his PhD from the University of Gothenburg in 2017. His dissertation dealt with the intersection between Christian theology and political thought in the German Vormärz period. His current research is focused on two themes: the history of atheism and secularism in Sweden, and the history of the humanities in postwar Sweden. From 2019 he holds a position as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Lund Centre for the History of Knowledge (LUCK), Lund University, and is also an affiliated researcher at the Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion, University of Gothenburg. Jansson is one of the directors of the research network ISHASH (International Society for Historians of Atheism, Secularism, and Humanism). Carolin Kosuch Carolin Kosuch (PhD University of Leipzig, 2014) is a historian interested in the European cultural and political history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including anarchism, Jewish history, religious nonconformity, and secularism. After holding positions at the SimonDubnow-Institute for Jewish History and Culture (Leipzig) and the German Historical Institute Rome, she currently works as a Research Associate at the University of Göttingen. Among her publications are Missratene Söhne: Anarchismus und Sprachkritik im Fin de Siècle (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015) dealing with German-Jewish intellectual history and political philosophy. She is also the editor of a volume on anarchism and the avant-garde studying the mutual influence of arts and politics in modernity (Anarchism and the Avant-Garde: Radical Arts and Politics in Perspective [Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2019]). Daniel Laqua Daniel Laqua is Associate Professor of European History at Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. His work is concerned with the dynamics and tensions of transnational activism, covering a variety of international movements and organizations. He is the author of The Age of Internationalism and Belgium, 1880 – 1930: Peace, Progress and Prestige (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013) as well as the (co‐)editor of three edited volumes and three themed journal issues. He has also published a range of journal articles and book chapters; his articles in Labour History Review (2009) and the European Review of History (2014) as well as his chapter in Isabella Löhr and Bernhard Gißibl, eds, Bessere Welten: Kosmopolitismus in den Geschichtswissenschaften (Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 2017) have shed light on different aspects of international freethought. Christoffer Leber Christoffer Leber, PhD, studied modern history and German literature at LMU Munich, where he completed his Master’s degree in 2014. From 2015 to 2018 he was a PhD student at the International Research Group “Religious Cultures in 19th and 20th Century Europe” at LMU Munich. His PhD project focused on the history of the German monist movement around 1900, relating it to the history of secularity in Imperial Germany. Since 2018, he is a Research Assistant at the History of Science Department at LMU Munich. His research interests include the history of science in nineteenth and twentieth century Germany and the intersection of science and politics.

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Antoine Mandret-Degeilh Antoine Mandret-Degeilh holds a PhD in political science from Sciences Po Paris (2015) and a Master’s degree in political sociology, also from Sciences Po Paris (2007). His Master’s thesis focused on the political and societal dimensions of the contemporary practice of republican baptism (also called civil baptism or civil godparenthood). His PhD is a socio-history of the kinship rituals celebrated by French and German municipalities (civil marriages, civil baptisms, Mother’s Day, wedding anniversaries, etc.). Mandret-Degeilh is currently pursuing his research on the rites of municipal institutions and political symbolism in general, as well as on the symbolic construction of Franco-German relations at a local level. Katharina Neef Katharina Neef, PhD, is researching and lecturing at the Department of Religious Studies at Leipzig University and at the Center for Teachers’ Education at the Technical University of Chemnitz. Her dissertation conducted in the field of religious studies at Leipzig University (Die Entstehung der Soziologie aus der Sozialreform: Eine Fachgeschichte [Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 2012]) reconstructed the influence of social reform and secularist agents on the formation of academic sociology in Germany prior to 1918. Her research focus is on religious nonconformism and (multiple) deviance, the history of minority religions, and the history of social sciences. Claus Spenninger Claus Spenninger is a PhD-candidate in the history of science at LMU Munich. As a member of the International Research Training Group “Religious Cultures in 19th and 20th-Century Europe” he works on the relationship between science and religion. After studying history, history of science, and political science at LMU Munich and Caltech, he is currently working on his dissertation on the interconnections of science, religion, and politics in nineteenth-century scientific materialism. Barbara Wagner Barbara Wagner is a historian and Professor at the Institute of History, University of Warsaw. Her research centers on modern history and social history. Other research interests include the history of education, didactics, and civic education. She is the author of five books, among them Przeobrażenia w edukacji historycznej w Polsce w latach 1945 – 1956 (Warsaw: COM SNP, 1986), dealing with the social history of education in Poland. Her latest book, Uzależnieni wolnomyśliciele: Stowarzyszenie Myśli Wolnej w Polsce 1945 – 1951 (Warsaw: Instytut Historyczny Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2002), is an in-depth study on the history of Polish freethought associations in the wake of communist politics after the Second World War. It provides explanations on the processes of secularization in Poland.

Abstracts Costanza D’Elia Group Portrait with Freethinker: Jacob Moleschott, Risorgimento Culture, and the Italian Nation-Building Process This essay aims to shed light on the philosophical and political implications of the scientific materialist and atheist Jacob Moleschott’s (1822– 1893) thought and on his role during the process of Italian nation building. In particular, his relationship to Francesco De Sanctis (1817– 1883), one of the founding fathers of the unified Italian nation state, will be analyzed. Moleschott and De Sanctis first met in Zurich as exiles after the failure of the Revolutions of 1848 – 49. Moleschott proved influential on De Sanctis, distancing him from Hegelianism. After 1860 and in the process of a radical reform of the university system, the latter, as first minister of public education in the new Italian state, offered Moleschott an academic position in Italy. Moleschott’s teachings became very popular and contributed to the secularization of science in Italy, namely the detachment from the traditional philosophical framework and the endorsement of materialist and Darwinist positions which were fiercely refused by the Catholic Church. De Sanctis’ and Moleschott’s cases exemplify a particular “Italian way” of secularization in which intellectual renewal was intertwined with a marked anticlericalism – an important element in the building of the new, unified nation. Not necessarily atheist, this anticlericalism included claims for a truly Christian mandate, or the quest for a non-transcendent civic faith. Laura Fournier-Finocchiaro Garibaldi and Mazzini: Anticlericalism, Laicism, and the Concept of a National Religion During the process of the Italian national unification, the Risorgimento, a strong anticlerical ideology came up. Freethinkers and “Neo-Ghibellines” joined forces to denounce papacy which seemed the main obstacle on the way to the Italian nation state. Despite their radicalism, there were very few supporters of infidelity in the ranks of those secularists. Rather, the positions adopted by the two leaders of the Italian unification movement, Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807– 1882) and Giuseppe Mazzini (1805 – 1872), proved decisive for the culture of Italian freethinkers during the nineteenth century. Among the anticlerical and anti-papal views expressed in their writings, Garibaldi attacked the “vileness of priesthood” and defended state’s laicism, while Mazzini struggled against the popes’ authority in the name of a new national religion. Yet both also differed from the self-declared freethinkers of their time because Mazzini’s and Garibaldi’s specific anticlericalhttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110688283-002

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ism did not necessarily separate politics and religion. In fact, and despite the negative terminology of anticlericalism, their ideas – deeply influential on Italian culture – conveyed a positive political ideology beyond reaction and destruction: the “fathers of the nation” aimed at building a new society based on a new religiosity. Johannes Gleixner Socialist Secularism between Nation, State, and the Transnational Movement: The International of Proletarian Freethinkers in Central and Eastern Europe After the First World War, freethinkers in Germany and in newly established Czechoslovakia faced similar problems, albeit with different consequences. Before the war, both national organizations belonged to the most influential branches of the worldwide freethought movement. After the war, however, both were faced with the challenge of embodying the new paradigm of the democratic and progressive society while, at the same time, they had to deal with an ever-increasing mass public. In the long run, this constellation reduced their impact significantly. Consequently, the old question came up anew of whether freethinkers should ally with a political party or stay apolitical. Parts of the national freethought movements felt drawn to the newly established communist parties because their radical approach of challenging and changing society resonated well with them. Even though this alliance seemed quite natural and manifested mostly in an aggressive pursuit of propagating atheism, it also had its limits, as the case of the emerging Союз воинствующих безбожников (Sojuz voinstvuiushchikh bezbozhnikov, Soviet League of the Godless) exemplifies. This chapter aims to study the different frameworks in which several Czech and German freethought organizations interacted. A special focus will be on the collision of different expectations and timeframes, particularly on the International of Proletarian Freethinkers that went in opposition to its “bourgeois” freethought mother organization. Moreover, all the national organized freethinker groups had troubles finding a common denominator between an international organization and their own national ambitions, leading to diverging expectations of what a secularized society should look like. These tensions offer a fascinating insight into different “secularities,” or rather: “secularisms,” their interplay, and the process of finding their place on national as well as on European levels. Daniela Haarmann Freidenkerei, Libre-pensée, Szabadgondolkodás – Concepts of Freethinking during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries Different words carry different meanings, not only in various languages, but also within a language itself. This holds true for freethinking, secularism, and athe-

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ism, too, three key terms of this volume. This paper traces the conceptual history of these notions in different languages, such as English, French, German, Hungarian, and Romanian, during the so-called “long nineteenth century” (1789 – 1918). It discusses the respective entries in contemporary encyclopedias and dictionaries and analyzes the written works of the most influential intellectual leaders of secularism in these areas of language. In three parts, the chapter traces the historical development of the concepts, reaching from a non-organized, loose collection of ideas developed by European scholars at the beginning of the eighteenth century to the organized movements at the end of the nineteenth century. The introductory part examines the initial situation by embedding freethinking, secularism, and atheism in the English, German, and French Enlightenment before 1789. The second and third parts analyze and compare the terms in the periods from 1789 to 1848 and from 1848 to 1918, respectively, to highlight similarities and differences in their structures and contents. Covering the period from revolution to restoration to radicalization, the chapter demonstrates that the lexicographic reception of freethinking, secularism, and atheism was highly influenced by the philosophical and political spirit of their age. Furthermore, it contributes to a translingual approach to conceptual history. Anton Jansson Friends and Foes: Two Secularisms in late Nineteenth-Century Sweden Sweden, which historically has had a strongly Lutheran culture, today ranks among the most secular countries in the world. A first shift toward a more diverse and secular political and social landscape occurred in the late nineteenth century. Around the 1880s and 1890s several secularist organizations were founded, such as the Föreningen för religionsfrihet (Association for the Freedom of Religion) and the Utilistiska samfundet (Utilist Society). This was also a time for the foundation of the Swedish folkrörelser (popular movements), most notably the temperance movement, the revivalist/free church movement, and the labor movement. These are generally considered decisive for the establishment of the modern democratic Sweden. Swedish secularism needs to be understood in this context either as a popular movement of its own, or as part of the formation of these larger movements. In this chapter, I will focus on two different ways of conceiving and performing secularism at the high point of Swedish freethought around 1890. To this end, I will concentrate on two leading freethinkers of the time: the social democrat Hjalmar Branting (1860 – 1925), who was to become the Prime Minister of Sweden in the 1920s, and the utilist Viktor Lennstrand (1861– 1895). Proceeding from this, I will discuss the freethinkers’ legacy and role in the forging of secular modernity in Sweden.

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Daniel Laqua “The Most Advanced Nation on the Path of Liberty”: Universalism and National Difference in International Freethought Freethinkers frequently cast their views and actions in universalist terms, claiming that their cause transcended national differences. From 1880 onwards, they also maintained an international organization, the Fédération Internationale de la Libre Pensée (International Freethought Federation, IFF), to advance secularist aims across national borders. Yet despite their professions of unity, specific national visions and understandings of “secularity” featured prominently within international freethought circles. This chapter investigates such tensions. After highlighting different national contexts and terminologies surrounding freethought and the promotion of secular ideas, it examines how the IFF staged and celebrated commonalities through its congresses. In this context, the veneration – and, in some instances, appropriation – of particular individuals as “freethought martyrs” is considered in particular depth. Finally, the chapter discusses the IFF’s Prague congress of 1907, as this event allows us to trace some of the wider issues in question. Ongoing tensions surrounding Czech–German relations in Bohemia clearly affected the congress which became a forum for the expression of national anxieties but also for affirmations of transnational bonds. Christoffer Leber Integration through Science? Nationalism and Internationalism in the German Monist Movement (1906 – 1918) The Deutsche Monistenbund (German Monist League), founded in 1906, was a leading middle-class freethought movement in the German Empire. It promoted a universal worldview (Weltanschauung) based on natural sciences. As a main representative of German secularism at the turn of the century, the Monist League shaped different concepts of secularity and added them to the idea of the modern German nation. Monists not only popularized a scientific worldview; they also opposed the Christian churches and conservative forces in Wilhelmine Germany. This paper examines the conflicting relationship between nationalism and internationalism present in the writings of Ernst Haeckel (1834– 1919) and Wilhelm Ostwald (1853 – 1932), head of the Monist League from 1911– 1915. Drawing on a close reading of Haeckel’s and Ostwald’s monist accounts, I argue that the self-image of the monist movement oscillated between nationalism and internationalism. Although Ostwald was a strong defender of internationalism, especially before 1914, he believed in the supremacy of Western – not to say German – science. In his writings, two concepts were in conflict: the universality of science and the particularity of the nation. Referring to a nationalist and interna-

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tionalist rhetoric at once, he and other monists defined their own path to a secular nation. Antoine Mandret-Degeilh A Secular Avant-garde? About the Unknown Freethinker Roots of Today’s French Civil Baptism This chapter studies the unknown freethinker roots of French civil baptism, a family ceremony nowadays celebrated at French town halls. The ritual borrows from Catholic baptism: during the ceremony two persons − generally a woman and a man − are appointed to be godparents for a child. Descendant of the so-called “red baptisms” conducted in French communist municipalities of the interwar period, civil baptism originally was developed by freethinkers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with strong secularist leanings. This contribution of early secularists to today’s French municipal secularity remains a fact still widely unrecognized. Though nowadays civil baptism’s performance is neither authorized nor prohibited but left to the discretion of mayors, it has strongly developed in France during the last three decades. But contrary to its ideologically charged secularist origins, the large majority of today’s parents, by opting for civil baptism, do not pursue any anticlerical or anti-Catholic, and not necessarily anti-religious goals. Rather, their first concern is to create a spiritual kinship at the lowest possible symbolic cost, which is why they prefer civil baptism over the Catholic ritual. The administrative procedures, to them, seem less burdensome at the town hall compared to the church. As this chapter shows, an initially secular practice takes on different meaning in the course of history. Katharina Neef Politicizing a (Non)Religious Act: The Secularist Church Exit Propaganda of the Komitee Konfessionslos (1908 – 1914) In 1910, the secularist activism network intensified its propaganda on church exit. It concentrated forces to make visible the supposedly advanced secularization of the German society. This chapter centers on the Komitee Konfessionslos (Committee Un-Denominational), a prominent secularist initiative in those days. By analyzing the Committee’s publications not only its activities and its impact on society are reconstructed, but – from a larger perspective – the potentials, means, and limits of propaganda used by fringe groups in the Wilhelmine Era are discussed. In particular, this chapter probes the specific communicative strategies of the German secularists, who wanted to be acknowledged as scientific and not as ideological or political players in the public sphere. Above all, the scientific debate on secularist activists offers a contra-intuitive, new view

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on the development of the sciences in modernity. Other than their self-image suggests, the sciences were far from being unaffected by non-academic life and not as objective as they claimed to be. Rather, they have been shaped as a cultural practice under the influence of societal claims, necessities, and intrusions. In this process, secularism has been a key player from the outset. Claus Spenninger A Movement That Never Materialized: The Perception of Scientific Materialism as a Secular Movement in Nineteenth-Century Germany Scientific materialism dominated the German-speaking debates on science and religion in the 1850s. Its main proponents – the zoologist Carl Vogt (1817– 1895), the physiologist Jacob Moleschott (1822– 1893), and the physician Ludwig Büchner (1824– 1899) – propagated a science-based worldview that denied the existence of immateriality. Everything was to be explained by the laws of matter. The materialists sparked a polemical debate about the adequate role of science and religion in modern society. However, it would be misleading to assume a coherent movement or institutionalized group behind scientific materialism. Its proponents were only loosely in contact with each other and never founded an official organization dedicated to their views. Yet for their contemporaries it still seemed like Vogt, Moleschott, and Büchner figured as the leaders of a well-organized, growing secular mass movement. This chapter explores the fragile group identity of materialists as well as the ways in which their opponents interpreted materialism as a movement. Their perception not only came to dominate the debates over materialism but also contributed to the broader discourse over secularism after the Revolutions of 1848 – 49. Barbara Wagner Secularity in the New State: The Case of Poland This chapter aims to present the main phases in the history of the Polish freethought movement, which commenced its organized activity in Paris in July 1906, and further developed in the new Polish state established after the First World War. The history of the relationship between Polish freethinkers and state authorities proved very conflictual. Initially, the government allowed for their legal open activity, but later disbanded the freethought organizations. Polish freethought was heavily influenced by both Western European philosophical thought and organized freethinkers of other countries. Yet Polish secularists also developed their own unique ideology corresponding to the complex national setting in Poland, where ethnic minorities constituted one third of the society. Against the backdrop of the particular religious situation in Poland with Roman Catholics representing 68 % of the population, secularity, as exemplified

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by Polish freethinkers, took on a specific character. Shortly after 1918, a divergence in views between the leaders of the Polish freethought movement became evident. Parts of the organized Polish freethinkers established contact with the Polish labor movement, while the most radical Polish activists were fascinated with communism and admired post-revolutionary Russia. In these regards, Polish secularism and politics sealed a strategic alliance.

Carolin Kosuch

Freethinkers in Modern Europe’s Secularities: Introduction

Classical theories of secularization have been called into question for some time now. Their attempt to systematize a continuing process of religious differentiation and explain religion’s apparent loss of importance in modern societies – along with their assumption that modernity renders this development irreversible – has been challenged by numerous sociological, religious, anthropological, and historical studies, which have broadened and diversified our picture of the place and value religion has held in past and present European and non-European societies.¹ It is to their credit that we understand the secular today more as an epistemic category, shaped by a dynamic interplay with the religious. Following cultural anthropologist Talal Asad, the religious and the secular both seem determined by the same discursive process – that is, they are not fixed categories per se, but made and remade, each influencing the other’s definition and contours.² Current studies on the topic are conducted mostly in the field of “secular studies,” which have been experiencing a boom lately, especially in anthropology, ethnology, and sociology, with a focus on contemporary non-European

 For critical approaches to secularization, see Peter Berger, ed., The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Washington: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1999); Steve Bruce, ed., Religion and Modernization: Sociologists and Historians Debate the Secularization Thesis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001); Olaf Blaschke, Konfessionen im Konflikt: Deutschland zwischen 1800 und 1970, ein zweites konfessionelles Zeitalter (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002); Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, Die Wiederkehr der Götter: Religion in der modernen Kultur (Munich: C.H.Beck, 2007); Manuel Borutta, “Genealogie der Säkularisierungstheorie: Zur Historisierung einer großen Erzählung der Moderne,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 36, no. 3 (2010): 347– 376; Benjamin Ziemann, “Säkularisierung und Neuformierung des Religiösen: Religion und Gesellschaft in der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 51 (2011): 3 – 36; and Rebekka Habermas, ed., Negotiating the Secular and the Religious in the German Empire: Transnational Approaches (Oxford/New York: Berghahn, 2019).  See Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 1– 17. Asad’s approach has to be critically revaluated, particularly if applied in studies with a historical focus. See Rebekka Habermas, “Negotiating the Religious and the Secular in Modern German History,” in Habermas, Negotiating the Secular and the Religious, 6 – 7. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110688283-003

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regions.³ In comparison, the numbers of historical studies dealing with the subject in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe is relatively modest.⁴ This absence seems surprising, as the ideologically charged and politically significant interplay between the secular and the religious substantially shaped the histories, cultures, and mentalities of the European long nineteenth century. Opposing forces that nonetheless frequently intersected, the secular-religious dichotomy deeply influenced the era, both in institutional-political ways and in terms of worldviews and beliefs. The former led to politicized debates on secularism and the politics of secularization in a time characterized just as much by religious renewal and the ongoing importance of religious institutions and authorities in politics and society, while the latter inspired a shift in power relations that granted the individual more say in how they chose to interpret their belief system. In epistemic and anthropological terms, the secular seems the natural counterpart of the religious, and therefore carries a certain significance that transcends time and culture. When focusing on historical Europe, though, once it became deeply involved with the political sphere in the late eighteenth century, the secular has manifested in the form of the above-mentioned secularism and secularization.⁵ A historical perspective, in these respects, offers the benefit of obser-

 See, e. g., Rajeev Bhargava, The Promise of India’s Secular Democracy (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Marian Burchardt, Matthias Middell and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr, eds, Multiple Secularities Beyond the West: Religion and Modernity in the Global Age (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2015); or Daniel Kinitz, Die andere Seite des Islam: Säkularismus-Diskurs und muslimische Intellektuelle im modernen Ägypten (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2016).  See, e. g., the studies of Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Manuel Borutta, Antikatholizismus: Deutschland und Italien im Zeitalter der europäischen Kulturkämpfe (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010); Lisa Dittrich, Antiklerikalismus in Europa: Ö ffentlichkeit und Sä kularisierung in Frankreich, Spanien und Deutschland (1848−1914) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014); Todd Weir, Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Rise of the Fourth Confession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); and Habermas, Negotiating the Religious and the Secular. This volume aims at filling this research gap further.  The term secularism “can refer most broadly to a whole range of modern worldviews and ideologies concerning ‘religion’, which may be consciously held and reflexively elaborated or, alternatively, which have taken hold of us and function as taken-for-granted assumptions that constitute the reigning epistemic doxa or ‘unthought’. But secularism also refers to different normative-ideological state projects, as well as to different legal-constitutional frameworks of separation of state and religion and to different models of differentiation of religion, ethics, morality, and law.” (José Casanova, “The Secular, Secularizations, Secularisms,” in Rethinking Secularism, ed. Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer and Jonathan VanAntwerpen [New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011], 66.) Even though secularism overlaps with secularization, there are dif-

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vational distance, helps to reconnect these broad epistemic categories to concrete events and political backgrounds in a particular time and links them to a rich set of printed and unprinted historical sources. This focus on the European long nineteenth century is not meant to imply that secularization and secularism were without historical precursors reaching far back into history, at least as far as Martin Luther’s Reformation and the Confessional Age that followed.⁶ Still, it was in this era and region that they took on ideological features, along with a central and charged position in a culture war being waged against Catholicism by influential public intellectual and political figures holding anticlerical⁷ and scientific materialist⁸ views – the freethinkers.⁹

ferences when “secularization” is used to describe the processual replacement of religiously based public bodies, social institutions, but also views and opinions, by secular, that is, non-religious ones. On the twisted history of the term secularization, see Hermann Lübbe, Säkularisierung: Geschichte eines ideenpolitischen Begriffs (Freiburg: Alber, 2003).  See Philip S. Gorski, “Was the Confessional Era a Secular Age?,” in Umstrittene Säkularisierung: Soziologische und historische Analysen zur Differenzierung von Religion und Politik, ed. Karl Gabriel, Christel Gärtner and Detlef Pollack (Berlin: Berlin University Press, 22014), 189 – 224. Some historians even trace back the roots of secularization to the Investiture Controversy of the Middle Ages. See Gerd Althoff, “Libertas ecclesiae oder die Anfänge der Säkularisierung im Investiturstreit?,” in Umstrittene Säkularisierung: Soziologische und historische Analysen zur Differenzierung von Religion und Politik, ed. Karl Gabriel, Christel Gärtner and Detlef Pollack (Berlin: Berlin University Press, 22014), 78 – 100.  Anticlericalism functioned as the main cultural code in the European culture wars. It has strong secularist leanings but forms a category of its own with its hostile, polemicizing focus on Christian church officials of all denominations. (See Lisa Dittrich, “Europäischer Antiklerikalismus: Eine Suche zwischen Säkularisierung und Religionsreform,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 45, no. 1 [2019]: 5 – 36.) A concise definition of anticlericalism provides Wolfram Kaiser in stating that anticlericalism “was at once a deeper rooted and a politically more heterogeneous movement that can be discerned from an analysis focused exclusively on parliamentary debates and liberal governmental measures.” (Wolfram Kaiser, “‘Clericalism – that is our Enemy’!: European Anticlericalism and the Culture Wars,” in Culture Wars: Secular–Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth Century Europe, ed. Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003], 48.) Anticlericalism is also a vital part of anti-Catholicism, yet it carries a broader significance in turning against religious authorities in general, including Protestant and Jewish ones. (See also Nigel Aston and Michael Cragoe, eds, Anticlericalism in Britain, c. 1500 – 1914 [Stroud: Sutton, 2001].) However, both anticlericalism and anti-Catholicism primarily targeted the “traditional” Catholic clergy as many anticlericalists and anti-Catholicists stemmed from a Protestant, liberal Catholic, or leftwing, that is, socialist, anarchist, or communist, background. A special issue of the Journal of Contemporary History (3/2018) is dedicated to a comparison of nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture wars with focus on the interwar period and its ideological clashes. The contributions aim to stress the role of religion in the politicized Age of Extremes which seems to echo those of the nineteenth century. (See Todd Weir, “Introduction:

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Equipped with sharpened polemical weaponry, these radical players wanted the rapid secularization of their respective nations, and envisioned secularism as the basis of a nascent modern society. It was due at least in part to their continuous efforts that the specifics and aims of secularism were further defined:¹⁰ freethinkers called for the propagation of a worldview based on natural sciences; the separation of church and state; the coordination of measures to leave the church; legal and social acceptance for secular alternatives to religious life rituals, such as civil baptism, the Jugendweihe (civil confirmation), civil marriage, and cremation; and the substitution of religious education by non-religious moral or ethical instruction in schools. With these measures, Europe’s freethinkers intended to reduce the influence of religion on society and culture, and in the long run tried to remove it from the center of public institutions. On a political level their goal was to re-balance interpretations of culture and discursive power structures, re-grounding the secular-religious entanglement in favor of the secular. Following this freethinking logic, the residues of religion should be relocated in the private sphere, in the form of moral and ethical convictions – or eventually given up completely. What the historical European freethinkers established in nineteenth-century Europe has echoes in the multifaceted secular-religious discourse in many parts of the world today, with varying outcomes and shifting implications. In the nineteenth century, though, their radical goals often intersected with more moderate attitudes adopted by Europe’s Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish liberals and liberal socialists. This large group furthered a self-understanding based on science, civic values, and reason, but did not fight institutionalized religion the way the Comparing Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture Wars,” Journal of Contemporary History 53, no. 3 [2018]: 489 – 502.)  Scientific materialism was an influential concept advocated and popularized by intellectuals and scientists such as Jacob Moleschott, Ludwig Büchner, Carl Vogt, or Heinrich Czolbe. Deeply shaped by Darwin, those secularists developed a worldview based on natural sciences and positivism. Their concepts more or less openly opposed the Christian doctrine and significantly contributed to freethinking positions. On scientific materialism, see Annette Wittkau-Horgby, Materialismus: Entstehung und Wirkung in den Wissenschaften des 19. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998).  On freethinkers, see the following.  See Asad, Formations of the Secular, 23. For historical figures such as the freethinkers, modernity and secularity went hand in hand. This rather ideological view is contradicted by recent trends that indicate the opposite in many cases. Modernity and secularity align, when secularism is equated with a positive notion of liberation from religion (a “historical stadial consciousness” [Casanova, “The Secular, Secularizations, Secularisms,” 67]). The example of the United States and other non-European states show that – if this condition is not fulfilled – societies can be modern without being overall secular.

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small minority of radical secularists did. Rather, they assigned religion a new place in society, whether as humanism or civil religion.¹¹ Still, they added to the interplay of the secular and religious, and transitioned fluidly to making more radical demands. This volume focuses on the historical players of radical European secularism. It aims to shed light on Europe’s multifaceted freethinkers, which it frames as early secular agents, notably on their ideas, projects, networks, associations, and their sometimes heterogeneous, sometimes convergent goals in the age of European nation building. The chapters of this book present freethinkers’ political and cultural visions for the forming or consolidating European nation states: these radical secularists set high hopes in the modern state, despite its often expressly Christian foundations. Because of the homogenizing tendency of the national project and in accordance with their own ideologically charged progressivist, liberal, socialist, and modernizing viewpoints, Europe’s freethinkers expected the alliance of throne and altar soon to break up. They took it for granted that a scientific worldview would eventually triumph, paving the way for a renegotiation of the place and value of religion in society. In order to speed up this process and to distribute freethinking ideas, radical secularists such as the Italian iconic political figures Giuseppe Garibaldi and Giuseppe Mazzini, the Swedish social democrat Hjalmar Branting, and the scientific materialist and physician Jacob Moleschott used their professional networks, associations, and publications, but also prominently engaged in the political process of nation building, as the chapters by Laura Fournier-Finocchiaro, Costanza D’Elia, and Anton Jansson emphasize in addressing Italian and Swedish secularisms. The state, however, did not follow this freethinking direction unconditionally. Quite the contrary: to state authorities, radical secularists often seemed suspicious, uncomfortably close to socialism and revolutionary sentiment and in general inclined to challenge the status quo by criticizing religion and its representatives. Thus, especially in times of war, political conservativism, and totalitarianism, freethinkers were faced with surveillance and persecution, leading to the dissolution of their associations, as Barbara Wagner’s and other chapters of this volume explore. With its emphasis, our book ties into recent attempts to de-ideologize secularism and to embed its concrete historical impact in the context of a specific time, politics, and mindset.¹² The authors of this volume also strive to historicize

 Weir, Secularism and Religion.  See, e. g., Borutta, “Genealogie der Säkularisierungstheorie,” 347– 376; Lisa Dittrich, “European Connections, Obstacles, and the Search for a New Concept of Religion: The Freethought

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certain notions connected to the secularist enterprise, such as “progress” and “modernization,” and position them at the intersection of the fierce secular political propaganda that came from Europe’s freethinkers and existing secularizing tendencies in the European societies the freethinkers were part of. While we acknowledge that secularity and modernity, in their various forms, unquestionably take on global dimensions,¹³ our book deals with their European incarnations, including Central-European secularist pioneers, from a historical perspective in the first era of modernity – that is, the period from the late eighteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth century.¹⁴ This seems reasonable, as freethinkers often acted on national and transnational European levels, inspired each other, and, in many cases, maintained European networks. Their efforts led to an influential discourse that added to secularist ideas in other parts of the world, and – as the century moved on – was in return enriched by developments from abroad.¹⁵ This volume adopts a rather wide temporal span, starting from the Enlightenment and the French Revolution as the initial points of secularism in politics and society, not least in legal and institutional terms, and ending with the 1920s, which were crucial for Central Europe’s young nations and the secularist activities therein. The 1840s, the 1880s, and the First World War, the age of totalitarianisms, and particularly the period after 1945 initiated further major shifts in the

Movement as an Example of Transnational Anti-Catholicism in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Religious History 39, no. 2 (2015): 261– 279.  On the multifaceted dimensions of modernity, see Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). On the global scales of secularity, see Marion Eggert and Lucian Hölscher, eds, Religion and Secularity: Transformations and Transfers of Religious Discourses in Europe and Asia (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2013).  On the differentiation between the first (orthodox) and second (reflexive) modernity, see Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash, Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order (Cambridge: Polity, 2007).  On freethinkers in the United States of the same time period, see Susan Jacoby, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (New York: Henry Holt, 2005). See for the European connections of US-freethinkers: Katja Rampelmann, Im Licht der Vernunft: Die Geschichte des deutsch-amerikanischen Freidenker-Almanachs von 1878 bis 1901 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2003). Outside of Europe and in addition to the United States, freethinkers were, e. g., influential also in Australia already in the nineteenth century. A detailed study on their impact, however, is still missing. Besides, anticlericalism leading to a secularist policy was particularly strong in Central and South America.

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structure of European secularisms, which would be sufficient material for another volume entirely – and therefore are not at the center of our considerations.¹⁶ The era and region the chapters of this book deal with were characterized by massive political, religious, social, cultural, economic, scientific, and technological changes.¹⁷ They manifested in and simultaneously were triggered by the profound upheavals of the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the political revolutions of 1789, 1848 – 49, and 1917, and the First World War. With the broad removal of social and economic barriers, the extension of infrastructure, the granting of personal rights, freedom, and liberalism, a climate of unprecedented mobility and social permeability was created. Promoted by scientific and technological innovation and educational campaigns addressing larger parts of the populations, European modernities set once-statically organized societies in motion, leading them to break with conventions, beliefs, traditions, social norms, and securities. Knowledge and values that were once taken for granted, together with the Christian conception of creation, were put to the test by scientists and scholars, including Faraday, Schleiden, Darwin, Mendel, Freud, Durkheim, Einstein, and many others. Side by side with philosophers, artists, liberals, socialists, and radical-democratic politicians, several of those scientists, especially the natural scientists, spearheaded the most significant changes of their century. Catchwords like rationality, reason, positivism, and progress spread and reached a growing number of people. National movements formed that in some cases visibly adopted secularist views, sometimes using them – as in the Czech, French, Italian, or Polish cases – to draft strong secularist political agendas when shaping their state constitutions. In the course of the century, numerous new religious, political, and ideological ideas, including socialism and anarchism, the woman’s liberation movement, spiritism, esotericism, theosophy, the European branches of Buddhism, and vegetarianism – just to name a few – gained popularity and added to the existing confessions, political positions, and worldviews.¹⁸ This multitude of choices enabled individuals to express their opinions in different and more

 For a periodization of secularism, see Todd Weir, “Säkularismus (Freireligiöse, Freidenker, Monisten, Ethiker, Humanisten),” in Handbuch der Religionsgeschichte im deutschsprachigen Raum, vol. 6.2: 20. Jahrhundert: Religiöse Positionen und soziale Formationen, ed. Lucian Hölscher and Volkard Krech (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2016), 189 – 218.  On the era of modernity, see Peter Gay, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy (New York: Norton, 2007). See also Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).  See, e. g., Diethart Kerbs and Jürgen Reulecke, eds, Handbuch der deutschen Reformbewegungen 1880 – 1933 (Wuppertal: P. Hammer, 1998).

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autonomous ways. Among these new movements, radical secularism started as a small and primarily male project, with women a target group to be emancipated and “freed” from religious influences, closely following a broader tendency toward anti-Catholicism.¹⁹ However, a few stalwart female freethinkers participated in the European secular movements, including British feminists Annie Besant and Harriet Law. In their numerous public speeches, articles, and written disputes, they were active in fields far beyond charity and caring, the focal areas society assigned to women at the time. And even though vocational training and higher education were far from being broadly available to women in their era – an issue that would become the core of many European women’s liberation movements – these female freethinkers went further than many other feminists: their dedication to traditionally male-coded topics such as philosophy, science, politics, and atheism, their confident public appearances, and their thorough scholarly reasoning were met with curiosity, shock, resistance, and ambivalence, even by other freethinkers. In any case, their ideas and actions proved quite provocative for women who had just entered the public.²⁰ In the rapidly growing cities, with their new factories, their accelerated rhythms, their countless possibilities for consumption, artistic creativity, and entertainment, and their diversifying public sphere, European modernity found its most vivid expression. But also its dark side became apparent, namely in the precarious conditions of existence that shaped the everyday realities of many Europeans, and – together with new pressures, constraints, obligations, and fears – weighed heavily on their shoulders. Against this backdrop, Europe’s modernities seem an age of reconciling opposites. It was on these shifting grounds that freethinkers developed their ideas and influence. Not least due to the heterogeneous cultural, historical, and religious backgrounds of these agents in an era of upheaval, secularity took on different forms, too: “[t]he way secularity figures within configurations of modernity is fundamentally shaped by the long [sic] durée of civilizational history,ˮ²¹ as Monika Wohlrab-Sahr points out. Her idea of “multiple secularities,” which builds upon Shmuel Eisenstadt’s notion of “multiple modernities,”²² is vital for our vol-

 See Borutta, Antikatholizismus, 366 – 386.  See Laura Schwartz, Infidel Feminism: Secularism, Religion and Women’s Emancipation, England 1830 – 1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 5. For further reading, see Joan Wallach Scott, Sex and Secularism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).  Marian Burchardt and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr, “Multiple Secularities: Religion and Modernity in the Global Age,” International Sociology 28, no. 6 (11/2013): 605.  See Shmuel Eisenstadt, Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2003), 679 – 910.

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ume. It helps us to explore how exactly the secularities were defined and negotiated by Europe’s freethinking secularists, how they relate to the religious, and how they were implemented as political projects in society and state policies, with national and transnational ramifications. Our book works with a rather wide definition of freethinkers, including “freethinking” or “freethought” as intellectual concepts. The terminology refers to the flexible and mutating self-designations of individuals loosely united by a movement, which in turn comprised associations, clubs, magazines, lectures, publications, and political and cultural initiatives. They shared a certain set of broadly defined values and convictions, most prominently a longing for worldliness – that is, the separation of church and state and the promotion of a scientifically based, inner-worldly, rational, empiric, and positivist worldview. This, of course – in line with their ambivalence to more moderate stances mentioned above – does not mean that some freethinkers would not have shown an interest in radically re-valuing Christianity itself, purifying it from its alleged defects and turning it into the moral base of the newly formed nation. Many freethinkers were also curious about cultural reformist, pantheist, and even spiritualist and esoteric ideas.²³ Thus, in addition to their associations with freethought movements, some secularists also joined branches of the life reform movement, the peace movement, or new religious circles like theosophism or anthroposophism.²⁴ Nevertheless, or even for this very reason, their aims remained secular, and they struggled passionately for a secular society rather than one interwoven with organized, politically influential religion, for secular political and social in So called occultist, spiritualist, or esoteric ideas did not form the distinct “Other” of the modern striving for scientific rationalism, but rather contributed to promoting this aspiration. Because they shared central assumptions such as the belief in science and its methodology, and heavily criticized the Christian churches, freethinkers could enter such circles while maintaining their membership in the secularist camp. At this point we again encounter the secularreligious entwinement. (See Corinna Treitel, A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004]; Monika NeugebauerWölk, Renko Geffarth and Markus Meumann, eds, Aufklärung und Esoterik: Wege in die Moderne [Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2013].)  See Weir, “Säkularismus,” 194. See also the concept of “multiple deviance” developed by religious studies scholar Heinz Mürmel (University of Leipzig) that captures the simultaneous activities of freethinkers (and other religiously and culturally nonconformist figures) in various reform groups. (For a theoretical outline, see Katharina Neef, “Multiple Devianz: Zu Fassbarkeit und Struktur eines alternativ-kulturellen Phänomens,” in Devianz und Dynamik: Festschrift für Hubert Seiwert zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Edith Franke, Christoph Kleine and Heinz Mürmel [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014], 185−203.) Notwithstanding persisting differences, ideologies, worldviews and reform efforts merged into a heterogeneous, deviant field towards the end of the nineteenth century.

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stitutions, and for a secular morality based on equality, reason, individual responsibility, and autonomy, while polemicizing against the Christian churches with their influential links to politics, their supposed paternalism, their backwardness, and their exploitation. But we also take into account that scientific materialist, monist, radical anticlericalist, and – from a political perspective – radical liberal, socialist, communist, and anarchist stances added to, were closely related to, or were even intertwined with freethinking secularism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.²⁵ The chapters by Laura Fournier-Finocchiaro, Costanza D’Elia, Christoffer Leber, and Claus Spenninger in this volume are dedicated to the study of some of these freethinking agents, exploring secularism’s ranges of ideas and networks, its influencers, and its promoters in the nineteenth century. These different ideological foundations are to some degree related to the various social backgrounds of the freethinkers, as is particularly highlighted in the chapters of Katharina Neef and Antoine Mandret-Degeilh. In its early stages, radical secularism in Europe was promoted mainly by educated upper-middleclass men. However, this rather bourgeois tendency was complemented by proletarian secularist branches once the growing labor movements and the organized lower-middle classes gained importance socially and politically toward the end of the century. Some, though not all, of the freethinking positions found their equivalents in proletarian, communist, and anarchist circles, and were promoted emphatically by leading socialists – above all, rigorous religious criticism and anticlericalism, often framed as an element of the class struggle.²⁶ This politicization proved especially important for Central European freethinkers, who were faced with the siren’s call of the Bolshevik Revolution even

 See, e. g., Frederick Gregory, Scientific Materialism in Nineteenth Century Germany (Dordrecht/Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1977); Edward Royle, Radicals, Secularists and Republicans: Popular Freethought in Britain, 1866 – 1915 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980); Jochen-Christoph Kaiser, Arbeiterbewegung und organisierte Religionskritik: Proletarische Freidenkerverbände in Kaiserreich und Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981); Guido Verucci, L’Italia laica prima e dopo l’unità 1848−1876: Anticlericalismo, libero pensiero e ateismo nella società italiana (Rome/Bari: Laterza, 1981); Frank Simon-Ritz, Die Organisation einer Weltanschauung: Die freigeistige Bewegung im Wilhelminischen Deutschland (Gütersloh: Kaiser, 1996); Jacqueline Lalouette, La Libre Pensée en France, 1848−1940 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1997); and Michael Rectenwald, Nineteenth-Century British Secularism: Science, Religion, and Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).  See Kaiser, “Clericalism,” 56 – 57; 59. See also Sebastian Prüfer, Sozialismus statt Religion: Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie vor der religiösen Frage, 1863 – 1890 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002).

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more than their Western European equivalents, as the chapters of Barbara Wagner, Johannes Gleixner, and Daniel Laqua show.²⁷ But the convergence of scientific and historical materialism had its limits: while the former leaned more toward changing religion into a worldview based on scientific findings, experiment, and observation, which would in turn help to solve social and economic problems, the latter aimed at changing economies and societies more directly and more profoundly, turning hierarchies and power relations upside down by political means. Freethinkers and Marxists also differed regarding the question of individual autonomy and personal development versus class struggle and collective, not primarily personal advancement, with the freethinkers leaning toward the former and the Marxists the latter. This fundamental difference in direction caused the formation of factions in the freethought movement, even within their respective national contexts. As the historical circumstances changed, with bourgeois culture giving way to an unstable peace and the lure of communism after the First World War, freethinkers tended more and more toward politics. Given the importance of terminology and conceptual distinctions in the complex fields of secularism and freethinking, this volume opens with a chapter dedicated to these subjects, authored by Daniela Haarmann. She traces the conceptual histories of terms vital for our book, such as atheism, deism, freethinking, and secularism, based on their respective entries in seminal eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historical European encyclopedias and reference works in five language areas (English, French, German, Hungarian, and Romanian). In her chapter, she studies the development of these notions from their first appearance to their manifestations as organized movements. In doing so, Haarmann is able to show that their reception was highly influenced by political constellations, by various cultural and religious backgrounds, and by different intellectual traditions reflecting the heterogeneity of secular concepts in Europe. To give our readers an impression of the freethinkers’ authentic tones and diverse backgrounds, this and all other chapters of this volume include selected quotations in the original languages next to the English translations.

 See, e. g., Brian Porter-Szűcs, Faith and Fatherland: Catholicism, Modernity, and Poland (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 336. For Czech anticlericalism, see Stanislav Balík, Luka´š Fasora, Jiři´ Hanuš and Marek Vlha, Der tschechische Antiklerikalismus: Quellen, Themen und Gestalt des tschechischen Antiklerikalismus in den Jahren 1848−1938 (Vienna: LIT, 2016), 368. On Czech freethinkers in the nineteenth century, see also Jana Marková, Religiöse Konzepte im tschechischen nationalen Diskurs (1860−1885) (Hildesheim/Zurich/New York: Georg Olms, 2016), 111– 113.

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Arranged in three parts, the following ten chapters center on the freethinkers’ history, as well as their organizations, dynamics, and networks. They explore social backgrounds, practices, and projects, the reception of ideas, and freethinkers’ relations to politics. The freethinkers’ diverse cultural, national, and religious settings are discussed, in particular the Belgian, Czech, French, German, Italian, Swedish, Polish, and Russian contexts, against the backdrop of Europe’s rich plurality of Christianities. The structure of the volume mirrors our attempt to grasp this diversity: its three sections are organized along broader, connecting topics, not according to geographical, confessional, or political considerations. They study Catholic and Protestant cultures as well as the different national situations of various European freethinker groups, following the idea of the heterogeneity of the secular. This allows for an in-depth analysis of national and transnational viewpoints. Hence the chapters written by historians, philologists, political scientists, and religious studies scholars will deal with the many levels of conceptual framing and politicization, along with the different degrees of influence these processes exerted on policy, their diverse modes of institutionalization, and their varying relations with religion, especially how the freethinkers interacted with the predominant denominations of their respective states. The rich heterogeneity of secularisms already becomes evident in the first section, which includes four chapters dealing with freethinkers in the process of nation building. These essays suggest that the ideas of Europe’s freethinkers had a lasting influence on society and politics and added to Europe’s nations and their self-concepts. As these chapters show, nineteenth- and twentieth-century efforts to reestablish or achieve national sovereignty for the first time, or to widen the bases for social and political participation in the existing nation state, were accompanied by the slow advance of secularization processes. With Laura Fournier-Finocchiaro’s essay on the leading Italian secularist intellectuals and famous “national heroes” Mazzini and Garibaldi, we plunge into a secularist, anticlerical setting formative for the Italian Risorgimento culture of the nineteenth century, which also proved influential on other secularist initiatives in and outside of Europe. Interestingly, and despite the manifest radicalism in their writings – in Garibaldi’s case especially in his novels – both differed from the secularity of their fellow Italian freethinkers by struggling for a new, purified national religiosity closely aligned with politics. Rather than adopting atheist non-religion, their particular anticlericalism led both to develop new concepts of “civil religion.” These concepts evolved in protest against a powerful Catholic culture, the physical presence of the popes, and their growing opposition against the nascent nation state. Based on Christian ethics, morality, liberalism, and humanity, this influential idea of a “civil religion” lived on in the new Italian nation state.

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Costanza D’Elia’s chapter examines the Italian case from a different perspective. She studies the personal relationship between the scientific materialist, atheist politician Jacob Moleschott, who was famous throughout Europe, and Italian pater patriae Francesco De Sanctis. Their encounter proved crucial for Moleschott’s impact on the newly founded Kingdom of Italy: it was De Sanctis who offered Moleschott an academic position at the University of Turin, opening up the Peninsula to Moleschott’s secularist thought. Darwinism, anticlericalism, and materialist positivism were enforced by Moleschott’s scientific and political work in Italy, which also affected the direction Italian philosophy took in general, slowly turning it away from Hegelianism. With her case study, D’Elia confirms the idea brought up in Fournier-Finocchiaro’s chapter on Mazzini and Garibaldi, namely that there was a uniquely Italian secularity, which D’Elia labels the “two religions.” This concept entails both anticlerical notions and the depreciation of institutionalized Catholicism, and claims that a renewed, purified Christianity would be the moral base of a future civic faith that would mirror the “civil religion” of Mazzini and Garibaldi. Physician and senator Moleschott in particular contributed to the anti-Catholic, secularist notions by furthering the memory of heretics like Giordano Bruno. De Sanctis, on the other hand, helped to implement a positive concept of scientific materialism as a dynamic and revitalizing force in Italian culture and politics. Even though Italy’s and Poland’s national cultures were both fundamentally shaped by Catholicism, Polish freethinkers had to overcome larger obstacles, as Barbara Wagner points out in her chapter. During the Era of Partitions, and later in the young nation state, Polish Catholicism functioned as a cultural and political glue, as well as a national good that distinguished Poland from its Russian and Prussian neighbors. Polish freethinkers – many of them convinced patriots –, in their engagement with secularity, did not fit into these religious-national semantics. They drew their insights instead from Polish authors, and particularly from Western European philosophies and secularities they encountered in exile. But unlike in the Italian case, no Polish nation state was founded prior to the First World War, and no secularist-political players with international reputations comparable to those of Mazzini and Garibaldi managed to convert the Polish public. In 1919 the new Polish nation state was founded with strong secularist leanings. Yet despite the presence of significant national minorities with different religious backgrounds, Catholicism held onto its privileged position. In order to stand a chance in their struggles against this situation, Polish bourgeois freethinkers, marginalized in the national discourse, began to look for role models and alliances elsewhere: the United States, revolutionary Russia, and the Polish labor movement. But their initiatives remained rather apolitical, which added to their relatively limited impact.

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Intellectual-cultural programs, political missions, the concrete effects of freethinking secularist ideas, and their dialogue with other secularist enterprises constitute the subject matter of Anton Jansson’s chapter on Swedish secularism in the late nineteenth century. With his essay we switch to a Protestant setting in which secularists started from different conditions, and see how the freethinkers were able to achieve a higher degree of organization, a higher level of mobilization, and a greater impact on an already politicized society. As Jansson emphasizes, Swedish freethinking developed in the late nineteenth century in close proximity to the Swedish popular movements. Two emblematic figures, socialdemocrat Hjalmar Branting and utilist Viktor Lennstrand, formed the opposing poles of Swedish freethinking, which comprised political-socialist strands and atheist-republican leanings. While the latter, though almost forgotten, provided the grounds for future, more confrontational secularist efforts, it was freethinking as defined by social-democratic viewpoints – conciliatory, and with less profound religious criticism – that prevailed in the long run. It became a sort of substitute religion in Sweden – today a nation with a high percentage of nonreligious people and a significant but constantly decreasing number of Evangelical Lutherans. The second part of this volume extends the national perspective adopted in the first part to freethinkers’ international relations, probing the dimensions and depth of their self-understanding and cooperation across borders and across different secularities. Particular focus is placed on freethinkers’ national and international organizations and on their attempts to impose a shared agenda by uniting forces, not unlike the Catholic Church – a vertically and horizontally crosslinked inter- and transnational operating institution. Thus, as the chapters of this section reveal, the secular and the religious seem intertwined in terms of national and transnational organizational matters as well. Yet Europe’s freethinkers – who were still citizens of their respective nations in a time of patriotism – struggled to balance the contradictions and tensions between the national self-image and the transnational direction the movement had taken. These tensions between patriotism and globalism cast shadows over international freethinker conferences and associations, and limited the potential success of transnational secularism. Christoffer Leber analyzes these conflicts between nationalism and internationalism in the Deutsche Monistenbund (German Monist League) in the early twentieth century. As his essay shows, leading German monists like Ernst Haeckel and Wilhelm Ostwald, with their scientific and universal worldview, which came to take on ideological and dogmatic stances, were integral parts of the freethinking secular sphere in the Wilhelmine Empire. Yet monism was caught between nationalist pride and the respective allegiances of its

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most known representatives – famous and widely read German scientists working during a period of national prosperity – and the cosmopolitan-pacifist internationality the movement tried to popularize. From this a specific idea of secularity arose that contained traces of German Protestant culture: while the secularists shared and perpetuated the anticlerical tendencies of their time, German monists, convinced of the superiority of their national intellectual achievements and culture, hoped to simultaneously use secularism as a vehicle to finalize the legacies of Luther and Goethe. The freethinkers’ oscillation between national and international frameworks not only shook up the national movements, but also their umbrella organization, the Fédération Internationale de la Libre Pensée (International Freethought Federation, IFF), along with its regularly organized meetings over several decades, as Daniel Laqua highlights in his essay. He probes the ways freethinkers launched their distinct national objectives on international stages, how they made use of the platforms provided by the international meetings to promote their nationalism, and how the Czechoslovak and German freethinkers, which are also studied in the following chapter, collided in this international environment. However, as in the case of German monism on the eve of the First World War, the conflict between national and universal frames proved creatively fruitful, preparing grounds for the re-appropriation of national encoded figures, events, songs, and texts for the international secularist movement in times of peace, as is emphasized by Laqua’s chapter. He points to a certain fluidity of national and transnational codes in freethinking secularism, and underlines the importance of the universalist utopia for freethinkers. Johannes Gleixner’s chapter discusses examples of the German, Czech, and Soviet Russian organized secularist landscapes from national and international perspectives in the decades following the end of the First World War. With this triple focus, his work offers a particularly rich picture of the heterogeneity of historical European secularisms. During and after the war, the once large and flourishing German and Czech freethought movements with their numerous associations were faced with similar challenges, especially the same question of politicization that had stirred up German monists and Polish freethinkers. As in the case of the latter, parts of the postwar German and Czechoslovak freethinker circles felt attracted to communism and the Soviet system, and as in the cases of monism and the IFF, the national movements found themselves facing a difficult balancing act between local specificity and internationality. The bourgeois roots of prewar freethinking and the proletarian basis of much of its new membership further added to these problems, as Gleixner shows with the International of Proletarian Freethinkers, who were caught between Soviet dogmatism and freethinking visions of liberty in a time of intensified cooperation

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between the state and the church. Under these circumstances, success was unlikely from the start. Freethinking positions were not only expressed in intellectual reflections, political efforts, and strategic cooperation on various other grounds, but also featured practical implementations. Secularist networks, enterprises, and rituals proved influential on discourses, cultural trends, social certainties, and legal rights in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The third section of this volume addresses these topics of implementation and the lasting influence of secularist endeavors. At the core of Claus Spenninger’s study are questions of secularist networks and their external reception. He discusses the three main representatives of scientific materialism, Jacob Moleschott, Ludwig Büchner, and Carl Vogt, and their purported joint efforts to establish an organized movement. As Spenninger clarifies, the idea of collaboration and of a shared scientific materialist undertaking was one that was projected from the outside on the three scientists, especially by contemporary observers and critics of scientific materialism. In truth, they maintained only loose contact with each other. Thus it was actually because of this external perception that a more “coherent” scientific materialist worldview based on anticlericalism, the scientifically proven laws of matter, immanence, and secularity emerged and successfully entered the public discourse. Moleschott, Büchner, and Vogt were at the forefront of organized freethinking and secularism, with Büchner one of the founding fathers of the Deutsche Freidenkerbund (German Freethinker League) in 1881, Moleschott a prominent atheist and advocate of a new (secular) morality, and Vogt a leading popularizer of Darwinism. Katharina Neef’s chapter offers insight into German freethinking activities in different regions of the Wilhelmine Empire, more specifically the regional base of the church exit propaganda of the Komitee Konfessionslos (Committee Unconfessional) and its transregional reach. She also addresses the problems posed by group-specific tensions between socialist and bourgeois freethinkers. As her analysis reveals, the Komitee made use of scientific methods such as statistics to prove its claims. Otto Lehmann-Rußbüldt, the head of the initiative, together with his fellow freethinkers, in close proximity to Ostwald’s monism and side by side with other German freethought movements, drew attention to the issue of leaving the church by popularizing anticlericalism, launching extensive propaganda offensives, setting up a wide secularist network, and organizing spectacular mass-exit campaigns. But even though the events held in larger cities such as Berlin, Leipzig, and Chemnitz, with their public lectures and gatherings, attracted broad audiences, they had limited practical impact, and could not motivate greater numbers of participants to actually exit the church. Still, the Komitee

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managed to direct mass attention to the topic of leaving the church, and in doing so paved the way to the legal codification of secularist demands in the twentieth century. The freethinking roots of today’s secularism and freethinking-inspired popular secularist practices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are also at the heart of Antoine Mandret-Degeilh’s essay. He focuses on the practice of civil baptism in contemporary France, a ceremony adopting central aspects of the Catholic ritual but translating them into a secular language. While today civil baptism is chosen mainly for pragmatic reasons and not because of a general hostility toward religion or the church, its precursors first appeared during the French Revolution against an anti-Catholic background; workers associations in the early nineteenth century attempted to revive these rituals, with little success. It was up to French freethinkers to build the civil baptism ceremony on more solid ground in a municipal setting with political symbols, polemics against Catholicism, and republican imagery in the later nineteenth century. Similar to the case studies analyzed in the previous chapters, the foundations of French civil baptism show a clear shift from bourgeois to socialist/communist conceptions after the First World War. As a more or less politicized kinship ritual, it slowly attracted wider public support, and even spread to rural areas, though not without facing difficulties. The freethinking element, as Mandret-Degeilh underlines, lives on in these rituals to this day. They directly draw from the nineteenth-century secularist designs, and not, as is frequently assumed, from civil baptisms performed during the French Revolution. In its three sections, this volume approaches secularisms as advocated by Europe’s freethinkers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, looking at both their national and transnational ramifications. The pieces prove that freethinkers helped to form and advance secularist – anticlerical, non-religious, atheist, scientific materialist, or monist – viewpoints, which, along with religious ideas, became part of Europe’s forming multifold modernities, their cultures, and their self-perceptions. The legacy of these early secularists often seems difficult to trace, if not entirely hidden. In these regards, this volume helps to clarify our picture: it shows that freethinkers were among the first to combine cultural and political measures in the struggle for secularity in the long nineteenth century and the 1920s. Their efforts manifested as anticlerical polemics and a strong negative image of the Christian churches, but freethinkers also established a positive agenda, focused on education, culture and participation, personal and family rituals, and the free, self-determined development of the individual. These

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claims managed to live on in current secularist enterprises and trends.²⁸ What is more, they also added to the leitmotifs of the modernities, which draw from both the religious and the secular in their ever-changing constellations. This volume would not have been possible without the generous support provided by the directors of the German Historical Institutes of Rome and Warsaw, Martin Baumeister and Miloš Řezník, to whom goes our heartfelt gratitude. They encouraged this enterprise and funded the preceding International Workshop during which we were able to meet in person, to agree upon a common framework, and to discuss the contents, directions, and difficulties of this project. Thank you very much also to Jakub Basista, Fulvio Conti, Christhardt Henschel, Árpád von Klimó, and particularly Detlef Pollack, Todd Weir, and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr for their valuable input, their help in realizing this project, and their readiness to share their knowledge and their critical viewpoints with us. Together with their helpful remarks and the thorough reading by the anonymous reviewers of this volume, whom we would like to thank equally, this rich feedback deepened and enhanced the perspectives of the chapters substantially.

Bibliography Althoff, Gerd. “Libertas ecclesiae oder die Anfänge der Säkularisierung im Investiturstreit?” In Umstrittene Säkularisierung: Soziologische und historische Analysen zur Differenzierung von Religion und Politik, edited by Karl Gabriel, Christel Gärtner and Detlef Pollack, 78 – 100. Berlin: Berlin University Press, 22014. Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Aston, Nigel, and Michael Cragoe, eds. Anticlericalism in Britain, c. 1500 – 1914. Stroud: Sutton 2001. Balík, Stanislav, Luka´š Fasora, Jiři´ Hanuš and Marek Vlha. Der tschechische Antiklerikalismus: Quellen, Themen und Gestalt des tschechischen Antiklerikalismus in den Jahren 1848−1938. Vienna: LIT, 2016. Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and Ambivalence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. Beck, Ulrich, Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash. Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Cambridge: Polity, 2007. Berger, Peter, ed. The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics. Washington: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1999. Bhargava, Rajeev. The Promise of India’s Secular Democracy. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

 See, e. g., Stefan Schröder, Freigeistige Organisationen in Deutschland: Weltanschauliche Entwicklungen und strategische Spannungen nach der humanistischen Wende (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2018).

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Blaschke, Olaf. Konfessionen im Konflikt: Deutschland zwischen 1800 und 1970, ein zweites konfessionelles Zeitalter. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002. Borutta, Manuel. Antikatholizismus: Deutschland und Italien im Zeitalter der europäischen Kulturkämpfe. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010. Borutta, Manuel. “Genealogie der Säkularisierungstheorie: Zur Historisierung einer großen Erzählung der Moderne.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 36, no. 3 (2010): 347 – 376. Bruce, Steve, ed. Religion and Modernization: Sociologists and Historians Debate the Secularization Thesis. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001. Burchardt, Marian, and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr. “Multiple Secularities: Religion and Modernity in the Global Age.” International Sociology 28, no. 6 (11/2013): 605 – 611. Burchardt, Marian, Matthias Middell and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr, eds. Multiple Secularities Beyond the West: Religion and Modernity in the Global Age. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2015. Casanova, José. “The Secular, Secularizations, Secularisms.” In Rethinking Secularism, edited by Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, 154 – 174. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Chadwick, Owen. The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Dittrich, Lisa. Antiklerikalismus in Europa: Ö ffentlichkeit und Sä kularisierung in Frankreich, Spanien und Deutschland (1848−1914). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014. Dittrich, Lisa. “European Connections, Obstacles, and the Search for a New Concept of Religion: The Freethought Movement as an Example of Transnational Anti-Catholicism in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century.” Journal of Religious History 39, no. 2 (2015): 261 – 279. Dittrich, Lisa. “Europäischer Antiklerikalismus: Eine Suche zwischen Säkularisierung und Religionsreform.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 45, no. 1 (2019): 5 – 36. Eggert, Marion, and Lucian Hölscher, eds. Religion and Secularity: Transformations and Transfers of Religious Discourses in Europe and Asia. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2013. Eisenstadt, Shmuel. Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2003. Gay, Peter. Modernism: The Lure of Heresy. New York: Norton, 2007. Gorski, Philip S. “Was the Confessional Era a Secular Age?” In Umstrittene Säkularisierung: Soziologische und historische Analysen zur Differenzierung von Religion und Politik, edited by Karl Gabriel, Christel Gärtner and Detlef Pollack, 189 – 224. Berlin: Berlin University Press, 22014. Graf, Friedrich Wilhelm. Die Wiederkehr der Götter: Religion in der modernen Kultur. Munich: C.H.Beck, 2007. Gregory, Frederick. Scientific Materialism in Nineteenth Century Germany. Dordrecht/Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1977. Habermas, Rebekka. “Negotiating the Religious and the Secular in Modern German History.” In Negotiating the Secular and the Religious in the German Empire: Transnational Approaches, edited by Rebekka Habermas, 1 – 32. Oxford/New York: Berghahn, 2019. Habermas, Rebekka, ed. Negotiating the Secular and the Religious in the German Empire: Transnational Approaches. Oxford/New York: Berghahn, 2019. Jacoby, Susan. Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism. New York: Henry Holt, 2005.

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Kaiser, Jochen-Christoph. Arbeiterbewegung und organisierte Religionskritik: Proletarische Freidenkerverbände in Kaiserreich und Weimarer Republik. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981. Kaiser, Wolfram. “‘Clericalism – that is our Enemy’! European Anticlericalism and the Culture Wars.” In Culture Wars: Secular–Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth Century Europe, edited by Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser, 47 – 77. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Kerbs, Diethart, and Jürgen Reulecke, eds. Handbuch der deutschen Reformbewegungen 1880 – 1933. Wuppertal: P. Hammer, 1998. Kinitz, Daniel. Die andere Seite des Islam: Säkularismus-Diskurs und muslimische Intellektuelle im modernen Ägypten. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2016. Lalouette, Jacqueline. La Libre Pensée en France, 1848−1940. Paris: Albin Michel, 1997. Lübbe, Hermann. Säkularisierung: Geschichte eines ideenpolitischen Begriffs. Freiburg: Alber, 2003. Marková, Jana. Religiöse Konzepte im tschechischen nationalen Diskurs (1860−1885). Hildesheim/Zurich/New York: Georg Olms, 2016. Neef, Katharina. “Multiple Devianz: Zu Fassbarkeit und Struktur eines alternativ-kulturellen Phänomens.” In Devianz und Dynamik: Festschrift für Hubert Seiwert zum 65. Geburtstag, edited by Edith Franke, Christoph Kleine and Heinz Mürmel, 185−203. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014. Neugebauer-Wölk, Monika, Renko Geffarth and Markus Meumann, eds. Aufklärung und Esoterik: Wege in die Moderne. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2013. Osterhammel, Jürgen. The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. Porter-Szűcs, Brian. Faith and Fatherland: Catholicism, Modernity, and Poland. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Prüfer, Sebastian. Sozialismus statt Religion: Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie vor der religiösen Frage, 1863 – 1890. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002. Rampelmann, Katja. Im Licht der Vernunft: Die Geschichte des deutsch-amerikanischen Freidenker-Almanachs von 1878 bis 1901. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2003. Rectenwald, Michael. Nineteenth-Century British Secularism: Science, Religion, and Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Royle, Edward. Radicals, Secularists and Republicans: Popular Freethought in Britain, 1866 – 1915. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980. Schröder, Stefan. Freigeistige Organisationen in Deutschland: Weltanschauliche Entwicklungen und strategische Spannungen nach der humanistischen Wende. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2018. Schwartz, Laura. Infidel Feminism: Secularism, Religion and Women’s Emancipation, England 1830 – 1914. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017. Simon-Ritz, Frank. Die Organisation einer Weltanschauung: Die freigeistige Bewegung im Wilhelminischen Deutschland. Gütersloh: Kaiser, 1996. Treitel, Corinna. A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Verucci, Guido. L’Italia laica prima e dopo l’unità 1848−1876: Anticlericalismo, libero pensiero e ateismo nella società italiana. Rome/Bari: Laterza, 1981. Wallach Scott, Joan. Sex and Secularism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018.

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Weir, Todd. “Säkularismus (Freireligiöse, Freidenker, Monisten, Ethiker, Humanisten).” In Handbuch der Religionsgeschichte im deutschsprachigen Raum, vol. 6.2: 20. Jahrhundert: Religiöse Positionen und soziale Formationen, edited by Lucian Hölscher and Volkard Krech, 189 – 218. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2016. Weir, Todd. Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Rise of the Fourth Confession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Weir, Todd. “Introduction: Comparing Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture Wars.” Journal of Contemporary History 53, no. 3 (2018): 489 – 502. Wittkau-Horgby, Annette. Materialismus: Entstehung und Wirkung in den Wissenschaften des 19. Jahrhunderts. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998. Ziemann, Benjamin. “Säkularisierung und Neuformierung des Religiösen: Religion und Gesellschaft in der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts.” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 51 (2011): 3 – 36.

Daniela Haarmann

Freidenkerei, Libre-pensée, Szabadgondolkodás – Concepts of Freethinking during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries Ever since their first emergence in eighteenth-century Europe, the concepts of freethinking, secularism, and atheism have carried manifold and, at times, even paradoxical meanings.¹ During the nineteenth century, their ambiguity grew even stronger with the foundation of clubs, associations, and societies institutionalizing these terms.² This chapter analyzes and conceptualizes different understandings and developments of freethinking, atheism, and secularism³ during the so-called “long nineteenth century” (1789 – 1918) by using the theoretical and methodical approaches of the history of concepts, particularly those

 According to Reinhard Koselleck, a pioneer of German Begriffsgeschichte, these manifold meanings define the character of a concept; Reinhard Koselleck, “Richtlinien für das Lexikon politisch-sozialer Begriffe der Neuzeit,” Archiv Für Begriffsgeschichte 11 (1967): 86.  The list of research literature on the history of this chapter’s main terms is manifold. See, e. g., Reinhard Koselleck, “Säkularisation/Säkularisierung,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhard Koselleck (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1984), 791– 794; Georges Minois, Histoire de l’athéisme: Les Incroyants dans le monde occidental des origines à nos jours (Paris: Fayard, 1998); Gavin Hyman, “Atheism in Modern History,” in The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, ed. Michael Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 27– 46; Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Jack D. Eller, “What Is Atheism?,” in Atheism and Secularity, ed. Phil Zuckerman (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2010), 1– 18; Craig J. Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, “Introduction,” in Rethinking Secularism, ed. Craig J. Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3 – 30; Georges Minois, Dictionnaire des athées, agnostiques, sceptiques et autres mécréants (Paris: Albin Michel, 2012); and Stephen Sebastian Bullivant, “Defining ‘Atheism’,” in The Oxford Handbook of Atheism, ed. Stephen Sebastian Bullivant (New York/ Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 11– 21.  The terms “secularism” and “secularity” are often used interchangeably, yet they carry different meanings: “Secularism” describes the concept, and “secularity” the condition of the separation of state and church affairs and of the eradication of religion from public and social life; see Hans Raun Iversen, “Secularization, Secularity, Secularism,” in Encyclopedia of Sciences and Religions, ed. Anne L. C. Runehov and Lluis Oviedo (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2013), 2116 – 2121. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110688283-004

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formulated by Koselleck and Zillig.⁴ To this end, it focuses primarily on the cases of Britain, France, and the Protestant German-speaking countries, since they were the “birthplaces” of modern freethinking. Nevertheless, other language areas – such as the Hungarian or Romanian – are also considered to meet the volume’s pan-European, transnational approach.⁵ In doing so, this essay combines Western and Eastern European conceptual viewpoints: so far, research has tended to study either Western or Eastern European language areas,⁶ although – as will be shown – both complement each other. In three parts, the chapter traces the historical development of the concepts of freethinking, secularism, and atheism, reaching from a non-organized, loose collection of ideas developed by European scholars at the beginning of the eighteenth century to the organized movements at the end of the nineteenth century. The introductory part examines the initial situation by embedding freethinking, secularism, and atheism in English, German, and French Enlightenment before 1789. The second and third parts analyze and compare the terms in the periods from 1789 to 1848 and from 1848 to 1918, respectively, to highlight similarities and differences in their structures and contents.

 According to Koselleck, concepts document events and ideas and must be analyzed on these grounds; Koselleck, “Richtlinien,” 86. The linguist Zillig describes the relationship between conceptual history and lexicography: Werner Zillig, “Lexikologie und Begriffsgeschichte,” in Lexikologie, ed. David A. Cruise, Franz Hundsnurscher, Michael Job and Rolf Lutzeier, vol. 2 (Berlin/ Boston: De Gruyter, 2005), 1834– 1835. For the history of conceptual history and its integration into other disciplines, see Ernst Müller and Falko Schmieder, Begriffsgeschichte und historische Semantik: Ein kritisches Kompendium (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2016).  For the benefits and challenges of such a translingustic approach, see Ulrich Ricken, “Zum Verhältnis vergleichender Begriffsgeschichte und vergleichender Lexikologie,” in Begriffsgeschichte, Diskursgeschichte, Metapherngeschichte, edited by Mark Bevir and Hans Erich Bödeker (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002), 29 – 48. In its beginnings, the history of concepts was supposed to be monolingual to hold the analytical process in a distinct frame. Reference works such as Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe or Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie were only concerned with German concepts. As Ricken proves with the example of “Enlightenment,” using a multilingual approach helps to make visible the European dimensions of a concept. It seems therefore essential to consider the multilingual aspects of a term when it comes to pan-European research.  Charles Taylor, for example, distinguishes between the Eastern (North African, Middle Eastern, Asian) and Western/Northern Atlantic worlds (Taylor, A Secular Age). Eastern Europe, however, is hardly identifiable with the Northern Atlantic zone. Rather, the past and present of Eastern European peoples and language areas are determined by other geographical attributes (e. g. the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea, the Carpathian Mountains, inland waters).

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Historical encyclopedias and dictionaries are the primary sources of this chapter due to their normative character.⁷ When reference works gained popularity during the eighteenth century, they were supposed to comprise the knowledge of their time. This purpose turned them into authorities protective of the truth in past and present. By contrast, this chapter considers that lexicographical knowledge is not at all objective but was determined by the specific socio-historical context in which those works were created. Still, the discursive power of reference works makes them an indispensable and unique source for the study of conceptual history. For the given timeframe of the long nineteenth century, a transnationally embedded, comparative conceptual history of freethinking, atheism, and secularism is still lacking. Most studies discuss conceptual developments in relation to either one or more representatives of freethinking generally limited to a national framework.⁸ This chapter attempts, for the very first time and in a transnational approach, to analyze the conceptual discussions of freethinking, atheism, and secularism in modern reference works beyond the definitions of single persons and movements. These works were selected by matters of reception and influence, including the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Encyclopédie, and the Brockhaus, to name some of the most seminal. However, the work of individuals such as Anthony Collins, Christian Wolff, and Pierre Bayle cannot be entirely neglected, since they influenced either the freethought movements as such or the authors of the encyclopedias’ entries. In some cases, they even authored entries themselves. Therefore, they are briefly considered, particularly in the very first sections.

 Reinhard Koselleck, “Hinweise auf die temporalen Strukturen begriffsgeschichtlichen Wandels,” in Begriffsgeschichte, Diskursgeschichte, Metapherngeschichte, ed. Mark Bevir and Hans Erich Bödeker (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002), 46.  A transnational, yet limited to Western Europe, approach is taken by Lisa Dittrich, Antiklerikalismus in Europa: Öffentlichkeit und Säkularisierung in Frankreich, Spanien und Deutschland (1848 – 1914) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014); Lisa Dittrich, “European Connections, Obstacles, and the Search for a New Concept of Religion: The Freethought Movement as an Example of Transnational Anti-Catholicism in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Religious History 39, no. 2 (2015): 261– 279.

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Initial Situation: Freethinking pre-1789 in British, German, and French Reference Works While the existence of the concepts of freethinking and atheism can be traced back as far as to antiquity,⁹ the Enlightenment’s discourses on the topics were rooted in humanism and the Renaissance. The first author to introduce the term libertas philosophandi, the Latin variant of “freethinking,” was the Italian Dominican Tommaso Campanella, in his Apologia pro Galileo (Apology of Galileo, 1622).¹⁰ At that time, libertas philosophandi, along with the related term libertas cogitandi, did not challenge the doctrines of the Bible.¹¹ Yet their further use was not determined and depended on the viewpoints of the author, who referred to those notions.¹² However, encouraged by reformation movements, more radical voices called for a critical study of the Bible and demanded a general critical stance toward the restrictive power of the Catholic Church. While most medieval Christian scholars thought of the world’s knowledge as fully discovered, humanist scholars assumed a world beyond the realms of the Bible and the Christian text corpus. Encouraged by the achievements of the scientific revolution, such as Columbus’ discovery of America; Copernicus’, Kepler’s, and Galilei’s theories of heliocentrism; and Newton’s laws of motion and universal gravitation, scholars strove to explore these unknown worlds. Newton, in particular, proved that na-

 See the frequently reprinted works of John B. Bury, A History of Freedom of Thought (New York/London: Henry Holt, 1913), 21– 50; John M. Robertson, A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, vol. 1 (London: Watts & Co., 31915), 120 – 217. These concepts differed, of course, from those of the Early Modern Period. Yet freethinkers and works on freethinking used to recall the great ancient Greek and Roman philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, or Aristotle. This attempt of constructing continuity from the classic antiquity up to the present was a common practice of scholarship. From the many academic works discussing this issue, the following collection of essays shall be mentioned as exemplary: Gábor Klaniczay, Michael Werner and Ottó Gecser, eds, Multiple Antiquities – Multiple Modernities: Ancient Histories in Nineteenth Century European Cultures (Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 2011).  Robert B. Sutton, “The Phrase ‘Libertas Philosophandi’,” Journal of the History of Ideas 14, no. 2 (1953): 311.  Anita Traninger, “Libertas philosophandi,” in Neue Diskurse der Gelehrtenkultur in der Frühen Neuzeit: Ein Handbuch, ed. Herbert Jaumann and Gideon Stiening (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2016), 178.  Kay Zenker, Denkfreiheit: Libertas philosophandi in der deutschen Aufklärung (Hamburg: Meiner, 2012), 11.

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ture was not dependent on the capriciousness of the biblical God but rather on rational laws.¹³ These complex intellectual changes heralded the age of reason.¹⁴ The new knowledge eventually led to the development of a new religious mentality called deism. In contrast to theism – the traditional Christian belief in a personal God who is continuously influential on the course of the world and the individual within – deists believed in a more distanced Creator-God without further impact on the world and its inhabitants. To them, the Bible was created by man, not revealed by God, and therefore seemed open to criticism. This critical approach called “biblical hermeneutics” coalesced with the enlightened dogma of ratio, and together they were taken as the only means to explain and fully discover God’s creation. Two of the most noteworthy spokesmen of deism were René Descartes and Baruch de Spinoza. Spinoza’s idea of rationalism, called Spinozism, pioneered the early eighteenth-century concepts of freethinking. In his most influential work, Tractatus theologico-politicus (Theologico-Political Treatise, 1670),¹⁵ he claimed a secular state, religious freedom, and the detachment from the biblical dogma.¹⁶ Contrary to some of his fellow contemporary philosophers, he wrote his treatise in Latin rather than a vernacular. Spinoza justified  For a general introduction, see Malcolm Oster, ed., Science in Europe, 1500 – 1800: A Secondary Sources Reader (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Wilbur Applebaum, ed., Encyclopedia of the Scientific Revolution: From Copernicus to Newton (London: Routledge, 22008); John Henry, The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 32008), particularly 73 – 85; Lawrence Principe, The Scientific Revolution: A Very Short Introduction (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 42012). For special aspects, see Stephen Gaukroger, ed., The Uses of Antiquity: The Scientific Revolution and the Classical Tradition (Dordrecht/Boston: Kluwer, 1991); and Margaret C. Jacob, The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993). On discussions of the canonic correlation, see Margaret J. Osler, ed., Rethinking the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). For biographical approaches, see Laura Fermi and Gilberto Bernardini, Galileo and the Scientific Revolution (Greenwich: Fawcett, 1965); Desmond Clarke, “Descartes’ Philosophy of Science and the Scientific Revolution,” in The Cambridge Companion to Descartes, ed. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 258 – 285; Gale E Christianson, Isaac Newton and the Scientific Revolution (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); and Matjaž Vesel, Copernicus: Platonist Astronomer-Philosopher, Cosmic Order, the Movement of the Earth, and the Scientific Revolution (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 2014).  For a specific elaboration on freethought, secularism, atheism, and the age of reason, see Edward Royle, Victorian Infidels: The Origins of the British Secularist Movement, 1791 – 1866 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1974), 9 – 58.  For a critical English translation, see Benedictus de Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, ed. Jonathan Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).  Traninger, “Libertas philosophandi,” 181; 184.

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this decision by stating that he did not want to reach the largest possible target group, but only the “Philosophe lector.”¹⁷ The choice of language is an oft-overlooked aspect in the study of freethinking. While the Republic of Letters still used Latin – the language of the Catholic Church and the popes – as the language of scholarly communication and of publication, freethinkers opted for the vernacular. This initiated a major break with the Latin-speaking world of the Catholic Church. Even Christian Wolff – who, next to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, was one of the key figures of the German Freigeisterei (freethinking) – wrote his Ausführliche Nachricht (Detailed News, 1726) in German and not – as he did with other works – in Latin. Using the vernacular supported the general goal of Enlightenment to reach wider parts of society by publishing in a language that the general public would understand. Thus it is hardly surprising that the opponents of freethinking continued to write their refutations in Latin.¹⁸ Still, the choice of language was in no way a rule, as the example of Kant will illustrate.

Freethinking in Early Enlightenment: First Conceptual Approaches In contrast to “deist,” “freethinker” was a self-given designation of a more or less organized philosophical movement in late seventeenth-century Britain.¹⁹ The popularity of deism and freethinking in Britain did not come by accident: the religious conflicts and the Glorious Revolution (1688/89) created the perfect breeding ground for both concepts. Two of their representatives are notable, since the work of both authors also influenced freethinking’s ideas in France and in the German-speaking countries: John Toland and Anthony Collins.

 Ibid., 183; original in Baruch de Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (Amsterdam: s.l., 1674), fol. B.  This observation resulted from the academic conflicts about freethinking in Germany. (Described in Zenker, Denkfreiheit, 159 – 262.)  Günter Gawlick, “Einleitung,” in Anthony Collins: A Discourse of Freethinking, ed. Günter Gawlick (Stuttgart/Bad Cannstatt: frommann-holzboog, 1965), 9; Günter Gawlick, “Die ersten deutschen Reaktionen auf A. Collins’ ‘Discourse of Free-Thinking’ von 1713,” Aufklärung: Interdisziplinäres Jahrbuch zur Erforschung des 18. Jahrhunderts und seiner Wirkungsgeschichte 1 (1986): 21– 22.

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Toland was the illegitimate son of a Catholic priest, born 1670, somewhere in Northern Ireland.²⁰ Although he broke with his father’s religion at the age of 16, he graduated in philosophy and theology in Edinburgh, where he first encountered Newton’s Natural Philosophy.²¹ Only slightly later, in 1692, he traveled to Leiden and Utrecht, in those years both centers of heterodox ideas. He read Spinoza and got to know deistic and freethinking spirits, such as John Locke and Pierre Bayle.²² Ten years later, Toland met Leibniz in Hannover when traveling as a member of a royal delegation.²³ Even then, he already evoked feelings of deep disagreement in his contemporaries once he had published his first and most famous book, Christianity not Mysterious, in 1696. As the book’s title indicates, Toland supported the idea that the Christian religion is based on rational principles rather than mysterious beliefs. Throughout his work, specific terms, such as “truth” and “reason,” as well as their antonym, “mystery,” mirror the influence of Enlightenment: Truth is always and every where the same; and an unintelligible or absurd Proposition is to be never the more respected for being ancient and strange, for being originally written in Latin, Greek, or Hebrew.²⁴

This quotation also displays Toland’s use of the vernacular and his criticism of traditional authorities. Regarding religion, Toland claimed that his work would be a defense of the Christian faith and a rejection of the “mistaken Unbelievers.”²⁵ However, between the lines, his doubt becomes quite visible: “All the Doc-

 Geneviève Brykman, “Pour en savoir plus, cherchez dans mes écrits,” Revue de synthèse 116, no. 2– 3 (1995): John Toland (1670 – 1722) et la crise de conscience européenne: 22.  Ibid., 221.  On Locke: Geneviève Brykman, “Les Deux Christianisme de Locke et de Toland,” Revue de synthèse 116, no. 2– 3 (1995): John Toland (1670 – 1722) et la crise de conscience européenne: 281– 302. This article revised the assumption of Locke’s fundamental influence on Toland. On Bayle: Brykman, “Pour en savoir plus,” 222.  On this journey and Toland’s acquaintance with Leibniz, see Michel Fichant, “Leibniz et Toland: Philosophie pour princesses?,” Revue de synthèse 116, no. 2– 3 (1995): John Toland (1670 – 1722) et la crise de conscience européenne: 421– 440; Tristan Dagron, Toland et Leibniz: L’Invention du néo-spinozisme (Paris: Vrin, 2009); and Nora Gädeke, “Matières d’esprit et de curiosité Oder: Warum wurde John Toland in Hannover zur Persona non grata?,” in G. W. Leibniz und der Gelehrtenhabitus: Anonymität, Pseudonymität, Camouflage, ed. Wenchao Li and Simona Noreik (Cologne/Weimar/Vienna: Böhlau, 2016), 145 – 166.  John Toland, Christianity not Mysterious: Or, a Treatise Showing, that there is Nothing in the Gospel Contrary to Reason, nor Above it: And that no Christian Doctrine Can be Properly Call’d a Mystery (London: Sam. Buckley, 21696), xix.  Ibid., viii.

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trines and Precepts of the New Testament (if it be indeed Divine) must consequently agree with Natural Reason.”²⁶ The idea of freethinking is also present in this book, although Toland does not refer to the concept directly: But ‘tis the Perfection of our Reason and Liberty that makes us deserve Rewards and Punishment. We are perswaded [sic] that all our Thoughts are entirely free, we can expend the Force of Words, compare Ideas, distinguish clear from obscure Conceptions, suspend our Judgments about Uncertainties, and yield only to Evidence. ²⁷

Expanding upon Toland’s understanding of freethinking as a combination of reason and liberty, Anthony Collins further developed the concept. Born in 1676 in Heston/Middlesex, and educated at Eton and Cambridge, his most influential work was his Discourse of Free-Thinking, which he published anonymously in 1713. Collins, a student and close friend of Locke, defined “freethinking” as follows: By Free-Thinking then I mean, The Use of the Understanding, in endeavouring to find out the Meaning of any Proposition whatsoever, in considering the nature of the Evidence for or against it, and in judging of it according to the seeming Force or Weakness of the Evidence.²⁸

These words mirror the Enlightenment’s ultimate maxim, sapere aude: ²⁹ Collins demands making use of the cognitive ability in the sense of Descartes’ cogitare as an active process of reflecting on a statement (proposition). He further invokes his readers to prove the available evidence critically and to form their own opinions. In this context, “truth” serves as one of the key notions of his considerations: “Self-evident Truths,”³⁰ according to Collins, are part of God’s will to be

 Ibid., 46 (emphasis in the original).  Ibid., 60 (emphasis in the original).  Anthony Collins, “A Discourse of Free-Thinking, Occassion’d by the Rise and Growth of a Sect Call’d Free-Thinkers: London, Printed in the Year M.DCC.XIII,” in Anthony Collins: A Discourse of Freethinking, ed. Günter Gawlick (Stuttgart/Bad Cannstatt: frommann-holzboog, 1965), 5. (Emphasis deleted for improved readability.)  Although this phrase is inextricably linked to Immanuel Kant’s essay Was ist Aufklärung? (What Is Enlightenment?, 1784), it merely summarizes a concept that already had existed in the Early Enlightenment, as Collins’ case exemplifies.  Collins, “A Discourse of Free-Thinking,” 8.

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Figure 1: Front cover of the first and ragged French translation of Collins’ A Discourse of Freethinking (1714).

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known by men.³¹ “Therefore,” he concludes, “a Right to know any Truth whatsoever implies a Right to think freely.”³² It is also noteworthy that Collins chose to call freethinkers a “sect” in the subtitle of his work, although the term “society” would have been appropriate, since some British freethinkers, back then, were already a loosely organized group who even edited their own journal.³³ Though he did not further define his reading of the concept of “sect,” Collins’ wording could be interpreted as a provocation of the defenders of the traditional Christian worldview. Furthermore, “sect” is a first indication of the freethinking practice to create “substitute religions.” The latter became a characteristic of the freethought movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Collins’ Discourse was discussed vividly, yet controversially, in the Low Countries and in the Protestant parts of Germany, where the German Enlightenment originated.³⁴ The debates on libertas philosophandi and cogitandi, however, had already been strong prior to Toland’s and Collins’ impact in the Germanspeaking territories. Most of these early discourses focused on reviewing or – more accurately – contradicting Descartes and Spinoza. With regard to the traditional deep entanglement between the universities and the churches in Germany,³⁵ scholars agreed that freethinking must be compatible with the Christian dogma.³⁶ Those exceeding the dogma’s limits were accused of licentia philosophandi (arbitrary philosophizing) and faced the threat of exclusion from the academic world.³⁷ Despite these disputes, deism never gained major support in Germany. Wolff, for example, aligned faith and reason, yet he always adhered to the idea of divine revelation.³⁸ His notion of freethinking resulted from his criticism of authority, as he explained in the Ausführliche Nachricht: “Therefore, I do not

 Ibid., 6: “IF the Knowledge of some Truths be requir’d of us by God; if the Knowledge of others be useful to Society; if the Knowledge of no Truth be forbidden us by God, or hurtful to us; then we have a right to know, or may lawfully know any Truth.” (Emphasis in the original.)  Ibid., 6.  The weekly journal Free-Thinker was published for a brief period in the second half of 1711. It should not be confused, however, with the eponymous journal published in 1718 and 1719, reprinted in 1722 and 1723; see Gawlick, “Einleitung,” 22; 35, and note 20. Gawlick does not tell who the members of this first freethought organization were. The very few existing issues of this journal are held in the Bodleian Library in Oxford and in the Archives of the University of Edinburgh.  Gawlick, “Die ersten deutschen Reaktionen”; James O’Higgins, Anthony Collins: The Man and His Works (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), 201– 222; and Zenker, Denkfreiheit, 190 – 240.  Ibid., 20; 155.  For a detailed analysis of the German discourse on freethinking, see ibid., 25 – 158.  Ibid., 20; 155.  O’Higgins, Anthony Collins, 201.

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care if that, what I say, accords with another one’s opinion or not, if Aristoteles, Cartesius, Leibniz or another one understood it like this or not. I present my thoughts, and I dare to assert them against anybody.”³⁹ In France, Collins’ concept of freethinking was received much more warmly and openly. After a first French translation in 1713, which was so ragged that it changed the original’s content,⁴⁰ a more accurate version appeared in 1766. At the height of the French Enlightenment, the interest in English deism and freethinking was greater than ever before.⁴¹ According to O’Higgins, the French view on religion as a failing and unpopular idea explains Collins’ late success in France.⁴²

Freethinking in the “Encyclopedic Era” Following the alphabetical system of Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopaedia (2 vols., 1728),⁴³ the concept of encyclopedias spread all over the European English, French, and German language areas from the middle of the eighteenth century on. Publications such as Zedler’s Universal-Lexicon (1732) in Germany, the famous Encyclopédie (1751) in France, or the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768) in Great Britain assembled all kinds of “true” knowledge and opinions,⁴⁴ presented them in the vernacular, and made them accessible to the literate members of society. The following analysis focuses on chronologically comparing the encyclopedias’ definitions of “freethinking,” “atheism,” and “secularism” and asks how scholars received these terms in different language areas. Chamber’s Cyclopaedia, the oldest and most influential reference work, did not contain a separate entry on “freethinker,” yet it referred to the term as a sy-

 Christian Wolff, Ausführliche Nachricht von seinen eigenen Schrifften, die er in deutscher Sprache von den verschiedenen Theilen der Welt-Weissheit herausgegeben, auf Verlangen ans Licht gestellt (Frankfurt/Main: Hort, 1726), fol. 7v–r. (Emphasis in the original.) Unless otherwise stated, all translations are the author’s.  Gawlick, “Einleitung,” 30.  Ibid., 31– 32; 39, and footnote 47.  O’Higgins, Anthony Collins, 201.  Ulrich Johannes Schneider, Die Erfindung des allgemeinen Wissens: Enzyklopädisches Schreiben im Zeitalter der Aufklärung (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2013), 50.  The convergence of the two notions of “knowledge” and “opinion” is highly debated within the sociology of knowledge and the history of the sociology of knowledge.

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nonym for “deist.”⁴⁵ This equation was due to both movements’ idealization of reason and natural philosophy, their shared criticism of the idea of divine revelation, and the restrictions on the free expression of ideas implemented by the church: They complain, that the Liberty of thinking, and reasoning, is oppress’d under the Yoke of Religion and that the Minds of Men are ridden, and tyranniz’d over by the Necessity impos’d on them of believing inconceivable Mysteries; And contend, that nothing should be requir’d to be assented to, or believed, but what their Reason clearly conceive.⁴⁶

However, the Cyclopaedia also contradicts the equation of deists with freethinkers and atheists. Its definition of atheism exposes this contradiction: “In this Sense, Spinosa [sic] may be said to be an Atheist; and it is an Impropriety to rank him, as the learned commonly do, among Deists […].”⁴⁷ This quote also emphasizes the close ties between Spinozism, deism, freethinking, and atheism. Furthermore, it shows that, in these times, those categories were external ascriptions, rather than deliberately chosen self-descriptions. The term “secularization,” however, had no connection to atheism, deism, or freethinking at all. The author simply defined it as “the Action of Secularizing, or of converting a regular Person, Place, or Benefice into a Secular one […].”⁴⁸ An example of how to implement this term, together with regulations for secularization in France and the Catholic Church, completes his definition.⁴⁹ The next oldest reference work, the German Zedler, neither contained entries on Deismus (deism) nor Freidenker/Freigeisterei (freethinker, freethinking),⁵⁰ yet it provided entries on Atheisterey (atheism) and Säkularismus (secularism). In its second volume (1732), the Zedler dedicated ten pages to atheism, composed primarily of descriptions of different types of atheists, combined with moralizing assessments. Atheists, the reader is told, are those following doctrines that do

 “Deist,” in Cyclopaedia: Or, an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, ed. Abraham Rees (London: J. and J. Knapton et al., 1728), 179: “Deists, a Class of People, known also under the Denomination of Free-thinkers […].” (Emphasis in the original.)  Ibid., 179.  “Atheist,” in Cyclopaedia: Or, an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, ed. Ephraim Chambers (London: J. and J. Knapton et al., 1728), 166.  “Secularization,” in Cyclopaedia: Or, an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, ed. Abraham Rees (London: J. and J. Knapton et al., 1728), 46.  Ibid.  For this chapter, all spellings of “Freidenker” and “Freigeisterei” (such as Freydenker or Freygeisterey) were considered.

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not concur with the “wahrer Begriff” (“true notion”) of God.⁵¹ Following the dictionary, in strict sense atheism is the “Irrtum” (“error”) of denying the existence of God.⁵² Among atheism, the Zedler listed “Deisterey” (“deism”) along with naturalism, pantheism, and Atheismus Dogmaticus. But while the dictionary identified Spinozism as a general dogmatic variant of atheism, it was naturalism, pantheism, and deism that were further specified as indirect forms of Atheismus Dogmaticus. ⁵³ Thus Zedler referred to “Indirectus, if God’s name is mentioned, but practically a being is described, which can impossibly be identified with the name of God.”⁵⁴ Almost two decades later, the French philosopher Claude Yvon – characterized as an atheist by his contemporaries⁵⁵ – defined “Athéisme” in the famous Encyclopédie as “l’opinion de ceux qui nient l’existence d’un Dieu auteur du monde” (“opinion of those, who negate the existence of a God, the creator of the world”).⁵⁶ The mere denial of God’s existence, according to this interpretation, did not qualify to carry the “titre odieux” (“odious title”)⁵⁷ of atheism, but only the active fight against the idea of God: “L’athéïsme ne se borne pas à défigurer l’idée de Dieu, mais il la détruit entierement.” (“Atheism is not limited to disfigure the idea of God, but to destroy it entirely.”)⁵⁸ Although Yvon’s initial description and the adjectives he chose might have indicated that he holds the same moralizing opinion as the Zedler, in fact, he defended atheism as a method of tolerance. He devalued religion as an invention of governments to keep societies stable and their subjects obedient.⁵⁹

 “Atheisterey,” in Johann Heinrich Zedlers grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon aller Wissenschafften und Künste (Halle/Leipzig: Johann Heinrich Zedler, 1732), 2016.  Ibid.  Ibid., 2017– 2018.  Ibid., 2017.  Sylviane Albertan-Coppola and Françoise Launay, “Abbé Claude Yvon (1714– 1789),” Database. Les Contributeurs: Édition numérique collaborative et critique de l’Encyclopédie, accessed November 29, 2018, http://enccre.academie-sciences.fr/encyclopedie/documentation/?s=76&. Yvon even was forced to leave the country, while Diderot defused his theological articles; see Hisayasu Nakagawa, “Diderot, Rousseau et autres ‘incrédules’ au service du catholicisme: À propos du déisme réfuté par lui-même de l’abbé Bergier,” Recherches sur Diderot et sur l’Encyclopédie, no. 39 (2005): 158.  Claude Yvon, “Athéisme,” in Encylopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. 1 (Paris: Briasson – David – Le Breton – Durand, 1751), accessed March 22, 2019, http://enccre.academie-sciences.fr/encyclopedie/article/v1-3414-0/, 815.  Ibid.  Ibid. (Emphasis in the original.)  Ibid., 817.

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Edmonde Françoise Mallet, theologian and educator, authored an article on deism that he defined as “doctrine de ceux dont toute la religion se borne à admettre l’existence d’un Dieu, & à suivre la loi naturelle” (“a doctrine of those, whose whole religion is limited to admit the existence of God and to follow the natural law”).⁶⁰ Deism, for Mallet, was not synonymous with atheism, but – quite the contrary – a religion of its own, supportive of the idea of God. This definition stood out in particular because the author did not add anything else to his article. For a more detailed analysis, he created another entry titled Déistes, in which he equated the British “modern deists” to “freethinkers.”⁶¹ Other than the Enyclopédie, Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) also compared freethinking to atheism.⁶² First, it defined “freethinker” as a “libertine; a condemner of religion.”⁶³ The pejorative term “libertine,” building on the French insult libertin, already indicates the Dictionary’s negative stance toward freethinkers. Then, by characterizing them as “condemner of religion,” the article related freethinking to atheism. The author further emphasized this connection by adding a pertinent quote of Joseph Addison’s Drummer (1716) to his text: “Atheist is an old-fashion’d word: I am a freethinker, child.”⁶⁴ The Dictionary presented atheism merely as the disbelief in God, without attaching further moral judgment to the term. In the same manner, the entry on deism maintained its neutral tone and followed the contemporary understanding of the concept as an acknowledgment of God, the creator, but not of the idea of a divine revelation and intervention in the course of the world. Explicit connections to freethinking are absent.⁶⁵

 Edmonde François Mallet, “Déisme,” in Encylopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. 4 (Paris: Briasson – David – Le Breton – Durand, 1754), 773.  Ibid.: “The modern deists are a sect or a sort of ostensible strong spirits, in England known under the name of free-thinkers.” (Emphasis in the original.)  Johnson’s Dictionary was the first modern dictionary and grammar book in English. It influenced, as will be shown in the next section, the coming generations of English dictionaries and encyclopedias. Besides a profound terminological analysis, the dictionary included one or more quotes from literature for every term to exemplify its usage.  “Freethinker,” in A Dictionary of the English Language: In which the Words are Deduced of their Originals, and Illustrated in their Different Significations by Examples from the Best Writers, To which are Prefixed a History of the Language and an English Grammar, ed. Samuel Johnson, vol. 1 (London: W. Strahan, 1755), fol. T9 2/4.  Ibid.; the quotation is shortened. The original comprises a dialogue between Lady Truman and Tinsel during the first act: Lady: “I vow, Mr. Tinsel, I’m afraid malicious people will say I’m in love with an atheist.” – Tinsel: “Oh, my dear, that’s an old fashion’d word – I’m a freethinker, child.” – Abigail: “I am sure you are a free speaker.” (Joseph Addison, The Drummer: Or, The Haunted House, A Comedy [London: J. Tonson, 1716], 187– 188.)  “Deism,” in A Dictionary of the English Language: In which the Words are Deduced of their Originals, and Illustrated in their Different Significations by Examples from the Best Writers, To

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The clearest equation of “deism” and “freethinking” is given in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, edited between 1769 and 1771 by the Scottish Society of Gentlemen. For information on “Free-Thinker,” the reader is simply referred to “DEIST.”⁶⁶ Deists, according to the Encyclopaedia, in the modern sense of the word, are those persons in Christian countries, who acknowledging all the obligations and duties of natural religion, disbelieve the Christian scheme, or revealed religion. They are so called from their belief in God alone, in opposition to Christians.⁶⁷

Atheism and deism, here, clearly relate to each other. However, the Encyclopaedia Britannica cited four additional definitions borrowed from the English natural philosopher John Clarke. He understood deism not in opposition to the Christian belief but as its alternative, combining the concept of God with natural religion.⁶⁸ The final example of this section is the Encyclopédie méthodique. With this reference work, its founder Charles Joseph Panckoucke, who gave the encyclopedia its alias, Panckoucke, intended to perfect Diderot’s Encyclopédie. ⁶⁹ To meet this goal, over 200 volumes were published between 1782 and 1832. In contrast to previous reference works, the volumes were arranged according to disciplines, not in alphabetical order. Each discipline was authored by an expert or a team of experts in the particular field. The Panckoucke continued its publication, unimpressed by the events of the French Revolution and Jacobin Terror, even during the 1790s. This uninterrupted publication, which covered a timespan of half a century characterized by historical key events and turning points, makes the Panckoucke a most interesting source for analyzing conceptual changes of the terms studied in this chapter. Articles on athéisme and athée were published over two volumes and in two different disciplines: one in ancient and modern philosophy (1791) and the other in theology (1788). Jacques-André Naigeon authored the philosophical parts

which are Prefixed a History of the Language and an English Grammar, ed. Samuel Johnson, vol. 1 (London: W. Strahan, 1755), fols. 6N 1/4– 2/4.  “Free-Thinker,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica: Or, a Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, ed. Society of Gentlemen in Scotland, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: A. Bell – C. MacFarquhar, 1771), 631. (Emphasis in the original.)  “Deist,” in ibid., 1771.  Ibid.  Michel Porret, “Savoir encyclopédique, Encyclopédie des savoirs,” in L’Encyclopédie méthodique, 1782 – 1832: Des lumières au positivisme, ed. Claude Blanckaert, Michel Porret and Fabrice Brandli (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2006), 21.

