The Split, and Where the Tradition Actually Survived

Comte's followers divided over exactly the thing the chapel existed for. One party, led by Laffitte, accepted the religious system as the completion of the philosophy; another held that the cult, the calendar and the priesthood were an aberration of Comte's later years and that positivism should be taken as science and social theory without any of it. The chapel's foundation in 1881, a generation after Comte's death in 1857, marks the point at which the religious wing had consolidated enough to establish a physical centre, and it is the moment the Religion of Humanity stopped being a proposal in a book and became an organised practice with a building and a congregation. It did not become large. The most durable institutional home of the tradition turned out to be Brazil, where positivist temples were built from the turn of the twentieth century and where the movement had a real influence on republican politics, to the extent that the national motto on the Brazilian flag is drawn from Comte.

The atlas holds the Paris chapel as the first of these buildings and notes that the tradition's centre of gravity moved to South America within a generation of its founding. The Paris chapel is a listed building on the Rue Payenne and remains in the hands of the positivist body, which is a modest survival for a religion designed to replace Catholicism in the affections of Europe.