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I was introduced to their chiefs, Bazard and Enfantin, in 1830; and as long as their public teachings and proselytism continued, I read nearly everything they wrote.
Bazard charged Enfantin with denying Christian marriage, and with holding loose notions on the subject. Enfantin replied that he neither denied nor affirmed Christian marriage; that in enacting the existing law on the subject man alone had been consulted, and he could not recognize it as law till woman had given her consent to it.
The brilliant suggestions of Saint-Simon, the writings of Bazard and Enfantin, the vagaries of Fourier, might be dismissed as curious rather than serious propositions, but the massive system wrought out by Comte's speculative genius his organic scheme of human knowledge, his elaborate analysis of history, his new science of sociology was a great fact with which European thought was forced to reckon.
Bazard was about marrying his daughter, and he proposed to place her marriage under the protection of the existing French laws. Enfantin opposed his doing so, and called it a sinful compliance with the prejudices of the world.
The Saint-Simonian society, he maintained, was a State, a kingdom within itself, and should be governed by its own laws and its own chiefs without any recognition of those without. Bazard persisted, and had the marriage of his daughter solemnized in a legal manner, and for aught I know, according to the rites of the Church. A great scandal followed.
These and many others were in the sect; whose chiefs, after the death of its founder, were Bazard, a Liberal and a practical man, who killed himself; and Enfantin, who after the dissolution of the sect sought employment in the service of the Viceroy of Egypt, and occupies now some important post in connection with the French railways.
His disciples enlarged upon the hints of the master, and attributed to him ideas which he never entertained. They endeavored to reduce his hints to a complete system of religion, philosophy, and social organization. Their chiefs, I have said, were Amand Bazard and Barthélemy Prosper Enfantin....
As yet the society was only provisionally organized, inasmuch as they had not yet found the Mère Suprême. The law on marriage must emanate conjointly from the Supreme Father and the Supreme Mother, and it would be irregular and a usurpation for the Supreme Father to undertake alone to legislate on the subject. Bazard would not submit, and went out and shot himself.
The Saint-Simonians, therefore, proposed to place by the side of their sovereign Father at the summit of their hierarchy a sovereign Mother. The man to be sovereign Father they found; but a woman to be sovereign Mother, Mère Suprême, they found not. This caused great embarrassment, and a split between Bazard and Enfantin.
Bazard took the lead in what related to the external, political, and economical organization, and Enfantin in what regarded doctrine and worship. The philosophy or theology of the sect or school was derived principally from Hegel, and was a refined Pantheism.
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