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(three volumes, 1791– 1794), while Nicholas-Sylvestre Bergier assumed responsibility for the theological analysis in three volumes (1788 – 1790).⁷⁰ Both had already contributed to Diderot’s Encyclopédie,⁷¹ and the two could not have disagreed more: Naigeon was an atheist who promoted the separation of church and state and struggled for the limitation of monarchic power.⁷² Bergier, on the other hand, opposed the Enlightenment and acted as a canon at NotreDame. Among those apologetic of the Catholic Church, he was “the most faithful, the most zealous, and also the most polemic”⁷³ one. While Naigeon openly confessed his radical views on freedom, Bergier refused them by all available means. Particularly decisive for our case are Bergier’s Déisme réfuté par luiméme (Deism refuted by itself, 1765), a monograph polemicizing against the works of Rousseau, and his Examen du matérialisme ou système de la nature (Examination of Materialism, or System of Nature, 1771), which was directed against the atheism of Baron d’Holbach.⁷⁴ Because of his biographical background, Bergier’s final verdict on atheism in Panckoucke and the Dictionnaire du théologie, ⁷⁵ respectively, was damning. For him, deists and atheists were the same: “We take atheism not only as the system of those who do not acknowledge God, but also the opinion of those who deny the divine providence because, strictly speaking, a God without providence does not exist for us.”⁷⁶ Although Bergier did not refer to the idea of “divine revelation,” the deistic notion of naturalism, in his view, did not include divine providence. The equation of atheism and deism becomes even clearer in his article on the latter. There, he referenced several times “incrédules” (“infidels”) and “religion naturelle” (“natural religion”), while the rest of his elaborations followed, more or less, the arguments already given:⁷⁷ deists might recognize a God, but which one? For Bergier, it is because of this vague concept of a God rather than the Christian God that deists are qualified as atheists: “We should not be

 On the participation of Bergier, see Didier Masseau, “Un apologiste au service de l’Encyclopédie méthodique: Bergier et le Dictionnaire de théologie,” in ibid., 153– 168.  Bergier was not an author but offered his help and expertise concerning the articles on theology.  Franz Arthur Kafker, “Notices sur les auteurs des 17 volumes de ‘Discours’ de l’Encyclopédie (suite et fin),” Recherches sur Diderot et sur l’Encyclopédie 8 (1990): 106.  Nakagawa, “Diderot, Rousseau et autres,” 159.  Masseau, “Un apologiste,” 153.  This title is commonly used as an alternative to the nineteenth-century reprints of these three volumes of the Panckoucke.  Nicholas-Sylvestre Bergier, “Athée, Athéisme,” in Encyclopédie méthodique: Théologie, vol. 1, ed. Charles-Joseph Panckoucke (Paris/Liège: Panckoucke – Plomteux, 1788), 146 – 147.  Nicholas-Sylvestre Bergier, “Déisme,” in ibid., 496.

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surprised that the partisans of deism have almost all fallen for atheism. This progress of their principles was inevitable since one cannot make any objection against the revealed religion that does not fall with all its weight on the so-called natural religion.”⁷⁸ In the entry on Liberté de penser (freethought), he further pursued this argumentation and his biased reading. According to Bergier, thinking freely keeps the human being away from God. Freethinkers, unbelievers, atheists, and deists – to him – all perpetuated this dangerous illusion and thus were considered as one: But by freethinking, the unbelievers mean not only the freedom of not believing in anything, and of not having any religion, but also the right to preach unbelief, to speak, to write, and to rally against religion. Some even added the privilege of declaring against the law and the government. They claim that this freedom is a natural right.⁷⁹

The text further listed arguments to contradict “the absurdity of their reasoning”⁸⁰ and located the roots of freethinking in England, from whence the wave washed over to France. In Bergier’s defense of Catholicism as the only true religion, the Glorious Revolution served as an example of the catastrophic consequences that a free press and the publication of atheistic and freethinking thoughts could facilitate.⁸¹ If Catholicism as the traditional authority would have been victorious, he speculated, freethinking would have “ascended the scaffold.”⁸² Bergier also brought up the term “libertins.” Identifying them clearly as anti-Christian and as atheists originating in the first reformatory movements, he further accused them of “libertinage.” In a short entry, he labeled those libertarians as “fanatiques,” “pervers,” “heretic,” or “secte” (“fanatics,” “perverted,” “heretic,” or “sect”).⁸³ From the Catholic clergyman Bergier, we now turn to the atheist philosopher Naigeon. His three volumes expand on Diderot’s ideas and consist partially of articles taken from the Encyclopédie, written by Diderot, or of translations

 Ibid., 495.  Nicholas-Sylvestre Bergier, “Liberté de Penser,” in Encyclopédie Méthodique. Théologie, vol. 2, ed. Charles-Joseph Panckoucke (Paris/Liège: Panckoucke – Plomteux, 1789), 436.  Ibid.: “l’absurdité de leurs raisonnements.”  Ibid., 437.  Ibid.  Nicholas-Sylvestre Bergier, “Hérétique,” in Encyclopédie méthodique: Théologie, vol. 2, ed. Charles-Joseph Panckoucke (Paris/Liège: Panckoucke – Plomteux, 1789), 173; Nicholas-Sylvestre Bergier, “Libertins,” in ibid., 440; and Nicholas-Sylvestre Bergier, “Secte,” in Encyclopédie méthodique: Théologie, vol. 3, ed. Charles-Joseph Panckoucke (Paris/Liège: Panckoucke – Plomteux, 1790), 483.

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from foreign philosophers that he enhanced.⁸⁴ Strikingly, Naigeon does not provide any entries on deism or freethinking, only on atheism. Still, in several of his articles, he quotes known freethinkers and deists such as Toland, Collins, Hobbes, or Locke and refers to the term pensée libre in a natural manner. The noticeable lack of any clarifying definition mirrors the author’s conviction that it was unnecessary to define, or even defend, concepts that, in his opinion, eventually would become an integral part of a new worldview. Interestingly, neither Bergier nor Naigeon wrote about secularism, although Bergier touched upon the issue of laïque (laicist).⁸⁵ However, his entry did not distinguish from the already existing ones. He used this term primarily in a political and juristic sense, with no obvious connection to the three other notions. Still, with laïcité, Bergier managed to introduce an important new concept, which would become a key term for French secularization in politics, education, and science during the second half of the nineteenth century. To draw a first conclusion, it has become evident that until the end of the eighteenth century the term “freethinking” was hardly in use beyond the English language area. Influenced by English freethinkers, in the Protestant parts of Germany freethinking ideas derived, to a high degree, from the humanistic concept of libertas philosophandi and cogitandi. In France, on the other hand, the notion liberté de penser (freedom of thought) was in use following the English concept, but it was linked to French philosophers such as Rosseau or Voltaire. They, however, did not self-identify with this movement, or a French equivalent such as esprit forts. When it comes to freethinking in the eighteenth century, it must be stated that throughout Europe individuals with comparable views may have existed, but their stance alone did not qualify them as uncontested freethinkers. In this regard, the Hungarian scholars serve as a striking example. Although some influential philosophers were atheists (Dániel Berzsenyi) or advocates of tolerance (Ferenc Kazinczy), they did not at all consider themselves to be freethinkers. In fact, the concepts of szabadgondolkodó (freethinker) and szabadgondolkozás (freethinking) first appeared in Hungarian newspapers during the first half of the nineteenth century to report on events or persons outside of Hungary. It was not until the end of the nineteenth century that Hungarian scholars adopted them in a self-describing manner, as the next sections demonstrate.  For further reading, see Claire Fauvergue, “Naigeon lecteur de Diderot dans le Dictionnaire de philosophie ancienne et moderne de l’Encyclopédie méthodique,” Recherches sur Diderot et sur l’Encyclopédie, no. 50 (2015): 105 – 119.  See Nicholas-Sylvestre Bergier, “Laïque,” in Encyclopédie méthodique: Théologie, vol. 2, ed. Charles-Joseph Panckoucke (Paris/Liège: Panckoucke – Plomteux, 1789), 402– 403.

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Between the Revolutions: Freethinking from 1789 to 1848 – 49 The fears of traditionalists such as Bergier were not unfounded. The outbreak of the French Revolution shook the long-established divine right of kings to its very foundations: now, rulers could be legitimatized not only by the grace of God but also by men’s will, as constituted in parliaments or assemblies. To a certain degree, Napoleon embodied this “godless” policy: since his self-coronation, the debate over the question if he was an atheist has continued. The long-established ruling dynasties and the adherents of a traditional worldview denounced Napoleon as the Antichrist.⁸⁶ After his defeat and the restoration of the old order, freethinkers and members of related movements, even those of reading circles or intellectual gatherings, lived in a state of constant fear of being persecuted. In Austria, where Metternich installed a system of police surveillance, the consequential retreat of many citizens to the private sphere and their occupation with harmless amusements even created a distinct epoch named Biedermeier. The growing censorship often made it impossible to publish ideas that were potentially threatening to the status quo. Still – and regardless of the growing obstacles for authors and publishers – the number of new encyclopedias increased during the first half of the nineteenth century. This might have been because many of the encyclopedias adopted a positive attitude toward the traditional world order. In fact, encyclopedias formed the battleground for the fight of Christianity and Restoration powers against atheism in the early nineteenth century. This situation makes them an even more valuable source for the reconstruction of conceptual changes and the reception of the terms in question. For this purpose, each part of this section discusses the definitions offered by the encyclopedias, starting with the English reference works and followed by the French and German ones.

 Michael A Pesenson, “Napoleon Bonaparte and Apocalyptic Discourse in Early NineteenthCentury Russia,” The Russian Review 65, no. 3 (2006): 373; and Barbara Beßlich, “Zwischen Abwehr und Anverwandlung: Der deutsche Napoleon-Mythos im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert,” in Napoléon Bonaparte oder der entfesselte Prometheus/Napoléon Bonaparte ou Prométhée déchaîné, ed. Willi Jung (Göttingen: V & R Unipress, 2015), 124– 128.

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English Concepts of Freethinking From the late eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century, the concepts of freethinking, deism, atheism, and secularism barely changed concerning their lexicographical reception. Most of the newly published encyclopedias simply, and sometimes word-by word,⁸⁷ retained the definitions provided by the eighteenth-century reference works. Or, they decided not to include articles on the topic at all.⁸⁸ The same holds true for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which was published in its fourth edition from 1801 to 1810. Yet compared to the first edition discussed above, 30 years later, Britain’s most successful encyclopedia had grown to 20 volumes and consequently contained much more enhanced articles, including those on “deists” as well as on “deism”: Deism may be properly used to denote natural religion, as comprehending those truths which have a real foundation in reason and nature; and in this sense it is so far from being opposite to Christianity, that it is one great design of the gospel to illustrate and enforce it. In this sense some of the deistical writers affected to use it.⁸⁹

Although the Britannica – contrary to its first edition – did not directly equate deism with atheism, by contrasting deism with Christianity, it allocated deism

 Johnson’s Dictionary, for example, deeply inspired the London-Encyclopaedia (22 vols., 1829 and 1839). Not only did its editors copy entries of the Dictionary word by word, but they also included the quotes of prominent English politicians, philosophers, or clergymen cited therein. Due to their differing concepts, the quotes in the London-Encyclopaedia served other purposes than those in the Dictionary, since the London-Encyclopaedia approached its headwords judgmental. However, the first edition of the London-Encyclopaedia literally copied the entry on “freethinker” from Johnson’s Dictionary of 1755, yet without referencing it. (“Freethinker,” in The London Encyclopaedia: Or, Universal Dictionary of Science, Art, Literature, and Practical Mechanics, Comprising a Popular View of the Present State of Knowledge, vol. 9, ed. Thomas Curtis [London: Thomas Tegg, 1829], 611.) The definition of “deism” was taken from the fourth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. (“Deism,” in The London Encyclopaedia: Or, Universal Dictionary of Science, Art, Literature, and Practical Mechanics, Comprising a Popular View of the Present State of Knowledge, vol. 7, ed. Thomas Curtis [London: Thomas Tegg, 1829], 119.)  The British Encyclopaedia (6 vols., 1806 – 1809 in London; 12 vols., 1819 – 1821 in Philadelphia) neither contained an entry on freethinking nor on secularization. However, it copied word for word the lemma “Deist” printed in the first edition of the Britannica (1771) – with which it is not to be confused. (See “Deist,” in The British Encyclopedia: Or, Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, Comprising an Accurate and Popular View of the Present Improved State of Human Knowledge, vol. 2, ed. William Nicholson [London: C. Whittingham, 1809], fol. Hh 7v–8r.)  “Deism,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica: Or, a Dictionary of Arts, Sciences and Miscellaneous Literature, vol. 2, ed. James Miller (Edinburgh: Andrew Bell, 1810), 126.

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to the concepts of the still loose anticlerical movements. This is highlighted by the article on “deists,” which is a reprint of the respective entry in Chambers’ Encyclopaedia: ⁹⁰ […] a class of people known also under the denomination of Free-thinkers, whose distinguishing character it is, not to profess any particular form or system of religion; but only to acknowledge the existence of a God, and to follow the light and law of nature, rejecting revelation, and opposing Christianity.⁹¹

Furthermore, the article once more equates deists with atheists, when stating that the self-designation “deists” originated in the desire of the first deists to give themselves a “more honourable appellation than that of atheists” in the middle of the sixteenth century in France and Italy.⁹² As with the Britannica, the Cyclopaedia, edited by Abraham Rees,⁹³ referred to Toland, Collins, Hobbes, and Tindal as British deists.⁹⁴ Again, the entries on “deists” and “deism” were partially copied from other encyclopedias and put freethinkers on a level with deists.⁹⁵ Denouncing deism as an “arrogant ignorance of metaphysical reasoning”⁹⁶ and “speculative impiety,” Rees’ lexicographical work locates deism near to anticlericalism and atheism. Albeit critical of deists for their attitudes, the final paragraphs of both the entry of Britannica and the Cyclopaedia conclude with identical wording, quite affirmative, that the debates between Christians, deists, and freethinkers had been highly productive, since they added to the consolidation of Christianism to the point of its ultimate

 For the sake of completeness, it should be mentioned that Britannica also reprinted the four definitions of Clarke.  “Deists,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica: Or, a Dictionary of Arts, Sciences and Miscellaneous Literature vol. 2, ed. James Miller (Edinburgh: Andrew Bell, 1810), 126. (Emphasis in the original.)  Ibid.  Rees was a Presbyterian minister before he was entrusted to re-edit Abraham Chambers’ Cyclopaedia thanks to his interests in mathematics and physics. When the re-edition appeared in 1778, Rees was highly acclaimed. This success lead Thomas Longman, business manager of the Longman publishing company, to invite Rees to edit a new encyclopedia named The New Cyclopaedia, or, Universal Dictionary of the Arts and Science, commonly known as Rees’ Cyclopaedia, between 1802 and 1820. (A. P. Woolrich, “Rees, Abraham [1743 – 1825],” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: From the Earliest Times to the Year 2000, vol. 46, edited by Matthew Colin and Brian Harrison [New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004], 314– 316; Asa Briggs, “Longman Family [per. 1724– 1972],” in ibid., vol. 34, 402.)  “Deists,” in The Cyclopaedia: Or, Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Literature, ed. Abraham Rees (London, 1819), fol. Zz 1r.  Ibid., Yy 4v.  Ibid.

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victory.⁹⁷ The same pejorative reading is echoed by the entry “atheist” of the Britannica: Atheism, absurd and unreasonable as it is, has had its votaries and martyrs. Lucilio Vanini, an Italian, […] publicly taught atheism in France, about the beginning of the 17th century; and, being convicted of it at Toulouse was condemned to death.⁹⁸

The London Encyclopaedia (1829) followed the same pattern by adopting this judgment word-for-word, but instead of citing Vanini as a warning of publicly practiced atheism, it referred to the execution of Spinoza.⁹⁹ Spinoza, in general, was frequently quoted as the spokesmen of atheism by encyclopedias, partially, of course, because of the encyclopedists’ “copy & paste” practice. The cited examples of non-British atheists and deists were provided to suggest that those two concepts were foreign to British scholars by principle. To that end, the London Encyclopaedia used the rhetoric device of “we and the others” – which became more and more common in the context of the development of national identity – in naming Spinoza “a foreigner.”¹⁰⁰ Along these lines, the authors attested Newton and his followers, Boyle, and other presumably British deists or freethinkers as “principal advocates for the existence of a Deity […].”¹⁰¹ The British Encyclopaedia – not to be confused with Britannica – contains the same paragraph on British scholars and cites the Spinoza case, but it also includes original considerations on atheists: “Atheist, is one who does not believe in the existence of a God. He attributes every thing to a fortuitous concourse of atoms.”¹⁰² Although this specification might appear almost modern, the author followed the ancient Greek idea of atomism, which was quite influential on natural philosophers such as Boyle, Descartes, and Newton.¹⁰³ In its further  Ibid., fol. Zz lr, and “Deists,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 127.  “Atheist,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica: Or, a Dictionary of Arts, Sciences and Miscellaneous Literature, vol. 3, ed. James Miller (Edinburgh: Andrew Bell, 1810), 193.  “Atheism,” in The London Encyclopaedia: Or, Universal Dictionary of Science, Art, Literature, and Practical Mechanics, Comprising a Popular View of the Present State of Knowledge, vol. 3, ed. Thomas Curtis (London: Thomas Tegg, 1829), 212; for full quotation see the following footnote.  Ibid.: “In the seventeenth century, Spinosa, a foreigner, was its noted defender.”  Ibid.; and “Atheist,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 193.  “Atheist,” in The British Encyclopedia: Or, Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, Comprising an Accurate and Popular View of the Present Improved State of Human Knowledge, vol. 1, ed. William Nicholson (London: C. Whittingham, 1809), fol. Ee 2v.  For a brief introduction to the concept of atomism in modern times and for further reading, see Alan Chalmers, “Atomism from the 17th to the 20th Century,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, accessed December 14, 2018, https://plato.stanford.edu/ar chives/win2014/entries/atomism-modern/.

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course, the text holds to the reception of antique philosophers by quoting Plato, who distinguished three different forms of atheists: first, those who deny the existence of a god; second, those who admit the existence of a god but deny his influence on human affairs; and finally those who believe in gods but not in divine punishment.¹⁰⁴ A further elaboration was offered in the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia – next to the Encyclopaedia Britannica the most important English lexicographical publication of the early nineteenth century. Reverend John Lee, with five pages of two columns each, contributed a lengthy and original essay on “atheism” that summarized the state of knowledge and the concepts of morality of his time and offered a rigorous definition of atheism, according to which everyone is an atheist who does not concur with the traditional Christian worldview.¹⁰⁵ Whether this understanding also included deism or freethinking remains open to interpretation, since the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia does not refer to them in this article or in separate entries. Concerning secularism, neither the Edinburg Encyclopaedia nor the British Encyclopaedia dwelled on the issue. These reference works, in specifying secularism, only repeated the definition provided by the Cyclopaedia a hundred years before.¹⁰⁶ “Secularization,” therefore, still appeared as a political practice, while the three other terms remained philosophical-theological concepts.

Toward and against the libre-penseur – French Concepts of Freethinking In France, the publication of reference works paused until the 1830s. The first one released after the break was the Encyclopédie nouvelle, published between 1834 and 1841 in eight partially finished volumes by the economist Pierre H. Laroux and the sociologist Jean Reynaud.¹⁰⁷ Both represented a new generation of scholars heavily influenced (in both positive and negative ways) by the great names of the Enlightenment and by the upheavals initiated by Napoleon, the  “Atheist,” in British Encyclopaedia, fol. Ee 2v–3r.  John Lee, “Atheism,” in Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, ed. David Brewster (Edinburgh, 1830), 5: “We would extend the term still farther: To those who have no idea of God at all […].”  See, e. g., “Secularization,” in The London Encyclopaedia: Or, Universal Dictionary of Science, Art, Literature, and Practical Mechanics, Comprising a Popular View of the Present State of Knowledge, vol. 19, ed. Thomas Curtis (London: Thomas Tegg, 1829), 763.  Volumes five to seven – covering the terms from “Episc” to “Phil” – were only finished partially by the time of publication and were thus edited in one volume.

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Second Republic, and the Restoration. Besides, since the final defeat of Napoleon, the Catholic Church in France had again gained grounds, which was also echoed in the encyclopedias. Hence, the article on atheism in the Encyclopédie nouvelle offers less a definition than a judgment of the term’s usage. The first sentence already states: “Athéisme. Ce mot est un de ceux don’t on a fait le plus d’abus.” (“Atheism is one of the most abused words.”)¹⁰⁸ The further argumentation confirms the impression of “atheism” or “atheist” as being primarily external attributions resulting from a conflict with religion: “But intolerant people do not understand it this way: there is no God but their God, and rejecting their belief is to profess atheism. Also, there was no word more often condemned by the preachers or rejected by those who were accused to be atheists.”¹⁰⁹ After referring to some historical personalities associated with this combat term such as Socrates or Spinoza, the article turned its attention to those who self-identified as atheists. The Encyclopédie nouvelle labeled them as “quelques insensés” (“some lunatics”) who might consider themselves atheists but in reality believed in something comparable to God.¹¹⁰ To the authors, atheism seemed only an imagination deriving from the aberration of religion and mind. In consequence, the Encyclopédie nouvelle distinguished deism and freethinking from atheism, although definitions of these two terms, as well as of secularization, are missing. In contrast to other reference works, the authors of the Encyclopédie du dixneuvième siècle, edited in 28 volumes by Ange du Saint-Priest,¹¹¹ are known by name. Most of them were Catholic scholars or supporters of the Ancien Régime. Consequently, the Encyclopédie du dix-neuvième siècle adopted a conservative stance. Pierre-Sébastien Laurentie, a Catholic journalist, legitimist, and advocate of an anti-liberal ideology, authored the article on “atheism,” which he introduced with a praise to God. His worship reflects the re-emerging power of the Catholic Church, as well as the author’s rejection of the radical ideology of eighteenth-century enlightened philosophy: “Grâce au ciel, ce mot fatal d’athée, d’athéisme, disparaît de la langue philosophie contemporaine.” (“Thanks to  “Athéisme,” in Encyclopédie nouvelle, ou dictionnaire philosophique, scientifique, littéraire et industriel, ed. Pierre H. Laroux and Jean Reynaud (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, [1836] 1991), 195.  Ibid.  Ibid. Strictly speaking, Nouvelle’s concept of “atheism as self-identity” resembled agnosticism. Nevertheless, both terms were and still are used synonymously.  There is hardly any information available on Ange de Saint-Priest. His name suggests he was a member of the noble family Guignard de Saint-Priest, but the family tree does not mention his name. The only family member conducting intellectual work during the early nineteenth century was Alexis Guignard, diplomat in Russia. Although it might be possible that “Ange” is a short version of his two first names, it seems unlikely, since there was no need for him to publish under a quite obvious alias.

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heaven, this fateful word of atheism vanished from the contemporary language of philosophy.”)¹¹² In the following, Laurentie differentiated between four varieties of non-belief: dogmatic, practical, philosophical, and political atheism. In addition to the arguments given in other encyclopedias, he held the materialistic concept of eighteenth-century philosophy and the Enlightenment responsible for the French Revolutions of 1789 and 1830 and the moral decay of society. His reading of practical atheism implied that its representatives would feel empowered to committing a crime due to their lack of fear regarding divine punishment. Laurentie’s third notion of atheism discusses its philosophical, or rather rational, aspects.¹¹³ As both of these adjectives might already indicate, his singleparagraph explanation considers rational atheism “pure deism.” According to Laurentie, the enlightened ideal of ratio served as a substitute for religion. With his turning toward “athéisme politique” (“political atheism”),¹¹⁴ for the first time, the connection between atheism and secularism is created. It is the “État athée” (the “atheistic state”) that negates the existence and power of God.¹¹⁵ Characterizing the atheistic state as a “nouveauté contemporaine” (a “contemporary novelty”), Laurentie’s moralizing elaborations reflect the historical background of his time with the first political realizations of secularism during the French Revolution. By denouncing political atheism, he adds another distinction: “The private atheism might seem defeated; [now] we have to fight public atheism; the latest expression of so many mistakes in the world.”¹¹⁶ His differentiation between private and public atheism mirrors the general developments of the preceding decades which marked the emergence of a public sector strictly separated from the private sphere. In line with this, the author traces the development of religion as part of both spaces. While until the middle of the eighteenth century, the religion of a person had been a matter of the state, since the passing of various acts of toleration in Europe (e. g. in France or the Habsburg Empire),¹¹⁷ religion more and more became a matter of the individual sphere.

 Pierre-Sébastien Laurentie, “Athée, Athéisme,” in Encyclopédie du dix-neuvième siècle, ed. Ange de Saint-Priest (Paris: Bureau de l’Encyclopédie du XIXe siècle, 1838), 146.  Ibid., 149. Laurentie introduced the term “athéisme philosophique,” although “rational” was more common.  Ibid.  Ibid., 150.  Ibid.  In France: Toleration of Protestants and Jews in South-West France (1787); in the Habsburg Empire: Toleration of the Protestant and Orthodox Churches (1781); Toleration of Jews (1782).

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With his focus on natural philosophy in the final paragraph of the article,¹¹⁸ Laurentie affirmed his equation of deism with atheism. This was further deepened in his entry on “deism,” where he stated that because of the deists’ conviction of ratio instead of God’s arbitrariness as the explanation of nature, “le déiste, à ce point de vue, n’est guère autre chose que l’athée” (“from this point of view, the deist is hardly anything else than the atheist”).¹¹⁹ His definition of this “religion naturelle” (“natural religion”)¹²⁰ as a sect not only reminds of Collins’ freethinking self-description, but also labels deism as a substitute for organized religion. Thus the rest of the entry is written in form of an emotional refutation of deism and the French philosophers of the eighteenth century – above all, Rousseau – supportive of deism and atheism. Laurentie’s argumentation is filled with vulgarisms that he partially copied from his previous articles, such as “l’insensé,” “maniaque,” “vicieux,” and “l’idiot” (“the foolish,” “the maniac,” “vicious,” “idiot”),¹²¹ or simply “anarchie pure” (“pure anarchy”), which he pictured as a consequence of deism.¹²² Although the Encyclopédie du dix-neuvième siècle does not contain a definition of freethinking, it does mention the term esprit fort, the eighteenth-century French equivalent of “freethinker.” Again, it was Laurentie who authored this entry, dealing with different concepts of esprit, and just as in his previous entries, he grasped esprit fort as a sort of atheism and anarchism.¹²³ Most noteworthy is that he seems to have approached the notion in the past tense, as if this concept would not exist anymore. This choice of tense concludes with the general trend of all of the French encyclopedias of the Restoration period and their attempts to present the ideas of the Enlightenment as vanquished.

 Laurentie, “Athée, Athéisme,” 150.  Pierre-Sébastien Laurentie, “Déisme,” in Encyclopédie du dix-neuvième siècle, ed. Ange de Saint-Priest (Paris: Bureau de l’Encyclopédie du XIXe siècle, 1846), 711.  Ibid.  Ibid.  Ibid.  Pierre-Sébastien Laurentie, “Esprit,” in Encyclopédie Du Dix-Neuvième Siècle, ed. Ange de Saint-Priest (Paris: Bureau de l’Encyclopédie du XIXe siècle, 1850), 89: “A strong spirit was somebody who put himself above the belief and joined the religious faith of the profane that denies God and laughed at hell. Unfortunately, he obeyed his passions and freed his life from all rules.”

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Between “Freigeist” and “freier Geist” – German Concepts of Freethinking The number of German encyclopedias rose to unparalleled heights during the first half of the nineteenth century. All of those encyclopedias that included entries on freethinking distinguished between freethinking as a philosophical movement and the art of thinking free, that is, to be free of prejudices. While they held a positive view on the latter, they considered the philosophical movement as “false freedom.”¹²⁴ Their distrust echoed the alleged connection of freethinking and atheism, which was stressed in Adelung’s Wörterbuch (5 vols., four editions between 1774 and 1811). According to this influential reference work, a freethinker was someone “der sich von den Gesetzen der Vernunft, Religion und Sitten los macht” (who “freed himself from the rules of reason, religion, and morals”).¹²⁵ However, freethinking was not directly identified with atheism but rather taken as a movement of natural philosophy. In its third edition (1815), the Brockhaus – the most important German reference work to the present day – substantiates the connection of freethinking and deism, since deists may believe in God but not in divine revelation.¹²⁶ For the subsequent five editions, this explanation remained uncontested. The ninth edition (1844), however, deployed some significant modifications. First, Freidenker (freethinker) – the regular term in use today – was referenced under the entry “Freigeist.”¹²⁷ Second, the article differentiated between freethinkers as deists and as atheists: Freethinker does not only refer to a thinker, who draws his conclusions independent from the opinions of the church, but also to such a [thinker], who rejects the belief in revelation

 “Freigeist,” in Brockhaus Bilder-Conversations-Lexikon: Ein Handbuch zur Verbreitung der Kentnisse und zur Unterhaltung, vol. 2 (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1838), 107: “But the sensual human being is wrong in assuming to possess freedom in his self-will, and it is this false freedom that the freethinker upholds.”  Johann Christoph Adelung, “Freygeist,” in Versuch eines vollständigen grammatisch-kritischen Wörterbuchs der hochdeutschen Mundart, mit beständiger Vergleichung der übrigen Mundarten, besonders aber der Oberdeutschen, vol. 2, ed. Johann Christoph Adelung (Brno: Joseph G. Traßler, 1788), 290.  “Freigeist,” in Conversations-Lexicon oder Encyclopädisches Handwörterbuch für gebildete Stände, vol. 3 (Leipzig/Altenburg: F. A. Brockhaus, 1815), 309.  “Freigeist,” in Allgemeine Deutsche Real-Encyklopädie für die gebildeten Stände: Conversations-Lexikon, vol. 5 (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1844), 567.

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or generally all positive belief. In the first case, freethinking is deism, in the latter unbelief.¹²⁸

Freethinking, thus, still seemed closely linked to religion and theology. But, unlike some decades ago, neither freethinkers nor deists were received automatically as atheists. Instead, the Brockhaus, and its compacted edition, the Bilder-Lexikon, listed deism and theism as equivalent but antonymous to atheism.¹²⁹ In some cases, the Brockhaus distinguished between deism and theism but only if deism was taken as a negation of divine revelation as was the case in English deism. To avoid confusion, the Brockhaus suggested that any differentiation of those two terms apart from their linguistic origin would be “willkürlich” (“arbitrary”).¹³⁰ As a reference, Immanuel Kant and his reception of deism and theism was quoted, the Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason, 1781), in particular, in which reason was contrasted with the existence of a higher being. For Kant, deism supported only the idea of transcendental theology, while theism also promoted the concept of a natural theology.¹³¹ These thoughts proved highly influential on the entry on deism in the ErschGruber (1832). Besides the notion’s basic definition already given in other encyclopedias, Friedrich Köppen, who authored the entry, relied on Kant for his approach: Meanwhile, since nobody shall be accused of denying something [here: God], just because he dared to assert [the only transcendental existence of God], so it seems more moderate and accurate to say: the deist believes in a God, the theist believes in an active God [summam intelligentiam].¹³²

 “Freidenker,” in Allgemeine Deutsche Real-Encyklopädie für die gebildeten Stände: Conversations-Lexikon, vol. 5 (Leipzig/Altenburg: F. A. Brockhaus, 1844), 564.  “Deismus,” in Conversations-Lexicon oder encyclopädisches Handwörterbuch für gebildete Stände, vol. 3 (Leipzig/Altenburg: F. A. Brockhaus, 1815), 82; “Deismus,” in Brockhaus BilderConversations-Lexikon: Ein Handbuch zur Verbreitung der Kenntnisse und zur Unterhaltung, vol. 1 (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1837), 522. The following editions of Brockhaus kept this equivocation. However, the first edition did not explicitly treat them as synonyms. This equivocation might result from the analogy of “d” and “t” in the German language (contrary to English, the “h” in “theism” in German stays mute). In the spoken dialects, particularly in the southern parts of Germany, as in Switzerland and Austria, “d” and “t” are pronounced almost the same.  “Deismus,” in Brockhaus, 82.  Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Leipzig: Johann Friedrich Hartknoch, 51799), 659 – 660.  Friedrich Köppen, “Deismus,” in Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste, vol. 23, ed. Johann Samuel Ersch and Johann Gottfried Gruber (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1834), 352, after Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 661.

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Here, again, deism and atheism are attributions rather than self-descriptions, and in his subsequent article on “deists” – the actual followers of deism – the author abandoned his neutral tone. Specifying deists as supporters of “irgend eine” (“some”) doctrine of God that is not based on the idea of divine revelation, Köppen states that in the broadest sense of the word all those philosophers were to be characterized as “deists” who would attempt to prove the existence of a higher being by “Vernunftsspeculation” (“speculations of reason”), including pagan ones.¹³³ In the narrower sense of the term, however, the author classified those as deists who would promote the Ionic and Eleatic concepts of the ancient Greeks, such as the French philosophers of the Enlightenment.¹³⁴ Of course, both definitions applied to freethinkers and to atheists. All encyclopedias considered so far defined atheism as the simple negation of God. Depending on the reference work, a moral judgment also accompanied this reading.¹³⁵ In the early nineteenth century, however, it was still a matter of perception and personal opinion whether a person was regarded to be an atheist. The equation of atheism, deism, and freethinking continued to exist, although an increasing number of reference works downplayed or even denied their existence. The previous analysis suggests that the linguistic reception of freethinking, atheism, and deism differed markedly depending on the language and confessional spheres in the period of the Restoration. In Britain, the definitions written up during the eighteenth century were simply rewritten. In consequence, the identification of freethinking, deism, and atheism did not change at all. Catholic France, being caught between revolution, Napoleon, and the Restoration, did not touch upon the matter for almost three decades. When scholars resumed the lexicographic work, they were highly influenced by the restoration of the Catholic Church as the political power in France. In the German language areas, primarily the Protestant parts were involved with encyclopedias. Yet they could not agree on whether freethinking – as a philosophical movement – was deistic or whether deism equaled theism or rather atheism. These conflicts, as the final section demonstrates, concerned not only encyclopedists but also freethinkers.

 Friedrich Köppen, “Deisten,” in Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste, vol. 23, ed. Johann Samuel Ersch and Johann Gottfried Gruber (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1834), 352.  Ibid.  “Atheismus,” in Damen Conversations Lexikon, vol. 1, ed. Carl Herloßsohn (Leipzig: Fr. Volckmar, 1834), 340.

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Freethinkers in Opposition Although the encyclopedias suggested a period of stagnation concerning freethinking and secularization, the spokesmen of freethinking did not rest at all. Again, Britain took the lead, with industrialization triggering a new wave of anticlericalism.¹³⁶ One of the most influential representatives of British freethought at that time was Richard Carlile. In his book The Deist (1826), he relied on the already stated key points of deism. More noteworthy was his idea of freethinking, which he deduced from the simple necessity of thinking: These arguers [arguers of the rationality of discovering God] they call Freethinkers, and this appellation has obtained, in the understanding of pious believers, the most odious disgrace. Yet we cannot argue without thinking; nor can we either think or argue to any purpose without freedom. Therefore free-thinking, so far from being a disgrace, is a virtue, a most commendable quality.¹³⁷

In France, by contrast, the term freethinking was still not yet in use. The French equivalent, libre-pensée, did not appear before 1840, probably first used by Victor Hugo in several letters and unpublished drafts.¹³⁸ Other French scholars such as Paul-Louis Courier maintained their focus on atheism and anticlericalism in the follow-up of the Enlightenment.¹³⁹ In Germany, freethinking remained closely connected to Protestant movements such as the Lichtfreunde ¹⁴⁰ (Friends of Light, 1841) and to anticlerical movements, whose best-known example was the Los-von-Rom (Away from Rome) initiative of the Deutschkatholiken (German Catholics, 1844).¹⁴¹ At the beginning of the century, Johann Gottfried Herder, in

 On freethinking during this period, see John Eros, “The Rise of Organized Freethought in Mid-Victorian England,” The Sociological Review 2, no. 1 (1954): 98 – 120.  Richard Carlile, The Deist: Or, Moral Philosopher: Being an Impartial Inquiry into Moral and Theological Truths, Selected from the Writings of the Most Celebrated Authors in Ancient and Modern Times, vol. 3 (London: R. Carlile, 1826), 7.  See Jacqueline Lalouette, La Libre Pensée en France, 1848 – 1940 (Paris: Albin Michel, 2 2001), 15; and Claude Millet, “Jacqueline Lalouette: ‘Victor Hugo et la libre-pensée’,” Université Paris 7 equipe 19e siècle, accessed January 16, 2019, http://groupugo.div.jussieu.fr/groupugo/8902-25lalouette.htm.  See also Lalouette, La Libre Pensée en France, 15.  For further information on these movements, see Jörn Brederlow, “Lichtfreunde” und “Freie Gemeinden”: Religiöser Protest und Freiheitsbewegung im Vormärz und in den Revolution von 1848/49 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1976).  Anticlericalism impacted with differing intensity depending on the cultural context. In some countries, it was so strong that it even became a political matter (e. g. the Kulturkampf in Germany or the Los von Rom-initiative in Bohemia and Austria). Especially for Austria, that

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his Adrastea (1801– 1803), elaborated extensively and in a sincere tone on the issue of Freidenker. ¹⁴² In particular, he harshly criticized the antithetic use of “freethinker”: as (self‐)identity of outstanding minds, for one thing, and as stigmatization of intellectual opponents, infidels, or fools, for another.¹⁴³ “‘Still I do not know’, some might say, ‘what a freethinker is? Freely shall everybody think, after all’. It would be desirable that everybody shall pause and think before he uses this term as an expletive.”¹⁴⁴ This quote again mirrors the rather defensive approach that answered the disdain of freethinking by the defenders of the Ancien Régime. The post-Napoleonic era dampened freethinking. Its supporters suffered serious consequences if they expressed their opinions openly: Carlile, for example, was imprisoned on multiple occasions because of his advocacy for deism, atheism, and the rights of women and children. It was only the Revolutions of 1848 – 49 that caused the rebirth of liberal movements, in general, and of freethinking, in particular.

Freethinking 1848 – 1918: Organizing Freethought Movements The events of 1848 – 49 gave a fresh start to freethinking. Many among the new generation of freethinkers were natural scientists or medical professionals, materialists, atheists, and/or deists influenced by the ideas of the French Enlightenment and revolution.¹⁴⁵ Moreover, a significant part was aligned with the radical

is, the German-speaking Western parts of the Habsburg Empire, Los von Rom was not only a matter of anticlericalism and anti-Semitism, but also of creating a national German identity. For further reading, see Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, Die Politisierung des religiösen Bewußtseins: Die bürgerlichen Religionsparteien im deutschen Vormärz, Das Beispiel des Deutschkatholizismus (Stuttgart/ Bad Cannstatt: frommann-holzboog, 1978); and Karl-Reinhart Trauner, Die Los-von-Rom-Bewegung: Gesellschaftspolitische und kirchliche Strömung in der ausgehenden Habsburgermonarchie (Szentendre: Tillinger, 1999).  Johann Gottfried Herder, Adrastea, vol. 4.2 (Leipzig: Johann Friedrich Hartknoch, 1802), 214– 233.  Ibid., 214.  Ibid., 223.  See Lalouette, La Libre Pensée en France, 19; Marius Rotar, “Libera cugetare în România până la izbucnirea Primului Război Mondial: Cazul Doctorului Constantin Thiron,” Archiva Moldaviae 7 (2015): 143; and Marius Rotar, “The Freethought Movement in Romania until the Outbreak of the First World War: Developments, Criticisms and European Influences,” History of European Ideas 42, no. 4 (2016): 557.

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political left.¹⁴⁶ Their common ground was anticlericalism – on national as well as international levels. Before we continue, the terms anticlericalism and anti-Catholicism require further specification. This chapter follows Lisa Dittrich’s approach, since she provides easily applicable but concrete definitions of both terms. According to her, anticlericalism is a critical stance against all churches, their members, and their dogmas or against religion as such. Anti-confessional movements such as antiCatholicism can be integrated into this concept.¹⁴⁷ However, anticlericalism is not comparable with an anti-religious stance, since Protestants, free churches, and liberal Catholic movements joined the anticlerical camp.¹⁴⁸ Anti-Catholicism, in contrast, describes positions that are specifically directed against the Catholic Church and its dogmas, policies, and power.¹⁴⁹ A common characteristic of this period is the radicalization of all of these concepts. This might have been due to the general radicalization of politics. Freethinking, anticlericalism, and anti-Catholicism were often embedded in the context of nationalism and the culture wars,¹⁵⁰ as the following considerations illustrate. A symbol of this radicalization may be the introduction of the term laïcité, coined by the French pedagogue and Nobel Peace laureate Ferdinand É. Buisson to describe the specific French development of secularism, that is, the radical and absolute separation of church and state affairs.¹⁵¹ Buisson conceptualized laïcité in the context of the fierce culture war fought between the Third Republic and the Catholic Church.¹⁵²

 Ibid., 566; and Jacqueline Lalouette, “Une rencontre oubliée: La Libre Pensée française et les savants matérialistes allemands (1863 – 1870),” Romantisme 21, no. 73 (1991): 64.  Dittrich, Antiklerikalismus in Europa, 14.  Dittrich, “European Connections,” 274.  Dittrich, Antiklerikalismus in Europa, 14.  For an overview, see Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser, eds, Culture Wars: Secular– Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). For the French case, see Michael F. Leruth, “Laicism, Religion and the Economy of Belief in the French Republic,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 31, no. 3 (2005): The Dreyfus Affair in the Twenty-First Century: A Reconsideration: 445 – 467; and Jacqueline Lalouette, “Laïcité, anticléricalismes et antichristianisme,” Transversalités 108, no. 4 (2008): 69 – 84.  This term is often used anachronistically for secular approaches in earlier centuries, which is – strictly speaking – incorrect, since it simply did not exist prior to the later nineteenth century.  Michael Germann, “Laizismus,” in Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Handwörterbuch für Theologie und Religionswissenschaft (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), 38 – 39. In the following decades, however, laïcité (status of a given separation of state and church affairs) as well as its relative “laicism” (movement) became de-radicalized. Today, the terms secularism and laicism are mostly used synonymously. This is why the conceptual separation of both terms is difficult

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Figure 2: Anticlericalism as common frame of freethinking; Watson Heston, The Freethinkers’ Pictoral Text-Book (New York: The Truth Seeker Company, 1896), 63.

After 1848 – 49, freethinkers began to found societies and journals, and they acted out their left-wing network ambitions: they held international conferences to join with freethought organizations from other countries. With these steps, they intended to promote freethought, rally support for its ideas, and institutionalize the aims and contents of freethinking.

National and Transnational Dimensions of Freethinking: Constituting a Self-Identity By the middle of the nineteenth century, freethinking was no longer a Western European phenomenon, but an international movement consisting of regional, national, and transnational networks, organizations, and journals. Accordingly,

and sometimes even arbitrary, as R. Mehl emphasizes. (Roger Mehl, “Laizismus,” in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, vol. 20 [Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 1982], 404.)

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the ways to understand freethinking diversified even further. As a consequence, the internationally aligned freethinkers of the nineteenth century struggled to figure out a commonly accepted definition of freethinking. The following analysis focuses on the conflicts in the process of forming a transnational self-identity of freethinking rather than on tracing single national concepts. Those conflicts about freethinking’s definition and purpose rooted in national grounds: British freethinkers, for example, debated whether religion could be a part of freethought or whether it was opposed to freethinking in principle. Jacob Holyoake and Charles Bradlaugh, the most prominent spokesmen of freethinking and secularism of their time in Britain, adopted different positions: while the former advocated for a moderate stance against institutionalized religion, the latter intended to fight any religious interference with state affairs by the principles of secularism and atheism.¹⁵³ The same feeling of opposition – this time against the Orthodox Church – also motivated Romanian (here, inhabitants of the Romanian United Principalities) freethinkers to organize themselves: In response to the Orthodox Association, founded in Iași in 1885, Romanian freethinkers gathered in Bucharest, attempting – in vain, however – to establish a freethought association.¹⁵⁴ Only in 1909 did the physician Constantin Thiron manage to found the Asociației de Liberă-Cugetare monistă evoluționistă din România (Association of Monistic Evolutionary Freethinking in Romania)¹⁵⁵ and its journal Rațiunea (Rationality, 1911– 1914). As the Association’s designation indicates, Darwin’s theory of evolution was a primary point of reference in the Romanian freethought movement as well as for freethinkers in general. It was welcomed as an ally in the dispute with clericalism, as it seemed to scientifically prove deist, atheist, or monist principles.

 Laura Schwartz, Infidel Feminism: Secularism, Religion and Women’s Emancipation, England 1830 – 1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 9; and Royle, Victorian Infidels.  Marius Rotar, “The Freethought Movement in Romania,” 557.  The alternative name of the association was Asociației Naționale a Liber Cugetărilor (National Association of Freethinkers). Although this title might have been more common in the narrow literature on Hungarian freethought, the above-given designation is the historical title of the association used by Thiron and inscribed on his tombstone. See Gazeta Ilustrata, March 22, 1914, 6. For further information, see Rotar, “Libera cugetare.” Monism can be interpreted as a complement to deism, since prominent deists such as Spinoza or Hobbes developed early concepts of monism. It also is a related term to atheism or pantheism, most of all in the scientific interpretation of Ernst Haeckel, who propagated Darwinism in Germany. For further reading, see Todd Weir, “The Riddles of Monism: An Introductory Essay,” in Monism: Science, Philosophy, Religion, and the History of a Worldview, ed. Todd Weir (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 1– 44.

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In Hungary, freethinkers did not appear publicly before the turn of the century, although the history of Hungarian freethinking is scarcely studied. The most prominent Hungarian association of freethought was the Galilei Kör (Galilei Circle, 1908 – 1919), founded by radical left-wing students in Budapest.¹⁵⁶ Its program – printed in the liberal newspaper Nepszava (Word of the People) – primarily denounced backward-looking education in schools. Instead of teaching modern science, philosophy, and literature (the program mentioned Darwin, Nietzsche, and Tolstoy, amongst others), ancient Roman authors and other – according to the Galilei Circle – useless and outdated contents were prioritized.¹⁵⁷ A few years later, the physician, university professor of sociology, and politician Oszkár Jászi established another society, called Selmeczbányai Köre (Circle of Selmecbánya).¹⁵⁸ In his first speech (December 5, 1912), he defined the “essentials and basic principles of freethinking”¹⁵⁹ as follows: Yet freethinking does not mean the transformation of new concepts or new dogmas into general knowledge. On the contrary! [It means] that freethinking has neither theorems, nor dogmas, nor paragraphs. We freethinkers do not wish that anybody shall adopt the ideas represented by us, [but] shall be enthusiastic about those ideas. Freethought, dear ladies and gentlemen, has just one condition and that is the right of the free will. This is what we expect of everybody.¹⁶⁰

The very first Hungarian freethinking journal was Az Új Század (The New Century, 1906, two issues), published in Cluj (Transylvania) by Adolf J. Storfer and Lénárt Mahler.¹⁶¹ It was released to be a “szószék” (“pulpit”), and an “oázis”

 For further reading, see József Zoltán, Budapest történetének bibliográfiája: 1686 – 1950, vol. 6 (Budapest: Fővárosi Szabó Ervin Könvytár, 1969), 307– 308; Zsigmond Kende, A Galilei kör megalakulása (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1974); and Péter Tibor Csunderlik, Radikálisok, szabadgondolkodók, ateisták: A Galilei Kör (1908 – 1919) története (Budapest: Napvilág Kiadó, 2017).  “Haladásról nem szabad beszélni!” [“It is not allowed to speak about progress.”] Nepszava, February 21, 1909, 8.  Today Banská Štiavnica, Slovakia.  Oszkár Jászi, “A szabadgondolkodás lényege és alapelvei,” in A szabadgondolkodás lényege és alapelvei: Mi a programunk?, ed. Selmeczbányai Köre (Banská Štiavnica: Selmeczbányai Köre, 1912), 3.  Ibid., 4.  Nothing concrete is known about the biography of Lénárt Mahler. He only published an article named “Nemzeti eszme és szociálizmus” (National spirit and socialism) in Az Új Század: Szabadgondolkodó Folyóirat (The New Century: Freethinking Journal) in 1907.

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(“oasis”) “in the desert of lies, malevolence, tyranny, and stupidity.”¹⁶² Its title recalled the turn of the century and the hopes connected to the nineteenth century as a turning point in history: The twentieth century is no pioneer, just the realizer of the hopes of the advanced nineteenth century. Because the nineteenth century gave birth to positivism, sociology, socialism, anarchism, individualism, naturalism, Darwinism, monism, materialism. Because the nineteenth century gave [us] the Comtes, Marxs, Darwins, Haeckels, Zolas, Ibsens, Spencers. Those were the pioneers.¹⁶³

This assessment reflects, on the one hand, the hopes for a prosperous future just before the outbreak of the First World War and, on the other hand, the “conceptual networking” between freethinkers and their allies. It is worth noting that Storfer was not Hungarian but a German-speaking journalist from a Jewish family in Czernowitz. His collaboration with the Hungarian Mahler symbolizes the freethinkers’ ideal of cooperation beyond linguistic borders or national interests. Still, linguistic and national differences complicated the establishment of permanent transnational societies during the second half of the nineteenth century. Torn between specific national ideas of freethinking and transnational approaches, and between diverging economic, social, and religious ideals, the only thing freethinkers seem to have been able to agree upon was their shared opposition to the Catholic Church or, respectively, the Orthodox Church. This “common enemy” made freethinkers natural allies of other movements that offered alternative models for society and politics, such as the women’s rights movement. (For the gender issue, see also Figure 2: the boy leads the hesitating girl into the light of freedom.)¹⁶⁴ Anti-Catholicism was the primary motive for the Italian freethinker, journalist, and democrat Giuseppe Ricciardi to organize the First International Freethinker Conference. The so-called “Anti-Council” took place in Naples as a counter-project to the First Vatican Council; both opened simultaneously on December 8, 1869.¹⁶⁵ Despite its ambitious goal of founding an international freethought association, the Anti-Council ended ahead of schedule on the second day of the conference. This was due to the Neapolitan police dissolving the international assembly of the supposed political radicals, as well as for internal rea-

 Adolf J. Storfer and Lénárt Mahler, “Beköszöntő,” Az Új Század: Szabadgondolkodó Folyóirat 1, no. 1 (1905): 1.  Ibid.  For a comprehensive approach which reads together freethinking and the women’s rights movement, see Schwartz, Infidel Feminism.  Dittrich, “European Connections,” 267.

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sons, because the 55,000 – according to a contemporary testimony – representatives from around the world could not agree upon basic questions:¹⁶⁶ should an international freethought society be materialistic, deistic, atheistic, laic, or political in focus? And which position should it adopt regarding religion as such?¹⁶⁷ While some took freedom of thought literally as the right to choose opinions and beliefs freely, others demanded a resolution of universal principles that would have made freethinking into a kind of substitute religion. In this light, it is hardly surprising that the German national freethought movements were closely linked to the Protestant free churches,¹⁶⁸ whereas the British freethought societies were regarded as sects by some contemporaries¹⁶⁹ because of their rigid ideology, composed of natural law, rationalism, materialism, and atheism.¹⁷⁰ During the nineteenth century, deism’s role in Britain diminished, but it continued to be influential on French freethinker circles.¹⁷¹ Eventually, the attempt of bringing together the different national freethought movements was successful in 1880, when the Fédération Internationale de la Libre Pensée (International Freethought Federation, IFF) was founded on the initiative of the Belgian freethought movement. This Federation organized regular conferences, but since the conflicts of the Anti-Council could not be overcome and impeded all progress, it took until 1904 for the congress in Rome to finally decide upon a common definition of freethinking. The first and general resolution passed in Rome found that freethinking is not a doctrine but instead – as the term already suggests – a method of thinking. While nineteenth-century doctrines or ideologies tended to be “isms” that, according to Koselleck, are nouns indicating concepts of movement,¹⁷² the freethought movement never qualified for this totality, because freethought movements – also within national contexts – stood for different ideas, concepts, and teachings. At times, they even adopted religious patterns to create secular practices and ceremonies, for example, in matters of civil baptism or cremation. The congress in Rome decided on another important general direction: freethinking was declared a secular movement aiming at the separation of church and state. With this decision, a decade-

 Ibid., 268. But as Dittrich emphasizes, the conference site, the “Teatro San Fernandino,” offered seats for only 500 people. The number of 55,000 participants might thus be exaggerated.  Ibid., 279.  Ibid., 270.  Schwartz, Infidel Feminism, 22.  Ibid., 15.  For a detailed description of the interaction of deism, atheism, and freethinking in France after 1848, see Lalouette, La Libre Pensée en France, 143 – 182.  Ricken, “Zum Verhältnis vergleichender Begriffsgeschichte,” 38 – 39.

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long debate about freethinking’s position was put to an end and the up-untiltoday inseparable connection between freethinking and secularism was established.

Reception of Freethinking: The External Identity During the second half of the nineteenth century, encyclopedias were published in almost every language. Since not all of them can be studied concerning their definition of freethinking, this section illustrates the reception of freethinking on the basis of three examples that where most influential (Brockhaus, Pallas Nagy Lexikona) or pioneering (Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, the first modern theological handbook). They provide an overall impression on the divergences of freethinking from an external point of view. Because of the amount of published reference works after 1850, it would be impossible to discuss related terms just as in the first sections of this chapter. The focus, thus, is on freethinking, beginning with the German Brockhaus, which was highly influential on other reference works, such as the Dutch Winkler Prins Encyclopedie. The Brockhaus (1892) defined a Freidenker (freethinker) as someone who forms his opinion not by relying on religious authorities but according to rational principles. The author differentiated between freethought movements in England, France, and Germany but did not consider more recent developments. Thus he characterized English freethinking as closely connected to deism, while French freethinkers (Voltaire and Rousseau, in particular) were introduced as advocates of atheism. For Germany, the encyclopedia’s viewpoint is vague: freethinking emerged as a consequence of the restitution of “Orthodox Churches”¹⁷³ and rallied support among different circles of society.¹⁷⁴

 See the definition the Brockhaus offers for “Orthodoxy”: “In the Protestant Church those are called orthodox who keep to the doctrines of the confessional statements of Reformation as infallible divine truth against the critic of modern thinking.” (“Orthodoxie,” in Allgemeine Deutsche Real-Encyklopädie für die gebildeten Stände: Conversations-Lexikon [Leipzig/Altenburg: F. A. Brockhaus, 1896], 658.) Consequently, Brockhaus referred to Neo-Lutheranism as a “theological and ecclesiopolitical movement that sought to turn its back on the Enlightenment and rationalism and to renew Lutheranism (Lutherans) on the basis of strict fidelity to Scripture and the Lutheran confessions.” (Anselm Schubert and Markus Mühling, “Neo-Lutheranism,” in Religion Past and Present [Brill, 2011], accessed March 22, 2019, https://referenceworks.bril lonline.com/entries/religion-past-and-present/neo-lutheranism-COM_024078#.) For further reading, see Friedrich Wilhelm Kantzenbach, Gestalten und Typen des Neuluthertums: Beiträge zur Erforschung des Neokonfessionalismus im 19. Jahrhundert (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1968); and Gerhard Besier, ed., Neulutherische Kirchenpolitik im Zeitalter Bismarcks (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1982).

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The Hungarian Pallas Nagy Lexikona (Pallas’ Great Encyclopedia; 1893 – 1897, 18 vols.) likewise focused on Britain, France, and Germany as the “main countries” of freethinking: In our country, freethinking is a less common expression, a translation of foreign terms which mainly describes the anticlerical thinking. It had its origins in Britain, where those were called this way, who believed in God, but opposed church. In France, the freethinkers (libre penseurs) tended more toward atheism. The German Freidenker [sic] developed in distinct free churches, and from there, in the further course, into a German Freethinker Union. Just recently those tendencies shift off this burden, freethinkers do not like coalitions.¹⁷⁵

The final sentence is of particular interest, as it suggests that freethinkers would have scarcely appreciated the formation of organizations. This comment might refer to the fact that it took several years to establish an international freethought society. By identifying the practice of institutionalizing as a “burden,” freethinkers appear as loners, and thus suspicious. The third and final example comes from the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, edited by James Hasting, John A. Selbie, and Louis H. Gray. In the sixth volume (1908), the entry on “Free-Thought,” written by the German Protestant theologian Ernst P. W. Troeltsch, again distinguishes between freethinking in England (deistic), France (atheistic), and Germany (Protestant, free churches). Furthermore, Troeltsch identifies positive and negative forms of freethinking, with the positive as the “assumption that such free or natural thought leads universally to essentially identical conclusions in a natural morality and religion.” Conversely, negative freethinking is marked as the “opposition to the church’s doctrine of authority and revelation” and the claim for the independence and autonomy of thought. With this, Troeltsch followed the specifications provided by the encyclopedias of the first half of the nineteenth century and evinced his Protestant background. To him, freethinking was welcomed, as long as it followed Christian doctrines, even though this reading conflicted with the notion of “freethinking.” As these discussions of freethinking in the second half of the long nineteenth century have demonstrated, freethinking was rarely about thinking freely

 “Freidenker,” in Brockhaus Konversations-Lexikon, vol. 7 (Leipzig/Berlin/Vienna: F. A. Brockhaus, 1892), 257: “In Germany, freethinkers found support in the different circles of society since the renaissance of Orthodox Churches, but also as a consequence of modern Zeitgeist.”  “Szabad Gondolkodó (Freethinking),” in A Pallas Nagy Lexikona, vol. 15. Budapest: Pallas Irodalmi és Nyomdai Rt., 1893, digitalized in: Magyar Elektronikus Könvytár. Accessed January 9, 2019. http://mek.oszk.hu/00000/00060/html/094/pc009497.html#1.

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but rather about thinking against the clerical worldview. The attempts to constitute an international federation of freethinkers imply that freethinkers, as with every other movement, sought to agree on constitutions and rules, and with that, on restrictions of the ideals to be pursued.

Conclusion This chapter has offered an overview of the conceptual history of freethinking and related terms, including their changes and relations in a transnational context. Freethinking can be traced back to the opposition against the church during the Early Modern Period. These anticlerical movements provided the common ground for the organization of freethought movements on national and transnational levels during the nineteenth century. They form the conceptual fundament of freethinking until today. The analysis of lexicographical entries from between 1789 and 1848 substantiates the impression that “progressive” ideas such as freethinking, deism, and atheism, faced severe hardships. Reference works reflected the political context of the Era of Restoration. The re-emergence of ecclesiastical power in the postNapoleonic era as well as the general cultural and philosophic withdrawal from liberal concepts influenced the regressive style of the encyclopedias. Against this backdrop, European reference works hardly offered neutral definitions of terms, such as freethinking, atheism, secularism, and deism, but rather fought them as atavisms of Enlightenment and revolutions. Still, the ways and intensities of those written refutations differed regarding cultural, religious, and national contexts. As this chapter has demonstrated, Protestant Anglican Britain, where modern freethinking – intertwined with deism – originated, offered few new thoughts on this topic in the early nineteenth century. Instead, the authors of the new generation of encyclopedias simply fell back on the findings of the eighteenth century. This confirmed the impression of freethinking as a concept lacking validity, advancement, and development. Furthermore, the authors of French reference works, who were mostly supporters of political reinvigorated Catholicism, stood up against ideas threatening their worldview by using both intellectual arguments and insults. The German encyclopedias, conversely, were primarily published in the Protestant parts of the multi-confessional German Confederation. Although their entries were not as passive as those in British reference works, they did not come close to the offensive tone of the French ones. The stance against freethinking differed not only depending on the cultural background but also concerning the definitions of freethinking and related terms

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provided by the encyclopedias. In Britain, freethinkers were closely linked to deism and joined forces in movements beginning in the early eighteenth century. By contrast, during the eighteenth century, French freethinking was hardly a concept at all, even though there were French scholars to whom the term would have applied. Yet freethinking remained insignificant within the range of anticlerical, liberal, and radical movements in France until the middle of the nineteenth century. Germany took its own direction: here, freethinking was primarily a matter in the Protestant parts, not the Catholic ones. Also, it was closely linked to the free church movements. In other nations, freethinking was of no considerable interest until the end of the nineteenth century. In Hungary, freethought movements, such as the Galilei Circle, concentrated on modernizing the educational system and on spreading the latest scientific theories, such as Darwinism, to fight Catholicism. Besides, this chapter has proven that the connection of secularism and freethinking in the reference works under consideration was not established before the second half of the nineteenth century. This is because the definition of secularism as the act of secularizing church possessions did not originally comprise the ideology of separating church and state, although this idea did already circulate in the late eighteenth century. But it was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that secularism became a lasting political dogma and practice that liaised with freethinking. The multifaceted nature of freethinking and its relevant concepts extends to both their meaning and reception. Even though this chapter has focused only on the best-known reference works, it could demonstrate that the meaning and reception of the terms under consideration were not at all enshrined but were highly influenced by the philosophical and political spirit of their time. In line with this, it has been shown that reference works were hardly ever neutral. Rather, their authors were influenced by their general historical as well as biographical contexts, which underpins the oft-neglected necessity of approaching encyclopedias critically. Combining the specific cultural, historical, linguistic, religious, and personal settings with a transnational reading has helped to examine the conceptual history of freethinking, atheism, and secularism as pan-European phenomena. This approach might lay the groundwork for further studies on freethinking and secularism.

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Graf, Friedrich Wilhelm. Die Politisierung des religiösen Bewußtseins: Die bürgerlichen Religionsparteien im deutschen Vormärz, Das Beispiel des Deutschkatholizismus. Stuttgart/Bad Cannstatt: frommann-holzboog, 1978. Henry, John. The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 32008. Herder, Johann Gottfried. Adrastea, vol. 4.2. Leipzig: Johann Friedrich Hartknoch, 1802. Hyman, Gavin. “Atheism in Modern History.” In The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, edited by Michael Martin, 27 – 46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Iversen, Hans Raun. “Secularization, Secularity, Secularism.” In Encyclopedia of Sciences and Religions, edited by Anne L. C. Runehov and Lluis Oviedo, 2116 – 2121. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2013. Jacob, Margaret C. The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993. Jászi, Oszkár. “A szabadgondolkodás lényege és alapelvei.” In A szabadgondolkodás lényege és alapelvei: Mi a programunk?, edited by Selmeczbányai Köre, 3 – 9. Banská Štiavnica: Selmeczbányai Köre, 1912. Kafker, Frank Arthur. “Notices sur les auteurs des 17 volumes de ‘Discours’ de l’Encyclopédie (suite et fin).” Recherches sur Diderot et sur l’Encyclopédie 8 (1990): 101 – 121. Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Leipzig: Johann Friedrich Hartknoch, 51799. Kantzenbach, Friedrich Wilhelm. Gestalten und Typen des Neuluthertums: Beiträge zur Erforschung des Neokonfessionalismus im 19. Jahrhundert. Gütersloh: Mohn, 1968. Kende, Zsigmond. A Galilei Kör megalakulása. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1974. Klaniczay, Gábor, Michael Werner, and Ottó Gecser, eds. Multiple Antiquities – Multiple Modernities: Ancient Histories in Nineteenth Century European Cultures. Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 2011. Köppen, Friedrich. “Deisten.” In Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste, vol. 23, edited by Johann Samuel Ersch and Johann Gottfried Gruber, 352. Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1834. Koselleck, Reinhard. “Richtlinien für das Lexikon politisch-sozialer Begriffe der Neuzeit.” Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 11 (1967): 81 – 99. Koselleck, Reinhard. “Säkularisation/Säkularisierung.” In Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, vol. 8, edited by Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhard Koselleck, 791 – 794. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1984. Koselleck, Reinhard. “Hinweise auf die temporalen Strukturen begriffsgeschichtlichen Wandels.” In Begriffsgeschichte, Diskursgeschichte, Metapherngeschichte, edited by Mark Bevir and Hans Erich Bödeker, 29 – 48. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002. Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 4 2012. Lalouette, Jacqueline. “Une rencontre oubliée: La Libre Pensée française et les savants matérialistes allemands (1863 – 1870).” Romantisme 21, no. 73 (1991): 57 – 67. Lalouette, Jacqueline. La Libre Pensée en France, 1848 – 1940. Paris: Albin Michel, 22001. Lalouette, Jacqueline. “Laïcité, anticléricalismes et antichristianisme.” Transversalités 108, no. 4 (2008): 69 – 84. Laurentie, Pierre-Sébastien. “Athée, Athéisme.” In Encyclopédie du dix-neuvième siècle, vol. 4, edited by Ange de Saint-Priest, 146 – 150. Paris: Bureau de l’Encyclopédie du XIXe siècle, 1838.

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Laurentie, Pierre-Sébastien. “Déisme.” In Encyclopédie du dix-neuvième siècle, vol. 9, edited by Ange de Saint-Priest, 711 – 713. Paris: Bureau de l’Encyclopédie du XIXe siècle, 1846. Laurentie, Pierre-Sébastien. “Esprit.” In Encyclopédie du dix-neuvième siècle, vol. 12, edited by Ange de Saint-Priest, 88 – 90. Paris: Bureau de l’Encyclopédie du XIXe siècle, 1850. Lee, John. “Atheism.” In Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, vol. 3, edited by David Brewster, 4 – 10. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1830. Leruth, Michael F. “Laicism, Religion and the Economy of Belief in the French Republic.” Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques 31, no. 3: The Dreyfus Affair in the Twenty-First Century: A Reconsideration (2005): 445 – 467. Mallet, Edmonde François. “Déisme.” In Encylopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. 4, edited by Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert and Denis Diderot, 773. Paris: Briasson – David – Le Breton – Durand, 1754. Masseau, Didier. “Un apologiste au service de l’Encyclopédie méthodique: Bergier et le Dictionnaire de théologie.” In L’Encyclopédie méthodique: Des lumières au positivisme, 1782 – 1832, edited by Claude Blanckaert, Michel Porret and Fabrice Brandli, vol. 68, 153 – 168. Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2006. Mehl, Roger. “Laizismus.” In Theologische Realenzyklopädie, vol. 20, 404 – 409. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 1982. Millet, Claude. “Jacqueline Lalouette: ‘Victor Hugo et la libre-pensée’.” Université Paris 7 equipe 19e siècle. Accessed January 16, 2019. http://groupugo.div.jussieu.fr/groupugo/ 89-02-25lalouette.htm. Minois, Georges. Histoire de l’athéisme: Les Incroyants dans le monde occidental des origines à nos jours. Paris: Fayard, 1998. Minois, Georges. Dictionnaire des athées, agnostiques, sceptiques et autres mécréants. Paris: Albin Michel, 2012. Müller, Ernst, and Falko Schmieder. Begriffsgeschichte und historische Semantik: Ein kritisches Kompendium. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2016. Nakagawa, Hisayasu. “Diderot, Rousseau et autres ‘incrédules’ au service du catholicisme: À propos du déisme réfuté par lui-même de l’abbé Bergier.” Recherches sur Diderot et sur l’Encyclopédie, no. 39 (2005): 157 – 176. O’Higgins, James. Anthony Collins: The Man and His Works. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970. “Orthodoxie.” In Allgemeine Deutsche Real-Encyklopädie für die gebildeten Stände: Conversations-Lexikon, vol. 12, 658. Leipzig/Altenburg: F. A. Brockhaus, 1896. Osler, Margaret J., ed. Rethinking the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Oster, Malcolm, ed. Science in Europe, 1500 – 1800: A Secondary Sources Reader. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Pesenson, Michael A. “Napoleon Bonaparte and Apocalyptic Discourse in Early Nineteenth-Century Russia.” The Russian Review 65, no. 3 (2006): 373 – 392. Porret, Michel. “Savoir encyclopédique, encyclopédie des saviors.” In L’Encyclopédie méthodique, 1782 – 1832: Des lumières au positivisme, edited by Claude Blanckaert, Michel Porret and Fabrice Brandli, 13 – 53. Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2006. Principe, Lawrence. The Scientific Revolution: A Very Short Introduction. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

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I Secularities: National Perspectives

Laura Fournier-Finocchiaro

Garibaldi and Mazzini: Anticlericalism, Laicism, and the Concept of a National Religion The differing cultural expressions of the various anticlerical and secular movements¹ that manifested during the process of Italian national unification – the Risorgimento – have long been neglected by both the political and ruling classes, and by historians after 1861, the founding year of the Italian nation state. This led to a delay in studying Italy’s freethought movement, a tendency now partially compensated by the pioneering studies of Fulvio Conti, Adrian Lyttelton, Ettore Passerin d’Entrèves, Guido Verucci, and Jean-Pierre Viallet.² Still, the analysis of Italy’s secular cultures raises the problem of definitions and notions such as anticlericalism or anti-Catholicism circulating in Europe as well as in Italy in the nineteenth century. In this regard, René Rémond’s characterization might offer clarification: to him, anticlericalism claims the independence of politics from religion, the separation of civil society and church society: “It is in accordance with the conception of laicism and the inspiration of liberal individualism.”³ For Manuel Borutta, culture war – that is the struggle of democrats and liberals against the influence of the Catholic Church in state and society – in Risorgimento Italy divided society between secularist (anticlerical) and Catholic  Such as the anti-Jesuit campaign of the 1840s; the Neo-Ghibellines, who fought Neo-Guelfism (Vincenzo Gioberti’s political movement, started in 1843, that strove to unite Italy into a single kingdom with the pope as its sovereign); the conflict between state and church in Piedmont after 1848; the republican struggle for Rome in the 1860s; liberal anticlericalism after 1860 with the ideal of “a free church in a free state,” and militant anticlericalism after 1876 (Masons, atheists, socialists, etc.).  See Guido Verucci, L’Italia laica prima e dopo l’unita` 1848 – 1876: Anticlericalismo, libero pensiero e ateismo nella società italiana (Rome/Bari: Laterza, 1981); Adrian Lyttelton, “An Old Church and a New State: Italian Anticlericalism 1876 – 1915,” European Studies Review 13 (1983): 225 – 248; Jean-Pierre Viallet, “L’Anticle´ricalisme en Italie 1867– 1915” (The`se pour le doctorat d’E´tat, Universite´ de Paris X, 1991); Ettore Passerin d’Entrèves, Religione e politica nell’Ottocento europeo (Rome: Istituto per la storia del Risorgimento italiano, 1993), and Fulvio Conti, “Breve storia dell’anticlericalismo,” in Enciclopedia Treccani (2011), accessed December 15, 2018, http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/breve-storia-dell-anticlericalismo_%28Cristiani-d% 27Italia%29/.  René Rémond, “Anticléricalisme,” in Encyclopædia Universalis (1983), accessed December 15, 2018, http://www.universalis.fr/encyclopedie/anticlericalisme/. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110688283-005

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blocks. Yet he also states a more general anti-Catholic tendency on the side of secularists in the European culture wars, including the Italian ones.⁴ It is worth noting, however, that the idea of a monolithic “liberal block” in sharp contrast to a homogeneous “Catholic block,” or the overall picture of state and church as diametrically opposed entities, are misleading. As Martin Papenheim puts it with special regard to Italy, “culture wars were not fought along clearly defined lines.”⁵ When it comes to the particular cases of Giuseppe Mazzini (1805 – 1872) and Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807– 1882), a narrow definition of anticlericalism would exclude them from the circles of Italian freethinkers or other anticlericalists, such as socialists, anarchists, atheists, or positivists. Giuseppe Mazzini, founder of the secret revolutionary society Giovine Italia (Young Italy, 1831), was an uncompromising republican. He believed in God and respected priests (though he did not consider himself a Christian) but refused the pope’s territorial sovereignty which barred the way to Italian national unification.⁶ In 1848, he returned from his exile in England to Italy and led the Roman Republic (1849) until the French army crushed it following the pope’s call for help to Catholic countries. Giuseppe Garibaldi had come under the influence of Mazzini in the 1830s, before he went into exile in South America. In April 1848 he came back to Italy to fight in the First Italian War of Independence. First, he rushed to help the city of Milan, where Mazzini was already present. When Pius IX – threatened by the strengthening liberal forces of the Papal States – fled Rome toward the end of 1848, Garibaldi led a group of volunteers to the city and became the head of its defense. In the Second War of Italian Independence (1859), he directed an army of volunteers to Northern Italy. Soon after, in May 1860, he arranged the conquest of Sicily and Naples, secretly supported by Piedmont. After 1861, however, Garibaldi opposed the Italian government with his will to seize Rome and turn it into Italy’s national capital. While Mazzini’s influence on Garibaldi was still strong during the organization of the liberation of the Two Sicilies, the two patriots broke up after the unsuccessful attempt of the Mentana expedition (1867), when Garibaldi failed to free Rome. Even though they continued to share fundamental values such as democracy, republicanism, social justice, humanitarianism, and universal brother-

 See Manuel Borutta, “Anti-Catholicism and the Culture War in Risorgimento Italy,” in The Risorgimento Revisited: Nationalism and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Italy, ed. Silvana Patriarca and Lucy Riall (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 191.  Martin Papenheim, “Roma o Morte: Culture Wars in Italy,” in Culture Wars: Secular–Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Wolfram Kaiser and Christopher Clark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 208.  The popes, as heads of the Catholic Church, possessed large estates in Central Italy.

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hood, they chose separate ways. Garibaldi supported radical anticlerical movements while Mazzini could indeed be considered as a religious leader, a political prophet and a defender of faith: he struggled against the secularization of society in the sense of a separation of politics and religion. Instead, he promoted a clearly religious mission targeting a renewed religiosity as part of the national unification project and a free Europe of democratic nations.⁷ Garibaldi frequently expressed religious views in his writings and respected religious faith, too, as most of his fellow Italians remained devoted Catholics.⁸ Still, their religiosity differed substantially from the traditional Catholic faith, as will be discussed in the following. Concerning anticlericalism and religiosity, Jean-Pierre Viallet has already pointed out the difference between France and Italy: in the Peninsula, “laicism and anticlericalism are not only distinguished, they are often brought into opposition.”⁹ This chapter will highlight the specific anticlericalisms of Garibaldi and Mazzini, which made them true freethinkers, but ones who did not necessarily differentiate politics and religion. Despite this, their visions for society were highly secular as they relied on a new concept of religion including a notion of national faith, based on a new morale. This matches indeed with René Rémond’s definition, because Mazzini’s and Garibaldi’s attitudes proved to be fundamentally positive political ideologies, notwithstanding the overall negative terminology of anticlericalism. Their ideas that deeply and lastingly influenced Italian culture were not restricted to reaction and destruction, but aimed at building a new “secular” society based on a new religiosity.

Garibaldi against the Priests An essential component of “Garibaldinism” is the polemics against priests, the Catholic Church and papacy. Garibaldi’s anticlericalism appears sometimes  See Guido Verucci, “La religione progressiva di Giuseppe Mazzini,” in Cattolicesimo e laicismo nell’Italia contemporanea, ed. Guido Verucci (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2001), 205 – 213; Simon Levis Sullam, “The Moses of Italian Unity: Mazzini and Nationalism as Political Religion,” in Mazzini and the Globalization of Democratic Nationalism, 1830 – 1920, ed. Christopher Alan Bayly and Eugenio Biagini (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 107– 124.  See Dino Mengozzi, Garibaldi taumaturgo: Reliquie laiche e politica nell’Ottocento (Manduria: Lacaita, 2008).  Jean-Pierre Viallet, “L’Anticléricalisme en Italie (1867– 1915): Historiographie et problématiques de recherché,” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome – Italie et Méditerranée modernes et contemporaines 122, no. 1 (2010): 137– 159, accessed December 15, 2018, http://journals.open edition.org/mefrim/564.

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rude and rough which is why his clerical counterparts often reduced it to a superficial and confused expression of his personality and behavior. Even Mazzini, in 1871, alluded to Garibaldi’s “monomania antipretesca” (“anti-priesthood monomania”).¹⁰ It is difficult to distinguish between Garibaldi’s political anticlericalism – aiming at the abolition of papal temporal power in order to conquer Rome and to include the city and its surroundings to the Italian nation state; the moralization of society; the secularization of Italy’s legal code; the support of secularizing practices such as cremation, and his spiritual anticlericalism with its strong anti-monastic, anti-Catholic, and even anti-Christian leanings. It was not until his failed attempt to capture Rome in the Battle of Aspromonte (1862) that Garibaldi’s letters started to reveal expressions such as “vampiro pretino” (“priestly vampire”) or “iena sacerdotale” (“priestly hyena”).¹¹ Besides, he began to brand Pius IX “Grande Satana” (the “Great Satan”) and to frequently call him an “assassino del corpo e della mente” (“assassin of the body and soul”) or “nemico del genere umano” (“an enemy of the whole human race”).¹² After he was defeated by the pope’s troops and their French allies in the Battle of Mentana in 1867, his vocabulary and actions became even more radical: as a member of parliament, Garibaldi proposed to eliminate the state’s budget for clergy and he suggested to force priests to work, coining the slogan il prete alla vanga (priests have to dig). Finally, in September 1880, Garibaldi resigned, arguing that he refused to become one of the legislators of a country “dove la libertà è calpestata e la legge non serve nella sua applicazione che a garantire la libertà ai gesuiti ed ai nemici dell’unità d’Italia” (“where liberty is crushed and laws only serve to guarantee liberty to Jesuits and the enemies of the Italian unity”).¹³ Garibaldi’s anticlerical polemics are mirrored particularly clear in his often overseen literary writings:¹⁴ in his four novels, written in the 1870s, Clelia, il governo dei preti (The Rule of the Monk, 1870), Cantoni il volontario (Cantoni the Volunteer, 1870), I mille (Expedition of the Thousand, 1874), and Manlio (written in  Verucci, “L’anticlericalismo di Garibaldi,” 214.  Quoted in Jean-Pierre Viallet, “L’Anticléricalisme de Garibaldi,” in Hommes, idées, journaux: Mélanges en l’honneur de Pierre Guiral, ed. Jean Antoine Gili and Ralph Schor (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1988), 460 – 461.  Quoted in Viallet, “L’Anticléricalisme de Garibaldi,” 461.  Giuseppe Garibaldi, Epistolario, ed. Enrico Emilio Ximenes (Milan: A. Brigola e comp., 1885), 296.  On Garibaldi’s literary works, see Marziano Guglielminetti, “Giuseppe Garibaldi,” in La letteratura ligure: L’Ottocento, ed. Giorgio Bertone (Genoa: Costa & Nolan, 1990), 215 – 231; Mario Isnenghi, Garibaldi fu ferito: Storia e mito di un rivoluzionario disciplinato (Rome: Donzelli, 2007); and Angelo Cardillo, “Garibaldi romanziere,” Misure critiche, no. 1– 2 (2011): 93 – 122.

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1876, unpublished until 1982), but also in his Memorie autobiografiche (Memories, 1872), his historical drama Elisabetta d’Ungheria (Elizabeth of Hungary, 1879), and several poems written in Italian and French. There is a biographical component to Garibaldi’s anticlericalism, as displayed in his novels, as well as in his political and military actions. He himself stated that anticlericalism was one of the reasons he had started writing in the first place, to reveal “vizi e nefandezze del pretismo” (“the vices and vileness of priesthood”).¹⁵ During his travels to England, he had come into contact with masonic circles, anti-papists, and perhaps even with Protestants who all proved influential on his future development. With regard to Italian culture, Garibaldi’s principal reference was Italian philosopher, priest, supporter of Mazzini, and promotor of Italian unification under papal rule Vincenzo Gioberti with his tract Il Gesuita moderno (The Modern Jesuit, 1846). It was from this book that he borrowed notions of botany and epidemiology to describe the Society of Jesus as a threat to the nation. This anti-Jesuit attitude echoed a widespread antipathy in Europe during the second half of the nineteenth century against Jesuits faithful to the pope and their “clerical sins” which were denounced as early as in the 1850s by the Piedmontese daily newspaper Gazzetta del popolo. Besides, many visual and discursive strategies of anticlerical representations were transferred from other countries to Italy, especially from France: through convent novels (La religieuse [The Nun, 1796] by Denis Diderot); anti-Jesuit serialized novels (Eugène Sue’s Juif errant [The Wandering Jew, 1844]); and anticlerical cartoons from the satirical magazine Charivari (1832). Garibaldi’s novels follow the style of those serialized fictions, and they are interesting mostly from an ideological and political, less from a literary point of view. First published in London in 1870, Clelia became an international success.¹⁶ The plot is set in 1867 Venice, the (fictional) Solitaria Island, and Rome. Clelia is being abused by Cardinal Procopio, but she is finally saved and Procopio and his acolytes are murdered. The second part of the novel offers a historical narration of the events and the battles to conquer Rome: the protagonists meet a republican leader called the Solitario who convinces them to fight for Italy’s liberation. Soon after, the patriots die in battle and become martyrs of Italian independence and unification. The plot combines real persons (Garibaldi himself, called by his

 Giuseppe Garibaldi, Cantoni il volontario (Milan: Poletti, 1870), 5 (“Prefazione ai miei romanzi storici”).  Between 1870 – 1874 alone the book saw three Italian editions, five French, three English, three American, two Serbo-Croatian, one Czech, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Hungarian, German, and Spanish (from Montevideo).

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name in the English version,¹⁷ or il Solitario in the Italian; also the Cairoli brothers) and imaginary characters who are borrowed from the history of the ancient Roman Republic (Attilio, Muzio, Giulia). For the historian Aldo Alessandro Mola, this novel is “a popularization of Garibaldinism,”¹⁸ or his manifesto. Cantoni, the second novel, has a narrative structure very similar to Garibaldi’s first book. The protagonist is a real person, Achille Cantoni, who fought in the Wars of Italian Independence and died in the Battle of Mentana. Like Clelia, the novel constantly recalls civil and patriotic ideals, combined with GrecoRoman aesthetics. Its context is the Roman Republic of 1849: Garibaldi celebrates the volunteer’s heroism against unscrupulous priests, especially the perverse Jesuit Don Gaudenzio, “il Satiro di Roma”¹⁹ (the “satyr of Rome”) and “Sanfedista” (“defender of Catholicism”)²⁰ who kidnapped and kept a young girl prisoner. A similar pattern of anticlericalism is displayed in I Mille, an autobiographical novel with a heroin of serialized fiction, Marzia, a young Jewess who joined Garibaldi’s Expedition of the Thousand dressed up as a boy. She is chased and persecuted by Jesuits, especially Monsignor Corvo, the most repulsive of Garibaldi’s characters: he compels Marzia to prostitute herself and imprisons her; he tortures her father and forces her to convert to Catholicism. A final catharsis puts an end to his terror and leads Corvo to commit suicide.²¹ Garibaldi’s last novel, Manlio, on the other hand, is a work of social science fiction or future projection: the plot starts in 1874 and ends in 1896. The main character is Garibaldi’s son, destined to pursue and accomplish his father’s work among the pirates of the Rif region and the Amazon rainforest. Not surprisingly, also this novel has its Jesuit character, the libidinous Don Pancrazio, who seduces and kidnaps a

 On the translation of Clelia, see Sergio Portelli, “Anti-Clericalism in Translation: Anti-Catholic Ideology in the English Translation of Giuseppe Garibaldi’s ‘Clelia o il governo dei preti’ (1870),” Forum Italicum 50, no. 3 (2016): 1099 – 1108.  See Giuseppe Garibaldi, Clelia, Il governo dei Preti, ed. Aldo Alessandro Mola (Turin: MEB, 1973).  Garibaldi, Cantoni, 132– 133.  Ibid., 53. The terms “Sanfedismo” and “Sanfedista” refer to a popular anti-republican movement organized by Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo in the Kingdom of Naples after 1799. In Garibaldi’s polemics, it implies a closed and reactionary clericalism.  This novel is a reply to a famous serialized novel by the Jesuit Antonio Bresciani, L’Ebreo di Verona (The Jew of Verona, 1850), in which a Catholic converts to Judaism. See Paolo Orvieto, Buoni e cattivi del Risorgimento: I romanzi di Garibaldi e Bresciani a confronto (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2011). For a literary analysis, see Sophie Nezri-Dufour, “La peste pretina, piaga della nostra patria infelice (Garibaldi, ‘I Mille’, 1874),” Italies, no. 15 (2011): 121– 133, accessed December 15, 2018, http://journals.openedition.org/italies/3064.

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young girl; however, he remains the only priest in Garibaldi’s novels who stays alive. Each of these novels picture priests as negative characters in alliance with evil, and Jesuits, in particular, as clearly the “most disgusting creatures.”²² Garibaldi’s role for Italy’s freethinkers is vital because he introduced and popularized a specific anticlerical style and rhetoric in their discourse: he implemented a profusion of terms to devalue clergymen such as “nero” (“black”), “paolotto” (“paulist”),²³ “code/codino” (“tail”),²⁴ “cocolle” (“collar”),²⁵ “colli torti” (“crooked neck”),²⁶ “sanfedista,” or “negromante” (“soothsayer”). Also, he made up neologisms like “clericume,” “chercume,” or “pretume”²⁷ and he invented a bestiary: clergymen are compared to snakes, foxes, hyenas, crocodiles, jackals, vultures, and mostly to parasites.²⁸ To him, clericalism was a form of illness and dirtiness and he presented the Catholic Church as an abnormality, marked by the semantic field of monsters and monstrosity. Besides, Garibaldi disclosed urban legends which portrayed priests as sadistic torturers of prisoners and murderers of innocent children. In Clelia, his protagonist found “in every convent […] instruments of cruelty and vaults for the bones of infants.”²⁹ His novels also encouraged violence against priests: “Death to the priests! […] Who deserves death more than this wicked sect which has turned Italy into a land of the dead (Lamartine), into a cemetery?”³⁰ His Memories, in contrast, are – to a certain extend – less radical; in them, he developed a political concept of the Catholic Church and its priests conspiring with foreign powers: “The priest taught the farmers that the enemies of Italy are not the Austrians, but excommunicated us liberals! And the government by the

 Garibaldi, Cantoni, 26. (“Il Gesuita! Il Gesuita! Altra anomalia umana per la quale si diede il nome del Cristo alla più prava, alla più schifosa delle creature.”)  A “Paolotto” is a member of the charitable Society of St. Vincent de Paul, founded in 1833 by Frédéric Ozanam. Garibaldi used the term in a figurative sense, signifying clerical, bigot, conservative, and reactionary behavior.  During the French Revolution and the Era of Restoration, the King’s partisans continued to wear tails ostentatiously. The term “codino,” in Garibaldi’s novels, thus means – figuratively – conservative, and reactionary.  In reference to the clerical collar as an item of Catholic clerical clothing.  A “collotorto” is a person who flaunts religiosity in an untruthful way or manipulates with hypocritical compunction.  Formed with the suffix “-ume” added to the terms “clerico,” “chierco,” and “prete” (priest), with a pejorative connotation.  All references are quoted in Viallet, “L’Anticléricalisme de Garibaldi,” 461– 462.  Giuseppe Garibaldi, Clelia (Milan: Fratelli Rechiedei Editori, 1870), 21.  Ibid., 341.

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grace of God protects the priest.”³¹ Yet Garibaldi continued to agitate against Jesuits: “I must be tormented by the idea of the priest, who wants to transform the Italians in many sacristans. And if Italy doesn’t make up for it, it’s a serious affair. The Jesuits can only produce hypocrites, liars and cowards!”³² Garibaldi’s works reached a wide audience. Due to his writings, secularist ideas disseminated in the unified Italian nation state and furthered its laicist stance. However, in the official commemorations and celebrations of the “hero” Garibaldi, the anticlericalism of his fictional works was mostly ignored.

Mazzini against the Pope’s Authority Other than in Garibaldi’s case, Mazzini’s anticlericalism was mainly directed against the pope’s authority, not against clerics in general or Jesuits in particular.³³ The influence of the republican patriot Mazzini is essential to Italian freethinkers, because his ideology – hostile to each form of theocracy and abuse of authority – led to the creation of a “democratic school” that lastingly shaped the Italian culture of the Risorgimento and political liberal Italy. Mazzini struggled against the pope’s ambition to preserve his temporal sovereignty, against the Syllabus Errorum (Syllabus of Errors, 1864),³⁴ and against the hierarchical organization of the Catholic clergy. For the republican thinker and advocate of national unity, papacy was an outdated form of theocracy, an atavism struggling to survive by forming alliances with tyrants and despotic monarchs. In light of these assumptions it was Mazzini’s conviction that the Italians had to fulfill their God-given mission of sweeping away papacy through revolution. These ideas became central during the Revolutions of 1848 – 49, when the disillusion caused by “Pius IX’s betrayal”³⁵ led Mazzini to forge his

 Garibaldi, Memorie, 283.  Ibid., 350 – 351.  See Laura Fournier-Finocchiaro, “La Fin de l’autorité du pape chez Giuseppe Mazzini,” in Pape et papauté: Respect et contestation d’une autorité bifrons, ed. Agnès Morini (Saint-Etienne: Presses Universitaires de Saint-Etienne, 2013), 378 – 399.  The Syllabus condemns a total of 80 errors or heresies, including rationalism (even moderate), socialism, communism, secret societies, liberal clerical societies and liberalism in every political form. To the critics of the Syllabus, this document seemed to define Catholicism as a monarchical absolutism denying any kind of freedom. Subsequently, the Syllabus was used as a proof text by anticlericalists who accused the Catholic Church of rejecting parliamentary democracy and human rights.  The pope’s initial policy (in particular his general amnesty for political prisoners) created quite a sensation among Italian patriots, who hoped he would support Italy’s revolution. But

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idea of a Terza Roma (Third Rome)³⁶ of the people which would supersede the Rome of the Caesars and the Rome of the Popes by re-sacralizing the secularist discourse on the Eternal City. From 1832 onwards, Mazzini repeatedly declared: “Il Papato e` spento: il Cattolicismo e` spento.” (“Papacy is extinguished: Catholicism is extinguished.”)³⁷ To him, not only had the pope lost his spiritual authority, but Italian faith seemed distorted, too. However, he distinguished the Catholic Church and its clergy from the figure of the pope, pinning some of his hopes on the former, but completely rejecting the latter. Thus Mazzini proposed a new religion based on both a renewed faith in God (the motto of his Giovine Italia was “God and the people”), and an altered relationship between believers (including priests) and the papacy stripped off from large parts of its authority. That is why he exhorted clergymen to stop obeying the pope blindly and to listen to God’s will to prepare a broad social revolution. His vision relied on a new class of patriotic priests, ready to accompany humanity in the transition from the individual era of rights to the “social” era of duties.³⁸ Mazzini developed this philosophy in his Doveri dell’uomo (Duties of Man, 1860): he rejected the classical liberal principles of the Enlightenment based on the doctrine of individualism, criticizing them as advancing materialism and atheism. In his secular concept of humanity, duties are ethical guidelines to be considered and applied on a daily and personal basis, keeping in mind the consequences of one’s actions. This definition of duty was the premise for the Mazzinian notion of republican solidarity and his specific idea of freethought, characterized by a strong religious fervor and a deep sense of spirituality. Authority, for Mazzini, derived directly from God who transferred it to the people without the necessity of intermediaries. This is why Italian historian Gaetano Salvemini defined Mazzini’s political system as a “popular theocracy.”³⁹ But even though the concept of God was central to his vision of the future, Mazzini

by early 1848, Pius IX claimed to stand above national interests and refused to enter into a war with Austria. This totally reversed his popularity in Italy.  See Laura Fournier-Finocchiaro, “Le Mythe de la Troisième Rome de Mazzini à Mussolini” in Le Mythe de Rome en Europe: Modèles et contre-modèles, ed. Juan-Carlos D’Amico (Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2012), 213 – 230.  Giuseppe Mazzini, “Intorno all’enciclica di Gregorio XVI, papa: Pensieri ai preti italiani” (1832), in Scritti editi ed inediti, 100 vols. (Imola: Tipografia Galeati, 1906 – 1943) (hereafter SEI), 3; 133.  Giuseppe Mazzini, “Les Patriotes et le clergé” (1835), in SEI, 6; 161– 208.  Gaetano Salvemini, “Mazzini,” in Gaetano Salvemini, Scritti sul Risorgimento (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1961), 175.

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remained deeply anticlerical: he stood up against all kinds of hierarchies, oligarchies, institutions or organizations willing to monopolize power. In consequence of these attitudes expressed since the 1830s, Mazzini removed the privileged status of Catholicism as the long-established and most influential religion in Italy once he had taken over the leadership of the Roman Republic in 1849. The constitution he adopted asserted the principle of religious indifference in the exercise of civil and political rights. This marked a major change because Catholicism was present everywhere in the Italian society: in the school system, in law, in private law (marriage, divorce), and in the press. Mazzini aimed at altering all these institutions in a secular sense. He continued his struggle for the separation of temporal from spiritual power even after the quick downfall of the Roman Republic and the restoration of the pope by reinforcing his efforts to rally support for the overthrow of papacy: Neither pope nor king: only God and the people will open the fields of the future […]. The dogma of absolute authority, immutable, concentrated in one person or in one determined power, will be replaced by the dogma of progressive authority, of the people’s continuous, collective interpretation of God’s law.⁴⁰

It was Mazzini’s intention to transfer the pope’s authority to a council, which would be the equivalent of a constituent assembly, but specifically determined to deal with religious affairs: “Costituente e Concilio: son questi il principe e il papa dell’avvenire.” (“Constituent and Council: these are the prince and the pope of the future.”)⁴¹ Besides, he sent out further appeals to priests urging them to become agents of a religious renewal and of a transformative purification of the Catholic Church. His vision comprised the Holy Church of the future, the Church of free and equal people, the Church which will bless every progress of the spirit of truth, identifying itself with the life of humanity, and which will have no pope but only lay people, believers, and priests, all with specific duties.⁴²

Mazzini pursued his mission up to his last booklet published in April 1870, Dal Concilio a Dio (From the Council to God), a kind of political-religious testament addressing the cardinals gathered at the First Vatican Council to declare the in-

 Giuseppe Mazzini, “Dal papa al concilio” (1849), in SEI, 39; 190.  Ibid., 195.  Giuseppe Mazzini, “Sull’enciclica di papa Pio IX agli arcivescovi e vescovi d’Italia: Pensieri ai sacerdoti italiani” (1849), in SEI, 39; 281.

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fallibility of the pope.⁴³ In this text, Mazzini emphasized his vision of the “nascent church of the future” and called for a new crusade. His hopes, however, were disappointed by the takeover of Rome in September 1870, when his dream of a Third Rome of the people, the center of his new religion, finally was destroyed. The national unification did not turn out the way Mazzini had longed for (republican, democratic, and self-determined) but rather was dominated by new hegemonic players such as Piedmont. It was not until 1929 that the Kingdom of Italy found an agreement with the Catholic Church in the Lateran Treaty, in which Mussolini approved to compensate the Church financially for the loss of the Papal States, and with this set the relations between the Italian state and the Catholic Church on firm grounds. Until his death, Mazzini did not give up fighting atheism and individualistic morality which he believed were contemporary diseases caused by people’s selfishness. Also, he went on defending his attempt to link politics and religion to enforce the universal morality that he believed would be desired by God. This idea of a renewed, religiously based morality, however, did not at all contradict the objectives of the secularization of state and society strongly pursued by Mazzini and his fellow republicans, including the full and general freedom of conscience, equality for all before the law, the abolition of religious corporations, and the secularization of education that would reduce the influence of the Catholic Church to a minimum.

