Born Atheist, Buried Christian: The Case of Littré

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Down to Earth Series · 7 pages

From The Theosophist of August 1881, reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings III among the Miscellaneous Notes. It opens on the run of deaths that had marked the year — the assassination of President Garfield following the murder of the Emperor of Russia, the death of Rubinstein the pianist following that of the Belgian Vieuxtemps — and then turns to Maximilien Paul Émile Littré, academician, senator and the great French lexicographer, born in the first year of the century and just dead in his eighty-first year.

The portrait is admiring and the point is what was done with him afterwards. An eminent philologist who knew Sanskrit, Hebrew, Greek and Latin to perfection, Littré was a professed atheist all his life, a warm friend of Auguste Comte and a prominent promoter of his doctrines, of which he gave a synopsis in La Philosophie Positive and which he defended in a series of pamphlets. For years the doors of the Academy of Sciences were closed against him through the intrigues of Archbishop Dupanloup, the fiery Bishop of Orleans, in spite of his scientific standing. The title records what happened at the end — that a man who lived and argued as an atheist was buried as a Christian — and the exclamation set beneath it, Vive la libre pensée! Vive la liberté!, is the file's comment on that.

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