Chapelle de l'Humanite, Paris

Auguste Comte concluded that a society could not hold together on scientific philosophy alone and that what it needed was a religion, so he designed one. The Religion of Humanity has an object of worship, the Great Being, meaning the whole community of human beings past, present and future considered as a single continuing entity to which every individual owes what they are. It has a priesthood, a calendar of thirteen months with each month and each day dedicated to a person who contributed to human progress, and a set of sacraments marking the stages of a life from presentation after birth to incorporation into the Great Being after death.

Comte set this out in the Catechism of Positive Religion in 1852, and Gertrud Lenzer's edition of his writings presents both the earlier scientific philosophy and the later religious system, which many of his own followers regarded as incompatible. The chapel on the Rue Payenne in the Marais was established in 1881 under Pierre Laffitte, Comte's designated successor, as the place where this designed religion was actually conducted, with services on the Positivist calendar and commemoration of the Great Being. It is one of the very few cases in the atlas of a religion whose founder wrote down the whole apparatus in advance, from the object of worship to the order of service, and whose followers then had to decide whether to perform it.

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.