Mazzini’s and Garibaldi’s Propositions: Laicism and National Religion The freethought culture during the Italian Risorgimento, embodied by Garibaldi and Mazzini, did not only target the authority of priests and the pope, abuses of power, or the aspirations of the clergy to rule over civil society. During the process of nation-building, their anticlericalism also took on positive features with the absolute determination to bring about a profound renewal of society and to set its foundations on more equal, more brotherly, but also more moral grounds.

 The First Vatican Council was convoked to deal with the contemporary problems of the rising influence of rationalism, liberalism, and materialism. The doctrine of papal infallibility was meant to strengthen the pope’s authority against modernism. This dogmatic constitution of the Catholic faith generated strong reactions in the context of Italian culture wars.

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Within the broad spectrum of Italian anticlericalism,⁴⁴ Garibaldi and Mazzini followed their own path, embracing religious expressions which both – at times – even encouraged. Mazzini’s religiosity had a strong affirmative and constructive part: he defined a humanitarian religion, aiming at a form of transcendence, and promoted an altered, yet deep, religious faith. His unitarian project was considered crucial during the Risorgimento to build a new, organic society, and to overcome divergences and rivalries. The same holds true for his prophecy of the Third Rome and of the mission he believed the Italian people was entrusted with to realize it.⁴⁵ Mazzini’s thought is original and substantial because he invented and implemented for the first time in Italian history – through his Young Italy-movement, his speeches, and articles – a true “civil religion” on secular grounds, an alternative to Roman Catholic faith, even if this new religiosity borrowed from Christianity. In fact, he held beliefs certainly of Christian origin such as community, equality, high morale, and brotherly love, and he used expressions, symbols and a language with clear Christian leanings. His secularity, thus, mirrored the cultural background of nineteenth-century Italy with its strong Catholic tradition; however, he harshly criticized its current forms and proposed a civil religion in a democratically organized society on the basis of Christian values beyond institutions, authorities, and hierarchies. In these years, a great number of democrats embraced positivism and therefore regarded Mazzini’s refusal of scientific atheism and rational materialism as the decisive “weakness” of his doctrine. They realized very clearly that Mazzini’s religiosity was not a simple rhetorical instrument to further political goals. Rather, the republican thinker was truly convinced that no political or social program would prevail without a notion of God as the principle of unity at its base. Hence, Mazzini, during the constitutive act of his Young Italy-movement, frankly declared that this new political association was not a sect, not a party, but “credenza e apostolato” (“faith and apostolate”). Also, he wrote to the mother of his

 Italy’s anticlerical movement comprised many stances and positions, from socialist, republican, militant liberal, moderate, freemasonic, up to an artistic nostalgia for paganism. See Verucci, L’Italia laica.  See Simon Levis Sullam, “Dio e il Popolo: La rivoluzione religiosa di Giuseppe Mazzini,” in Storia d’Italia, vol. 22: Il Risorgimento, ed. Alberto Mario Banti and Paul Ginsborg (Turin: Einaudi, 2007), 401– 422; Laura Fournier-Finocchiaro and Jean-Yves Frétigné, “Prophètes et prophétie chez Giuseppe Mazzini,” Laboratoire italien, 21 (2018), accessed December 15, 2018, http:// journals.openedition.org/laboratoireitalien/2172.

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friend Jacopo Ruffini in 1836: “noi non siamo che un pensiero religioso incarnato” (“we are nothing else but an embodied religious thought”).⁴⁶ Undoubtedly, Mazzini was aware of the close association of Italian identity with the Roman Catholic Church, which he initially did not consider an enemy of national unification. He even imagined the new Italy and the church walking hand in hand toward the new era of nationalities. In his view, the church was a vital entity as it combined the Christian spiritual message with the long-standing heritage of classical Rome. The Catholic Church, Mazzini underscored, had turned the Rome of the Caesars into the Rome of the Popes; it had also turned Christendom from a religion of personal salvation into a social religion capable of changing the world. In this light it does not come as a surprise that Mazzini accused Protestantism of having taken a step backwards by promoting the expression of faith on an individual base and by depriving those individuals of the social organization power of Catholicism.⁴⁷ He considered Catholicism the only power preserving the concept of a public mission that would also perpetuate the tradition of the ancient Roman civilization. In accordance with this interpretation, Mazzini’s project of the Third Rome of the people was designed to maintain the ecumenical spirit of papal Rome. The true obstacle to achieve this goal, to Mazzini, was not the Catholic Church, but papacy and papal absolutism. Against the general trend among Italian democrats and freethinkers to promote a separation of religiosity and politics, Mazzini always upheld the idea of building a new church closely intertwined with the new political community. Nevertheless, his almost evangelical message influenced Italian democrats, even if many of them took different paths after Italy’s unification. It also heavily impacted on Italian socialists, who developed their propaganda for the masses in creating a “surrogate religion” they called – not by accident – “evangelical socialism.”⁴⁸ In Garibaldi’s case, on the other hand, irreligious declarations are absent until 1849. He was loyal to Mazzini’s idea of God and civil religion; and during the Roman Republic, which he supported militarily, he restrained his soldiers from attacking churches and clerics. Even after his defeat, and until the 1860s, he distinguished between good and bad priests. Besides, he participated in religious celebrations in Palermo and Naples, where he emphasized: “I am a Christian, and I speak to Christians: I am a good Christian, I speak to good Christians. I love and venerate the religion of Christ, because Christ came into the  Fulvio Conti, Massoneria e religioni civili: Cultura laica e liturgie politiche fra XVIII e XX secolo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2008), 259.  See Giuseppe Mazzini, “Letter to Palla,” September 1834, in SEI, 10; 79.  Verucci, “La religione progressiva di Giuseppe Mazzini,” 210.

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world to wrest humankind from slavery for which God has not created it.”⁴⁹ In line with this conviction, Garibaldi married his Brazilian wife Anita religiously and had his children baptized. He also shared the ideals of freemasonry which he had joined in South America and he continued to support, back in Italy, democratic evangelism, based on brotherhood and equality. In April 1862, he even welcomed a group of Lombard priests among his volunteers: “Dear and true priests of Christ, I welcome you brotherly.”⁵⁰ But after the Battle of Aspromonte in August 1862, the papal condemnation of liberal priests and the anti-liberal, anti-secular, and directed against religious freedom encyclical Quanta cura (With Great Care, 1864) with its appendix, the Syllabus Errorum, Garibaldi distanced himself from Mazzini’s religious doctrine and adopted openly irreligious and atheistic positions. He no longer cherished hopes that the clergy would be willing to separate from the papacy. Subsequently, he took over the honorary presidency of the Società del libero pensiero (the first Italian Freethought Society), founded in Siena in 1864.⁵¹ The Italian freethought movement, decisively shaped by German and French influences, quickly attracted new adherents who organized in societies: 63 of them attended the socalled Anti-Council of Naples in 1869. Garibaldians like the rationalist philosopher and writer Luigi Stefanoni, the founder of the Milanese journal Il Libero Pensiero (The Freethinker),⁵² formed the backbone of the Italian freethought movement.⁵³ Well-known authors and democratic politicians collaborated with the journal: Giuseppe Ferrari, Giuseppe Ricciardi, Angelo De Gubernatis, Alessandro Borella and also French and German scientists, exponents of materialistic positivism like Émile Littré (director of the Revue de philosophie positive) and Charles Letourneau (secretary of the Société d’anthropologie de Paris [Society of Anthropology of Paris]), Ludwig Büchner (founder of the Deutsche Freidenkerbund [German Freethinker League]), Jacob Moleschott, Moritz Schiff, Carl Vogt, and the Russian philosopher Aleksandr Ivanovich Herzen. The weekly gave news and reprinted passages of articles from French rationalist and materialist magazines, such as the Libre Pensée and L’Excommunié, the Rationaliste and the Pensée nouvelle. The cultural level was generally not very high, but the

 Pier Giorgio Camaiani, “Valori religiosi e polemica anticlericale della sinistra democratica e del primo socialism,” Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa 30, no. 2 (1984): 235.  Cited in Isnenghi, Garibaldi fu ferito, 114.  See Verucci, L’Italia laica, 181– 182.  See Antonio De Lauri, Scienza, laicità, democrazia: ‘Il Libero Pensiero. Giornale dei razionalisti’ (1866 – 1876) (Milan: Biblion Edizioni, 2014).  See Fabio Bertini, Figli del ’48: I ribelli, gli esuli, i lavoratori: Dalla Repubblica universale alla Prima Internazionale (Rome: Aracne, 2013).

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tone was always lively and bellicose, which earned the journal some seizures for offending the religion of the state. In this sense, an article about the First Vatican Council reads: The Roman Church, therefore, makes people laugh. This decrepit prostitute still believes in the spring of the years that made her dear to the peoples of Buddha, Moses or Jesus. The great prostitute has become shady, wrinkled, exhausted; and she would like the blood thrown back into her veins […] Imbecile! An ecumenical council, that is, a council of priests belonging to the Roman caste, would like to place among the dogmas the temporal power of the great Catholic Lama?⁵⁴

In 1879, Garibaldi also accepted the presidency of the Società atea (Atheist Society) in Venice and, at the same time, intensified his commitment to freemasonry. Due to these circumstances and attitudes he became a pioneer for a new positivist ideology based on the principles of reason and science.⁵⁵ Their shared opposition to Mazzini’s social religion also strengthened the links between the Italian freethought movement and the anarchist branches of the First International. Stefanoni, for instance, criticized the Mazzinian formula “God and people” to be too dogmatic. He rejected Mazzinianism as he felt it would try to introduce a new political conception in Italy without adequate backing by corresponding philosophical tenets. According to Stefanoni, Mazzini deluded himself in believing that the idea of progress derived from the notion of an immutable God and that the principle of freedom and free examination were rooted in religious faith.⁵⁶ These convictions brought him, at least in part, close to the otherwise much more fiery theories of Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin, the Russian revolutionary anarchist involved in the propagation of atheism in Italy.⁵⁷ In general, the Italian freethinkers, no other than anarchist ac-

 Aldisio Sammito, “Concilio ecumenico,” Il Libero Pensiero, October 8, 1868, 236 – 237.  Fulvio Conti, “Il Garibaldi dei massoni: La libera muratoria e il mito dell’eroe (1860 – 1926),” Contemporanea 11, no. 3 (2008): 359 – 395.  See Verucci, L’Italia laica, 221.  Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin’s stay in Italy in the mid-1860s left a lasting impression on all those disappointed by the Risorgimento. His influence laid the foundations for the development of internationalist sections. Bakunin accused Mazzini of having founded a new church of which he had proclaimed himself a “high priest.” In contrast, he stressed his atheism, claiming the need for materialistic and atheistic analysis to interpret and radically transform society. He was highly appreciated by Stefanoni and, more generally, by the collaborators of Il Libero Pensiero.

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tivists of the time, were not merely concerned with theoretical debates but oriented toward practical objectives.⁵⁸ Garibaldi, however, still differed from other European freethinkers because he continued to use religious terminology to explain his principles as “religione del vero” (“true religion”), “religione di Dio, della verità e della ragione” (“religion of God, of truth, and of reason”), or even “religione di Cristo” (“religion of Christ”) that embarrassed and alienated atheist democrats. In September 1867, in a speech held at the Peace congress in Geneva, he declared: “The religion of God is adopted by the congress and every member should disseminate it.”⁵⁹ Similarly, in his novel The Rule of the Monk, the “Solitario” stated: It is in vain that my enemies try to make me out an atheist. I believe in God. I am of the religion of Christ, not the religion of the pope. I do not admit any intermediary between God and man. Priests have merely thrust themselves in, in order to make a trade of religion. They are the enemies of true religion, liberty, and progress; they are the original cause of our slavery and degradation, and in order to subjugate the souls of Italians, they have called in foreigners to enchain their bodies.⁶⁰

Some critics have interpreted those statements as an expression of Garibaldi’s deism, or even as a rhetorical strategy to familiarize the masses with the new rationalist credo by using accustomed religious vocabulary. All in all, Garibaldi’s choice of words indicate that he took into account the profound roots of traditional Catholic Christianity in the Italian culture and that he understood the necessity to adopt a certain form of religiosity – secularized and civil – in order to propose projects of political reforms. It is also worth noting that, despite his proclaimed anticlericalism, Garibaldi himself was constantly compared to and represented as a Christ-like figure during the Risorgimento.⁶¹ Thus it seems no contradiction that notwithstanding his religious rhetoric and beliefs Garibaldi strove for the unification of all Italian democrats and promoted secularization: he struggled for the abolition of the Albertine Statute’s  In particular, the Italian anarchist Carlo Cafiero was a follower of Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin during the second half of the nineteenth century. Historiography has highlighted how the relations between the freethought movement and internationalism soon became tense and how the distance between the two conceptions grew because of personal rivalries of Cafiero and Stefanoni. But both shared practical objectives such as atheism, the irreverence toward religious symbols and rites, and the positivist and materialist cultural formation. All those elements became an integral part of the internationalist movement.  Cited in Camaiani, “Valori religiosi e polemica anticlericale,” 233.  Garibaldi, The Rule of the Monk, vol. 2, 91.  Alberto Mario Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento: Parentela, santità e onore alle origini dell’Italia unita (Turin: Einaudi, 2000), 172– 173.

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first article,⁶² the abolition of the Law of Guarantees of 1871,⁶³ for lay education, and also for the introduction of cremation which was a harsh attack on Catholic custom and influence.⁶⁴ But instead of putting the focus on the contradictory character of his convictions and attitudes, he seems to be best understood in light of his vision of a renewed culture in which religion and social freedom would go hand in hand. Garibaldi was situated at the crossroads of events and changes allowing him to exert a certain influence over the following decades, yet not to such extend that he would have significantly determined the “ideology” of the Italian freethought movement. Rather, he helped shaping the broader anticlerical culture of radical movements in Italy and beyond. His heritage lived on in Italy’s socialist party and Italian freemasonry. The first groups of evolutionary socialism resumed the anti-religious and atheistic orientation of Garibaldi’s internationalist ideology, permeated with positivist and materialistic ideas. For example, La Plebe of Lodi, a newspaper directed by Ettore Bignami, who was the leader of this current, looked with great sympathy to the freethought movement of Stefanoni, and from December 1872 on adopted the name Giornale Repubblicano – Razionalista – Socialista. In 1881, the same influence could be traced in the program of the Socialist Revolutionary Party of Romagna, whose leader and inspirer, Andrea Costa, joined freemasonry in 1883, imitating Bignami and representing, until his death in 1910, an important link between the socialists and the exponents of radical and republican democracy.⁶⁵ In the long run, Garibaldi’s influential testimonial, comprising anticlerical claims and a certain secular custom in daily life, gained the support of broader social circles, bourgeois and popular, first in Central-Northern Italy and later also in the cities of Southern Italy.

 The first article of the Italian Constitution (Statuto Albertino) reads: “The Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Religion is the only religion of the State. The other cults now existing are tolerated according to the laws.” This is what Garibaldi wished to alter.  The Law of Papal Guarantees, passed by the senate and the chamber of the Italian parliament on May 13, 1871, accorded the pope certain honours and privileges similar to those enjoyed by the King of Italy, including the right to send and receive ambassadors. The law intended to avoid further conflicts following the unification and was bluntly criticized by anticlerical politicians of all directions, but particularly from the left. At the same time, it subjected the papacy to a law that the Italian parliament could modify or abrogate at any time.  See Dino Mengozzi, La morte e l’immortale: La morte laica da Garibaldi a Costa (Manduria: Lacaita, 2000).  See Conti, “Breve storia dell’anticlericalismo.”

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Conclusion In conclusion, it seems that the Italian Risorgimento was shaped less by atheist or anti-Christian motifs than by a liberal or “civil” variant of Catholicism with secular leanings. Still, the widespread anticlericalism promoted by the spokesmen of Italian national unification, Mazzini and Garibaldi, had the potential to develop into atheism or irreligious directions. Some interpreted their anticlericalism as a problematic and “weak” aspect of their thought while others held it would not be radical enough but still too much intertwined with traditional Catholicism. By some margin and in more positive terms, however, Mazzini’s and Garibaldi’s conviction served as a bridge toward new forms of political and social struggles: political radicalism and idealistic radicalism, including forms of “secularized religion” and “religion of irreligion,” as they became apparent in anticlerical rituals and martyrology flourishing throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. New rites of passage were invented, different and alternative to Catholic ones, such as civil baptism, civil marriage, and the republican or socialist funeral. Camillo Prampolini preached the socialist Jesus, depicted in the paintings of the “Christ of the workers” that many workers and peasants hung above their beds,⁶⁶ while Giordano Bruno was celebrated as the martyr of freethought in 1889.⁶⁷ By this means, Mazzinian and Garibaldinian anticlericalism lived out in the Italian political and literary culture: both republican and socialist propaganda are imbued with a notion of “civil religion” inspired by Mazzinian thought that draw from evangelical and Christian expressions, terms, and symbols. The spread of Mazzini’s Doveri dell’uomo as a new gospel and catechism of the Republican Party (that called itself “il partito educatore” [“the education party”]),⁶⁸ in this regard, is most emblematic. It rejected individualistic and bourgeois materialism while conveying the principles of Christian spiritualism, ethical commitment, democratic liberalism, but also nationalism. In literary culture, the poetic anticlericalism and “Satanism” of Italian poet and historian of literature Giosue Carducci mirrors traces of Garibaldi’s beliefs,⁶⁹

 See Camaiani, “Valori religiosi e polemica anticlericale,” 241.  See Massimo Bucciantini, Campo dei Fiori: Storia di un monumento maledetto (Turin: Einaudi, 2015).  This is studied in particular by Maurizio Ridolfi, “Il partito educatore: La cultura dei repubblicani italiani fra Otto e Novecento,” Italia Contemporanea 175 (1989): 25 – 52.  See Laura Fournier-Finocchiaro, Carducci et la construction de la nation italienne (Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2006), 154– 158. See also Laura Fournier-Finocchiaro, “Carducci

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as does the philosophy of Antonio Gramsci, who ranked Garibaldi’s anticlerical novels among the very few expressions of Italian national popular culture. Garibaldi’s writings even inspired Benito Mussolini’s novel Claudia Particella, l’amante del cardinale (The Cardinal’s mistress), first published in 1910 and recently republished.⁷⁰ The interest in this kind of literature has never weakened: Garibaldi’s novels Clelia and Cantoni, for instance, are still republished and translated nowadays.⁷¹

Bibliography Banti, Alberto Mario. La nazione del Risorgimento: Parentela, santità e onore alle origini dell’Italia unita. Turin: Einaudi, 2000. Bertini, Fabio. Figli del ’48, i ribelli, gli esuli, i lavoratori: Dalla Repubblica universale alla Prima Internazionale. Rome: Aracne, 2013. Borutta, Manuel. “Anti-Catholicism and the Culture War in Risorgimento Italy.” In The Risorgimento Revisited: Nationalism and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Italy, edited by Silvana Patriarca and Lucy Riall, 191 – 213. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Bucciantini, Massimo. Campo dei Fiori: Storia di un monumento maledetto. Turin: Einaudi, 2015. Camaiani, Pier Giorgio. “Valori religiosi e polemica anticlericale della sinistra democratica e del primo socialismo.” Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa 30, no. 2 (1984): 223 – 250. Cardillo, Angelo. “Garibaldi romanziere.” Misure critiche, no. 1 – 2 (2011): 93 – 122. Conti, Fulvio. “Il Garibaldi dei massoni: La libera muratoria e il mito dell’eroe (1860 – 1926).” Contemporanea 11, no. 3 (2008): 359 – 395. Conti, Fulvio. Massoneria e religioni civili: Cultura laica e liturgie politiche fra XVIII e XX secolo. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2008. Conti, Fulvio. “Breve storia dell’anticlericalismo.” In Enciclopedia Treccani (2011). Accessed December 15, 2018. http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/breve-storia-dell-anti clericalismo_%28Cristiani-d%27Italia%29/. De Lauri, Antonio. Scienza, laicità, democrazia: ‘Il Libero Pensiero. Giornale dei razionalisti’ (1866 – 1876). Milan: Biblion Edizioni, 2014. Fournier-Finocchiaro, Laura. “Carducci et l’anticléricalisme.” In L’Italie menace: Figures de l’ennemi du 16e au 20e siècle, edited by Laura Fournier-Finocchiaro, 67 – 90. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004.

et l’anticléricalisme,” in L’Italie menace: Figures de l’ennemi du 16e au 20e siècle, ed. Laura Fournier-Finocchiaro (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004), 67– 90.  Benito Mussolini, L’amante del Cardinale: Claudia Particella, ed. Paolo Orvieto (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2009).  See in French: Giuseppe Garibaldi, Clelia, trans. Yves Branca (Paris: Editions Ex Aequo, 2009); Giuseppe Garibaldi, Cantoni le volontaire, trans. Tullio Martello (Lyon: La Fosse Aux Ours, 2018).

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Fournier-Finocchiaro, Laura. Carducci et la construction de la nation italienne. Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2006. Fournier-Finocchiaro, Laura. “Le Mythe de la Troisième Rome de Mazzini à Mussolini.” In Le Mythe de Rome en Europe: Modèles et contre-modèles, edited by Juan-Carlos D’Amico, 213 – 230. Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2012. Fournier-Finocchiaro, Laura. “La Fin de l’autorité du pape chez Giuseppe Mazzini.” In Pape et papauté: Respect et contestation d’une autorité bifrons, edited by Agnès Morini, 378 – 399. Saint-Etienne: Presses Universitaires de Saint-Etienne, 2013. Fournier-Finocchiaro, Laura, and Jean-Yves Frétigné. “Prophètes et prophétie chez Giuseppe Mazzini.” Laboratoire italien 21 (2018). Accessed December 15, 2018. http://journals. openedition.org/laboratoireitalien/2172. Garibaldi, Giuseppe. Cantoni il volontario. Milan: Poletti, 1870. Garibaldi, Giuseppe. Clelia, il governo del monaco (Roma nel secolo XIX): Romanzo storico politico. Milan: Fratelli Rechiedei Editori, 1870. Garibaldi, Giuseppe. Rule of the Monk: Rome in the Nineteenth Century. London: Cassell, 1870. Garibaldi, Giuseppe. I Mille. Turin: Camilla e Bertolero, 1874. Garibaldi, Giuseppe. Epistolario, edited by Enrico Emilio Ximenes. Milan: A. Brigola e comp., 1885. Garibaldi, Giuseppe. Memorie autobiografiche. Florence: G. Barbèra, 1888. Garibaldi, Giuseppe. Manlio. Naples: Guida, 1982. Garibaldi, Giuseppe. Clelia, translated by Yves Branca. Paris: Editions Ex Aequo, 2009. Garibaldi, Giuseppe. Cantoni le volontaire, translated by Tullio Martello. Lyon: La Fosse Aux Ours, 2018. Guglielminetti, Marziano. “Giuseppe Garibaldi.” In La letteratura ligure: L’Ottocento, edited by Giorgio Bertone, 215 – 231. Genoa: Costa & Nolan, 1990. Isnenghi, Mario. Garibaldi fu ferito: Storia e mito di un rivoluzionario disciplinato. Rome: Donzelli, 2007. Lyttelton, Adrian. “An Old Church and a New State: Italian Anticlericalism 1876 – 1915.” European Studies Review 13 (1983): 225 – 248. Mazzini, Giuseppe. Scritti editi ed inediti, 100 vols. Imola: Tipografia Galeati, 1906 – 1943. Mengozzi, Dino. La morte e l’immortale: La morte laica da Garibaldi a Costa. Manduria: Lacaita, 2000. Mengozzi, Dino. Garibaldi taumaturgo: Reliquie laiche e politica nell’Ottocento. Manduria: Lacaita, 2008. Mussolini, Benito. L’amante del Cardinale: Claudia Particella, edited by Paolo Orvieto. Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2009. Nezri-Dufour, Sophie. “La peste pretina, piaga della nostra patria infelice (Garibaldi, ‘I Mille’, 1874).” Italies, no. 15 (2011): 121 – 133. Accessed December 15, 2018. http://journals. openedition.org/italies/3064. Orvieto, Paolo. Buoni e cattivi del Risorgimento: I romanzi di Garibaldi e Bresciani a confronto. Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2011. Papenheim, Martin. “Roma o Morte: Culture Wars in Italy.” In Culture Wars: Secular–Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe, edited by Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser, 202 – 226. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

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Passerin d’Entrèves, Ettore, and Francesco Traniello. Religione e politica nell’Ottocento europeo. Rome: Istituto per la storia del Risorgimento italiano, 1993. Portelli, Sergio. “Anti-Clericalism in Translation: Anti-Catholic Ideology in the English Translation of Giuseppe Garibaldi’s ‘Clelia o il governo dei preti’ (1870).” Forum Italicum 50, no. 3 (2016): 1099 – 1108. Rémond, René. “Anticléricalisme.” In Encyclopædia Universalis (1983). Accessed December 15, 2018. http://www.universalis.fr/encyclopedie/anticlericalisme/. Ridolfi, Maurizio. “Il partito educatore: La cultura dei repubblicani italiani fra Otto e Novecento.” Italia contemporanea 175 (1989): 25 – 52. Salvemini, Gaetano. Scritti sul Risorgimento. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1961. Sammito, Aldisio. “Concilio ecumenico.” Il Libero Pensiero, October 8, 1868, 236 – 237. Sullam, Simon Levis. “Dio e il Popolo: La rivoluzione religiosa di Giuseppe Mazzini.” In Storia d’Italia, vol. 22: Il Risorgimento, edited by Alberto Mario Banti and Paul Ginsborg, 401 – 422. Turin: Einaudi, 2007. Sullam, Simon Levis. “The Moses of Italian Unity: Mazzini and Nationalism as Political Religion.” In Mazzini and the Globalization of Democratic Nationalism, 1830 – 1920, edited by Christopher Alan Bayly and Eugenio Biagini, 107 – 124. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Verucci, Guido. L’Italia laica prima e dopo l’unita` 1848 – 1876: Anticlericalismo, libero pensiero e ateismo nella società italiana. Rome/Bari: Laterza, 1981. Verucci, Guido. Cattolicesimo e laicismo nell’Italia contemporanea. Milan: Franco Angeli, 2001. Viallet, Jean-Pierre. “L’Anticléricalisme de Garibaldi.” In Hommes, idées, journaux: Mélanges en l’honneur de Pierre Guiral, edited by Jean-Antoine Gili and Ralph Schor, 457 – 476. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1988. Viallet, Jean-Pierre. “L’Anticle´ricalisme en Italie 1867 – 1915.” PhD diss., University of Paris X, 1991. Viallet, Jean-Pierre. “L’Anticléricalisme en Italie (1867 – 1915): Historiographie et problématiques de recherché.” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome – Italie et Méditerranée modernes et contemporaines 122, no. 1 (2010): 137 – 159. Accessed December 15, 2018. http://journals.openedition.org/mefrim/564.

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Group Portrait with Freethinker: Jacob Moleschott, Risorgimento Culture, and the Italian Nation-Building Process Giorni belli della mia vita furono quelli che io spesi a leggere le opere di Carlo Darwin. (Beautiful were the days of my life I spent reading the works of Charles Darwin.) Francesco De Sanctis, Il darwinismo nell’arte (1883) Rinnovare gli uomini per rinnovare i sistemi. (Renewing the people in order to renew the systems.) Luigi Russo, Francesco De Sanctis e l’Università di Napoli (1928)

The term “materialism” does not summarize a well-defined philosophical, nor ideological system, but rather comprises clusters of conceptual positions cutting across different time spans.¹ When it comes to the long nineteenth century up to the First World War, materialism takes on distinct meanings for philosophy, politics, and science, and it intersects with different views, or denials, of religion.² These include such heterogeneous stances as atheism, agnosticism, and deism, but also anticlericalism and anti-Catholicism which may lie at the core of attempts to establish a “true religion,” one that carries the promise of being “genuinely Evangelical.”³ Though present in many European societies, anticlericalism particularly flourished in the Kingdom of Italy (founded in 1861; the unification of the Peninsula put an end to the temporal power of the popes in 1870).⁴ It arose from the sharp political, religious, and cultural confrontations between  On materialism, see the comprehensive studies of Richard C. Vitzthum, Materialism: An Affirmative History and Definition (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995); and Martin Küpper, Materialismus (Cologne: PapyRossa, 2017).  See Annette Wittkau-Horgby, Materialismus: Entstehung und Wirkung in den Wissenschaften des 19. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998).  On anti-Catholicism and European anticlericalism, see Manuel Borutta, Antikatholizismus: Deutschland und Italien im Zeitalter der europäischen Kulturkämpfe (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 22011); and Lisa Dittrich, Antiklerikalismus in Europa: Öffentlichkeit und Säkularisierung in Frankreich, Spanien und Deutschland (1848 – 1914) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014).  On political radicalism and anticlericalism in Italy, see Alessandro Galante Garrone, I radicali in Italia (1849 – 1925) (Milan: Garzanti, 1973); and Guido Verucci, L’Italia laica prima e dopo l’unità 1848 – 1876: Anticlericalismo, libero pensiero e ateismo nella società italiana (Rome/ Bari: Laterza, 1981). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110688283-006

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Catholic Church-hierarchies and the new, laicist democratic nation state and triggered needs for a “civil religion” to replace its traditional counterpart and its political influence.⁵ In light of such a complex situation, this chapter aims to investigate the case of Jacob Moleschott (1822– 1893), a prominent representative of late nineteenthcentury scientific materialism. Born in the Netherlands, professor of physiology Moleschott came to Italy in 1861 after having resigned from the University of Heidelberg because of his democratic and atheist convictions and after several years of employment in Zurich. Taking into account the evolving Italian secular culture, this chapter focusses on elements of Moleschott’s anti-dualistic, materialist, secular thought and, above all, its reception in Italy, where he actively participated in the scientific, academic, and political life of the newly founded nation state. Though a large number of studies have been conducted on Moleschott,⁶ questions regarding his exchange with the intelligentsia of his time (not limited to the natural sciences), and above all his role in the framework of the Italian nation-building process, remain open. This is where the chapter ties in: it studies Moleschott as a vital part of an intellectual, academic, and political network in which Francesco De Sanctis (1817– 1883), a famous literary critic, professor of comparative literature, and minister of public education in several Italian governments, was a key player. De Sanctis was responsible for the controversial appointment of the materialist Moleschott as professor of physiology at the University of Turin in the course of the radical reform of the Italian university system initiated after his own appointment as the first minister of public education in the “new Italy.” No other than Moleschott, De Sanctis was one of the most “European” figures in the culture of the new Italian state, not least due to his stay in Zurich, where the two had met. Their lives encompassed both the

 On modern Italian history, see Christopher Duggan, The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy since 1796 (London: Penguin Books, 2008). The conflict of state and church is scrutinized in Martin Papenheim, “Roma o morte: Culture Wars in Italy,” in Culture Wars: Secular–Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 202– 225.  The literature on Moleschott is characterized by a significant split between two approaches: history of science and history of philosophy. The works by Giorgio Cosmacini belong to the first group: Giorgio Cosmacini, Il medico materialista: Vita e pensiero di Jakob Moleschott (Rome/Bari: Laterza, 2005). For the philosophical approach, see Antimo Negri, Trittico materialista: Georg Büchner, Jakob Moleschott, Ludwig Büchner (Rome: Cadmo, 1981); and Alessandro Savorelli, “Jakob Moleschott e la cultura italiana del suo tempo,” Giornale critico della filosofia italiana 7, no. 3 (2011): 543 – 554 (a special issue devoted to Moleschott). For a recent comprehensive approach, see Laura Meneghello, Jacob Moleschott – A Transnational Biography: Science, Politics, and Popularization in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Bielefeld: transcript, 2017).

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political and the intellectual. During the process of Italian nation building, De Sanctis was able to translate his cultural wealth into a political project and to implement it effectively. An exceptional freedom to act in the founding phase of the new state allowed him to radically demolish and rebuild the Italian university system. Next to Moleschott and De Sanctis, also Camillo De Meis and Betrando Spaventa were key players in this secularizing process of renewal.⁷ Yet tensions arose over topics such as the constitution and the role, as well as the interrelation, of science, religion, and education in the new system. Their opinions diverged mostly with regard to the essence and function of the state. The intertwined network of politics, science, and religion in which they moved offers insight into the making and complexity of the dynamics of secularization and emphasizes its key role in the process of Italian nation building of the late 1800s.

Exiles in Zurich Moleschott first encountered Italian culture in Zurich. He got acquainted with Francesco De Sanctis, professor from Southern Italy appointed to teach Italian literature at the Polytechnic Institute. In the 1850s, Zurich was an extraordinary melting pot of exiles; most of them were united by their loyalty to the ideals of the Revolutions of 1848 – 49. Besides Moleschott and De Sanctis, other Italians, such as Filippo De Boni, gathered in Zurich, but also vibrant personalities such as the “revolutionary” Richard Wagner (who, back then, had entered into a relationship with Mathilde Wesendonck that caused a rivalry with De Sanctis), Georg Herwegh and his wife Emma, and even Karl Marx.⁸ Among De Sanctis’ discussion partners were the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt and the philosopher Theodor Vischer. Large parts of the Hegelian Left would come together on the banks of the Limmat; as to Moleschott, he was a devoted reader of Feuerbach, whose ideas had a lasting impact on his thought. De Sanctis’ rich corpus of let-

 On the Italian educational system and its reforms, see Giuseppe Decollanz, Storia della scuola e delle istituzioni educative: Dalla Legge Casati alla riforma Moratti (Rome/Bari: Laterza, 2005).  “In quell’illustre città era allora accolto il fiore dell’emigrazione tedesca e francese. C’era Wagner, Mommsen, Vischer, Herwegh, Marx, Köchli, Flocon, Dufraisse, Challemel-Lacour, e talora vi appariva Sue, Arago, Charrras.” (“Back then, that illustrious town hosted the elite of German and French emigrants. There were Wagner, Mommsen, Vischer, Herwegh, Marx, Köchli, Flocon, Dufraisse, Challemel-Lacour; every now and then Sue, Arago, Charras would show up.”) (Francesco De Sanctis, Saggio critico sul Petrarca [1869], ed. Niccolò Gallo [Turin: Einaudi, 1964], 3.)

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ters and Moleschott’s autobiography allow insight in these Swiss years which the latter remembered fondly,⁹ whilst for the Italian they proved rather difficult. De Sanctis arrived in Zurich after a series of disillusions: the first was the failure of the revolution which hit him particularly hard as his most promising student, Luigi La Vista, died on the barricades. After going into hiding in Calabria and being imprisoned at Castel dell’Ovo, where he mastered German and translated Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik (Science of Logic, 1812– 1816), Rosenkranz’s Handbuch einer allgemeinen Geschichte der Poesie (Handbook of a General History of Poetry, 1833), and the first part of Goethe’s Faust: Eine Tragödie (Faust: A Tragedy, 1808), De Sanctis moved to Turin in 1853. In a reactionary environment, he reunited with some of his close friends: Angelo Camillo De Meis and Bertrando Spaventa, who were both patriotic revolutionaries imbued with Hegelianism. The exiles had a hard time in the Savoy capital; even such a prominent intellectual and jurist like the Neapolitan Marquess Pasquale Stanislao Mancini was faced with difficulties on his way to a professorship of international law. But whereas a Catholic, moderate liberal, and freemason like Terenzio Mamiani finally managed to become professor of philosophy of history, De Sanctis was kept out of the running and had to earn his living by teaching at a girls’ boarding school. In early 1856, he proudly refused the allowance that the Savoy government granted to political refugees and accepted an invitation to teach in Zurich. This exile meant a painful trauma, but also a starting point for a cultural renewal for De Sanctis, who already as a young professor in Naples had soaked up as much as he could of what reached the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies culturally, from Romantic poetry to historical novels, German philosophy, and Hegel. This mixture of influences stirred up hopes for freedom and political unity, although Hegelian philosophy was already outdated beyond the Alps. De Sanctis’ relationships during his years in Switzerland were intellectually very fruitful but not always satisfying on a personal level, as he confessed in a letter to one of his friends: “And here, Camillo, no one cares about me. My days of friendships are over; compliments, smiles, handshakes – these are my friendships here. I haven’t entered into closer relationship with anyone yet. […] Have you received Moleschott’s book?”¹⁰

 Jacob Moleschott, Für meine Freunde: Lebens-Erinnerungen (Giessen: Emil Roth, 1894), 275 – 289. On De Sanctis: 302– 305.  Francesco De Sanctis, Epistolario (1836–1858), ed. Giovanni Ferretti and Muzio Mazzocchi Alemanni (Turin: Einaudi, 1965), letter to Angelo Camillo De Meis, July 19, 1856, 109. If not indicated otherwise, all translations are the author’s.

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As regards famous personalities, he sometimes was shy on a personal level, yet never on intellectual grounds: “The renowned Vischer […] gave me three enormous volumes on aesthetics to which he is to add another two! It will take me five years to read them all.”¹¹ De Sanctis’ intellectual freedom becomes apparent in his philosophical masterpiece, Schopenhauer e Leopardi: Dialogo fra A. e D. (Schopenhauer and Leopardi, a Dialogue Between A. and D.), written in Zurich in 1858,¹² in which he radically and ironically criticized Schopenhauer, a philosopher appreciated by Moleschott. Unlike De Sanctis, Moleschott was already famous by the time he had reached Zurich, owed in part to his resignation from the University of Heidelberg following his conflict with the Baden government over his atheist and materialist teachings. After a period of self-employment in the Netherlands, he sought a freer climate in Zurich. De Sanctis was struck by Moleschott’s exceedingly selfconfident manner as he revealed in a letter to his close friend Camillo De Meis, a physician himself: I’ve met Moleschott, a physiologist like you, a young man of thirty: what a difference in character! A vain man, he tells everyone of his resignation: a frivolous gossip, pompous, lacking in enthusiasm, with no reverence for science. And yet he is already famous, and you remain obscure! What a charlatan! He had his opening speech – which he still has to deliver – announced in all the bookshops in Germany! He is a German Mancini, and he will go far.¹³

Soon after, De Sanctis accused Moleschott for not having openly declared his materialism, and for not having the courage to defend his views in public: Yesterday Moleschott read his famous speech; the hall was packed. He had to respond to his enemies, who accused him of materialism. And he lacked the courage to hurl a “yes” in their faces. He had spoken to me about it days earlier, and I told him, “Science is free; be direct. Are you aware that your persecution has brought you some of your fame, and if people know of you in Italy, you owe it not to your work but to the theologians who refuse to leave you in peace?” He lacked the courage, because he has no faith in science, because he thinks only of success and his career: I saw through him when I spoke to Camillo about him. He claimed that he acknowledged the soul, but within the body, not outside of it. “You’re a pantheist, then!” people around him said. But shortly thereafter, when it came down to the consequences, he revealed himself to be a materialist. A poor compromise between one’s interest and one’s conscience!¹⁴

   

Ibid., letter to Angelo Camillo De Meis, April 14, 1856, 20. See Francesco de Sanctis, Saggi critici vol. II, ed. Luigi Russo (Bari: Laterza, 1979), 136 – 186. De Sanctis, Epistolario (1856 – 1858), letter to Angelo Camillo De Meis, April 14, 1856, 19. Ibid., letter to Diomede Marvasi, June 17, 1856, 88.

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However, De Sanctis’ judgment reveals his acquaintance with Moleschott, who attended his lessons in Italian literature: “I have a large group gathering at the Polytechnic, some twenty people including Hardmeyer, Sieber, and Moleschott.”¹⁵ In comparison to these impressions, Moleschott’s memories of De Sanctis are much warmer. In any case, the scope of Moleschott’s and De Sanctis’ relationship is much more profound than their initial encounter might suggest. Meeting De Sanctis led to a great turning point in Moleschott’s life: his move to Italy, which permitted him a dual career in academia and politics. To De Sanctis, on the other hand, the consequences were primarily of intellectual nature. Moleschott seems to have played a role in distancing De Sanctis from Hegelianism, and in sharpening his awareness of the conflicting relation between religion and politics. Besides, Moleschott’s writings proofed influential on De Sanctis and the development of his key-concept of “life” with its philosophical, civic, and pedagogical elements, as will be shown in the following. Moleschott’s impact on the Italian process of nation building, thus, was twofold and went well beyond his direct political commitment as a senator of the Italian parliament (he was appointed on November 16, 1876). He gained influence through his academic teaching and intellectual instruction by which he reached a wide academic and lay public; and through his personal relation with one of the primary architects of the new Italy, Francesco De Sanctis. As a matter of fact, Moleschott’s influence was of vital relevance for De Sanctis’ disassociation from Hegelianism he – like many other intellectuals of his time – was attached to due to his contacts with modern German culture. While he remained substantially loyal to Leopardi’s skeptical critique and to Mazzini’s democratic radicalism throughout his life, De Sanctis distanced himself from Hegelianism in Zurich in order to come to grips with the failure of the revolution. Not least thanks to Moleschott (but also to Burckhardt, and to Mathilde Wesendonck’s circle),¹⁶ he realized that he had relied on the German philosopher as his loadstar without considering the time-bound nature and the authoritarian bias of his writings. Thus De Sanctis concluded: “I have never been Hegelian at any cost. Of course, it is not servility to hold on to a system one believes to be true; we have to serve the truth. […] I am tired of the absolute, of ontology,

 Francesco De Sanctis, Epistolario (1859 – 1860), ed. Giuseppe Talamo (Turin: Einaudi, 1965), letter to Teodoro Frizzoni, January 2, 1859, 6.  See Sergio Landucci, Cultura e ideologia in Francesco De Sanctis (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1964), 159 – 169.

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and of a priori. Hegel has done me a lot of good, but also a lot of evil. He has withered my soul. […] Today, his philosophy seems unbearable to me.”¹⁷ Subsequently, De Sanctis rejected Hegel’s dogmatism, his deductive reasoning, and the systematic architecture of his thought more and more – a decision which distanced him considerably from his Italian friends. In the following subsection, the consequences of this split will be further analyzed. Meanwhile, De Sanctis could ill afford medical treatment by Moleschott: “Ogni parola che esce dalla preziosa bocca del Moleschott costa due franchi.” (“Each word from Moleschott’s precious mouth costs two Francs.”)¹⁸

The Anti-Hegelian Turn and the Secularization of Knowledge One of De Sanctis’ first official acts as the first minister of public education in the unified Italy was the appointment of Moleschott to the chair of physiology at the University of Turin, the capital of Italy until 1865. Its legal premise was the Savoy “Casati Law” (November 1859), which deprived the Catholic Church of all its power in the field of education and allowed direct appointments to professorships on the basis of calls without further competition. After the national unification, this law, together with the entire Savoy legislation, was extended to the whole Peninsula. De Sanctis’ choice did not go unopposed but provoked resistance among local university professors, as did his political program and appointments elsewhere in Italy.¹⁹ Public education was one of the crucial factors in the construction of the modern Italian nation state, and next to church property the most important battlefield of state authorities, intellectuals, and scientists with the Catholic Church. De Sanctis intended to modernize the decried musty, backward-looking atmosphere of Italian universities whatever the cost. It seemed all too much burdened with the clericalism of the academic staff which had lost its most outstanding members after 1848. His efforts were not primarily aimed at nationalizing the Italian university system, where public education, in the decades prior to the unification, had coexisted with much more lively

 De Sanctis, Epistolario (1856 – 1859), letter to Angelo Camillo De Meis, September 20, 1857, 442.  Ibid.  On the Casati Law, see Maria Cristina Morandini, “Da Boncompagni a Casati: La costruzione del sistema scolastico nazionale,” in Scuola e società nell’Italia unita, ed. Luciano Pazzaglia and Roberto Sani (Brescia: Editrice La Scuola, 2001), 9 – 46.

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private schools such as De Sanctis’ First School in Naples. Rather, it was about initiating a clear-cut and far-reaching political turn: those persecuted by the old regimes, such as Luigi Settembrini in Naples, and “heretics” like Moleschott, rejected by the Baden government, from now on were given the absolute priority.²⁰ For De Sanctis, first morality had to be renewed, and then culture. With the creative freedom to set up new institutions and overthrow old elites, freshly unified Italy was a unique experimental field for applying a new, secular, and “positive” imprint on education. In 1878, De Sanctis, once again minister of public education, proposed to Moleschott to work at the University of Naples. In the end, though, the Dutch scientist, with De Sanctis’ support, decided to go to Rome.²¹ Yet Naples’ science and medicine were anything but backward. Key players such as Salvatore Tommasi, whom Moleschott commemorated in a speech held in the Senate in 1888,²² had rejected Hegelianism that for longer periods had shaped Italian natural sciences with its deductive schematics and a marked theological dogmatism. In the 1860s, the process of secularizing science consolidated in the cry: “Keine Metaphysik mehr!” (“No more metaphysics!”)²³ Dogmatized Hegelianism as well as mannerism were left behind in favor of a twofold epistemological shift: the detachment of science from any traditional form of philosophy, and the struggle for unity and connectedness of all the sciences on the basis of the experimental method. This very “secularization of knowledge” meant freedom from any metaphysical backlash, combined with an explicit acceptance of Darwinism and an implicit acceptance of scientific materialism. These were also the positions adopted by Moleschott, who added with this to an already existing Italian movement of intellectual refreshment so far labelled as “naturalism.” But how was Moleschott received in Italy? In the 1860s, his name recurs along with that of Darwin and the term “naturalism.” The zoologist Filippo De Filippi, who was a convinced Darwinist, published an article which promptly informed the Italian public about Moleschott’s arrival and fully backed De Sanctis’

 For an analysis of the university reform in the years after unification, with particular attention to Naples, see Luigi Russo, Francesco De Sanctis e la cultura napoletana (1860 – 1885) (Venice: La Nuova Italia Editrice, 1928), chapters I–VI.  See Carla De Pascale and Alessandro Savorelli, “L’archivio di Jakob Moleschott (con documenti inediti e lettere di F. De Sanctis, S. Tommasi, A. C. De Meis),” Giornale critico della filosofia Italiana, no. 6 (1986): 216 – 248; here 242.  To this purpose, Moleschott retrieved information on Tommasi from Camillo De Meis. (Ibid., 244– 248.)  Russo, Francesco De Sanctis, 166.

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decision for the Dutch materialist.²⁴ Moleschott and the German scientist Moritz (then Maurizio) Schiff, who was appointed professor of physiology in Florence in 1862, were materialists and Darwinists: that was how they were perceived in Italy, where an early summary of Darwin’s theories had appeared in the journal Il Politecnico as early as 1860.²⁵ In 1864, Italian Darwinist De Filippi published another article destined to become famous in which he tackled the problem of the origin of the human species: L’uomo e le scimie (Man and Monkeys). This essay highly contributed to a Europe-wide debate on the topic, and with good reason: an informed and fervent Darwinist, Di Filippo suggested a possible reconciliation between faith in the Christian God and the descent of humans from primates that was but an anatomic matter of fact and not extended to human superior attributes such as thought and sentiments.²⁶ Still, Di Filippo criticized Justus von Liebig, German chemist and adversary of Moleschott’s teachings on phosphorus being the base of human thought, as a defender of orthodoxy and with that upheld Moleschott’s supremacy in the Italian public discourse. On the Catholic side, however, Moleschott was associated with pantheism, the first and most serious sin listed in the Syllabus Errorum (Syllabus of Errors, 1864; one of the key words of those decades). To quote from an article by the Sicilian professor of philosophy Vincenzo Di Giovanni: […] the materialists of our times have pushed frankly and inexorably the premises of pantheism to their extreme consequences, which the conservatives of the Hegelian Right, by now surrendered to the assaults of the Hegelian Left, did not want to foresee. It is well known that German adherents of pantheistic materialism pertain to the latter school. The most prominent among them are Feuerbach, Vogt, Moleschott, and Büchner. They are combatted by Fichte (son), by Ulrici and by Wirth, by Herbart’s school, by Lotze, and, among the naturalists, by the famous Liebig, against whom Moleschott has directed his most renowned work.²⁷

 Filippo De Filippi, “La fisiologia ed il professore Moleschott,” Rivista italiana di scienze, lettere ed arti, October 21, 1861, V. On De Filippi, see Guido Cimino, “Filippo De Filippi,” in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani 33 (1987), http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/filippo-de-filippi_ (Dizionario-Biografico)/, accessed March 15, 2019.  See “On the origin etc. Sull’origine delle specie coi mezzi di scelta naturale […] di Carlo Darwin, Londra 1859,” Il Politecnico IX (1860): 110 – 112. The anonymous article could have been authored by De Filippi. On Darwinism in Italy, see Fabio Forgione, Il dibattito sulla variabilità delle specie nella Torino dell’Ottocento (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2018); in Europe: Eve-Marie Engels, ed., The Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe (London/New York: Continuum, 2008).  Filippo De Filippi, L’uomo e le scimie (Milan: Daelli, 1864).  Vincenzo Di Giovanni, “Delle attinenze fra il panteismo e il materialismo nella storia contemporanea della filosofia,” Il campo dei filosofi italiani: Periodico da esercitare i maestri liberamente 2 (1866): 411.

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The articles printed in the topical Italian magazine Rivista contemporanea nazionale italiana, to which De Sanctis himself contributed, display the lively and pugnacious variety of arguments exchanged during these years. They clearly illustrate that the new freedom of opinion mattered more than the specificity of positions. This magazine also issued the radical views of Agostino Perini, publicist of Trento who, as a follower of the anthropology of Feuerbach, analyzed religion as a purely human phenomenon maintained by basic human interests. In contrast to the Neo-Kantian mediation of the influential Italian philosopher Felice Tocco, who claimed that coexistence between the new science and the philosophical discourse was possible, Perini denied any form of religious faith or metaphysics.²⁸ In this lively cultural atmosphere – a laboratory of secularism – Moleschott gradually became the embodiment of a particular type of intellectual: the scientist-philosopher. During the 1860s, the emancipation of science from any form of dogmatism had manifold philosophical implications which were developed and discussed by several parties. It was precisely the theoretical naivety of a rash empiricism common among academics and in the broader public that fervent NeoHegelians – such as the philosopher Bertrando Spaventa, but also Camillo De Meis, De Sanctis’ old friend who had disassociated himself ideologically from his teacher ever since the Zurich years – criticized.²⁹ In the second half of the nineteenth century, each branch of Italian science became a battlefield of materialists and spiritualists, and both sides interpreted Darwin’s writings in their own interest. De Sanctis’ call of Moleschott to an Italian professorship proved to be forward-thinking: alongside his scientific achievements, the Dutch materialist played a decisive, yet also highly politicized public role as a dispeller of any form of scientific and philosophical obscurantism in the modernizing climate of the Italian Risorgimento.

The Two Religions In the turbulent context of the 1860s (which for Italy, to use a Freudian term, triggered impulses that until then had been repressed), philosophical and religious

 See Agostino Perini. “La religione naturale,” Rivista contemporanea nazionale italiana, August 1868, 62– 75; and Felice Tocco, “Studi sul positivismo,” Rivista contemporanea nazionale italiana, June 1869, 21– 37.  See Costanza D’Elia, “La vita e la storia: Incroci desanctisiani sulla scena europea del secondo Ottocento,” Studi desanctisiani: Rivista internazionale di letteratura, politica, società, no. 4 (2016): 40 – 43.

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trends intermingled. Darwinism, naturalism, and also “materialism” had no clear equivalent on the religious-spiritualist side. Its representatives leaned toward both atheism and a more nuanced deism, yet not without tendencies to reconcile religion and the new scientific views. In these respects the case of the Italian abbot Zanella stood out, who penned an ode to a fossilized shell that certainly did not intend to evoke heterodoxy, but still was interwoven with Darwinian influences circulating in Italy at that particular time. As shown above, “pantheism” was a label applied from the outside to devalue the changes in philosophy and religion. After Vincenzo Gioberti’s attempt to reconcile the Catholic Church with the project of unifying Italy in the 1840s (envisaging an Italian confederation under the guidance of the pope), and its entire failure in the course of 1848, the conflict between the Catholic Church and the new Italian nation state became more and more radical in the aftermath of the unification of 1861. The clash reached its peak with the annexation of the Papal State in 1870. In this context the term “pantheism” was dusted off its old fashioned sound by church officials to mark modernity and fight it as a radical evil. In an essay on Il panteismo in Italia e il prof. Moleschott (Pantheism in Italy and Professor Moleschott, 1868) published in the Rivista Universale, a Catholic magazine, the prominent physician and public defender of Catholicism Luigi Maschi examined one by one Moleschott’s positions in Der Kreislauf des Lebens: Physiologische Antworten auf Liebig’s Chemische Briefe (The Circle of Life, 1852), published in answer to Justus von Liebig’s Chemische Briefe (Chemical Letters, 1844).³⁰ Maschi repeated his main argument against materialism over and over again: reality cannot be reduced to its material, sensual perceptible components. By this, he denounced both the philosophical and anti-religious political implications of Moleschott’s theories. Reducing thought “to perceptible events,” denying the existence of the soul (which he calls, using a neologism, “ideogenic agent”), and mocking it as “illusory,” according to Maschi implied “excluding God from our thought and […] leading others to believe that there is no primary thinking agent to which we must consider nature and art subordinate, and make politics subordinate.”³¹ On the one hand, Maschi decried Moleschott’s thought that could be attributed but to a reproducible sensory perception, a position which made it impossible to derive laws from individual, subjective observations, unless a new metaphysics would be created – leading to an irremediable

 Luigi Maschi, “Il panteismo in Italia e il prof. Moleschott,” Rivista universale, November and December 1868, 101– 118; 249 – 265.  Ibid., 111.

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contradiction. On the other hand, he accused Moleschott of having advocated a new Hegelianism in which nature would be totally equated with ideas: Moleschott hides behind the philosophy of experience and then reduces it to gratuitous claims only to replace the facts with his dreams. He recounts his dreams with the seriousness of a teacher; and he instructs his audience as a priest of the Nature-God under the papacy of Hegel, the messiah.³²

While Moleschott supported the unification of the sciences and rejected any mingling of science with faith, Maschi emphasized that “science does not end where faith begins.”³³ Finally, to him, Moleschott’s mixing of Hegel and Spinoza originated in a school of thought foreign to Italian tradition: Here are the metaphysicians of nihilism, the great men of Germany, whom Wagner insists on transforming into masters of science to be sent out to the nations […] to reduce thought to an aggregate of sensations is to deny mankind’s imaginative and ideological agency and to push his dignity down to a state below that of animals. That is what the physiology of Moleschott, the priest of the Nature-God, comes down to.³⁴

Moleschott, the new priest: a devoted anti-Darwinist and Catholic like Maschi painted the gloomy picture of a new scientific discourse replacing traditional religion (although advocating a non-pantheistic Hegelianism). He envisaged the possibility that this discourse could become the new creed in the young Italian nation state with its society hungry for novelty after decades of censorship. Yet Maschi, to a certain extent, draw wrong conclusions: secularization was not only a long-awaited – and with the national unity enforced – process from below, but in many fields took on the features of a revolution from above with university reform as one of its most outstanding battlefields. Without any doubt, Moleschott represented a new type of scientist in Italy: not just a philosopher-scientist, but also a great popularizer.³⁵ His vision was not necessarily received as atheist – a position adopted only by a small minority in nineteenth-century Italy. Rather, it was a cultural phenomenon within the wide area of the “secularization” process which seems to involve what I propose to call “the two religions.”³⁶ The radical anticlericalism present in parts of the Ital-

     De

Ibid. Ibid., 113. Ibid., 118. See Meneghello, Jacob Moleschott. See Costanza D’Elia, “‘E lasciatelo quel benedetto Leopardi’: Il tema delle due religioni fra Sanctis e Settembrini,” Studi desanctisiani 2 (2014): 55 – 74.

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ian cultural and intellectual scene could resort to atheism or deism, but could also pave the way for a religion based on the Gospel, a renewed faith that aimed at recovering the supposed lost purity of the Christian message, or it could become the starting point for a religion of humanity. The call for a “true” religion could also be connected to a moral and militant renewal launched by philosophers, politicians, and scientists “from above,” a trend which in the decades before and after the First World War would merge into nationalized civil religions – consisting of the incorporation of sacral elements into the political sphere – and later into the liturgies of the totalitarianisms.³⁷ Compared to the radical atheism of a philosopher like Perini, De Sanctis’ position and that of Moleschott were more nuanced. Neither of them participated in such radical and somewhat theatrical enterprises like the Anti-Council held in Naples in 1869, which started on December 9, the day after the opening of the First Vatican Council (and soon was dissolved by police forces).³⁸ The Anti-Council was an emblem for the central position Italy had acquired in the course of its unification process regarding the transnational network of materialists and anticlericalists. Together with freethinkers and freemasons – the transitions were fluid – they gathered in Naples to declare publicly for liberalism, for lay schools, freedom of conscience, a civil gospel, science and women’s suffrage.³⁹ The choice of Naples was a provocation within the provocation, given the House of Bourbon’s reputation for clericalism and obscurantism which had taken on a European dimension thanks, in part, to the anti-Bourbonian pamphlet published by the British statesman William Edward Gladstone Two Letters on the State Prosecution of the Neapolitan Government (1851).⁴⁰ If Moleschott was in Italy the herald of the secular doctrine that fueled international materialism, he was politically very far from the militant spirit of the Neapolitan meeting backed by Garibaldi and promoted by the left-wing deputy Giuseppe Ferrari.

 On this issue, however, see Kelsen’s critique: Hans Kelsen, Secular Religion: A Polemic against the Misinterpretation of Modern Social Philosophy, Science and Politics as ‘New Religions’ (Vienna/New York: Springer, 2011).  See Giuseppe Ricciardi, L’Anti-Concilio di Napoli del 1869 (Naples: Stabilimento Tipografico, 1870).  See Lisa Dittrich, “European Connections, Obstacles and the Search for a New Concept of Religion: The Freethinker Movement as an Example for Transnational Anti-Catholicism in the Second Half of the 19th Century,” Journal of Religious History 39, no 2 (2015): 261– 279.  William Edward Gladstone, Two Letters to the Earl of Aberdeen on the State Prosecutions of the Neapolitan Government (London: John Murray, 1851).

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For Karl Marx, materialists like Moleschott, Vogt, and Büchner were merely kleinbürgerlich (petty bourgeois) in their ideology.⁴¹ To some degree, this judgment is accurate, in light not so much of Moleschott’s theoretical views, but with regard to his political attitude, which was marked by liberalism devoid of excess.⁴² Likewise De Sanctis: he was too pragmatic to jump on the colorful bandwagon of the Anti-Council. After all, both circled around what might be called a “religious” core: a very vague one in Moleschott’s case. He balanced on the thin line between materialism and pantheism, and revealed a very eclectic if not ecumenical attitude in his advocacy, not of freethinking, but of freedom of thinking. This became evident in the speech he delivered on June 8, 1889, on the occasion of the unveiling of the Giordano Bruno monument in Campo de’ Fiori, Rome, which was endowed by freemasons and freethinkers in response to attacks launched by Catholic authorities against their positions: Sirs! In this celebration the government is not officially present, yet the government is with us. But if it is not represented officially, we are the delegation of the nation, an effective and official delegation […]. Moreover, we represent the freedom of thinking. And I say deliberately: freedom of thinking, and not freethinking, as everyone is welcome: believers and philosophers, spiritualists and materialists, atheists and deists, everyone provided that they are idealists, united by the protest against every persecution of the thought, that forms man’s conscience, may the persecution come from the pope or from Calvin.⁴³

De Sanctis’ attitude toward religion is even more nuanced. His adherence to Vincenzo Gioberti and his neo-Catholic stance in the 1840s, to me, seems vastly overestimated.⁴⁴ He already grew up in a cultural environment characterized by a “spontaneous” anticlericalism, nourished by the distrust of the educated Southern bourgeoisie toward an often ignorant and corrupt clergy. However, in one of his last writings on Darwin, De Sanctis, to some extent, seemed to be inclined to reconcile Darwinism and religion.⁴⁵ This, though, did not mean that, at the end of his life, he would have thought of a late conversion. Rather, De Sanctis  See Arrigo Pacchi, “Introduzione,” in Materialisti dell’Ottocento, ed. Arrigo Pacchi (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1978), 35; and Negri, Trittico materialistico.  This is the key argument of Meneghello, Jacob Moleschott.  Reprinted in Eva Del Soldato, “Jacob Moleschott tra Serveto e Bruno,” Giornale critico della filosofia italiana 7, no. 3 (2011): 585.  See Landucci, Cultura e ideologia, 46 – 58.  “L’orgoglio di scienziato non gli ha impedito, in quella meravigliosa catena di esseri da lui concepita, d’inchinarsi innanzi al Primo, innanzi all’Inconoscibile.” (“The scientist’s pride did not detain him from kneeling down to the First, the Unknowable Being in that marvelous chain of beings that he has conceived.”) (Francesco De Sanctis, “Il darwinismo nell’arte [1883],” in Saggi critici, vol. 3, ed. Luigi Russo [Bari: Laterza, 1972], 357.)

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continued to move in the theoretical and ethical realm of the “two religions”: a detested institutional religion for one thing, and a non-dogmatic, non-metaphysical faith which was not necessarily transcendent, but – with certain reservations – came close to Giuseppe Mazzini’s civil religion, for the other.⁴⁶ Throughout his life, De Sanctis remained true to Mazzini’s egalitarian vision which was widely popular in the decades between 1848 and the unification, not, however, to his ideological rigidness, and the marked religious bias of his political views. After all, while De Sanctis was a minister and, therefore, influential on politics and society, Mazzini was forced to move between his exiles in London and Lugano and to live underground during his brief visits to Italy; in 1872, he died in Pisa under the pseudonym of Dr. Brown. It is feasible to assume that De Sanctis’ opinion of Moleschott, which was anything but personal, was dictated above all by his clear rejection of traditional religion – in a time when the anticlerical attitude assumed sometimes violent tunes, as this passage written by a Neapolitan officer and naturalist some years after the foundation of the Italian nation state shows: In straying from the footprints left by the wise fathers of Christianity of old, who were at the forefront of human knowledge in their time, and reducing themselves to idle talk and the doctrines of words and absurdities of the barbarous Middle Ages, priests do just endeavor to patch up the strange flagship of St. Thomas Aquinas, splitting its sides further […] because by faith they mean the acquiescence to absurdities created by their interests.⁴⁷

To sum up, in the context of the “new Italy,” manifold forms of anticlericalism emerged that were at times connected to a concept of “useful religion” (that is, of a religio instrumentum regni): without God, but populated by deities. In the Pantheon of the new civil religion, the figure of Giordano Bruno stood out. Moleschott was among the leading figures supporting the controversial dedication of a monument to the heretical monk in the heart of Rome. While the glorification of Bruno was sometimes tied to particularly violent tones, as in the poem on the “New Life,” written in 1870 on the eve of the Breach of Porta Pia, containing raging verses against the “guilty priest,” that is to say, the

 On De Sanctis̕ approach to religion, see Max Holliger, “Francesco De Sanctis: Sein Weltbild und seine Ästhetik” (PhD diss., University of Basel, 1949), 142– 149. Giuseppe Mazzini was one of the leading figures of the Italian national unification. He rallied support for republicanism and envisioned a united Europe based on broad democratic participation.  Crescenzo Montagna, “Studii geologici ossia Il generale conte Alberto La Marmora e l’antichità dell’uomo,” Rivista contemporanea nazionale italiana, May 1864, 240.

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pope,⁴⁸ it became almost obligatory to refer to him. In De Sanctis’ network of friends, the philosopher Francesco Fiorentino wrote about Bruno, Bertrando Spaventa published on him in 1867 (the manuscript dated back to 1854/55), as did later his student Felice Tocco.⁴⁹ Even De Sanctis himself, shortly before the capture of Rome, payed his tribute to Bruno by devoting ample space to him in his Storia della letteratura italiana (History of Italian Literature), which appeared in 1870/71 to celebrate and seal the achievement of national unity thanks to the defeat of the pope-king.

Conclusion – From the System to Life To conclude this essay, I return to the opening question: what materialism in the Italian secularizing context implied. De Sanctis’ interpretation of Bruno and of the modern age – starting with humanism, Machiavelli, and Galileo as the leading figures of a “new science” and ideological founding fathers of the Italian nation – tended toward materialism.⁵⁰ But his perception of Moleschott and materialism differed from Mazzini’s views: in 1858, during the difficult period in Zurich, De Sanctis devalued materialism which he took as a keyword for an era of decline. To him, it was a derivative of the moral weakness of his age (a lasting topos in Italian culture that he shared with Leopardi). Materialism, thus, seemed a symptom: Everything is in decay […]. The spirit dies and the flesh fattens. This is the motto of this second half of the century, and its worthy philosophy is materialism, which now raises its head everywhere, and spreads its fame as the proper response to the new needs.⁵¹

Some ten years later, however, De Sanctis would declare:

 See Vincenzo Riccardi di Lantosca, “Vita Novella,” Rivista contemporanea nazionale italiana, April 1870, 68 – 73.  See Francesco Fiorentino, Il panteismo di Giordano Bruno (Naples: Lombardi, 1861); Felice Tocco, Giordano Bruno: Conferenza (Florence: Le Monnier, 1886); Felice Tocco, Le opere inedite di Giordano Bruno (Florence: Tip. della Regia Università, 1891); and Bertrando Spaventa, “Giordano Bruno (1854),” in Saggi di critica filosofica, politica e religiosa (1867), ed. Biago De Giovanni (Naples: La Scuola di Pitagora, 2008), 138 – 175.  De Sanctis dedicated the first section of chapter XIX (La nuova scienza – The New Science) to Bruno. (Francesco de Sanctis, Storia della letteratura italiana, ed. Niccolò Gallo [Milan: Mondadori, (1870 – 1871) 1991], 644– 668.)  Francesco De Sanctis, Lettere dall’esilio, ed. Benedetto Croce (Bari: Laterza, 1938), 210.

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I hear whispers around me with an air of fear: – The new generation is materialistic. But what do you wonder and be afraid of? What is materialism, not basic and vulgar materialism, but its higher meaning? It is the world that reconciles itself with life, and takes possession of it, and places its ideals there, and, throwing itself into life, partakes in its joys and its bitterness, no more a skeptical and restless observer, but a calm actor and a soldier.⁵²

As shown above, it was through the strong backing of De Sanctis that Moleschott became a professor at the University of Turin in 1861. Only some years later, in a broader attack launched against “materialism,” it was Mazzini who associated Moleschott with De Sanctis. He noticed an overlap between De Sanctis’ adherence to Hegelianism, typical of an “atheist” Neapolitan culture, and materialism. In those same years, Mazzini complained about the success of the atheism of “Comte, Büchner, and Moleschott.”⁵³ After all, Mazzini’s critical stand toward atheism and materialism had caused, to some extent, his divergences with Garibaldi, who had joined enthusiastically the 1869 Anti-Council. Other than Mazzini, De Sanctis, over the years, attributed to “materialism” a sense of positive novelty within the framework of the unified nation: “It is the world reconciling with life.” Those are seemingly cryptic words which must be deciphered in light of De Sanctis’ writings of the early 1870s. These years were turbulent: on the national level, unification was completed; on an international level, France was again at the center of a revolution (and of its bloody repression). Both processes, along with the German unification, were influenced by the outcome of the Franco-Prussian War. Against this backdrop, between 1870 and 1872, De Sanctis’ first and second volume of the History of Italian Literature appeared, along with the first collection of critical essays and his lecture La scienza e la vita (Science and Life), held on November 16, 1872 on the occasion of the opening of the academic year at the University of Naples. This text has rightly been considered, along with Schopenhauer and Leopardi, to be De Sanctis’ most philosophical work. However, its meaning has not been thoroughly understood, as it needs to be read in reference to the scientific literature of the time, in particular to Moleschott with his bestseller, Der Kreislauf des Lebens. ⁵⁴ To give just one crucial sentence from De Sanctis’ work that displays this influence: “Also in life there is the thought, a latent thought, slow formation of the centuries, which

 Cited in Landucci, Cultura e ideologia, 205.  Cited ibid., 205 – 206.  Jacob Moleschott, Der Kreislauf des Lebens: Physiologische Antworten auf Liebig’s Chemische Briefe (Mainz: Victor v. Zabern, 1852). The Italian translation was done by Cesare Lombroso, positivist scientist and founder of criminal anthropology (1869). See Meneghello, Jacob Moleschott, 446 – 447.

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reproduces itself and passes down along the generations, mingling with generative fluids.”⁵⁵ In De Sanctis’ view, life is a dynamic element, a moral energy; the quoted passage includes a Darwinian echo as well as traces of Moleschott’s doctrine about the inseparability of matter and force. To De Sanctis, life broadly overlaps with “faith,” in a non-transcendent sense, taken as the true inner motivation responsible for the character and greatness of nations. The destiny of the unified Italy depended on this: “Science” in itself, knowledge, and culture could not replace the vitality of a people. On this basis, it seemed necessary to “convertire il mondo moderno in mondo nostro” (“convert the modern world into our own world”).⁵⁶ With this implicit and non-systemic reference to Hegel’s philosophy of history (“moderne Welt” – “modern world”), an approach which had distanced De Sanctis from his old friends Spaventa and De Meis already in the Zurich days, he came also close to Moleschott’s unorthodox reading of Hegel. Other than expected, the true hero of Moleschott’s Pantheon was not Bruno, but Michael Servetus: the Dutch scientist insisted on having Servetus placed in the bas-relief decorating the pedestal of his statue.⁵⁷ Servetus was himself a scientist and was condemned by his church – the one of Calvin – no other than Moleschott was rejected by the Baden state and by German academia for his convictions. This attitude of Moleschott explains a great deal about his relationship with De Sanctis which was not sentimental, but ideological: their lowest common denominator was the refusal of an institutional power that subjugated the people rather than serving it. In their view, the people was not supposed to obey, but to become the actor of moral “life,” which could not be replaced by any state system. From a philosophical point of view, the rejection of the orthodox Hegelian “system” implied for each of them the rejection of an absolute state which they grasped as a new deity. To Moleschott and De Sanctis, “civil religion” was to be based on freedom and not on the sacredness of the state. The cases of Moleschott and De Sanctis, whose lives were strictly intertwined since the Zurich days, offers a privileged insight into the “Italian way” of the secularizing process marked by the coincidence of the founding phase of the new state and the spread of new concepts like materialism and Darwinism throughout Europe. The commitment to these currents of thought was particularly swift and to some extent radical: Italy had to regain the time lost in the obscurantist Restoration period, to abandon a belated Hegelianism as an alleged progressive

 Francesco De Sanctis, “La scienza e la vita (1872),” in Saggi critici, vol. 2, 180.  De Sanctis, Storia della letteratura, 847.  See Del Soldato, “Jacob Moleschott,” 587; and Meneghello, Jacob Moleschott, 340.

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and revolutionary ideology, and to absorb a new frame of mind, characterized by the dovetailing of already existing currents of materialism with the fresh approach of Darwinism, the theoretical and moral consequences of which grew far beyond Darwin’s assumptions. As De Sanctis noted: “Just as Hegel before him, his [Darwin’s] name was the flag of all related doctrines that would arise later: positivism, realism, materialism.”⁵⁸ Most of all, Italian secularization manifested in a process of distinction.⁵⁹ The independence of science, politics, and religion can be epitomized by the famous motto of Cavour, one of the founding fathers of the new nation: libera Chiesa in libero Stato (a free church in a free state). While the Catholic hierarchies adopted an anti-modernist attitude, the modernizing front was characterized by a wide array of combinations of philosophical, political, and scientific discourses; the very paradigm of the “two religions” exemplifies the complexity of this constellation. The intellectual alliance of the Dutch scientist and the Southern humanist contributed significantly to the Italian nation building and added to the international choir of progressive and freethinking voices in a vibrant atmosphere of change.

Bibliography Anon. “On the origin etc.: Sull’origine delle specie coi mezzi di scelta naturale […] di Carlo Darwin, Londra 1859.” Il Politecnico IX (1860): 110 – 112. Borutta, Manuel. Antikatholizismus: Deutschland und Italien im Zeitalter der europäischen Kulturkämpfe. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 22011. Carrannante, Antonio. “Francesco De Sanctis educatore e ministro.” Rassegna storica del Risorgimento, no. 1 (1993): 15 – 34. Cimino, Guido. “Filippo De Filippi.” In Dizionario biografico degli Italiani 33 (1987). http:// www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/filippo-de-filippi_(Dizionario-Biografico). Accessed March 15, 2019. Cosmacini, Giorgio. Il medico materialista: Vita e pensiero di Jakob Moleschott. Rome/Bari: Laterza, 2005. Decollanz, Giuseppe. Storia della scuola e delle istituzioni educative: Dalla Legge Casati alla riforma Moratti. Rome/Bari: Laterza, 2005. D’Elia, Costanza. “‘E lasciatelo quel benedetto Leopardi’: Il tema delle due religioni fra De Sanctis e Settembrini.” Studi desanctisiani: Rivista internazionale di letteratura, politica, società, no. 2 (2014): 55 – 74.

 Francesco De Sanctis, “Il darwinismo nell’arte (1883),” in Scritti critici vol. 3, 357.  See Detlef Pollack and Gergely Rosta, “Forum Religion und Moderne: Bedingungsfaktoren und Muster religiösen Wandels in der Moderne, Ein multi-paradigmatisches Erklärungsmodell,” Zeitschrift für Theoretische Soziologie 5 (2016): 214– 230.

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D’Elia, Costanza. “La vita e la storia: Incroci desanctisiani sulla scena europea del secondo Ottocento.” Studi desanctisiani: Rivista internazionale di letteratura, politica, società, no. 4 (2016): 39 – 56. De Filippi, Filippo. “La fisiologia ed il professore Moleschott.” Rivista italiana di scienze, lettere ed arti, October 21, 1861. De Filippi, Filippo. L’uomo e le scimie. Milan: Daelli, 1864. De Pascale, Carla, and Alessandro Savorelli. “L’archivio di Jakob Moleschott (con documenti inediti e lettere di F. De Sanctis, S. Tommasi, A. C. De Meis).” Giornale critico della filosofia Italiana, no. 6 (1986): 216 – 248. De Sanctis, Francesco. Lettere dall’esilio, edited by Benedetto Croce. Bari: Laterza, 1938. De Sanctis, Francesco. Epistolario (1836 – 1856), edited by Giovanni Ferretti and Muzio Mazzocchi Alemanni. Turin: Einaudi, 1956. De Sanctis, Francesco. Saggio critico sul Petrarca, edited by Niccolò Gallo. Turin: Einaudi, [1869] 1964. De Sanctis, Francesco. Epistolario (1859 – 1860), edited by Giuseppe Talamo. Turin: Einaudi, 1965. De Sanctis, Francesco. “Il darwinismo nell’arte.” In Saggi critici, vol. 3, edited by Luigi Russo, 355 – 367. Bari: Laterza, [1883] 1972. De Sanctis, Francesco. “La scienza e la vita.” In Saggi critici, vol. 3, edited by Luigi Russo, 161 – 186. Bari: Laterza, [1872] 1972. De Sanctis, Francesco. “Schopenhauer e Leopardi: Dialogo fra A. e D.” In Saggi critici, vol. 2, edited by Luigi Russo, 136 – 186. Bari: Laterza, [1858] 1979. De Sanctis, Francesco. Storia della letteratura italiana, edited by Niccolò Gallo. Milan: Mondadori, [1870 – 1871] 1991. Del Soldato, Eva. “Jacob Moleschott tra Serveto e Bruno.” Giornale critico della filosofia italiana 7, no. 3 (2011): 577 – 587. Di Giovanni, Vincenzo. “Delle attinenze fra il panteismo e il materialismo nella storia contemporanea della filosofia.” Il campo dei filosofi italiani: Periodico da esercitare i maestri liberamente vol. 2 (1866): 409 – 431. Dittrich, Lisa. Antiklerikalismus in Europa: Öffentlichkeit und Säkularisierung in Frankreich, Spanien und Deutschland (1848 – 1914). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014. Dittrich, Lisa. “European Connections, Obstacles and the Search for a New Concept of Religion: The Freethinker Movement as an Example for Transnational Anti-Catholicism in the Second Half of the 19th Century.” Journal of Religious History 39, no. 2 (2015): 261 – 279. Duggan, Christopher. The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy since 1796. London: Penguin Books, 2008. Engels, Eve-Marie, ed. The Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe. London/New York: Continuum, 2008. Fiorentino, Francesco. Il panteismo di Giordano Bruno. Naples: Lombardi, 1861. Forgione, Fabio. Il dibattito sulla variabilità delle specie nella Torino dell’Ottocento. Milan: Franco Angeli, 2018. Garrone, Alessandro Galante. I radicali in Italia (1849 – 1925). Milan: Garzanti, 1973. Gladstone, William Edward. Two Letters to the Earl of Aberdeen on the State Prosecutions of the Neapolitan Government. London: John Murray, 1851.

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Holliger, Max. “Francesco De Sanctis: Sein Weltbild und seine Ästhetik.” PhD diss., University of Basel, 1949. Kelsen, Hans. Secular Religion: A Polemic against the Misinterpretation of Modern Social Philosophy, Science and Politics as ‘New Religions’. Vienna/New York: Springer, 2011. Küpper, Martin. Materialismus. Cologne: PapyRossa, 2017. Landucci, Sergio. Cultura e ideologia in Francesco De Sanctis. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1964. Maschi, Luigi. “Il panteismo in Italia e il prof. Moleschott.” Rivista universale, November and December 1868. Meneghello, Laura. Jacob Moleschott – A Transnational Biography: Science, Politics, and Popularization in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Bielefeld: transcript, 2017. Moleschott, Jacob. Der Kreislauf des Lebens: Physiologische Antworten auf Liebig’s Chemische Briefe. Mainz: Victor v. Zabern, 1852. Moleschott, Jacob. Für meine Freunde: Lebens-Erinnerungen. Giessen: Emil Roth, 1894. Montagna, Crescenzo.”Studii geologici ossia Il generale conte Alberto La Marmora e l’antichità dell’uomo.” Rivista contemporanea nazionale italiana, May 1864. Morandini, Maria Cristina. “Da Boncompagni a Casati: La costruzione del sistema scolastico nazionale.” In Scuola e società nell’Italia unita, edited by Luciano Pazzaglia and Roberto Sani, 9 – 46. Brescia: Editrice La Scuola, 2001. Negri, Antimo. Trittico materialista: Georg Büchner, Jakob Moleschott, Ludwig Büchner. Rome: Cadmo, 1981. Pacchi, Arrigo, ed. Materialisti dell’Ottocento. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1978. Papenheim, Martin. “Roma o morte: Culture Wars in Italy.” In Culture Wars: Secular–Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe, edited by Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser, 202 – 225. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Perini, Agostino. “La religione naturale.” Rivista contemporanea nazionale italiana, August 1868. Pollack, Detlef, and Gergely Rosta. “Forum Religion und Moderne: Bedingungsfaktoren und Muster religiösen Wandels in der Moderne, Ein multi-paradigmatisches Erklärungsmodell.” Zeitschrift für Theoretische Soziologie 5 (2016): 214 – 230. Riccardi Di Lantosca, Vincenzo. “Vita Novella.” Rivista contemporanea nazionale italiana, April 1870. Ricciardi, Giuseppe. L’Anti-Concilio di Napoli del 1869. Naples: Stabilimento Tipografico, 1870. Russo, Luigi. Francesco De Sanctis e la cultura napoletana (1860 – 1880). Venice: La Nuova Italia Editrice, 1928. Savorelli, Alessandro. “Jakob Moleschott e la cultura italiana del suo tempo.” Giornale critico della filosofia italiana 7, no. 3 (2011): 543 – 554. Spaventa, Bertrando. “Giordano Bruno (1854).” In Saggi di critica filosofica, politica e religiosa, edited by Biago De Giovanni, 138 – 175. Naples: La Scuola di Pitagora, [1867] 2008. Tocco, Felice. “Studi sul positivismo.” Rivista contemporanea nazionale italiana, June 1869. Tocco, Felice. Giordano Bruno: Conferenza. Florence: Le Monnier, 1886. Tocco, Felice. Le opere inedite di Giordano Bruno. Florence: Tip. della Regia Università, 1891. Verucci, Guido. L’Italia laica prima e dopo l’unità 1848 – 1876: Anticlericalismo, libero pensiero e ateismo nella società italiana. Rome/Bari: Laterza, 1981.

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Vitzthum, Richard C. Materialism: An Affirmative History and Definition. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995. Wittkau-Horgby, Annette. Materialismus: Entstehung und Wirkung in den Wissenschaften des 19. Jahrhunderts. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998.

Barbara Wagner

Secularity in the New State: The Case of Poland Since 1795 and throughout the whole nineteenth century, no Polish state had existed. Poland’s territories were partitioned among its three powerful neighbors – the Russian Empire, the Habsburg Empire, and the Kingdom of Prussia.¹ Despite the partitions, Polish culture and education continued to develop, as did Polish political life which, depending on the historical constellation and the methods the partitioning powers adopted, was practiced either overt or covert. During the century of foreign rule, Polish people had fought the invaders in various ways such as employing passive economic resistance, honoring national war heroes, deciding for an inner or actual emigration, or celebrating national holidays.² They also attended Catholic church services which were conducted in Polish. In those decades, the Polish Catholic Church turned into a stronghold preserving and furthering national identity, custom, and life.³ Characterized by the idea of a Polish sense of mission and humanity, Polish Catholicism deeply influenced both Polish intellectual life – infusing it with a religious semantic – and the idea of a Polish nation which, in the following years, became almost inseparable from Catholicism. But also agnostics like Joachim Lelewel proved influential with his theory of Polishness and the struggle for freedom and democracy as natural allies.⁴ In light of this underground political self-confidence, Poles also organized military resistance: most noticeable were the two uprisings against the Russian Empire in 1830 – 31 and 1863 – 64, both of which, in the end,

 On Polish history and culture of the nineteenth century, see Piotr Stefan Wandycz, The Lands of Partitioned Poland, 1795 – 1918 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 41996); and Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland, vol. 2: 1795 to the Present, 22013 (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).  See, e. g., Brian Porter-Szűcz, When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Modern Politics in Nineteenth-Century Poland (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 3 – 103.  On the intertwined relation of nationalism and Catholicism in nineteenth-century Polish territories, see Zygmunt Zieliński, Kościół i naród w niewoli (Lublin: Red. Wydawnictw Katolickiego Uniwersytetu Lubelskiego, 1995); and Brian Porter-Szűcs, Faith and Fatherland: Catholicism, Modernity, and Poland (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).  On Lelewel, see Maciej Janowski, “Romantic Historiography as a Sociology of Liberty: Joachim Lelewel and his Contemporaries,” in Manufacturing Middle Ages: Entangled History of Medievalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Patrick Geary and Gábor Klaniczay (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2013), 89 – 110. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110688283-007

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turned out bloody and unsuccessful, resulting in the severe punishment of the Polish people by Russian authorities. Despite, or maybe precisely because they had no nation state of their own, the educated Polish middle-class showed a keen interest in Europe’s flourishing social and political movements, particularly radical, national, or democratic ones like the French Revolution or the Italian Risorgimento nourished by Enlightenment, liberalism, Romanticism, and the ideas of autonomy and emancipation.⁵ Especially the exiled,⁶ but also the remaining Polish intelligentsia in the partitioned territories was influenced by Europe’s left-wing culture, philosophy, and literature critical of religion. In the era of the Polish partitions, these foreign influences formed the preconditions for the birth of an original Polish freethought movement. This chapter aims to trace the development of the organized Polish freethought movement in the early twentieth century. Polish freethinkers started to coordinate their efforts in Paris in July 1906 and, after the First World War, expanded their activities to the new Polish state established in November 1918. The overall history of the relationship between Polish freethinkers and state authorities proved very conflictual: initially, the government allowed for their legal open activity, but later disbanded the freethought organizations. Even though Polish freethought was heavily influenced by both, Western European philosophical thought and freethought organizations in other countries, it also developed its own approach. This resulted partly from the complex national situation in Poland, where ethnic minorities constituted one third of the society and therefore heavily impacted on the predominant Polish national culture shaped by Catholicism.⁷ In light of the particular religious situation in Poland with Roman Catholics representing 68 % of the population, secularity, as exemplified by Polish freethinkers, took on a specific character. Already shortly after 1918, a divergence in views between the leaders of the Polish freethought movement became apparent. Parts of the organized Polish

 See Andrzej Walicki, Philosophy and Romantic Nationalism: The Case of Poland (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994); Andrzej Walicki, Poland between East and West: The Controversies of Self-Definition and Modernization in Partitioned Poland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); and Adam Zamoyski, Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots and Revolutionaries, 1776 – 1871 (London: Phoenix, 1999).  On Polish emigration, mainly to France, the United States and – as forced migration – to Siberia, see Sławomir Kalembka, Wielka Emigracja 1831 – 1863 (Toruń: Wydawnictwo Adam Marszałek, 2003).  Ethnic minorities on Polish territories include Ukrainians, Jews, Belarussians, Germans, and numerous other groups.

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freethinkers established contact with the Polish labor movement, while the most radical Polish activists were fascinated with communism and admired post-revolutionary Russia. In these regards, Polish secularism and politics seem to have sealed a strategic alliance, as will be shown in the following.

The Early Stages of Organized Polish Freethought The beginnings of an organized Polish freethought movement can be traced back to France with its large Polish diaspora. A group of Polish activists, who had been forced into exile due to their protests against Russian educational reforms introduced by Alexander Apuchtin in the University of Warsaw during the 1880s, established the first Polish freethought club abroad called Polska Liga Wolnej Myśli (Polish League of Freethinkers, PLFT) in July 1906. Its members – mostly academics, writers, and journalists – prided themselves in entertaining distinct political – that is: socialist – views critical of all kinds of doctrines, including religious ones. They combated religious dogmas and emphasized the primacy of a non-religious morality led by rational considerations over a religious morality they supposed would be based on blind obedience. The PLFT’s charters borrowed from French and Italian ones and the organization’s activists kept close contacts with comparable European groups. Besides their cooperation with several Polish journals, they published in the Parisian Panteon magazine. After a while, an organization similar to the PLFT was set up in Warsaw that deepened the connections between French and Polish freethinkers. The PLFT functioned for two years only, and disbanded in 1908.⁸ Interestingly, the PLFT included Polish freemasons in their ranks. Masonry was prohibited by Tsar Alexander I since 1822 throughout Russia, including the Polish territories under Russian rule. Subsequently, many Polish masons emigrated to Western Europe. Members and supporters of Polish masonry like Izabela Zielińska, Józef Zieliński, Stanisław Blanc, Jerzy Kurnatowski, and Józef Wasowski gathered in the PLFT and decided to fund a periodical addressing the intelligentsia to arouse interest in masonry on Polish soil. The creation of the Myśl Niepodległa (The Independent Thought) magazine was agreed upon during a meeting of the leading Polish mason Andrzej Niemojewski with Polish freethinking emigrants.⁹ This way, the ideas of the tabooed masonry were sup On the history of the PLFT, see Michał Szulkin, Z dziejów ruchu wolnomyślicielskiego w Polsce 1906 – 1936 (Warsaw: Centralny Ośrodek Doskonalenia Kadr Laickich, 1965), 1– 4.  On Niemojewski, see Barbara Świtalska-Starzeńska, Człowiek szalony: Andrzej Niemojewski (1864 – 1921) (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UKSW, 2018), 207– 212.

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posed to reach the Polish public through the just forming freethought movement.¹⁰ Poet, writer, journalist, and social activist Niemojewski acted as editorin-chief of the periodical and authored many articles. But his political and social views underwent changes: from 1906 to 1912, two thematic trends prevailed in the articles of Myśl Niepodległa, a freemasonic and a freethinking one, connected by the ideas of humanism, rationalism, and the shared value of human freedom. Large parts of the single issues were dedicated to the study of religion, mainly the history of Christian churches, Judaism, Buddhism, and other religions all discussed as social and cultural phenomena. Several dozens of authors contributed to the journal, among them journalists and correspondents, but also writers and scientists. After a few years, though, the enterprise entered a state of crisis because of Niemojewski’s about-face. He started to write about the incompatibility of Polish and Jewish interests and included anti-Semitic contents to his publications. This caused a storm of protests among masons and freethinkers like Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, Jan Hempel, or Izabela Moszczeńska who ceased cooperation with the periodical. Thus prior to the First World War the magazine had already changed its character completely. Niemojewski moved away from freethought. After 1918, he wrote aggressively on current politics and supported the right-wing national movement.¹¹ “Independent thought” was a term that appeared in the Polish public discourse at the beginning of the twentieth century. “Independent” or “free” thought was both a method of research and a way of life. Adherents of independent thought hoped to conduct their research freely and to popularize their findings fearlessly, provided that there were no dogmas obstructing their convictions. To Polish freethinkers it seemed difficult to detect independent thought among the Polish people as to them Poles were kept in the dark by political and religious authorities. Especially farmers and factory workers, according to this view, were subjected to the needs of the Catholic religion and politics by birth: farmers were expected to be meek and obedient, so they would not leave the Catholic Church to turn toward a new, less oppressing faith. In the same way, factory workers were supposed to be a mere addition to the machines they operated.¹² Religion in general was regarded as the main adversary of independent thought by Polish freethinkers. However, from the beginning of the twentieth  See Ludwik Hass, Ambicje, rachuby, rzeczywistość: Wolnomularstwo w Europie środkowowschodniej 1905 – 1928 (Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1984), 78.  See Świtalska-Starzeńska, Człowiek szalony, 220 – 253.  See Feliks Jabłczyński, “Kto burzy?,” Myśl Niepodległa, September 1906, 14, accessed December 4, 2018, http://wbc.poznan.pl/dlibra/publication?id=101180&tab=3.

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century on, a specific criticism of the Catholic Church prevailed among freethinkers that echoed their anticlericalism and anti-Catholicism.¹³ In line with their fellow freethinkers from other countries, Polish freethinkers, too, regarded the Catholic clergy as a sect striving for world dominance. In particular, they accused the Catholic Church for its exuberant political power which it started to accumulate, according to their reading, as early as in the Middle Ages, but later had to share it also with lay authorities. Throughout history, Catholic clerics – to freethinkers – proved very far-sighted and power-craving, including colonial exploitation, which they eagerly joined. In their critique, Polish freethinkers pointed to a strategy they believed the Catholic clergy would have applied continuously to secure its supremacy: whenever gaining new territories by military conquest turned out to be too difficult and expensive, they simply sent out missionaries to achieve the same objective. Polish freethinkers complained that in this struggle for hegemony the clerics fought with money, tendentious literature, and scholastic philosophy which made of philosophy a servant of faith.¹⁴ While the Warsaw journal Myśl Niepodległa introduced such anticlerical topics to the Polish culture, the first Polish freethinker convention was held in Warsaw, attended by 631 men and women, in December 1907. This was a remarkable number considering persecution, censorship, and the overall Catholic national culture conflicting with freethinking attitudes and organization. During the meeting, passionate speeches were delivered that focused on political and religious issues. Major topics discussed in the Warsaw conference comprised the imposition of religion by the ruling powers, forced attendance of religious lessons at schools, and the greed of priests. Catholic priests were presented as shepherds eager to build their own sheepfolds for lambs, or, in other words, for children, to wield power over them from the beginning on. Priests were also accused of carrying out arbitrary excommunications. The resolution passed toward the end of the conference was much more moderate in tone – also compared to the PLFT’s declarations – and did not contain direct attacks on Catholicism or the clergy which seems a reaction to the Polish national religious culture and

 On the European dimensions of freethought and the common anticlericalism in the nineteenth century, see Lisa Dittrich, “European Connections, Obstacles and the Search for a New Concept of Religion: The Freethinker Movement as an Example for Transnational Anti-Catholicism in the Second Half of the 19th Century,” Journal of Religious History 39, no. 2 (2015): 261– 279.  See Adam Kurcyusz, “Zabór katolicki,” Myśl Niepodległa, September 1906, 23, accessed December 4, 2018, http://wbc.poznan.pl/dlibra/publication?id=101180&tab=3.

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the threat by Russian authorities.¹⁵ It was composed of four single declarations: the first announced the foundation of a new organization, the Stowarzyszenie Myśli Wolnej (Association of Freethought, AFT). It was supposed to be overall apolitical, yet its members could still join political parties. In fact, members obtaining a party membership were highly praised for their excellent critical thinking skills. As a result, the AFT functioned as a meeting place for non-believers with different political views such as liberal and socialist ones. From the outset, the topic of party affiliation repeatedly resurfaced in different contexts, including discussions to limit the AFT to the fight against the clergy and religion and to leave other freethinking and political matters to be solved at free discretion. The second declaration concerned the relationship of Polish freethinkers to masonry. Unlike previous freethinking enterprises, the AFT denied any ties with freemasons who were considered – in line with the official political assessment – a secret, closed-off association. The AFT, on the other hand, was supposed to be an open, accessible to the public association. In the third declaration it was recognized that the Polish freethought organization was closely connected to freethought movements abroad, and that it would adapt their strategies to Polish specifics and needs. The fourth and final declaration concerned legal issues and was the most radical one. It claimed that the codex imposed by the Russian tsar had to be abolished in favor of the restoration of the previous, Napoleonic law, particularly the right to civil marriage stated in the Articles 165 and 193 of the Napoleonic Code.¹⁶ Polish freethinkers’ discussions centered on the internationally aligned national-secular as an equivalent to the national-Catholic, yet at the same time they were oriented toward a global concept of a socially and culturally connected humanity: amongst others, they demanded secular birth certificates, secular funerals, secular divorces, and secular oaths in court. Of course, these changes in favor of civil law were supposed to be carried out on an optional base and were not intended to be forced upon the Polish society in general. The AFT originally fostered plans to establish additional branches of the organization within the Russian partition territory. After a short-lived political thaw caused by the Russian Revolution of 1905, however, Russian authorities nar-

 On the resolution, see “Sprawozdanie z pierwszego zgromadzenia wolnych myślicieli polskich,” Myśl Niepodległa, December 1907, 1671– 1692, accessed December 4, 2018, http://wbc. poznan.pl/dlibra/publication/101181?tab=1.  The Polish version of the Napoleonic Code of 1807 included articles on civil marriages with all their secularist consequences and implications. In 1836, the law was abolished by the Russian tsar. During the freethinker convention in December 1907, voices were raised to reinstall the Napoleonic Code which met the demands of Polish freethinkers to a much greater extent than Russian law.

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rowed the already limited political freedoms even further. The tsarist police restricted the ways in which people could organize public gatherings and refused to legitimize the AFT. Russian officials persecuted liberal activists and the most well-known Polish freethinkers such as Izabela Moszczeńska and Romuald Minkiewicz.¹⁷ Moszczeńska, an educational activist and committed feminist, was arrested during the Revolution of 1905 after having participated in a school strike. In 1907, she contributed to the first Polish freethinker convention in Warsaw. Just like Moszczeńska, also Minkiewicz was imprisoned during the revolution because of his political activities in the socialist movement. He was already known for his anti-religious views back then. Secularity in the Polish territories, after all, was difficult to uphold against the occupying powers and the Catholic Church with its social, political, and cultural influence as well as its prerogative of interpretation concerning the national discourse. Polish secularists had to adapt their strategies to these circumstances: their public appearance was moderate even though their claims were far-reaching. Freethinkers were forced to relocate their journal abroad and they depended on impulses from their non-Polish companions, as will be shown in the following.

A Catechism of Polish Freethought – and its Counterpart Polish freethinkers took their inspirations from books available in the Polish territories: either from original Polish texts (at the beginning of the twentieth century texts by Andrzej Niemojewski were most relevant, followed by the works of the philosopher Teofil Jaśkiewicz) or foreign classics in circulation, published in English or translated into Polish. An author with a huge impact on Polish freethinkers was the Irish historian, essayist, and political theorist William Lecky. The Polish edition of his work in two volumes History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe (1865) was based on the eighteenth English edition.¹⁸ Its title, Dzieje wolnej myśli w Europie (The History of Freethought in  On Izabela Moszczeńska, see Jan Rzepecki, “Moszczeńska, Iza,” in Polski Słownik Biograficzny XXII/1/92 (Wroclaw: Polska Akademia Nauk Ossolineum, 1977), 82. On Romuald Minkiewicz, see Michał Szulkin, “Romuald Minkiewicz uczony i wolnomyśliciel,” in Instytut Biologii Doświadczalnej im. Marcelego Nenckiego Historia i Teraźniejszość, vol. 3: Wspomnienia i Refleksje (Warsaw: Instytut Biologii Doświadczalnej im. Marcelego Nenckiego PAN, 2008), 58, accessed December 4, 2018, http://rcin.org.pl/Content/4150/WA488_17335_18966_Kuznicki-T3-Insthist.  William Edward Hartpole Lecky, History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe, vol. 1 (New York: D. Appleton, 1919).

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Europe, 1908), clearly differed from the English original. Apart from this rather free adaption, Maria Feldmanowa, the translator of the book and wife of Wilhelm Feldman, its editor, stuck closely to the original tone and content.¹⁹ Wilhelm Feldman, a publicist and art historian, was born into a family of Orthodox Jews and supported Jewish acculturation in Poland. In his work on the influence of rationalism on society during the past 300 years, William Lecky had emphasized the difference between faith in the Catholic Church and what he claimed to be real faith in God. Reading this highly sophisticated and scientific book proved difficult for the average Polish recipient. A preserved volume from a private collection of the early twentieth century shows much underlining in the more general parts dealing with whole Europe. They were obviously more important to the reader than historical descriptions of specific European countries. Currently, this copy is held by the library of the Historical Institute of the University of Warsaw. This example points to a certain need for easier texts written in a more comprehensible way to reach the average readership of the early twentieth century. For this purpose, criticism of religion was presented in form of short fictional dialogues composed of questions and answers. They were published in Myśl Niepodległa ²⁰ and later compiled in a booklet titled Katechizm (Catechism, 1908) – suggesting the beginning of a new “anti-religion” of freethought. After necessary simplifications, cuts, and stylistic changes, the following eight points summarize the general ideas of this volume: 1. Q: Who are you? A: A human being. Q: What is your most important duty? A: To think with my own mind and feel with my own heart. 2. Q: Where do the church teachings lead to? A: The church teachings lead to extreme pessimism, since they imply that men go to hell at the end of their lives. Q: How should a ruler, who destines millions of people to hell and burning, be considered? A: Such a ruler should be considered cruel or insane.

 William Edward Hartpole Lecky, Dzieje wolnej myśli w Europie, trans. Maria Feldmanowa (Lodz: M. Stifter, A. Strauch, 1908).  See Andrzej Niemojewski, “Katechizm wolnego myśliciela,” Myśl Niepodległa, January 1908, 1– 15, accessed December 4, 2018, https://wbc.poznan.pl/dlibra/publication/101237/edition/ 115360.

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3. Q: Can knowledge be dependent? Can knowledge be conditional and biased? A: Yes, because the church has a hold on philosophy, and even calls it a servant of theology. The church burned people at stakes. Due to this influence, humanity suffered tremendously and lived in the dark. Q: Was it only the Catholic clergy that did this? A: No, pastors and rabbis did the same. But now the power of clergy, rabbis and pastors is limited. Q: What limited their power? A: Civilizational progress. Q: And where is still a stronghold of this power of clerics, rabbis, and pastors? A: This stronghold is in human ignorance. 4. Q: What do the priests need obedient people for? A: The priests always prefer rich and influential people. And the rich demand that rural schools teach different knowledge than the universities. The rich don’t want other people to know the truth, because then they will stop to be obedient. 5. Q: How can people avoid learning in schools where the church decides on the syllabus? A: By establishing public universities and by demanding reforms of the public schools. 6. Q: What do people need independent science and knowledge for? A: Independent knowledge is necessary to learn about the world in a scientific way, not a theological one. Q: What does the scientific worldview show? A: The scientific worldview shows that people were created by nature and that they later created the social organizations they needed. Q: What does result from the scientific worldview? A: The belief that humanity should be independent. 7. Q: Should the rich share their wealth with the poor? A: Nobody demands it from them, since the rich don’t have enough wealth to feed everyone who is hungry and clothe everyone who is naked. However, the rich should share their knowledge with others. This will motivate the poor to work and produce goods necessary to live. 8. Q: Would the people be better off if they were self-governed? Would the people govern better without their rulers and governments? A: No, the simple people may govern even worse. The masses aren’t capable of self-governance, because they are neither enlightened nor educated. Their ignorance is like a knife that humanity drives into its own heart.²¹

 Andrzej Niemojewski, Katechizm wolnego myśliciela (Warsaw: L. Biliński i W. Maślankiewicz, 1908), 1– 21.

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No other than the freethinkers, also their adversaries, that is, the defenders of a religious worldview, missionaries of faith, and, more precisely, Catholic clerics fighting atheism, referred to classical European works for their purposes. They translated into Polish a book of the famous French Roman Catholic writer and publisher Ernest Hello. He authored numerous volumes and articles on questions of philosophy, theology, and literature. His book Philosophie et athéisme (Philosophy and Atheism, 1888)²² was published in two parts a few years after his death. The initial part consisted of texts released for the first time, whereas the second part contained a reprint of an already available publication titled M. Renan, l’Allemagne et l’athéisme au XIX siècle (M. Renan, Germany and Atheism in the Nineteenth Century, 1859).²³ The Polish translation of the book, Filozofia i ateizm, was part of the publishing series Biblioteka dzieł chrześcijańskich (The Library of Christian works), promoted by the Polish Catholic clergy. The Polish readers of Hello’s book were told how a lack of faith had destroyed art and philosophy in the past. Nonetheless, they are not lost for good but about to return into the waiting arms of the powerful and united Christianity, following the example of the prodigal son. Sin divided humanity, as Hello emphasized, but the Catholic Church opposed sins and centrifugal movements with prayers and sacraments. Hello stressed that prayers and the reception of sacraments were repeatable actions. They worked like a magnet that attracts good and banishes evil. When an individual shut itself off from thoughts of salvation, it inevitably would lose the unity of its own self. Sects and heresies were nothing new, Hello clarified, but the Catholic Church always fought her enemies and she always defeated them.²⁴ These diametrically opposing approaches to institutionalized religion, secularization, and to the role of faith in nineteenth-century Poland mirror a clash of different worldviews: rational-scientific on the side of freethinkers, defensive of Christian positions on the side of Catholics, who responded to the freethought movement, as narrow as it might have been. Yet Catholics applied the same strategies as freethinkers and thus moved in the same “modern” patterns as their adversaries: both acted in a broad transnational network, but also within a specific national culture, and both relied on translations of bestselling books from abroad to strengthen their respective positions.

 Ernest Hello, Philosophie et athéisme (Paris: Librairie Poussièlgue Frerès, 1888).  Ernest Hello, M. Renan, 1’Allemagne et l’athéisme au XIX siècle (Paris: Charles Douniol Libraire, 1859).  Ernest Hello, Filozofia i ateizm (Warsaw: Ks. Zygmunt Chełmicki, 1909), 7– 49.

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Freethinkers and the New State After the First World War, Poland regained independence. Generations of Poles had dreamed of living in their own, sovereign country, but it was only in 1918 that this dream finally came true. However, building the Polish nation state was not easy with both inner struggles and persisting border conflicts. The Second Polish Republic was a multicultural, religiously diverse country. In 1921, the year in which the first democratic constitution and parliamentarianism was enacted, the demographic statistics showed 63.8 % Roman Catholics, 11.2 % Greek Catholics, 10.5 % Orthodox Christians, 10.5 % Jews, 3.7 % Protestants, and 0.3 % others.²⁵ The new constitution promised to grant various rights and personal freedoms to each citizen. All Polish citizens were equal regardless of their income, origin, or religion; freedom of conscience and religion were secured, and forced participation in religious activities was henceforth forbidden. Still, the Catholic Church upheld its influential position with her own set of rights guaranteed by the constitution. Even though Polish freethinkers such as Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, Dawid Jabłoński, or Teofil Jaśkiewicz appreciated the newly gained national sovereignty, they claimed that the country was not fully independent yet and that there was no real freedom in the new state. While three of the partitioning powers were defeated and had left Poland, the fourth one – the Catholic clergy – was still active, they bemoaned. Freethinkers were convinced that the recapture of their country was only superficial; the minds of the Polish people, to them, seemed still occupied. From this, Polish freethinkers draw the conclusion that it would be impossible to be a good Pole and a good Catholic at the same time, because convinced Catholics would put their faith over their national identity. Thus the freethinkers prepared to continue fighting the “fourth partitioning power” assuming that the Vatican secretly would rule the country with the help of priests – “Poles in cassocks” – whom they blamed to be national traitors: “Odzyskaliśmy wprawdzie prawa narodu do politycznego bytu, lecz mózg, wolę i intelekt Wyzwolonej […] ogarnął z całą zachłannością i bezwzględnością […] czwarty jej zaborca, despota i okupant: kler katolicki.” (“Admittedly, we have regained the nation’s right to political existence, but the brain, will, and intellect of the liberated […] has been overtaken, with all the greed and ruthlessness […] by its fourth partitionist, tyrant and invader: the Catholic clergy.”)²⁶

 For the statistics, see Franciszek Kubiczek, Zarys historii Polski w liczbach: Społeczeństwo i gospodarka (Warsaw: Główny Urząd Statystyczny, 2012), 152.  “Nasze zadania i cele,” Wolnomyśliciel Polski, June 1928, 1– 4.

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Interestingly, Polish freethinkers did not stop at Catholic priests but extended their critique to other religions as well. Their reasons, though, remained the same: the clergy, regardless of confession, faith, or religion, would degrade society morally and materially; it would further superstition, gullibility, and religious addiction. According to freethinkers, farmers and workers did not require priests or rabbis; rather they blamed the Polish intelligentsia, with secondary or higher education, for their tolerance toward the clergy facilitating the silent deception of the people. Poland was a republic, but it was a democratic country only in theory, freethinkers criticized. This dissatisfying situation was the fault of the Polish people that allowed the backsliding of Poland’s social development. What Poland needed was a revolution, like the one in France, but without bloodshed, they suggested. Poland’s leading freethinkers such as Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, Romuald Minkiewicz, or Zdzisław Mierzyński were convinced that propaganda contents and agitation should be adapted to different groups of recipients, their expectations, needs, their social positions, cultures, and languages. Eventually they hoped to address two different social groups with their message: the educated Polish middle class and the large, yet heterogeneous, social strata of Polish farmers and workers. The propaganda targeting the educated classes took on the following characteristic and invoking pattern: you, an educated and intelligent person, should think whether you actually need a priest or a rabbi. What do you receive from clerics? Since you are a member of the intelligentsia, the clergy impedes your professional duties. If you are a teacher, then the clergy obstructs your teaching duties as it were clerics who mobilized the dazed mob against you. Each parish is a center of inquisition, backward thinking, and a refuge for medieval fanaticism. You obtained an average or higher education, why should you tolerate the clergy?²⁷ The propaganda addressing farmers and workers was supposed to make this target group aware of the uselessness of clerics, too. To them freethinkers explicated that the clerics would fully depend on them, not the other way round, since the clerics lived on their expense. Besides, clerics would not support ordinary people in their hard and poorly paid work but instead take away their money to live comfortably and idly. In freethinker propaganda brochures, farmers and workers were confronted with rhetorical questions on whether the clergy actually helped them to feed their families, to support them once their strength weakened, or in times of illness and in old age.²⁸

 Paraphrazed from Teofil Jaśkiewicz, Czy kler jest nam potrzebny (Warsaw: Wolnomyśliciel Polski, 1928), 4.  Ibid., 1– 3.

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After the First World War, Polish freethinkers widened their geographical horizons and started to look for role models not only among their European neighbors but also in North America. An obvious – and highly idealized – example of a tolerant culture seemed the United States. Polish freethinkers admired the separation of church and state and the particular liberal conditions of religious life so difficult to implement in Europe. They praised the United States for not supporting any church in particular and for not hindering the development of cults and religious organizations which could be set up simply by submitting an appropriate declaration to a state office. What struck Polish freethinkers the most was that, in the United States, every religious group maintained its place of worship and its officiants with its own money, and that religious congregations were allowed to build a shared place of worship, where services of various religions could be held according to a schedule. By contrast, they particularly bemoaned the “arrogant” Christians and Jews refusing to cooperate with other churches and cults they considered dissenters from their exclusive and solely true faith. Polish freethinkers highly appreciated the “sheer independent thought” and its American adherents gathered in the American Secular Union.²⁹ From the European point of view, the Union had to be praised for taking action against the return of religion into the state life of the United States, especially for their efforts to remove all religious schools and posts, and to introduce a ban on showing the Bible in schools. The American Secular Union directed their demands concerning education to the US president and the governors of various federal states. It became the role model of an organization defending the secular constitution of its state.³⁰ Thus, in 1920 and modelled after the American Secular Union, the Stowarzyszenie Wolnomyśliceli Polskich (Association of Polish Freethinkers, APF) was created with its own monthly magazine and 1,200 registered members (in 1922). Among APF’s many well-known and critical intellectuals, three should be mentioned in particular: first, the polyglot linguist Jan Baudouin de Courtenay,³¹ a student of Ernst Haeckel and later lecturer at a number of Polish and Russian universities. In 1918, he became a professor at the University of Warsaw, and, in 1922, was nominated candidate for the presidency of Poland by the political parties of national minorities. De Courtenay held the view that the precondition

 On freethinkers and their associations in America, see Susan Jacoby, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (New York: Henry Holt, 2004).  See Józef Landau, Szkice przeciwwyznaniowe (Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie Wolnomyślicieli Polskich, 1928), 44– 50.  On Baudouin de Courtenay, see Kazimierz Nitsch, “Baudouin de Courtenay, Jan,” in Polski Słownik Biograficzny I (Warsaw/Cracow/Lodz: Polska Akademia Umiejętności, 1935), 359 – 362.

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for a stable peace would be the equality of all religions. Although he promoted freedom of religion and was a nonbeliever himself, he understood the human need for faith and thus advocated liberal views. The second renowned member of the APF was the biologist and physiologist Romuald Minkiewicz,³² a member of the Polish Socialist Party, and a versatile and talented publicist and writer. As a university professor, he gave lectures on medicine, philosophy, geography, and history. His rational, scientific worldview was based on the results he obtained during his work on his thesis. He believed that scholars had to respect the findings of their studies, and that those results, in turn, would force a particular morality on them. Just as De Courtenay, Minkiewicz adopted a critical attitude toward communism and the Soviet model of fighting religion. He refrained from associating freethinking with atheism. In general, the APF leaders argued mainly about the situation in the Soviet Union. De Courtenay could not accept the devastation of religions by Soviet freethinkers and did not approve of all the ridicule the Orthodox Church had been receiving. The Soviet religion of dead communists, to him, seemed even worse. Philosopher and member of the Communist Party Jan Hempel,³³ another well-known leading voice of the APF, took different political views and opinions on the Soviet Union. Throughout his publications, he emphasized the social roots of religion and postulated the expansion of Marxism. Following these convictions, he strove to connect the APF to the large revolutionary power base of the labor movement because he considered it a futile enterprise to address the bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia with freethinking slogans. During his journey to the Soviet Union, he received impressions different from those of many other travelers. Hempel was fascinated with the Soviet Union and enjoyed the empty buildings of Orthodox churches as well as the fading religious devotion of the Russian people. His observations suggested that Russian peasants felt indifferent toward the erasure of churches and the fate of priests removed from power.³⁴ In 1922, APF members decided to establish an exemplary, non-denominational community. The idea dated back to the convention of 1907 where it was first mentioned. Little later, volunteers were enlisted, and the freethinking

 See Szulkin, “Romuald Minkiewicz,” 57– 65.  See Feliks Tych, “Hempel Jan,” in Polski Słownik Biograficzny IX (Wrocław/Warsaw/Cracow: Polska Akademia Nauk Ossolineum, 1960 – 1961), 382.  On the APF, see Barbara Jakubowska (Wagner), Uzależnieni wolnomyśliciele: Stowarzyszenie Myśli Wolnej w Polsce 1945 – 1951 (Warsaw: Uniwersytet Warszawski, 2002), 14.

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press printed their names.³⁵ Still, it was quite an unrealistic plan. In the newly founded Polish nation state of the twentieth century, however, expectations for a successful implementation of a non-denominational community were high. A list of non-denominational volunteers was set up, consisting mainly of APF activists. Plans were made to establish joint facilities for “corporeal and spiritual exercises,” non-denominational schools, workshops for employment purposes, funeral homes, and cemeteries. Also children, enlisted by their parents, could become members of the community. It was supposed to be run by a council and administered by local officials in Warsaw. Right from the start, though, this whole enterprise was doomed to fail because the Polish ministry responsible for religious affairs declined the registration of the community by pointing out that the existing law would not allow creating such new associations. Freethinkers, thus, could not establish and legalize their community, but at the same time they also were forbidden to leave their current church and remain – as atheists, agnostics, humanists, socialists, communists or nothing of the sort – simply without religious affiliation. In 1923, David Jabłoński, an activist of the APF, made an attempt to change this situation. He wrote a letter to the Jewish community of Warsaw asking to be unlisted from its registers. Next, he approached the municipal office in Warsaw requesting a certificate that would state his retreat from any religious collective. Naturally, this request was denied and also appealing to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and to the Ministry of Justice brought no changes.³⁶ This episode clearly emphasizes the hardships freethinkers in Poland had to face and it illustrates the sheer impossibility to set up a non-denominational community in a society with large proportions of minorities, but with a predominant Catholic imprint closely linked to the idea of the Polish nation – and its state. Every Polish citizen was obliged to be registered as part of a religious group, otherwise he could not properly identify as there were no birth, marriage, or death records aside the ones ran by religious communities in these days. This practice clearly went against the constitution, but no political lobby was able to enforce changes and alter the law.

 See “Wolna gmina,” Myśl Niepodległa, no. 49, January 1909, 36 – 37; and “Wolna gmina,” Myśl Niepodległa, no. 50, January 1909, 83 – 84, accessed December 4, 2018, http://www.wbc. poznan.pl/dlibra/publication/101182?tab=1.  See Jakubowska (Wagner), Uzależnieni wolnomyśliciele, 17– 18.

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Practices of Freethought Over the course of time, new issues concerning the participation of Polish freethinkers in social life came up. Ways of spending holidays and Sundays in a nonreligious way required some thought. According to the freethinking ideology, Sunday was a holiday, but not a religious one. Rather, it was considered a holiday of rest, that is, a break in everyday work necessary to regain mental and physical strength. Another issue referred to the celebration of Christian holidays such as Christmas and Easter by atheists. Freethinkers tried to solve this problem by declaring that these holidays neither were a Polish tradition nor of Christian origin but pagan holidays established to venerate celestial bodies, the sun, the moon, the rebirth of nature, or to commemorate the dead, to which Christianity later simply added new meaning. Apart from these elaborations, Polish freethinkers quickly decided that any further negation of the need to rest and of the charm surrounding religious holidays would not further their goals. Participation in religious festivities, thus, was not neglected, though freethinkers continued to openly distinguish religious elements from pagan traditions preceding Christianity. Following this reasoning, adorning a Christmas tree for the holidays was accepted, as was buying a celebratory cake for Easter, or preparing and eating hard-boiled eggs, since these customs originated in pagan times. Therefore, in our opinion, someone who lights a symbolic Christmas tree on the day of the winter solstice […] on the eternal holiday of the victorious sun […], buys himself an Easter cake in a confectionary, and hard-boils eggs, doesn’t necessarily have to be considered a religionist.³⁷

Nevertheless, to build a solid ideological base of freethinking, the mere negation of the old dogmas and traditions, or the sheer criticism of religion were not sufficient. New ideas for new customs had to be developed. Poland’s freethinkers, however, could not limit themselves to propagating new concepts because their idea of secularization was based on anticlericalism and thus on a negating tendency. Anticlericalism was their driving force and they developed more creative means than just writing and publishing articles on the topic. Plans were made to create their own body of literature propagating non-religious beliefs with books entitled Ilustrowana encyklopedia wolnomyślicielska (Illustrated Encyclopedia of

 “O świętach i świętowaniu,” Wolnomyśliciel Polski, April 1931, 193 – 199.

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Freethought, 1929).³⁸ This encyclopedia did not offer an exhaustive presentation of the subject, but a readable account composed of short narrations in form of lectures providing a multitude of information on the struggle with religion, and the benefits of a secular ideology. It also referenced classical literature of Western Europe. Besides, a whole chapter was dedicated to cremation, justifying its logic and advantages and promoting the building of crematories. It should be noted that despite their bold efforts, Polish freethinkers did not manage to obtain permission for the instalment of a cemetery for atheists or the building of a crematory in Warsaw. Throughout the 1920s, they had constantly claimed these two issues in their secular propaganda. Public talks and lectures were organized for medicine students and physicians to promote cremation, a novelty opposing the funeral traditions of all major religions in Poland. The arguments in favor of burning the human remains were hygienic and sanitary, mostly, but also economic and spatial ones, as well as the applicability of cremation across cultures and religions. Cremation, in the view of freethinkers, not only quickened the process of returning the body to the ground, but it was also a prehistoric and therefore non-Christian custom common among Slavic people. Besides secular practices, the book offered a glimpse into the future. In this imagined age of freethought, superstitions and arrogance would have disappeared together with the use of national languages in transnational encounters. The authors stated that national languages would only limit social connections and thus should be replaced by the international auxiliary language Esperanto. This new language was considered to be a tool of human liberation removing age-old barriers that bar the way to international understanding, tolerance, and brotherhood. To reinforce this claim, the encyclopedia was printed with two titles and two front pages – one in Polish, and one in Esperanto. (Fig. 1) Publications of Polish freethinkers were poor in terms of artwork and usually did not include photographs. Images appeared rarely and if they did, then in small size only. The title of the Ilustrowana encyklopedia promised otherwise but the book maintained this tradition with only a few black and white pictures, photographs, and small drawings, among them an image of the crematory in Zurich. One of those illustrations was a caricature showing the officiants of the three main monotheist religions. (Fig. 2) The APF did not unanimously approve the organizational strategy of Polish freethought. A conflict between liberals and radicals arose: the liberals openly accepted the social and political system in Poland. Even though they demanded

 For the Encyclopedia of Freethought, see Henryk Halpern and Antoni Zbikowski, eds, Ilustrowana encyklopedia wolnomyślicielska (Lublin: Wolnomyśliciel, 1929).

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Figure 1: Halpern and Zbikowski, Ilustrowana encyklopedia, front cover.

Figure 2: Halpern and Zbikowski, Ilustrowana encyklopedia, 59.

a secular country and the elimination of the clergy, especially the Roman Catholic one, they did not go so far to call for political violence, protests, or demonstrations potentially harmful to the people. Discussion was their main means of confrontation to uncover religious beliefs as complete nonsense. Still, liberal Polish freethinkers did not support the religious struggles and mass apostasies taking place in the Soviet Union. The radicals, on the other hand, demanded that the APF should promote leaving church and gather the apostates. They also attempted to spread awareness among Polish workers for their exploiters, both the capitalists and church officials, as for radical freethinkers, religion covered capitalism. The radicals also voted against time-consuming ideas such as transforming the APF into a number of non-denominational communities in Poland. Their role model was the Soviet Union and they pursued the concept to create a secular country at all costs and by all means. On these issues the two fractions clashed in the 1920s. Liberal freethinkers such as Baudouin de Courtenay,

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Jabłoński, Józef Landau, and Minkiewicz, together with scholars, artists, and writers, engaged in discussions and political lectures presenting freethinking as distanced as possible from politics. Contrary to this, radicals like Hempel, or Zygmunt Mierzyński were fascinated with the vision of a secular, proletarian state. This position was also adopted by politicians with left-wing views, by the leaders of the Polish labor movement, and by the Polish and Jewish trade unions. The most radical freethinkers took Marxist views and, in line with this, believed religion would be a tool of stupefying the masses. They praised atheism and faithlessness and familiarized the Polish public with the Russian term безбожник (bezbożnik, heathen, faithless). In line with this, radical freethinkers prided themselves in being called heathens and fought all religions and nationalism simultaneously, since they considered these concepts henchmen of capitalism and enemies of workers’ international unity. With the help of the freethought movement they hoped to spread scientific socialism and class struggle and to start a revolution leading to a class-free society, united by a shared, secular culture. Their promotion of a material-scientific worldview was the equivalent to the liberal initiative of leaving the church. To promote secularization, the radicals built their ideology on many general slogans and abstract terms borrowed from scientific materialism and they created a pantheon of “thinkers and fighters,” including deceased heroes, to furnish their movement with credibility. Those famous individuals figured as exemplary role models for the young generation of radicals. In particular, Polish radical freethinkers authored biographies in a simple, sometimes even infantile way filled with quotations of Marx, addressing Polish workers and acquainting them with the international avant-garde of political, cultural, and scientific radicals. In the following, a ranking of the most important figures of the radical freethinkers’ pantheon is paraphrased from Władysław Poniecki’s Myśliciele i bojownicy (Thinker and Fighter, 1935), each with a short biography echoing the original tone of the publication. 1)

Karl Marx – a titan of human thought, a genius appreciated even by his enemies. He was a social philosopher, revolutionary and atheist who treated religion as opium of the people.

2)

Friedrich Engels – followed the same life path as Marx and came to the same conclusions.

3)

Ferdinand Lassalle – a great orator who was able to win workers over and organized them in cooperatives. His beliefs were different from Marx’s despite Lassalle considering himself a Marxist.

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4)

Paul Lafargue – one of the most talented Marxist pioneers. He was a writer and an atheist detesting class distinctions and pomp. Lafargue criticized capitalist morality as a poor parody of Christian morality.

5)

Ludwig Feuerbach – did not believe in freedom as long as human beings are slaves of religious superstitions.

6)

Charles Darwin – prosecuted in the most brutal way by the clergy after publishing his work. His theory of evolution became a basis of human knowledge and freed people from superstition. All religions considered him an enemy and condemned him.

7)

August Bebel – a leader of German democracy, a distinguished socialist writer, and adversary of the clergy and its ignorance.

8)

Vladimir Lenin – known all over the world. His opponents loathed him endlessly, while his supporters set high expectations in him. He destroyed the tsardom and the ruling dynasty, and he woke up Russia that will not fall asleep again.

9)

Denis Diderot – his philosophy was based on materialism and atheism. He started to fight the church with his skepticism.

10) Louis Auguste Blanqui – was convinced that only the bourgeoisie knew and fulfilled their needs, while simple working people did not. He argued that the republican government should provide the people with free education.³⁹

This sort of radicalism attracted curiosity among the intelligentsia and the academic youth, but also among the supporters of socialism, communism, and among members of Poland’s worker parties, all of which demanded a secular country. Toward the 1920s and 1930s, the ideological fight relied more and more on original texts written by Polish authors. Polish publicists defending the religious nation state from secularization warned their readers of atheism which they believed could easily turn into a new, “utilitarian” religion. This new conviction could encourage breaking laws and making morality conditional and adaptable to the changing human needs. The freethinking radicals were presented as a threat to national security, as agents of foreign states who would infiltrate young nations with their ideas pictured as pure reflections of Bolshevist doctrines. Urgent warnings were issued – for example that secularization would lead to the destruction of families and the erosion of marriages which finally would cause anarchy in state and society.⁴⁰ These arguments launched by Catho-

 Władysław Poniecki, Myśliciele i bojownicy (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Wolność, 1935), 7– 69.  See Mieczysław Skrudlik, Bezbożnictwo w Polsce (Katowice: Księgarnia i drukarnia katolicka, 1935), 114– 118.

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lics and clerical writers, though, were common among the adversaries of freethought and not a Polish specific. In any case, hostility toward the nation as well as fraternizing with the Soviet Union were serious accusations persecuted by the police; blasphemy was additionally punished by parish priests who would publicly condemn anyone criticizing religion within their jurisdiction.⁴¹ Under these circumstances, freethinkers in Poland continued to face difficulties and hardships. Besides, their partly public alliance with Soviet Russia – the successor of the much despised former partition power – proved not helpful for their attempts to attract larger numbers of followers. Also, the internationally and nationally well-organized Catholic Church pulled its weight to fight freethinkers in the parishes, in the media, and in politics. Freethinking in Poland, consequently, remained the position of a minority.

Conclusion For Polish freethinkers, ideological matters ranked first. They imagined a future secular Polish society and state in which the clergy no longer would interfere with politics. Even though their attacks were directed mainly against Catholic priests and Jewish religious officials, they fought the privileges of all denominations and religions. Romuald Minkiewicz, one of the leading Polish freethinkers, in his articles in the journal Freethought, called on all citizens irrespective of religious or national differences to participate in the freethought movement. He held the view that the power of the Christian churches and the persistent nationalism would diminish and finally disappear in the future. To work toward the realization of this vision, Polish freethinkers engaged in activities such as public lectures and discussion evenings dedicated to the debate of freedom as a mandatory requirement to achieve the equality of all citizens regardless of their origin, gender, or religion.⁴² The Polish freethinkers’ understanding of secularization did not take into account the problem of national minorities separately. Rather, Polish and Jewish freethinkers cooperated in the branches of the Polish freethought movement and fostered the general, yet little discussed conviction that atheism would be the solution to national disputes. This somewhat apolitical stance mirrored the  See Michał Staszewski, Kościół wobec wolnomyślicielstwa i różnowierstwa w Polsce 1918 – 1932 (w świetle procesów karnych na tle religijnym) (Warsaw: Centralny Ośrodek Doskonalenia Kadr Laickich, 1965).  See Barbara Wachowska, “Polski Związek Myśli Wolnej,” Acta Universitatis Lodziensis: Folia Historica, no. 43 (1991): 59 – 64.

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social and intellectual roots of the movement and pointed to the distance of its members to state authorities. Due to this distance, they did not feel the need to take a stand on the complicated Polish nationality problems, especially on the conflicts between the Poles and the Ukrainians, the largest national minority in Poland. After the Second World War, the Polish freethought movement continued its existence under the protectorate of communists, who were ruling in Poland in accordance with Stalin’s directives from Moscow. It was a movement devoid of any greater intellectual background or impact. Religion, now, was supposed to be replaced by the doctrine of Marxism-Leninism. After a few years, in 1951, the communists withdrew their support for the Polish Freethought Association. Another organization, the Association of Atheists and Freethinkers, which operated in Poland since 1957, engaged in the laicization of society. It propagated a secular culture and a materialistic worldview. But little later, secularization became a rather exclusive goal of the politics and ideology of the totalitarian state. After 1989 and the collapse of communism several, usually small organizations, which were not even publicly operating, enriched the freethinking spectrum. Attempts were made to unite the movement and lively discussions over a long list of topics related to secularization in the twenty-first century took place. The modern lay movement in Poland took up on the historical freethinking activists and their struggles to push through their ideas in the newly found Polish nation state. In 2007, people celebrated the hundredth anniversary of the 1907 freethinking convention in Warsaw. They admired and commemorated the courage of the historical Polish freethinkers and especially recollected their dream of an independent country with a basic democratic order. Back then, democracy was associated with tolerance and the separation of church and state⁴³ – a timeless, yet fragile truth.

Bibliography Anon. “Sprawozdanie z pierwszego zgromadzenia wolnych myślicieli polskich.” Myśl Niepodległa, December 1907. Accessed December 4, 2018. http://wbc.poznan.pl/dlibra/ publication/101181?tab=1. Anon. “Wolna gmina.” Myśl Niepodległa, no. 49, January 1909. Accessed December 4, 2018. http://wbc.poznan.pl/dlibra/publication/101182?tab=1. Anon. “Wolna gmina.” Myśl Niepodległa, no. 50, January 1909. Accessed December 4, 2018. http://www.wbc.poznan.pl/dlibra/publication/101182?tab=1.

 See Zdzisław Słowik, “Dziedzictwo myśli niepodległej,” Res Humana 91, no. 6 (2007): 7.

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Anon. “Nasze zadania i cele.” Wolnomyśliciel Polski, June 1928. Anon. “O świętach i świętowaniu.” Wolnomyśliciel Polski, April 1931. Davies, Norman. God’s Playground: A History of Poland, vol. 2: 1795 to the Present. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 22013. Dittrich, Lisa. “European Connections, Obstacles and the Search for a New Concept of Religion: The Freethinker Movement as an Example for Transnational Anti-Catholicism in the Second Half of the 19th Century.” Journal of Religious History 39, no. 2 (2015): 261 – 279. Halpern, Henryk, and Antoni Zbikowski, eds. Ilustrowana encyklopedia wolnomyślicielska. Lublin: Wolnomyśliciel, 1929. Hass, Ludwik. Ambicje, rachuby, rzeczywistość: Wolnomularstwo w Europie środkowo-wschodniej 1905 – 1928. Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1984. Hello, Ernest. M. Renan, l’Allemagne et l’athéisme au XIX siècle. Paris: Charles Douniol, 1859. Hello, Ernest. Philosophie et athéisme. Paris: Librairie Poussielgue Frères, 1888. Hello, Ernest. Filozofia i ateizm. Warsaw: Księgarnia św. Wojciecha, 1909. Jabłczyński, Feliks. “Kto burzy?” Myśl Niepodległa, September 1906. Accessed December 4, 2018. http://wbc.poznan.pl/dlibra/publication?id=101180&tab=3. Jacoby, Susan. Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism. New York: Henry Holt, 2004. Jakubowska (Wagner), Barbara. Uzależnieni wolnomyśliciele: Stowarzyszenie Myśli Wolnej w Polsce 1945 – 1951. Warsaw: Uniwersytet Warszawski, 2002. Janowski, Maciej. “Romantic Historiography as a Sociology of Liberty: Joachim Lelewel and his Contemporaries.” In Manufacturing Middle Ages: Entangled History of Medievalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe, edited by Patrick Geary and Gábor Klaniczay, 89 – 110. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2013. Jaśkiewicz, Teofil. Czy kler jest nam potrzebny. Warsaw: Wolnomyśliciel Polski, 1928. Jaśkiewicz, Teofil. O kremacji czyli pogrzebowym spopielaniu zwłok. Warsaw: Bez Dogmatu, 1928. Kalembka, Sławomir. Wielka Emigracja 1831 – 1863. Toruń: Wydawnictwo Adam Marszałek, 2003. Kubiczek, Franciszek. Zarys historii Polski w liczbach: Społeczeństwo i gospodarka. Warsaw: Główny Urząd Statystyczny, 2012. Kurcyusz, Adam. “Zabór katolicki.” Myśl Niepodległa, September 1906. Accessed December 4, 2018. http://wbc.poznan.pl/dlibra/publication?id=101180&tab=3. Landau, Józef. Szkice przeciwwyznaniowe. Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie Wolnomyślicieli Polskich, 1928. Lecky, William Edward Hartpole. Dzieje wolnej myśli w Europie, translated by Maria Feldmanowa. Lodz: M. Stifter, A. Strauch, 1908. Lecky, William Edward Hartpole. History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe, vol. 1. New York: D. Appleton, 1919. Niemojewski, Andrzej. “Katechizm wolnego myśliciela.” Myśl Niepodległa, January 1908. Accessed December 4, 2018. https://wbc.poznan.pl/dlibra/publication/101237/edition/ 115360. Niemojewski, Andrzej. Katechizm wolnego myśliciela. Warsaw: L. Biliński i W. Maślankiewicz, 1908. Nitsch, Kazimierz. “Baudouin de Courtenay, Jan.” In Polski Słownik Biograficzny I, 359 – 362. Warsaw/Cracow/Lodz: Polska Akademia Umiejętności, 1935.

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Poniecki ,Władysław. Myśliciele i bojownicy. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Wolność, 1935. Porter-Szűcs, Brian. When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Modern Politics in Nineteenth-Century Poland. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Porter-Szűcs, Brian. Faith and Fatherland: Catholicism, Modernity, and Poland. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Rzepecki, Jan. “Moszczeńska, Iza.” In Polski Słownik Biograficzny XXII/1/92, 80 – 85. Wroclaw: Polska Akademia Nauk Ossolineum, 1977. Skrudlik, Mieczysław. Bezbożnictwo w Polsce. Katowice: Księgarnia i drukarnia katolicka, 1935. Staszewski, Michał. Kościół wobec wolnomyślicielstwa i różnowierstwa w Polsce 1918 – 1932 (w świetle procesów karnych na tle religijnym). Warsaw: Centralny Ośrodek Doskonalenia Kadr Laickich, 1965. Słowik, Zdzisław. “Dziedzictwo myśli niepodległej.” Res Humana, no. 6 (2007): 7. Świtalska-Starzeńska, Barbara. Człowiek szalony: Andrzej Niemojewski (1864 – 1921). Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UKSW, 2018. Szulkin, Michał. Z dziejów ruchu wolnomyślicielskiego w Polsce 1906 – 1936. Warsaw: Centralny Ośrodek Doskonalenia Kadr Laickich, 1965. Szulkin, Michał. “Romuald Minkiewicz uczony i wolnomyśliciel.” In Instytut Biologii Doświadczalnej im. Marcelego Nenckiego Historia i Teraźniejszość, vol. 3: Wspomnienia i Refleksje, 57 – 65. Warsaw: Instytut Biologii Doświadczalnej im. Marcelego Nenckiego PAN, 2008. Accessed December 4, 2018. http://rcin.org.pl/Content/4150/WA488_17335_ 18966_Kuznicki-T3-Insthist.pdf. Tych, Feliks. “Hempel, Jan.” In Polski Słownik Biograficzny IX, 380 – 382. Wroclaw/Warsaw/Cracow: Polska Akademia Nauk Ossolineum, 1960/1961. Wachowska, Barbara. “Polski Związek Myśli Wolnej.” Acta Universitatis Lodziensis: Folia Historica, no. 43 (1991): 57 – 84. Walicki, Andrzej. Philosophy and Romantic Nationalism: The Case of Poland. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994. Walicki, Andrzej. Poland between East and West: The Controversies of Self-Definition and Modernization in Partitioned Poland. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Wandycz, Piotr Stefan. The Lands of Partitioned Poland, 1795 – 1918. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 41996. Zamoyski, Adam. Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots and Revolutionaries, 1776 – 1871. London: Phoenix, 1999. Zieliński, Zygmunt. Kościół i naród w niewoli. Lublin: Red. Wydawnictwo Katolickiego Uniwersytetu Lubelskiego, 1995.

Anton Jansson

Friends and Foes: Two Secularisms in late Nineteenth-Century Sweden On Sunday morning, November 9, 1890, an impressive congregation of around 1,100 people met at Mosebacke in the Swedish capital of Stockholm to listen to edifying orations on religion. But it was not, as could have been expected given the time of the meeting, a Sunday service where a priest delivered a sermon. Rather, the speakers elaborated on religion from an external perspective, on religion as a problem. And more than a sermon, it was a debate between some of the most notorious and radical freethinkers of that time. In the center of events were Viktor Lennstrand (1861– 1895) and Hjalmar Branting (1860 – 1925), who one year earlier both had served time in prison for blasphemy. Lennstrand and Branting were freethinkers and starkly opposed to the existing state church, but they still differed widely in their secularisms.¹ Toward the end of the Sunday meeting a vote among the audience was taken between two resolutions, one basically proposing Branting’s position on secularism, the other Lennstrand’s. The clearest dividing line between their respective resolutions, in which they both took a stand for the scientific enlightenment of the people, was whether freethinkers needed to unite and form an independent movement or not. Lennstrand’s stance was that they should, while Branting stood for the social democratic idea that secularism should be a subordinate issue to the political activity of the labor movement. Their different positions thus concerned politics, tactics, and organization, but also were grounded in two different ways of conceiving religion and secularity. I here define secularism as a combination of a political project targeting the separation of church and state (thus advancing a secular state) and an immanent worldview.² It should be noted that in the period considered here, the word se-

 The research on Swedish freethought and secularism during late nineteenth century is limited. The meeting at Mosebacke is mentioned in the intellectual biographies of its two main characters. Ture Nerman, Hjalmar Branting – fritänkaren (Stockholm: Tiden, 1960), 109 – 116; and Pär Alexandersson, Förnekelsens förbannelse: Viktor Lennstrand som förkunnare och blasfemiker (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2014), 163 – 169. For further works on Swedish secularism of the time, see Lennart Ståhle, Organisationer för svensk religionskritik 1880 – 1910 (Stockholm: Religionssociologiska institutet, 1979); and Inga Sanner, Att älska sin nästa såsom sig själv: Om moraliska utopier under 1800-talet (Stockholm: Carlsson, 1995).  Thus coming close to how José Casanova defines secularism as a “world-view and ideology.” José Casanova, “The Secular, Secularizations, Secularisms,” in Rethinking Secularism, ed. Craig J. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110688283-008

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kularism (secularism) had not been established in the Swedish language.³ The conceptual framework is complex, but those who supported secularism in the sense suggested here would have been labeled as being involved in fritänkande or fritänkeri (freethought), materialism (materialism), or even ateism (atheism). In this chapter, I will discuss the two main ways of envisioning and performing secularism during the high point of Swedish nineteenth-century freethought, the decade around 1890. These years saw the organization of the Swedish labor movement and in general the so-called folkrörelser (popular movements), which will be further presented below. These organizations are contextually important for understanding the two secularisms of the period and their mutual relation. The socialist Hjalmar Branting and the “utilist” Viktor Lennstrand are representatives of those two modes of Swedish secularism. Both were public figures, friends and collaborators, but over fierce debates on secularism they also became foes and competitors. This chapter also aims to contribute to ongoing discussions on the plurality of secularisms.⁴ In a global perspective, there are a variety of national cases, of which Sweden constitutes an interesting example, not least because of the plurality of secularisms within Sweden itself at the heyday of nineteenth-century freethought. This period is also important to consider as a decisive historical background for the secularity and secular identity of Sweden up to our contemporary age. To this larger setting of the chapter I will return in the concluding remarks. Before reaching this conclusion, in which I will discuss the legacies of Lennstrand and Branting, the chapter will address the following topics: first, I will introduce the context of the 1880s, focusing on the popular movements of Sweden which were forming at that time. After that, I will concentrate on Branting and Lennstrand and their main activities. I will then discuss secularism in the context of the popular movements, including its entanglements with and similar-

Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 54. For a discussion of the complex and variously defined concept of secularism, see also Phil Zuckerman and John R. Shook, “Introduction: The Study of Secularism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Secularism, ed. Phil Zuckerman and John R. Shook (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 2– 7. See also Monika Wohlrab-Sahr and Marian Burchardt, “Multiple Secularities: Toward a Cultural Sociology of Secular Modernities,” Comparative Sociology 11, no. 6 (2012): 880 – 883.  If used at all, the term denoted the British secularist movement. See, e. g., Otto Thomson, “Tidstecken i England,” Fritänkaren 1, no. 1 (1889): 6.  See Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt, “Multiple Secularities”; and Todd Weir, “Germany and the New Global History of Secularism: Questioning the Postcolonial Genealogy,” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 90, no. 1 (2015): 6 – 20.

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ities to the larger movements. Finally, I will return to the debate introduced above, to deepen the understanding of the dividing line between Branting and Lennstrand.

Popular Movements and Cultural Radicalism in Sweden around the 1880s Starting in the mid nineteenth century, but especially from the 1870s onwards, Sweden saw a rapid industrialization accompanied by urbanization and the formation of a new working class. Swedish society in the late nineteenth century was highly unequal with the old regime persisting in many ways.⁵ Politically, however, there had been some liberalizing reforms. In 1866, the Diet of the Estates was replaced by a new parliament, and successive adjustments of the religious legislation weakened the bonds between state, citizens, and the Lutheran state church dominating the country since the Protestant Reformation. Subsequently, the so-called folkrörelser, popular movements, emerged, which had a lasting influence on twentieth-century politics and society in Sweden.⁶ There were three large popular movements: the revival or free church movement, the temperance movement, and the labor movement, developing in that order.⁷ There had been smaller revival movements and attempts to establish free religious organizations earlier, but after the liberalization of religious legislation – for instance allowing the foundation of independent congregations – the revival

 For a recent synthesis of Swedish history in this era, see Bo Stråth, Sveriges historia: 1830 – 1920 (Stockholm: Norstedt, 2012). On industrialization and economic history in particular, see chapters 5 and 6 of Lars Magnusson, An Economic History of Sweden (London: Routledge, 2000). On the inequality of Sweden and the persistence of the old regime, see Erik Bengtsson, “The Swedish Sonderweg in Question: Democratization and Inequality in Comparative Perspective, c. 1750 – 1920,” Past & Present 244, no. 1 (2020): 123 – 161.  I use the term popular movements rather than social movements. “Popular movement” comes closer to how those organizations were conceived as people’s movements (folkrörelser), both at the time and afterwards. This is also standard in research literature, see, e. g., Bengtsson, “The Swedish Sonderweg in Question”; Sven Lundkvist, “The Popular Movements in Swedish Society, 1850 – 1920,” Scandinavian Journal of History 5, no. 1– 4 (1980): 219 – 238. See also John Chalcraft, “Popular Movements in the Middle East and North Africa,” in The History of Social Movements in Global Perspective: A Survey, ed. Stefan Berger and Holger Nehring (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 1– 35.  Other movements may also be reckoned as part of the general trend: most prominently, the women’s rights movement may be regarded as a popular movement, albeit on a somewhat smaller scale.

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movement grew in size and set up firm organizations.⁸ Some revivalists formally stayed within the framework of the Lutheran state church, but the main legacy of the revival was the free churches which established themselves outside of the state church. This was done by an import of denominations such as Methodism and Baptism, but also by the evolution of indigenous variants, such as the Mission Covenant Church, which was to become the largest free church of Sweden.⁹ The temperance movement had some modest predecessors earlier in the nineteenth century but likewise mushroomed in the 1880s. The introduction of the Independent Order of Good Templars (IOGT) in Sweden in 1879 was one of the reasons, but also other temperance organizations flourished. Their objective was to counter the excessive consumption of alcohol – a major social problem in the country during this period. Over time, the teetotalers became politically influential, and in 1922 Sweden came close to prohibition, when, in a national referendum, 49 % voted in favor of prohibiting alcohol. On a more general level it should be noted that the teetotalers were no isolated phenomenon but had connections to and overlaps with the other movements. At first, they were close mainly to the free churches, in the early twentieth century, though, increasingly to the labor movement.¹⁰ The Swedish labor movement in its modern and socialist form was born in the 1880s, even though membership did not seriously rise until closer to the turn of the century. Agitators such as the tailor August Palm, who had traveled as a journeyman in Europe and had been influenced by Ferdinand Lassalle and other socialists, gained influence. Socialist newspapers were launched, and workers started to organize in unions. The Landsorganisationen (Swedish Trade Union Confederation, LO), which was to become very influential, was established in 1898, almost a decade after the Sveriges socialdemokratiska arbetareparti (Swedish Social Democratic Party), founded in 1889. These two organizations were very close, and came to dominate Swedish politics in the twentieth century, when the social democrats held power between 1936 and 1976. Swedish social democrats were influenced by their German counterparts early on, and while

 The easing of religious legislation happened successively. See Oloph Bexell, Sveriges kyrkohistoria: 7, Folkväckelsens och kyrkoförnyelsens tid (Stockholm: Verbum, 2003), 38 – 39; 45 – 47; 93 – 98.  See Sven Lundkvist, Folkrörelserna i det svenska samhället 1850 – 1920 (Stockholm: Sober, 1977), 47– 50; and Sven Lundkvist, Tron och gärningarna: Svenska missionsförbundets bakgrund och utveckling till omkring 1970 (Uppsala: Svenska institutet för missionsforskning, 2003).  See Samuel Edquist, Nyktra svenskar: Godtemplarrörelsen och den nationella identiteten 1879 – 1918 (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2001); and Lundkvist, Folkrörelserna i det svenska samhället, 50 – 52.

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they initially cultivated a revolutionary rhetoric, they successively moved in a more reformist direction.¹¹ While there were certainly tensions and disagreements between the movements, especially between the free churches and the labor movement, looking at the movements from a historical perspective, it is possible to see many commonalities – which is also how they are generally viewed in historiography.¹² They collectively organized around discontents with the religious, social, and political situation of their day. Put into action, they mobilized the masses, particularly the lower classes deprived of political and economic influence. The movements pursued collective goals, advocated new norm systems for the individual, and worked for the construction of a reformed society based on equality and selfdetermination. They held meetings with speeches by charismatic leaders and collective singing. Also, they are often said to have provided democratic training, since they were generally self-run, democratic in their structures, and eager to offer means and opportunities for education.¹³ A common goal, apart from temperance, was extended or even universal suffrage. It is estimated that by 1920 a third of the Swedish population was actively organized in at least one of the popular movements. Their impact was strengthened further by their organization in existing political forms.¹⁴ In 1911 and 1917, for instance, around two thirds of the members of the second chamber of the Swedish parliament, mainly liberals and social democrats, were teetotalers. In 1911, approximately 20 % of the parliamentarians were members of a free church.¹⁵ As mentioned above, after universal suffrage had been granted in 1919, social democracy, the main political wing of the labor movement, became the dominant political party in Sweden. The 1880s not only witnessed the birth and explosion of the popular movements, but also a general cultural upheaval, similar to developments in other

 See ibid., 52– 55; Gullan Gidlund, “From Popular Movement to Political Party: Development of the Social Democratic Labor Party Organization,” in Creating Social Democracy: A Century of the Social Democratic Labor Party in Sweden, ed. Klaus Misgeld, Karl Molin and Klas Åmark (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 97– 130; and Mary Hilson, Political Change and the Rise of Labour in Comparative Perspective: Britain and Sweden, 1890 – 1920 (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2006), 28 – 58.  The main historiographical endeavor concerning the popular movements was a large research program concluded in the late 1970s and summarized in Lundkvist, Folkrörelserna i det svenska samhället. For an English summary, see Lundkvist, “The Popular Movements.”  Lundkvist, Folkrörelserna i det svenska samhället, 55 – 59; 153 – 161; 192– 212.  Ibid., 218. For a recent discussion of their political impact (focusing on the labor movement which was exceptionally organized in international comparison), see Bengtsson, “The Swedish Sonderweg in Question.”  Lundkvist, Folkrörelserna i det svenska samhället, 175 – 179; 230 – 233.

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European societies at that time. In literature, authors dubbed themselves the “young Sweden,” furthering a self-image of being new and modern, aiming at a radical break with the past.¹⁶ Particularly Sweden’s university towns hosted currents of intellectual cultural radicalism which included protests against the state church and monarchy, demands for freedom of expression, and even sexual enlightenment and reform.¹⁷

Hjalmar Branting: Socialist and Freethinker Karl Hjalmar Branting was born in 1860 into a bourgeois upper-class family in Stockholm. His mother was a noblewoman and his father worked as a professor and director of the Royal Central Gymnastics Institute. Branting went to school with the future Swedish King Gustaf V and the future liberal Prime Minister Karl Staaff, with whom he later also studied at Uppsala University. Despite his roots in the upper-class he came to sympathize with the emerging labor movement, and became famous for being not only the first social democrat in the Swedish parliament (in 1897), but also the first Swedish social democratic Prime Minister (from 1920 on), holding that office for three short terms, the last one until his death in 1925. He was also awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1921 for his activity in the League of Nations.¹⁸ The young Hjalmar Branting of the 1880s was a cultural radical. For instance, he was one of the drivers of the influential student club Verdandi, founded in Uppsala in 1882, which organized lectures and published books on science, culture, and politics with a progressive bent.¹⁹ But more than a general radical, Branting turned into an engaged socialist, and, by 1886, became the leading figure of Swedish social democracy. One of Branting’s early programmatic speeches, later more or less canonized by the Swedish labor movement, was held in the industrial town of Gävle in 1886. In this speech, he expressed his Marxist-leaning socialist worldview and political program. Branting presented

 See Per Arne Tjäder, “Det unga Sverige”: Åttitalsrörelse och genombrottsepok (Lund: Arkiv för studier i arbetarrörelsens historia, 1982).  Tore Frängsmyr, Svensk idéhistoria: Bildning och vetenskap under tusen år: Del 2, 1809 – 2000 (Stockholm: Natur och kultur, 2000), 143 – 147.  Biographically, the most comprehensive work on Branting is Olle Svenning, Hövdingen – Hjalmar Branting: En biografi (Stockholm: Bonnier, 2014). In 1960, the social democrat and freethinker Ture Nerman published a book on Branting focusing on his activity as a freethinker: Nerman, Hjalmar Branting – fritänkaren.  Verdandi is Old Norse, meaning roughly “in the making,” or “happening.”

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a historical-materialist account of how the large-scale mode of modern production created inequality and misery burdening the workers. This system would increasingly tear humanity apart into two blocs, the capitalists and the proletariat, until the proletarians ultimately would revolt and become the gravediggers of capitalism.²⁰ Both here and in later programmatic texts, Branting outlined short-term as well as long-term political goals: universal suffrage was a shortterm goal and a means for the long-term “fullständiga frigörelse från all träldom, politisk, ekonomisk, social och andlig” (“total emancipation from all servitude, political, economic, social, and spiritual”).²¹ This, according to Branting, would come about by the expropriation of private capital.²² The political content of Branting’s speech intermingled with his freethought attitude he shared with many early socialists. The equitable society which the socialists were fighting for, to him, was the new, coming kingdom, which for us freethinkers and materialists has arrived as a certain, demonstrable expectation instead of the fairy-tale about a heaven on the other side of the grave, which still is the sheet anchor for so many unhappy people in the storms of their lives. We socialists want to show the people that it is in their own hands to create here on earth a happier and, above all, more certain existence than the heaven of the priests, from which no one has returned to tell whether it exists.²³

Branting was a convinced freethinker and materialist, and especially during the 1880s also an avid secularist. Early in his life, he read Ludwig Büchner, Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill, and David Friedrich Strauss, intellectuals, who countered established Christianity in different ways.²⁴ Branting also was one of the

 Hjalmar Branting, Hvarför arbetarerörelsen måste bli socialistisk: Föredrag hållet första gången på inbjudan af Gefle arbetareklubb 24 okt 1886 [Why the labor movement must become socialist: Lecture held first of invitation by the Gävle labor club] (Stockholm: Social-Demokraten, 1887). For a similar account, see also Hjalmar Branting, Socialismen: En historisk framställning [Socialism: An historical account] (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1892). For the main source material, the texts by Branting and Lennstrand, I provide English translations of the titles in the notes.  Branting, Hvarför arbetarerörelsen, 28. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are the author’s.  A decade later, in a programmatic text, the short-term goals were more specific: eight-hour work day, abolition of child labor, and rest on Sundays. The language, then, was somewhat more reformist, but the ultimate goals remained the same: the abolition of class society, and the socialization of capital. Hjalmar Branting, En vidräkning med det moderna samhället [An indictment of modern society] (Östersund: Jämtlandsposten, 1897).  Branting, Hvarför arbetarerörelsen, 23.  For further information on the intellectual formation of Branting’s freethinking conviction, see Nerman, Hjalmar Branting – fritänkaren, 9 – 14.

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founding members of the Föreningen för religionsfrihet (Association for Freedom of Religion) and part of its steering committee between its establishment in 1884 and 1889.²⁵ The purpose of this association was to propagate for the separation of church and state. Branting himself left the Lutheran state church in 1884, and as the only legal possibility to leave the state church at that time was by converting to another state-approved denomination, he set out to join a Methodist congregation.²⁶ This let him claim, in an angry, satirical article in 1888, that he actually had printed evidence of his “förnekelse av den rena evangeliska läran” (“denial of the pure, evangelical teachings”).²⁷ He even went to jail for his freethought activity – not because of anything that came from his own mouth or pen, but for republishing in his newspaper an anti-religious text for which a Malmö socialist had previously ended up in prison. In 1889, Branting served three months for blasphemy.

Viktor Lennstrand: Atheist and Utilist Viktor Emanuel Lennstrand, born in 1861, grew up in Gävle, at that time an important industrial town by the Baltic Sea, north of Stockholm. During his adolescence, he was a zealous Christian intending to become a missionary in Africa.²⁸ With his father being an artisan, his upbringing may be described as middleclass without attachment to the bourgeois elite of the town. After a religious crisis during his years as a student in Uppsala, Lennstrand declared himself an atheist in the mid-1880s. He was no central figure in the cultural radical circles

 Ibid., 15 – 86. The liberal physician Anton Nyström acted as chairman of the association. In 1879, he had founded a Comte-inspired Positivistiska samfundet (Positivist Society) intending to provide an alternative to existing Christianity. Nyström and Branting were the two most prominent members and agitators of the Association for Freedom of Religion in the 1880s.  Ture Nerman, Hjalmar Branting: Kulturpublicisten (Stockholm: Tiden, 1958), 71– 73.  Hjalmar Branting, “Vårt åtal [Our prosecution],” in Tal och skrifter III: Kampen för demokratin I, ed. Hjalmar Branting and Zeth Höglund (Stockholm: Tiden, 1927), 53. Many of the texts I refer to in this chapter, by both Branting and Lennstrand, were published in different places; first in newspapers and journals and later as pamphlets, in books, or collected volumes. In this essay, I prioritize references to later book versions, since these are more readily accessible. The original years of the texts from Branting’s collected writings are given in the bibliography.  For an excellent, comprehensive, recently published biography of Lennstrand, see Alexandersson, Förnekelsens förbannelse. The biographical details given in this chapter build on Alexandersson’s work. Earlier research focusing on Lennstrand is scarce, but there are a few interesting portraits: William Öhrman, “Viktor E. Lennstrand, en anti-Waldenström,” Kyrkohistorisk årsskrift 74 (1974): 115 – 147; and Sanner, Att älska sin nästa, chapter 4.

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of Uppsala. Yet through time he got to know and cooperate with some of the leading radicals, such as Branting and Knut Wicksell, a freethinker and later world-famous economist. From 1887, Lennstrand agitated publicly against Christianity and quickly built a reputation as the most notorious freethinker of Sweden. His career turned out to be short and intense; he died young of illness in 1895. By that time, he had managed to agitate in large parts of Sweden, spend time in prison, publish a number of pamphlets and tracts, and start an organization for freethinkers with two attached journals. During his short lifetime, Lennstrand acquainted himself with and introduced to the Swedish public, figures and basic writings from the broad international canon of freethinkers, secularists, materialists, and critics of religion.²⁹ His speeches and pamphlets often comprised historical criticism of the Bible and of God, coupled with references to natural sciences, which, according to Lennstrand, disproved literal interpretations of the Holy Scripture. Besides, he frequently bemoaned the moral and intellectual destructiveness of Christian preaching and emphasized the values and aims of freethought he believed would prepare the ground for love, justice, morality, and felicity in much more substantial ways than the respective Christian teachings.³⁰ One of the thinkers who inspired him was John Stuart Mill: Lennstrand propagated a utilitarian-colored notion that humanity should aim for the highest possible felicity in this world.³¹ Utilitarianism also played a role in providing the name for Lennstrand’s secularism. He called his new teaching utilism, short for utilitarianism. In 1888, he founded the Utilistiska samfundet (Utilist Society), a sort of free In a sense, Lennstrand is the one Swede who came closest to this international congregation of prominent freethinkers. The Freethinker portrayed him repeatedly, and he is included in early overviews of freethought history: Samuel P. Putnam, 400 Years of Freethought (New York: The Truth Seeker Company, 1894), 619 – 624; John Mackinnon Robertson, A History of Freethought in the Nineteenth Century, vol. 2 (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1969), 487. In both of these works, Branting is mentioned in passing.  See, e. g., Viktor Lennstrand, Hvad jag sagt och hvad jag icke sagt: Föredrag hållet å Hörsalen i Örebro den 30 maj 1888 [What I have said and what I have not said: Lecture held in the lecture hall in Örebro] (Stockholm: s.l., 1888); Viktor Lennstrand, De fyra evangelierna, deras uppkomst och historiska värde: Föredrag, hållet på Svenska teatern den 14 april 1889 [The four gospels, their origin and historical value: Lecture held at the Swedish theater] (Stockholm: s.l., 1889); Viktor Lennstrand, Det åtalade föredraget om “Gud” [The prosecuted lecture about “God”] (Stockholm: s.l., 1889); and Viktor Lennstrand, Hvarför uppträder jag mot kristendomen? [Why do I stand up against Christianity?] (Stockholm: s.l., 1890).  This, for instance, becomes clear in the text written under the pseudonym Kettil Okristen, “Hvad en fritänkare tror på,” Tänk Sjelf! Utilistiskt flygblad 1, no. 1 (1891): 1. Lennstrand claimed that Mill had an outstanding “sharpness of thought, depth, clarity, and honesty.” Lennstrand, Hvad jag sagt, 10.

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thought congregation. I will return to this society below, at this point it should only be noticed that it was an organization centered on Lennstrand’s activity, with a base in Stockholm complemented by a varying amount of local branches in the rest of Sweden. A vital part and central node of the Utilist Society was its journal, Fritänkaren (The Freethinker), issued for the first time in 1889. The choice of its title seems natural, as it echoes both the main term around which critics of religion in Sweden rallied, and the British publication The Freethinker, which was an inspiration for Fritänkaren. The Swedish journal often published translated material from the British organ, but also from the U.S. freethought journals The Truth Seeker and Boston Investigator, as well as texts by leading freethinkers of the Anglosphere such as George William Foote and Robert Ingersoll. Apart from reports on the activities of the Utilist Society, polemics of Lennstrand, and news from around the world, Fritänkaren voiced critique against Christianity, regarding both topical Swedish themes and more general issues. Satirical articles about “God’s providence” (with reports on catastrophes and evils), the inconsistencies of the Bible, and the immorality of priests were common, as were portraits of notable international freethinkers. More constructive appeals to moral edification and future felicity often found their expression in poems and song lyrics which were printed in almost every issue.³² Freethought was at that time necessarily connected to a more or less radical bent, and that applied to Lennstrand, too. For instance, he connected freethought with republicanism and universal suffrage. In 1891, on the occasion of a French state visit to Sweden, he noted: Our time has surpassed the stupidity of this faith and the Christian fatheadedness. We have found that this entire fairytale about God’s government “by the grace of God” is untrue. We do not see anything godly or supernatural in the king. The blood of the Bourbons was not, as the Frenchmen once thought, blue, nor was the blood of any other king either. They are human beings just like us and the state is just an organization of the people. The great

 This characterization is based on my own reading of the journal. It came out from the summer of 1889 to December 1894, although in the last year it was much more sporadically published than in earlier years, when it was issued about twice a month. There was also another version of Fritänkaren in circulation, namely Tänk Sjelf! (Think for yourself). It was initially conceived as a one-off publication for the South of Sweden, but came to be a regular publication as the title was held to be less controversial in the countryside than Fritänkaren. See “Notiser,” Fritänkaren 3, no. 17 (1891): 136; and Lennstrand, “Meddelande [Message],” Fritänkaren 3, no. 19: 153. Lennstrand was not formally the editor of the journals, but he was their most prominent author, and it is clear that they were organs for his preaching.

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motto of our time is thus: of the people and by the people. It should itself choose its leading men, enact its own laws and decide over its own destiny.³³

In addition, Lennstrand claimed that the fulfillment of liberty, justice, and enlightenment required the republic as its basic prerequisite. Just like Branting, he advocated for the quick introduction of universal suffrage he believed would be the first step toward the emancipation and formation of the people, leading inevitably to ever-increasing liberty and reason.³⁴ The socialist ideology was never very profoundly developed by Lennstrand, neither at the center of his personal interest nor his public propaganda. He publicly underlined how utilism was not a socialist movement.³⁵ At times, however, he also expressed his adoration for the socialist ideology, was generally close to the labor movement, and cooperated with its members.³⁶ This particular affiliation reveals that Lennstrand’s utilism was closely connected to the rise of the popular movements, yet it was not the only connecting point, as will be shown in the following section.

Secularism in the Context of the Popular Movements The popular movements are vital for understanding the social change during this era, therefore key also to assess secularism, including the differences of Branting’s and Lennstrand’s secularisms. While the Association for the Freedom of Religion, in which Branting was engaged, had more modest aspirations of influencing politics and opinion on the issue of church and state, Lennstrand explicitly nourished hopes of forming a mass movement of utilism. He expressed his conviction repeatedly, such as in one article in Fritänkaren, where he claimed the journal would be the means to “skapa en stark, enig och sjelfständig fritänkarorganisation och ateistisk folkrörelse som motvigt mot de alltmera tillväxande läsarsekterna och kristna arméerna” (“create a strong, united and independent freethought organization and atheist popular movement, as a  Viktor Lennstrand, Republiken, allmänna rösträtten och fritänkeriet [The republic, the universal suffrage, and freethinking] (Stockholm: s.l., 1891), 3.  Ibid., 4– 5.  Viktor Lennstrand, “Är utilismen socialistisk? [Is utilism socialist?],” Social-Demokraten, November 24, 1888.  Not least after his first prison sentence, he seems to have been tilted toward socialism more explicitly. Alexandersson, Förnekelsens förbannelse, 299.

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counterweight to the ever growing reader sects and Christian armies”).³⁷ More privately, in his correspondence with friends, he outlined how he wanted to model his own movement on the successful free church movements.³⁸ Judging by what I have highlighted as the hallmarks of the three main Swedish popular movements, Lennstrand’s Utilist Society certainly ticked in most of the boxes. His association was an attempt to collectively organize around the discontent with the old regime, in this case specifically the church and organized Christianity. Lennstrand’s movement targeted the lower classes, and tried to assemble the broader strands of the population, rather than being an exclusive club for the social or intellectual elite. He wanted to create a new norm system and fostered hopes for what he believed would be a better, reformed society without traditional religion. Similar to the other movements, the utilists held regular meetings with singing and speeches, and Lennstrand toured the country to spread pamphlets, to preach, and to found local chapters of the society, which were to be run democratically. Despite its high aspirations and the personal engagement of its charismatic leader, utilism failed to become a popular movement, in the sense of gaining a large following over time. Its negatively framed message – against Christianity – was not enough to set a mass movement in motion. Membership never exceeded 2,000, a figure stated by the organization itself.³⁹ Utilism died with its founder, and never became a movement with the strength to evolve independently of its leader. Lennstrand’s biographer Pär Alexandersson, therefore, has aptly described utilism as a “one-man popular movement.”⁴⁰ Secularism in the late nineteenth century was not only incidentally a phenomenon emerging simultaneously with the popular movements; it is strongly entangled with them, also apart from Lennstrand’s visions. While decidedly less successful than Lennstrand’s attempt, there were also other freethought organizations similar to the popular movements of that time.⁴¹ Even though no large-scale study of the connections between the free churches and organized secularism in Sweden exists, it is clear that they had an important, mutually constitutive relation. First of all, proponents of secularism like Branting and Lenn-

 Viktor Lennstrand, “Till Fritänkarens vänner och prenumeranter! [To friends and subscribers of Fritänkaren!],” Fritänkaren 2, no. 24 (1890): 185. Sweden’s revivalist Christians were often called läsare (readers) because of their avid reading, both of the Bible and Christian literature of tracts, journals and newspapers.  Öhrman, “Viktor E. Lennstrand,” 133; Alexandersson, Förnekelsens förbannelse, 101– 112.  See Ståhle, Organisationer för svensk religionskritik, 15.  Alexandersson, Förnekelsens förbannelse, 220.  Ståhle, Organisationer för svensk religionskritik.

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strand, and the often zealously born-again Christians of the free churches revealed similar interests in their opposition toward the existing Lutheran state church. This becomes evident in the strongly anticlerical monthly magazine Ärkeängeln (The Archangel) which included information about Lennstrand and defended him and other freethinkers, but, at the same time, gave voice to free church representatives and their fierce critique of the state church.⁴² When the Association for Freedom of Religion was founded, apart from notorious freethinkers, there were also Methodists and Baptists involved (even though they quickly seemed to have withdrawn from the organization).⁴³ Enmity was, however, the main trend. Prominent freethinkers such as Lennstrand, Branting, and Anton Nyström were strongly opposed to the free churches, and lambasted revivalist Christians for being superstitious, irrational, or even lunatic.⁴⁴ On a metalevel, these conflicts proved identificatory for both sides: the revivalist Christians were a vital part of the necessary enemy image for the freethinkers. The threat of growing secularism, on the other hand, welded together the adherents of the free church movement. Secularism, finally, was an important aspect of the labor movement and the socialist ideology it adopted during the 1880s. Not only Branting, but also other leading social democrats were prosecuted for blasphemy.⁴⁵ But the exact profile and role of secularism within the Swedish social democracy was somewhat contended, and the secularism which came to dominate was in conflict with other forms of secularism, most notably the one proposed by Viktor Lennstrand. This will become even clearer when we now return to the 1890 debate of Branting and Lennstrand.

 Ärkeängeln however, was only published for one year (1890).  Nerman, Hjalmar Branting – fritänkaren, 17– 27.  Anton Nyström was a physician, and as such relied on scientific argumentation to back up his claims that revivalist Christianity created insanity. Anton Nyström, Samhälliga tidsfrågor: En följd af folkskrifter, 5, Om läseri och sinnesrubbning (Stockholm: Positivistiska missionen, 1880). The utilist journal Fritänkaren regularly printed articles on how religious brooding caused people to become depressed or crazy. See also Branting on the madness of different Christian denominations: Hjalmar Branting, “Steyerns nya munkorgslagar [Steyern’s new laws of muzzle],” in Tal och skrifter III: Kampen för demokratin I, ed. Hjalmar Branting and Zeth Höglund (Stockholm: Tiden, 1927), 45.  Alexandersson, Förnekelsens förbannelse, 333.

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A Clash of Secularisms: Materialism or Rationalism The secularism-debate launched on November 9, 1890 – briefly described in the introduction of this chapter – was not unprecedented, but in many ways continued or condensed what had been uttered earlier, mainly in newspapers: Lennstrand had faced critique by social democrats on many occasions. Also Branting, in 1888, had published a text entitled Vän eller fiende? (Friend or foe?), in which he pondered on whether the utilists were companions or enemies of the labor movement. A week before the debate of November 9, Lennstrand had given a speech in the same location, Mosebacke, stating his view on the importance of utilism for the labor movement. Branting replied briefly on this in his newspaper, but in greater detail during the debate.⁴⁶ A main point of disagreement between the two freethinkers was the necessity of an independent anti-Christian popular movement. The term folkrörelse – popular movement – is not a historiographical term coined in retrospect, but was very much how the labor movement understood itself at that time. And for the leading social democrats, the social democratic labor movement was the only legitimate popular movement: Branting, in the debate, explicitly stated that the utilists could not be allowed to become a popular movement; it was his opinion that “the only popular movement which is legitimate is the social democratic one.”⁴⁷ In his text from 1888, Branting had not really seen utilism as necessarily a foe, or a threat, at least not as long as utilitism remained a special interest for the most engaged, but if utilitists would start to rally the masses, “then there is a danger.”⁴⁸ Workers, according to Branting, did not have the time and energy to be engaged in too many activities at once. A utilist movement focusing on propaganda against religion would, in that case, be a competitor, not a friend. That is why Branting continued to underscore that “the class organization of the

 Hjalmar Branting, “Utilismens behövlighet som särskild rörelse [The necessity of utilism as a specific movement],” in Tal och skrifter I: Socialistisk samhällssyn I, ed. Hjalmar Branting and Zeth Höglund (Stockholm: Tiden, 1926), 141– 143.  Viktor Lennstrand and Hjalmar Branting, Socialism och utilism: Föredrag af Viktor E. Lennstrand och hrr Brantings och Lennstrands anföranden vid diskussionen å Mosebacke söndagen den 9 nov. 1890 [Socialism and utilism: Lectures by Viktor E. Lennstrand and Mr Branting’s and Lennstrand’s speeches at the debate at Mosebacke, Sunday, November 9, 1890] (Stockholm: Utilistiska propagandans skrifter, 1890), 19.  Hjalmar Branting, “Vän eller fiende? [Friend or foe?],” in Tal och skrifter I: Socialistisk samhällssyn I, ed. Hjalmar Branting and Zeth Höglund (Stockholm: Tiden, 1926), 139.

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workers must not be harmed by any association for specific causes.”⁴⁹ Another reason why this was wrong was that, although socialism, according to Branting and his fellows, was really materialist and thus incongruent with any kind of positive religion, there were still many religious workers. The labor movement, therefore, had to tread carefully so as not to alienate its members by a too harsh critique of their religious convictions. While this seemed mainly an argument against an all too radical anti-religious propaganda within social democracy, it also related to utilism as an independent movement: in the countryside, Branting argued, priests used a highly stylized negative picture of utilism for polemics to dissuade “stupid readers” from any kind of reform movement.⁵⁰ Lennstrand centered his reply on the continuing power of organized Christianity, pointing out, in a long tirade, the high numbers of existing churches, priests and free church pastors, children in Sunday schools, and the strong financial resources of both the state and the free churches. To him it seemed all too obvious that this condition ought to be countered immediately. And why should the social democrats focus on the insignificant Utilist Society, which held two lectures for every 250 Christian lectures, only in Stockholm? An argument between socialists and utilists, following Lennstrand, would only hinder the fight for enlightenment, and strengthen the Christian churches.⁵¹ Utilism was absolutely necessary as a movement to fight the supposed bad influence of Christianity on the people, Lennstrand claimed in his resolution, which was voted down in favor of Branting’s at the end of the meeting.⁵² In his speech given a week earlier, Lennstrand had advocated even stronger for enlightenment and the necessity of utilism as a movement. To him, utilism’s categorization was indubitable: “en folkrörelse är det” (“it is a popular movement”), Lennstrand stated and claimed that it had been so since the founding of his society.⁵³ And there was a need for it. History taught, Lennstrand asserted, that every reform or revolution must first be prepared by enlightenment, by changing people’s minds. He emphasized that the French Revolution was preceded by a period with the very name of the Enlightenment. No wonder the Spanish Revolution had failed, he continued, because the priests had dominated over opinions and prevented any preparatory movement to waken up the peo-

 Ibid. See also Hjalmar Branting, “Socialdemokrati och utilism [Social democracy and utilism],” in Tal och skrifter I: Socialistisk samhällssyn I, ed. Hjalmar Branting and Zeth Höglund (Stockholm: Tiden, 1926), 145.  Lennstrand and Branting, Socialism och utilism, 20.  Ibid., 22– 24.  Nerman, Hjalmar Branting – fritänkaren, 115 – 116.  Lennstrand and Branting, Socialism och utilism, 5.

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ple.⁵⁴ “Vi utilister vilja just utföra detta nödvändiga förberedelsearbete. Vi angripa den kristna religionen, hvilken är det stora klippblock som ligger för framtidens port.” (“We utilists want to perform precisely this necessary preparatory work. We attack the Christian religion, which is the boulder that is blocking the gate to the future.”)⁵⁵ This declaration could, in a way, be seen as a question of organization and tactics. The same holds true for Branting’s claim that focusing on religion – or rather the critique of religion – might be counter-productive. Offenses against Christianity could stir up religious interests; therefore, the best thing would be not to quarrel.⁵⁶ An indifferent attitude toward religion, in Branting’s view, was also a way of fighting it. This ties in with the fact that the disagreement between the socialists and utilists did not stop at tactics and organization, but also includes their disparate ways of conceiving religion and secularity. Branting’s claim that creating religious indifference would be the best way to counter religion was rooted in his general materialist Marxist worldview. He left no doubt about his conviction that material or economic relations were the foundation of the entire “superstructure” of society: “If one wants to change religion profoundly, one should ensure that its conditions are changed, or in other words, simply: The belief in an afterlife receives a death-blow only when this life is made rich and worth living.”⁵⁷ This often repeated view clearly echoes Karl Marx’s famous presupposition that the vale of tears in this world needs to be changed in order to eradicate the dazing opium of the people.⁵⁸ Lennstrand, on the other hand, did not take religion as a mere secondary phenomenon. He was clear about the socialists’ position: “Their opinion is a mistake. Religion is not one of the superstructures of this society, but one of its foundations. And as long as Christianity is believed and preached, this society will stand steadfast.”⁵⁹ To Lennstrand, religion was not attached to or depending

 Ibid., 7– 8.  Ibid., 7.  Branting, “Vän eller fiende?,” 138.  Ibid., 135.  Karl Marx, “Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie: Einleitung,” in Werke, vol. 1, ed. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (Berlin: Dietz, 1956), 378 – 391. For similar arguments of Branting, see Lennstrand and Branting, Socialism och utilism, 19 – 20; Branting, “Utilismens behövlighet som särskild rörelse”; Branting, “Socialdemokrati och utilism”; Hjalmar Branting, “Religionen en privatsak [Religion, a private matter],” in Tal och skrifter VIII: Stridsfrågor inom arbetarrörelsen, ed. Hjalmar Branting and Zeth Höglund (Stockholm: Tiden, 1929), 84– 88; and Hjalmar Branting, “Viktor E. Lennstrand,” in Tal och skrifter X: Stridskamrater och vänner, ed. Hjalmar Branting and Zeth Höglund (Stockholm: Tiden, 1929), 27– 34.  Lennstrand and Branting, Socialism och utilism, 6.

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on economic conditions, but proved a basic tenet of humanity, although one which could be changed. Both were aware of their disagreement. Branting repeatedly reflected on the two possible ways of fighting religion: the materialist one, or, as he sometimes called it, the historical one, which asked for the causes of religion and hoped to change them, and the rationalist one, which strove to expose errors in the Christian message and to convince people of its falsity.⁶⁰ Lennstrand would agree with Branting’s description, but point out the importance of the latter. It was his belief that to engage with the “lunacy” of religion and ultimately get rid of it was the same thing – improving the world – as the socialists do when they engage with social inequalities.⁶¹ Branting and other social democrats called utilism a “sect” and consequently, with Lennstrand’s insistence on rational argumentation about religion, to them, he seemed in a sense himself a theologian. From a social democratic perspective, the utilists only proved that they had not yet entered a higher cultural stage. Branting felt that the utilist critique of the Holy Scripture was a confession of “not having grown up and surpassed the Bible, as they [the utilists] want to use the Bible to kill itself, not by positing it as just one book among millions of others.”⁶² The raison d’être of utilism, thus, was entirely to counter religion, a very clear and direct expression of secularism. The social democrats were also secularists, in being anticlerical and often also anti-religious, in wanting to separate state and church, and in providing an alternative worldview. According to Branting, historical materialism and religion were basically opposed. He himself called socialism a “worldview” which was “incompatible” with religion.⁶³ However, both in worldview and tactics, Branting and his fellow social democrats still posited religion as being of secondary importance, since the realization of socialism was superordinate. Thus the Swedish social democrats followed their German forerunners, and declared religion a Privatsache, a private matter.⁶⁴ This let them po-

 Branting, “Utilismens behövlighet som särskild rörelse.”  Lennstrand and Branting, Socialism och utilism, 11.  Branting, “Vän eller fiende?,” 133.  Ibid., 137. This position did not change after the clash between Branting and the socialists with Lennstrand and the utilists. See Hjalmar Branting’s views (in 1893), “Religionsfrihet [Freedom of religion],” in Tal och skrifter III: Kampen för demokratin I, ed. Hjalmar Branting and Zeth Höglund (Stockholm: Tiden, 1927), 27– 34.  See Sebastian Prüfer, Sozialismus statt Religion: Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie vor der religiösen Frage, 1863 – 1890 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002), 192– 199. For further information on German social democracy and freethought, see Todd Weir, Secularism and Religion

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sition themselves sharply against the state church and the religious influence over schools and education, and at the same time advocate religious tolerance, within as well as outside their own party and movement. Declaring religion a private matter was Branting’s conviction before and after the debate with Lennstrand. It was strengthened even more when Branting attended a meeting of the German social democrats in Halle in 1890, where he heard Wilhelm Liebknecht defending this parole.⁶⁵ As mentioned before, Branting’s materialist resolution won out when the audience voted on November 9, 1890, and it may be said that Branting succeeded in the long run as well. The chapter will conclude by taking into account this longue durée, and the legacies of the two Swedish secularisms.

Conclusion: The Legacy of Lennstrand’s and Branting’s Secularisms Having served his blasphemy sentence, Hjalmar Branting left the Långholmen prison in Stockholm on October 28, 1889. The newspaper Dagens Nyheter reported from the scenery of his release from prison: around a thousand people had gathered together, and when Branting passed the crowd in his coach there were celebratory exclamations and “loud hoorays.” Afterwards, he attended an overcrowded party which went on until the late hours.⁶⁶ On the very same day, Viktor Lennstrand also passed the prison gates, but in the opposite direction, starting his second imprisonment for blasphemy under much less noticed circumstances.⁶⁷ The fates of the two freethinkers on this particular day may in a sense serve as an analogy for their legacies: Branting hailed in public as a popular leader, well remembered and honored; Lennstrand alone, confined to isolation, and comparatively forgotten. In a concrete and direct sense, Lennstrand’s influence and legacy has been weak. Utilism died with him, and no other secularist organization has gained major influence in twentieth-century Sweden. Today, there exists a prominent in Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Rise of the Fourth Confession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 158 – 172.  Hjalmar Branting, “Socialdemokratin i Tyskland [Social democracy in Germany],” Social-Demokraten, October 27, 1890, n.p.; Branting, “Religionen en privatsak”; Branting, “Religionsfrihet”; and Branting, “Vän eller fiende?,” 137.  “Hjalmar Brantings frigifvande,” Dagens Nyheter, October 29, 1889, n.p.  Lennstrand had served his first sentence in Malmö. (Alexandersson, Förnekelsens förbannelse, 293 – 298; 316.)

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Swedish association for secular humanism, Humanisterna, but even though Lennstrand has been occasionally mentioned in this journal, his memory remains peripheral.⁶⁸ In historiography, he has not been entirely forgotten, but it took more than a century after his death for a sound scholarly biography to appear.⁶⁹ Outside research focusing on religion and freethought, he does not attract much attention. It is telling that Lennstrand was not even mentioned in the latest comprehensive synthesis of the history of Sweden covering the turn of the last century, although, for a few years, he was one of the most famous personalities in Sweden.⁷⁰ In a way this is understandable given his minor immediate influence. But it would be possible to consider a more indirect legacy of Lennstrand’s secularism, even though it is harder to measure. He was one of those who, by a radical critique of Christianity, widened the possibilities for utterances and lifestyles which defied the Christian religion, and, with that, prepared the way for further secularist claims in the public sphere in the twentieth century.⁷¹ Hjalmar Branting’s personal legacy has certainly been much more lasting than Lennstrand’s due to his leading role in social democracy which came to dominate Swedish politics in the twentieth century. His activity as a freethinker has been appreciated in later periods as well. Branting and the Association for the Freedom of Religion were also repeatedly mentioned as an inspiration for the 1950s–60s League for the Freedom of Religion.⁷² And the secularism of Branting, or rather the social democratic secularism which he prominently represented, has to be considered when discussing the state of secularity in Sweden today. While this is not the place to discuss in detail why Sweden ranks among the least believing countries in the world, some reflections may be added.⁷³ Socio-

 See, e. g., Gerhard Köppen, “Ur fritänkeriets svenska historia,” HEF-EKO, no. 56 (1988): 13 – 15; and Håkan Blomqvist, “Föregångarna och framtiden,” Humanisten: Tidskrift för kulturoch livsåskådningsdebatt 7, no. 2 (2001): 44– 45. There are other Swedish freethinkers who have been more central to the identity of Humanisterna, primarily professor of philosophy Ingemar Hedenius. See Anton Jansson, “‘A Swedish Voltaire’: The Life and Afterlife of Ingemar Hedenius, 20th-Century Atheist,” Secularism and Nonreligion 7, art. 4 (2018): 1– 10.  Alexandersson, Förnekelsens förbannelse.  Stråth, Sveriges historia: 1830 – 1920.  See, e. g., Sven Thidevall, Kampen om samhällsreligionen: Dagens nyheters djävulskampanj 1909 (Skellefteå: Artos Academic, 2016).  The author and social democratic politician Ture Nerman was one of the leaders of this later organization. Nerman wrote a book about Branting as a freethinker, to which I refer in this chapter. Branting also appeared in the journal of the 1950s organization. See “Friskare toner på 80talet,” Fri tanke 5, no. 2 (1958): 5 – 8.  Measuring secularity and non-belief is tricky. Based on the percentage of self-declared nonbelievers, Sweden is one of the most atheist or secular in the world. Phil Zuckerman, “Atheism:

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logical explanations for Swedish secularity include the high levels of social security and the inclusion of women in the workplace, supported by the social democratic welfare state.⁷⁴ The ideological impulse of social democracy should also be taken into account. Historian of socialism Sebastian Prüfer has pointed out that, even though the idea that socialism constitutes a “new religion” is exaggerated, it is still possible to claim that socialism, including social democracy, has been an alternative to traditional religion. This is because socialism provides an immanent worldview explaining the conditions of humanity and offers solutions to social problems. Prüfer calls this “socialism instead of religion.”⁷⁵ Concerning self-identity and worldview, this holds true also for the Swedish social democracy of the twentieth century. It is not that Swedish social democrats were always aggressively and explicitly pushing secularism. The relation between social democracy and religion in Sweden has been complex and changing, and there have of course been differing opinions on the issue within the social democratic party. What can be said is that while the Swedish Social Democratic Party has retained freedom of religion as a central value and some sort of formulation of the desire to separate state and church among their central objectives, this was not always prioritized during the long period when the social democrats held government power and were able to greatly reform and influence Swedish society. The Church of Sweden did not lose its status as state church until the year 2000.⁷⁶ Starting from the late nineteenth century, a general trend of moderation toward or even accommodation of the church in the social democratic project Contemporary Numbers and Patterns,” in The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, ed. Michael Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 47– 66. For a nuanced discussion of the complexity of Swedish secularity and secularization, see chapter 1 in David Thurfjell, Det gudlösa folket: De postkristna svenskarna och religionen (Stockholm: Molin & Sorgenfrei, 2015).  Phil Zuckerman, “Why are Danes and Swedes so Irreligious?,” Nordic Journal of Religion & Society 22, no. 1 (2009): 55 – 69; Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Interestingly, the social security thesis echoes Branting’s Marxist position that the abolition of material hardships would change the superstructural construction of religion.  Prüfer, Sozialismus statt Religion, 330 – 337. This is a somewhat weaker claim than the notion that socialism (and other modern ideologies) constitute a new “political religion” or “secular religion” – an idea spread through the works of, among many others, Eric Voegelin and Emilio Gentile.  From the first party programs of 1897 – and for over half a century – the abolition of the state church was stipulated. Later, from 1960 on, this was reframed to regulate the relation between state and church according to the principle of the freedom of religion. See Klaus Misgeld, ed., Socialdemokratins program: 1897 till 1990 (Stockholm: Arbetarrörelsens arkiv och bibliotek, 2001).

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seems to have been prevalent.⁷⁷ This has been described as a secular development by “consensus” rather than “confrontation.”⁷⁸ Against this backdrop it may be stated that Branting’s position has won out: a basic secularism which, however, is less prioritized and politicized than the material and social issues, and possible to compromise around. It is conceivable that Sweden, therefore, has displayed a comparatively large indifference to Christianity. Of course, these are tentative reflections, but no exploration of secularity in Sweden should entirely omit social democracy, its history and legacy. In these respects, the study of the secularisms of the nineteenth century, as well as the popular movements and religion, continues to be indispensable.

Bibliography Periodical literature: Ärkeängeln 1890 Fritänkaren 1889 – 1894 Tänk Sjelf! 1891 Alexandersson, Pär. Förnekelsens förbannelse: Viktor Lennstrand som förkunnare och blasfemiker. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2014. Anderson, Karen M. “The Church as Nation? The Role of Religion in the Development of the Swedish Welfare State.” In Religion, Class Coalitions, and Welfare States, edited by Kees van Kersbergen and Philip Manow, 210 – 235. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Anon. “Hjalmar Brantings frigifvande.” Dagens Nyheter, October 29, 1889. Anon. “Notiser.” Fritänkaren 3, no. 17 (1891): 136. Anon. “Friskare toner på 80-talet.” Fri tanke 5, no. 2 (1958): 5 – 8. Bengtsson, Erik. “The Swedish Sonderweg in Question: Democratization and Inequality in Comparative Perspective, c. 1750 – 1920.” Past & Present 244, no. 1 (2020): 123 – 161.

 See Karen M. Anderson, “The Church as Nation? The Role of Religion in the Development of the Swedish Welfare State,” in Religion, Class Coalitions, and Welfare States, ed. Kees van Kersbergen and Philip Manow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 210 – 235. Further studies of the relation between state, social democracy, and church include: Sören Ekström, Makten över kyrkan: Om Svenska kyrkan, folket och staten (Stockholm: Verbum, 2000); Urban Claesson, Folkhemmets kyrka: Harald Hallén och folkkyrkans genombrott: En studie av socialdemokrati, kyrka och nationsbygge med särskild hänsyn till perioden 1905 – 1933 (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2004); and Tobias Harding, “The Dawn of the Secular State? Heritage and Identity in Swedish Church and State Debates 1920 – 1939,” International Journal of Cultural Policy 22, no. 4 (2016): 631– 647.  Ibid., 631.

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Bexell, Oloph. Sveriges kyrkohistoria: 7, Folkväckelsens och kyrkoförnyelsens tid. Stockholm: Verbum, 2003. Blomqvist, Håkan. “Föregångarna och framtiden.” Humanisten: Tidskrift för kultur- och livsåskådningsdebatt 7, no. 2 (2001): 44 – 45. Branting, Hjalmar. Hvarför arbetarerörelsen måste bli socialistisk: Föredrag hållet första gången på inbjudan af Gefle arbetareklubb 24 okt 1886. Stockholm: Social-Demokraten, 1887. Branting, Hjalmar. “Socialdemokratin i Tyskland.” Social-Demokraten, October 27, 1890. Branting, Hjalmar. Socialismen: en historisk framställning. Stockholm: Bonnier, 1892. Branting, Hjalmar. En vidräkning med det moderna samhället. Östersund: Jämtlandsposten, 1897. Branting, Hjalmar. “Socialdemokrati och utilism.” In Tal och skrifter I: Socialistisk samhällssyn I, edited by Hjalmar Branting and Zeth Höglund, 144 – 148. Stockholm: Tiden, [1890] 1926. Branting, Hjalmar. “Utilismens behövlighet som särskild rörelse.” In Tal och skrifter I: Socialistisk samhällssyn I, edited by Hjalmar Branting and Zeth Höglund, 141 – 143. Stockholm: Tiden, [1890] 1926. Branting, Hjalmar. “Vän eller fiende?” In Tal och skrifter I: Socialistisk samhällssyn I, edited by Hjalmar Branting and Zeth Höglund, 132 – 140. Stockholm: Tiden, [1888] 1926. Branting, Hjalmar. “Religionsfrihet.” In Tal och skrifter III: Kampen för demokratin I, edited by Hjalmar Branting and Zeth Höglund, 27 – 34. Stockholm: Tiden, [1893] 1927. Branting, Hjalmar. “Steyerns nya munkorgslagar.” In Tal och skrifter III: Kampen för demokratin I, edited by Hjalmar Branting and Zeth Höglund, 41 – 48. Stockholm: Tiden, [1887] 1927. Branting, Hjalmar. “Vårt åtal.” In Tal och skrifter III: Kampen för demokratin I, edited by Hjalmar Branting and Zeth Höglund, 49 – 54. Stockholm: Tiden, [1888] 1927. Branting, Hjalmar. “Religionen en privatsak.” In Tal och skrifter VIII: Stridsfrågor inom arbetarrörelsen, edited by Hjalmar Branting and Zeth Höglund, 84 – 88. Stockholm: Tiden, [1904] 1929. Branting, Hjalmar. “Viktor E. Lennstrand.” In Tal och skrifter X: Stridskamrater och vänner, edited by Hjalmar Branting and Zeth Höglund, 27 – 34. Stockholm: Tiden, [1895] 1929. Casanova, José. “The Secular, Secularizations, Secularisms.” In Rethinking Secularism, edited by Craig J. Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, 54 – 74. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Chalcraft, John. “Popular Movements in the Middle East and North Africa.” In The History of Social Movements in Global Perspective: A Survey, edited by Stefan Berger and Holger Nehring, 1 – 35. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Claesson, Urban. Folkhemmets kyrka: Harald Hallén och folkkyrkans genombrott: En studie av socialdemokrati, kyrka och nationsbygge med särskild hänsyn till perioden 1905 – 1933. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2004. Edquist, Samuel. Nyktra svenskar: Godtemplarrörelsen och den nationella identiteten 1879 – 1918. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2001. Ekström, Sören. Makten över kyrkan: Om Svenska kyrkan, folket och staten. Stockholm: Verbum, 2000. Frängsmyr, Tore. Svensk idéhistoria: Bildning och vetenskap under tusen år. Del 2, 1809 – 2000. Stockholm: Natur och kultur, 2000.

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Gidlund, Gullan. “From Popular Movement to Political Party: Development of the Social Democratic Labor Party Organization.” In Creating Social Democracy: A Century of the Social Democratic Labor Party in Sweden, edited by Klaus Misgeld, Karl Molin and Klas Åmark, 97 – 130. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992. Harding, Tobias. “The Dawn of the Secular State? Heritage and Identity in Swedish Church and State Debates 1920 – 1939.” International Journal of Cultural Policy 22, no. 4 (2016): 631 – 647. Hilson, Mary. Political Change and the Rise of Labour in Comparative Perspective: Britain and Sweden, 1890 – 1920. Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2006. Jansson, Anton. “‘A Swedish Voltaire’: The Life and Afterlife of Ingemar Hedenius, 20th-Century Atheist.” Secularism and Nonreligion 7, art. 4 (2018): 1 – 10. Köppen, Gerhard. “Ur fritänkeriets svenska historia.” HEF-EKO, no. 56 (1988): 13 – 15. Lennstrand, Viktor. “Är utilismen socialistisk?” Social-Demokraten, November 24, 1888. Lennstrand, Viktor. Hvad jag sagt och hvad jag icke sagt: Föredrag hållet å Hörsalen i Örebro den 30 maj 1888. Stockholm: s.l., 1888. Lennstrand, Viktor. De fyra evangelierna, deras uppkomst och historiska värde: Föredrag, hållet på Svenska teatern den 14 april 1889. Stockholm: s.l., 1889. Lennstrand, Viktor. Det åtalade föredraget om “Gud.” Stockholm: s.l., 1889. Lennstrand, Viktor. Hvarför uppträder jag mot kristendomen? Stockholm: s.l., 1890. Lennstrand, Viktor. “Till Fritänkarens vänner och prenumeranter!” Fritänkaren 2, no. 24 (1890): 185. Lennstrand, Viktor. “Meddelande.” Fritänkaren 3, no. 19 (1891): 153. Lennstrand, Viktor. Republiken, allmänna rösträtten och fritänkeriet. Stockholm: s.l., 1891. Lennstrand, Viktor, and Hjalmar Branting. Socialism och utilism: Föredrag af Viktor E. Lennstrand och hrr Brantings och Lennstrands anföranden vid diskussionen å Mosebacke söndagen den 9 nov. 1890. Stockholm: Utilistiska propagandans skrifter, 1890. Lundkvist, Sven. Folkrörelserna i det svenska samhället 1850 – 1920. Stockholm: Sober, 1977. Lundkvist, Sven. “The Popular Movements in Swedish Society, 1850 – 1920.” Scandinavian Journal of History 5, no. 1 – 4 (1980): 219 – 238. Lundkvist, Sven. Tron och gärningarna: Svenska missionsförbundets bakgrund och utveckling till omkring 1970. Uppsala: Svenska institutet för missionsforskning, 2003. Magnusson, Lars. An Economic History of Sweden. London: Routledge, 2000. Marx, Karl. “Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie: Einleitung.” In Werke, vol. 1, edited by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 378 – 391. Berlin: Dietz, [1844] 1956. Misgeld, Klaus, ed. Socialdemokratins program: 1897 till 1990. Stockholm: Arbetarrörelsens arkiv och bibliotek, 2001. Nerman, Ture. Hjalmar Branting: Kulturpublicisten. Stockholm: Tiden, 1958. Nerman, Ture. Hjalmar Branting – fritänkaren. Stockholm: Tiden, 1960. Norris, Pippa, and Ronald Inglehart. Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Nyström, Anton. Samhälliga tidsfrågor: En följd af folkskrifter. 5, Om läseri och sinnesrubbning. Stockholm: Positivistiska missionens tryckeri, 1880. Öhrman, William. “Viktor E. Lennstrand, en anti-Waldenström.” Kyrkohistorisk årsskrift 74 (1974): 115 – 147. Okristen, Kettil. “Hvad en fritänkare tror på.” Tänk Sjelf! Utilistiskt flygblad 1, no. 1 (1891): 1.

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Prüfer, Sebastian. Sozialismus statt Religion: Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie vor der religiösen Frage, 1863 – 1890. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002. Putnam, Samuel P. 400 Years of Freethought. New York: The Truth Seeker Company, 1894. Robertson, John Mackinnon. A History of Freethought in the Nineteenth Century, vol. 2. London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1969. Sanner, Inga. Att älska sin nästa såsom sig själv: Om moraliska utopier under 1800-talet. Stockholm: Carlsson, 1995. Ståhle, Lennart. Organisationer för svensk religionskritik 1880 – 1910. Stockholm: Religionssociologiska institutet, 1979. Stråth, Bo. Sveriges historia: 1830 – 1920. Stockholm: Norstedt, 2012. Svenning, Olle. Hövdingen – Hjalmar Branting: En biografi. Stockholm: Bonnier, 2014. Thidevall, Sven. Kampen om samhällsreligionen: Dagens nyheters djävulskampanj 1909. Skellefteå: Artos Academic, 2016. Thomson, Otto. “Tidstecken i England.” Fritänkaren 1, no. 1 (1889): 6. Thurfjell, David. Det gudlösa folket: De postkristna svenskarna och religionen. Stockholm: Molin & Sorgenfrei, 2015. Tjäder, Per Arne. “Det unga Sverige”: Åttitalsrörelse och genombrottsepok. Lund: Arkiv för studier i arbetarrörelsens historia, 1982. Weir, Todd. Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Rise of the Fourth Confession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Weir, Todd. “Germany and the New Global History of Secularism: Questioning the Postcolonial Genealogy.” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 90, no. 1 (2015): 6 – 20. Wohlrab-Sahr, Monika, and Marian Burchardt. “Multiple Secularities: Toward a Cultural Sociology of Secular Modernities.” Comparative Sociology 11, no. 6 (2012): 875 – 909. Zuckerman, Phil. “Atheism: Contemporary Numbers and Patterns.” In The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, edited by Michael Martin, 47 – 65. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Zuckerman, Phil. “Why are Danes and Swedes so Irreligious?” Nordic Journal of Religion & Society 22, no. 1 (2009): 55 – 69. Zuckerman, Phil, and John R. Shook. “Introduction: The Study of Secularism.” In The Oxford Handbook of Secularism, edited by Phil Zuckerman and John R. Shook, 1 – 17. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Acknowledgments: This work was supported by generous grants from Johan & Jakob Söderbergs stiftelse, and Birgit och Gad Rausings Stiftelse för Humanistisk forskning. I am grateful to Carolin Kosuch and Erik Bengtsson for very helpful comments on the text.

II Organized Freethought in National, International, and Transnational Entanglements

Christoffer Leber

Integration through Science? Nationalism and Internationalism in the German Monist Movement (1906 – 1918) Throughout the “long” nineteenth century, various actors and organizations of European freethought shaped ideas of modern and secular nationhood.¹ As recent studies have shown, nineteenth-century secularism was far from being anti-religious or atheist in general. On the contrary, secularism “was a manifestation of a highly religious age.”² Freethinkers in Germany, France, Italy, and Spain fought for a new concept of religion that was “more suited to a society undergoing rapid changes.”³ Although freethinkers established a transnational network based on the circulation of anti-Catholic books, journals, images, and codes, long-term cooperation between freethinkers was constrained by the political and national framework of their home countries. The failure of the AntiCouncil, organized by secularists, atheists, and freemasons in 1869 in order to protest against the First Vatican Council (1870), is one prominent example of the obstacles European freethinkers were faced with once they strove to collaborate beyond national borders.⁴

 On the history of European anticlericalism, see Manuel Borutta, Antikatholizismus: Deutschland und Italien im Zeitalter der europäischen Kulturkämpfe (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 22011); and Lisa Dittrich, Antiklerikalismus in Europa: Öffentlichkeit und Säkularisierung in Frankreich, Spanien und Deutschland (1848 – 1914) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014). On the history of freethinkers in Germany, Great Britain, and the US, see Edward Royle, Radicals, Secularists and Republicans: Popular Freethought in Britain, 1866 – 1915 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980); Susan Jacoby, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (New York: Henry Holt, 2005); Todd Weir, Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Rise of the Fourth Confession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); and Michael Rectenwald, Nineteenth-Century British Secularism: Science, Religion and Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).  Laura Schwartz, Infidel Feminism: Secularism, Religion and Women’s Emancipation, England 1830 – 1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 22.  Lisa Dittrich, “European Connections, Obstacles and the Search for a New Concept of Religion: The Freethinker Movement as an Example for Transnational Anti-Catholicism in the Second Half of the 19th Century,” Journal of Religious History 39, no. 2 (2015): 261.  See ibid., 267– 273. The Anti-Council was organized by the Italian freethinker and journalist Giuseppe Ricciardi. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110688283-009

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In an age of conflicting nationalisms, freethinkers envisioned a European public and developed an internationalist identity.⁵ The Fédération Internationale de la Libre Pensée (International Freethought Federation, IFF), founded in 1880 in Brussels, expressed freethinkers’ search for internationalism and provided a transnational forum for their exchange.⁶ Yet ideas of internationalism not only promoted and shaped, but also challenged secularist identities, as the history of the monist movement in Wilhelmine Germany reveals. In their writings and speeches, German monists had to balance out national and international perspectives of their movement: Wilhelm Ostwald (1853 – 1932), president of the Monist League between 1911 and 1915, emphasized the importance of international cooperation in his writings, while praising the scientific and technological achievements of the German Empire. The Deutsche Monistenbund (German Monist League) was founded in 1906 by the Zoologist Ernst Haeckel (1834 – 1919) and promoted a “totalizing worldview” based on scientific knowledge.⁷ Haeckel’s Monist League popularized what he called wissenschaftliche Weltanschauung (scientific worldview) in lectures, writings and the journal Das Monistische Jahrhundert (The Monist Century) as well as it opposed the influence of the Christian churches on Wilhelmine society. From the 1870s on, Haeckel started to publish popular books on Darwinism and evolution. Influenced by Darwin’s and Lamarck’s theories of evolution and Goethe’s pantheism, he praised monism as a new “link between religion and sci-

 On the creation of a European public among freethinkers, see Dittrich, Antiklerikalismus in Europa, 219 – 276; and Daniel Laqua, “Freethinkers, Anarchists and Francisco Ferrer: The Making of a Transnational Solidarity Campaign,” European Review of History 21, no. 4 (2014): 467– 484.  See Jeffrey Tyssens and Petri Mirala, “Transnational Seculars: Belgium as an International Forum for Freethinkers and Freemasons in the Belle Epoque,” Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire 90, no. 4 (2012): 1353 – 1372.  On the history of the monist movement, see Gangolf Hübinger, “Die Monistische Bewegung: Sozialingenieure und Kulturprediger,” in Kultur und Kulturwissenschaften um 1900, vol. 2: Idealismus und Positivismus, ed. Gangolf Hübinger, Rüdiger vom Bruch and Friedrich Wilhelm Graf (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1997), 246 – 259; Olaf Breidbach, “Monismus um 1900 – Wissenschaftspraxis oder Weltanschauung?,” Stapfia 56 (1998): 289 – 316; Paul Ziche, ed., Monismus um 1900: Wissenschaftskultur und Weltanschauung (Berlin: Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung, 2000); Eric Paul Jacobsen, From Cosmology to Ecology: The Monist World-View in Germany from 1770 to 1930 (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 2005); Adrian Brücker, Die Monistische Naturphilosophie im deutschsprachigen Raum um 1900 und ihre Folgen: Rekonstruktion und kritische Würdigung naturwissenschaftlicher Hegemonialansprüche in Philosophie und Wissenschaft (Berlin: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2011); and Todd Weir, ed., Monism: Science, Philosophy, Religion, and the History of a Worldview (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

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ence.”⁸ In his 1899 highly influential and bestselling book Die Welträtsel (The Riddles of the Universe) he worked out his monist philosophy for a broader public and claimed the unity of spirit and matter.⁹ The Monist League was shaped by the tradition of European freethought and became a main representative of anticlerical and anti-Catholic radicalism in Germany. As president of the league, Ostwald started to publish short articles on philosophical, cultural, and political topics provocatively called “Monistische Sonntagspredigten” (“Monist Sunday Sermons”).¹⁰ In these sermons, Ostwald sought to unite the heterogeneous views of German monists under the umbrella of his own version of monism, which he referred to as Energetik (energetics). Whereas Haeckel was strongly influenced by the idea of evolution, Ostwald regarded natural phenomena as manifestations of energy.¹¹ Although Ostwald envisioned monism as an international movement with science as its universal integrative force, the ideas of the German nation and culture remained powerful among monist thinkers. Thus I will argue that the selfperception of the German monist movement oscillated between a national and international identity. In other words, in German monism two conflicting concepts were at play – the universality of science and the particularity of the German nation. My understanding of internationalism is based on Glenda Sluga’s account on “internationalism in the age of nationalism.”¹² She defines the concepts of nationalism and internationalism as complementary to each other. Throughout the twentieth century, Sluga argues, these concepts were deeply intertwined and lastingly shaped ideas about national interdependence and sovereignty. This essay starts with a short outline of the German Monist League, its history, agenda, and social goals. I will then examine Wilhelm Ostwald’s concept of society and culture as living organisms that provided the conceptual background for his internationalism. The third part analyzes Ostwald’s ambiguous attitude toward nationalism and internationalism. In the last section of this chapter I  Ernst Haeckel, Monismus als Band zwischen Religion und Wissenschaft: Glaubensbekenntniss eines Naturforschers (Bonn: Emil Strauss, 1893), 9 – 46.  Haeckel’s Riddles of the Universe sold over 340,000 copies in 1918; see Hübinger, “Die monistische Bewegung,” 246.  See Wilhelm Ostwald, Monistische Sonntagpredigten, 5 vols. (Leipzig: Unesma, 1912– 1915).  See Wilhelm Ostwald, Die Überwindung des wissenschaftlichen Materialismus (Leipzig: Veit & Comp, 1895). On Ostwald’s energetic monism, see Caspar Hakfoort, “Science Deified: Wilhelm Ostwald’s Energeticist World-View and the History of Scientism,” Annals of Science 49, no. 6 (1992): 525 – 544.  Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).

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will show how his internationalist attitude changed after the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Subsequently, I will ask in how far Ostwald’s shift toward nationalism came as a sudden change of heart. My conclusion refers again to the issue of secularity, discussing, whether monists contributed to the concept of the secular in Germany.

The Monist Movement in the German Empire (1906 – 1918) Although the term “monism” dates back to the eighteenth century, it gained popularity particularly during the nineteenth century, when German secularists and freethinkers chose it to label their movement.¹³ It was during Enlightenment that the German philosopher Christian Wolff introduced monism in a treatise from 1721 to describe pantheism and philosophical systems opposing Christian dualism.¹⁴ Ernst Haeckel, professor of zoology in Jena, revived this terminology and popularized monism as a new scientific Weltanschauung. Linguist August Schleicher (1821– 1868) inspired him to use the term in an open letter from 1863: The direction of modern thought inevitably leads us to monism. The dualism, either understood as the opposition of spirit and nature, content and form, or essence and appearance, has become an outdated point of view for the natural sciences.¹⁵

While Haeckel started his scientific career as an evolutionary morphologist and a strong defender of Darwinism in the 1860s, he dedicated his later work to his monist philosophy. From the 1890s on, his monism adopted characteristics of panpsychism, claiming a consciousness in all natural phenomena and the identity of matter and force.¹⁶ This shift became evident in Haeckel’s notion of Theophysis which he used to emphasize nature’s creative power.¹⁷  See Horst Hillermann, “Zur Begriffsgeschichte von Monismus,” Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 20 (1976): 214– 235; and Jacobsen, From Cosmology to Ecology, 9 – 90.  See Weir, “Riddles of Monism,” 5.  Heinrich Schmidt, ed., Was wir Ernst Haeckel verdanken, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Unesma, 1914), 149. In the late nineteenth century, the term “Weltanschauung,” according to Todd Weir, characterized “a systematic understanding of the world as a meaningful totality that formed the basis of a community.” (Weir, “Riddles of Monism,” 13.) If not otherwise indicated, all translations are the author’s.  See Niles Holt, “Ernst Haeckel’s Monistic Religion,” Journal of the History of Ideas 32, no. 2 (1971): 279.  See ibid.; and Kleeberg, Theophysis.

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In his 1899 bestseller The Riddle of the Universe, Haeckel introduced his Substanzgesetz (law of substance) which he derived from the principles of mass and energy conservation. According to Haeckel, matter and force were two modes of the same hypothetical substance at the base of the universe. This law, he wrote, was “just as much an irrevocable principle “ in the sciences “as the dogma of the papal infallibility is for the Catholic Church.”¹⁸ Although contemporaries declared Haeckel to be the “German Darwin,” his monism was equally reminiscent of Goethe’s pantheism and romantic natural philosophy.¹⁹ In that sense, monism not only figured as an “intrusion” of science into the realms of philosophy and religion but also as an “intrusion” of a new worldview into the realm of science, as Todd Weir noted.²⁰ As already mentioned, Haeckel set up the German Monist League in Jena in early 1906.²¹ Albert Kalthoff, a left-liberal pastor from Bremen, became the league’s first president. Haeckel, who was already 72 at that time, felt too old to take over the organization’s presidency and declared himself honorary president. Two years earlier, however, he had been appointed the scientific “antipope” at the International Conference of Freethinkers in Rome – a provocative gesture directed against the head of the Catholic Church.²² Haeckel approached Wilhelm Ostwald in December 1910 to offer him the leadership of his league, a strategic move, since Ostwald was a famous scientist who had been awarded the Nobel Prize in 1909 for his research on chemical catalysis. Ostwald accepted the offer and started to promote his own version of monist thought called “energetics.”²³ Based on his reading of the first law of thermodynamics (energy conservation), Ostwald assumed that the physical world was driven by self-preserving energy. He therefore believed that energy – not matter – “was fundamental to the universe.”²⁴ In his memoirs, Ostwald summa-

 Ernst Haeckel, “Die Wissenschaft und der Umsturz,” Die Zukunft 10 (1895): 199.  See ibid., 265; and Kleeberg, “God-Nature Progressing: Natural Theology in German Monism,” Science in Context 20, no. 3 (2007): 537– 569.  Weir, “Riddles of Monism,” 14.  See Rosemarie Nöthlich, ed., Substanzmonismus und/oder Energetik: Der Briefwechsel von Ernst Haeckel und Wilhelm Ostwald (1910 bis 1918), Zum 100. Jahrestag der Gründung des Deutschen Monistenbundes (Berlin: Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung, 2006), 9 – 20. On the life and work of Ernst Haeckel, see Mario A. Di Gregorio, From Here to Eternity: Ernst Haeckel and Scientific Faith (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005); and Robert J. Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).  See Nöthlich, Substanzmonismus, 9 – 10.  See Hakfoort, “Science Deified,” 525 – 544.  Holt, “Ostwald’s Energeticism,” 369.

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rized his insight as follows: “What if energy had primary existence and matter was only a secondary product of energy – a complex of different energies?”²⁵ Referring to the second law of thermodynamics (entropy), he maintained that the transformation of free energy into a fixed “saturated” state was irreversible.²⁶ He therefore called for a new approach to ethics, summarized in the energetic imperative: “Vergeude keine Energie, nutze sie!” (“Don’t waste energy, utilize it!”)²⁷ The approaches popularized by Haeckel and Ostwald found a vivid echo among the German public. Thanks to Haeckel’s and Ostwald’s popular writings, monism dominated the debates on the relationship between science and religion at the turn of the century. Compared to other secularist organizations in the German Empire such as the Ethische Gesellschaft (Ethical Society) or the Freidenkerbund (Freethinker League) the Monist League became quite successful in terms of membership and impact. Under Ostwald’s presidency, the league cooperated with several reform movements such as the Gesellschaft für ethische Kultur (Society for Ethical Culture), the Bund für Mutterschutz (League for the Protection of Mothers), and the peace movement in order to push through social and cultural reforms on many levels. One of the main goals of the Monist League was to abolish religious instruction in schools. In 1909, several major freethought organizations in Germany, amongst them the Monist League, founded the Weimarer Kartell (Weimar Cartel) with the purpose to unite and defend secularist interests.²⁸ By 1912, the Monist League had managed to attract about 6,200 members organized in more than 40 local groups throughout Germany.²⁹ While the leading ranks of  Wilhelm Ostwald, Lebenslinien: Eine Selbstbiographie, vol. 2: Leipzig 1887 – 1905 (Berlin: Klasing & Co., 1927), 155.  Entropy is a measure of energy that is unavailable for doing useful work. It describes natural processes that are irreversible such as the melting of an ice cube within a glass of water. On the cultural history of energy conservation and entropy, see Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Elizabeth Neswald, Thermodynamik als kultureller Kampfplatz: Eine Faszinationsgeschichte der Entropie (Berlin: Rombach, 2003); and Daan Wegener, “A True Proteus: A History of Energy Conservation in German Science and Culture 1847– 1914” (PhD diss., University of Utrecht, 2009).  Wilhelm, Ostwald, Der energetische Imperativ (Leipzig: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1912), 99. Ostwald’s “energetic imperative” is one example for the use and translation of scientific knowledge amongst members of the German monist movement. For further reading, see Christoffer Leber, “Energetic Education: Monism, Religious Instruction, and School Reform in Fin-de-Siècle Germany,” Yearbook of the Italian-German Institute in Trient, Special Issue, Science and Religion: Revisiting a Complex Relationship 43, no. 1 (2017): 85 – 114.  See Horst Groschopp, Dissidenten: Freidenkerei und Kultur in Deutschland (Berlin: Dietz, 1997), 9 – 41.  See Weir, Secularism and Religion, 281.

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the monist movement clearly belonged to the German Bildungsbürgertum – the educated upper middle class – urban middle-class teachers, merchants, engineers, and physicians formed its main body.³⁰ Although the Monist League was a main actor of radical anticlericalism in Germany, its relation to religion remained ambiguous. While some philosophers and liberal theologians such as Kalthoff praised monism as a secular religion, others associated it with rationalist, even atheist notions.³¹ Subsequently, monists expressed different, sometimes even conflicting concepts of the secular: for some, secularity aimed at the separation of state and church, while for others its purpose was to strengthen religious freedom against the dominance of the state.

Society as Organism Monist thinkers such as Wilhelm Ostwald, Ernst Haeckel, and Franz Müller-Lyer regarded society as an organism that evolved along inherent laws. In drawing an analogy between the human social order and the biological organism, they followed a topos of their time present in scientific, popular, and political writings. In the nineteenth century, the state-as-organism metaphor was either used to compare the part-whole-relations of the body with those of a state, or to parallel animal states (mainly highly socialized species such as bees and ants) with human political organizations.³² Originally, the term “organism” implied a principle of form and order present in the natural world.³³ Influenced by eighteenthcentury natural philosophy, the notion later turned into a generic term for biological entities. Rudolf Virchow’s conception of the body as a Zellenstaat (state of cells) was probably the most prominent example of the body-as-state metaphor in nineteenth-century popular science. In his lecture on Arbeitsteilung in Natur- und Menschenleben (Division of Work in the Natural and Human Order, 1868), Ernst Haeckel already dwelled on the many ways in which nature fell back on cooperation to increase efficien-

 See Wilhelm Bloßfeldt, ed., Der erste internationale Monistenkongreß in Hamburg vom 8.– 11. September 1911 (Leipzig: Alfred Körner, 1912), 156.  See Lucian Hölscher, Geschichte der Protestantischen Frömmigkeit in Deutschland (Munich: C.H.Beck, 2005), 367.  See, for instance, Carl Vogt’s use of analogies between the animal and the human state in his book Thierstaaten (Animal States, 1851).  See Tobias Cheung, “What is an ‘Organism’? On the Occurrence of a New Term and Its Conceptual Transformation 1680 – 1850,” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 32 (2010): 155 – 194.

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cy. Building on the state-as-organism metaphor, he asserted that the very essence of human political order was collaboration and the division of work: “All organisms, as well as animals and plants – except for the most primitive ones – are made of cells. The unity of every single living organism is, like the political unity of every single state, the result of the combination and cooperation between these smallest ‘citizens.’ They form the actual elementary organisms.”³⁴ Forty years later, Ostwald revived those ideas and made use of organic analogies to justify international cooperation, especially in science and technology. Just as the human organism depended on the cooperative work of cells, science hinged on the international cooperation of nations, he declared. In this, Ostwald’s writings mirror the influence of the late-Enlightenment French philosopher Auguste Comte. Comte’s positivism held that true knowledge was based exclusively on natural phenomena and empirical data. His “law of three stages” implied that each civilization ran through three phases of development, namely: the theological, abstract, and scientific (positivist) one. These stages, according to Comte, corresponded to the mental development of the human being.³⁵ While the theological stage fell back to personified deities, the metaphysical stage resorted to impersonal, abstract concepts such as “nature” or “reason.” The most advanced stage of cultural development – the scientific one – relied on observation, experiment, and comparison to explain life in its totality. Comte’s understanding of history was permeated by teleology and finalism, since he was convinced that each civilization would culminate in a scientific age. Ostwald, who translated one of Comte’s earliest works into German and also authored a biography on the French philosopher, took up this stage model. Unlike Comte, however, he referred to these stages as the social, individual, and organizational one.³⁶ According to Ostwald, at the lowest, most primitive stage of human culture, humans lacked any individuality and defined themselves solely as part of a group (or as Ostwald put it: a herd). At this level, human will was subordinated to group decisions, as was the case in the Middle Ages. Following this typology, the rise of capitalism and the French Revolution led to the second, individual stage of development. In this period, new concepts like individual freedom and human rights incited people to criticize traditional authorities

 Ernst Haeckel, Ueber Arbeitstheilung im Natur- und Menschenleben (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1869), 27– 28.  On Comte’s “organic doctrine,” see Gerhard Wagner, Auguste Comte zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius, 2001), 59 – 63.  See Wilhelm Ostwald, Plan der wissenschaftlichen Arbeiten, die für eine Reform der Gesellschaft notwendig sind (Leipzig: Unesma, 1914); and Wilhelm Ostwald, Auguste Comte: Der Mann und sein Werk (Leipzig: Unesma, 1914).

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such as the Christian churches and absolutist rulers. The third and highest level of cultural development, Ostwald believed, was a synthesis of the former ones: the “period of organization.” From that moment on, society would organize itself on a national and international level using the tools of science and technology. Due to better living conditions, the scientific and technological progress would also contribute to higher moral standards.³⁷ Instead of struggling for existence, people would help and support each other for the sake of progress, Ostwald asserted. His notion of “organization” echoed the functionality of the biological organism: The term organization refers to the fact that future mankind ascribes to the individual the same role as the cell to the organism of the human being. The cells are different from each other (thanks to individualism). But they are created and shaped in a way that they complete each physical function in a perfect way, be it the sensory function, digestion, or the muscle contraction, so that the overall performance of such a living being reaches far beyond that of an entity organized according to the principles of a herd, such as a coral colony.³⁸

Ostwald envisioned the ideal state as an internationally embedded technocracy, in which scientists and engineers would control the affairs of their respective societies.³⁹ Although he condemned Catholicism – and Ultramontanism in particular – he compared his technocratic future vision to the internationally organized Catholic Church. Just as the church had gained control over society and mindset during the Middle Ages, the “international priesthood of the sciences” would become the leading political, moral, and cultural authority of the future, he concluded.⁴⁰ Given these analogies, Perry Myers defined Haeckel’s and Ostwald’s political conceptions as those of a “priestly class of elite thinkers.”⁴¹ In his Sunday ser-

 See Wilhelm Ostwald, Religion und Monismus (Leipzig: Unesma, 1914).  Ibid., 53.  On the history and philosophy of technocracy, see Hermann Lübbe, “Technokratie: Politische und wirtschaftliche Schicksale einer philosophischen Idee,” in Politik nach der Aufklärung: Philosophische Aufsätze, ed. Hermann Lübbe (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2001), 11– 37.  Ostwald, Religion und Monismus, 75: “Was also die katholische Priesterschaft im Mittelalter schon angestrebt und vorübergehend erreicht hat, was aber durch irrationale Beschaffenheit ihrer Grundlagen notwendig alsbald verschwinden mußte, das wird die internationale Priesterschaft der Wissenschaft mit vollkommener Sicherheit und ohne die Anwendung äußerer Zwangsmittel in täglich umfassenderem Maße erreichen.”  Perry Myers, “A Priestly Class of Thinkers: Monism between Science and the Spiritual in Wilhelmine Germany,” in Revisiting the “Nazi Occult”: Histories, Realities, Legacies, ed. Monica Black and Eric Kurlander (Rochester/New York: Camden House, 2014), 56.

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mon dedicated to the question whether monism was a threat to the state or not, Ostwald seemed to prove Myer’s point of an elitist self-image among those thinkers: “Only a permeation by monist thought,” he argued, “can enable our governments and state leaders to act in favor of the state. Only this thought triggers in them the higher capability of state organization that is the solely fitting form of existence for our contemporary cultural humanity.”⁴² The state-as-organism metaphor affected Ostwald’s understanding of the secular profoundly. In his view, a secular society was only possible by pushing forward scientific progress and by detaching the “cultural organism” from its religious remains.

A Question of Loyalty: Monism, Nationalism and Internationalism Up until the 1980s historians have argued that monism, and Haeckel’s philosophy in particular, have paved the way for the racist ideology of National Socialism in Germany.⁴³ On this matter, Daniel Gasman pointed out in 1971: “In the Monist ideology, radical racial nationalism was coupled with a profound and aggressive denial of the political and social assumptions of bourgeois liberalism.”⁴⁴ Yet, in recent years, historians have challenged this narrow view and offered a more differentiated, source-based reading of the relationship of monism, the German nation, and nationalism.⁴⁵ According to their findings, the Monist League’s early public work was certainly influenced by ideas of racial hygiene, social Darwinism, and anti-Catholic propaganda; however, it took a “leftward turn” after the collapse of the liberal-conservative coalition in 1909, the so-called BülowBlock. ⁴⁶ Especially under Ostwald’s presidency, members of the Monist League popularized Lamarckian theories and ideas of mutual aid which they linked to the energetic imperative.

 Wilhelm Ostwald, “Ist der Monismus staatsgefährlich?,” in Monistische Sonntagspredigten 3, 136. (English translation by Perry Myers.)  See Daniel Gasman, The Scientific Roots of National Socialism: Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League (London: Macdonald & Co., 1971).  Ibid., 44.  See Robert J. Richards, “That Darwin and Haeckel were Complicit in Nazi Biology,” in Galileo goes to Jail and other Myths about Science and Religion, ed. Ronald L. Numbers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 170 – 178; and Weir, “Riddles of Monism,” 24– 25.  See Weir, “Riddles of Monism,” 6.

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Yet, the history of German monism is characterized by a constant tension between “part” and “whole,” between national and international claims. On the one hand, monists celebrated their scientific worldview as the new, integrative force to achieve complete national unity by asserting that science prevailed over personal interests, confessional differences, and political struggles. They even went so far to propose their scientific worldview as a solution to the Jewish question and anti-Semitism.⁴⁷ Once Jews would adopt the scientific worldview, monists argued, they would abandon their cultural and religious idiosyncrasies and become an integral part of the German nation. On the other hand, monists like Ostwald stressed the international character of their worldview by arguing that science was a universal endeavor beyond national borders.⁴⁸ Ostwald, for instance, imagined a future world in which scientists managed the affairs of the state and cooperated in a transnational “republic of letters.”⁴⁹ However, the tension between nationalism and internationalism inevitably raised the question of loyalty, especially in times of increasing nationalistic sentiments: should monism be considered a national or an international movement? Could a monist be an adherent of a universal scientific worldview and, at the same time, be a wholehearted, maybe even patriotic German citizen? Although Ostwald envisioned monism to be an international movement, the idea of the German nation remained powerful in his writings. Roughly nine months after he had become president of the German Monist League, he organized the First International Monist Congress (1911) in Hamburg, which later generations of monists praised as a legendary success.⁵⁰ Ostwald was determined to present the Monist League as an international association during the Hamburg congress. The reality, however, differed completely from the picture he had hoped to convey, since most participants of the Hamburg congress were Germans or at least German-speaking. In order to stress the internationalism of monism, Ostwald invited world-renowned scientists such as the American biologist Jacques Loeb and the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius to lecture at the meeting.⁵¹

 See Hermann Schnell, “Die Zukunft der Juden im Lichte des Monismus,” Das Monistische Jahrhundert 2 (1913): 311.  Ostwald, Religion und Monismus, 71: “Ebenso ist der Gesamtbetrieb der Wissenschaft gegenwärtig schon völlig international geworden. Jeder Tag bringt uns hier neue Fortschritte, die diesen praktischen Internationalismus der Wissenschaft in einzelnen organisatorischen Maßnahmen betätigen.”  Ibid., 50 – 51.  See Bloßfeldt, Der erste Internationale Monistenkongreß.  Loeb gave a talk on the topic of “life” from the perspective of reductionist biology, whereas Arrhenius elaborated on the “universe.”

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Although Ostwald tried hard to stage the internationality of monism and even proclaimed the dawn of a “monist century,” he wrote to his wife after the congress that the Monist League was about to turn into a successful “national movement.”⁵² Prior to the First World War, Ostwald explicitly rejected any form of nationalism and chauvinism. In a monistic sermon on Patriotismus und Internationalismus (Patriotism and Internationalism, 1913) he compared nationalism to a primitive and backward level of culture: Chauvinism is nothing less than politics of raw violence applied to the lives of nations. Such kind of politics was possible as long as single nations (for instance the ancient Romans) surpassed others in technical-military respects. This policy will cease to exist, once all neighbors have reached the same level of technical development, which is currently the case in Europe. Chauvinism is a harmful ideology that needs to be eradicated by every single monist because it is one of the remains of our animal-like past.⁵³

International cooperation, Ostwald maintained, was a decisive factor helping nations to advance their cultural levels by expanding their scientific and technological knowledge. He was convinced that internationalism would speed up the cultural development toward the stage of “organization,” including improved living conditions and higher moral standards. In order to legitimate the cultural importance of cooperation, Ostwald and other monists referred to Piotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin’s evolutionary theory of mutual aid. The Russian biologist and anarchist Kropotkin opposed social Darwinist notions of the struggle for life. Instead, he stressed the value of mutual aid and its pragmatic advantages for the survival of organisms in the process of evolution. Following Kropotkin, Ostwald condemned nationalism as “cultural atavism” that would revive primitive ideas like the survival of the fittest. In order to avoid a nationalist rhetoric, he emphasized universal terms like “Menschheitskultur” (“culture of humanity”) or “Menschheitsorganisation” (“organization of humanity”).⁵⁴ Coming from a scientific background, Ostwald was well aware that research depended on transnational exchange in order to save time, money, and resour-

 Wilhelm Ostwald to Helen Ostwald, Hamburg, September 11, 1911, ABBAW, Ostwald Papers, no. 5206: “Ich habe mit meinem Vortrag und sonst sehr grossen Erfolg gehabt und bin heute unzählige mal photographiert worden. Ich kann mich dem Eindruck nicht entziehen, dass wir hier am Anfang einer grossen nationalen Bewegung stehen.”  Wilhelm Ostwald, “Patriotismus und Internationalismus II (29.11.1913),” in Monistische Sonntagspredigten 3, 271– 272.  Ostwald, Religion und Monismus, 41.

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ces. In the 1880s and ‘90s he was involved in the disciplinary formation of physical chemistry, experiencing from the outset that its success relied on transnational cooperation. He therefore founded a journal for physical chemistry in 1887, which he co-edited with his Dutch colleague Jacobus Henricus van’t Hoff, and initiated the International Association of Chemical Societies in 1912.⁵⁵ His monist movement copied patterns and structures the academic natural sciences had predefined. Despite his involvement in early international scientific networks, Ostwald ranked German science and technology atop other nations. Against this backdrop, internationalism could be interpreted as part of an “olympic” competition, in which each nation sought to prove its scientific superiority.⁵⁶ Notably before 1914 the search for internationalism in the scientific community and nationalism were not mutually exclusive. According to Geert Somsen, international scientific institutions even fulfilled genuinely nationalistic purposes: While the new institutions were presented as vehicles for international cooperation, they were also meant to assess and acknowledge national scientific accomplishments. National achievements, after all, can only be measured by international standards, so some form of international organization was required for them to be recognized at all.⁵⁷

Ostwald aspired more than just to pay a lip service when he promoted international cooperation: from 1907 on, he was involved in the transnational Ido movement, which sought to popularize a reform version of Esperanto – a universal language developed in the late nineteenth century to facilitate international communication and global exchange. Ostwald kept close contacts with the French mathematician Louis Couturat, founder and promoter of Ido, and became member of the Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language, founded in 1900 during the world’s fair in Paris. Moreover, in 1912, he co-founded an office for international science organization and communication in Munich, called Die Brücke (The Bridge)⁵⁸ that strove to gather information on scientific projects on a global scale. It also supported Ido as the new lingua

 See Katharina Neef, Die Entstehung der Soziologie aus der Sozialreform: Eine Fachgeschichte (Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 2012), 20.  The term “Olympic internationalism” was coined by Geert J. Somsen, “A History of Universalism: Conceptions of Internationality of Science from Enlightenment to the Cold War,” Minerva 46 (2008): 361– 379.  Ibid., 366.  In 1911, the Swiss entrepreneur Karl Bührer and the journalist Adolf Saager approached Ostwald asking him to fund the Bridge project. On the history of this project, see Niles R. Holt, “Ostwald’s The Bridge,” The British Journal for the History of Science 10 (1977): 146 – 150; and Markus Krajewski, Restlosigkeit: Weltprojekte um 1900 (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 2006).

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franca of science and technology. The Bridge even proposed a standardization of paper and book sizes which Ostwald referred to as “world format.”⁵⁹ Ostwald’s open and manifold commitment to internationalism, however, challenged the monist identity and raised questions about the actual goals of the Monist League. In 1913, the monist local group of Krefeld published an appeal in the monist weekly defending the uniqueness of German culture, language, race, and history against the arbitrariness of “cosmopolitanism.” Monism, they argued, ought to channel its efforts toward the establishment of the “secular nation state” instead of pursuing the unrealistic ideal of a global “Kulturmenschheit” (“culture of humanity”).⁶⁰ The editors of the monist weekly answered the Krefeld appeal by stating that a “cosmopolite” in the monist sense was not an unpatriotic “Weltbürger” (“world citizen”) but someone who contributed to the “weltweite Menschheitsorganisation” (“worldwide organization of mankind”).⁶¹ These tensions between the national and international self-image of German monists became evident in their attempts to connect their scientific worldview to a specific German cultural tradition. Ostwald, for instance, grasped monism as the historical successor of Martin Luther’s sixteenth-century Reformation, depicting monism as the legitimate successor of Luther’s legacy.⁶² For Ostwald, monism had the potential to “purify” liberal Protestantism from its religious remains, turn it into a truly scientific worldview, and, consequently, realize the vision of a secular nation. As we can see, his secularist vision was intertwined with the cultural and confessional heritage of German history. Ostwald found evidence for the “new Reformation” in the radical theology of Carl Jatho, a pastor from Cologne who had been removed from office due to his allegedly monist teachings. Jatho, Ostwald emphasized, stood for a new kind of Protestantism that was about to turn into a scientific worldview once German culture and society would have abandoned their religious imprint. Similarly to his colleague, Haeckel likewise located monism in the context of a specific German tradition. In his bestseller Die Welträtsel, Haeckel praised Bismarck as the “political Luther” who freed Germany from “clerical tyranny” during the culture wars of the 1870s.⁶³ According to Haeckel, monism was the com-

 Ibid., 64– 140.  “Zur Frage: Nationalismus-Internationalismus,” Das Monistische Jahrhundert 2, no. 36 (1913): 1012– 1013.  Ibid., 1013.  Hannah Dorsch, Eine neue Reformation (Jena: s.l., 1919).  Ernst Haeckel, Die Welträtsel: Gemeinverständliche Studien über Monistische Philosophie (Bonn: Emil Strauß, 1899), 378.

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pletion of Luther’s Reformation and Bismarck’s culture war. Furthermore, he praised Goethe as the precursor of monist thought and with that took up on the contemporary appreciation of Goethe as a German national poet.⁶⁴ He included a whole range of Goethean quotations to his monist and popular scientific writings: the second volume of his Generelle Morphologie der Arten (General Morphology of Organisms, 1866) opens with a quotation taken from Goethe’s Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen (Metamorphosis of Plants, 1798) reading: “All figures are similar, and none equals the other. And so the choir points to a hidden law, to a holy riddle!”⁶⁵ Even thirty years later, Haeckel’s most prominent work Die Welträtsel was permeated by allusions to Goethe and Goethean aphorisms. Also Ostwald drew from Goethe’s poetry and natural philosophy: following a famous quote taken from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, 1821), Ostwald entitled his collection of monist essays Die Forderung des Tages (The Challenge of the Day, 1910).⁶⁶ To him, this quote summarized the everyday importance of his energetic imperative: “Don’t waste energy, utilize it!” Moreover, he showed special interest in Goethe’s theory of color and devoted two monist Sunday sermons to Goethe’s journeys to Italy.⁶⁷ Ostwald also referred to Goethe’s poetry in his secular practices. When his grandchildren Fritz Ostwald and Hellmut Brauer received a Kinderweihe (a monist “baptism”), he suggested to include Goethe’s poem Kophtisches Lied (Coptic Song, 1827) to the ceremony. Ostwald ended the ritual with the following words, which underline the commitment of monists both to the German nation and the global community: “We Monists are Germans, as we are Europeans […] because we know that our immediate surroundings are able to exist as long as they blend in harmonically with the largest entity we live in: the whole of mankind.”⁶⁸

 See Olaf Breidbach, “Monismus, Positivismus und deutsche Ideologie,” in Biologie, Psychologie und Poetologie: Verhandlungen zwischen Naturwissenschaft und Literatur, ed. Walburga Hülk and Ursula Renner-Henke (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005), 55 – 70.  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen,” in Musen-Almanach für das Jahr 1799, ed. Friedrich Schiller (Tübingen: Cottaische Buchhandlung, 1799), 17– 23: “Alle Gestalten sind ähnlich und keine gleichet der andern; Und so deutet der Chor auf ein geheimes Gesetz, Auf ein heiliges Räthsel!”  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethes Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe, vol. 12, ed. Erich Trunz (Munich: C.H.Beck, 1981), 517– 518: “Was aber ist deine Pflicht? Die Forderung des Tages.”  See Wilhelm Ostwald, “Goethe in Italien I (31. 5.1915),” in Monistische Sonntagspredigten 5, 449 – 462.  Ostwald, “Kinderweihe,” in Monistische Sonntagspredigten 5, 220.

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The First World War: From Internationalism to Nationalism? With the outbreak of the First World War, the monist movement underwent considerable changes. Tensions between pacifists and nationalists started to burden the identity of the movement. After years of active collaboration with pacifist circles, Ostwald radically altered his opinion: in October 1914, he and Haeckel signed the public Manifest der 93 (Appeal of 93 professors to the Civilized World) refusing the accusations by the Allies. Instead, the signatories presented the German emperor Wilhelm II as a defender of peace: It is not true that Germany is guilty of having caused this war. Neither the people, the government, nor the Kaiser wanted war. Germany did her utmost to prevent it; for this assertion the world has documental proof. Often enough during the twenty-six years of his reign has Wilhelm II shown himself to be the upholder of peace, and often enough has this fact been acknowledged by our opponents.⁶⁹

Ostwald, the former spokesmen of the international Ido movement, now advocated for a new planned language called Weltdeutsch (World German). In his Sunday sermon on the introduction of the new auxiliary language he stated: I propose to produce a simplified German on a scientific-technical basis for practical use in those areas [i.e. newly occupied countries]. In this, all dispensable variations, all of the aesthetically charming richness of the language which complicates its learning so tremendously, must be removed so that this new means of communication, for which I propose the name Weltdeutsch, can be learned and used by everyone with little effort.⁷⁰

As Markus Krajewski puts it, Ostwald turned “from Paul into Saul” of the international language movement.⁷¹ In September 1914, he even proposed a European confederation of states under German rule, replacing his former notion of a

 German Professors, “To the Civilized World,” North American Review 210, no. 765 (August 1919): 284– 287.  Wilhelm Ostwald, “Weltdeutsch,” in Monistische Sonntagspredigten 5, 557. English translation by Markus Krajewski, “One Second Language for Mankind: The Rise and Decline of the World Auxiliary Language Movement in the Belle Époque,” in Language as a Scientific Tool: Shaping Scientific Language across Time and National Traditions, ed. Miles Alexander James MacLeod, Rocio G. Sumillera, Jan Surman and Ekaterina Smirnova (London: Routledge, 2017), 194.  Ibid.

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peaceful cooperation among scientists in an internationalist setting.⁷² Since Germany was the most advanced civilization in terms of science, technology, and military, Ostwald claimed during wartime, it was “chosen” to help other states – the Slavic nations in particular – to reach a higher stage of culture.⁷³ Ostwald’s apparent shift from internationalism to nationalism did not, as many historians have argued, come as a sudden change of heart.⁷⁴ On the contrary, his internationalist rhetoric carried undertones of national superiority right from the start, since he always regarded Germany and German monism as the embodiments of the highest level of culture and civilization: to him, Germany had already reached the stage of “organization.” Even before the war broke out, Ostwald had praised Germany’s “cultural blossoming” based on its scientific and technological achievements.⁷⁵ Yet the euphoria in the summer of 1914 further radicalized the nationalistic tendencies which became part and parcel of his ambivalent internationalism. Ostwald’s nationalistic Sunday sermons of late 1914 and 1915 further complicated his relationship with those monists who remained active pacifists. He started alienating himself from Rudolf Goldscheid, president of the Austrian Monist League between 1912 and 1917 and co-editor of Ostwald’s Annalen der Naturphilosophie (Annals of Natural and Cultural Philosophy, 1901– 1921), informing him in a letter from May 1916 that he preferred to edit the journal on his own because of “unbridgeable differences” in their political views.⁷⁶ Since Ostwald experienced increasing opposition by the pacifist wing of the Monist League, including Goldscheid himself, he decided to resign from his office. In 1915, he wrote to Haeckel: “My office is pretty difficult and tough these days. Whereas some think that I am not patriotic enough, others blame the Monist League for having almost turned into a war association.”⁷⁷

 See Wilhelm Ostwald, “Europa unter deutscher Führung,” in Monistische Sonntagspredigten 5, 161– 192.  See Wilhelm Ostwald, “Das auserwählte Volk I und II.,” in Monistische Sonntagspredigten 5, 465 – 495.  Braune, Fortschritt als Ideologie, 131– 140. See also Hartmut Kästner, “Wilhelm Ostwald und der 1. Weltkrieg,” Osteuropa in Tradition und Wandel 12 (2011): 58 – 73.  Wilhelm Ostwald, Philosophie der Werte (Leipzig: Körner, 1913), 268.  Ostwald to Goldscheid, May 30, 1916, in Rudolf Goldscheid und Wilhelm Ostwald in ihren Briefen, ed. Karl Hansel (Großbothen: Selbstverlag, 2004), 119.  Ostwald to Haeckel, February 23, 1915, ABBAW, Ostwald Papers, no. 1041.

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Conclusion The German Monist League was part of a broad spectrum of life and social reform movements in fin de siècle Germany. Yet still monists stood out because of their exceptional belief in science and progress. They promoted science and a scientific worldview as ways to advance mankind culturally – freed from any religious and dogmatic constraints. To achieve this goal, Ostwald and other monists called for international cooperation among scientists. Monism’s self-image as a universal, international movement, however, was challenged by Haeckel’s and Ostwald’s recourses to specific German traditions in their search for monism’s position in history. Especially in Ostwald’s popular writings the tension between scientific universalism and national particularism remained visible: on the one hand, Ostwald was eager to integrate internationalism into the monist agenda and emphasized his deep commitment to the artificial language movement, the peace movement, and “The Bridge”. On the other hand, his internationalist rhetoric revealed an underlying nationalistic dimension based on the idea of Germany’s scientific and cultural supremacy. This element became manifest in his attacks against the allegedly primitive cultures of the Slavic nations or the supposed backwardness of the Catholic countries in the European South.⁷⁸ Ostwald specifically relied on anti-Catholic stereotypes in order to create a common enemy and to strengthen the group cohesion of his movement. At the same time, Haeckel and Ostwald nationalized monism by integrating it into a German historical narrative. Whereas Haeckel depicted Goethe – who had become a canonical German writer in the nineteenth century – as a pioneer of monist thought, Ostwald interpreted monism as the point of departure for a second Reformation completing Luther’s legacy. When the First World War broke out in August 1914, their rhetoric turned increasingly nationalistic.⁷⁹ Ostwald’s conversion from “Paul to Saul” of internationalism, however, came not as a sudden change of heart: rather, the outbreak of the war only made visible the ambivalent identity of monism in which nationalism and internationalism merged. This tension between nationalism and internationalism raises the question of whether monism contributed to a specific German path to secularity. The answer is twofold: for one thing, monists were part of a European anticlerical dis-

 See, for instance, Wilhelm Ostwald: “Wie kam das Böse in die Welt?,” in Monistische Sonntagspredigten 1, 9 – 16.  See Ostwald, “Europa unter deutscher Führung,” 161– 192.

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course which claimed the separation of church and state, the secularization of schools, and the strengthening of individual rights. Then again, German monists believed their movement would be destined to continue a vision of emancipation inherent to German culture. It was their mission to continue and finalize the legacies of Luther and Goethe, paving the way to a modern and secular German nation.

Archival Source Archive of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science, Berlin (ABBAW) Ostwald Papers

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Ostwald, Wilhelm. Monistische Sonntagspredigten, vol. 5. Leipzig: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1916. Ostwald, Wilhelm. Lebenslinien: Eine Selbstbiographie, vol. 2: Leipzig 1887 – 1905. Berlin: Klasing & Co., 1927. Rabinbach, Anson. The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Rectenwald, Michael. Nineteenth-Century British Secularism: Science, Religion and Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Richards, Robert J. The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Richards, Robert J. “That Darwin and Haeckel were Complicit in Nazi Biology.” In Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion, edited by Ronald L. Numbers, 170 – 178. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Royle, Edward. Radicals, Secularists and Republicans: Popular Freethought in Britain, 1866 – 1915. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980. Schmidt, Heinrich, ed. Was wir Ernst Haeckel verdanken, vol. 1. Leipzig: Unesma, 1914. Schnell, Hermann. “Die Zukunft der Juden im Lichte des Monismus.” Das Monistische Jahrhundert 2 (1913): 311. Schwartz, Laura. Infidel Feminism: Secularism, Religion and Women’s Emancipation, England 1830 – 1914. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. Simon-Ritz, Frank. Die Organisation einer Weltanschauung: Die freigeistige Bewegung im Wilhelminischen Deutschland. Gütersloh: Kaiser, 1997. Sluga, Glenda. Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Somsen, Geert J. “A History of Universalism: Conceptions of Internationality of Science from Enlightenment to the Cold War.” Minerva 46 (2008): 361 – 379. Tyssens, Jeffrey, and Petri Mirala. “Transnational Seculars: Belgium as an International Forum for Freethinkers and Freemasons in the Belle Epoque.” Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire 90, no. 4 (2012): 1353 – 1372. Wagner, Gerhard. Auguste Comte zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius, 2001. Wegener, Daan. “A True Proteus: A History of Energy Conservation in German Science and Culture 1847 – 1914.” PhD diss., University of Utrecht, 2009. Weir, Todd. “The Riddles of Monism: An Introductory Essay.” In Monism: Science, Philosophy, Religion, and the History of a Worldview, edited by Todd Weir, 1 – 44. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Weir, Todd. Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Rise of the Fourth Confession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Ziche, Paul, ed. Monismus um 1900: Wissenschaftskultur und Weltanschauung. Berlin: Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung, 2000.

Daniel Laqua

“The Most Advanced Nation on the Path of Liberty”: Universalism and National Difference in International Freethought When William Heaford, a key figure in Britain’s National Secular Society, introduced a new section on “Freethought in Other Lands” for the periodical The Freethinker, he argued that the movement should not be seen through a national lens: “The glory of Freethought shines forth in the fact that it is not […] a mere by-product of the English intellect, or some casual parochial characteristic chained down to a particular spot, or rooting itself to some eccentric local centre of manifestation.” Instead, freethought was “cosmopolitan, international, and widespread as civilisation itself.”¹ Such statements were far from exceptional. Protagonists of international freethought frequently stressed the universal nature of their cause when promoting their vision of secularity. In analytical terms, their agenda was associated with a particular “dynamic of secularization” one that, according to José Casanova’s words, “aims to emancipate all secular spheres from clerical-ecclesiastical control.”² Professions of unity among freethinkers must not be taken at face value. Although their ideas and actions had cosmopolitan features, these were subject to many boundaries.³ This chapter examines how freethinkers sought to construct the universality of their cause while expressing notions of national difference, either explicitly or implicitly. An investigation of these ambivalences is particular relevant because recent literature has highlighted the existence of “multiple secularities” and different “secularisms.”⁴ While such work has drawn particular attention to non-Western categories and experiences, the debates within the IFF shed light on pluralities even within European settings. As such, the case of the  William Heaford, “Freethought in Many Lands: Bohemia,” The Freethinker, June 7, 1908, 362.  José Casanova, “The Secular, Secularizations, Secularisms,” in Rethinking Secularism, ed. Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 54– 74.  I have discussed these dimensions in Daniel Laqua, “Kosmopolitisches Freidenkertum? Ideen und Praktiken der Internationalen Freidenkerföderation von 1880 bis 1914,” in Bessere Welten: Kosmopolitismus in den Geschichtswissenschaften, ed. Bernhard Gißibl and Isabella Löhr (Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 2017), 193 – 221.  Marian Burchardt, Monika Wohlrab-Sahr and Matthias Middell, eds, Multiple Secularities Beyond the West: Religion and Modernity in the Global Age (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2015); Casanova, “The Secular, Secularizations, Secularisms.” https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110688283-010

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organization reveals overlaps and intersections between different ways of framing “the secular” as a sphere and objective. Recent work on anti-Catholicism and the culture wars of the late nineteenth century has stressed the need to look beyond specific national contexts, as these conflicts amounted to “a Pan-European phenomenon” that “demands an allEuropean and comparative perspective.”⁵ In view of wider antagonisms around state–church relations, the opposing camps developed transnational links. In the 1870s and 1880s, the Roman Catholic Church had started to establish new transnational structures, for instance the Catholic Defense Committee (1870 – 1878), which served as a “Black International,” and the Union de Fribourg (Fribourg Union, 1885 – 1891), a body dedicated to Catholic enquiry into social and economic questions.⁶ Freethinkers’ efforts to work across national divides also intensified in this period. To some extent, their international cooperation occurred as part of their competition with religious forces, yet it also needs to be understood within a wider context: the late nineteenth century was an age in which processes of global integration went together with the development of new international structures and organizations.⁷ In 1880, freethinkers from different countries created the Fédération Internationale de la Libre Pensée (International Freethought Federation, IFF) as a joint vehicle for advancing their cause. For half a century, the federation held international congresses and facilitated contacts between national freethought organizations. The IFF is well suited to exploring commonalities and differences in secularist movements for several reasons. First of all, while freethinkers proclaimed their unity, the promotion of “freethought” had different meanings within differ Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser, “Introduction: The European Culture Wars,” in Culture Wars: Secular–Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 3. See also Manuel Borutta, Antikatholizismus: Deutschland und Italien im Zeitalter der europäischen Kulturkämpfe (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010); Lisa Dittrich, Antiklerikalismus in Europa: Öffentlichkeit und Säkularisierung in Frankreich, Spanien und Deutschland (1848 – 1914) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014).  Emiel Lamberts, ed., The Black International, 1870 – 1878: The Holy See and Militant Catholicism in Europe (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2002); Vincent Viaene, “Nineteenth-Century Catholic Internationalism and its Predecessors,” in Religious Internationals in the Modern World: Globalization and Faith Communities since 1750, ed. Abigail Green and Vincent Viaene (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 82– 110.  Emily S. Rosenberg, “Transnational Currents in a Shrinking World,” in A World Connecting: 1870 – 1945, ed. Emily S. Rosenberg (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 850 – 996. See also Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: C.H.Beck, 2009), 723 – 735; Johannes Paulmann, Globale Herrschaft und Fortschrittsglaube: Europa 1850 – 1914 (Munich: C.H.Beck, 2019), chapter 5.

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ent national contexts. As a result, the organization sought to construct and showcase a shared “essence” that was cast in universalist terms. Secondly, as a “Freethinkers’ International,” the IFF was a manifestation of the wider phenomenon of internationalism, which was intrinsically connected to ideas about nationhood.⁸ National ideas – and different conceptions of the relationship between nationhood, statehood and secularity – thus formed an important subtext to freethinkers’ discussions at international congresses. Even at an organizational level, this aspect was evident, as the IFF was based on the affiliation of national member organizations. This chapter explores the interaction between universal claims and ideas of national distinctness at several levels. After sketching out key differences within the constituency of the Freethinkers’ International, it considers the role of universalist tropes at international freethought congresses. In doing so, it draws particular attention to the way in which ideas about national pasts were entwined with conceptions of a universal struggle. The latter also manifested itself in the celebration of figures who were venerated as “martyrs” of freethought. Finally, the chapter explores these wider issues through the prism of a specific event, namely the IFF’s Prague congress of 1907, which took place at a time when education and nationhood were major political battle grounds in the Habsburg Monarchy. As a whole, then, the chapter highlights a tension: while freethinkers sought to promote secularity through international channels, they often emphasized distinct national paths.

National Contexts for International Freethought To some extent, it is possible to argue that freethought had international characteristics from the outset. After all, its key principles can be traced back to the Enlightenment, which had wider European features – even if they manifested themselves differently within individual national contexts.⁹ Moreover, anticlericalism, which was common to many freethinkers, was in itself a transnational phenomenon, with the Roman Catholic Church serving as a major foil.¹⁰ Even

 Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).  Margaret Jacob, The Secular Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). On different national varieties, see the classic volume by Roy Porter and Mikoláš Teich, eds, The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).  See René Rémond, “Anticlericalism: Some Reflections by Way of Introduction,” European Studies Review 13 (1983): 121– 126 as well as, more recently, Dittrich, Antiklerikalismus in Europa.

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at the linguistic level, there were shared roots, as the British term “freethinker” had closely matching expressions in other languages. As Jacqueline Lalouette has noted, the French term libre penseur derived from the English word.¹¹ Meanwhile, there were similar expressions in other languages: librospensador in Spanish, libero pensatore in Italian, Freidenker in German, vrijdenker in Dutch and fritänkare in Swedish, to cite but a few examples. Hence, freethinkers had not only shared origins that they could point to but also corresponding terms by which they described their movement. Within the present volume, Daniela Haarmann further explores the terminologies and concepts associated with the promotion of secular ideas. At its foundation in 1880, the IFF brought together freethought organizations from nine countries.¹² Over the subsequent decades, it expanded further, and from 1900 onwards, the organization maintained a secretariat in Brussels. Belgians played a prominent role in the IFF. In some respects, their participation reflected the strengths of Belgian freethought and the degree to which the question of church influence was subject to intense political conflicts in Belgium. At the same time, their involvement in the IFF formed part of a wider pattern of Belgian participation in international movements and organizations during this period.¹³ Alongside Belgian freethinkers, the main freethought organizations from France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain all regularly contributed to the federation’s work, while the involvement of other countries partly depended on the ebbs and flows of the movement in those countries.¹⁴ By 1913, the IFF’s council included representatives from sixteen countries; while largely European in its composition, Argentina, Brazil and Peru were also represented.¹⁵ The organization’s Eurocentricity was not specific to international freethought but rather reflected wider features of European internationalism before the First World War.

 Jacqueline Lalouette, La Libre Pensée en France, 1848 – 1940 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1997), 15.  Historical overview of “La Libre Pensée Universelle” in Guide illustré dédié aux libres-penseurs qui assisteront au Congrès International et Universel de Bruxelles: 21, 22, 23 et 24 août 1910, ed. Fédération Nationale des Sociétés de Libres-Penseurs (Brussels: Fédération Nationale, 1910), 21.  Daniel Laqua, The Age of Internationalism and Belgium, 1880 – 1930: Peace, Progress and Prestige (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 80 – 114.  For a snapshot, see Fédération Internationale de la Libre Pensée, Almanach-annuaire illustré de la libre-pensée internationale (Brussels: Bureau permanent de la Féderation Internationale de la Libre Pensée, 1908).  Eugène Hins, La Libre Pensée Internationale en 1913 (Brussels: Bibliothèque de La Pensée, 1914), 8 – 9.

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Notwithstanding various shared aims, national differences affected the configurations and ideas associated with individual freethought movements. The development of distinct terminologies was a case in point. In Britain, “secularism” became a favored term for many groups and individuals that contributed to the IFF. The expression was historically recent, having been coined by G.J. Holyoake and promoted by Charles Bradlaugh to distinguish the members of the National Secular Society from less respectable “infidels” or “atheists.”¹⁶ Secularists accentuated the political dimensions of a commitment to the promotion of separation between church and state. Meanwhile, in France, the term laïcisme referred to the promotion of laïcité – a concept that had made its first dictionary appearance as an “activist neologism” in 1872.¹⁷ The example of laïcité illustrates that in some contexts, freethought could inform ideas about republican nationhood. In the French Third Republic, the role of the Radical Party as well as the Law on the Separation of the Churches and the State (1905) exemplified this aspect. Freethinkers were not only actively involved in the Radical Party, but also played a key role in shaping the ideas that led to the legislation of 1905.¹⁸ Today, laïcité is enshrined in the French constitution; according to Jean Baubérot, to some extent it “now forms part of the French national ‘patrimony’.”¹⁹ The French case is but one example of such connections. For instance, Susan Jacoby has noted that the United States were “a nation founded on the separation of state and church” while tracing a “tension between secularism and religion” that existed from the early days of the republic.²⁰ Meanwhile, in her study of European anticlericalism, Lisa Dittrich has drawn attention to national differences, noting that the close association between anticlericalism and republicanism in France and Spain was not mirrored in Germany.²¹ Such ob-

 Edward Royle, Victorian Infidels: The Origins of the British Secularist Movement, 1791 – 1866 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1974), 145 – 169. On British secularism in the era of the IFF, see Edward Royle, Radicals, Secularists and Republicans: Popular Freethought in Britain, 1866 – 1915 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980).  Pierre Fiala, “Les Termes de la laïcité: Différenciation morphologique et conflits sémantiques,” Mots: Les Langages du politique 26 (June 1991): 48. Unless stated otherwise, all translations are the author’s.  Lalouette, La Libre Pensée en France, esp. chapter 5. See also Jacqueline Lalouette, La Séparation des églises et de l’état: Genèse et développement d’une idée (1789 – 1905) (Paris: E´ditions du Seuil, 2005).  Jean Baubérot, Histoire de la laïcité française (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000), 3.  Susan Jacoby, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (New York: Henry Holt, 2004), 3 – 4.  Dittrich, Antiklerikalismus in Europa, 145.

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servations suggest the existence of varying secularities that were informed by the religious and denominational make-up of the country in question. Beyond the role of freethought-related discourses in specific national contexts, there were significant differences in the composition of the IFF’s national constituents. In Germany, the Freireligiöse Gemeinden (free religious parishes) retained religious practices but were comprised within a broader conception of freethought.²² This aspect was noted in the British periodical The Freethinker, in an article that described the “free religious” movement as “quite frankly and outspokenly Freethought,” but noting its adherence to Christian beliefs and its retention of practices “which are, at best, but feeble imitations of church ceremony.”²³ Another prominent feature of the German movement was the growing role of “proletarian freethought.” Divisions surrounding the social question first became obvious at a national congress in 1908. One year later, Ida Altmann – a socialist and feminist – and Gustav Tschirn – a leader of the main freethought and “free religious” organizations – outlined their competing views in the IFF’s Almanach. ²⁴ Ideological differences ultimately affected the international movement as well.²⁵ In the present volume, Johannes Gleixner elaborates on this issue with regard to proletarian freethought during the interwar years. Both his chapter and Christoffer Leber’s contribution shed further light on the national and political differences that shaped activism at the international level. Although hostility to the Roman Catholic Church united the IFF, the practical implications of such views were shaped by the role of Catholicism within particular states and societies. In countries such as Belgium, France, Italy, Portugal and Spain, the battles of freethought were fought with particular severity because the stakes seemed higher, given the relative strength of the adversary. This difference was noted by William Heaford who, in viewing the “pamphlets

 Fédération Internationale de la Libre Pensée, Almanach-annuaire illustré, 60 – 61. For a detailed analysis, see Todd Weir, Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Rise of the Fourth Confession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).  G. Caffrey, “Freethought Work in Germany,” The Freethinker, June 5, 1911, 1.  Ida Altmann, “Les Entraves au mouvement de la libre pensée en Allemagne,” and Gustav Tschirn, “Considérations sur les congrès nationaux allemands de 1908 et de 1909 des sociétés affiliées à la Fédération Allemande de Libres-Penseurs,” both in 1909 Annuaire illustré de la libre-pensée internationale, ed. Fédération Internationale de la Libre Pensée (Brussels: Bureau Permanent International, 1909), 19 – 25, and 28 – 30 respectively.  Daniel Laqua, “‘Laïque, démocratique et sociale’? Socialism and the Freethinkers’ International,” Labour History Review 74, no. 3 (2009): 257– 273. On the creation and debates within International Proletarian Freethought, see also Jochen-Christoph Kaiser, Arbeiterbewegung und organisierte Religionskritik: Proletarische Freidenkerverbände in Kaiserreich und Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981), 187– 230.

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issued against Christianity in Catholic countries,” concluded “that our English ways are not as their ways, nor our methods of attack as their methods.”²⁶ To Heaford, this was not a criticism: he concluded that it would be advisable to consider the views of “Freethinkers redeemed from the quackery of Protestantism – that illogical halting place on the road from Rome to Reason.”²⁷ In largely Catholic countries, freethought and freemasonry were often allied. For example, two of the IFF’s leaders from Belgium, Léon Furnémont and Eugène Hins, were also freemasons.²⁸ In Portugal, Sebastião de Magalhães Lima served as Master of the Grand Orient of Portugal as well heading the main freethought association. A report on the IFF’s Buenos Aires congress of 1904 observed that “[t]he full weight of the Lodges of Freemasonry was thrown into the scale in order to ensure the success of the congress.”²⁹ Yet such links did not exist everywhere, partly because of major differences between national freemasonries. Pointedly, an IFF publication stated that “German freemasons are neither generally nor necessarily freethinkers.”³⁰ In Germany and Britain, masonic lodges adhered to the notion of a “Great Architect” – ideas that sat uneasily alongside the anticlericalism of freemasons in several other countries. German and British lodges had responded negatively when the Grand Orient of Belgium removed the notion of the “Great Architect of the Universe” from its statutes in 1871.³¹ Six years later, French freemasons took a similar turn towards the secular, creating further challenges for masonic internationalism.³² Jeffrey Tyssens and Petri Mirala have suggested that “the more conservative and rather religious Freemasonry of the Anglo-American variety […] on one hand, and the politically radical

 William Heaford, “The Lisbon Freethought Congress,” The Freethinker, October 30, 1910, 694.  Ibid.  Jeffrey Tyssens and Petri Mirala, “Transnational Seculars: Belgium as an International Forum for Freethinkers and Freemasons in the Belle Époque,” Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire 90, no. 4 (2012): 1355.  William Heaford, “Freethought in Many Lands: South America,” The Freethinker, June 28, 1908, 412.  Fédération Internationale de la Libre Pensée, Almanach-annuaire illustré, 60.  Hubert Derthier, “Libre pensée, franc-maçonnerie et mouvements laïques,” in La Belgique et ses dieux: Églises, mouvements, religieux et laïques, ed. Liliane Voyé, Karel Dobbelaere, Jean Remy and Jaak Billiet (Louvain-la-Neuve: CABAY, 1985), 44.  Joachim Berger, “European Freemasonries, 1850 – 1935: Networks and Transnational Movements,” EGO – European History Online (3 March 2010), http://ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/transna tional-movements-and-organisations/international-organisations-and-congresses/joachim-berg er-european-freemasonries-1850-1935. See also Joachim Berger, “Une institution cosmopolite? Rituelle Grenzziehungen im freimaurerischen Internationalismus um 1900,” in Bessere Welten, ed. Gißibl and Löhr, 167– 192.

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and secular ‘Latin’ variety […] on the other” constituted “two worlds with a completely antagonistic philosophical and political outlook.”³³ Such differences explain why we should treat any proclamations of unity with great caution. Freethinkers opposed church power and promoted the separation of church and state, but the commonality of their struggle did not make for a unified outlook. It was only at its 1904 congress that the IFF agreed on a definition of its subject, based on a motion by the renowned French pedagogue and politician Ferdinand Buisson. The compromise described freethought as primarily a “method” that rejected any form of dogma.³⁴ At the same time, it was characterized as laïque, démocratique et sociale – a phrase that became so closely associated with French political ideas that it ultimately made it into the constitutions of the Fourth and Fifth Republics (1946 and 1958). This connection is no coincidence: Buisson himself was a major figure in French republicanism and played a key role in shaping ideas about laïcité. A recent biography even refers to him as the “father of secular schooling.”³⁵

Celebrating Commonalities If the differences between the protagonists of freethought were greater than some freethinkers were willing to admit, they also raise the question of how claims about universality could be upheld. One way of doing so was through international congresses. Between 1880 and 1939, the IFF held twenty-five such events, featuring discussions and deliberations that involved delegates from its national member organizations. Moreover, many congresses had popular dimensions in the shape of public debates, processions and demonstrations. On several occasions, IFF congresses took place against the backdrop of events at which national and universal imagery coexisted: in 1885 (Antwerp), 1889 (Paris), 1900 (Paris), 1910 (Brussels) and 1925 (Paris), freethinkers met in cities

 Tyssens and Mirala, “Transnational Seculars,” 1359 – 1360.  Fédération Internationale de la Libre Pensée, Congrès de Rome, XX septembre 1904: Compterendu officiel (Ghent: Volksdrukkerij, 1905), 183 – 196.  Patrick Cabanel, Ferdinand Buisson: Père de l’école laïque (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 2016). On Buisson’s centrality, see also Jean Baubérot, Laïcité 1905 – 2005, entre passion et raison (Paris: Le Seuil, 2004), 13. On his transnational connections, see Klaus Dittrich, “Appropriation, Representation and Cooperation as Transnational Practices: The Example of Ferdinand Buisson,” in The Nation State and Beyond: Governing Globalization Processes in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, ed. Isabella Löhr and Roland Wenzlhuemer (Berlin: Springer, 2013), 149 – 173.

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that, at the same time, hosted world’s fairs, and the Amsterdam congress of 1883 coincided with the International Colonial and Export Exhibition. With their changing venues, freethought congresses allowed the hosts to showcase national movements and emphasize their country’s contribution to a shared cause. The 1889 congress in Paris, for example, evoked a connection between international freethought and the struggles of revolutionary France. While marking the centenary of the French Revolution, delegates also commemorated the Paris Commune by placing a wreath at Mur des Fédérés of Père-Lachaise Cemetery, where 147 Communards had been killed in 1871.³⁶ The anticlericalism of the French Revolution and the Paris Commune made them suitable for a freethought event, yet such commemorative acts also had a national dimension: the representation of the revolutionary past was closely entwined with particular visions of French culture, politics and society.³⁷ When freethinkers returned to the French capital in 1905, they renewed their earlier claims at a time when the French Senate prepared to vote on the French Law on the Separation of the Churches and the State. For instance, in the run-up to the congress, the organizers expressed their confidence in a strong turnout from their compatriots, stressing that an “important year” for the defense of republican values lay ahead.³⁸ The congress passed several other demands connected to French political debates, such as calling for the abrogation of the loi Falloux (1850), which had included provisions for schools run by religious congregations.³⁹ At IFF congresses, speakers frequently praised the host nation for its positive historical role. In this respect, the gatherings in France were but one of many examples. For instance, at the 1910 congress in Brussels, IFF vice-president Georges Lorand described his home country Belgium as “the classic land of liberty and of the struggle for freedom of conscience.”⁴⁰ That event coincided with the eightieth anniversary of national independence, just as the federation’s foundation in 1880 had taken place fifty years after the Belgian Revolution. Indeed,

 Commission du congrès, Congrès universel des libres penseurs, tenu à Paris, du 15 au 20 septembre 1889: Compte-rendu officiel (Paris: E. Dentu, 1889), 209.  Robert Gildea, The Past in French History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 13 – 61.  “Aux congressistes français,” Bulletin officiel: Association Nationale des Libres-Penseurs de France, no. 6 (April–June 1904): 10. For the political context, see Lalouette, La Séparation des églises et de l’état, 413 – 414.  Fédération Internationale de la Libre Pensée, Congrès de Paris: 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 septembre 1905 au Palais du Trocadéro: Compte rendu (Paris: Secrétariat du Congrès de Paris, 1905), 146. On the loi Falloux of 1850, see Baubérot, Histoire de la laïcité, 44.  Fédération Internationale de la Libre Pensée, Le Congrès de Bruxelles et la manifestation Ferrer, 20 – 24 août 1910 (Brussels: G. Meert, 1910), 38.

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in some respects, prominent involvement in the IFF exemplified the way in which some Belgians cast internationalism as a national project.⁴¹ Another example of the host country’s celebration was the IFF congress of 1913. Held in Lisbon, it took place three years after the republican revolution in which freethinkers and freemasons had played a leading role. Hosts and guests alike paid tribute to the way in which Portugal had seemingly accomplished many of the movement’s aims.⁴² In issuing an invitation to the Lisbon congress, Magalhães Lima proclaimed: “Portugal is a small country. But the Portuguese Republic is a great Republic. And why? Because its advent was at once a moral and a global act, blessed by the attention and solidarity of the civilized nations.”⁴³ Speeches and pamphlets are one way of studying congresses, and Jacqueline Lalouette has summarized some of the themes that characterized the debates at IFF congresses.⁴⁴ However, ideas about universality and national distinctness were not only expressed in such formal terms, as congresses had manifold performative dimensions. The 1904 IFF congress in Rome illustrates this aspect. At this event, the ongoing struggle between l’Italia laica and l’Italia cattolica, the representation of the Risorgimento and transnational notions of combating ecclesiastical power became intermingled.⁴⁵ In 1905, the American freethinker John Byers Wilson – a physician from Cincinnati, Ohio – published a detailed account of his Trip to Rome and his experience of the 1904 congress.⁴⁶ Wilson was a major figure in Midwestern secularism, formerly head of the American Secular Union and, at the time of the Rome congress, leader of the National Liberal Party. The latter organization transformed itself into the American Freethought Association shortly after his return to the United States, partly inspired

 Laqua, The Age of Internationalism and Belgium, 17– 44. On the related issue of internationalism as a vehicle for Belgian foreign policy, see Madeleine Herren, Hintertüren zur Macht: Internationalismus und modernisierungsorientierte Außenpolitik in Belgien, der Schweiz und den USA, 1865 – 1914 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2000).  Tyssens and Mirala, “Transnational Seculars,” 1364.  Magalhães Lima, Le Portugal libre penseur: De la monarchie cléricale à la république laïque (Lausanne: Édition de la Libre Pensée Internationale, 1912), 5.  Jacqueline Lalouette, “Les Questions internationales dans les congrès de la Fédération universelle de la Libre Pensée (1880 – 1913),” Cahiers Jean Jaurès, no. 212– 213 (2014): 119 – 133.  On the wider context of the Italian culture wars: Martin Papenheim, “Roma o morte: Culture Wars in Italy,” in Culture Wars, ed. Clark and Kaiser, 202– 226; and Borutta, Antikatholizismus, 120 – 150.  John Byers Wilson, A Trip to Rome (Lexington: James E. Hughes, 1905).

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by the contacts made in Europe.⁴⁷ In Wilson’s view, freethinkers were engaged in a universal struggle – “an eternal warfare between the selfish and powerful of humanity on one side, and the weak and ignorant on the other” – in which “Freethought, Science, and Education” were the “battlefield.”⁴⁸ Wilson’s book provided extracts and summaries of the different reports and speeches at the IFF congress. In this respect, it included material that also featured in the official congress proceedings.⁴⁹ Yet in addition, his account is instructive in the way that it sought to capture the wider atmosphere. Wilson stressed the scale of the event while articulating both its national and its international features. In commenting on the opening, he noted that “the immense Cortile and galleries were crowded, and thousands were standing out on the Plaza.” While there were delegates “from all the states of Europe,” Wilson singled out the large number of French participants – allegedly two thousand – as well as three hundred guests from “enlightened, priest-ridden Spain.”⁵⁰ On the first congress day, the organizers showcased the movement’s strength through a public march to the Porta Pia, the place where Italian troops had entered Papal Rome in September 1870. According to Wilson, “[t]here were twelve to fifteen thousand in the procession, a band, two brigades of old Garibaldians in red shirts leading and the women numbering perhaps a thousand.”⁵¹ As a landmark event in the national unification of Italy, the Capture of Rome had been commemorated annually – but on this occasion, an episode from national history was transformed into an international affair: “Here were over five thousand patriotic spirits of other countries to join them in celebrating the triumph of conscience over superstition.”⁵² The march to the Porta Pia was but one case of freethinkers putting a universal spin on phenomena that in other contexts were interpreted in national terms. The music at international congresses offers further examples. As Jacqueline Lalouette has observed, music played an important role at freethought events, with revolutionary tunes such as the Marseillaise offering “an expression of convivial-

 Patrick W. Hughes, “American Freethought Association,” in Encyclopedia of Christianity in the United States, vol. 5, ed. George Thomas Kurian and Mark A. Lamport (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 69.  Wilson, A Trip to Rome, 204.  Fédération Internationale de la Libre Pensée, Congrès de Rome, 5 – 220.  Wilson, A Trip to Rome, 145.  Ibid., 160.  Ibid.

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ity.”⁵³ While Lalouette’s comments refer to the French libres-penseurs, similar observations apply to the international movement, as exemplified by repeated renditions of the Marseillaise at the Rome congress. For instance, after the German scientist Ernst Haeckel had completed his speech, a band launched into the tune, and “while thousands sang the inspiring song, banners and handkerchiefs were waved, all making a scene of enthusiasm, seldom witnessed.”⁵⁴ On such occasions, the Marseillaise appeared not as a national anthem, but as a reference to the French Revolution’s transnational ideals. This interpretation was far from unique to international freethought: the song had already been used in various parts of Europe during the Revolutions of 1848 – 49, and its reach extended into the German labor movement.⁵⁵ The Marseillaise may have been exceptional in its symbolic power, yet it was not the only “national” tune that could represent a universal cause. For example, the Brabançonne – the Belgian national anthem that dated back to the revolution of 1830 – and the Himno de Riego – which commemorated Spain’s Liberal Triennium (1820 – 1823) – were performed after Belgian and Spanish guests had given speeches at the IFF congress in Buenos Aires in 1906.⁵⁶ These renditions were more than nods to the nationality of the delegates: both songs were associated with national events that could be linked to a wider struggle for freedom. Moreover, the singing of different national tunes implied claims about the reach of freethought. During the procession to the Porta Pia, Wilson noted that as musical bands “played the national airs, and the Marseillaise, their music was drowned by the thousands of voices that joined in singing.” To Wilson, it seemed that “all the Italians, French and German can sing.”⁵⁷ The culture of freethought congresses also included attempts to craft an explicitly international message. For example, the Parisian congress of 1905 featured a public recital of Lamartine’s Marseillaise de la Paix. The latter was a poem written during Franco-Prussian tensions concerning the left bank of the

 Jacqueline Lalouette, La République anticléricale: XIXe – XXe siècles (Paris: E´ditions du Seuil, 2002), 398.  Wilson, A Trip to Rome, 150. Further mentions feature on pages 160, 196, and 284.  Axel Körner, Das Lied von einer anderen Welt: Kulturelle Praxis im deutschen und französischen Arbeitermilieu (Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 2007), 237– 240. On the history of the Marseillaise, see Hervé Luxardo, Histoire de la Marseillaise (Paris: Plon, 1989); and Frédéric Robert, La Marseillaise (Paris: Nouvelles Éditions du Pavillon, 1989).  The IFF congress in Buenos Aires, for instance, featured “Le Congrès de la libre pensée,” Courrier de La Plata, September, 21, 1906, 1.  Wilson, A Trip to Rome, 160.

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Rhine in the 1840s.⁵⁸ Lamartine’s piece celebrated the river’s transnational nature and promoted a cosmopolitan vision of Europe: “Egotism and hatred only have one fatherland / Fraternity has none!”⁵⁹ At the Paris congress, freethinkers also sang the Internationale, evoking links to the international labor movement.⁶⁰ Finally, in the 1930s, Renaud Strivay, a Belgian IFF leader, sought to create an international anthem with his Chant des Libres Penseurs. The song itself did not leave much of a trace but it is instructive in the framing of freethought, referring to past struggles but also the “dream of the glorious days / when reason and science will have secularized the heavens.” More generally, however, the culture of freethought congresses is notable in the way that it drew on traditions, repertoires and symbols that were not genuine to the movement itself. The reference to episodes from national pasts and the use of tunes such as the Marseillaise and the Internationale indicate that international freethought was often hitched on to concepts that were rooted in nationhood or in revolutionary politics. While on the one hand, this may seem like a limitation, on the other hand, it suggests that the international promotion of secular agendas could build on existing traditions and imagery, even when the roots of the latter lay elsewhere.

National Pasts and International Martyrdom Renaud Strivay’s Chant des Libres Penseurs described the point when “the world liberates itself from the detested servitude” as “Voltaire’s revenge.”⁶¹ In this respect, the philosophe was not primarily portrayed as a French Enlightenment thinker but rather as the embodiment of a universal cause. The mention of Voltaire was one of many examples of freethinkers referencing figures from the past. Such worship was exemplified in the Biographical Dictionary of Freethinkers of all Ages and Nations, written by Joseph Mazzini Wheeler, a British secularist journalist whose middle name paid tribute to the Italian republican leader Giuseppe

 It was a direct response to the nationalist German Rheinlied. See René Garguillo, “La Marseillaise de Lamartine,” in Relire Lamartine aujourd’hui, ed. Simone Bernard-Griffiths and Christian Croisiller (Paris: Éditions Nizet, 1993), 157– 159.  Ibid., 160 – 165.  See e. g. Fédération Internationale de la Libre Pensée, Congrès de Paris, 93. On the Internationale and freethinking, see Lalouette, La République anticléricale, 406 – 407.  Renaud Strivay, Union mondiale des libres penseurs: Bruxelles 1880 – Prague 1936 (Brussels: Imprimerie Henri Kumps, 1936), 141– 142.

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Mazzini.⁶² Published in 1889, Wheeler’s book presented an eclectic cast across more than 350 pages. For instance, the entries for the letter “A” featured Aristotle alongside figures such as the eleventh-century theologian Abelard and the Qarmatian ruler Abu Tahir, who led the sacking of Mecca in 930. These examples suggest an appropriation of past historical figures for a contemporary cause, evoking a perennial struggle between the forces of reaction and the power of reason. Likewise, John Byers Wilson evoked the memory of past figures when he described the Rome congress of 1904 as “the victory of all the great Pagan Moralists, the victory of Hypatia, Copernicus, Galileo, Bruno, Vanini, Voltaire, Rousseau, Paine, Shelley, and of every brave and loving soul, of their time, and since their day, who have given the thoughts of their brains to make men free.”⁶³ Of the different individuals who were singled out for commemorative activities, those who had suffered violent deaths – and could thus be cast as martyrs – featured particularly prominently at freethought events. As Wheeler put it: “Freethought boasts its notable army of martyrs for whom the world was not worthy, and who paid the penalty of their freedom in prison or at the stake.”⁶⁴ In Italy, the philosopher and scientist Giordano Bruno enjoyed a special place in this imaginary pantheon, having been sentenced to death for heresy in 1600. Italian liberals and radicals saw Bruno as a symbol for their anti-ecclesiastical model of Italianità. ⁶⁵ This dimension was highlighted by the erection of Giordano Bruno statues in several Italian cities governed by the left.⁶⁶ The most famous such monument was located in Rome at the Campo de’ Fiori, the square where Bruno had been burnt at the stake. Having been inaugurated in 1889, the statue was both “a provocative symbol” that angered many Catholics

 Joseph Mazzini Wheeler, A Biographical Dictionary of Freethinkers of all Ages and Nations (London: Progressive Publishing Company, 1889).  Wilson, A Trip to Rome, 142.  Wheeler, Biographical Dictionary, iii.  On constructions of Italianità more generally, including the role of the secular therein: Silvana Patriarca, Italian Vices: Nation and Character from the Risorgimento to the Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Carolin Kosuch, “Hygiene, Rasse und Zukunftstechnik: Paolo Mantegazzas Beiträge zur Italianità,” Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken, no. 97 (2017): 316 – 338.  See e. g. Mario Isnenghi, “La Place italienne,” in L’Italie par elle-même – lieux de mémoire italiens de 1848 à nos jours, ed. Mario Isnenghi (Paris: Éditions Rue d’Ulm, 2006), 117– 118. See also Bruno Tobia, “Urban Space and Monuments in the ‘Nationalization of the Masses’: The Italian Case,” in Nationalism in Europe, 1815 to the Present: A Reader, ed. Stuart Woolf (London: Routledge, 1995), 171– 191.

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and “a venerated pilgrimage site among freethinkers.”⁶⁷ The controversy surrounding the planned monument as well as its subsequent unveiling attracted international attention.⁶⁸ Published in the year of its unveiling, Wheeler’s Biographical Dictionary noted the plans for a memorial to “this heroic apostle of liberty and light,” claiming that “the principal advanced thinkers in Europe and America” had helped to fund it.⁶⁹ The 1904 congress in Rome offered manifold opportunities to commemorate Bruno as an international martyr. Upon arriving in Rome for the event, John Byers Wilson spotted “a large lithography, about twelve feet high of Giordano Bruno, with the announcement of the coming Congress.” Indeed, in the Eternal City, “Bruno loomed up everywhere. Where the walls were spacious enough, there would be two or three of these huge lithographs pasted thereon.”⁷⁰ Independent of the formal congress program, British and American freethinkers decided to visit the Bruno statue. Having reached the Campo de’ Fiori, they recited a poem that Walter Hurt, editor of the American periodical Culturist, had written prior to the trip. It denounced the Roman Catholic Church as “a Courtesan queen” that had “long sat superbly enthroned […] while all of humanity groaned.” A long litany of ecclesiastical misdeeds – including the way it had “offered the body of Bruno / to feed to the greed of the flame” – was followed by a more optimistic message: “No longer the Vatican voices / its rulings for all of the race / for reason now reigns and rejoices / in liberty’s glory and grace.”⁷¹ One day after the American and British visit to the Bruno statue, the IFF staged an official parade to the monument. Similar to the congress opening, the march featured “a long line of Garibaldi veterans, arrayed in the red uniforms in which they fought for Italian independence,” followed by state troops.⁷² On this occasion, the organizers eschewed the use of musical groups or flags as they sought to offer “a tribute to a citizen and man,” rather than staging a procession of “a political or class character.” Yet the participants did not require the musical accompaniment: having reached their destination, “the hymn of the Marsellaise [sic] arose and resounded upon the air.” In Wilson’s account, this expression offered a marked contrast to “the jeers and yells of the savage supersti-

 Peter D’Agostino, Rome in America: Transnational Catholic Ideology from the Risorgimento to Fascism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 70.  With regard to Britain, see Hilary Gatti, Essays on Giordano Bruno (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 230 – 237.  Wheeler, Biographical Dictionary, 56 – 57.  Wilson, A Trip to Rome, 139.  Ibid., 186.  Ibid., 196.

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tious mob” at the time of Bruno’s death.⁷³ From the Bruno monument, the crowd moved onwards to a statue of Giuseppe Garibaldi. The reverence shown to the political and military leader can be interpreted in several ways. To Italian freethinkers, it served to legitimize their own concept of secularity at a domestic level, by associating their efforts with a figure who was venerated as a national hero. Yet the involvement of foreign visitors meant that Garibaldi was also appraised as a universal figure – taking up an element that had already featured in contemporary representations of him.⁷⁴ One year after the events in Rome, the IFF congress in Paris marked the memory of another “freethought martyr,” the Chevalier de La Barre. La Barre’s case had been one of the causes célèbres of the French Enlightenment: in 1766, the nineteen-year-old nobleman had been burnt alive, with a copy of Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique around his neck, as a punishment for “sacrilege.” Voltaire himself wrote about the “horrifying case” that “had appalled the whole of Europe (except for a few fanatic enemies of humanity).”⁷⁵ In 1905, the IFF congress began with a march that took an estimated 20,000 people – again with flags and music – to the unveiling of a monument dedicated to La Barre.⁷⁶ The location was significant: the statue was placed outside Sacré-Cœur, the enormous Catholic basilica whose construction had incensed many freethinkers. The memorial has therefore been interpreted as an attempt to “de-sacralize the site.”⁷⁷ The La Barre monument was the second Parisian statue dedicated to a victim of clericalism: in 1889, the municipality had erected a bronze statue of Étienne Dolet – a sixteenth-century critic of the Inquisition – at the Place Maubert, the square where he had been burned to death on heresy charges.⁷⁸ If figures from the past could be used to represent a universal and eternal struggle, freethinkers acquired a contemporary martyr figure when the Spanish authorities executed the anarchist and educator Francisco Ferrer on October

 Ibid.  Lucy Riall, Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008).  Voltaire, “An Account of the Death of the Chevalier de La Barre,” in Voltaire on Tolerance and Other Writings, ed. Simon Harvey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 139.  “Le Congrès de la libre-pensée: La manifestation du Montmartre,” Le Radical, September 5, 1905, 1. From 1907, La Barre was also commemorated through another monument, located in Abbeville, where freethinkers gathered on an annual basis – see e. g. Eugene Hins, La Libre Pensée internationale en 1911 (Brussels: Bibliothèque de La Pensée, 1912), 77.  Lalouette, La République anticléricale, 197.  Jacqueline Lalouette, “Du bû cher au pie´destal: Étienne Dolet, symbole de la libre pense´e,” Romantisme, no. 64 (1989): 85 – 100. (Reprinted in Lalouette, La Répulique anticléricale, 201– 223.)

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13, 1909. Several recent studies have acknowledged the widespread international mobilization triggered by Ferrer’s fate.⁷⁹ The Ferrer protests downplayed his political radicalism and focused on his work for secular education, casting him as a victim of Catholic reaction. Posthumous commemorations consolidated ideas about Ferrer as a martyr.⁸⁰ Memorialization efforts were particularly widespread on the first anniversary of his death. For example, the Italian Associazione nazionale del libero pensiero “Giordano Bruno” (National Freethought Association “Giordano Bruno”) brought together 30,000 people who listened to speeches that praised Ferrer and joined together in cries of “down with the Vatican.”⁸¹ In Lisbon, the anniversary of Ferrer’s death coincided with the first national freethought congress – held merely eight days after the Portuguese revolution had disposed of the monarchy. A British report on the Lisbon gathering commented on history’s “strange coincidence,” claiming that October 13 had also been the day when, back in 1541, “the Holy Inquisition was officially established in Portugal.” This assertion was historically questionable, as the actual date had been May 23, 1536. But the statement allowed the periodical to integrate recent events into a wider historical narrative: “And thus the blood of the martyrs fructifies, and all the Ferrers slain in the evil past look down from the heights of their peerless immortality upon a world growing better and wiser because brave men dared to suffer and die.”⁸² The IFF memorialized Ferrer through its congresses and by supporting the construction of a monument in Brussels. To William Heaford, the Ferrer monument was “more than a tribute in stone and bronze to a brave man”: it highlighted “the martyrdom which Freethought and its heroes, teachers, and apostles have had to suffer at the hands of bigots.” Moreover, it also pointed to “the martyrdom which may in future be inflicted upon Freethinkers if and wherever reaction raises its head of yore.”⁸³ Ferrer continued to occupy a prominent place within IFF discourse. When the organization marked its fiftieth anniversary in

 Kevin J. Callahan, Demonstration Culture: European Socialism and the Second International, 1889 – 1914 (Leicester: Troubadour Publishing, 2010), 234– 237; Daniel Laqua, “Freethinkers, Anarchists and Francisco Ferrer: The Making of a Transnational Solidarity Campaign,” European Review of History 21, no. 4 (2014): 467– 484; and Dittrich, Antiklerikalismus in Europa, 219 – 276.  For examples, see “World-Wide Movement to Honor Memory of Ferrer,” New York Times, Sunday Magazine, July 31, 1910, 6.  Eugène Hins, La Libre Pensée internationale en 1910 (Brussels: Bibliothèque de La Pensée, 1911), 9.  Heaford, “The Lisbon Freethought Congress,” 694.  William Heaford, “Ferrer’s Monument in Brussels – The New Crusade,” The Freethinker, August 9, 1914, 506.

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1930, delegates laid flowers at the Ferrer monument in Brussels.⁸⁴ A few years later, Strivay’s Chant des Libres Penseurs proclaimed that freethinkers would “not rest until […] our sons live the dream for which Ferrer gave his blood.”⁸⁵ Representations of Ferrer as a universal figure coincided with a discourse that cast Spain as a despotic nation dominated by the clergy.⁸⁶ The IFF congress of 1910 exemplified this aspect. British freethinker John T. Lloyd reported that, at the event, “Ferrer’s name was naturally linked with those of Counts Egmont and Horn, who had been cruelly massacred by Spanish tyranny three centuries earlier.” Congress delegates gathered at the Grand-Place of Brussels, where a marble inscription stated that Egmont and Horn had been “beheaded in this square by order of Philip II for having defended liberty of conscience in 1568.” Speakers explicitly likened the fates of Egmont, Horn and Ferrer. Moreover, the inscription was signed by “the International Committee appointed to commemorate the heroic death of Francisco Ferrer shot at Montjuïc for the same cause in 1909.”⁸⁷ Lloyd acknowledged the limits of such comparisons, as Egmont and Horn “had many serious faults.” Moreover, he also suggested that even in Spain, progress had been made since the days of the Inquisition, as “there are now to be found hundreds of thousands of stalwart Freethinkers, who are resolved, at whatever cost, to deliver their country from the bondage of superstition.”⁸⁸ Nonetheless, as The Freethinker’s main correspondent on international matters, William Heaford continued to evoke images of Spanish reaction.⁸⁹ Ideas of Spanish distinctness were reinforced by unfavorable comparisons with Portugal. For instance, the IFF’s secretary suggested that “whereas Spain finds itself plunged more than ever in reaction, liberated Portugal continues to march on the track of progress and is effecting the separation of state and church.”⁹⁰

 Strivay, Union mondiale des libres penseurs, 25.  Ibid., 71.  Dittrich, Antiklerikalismus in Europa, 256 – 264; Laqua, “Freethinkers, Anarchists and Francisco Ferrer,” 472– 474.  John T. Lloyd, “Freethought in Belgium,” The Freethinker, September 11, 1910, 579.  Ibid., 579 – 580.  See, e. g., a series of articles written by William Heaford in 1912: “The Spanish Inquisition,” The Freethinker, January 28, 1912, 52– 54; “Spain and the Inquisition,” The Freethinker, February 4, 1912, 75 – 76; “Spain and the Holy ‘Office’,” The Freethinker, February 11, 1912, 84– 86; “Ecuador, Spain, and the Inquisition,” The Freethinker, March 17, 1912, 164– 165; and “The Medievalism of Modern Spain,” The Freethinker, April 14, 1912, 234– 235.  Hins, La Libre Pensée internationale en 1911, 5.

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The Tensions between the National and the Universal: the 1907 Congress in Prague The IFF’s congress of 1907 illustrates the tensions between universal claims and notions of national distinctness in particularly striking fashion. Held in Prague, it took place in a period of heightened conflict between Czech and German nationalists. Before discussing the event itself, it is worth outlining its wider historical context. Pieter Judson has noted that the late Habsburg Monarchy was subject to manifold “battles over control of education.”⁹¹ Education was a contentious field in two respects: first, the question of secular education pitched Liberals and Catholics against one another. Second, towards the turn of the century, the role of language in schooling gave rise to further conflicts, especially in linguistically mixed areas. In 1897, the political sensitivities surrounding language were evidenced by the crisis over the Badeni Language Ordinances, a set of measures that sought to strengthen the role of Czech in the administration of Bohemia and Moravia. As Judson has argued, the conflict “galvanized German nationalist activists as had no other before it, motivating larger numbers of people to join existing nationalist and protective associations.”⁹² Georg von Schönerer was a highly controversial protagonist in these conflicts. Having initially been elected to the Reichsrat as a liberal deputy, he subsequently promoted a radical nationalist agenda that fused Pan-Germanism and anti-Semitism.⁹³ He was not a freethinker, but he shared freethinkers’ hostility to the Catholic Church: in his view, Catholicism seemed to advance the cause of the Czechs. As John Boyer put it, “Schönerer’s strategy combined extreme nationalism and extreme anticlericalism in one unified, ideological format.”⁹⁴ In 1890, Schönerer launched his Los von Rom (Away from Rome) campaign which has been described as “a twofold attack on Austrian Catholicism and on Viennese Christian Socialism,” based on the notion that they “were part of a scheme to

 Pieter Judson, The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 283.  Pieter Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience, and National Identity in the Austrian Empire, 1848 – 1914 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 259. See also John Deak, Forging a Multinational State: State Making in Imperial Austria from the Enlightenment to the First World War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 223 – 226.  On the process in which “racial nationalism” became increasingly prominent from the turn of the century, see Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries, 258 – 266.  John Boyer, Culture and Political Crisis in Vienna: Christian Socialism in Power, 1897 – 1918 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), 42– 43.

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despoil the purity of German culture and to undermine the resolve Austro-Germans needed to resist Czech political imperialism.”⁹⁵ Los von Rom had limited success. The ambivalent response among German freethinkers is illustrated by Das freie Wort, a Frankfurt-based periodical with ties to freethought.⁹⁶ In covering Schönerer’s campaign, one contributor acknowledged the positives of a rupture with Rome but suggested that the “enemies of Papism” needed “something better than an attachment to Protestantism.”⁹⁷ In this instance, Schönerer’s affinities with Prussian Lutheranism were an obstacle. Another contributor to Das freie Wort was more receptive to Schönerer’s ideas, however. Writing under the alias of “Peregrinus” (a term that described free subjects without citizenship in Roman law), he praised Los von Rom as “eminently patriotic in an Austrian sense.”⁹⁸ His article formed part of a wider series on “the Austrian problem.” Strong anti-Slavic sentiment pervaded these pieces, as reflected in references to a “racial struggle between Germans and Slavs” and the proclamation that “the Slavic danger has never been greater than today.”⁹⁹ To Peregrinus, the “Young Czechs and the clergy” were “marching hand in hand.”¹⁰⁰ Such statements seemingly ignored that large parts of the Czech national movement maintained their distance from the Catholic Church. While some Czech activists did seek to integrate Catholics into their conception of the Czech nation, such efforts proved controversial within the national movement.¹⁰¹ As Jiří Malíř has argued, most members of the “Czech National Liberal camp,” which the Young Czechs formed part of, “held a critical and detached stance towards the Catholic Church,” while another section of the Czech movement, namely the National Social Party, embraced a “nationally motivated fierce anti-clericalism.”¹⁰² It has even been suggested that Bohemia’s distinct religious

 Ibid., 42.  John Mackinnon Robertson, A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, vol. 2 (London: Watts & Co, 31915), 411; Horst Groschopp, Dissidenten: Freidenker und Kultur in Deutschland (Marburg: Tectum, 22011), 338.  J. Brand, “Das Übel der ‘Los-von-Rom’-Bewegung,” Das freie Wort 1, no. 22 (1902): 681.  Peregrinus, “Los von Rom,” Das freie Wort 1, no. 5 (1901): 134.  Peregrinus, “Das österreichische Problem,” Das freie Wort 1, no. 2 (1901): 39.  Ibid., 41.  On these dynamics, see Martin Schulze Wessel, “Die Konfessionalisierung der tschechischen Nation,” in Nation und Religion in Europa: Mehrkonfessionelle Gesellschaften im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Dieter Langewiesche (Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 2004), 135– 150.  Jiří Malíř, “The Anti-Clericalism of Social Democracy and the Secularization of the Working Class in the Czech Lands,” in Secularization and the Working Class: The Czech Lands and Central

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traditions could amount to “a Czech variant” of Los von Rom. ¹⁰³ In other words, Peregrinus’s comments were highly misleading. At the same time, they showed how anti-Catholic and anti-Slavic rhetoric could intersect. In line with such discourse, he described Agenor Maria Gołuchowski, the Polish count who served as the Habsburg Monarchy’s foreign minister, as an “ancestry-proud aristocrat with the pain of a shipwrecked nation and the fervor of burning Catholicism in his heart.”¹⁰⁴ The IFF’s Prague congress took place in a year that had already seen significant political mobilization. In May 1907, an electoral reform in the Cisleithanian half of the Habsburg Monarchy had resulted in the first elections based on universal male suffrage.¹⁰⁵ When freethinkers gathered in September, they affirmed the potential of their shared principles to override national differences and provide a forum for dialogue. The Czech freethought leader Theodor Bartošek opened the event by pointing out that “the two nationalities” had come together “in unity to accomplish an endeavor that had seemed impossible in light of the tense national circumstances of our country.”¹⁰⁶ Indeed, Czech and German freethinkers from Bohemia had jointly organized the event. Having visited the congress as a delegate from Imperial Germany, Gustav Tschirn emphasized this aspect in his report for Das freie Wort. As he suggested, national groups that were otherwise “divided by hostility” had engaged in “fraternally enthusiastic cooperation for the shared cultural ideal of freedom of thought.” Tschirn was hopeful about the positive legacy that the Prague gathering might have “for the nationality struggle in Austria.”¹⁰⁷ Some of the press coverage portrayed the event along similar lines. The Prager Tagblatt argued that the congress was particularly significant because “on this classic territory of nationality struggle, it has managed to attract Germans

Europe in the 19th Century, ed. Jiří Hanuš, Lukás Fasora and Jiří Malíř (Eugene/OR: Wipf and Stock, 2011), 99.  H. Gordon Skilling, “Masaryk: Religious Heretic,” in The Czech and Slovak Experience: Selected Papers from the Fourth World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies, Harrogate, 1990, ed. John Morison (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 72; 62– 88.  Peregrinus “Der polnische Kanzler,” Das freie Wort 1, no. 14 (1901): 423.  In the wake of the elections, various Czech political groups put their joint efforts on a firmer organizational footing as they had lost electoral ground to the Social Democrats: Catherine Albrecht, “The Bohemian Question,” in The Last Years of Austria-Hungary: A Multi-National Experiment in Early Twentieth-Century Europe, ed. Mark Cornwall (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2002), 85 and 88.  “Der Freidenker-Weltkongreß,” Prager Tagblatt, September 9, 1907, 3.  Gustav Tschirn, “Der internationale Freidenker-Kongreß in Prag,” Das freie Wort 7, no. 14 (1907): 537. With thanks to Katharina Neef for sharing this source.

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and Czechs to [undertake] joint work.”¹⁰⁸ The newspaper noted approvingly that the Czech academic František Krejčí had received “particularly great applause” for a speech in which he suggested that freethought might offer “a cleansing and overcoming of national antagonisms.” Krejčí argued that “the motives of national strife cannot be justified on ethical grounds.”¹⁰⁹ Symbolically, he switched from Czech to German midway through his speech. Notwithstanding the sentiments expressed in such speeches, the congress was affected by the political tensions in Bohemia. The IFF’s official report alluded to this aspect, referring to “the animosity which, in certain parts of Bohemia, exists between Czechs and Germans,” singling out events in Prachatice/Prachatitz as “one of the battles where the racial animosity lit up.”¹¹⁰ As Pieter Judson has pointed out, Prachatice/Prachatitz was “largely a German-speaking administrative center” that “sat directly on the language frontier in a district whose rural majority spoke Czech.”¹¹¹ Shortly before the congress, attempts by Czech nationalists to stage a festival in this town led to violent altercations.¹¹² Czech leaders highlighted these events by sending a telegram to the IFF gathering. In the congress hall, Ernst Viktor Zenker, a radical Viennese journalist, received “lively applause” when he asked the delegates to “protest against these barbarian mores.” The congress subsequently passed a resolution that “condemned all nationalist agitation that departs from the peaceful path.”¹¹³ The motion portrayed such disputes as a division from the “successful struggle against reaction and clericalism,” yet it also seemed to take sides as it denounced “in the strongest terms any attempt that aim at violating the right of a minority to demonstrate.”¹¹⁴ Gustav Tschirn’s report described the episode as “a test of solidarity of the most beautiful kind.”¹¹⁵ Yet whereas freethinkers managed to agree on a joint stance, various external observers expressed their disapproval. The Prager Tagblatt argued that the IFF resolution had been adopted “under the pressure of Czech politicians” and that, in the absence of “real information,” it would  “Der Freidenker-Weltkongreß,” Prager Tagblatt, September 9, 1907, 3.  Ibid.  Eugéne Hins, Le Congrès de Prague (8 au 12 septembre 1907) (Brussels: Bibliothèque de La Pensée, 1908), 17– 18.  Pieter Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 89.  See e. g. “Große Demonstration in Prachatitz: Militär und Gendarmerie räumt den Marktplatz – Mehrere Deutsche verwundet,” Prager Tagblatt, September 9, 1907, 1.  Hins, Le Congrès de Prague, 18.  “Der Freidenkerkongreß,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, September 10, 1907, 4  Tschirn, “Der internationale Freidenker-Kongreß in Prag,” 537.

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have been better not to pass it. According to the newspaper, the freethinkers had violated their “proudly proclaimed principle,” namely a “love for truth.”¹¹⁶ Such staunch criticism is noteworthy as it came from a periodical that covered freethought in largely favorable terms. Likewise, an article in Vienna’s Arbeiter-Zeitung – the newspaper of the Austrian socialists – argued that the congress should have accepted that “the Prachatitz row is none of its business.”¹¹⁷ Seen from this angle, Zenker’s support for the motion seemed unrepresentative of Austrian-German sentiment. At Prague, his speeches – delivered with “captivating passion, humor and satire” – attracted praise,¹¹⁸ yet his popularity rarely extended beyond secularist circles. Notwithstanding his election to the Austrian Reichsrat in 1908, John Boyer has noted his relative isolation. In this context, he has stressed the distinctness of Zenker’s stance on national matters: his “emphasis on culture as opposed to nation or class as the defining variable of progress made it easy for him to project transnational schemes of ethnic conciliation.”¹¹⁹ In light of the political sensibilities surrounding the situation in Bohemia, even the traditional commemorative acts associated with IFF congresses proved contentious. As part of the congress program, delegates visited the city of Tábor, placing a crown on a monument to the Bohemian Hussite Jan Žižka. On the one hand, this act honored an individual who had confronted the ecclesiastical authorities. On the other hand, Žižka’s role in the Hussite Wars made him a historical figure that could be appropriated for national purposes. The organizers admitted that the visit to Tábor had triggered “lively polemics” in Prague’s German papers. In response, the IFF’s Belgian secretary-general argued that the federation had not intended to engage in “nationalist propaganda.” Instead, it had merely built on the custom of recent congresses, notably the visit to the Bruno monument in Rome in 1904 and commemorative acts for La Barre and Dolet in Paris in 1905.¹²⁰ The celebrations in Tábor did not reach the scales of these earlier events: it turned out to be a “rather modest and embarrassing” affair, with a somewhat “cold reception” for the visiting freethinkers.¹²¹

 “Der Freidenker-Weltkongreß,” Prager Tagblatt, September 10, 1907, 1  “Der Freidenkerkongreß,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, September 10, 1907, 4. This statement was also noted in one of Prague’s German-language newspapers: “Ein bemerkenswertes Urteil über die Prachatizer Resolution,” Prager Tagblatt, September 11, 1907, 3.  Tschirn, “Der internationale Freidenker-Kongreß in Prag,” 537.  Boyer, Culture and Political Crisis, 183.  Hins, Le Congrès de Prague, 26.  Stanislav Balík, Jiří Hanuš, Lukáš Fasora and Marek Vlha, Der tschechische Antiklerikalismus: Quellen, Themen und Gestalt des tschechischen Antiklerikalismus in den Jahren 1848 – 1938 (Vienna: Lit, 2016), 231.

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The Czech–German tensions in Bohemia were not the only national question that figured at the Prague congress: the German social democrat Ewald Vogtherr spoke out against the oppression of Poles, Danes and Alsatians in Imperial Germany, receiving much applause for his comment that people should “not be defined by their nationality or confession.”¹²² Vogtherr’s comments formed part of a debate on “Patriotism and Freethought.” They were based on a resolution that he had introduced together with the Swiss freethinker Otto Karmin. Their motion criticized “chauvinism,” arguing that freethinkers should work towards a “federation of all nations, based on equal rights for everyone.”¹²³ Such comments indicate the wider internationalist discourse within the IFF. However, not everyone went along with such notions. Indeed, in response to the resolution, the French delegate Delarue proclaimed himself a “patriot.” In his view, not all nations were equal. He stressed that the French people would be “prepared to spill their blood for the freedom of other countries” and suggested that some nations were worthier to be defended than others. Elaborating on this theme, Delarue argued That the responsibility of every freethinker, in the case of a war that no measure could have prevented, is – by all means – not to give any support to the war effort by a people with a retrograde mentality against a people with more advanced mentality; but on the contrary, to participate in the defense of the most advanced nation on the path of liberty against the most retrograde nation.¹²⁴

Such comments reveal ideas about a hierarchy of nations that, in some respects, sat uneasily alongside proclamations of universal values. Seen from another angle, however, they were but a manifestation of the ambivalent views that were present within the IFF. Even Karmin and Vogtherr’s resolution was in some ways ambiguous: on the one hand, it stated that “Freethought, like science is international.” On the other hand, it stressed that just as it “recognized everyone’s right to an individual life,” it would accord “the same right to the natural political and formations that are the nations.”¹²⁵ Despite these debates and divisions, freethinkers celebrated the Prague congress as a success. In his account for The Freethinker, William Heaford argued that the event had been “of incalculable advantage in stirring up the Czechs, the Poles, and their neighbors, the Austrian Germans, into united hostility

   

Hins, Le Congrès de Prague, 39. Ibid., 38. Ibid., 40. Ibid., 38.

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against the powers of darkness represented by religion.”¹²⁶ He echoed the content of several congress speeches in claiming that Czechs and Germans were able to “forget their animosities under the beneficent aegis of Freethought.”¹²⁷ Moreover, Heaford’s comments illustrated how Czech freethinkers had been able to place their own activism within a wider historical narrative: “Evidently the spirit of Jan Huss [sic] is not dead in Bohemia, nor amongst the sons and daughters of that heroic race.”¹²⁸ A few years later, Heaford returned to praising Bohemia as this “land, the sacred ground which has been soaked with the blood of martyrs innumerable, headed by the indomitable John Huss [sic] and Jerome of Prague, is the generous soil from which the seed of Freethought has recently sprung into a rich harvest of activity.”¹²⁹ Such comments are significant in several respects. They highlight that Czech activists had some success in casting their nation as a force for progress – built upon notions of a secular mission – rather than being dominated by reactionary interests. Such claims were more than rhetoric: freethinkers in Bohemia did enjoy links to influential political forces, for instance the Czech Realist Party and its co-founder Tomáš Masaryk.¹³⁰ Moreover, most Czech parties – with the obvious exception of the Catholic ones – had a wing that was positively inclined towards the freethought movement.¹³¹ The convergence of secularist and national representations was embodied by the figure of Jan Hus. Freethinkers claimed the late medieval religious reformer as a martyr for their cause, yet he also played a central role in Czech visions of the national past.¹³² This duality was not a contradiction: in freethought discourse, Hus could be a national contribu-

 William Heaford, “Freethought in Many Lands: International Freethought,” The Freethinker, July 26, 1908, 474.  Heaford, “Freethought in Many Lands: Bohemia,” 362.  Ibid.  William Heaford, “Bohemia for Freethought,” The Freethinker, January 7, 1912, 4.  Johannes Gleixner, “Menschheitsreligionen”: T.G. Masaryk, A.V. Lunačarskij und die religiöse Herausforderung revolutionärer Staaten (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017), 71– 77.  With thanks to Johannes Gleixner for clarifying and contextualizing this aspect, as well as also commenting on other parts of this chapter.  On the imagery of Jan Hus in Czech nationalism: Cynthia Paces, “Religious Heroes for a Secular State: Commemorating Jan Hus and Saint Wenceslas in 1920s Czechoslovakia,” in Staging the Past: Commemorations in the Habsburg Lands, ed. Nancy Wingfield and Marie Bucur (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2001), 199 – 225; Cynthia Paces and Nancy Wingfield, “The Sacred and the Profane: Religion and Nationalism in the Bohemian Lands, 1880 – 1920,” in Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe, ed. Pieter Judson and Marsha Rozenblit (New York/Oxford: Berghahn, 2005), 107– 125; Schulze Wessel, “Die Konfessionalisierung der tschechischen Nation.”

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tion to an international pantheon. Unsurprisingly, Czech freethinkers planned an international congress to mark the 500th anniversary of Hus’s death. While the outbreak of the First World War meant that this congress never happened, its initial announcement highlighted the national connotations of this planned international event: We would like this to become a new stage on the path towards the rebirth of our national character. We want the Czech nation to put an end to the spirit of Rome which would effectively be the best celebration of the martyr of [the Council of] Constance. We want that the year 1915 be the triumph of the Czech spirit over the spirit of Rome.¹³³

Conclusion By the early twentieth century, freethinkers drew on a well-established repertoire that allowed them to assert the universality of their cause. Alongside speeches and pamphlets, they deployed processions, marches, music and a host of commemorative activities. In doing so, they suggested that their shared goals overrode national differences. Moreover, through the celebration of particular martyr figures, they alleged that the IFF’s work formed part of a struggle that had been waged for a long time. The position and nature of freethinkers evidently varied between different countries. In some respects, this could in itself be of use to the international movement. For instance, by showcasing a nation’s contribution to the wider cause, freethinkers could offer inspiration and renewed vigor to their peers in other countries. With regard to the Belgian case, Jeffrey Tyssens and Petri Mirala have noted the relevance of such transnational influences: “Looking optimistically at developments in France, Latin America and especially Portugal, Belgian freethinkers saw their aspiration to laïcité as a part of a broad progressive movement of history toward a secular utopia.”¹³⁴ In this respect, references to national distinctness were not necessarily a matter of nationalism, but of identifying cases that might reinforce convictions about the onward march of freethought. The flipside of the coin, however, was that countries could also be cast as lagging behind on the road of progress. The negative portrayals of Spain, which the Ferrer affair reinforced, were a striking example of this dimension. Freethinkers were hardly oblivious to notions of national difference. The freethought congress in Prague illustrated this point. Whereas to German nation La Libre Pensée Prague, Les Tchèques et la libre pensée (Prague: A. Reis, 1910), 15.  Tyssens and Mirala, “Transnational Seculars,” 1369.

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alists, Slavic nationalism seemed allied to clericalism, Czech freethinkers posited a different vision in which the Hussite legacy allowed them to cast their nation as particularly progressive. But alongside such national discourse, the IFF congresses continued to proclaim the conviction that freethought would transcend national antagonisms. As subsequent wartime ruptures demonstrated, this view was overly optimistic – but the pervasiveness of this discourse suggests that universalist notions were central to freethinkers’ understanding of secularity.

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Johannes Gleixner

Socialist Secularism between Nation, State, and the Transnational Movement: The International of Proletarian Freethinkers in Central and Eastern Europe In December 1928, the well-established Czechoslovak branch of the international freethought movement, the Volná Myšlenka (Free Thought, VM), reflected on the question of “unity in the movement of unbelievers.” Looking back on 1926, these freethinkers remembered having been pressured by so called “proletarian” freethinkers to dissolve the differing national and political organizations in order to found a united socialist freethought movement. Quite gleefully, the VM noticed the lacking success of this enterprise. Czech and German socialist freethinkers in Czechoslovakia did not only fail to unify behind the banner of proletarian freethinking. What is more, also their international organization, the International of Proletarian Freethought (IPF), was torn apart by factional struggles: […] this International, which is mostly communist and does not have any other members than Russians, Germans from Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Germany, the Communist League [of Unbelievers, J. G.] from Czechoslovakia, as well as several miniature and in their respective countries completely meaningless organizations of other nationalities […].¹

At first glance, this harsh judgement seems to be justified: in the short time of its nominal existence (1925 – 1936), the IPF, in fact, was only functional for three years, that is, until 1928. Its rapid disintegration mirrored, albeit with some delay, the labor movement’s split into communists and social democrats. The IPF also never was international in the broad sense of the term but rather a peculiar East and Central European organization that recruited its members almost exclusively from Soviet Russia, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Germany, and Poland.² In its mocking report, the VM also mentioned the nationality of the German and Russian member organizations while conveniently omitting that the Communist League of Czechoslovakia, notwithstanding its transnational orientation, was, in  R. K., “O jednotu v bezvěreckém hnutí,” Volná Myšlenka, December 7, 1928, 49. If not indicated otherwise, all translations are the author’s.  Amongst others, some token member organizations existed in France, Belgium, Norway, and the United States, though they never represented more than fringe movements in their respective countries. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110688283-011

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fact, overwhelmingly Czech in its actual setup. This points to the problem of international organizations as battlegrounds for national(ist) struggles that also stirred up the IPF – an organization at the crossroads between ideological, national, and socio-cultural differences. Still, the IPF was an ambitious attempt not only in terms of overcoming these fault lines but also in creating an international platform for socialists, who mostly were not at the center of their respective parties but, nonetheless, tried to shape socialism as a cultural force. Analyzing the IPF’s structures and initiatives, it becomes evident how freethinkers from different countries dealt with the question of church and religion in public life and to what degree they influenced each other. Thus, and despite all its faults, the sheer existence of the IPF could be considered a success story, as this organization proved – and to a certain degree also ensured – the plurality of the socialist discourse beyond party discipline well into the late 1920s. Besides, and other than their more nationalist (or more loyalist) liberal counterparts, its member organizations often took on a decidedly internationalist outlook.³ From an international and transnational perspective, this illustrates both ideological and national conflicts and the ways in which socialists of all shades perceived each other beyond the factional struggles of national political arenas. The IPF also served as a challenger to established liberal secularist narratives by forcefully claiming for religion never to be a sheer private matter, but to be political in its essence and therefore an integral part of the political discourse. The “proletarian secularity” it propagated could neither be an individual nor private matter, but claimed to be a comprehensive political doctrine. Thus, for the socialist freethinkers, fighting religion and creating a new secular and socialist culture seemed linked on a basic level. Therefore, the ultimate fate of proletarian secularity was bound to its political success as a movement. This explains the most striking feature of Proletarian Freethought, namely that its intense focus on organizational matters has to be understood as part of its ideological framework.⁴ In short, the IPF tells us as

 In this chapter, I will mostly rely on the more general expression of “socialist freethought/ freethinker,” when addressing the movement. I am aware that this is not a very precise term, but it does not evoke the same difficulties concerning translation as “proletarian freethought,” “unbelievers,” or “godless.” Also, neither Czech nor Russian nor German sources are in any way consistent in their use of such terms or in their translations from other languages. Only after 1930 the terms “godless” and “unbeliever” were used to characterize decidedly militant communist organizations.  This idea of organization as ideology is a key argument in Daniel Peris’ account of organized atheism in the early Soviet Union. See Daniel Peris, Storming the Heavens: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 138 – 141. In my chapter, I would like

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much about the specific interwar “culture wars,”⁵ as it reveals about the dynamics of European socialisms. In this chapter, I will focus mostly on German and Czech socialist freethought in Czechoslovakia and the Soviet godless movement in their national and transnational interplay within the IPF,⁶ including some additional remarks on German proletarian freethought.⁷ I will mostly consider the years from 1920 to 1928. They cover the various attempts to set up an international organization of socialist freethought as well as the foundation and the establishment of the IPF up until its de facto split into competing factions. After all, the chapter offers an overview and case study of socialism, revolutionary secularism, and freethinking in a tense and eventful national and international framing.

Socialism and Freethinking after the First World War Freethinking has always taken on international colorings. As recent scholarship has stressed, especially during the nineteenth century, Europe’s freethinkers did

to expand on this, casting it not as a specific feature of Soviet godlessness, but a general problem of socialist freethought as a political movement.  See Todd Weir, “Introduction: Comparing Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture Wars,” Journal of Contemporary History 53, no. 3 (2018): 497– 498.  Todd Weir has already pointed to the entanglement of transnational and national struggles in the interwar culture wars in Germany: Todd Weir, “European Culture War in the Twentieth Century? Anti-Catholicism and Anti-Bolshevism between Moscow, Berlin, and the Vatican 1922 to 1933,” Journal of Religious History 39, no. 2 (2015): 298 – 304.  To my knowledge, no systematic research on Austrian freethought has yet been conducted. For the sake of my argument, I will focus mostly on German-speaking socialist freethinkers in Czechoslovakia. Besides the designation of their organization, Freidenkerbund, these freethinkers share some more similarities with the Austrians, even after 1918. For German socialist freethought, I will rely mostly on Jochen-Christoph Kaiser’s seminal work: Jochen-Christoph Kaiser, Arbeiterbewegung und organisierte Religionskritik: Proletarische Freidenkerverbände in Kaiserreich und Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981). On the Soviet godless movement, there is a solid body of research; its international connections, however, have been mostly neglected so far. To complete the picture, one would also have to consider the Polish member organization. Polish freethought was likewise marked by splits and mergers of different ideological and regional groups. Simultaneously, it often was the target of state repressions which made it almost impossible for Polish freethinkers to engage substantially in transnational terms. I will also not refer to the member organizations of the United States, Belgium, and France because they were too small to have any significant impact. Without exception, they voted together with the Soviet and Czech (communist) delegates.

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indeed constitute a transnational movement, often referring to and campaigning for commonly shared topics.⁸ Lasting efforts to organize transnationally were not made before the late nineteenth century, though. The foundation of the Fédération Internationale de la Libre Pensée (International Freethought Federation, IFF) in Brussels in 1880 was rather the result of several decades of European freethinking activity than its starting point. In Central Europe, national affiliates of the IFF developed even later, mostly during the first decade after the turn of the century. Once they had gained influence, the national freethought movements started to diversify. In the presence of influential socialist mass movements they were challenged to work out their stance toward politics. While freethinkers always displayed an affinity to socialist ideas, this relationship was quite ambiguous, as Daniel Laqua has already pointed out with regard to Western Europe.⁹ This counts even more true for Central and Eastern Europe with the German, Austrian, and Russian social democratic parties employing a more rigid Marxist political doctrine. Not surprisingly, from the turn of the century on, freethinkers in Imperial Germany and the Habsburg Empire started to experience conflicts with social democracy. Already back then, one main fault line between freethinkers and social democrats was the question on whether the fight against religion could be subsumed under the doctrine of class struggle or whether it should follow its own logic. German social democracy remained markedly indifferent to freethinkers despite attempts to come to terms with their movement; the leadership of the Czech Social Democratic Party, however, openly attacked the freethinkers in 1908, denying them the right to be a part of the labor movement.¹⁰ Even though they acknowledged the role of religious dissenters in general, Rus-

 See on the German, French, and Spanish cases and for a discussion of the transnationality of anticlericalism: Lisa Dittrich, Antiklerikalismus in Europa: Öffentlichkeit und Säkularisierung in Frankreich, Spanien und Deutschland (1848 – 1914) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014). See also Daniel Laqua, The Age of Internationalism and Belgium 1880 – 1930: Peace, Progress and Prestige (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).  See Daniel Laqua, “‘Laïque, démocratique et sociale’? Socialism and the Freethinkers’ International,” Labour History Review 74, no. 3 (2009): 259 – 262.  On Germany, see Sebastian Prüfer, Sozialismus statt Religion: Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie vor der religiösen Frage, 1863 – 1890 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002); on the Czech case prior to the war, see Jiří Malíř, “The Anti-Clericalism of Social Democracy and the Secularization of the Working Class in the Czech Lands,” in Secularization and the Working Class: The Czech Lands and Central Europe in the 19th Century, ed. Lukáš Fasora, Jiří Hanuš and Jiří Malíř (La Vergne: Wipf and Stock, 2011), 83 – 115.

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sian social democrats similarly refused to dilute their Marxist doctrine.¹¹ No other than their German and Czech comrades, the Russian Marxists considered the freethought movement to be a related, but nonetheless liberal bourgeois project.¹² The Russian example constituted a special case also insofar as organized freethinking simply did not exist and a critique of religion remained mostly confined to intellectual philosophical circles without mass appeal.¹³ But already the Revolution of 1905 had indicated that questions of democracy, socialism, and revolution could be tied to religion easily.¹⁴ It was only in the last decade before the First World War that a distinctly socialist freethought movement started to develop and – while being in general friendly to the Brussels based IFF – sought to differentiate from its “bourgeois” comrades in order to answer the needs of the non-believing working class. Still, socialist freethought did not become a mass phenomenon before the war. While in 1908 the more left wing German freethinkers successfully established a “proletarian” organization (Zentralverband deutscher Freidenkervereine, German Freethinkers’ League), and the Czechs, quite similarly, founded the Svaz socialistických monistů (League of Socialist Monists), none of these associations gained significant influence on the party leadership before the war, and they also did not manage to attract a larger number of members.¹⁵ One could argue that already before the war the socio-cultural setup of freethinking in Central and Eastern Europe started to diverge from its Western counterparts. Differences between bourgeois anticlericalism and organizations of

 See in general Lenin’s well known essay on “Socialism and Religion” (Социализм и религия, Socializm i religija, 1905), whose main goal was to draw a distinction between Marxist revolutionaries and the liberal (and religious) opposition to Czarist rule. Curiously enough, this document became a rather unintended blueprint for later Soviet anti-religious policy. See Vladimir I. Lenin, “Socialism and Religion,” in V. I. Lenin: Collected Works, vol. 10: November 1905 – June 1906, ed. Andrew Rothstein (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 31972), 83 – 87.  For details, see Johannes Gleixner, “Menschheitsreligionen”: T. G. Masaryk, A. V. Lunačarskij und die religiöse Herausforderung revolutionärer Staaten (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016), 127– 129.  Considering the absence of institutionalized freethought, it is generally difficult to distinguish a tradition of freethought from liberal religious activism before 1917. See Gregory L. Freeze, “A Case of Stunted Anticlericalism: Clergy and Society in Imperial Russia,” European History Quarterly 13 (1983): 191– 193.  Martin Schulze Wessel, Revolution und religiöser Dissens: Der römisch-katholische und der russisch-orthodoxe Klerus als Träger religiösen Wandels in den böhmischen Ländern und in Russland 1848 – 1922 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2011), 73 – 79.  See Jochen-Christoph Kaiser, “Organisierte Religionskritik im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert,” Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 37 (1985): 206 – 208; and Malíř, “The Anti-Clericalism of Social Democracy,” 98.

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working class culture already existed at the beginning of the twentieth century. But the breakthrough of secular(izing) mass organizations in this particular region happened only after the fundamental shift in the political and legal framework that was initiated in the revolutionary aftermath of the First World War.¹⁶ The new revolutionary and democratic governments of the successor states of the German, Habsburg, and Russian Empires re-evaluated the former influential role of the churches that had been shaken up by the events.¹⁷ The shifting discursive framework of the postwar years suggests that, with the monarchies gone, the masses were finally free to entirely adopt a better way of life. This narrative was not limited to socialist circles, but gained cross-party support, not least also among nationalists and elites in several of the new states. They were hoping for the urban and rural population to take on new collective identities more in line with intellectual visions of society and in support of the new political order. In most cases, this particular identity was bound to a religious confession. In the Czech case, virtually all political elites expected the population to abandon Catholicism; the same counts true for other newly established or transformed states. Up until 1921, an unprecedented high number of people left the churches, especially in industrial areas.¹⁸ Both church apologetics and

 There seems no contradiction between the long term trend of declining religious practice and the relatively quick development of socialist atheist organizations immediately after the war. This is because other than bourgeois secularization, non-religion among workers was in general a phenomenon of the early twentieth century and the aftermath of the First World War. For a study of the German case, see Benjamin Ziemann, “Zur Entwicklung christlicher Religiosität in Deutschland und Westeuropa, 1900 – 1960,” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 65 (2013): 102– 109.  See for an explanation of this argument with regard to Austria-Hungary and the Russian Empire Martin Schulze Wessel, “Religion, Politics and the Limits of Imperial Integration: Comparing the Habsburg Monarchy and the Russian Empire,” in Comparing Empires: Encounters and Transfers in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Jörn Leonhard and Ulrike von Hirschhausen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010), 337– 358. A comparison to the situation in interwar-Germany, to my knowledge, still awaits attention. See, however, Todd Weir, “The Secular Beyond: Free Religious Dissent and Debates over the Afterlife in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” Church History 77, no. 3 (2008): 633.  Ziemann, “Zur Entwicklung,” 109 – 110; Zdeněk R. Nešpor, “Der Wandel der tschechischen (Nicht‐)Religiosität im 20. Jahrhundert im Lichte soziologischer Forschungen,” Historisches Jahrbuch 129 (2009): 508 – 510. As already mentioned, the Russian case is harder to access. Soviet surveys from a later period, however, indicate a similar phenomenon in Russian industrial areas. See Johannes Gleixner, “Beginnings of Soviet Sociology of Religion and the A(Religion) of Muscovite Workers (1925 – 1932),” in Transfers of Knowledge about Religion and Atheism in Central and Eastern Europe, ed. Dirk Schuster and Jenny Vorpahl (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2020) (forthcoming).

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atheists interpreted this wave of exits as a sign of the times: areligious indifference finally was over and the people seemed to wake up to their spiritual needs. Many freethinkers and socialists spotted the opportunity to recruit followers for their scientific and progressive worldviews, a step they believed would be no less than a political necessity. Against this backdrop it is not by chance that the histories of socialist freethought and the IPF are mostly tied to the interwar history of Central and Eastern Europe. For left-wing freethinkers, this development was a call for restructuring and unifying the movement. What seemed even more urgent was the search for a new and comprehensive socialist culture build around promoting church exit. The old social democratic paradigm of religion being a private matter had lost any traction and, by 1918, even seemed an obstacle on the way to a broad socialist education and politics.¹⁹ But the socialist parties, social democrats, and the new communist movement alike, continued to ignore these tendencies, making the need for independent organizations even more imperative.²⁰

Toward Socialist Freethought as an International Movement Despite some broad convergences, the socialist freethinkers in each of the mentioned countries started under different conditions and, in the beginning, developed along different paths. In these regards, among the most significant ideological challenges for freethinkers was the formation of a revolutionary socialist state in Russia that proclaimed to be atheist and internationalist. One of the first decrees the Bolshevik government issued in January 1918 ordered the separation of church and state and the secularization of the educational system. These steps did not signal a cultural revolution, though, but rather completed nineteenth-century Russian bourgeois anticlericalism that relied on the example of French laïcité. ²¹ The Russian case strongly echoed in both revolutionary Ger-

 The freethinkers reinvigorated an old debate within social democracy that never had been resolved. See Prüfer, Sozialismus statt Religion, 192– 199; 271– 273. One of the main proponents of proletarian international freethought, Theodor Hartwig, published extensively on this question. For a synthesis of some of his articles, see Theodor Hartwig, Sozialismus und Freidenkertum (Bodenbach: Verlag des Bundes proletarischer Freidenker, 1924).  See Kaiser, Arbeiterbewegung und Religionskritik, 140 – 141.  Otto Luchterhand, Die Religionsgesetzgebung der Sowjetunion (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 1978), 9 – 20.

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many and Czechoslovakia which announced almost identical goals. But other than in Germany and Czechoslovakia, Soviet Russia actually implemented the strict separation of church and state, accompanied by widespread violence and lawlessness during the civil war. The Soviet government initially interpreted religious changes as a mere rise of religious indifference, assuming people would stop believing once they discovered the religious “fraud.” This is why no comprehensive doctrine of atheism was developed in any way up until 1929. Although a number of activists expressed freethinking ideas and published on the topic, they were only loosely linked to the Communist Party.²² Other early attempts to form a secularist worldview were put under the umbrella term of “proletarian culture” prominently institutionalized in the Пролеткульт (proletkul’t, Proletarian Culture) during the civil war. This organization, in fact, tried to reach out internationally but was soon dissolved.²³ International contacts fell under the domain of the newly founded Communist International, the Komintern. In 1922, on its fourth congress, a declaration was passed stating that proletarian culture and lifestyle could only form as part of the class struggle. Proletarian freethinking – identified with various proletarian culture organizations – was not referenced in particular.²⁴ Specific “anti-religious” organizations did not even exist in Soviet Russia until 1922, which added to the absence of Soviet freethinking activists from the international area for longer periods. In Germany, proletarian freethought organizations already existed before the war, albeit with regional strongholds, mainly in Berlin, the Rhineland, and Saxony. Communism prospered in these regions; the socialist freethinkers, however, were equally present in both of the large German socialist parties, SPD and KPD. But most of the German freethinkers were without formal party affiliation: in 1929, still only around 20 % of proletarian freethinkers in Berlin were organized in those two parties. This suggests the tendency to hold non-affiliated memberships, whereas in the early aftermath of the First World War socialist freethinkers

 For more detailed information on the early Soviet anti-religious discourse, see Gleixner, Menschheitsreligionen, 151– 159.  In Soviet Russia, the institutionalization of proletkul’t reached its peak in the years 1921– 1922 when it was placed under the control of the Communist Party. Shortly afterwards, it ceased working as an independent organization and was dissolved thereafter. See Lynn Mally, Culture of the Future: The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 200 – 201.  John Riddell, ed., Toward the United Front: Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, 1922 (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2012), 879.

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displayed a close proximity to the short-lived Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD).²⁵ When the (bourgeois) IFF resumed its activities after the war, the German and Austrian national organizations initially were banned because the influential Belgian branch accused them of having supported the German war atrocities against Belgian civilians. During the first postwar international congress held in Prague in 1920, the IFF put forward conditions for their readmission, given that they would condemn the German-Austrian aggression.²⁶ Though perfectly willing to denounce war and nationalist aggression in general, German and Austrian freethought organizations refused to be stigmatized as perpetrators.²⁷ It is striking that the German freethinkers from Bohemia – reorganized as Freidenkerbund für die Tschechoslowakische Republik (Freethinker League of Czechoslovakia) in December 1919 – were not expelled but instead invited to join the Prague congress. Together with the German-speaking freethinkers from Switzerland they assumed the speaker role for German freethinkers, emphatically supporting an unconditional readmission of the banned member organizations.²⁸ Their success, though, was limited: it was only in 1922 that several German freethought organizations accepted the conditions and rejoined the IFF. The openly socialist organizations were not among them.²⁹ This temporary expulsion and the rapid growth of socialist freethought organizations already set the scene for an alternative attempt by German-speaking freethinkers to organize internationally.³⁰ To them, the IFF seemed toothless anyway – it was called a “Papier-Internationale” (“international on paper”). Instead, German-speaking freethinkers started to find a “lebensfähige” (“viable”) international organization they believed would be able to cope with the challenges of the new era.³¹ Attempting to address all these issues at once, the Zentralverband proletarischer Freidenker in Deutschland (Central Association of Proletarian Freethinkers in Germany, ZpFD) called for an International Conference in Leipzig in 1922. This  Kaiser, Arbeiterbewegung und Religionskritik, 126 – 128.  Jeffrey Tyssens and Petri Mirala, “Transnational Seculars: Belgium as an International Forum for Freethinkers and Freemasons in the Belle Époque,” Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire 90, no. 4 (2012): 1367. On the influential role of Belgian freethought in general, see Laqua, “Socialism and Freethinker,” 264– 265.  “Aus unserer Internationale,” Freier Gedanke 2, no. 7 (1921): 5.  Freier Gedanke 1, no. 3 (1920): 6 – 7.  Tyssens and Mirala, “Transnational Seculars,” 1367.  Ibid.  Theodor Kilian, “Freidenker-Internationale und ihr Organ,” Freier Gedanke 3, no. 13 (1922): 4– 5.

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meeting should consolidate the German freethinker-scene, define its supposedly “proletarian” outlook and discuss the matter of an alternative international organization.³² As a precondition for participation, no cooperating association was allowed to deny the important role and reality of class struggle for freethinking.³³ After two follow-up meetings in Kassel and Magdeburg in the same year, several factions of socialist freethought in Germany merged and formed the Gemeinschaft proletarischer Freidenker (Society of Proletarian Freethought, GpF). With more than 100,000 members, it became the largest political organization of socialist freethought.³⁴ Besides the GpF, the even more frequented funeral insurance funds continued to exist with the single largest organization of non-believing workers in Germany, the Verein der Freidenker für Feuerbestattung (Association of Freethinkers for Cremation, VfF) based in Berlin.³⁵ While the VfF, for the time being, acted rather unpolitical, the call for organizational renewal was met also by several bourgeois organizations. They also combined their efforts and cooperated with the GpF. The goals of greater international recognition, national consolidation, and of a strengthened socialism seemed to overlap and complement each other. The IFA’s manifesto also foresaw – much to the chagrin of the socialists – that freethought organizations from abroad could intervene to prevent a clear commitment to socialism and class struggle by consulting with the existing federation before signing off on a completely new organization.³⁶ Ironically, this position was supported by the only, to some extend communist delegate, an unnamed representative of the Soviet Russian proletkul’t. He likewise refused to join the IFA and suggested instead to establish an International of culture organizations. This was in line with the direction taken by the Komintern. The new Czechoslovak Republic, by contrast, was set up as a progressive polity, striving to introduce a democratic laïcité. One of the founding documents of Czechoslovakia, the Pittsburgh Declaration of May 1918, had propagated the separation of church and state as a precondition for state-building early, while

 Freier Gedanke 3, no. 10 (1922): 5 – 7.  A. Müller, “Die Freidenker-Internationale auf dem Wege,” Freier Gedanke 3, no. 21 (1922): 1.  Jochen-Christoph Kaiser casts some doubt on these numbers and suggests a membership half the size. (Kaiser, Arbeiterbewegung und Religionskritik, 146.)  While the GpF was the largest association of its kind, several other socialist freethought organizations continued to exist, especially in the Western German Rhineland. Based mostly in the industrial cities of Thuringia and Saxony, the GpF showed also certain regional features. For a short overview, see ibid., 146 – 147; 350 – 351.  Müller, “Freidenker-Internationale,” 2; 5. See also Kaiser, Arbeiterbewegung und Religionskritik, 187– 188.

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the war was still going on. Czech freethinking was an important element of the dominant anti-Catholic Czech culture originating in prewar times, therefore deeply entangled with the political mainstream and closer to actual political power. When, in 1919, German freethought socialists lamented the betrayal of the revolution by a government that included the Catholic Center Party,³⁷ Czech anticlerical freethinkers still were hopeful activists, discussing how to separate church and state.³⁸ The VM, together with several of the growing socialist groups of “unbelievers,” thus, experienced the year 1918 as a historical breakthrough. The discussions of this pivotal moment among freethinkers lasted for several years.³⁹ One of the leading freethinking voices was probably Theodor Bartošek, a high ranking member of both the VM and the Czechoslovak Socialist Party, who worked out a detailed separation law, which he submitted in May 1920.⁴⁰ In the end it was not implemented, but the Freidenkerbund (Freethinker League) of Czechoslovakia discussed Bartošek’s ideas broadly, suggesting some corrections, but otherwise expressing its support.⁴¹ Despite strong anti-Catholic leanings in Czech political culture, a political majority for the idea of separating church and state was hard to gain. As the relationship between the Catholic Church and the state remained an open question, a sort of culture war between social democrats, socialists, freethinkers, and secular nationalists on the one hand, and the Catholic Church on the other erupted.⁴² For the duration of this struggle to implement a secular state on a constitutional level, socialist and bourgeois freethinkers found themselves fighting the same fight. But just as in Germany, socialist freethought was on the rise also in Czechoslovakia. A multitude of local “unbeliever”-groups sprang up, mostly in Prague, the industrialized areas of Northern and Eastern Bohemia, and in larger cities like Ostrava and Brno. Their members entertained vague ideas about socialism, class struggle, and atheist culture. Not least due to the unique situation of the socialist parties in Czechoslovakia it proved quite difficult to establish a common framework: while the com Ibid., 140  Schulze Wessel, Revolution und Dissens, 137– 139.  For an overview of the contemporary literature on the topic, see Michal Pehr and Jaroslav Šebek, Československo a Svatý stolec: Od nepřátelství ke spolupraci (1918 – 1928): I. Úvodní studie, with the assistance of Pavel Helan and Marek Šmíd (Prague: Masarykův ústav AV ČR, 2012), 50.  Theodor Bartošek, Odluka církve od státu a její důsledky (Prague: Svaz Národního Osvobození, 1924).  Ludwig Wahrmund, the first president of the Freidenkerbund, was a respected scholar of church law. In the autumn of 1920, he wrote a series of articles on Bartošek’s legislative proposal. See Freier Gedanke 1, no. 4– 9 (1920).  Pehr and Šebek, Československo a Svatý, 13 – 23.

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munists split up with social democracy quite late, at the end of 1920,⁴³ there was a “national-social” party originating in the late nineteenth century, which had moved to the left, embraced socialism and, to a certain degree, furthered the idea of class struggle without Marxism, called the Czechoslovak Socialist Party.⁴⁴ These Czechoslovak socialists, although quite nationalistic, also included a number of known anarchists and pacifists, often with strong anticlerical attitudes, such as Bohuslav Vrbenský, Luisa Landová-Štychová, or the already mentioned Theodor Bartošek. The two most important factions of socialist freethought were the Sdružení sociálnědemokratických bezvěrců (Association of Social Democratic Unbelievers) and the Svaz socialistických bezvěrců (League of Socialist Unbelievers). The first rooted in the social democratic tradition of the socialist monists of 1913 and, after 1920, decided to side with the Communist Party, renaming itself Federace komunistických osvětových jednot (Federation of Enlightened Communist Cells, FKOJ), and chose the label “communist” slightly before the foundation of the actual party.⁴⁵ The second faction was established as a decidedly non-party organization but had a clear personal overlap with the Czechoslovak socialists. Both groups were structured rather loosely, as the designation FKOJ already suggested. The Socialist Unbelievers, for their part, consisted of two homonymic organizaions located in Prague and in Northern Bohemia in the industrial town of Most.⁴⁶ Besides, many socialist freethinkers such as Bartošek remained members of the traditional Volná Myšlenka. Together with the Deutsche Freidenkerbund (German Freethinker League), only the latter was active on international grounds. As organizer of the 1920 congress in Prague, the VM remained an important member of the IFF in Brussels. In the autumn of 1920, Czech freethinkers saw the opportunities for a secular state passing by: firstly, growing tensions in the ranks of the social democrats weakened the party’s influence. Furthermore, it became clear that Bartošek’s proposal would not turn into law in the foreseeable future. In light of these de Nancy M. Wingfield, “Working-Class Politics in the Bohemian Lands 1918 – 1921: National Identity, Class Consciousness, and the Social Democratic Parties,” Bohemia 34 (1993): 90 – 105.  While this “national socialist” party later developed a fascist wing, it should not be confused with German National Socialism. For that reason, I will address this group as “Czechoslovak Socialists,” although they used different labels. Research on this party is still scarse. Some clarification offers Detlef Brandes, “Die tschechoslowakischen National-Sozialisten,” in Die erste tschechoslowakische Republik als multinationaler Parteienstaat, ed. Karl Bosl (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1979), 101– 154.  “K našemu názvu,” Jiskry 2, no. 15 (1921): 144.  Milan Matoušek, “K organisační otázce našeho hnutí,” Socialistický bezvěrec 1, no. 14 (1922): 108.

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velopments, the VM and the two socialist organizations joined forces and founded an Akční výbor pro rozluku církve od státu (Action Committee for the Separation of the Church from the State).⁴⁷ Due to their quite friendly relations dating back to prewar times, the Freidenkerbund and the VM formed common action committees as well.⁴⁸ One curious common feature of this broad anti-Catholic coalition was its devotion to the Czech reformer Jan Hus, taken as a secular symbol not only of Czech nationality but also of progressiveness more in general. In this veneration, the German freethinkers of Czechoslovakia, with their loyalist attitude, differed from freethinkers in Germany and Austria.⁴⁹ This broad alliance did not last, however, not least because of its lacking success and a beginning feeling of resignation. It came as a major shock to freethinkers in Czechoslovakia, when the Catholic Československá strana lidová (Czechoslovak People’s Party) joined the government in 1921, having made itself indispensable for the government.⁵⁰ The FKOJ and the Socialist Unbelievers started to cooperate closely in the same year. They shared an antipathy for mainstream social democracy and its dovish policy with regard to the relationship between state and church.⁵¹ Also, both were suspicious toward the VM, especially because of its neutral stance regarding other, non-Catholic, denominations and due to its refusal to accept socialism as the only possible basis of freethinking.⁵² The German Freidenkerbund

 This organization called for the separation of church and state and claimed the confiscation of church property. See the title page of Jiskry: Organ Sdružení Soc. Dem. Bezvěrců 1 (1920): 1.  Rudolf Lebenhart, the general secretary of the Freidenkerbund, even singled out the representative of the Volná Myšlenka, František Krejčí, as the only comrade supporting him at the 1920 Prague Congress, when pleading the German cause. As Daniel Laqua’s chapter in this volume shows, Krejčí was a consistent advocate of internationalism in this account. See Lebenhart’s report from the retrospective: Rudolf Lebenhart, “Zum ersten internationalen Freidenkerkongreß,” Freier Gedanke 5, no. 19 (1924): 1.  R. L. [= Rudolf Lebenhart], “Johann Hus,” Freier Gedanke 6, no. 13 (1925): 1.  After 1921, due to parliamentary majorities, almost any coalition government of parties loyal to the republic had to rely on the Czech Catholics. Although despised by freethinkers and especially by the anticlerical Czechoslovak socialists, the people’s party was actually very loyal to the republic, even alienating the Holy See at times. See Pehr and Šebek, Československo a Svatý, 21– 23.  Even though there were also social democratic freethinkers, their influence was limited to the local level. The situation in Ostrava marked an important exception. See Martin Jemelka, “The Social Democratic Atheist Movement in Interwar Ostrava,” in Fasora, Hanuš and Malíř, eds, Secularization and the Working Class, 174– 192.  Such conflicts arose on a local level as well, leading young radical activists to abandon traditional freethought. See Vojtěch Malínek, “Kapitán generace? Zdeněk Kalista a nejmladší česká

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of Czechoslovakia took an interesting stance between those forming camps. Other than its Czech counterparts, it remained a unified organization that incorporated liberal freethinkers, social democrats, and even communists. This might have been because the split between social democrats and communists, without even taking into account the Czechoslovak socialists, had affected the German labor movement to a much lesser degree. Also, the Freidenkerbund most probably acted as a common interest group for secular Germans in the Czechoslovak Republic, who found themselves marginalized.⁵³ This position was about to change once the organization got involved with the IPF. In many ways Czechoslovakia formed a microcosm of the international situation both with regards to its ideological and national fractions. In this respect, the German freethinkers in Czechoslovakia even called one of their initiatives Internationale Arbeitsgemeinschaft in der Tschechoslowakischen Republik (International Cooperation in the Czechoslovak Republic), indicating a cooperation between the different nationalities within the state.⁵⁴ Once started, this drive to define socialist freethought internationally and to unify the freethought movement under this new banner continued in both Germany and Czechoslovakia. While freethought in Germany took part in the Interessengemeinschaft für Arbeiterkultur (Interest Group for Workers’ Culture), its Czechoslovak counterparts tried to continue their coalition with bourgeois organizations by co-founding the Arbeitsgemeinschaft kultureller Organisationen in der Tschechoslowakischen Republik (Interest Group of Cultural Organizations in the Czechoslovak Republic) in 1923. Both were umbrella associations with a shared target: in light of diverging ideologies they should provide the ground for the fight against the common clerical enemy. No other than it was the case with the IFA, the success of these organizations was to structure and institutionalize freethought. They did not contribute substantially to its set of ideas. Although the Czech socialist and communist freethinkers – other than the Germans – ignored international trends with the exception of expressing an

literatura v letech 1919 – 1924” (PhD diss., Filosofická fakulta, Univerzita Karlova v Praze, 2014), 61.  Wingfield, “Working-Class Politics,” 103.  “Der Schutz der Interessen der Konfessionslosen in der Tschechoslowakischen Republik,” Freier Gedanke 4, no. 11 (1923): 2. See also Rudolf Lebenhart, “Zur Vereinheitlichung der proletarischen Freidenkerbewegung in der tschechoslowakischen Republik,” Freier Gedanke 6, no. 20 (1925): 1.

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open fascination with Soviet Russia,⁵⁵ internationalism had an impact on them, even though a negative one: in line with Komintern policy, the newly found Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KPČ) tried to liquidate the FKOJ in late 1921 by merging it with the Czech proletkul’t in order to create a unified structure of communist culture organizations.⁵⁶ This attempt was met with little resistance from the side of the FKOJ: an emphatic call to international communism was released at the end of 1921. With this step, die FKOJ strove to create a “world-wide league of anticlerical fighter-communists” based on the guidelines of the Komintern and by this subordinated itself to the party structure.⁵⁷ Ironically, the party abandoned all efforts to centralize “proletarian culture” soon afterwards, when the Soviet proletkul’t fell out of favor of the Bolshevik leadership.⁵⁸ This in turn helped to rebuild the original FKOJ which, thanks to its decentralized structure, had apparently continued to function quite untroubled anyway.⁵⁹ The only major casualty was the FKOJ’s journal Plameny/Jiskry (The Flames/The Sparks) with its proud prewar pedigree that was discontinued in late 1921. Despite being the strongest socialist freethought organization, this left the FKOJ even more localized than before, often serving as a template for local socialists without any connection to the Communist Party.⁶⁰ The socialist organizations of Czech freethought, thus, did not take part in the supposedly international conferences of the German GpF in 1922, and also did not enter the IFA. In retrospect, the Czech Socialist Unbelievers criticized

 While the members of FKOJ were integrated into the Komintern structure, the Socialist Unbelievers expressed a rather general fascination that included an admiration for Russian anarchists like Piotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin.  Antonín Zápotocký, Stanislav K. Neumann and Ladislav Beran, “Ujednání: Z ujednání mezi zástupci výkonného výboru KSČ, Proletkultu a Federace komunistických osvětových jednot, usneseného na společné poradě dne 15. května 1922,” in KSČ a kultura: Sborník dokumentů, projevů a článků ke kulturní politice KSČ: Díl I. 1921 – 1948, ed. Václav Šeda (Prague: Vysoka´ Škola Politicka´ U´V KSČ, 1973), 36 – 37.  “Sjezd Federace Komunistických Osvětových Jednot,” Jiskry: Orgán Federace Komunistických Osvětových Jednot 2, no. 24 (1921): 249. This league intended to use the planned language of Ido in order to facilitate communication between its international members.  Ibid.  In early 1924, the decision to liquidate the FKOJ was officially abandoned. Membership in the KPČ and the FKOJ, thus, was possible once more. (“Aus dem Bunde,” Freier Gedanke 5, no. 2 [1924]: 8.)  The German Freidenkerbund, in 1922, counted – not without envy – an FKOJ membership of 20,000. (Freier Gedanke 3, no. 1– 2 [1922].) Its successor organization, the SPB, counted 17,000 members in late 1926. While these numbers are highly dubious, the other organizations in Czechoslovakia each could muster significantly less than 10,000 members.

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the Magdeburg conference for its unambitious political goals, mainly targeting the reintegration of German organizations into the mainstream of freethought.⁶¹ The IFA for its part, with its overly compromising manifesto, its almost exclusively German character, and the virtual absence of other influential left-wing associations was no functioning institution. Symptomatically, it did not issue any further declarations. It also proved unhelpful that the German proletarian freethinkers, during the next two years, were shaken up by internal discord.⁶² Despite these difficulties, the IFA still did serve its intended purpose and established a common point of reference for socialist freethinkers off the Brussels International.⁶³ This was ensured, for example, by the regular news item “Aus unserer Internationale” (“News from our International”) in the journal of the Czechoslovak Freidenkerbund, which stopped referring to Brussels as “ours” and was updated later on to refer first to the IFA, then to the IPF.⁶⁴ The IFA thus presented the future watershed concerning the ideological position of every freethought association with international ambitions. This mostly affected the bourgeois member organizations of the IFA, such as the German Monistenbund (German Monist League) on the one hand, and those organizations still part of the Brussels International but close to the socialist movement. As already noted, the German monists, just as the French socialist freethinkers, soon rejoined Brussels, while the German freethinkers of Czechoslovakia opted for the socialist alternative, not only for ideological, but initially also for practical reasons: “[We] will have to choose, whether to stay with the Brussels organization. And already today we have to be careful, which path to take. It is a fact that, if we need something, especially literature, we will have to turn to Germany.”⁶⁵ Austrians and Poles followed this example and took the socialist path, too.⁶⁶ In the Soviet Union, an organized anti-religious movement developed comparatively late. As mentioned before, there were no prewar socialist freethought traditions the Communist Party could rely on. In the early 1920s, the Bolsheviks realized that their earlier efforts to combat the Orthodox Church as a political actor had only transformed, not abolished religion in the Soviet Union and,

 Milan Matoušek, “První mezinárodní kongres socialistických bezvěrcú,” Maják: Lidová revue pro socialism, kulturu a výchovu, Organ svazu socialistických bezvěrců 1, no. 9 (1924): 120.  Kaiser, Arbeiterbewegung und Religionskritik, 146 – 148.  See also ibid., 189.  See the volumes of Freier Gedanke for 1922 and 1924– 25.  “Der Karlsbader Bundestag,” Freier Gedanke 4, no. 1 (1923): 2.  Due to a lack of basic research on both of the cases, I have to rely on circumstantial evidence given in German, Czech, and Soviet periodicals of the time.

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amongst others, had furthered the revival of religious minorities. For this reason, ideological efforts were coined as “anti-religious propaganda,” which was a telling term insofar, as it was a purely negative definition. Only later “scientific atheism” was placed in its stead. Although Soviet terminology was meant to serve as a distinction from liberal bourgeois freethought, such definitions stayed fluid. The IPF’s member organizations were usually considered Western “godless” or anti-religious institutions. A first comprehensive Soviet organization, the Союз воинствующих безбожников (Vsesoiuznyi soiuz bezbozhnikov, League of the Godless, from 1929 on: Militant League of the Godless, SVB) was formed in April 1925, that is, between the first official congress of proletarian freethought in Vienna and the creation of the IPF in Teplice/Schönau. As usually the case with non-party “volunteer societies,” the SVB was organized mainly from above, but still included some grassroots activism contrasting the image of a joined effort to combat religion unionwide. From the beginning on, unity was as much an issue as in German and Czechoslovak freethought, because the SVB’s centralized structure was working on paper only. Throughout the Soviet Union, numerous anti-religious groups formed, particularly in larger cities and usually organized around journals like Aтеист (Ateist, Atheist), Безбожник (Bezbozhnik, The Godless), Религия и наука (Religiia i Nauka, Religion and Science), and Безбожник у станка (Bezbozhnik u stanka, The Godless at his Workbench),⁶⁷ attempting to put anti-religious policy on a more professional basis. It was due to the internal political success of the people behind the Bezbozhnik journal that the Soviet effort became known as “godlessness” on a general level. Despite their differences, Czechs, Germans, and Soviets, therefore, were still faced with a set of structurally similar questions: one of the most pressing matters was the centralization and unification of organized socialist unbelief in each state. As proletarian freethought continued to be a very heterogeneous movement, a tool was needed to further this goal. Besides, the relationship of proletarian freethinkers to the socialist parties had to be worked out. All of the freethought organizations prided themselves in not participating in the split of the labor movement and in even trying to overcome it. In turn, the political parties mostly ignored them, or took a slightly hostile stance: the social democrats, for example, accused freethinkers of being communist lackeys.⁶⁸ Neither did the

 Daniel Peris, in his seminal work on the SVB, has already pointed out that questions of organization were always on the forefront of the SVB’s activities, partly even substituting ideology. See Peris, Storming the Heavens, 48 – 54; 195 – 196.  “Kulturpolitik – nicht Parteipolitik,” Atheist 20, no. 2 (1924): 11– 14.

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newly found communist parties express a specific interest in battling religion or building an atheist culture, nor did the socialist freethinkers, in the beginning, included noted communists. Several local party cells of the German KPD, in 1923, even prohibited their members to join any freethought organization.⁶⁹ The similarities between German Socialist Freethinkers and Czech Socialist Unbelievers stretched out also to ideological grounds: both the Czechoslovak and the German organizations felt they were at the center of a clerical counterattack, while their Soviet comrades had to deal – in a similar way – with a resilient Orthodox Church and the flourishing of smaller religious communities. A possible solution for freethinkers was to combat religion in general and to build a socialist culture which would transcend party lines. In the German and Czech cases, this meant bridging the rift of the labor movement; in the Soviet case, an anti-religious organization had to involve non-party members. The SVB even explicitely stressed the need to win over non-communists for its cause. Above all, socialist freethought was aiming to become a unified movement of its own.

The IPF and the Internationalization of Socialist Freethought A second, more serious attempt to unite socialist freethought internationally was undertaken in Vienna in October 1924 following the call of Austrian freethinkers for an international congress of proletarian freethought. Again, this invitation was answered mostly by German and Austrian organizations, even if the congress claimed to represent fifteen associations from different countries.⁷⁰ This time, Bartošek, the representative of mainstream Czechoslovak freethought, was present. Like the liberal freethought delegates at the Magdeburg conference in 1922, he expressed reservations about breaking with Brussels. According to him, the IFF was already on its way to becoming socialist and could be expected to turn proletarian soon. In Vienna, however, members of the German GpF were present and Arthur Wolf, its secretary, again linked the IFF’s exclusion of German organizations to its insufficient socialist worldview. The congress, then, published fourteen guidelines on the necessarily socialist character of free-

 Kaiser, Arbeiterbewegung und Religionskritik, 141.  Arthur Wolf, “Der erste internationale Kongress proletarischer Freidenker,” Atheist 20, no. 20 (1924): 125 – 131.

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thought and sent them to Brussels as the conditions to be fulfilled to avoid the establishment of a second international organization.⁷¹ The IFF could only decline these Vienna guidelines, and while the Germans were looking forward to breaking with Brussels, the Czechs were either hoping to maintain the common framework or suspicious of the German predominance in Vienna. National and ideological fault lines did not completely overlap, as the Germans and Austrians were mostly social democrats, whereas the more radical Czech Socialist Unbelievers tended to agree with Bartošek’s judgement of the IFF becoming proletarian on its own.⁷² In general, the Czechs seemed to be rather surprised by these recent developments: several socialist groups from Czechoslovakia attended the Vienna congress, but they were unsure what to make of it. The Socialist Unbelievers, for their part, agreed with the general idea of uniting socialist freethought, but noticed that Wolf’s policy to link Brussel’s anti-German bias to its lack of socialist ideology was actually a very weak argument and did not suffice to justify the foundation of a new international organization, especially, if the latter could not come up with a socialist doctrine of its own. They were also annoyed that Volná Myšlenka’s Bartošek would speak for all Czechs.⁷³ Once the IFF rejected the Vienna guidelines as the basis for further cooperation, the provisory leadership of the new International, consisting of Bartošek for the VM, Wolf for the GpF, and Karl Frantzl for the Freidenkerbund Österreich (Freethinker League of Austria), continued with its preparations for a constituent congress. Along the way, the Soviet SVB first entered the European scene: one Russian activist from Leningrad, Andrei Rostovcev-Blauberg, apparently by chance discovered a brochure of proletarian freethought that had found its way to his hometown. According to his lecture held at the founding congress of the SVB in April 1925, he realized that there were “godless” in Germany and Czechoslovakia, too. Thanks to his knowledge of German he was able to contact the secretary of the GpF in Leipzig, Arthur Wolf.⁷⁴ For several months, Rostovcev figured as the main link between the Germans in the IPF and the Soviet godless movement. He became the main correspondent for the Leipzig based IPF journal Der Atheist (The Atheist), reporting from the aforementioned constituent con-

 Kaiser, Arbeiterbewegung und Religionskritik, 189 – 191.  J. H., “Snahy po sjednocení bezvěreckého hnutí,” Maják: Lidová revue pro socialism, kulturu a výchovu, Organ svazu socialistických bezvěrců 2, no. 3 (1925): 36 – 38.  Matoušek, “První mezinárodní kongres.”  For a detailed approach to Rostovcev-Blauberg, see E. S. Tokareva, “Komintern i Internacional proletarskich svobodomyslsljaščich v bor’be protiv religii i Vatikana,” Istorija: Ėlektronnyj naučno-obrazovatel’nyj žurnal 9, no. 4 (2018), http://history.jes.su/s207987840002215-5-1. See also “Pis’mo I. P. F. v Bezbožnik,” Antireligioznik 1, no. 1 (1926): 80 – 81.

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gress of the godless and sending greetings from Soviet Russia to the German comrades. Rostovcev was obviously no high ranking official because he differed notably from other Soviet activists in style and substance.⁷⁵ Still, he managed to be appointed representative for the SVB and to sign the IPF statute, even though he did not attend the founding congress in Teplice. The leadership of the SVB was not fully aware of this development. They had not wasted any thought on the fact that the IPF was an organization with a significant social democratic influence, probably because Rostovcev, in his Moscow lecture, had praised his German comrades almost excessively as “true proletarians.” Rostovcev himself seemed to know that he actually was in no position to speak for the whole SVB which is why he signed the statutes only conditionally, provided that the Moscow leadership would agree. On the Soviet side, there was significant confusion on the responsibility for the anti-religious policy abroad. The Komintern, although being taken by surprise by the events as well, was aware of the forming international proletarian freethought movement, but criticized it initially as a social democratic enterprise. Rostovcev even contacted the Komintern Agitprop department, but complained of not obtaining any directives on how to proceed.⁷⁶ In the end it was decided that the emerging godless organization should participate in the IPF, as Soviet organizations could not ignore this internationalization. A clash of competences seemed inevitable, especially when the SVB established its own иностранный отдел (inostrannyi otdel, foreign section) in 1926, led by an ethnic German from Russia, M. Shvab.⁷⁷ Additionally, all delegations abroad had to report to and were instructed by the Komintern. ⁷⁸ Both the SVB and the Komintern were aware of social democratic influences in the IPF, but while the former dismissed freethinking, the latter grasped the opportunity interpreted as useful abroad and at home.⁷⁹ Due to this confusion, Frantzl, the acting secretary, felt obliged to write to the editorial office of the journal Bezbozhnik in Moscow, asking for clarification. The executive bureau of the SVB sent a letter back to Vienna – the new seat of

 Rostovcev hardly ever referred to Leninism and never mentioned the official leadership of the League of the Godless, instead praising known Bolsheviks as “Freidenker” (“freethinkers”). Andrei Rostowzeff, “Der Kongreß der ‘Gottlosen’ in Moskau,” Atheist 21, no. 9 (1925): 77– 80.  Tokareva, “Komintern i Internacional,” 4– 7.  “Die Freidenkerbewegung in Sowjetrußland: Referat des Genossen Jaroslawsky, Vorsitzender der Organisation der ‘Gottlosen’ und Chefredakteur der freisinnigen Zeitungen,” Freier Gedanke 7, no. 20 (1926): 1.  Tokareva, “Komintern i Internacional,” 11.  See the discussions of the executive committee of the SVB in 1926: Gosudarstvennyj arkhiv Rossiiskoi federacii (State Archive of the Russian Federation, GARF), fond R5407, opis’ 1, delo 11.

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the IPF after having been moved from Leipzig – simultaneously printed in Russian in its main theoretical journal, Антирелигиозник (Antireligioznik, The Antireligious).⁸⁰ This letter took a surprisingly hostile stance toward the organization, criticizing its vague language with regard to class struggle and demanding a clear break from the Second (social democratic) International, something the IPF leadership in Vienna could obviously not agree to. Still, the SVB did join the IPF. Its harsh reaction was most probably aimed at a Soviet audience: the suspicions of the Komintern had to be placated and the SVB leadership, at that time, was under pressure from its local competitors to take a more aggressive stance toward religion.⁸¹ The founding congress of the IPF took place in the Czechoslovak town of Teplice on May 31 and June 1, 1925. Next to the GpF, several other German organizations took part, two Austrian ones, one French organization from Alsace-Lorraine, and one from Poland. From Czechoslovakia, only the Communist FKOJ and the German Freidenkerbund attended, the Socialist Unbelievers, still present in Vienna, apparently stayed away. The SVB, which the congress addressed as “proletarian freethinkers of Russia,” was formally represented by Ladislav Beran, the representative of the FKOJ.⁸² Theodor Hartwig from Brno, who had made his mark as a leading publicist among German-speaking freethinkers, became the IPF’s first chairman. Next to him, the board of the new International consisted of representatives from each member state, including Russia (Rostovcev), Czechoslovakia (Beran), Germany (Wolf), France (Fritsch), and Poland (Mierczinsky). The Austrian representative, Frantzl, became general secretary.⁸³ While in the German GpF continuous struggles between social democrats and communists made it necessary to balance the party influence in its executive committee, the IPF board did not include any high-ranking cadres of either party, with the minor exception of Beran.

 “Ispolnitel’nomu Komitetu Internacionala Proletarskich Vol’nodumcev,” Antireligioznik 1, no. 1 (1926): 74– 79.  The Godless Division of the Moscow party organization and the All-Union League of the Godless were involved in endless disputes. These disagreements balanced out only in 1929 which proves that for most of the decade anti-religious policies were no major concern for the Soviet government. For further information, see Peris, Storming the Heavens, 51– 56; and Sandra Dahlke, “An der antireligiösen Front”: Der Verband der Gottlosen in der Sowjetunion der zwanziger Jahre (Hamburg: Kovač, 1998), 51– 74.  Both Czechoslovak communist delegates, Beran and Viktor Stern, apparently had contacts with Soviet comrades before, but no access to the godless movement. (See “Pis’mo.”)  Rudolf Lebenhart, “Die Internationale proletarischer Freidenker,” Freier Gedanke 6, no. 12 (1925): 1. See also Kaiser, Arbeiterbewegung und Religionskritik, 191– 195.

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As Jochen-Christoph Kaiser has pointed out, the Czech communist influence became manifest especially in the main guidelines of the new International. Another representative of the KPČ, Viktor Stern, “sharpened” the Vienna guidelines, making them more exclusive with regard to non-socialist freethought. The new version also stressed the need for revolutionary political action and the ideological primacy of economic conditions.⁸⁴ Apart from molding the IPF doctrine according to his own communist believes, Stern may also have come to a similar conclusion as the Czech Socialist Unbelievers in Vienna. Both stressed the ideological differences between Brussels and Vienna in order to avoid turning the new International into a simple tool for German negotiations with Brussels. But while the IPF stressed its non-party affiliation, obvious ideological overlaps with the communist doctrine were hard to overlook. The call for class struggle might have been quite in line with the general socialist freethinker agenda and largely consistent with the common critique of the social democratic programmatic, however, vital questions remained open. Hartwig and others clearly took freethought as an independent socialist enterprise that provided workers with spiritual fulfillment. To them, freethought constituted the “third pillar” of the labor movement – next to the parties and the trade unions. Orthodox communists like Stern, on the other hand, considered freethinkers’ activities rooted in active class struggle and bound to its economic conditions. As long as the Marxist-Leninist doctrine was shaped by major ideological gaps, not too many causes for ideological conflict with communism arose. Leading IPF figures like Hartwig and Wolf, both no members of any communist party, shared the communist critique of the social democratic program with regard to religion. In turn, the SVB, while aggressively insisting on a clear break with mainstream social democracy for political reasons, was less strict than activists like Stern and some of his German comrades. After all, the leadership of the SVB was embroiled in an ideological struggle with the independent Moscow based godless organization that mirrored the differences between Stern and Hartwig. Notwithstanding the SVB’s vital interest in casting godlessness and freethought as a socialist doctrine of its own, it called for Leninism.⁸⁵ The IPF impacted lastingly on the German and Czechoslovak freethought discourse: in its internal struggles, the German GpF tied in with the IPF’s call for unity to stress the need for concord also in Germany. As early as August 1925, the board of the IPF was invited to negotiate between different GpF factions

 Ibid., 192.  Ibid.

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in this sense.⁸⁶ The dynamics unleashed by the IPF’s founding also influenced the liberal-bourgeois VM: Czechoslovakia’s most prominent case was Bartošek, who, together with other socialist freethinkers like Vrbenský and Landová-Štychová, had been expelled from the Czechoslovak socialists in 1923. After the founding of the IPF, he unsuccessfully tried to work toward a cooperation of traditional freethinkers with the new proletarian ones in Brussels and at home. In autumn 1925, shortly after having joined the Communist Party, he toured the Soviet Union as part of a group of Czech intellectuals. Being the only freethinker, he was greeted quite warmly by the godless press and spoke on the anniversary of the October Revolution. In his lecture, he linked the revolution to the history of the “anti-religious” movements in the West. This ideological nexus, once again, highlights the common interest of freethinkers like Bartošek and the godless movement in the Soviet Union: both grasped revolutionary socialism not only as a political, but as a spiritual revolution with freethought as an integral part of the world revolution.⁸⁷ Upon his return, Bartošek reported to the Czech press and – adopting Soviet lingo – praised the Soviet state’s “nenáboženský” (“non-religious”) attitude which allowed for an intensified “protináboženský” (“anti-religious”) propaganda.⁸⁸ He was proactive in two directions, stating his message to the Communist Party, and equally hoping to join the Czechoslovak freethinkers with the IPF. To him, chances for such an alliance seemed good, as there were still many communists in the VM’s ranks. But Bartošek failed to win a majority and his tenure in the VM came to an end. Together with several other well-regarded freethinkers of the VM’s left wing such as Otakar Kunstovný and Zdeněk Lahulek-Faltys, he left the organization and, in December 1925, found the Spolek volných myslitelů Augustín Smetana (Society of Freethinkers Augustín Smetana, SVMAS), a splinter freethought organization which claimed to be the only true representative of worldwide freethought in Czechoslovakia and subsequently applied for IPF membership.⁸⁹ The split from VM occurred

 “Die proletarische Freidenker-Internationale an die proletarischen Freidenker Deutschlands,” Atheist 21, no. 6 (1925): 61. For details on the internal strife shaking the GpF, see Kaiser, Arbeiterbewegung und Religionskritik, 156 – 158.  “D-r Bartošek,” Bezbožnik 1, no. 1 (1926): 13.  Theodor Bartošek, “Naše první studijní výprava do SSSR,” Nové Rusko 1, no. 10 – 11 (1925): 257– 260.  The splinter organization’s name was a reference to Augustín Smetana, an excommunicated priest and revolutionary of 1848 – 49. Czech freethinkers regarded him as one of their founding fathers. See “Aus der Bewegung,” Atheist 22, no. 9 (1926): 140 – 141; and Antonín K. K. Kudláč, Příběh(y) Volné myšlenky (Prague: Nakl. Lidové Noviny, 2005), 78 – 79.

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after the factions accused each other of “politicizing” freethought by either being too loyal to the republic or by siding with the communists.⁹⁰ In the meantime, the Socialist Unbelievers and the FKOJ, for their part, were already negotiating a merger. With the new IPF in sight, they also approached the German Freidenkerbund of Czechoslovakia. Contrary to their previous stance, the Socialist Unbelievers praised the IPF as a basis for the different groups to come together.⁹¹ In 1926, the FKOJ renamed itself the Svaz proletářských bezvěrců (League of Proletarian Unbelievers, SPB) and subsequently merged with the Socialist Unbelievers for good. The SVMAS splinter group likewise gladly took the opportunity to join the new SPB. Although they never had any affiliation with Marxism or social democracy before, these activists from now on provided the bulk of the Czech Proletarian Unbelievers’ journalistic output. Besides, negotiations to merge the united SPB with the German Freidenkerbund of Czechoslovakia continued. In the Soviet Union, the Научное Общество Aтеист (Nauchnoe Obshchestvo Ateist, Scientific Society “Atheist”), another representative of organized atheism, asked for joining the IPF and became the second Soviet organization in its ranks. Both the SVB and Ateist were eager to make use of the international connections to influence politics at home. While the SVB invited several freethinkers from Germany and Czechoslovakia to visit the Soviet Union and organized public and scholarly discussions on the research of religion, the society Ateist started to extensively translate and print articles written by German freethinkers in its journal of the same name, advertising this activity as an important step toward accessing the situation in the West.⁹² The main journal of the SVB published some translated articles as well, mostly by the same authors. Both journals also repeatedly issued the statutes of the newly found IPF, not only to inform their readers, but also to prove their own relevance to the Communist Party.⁹³ With the Soviet godless movement fully on board, the IPF seemed to have entered the road to success. In 1926, it claimed to represent more than one million proletarian freethinkers – and rising. Several other freethought organizations from all over Europe showed an interest in joining its ranks. The IPF’s national member organizations seemed to start an ambitious transnational cooperation. Reports about the new Soviet society filled the pages of freethought

 “Členům Volné myšlenky československé!,” Volný Myslitel 1, no. 21 (1926): 3.  J. H., “Snahy po sjednocení.”  In February 1926, five of six articles were translations of foreign authors, three of them from German socialists like Heinrich Eildermann and Theodor Hartwig.  Both journals competed with each other openly, also on the level of their leading authors, who frequently criticized each other.

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journals in Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. In turn, leading German freethinkers, social democrats, and communists alike, were published in the anti-religious press, most of all Hartwig. The two most important mergers left were those of the German GpF with the social democratic VfF in Berlin, and the creation of a transnational proletarian freethought organization in Czechoslovakia. Again, the IPF was supervising the negotiations, with the Soviet IPF representative Lukachevskii being present.⁹⁴ In Germany, the merger was realized in 1927, thus creating, if not a single, at least a dominating German organization of proletarian freethought.⁹⁵ The negotiations of the Freidenkerbund and the Socialist Unbelievers in Czechoslovakia, planned for early 1927, made good progress as well. After the first year, the results of the IPF were indeed impressive: in Czechoslovakia and Germany, proletarian freethinkers had settled some of their major disputes and had started to create unified national freethought associations. All of these negotiations were already underway when the IPF was established and could, therefore, be interpreted as both an effect and a cause of the new international cooperation. Even though the IPF could not wield any real power over its member associations, it was able to leverage its representative authority to form a common international body of socialist freethought and to define guidelines for the merging of the heterogeneous national associations. Most of all, it provided a quite powerful platform for those, who saw socialist freethought as a non-party movement and strove to overcome the split between social democrats and communists. In 1926, the attempts to cooperate peaked, when a large group of German freethinkers from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia set out for a sevenweek journey through the Soviet Union “from Leningrad to Baku” and back again, as one participant summarized it.⁹⁶ “Soviet tourism” at that time was an expanding industry with many intellectuals and journalists marveling at revolutionary Russia. In turn, the Bolsheviks embraced the opportunity for extended propaganda. The tour group of freethinkers was special insofar as it consisted of convinced socialists and other sympathizers with the Soviet religious policy but was not dominated by communists. Besides, they were apparently special guests of the SVB with several GpF officials taking part in the sessions of the SVB executive committee.⁹⁷  “Aus unserer Internationale,” Freier Gedanke 8, no. 3 (1927): 5.  For further reading, see Kaiser, Arbeiterbewegung und Religionskritik, 173 – 177.  Erich Mäder, Zwischen Leningrad und Baku: Was sah ein proletarischer Freidenker in Sowjetrussland? (Windischleuba: Hans Schumann, 1926).  See GARF, Fond R5407, opis’ 1, delo 10.

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After his return, Erich Mäder, one of the social democrats, authored a general sympathizing but at times sharply critical travel report. Like his fellow traveler Erich Vogl, who was neither a freethinker nor a socialist, but a modernist priest, Mäder was very impressed by the efforts of Soviet society in combating religion.⁹⁸ His critique concerned certain details of Soviet everyday life and culture and most of all the broad suppression of non-Bolshevik socialists. Nonetheless, the Soviet way of life obviously fascinated non-communists across party lines and invoked the vision of a new secular socialist culture.⁹⁹ The godless movement, thus, became a representative of socialism and socialist culture abroad. To draw a first conclusion on the IPF’s impact, it might be stated that its success was always presented as a reason and model for uniting the differing factions of socialist freethought on national levels. What is more, the international movement with its strong unifying drive even seemed to dominate the national developments. To a certain degree, this was caused by the IPF’s ability to circumvent factional ideological clashes that could not be avoided on national and regional grounds with its very concrete power struggles. In the new organization, ideological cleavages seemed secondary. The IPF was dominated by non-party socialists who envisioned a radical socialist, but nonetheless non-communist atheist society. Both social democrats and communists in the IPF played along.

Crisis and Split, 1928 – 1930 The IPF’s credo of supporting all socialist parties that favored the separation of church and state and refused to cooperate with the “clericals,” and social democratic parties entering “capitalist” or “clerical” governments all over Europe evoked latent tensions. Once the German proletarian freethought organizations split up in the wake of social democratic support for a “clerical” candidate to run for president, the IPF sided with the critics. But although the IPF was ideologically closer to the communist parties, it did not approve its strict party discipline increasingly enforced by Moscow. In her report about her experiences in Soviet Russia, the German communist Anna Lindemann, in a journal of the godless movement, stressed that the ques-

 Mäder, Zwischen Leningrad und Baku; and Carl Vogl, Sowjet-Rußland: Wie ein deutscher Pfarrer es sah und erlebte (Leipzig: Oswald Mutze, 1927).  The fascination Western visitors experienced once faced with godlessness and state atheism could be the topic of a separate research project.

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tion of religion or non-religion was a political and not simply a cultural one.¹⁰⁰ In the same way Viktor Stern sharply criticized Austrian social democracy and the Austrian branch of the IPF which – just as the German Freidenkerbund of Czechoslovakia – had evolved directly from the bourgeois organization by “proletarizing” itself. With regard to the IPF’s guidelines, he repeated his critique of religion as a private matter.¹⁰¹ While the non-communists fully agreed, they did not accept supremacy of communist politics over the common freethought cause.¹⁰² These differences could be ignored as long as organizational work continued. But the intended mergers of German and Czechoslovakian socialist freethought associations did, in the end, not work out. While the GpF and the VfF found common grounds and united, several smaller groups – many of them communist – either never went through with the plan to merge, or split off the GpF right before the union was sealed.¹⁰³ In the same way, negotiations between the Freidenkerbund and the SPB in Czechoslovakia were stalled. Negotiations never went past the agreement on the formal conditions for the union in May 1927.¹⁰⁴ This was partly caused by the renewed alignment of national and ideological fault lines: the SPB journal, Maják (Lighthouse), attacked the communist Lebenhart, the secretary of the Freidenkerbund, because he had dared to complain about KPČ behavior to the German proletarian freethinkers.¹⁰⁵ The Freidenkerbund, in turn, refused communist meddling in its own affairs and, subsequently, criticized the SPB for clearly leaning toward one political direction.¹⁰⁶ By 1928, Leninist orthodoxy had been established in the Soviet Union and all the communist parties were pressured to conformity. Again, this new political orthodoxy was not too outspoken on religious topics. Still, the godless movement seized the moment and declared once and for all that a true socialist worldview was tantamount with dialectical materialism, which left no place for religion – not even in private matters. This was still compatible with the IPF’s principles, but communist tactics soon led to open conflict. When the IPF met for its third congress in Cologne, no one expected the crisis in the national associations would spread to the international level. Hartwig,

 A. Lindeman, “Bor’ba s religiej v Sovetskom Sojuze,” Antireligioznik 1, no. 11 (1926): 18.  V. Štern, “Otnošenie avstriiskoi social-demokratii k religii i cerkvi,” Antireligioznik 1, no. 11 (1926): 19 – 25.  Rudolf Lebenhart, “Freidenkerbund und KPČ,” Freier Gedanke 8, no. 1 (1927): 1– 2.  Kaiser, Arbeiterbewegung und Religionskritik, 178.  Ladislav Beran, “Slučování bezvěreckého hnutí,” Maják 3, no. 22 (1926 – 27): 282– 284.  A. Singer, “Bezvěrectví a politické strany,” Maják 3, no. 16 (1926 – 27): 195 – 196.  “Aus dem Bunde,” Freier Gedanke 9, no. 12 (1928): 7.

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the chairman, had actually largely agreed with the communist critique, and was himself referenced by the communists. Besides, for the first time, the SVB delegate, Lukachevskii, obtained approval by German authorities to attend. Still optimistic, Hartwig even attributed the IPF to be a role model for socialist internationalism in general. But the communist delegates chose a collision course: they suggested a resolution that condemned social democratic leaders and their supposedly treasonous policy toward Soviet Russia. While the German and Austrian delegates voted against this resolution, all the others were in favor. It passed with a narrow majority, particularly because the non-communist German Freidenkerbund of Czechoslovakia voted in favor and, by this, secured the communist majority.¹⁰⁷ As Lebenhart explained in retrospect, the Freidenkerbund had considered this conflict an internal issue of the GpF that had spread to the IPF.¹⁰⁸ But the damage was irreparable. Hartwig took a stance against the resolution which he considered not only as a communist, but as a Soviet infringement. Throughout the years 1928 and 1929 he exchanged verbal blows with Lukachevskii in the IPF press. Backed by the German, Austrian, and Czechoslovak social democratic organizations, he took over control of the official IPF journal, while the Soviet SVB continued to agitate against the IPF leadership in its own journals and supported the oppositional communists among the GpF. The Czech SPB also attacked both the social democrats and the German Freidenkerbund, shattering the possibility of a united proletarian freethought movement in Czechoslovakia. In turn, only a small minority of the Freidenkerbund’s local chapters aligned with the SPB and the Communist Party. Rudolf Lebenhart was expelled from the KPČ, when he defended the Freidenkerbund’s independent stance. As a consequence, the IPF de facto and quite abruptly stopped functioning after Cologne. This split, however, should not be reduced to pure communist tactics as it rooted in long existing fault lines. In retrospect, it seems astonishing how late this conflict openly manifested. One corollary was the SVB’s failure to create an independent socialist atheist culture of their own. In search for allies, they were prepared to enter Komintern territory. When, in 1928, the SVB encountered a local organization of German freethinkers in Düsseldorf, they were impressed by its revolutionary fervor and willingness to attack the social democrats.¹⁰⁹ But as the SVB did not exactly know whom they were dealing with, they contacted the KPD leadership in Berlin. The German communists, for their part, reacted with appall and warned the SVB of cooperating with the Düsseldorf group,

 Kaiser, Arbeiterbewegung und Religionskritik, 199 – 203.  Rudolf Lebenhart, “Der III. Kongress der IPF,” Freier Gedanke 9, no. 3 (1928): 2– 4.  Most probably one of the anarcho-syndicalist GpF splinter factions.

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whose members most certainly were not communist, but “syndicalist.” However, as a delegate of the godless movement at the IPF congress in Cologne noted in June 1928, in light of the lacking organization of German communist freethinkers, the oppositional syndicalists were actually valuable allies.¹¹⁰ Still, in 1929, Lukachevskii complained in the Russian press that “the communist parties to this day did not really acknowledge the significance […] of the movement of proletarian freethinkers as a genuine mass movement.”¹¹¹ The Cologne resolution should, therefore, also be taken as a document of the godless movement’s failure to secure, at least partly, independence from the Bolshevik leadership. This is not to deny the obvious attempts to subvert social democratic organizations all over Europe after 1929 – a mirror of the path to Stalinism in the Soviet Union.¹¹² At the same time, the SVB started to confront non-communists in the IPF more aggressively: it changed its internal course, now trying to eradicate religion by suppressing the believers.¹¹³ In 1930, the IPF finally split up into two factions, both claiming to represent the organization. While the social democratic wing soon enough moved closer to the Brussels International, the (smaller) communist wing tried to establish the label “IPF” for its own goals without major success. By 1936, all the factions gathered again in Prague at the last congress of the worldwide freethought movement before the upcoming war. By then, the German and Austrian organizations had stopped functioning. But also the Soviet godless movement had passed its zenith: during the 1930s, it was virtually abolished by the Communist Party.

Conclusion The history of the IPF appears as a failed attempt to integrate two different wings of the socialist movement. While this assessment is certainly true, it is worth considering more closely the origins of the conflict that surfaced in the year 1928. The communist members of the PFT were set on a collision course with their colleagues after the Komintern had declared all social democratic parties to be “social traitors” and “social fascists” – a slogan that the German and Czech commu-

 See GARF, Fond R5407, opis’ 1, delo 16.  Quoted in Tokareva, “Komintern i Internacional,” 20.  For a similar case of subversion, see the Freie Schulgesellschaften (Free School Societies) in Germany: Siegfried Heimann and Franz Walter, Religiö se Sozialisten und Freidenker in der Weimarer Republik (Berlin: Dietz, 1993).  Daniel Peris, “The 1929 Congress of the Godless,” Soviet Studies 43, no. 4 (1991): 711– 732.

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nists employed eagerly. The godless movement accepted these labels as they fit its own radicalizing agenda.¹¹⁴ Still, in both the German and the Czechoslovak examples, other explanatory approaches have to be considered. As this chapter has emphasized, the PFT furthered a self-image of being part of the worldwide socialist movement. But contrary to the socialists, these leftist freethinkers directly connected the economic liberation of the workers to their spiritual emancipation. From the very beginning, they were much less willing and able to compromise. Even though they sometimes tolerated coalitions of socialist and bourgeois parties, alliances with the churches, taken as the real class enemy, were taboo. Interestingly enough both the German and the Czechoslovak Republics started to enter into dialogue with the Catholic Church roughly the same time as freethinkers radicalized, namely during the second half of the 1920s. Consequently, the radical parts of the PFT felt betrayed by their own secularly constituted republics. This was particularly true for the federal state of Prussia, whose social democratic government signed a concordat with the Catholic Church in 1929. This rapprochement mostly reflected the postwar order, but served as initial spark for the PFT which saw convincing evidence for the collusion between the social democratic governments and the clerical powers. Consequently, freethinkers were particularly alarmed by the fact that confessional schools continued to exist and enjoyed certain legal prerogatives. The Soviet SVB, on the other hand, repeatedly used the IPF press to assure the broader public that no such agreement between church and state was to be realized in Soviet Russia. Caught between an intransigent and increasingly Stalinist Komintern and a concordat of church and state, not much space was left for the proletarian freethinkers who, by definition, held secularist views, including the separation of church and state and the idea that for socialist parties a commitment to a non-religious culture was an essential ideological prerequisite. What is more, the IPF appeared to be a very “Austrian” organization with its power base (if any) mostly among the German freethinkers of Czechoslovakia and Austria. These were not by chance the only regions in Central Europe where the split between social democrats and communists had only a minor impact. The IPF’s leading personnel consisted of non-party socialists who tried to make fruitful the international IPF in order to strengthen the unity of the labor movement on a national level. This undertaking was probably doomed from the beginning, but should still be recognized as a significant contribution to the interwar history of socialism and secularism.

 Michail Šejnman, “Komintern i religija,” Antireligioznik 3, no. 11 (1928): 6 – 22.

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Proletarian freethought, in its organized form, from the very beginning strove to exceed the existing currents of freethought in two crucial aspects. First, it hoped to launch a mass movement, intending to bring a new way of life to the whole working class. Second, it wanted to be more than an enlightened alternative to church belief. Instead, it considered religion in public and religion in private to be identical and tried to counter both. Interestingly, proletarian freethought as a historical cultural phenomenon had to rely heavily on established freethought practices:¹¹⁵ when, in 1931, communist freethinkers visited the Soviet Union and inquired about new “communist” rituals, they were pushed aside. As the head of the godless movement, Iaroslavskii, explained, such rituals did exist simply because some people in rural areas demanded it. But, as he declared, such acts had nothing whatsoever to do with godlessness or socialist freethought.¹¹⁶ The raison d’être of proletarian freethought, therefore, rested on its political impact: socialist secularism as represented by the IPF never consisted of any new content beyond the already established secular rituals in the tradition of nineteenth-century freethought. It was precisely this political focus which led to the clash with social democracy and orthodox communism: both were not all too interested in diluting their ideological core. Once the communists embraced the IPF and its member organizations as useful tools, they soon became empty shells.

Archival Sources Gosudarstvennyj arkhiv Rossiiskoi federacii (State Archive of the Russian Federation, GARF) Fond R5407, opis’ 1, delo 10 Fond R5407, opis’ 1, delo 11 Fond R5407, opis’ 1, delo 16

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Tyssens, Jeffrey, and Petri Mirala. “Transnational Seculars: Belgium as an International Forum for Freethinkers and Freemasons in the Belle Époque.” Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire 90, no. 4 (2012): 1353 – 1372. Vogl, Carl. Sowjet-Rußland: Wie ein deutscher Pfarrer es sah und erlebte. Leipzig: Oswald Mutze, 1927. Weir, Todd. “The Secular Beyond: Free Religious Dissent and Debates over the Afterlife in Nineteenth-Century Germany.” Church History 77, no. 3 (2008): 629 – 658. Weir, Todd. “European Culture War in the Twentieth Century? Anti-Catholicism and Anti-Bolshevism between Moscow, Berlin, and the Vatican 1922 to 1933.” Journal of Religious History 39, no. 2 (2015): 280 – 306. Weir, Todd. “Introduction: Comparing Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture Wars.” Journal of Contemporary History 53, no. 3 (2018): 489 – 502. Wingfield, Nancy M. “Working-Class Politics in the Bohemian Lands 1918 – 1921: National Identity, Class Consciousness, and the Social Democratic Parties.” Bohemia 34 (1993): 90 – 105. Wolf, Arthur. “Der erste internationale Kongress proletarischer Freidenker.” Atheist 20, no. 20 (1924): 125 – 131. Zápotocký, Antonín, Stanislav K. Neumann, and Ladislav Beran. “Ujednání: Z ujednání mezi zástupci výkonného výboru KSČ, Proletkultu a Federace komunistických osvětových jednot, usneseného na společné poradě dne 15. května 1922.” In KSČ a kultura: Sborník dokumentů, projevů a článků ke kulturní politice KSČ: Díl I. 1921 – 1948, edited by Václav Šeda, 36 – 37. Prague: Vysoka´ Škola Politicka´ U´V KSČ, 1973. Ziemann, Benjamin. “Zur Entwicklung christlicher Religiosität in Deutschland und Westeuropa, 1900 – 1960.” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 65 (2013): 99 – 122.

III Freethinkers’ Networks and Projects Critically Revised

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A Movement That Never Materialized: The Perception of Scientific Materialism as a Secular Movement in Nineteenth-Century Germany In November 1855, Rudolph Wagner, a renowned German anatomist and physiologist, wrote an urgent letter to the famous chemist Justus von Liebig. As a devout and conservative Protestant, Wagner warned Liebig of what he believed to be an emerging atheist movement in Germany that took its arguments from the natural sciences. More specifically, he warned his colleague of the “Vogt-Moleschott-Büchnersche […] Materialismus, der uns mit einem neuen Zeitalter der Barbarei bedroht” (“materialism of Vogt-Moleschott-Büchner which threatens us with a new era of barbarism”).¹ At that time, Wagner was in the midst of a polemical public debate with the materialist zoologist Carl Vogt (1817– 1895). The two had entered into a severe dispute over the relationship between Christianity and modern science. While Wagner argued for compatibility, Vogt sought to present atheism as a logical consequence of the natural sciences. In his letter to Liebig, Wagner not only mentioned Vogt, but also referenced the other two main protagonists of what became known as “scientific materialism”: the Dutch physiologist Jacob Moleschott (1822– 1893) and the German physician Ludwig Büchner (1824– 1899). In the German-speaking world of the 1850s, these three men were widely read and highly controversial figures. Through the medium of popular science writing they promoted the idea that everything, even life itself, was to be explained solely by the laws of matter. They claimed that human beings were just natural products and that neither God nor an immaterial soul would exist. Even thought and behavior, according to this reading, were determined by matter. In consequence, the materialists also denied human free will and the existence of an absolute morality.²  Wagner to Liebig, Göttingen, November 19, 1855, BSB Liebigiana II B, Wagner, Rudolf. Translations are my own.  Among the most widely read materialist books were Jacob Moleschott, Lehre der Nahrungsmittel: Für das Volk (Erlangen: Ferdinand Enke, 1850); Carl Vogt, Untersuchungen über Thierstaaten (Frankfurt/Main: Literarische Anstalt J. Rütten, 1851); Jacob Moleschott, Der Kreislauf des Lebens: Physiologische Antworten auf Liebig’s Chemische Briefe (Mainz: Victor v. Zabern, 1852); Carl Vogt, Köhlerglaube und Wissenschaft: Eine Streitschrift gegen Hofrath Rudolph Wagner in Göttingen (Gießen: J. Ricker’sche Buchhandlung, 1855); Ludwig Büchner, Kraft und Stoff: Empirisch-naturhttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110688283-012

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The 1850s, in Germany, were shaped by the failing of the Revolutions of 1848 – 49 and the subsequent political reaction.³ The case of scientific materialism illustrates how irreligion and supposedly scientific arguments were used to express political dissent during this period. It also shows that Germany witnessed controversial debates over the compatibility of Christianity and modern science already in the decade before Charles Darwin’s publication of the Origin of Species (1859).⁴ The materialists’ aggressive combination of science and atheism caused many contemporaries to come forward against what they saw as an abuse of science for ideological purposes. There are different interpretations at play on whether materialism can count as an actual secular movement comparable to Ernst Haeckel’s and Wilhelm Ostwald’s later monist movement.⁵ Some scholars explicitly refer to a “materialist movement”⁶ or even to Vogt, Moleschott, and Büchner as the “leaders of the radical materialist movement.”⁷ In contrast, others argue more cautiously that within nineteenth-century German secularism “the radical, anti-Christian materialists remained a minority.”⁸ Owen Chadwick emphasized that while the materialists had many readers, they did not have “a hierarchy, a cult, an organization.”⁹ Frederick Gregory

philosophische Studien, In allgemein-verständlicher Darstellung (Frankfurt/Main: Meidinger Sohn & Cie., 1855).  While the revolution had failed, the 1850s did not intend a complete return to the status quo ante. Democratic and liberal agency remained an important factor in the public. For the postrevolutionary years, see the detailed study by Christian Jansen, Einheit, Macht und Freiheit: Die Paulskirchenlinke und die deutsche Politik in der nachrevolutionären Epoche 1849 – 1867 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2000).  For the reception of Darwinism in Germany, see William M. Montgomery, “Germany,” in The Comparative Reception of Darwinism, ed. Thomas F. Glick (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2 1988), 81– 116.  For the monist movement in Wilhelmine Germany, see Todd Weir, Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Rise of the Fourth Confession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 253 – 268.  Kurt Bayertz, “Spreading the Spirit of Science: Social Determinants of the Popularization of Science in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” in Expository Science: Forms and Functions of Popularization, ed. Terry Shinn and Richard Whitley (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1985), 220.  Peter C. Caldwell, Love, Death, and Revolution in Central Europe: Ludwig Feuerbach, Moses Hess, Louise Dittmar, Richard Wagner (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 59.  Andreas W. Daum, “Science, Politics, and Religion: Humboldtian Thinking and the Transformation of Civil Society in Germany, 1830 – 1870,” Osiris, 2nd Series 17 (2002): 136.  Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 21993), 173.

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speaks of an “entire movement”¹⁰ while also noting that the materialists “had never joined forces formally.”¹¹ The characterization of scientific materialism as a secular movement remains disputed. Historian Todd Weir observes that “a clearly secularist movement” in Germany would only “emerge by the 1860s.”¹² What, then, should one make of the phenomenon of scientific materialism in the 1850s? Was it composed of a few isolated authors or did it, in fact, form a whole movement? And how did it relate to the broader range of nineteenth-century secularism? The term “social movement” in use for these phenomena often remains vague. As Charles Tilly observed, “no one owns the term.”¹³ In his own definition, Tilly identified as central elements “campaigns of collective claims on target authorities,” “claim-making performances including special-purpose associations” as well as “public representations of the cause’s worthiness, unity, members, and commitment.”¹⁴ Others have stressed a “large number of involved persons”¹⁵ and a “distinctive feeling of cohesiveness”¹⁶ as important constituents. Furthermore, political scientist Joachim Raschke states that while social movements are not defined by a specific form of organization, they “generally do not exist without organization.”¹⁷ Based on these considerations, I argue that materialism in the 1850s did not constitute a cohesive secular movement. The case of scientific materialism confirms the heterogeneity of secular identities in the nineteenth century. Its proponents barely displayed a feeling of cohesiveness or attempted to campaign for collective claims. The materialists also did not create associations dedicated to their views. However, scientists, theologians, and philosophers who fought against materialism in the 1850s still perceived it to be an organized, growing

 Frederick Gregory, Scientific Materialism in Nineteenth Century Germany (Dordrecht/Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1977), 7. To this day, Gregory’s book is the most thorough study on the topic.  Gregory, Materialism, 2.  Weir, Secularism, 6.  Charles Tilly, Social Movements, 1768 – 2004 (Boulder/London: Paradigm Publishers, 2004), 7.  Ibid., 7.  Harald Bender, Die Zeit der Bewegung – Strukturdynamik und Transformationsprozesse: Beiträge zur Theorie sozialer Bewegungen und zur Analyse kollektiven Handelns (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 1997), 54.  Joachim Raschke, Soziale Bewegungen: Ein historisch-systematischer Grundriß (Frankfurt/ Main: Campus, 1985), 78.  Ibid., 80. Tilly also lists forms of organization like special-purpose associations under the term “social movement repertoire.” (Tilly, Social Movements, 3.)

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secular movement that threatened the foundations of Christian society. Even though the most famous materialists had only little contact with each other and disagreed on several issues, anti-materialist publications from the 1850s onwards made it seem like Vogt, Moleschott, and Büchner operated in close cooperation as the leaders of a new movement. The constant imagination and representation of materialism as an organized movement covered up the actual absence of unity among the materialists and contributed to the prominence of materialism in public debates concerning the relationship between secularism and modernity. Vogt, Moleschott, and Büchner publicly criticized supernatural belief as well as the Christian churches’ position of power. They contrasted this situation with their own ideas of an immanent explanation of the world and a secular society free from superstition and repression. In this sense they can be called freethinkers, even though the term did not play a prominent role in the debates over materialism in the 1850s.¹⁸ The materialists self-identified first and foremost as scientists and not as freethinkers or secular activists. But the public role they played was certainly that of aggressive advocates of freethought and secularism. In the following, I will first analyze some of the core aspects of the materialist worldview and discuss how they tied in with ideas of a secular modernity. I will then argue that materialism did not possess most of the characteristics of an actual movement and will contrast this with academic, clerical, and political perceptions of materialism in the reactionary 1850s.

The Worldview of Scientific Materialism In order to understand why so many contemporaries feared a materialist movement and its secular character in the 1850s, we first have to consider the idea content of scientific materialism and its historical context. Vogt, Moleschott, and Büchner not only criticized the truth claims of Christianity but also propagated political ideas that differed from the realities of nineteenth-century alliances of worldly and clerical authorities. Nineteenth-century secularism – to follow Todd Weir’s definition – was shaped by the three central elements of “immanent worldview, practical ethics, and anticlericalism.”¹⁹ The materialists propagated all those elements: whereas anticlericalism was an outward expres-

 I use the term “freethinker” to describe people who actively promoted a secular worldview in contrast to “traditional” notions of faith and religiosity in the nineteenth century.  Weir, Secularism, 4.

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sion of their opinions, they saw their worldview and ethics as resulting directly from scientific insight. Furthermore, the materialists were proponents of what John Hedley Brooke has called “secularization of science” and “secularization by science”: They hoped for the disappearance of any remaining references to the supernatural in the sciences and were, at the same time, convinced that such a secularized explanation of the world would lead to the inevitable secularization of society.²⁰ The materialists’ concept of secularity was all-encompassing: they did not hope for a more clear-cut “distinction between religious and non-religious spheres,”²¹ but for a complete replacement of Christianity by a new, science-based worldview. Their goal was not differentiation, but substitution. In 1848, the revolutionary upheavals across Europe also spread to Germany, calling for constitutional reforms and a unified German nation state. However, the revolution soon fell apart and gave way to a reactionary period after 1849. Several German scientists had become politically active during the years of unrest and many saw science as a means toward political and social progress.²² This politically charged image of the natural sciences persisted even after the revolution had ended. For many former revolutionaries science was a tool to perpetuate a progressive outlook in times of its official repression. Within this group, only a small number tended toward scientific materialism, most notably Vogt, Moleschott, and Büchner who all took on radical stances: to them, the study of nature seemed to prove that neither a personal God nor any other deity existed. Science would not only guarantee socio-political progress but also liberation from superstition and clerical oppression. To be clear, scientific materialism and secularism was not the same thing in the middle of the century: secularism was a broader phenomenon with different strands and ideas about the relationship of religion, society, and modernity. The materialists stood out among secularists because of their explicit atheism, whereas, for example, proponents of “free reli-

 John Hedley Brooke, “Science and Secularization,” in The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion, ed. Peter Harrison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 108 – 109. I take secularization here as the – real or imagined, abhorred or hoped for – process of changing or even declining religious influence and significance in modern societies and states. For a summarizing assessment of secularization theories, see Detlef Pollack, “Säkularisierungstheorie, Version: 1.0,” Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte, last modified March 7, 2013, http://docupedia.de/zg/ Saekularisierungstheorie.  Marian Burchardt and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr, “Multiple Secularities: Religion and Modernity in the Global Age,” International Sociology 28, no. 6 (11/2013): 606.  See Bayertz, “Spreading the Spirit,” 218.

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gion,” one of the major secular movements of the time, tended more toward reconciling Christianity and modernity.²³ But even the scientific materialists themselves did not exhibit an overall ideological coherence. While they all shared a progressive outlook, they did not adhere to the same political convictions. As a delegate of the democratic left, Vogt had actively participated in the revolution. Afterwards, inspired by such thinkers as Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin, he turned to anarchism for some time. Moleschott sympathized with socialism, albeit in a very vague fashion. In fact, he leaned more toward reforms and moderate positions. Büchner, as a student, had supported the revolution. Later he became involved with the emerging labor movement. But he, too, advocated reforms over revolution.²⁴ If not concrete policy, what then formed the core of the materialist worldview? All three materialists shared a positivistic outlook: they believed that, based on scientific, especially physiological insights, the future would be grounded in science, no longer in any form of faith-based religion. For the time being, the widespread belief in the supernatural only seemed to distract the people from science’s transformative potential. The influence of the Christian churches seemed to threaten any progress. Thus anticlerical disdain was ever-present in their writings.²⁵ Generally, the materialists were heavily influenced by the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach and his critique of religion that identified God as a man-made projection.²⁶ But while paying respect to Feuerbach, they constantly presented their atheism as the outcome of scientific insight into the laws of nature and not as sheer philosophical reasoning. Whereas they saw religion and philosophy to be almost exclusively speculative, science – with all its calculating, measuring, microscopical, and laboratory work – seemed to provide the facts vital for a secular worldview that – to them – appeared appropriate for the modern world. Using a distinction made by Todd Weir, one might call the materialists’ denial of the supernatural and their critique of clerical power the negative work of their worldview. On the other hand, their popularization of natural science as the

 See Weir, Secularism.  See Gregory, Materialism, 189 – 212; and Laura Meneghello, Jacob Moleschott – A Transnational Biography: Science, Politics, and Popularization in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Bielefeld: transcript, 2017), 67.  Vogt, for example, described clerics as roaches and locusts: Vogt, Untersuchungen, 119 – 160.  Moleschott, for instance, wrote that “man creates everything in his image, […] [even] the God he prays to.” See Moleschott, Kreislauf, 362.

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basis for socio-political progress might be called their positive work.²⁷ In their writings, science – in contrast to the Christian denominations – appeared as the only pathway to solving pressing social crises, especially the widespread pauperism. Mankind, they propagated, could learn how to use the laws of nature to its advantage. Büchner praised the sciences’ potential for improving everyone’s living conditions.²⁸ Vogt saw the “Herstellung des möglichst großen […] Glücks für Alle” (“creation of as much […] joy for everyone as possible”) as one of the central tasks of a scientific worldview.²⁹ And Moleschott stipulated that scientists should disseminate “vernünftige Lebensregeln” (“reasonable maxims”) – scientifically backed rules for a better life.³⁰ The people could use science to improve their lives and thereby emancipate themselves. According to the materialists, brain activity was determined by matter. Moleschott, for example, coined the catchphrase “Ohne Phosphor kein Gedanke” (“No thought without phosphorus”) to indicate the material basis of thought.³¹ Therefore, materialists paid special attention to the human metabolism, assuming that if one knew how to influence the material composition of the organism, one could potentially alter its physical and mental strength. To this aim it seemed crucial to spread nutritional knowledge. Moleschott emphasized the importance of metabolic processes by reasoning that the “Gluth des Herzens” (“fervor of the heart”) and the “Regsamkeit des Hirns” (“activity of the brain”) of humans and animals were essentially determined by nutrients.³² Vogt stated “that all brain functions are essentially modified by and dependent on the nourishment of the organ”.³³ Büchner wrote that “a normally formed and nourished brain” would always be able to think properly.³⁴ While the formation of one’s brain was a physical fact, theoretically everyone could arrange for the appropriate nourishment. Moleschott even published a guidebook on nutrition, particularly addressing the poor. In this book he presented food recommendations for different age groups, sexes, and professional categories – hoping

 70;       

See the distinction between negative and positive work within secularism: Weir, Secularism, 84. Büchner, Kraft, 26. Vogt, Köhlerglaube, 123. Moleschott, Lehre, 246. Ibid., 116. Ibid., 1. Vogt, Köhlerglaube, 121. Büchner, Kraft, 191– 192.

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these would enable the poor to gain enough physical and mental strength to live a self-determined, free life.³⁵ The message was ambiguous and showed traces of scientific governmentality: on the one hand, the people should be empowered to improve their lives; on the other hand, scientists and politicians were given the task to make use of nutritional physiology in order to transform society according to the paradigms of reason, progress, and modernity. From a socio-political standpoint, Moleschott argued that industrial workers had a natural right to demand well-balanced nutrition from their employers. Then again, he directly advised employers to supply their workers with rich nutrition in order to optimize their work performance.³⁶ Thus the emancipation of the poor could, at the same time, mean an optimization of their economic performance and therefore be beneficial to the state. This ambiguity is mirrored in the writings of Vogt who suspected that one could “through an appropriate arrangement of nutrition (once we know the premises), deliberately build statesmen, bureaucrats, theologians, revolutionaries, aristocrats, socialists.”³⁷ And Büchner emphasized that science would allow mankind “to understand the laws of matter and thereby rule over them.”³⁸ Science would not only benefit the individual, but also enable a well-functioning, optimized society. With their secular program focusing on the usefulness of science, the materialists participated in the discourse around the modern nation state and its attitude and efforts toward healthy, productive, and improved citizens.³⁹ Scientific materialism had various admirers in the second half of the century. The distinguished zoologist Anton Dohrn, for example, later admitted that as a young student he had become a fervent materialist after reading Vogt’s books.⁴⁰ In 1858, the philosopher Johann Christoph Fischer dedicated a book on free will, in which he further popularized the materialist position, to Moleschott whom he

 Moleschott, Lehre. For Moleschott’s approach to nutrition, see Harmke Kamminga, “Nutrition for the People, or the Fate of Jacob Moleschott’s Contest for a Humanist Science,” in The Science and Culture of Nutrition, 1840 – 1940, ed. Harmke Kamminga and Andrew Cunningham (Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 1995).  Moleschott, Kreislauf, 454.  Vogt, Untersuchungen, 25. Vogt does not specify the potential functions and roles in society for any of these groups. The reference to theologians might – like in many of Vogt’s writings – be tongue-in-cheek.  Büchner, Kraft, 112.  For the relationship between nationalism, modernism, and progress, see Daniele Conversi, “Modernism and Nationalism,” Journal of Political Ideologies 17, no. 1 (2012): 13 – 34.  Dohrn to F. A. Lange, Bahrendorf, August 30, 1866, reprinted in Georg Eckert, ed. Friedrich Albert Lange: Über Politik und Philosphie, Briefe und Leitartikel 1862 bis 1875 (Duisburg: Walter Braun, 1968), 206.

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called a “courageous warrior for the consequences of scientific facts.”⁴¹ Yet it was Büchner’s Kraft und Stoff (Force and Matter, 1855) that received the most attention, albeit positive and negative. During his lifetime, the book ran through nineteen editions and was translated into sixteen languages. Autobiographical notes from various people show that they had read Büchner’s work with interest. Among those were, for example, the Austrian suffragette Marianne Hainisch and even the young Albert Einstein.⁴² Later in the century, the ideas of scientific materialism were widely debated among bourgeois as well as socialist freethought circles.⁴³ Starting in the 1850s, scientific materialism became crucial in propagating an aggressive combination of secularism and scientific arguments. However, by no means did this branch of secularism become an actual, organized mass movement in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Deconstructing the “Materialist Movement” Toward the end of his life, Büchner reflected on his relationship with Moleschott. He admitted that the latter’s writings largely influenced his own ideas. However, as he noted, he had “never known Moleschott personally.” Speaking of himself in third person, Büchner concluded: It has always astonished him that he was so often portrayed as a member of a secret trinity with Moleschott and Karl Vogt which supposedly made it its goal to push the world into the abyss of materialist unbelief. Between the three of us there was never anything but an intellectual community.⁴⁴

Büchner recognized a common misconception: other than generally assumed, the spokesmen of scientific materialism had very little personal contact with each other. As historian Christoph Kockerbeck has shown, they only exchanged a handful of letters in which they primarily discussed scientific matters but rare-

 Johann Christoph Fischer, Ueber die Freiheit des menschlichen Willens (Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1858). The dedication has no page numbers.  Lilly Klaudy, “Marianne Hainisch erzählt aus ihrem Leben,” Neue Freie Presse: Morgenblatt, March 20, 1930, 5; Max Talmey, The Relativity Theory Simplified and the Formative Period of its Inventor (New York: Falcon Press, 1932), 162– 163.  See Frank Simon-Ritz, Die Organisation einer Weltanschauung: Die freigeistige Bewegung im Wilhelminischen Deutschland (Gütersloh: Kaiser, 1997).  Ludwig Büchner, “Jacob Moleschott (1894),” in Im Dienste der Wahrheit: Ausgewählte Aufsätze aus Natur und Wissenschaft, ed. Ludwig Büchner (Gießen: Emil Roth, 1900), 140.

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ly questions of worldview or religion.⁴⁵ While they quoted each other in their books, their correspondence does not indicate any specific form of group identity or interest in creating more formal bonds to push forward a joint enterprise based on their shared secular conviction. Nevertheless, already starting in the 1850s, Vogt, Moleschott, and Büchner were perceived in close personal proximity to each other, even by people who sympathized with them. In 1855, a German publisher asked Moleschott if he would be willing to translate a book by the British physician Thomas Lindley Kemp into German. In case Moleschott lacked time or interest to carry out this task, the publisher asked Moleschott if Vogt would be willing to translate the book.⁴⁶ Apparently, to some it seemed like Moleschott and Vogt were close enough to know about each other’s work schedule and willingness to translate books. After Büchner released his scandalous Kraft und Stoff, he quickly became part of this perceived relationship. As early as December 1855, a friend of Moleschott expressed his discontent regarding the constant association of Moleschott with Vogt and Büchner.⁴⁷ A movement led by Vogt, Moleschott, and Büchner seems also unlikely in regards to their spatial distance. The last time all three resided in Germany at the same time was in 1849. Vogt, due to his active involvement in the revolution, fled to Switzerland where, in 1852, he became professor of geology in Geneva. The fates of Moleschott and Büchner attest to the influence clerical authority and religious sentiments still had on the German educational system in the middle of the century. Denying the existence of God and criticizing Christianity was not just a religious but also a political matter. Moleschott’s and Büchner’s critique of religion was seen as an attack on the religious foundations of state and society. Their materialism, therefore, equaled political subversion and authorities would not tolerate such ideas in the highest educational institutions. Two years after the 1852 publication of his Kreislauf des Lebens (The Circle of Life), the senate of the University of Heidelberg officially reprimanded Moleschott for his materialist teachings. He immediately resigned from his post as Privatdozent, arguing that he could not work in such a repressive environment. In 1856, he moved to Zurich, Switzerland, where he became professor of physiology,

 Christoph Kockerbeck, “Einleitung des Herausgebers,” in Carl Vogt, Jacob Moleschott, Ludwig Büchner, Ernst Haeckel: Briefwechsel, ed. Christoph Kockerbeck (Marburg: Basilisken Presse, 1999), 14– 16.  Findel to Moleschott, Braunschweig, August 8, 1855, BCABo, FSM, Busta 11, fs. 17.  Gustav Buek to Moleschott, Hamburg, December 15, ibid., Busta 7, fs. 43.

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and finally – in 1861 – took residence in Italy working as a professor and later on also as a politician.⁴⁸ No other than Moleschott, Büchner suffered consequences because of his teachings. When he published Kraft und Stoff, he worked as a Privatdozent at the medical faculty of the University of Tübingen. The book immediately aroused the concern of university officials and politicians who feared that Büchner might preach materialism to his students. Even though he denied these allegations, suspicion persisted.⁴⁹ In August 1855, the King of Württemberg ordered that Büchner’s teaching license was to be revoked. He lost his university position, and subsequently returned to this hometown of Darmstadt where he started working as a medical practitioner. Apart from these biographical parallels and the shared, yet not identical convictions, one episode stands out in which materialism almost adopted the character of an organized effort. In the second half of 1856, a few Hamburg-based publishers and political activists founded a new journal, Das Jahrhundert, which, to a certain degree, was launched to promote scientific materialism. But, as I will show, this journal did not manage to establish a solid materialist group identity – which further underlines the fragility of scientific materialism as a secular ideology. Das Jahrhundert was short-lived. Following a series of repressive political measures, it had to cease publication in June 1859 after less than three years of existence. It is worth noting that neither Vogt nor Moleschott nor Büchner were involved in the journal’s formation and it was only Büchner who contributed some articles. Yet all three served as a central point of reference in many articles. In the 1850s, overtly democratic political action – let alone open debates on socialism – were widely suppressed. Within the German territories, Hamburg had a relatively high standard of press freedom. Thus the journal’s editors were able to publish several explicitly political articles and scientific papers with political leanings.⁵⁰ In a letter dating January 1857, one of the editors, Friedrich Au See Meneghello, Moleschott.  Klaus Schreiner, “Der Fall Büchner: Studien zur Geschichte der akademischen Lehrfreiheit an der Universität Tübingen im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Beiträge zur Geschichte der Universität Tübingen 1477 – 1977, ed. Hansmartin Decker-Hauff, Gerhard Fichtner and Klaus Schreiner (Tübingen: Attempto, 1977).  Themes ranged from science-oriented articles such as “Naturwissenschaften und Gesellschaftslehre” (“Natural Sciences and Social Studies”) and “Physische Beschaffenheit und Geschichte der Weltkörper” (“Physical Nature and History of Celestial Bodies”) to explicitly political ones such as “Der Kapitalismus und seine Kritik” (“Capitalism and its Critique”) and “Soll die Demokratie den Kampf mit dem Pfaffenthum vermeiden?” (“Should Democracy Avoid the Struggle with Priesthood?”).

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gust Reckahn, explained the journal’s highly ideological mission to one of its contributors: Das Jahrhundert was to work in favor of the “social-democratic party and […] in the interest of the materialist worldview, or, if you like, natural science.”⁵¹ This statement documents not only Reckahn’s conviction that science and materialism meant the same, but also that there was a link between science and left-leaning political ideologies. In another letter, Reckahn characterized the editors as “Materialisten aus Überzeugung” (“convinced materialists”) who believed that scientific materialism was the most suitable basis for the “intellectual development of humanity.”⁵² However, from the very beginning, quarrels arose among editors and authors concerning questions of politics and worldview. To some contributors, the high value ascribed to materialism seemed dubious. Thus, in the January 1857 volume, the philosopher and former revolutionary Arnold Ruge, one of the journal’s authors, criticized scientific materialism. Without reference to specific persons, he made it clear that his critique was directed against the materialists. Ruge mocked the “naive friends,” mostly geologists and physiologists, who wanted to abolish philosophy and therefore tried to spare the people from thinking for themselves. He continued to lament the “eternal truth of the natural sciences.”⁵³ Ruge noted that “the true fatherland of the Germans, thinking and poetry, is in danger.”⁵⁴ Due to these remarks, Ruge was temporarily removed from the group of authors for Das Jahrhundert. However, this episode indicates that some contributors shared the journal’s democratic political goals without adhering to its accompanying materialist worldview. Other cases of disagreement involved contributors of the journal blaming each other for not being materialistic enough. The author Mathilde Reichardt, for example, speculated that the materialist philosopher Heinrich Czolbe might in fact not be a “consequential materialist,” even though she admitted not having read his books.⁵⁵ She also accused Otto Ule, another contributor, who had criticized her on a previous occasion, of damaging the materialist

 Reckahn to Moses Hess, Hamburg, January 10, 1857, printed in Moses Hess: Briefwechsel, ed. Edmund Silberner (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1959), 320.  Reckahn to Moses Hess, Hamburg, January 28, 1857, printed in ibid., 322.  Arnold Ruge, “Der Geist unserer Zeit; zum Neujahrsgruß,” Das Jahrhundert: Zeitschrift für Politik und Literatur 2, no. 1 (1857): 16.  Ibid., 13.  Mathilde Reichardt, “Der Kampf um die Seele, von Rudolph Wagner (Göttingen, Verlag der Dieterich’schen Buchhandlung),” Das Jahrhundert: Zeitschrift für Politik und Literatur 3, no. 1 (1858): 63.

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worldview with his critique.⁵⁶ Reichardt insisted that she did not even think of Ule as a materialist.⁵⁷ Finally, Das Jahrhundert lacked input from Vogt and Moleschott. In October 1857, Reckahn told Moses Hess, one of the journal’s prominent authors, that both Vogt and Moleschott had agreed to publish articles in the January 1858 volume.⁵⁸ However, for the remaining time of its existence, none of them contributed a single paper to the organ. The last volume was published in June 1859. It contained an anonymously written article on the journal’s history. The author’s disappointment became obvious in his critical remarks on the journal’s previous focus on materialism and the natural sciences. Scientific progress and materialism, the contributor implied, had not furthered democracy in Germany. The sciences, taken as materialism, had strongly underestimated the complexity of the modern world which could not solely be explained on the basis of natural laws and sheer necessity.⁵⁹ Reflecting on the materialist stance on determinism and the negation of free will, the author criticized: “Was all the scientific enrichment […] just a way to remove the term freedom from this world? Then we do in fact deserve all the slavery in which we were cast for so long!”⁶⁰ This indicates again that secularism and radical politics did not necessarily overlap with scientific materialism. Nineteenth-century secularism exhibited a multitude of heterogeneous ideas. This heterogeneity manifested itself in Das Jahrhundert, where materialism, in the end, was a source of disappointment. The journal remained the only serious attempt to institutionalize scientific materialism in the 1850s. Vogt, Moleschott, and Büchner had their supporters mostly among politically radical and scientifically interested, yet untrained individuals. But as the case of Das Jahrhundert shows, materialism remained too disputed to become the basis for any collective secularist attempt targeting political or social influence. Even among the journal’s authors the details of secularism as an ideology remained unclear. Nevertheless, despite its lack of cohesiveness, many contemporaries, especially more conservative ones, saw and presented scientific materialism as a growing movement that increasingly gained influence on the intellectual and political climate of Germany.

 Mathilde Reichardt, “Die Kritik als Verläumderin: Mathilde Reichardt an Otto Ule,” Das Jahrhundert: Zeitschrift für Politik und Literatur 3, no. 1 (1858): 335.  Ibid., 317.  Reckahn to Hess, Hamburg, October 29, 1857, printed in Hess: Briefwechsel, 342.  “Geschichte des ‘Jahrhunderts’: Erbauliches und Beschauliches,” Das Jahrhundert: Zeitschrift für Politik und Literatur 4 (1859): 419.  Ibid.

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The Perception of Materialism as a Movement Advocating secularism and declaring in favor of atheism, in the 1850s, were clearly political positions. To doubt Christianity implied questioning the foundations of the state and of the monarchs who continued to legitimize their rule religiously. Besides, the materialists explicitly demanded the secularization not only of science, but also of society and politics and, in their writings, made it no secret that their political sympathies lay with democracy and other left-leaning ideologies. Scientific materialism in the 1850s, therefore, was per se political and, consequently, was perceived this way by contemporaries. Theologians, philosophers, but also scientists, answered materialism – whether as part of a conscious strategy or their actual perception – in building up a hostile image of an organized, coherent enemy of growing importance. To them, Germany’s university students seemed to form the basis of this supposed mass movement. The universities were presented as a hotbed of materialism. In the eyes of politically conservative, devout Christian authors the appeal of materialism to the academic youth posed a great threat to society as a whole. They were afraid that if the future elite was to be further indoctrinated by materialism, this would open the doors to immorality and unrest. The anti-materialist philosopher Karl Fischer, who, already in 1853, published a book against Vogt and Moleschott, stated that he felt he had to take action because of his “Liebe zu strebenden Jünglingen” (“love for the striving youth”).⁶¹ An anonymous author argued in a similar direction, bemoaning, the materialists would abuse the innocent natural sciences in order to bring about “Verderben der unerfahrnen Jugend oder der ungebildeten Menge” (“corruption of the inexperienced youth and the uneducated masses”).⁶² In 1856, the Protestant theologian Friedrich Fabri intervened, complaining that there are “countless people who are indoctrinated by materialism in the lecture halls blindly believing what they are being told”.⁶³ Some time later, the theologian and natural scientist August Böhner released a harsh critique of materialism. He felt such a critical volume was missing as it would summarize the countless publications for and against materialism and offer guidance especially for students. By reading his book,

 Karl Fischer, Die Unwahrheit des Sensualismus und Materialismus mit besonderer Rücksicht auf die Schriften von Feuerbach, Vogt und Moleschott (Erlangen: Theodor Bläsing, 1853), 52.  Dr. Büchner’s Kraft und Stoff oder die Kunst Gold zu machen aus Nichts: Auch ein Zeichen unserer Zeit; beleuchtet und gewürdigt von einem Freunde der Naturwissenschaft und Wahrheit (Darmstadt: Gustav Georg Lange, 1856), 23.  Friedrich Fabri, Briefe gegen den Materialismus (Stuttgart: S. G. Liesching, 1856), X.

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Böhner hoped, readers would realize how “the most recent results of the natural sciences prove the basic truths of […] Christianity.”⁶⁴ Others directly referred to the alleged growth of the movement. While the Catholic theologian Jakob Frohschammer noticed that Vogt had “already gained a considerable number of disciples and coworkers,”⁶⁵ the philosopher Adolf Helfferich agreed that Vogt had “a vast number of fellow believers.”⁶⁶ And Friedrich Euen, a Protestant pastor in Pomerania, called scientific materialism the “ruler of our days.” It seemed so widespread that he characterized it as the “im Wachsthum begriffene Herrschaft eines Usurpators” (“expanding rule of an usurper”).⁶⁷ Many of these authors did not just present materialism as a growing movement, but also accused Vogt, Moleschott, and Büchner of consciously working toward expansion and therefore toward social and political power. August Weber, for example, district medical officer in the German state of Hesse, insinuated the materialists would actively recruit followers.⁶⁸ And another author warned: “The propaganda of materialism seeks to influence the masses in order to release man from divine law and to remodel the existing social order according to the materialist dogma.”⁶⁹ Vogt’s, Moleschott’s, and Büchner’s contemporaries explicitly thought of them as an organized, cooperating trinity. Again and again their names were invoked together, making it seem like they were a group. The Protestant pastor Friedrich Fabri contemptuously spoke of “Vogt, Moleschott, Büchner, and whatever their names may be” and decried them as “die Koryphäen und Ritter von der Materie” (“luminaries and knights of matter”).⁷⁰ Another publication suggested that Vogt was the “most influential representative” of materialism, who

 August Nathanael Böhner, Naturforschung und Kulturleben in ihren neuesten Ergebnissen zur Beleuchtung der grossen Frage der Gegenwart über Christenthum und Materialismus, Geist und Stoff (Hannover: Carl Rümpler, 1859), VIII–IX.  Jakob Frohschammer, Menschenseele und Physiologie: Eine Streitschrift gegen Professor Carl Vogt in Genf (Munich: Literarisch-artistische Anstalt, 1855), 93.  Adolf Helfferich, Die neuere Naturwissenschaft, ihre Ergebnisse und ihre Aussichten (Trieste: Literarisch-artist. Abtheilung des österr. Lloyd, 1857), 42.  Friedrich Euen, Der naturwissenschaftliche Materialismus in seinem Princip und in seinen Konsequenzen: Ein Vortrag, auf der Veranstaltung des Evangelischen Vereins für kirchliche Zwecke gehalten am 3. März 1856 (Berlin: Wilhelm Schultze, 1856), 3.  August Weber, Die neueste Vergötterung des Stoffs: Ein Blick in das Leben der Natur und des Geistes, für denkende Leser (Gießen: Emil Roth, 1856), 229.  Böhner, Naturforschung, VIII.  Fabri, Briefe, 8.

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was joined by Moleschott and most recently also by Büchner.⁷¹ In a more moderate tone the philosopher Jürgen Bona Meyer referred to them as “that triumvirate.”⁷² And a Swiss theological journal denounced “these materialist noisemakers […] à la Vogt, Büchner, Moleschott et Comp. [and we know that this company is very large and expanded and also reaches for Switzerland].”⁷³ The constant mentioning of all three names evoked the impression of an inseparable group. One could even instrumentalize the chain Vogt-Moleschott-Büchner to attack others as alleged materialists. In Vienna, the Catholic agitator Sebastian Brunner denounced the Botanist Franz Unger as “the Austrian Vogt-Büchner-Moleschott.”⁷⁴ According to Brunner, Unger was teaching his students a materialist worldview. It did not matter that Unger, in fact, was no materialist at all.⁷⁵ Brunner still could evoke their names and teachings to discredit a disliked contemporary. Historian Christoph Kockerbeck was right to doubt the perception of Vogt, Moleschott, and Büchner as a “materialist triumvirate.”⁷⁶ However, Kockerbeck traces back this “triadic identification” first and foremost to the Marxist critique of scientific materialism.⁷⁷ While it is true that Marx and Engels were critical of Vogt, Moleschott, and Büchner and also identified them as belonging together, this perspective misses an important point. Apart from the Marxist critique, the scientific materialists were attacked by numerous philosophers, theologians, and scientists who rejected the atheism and secularism of materialism. Here, Vogt, Moleschott, and Büchner were stylized as a triumvirate leading an organized mass movement that furthered atheism and radical politics. While the materialists’ books sold well, the intensive reception by their critics added to their prominent role within debates over secularism in the middle of the century. The topic became so controversial that, as the case of Sebastian Brunner shows, one could attack people suspected of political radicalism or religious deviance as being adherents of scientific materialism. The identification of materialism as

 Friedrich von Thiersch, “Rede über die Grenzscheide der Wissenschaften, zur Feier des Allerhöchsten Geburtsfestes Sr. Majestät des König Maximilian II. von Bayern (Fortsetzung),” Gelehrte Anzeigen der k. bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, December 27, 1855, 191.  Jürgen Bona Meyer, Zum Streit über Leib und Seele: Worte der Kritik, Sechs Vorlesungen, am Hamburger akademischen Gymnasium gehalten (Hamburg: Perthes-Besser & Mauke, 1856), 36.  “Gläubige und ungläubige Naturforscher,” Schweizerische Kirchenzeitung, April 19, 1856, 136.  Sebastian Brunner, “Der österreichische Vogt-Büchner-Moleschott,” Wiener Kirchenzeitung, January 4, 1856, 9 – 10.  See Sander Gliboff, “Evolution, Revolution, and Reform in Vienna: Franz Unger’s Ideas on Descent and their Post-1848 Reception,” Journal of the History of Biology 31 (1998): 205.  Kockerbeck, “Einleitung,” 14.  Ibid., 15.

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a movement also caught the attention of political authorities. In a relatively short time span in the 1850s, scientific materialism became a problem that they could no longer ignore. The combination of anticlericalism, secularism, and radical politics – all under the banner of the natural sciences – contradicted everything the post-revolutionary rulers represented. The many critics of materialism were therefore successful in establishing the image of a dangerous, growing secular movement. In effect, materialism was not just the topic of an academic conflict, but rapidly became a political one, too. Another episode shall illustrate the lasting and politically charged perception of materialism as a secular mass movement led by a triumvirate. In late 1865, Paul Haffner, a high-ranking Catholic priest in the Rhenish city of Mainz, published Der Materialismus in der Culturgeschichte (Cultural History of Materialism). According to Haffner, scientific materialism continued to be a dangerous, widespread ideology. He reported that “about a year ago a banquet of 600 workers in Frankfurt/Main ceremonially declared the idea of God and immortality as a form of slavery that had to be relinquished – and extended the gratitude of the people to men like Vogt, Büchner, and Moleschott as their liberators.”⁷⁸ Haffner added, in a cautionary tone, that there were thousands of supporters behind those 600 workers. He even implied that materialism might initiate a return to the “catastrophe of the French Revolution.”⁷⁹ His account points to the persistence of the heated debates and perceptions following the Revolutions of 1848 – 49. If the scientific materialist movement with its many thousands of members would prevail, Haffner assured his readers, the outcome would be nothing short of a catastrophe.

Surveillance and Oppression For the people associated with materialism, these pejorative and insinuating characterizations soon led to real consequences. Ecclesiastical and worldly authorities increasingly grew suspicious of the alleged dangers of materialism. Hence, the German Evangelical Church Conference of 1856 debated “how the Church should deal with the influence of the new scientific materialism on

 Paul Haffner, Der Materialismus in der Culturgeschichte (Mainz: Franz Kirchheim, 1865), 369 – 370.  Ibid., 370.

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the people.”⁸⁰ One Catholic commentator lauded these Protestants debates on how to counter materialism, noting that this question was “nichts spezifisch Confessionelles” (“nothing specifically denominational”). Catholics and Protestants had “a common enemy of the Christians, because he is an enemy of Christ”.⁸¹ State authorities shared those fears: not only did they remove the materialists from university positions, but also prosecuted the perceived connection between the three and the movement they seemed to lead. While the University of Tübingen and the responsible ministry of the Kingdom of Württemberg negotiated whether Büchner should be deprived of his teaching license, they compared his positions to those of Vogt and Moleschott. One of the ministers even turned directly to the king and presented Büchner’s Kraft und Stoff as part of a homogeneous concept shared by the other two materialists.⁸² As already noted, Büchner lost his position in Tübingen and retreated from an academic career in the end. Political consequences were not just restricted to regional affairs. Even though Germany was not yet unified, the states of the German Confederation already cooperated on various issues. Police and surveillance institutions were among the first to operate on transregional levels after 1848, falling back to a certain extent to former networks, including Austria. The Police Association of the Major German States became a repressive, assertive secret police.⁸³ As there were no materialist organizations and Vogt and Moleschott did not even reside in Germany anymore, the police took action against their publications. Several of them were banned from distribution while police reports from the 1850s listed materialism among the “anti-government parties.”⁸⁴ One report of 1858 reads: “By supporting people like Vogt, Moleschott, Büchner, who only seek doom and destruction, Switzerland contributes to the spread of revolution-

 August von Bethmann-Hollweg, Friedrich Julius Stahl and Heinrich von Mühler, “Einladung zum Kirchentage in Lübeck 1856,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für christliche Wissenschaft und christliches Leben 7 (1856): 183.  Dr. Haas, “Ein Beitrag zur Kritik des Materialismus,” Sion: Eine Stimme in der Kirche für unsere Zeit, November 4, 1856, 1061.  Schreiner, “Fall,” 325 – 328.  Wolfram Siemann, “Einleitung,” in Der “Polizeiverein” deutscher Staaten: Eine Dokumentation zur Überwachung der Öffentlichkeit nach der Revolution von 1848/49, ed. Wolfram Siemann (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1983), 2.  See Meyer, Streit, 10. See also “Regierungsfeindliche Parteien” (1858), printed in Siemann, “Polizeiverein,” 148 – 156.

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ary ideas in literature […]. It is Switzerland’s prime credit that it nourishes and fosters materialism.”⁸⁵ Despite the fact that in 1858 only Vogt and Moleschott resided in Switzerland, the idea of a close-knit materialist group seemed to be so alluring that even the secret police saw Vogt, Moleschott, and Büchner – or at least their ideas – as operating together there. Scientific materialism, as perceived by the secret police, was trying to overthrow the existing social and political order. It was thus presented as one branch of “anti-government” circles – alongside, for example, socialist and Marxist groups. The report even listed “assassinations of heads of states” as one possible result of materialist propaganda.⁸⁶ The police assumed a “party” of materialism,⁸⁷ “mainly connected to the names Vogt, Moleschott, Büchner.” This party was seen as supporting the revolution through its propaganda. The report states that not only would it be necessary to combat materialism “with intellectual weapons,” but also deemed repressive police measures appropriate.⁸⁸ There was no organized secular mass movement of materialists led by Vogt, Moleschott, and Büchner. However, all three materialists argued for a secularized version of science that in turn would secularize society as a whole. Their ideas, albeit often in a vague form, encompassed philosophical, ethical, and also political elements. Critics inherently perceived materialism in a political fashion. Many influential contemporaries and even state officials not only assumed, but also medially constructed an organized movement behind this set of ideas that was threatening the Christian foundations of state and society. So, was there an actual materialist movement in the 1850s? The answer is both yes and no. No, materialism never possessed many of the traits that usually define social movements. It was a movement that never materialized. But on the other hand, yes, a materialist movement did exist – at least in the perception of many of its contemporaries.

 “Protokoll der 13. Polizeikonferenz vom 14.–17.06.1858 in München,” printed in Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven, vol. 5: Die Polizeikonferenzen deutscher Staaten 1851 – 1866: Präliminardokumente, Protokolle und Anlagen, ed. Friedrich Beck and Walter Schmidt (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1993), 326.  Ibid.  The term “party” does not necessarily indicate a political party. For the 1850s, it carries a much more informal meaning than today.  “Regierungsfeindliche Parteien” (1858), printed in Siemann, “Polizeiverein,” 155 – 156. Italics in the original.

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Conclusion Historian Christoph Kockerbeck stated that the reception of Vogt, Moleschott, and Büchner “was informed by exaggeration and distortion for a fairly long time.”⁸⁹ We might even go further and find this exaggeration to be an immediate by-product of the appearance of the three scientists on the stage of German popular scientific literature. Following the publication of Büchner’s Force and Matter, the three names seemed inseparable. Yet critics of materialism overstressed any existing connections of the materialists and insinuated they would pursue political goals by actively recruiting people, especially students, to amplify their movement. Contrary to these assumptions, scientific materialism never became an organized movement with the goal of spreading secularism. No materialist organizations, associations, and – apart from the short-lived Das Jahrhundert – also no journals existed that dedicated their causes exclusively to the teachings of Vogt, Moleschott, and Büchner. And not even the members of the triumvirate themselves identified as a group. That is not to say that those widely read and often referenced materialists were not influential in regards to secularization in the nineteenth century. Already prior to Darwin’s publication of the Origin of Species they fostered an image of science versus religion that would later become one of the defining narratives of modernity. To some extent they paved the way for others who followed them later in the century and attempted to substitute the Christian worldview by a secular one based on the natural sciences. Most notably, Ernst Haeckel’s monist philosophy is often regarded as the heir of scientific materialism. According to historian Bernhard Kleeberg, Haeckel already toyed with the idea of establishing monism as an “anticlerical popular movement” during the 1870s, even though it took him much longer to formally launch monism on a broad basis.⁹⁰ During those years the materialists did not disappear from public debate. Vogt, Moleschott, and Büchner remained controversial authors until the end of the century. In 1881, several freethinkers, atheists, and other activists founded the Deutsche Freidenkerbund (German Freethinker League), the first major German organization promoting freethought and atheism. Not surprisingly, Ludwig Büchner became the league’s first president.⁹¹ Moleschott died in 1893, Vogt in 1895, and Büchner in 1899. After the turn of the century, in 1906, Ernst Haeckel

 Kockerbeck, “Einleitung,” 14.  Bernhard Kleeberg, Theophysis: Ernst Haeckels Philosophie des Naturganzen (Cologne/Weimar/Vienna: Böhlau, 2005), 285.  See Simon-Ritz, Die Organisation einer Weltanschauung, 93.

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officially founded the Deutsche Monistenbund (German Monist League) with the purpose of creating a strong secularist organization with a scientific worldview.⁹² But it was not until very late in the nineteenth century that freethought and even atheism in Germany truly became mass movements.

Archival Sources Bavarian State Library, Munich BSB Liebigiana II, B, Wagner, Rudolf Archiginnasio Public Library Bologna, Fondo Speciale Moleschott BCABo, FSM, Busta 11, fs. 17 BCABo, FSM, Busta 7, fs. 43

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 See Christoffer Leber’s chapter in this volume.

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Jansen, Christian. Einheit, Macht und Freiheit: Die Paulskirchenlinke und die deutsche Politik in der nachrevolutionären Epoche 1849 – 1867. Düsseldorf: Droste, 2000. Kamminga, Harmke. “Nutrition for the People, or the Fate of Jacob Moleschott’s Contest for a Humanist Science.” In The Science and Culture of Nutrition, 1840 – 1940, edited by Harmke Kamminga and Andrew Cunningham, 15 – 47. Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 1995. Klaudy, Lilly. “Marianne Hainisch erzählt aus ihrem Leben.” Neue Freie Presse: Morgenblatt, March 20, 1930. Kleeberg, Bernhard. Theophysis: Ernst Haeckels Philosophie des Naturganzen. Cologne/Weimar/Vienna: Böhlau, 2005. Kockerbeck, Christoph, ed. Carl Vogt, Jacob Moleschott, Ludwig Büchner, Ernst Haeckel: Briefwechsel. Marburg: Basilisken Presse, 1999. Kockerbeck, Christoph. “Einleitung des Herausgebers.” In Carl Vogt, Jacob Moleschott, Ludwig Büchner, Ernst Haeckel: Briefwechsel, edited by Christoph Kockerbeck, 13 – 81. Marburg: Basilisken Presse, 1999. Meneghello, Laura. Jacob Moleschott – A Transnational Biography: Science, Politics, and Popularization in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Bielefeld: transcript, 2017. Meyer, Jürgen Bona. Zum Streit über Leib und Seele: Worte der Kritik, Sechs Vorlesungen, am Hamburger akademischen Gymnasium gehalten. Hamburg: Perthes-Besser & Mauke, 1856. Moleschott, Jacob. Lehre der Nahrungsmittel: Für das Volk. Erlangen: Ferdinand Enke, 1850. Moleschott, Jacob. Der Kreislauf des Lebens: Physiologische Antworten auf Liebig’s Chemische Briefe. Mainz: Victor v. Zabern, 1852. Montgomery, William M. “Germany.” In The Comparative Reception of Darwinism, edited by Thomas F. Glick, 81 – 116. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 21988. Pollack, Detlef. “Säkularisierungstheorie, Version: 1.0.” Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte. Last modified March 7, 2013. http://docupedia.de/zg/Saekularisierungstheorie. Raschke, Joachim. Soziale Bewegungen: Ein historisch-systematischer Grundriß. Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 1985. Reichardt, Mathilde. “Der Kampf um die Seele, von Rudolph Wagner (Göttingen, Verlag der Dieterich’schen Buchhandlung).” Das Jahrhundert: Zeitschrift für Politik und Literatur 3, no. 1 (1858): 28 – 32; 59 – 64; 75 – 80. Reichardt, Mathilde. “Die Kritik als Verläumderin: Mathilde Reichardt an Otto Ule.” Das Jahrhundert: Zeitschrift für Politik und Literatur 3, no. 1 (1858): 317 – 320; 332 – 336. Ruge, Arnold. “Der Geist unserer Zeit; zum Neujahrsgruß.” Das Jahrhundert: Zeitschrift für Politik und Literatur 2, no. 1 (1857): 13 – 18. Schreiner, Klaus. “Der Fall Büchner: Studien zur Geschichte der akademischen Lehrfreiheit an der Universität Tübingen im 19. Jahrhundert.” In: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Universität Tübingen 1477 – 1977, edited by Hansmartin Decker-Hauff, Gerhard Fichtner and Klaus Schreiner, 307 – 346. Tübingen: Attempto, 1977. Siemann, Wolfram, ed. Der Polizeiverein deutscher Staaten: Eine Dokumentation zur Überwachung der Öffentlichkeit nach der Revolution von 1848/49. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1983. Siemann, Wolfram. “Einleitung.” In Der Polizeiverein deutscher Staaten: Eine Dokumentation zur Überwachung der Öffentlichkeit nach der Revolution von 1848/49, edited by Wolfram Siemann, 1 – 19. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1983. Silberner, Edmund, ed. Moses Hess: Briefwechsel. The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1959.

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Simon-Ritz, Frank. Die Organisation einer Weltanschauung: Die freigeistige Bewegung im Wilhelminischen Deutschland. Gütersloh: Kaiser, 1997. Talmey, Max. The Relativity Theory Simplified and the Formative Period of its Inventor. New York: Falcon Press, 1932. Thiersch, Friedrich von. “Rede über die Grenzscheide der Wissenschaften, zur Feier des Allerhöchsten Geburtsfestes Sr. Majestät des König Maximilian II. von Bayern (Fortsetzung).” Gelehrte Anzeigen der k. bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, December 27, 1855. Tilly, Charles. Social Movements, 1768 – 2004. Boulder/London: Paradigm Publishers, 2004. Vogt, Carl. Untersuchungen über Thierstaaten. Frankfurt/Main: Literarische Anstalt (J. Rütten), 1851. Vogt, Carl. Köhlerglaube und Wissenschaft: Eine Streitschrift gegen Hofrath Rudolph Wagner in Göttingen. Gießen: J. Ricker’sche Buchhandlung, 1855. Weber, August. Die neueste Vergötterung des Stoffs: Ein Blick in das Leben der Natur und des Geistes, für denkende Leser. Gießen: Emil Roth, 1856. Weir, Todd. Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Rise of the Fourth Confession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Katharina Neef

Politicizing a (Non)Religious Act: The Secularist Church Exit Propaganda of the Komitee Konfessionslos (1908 – 1914) The late nineteenth century saw a rush of organized secularism. While in the past research tended to frame secularism as a by-product of modernization or an extreme case of secularization, more recent studies grasp secularist associations and their communicative forums as active players in society. Instead of reconstructing the reception and adaption of scientific and social discourses within these groups, the general research focus now is on the impact that these marginalized voices made on the public discourses of their times. The German Komitee Konfessionslos (Committee Un-Denominational)¹ is one protagonist in this field. Established in 1911, it agitated passive church members (who did not participate in church services or biographical rituals anymore) to leave church and become “dissidents.” With its propaganda, the Committee reached a broad audience. Moreover, its publications and mass events offered the scarce opportunity for an intense cooperation between protagonists of two antagonist political camps – bourgeois liberals and social democrats – to jointly advocate a certain agenda. Furthermore, the head of the Committee, Otto Lehmann-Rußbüldt (1873 – 1964),² managed to introduce his work as an eminent discursive support of the progressivist social reform milieu by popularizing and legitimizing classical anticlerical stereotypes. Focusing on the Komitee Konfessionslos, its publications, and communicative strategies, this chapter first will refer to some historical contexts of church

 Horst Ermel, Die Kirchenaustrittsbewegung im Deutschen Reich 1906 – 1914 (PhD diss., University of Cologne, 1971); Raoul R. Grossman, “Heraus aus der Kirche: German Social Democracy’s Policies towards the Churches, 1865 – 1918” (MA thesis, University of Vancouver, 1976), accessed March 27, 2020, https://open.library.ubc.ca/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/831/items/1.0093775; Jochen-Christoph Kaiser, Arbeiterbewegung und organisierte Religionskritik: Proletarische Freidenkerverbände in Kaiserreich und Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981); and Jochen-Christoph Kaiser, “Sozialdemokratie und ‘praktische’ Religionskritik: Das Beispiel der Kirchenaustrittsbewegung 1878 – 1914,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 22 (1982): 263 – 298.  See Wilhelm Gröf, “Lehmann-Rußbüldt, Otto,” in Neue Deutsche Biographie 14 (1985), accessed March 27, 2020, https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/pnd116873310.html; and Nicholas A. Furness, “Otto Lehmann-Rußbueldt: Forgotten Prophet of a Federal Europe,” in “England? Aber wo liegt es?” Deutsche und österreichische Emigranten in Großbritannien, 1933 – 1945, ed. Charmian Brinson (Munich: Iuridicum, 1996), 87– 98. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110688283-013

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membership and church exit in order to contextualize secularist aims, strategies, and narratives. Second, the Committee’s work will be approached in two dimensions: its public impact and the agenda of its mastermind, Otto LehmannRußbüldt. In a third step, the textual strategies framing church exit will be reconstructed and potential reasons for leaving church will be traced together with potential benefits – individually and socially – contemporaries might have connected to this act. With that in mind, the social dimension of leaving church is discussed: as will be shown, the mass events to agitate church exit reached and mobilized an immense audience, yet failed to actually implement the intended change. Still, the Komitee Konfessionslos proves an eminent force in shaping the late-Wilhelmine anticlerical discourse that has been identified as an important source of the constitutional debates of 1919. One last aspect to be discussed are the surveys organized by the Committee, which counted church visitors and published the results as a means of criticizing religion. By this and with regard to emptying churches, its members questioned the civilizing effect of Sunday sermons and invoked a public debate in the German Empire on the (self)definition of being religious and of being a Christian nation. The strictly statistical-empiric approach not only copied scientific methods but – even more – was discussed as a scientific practice by the secularists who stressed the critical potential of science toward religion. Through its efforts, the Committee coined a pattern of a dialectic dissemination of theory and practice between academic circles and “worldview producing amateurs” among the social reformers.³

Historical Context: German Confessionalism, Dissidence, Konfessionslosigkeit Anticlerical and freethought movements flourished prior to 1914, preceded by the scientific revolutions of the nineteenth century and by the formation of secular worldview organizations.⁴ This development rooted most notably in the shift of  Horst Groschopp, Dissidenten: Freidenkerei und Kultur in Deutschland (Berlin: Dietz, 1997).  See Jörn Brederlow, “Lichtfreunde” und “Freie Gemeinden”: Religiöser Protest und Freiheitsbewegung im Vormärz und in der Revolution von 1848/49 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1976); Frank SimonRitz, Die Organisation einer Weltanschauung: Die freigeistige Bewegung im Wilhelminischen Deutschland (Gütersloh: Kaiser, 1996); Groschopp, Dissidenten; Rebekka Habermas, “Piety, Power, and Powerlessness: Religion and Religious Groups in Germany, 1870 – 1945,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History, ed. Helmut Walser Smith (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 453 – 480; Lisa Dittrich, Antiklerikalismus in Europa: Öffentlichkeit und Sä-

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paradigms with natural sciences taking a lead in the public discourse and becoming the legitimate source of empirical knowledge.⁵ Another reason causing these changes was the growing transnational interconnectedness of the participating actors: a broader discourse of social reform and social progressiveness formed, boosted by the legitimacy of famous and internationally renowned personalities within the spectrum of reform.⁶ A third aspect that has to be considered when it comes to the publicity of freethought in the Wilhelmine period are the continuous attempts to convince all non-active or non-believing church members to de-convert openly from the established Christian churches. This approach roots in the fact that almost all citizens of the German Empire were registered members of a religious community, most notably of the Roman Catholic Church or one of the established Protestant churches. Thus, a significant part of the personal, financial, and temporal

kularisierung in Frankreich, Spanien und Deutschland (1848 – 1914) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014); Todd Weir, Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Rise of the Fourth Confession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); and Lisa Dittrich, “European Connections, Obstacles, and the Search for a New Concept of Religion: The Freethought Movement as an Example of Transnational Anti-Catholicism in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Religious History 39, no. 2 (2015): 261– 279.  Olaf Breidbach, “Monismus um 1900 – Wissenschaftspraxis oder Weltanschauung?,” in Welträtsel und Lebenswunder: Ernst Haeckel – Werk, Wirkung und Folgen, ed. Erna Aescht (Linz: Oberösterreichisches Landesmuseum, 1998), 289 – 316; Eve-Marie Engels, “Darwins Popularität im Deutschland des 19. Jahrhunderts: Die Herausbildung der Biologie als Leitwissenschaft,” in Menschenbilder: Zur Pluralisierung der Vorstellung von der menschlichen Natur (1850 – 1914), ed. Achim Barsch and Peter Hejl (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 91– 145; Rosemarie Nöthlich, Olaf Breidbach and Uwe Hoßfeld, “‘Was ist Natur’? Einige Aspekte zur Wissenschaftspopularisierung in Deutschland,” in “Klassische Universität” und “akademische Provinz”: Studien zur Universität Jena von der Mitte des 19. bis in die dreißiger Jahre des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Matthias Steinbach and Stefan Gerber (Jena/Quedlinburg: Bussert & Stadeler, 2005), 239 – 250; and Paul Ziche, Wissenschaftslandschaften um 1900: Philosophie, die Wissenschaften und der nichtreduktive Szientismus (Zurich: Chronos, 2008).  Details on this process offer Dittrich, Antiklerikalismus in Europa; Dittrich, “European Connections”; Christophe Verbruggen and Julie Carlier, “Laboratories of Social Thought: The Transnational Advocacy Network of the Institut International pour la Diffusion des Expériences Sociales and its Documents du Progrès (1907– 1916),” in Information beyond Borders: International Cultural and Intellectual Exchange in the Belle Époque, ed. W. Boyd Rayward (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 123 – 142; Nico Randeraad, “Triggers of Mobility: International Congresses (1840 – 1914) and their Visitors,” Jahrbuch für Europäische Geschichte 16 (2015): 63 – 82; and Nico Randeraad and Chris Leonards, “Building a Transnational Network of Social Reform in the Nineteenth Century,” in Shaping the Transnational Sphere: Experts, Networks and Issues from the 1840s to the 1930s, ed. Davide Rodogno, Bernhard Struck and Jakob Vogel (New York/Oxford: Berghahn, 2015), 111– 131.

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resources of the numerous German freethought associations were used to proselytize in public speeches or debates, but also by agitating and polemic brochures aiming to win over new members. Public speeches and debates, in particular, turned out to be successful, yet at the same time quite elusive instruments to attract prospective members. Although it is true that public events were highly frequented, anticlericalism was widespread, and the secularization of daily habits was common (especially in the urban, Protestant regions of the German Empire),⁷ the secularist associations continued to attract only a scarce membership:⁸ The Deutsche Freidenkerbund (German Freethinker League, DFB), founded 1881 by Ludwig Büchner with a focus on materialism and a critique of religion, had 6,000 members (including 5,000 corporate members); the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Ethische Kultur (German Society for Ethical Culture), founded in 1892 by Georg von Gizycki as the German branch of the Ethical Movement, had 850 members; and the Deutsche Monistenbund (German Monist League, DMB), founded in 1906 by Ernst Haeckel, had 6,000 members gathering around the idea of the scientific fundaments of a modern worldview. Furthermore, there were the communities of the Deutsche Bund Freireligiöser Gemeinden (Federation of Free Religious Parishes in Germany, DBFG), founded in 1844 by the pre-revolutionary Deutschkatholiken and the Protestant Lichtfreunde, that counted 50,000 members (including 18,000 paying members) in 1914. This broad membership of the DBFG owes to its familial structure and the religious community, devoted to non-dogmatic religious belief settings and a “rationalized” (that is, non-sacramental, social-centered) practice. While the former associations had mainly male members, free religion attracted couples and families, providing them with the regular services of a church community. Here, the social setting for the biographical rites of passage grew in importance. This dimension became crucial in the years 1890 to 1914 with the quarrels on preparatory education lessons leading to Jugendweihe, as the free religious parishes termed their alternative to the Christian confirmation.⁹ To sum up, the German public discourse was permeated by a widespread anticlerical momentum, but the main carriers of this attitude (anticlericals, free-

 Lucian Hölscher, Datenatlas zur religiösen Geographie im protestantischen Deutschland: Von der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg, 4 vols. (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2001).  For numbers, see Max Henning, ed., Handbuch der freigeistigen Bewegungen Deutschlands, Österreichs und der Schweiz (Frankfurt/Main: Neuer Frankfurter Verlag, ²1914).  See Werner Lesanovsky, ed., Den Menschen der Zukunft erziehen: Dokumente zur Bildungspolitik, Pädagogik und zum Schulkampf der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung 1870 – 1900 (Frankfurt/ Main: Peter Lang, 2003).

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thinkers, free religious, and social reformers of different provenience) were constantly failing to transform this stance into social forms and public agency. One strategy they applied was the attempt to mobilize the assumed critical stratum to initiate a church exit mass movement in the German Empire that would enforce secularism, i. e. the separation of church and state. This strategy was mainly pursued by the freethought magazine Der Dissident (The Dissident).¹⁰ In April 1911, an anonymous author speculated that most citizens refrained from leaving church because they feared professional or social disadvantages. This seemed to call for a collective approach to prevent discrimination: “Wir sammeln Unterschriften von Personen, die sich verpflichten, aus der Kirche auszutreten, wenn innerhalb eines bestimmten Zeitraumes 100.000 oder 200.000 Unterschriften zusammenkommen.” (“We collect signatures of those willing to leave church, if one or two hundred thousand others would join them.”)¹¹ One year later, the same journal announced the founding of the Komitee Konfessionslos with the agenda to ignite a mass exodus from the established churches.¹²

Church Membership and Konfessionslosigkeit Before considering the Committee’s activities in detail, there are two more aspects to take into account: the status of church membership in the German Empire and its growing importance for the freethought discourse. Church membership had been autonomously administered by the religious communities until 1875, when the imperial state introduced compulsory communal civil registers throughout the country. Although the focus of the Bismarck administration was on centralized birth registers and the introduction of civil marriages, the registers also enlisted the religious affiliation of each citizen. The monopolization of the civil registries had been introduced as a measure of the (predominantly antiCatholic) Kulturkampf,¹³ but it weakened all established churches by diluting

 On the journal, see the following.  Gr., “Ein Vorschlag zur Kirchenaustrittsbewegung,” Der Dissident 5, no. 2 (May 1911): 16. The author could not be identified, but it is likely that he knew of the foundation of a Committee in Berlin. Unless otherwise stated, all translations are the author’s.  Otto Lehmann-Rußbüldt, “Erste Versuche des Komitees ‘Konfessionslos’,” Der Dissident 6, no. 9 (December 1912): 91– 96; and Otto Lehmann-Rußbüldt, “Kirchenaustritt als Demonstration zur Erlangung von Volksrechten,” Das freie Wort 12, no. 19 (January 1913): 724– 726.  See Habermas, “Piety,” 460; and Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser, eds, Culture Wars: Secular–Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

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means of social control (forced baptisms,¹⁴ impediment of mixed marriages¹⁵) and by fostering secular identity processes.¹⁶ This administrative shift has been described along processes of secularization, as the autonomy of the administration increased and the field of legal agency expanded to the personal affairs of the individual that now became a citizen in bureaucratic manners.¹⁷ The option to delete the recorded religious affiliation from the civil registry was not intended with its introduction, but it soon became obvious that the register and the official status of the register entry were tools to express protest. Remarkably, this protest echoed diametrically different attitudes: an anti-religious position for one thing, and a highly religious position for another. The former connected church secession to atheism, materialism, and claims of secularization, whereas the latter, by leaving church, protested against the worldliness and corruption of the Christian church or religion itself in service of the authorities. Both positions were anticlerical, i. e. both criticized the established churches and their personnel. But while anticlericalism was just a segment in the former’s anti-Christian or anti-religious agenda, it formed the core of the religious critique of the latter.¹⁸

 In 1873 (when a Saxonian law concerning dissidence had been passed already), the furrier Friedrich Thumen was pursued by the local police of Leipzig because his son (born in 1872) had not yet been baptized. The local pastor had pressed charge on Thumen. The inquiry ran until 1874, when Thumen could prove that his son in the meantime had been baptized in another parish of Leipzig. See Stadtarchiv Leipzig (SAL), Polizeiamt der Stadt Leipzig, Sachakten, Nr. 29 (Anzeige wegen Taufweigerung). The issue of forced baptisms has almost exclusively been discussed in connection with Jewish conversion, whereas research on forced baptisms of the children of non-religious persons is missing.  Tillmann Bendikowski, “‘Eine Fackel der Zwietracht’: Katholisch-protestantische Mischehen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert,” in Konfessionen im Konflikt: Deutschland zwischen 1800 und 1970, Ein zweites konfessionelles Zeitalter, ed. Olaf Blaschke (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002), 215 – 241.  In the traditional social setting, the religious and social identity interfered: being member of a certain religious community meant belonging to a certain parish. This inevitable biographical connection to the parish ceased when the town hall became the place where the hard facts of the individual life (birth, marriage, and death) were certified.  See José Casanova, “Private and Public Religions,” Social Research 59 (1992): 17– 57; Detlef Pollack, Säkularisierung – Ein moderner Mythos? Studien zum religiösen Wandel in Deutschland (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 82– 94; 132– 204; Detlef Pollack, The Role of Religion in Modern Societies (London: Routledge, 2008); Detlef Pollack, Rückkehr des Religiösen? Studien zum religiösen Wandel in Deutschland und Europa II (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 19 – 104; and Detlef Pollack, Religion und gesellschaftliche Differenzierung: Studien zum religiösen Wandel in Europa und den USA III (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016), 67– 112.  Pietistic or awakened anticlericalism is a form of internal critique of religion. It denounces the established churches to neglect their core function in offering salvation in favor of political

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Prior to 1900, only a few freethinkers left church, yet their cases were highly scandalized and mediatized,¹⁹ which is why they could not figure as a role model for a regular church exit. Attempts by a radical anticlerical milieu led by the socialist and anarchist Johann Most to speed up church exits were not successful either – both for internal reasons (the anarchist Most gained no recognition within the party) and external reasons.²⁰ Church exit was highly estimated among freethinkers as a symbolic act signaling the stringency of lifestyle. But there was no serious effort to introduce it as an exemplary pattern of freethought behavior: belonging without believing seemed the normal case for disaffected or not-participating church members.²¹ Consequently, most of the church exits of the nineteenth century rooted in the milieu of the highly religious. The Protestant churches registered most of the secessions as conversions to “other Christian denominations,”²² that is, the new affiliation was not enlisted in the civil registry. In consequence, being a dissident equaled being highly religious, as it originally denoted members of unacknowledged, mainly Protestant denominations (e. g. Mennonites, Baptists, Methodists). This fundamentally changed at the turn of the twentieth century, when dissidence semantically transformed into Konfessionslosigkeit, meaning “not belonging to a religion” or simply being non-religious. The mentioned journal Der Dissident illustrates this shift: although the journal promised to be the “Zentralorgan für die Interessen aller Dissidenten” (“the central organ for the matters of all dissidents”), its contents addressed almost exclusively non-religious dissidents.²³ The release of the journal also marked the point of this semantic change: its first edition was published in 1907 – right after new legislation transformed the

influence. It corresponds to what Rebekka Habermas has identified as a secularization of Protestantism in her study of the reconfigurations of the religious and the secular in the nineteenth century. (Habermas, “Piety,” 457– 460.)  Johann Most, Die Gottes-Pest (New York: Verlag der “Freiheit,” 1883); and Traugott von Koppelow, Mein Austritt aus der Landeskirche, Flugschriften des Comités “Confessionslos” 2 (BerlinSchmargendorf: Verlag “Confessionslos,” [ca. 1911]).  See Kaiser, “Sozialdemokratie,” 277. See further Grossman, “Heraus aus der Kirche”; and Groschopp, Dissidenten.  Olav Aarts, Ariana Need, Manfred Te Grotenhuis and Nan Dirk De Graaf, “Does Belonging Accompany Believing? Correlations and Trends in Western Europe and North America between 1981 and 2000,” Review of Religious Research 50, no. 1 (2008): 26. The term flips Grace Davie’s concept of “believing without belonging” as the modern religious pattern in the UK. Grace Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).  Hölscher, Datenatlas.  Horst Groschopp argues differently: the term “dissident” had not been common prior to the Kulturkampf and was used then in a non-religious sense. (Groschopp, Dissidenten, 17.)

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financial settings of the churches fundamentally. Prussia, from then on, began to levy the church taxes systematically for the churches.²⁴ Consequently, from 1906 onwards, the exit numbers grew and reached a peak in 1909 with 33,814 exits in Berlin.²⁵ Contemporary observers (and researchers likewise) have since then analyzed the motivations for this rush. Financial reasons, obviously, were a prominent cause to exit church.²⁶ But money surely was not the only motivation, for low incomes were not taxable. The interviews Ernst Bittlinger, a pastor from Berlin, conducted with dissidents reveal rather strong anticlerical and political incentives.²⁷ Accordingly, the symbolic aspect of the situation became more important after 1906 – and freethought associations could use this symbolic dimension as a means to prominently introduce their agenda. A church tax collecting state could easily be identified as a manifestation of the close ties between state and church. This narrative fostered the anticlerical prejudice and added to classical narratives of the critique of religion. In the long run, Konfessionslosigkeit became a broadly discussed public issue and a performative and symbolic marker. When speaking of a church exit movement and secularization in respect to church attendances in the Wilhelmine Era, this has to be qualified. The mentioned growth of church secessions was restricted to certain regions and settings

 This new fiscal policy coincided with the efforts of modern states to monopolize the administrative access and control over its citizens, thereby conflicting with other societal spheres and their institutions, such as religions and church functionaries. See Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: C.H.Beck, 2009); and Habermas, “Piety.” In fact, the fiscal reform pacified this conflict, as the state allowed the Evangelical State Church of Prussia to inspect the tax records of its members to readjust the church taxes.  Hölscher, Datenatlas, vol. 2, 474– 475. There are some statistical distortions as the “none”category existed only from 1867 to 1874 and from 1909 onwards. The other years show a remarkably high record of conversions to “other Christian denominations.” Highly and non-religious exit motives, thus, seem blurred. Also, no pattern concerning the church exit numbers can be identified – the annual numbers vary in a high degree, from 49 in 1884 to the mentioned 33,814 in 1909. Kaiser, “Sozialdemokratie,” 278, calculates different numbers from the police records: 11,063 in 1908 and 9,769 in 1909.  Ernst Bittlinger, “Vom Kirchenaustritt in Berlin: Tatsachen und Folgen,” Evangelisch-sozial 22 (1913): 290 – 303; Ermel, Kirchenaustrittsbewegung; and Kaiser, “Sozialdemokratie,” 280. Kaiser notes that the annual tax burdened many families with disproportionally high costs.  Bittlinger, “Kirchenaustritt.” Neither Bittlinger nor the scholars quoting him take into account that referring to non-religious reasons for secession can also be interpreted as a strategy to fend off discussions with an interrogating religious functionary: religious arguments obviously keep the discussion going, whereas reference to money cuts it off quite easily and impersonally.

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– mainly to Protestant, urbanized, and industrialized regions.²⁸ Prussia and – most exclusively – Berlin did not represent a general trend but constituted an extreme point. Catholic regions and rural areas, on the other hand, show significantly smaller numbers of secession and constant or slowly decreasing church attendance rates. In this respect, Saxony can serve as a counter-example. Urban and highly industrialized regions such as Leipzig and Chemnitz resembled Berlin, albeit on a lower scale, whereas the southern regions (Erzgebirge and Vogtland) displayed no signs for an accelerated secularization,²⁹ although they were significantly Protestant and grew as industrial regions with a decentralized, slow-scale urbanization and a strong working-class agency.

Der Dissident With the growing number of church exits, the issue gained momentum in the anticlerical movement. The manifold German anticlerical press increasingly discussed it – and even made it the central topic of a journal. Der Dissident was published from 1907 on as enclosure of the freethought magazine Das freie Wort and mainly reported events and debates from the German free religious parishes. Both magazines were published in the Neuer Frankfurter Verlag owned by the industrial Arthur Pfungst, an eminent financier of the German freethought scene.³⁰ Pfungst’s reform efforts were multifaceted: he was a member of the Buddhist Mahabodhi Society, president of the Weimar Cartel (an umbrella organization of the German freethought associations), chairman of the Bund für weltliche Schule und Moralunterricht (Association for Secular Schools and Moral Education), and a renowned publisher. Pfungst advocated freethought and the critique

 Remarkably, secession from a religious community was an even more prominent issue among the Jewish community throughout the whole nineteenth century. Quite unsurprisingly, this was not problematized in public, but either welcomed as a means of assimilation and integration or problematized in the accelerating anti-Semitic debates.  Hölscher, Datenatlas, vol. 2: whereas 56 percent of the Lutheran Protestants of Marienberg (in the Erzgebirge) received the Holy Communion in 1910, only 16 percent did so in Leipzig (p. 531, the statistics of the church districts are on p. 549 and pp. 552– 553).  A comprehensive biography of Pfungst or research on his networks are still missing. A biographical sketch is offered by Hellmuth Hecker, “Arthur Pfungst,” in Lebensbilder deutscher Buddhisten: Ein bio-bibliographisches Handbuch, vol. 2: Die Nachfolger (Constance: Universität Konstanz, ²1997), 252– 256. See also Groschopp, Dissidenten.

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of religion, merged with a religious approach that was founded on individuality and high moral standards.³¹ Initially, Der Dissident brought up the discriminatory situation of the free religious parishes and freethinkers in general: the community in Breslau (Wrocław) was not allowed to take possession of an inheritance (the “Erbschaft Müller”-affair); church exits were denied or impeded; free religious burials were prohibited or curtailed; Jugendweihe-celebrations were forbidden; and children of community members were forced to attend the religious education lessons in public schools. The journal gave voice to the growing discontent with this treatment. Its critique and its emergent activism mirrored both the development of a clear secular laicist concept of the modern state and the increasing self-confidence of the minority milieu with its self-perception as vanguard of modern society. From 1912 on, Der Dissident was sold as an independent journal. Whereas Das freie Wort remained an open platform of the freethought movement, Der Dissident focused on questions of church-state relations and the legal dimensions of being a freethinker – marking the high awareness of the issue’s potential. Despite its specific set of questions, Der Dissident covered a multitude of subjects such as cremation, the secularization of public schools, the moral education in public schools, the decriminalization of blasphemy, the extension of parental rights of mixed couples, the introduction of a non-theist form of oath, the general conditions for the separation of church and state, and – last but not least – the various existing church exit procedures.³² And although church secession was just one aspect of the journal’s agenda, it became its main topic in the years 1912 to 1914. For the journal’s editors, authors, and its readership, laicity seemed interesting not only with respect to church secession but also to illustrate the discriminatory religious situation in the German Empire. As the federal states were responsible for laws concerning church exit, each state had its own procedure. Der Dissident mapped these differences, documented the intermingling of church and state, and identified inequitable procedures hindering church exits by

 Interestingly, the study of religion is quite important in his oeuvre: not only did he publish philological and philosophical works on Buddhist sources; he also patronized Max Henning, paying him as the editor of the Freies Wort. The orientalist Henning is renowned for his translation of the Qur’an (1901).  The journal’s broad agenda becomes visible in the indices. Another approach to visualize this diversity is an evaluation of the journal’s authors: a wide spectrum of free religious functionaries (preachers, congregation members, moral teachers), but also monists, freethinkers, reformed freemasons, school reformers, and law reformers contributed articles.

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hyper-formalized bureaucratic procedures or high fees.³³ The journal’s call for a standardized, non-discriminatory procedure was a first attempt to propagate and realize the secularist reform agenda which claimed the separation of church and state and the juridical and formal equality of non-religious citizens. The foundation of the Komitee Konfessionslos dynamized this situation in putting this agenda directly into action.

The Komitee Konfessionslos The Komitee Konfessionslos started to announce its activities from December 1911/January 1912 on, but it insisted on its official formation in December 1910, when first meetings had taken place.³⁴ This sort of post-dating was a widespread legitimizing strategy. In the case of the Komitee this is relevant in particular, because the year 1911 marked a phase of intensified reformist activities. Thus backdating bestowed the endeavor with a solid air that suggested it was not part of an ephemeral trend, but an independent, consistent project. The Committee declared to be a functioning network of ombudsmen all over the Empire, although no hints concerning the recruitment of these men can be traced. Most of the ombudsmen can be connected to further reformist or secularist networks but it remains unclear how they were contacted and contracted as there are no sources providing internal communication. Freethinker congresses such as the International Monist Congress in Hamburg in September 1911, or the International Freethinker Congress in Munich in September 1912 presumably were good opportunities to extend the network. The function of the Committee was simple: every ombudsman kept “signing lists for individuals that declare to leave church, if others join them simultaneously. Then, on a fixed date, all these exit declarations are submitted to the

 Berlin, for example, had a liberal legislation that administered church exits via the local courts and civil registries. This procedure seems one reason for Berlin’s high church exit numbers. Saxony’s exit procedure, in contrast, was strenuous, for the first step to church exit was a conversation with the local pastor on one’s wish to quit church (which the pastor had to receipt). The notification in court was followed by a probation period of six weeks, after which a new court hearing assured the individual’s wish to quit church membership. Each step of the procedure entailed costs. See John Mez, “Einheitliche Regelung der Kirchenaustrittsbewegung in den deutschen Bundesstaaten,” Der Dissident 8, no. 5 (August 1914): 35 – 40.  Otto Lehmann-Rußbüldt, “Das Komitee ‘Konfessionslos’,” in Handbuch der freigeistigen Bewegungen Deutschlands, Österreichs und der Schweiz, ed. Max Henning (Frankfurt/Main: Neuer Frankfurter Verlag, ²1914), 98 – 109.

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courts.”³⁵ The logic resembles that of a contemporary flash mob:³⁶ individuals with loose social ties agree to gather and act in a certain symbolic way in order to gain public attention. In absence of any social media, the prospective secularists had to sign the lists during public meetings. Secularist journals and local anticlerical associations supported the spread of the idea quite successfully – the meetings were generally well-attended and the lists were long. The press circulated a small number of these deadlines,³⁷ but they seem to have been abandoned already during the early stages of the Komitee – its plan of mobilizing a crowd in the local courts obviously failed. Consequently, the lists were compiled without deadlines and discussed as manifestation of public trends. The circulation of these lists was accompanied by a rush of propaganda activities: the publication of books, themed brochures, and articles in freethought journals, the organization of mass events, and the conduct of church attendance surveys. These three measures are to be discussed separately, although they intertwine: reports of meetings were published, euphorically praising the number of church exit declarations signed during these meetings; speakers from different associations contributed to the meetings and, thereby, strengthened the ties of the social reform network; and the results of the surveys were discussed and presented during the meetings and in journals. But first, Otto LehmannRußbüldt, head of the Committee and author of most of its texts, will be considered more closely.

The Protagonist: Otto Lehmann-Rußbüldt The Komitee Konfessionslos completely turned out to be a project of Otto Lehmann-Rußbüldt. As secretary of the Committee, he coordinated its activities

 Otto Lehmann-Rußbüldt, “Der organisierte Kirchenaustritt,” Der Dissident 5, no. 10 (January 1912): 81– 82. Similarly: Otto Lehmann-Rußbüldt, “Komitée ‘Konfessionslos’,” Der Monismus 6, no. 63 (December 1911): 413 – 414.  There is a significant connection between marginalized or minority groups and their fascination with modern techniques of (public) communication. Thus technological “hypermodernity” can be interpreted as a strategy to gain a discursive presence that is consistently obstructed by cultural majorities. This phenomenon is particularly discussed in Jewish history. See Gabriel Sheffer, Diaspora Politics: At Home Abroad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). This aspect has been brought up by Carolin Kosuch.  “16. Februar und 15. Mai, II. und III. Stichtag der Massenaustritte aus den Landeskirchen,” Der Dissident 6, no. 11 (January 1913): 119 – 120.

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and was the primary contact person of the ombudsmen. He also continuously published articles and brochures³⁸ on behalf of the Committee – mostly in Der Dissident, but also in other freethought or progressivist journals, where he reported about upcoming activities and projects.³⁹ As a book trader, LehmannRußbüldt was one of the few protagonists of Wilhelmine freethought without any academic background. He earned his living by selling monist books via mail-order and by reporting parliamentary proceedings.⁴⁰ The published reports of the Committee are vague as to whether Lehmann-Rußbüldt received a salary or allowances for his work (e. g. remuneration for authoring or lecturing).⁴¹ When he started promoting church exit, Lehmann-Rußbüldt was part of the German reform scene already: he had been secretary of the Giordano Bruno Bund founded by Bruno Wille,⁴² which made him a member of the free religious and freethought circles of Berlin and also brought him into contact with the Monist League. This bond was intensified when Wilhelm Ostwald became president of the league and established a networking strategy that connected monism – taken as an epistemological approach – to different reform practices such as school reform, juridical reform, reform architecture and urban planning, Lebensreform, abstinence, etc. Church secession, obviously, became a relevant aspect within this network.⁴³ Lehmann-Rußbüldt noted that the Committee took shape during the International Monist Congress in Hamburg with Ostwald as the catalyst and himself an active participant in the proceedings.⁴⁴ Ostwald also mediated the Committee’s participation in the Weimar Cartel in 1912.⁴⁵

 Most notably: Otto Lehmann-Rußbüldt, Der geistige Befreiungskrieg durch Kirchenaustritt (Berlin: Komitee Konfessionslos, Frankfurt/Main: Neuer Frankfurter Verlag, 41914).  He regularly wrote for the monist journals Der Monismus (Monism), Das Monistische Jahrhundert (The Monist Century), Das freie Wort (The Free Word), and Der Weg (The Way). (LehmannRußbüldt, “Komitée ‘Konfessionslos’” [Der Monismus]; Lehmann-Rußbüldt, “Kirchenaustritt als Demonstration” [Das freie Wort]; and Lehmann-Rußbüldt, “Bibelstunden im Gefängnis,” Das Monistische Jahrhundert 3, no. 2– 3 [April 1914]: 43 – 46.)  Gröf, “Lehmann-Rußbüldt.”  Otto Lehmann-Rußbüldt, “Finanzbericht 1913,” Der Dissident 7, no. 12 (March 1914): 126.  See Karin Bruns, “Giordano Bruno Bund,” in Handbuch literarisch-kultureller Vereine, Gruppen und Bünde 1825 – 1933, ed. Wulf Wülfing, Karin Bruns and Rolf Parr (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1998), 163 – 175.  See Katharina Neef, Die Entstehung der Soziologie aus der Sozialreform (Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 2012), 127– 134; and Katharina Neef, “Multiple Devianz: Zu Fassbarkeit und Struktur eines alternativkulturellen Phänomens,” in Dynamik und Devianz: Festschrift für Hubert Seiwert zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Christoph Kleine, Edith Franke and Heinz Mürmel (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 185 – 203.  “Kirchenaustritt von 20 Volksschullehrern,” Der Dissident 6, no. 3 (June 1912): 22. But in 1914, Lehmann-Rußbüldt claimed to have developed this idea as early as 1909 and to have founded

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As already mentioned, the question of Lehmann-Rußbüldt’s sustenance remains vague. He obviously lacked the financial resources of his bourgeois fellow functionaries. The activity reports of the Committee indicate that his funding could not have been generous – the operated sums are in total quite small. Additionally, he continuously stressed the transitional character of the venture: to him, it was an auxiliary means for strengthening equal civil rights. “The Committee will be dissolved once its aim is reached,” as the statute emphasized.⁴⁶ And really, the Committee was not re-arranged in 1919, when the Weimar Constitution guaranteed non-confessional civil rights, the church exit procedure was simplified, and an unseen rush of church exits brought the minority of non-churchmembers up to a percental scale.⁴⁷ However, since this self-dissolution coincided with Lehmann-Rußbüldt’s shift of interest toward pacifism and internationalism that detracted him further from the Committee, the situation of 1918 – 19 can also be interpreted as a missing re-arrangement. Lehmann-Rußbüldt co-founded the Bund Neues Vaterland (League of the New Fatherland) and became secretary of the German branch of the Internationale Liga für Menschenrechte (International Human Rights Federation). After imprisonment by the National Socialists in 1933, he emigrated to England in November 1933 and became an active member of the British anti-Hitler propaganda initiatives.⁴⁸ His pacifist and anti-militarist engagement earned him merits in the Federal Republic of Germany, whereas his secularist agency is hitherto undiscussed. Organizing a national church exit campaign, therefore, remained only an episode in the reformist biography of Lehmann-Rußbüldt. And although his activities varied throughout his life, they all seem to have led him to participate in an interconnected, multiple network of movements and associations. In there, he professionalized and actively pursued his interests in naturalist literature, free religious thought, church exit, internationalism, human rights, and antimilitarism. In this way, he was a typical representative of “multiple deviance” – the

the Committee in 1910. With the Monist Congress, the Committee would have just “broadened its tasks.” (Lehmann-Rußbüldt, “Komitee,” [Handbuch] 99 – 101.)  Henning, Handbuch, 7– 11; 20 – 29.  Lehmann-Rußbüldt, “Komitee,” [Handbuch] 99.  Hölscher, Datenatlas.  Furness, “Lehmann-Rußbueldt,” 87– 98.

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intersection of different alternative attitudes and practices, condensing in a nonconformist lifestyle.⁴⁹

Text Strategies and Motifs The contents and actual focus of the written material concerning the question of church secession cover a wide range. Agitating pamphlets form an essential part of these writings, in particular manuscripts of propaganda speeches that were given in order to motivate leaving church. This argument was also at the core of brochures and can be traced – often rather indirectly – in newspapers or police reports. Also Der Dissident repeatedly printed calls to quit church membership.⁵⁰ The brochure texts by Wilhelm Ostwald offer insight in this kind of writing. Though the preservation of secularist grey literature is sometimes quite contingent, Ostwald – a prominent figure in the progressivist network – strove ardently to publish his views. He regularly released the Monistische Sonntagspredigten (Monist Sunday Sermons) from 1912 on to broaden and to push forward the freethought agenda. Thereby, he connected a wide spectrum of freethought key issues and potential freethought topics to actual political subjects in the light of monism.⁵¹ Church secession is discussed thrice in these sermons.⁵² In April

 On “multiple deviance” (Heinz Mürmel): Neef, “Multiple Devianz.” On “religious nonconformism”: Christoph Kleine, “Religiöser Nonkonformismus als religionswissenschaftliche Kategorie,” Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft 23, no. 1 (2015): 3 – 34.  See, e. g., Georg Kramer, “Kirchenaustritt und Arbeiterschaft,” Der Dissident 6, no. 2 (May 1912): 9 – 12; and Heinz Albin, “Aufklärung ins Volk!,” Der Dissident 6, no. 3 (June 1912): 25 – 32.  The sermons were published from April 1911 to March 1916. They were included to the league’s magazine Das Monistische Jahrhundert also published by Ostwald. The amount of monist publications – journals, brochures, pamphlets, books, anthologies, art prints, etc. – gives a vivid understanding of the potentials of the freethought (book) market. See Katharina Neef, “Biografische Kontexte für Wilhelm Ostwalds Engagement im Deutschen Monistenbund,” Mitteilungen der Wilhelm-Ostwald-Gesellschaft zu Großbothen e. V. 14, no. 3 (2009): 36 – 46.  Wilhelm Ostwald, “Kirchenaustritt: 53. Predigt,” Monistische Sonntagspredigten: Dritte Reihe (Leipzig: Akademische Verlagsanstalt, 1913), 1– 8; Wilhelm Ostwald, “Kirchenaustritt: II. 97. Predigt,” Monistische Sonntagspredigten: Vierte Reihe (Leipzig: Unesma, 1914), 321– 336; and Wilhelm Ostwald, Die Gegner des Kirchenaustritts (Leipzig: Unesma, 1914). The third text is grey literature: Originally published on April 11, 1914, it was not re-published in the fifth volume of Monistische Sonntagspredigten. It is preserved as enclosure to Das Monistische Jahrhundert. An abridged version can be found in: Wilhelm Ostwald, Wissenschaft contra Gottesglaube: Aus den atheistischen Schriften des großen Chemikers, ed. Friedrich Herneck (Leipzig: Urania, 1960), 139 – 144.

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1912, slightly after Lehmann-Rußbüldt announced the foundation of the Committee in Der Dissident, Ostwald called his fellow monists to quit their church membership and to contact the newly established Komitee. ⁵³ Also, he emphasized the role model function of individual church exits for the whole movement. But above all, he praised the liberating effects of formal secession as “eine innere Klärung und Stärkung” (“an inner purification and revitalization”).⁵⁴ Leaving church is framed as an ethical standard: both as a conceivable, empirical manifestation of a certain non-religious worldview and as a symbolic act of performing straightness and honesty (contrasting clerical hypocrisy). Hence, church exit became a prominent performative moment in a practical model of what Ostwald called wissenschaftliche Weltanschauung (scientific worldview). He specified this idea in contrasting a dualist (i. e. religious) and a monist (resp. scientistic) worldview: “Denn Monismus bedeutet grundsätzliche Einheitlichkeit des gesamten Denkens und Handelns und ist daher der Gegensatz aller doppelten Buchführung.” (“Monism means unity of thought and action and is the opposite of any double-entry accounting.”)⁵⁵ This principle, then, is directly transferred to the question of church membership which Ostwald approached with a scientistic reading: lifestyle and worldview should apply to each other; they should form a reciprocal system of reference. Ostwald postulated a straight logical relation between all spheres of life, with theory (science) informing practice. Church exit, thus, became a vital element of a scientific or scientifically informed lifestyle, while monism or freethought were paralleled with progress, truth, altruism, solidarity, and science and functioned as counterpart of (church) religion. Consequently, science, in Ostwald’s view, was not framed as a cultural practice, but hypertrophied as a producer of meanings, worldviews, ethical creeds, and normative foundations of social behavior.⁵⁶ Ostwald framed his logic by using an antithetical argumentation with the churches and church membership portrayed as conservative, authoritative remnants of an overcome past: “Orthodoxy is not a distinct doctrine, it is a distinct method. […] Dogmas are exclusively used to maintain the inner need to obey

 Ostwald, “Kirchenaustritt: 53. Predigt,” 8.  Ibid., emphasis in the original.  Wilhelm Ostwald, “Warum sind wir Monisten? Erste Predigt,” in Monistische Sonntagspredigten: Erste Reihe (Leipzig: Akademische Verlagsanstalt, 1911), 7.  See the discussion on “scientism”: Ian Barbour, Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues (London: SCM Press, 1998); and Richard G. Olson, Science and Scientism in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008).

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among the people and among the subordinate clergy.”⁵⁷ To Ostwald, institutionalized religion was a tool to preserve the power of the ruling minorities. His sermon of 1914 even fortified this anti-religious narrative (religion being an intentional fraud).⁵⁸ But it remained completely open whether the freethought discourse referred to religion in its institutionalized form or to religious phenomena in general. Consequently, Ostwald’s critical impetus meandered between anticlerical and anti-religious approaches that caused a lack of clarity amongst both fellows and critics.⁵⁹ This antithetical pattern – corrupted, outdated, naive religion vs. progressive, honest science – neither did simply form the illustrative background nor was pure polemics. Rather, as an analysis of Der Dissident suggests, this antithesis is to be understood as a normative pattern of argumentation and behavior: although church exit was often discussed in terms of finances,⁶⁰ it is the idealistic frame that was most prominently referred to. Church exit was the performative act of a conversion – to Konfessionslosigkeit, modernity, and science. Therefore Der Dissident hinted: “If all those leaving church transferred the annual amount of their church tax to the Committee – to document that they did not secede for economic reasons –, it would have plenty of resources to fullfil its tasks.”⁶¹ The idealistic frame indicates two strategic directions: on the one hand, it addressed the internal, freethinking audience by reproducing and stressing the self-image of altruistic agency in order to promote social development and progress. On the other, it became a manifestation of a high standard of individual morality. The external message, obviously, was to rebut the critical cliché of stingy dissidents saving money by church exit. At this point, a closely connected second narrative can be identified: the anticlerical publications on church exit tied worldview to morality and presented the established Christian churches as morally corrupt institutions. This narrative

 Ostwald, “Kirchenaustritt: 53. Predigt,” 5. Ostwald describes religion using the metaphor of a royal court that upholds its regime by pretending the long dead king would still be alive.  Ostwald, “Kirchenaustritt II,” 327– 328.  See Johannes Gleixner, “Menschheitsreligionen”: T. G. Masaryk, A. V. Lunacarskij und die religiöse Herausforderung revolutionärer Staaten (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017), 108 – 109; 175.  Financial issues connected to church membership and church exit include high fees for families, the church taxes, the considerable incomes of the churches secured by these taxes, and the impact of massively reduced church tax incomes caused by mass exits.  Lehmann-Rußbüldt, “Erste Versuche,” 96. The quote is a postscript by the editors. It also reveals the tight financial situation of the Committee: Wilhelm Ostwald stated that, in 1913, the Komitee Konfessionslos survived only with financial support of the Monist League. (Ostwald, “Kirchenaustritt II,” 322.)

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relates to a contrasting one, namely the thesis of the moral corruption of the institution – which intensifies its antithesis, that is: the high moral standard of the church-seceding individual: On the one hand, it is obvious that every monist has to demonstrate ostentatiously his inner freedom by separating from the confessional church he hitherto belonged to. On the other hand, it seems opportune to strengthen the liberal wing of the churches. […] But it is often the case that a measure advised as “tactical” turns out to be a measure that a righteous man cannot undertake with good conscience.⁶²

This connection of freethought agency to morals was ubiquitous and multifaceted. First, it functioned as a defense strategy, for freethought had long since been confronted with the critique of amorality because of its denial of the existence of a transcendent point of reference for the justification and legitimation of its moral standards. To emphasize a peculiar morality was to fence of this critique. Second, contemporaneous interpretations of cultural degeneration were closely connected to discussions of decreasing morality among wider parts of society. Approaches to re-moralize the Western civilization (and/or its colonies) were a typical concern for bourgeois agents of that time.⁶³ By partaking in this discourse, freethinkers ostentatiously claimed to be a vital element of the hegemonial bourgeois stratum in which they inscribed themselves even stronger through their protest and, in this way, stressed their assertion. Finally, secularists aimed at legitimizing their public agency by turning their moral agenda into a social venture. The moral topos leads to a third motive: whereas Ostwald strengthened the individual responsibility of the citizen to justify and encourage church secession, Gustav Tschirn emphasized parental responsibility. Tschirn was the president of the DBFG. Thus he mostly addressed families⁶⁴ and advocated parental church secession as a necessity to protect children from the allegedly malevolent influ-

 Ostwald, “Kirchenaustritt: 53. Predigt,” 1– 2.  A paradigmatic reference for this discourse is the Institute International pour la Diffusion des Expériences Sociales (International Institute for the Dissemination of Social Experiences) of Rudolf/Rodolphe Broda. See Verbruggen and Carlier, “Laboratories of Social Thought”; and Bregt Saenen, “‘Pour la diffusion des expériences sociales” – een onderzoek naar documents du progrès binnen de transnationale ruimte aan het begin van de twintigste eeuw” (MA thesis, University of Gent, 2008), accessed March 27, 2020, http://lib.ugent.be/fulltxt/RUG01/001/376/209/ RUG01-001376209_2010_0001_AC.pdf.  The freethought press was dominated by male authors and it addressed male readers with different familial status. Parental rights were also discussed in the monist press, but less frequently compared to the free religious press, where issues such as religious school education, complementary or substituting moral education, and Jugendweihe were regularly addressed.

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ence of organized Christianity. Dwelling on the educational aims of the moral education lessons given in the secularist congregations, he advertised them not only to members: 1. The children should […] know and understand the religious conditions […], their variety and tradition; they respect them in their historical context. 2. They have a solid, clear scientifically based worldview. 3. They are educated to dedicate their life to the development of mankind; it will be their honor and pleasure to manifest high moral standards in their personal conduct of life.⁶⁵

Countering Tschirn’s appraisal, the philosopher, monist, and ethicist Friedrich Jodl admonished a professionalization of the pedagogic endeavors in public schools and, moreover, favored secular schools without confessional religious education but with a strong impetus on ethical lessons.⁶⁶ His program did not stop at children: being a prominent functionary of the Vienna university extension, he also called for an improved adult education – with professional scientific courses based on a pedagogy “that touches on the key questions of life with a steady hand; [in other words: we need] a popular philosophy and wisdom by experience.”⁶⁷ A fourth prominent motif relates to the question of how to address those who already left church or rather: how to re-integrate them to join free religious, ethical, monist, or freethought communities. Seeing them as prospective members was not only an expansive strategy, but also mirrored the conviction that non-religiousness meant a threat to morality.⁶⁸ Individuals without constant moral address were seen as defunct and had to be reached to find edification. This patriarchal ethical mission is a variation of the mentioned bourgeois supremacy narrative. In this light, Otto Lehmann-Rußbüldt and the Komitee Konfessionslos also suggested a new social affiliation to those who had left church:

 Gustav Tschirn, “Die freireligiöse Bewegung in Deutschland und ihre Zukunft,” Dokumente des Fortschritts 7, no. 4 (April 1914): 201.  Friedrich Jodl, “Die Kirchenaustrittsbewegung und was aus ihr folgt,” Das freie Wort 10, no. 8 (July 1910): 304– 307. Jodl inverted the moral argument: he called the established churches immoral when he accuses them “to recoin their spiritual riches to circulating cash” (304). This reference to economic drives is definitely pejorative.  Jodl, “Kirchenaustrittsbewegung,” 302– 303.  When attacking the churches in the mentioned article, Friedrich Jodl concurrently criticized another antagonist: “Only social democracy compares to clerical organizations concerning the activity and intensity of their sales in ideas.” (Jodl, “Kirchenaustrittsbewegung,” 304). Jodl, at this point, denounced social democracy’s reduction to economic factors and its neglect of humanitarian ideals.

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“Membership in one of the freethought associations united in the Weimar Cartel is highly recommended to anyone who leaves church by the activity of this committee.”⁶⁹ And a last narrative can be traced, albeit almost exclusively in social democratic circles. Here, church exit was framed politically, taken as an active instrument to weaken the suppressive state. This narrative followed a fiscal logic: the established churches are run by church taxes; if they lose this income, they would either need state money to secure their existence and by this become a burden, or they would be unable to uphold their agency in favor of the state. In any case, targeting the church meant hitting the state. When a bourgeois freethought audience was addressed, this argument was generally de-economized and de-politicized: the stress, then, was on weakening the clerical influence. This differentiation also accounts for press reports. The reviewed joint mass events of bourgeois and social democrat activists were discussed differently in the bourgeois respectively the proletarian freethinker press: both focused on “their” speakers with detailed prints of their contributions, yet just summarizing, commenting, or even criticizing the other statements.⁷⁰

Mass Events The years 1913 and 1914 saw a rush of organized propaganda meetings advocating church secession. The dynamics of social events met with a sympathetic audience receiving the secular messages and afterwards multiplying the narratives. Their impact, thus, significantly increased. Initially, Lehmann-Rußbüldt networked intensely to posit the Committee as a flexible player in the social reform and freethought movement: he advocated his work during the meetings of several freethought associations, e. g. the DMB, DFB, and the Weimar Cartel. Simultaneously, he won over freethought celebrities as patrons: Ernst Haeckel, Wilhelm Ostwald (both DMB), Gustav Tschirn (DFB), Bruno Wille (BFGD), Ludwig Gurlitt (an influential German educational reformer), Arthur Drews (a wellknown speaker), and Georg Zepler (a social democratic politician and editor of Der Weg). By 1913, this strategy proved successful: the Committee received funding from the secularist associations and had a good standing in the bourgeois freethought public.

 Lehmann-Rußbüldt, “Kirchenaustritt,” [Dissident] 82.  “Massenstreik gegen die Staatskirche,” Der Atheist 9, no. 48 (December 1913): 363 – 365; and Karl Liebknecht, “Politischer Kirchenboykott,” Der Atheist 9, no. 49 (December 1913): 387.

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The practical level of the Committee’s work, by contrast, was more complicated. Its original motive of igniting a “mass secession” on an appointed date failed. The intended “flash mob” – the physical presence of lots of activists in the courts – never materialized. But the public interest during information meetings and propaganda events grew immensely. In October 1912, a lecture evening with the Berlin free religious protagonists Bruno Wille and Gustav Tschirn attracted more than 1,000 listeners.⁷¹ Consequently, the strategy changed. The Committee now organized propaganda events to advocate church exit and, to this end, invited speakers to discuss the threads of clericalism and the benefits of secularism. While the narrative of an organized mass exit was kept up and there were still lists laid out during the events, they now functioned as individual incentives for a personal decision rather than actually targeting a fixed date of mass exit. The Committee greatly valued the symbolic act of sympathizers signing a list who, by this, personally engaged in a covenant. However, the meaning of the act of signing was ambiguous: the secularist activists grasped the signatures as a promise, the subscribers, though, considered them as a sign of sympathy or as supporting a petition. Instead of agitating and leading local mass movements, the ombudsmen turned out to be local contact persons to provide help with the complex exit procedure and, in some cases, they also received money from the Committee to finance the church exit of poor people or whole families. By 1913, the emphasis was on the mentioned mass events to propagate church secession, for which the Committee became prominent: LehmannRußbüldt succeeded in mobilizing well-known social democrats who publicly joined the protagonists of the bourgeois freethought movement.⁷² The manifestations were headlined “Massenstreik gegen die Staatskirche” (“Mass Strike against the State Church”) and clearly indicated a relation to the socialist movement as this motto marked the utopian potential attributed to the endeavor. The mass strike was discussed as the ultima ratio of political agency and gained an almost eschatological significance: it was considered a means with both unifying and revolutionary potential.⁷³ The instrumentalization of this central anti-capitalist mythologeme for a particularistic issue such as church membership is an

 Lehmann-Rußbüldt, “Komitee,” [Handbuch] 102– 103.  Ibid., 104.  For the socialist discussion, see Rosa Luxemburg, Massenstreik, Partei und Gewerkschaften (Hamburg: Erdmann Dubber, 1906); and Karl Kautsky, Der politische Massenstreik (Berlin: Vorwärts, 1914). See also Michael L. Hughes, “‘The Knife in the Hands of the Children’? Debating the Political Mass Strike and Political Citizenship in Imperial Germany,” Labor History 50, no. 2 (2009): 113 – 138; and John D. Bies, “A Transnational Perspective of the Evolution of Rosa Luxemburg’s Theory of the Mass Strike,” Critique 46, no. 2 (2018): 185 – 219.

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important incident. Not only does it mirror the importance the contemporaries attached to it but it also highlights the communicative process that linked the bourgeois activists to the proletarian speakers by adapting the revolutionary social democratic language to the bourgeois discourse.⁷⁴ This adaptation further underlined the self-image of the freethinkers as nonconformist avant-garde of their time. Finally, this instrumentalization explains the critique brought forward against the Committee by social democrats: the particularization of the general proletarian myth seemed like a blasphemous act. On October 28, 1913, these propaganda efforts reached their uncontested peak, when four simultaneous conventions took place in Berlin, each in a working-class district and led by prominent speakers of both milieus. In Moabit, the free religious Wilhelm Klauke and the social democrat Adolph Hoffmann gave speeches. Wilmersdorf was mobilized by the already mentioned Bruno Wille, the social democrat Ewald Vogtherr, and Lilli Jannasch, an activist of the secular school movement, of pacifism, and monism. The mentioned free religious Gustav Tschirn and the social democrat Heinrich Peus agitated Friedrichshain. And Wilhelm Ostwald and Karl Liebknecht spoke in Neukölln.⁷⁵ But a closer look reveals that the dichotomy of bourgeoisie and working class was just illusive. With the exception of Karl Liebknecht, all social democratic protagonists were also active freethinkers: Vogtherr and Hoffmann were eminent members of Berlin’s free religious parish;⁷⁶ the social democrat and member of the Reichstag Peus was a monist and an old acquaintance of Ostwald with whom he shared the commitment for the planned language Ido.⁷⁷ All social democrats framed their efforts for secularism as a private intervention and not as a functionary’s duty, because the party resolution of 1875 had declared religion a private matter and no topic for party politics.⁷⁸

 Otto Lehmann-Rußbüldt, “Massenstreik gegen die Staatskirche: 1328 Austrittserklärungen an einem Tage,” Das Monistische Jahrhundert 2, no. 32 (November 1913): 900 – 902. On the other hand, the social democrats avoided the term “mass strike” and preferred “mass exodus” or “boycott.” (Liebknecht, “Politischer Kirchenboykott.”)  Lehmann-Rußbüldt, “Massenstreik.” The event was discussed throughout the German public.  Todd Weir, Secularism, 203; 242.  Peus’ agitation for the world language met the critique and ridicule of his social democrat fellows. When he spoke about Ido on a party congress, the delegates mocked him during his speech. See Handbuch der sozialdemokratischen Parteitage von 1910 bis 1913 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1910 – 1913), 266 (Peus on the Congress in Magdeburg 1910).  See Sebastian Prüfer, Sozialismus statt Religion: Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie vor der religiösen Frage, 1863 – 1890 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002); and Grossman, “Heraus aus der Kirche.”

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Although these meetings were highly criticized within the participating associations, the joint venture of Berlin served as a performative pattern. Sequels took place in Leipzig on January 9 and February 6, 1914. During the January meeting, 4,500 attendees gathered in a ballroom to listen to Wilhelm Ostwald and Heinrich Peus.⁷⁹ Even though the social democrat Leipziger Volkszeitung was dissatisfied with the contents of the speeches (Ostwald was too shallow, Peus was too defensive and spoke – as expected – on the world language),⁸⁰ the daily paper promoted another, even bigger manifestation to be held in February. The three parallel meetings of this second venture were all situated in Leipzig’s working class districts and were organized by the Vereinigtes Komitee für Kirchenaustritt (Joint Committee for Church Secession), a joint venture of the local monist branch and the local branch of the Zentralverband proletarischer Freidenker (Association of Proletarian Freethinkers) with two speakers on every location: the SPD-politician Adolf Thiele and the already mentioned Lilli Jannasch at the Volkshaus (the local headquarters of the trade unions in southern Leipzig); the social democrat editor Richard Wagner from Braunschweig and a certain Dr. (Arthur?⁸¹) Westphal from Stuttgart at the Schlosskeller (situated in the East of Leipzig), and the notorious Hans Leuß (author of Die Neue Zeit) and the secretary of the Proletarian Freethinkers Bernhard Menke from Dresden at the Felsenkeller (in the West of Leipzig).⁸² The events were attended by 5,000 visitors.⁸³ Significantly, almost all speakers were social democrats. Although the monist Willy Bloßfeldt worked as the central organizer of the propaganda event,⁸⁴ no renowned representative of the bourgeois freethought movement made his public appearance during the Leipzig-venture. Heinrich Peus even mentioned having visited Leipzig on February 7, but he does not reference the secession agitation right before his stay.⁸⁵ Moreover, the event was not reported

 “Leipzig,” Der Atheist 10, no. 6 (February 1914): 46.  “Freie Weltanschauung gegen Staatskirche,” Leipziger Volkszeitung, January 10, 1914, 2nd supplement.  That is just an assumption. Dr. Arthur Westphal was secretary to the Stuttgart branch of the Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft.  “Zur Kirchenaustrittsbewegung,” Leipziger Volkszeitung, February 7, 1914, 2.  “Leipzig,” Der Atheist 10, no. 9 (March 1914): 68.  Willy Bloßfeldt, “Die Leipziger Polizei gegen die Kirchenaustrittsbewegung,” Leipziger Volkszeitung, February 5, 1914, 2nd supplement.  Heinrich Peus, “Praktischer Monismus,” Das Monistische Jahrhundert 2, no. 48 (February 1914): 1351. Instead, he refers to an exhibition on hygiene he had visited accidentally. This article illustrates Peus’ affiliation to bourgeois discussions and his self-perception as monist rather than social democrat – at least in non-proletarian media.

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in Das Monistische Jahrhundert which is remarkable because Bloßfeldt was its editor.⁸⁶ The situation in Leipzig seems of particular interest for three reasons: first, it illustrates the copied patterns, the comparable success, and the parallel discussions in Berlin and Leipzig. Both events indicate the topic’s mobilizing potential in the time immediately preceding the First World War. Lehmann-Rußbüldt obviously succeeded in connecting the subject to pressing political questions and to make it a “Forderung des Tages.”⁸⁷ He took advantage of politicizing a hitherto non-political but rather religious question, thereby implementing a secularist pattern to gain public attention. This leads to a more complex question, i. e. the practical shift of boundaries. By staging church exit as a political act, religion was critically publicized. This not only provoked the critique of religious institutions, but also of social democrats, who preferred to leave religion a private matter. Thus the publicity or privacy of religion turns out to be a highly flexible marker within the politico-religious sphere.⁸⁸ Second, the comparison with Leipzig relativizes the argument that the church exit movement was only recognizable in Berlin with its easy church exit procedure, its deep-reaching every-day-life secularization, and the particularity of its social democrat free religious parish.⁸⁹ In Leipzig, an anticlerical audience could be agitated. The network of secularist ombudsmen throughout the Reich supports this impression: church secession had become an issue not only in Berlin, but also outside of Prussia, in Catholic regions, and in less urbanized communities. Third, the resemblance also points to remarkable differences: whereas the agitation induced a real growth of secession numbers in the capital, it failed outside of Berlin. Church exit propaganda meetings aroused the interest of many contemporaries, but they failed to induce activities and interests beyond an entertaining evening or fostering one’s anticlerical stereotypes and anti-religious prejudices.

 Das Monistische Jahrhundert does not mention the events, neither Bloßfeldt’s nor LehmannRußbüldt’s articles, who gave an account of the Committee’s activities in January 1914.  This is a contemporary key term coined by Wilhelm Ostwald. Semantically, it refers to a necessary duty or a challenge. Wilhelm Ostwald, Die Forderung des Tages (Leipzig: Akademische Verlagsanstalt, 1911).  Casanova, “Private and Public Religions.”  Kaiser, “ Sozialdemokratie und ‘praktische’ Religionskritik,” 277– 279.

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Practicing Science – Staging Scientism: Anticlerical Surveys A last aspect to capture the Committee’s impact is its recourse on statistics – an attempt to perform a specifically scientific habitus: Committee members counted church visitors to prove their proposition of a vanishing social influence of religion. To this end, the Committee organized the observation of every church in Berlin on May 18, 1913 – followed by other cities such as Leipzig and Chemnitz.⁹⁰ The results seemed to support the assumptions of the anticlerical movement: no church was fully crowded; most of the few attendees were elderly women and children – usually the choir.⁹¹ This result surely was polemic and the method of collecting the data was questioned, but in the end, the churches admitted that attendance was decreasing, even if the collected numbers were adjusted upwards.⁹² With this evaluation of religious practice, the Komitee affirmed three of its major claims. First and most notably, the statistical analysis comprised a critique of established religion. Pointing to empty churches was to deny the representative functions and relevance of public religion: the unity of throne and altar became obsolete, if church influence decreased so obviously and no longer could support the political sphere of power. Second, the Committee, by organizing such surveys, demonstrated its manpower because a certain number of activists were needed to observe all churches in Berlin and other cities and to analyze the obtained data. A third aspect refers to the practice of producing statistics. By independently collecting the relevant data, the secularist milieu not only indirectly criticized the regular academic staff for not having recognized the potential of the topic, they also directly claimed to have scientific capabilities themselves. By applying statistical methods to their field, the overall non-academic members of the Committee adopted scientific modes of practice. By this, they emphasized

 Otto Lehmann-Rußbüldt, “Miszellen zur Kirchenbesuchsstatistik,” Der Dissident 7, no. 6 (September 1913): 77– 79; and Lehmann-Rußbüldt, “Komitee,” [Handbuch] 103. See also Arthur Wolf, “Kirchenbesuch in Leipzig,” Der Atheist 10, no. 12 (March 1914): 90. Wolf presented a sample but called his fellows to engage in a general survey.  Otto Lehmann-Rußbüldt, “Eine Kirchenbesuchs-Statistik,” Der Dissident 7, no. 4 (July 1913): 41– 47.  Statistischer Bericht über die Zustände in der evangelisch-lutherischen Landeskirche Sachsens in den Jahren 1911 bis 1918 (Dresden: Meinhold, 1919), 6 (tab. II b and II c.); 8 (tab. II e). See also Hölscher, Datenatlas. On a contemporary polemics, see Erich Schairer, “Die Entkirchlichung in Zahlen,” Der Dissident 7, no. 8 (November 1913): 89 – 93.

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their claim of producing knowledge and substantiated their self-image as scientific agents – that is: they framed their secularism in terms of non-partisan, descriptive, positive, and empirical agency. This strategy legitimized their efforts and – simultaneously – delegitimized (religious) critique against this agency as particular and normative. The statistics raised by the Committee were discussed not only within the anticlerical milieu, but also in a broader public, which offers the possibility to take into account the long-range influences of the anticlerical discourse. By providing the public with data, the discussion of religion versus secularity gained a new perspective – religion, now, was debated in its practical dimensions. Being Christian increasingly was connected to quantitative measures such as church attendance, the frequency of communion, and the participation in other religious activities. At the same time, (unqualified) church membership became less relevant as a marker of (confessional) identity; the status of cultural Protestantism as a religion was questioned.

Internal Critique against the Committee Whereas these statistics were highly appreciated by secularists, the activities of the Komitee Konfessionslos also met harsh critique, especially from the social democrat wing. It mostly centered on effectiveness, imbalance of costs and efforts, and ideological reasons. In 1914, their journal Der Atheist disapproved of the work of the Committee, complaining about the lacking involvement of the bourgeois partners: “Workers and the proletarian freethinkers keep the local committees working, whereas the monists often just give their name and some money.”⁹³ But also the monists criticized this cooperation. Most monists stayed church members for fear of discrimination and because they realized that workers who had left church did not become monists. Therefore, the benefits of the investments were openly questioned.⁹⁴ Further indications on this are missing in the monist sources because, here, the cooperation was labelled as a success. The editor of Der Atheist, Arthur Wolf, also questioned the venture. The propaganda meetings in Leipzig in January and February 1914 – with only 150 declarations to leave church – produced no significant outcomes compared to

 “Der Monistentag in Leipzig,” Der Atheist 10, no. 19 (May 1914): 150.  Ibid.

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the huge efforts.⁹⁵ Moreover, “necessary agitation was made by our members [the Proletarian freethinkers]; the immense crowd at the meeting resulted completely from their efforts.”⁹⁶ Wolf openly criticized two misbalanced conditions: the efforts and results in general and the efforts made by the Proletarian Freethinkers and by the bourgeois freethought associations. The Proletarian Freethinkers questioned the cooperation in the joint committees, because they saw themselves doing the main work, while the monists just played a representative role. The monists, on the other hand, suspected to work in favor of the proletarian freethinkers’ member lists rather than for their own interests. Both groups assumed a disproportional gain on the other side. This suggests that there were no gains at all – neither was there a new potential of members to recruit nor much prestige to win. A report of Lehmann-Rußbüldt strengthens this impression: It was found that the church exit movement should not be mixed up with the direct proselytization for the freethought organizations. The simultaneous attempt to recruit members for one of these associations often results in the withdrawal of a planned church exit. The committee members admit that they failed as a mobilizer of organized dissidence.⁹⁷

The proletarian view (of doing the work while others benefitted from the results) paralleled the general socialist interpretation of the capitalist state of society: consequently, the cooperation itself was questioned fundamentally. Heinrich Ficks ranted in the Atheist against the monists and the DMB: The Monist League is capitalist to the bone. Its beginnings were hopeful, but it developed quite anti-labor. The free religious parishes are voicing the bourgeois, educated, atheist capitalists. […] We can only get rid of church, capitalism, and religion by promoting the Marxist worldview. […] We are a political organization of social democrat freethinkers and it is impossible to cooperate with bourgeois freethinkers.⁹⁸

Naturally, Lehmann-Rußbüldt as the driving force behind the cooperation reported a different result. He stated significantly rising numbers of dissident children in public schools requiring new arrangements for their religious education and –

 Arthur Wolf, “Die Kirchenaustrittsbewegung in Sachsen,” Der Atheist 10, no. 15 (April 1914): 113.  “Leipzig,” [February 1914] 46.  Otto Lehmann-Rußbüldt, “Ein Experiment in Neukölln (307 Kirchenaustritte auf einmal!),” Der Dissident 7, no. 7 (October 1913): 85 – 86.  Heinrich Ficks, “Bürgerliches und proletarisches Freidenkertum: Auszug aus einem Vortrag,” Der Atheist 10, no. 11 (March 1914): 81.

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as a general trend – indicating growing numbers of dissident families. And he established an alternative view on the whole joint venture by emphasizing the initiative role of Wilhelm Ostwald and Karl Liebknecht: “Besides confronting the privileged position of the church, the church secession movement had the benefit to mitigate the antagonism between proletarians and bourgeoisie.”⁹⁹ Lehmann-Rußbüldt’s evaluation remained the only truly positive one which makes it highly questionable if the achieved cooperation of bourgeois and proletarian freethinkers would have been stable beyond the summer of 1914, when the secularist networks had reached the climax of their activities. This high productivity and the ongoing colonization of public debates under the auspices of secularism exhausted the network’s resources. A downshift of public engagement, publicity, and thematic expansion of freethought seemed an inevitable consequence preempted by the breakdown of any activities because of the war. Church secession appeared as an issue that could have been skipped: the linkage to active politics failed. And although church membership became a public concern, the target was missed. While gaining discursive power was an aim for monists and their milieu, it was not a central goal for the social democrat atheists. This divergence also manifested on the level of members. While membership in the several bourgeois associations stagnated, the numbers of proletarian freethinkers kept growing – Konrad Beißwanger, thus, concluded already in 1909: “The bourgeois movement is dying, while the proletarian movement is flourishing.”¹⁰⁰

Conclusion In the end, the activists of church secession failed in their attempts to form a mass movement. Most Germans continued to be part of the established Catholic or Protestant churches – or the larger minority groups like the Jewish communities or the Christian free churches. Freethought, for its part, remained in a minoritarian position. Yet, and despite this failure, the Komitee Konfessionslos succeeded in other aspects. Its members proved influential in the freethought movement and in the German society on the eve of the First World War. They successfully raised the awareness of the public that church membership was not a fixed dimension of the individual identity, but a chosen personal aspect of the social  Otto Lehmann-Rußbüldt, “Die Liebschaft zwischen Polizei und Kirche und anderes,” Der Dissident 8, no. 1 (April 1914): 6.  Konrad Beißwanger, “Die freigeistigen Strömungen in Deutschland und die proletarischen Freidenker,” Der Atheist 5, no. 43 (October 1909): 338.

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sphere – with non-belonging as an equivalent possibility. Consequently, their agitation triggered the public attention for the confessional bias of civil rights and the need to participate in public agency. This does not mean that secularists would have achieved civil equality for all citizens. But the debates launched by the Komitee Konfessionslos were one reason for the efforts to codify civil equality independent of religion in the Weimar Constitution and in subsequent constitutional debates.

Archival Source Stadtarchiv Leipzig (SAL) Polizeiamt der Stadt Leipzig, Sachakten, Nr. 29 (Anzeige wegen Taufweigerung)

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Habermas, Rebekka. “Piety, Power, and Powerlessness: Religion and Religious Groups in Germany, 1870 – 1945.” In The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History, edited by Helmut Walser Smith, 453 – 480. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Handbuch der sozialdemokratischen Parteitage von 1910 bis 1913. Munich: G. Birk, 1910 – 1913. Hecker, Hellmuth. “Arthur Pfungst.” In Lebensbilder deutscher Buddhisten: Ein bio-bibliographisches Handbuch, vol. 2: Die Nachfolger, 252 – 256. Constance: Universität Konstanz, ²1997. Henning, Max, ed. Handbuch der freigeistigen Bewegungen Deutschlands, Österreichs und der Schweiz. Frankfurt/Main: Neuer Frankfurter Verlag, ²1914. Hölscher, Lucian. Datenatlas zur religiösen Geographie im protestantischen Deutschland: Von der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg, 4 vols. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2001. Hughes, Michael L. “‘The Knife in the Hands of the Children’? Debating the Political Mass Strike and Political Citizenship in Imperial Germany.” Labor History 50, no. 2 (2009): 113 – 138. Jodl, Friedrich. “Die Kirchenaustrittsbewegung und was aus ihr folgt.” Das freie Wort 10, no. 8 (July 1910): 299 – 308. Kaiser, Jochen-Christoph. Arbeiterbewegung und organisierte Religionskritik: Proletarische Freidenkerverbände in Kaiserreich und Weimarer Republik. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981. Kaiser, Jochen-Christoph. “Sozialdemokratie und ‘praktische’ Religionskritik: Das Beispiel der Kirchenaustrittsbewegung 1878 – 1914.” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 22 (1982): 263 – 298. Kautsky, Karl. Der politische Massenstreik. Berlin: Vorwärts, 1914. Kleine, Christoph. “Religiöser Nonkonformismus als religionswissenschaftliche Kategorie.” Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft 23, no. 1 (2015): 3 – 34. Koppelow, Traugott von. Mein Austritt aus der Landeskirche. Flugschriften des Comités “Confessionslos” 2. Berlin-Schmargendorf: Verlag “Confessionslos,” [ca. 1911]. Kramer, Georg. “Kirchenaustritt und Arbeiterschaft.” Der Dissident 6, no. 2 (May 1912): 9 – 12. Lehmann-Rußbüldt, Otto. “Komitée ‘Konfessionslos’.” Der Monismus 6, no. 63 (December 1911): 413 – 414. Lehmann-Rußbüldt, Otto. “Der organisierte Kirchenaustritt.” Der Dissident 5, no. 10 (January 1912): 81 – 82. Lehmann-Rußbüldt, Otto. “Erste Versuche des Komitees ‘Konfessionslos’.” Der Dissident 6, no. 10 (December 1912): 91 – 96. Lehmann-Rußbüldt, Otto. “Eine Kirchenbesuchs-Statistik.” Der Dissident 7, no. 4 (July 1913): 41 – 47. Lehmann-Rußbüldt, Otto. “Kirchenaustritt als Demonstration zur Erlangung von Volksrechten.” Das freie Wort 12, no. 19 (January 1913): 724 – 726. Lehmann-Rußbüldt, Otto. “Miszellen zur Kirchenbesuchsstatistik.” Der Dissident 7, no. 6 (September 1913): 77 – 79. Lehmann-Rußbüldt, Otto. “Ein Experiment in Neukölln (307 Kirchenaustritte auf einmal!).” Der Dissident 7, no. 7 (October 1913): 85 – 87. Lehmann-Rußbüldt, Otto. “Massenstreik gegen die Staatskirche: 1328 Austrittserklärungen an einem Tage.” Das Monistische Jahrhundert 2, no. 32 (November 1913): 900 – 902. Lehmann-Rußbüldt, Otto. “Finanzbericht 1913.” Der Dissident 7, no. 12 (March 1914): 126.

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Lehmann-Rußbüldt, Otto. “Bibelstunden im Gefängnis.” Das Monistische Jahrhundert 3, no. 2 – 3 (April 1914): 43 – 46. Lehmann-Rußbüldt, Otto. “Die Liebschaft zwischen Polizei und Kirche und anderes.” Der Dissident 8, no. 1 (April 1914): 4 – 8. Lehmann-Rußbüldt, Otto. “Das Komitee ‘Konfessionslos’.” In Handbuch der freigeistigen Bewegungen Deutschlands, Österreichs und der Schweiz, edited by Max Henning, 98 – 109. Frankfurt/Main: Neuer Frankfurter Verlag, ²1914. Lehmann-Rußbüldt, Otto. Der geistige Befreiungskrieg durch Kirchenaustritt. Berlin: Komitee Konfessionslos, Frankfurt/Main: Neuer Frankfurter Verlag, 41914. Lesanovsky, Werner, ed. Den Menschen der Zukunft erziehen: Dokumente zur Bildungspolitik, Pädagogik und zum Schulkampf der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung 1870 – 1900. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 2003. Liebknecht, Karl. “Politischer Kirchenboykott.” Der Atheist 9, no. 49 (December 1913): 387. Luxemburg, Rosa. Massenstreik, Partei und Gewerkschaften. Hamburg: Erdmann Dubber, 1906. Mez, John. “Einheitliche Regelung der Kirchenaustrittsbewegung in den deutschen Bundesstaaten.” Der Dissident 8, no. 5 (August 1914): 35 – 40. Most, Johann. Die Gottes-Pest. New York: Verlag der “Freiheit,” 1883. Neef, Katharina. “Biografische Kontexte für Wilhelm Ostwalds Engagement im Deutschen Monistenbund.” In Mitteilungen der Wilhelm-Ostwald-Gesellschaft zu Großbothen e. V. 14, no. 3 (2009): 36 – 46. Neef, Katharina. Die Entstehung der Soziologie aus der Sozialreform. Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 2012. Neef, Katharina. “Multiple Devianz: Zu Fassbarkeit und Struktur eines alternativkulturellen Phänomens.” In Dynamik und Devianz: Festschrift für Hubert Seiwert zum 65. Geburtstag, edited by Christoph Kleine, Edith Franke and Heinz Mürmel, 185 – 203. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014. Nöthlich, Rosemarie, Olaf Breidbach, and Uwe Hoßfeld. “‘Was ist Natur’? Einige Aspekte zur Wissenschaftspopularisierung in Deutschland.” In “Klassische Universität” und “akademische Provinz”: Studien zur Universität Jena von der Mitte des 19. bis in die dreißiger Jahre des 20. Jahrhunderts, edited by Matthias Steinbach and Stefan Gerber, 239 – 250. Jena/Quedlinburg: Bussert & Stadeler, 2005. Olson, Richard G. Science and Scientism in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Osterhammel, Jürgen. Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Munich: C.H.Beck, 2009. Ostwald, Wilhelm. Die Forderung des Tages. Leipzig: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1910. Ostwald, Wilhelm. “Warum sind wir Monisten? Erste Predigt.” In Monistische Sonntagspredigten: Erste Reihe, 1 – 8. Leipzig: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1911. Ostwald, Wilhelm. “Kirchenaustritt: 53. Predigt.” In Monistische Sonntagspredigten: Dritte Reihe, 1 – 8. Leipzig: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1913. Ostwald, Wilhelm. Die Gegner des Kirchenaustritts. Leipzig: Unesma, 1914. Ostwald, Wilhelm. “Kirchenaustritt: II. 97. Predigt.” In Monistische Sonntagspredigten: Vierte Reihe, 321 – 336. Leipzig: Unesma, 1914. Ostwald, Wilhelm. Wissenschaft contra Gottesglaube: Aus den atheistischen Schriften des großen Chemikers, edited by Friedrich Herneck, 139 – 144. Leipzig: Urania, 1960.

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Peus, Heinrich. “Praktischer Monismus.” Das Monistische Jahrhundert 2, no. 48 (February 1914): 1351 – 1352. Pollack, Detlef. Säkularisierung – Ein moderner Mythos? Studien zum religiösen Wandel in Deutschland. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003. Pollack, Detlef. The Role of Religion in Modern Societies. London: Routledge, 2008. Pollack, Detlef. Rückkehr des Religiösen? Studien zum religiösen Wandel in Deutschland und Europa II. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009. Pollack, Detlef. Religion und gesellschaftliche Differenzierung: Studien zum religiösen Wandel in Europa und den USA III. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016. Prüfer, Sebastian. Sozialismus statt Religion: Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie vor der religiösen Frage, 1863 – 1890. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002. Randeraad, Nico. “Triggers of Mobility: International Congresses (1840 – 1914) and their Visitors.” Jahrbuch für Europäische Geschichte 16 (2015): 63 – 82. Randeraad, Nico, and Chris Leonards. “Building a Transnational Network of Social Reform in the Nineteenth Century.” In Shaping the Transnational Sphere: Experts, Networks and Issues from the 1840s to the 1930s, edited by Davide Rodogno, Bernhard Struck and Jakob Vogel, 111 – 131. New York/Oxford: Berghahn, 2015. Saenen, Bregt. “‘Pour la diffusion des expériences sociales’ – een onderzoek naar documents du progrès binnen de transnationale ruimte aan het begin van de twintigste eeuw.” MA thesis, University of Gent, 2008. Accessed March 27, 2020. http://lib.ugent. be/fulltxt/RUG01/001/376/209/RUG01-001376209_2010_0001_AC.pdf. Schairer, Erich. “Die Entkirchlichung in Zahlen.” Der Dissident 7, no. 8 (November 1913): 89 – 93. Sheffer, Gabriel. Diaspora Politics: At Home Abroad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Simon-Ritz, Frank. Die Organisation einer Weltanschauung: Die freigeistige Bewegung im Wilhelminischen Deutschland. Gütersloh: Kaiser, 1996. Slezkine, Yuri. The Jewish Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Statistischer Bericht über die Zustände in der evangelisch-lutherischen Landeskirche Sachsens in den Jahren 1911 bis 1918. Dresden: Meinhold, 1919. Tschirn, Gustav. “Die freireligiöse Bewegung in Deutschland und ihre Zukunft.” Dokumente des Fortschritts 7, no. 4 (April 1914): 195 – 204. Verbruggen, Christoph, and Julie Carlier. “Laboratories of Social Thought: The Transnational Advocacy Network of the Institut International pour la Diffusion des Expériences Sociales and its Documents du Progrès (1907 – 1916).” In Information beyond Borders: International Cultural and Intellectual Exchange in the Belle Époque, edited by Warden Boyd Rayward, 123 – 142. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. Weir, Todd. Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Rise of the Fourth Confession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Wolf, Arthur. “Kirchenbesuch in Leipzig.” Der Atheist 10, no. 12 (March 1914): 90. Wolf, Arthur. “Die Kirchenaustrittsbewegung in Sachsen.” Der Atheist 10, no. 15 (April 1914): 113 – 114. Ziche, Paul. Wissenschaftslandschaften um 1900: Philosophie, die Wissenschaften und der nichtreduktive Szientismus. Zurich: Chronos, 2008.

Antoine Mandret-Degeilh

A Secular Avant-Garde? About the Unknown Freethinker Roots of Today’s French Civil Baptism Civil baptism in contemporary France is a family ceremony celebrated at the town hall. During the ceremony, two persons − generally a woman and a man chosen among family members or, in less traditional milieus, among friends − are appointed to be godparents for a child. In this, civil baptism equals its Catholic counterpart.¹ The ceremony generally takes place in the wedding room and resembles the staging of a civil marriage: the parents and their child are sitting on the chairs for the bridal couple, the godparents on the chairs for the witnesses, while the relatives sit behind them. First, the celebrant – the mayor or any other town councilor – welcomes the participants and holds a speech referring to the fundamental values of the Republic – “liberté, égalité, fraternité,” mostly. Then he asks the consent of the parents and the godparents and invites them to sign a certificate. After the public ceremony, the participants share a private feast – like it is the case for any other family ritual – where they generally present the child or the parents with gifts. Though nowadays civil baptism’s performance is neither authorized nor prohibited but left to the discretion of mayors – which means that the issued certificate has no legal value – it has strongly developed in France during the last three decades.² In their large majority, today’s parents, in opting for civil baptism, do not pursue anticlerical or anti-Catholic goals. Most of them were raised as Catholics and socialized to the norms and values of Catholic godparenthood. However, they got slowly alienated from Catholicism and ceased to visit church services. After having become parents themselves, they still aim to create a spiritual kinship for their child, though at the lowest possible symbolic cost, which is why they prefer civil baptism over the Catholic ritual. The administrative procedures, to them, seem less burdensome at the town hall compared to the church: these parents find it easier to simply present a photocopy of the godparents’ identity

 See Vincent Gourdon, “L’Affirmation d’un rite familial: Premiers résultats d’une enquête sur les baptêmes civils auprès des municipalités de Charente-Maritime,” Ecrits d’Ouest, no. 13 (2005): 169 – 198.  On today’s legal practice of civil baptism, see Antoine Mandret-Degeilh, “Gouverner par le rite: Socio-histoire des rites d’institution municipaux autour de la parenté en France, au miroir de la situation en Allemagne (1789 – 1989)” (PhD diss., Sciences Po Paris, 2015), 403 – 413. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110688283-014

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card than their baptismal certificate, all the more so as many parents do not want to commit themselves to having their child attend catechism classes in the years after the baptism.³ This is not to say that these parents would be hostile to religion or act out of an ideologically charged motivation. Rather, they mostly feel indifferent towards the Catholicism they were raised in. Interestingly – and counterintuitively to the aforesaid – when turning to the history of civil baptism, strong secularist influences become evident, in particular the successful but widely unknown contribution of early twentieth-century French freethinkers to today’s French civil baptism. Also, the “banal” nationalism in civil baptism is striking, as political symbols such as flags and tricolor objects were and still are used today during the ceremony.⁴ This chapter aims to trace the freethinker roots of French civil baptism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is based on research conducted in municipal archives (notably in Bobigny, a town located in the suburbs of Paris, one of the first and the most known communist municipalities in France from the interwar period to the early twenty-first century),⁵ as well as on academic literature on the freethought movement in France.⁶ In the first part, the invention of freethinker baptism and its extension to other political groups in the twentieth century will be addressed. The second part will show that freethinkers continue to inspire civil baptism down to the present day despite the decline of freethinker baptism since the interwar period.

 See Antoine Mandret-Degeilh, “Sous l’égide et la protection de l’autorité civile et républicaine: Dimensions politiques et sociétales de la pratique contemporaine du baptême républicain” (MA thesis, Sciences Po Paris, 2007), 82– 125.  On the concept of banal nationalism, see Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995).  See Annie Fourcaut, Bobigny, banlieue rouge (Paris: Les Editions ouvrières & Presses de la FNSP, 1986); and Tyler Stovall, The Rise of the Paris Red Belt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).  On the history of freethinkers in France in general, see Jacqueline Lalouette, “La Libre Pensée,” in Le XIXe siècle: Science, politique et tradition, ed. Isabelle Poutrin (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1995), 509 – 521; Jacqueline Lalouette, La Libre Pensée en France, 1848 – 1940 (Paris: Albin Michel, 22001); and Maurice Agulhon, “La Libre-Pensée,” in La France d’un siècle à l’autre: 1914 – 2000, ed. Jean-Pierre Rioux and Jean-François Sirinelli (Paris: Hachette littératures, 2002), 319 – 330.

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The History of Civil Baptism in France and its Freethinker Pioneers To some extent, the historical French freethinkers can be considered the inventors of today’s French civil baptism. However, there have been – in the end unsuccessful – attempts to introduce secular baptisms prior to these freethinker initiatives of the late nineteenth century. During the French Revolution, for instance, so-called “civic” baptisms were celebrated: in 1792, and in the course of the secularist turn during the revolution,⁷ the parish registers had been transferred from the parishes to the communes.⁸ This created some confusion on the side of the citizens who were used to the fact that, until then, the birth registration of a child was equivalent to the celebration of its religious (Catholic) baptism. The first birth certificates issued by the civic municipalities did not fail to testify to this confusion: many of them contained the word “baptême” (“baptism”).⁹ In addition to this confusing reference, there also was some frustration with the lacking ritualization of the new civil registration practices.¹⁰ It is in this context that the first projects of “civic baptisms” – aimed at ritualizing the new civil custom – were born in 1792 and the years following.¹¹ Civic baptism reached its first peak in the second half of the 1790s in the so-called “cultes révolution-

 On this secularist turn, see Mona Ozouf, “Déchristianisation,” in Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution Française, ed. François Furet and Mona Ozouf (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), 50 – 62; Claude Langlois, “Politique et religion,” in Histoire de la France religieuse: Du roi très chrétien à la laïcité républicaine, ed. Philippe Joutard (Paris: Seuil, 1991), 108 – 144; and Jacqueline Lalouette, La Séparation des Églises et de l’État: Genèse et développement d’une idée, 1789 – 1905 (Paris: Seuil, 2005). On the secularization of rituals during the revolution, see Antoine Mandret-Degeilh, “Gouverner par le rite: Socio-histoire des rites d’institution municipaux autour de la parenté en France, au miroir de la situation en Allemagne (1789 – 1989)” (PhD diss., Sciences Po Paris, 2015), 80 – 99 (on marriage); 345 (on confirmation); and 338 – 339 (on funerals).  See Marcel Garaud and Romuald Szramkiewicz, La Révolution Française et la famille: Histoire générale du droit privé français (de 1789 à 1804) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1978), 39 – 42.  Louis Pérouas, Léonard, Marie, Jean et les autres: Les Prénoms en Limousin depuis le millénaire (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1984), 133.  On these difficulties, see Louis-Marie de la Révellière-Lépeaux, Réflexions sur le culte, sur les cérémonies civiles et sur les fêtes nationales: Lues à l’Institut le 12 floréal, an 5 de la République, dans la séance de la classe des sciences morales et politiques (Paris: H.-J. Jansen, 1796), 22– 23.  The historical predecessors of civil baptism are studied in: Albert Mathiez, Les Origines des cultes révolutionnaires (1789 – 1792) (Paris: Société nouvelle de librairie et d’édition, 1904), 133 – 136.

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naires” (“revolutionary religions”),¹² including ideas such as “theophilanthropy”¹³ that were supposed to replace the Catholic religion. These second-generation “civic,” “patriotic,” or “constitutional” baptisms were conceived as counterrituals to the religious predecessor.¹⁴ Though, with the failure of the revolution and the Restoration period, civic baptism remained a very marginal practice and finally disappeared completely during the early nineteenth century. In the first half of the nineteenth century, multiple new attempts were made to set up secular baptisms on regular grounds. French freemasons with their strong enlightened and civic tradition, for instance, organized such celebrations for their children, whereas a workers’ society in Lyon, the Voraces de Vaise, ¹⁵ celebrated similar ceremonies in the early 1850s.¹⁶ These local initiatives, again, remained marginal and declined quickly. Thus, when French freethinkers in search for new provocative means of collective action started to systematically advocate for civil baptisms in the late nineteenth century, they could hardly rely on an already known and implemented tradition, even though there were similar attempts to set up secular baptisms in socialist circles at the same time.¹⁷ Still, the French freethought movement became the main promotor of these new baptisms in France, now called “civil” baptisms. The diffusion of civil baptism in the freethought movement occurred in several stages that reflect the history of the freethought movement in France.¹⁸

 Serge Bianchi, “Cultes révolutionnaires,” in Dictionnaire historique de la Révolution Française, ed. Albert Soboul (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 32004), 312– 315.  “Theophilanthropy” was a religion established in the second half of the 1790s, consisting of a set of individual practices and public festivals. Two of its most important beliefs were the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. In the late 1790s, “theophilanthropy” was challenged by the so-called “decadary religion,” a semi-official religion celebrating festivals every “décadi” (the day of rest in the 10-day week of the republican calendar).  See Adeline Trombert, “Les Baptêmes de la fraternité: Eléments pour une sociologie historique des parrainages civils et républicains” (MA thesis, Sciences Po Grenoble, 2000), 32– 36; and Vincent Gourdon, “Les Révolutions du baptême en France de 1789 à nos jours” (Habilitation thesis, Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2014), 95 – 108.  Vaise is a town quarter of Lyon. The term “voraces” (“voracious”) was a corruption of the word “dévoirant” that sounded like “dévorant” (“devouring”) but actually derived from the expression “devoir mutuel” (“mutual duty”).  On civic baptism conducted by freemasons, see Gourdon, “Les Révolutions du baptême en France de 1789 à nos jours,” 614. On early proletarian civic baptism, see Jacqueline Lalouette, La Libre Pensée en France, 368.  See Trombert, “Les Baptêmes de la fraternité,” 40.  After the first French freethought associations were founded in the 1850s, the movement kept growing slowly in the 1860s and 1870s before experiencing a boom in the three following decades. In the interwar period, it started to decline and almost disappeared after the Second

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It was during the 1870s when French freethinkers started to work on their projects to replace religious by secular rituals. Charles Fauvety’s idea of an unitarian church inspired by the British and US-American unitarian projects from previous decades could be mentioned here.¹⁹ He proposed an “adoption ceremony” as the secular equivalent of Catholic baptism. Fauvety, a deistic freethinker and a freemason, took his inspiration from the revolutionary, theophilanthropist counter-rituals, as well as from those of the so-called “decadary religion.”²⁰ Subsequently, the practice of civil baptism slowly gained wider recognition during the 1880s: freethinker baptisms were reported in many different places such as in Paris in 1880, in Carcassonne at the same time, in Perpignan in 1882, and in Lyon in 1886.²¹ During the next two decades, the custom finally experienced a huge upsurge and took on institutionalized forms:²² freethinker local societies in charge specifically of the organization and the celebration of civil baptisms were founded in several cities such as in the eighteenth arrondissement of Paris in 1893, or in the Paris region (in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Neuilly-en-Thelle, and Alfortville).²³ Elsewhere in France – such as in the Lille, Charente, Limousin, Bordeaux, and Dijon regions – regular freethinker local societies celebrated civil baptisms as well.²⁴ The First World War brought a stop to this practice.²⁵ Between

World War. More than a hundred local societies were established all over France in the late nineteenth century, not only in the Paris region, but also in the Lille, Limoges, and Dijon regions, etc. They were mainly composed of men aged between 30 and 50 years who stemmed mostly from popular milieus, many of them teachers. The freethought movement largely contributed to the separation of church and state in France prior to the First World War. See Lalouette, La Libre Pensée en France.  The projects were called unitarian because they opposed the concept of trinity. See André Combes, “Charles Fauvety et la religion laïque,” in Libre pensée et religion laïque en France: De la fin du Second Empire à la fin de la Troisième République, Journée d’étude tenue à l’Université de Paris XII, 10 novembre 1979, ed. Centre de Recherche et de Documentation des Institutions Chrétiennes (Strasbourg: CERDIC publications, 1980), 41.  Pierre Pierrard, L’Église et les ouvriers en France: 1840 – 1940 (Paris: Hachette, 1984), 468.  See Lalouette, La Libre Pensée en France, 369; and Joseph Ramoneda, La République concordataire et ses curés dans les Pyrénées-Orientales, 1870 – 1905 (Perpignan: Presses Universitaires de Perpignan, 2011), 78.  See Lalouette, La Libre Pensée en France, 369.  Documented in ibid.; Gourdon, “Les Révolutions du baptême en France de 1789 à nos jours,” 619; and Trombert, “Les Baptêmes de la fraternité,” 49 – 50.  See for Lille: Yves-Marie Hilaire, Histoire du Nord-Pas-de-Calais: De 1900 à nos jours (Toulouse: Privat, 1982), 470; for Charente: Emile Papillon, “Charente: Dignac,” Le Libre Penseur du Centre et de l’Ouest: Journal anticlérical de défense socialiste, républicaine et laïque, June 15, 1908, 6; for Limousin and Bordeaux: Pérouas, Léonard, Marie, Jean et les autres, 183; and for Dijon: Dominique Goussot, “Le Baptême républicain,” La Raison (December 2005): 13.

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1870 and the interwar period (which marked the beginning of a general decline of the freethought movement in France), freethinker baptism eventually remained a marginal practice with only a few thousand celebrations, compared to much higher numbers reached by other freethinker practices such as civil funerals.²⁶ It should be stressed, though, that freethinker celebrations were never merely rituals but always had a political side, with the secularists publicly participating in civil baptisms – sometimes forming a large audience of several hundred people (as in Saint-Denis in 1876), most of them male freethinkers coming from the neighboring local societies, striving to stand up for their secularist agenda.²⁷ Anticlerical speeches given during the ceremony added to this politicized aspect of civil baptism: for instance, in 1895 in Waziers (Northern France), the celebrant denounced “l’effroyable mortalité des trois-quarts des nouveauxnés qui, sans pouvoir se défendre, sont forcés de subir les douches abrutissantes de notre prostitutée-sainte mère l’église” (“the frightful mortality of three-quarters of the newborns who, without being able to defend themselves, are forced to undergo the stultifying showers of our prostitute-holy mother church.”)²⁸ This was enforced even more by provocative ritual sequences such as toasts to the dechristianization of France²⁹ and by the intense use of political symbols, namely revolutionary and republican ones including the Phrygian cap, tricolor flags, and the singing of the Marseillaise³⁰ next to specific freethinker symbols such as crowns of rosehips and red cockades.³¹ Civil baptism, thus, alongside other practices like civil funerals, appeared as a means of a secularist freethinker repertoire  On the impact of freethinker practices in prewar times, see Gourdon, “Les Révolutions du baptême en France de 1789 à nos jours,” 616. On the caesura of the First World War, see Lalouette, La Libre Pensée en France, 370.  On the marginal success of civil baptism, see Louis Pérouas, Refus d’une religion, religion d’un refus: En Limousin rural, 1880 – 1940 (Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1985), 177; and Lalouette, La Libre Pensée en France, 371. On the history of civil funerals in France, see Jacqueline Lalouette, “Les Baptêmes républicains de la Révolution à nos jours,” in Accueillir le nouveau-né, d’hier à aujourd’hui, ed. Marie-France Morel (Toulouse: Erès, 2013), 295.  See Trombert, “Les Baptêmes de la fraternité,” 44.  Bulletin mensuel de la Fédération Française de Libre Pensée (December 1895): 573.  See Trombert, “Les Baptêmes de la fraternité,” 41.  On anticlericalism underlying secularist ceremonies, see Lalouette, La Libre Pensée en France, 373. On the Phrygian cap, see Lalouette, “Les Baptêmes républicains de la Révolution à nos jours,” 297; on the tricolor flag: Ramoneda, La République concordataire et ses curés dans les Pyrénées-Orientales, 78.  On red cockades, see Lalouette, La Libre Pensée en France, 376; and Trombert, “Les Baptêmes de la fraternité,” 44 (on the Marseillaise: 47).

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of politicized collective action against religion in general and Catholicism in particular.³² At the same time, freethinker civil baptism could be considered a secular kinship ritual with godparenthood at its core, as became apparent in the course of the celebrations: not only were the godparents asked to give their consent to bring up their godchildren in the values cherished by freethinkers, starting with “le culte de l’honneur et de la raison” (“the religion of honor and reason”), but this secularist moral element was enforced even more by the speech of the freethinker celebrant. He was usually the leader of the freethinker local society or a famous politician and member of the local society. In his speech, the celebrant often referred to the vital role of the godparents for the children’s education.³³ Even though this may seem paradoxical, freethinker civil baptisms seem to have borrowed from Catholic traditions, which is further underscored by the young age in which the children received their baptism both in Catholicism and in the freethinker ritual. Also striking is the persistence of practices such as the use of sugared almonds and white robes imported from Catholic traditions.³⁴ This suggests that freethinker civil baptism was also a kinship ritual answering to a social demand of secularists.

Civil Baptism in French Communist Cities of the Interwar Period and in the Mid-Twentieth Century After the decline of freethinker civil baptisms, a new type of secular baptism arose during the interwar years. These so-called “red baptisms” were increasingly celebrated in French municipalities, most of them newly communist³⁵ and mainly located in the “red belt” of the Paris region: Aubervilliers, Aulnaysous-Bois, Bagnolet, Bobigny, Montreuil, Ivry-sur-Seine, Villejuif, Vitry-surSeine, and Le Kremlin-Bicêtre.³⁶ For the first time, municipal administrations

 See Jacqueline Lalouette, “Les Enterrements civils dans les premières décennies de la Troisième République” Ethnologie française 23, no. 2 (1983): 111– 128.  See Lalouette, La Libre Pensée en France, 373; 377.  See ibid., 371; 377; Trombert, “Les Baptêmes de la fraternité,” 45; and Gourdon, “Les Révolutions du baptême en France de 1789 à nos jours,” 211– 262.  The Parti communiste français (French Communist Party) was founded in 1920 by the majority faction of the socialist Section française de l’internationale ouvrière (French Section of the Workers’ International, SFIO).  On red baptisms in general, see Mandret-Degeilh, “Gouverner par le rite,” 170. For Aubervilliers, Aulnay-sous-Bois, Bagnolet, Bobigny, and Montreuil, see Lalouette, La Libre Pensée en

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took charge of the preparation of secular baptisms and their celebration, namely by the mayor (or town councilors) at the town hall, sometimes supported by the members of the declining local freethinker societies, for instance in Avion (Northern France). These rituals became an instrument of the (anticlerical) religious policies of the French communist municipalities, as the speeches held by the mayors during these celebrations indicate.³⁷ In the course of one of these ceremonies performed in Bobigny in 1934, a collective baptism of twenty children ended up in a procession to the church during which parodies of Catholics songs were sung.³⁸ Also, the intense use of communist symbols is striking, as the cover page of Bobigny’s first register from 1926 shows. (Fig. 1) While civil baptism in the interwar period became an institutionalized practice that was implemented from top-down in communist cities, militant and political bottom-up uses and re-appropriations of these “red baptisms” also occurred. Originally, the new civil baptisms were set up for the whole population of the communist cities, yet eventually they attracted a specific militant audience. The political affinity of those families opting for a civil baptism in communist cities was revealed by their place of residence: many communist cities surrounding Paris, including Bobigny and Ivry-sur-Seine, welcomed families coming from the arrondissements of Northern Paris – the main setting of the Paris Commune of 1871. These families chose politically explicit first names for their children such as Trotsky, Lénine, and Jaurès, traceable, e. g., in Bobigny in the interwar years. Also the days they picked to celebrate the baptisms stand out: Labor Day, May Day, or the Bastille Day, the French national holiday closely aligned with the revolution.³⁹ The small number of celebrations confirms that we deal here with a specific public: in Bobigny, for instance, only 39 civil baptisms (of 84 children) were celebrated between 1925 and 1938.⁴⁰ No other than the freethinker baptisms, “red baptisms” could also be considered a secular kinship ritual responding to a (secular) social demand that borrowed from Catholic traditions. Again, the age of the children civilly baptized France, 370. For Ivry-sur-Seine, Villejuif, Vitry-sur-Seine, and Le Kremlin-Bicêtre, see Etienne Fouilloux and Claude Langlois, “Les Parrainages civils à Ivry-sur-Seine au XXe siècle,” in Libre pensée et religion laïque en France: De la fin du Second Empire à la fin de la Troisième République, Journée d’étude tenue à l’Université de Paris XII, 10 novembre 1979, ed. Centre de Recherche et de Documentation des Institutions Chrétiennes (Strasbourg: CERDIC publications, 1980), 194; 203; 206; 210.  See Mandret-Degeilh, “Gouverner par le rite,” 172.  Ibid.  See ibid., 175 – 176 (for Bobigny); and Fouilloux and Langlois, “Les Parrainages civils à Ivrysur-Seine au XXe siècle,” 202– 203 (for Ivry-sur-Seine).  See Mandret-Degeilh, “Gouverner par le rite,” 174.

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Figure 1: Baptêmes Rouges, front cover (Municipal Archives of Bobigny, W 990).

was very similar to the age of Catholic children: in Ivry-sur-Seine, 65 % of them were less than three years old when receiving civil baptism in the interwar period. The number of godparents and their gender (one man and one woman) likewise recalled the Catholic practice. In the interwar years, all 84 children in Bobigny had a male and a female godparent.⁴¹ The Second World War neither put an end to the municipal practice of civil baptism nor marked a break in its development. On the contrary, civil baptisms kept on flourishing in communist cities, even though, from the 1970s on, their strong anticlerical character decisive for the secular baptisms until then began to weaken, as is illustrated by the less controversial speeches held during the ceremonies, and the less polemical terminology used to refer to the practice. The expression “red baptism,” for instance, disappeared at that time. Even the

 See ibid., 176 – 178; and Fouilloux and Langlois, “Les Parrainages civils à Ivry-sur-Seine au XXe siècle,” 199.

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members of the few remaining freethinker local societies that continued to support the celebration of civil baptism took less and less part in the ceremonies, as was the case in the aforementioned city of Avion.⁴² Several reasons can be put forward to explain this observable turning point of the 1970s and 1980s in the communist practice of civil baptism, namely the simultaneous transformations of municipal communism echoing the beginning electoral decline of the French Communist Party and the collapse of the French freethought movement.⁴³ Once depoliticized, the practice of civil baptism in communist cities stretched out to a wider public. In Bobigny, for instance, 362 children were civilly baptized between 1971 and 1990, compared to only 59 children between 1945 and 1970.⁴⁴ The profile of the families opting for a civil baptism also changed, as becomes evident by the growing numbers of single-parent families: in Bobigny, around 25 % of the civilly baptized children grew up in single-parent households towards the end of the 1980s. This suggests that new uses of civil baptism in terms of kinship were developing at that time. In the latter case, civil baptism could have been a means to compensate for the absence of the missing parent (generally the father), creating instead symbolic kinship between a child and two adults and thus ceased to be a secularist activist practice. Consequently, civil baptism started to resemble even stronger Catholic baptisms, be it concerning the seasonality of the practice (around 40 % of the celebrations took place in April, May, and June), the age of the godchildren (more than 75 % of the children civilly baptized in Bobigny in the 1970s and 1980s were less than one year old), or the selection of godparents from within the family (as is illustrated by the strong patronymic homonymy between parents and godparents in several cases).⁴⁵ In other words, French civil baptism became a family ritual at that time. The reasons for this de-politicization of the practice in “red” cities from the 1970s onwards lie not only in the municipalities and their development, but were also enforced by their citizens and their changing social relations and needs. This illustrates the growing secularization of the French society in the twentieth century.⁴⁶

 See Mandret-Degeilh, “Gouverner par le rite,” 380 – 382.  On communism, see Jean Ranger, “Le Déclin du Parti communiste français,” Revue française de science politique 36, no. 1 (1986): 46 – 63. On freethinkers during these years, see Lalouette, La Libre Pensée en France, 398.  See Mandret-Degeilh, “Gouverner par le rite,” 386.  Ibid., 388 – 393.  On the theories of secularization, see Jean Baubérot, “Les seuils de laïcisation dans l’Europe latine et la recomposition du religieux dans la modernité tardive,” in La modernité religieuse en perspective comparée: Europe latine – Amérique latine, ed. Jean-Pierre Bastian (Paris: Karthala,

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The Extension of Civil Baptism since the 1970s Another striking fact of these decades is the spreading of civil baptism to noncommunist French municipalities previously not familiar with this practice, especially in small villages in rural areas.⁴⁷ Contrary to the earlier development, it was not about a top-down institutionalization of civil baptism but about its bottom-up diffusion, even though this new phenomenon remained marginal, representing on average less than 0.1 celebrations a year per 1,000 inhabitants.⁴⁸ Most of the municipalities that celebrated a civil baptism for the first time in the 1970s and 1980s actually were first informed about the existence of this practice upon request by their citizens, who had heard of it and now wanted to celebrate it, too. These parents refused Catholic baptism and searched for a secular birth ritual or private celebration to appoint godparents for their children in a ceremonious way.⁴⁹ Yet these new civil baptisms were not as apolitical as they seemed at first glance: even if the new practice spread mainly from the bottom-up, a politicization of civil baptism on the side of certain, mostly left-wing municipalities can be traced, for example in medium-sized French cities or even larger cities, such as La Rochelle in Western France, where civil baptism was connected to a municipal project to promote citizenship. But a politicization recalling the culture wars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with their strong confrontation of clericalism and anticlericalism⁵⁰ also took place on the side of small, mostly right-wing municipalities in rural areas. They contributed to the political charging of civil baptism by refusing to approve the request of their citizens which they took as an anticlerical provocation.⁵¹ Civil baptism, finally, underwent politicization also from the side of a minority of parents. They considered the ritual as a means to promote the French republican values or to demonstrate their support of the concept of the separation of church and state, even if – other than in previous decades – their actions remained an individual initiative unrelated to the freethought movement or any other political movement. This is

2001), 16 – 28; and Detlef Pollack, “Varieties of Secularization Theories and their Indispensable Core,” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 90, no. 1 (2015): 60 – 79.  See Mandret-Degeilh, “Gouverner par le rite,” 414– 420.  Ibid., 418.  See Sylvie Garnier, “Les Baptêmes civils dans l’Isère 1970 – 1985” (MA thesis, Institut d’études politiques Grenoble, 1985).  See James McMillan, “‘Priest hits girl’: On the front line in the ‘war of the two Frances’,” in Culture Wars: Secular–Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 77– 101.  See Mandret-Degeilh, “Gouverner par le rite,” 426; 428.

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not to say that all parents opting for civil baptism in non-communist municipalities in the 1970s and 1980s turned the practice into a political act: for most of them, civil baptism remained an uncomplicated kinship ritual resembling the Catholic customs.⁵² In the following decades, the practice continued its road to success, spreading to other communes by word-of-mouth recommendation and upon request from the citizens. In the 2000s, civil baptism even experienced a particular boom due to the growing media attention the ceremony generated in local newspapers and because of the continuing religious de-institutionalization that caused more and more parents to seek alternatives to Christian baptism.⁵³ At the same time, parliamentary initiatives strived to enforce this trend by codifying civil baptism – all in all, with nearly a dozen bills and proposed amendments.⁵⁴ Even if none of these attempts have been successful, the fact that some of them were proposed by right-wing parliamentarians, together with the fact that many right-wing municipalities – such as Nice, Châlons-en-Champagne, and MaisonsLaffitte – now celebrate civil baptisms, reveals the gradual trivialization of the ritual. It primarily remains a kinship ritual that lost its marginality:⁵⁵ as many as 10 % of the 37,000 French communes have celebrated at least one civil baptism since 2002. The proportion of children receiving a civil baptism could be estimated around 3.5 % at the beginning of the 2000s.⁵⁶

Freethinkers as the Entrepreneurs of French Civil Baptism The previous considerations have clearly indicated that freethinkers were pioneers in developing and furthering the practice of civil baptism at the turn of the twentieth century. However, the analysis seems to suggest their absence

 See ibid., 425; 433 – 440; and Caroline Bonenfant, “La Cérémonie du baptême civil dans le Toulousain depuis les années 1970” (MA thesis, Université Toulouse 2, 1997), 110.  See Mandret-Degeilh, “Sous l’égide et la protection de l’autorité civile et républicaine,” 129 – 137.  See ibid., 26; and Gourdon, “Les Révolutions du baptême en France de 1789 à nos jours,” 619.  Mandret-Degeilh, “Sous l’égide et la protection de l’autorité civile et républicaine,” 79 – 81; and Mandret-Degeilh, “Le Baptême républicain, un baptême catholique comme les autres,” 477– 481.  See Mandret-Degeilh, “Sous l’égide et la protection de l’autorité civile et républicaine,” 43; and Gourdon, “Les Révolutions du baptême en France de 1789 à nos jours,” 627.

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from the following stages in the history of civil baptism. This impression is misleading because freethinkers were actually not only the first to institutionalize civil baptism but they also continued to be their entrepreneurs throughout the twentieth century. Even though “red baptisms” had, at first sight, nothing to do with the civil baptisms promoted by freethinkers of the beginning twentieth century – notably because the ritual was now a strictly municipal practice and because these civil baptisms were not, at least theoretically, reserved for a militant public –, the fact remains that there were visible links between freethinker baptisms and “red baptisms.” Indeed, many celebrations of civil baptism took place in communist cities in the interwar years on the initiative of declining local freethinker societies which had convinced the communist mayors to take over the former freethinker practice. In Bagnolet, a commune located in the Paris suburbs, two freethought organizations, the Union des Libres Penseurs Révolutionnaires (Union of the Revolutionary Freethinkers) and the Association des Travailleurs sans Dieu (Association of the Godless Workers), helped institutionalizing civil baptism on a municipal level after the First World War.⁵⁷ Some of these freethought organizations also moved to other cities to propagate the secular ritual, such as in Bobigny, where a team of the freethinker Enfants sans Dieu (Godless Children) coming from Bagnolet contributed to the introduction of civil baptism by providing the musical backdrop of the ceremony, for instance.⁵⁸ In many other communist cities, without freethinkers necessarily being associated with the implementation of the new “red baptisms,” the municipalities still sought inspiration by turning to the practice of freethinker baptisms and adopting some of their customs, e. g. issuing the same certificates.⁵⁹ The connection between freethinkers and some communist municipalities was further facilitated because many local officials such as Jules Coutant from Ivry-sur-Seine were also members of freethinker societies and, thus, were used to taking part in freethinker baptisms, sometimes held speeches, or issued certificates.⁶⁰ Prior to the First World War, some municipalities even offered the re-

 See Jacqueline Lalouette, “Communisme et libre pensée durant l’entre-deux-guerres: L’Union des Libres Penseurs Révolutionnaires de France et l’Association des Travailleurs sans Dieu,” in Des communistes en France (années 1920 – années 1960), ed. Jacques Girault (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2002), 437.  See ibid., 437– 438; and Trombert, “Les Baptêmes de la fraternité,” 61.  See Pierre Bonte, Bonjour, monsieur le maire: Le Livre d’or des communes de France (Paris: La table ronde, 1965), 286.  See Fouilloux and Langlois, “Les Parrainages civils à Ivry-sur-Seine au XXe siècle,” 200 – 201; and Mandret-Degeilh, “Gouverner par le rite,” 167.

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ception rooms of their town halls to local freethinker societies for their celebrations, as is verifiably, e. g., in Pollestres in Southern France, in Inval-Boiron in the Somme region, and in Limoges.⁶¹ Although the French freethought movement slowly ceased to exist after the Second World War, many of the “surviving” freethinkers sought to support the introduction of the practice outside communist municipalities in the 1970s and 1980s. Citizens faced with the refusal of their request for civil baptism by the major shared this denial with the public, reporting about it in the local press: having read these reports, local freethinkers contacted them in several cases, proposing to refer them to another municipality.⁶² As already mentioned, local officials in many of those municipalities hosting a civil baptism in the 1970s and 1980s for the first time were unaware of this ritual and its specifics. The first concern of these officials was therefore often of a more practical nature. They wanted to know if and under which conditions they could celebrate such a ceremony and above all how they could or should proceed.⁶³ Knowing or being informed about the existence of a freethinker precedent, some municipalities directly turned to the remaining Fédération Nationale de la Libre Pensée (National Freethought Federation) whose members – mostly elderly people nostalgic about the golden age of the freethought movement they experienced in the interwar period as young activists – provided them with material for the organization and celebration of civil baptism, even though neither the municipality nor the citizens asking for this celebration were freethinkers.⁶⁴ In other cases, officials approached their colleagues in those communist cities already offering this celebration. Municipalities such as Aubervilliers, Genevilliers, and Bezons subsequently advised them a model of celebration composed of a speech and a certificate referring to freethinker values and symbols and, by this, reviving central aspects of the former freethinker baptisms.⁶⁵ In consequence, the speeches held during these new civil baptisms of the 1970s and 1980s by mayors who believed they were following the correct procedure, as well as the certificates issued at the end of these celebrations, carried a freethinker handwriting and alluded to the “culte de l’honneur et de la raison”

 See for Pollestres: Ramoneda, La République concordataire et ses curés dans les Pyrénées-Orientales, 78. For Inval-Boiron and the Somme-region: Trombert, “Les Baptêmes de la fraternité,” 46 – 47. For Limoges: Pérouas, Refus d’une religion, religion d’un refus, 176 – 177.  See Mandret-Degeilh, “Gouverner par le rite,” 416.  Ibid., 429 – 432.  Ibid., 431.  See for Genevilliers and Bezons: ibid., 432. For Aubervilliers: Garnier, “Les Baptêmes civils dans l’Isère 1970 – 1985,” 45.

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(“the worship of honor and reason”).⁶⁶ This circle of reference has repeated itself since the new rise of civil baptism in the 2000s, so that the freethinker model outlived until today.

Conclusion This essay has shown that the contemporary practice of French civil baptism traces back, directly and indirectly, to the freethinker ritual of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, this influence remains unknown to most of those celebrating or attending a civil baptism today. In recent decades, many mayors celebrating civil baptisms have wrongly affirmed that the legal basis for this secular practice would be a revolutionary norm directly associated with the projects of the French Revolution to secularize the registration of births, marriages, and deaths. Some of today’s officials refer to a text dating back to July 13, 1790, others to a law passed on 18 Brumaire, Year II, while still others of those responsible rely on a law passed on 20 Prairial, Year II, for historical legitimacy.⁶⁷ These local officials have simply taken up a narrative created by regional press organs, by other poorly informed officials – prefects and bureaucrats from the ministries of justice and of the interior,⁶⁸ whom they have consulted about the legal basis of the practice –, as well as, more recently, by private firms. Those firms seek to benefit from the rise of civil baptism in the 2000s: they sell ceremonial speeches or certificates to municipalities and emphasize the supposed revolutionary origin of civil baptism.⁶⁹ The local officials in charge of civil baptism do not know that, actually, the practice is not based on any revolutionary text and that it even lacks a legal basis.⁷⁰ This supposed and perpetuated revolutionary origin thus takes on the features of a myth and obscures completely the freethinker origin of the contemporary practice.⁷¹ In fact, the opposite is the case: while there has been a kind of continuity between the freethinker, the communist, and the contemporary practices of civil baptism that have been passed down from generation to generation,

 Mandret-Degeilh, “Sous l’égide et la protection de l’autorité civile et républicaine,” 71.  See Mandret-Degeilh, “Gouverner par le rite,” 411.  Ibid., 412.  Mandret-Degeilh, “Sous l’égide et la protection de l’autorité civile et républicaine,” 25 – 26; 81.  Mandret-Degeilh, “Gouverner par le rite,” 405 – 406.  Rachel Guidoni, “Le Parrainage civil: Une pratique française revisitée,” Ateliers, no. 27 (2004): 9.

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no such continuity can be identified between the revolutionary practice of civic baptism and the freethinker civil baptism. This seems all the more ironic as it was the freethought movement which indirectly contributed to the construction of this revolutionary myth: at the end of the nineteenth century, some freethinkers sought to draw inspiration from the civic baptisms conducted during the French Revolution, relying on the rare testimonies about these marginal initiatives that existed at that time to create an uninterrupted chain of historical tradition. Charles Fauvety’s project of a unitary church, Jacqueline Le Sidaner’s celebrations in Trégastel, and Emile Noël’s initiatives in the Limoges region could be mentioned here.⁷² Today’s civil baptisms are the descendants of the so-called “red baptisms” in communist municipalities from the interwar period which directly stem from the freethinker baptisms of the late nineteenth and the beginning twentieth centuries. However, this relation remains unknown to most of those who celebrate or attend a civil baptism nowadays. There are several plausible explanations for this ignorance of the freethinker roots of today’s civil baptism. One hypothesis links this lack of knowledge to the difficult situation of the freethought movement in France in the second half of the twentieth century. Its steady decline since the Second World War has increased the ignorance of large parts of the French population.⁷³ A second reason for this lack of awareness might be the revival of the commemoration of the French Revolution in the French political culture during the last decades. Many Frenchman today are more consensual towards the revolution than they were in the past. The scattered history of freethought in France is no match to counter this renewed powerful radiance of the revolution.⁷⁴

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 See on the unitary church: Pierrard, L’Eglise et les ouvriers en France, 468. See on the celebrations in Trégastel: Trombert, “Les baptêmes de la fraternité,” 38. On the initiatives in the Limoges region, see Pérouas, Refus d’une religion, religion d’un refus, 176 – 177.  See Lalouette, La Libre Pensée en France.  See Serge Berstein, “Le Retour de la culture républicaine,” Vingtième Siècle, no. 44 (1994): 113 – 120.

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Lalouette, Jacqueline. “La Libre Pensée.” In Le XIXe siècle: Science, politique et tradition, edited by Isabelle Poutrin, 111 – 128. Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1995. Lalouette, Jacqueline. La Libre Pensée en France, 1848 – 1940. Paris: Albin Michel, 22001. Lalouette, Jacqueline. “Communisme et libre pensée durant l’entre-deux-guerres: L’Union des Libres Penseurs Révolutionnaires de France et l’Association des Travailleurs sans Dieu.” In Des communistes en France (années 1920 – années 1960), edited by Jacques Girault, 423 – 440. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2002. Lalouette, Jacqueline. La Séparation des Églises et de l’État: Genèse et développement d’une idée, 1789 – 1905. Paris: Seuil, 2005. Lalouette, Jacqueline. “Les Baptêmes républicains de la Révolution à nos jours.” In Accueillir le nouveau-né, d’hier à aujourd’hui, edited by Marie-France Morel, 287 – 305. Toulouse: Erès, 2013. Langlois, Claude. “Politique et religion.” In Histoire de la France religieuse: Du roi très chrétien à la laïcité républicaine, edited by Philippe Joutard, 108 – 144. Paris: Seuil, 1991. Mandret-Degeilh, Antoine. “Sous l’égide et la protection de l’autorité civile et républicaine: Dimensions politiques et sociétales de la pratique contemporaine du baptême républicain.” MA thesis, Sciences Po Paris, 2007. Mandret-Degeilh, Antoine. “Gouverner par le rite: Socio-histoire des rites d’institution municipaux autour de la parenté en France, au miroir de la situation en Allemagne (1789 – 1989).” PhD diss., Sciences Po Paris, 2015. Mandret-Degeilh, Antoine. “Le Baptême républicain, un baptême catholique comme les autres? Une histoire des pratiques baptismales séculières en France depuis la Révolution Française.” In Le Parrainage en Europe et en Amérique: Pratiques de longue durée (XVIe–XXIe siècle), edited by Guido Alfani, Vincent Gourdon and Isabelle Robin-Romero, 459 – 482. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 2015. Mathiez, Albert. Les Origines des cultes révolutionnaires (1789 – 1792). Paris: Société nouvelle de librairie et d’édition, 1904. McMillan, James. “‘Priest Hits Girl’: On the Front Line in the ‘War of the two Frances’.” In Culture Wars: Secular–Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe, edited by Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser, 77 – 101. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Ozouf, Mona. “Déchristianisation.” In Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution Française, edited by François Furet and Mona Ozouf, 50 – 62. Paris: Flammarion, 1988. Papillon, Emile. “Charente: Dignac.” Le Libre Penseur du Centre et de l’Ouest: Journal anticlérical de défense socialiste, républicaine et laïque, June 15, 1908. Pérouas, Louis. Léonard, Marie, Jean et les autres: Les Prénoms en Limousin depuis le millénaire. Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1984. Pérouas, Louis. Refus d’une religion, religion d’un refus: En Limousin rural, 1880 – 1940. Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1985. Pierrard, Pierre. L’Église et les ouvriers en France: 1840 – 1940. Paris: Hachette, 1984. Pollack, Detlef. “Varieties of Secularization Theories and their Indispensable Core.” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 90, no. 1 (2015): 60 – 79. Ramoneda, Joseph. La République concordataire et ses curés dans les Pyrénées-Orientales, 1870 – 1905. Perpignan: Presses Universitaires de Perpignan, 2011.

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Ranger, Jean. “Le Déclin du Parti communiste français.” Revue française de science politique 36, no. 1 (1986): 46 – 63. Stovall, Tyler. The Rise of the Paris Red Belt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Trombert, Adeline. “Les Baptêmes de la fraternité: Eléments pour une sociologie historique des parrainages civils et républicains.” MA thesis, Sciences Po Grenoble, 2000.

Illustrations Daniela Haarmann Freidenkerei, Libre-pensée, Szabadgondolkodás – Concepts of Freethinking during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries Figure 1: Anthony Collins, Discours sur la liberté de penser: Ecrit à l’occasion d’une nouvelle secte d’Esprits forts, ou de gens qui pensent librement: Traduit de l’anglois & augmenté d’une lettre d’un médecin arabe (London: s.l., 1714), front cover. Figure 2: “Two Ways to Go,” in The Freethinkers’ Pictoral Text-Book, ed. Watson Heston (New York: The Truth Seeker Company, 1896), 63. Barbara Wagner Secularity in the New State: The Case of Poland Figure 1: Henryk Halpern and Antoni Zbikowski, eds, Ilustrowana encyklopedia (Lublin: Wolnomyśliciel, 1929), front cover. Figure 2: Henryk Halpern and Antoni Zbikowski, eds, Ilustrowana encyklopedia (Lublin: Wolnomyśliciel, 1929), 59. Antoine Mandret-Degeilh A Secular Avant-Garde? About the Unknown Freethinker Roots of Today’s French Civil Baptism Figure 1: Baptêmes Rouges, front cover (Municipal Archives of Bobigny, W 990).

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Index of Names Altmann, Ida

208

Bakunin, Mikhail Alexandrovich 101 f., 278 Bartošek, Theodor 223, 245 f., 252 f., 257 Baudouin de Courtenay, Jan 134, 141 – 143, 148 Beran, Ladislav 249, 255, 261 Bergier, Nicholas-Sylvestre 47, 50 – 53 Berzsenyi, Dániel 52 Besant, Annie 20 Bismarck, Otto von 72, 194 f., 301 Bloßfeldt, Willy 187, 191, 319 f. Bradlaugh, Charles 68, 207 Branting, Karl Hjalmar 7, 17, 26, 155 – 157, 160 – 163, 165 – 175 Bruno, Giordano 25, 104, 122 – 124, 126, 216 – 219, 225 – Monument of (Rome) 122, 216 f. – See also: Campo de’ Fiori Büchner, Ludwig 10, 16, 28, 100, 110, 117, 122, 125, 161, 273 f., 276 – 283, 285 – 292, 300 Buisson, Ferdinand Édouard 66, 210 Cafiero, Carlo 102 Carlile, Richard 64 f. Collins, Anthony 37, 40, 42 – 45, 52, 55, 60, 351 Comte, Auguste 70, 125, 161 f., 188 Counts Egmont and Horn 220 Darwin, Charles 16, 19, 68 – 70, 109, 116 – 118, 122, 127, 150, 182, 185, 190, 274, 292, 299 Dolet, Étienne 218, 225 – Monument of (Paris) 218 Engels, Friedrich

117, 149, 170, 288, 299

Fauvety, Charles 335, 346 Ferrer i Guàrdia, Francisco 218 – 220, 228 – Monument of (Brussels) 219 f.

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Feuerbach, Ludwig 111, 117 f., 150, 274, 278, 286 Filippi, Filippo de 116 f. Frantzl, Karl 253 – 255 Galilei, Galileo 38, 69, 75 Garibaldi, Giuseppe 5, 17, 24 f., 87 – 94, 97 – 105, 121, 125, 217 f. Gioberti, Vincenzo 87, 91, 119, 122 Gizycki, Georg von 300 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 27, 112, 182, 185, 195, 198 f. Goldscheid, Rudolf 197 Haeckel, Ernst 8, 26, 68, 70, 143, 182 – 190, 194 – 198, 214, 274, 282, 292, 299 f., 316 Hartwig, Theodor 241, 255 f., 258 f., 261 f. Heaford, William 203, 208 f., 219 f., 226 f. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 112, 115, 120, 126 f. Hello, Ernest 140 Hempel, Jan 134, 144, 149 Herder, Johann Gottfried 64 f. Hobbes, Thomas 52, 55, 68 Holyoake, Jacob 68, 207 Hus, Jan 227, 247 Jabłoński, David 141, 145, 149 Jannasch, Lilli 318 f. Jászi, Oszkár 69 Jatho, Carl Wilhelm 194 Jodl, Friedrich 315 Kant, Immanuel 40, 42, 62 Kazinczy, Ferenc 52 Köppen, Friedrich 62 f., 173 Krejčí, František 224, 247 Kropotkin, Piotr Alexeyevich 192, 249 Lassalle, Ferdinand 149, 158 Laurentie, Pierre-Sébastien 58 – 60 Law, Harriet 20, 103, 115, 207, 211 Lebenhart, Rudolf 247 f., 255, 261 f.

354

Index of Names

Lecky, William 137 f. Lefèbvre, Jean-François, Chevalier de la Barre 218 – Monument of (Paris) 218 Lehmann-Rußbüldt, Otto 28, 297 f., 301, 307 – 310, 312 f., 315 – 318, 320 f., 323 f. Lennstrand, Viktor Emanuel 7, 26, 155 – 157, 161 – 173 Leopardi, Giacomo 113 f., 120, 124 f. Liebig, Justus von 117, 119, 125, 273 Liebknecht, Karl 172, 316, 318, 324 Lima, Sebastião de Magalhães 209, 212 Luther, Martin 15, 27, 194 f., 198 f. Mäder, Erich 259 f. Mahler, Lénárt 69 f. Mallet, Edmonde Françoise 48 Marx, Karl 70, 111, 122, 149, 170, 288 Maschi, Luigi 119 f. Mazzini, Giuseppe 5, 17, 24 f., 87 – 91, 94 – 101, 104, 114, 123 – 125, 216 Meis, Camillo de 111 – 113, 115 f., 118, 126 Mill, John Stuart 54 – 56, 92, 161, 163 Minkiewicz, Romuald 137, 142, 144, 149, 151 Moleschott, Jacob 5, 10, 16 f., 25, 28, 100, 109 – 126, 273 f., 276 – 283, 285 – 293 Most, Johann 303 Moszczeńska, Izabela 134, 137 Mussolini, Benito 95, 97, 105 Naigeon, Jacques-André 49 – 52 Napoleon Bonaparte 53 Niemojewski, Andrzej 133 f., 137 – 139 Ostwald, Wilhelm 8, 26, 28, 182 – 199, 274, 309, 311 – 314, 316, 318 – 320, 324 Panckoucke, Charles Joseph 49 Peus, Heinrich 318 f. Pfungst, Arthur 305 Pius IX 88, 90, 94 f. Plato 38, 57 Reckahn, Friedrich-August Rees, Abraham 46, 55

284 f.

Ricciardi, Giuseppe 70, 100, 121, 181 Rostovcev-Blauberg, Andrei 253 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 47, 50, 60, 72, 216 Ruge, Arnold 284 Saint-Priest, Ange du 58 – 60 Sanctis, Francesco de 5, 25, 109 – 116, 118, 120 – 127 Schönerer, Georg von 221 f. – Peregrinus 222 f. Schopenhauer, Arthur 113, 125 Servetus, Michael 126 Spaventa, Betrando 111 f., 118, 124, 126 Spinoza, Baruch de 39 – 41, 44, 56, 58, 68, 120 Stefanoni, Luigi 100 – 103 Stern, Viktor 255 f., 261 Storfer, Adolf Josef 69 f. Strivay, Renaud 215, 220 Thiron, Constantin 65, 68 Tocco, Felice 118, 124 Toland, John 40 – 42, 44, 52, 55 Tschirn, Gustav 208, 223 – 225, 314 – 318 Vogt, Carl 10, 16, 28, 100, 117, 122, 187, 273 f., 276 – 283, 285 – 292 Vogtherr, Ewald 226, 318 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) 52, 72, 173, 215 f., 218 Wagner, Rudolph 10, 17, 23, 25, 111, 120, 131, 144 f., 188, 273 f., 284, 293, 319, 351 Wheeler, Joseph Mazzini 215 – 217 Wille, Bruno 309, 316 – 318 Wilson, John Byers 212 – 214, 216 f. Wolf, Arthur 252 f., 255 f., 321 – 323 Wolff, Christian 37, 40, 44 f., 184 Yvon, Claude

47

Zenker, Ernst Viktor 38, 40, 44, 224 f. Žižka, Jan 225 – Monument of (Tábor) 225

Index of Places Amsterdam 211 Antwerp 210 Berlin 28, 242, 244, 259, 262 f., 300 f., 303 – 305, 307, 309, 317 – 321 Bobigny 332, 337 – 340, 343, 351 Breslau (Wrocław) 306 Brno 61, 245, 255 Brussels 182, 206, 208, 210 f., 215, 218 – 220, 224, 238 f., 246, 250, 252 f., 256 f., 263 Bucharest 68 Budapest 69, 73 Buenos Aires 209, 214 Cambridge 42 Chemnitz 28, 305, 321 Cluj 69 Cologne 41, 109, 194, 261 – 263, 292, 297 Czernowitz 70

Kassel

Leiden 41 Leipzig 28, 243, 253, 255, 302, 305, 319 – 323 Lisbon 209, 212, 219 Lodi 103 London 91, 123 Lugano 123 Lyon 105, 334 f. Magdeburg 244, 250, 252, 318 Milan 88, 100 Moscow 152, 254 – 256, 260 Most 246 f. Munich 193, 307 Naples 70, 88, 92, 99, 100, 112, 116, 121, 125 Ostrava

Darmstadt 283, 286 Düsseldorf 262, 274 Edinburgh Eton 42

41, 44, 49, 54 – 57

Florence 117, 124 Frankfurt/Main 222, 289 Gävle 160 – 162 Geneva 102, 282 Halle 172 Hamburg 191 f., 195, 255, 282 – 285, 307, 309 Hannover 41 Heidelberg 110, 113, 282 Heston/Middlesex 42 Iaşi Jena

244

245, 247

Palermo 99 Paris 100, 132, 193, 210 f., 214 – 216, 218, 225, 331 – 338, 343 Pisa 123 Prachatice (Prachatitz) 224 Rome 30, 71, 87 – 92, 95, 97 – 100, 116, 122 – 124, 185, 209 f., 212 – 214, 216 – 218, 221 f., 225, 228 Siena 100 Stockholm 155, 160 – 165, 169, 172 Tábor 225 Teplice (Schönau) 251, 254 f. Trento 118 Tübingen 283, 290 Turin 25, 110 – 112, 114 f., 125

68 184 f., 194, 299

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Uppsala 160, 162 f. Utrecht 41

356

Index of Places

Venice 91, 101 Vienna 225, 251 – 256, 288, 315 Warsaw

30, 133 – 135, 137 – 145, 147, 152

Zurich

110 – 114, 118, 124, 126, 147, 282

Index of Subjects Akcní výbor pro rozluku církve od státu (Action Committee for the Separation of the Church from the State) 247 American Secular Union 143, 212 – American Freethought Association 212 f. Anarchism 19, 60, 70, 150, 278 Научное Общество Aтеист (Nauchnoe Obshchestvo Ateist, Scientific Society „Atheist“) 258 Anglican Church 74 Anti-Catholicism 15, 18, 20, 37, 66, 70, 87 f., 109, 121, 135, 181, 204, 237, 299 Anti-Christianism 51, 90, 104, 168, 274, 302 Anticlericalism 15, 18, 22 – 25, 28, 55, 64 – 67, 87 – 92, 94, 97 f., 102, 104, 109, 120, 122 f., 135, 146, 181, 187, 205, 207, 209, 211, 221, 238 f., 241, 276, 289, 300, 302, 336, 341 Anti-Council 70 f., 100, 121 f., 125, 181 Anti-materialism 276, 286 Anti-religious 66, 103, 119, 137, 162, 169, 171, 181, 239, 242, 250 – 252, 254 f., 257, 259, 302, 313, 320 Anti-Semitism 65, 191, 221 Anti-Slavism 222 f. Arbeitsgemeinschaft kultureller Organisationen in der Tschechoslowakischen Republik (Interest Group of Cultural Organizations in the Czechoslovak Republic) 248 Asociației de Liberă-Cugetare monistă evoluționistă din România (Association of Monistic Evolutionary Freethinking in Romania) 68 Association des Travailleurs sans Dieu (Association of the Godless Workers) 343 Associazione nazionale del libero pensiero „Giordano Bruno“ (National Freethought Association „Giordano Bruno“) 219 Atheism 20, 23, 35 – 39, 45 – 65, 68, 71 – 75, 95, 97 f., 101 f., 104, 109, 119, 121, 125, 140, 144, 149 – 151, 156, 173 f., 236, 240,

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242, 251, 258, 260, 273 f., 277 f., 286, 288, 292 f., 302 Az Új Század (The New Century) 69 f. Blasphemy 151, 155, 162, 167, 172, 306 Bolshevism 22, 150, 237, 241, 249 f., 254, 259, 263 Brabançonne 214 Bund für weltliche Schule und Moralunterricht (Association for Secular Schools and Moral Education) 305 Bund Neues Vaterland (League of the New Fatherland) 310 Campo de’ Fiori 122, 216 f. Capitalism 148 f., 161, 188, 283, 323 Catholicism 15, 23, 25, 29, 47, 51, 74 f., 92, 94 – 96, 99, 104, 119, 131 f., 135, 189, 204, 208, 221, 223, 240, 331 f., 337 – Catholic Church 26, 38, 40, 46, 50, 58, 63, 66, 70, 87 – 89, 93 – 97, 99, 110, 115, 119, 131, 134 f., 137 f., 140 f., 151, 185, 189, 204 f., 208, 217, 221 f., 245, 264, 299 – Catholic Defense Committee 204 – Deutschkatholiken (German Catholics) 64, 300 – Union de Fribourg (Fribourg Union) 204 Chant des Libres Penseurs 215, 220 Chauvinism 192, 226 Christianity 13, 21, 25, 41, 53 – 55, 98, 102, 123, 140, 146, 161 – 164, 166 f., 169 f., 173, 175, 209, 213, 273 f., 276 – 278, 282, 286 f., 315 Church tax 304, 313, 316 Civil baptism 16, 29, 71, 104, 331 – 346, 351 – Civic baptism 333 f., 346 – Kinship ritual 29, 331, 337 f., 340, 342 – Red baptism 337 – 339, 343, 346 Civil marriage 16, 104, 136, 301, 331 Civil register 301 f., 338 Civil religion 17, 24 f., 98 f., 104, 110, 121, 123, 126

358

Index of Subjects

Clericalism 15, 22, 68, 92 f., 115, 121, 218, 222, 224, 229, 238 f., 317, 341 Communism 23, 27, 94, 133, 144, 150, 152, 242, 249, 256, 265, 340, 343 Conceptual history 36 f., 74 f. Cosmopolitanism 27, 194, 203, 215 Cremation 16, 71, 90, 103, 147, 306 Critique of religion 170, 239, 261, 278, 282, 300, 302, 304, 306 Cultes révolutionnaires (revolutionary religions) 333 f. Culture war 15 f., 66, 87 f., 97, 110, 194 f., 204, 212, 237, 245, 301, 341 Darwinism 25, 28, 68, 70, 75, 116 f., 119, 122, 126 f., 182, 184, 190, 274 Das freie Wort (The Free Word) 222 f., 301, 305 f., 309, 315 Das Jahrhundert (The Century) 283 – 285, 292 Das Monistische Jahrhundert (The Monist Century) 182, 191, 194, 309, 311, 318 – 320 Deism 23, 39 f., 44 – 52, 54 f., 57 – 65, 68, 71 f., 74 f., 102, 109, 119, 121 Der Atheist (The Atheist) 253, 316, 319, 321 – 324 Der Dissident (The Dissident) 301, 303, 305 – 309, 311 – 313, 321, 323 f. Der Kreislauf des Lebens (The Circle of Life, 1852) 119, 125, 282 Deutsche Gesellschaft für Ethische Kultur (German Society for Ethical Culture) 186, 300 Deutscher Bund Freireligiöser Gemeinden (Federation of Free Religious Parishes in Germany, DBFG) 300, 314, 316 Deutscher Freidenkerbund (German Freethinker League, DFB) 28, 100, 246 f., 249, 255, 258, 262, 292, 300, 316 Die Brücke (The Bridge) 193 Energetik (energetics) 183, 185, 190 Enfants sans Dieu (Godless Children) 343 Enlightenment 18 f., 36, 38, 40 – 42, 44 f., 50, 57, 59 f., 63 – 65, 72, 74, 95, 132, 155,

160, 165, 169, 184, 188, 193, 205, 215, 218, 221 Esperanto 147, 193 Federace komunistických osvětových jednot (Federation of Enlightened Communist Cells, FKOJ) 246 f., 249, 255, 258 Fédération Internationale de la Libre Pensée (International Freethought Federation, IFF) 27, 71, 182, 204, 206, 208 – 211, 213, 215, 238 Fédération Nationale de la Libre Pensée (National Freethought Federation) 344 Feminism 20, 68, 70 f., 181 First Vatican Council 70, 96 f., 101, 121, 181 First World War 18 f., 23, 25, 27, 29, 65, 70, 109, 121, 132, 134, 141, 143, 184, 192, 196, 198, 206, 221, 228, 237, 239 f., 242, 320, 324, 335 f., 343 Folkrörelser (Popular Movements) 26, 156 f., 159, 165 – 169, 175 – Free church movement 66, 71, 73, 75, 157 – 159, 166 f., 169, 324 – Temperance movement 157 – 159 Föreningen för religionsfrihet (Association for Freedom of Religion) 162, 167, 173 Freemasonry 100 f., 103, 209 – Great Architect 209 Free religious 157, 208, 240, 300 f., 305 f., 309 f., 314 f., 317 f., 320, 323 Freethinking 16 f., 21 – 23, 26 – 29, 35 – 46, 48 f., 51 – 54, 57 f., 60 – 75, 122, 127, 133 – 136, 144, 146, 149 – 152, 161, 165, 215, 235, 237 – 239, 242, 244 f., 247, 254, 313, 351 Freethought 21 f., 27, 38 f., 51, 64, 67 – 71, 73, 95, 97, 100, 104, 132 – 138, 146 f., 151 f., 155 f., 161 – 164, 171, 173, 181 – 183, 203 – 211, 213 – 216, 218 – 220, 222 – 229, 237 – 239, 241, 243, 245, 247 – 253, 256 – 258, 261, 265, 276, 292 f., 299, 301, 303, 305, 308 f., 311 – 316, 324, 344, 346 – Freethought movement 18, 21, 23, 27 f., 37, 44, 65, 68, 71 f., 74 f., 87, 100 – 103, 132 – 134, 136, 140, 149, 151 f., 207, 227, 235, 238 f., 248, 263, 298 f., 306, 316 f.,

Index of Subjects

319, 324, 332, 334 – 336, 340 f., 344, 346 – Freethought organizations 44, 67, 132, 136, 165 f., 186, 204, 206, 243 f., 251 f., 257 f., 259, 300, 304 f., 316, 323, 334, 343 – International movement 67, 183, 191, 198, 206, 208, 214, 228, 241, 260 – Freethought symbols 29, 98, 146, 215, 218, 332, 336, 342 – 344 – Proletarian freethought (PFT) 236 f., 242, 244, 251 – 254, 259 f., 262 – 265 – Proletarian freethinkers 27, 208, 235, 242 f., 250 f., 255, 258 f., 261, 263 f., 316, 319, 322 – 324 – Socialist freethought 235 – 237, 239, 241, 243 – 246, 248 – 250, 252 f., 256, 259 – 261, 265, 281 Freidenkerbund für die Tschechoslowakische Republik (Freethinker League of Czechoslovakia) 243 Freidenkerbund Österreich (Freethinker League of Austria) 243, 252 f., 255, 263 f. French Revolution 18, 29, 49, 53, 59, 93, 132, 169, 188, 211, 214, 289, 333, 345 f. Fritänkaren (The Freethinker) 155 f., 160 f., 164 – 167, 169, 175 Galilei Kör (Galilei Circle) 69, 75 Gemeinschaft proletarischer Freidenker (Society of Proletarian Freethought, GpF) 244, 249, 252 f. 255 – 257, 259, 261 f. Giordano Bruno Bund (Giordano Bruno League) 309 Giovine Italia (Young Italy) 88, 95, 98 Habsburg Monarchy 59, 65, 131, 205, 221, 223, 238, 240 Hegelianism 25, 112, 114 – 118, 120, 125 f. Himno de Riego 214 Humanism 17, 38, 52, 88, 98, 124, 127, 134, 145, 173, 315 Humanity 24, 95 f., 121, 131, 136, 139 f., 161, 163, 171, 174, 190, 192, 194, 213, 217 f., 284 Ido

193, 196, 249, 318

359

Il Libero Pensiero (The Freethinker) 100 f. Individualism 70, 87, 95, 189 Interessengemeinschaft für Arbeiterkultur (Interest Group for Workers’ Culture, IFA) 244, 248 – 250 Internationale Arbeitsgemeinschaft in der Tschechoslowakischen Republik (International Cooperation in the Czechoslovak Republic) 248 Internationale Liga für Menschenrechte (International Human Rights Federation) 310 International Freethinker Congress 71, 191, 204 f., 209 – 229, 243, 247, 251 – 255, 261, 263, 307, 309 Internationalism 26, 101 – 103, 181 – 184, 190 – 194, 196 – 198, 204 – 206, 209, 212, 226, 236, 238, 241, 247, 249, 262, 310 International of Proletarian Freethought (IPF) 235 – 237, 241, 248, 250 – 265 Italianità 216 Jesuits (Society of Jesus) 90 – 94 Judaism 92, 134 – Jews 59, 132, 138, 141, 143, 191 – Jewish 15 f., 70, 134, 138, 145, 149, 151, 191, 302, 305, 308, 324 Jugendweihe (civil confirmation) 16, 300, 306, 314 Komintern 242, 244, 249, 253 – 255, 262 – 264 Komitee Konfessionslos (Committee Un-Denominational) 28, 297 f., 301, 307 – 313, 315, 317, 321 f. 324 f. – Church Exit Campaign 297 f., 301 – 314, 316 f., 319 f., 323 f. Konfessionslosigkeit (Irreligion) 298, 301, 303 f., 313 KPČ 249, 256, 261 f. KPD 242, 252, 262 Kraft und Stoff (Force and Matter, 1855) 273, 281 – 283, 286, 290 Labor movement 22, 25, 133, 144, 149, 155 – 161, 165, 167 – 169, 214 f., 235, 238, 248, 251 f., 256, 264, 278

360

Index of Subjects

Laicism 5, 66, 87, 89, 97 Laïcité 52, 66, 207, 210, 228, 241, 244 Liberalism 19, 24, 94, 97, 104, 121 f., 132, 190 Liberty 27, 42, 46, 90, 102, 131, 165, 203, 211, 217, 220, 226 Loi Falloux 211 Los von Rom (Away from Rome) campaign 64 f., 221 – 223 Lutheranism 72, 222 Manifest der 93 (Appeal of 93 Professors to the Civilized World) 196 Marseillaise 213 – 215, 336 Marseillaise de la Paix 214 Martyr (of freethought) 56, 91, 104, 205, 216 – 219, 227 f. Marxism 23, 144, 149, 152, 160, 170, 174, 238 f., 246, 258, 288, 291, 323 Materialism 25, 50, 65, 70 f., 95, 97 f., 100, 102, 104, 109 f., 113, 117, 119, 121 f., 124 – 127, 150, 156, 161, 163, 168–, 282 – 292, 300, 302 – Historical materialism 23, 171, 261 – Scientific materialism 15 f., 22, 25, 28, 110, 116, 149, 273 – 278, 280 f., 283 – 289, 291 f. Modernism 19, 97, 280 Modernity 13 f., 16, 18 – 20, 23, 119, 131, 186, 203, 276 – 278, 280, 292, 313 – Multiple modernities 20, 38 Monism 26 – 28, 68, 70, 182 – 187, 189 – 192, 194, 197 f., 292, 309, 311 f., 318 – Deutscher Monistenbund (German Monist League) 26, 182 f., 185 – 187, 190 – 192, 194, 197 f., 250, 293, 300, 309, 313, 316, 323 – Monistische Sonntagspredigten (Monist Sunday Sermons) 183, 190, 192, 195 – 198, 311 f. Morality 14, 22, 24, 28, 57, 61 f., 73, 89, 97, 116, 121, 124, 126, 133, 144, 150, 163, 273, 313 – 315 Multiple deviance 21, 310 f. Mutual aid 190, 192 Myśl Niepodległa (The Independent Thought) 133 – 136, 138, 145

Napoleonic Code 136 Nationalism 26 f., 66, 88 f., 104, 131 f., 149, 151, 181 – 184, 190 – 193, 196 – 198, 205, 216, 221, 227 – 229, 280, 332 National Secular Society 203, 207 Naturalism 47, 50, 70, 116, 119 Научное Общество Aтеист (Nauchnoe Obshchestvo Ateist, Scientific Society „Atheist“) 258 Nepszava (Word of the People) 69 Nutrition 279 f. Orthodox Church 252

59, 68, 70, 72 f., 144, 250,

Pantheism 47, 68, 117, 119, 122, 182, 184 f. Papacy 89, 94 – 96, 99 f., 103, 120 Papal infallibility 97, 185 Paris Commune 211, 338 Plameny/Jiskry (The Flames/The Sparks) 249 Polish partitions 25, 131 – 133 Polska Liga Wolnej Myśli (Polish League of Freethinkers, PLFT) 133, 135 Positivism 16, 19, 25, 49, 70, 98, 100 – 102, 127, 188 Progress 18 f., 51, 69, 71, 96, 101 f., 139, 189 f., 198, 206, 220, 225, 227 f., 238 f., 259, 277 – 280, 285, 312 f. Пролеткульт (proletkul’t, Proletarian Culture) 242, 244, 249 Protestantism 99, 194, 209, 222, 303, 322 – Lichtfreunde 64, 298, 300 – Lutheran state church 157 f., 162, 167, 174 – Protestant Church 72, 299, 303, 324 – Protestant 15 f., 24, 26 f., 36, 44, 52, 59, 63 f., 66, 71, 73 – 75, 91, 141, 273, 286 f., 290, 300, 303, 305 Quanta cura (With Great Care)

100

Rațiunea (Rationality) 68 Rationalism 21, 39, 71 f., 94, 97, 134, 137 f., 168 Reason 16, 19, 21 f., 29, 39, 41 f., 44, 46, 54, 61 – 63, 71, 91, 101 f., 117, 142, 158, 165, 169, 188, 204, 209, 215 – 217, 246,

Index of Subjects

250 f., 256, 260, 280, 298 f., 303 f., 307, 313, 320, 322, 325, 337, 340, 345 f. Reformation 15, 38, 72, 157, 194 f., 198 Republicanism 88, 123, 164, 207, 210 Restoration 53, 58, 60, 63, 74, 93, 96, 126, 136, 334 Revolutions of 1848 – 49 19, 65, 67, 94, 111, 214, 257, 274, 277, 289 Risorgimento 24, 87 f., 92, 94 f., 97 f., 101 f., 104, 109, 111, 114, 118, 132, 212, 216 f. Roman Republic 88, 92, 96, 99 Science 16, 20 – 22, 35, 39, 46 – 49, 52, 54 – 57, 68 f., 92, 101, 109 – 113, 116, 118, 120 f., 124 – 127, 139, 160, 163, 181 – 191, 193 f., 197 – 199, 213, 215, 226, 251, 273 f., 277 – 280, 283 – 287, 289, 291 f., 298 f., 312 f., 321, 331 – 334, 336, 340 Sdružení sociálnědemokratických bezvěrců (Association of Social Democratic Unbelievers) 246 Second Polish Republic 141 Second World War 152, 335, 339, 344, 346 Secular education 52, 75, 97, 115 f., 143, 213, 219, 221, 314 f. Secularism 14 – 20, 22 – 24, 26 – 29, 35 – 37, 39, 45 f., 52, 54, 57, 59, 66, 68, 72, 74 f., 118, 133, 143, 155 f., 163, 165 – 168, 171 – 175, 181, 186, 203, 207 f., 212, 235, 237, 264 f., 274 – 279, 281, 285 f., 288 f., 292, 297, 299, 301, 317 f., 322, 324 Secularity 16, 18, 20, 24 f., 27 – 29, 35, 98, 131 f., 137, 155 f., 170, 173 – 175, 184, 187, 198, 203, 205, 218, 229, 236, 277, 322, 351 – Multiple secularities 14, 20, 156, 203, 277 Secularization 13 – 16, 24, 35, 46, 52, 54, 57 f., 64, 89 f., 97, 102, 111, 115 f., 120, 127, 140, 146, 149 – 152, 155, 174, 199, 203, 222, 238, 240 f., 247, 274, 277, 286, 292, 297, 300, 302 – 306, 320, 333, 340 f. – Theories of secularization 13, 340 Selmeczbányai Köre (Circle of Selmecbánya) 69 Separation of church and state 16, 21, 50, 66, 71, 143, 152, 155, 162, 199, 210, 220,

361

241 f., 244, 247, 260, 264, 301, 306 f., 335, 341 Social democracy 159 f., 167, 169, 171 – 175, 222, 238 f., 241, 246 f., 256, 258, 261, 265, 297, 315 Socialism 17, 19, 69 f., 94, 99 f., 103, 149 f., 161, 165, 168 – 171, 174, 190, 208, 219, 221, 236 – 239, 243 – 247, 250, 253, 257, 260, 264, 278, 283 Social reform 198, 297, 299, 308, 316 Società atea (Atheist Society) 101 Società del libero pensiero (Freethought Society) 100 Союз воинствующих безбожников (Soiuz voinstvuyushchikh bezbozhnikov, League of the Godless, from 1929 on: Militant League of the Godless, SVB) 251 – 259, 262 – 264 Soviet Russia 27, 151, 235, 242, 244, 249, 254, 260, 262, 264 Soviet Union 144, 148, 151, 236, 250 f., 257 – 259, 261, 263, 265 Spinozism 39, 46 f. Spolek volných myslitelů Augustín Smetana (Society of Freethinkers „Augustín Smetana“, SVMAS) 257 f. Stowarzyszenie Myśli Wolnej (Association of Freethought, AFT) 136 – 138, 144, 151 Stowarzyszenie Wolnomyśliceli Polskich (Association of Polish Freethinkers, APF) 143 – 148 Svaz proletářských bezvěrců (League of Proletarian Unbelievers, SPB) 249, 258, 261 f. Svaz socialistických bezvěrců (League of Socialist Unbelievers) 246 f., 249, 252 f., 255 f., 258 f. Svaz socialistických monistů (League of Socialist Monists) 239, 246 Syllabus Errorum (Syllabus of Errors) 94, 100, 117 Terza Roma (Third Rome) 95 The Freethinker 163 f., 203, 220, 226 The Internationale 215, 310 Theism 39, 62 f. Theophilanthropy 334

362

Index of Subjects

The religious 13 f., 21, 26, 30, 208, 303, The secular 13 – 17., 21, 24, 26, 30, 121, 184, 187, 190, 203 – 205, 209, 216, 303, Transnationalism 18, 21, 24, 26 – 29, 36 f., 67 f., 70, 74 f., 121, 140, 147, 181 f., 191 – 193, 240 f., 210, 212 – 215, 225, 228, 235, 236 – 238, 258 f., 299 Union des Libres Penseurs Révolutionnaires (Union of the Revolutionary Freethinkers) 343 Universalism 193, 198, 203 Universal suffrage 159, 161, 164 f. Utilism 163, 165 f., 168 – 172 Utilistiska samfundet (Utilist Society) 163 – 166, 169 Verein der Freidenker für Feuerbestattung (Association of Freethinkers for Cremation, VfF) 244, 259, 261 Vereinigtes Komitee für Kirchenaustritt (Joint Committee for Church Secession) 319

Volná Myšlenka (Free Thought, VM) 246 f., 253 Voraces de Vaise 334

235,

Weimarer Kartell (Weimar Cartel) 186 Weltdeutsch (World German) 196 Wilhelmine Empire 26, 28 Worldview 14, 16, 19, 21, 23, 26, 28, 52 f., 68, 74, 140, 152, 155, 170 f., 174, 182, 185, 191, 241 f., 276 – 278, 282, 284, 298, 300, 312 f., 315, 323 – Christian worldview 44, 57, 292 – Materialist worldview 276, 278, 284 f., 288 – Socialist worldview 160, 252, 261 – Scientific worldview 17, 139, 144, 149, 182, 191, 194, 198, 279, 293, 312 Zentralverband deutscher Freidenkervereine (German Freethinkers’ League) 239 Zentralverband proletarischer Freidenker in Deutschland (Central Association of Proletarian Freethinkers in Germany, ZpFD) 243