The philosophical and political commitments of Eugène Catalan

In 1865 the French mathematician Eugène Catalan was appointed professor at the University of Liege. In the nineteenth century the Belgian government developed a policy of attracting famous foreign scholars, mainly coming from the German principalities and France, in order to bring the education system to a higher level. In this case, however, the appointment had an outspoken political and philosophical dimension. Catalan sought and found refuge in Belgium because his career prospects in France were severely hindered due to his strong republican and anti-Bonapartist viewpoints.
In a speech he gave at the University’s Academic Hall on the occasion of his retirement on December 7, 1881, Catalan emphasized he had two passions in life: la Politique militante et les Mathématiques [“Militant Politics and Mathematics”].
In this paper, we investigate the first of these passions against the background of the revolutionary tensions of the time on the basis of a series of primary sources: first, a brochure edited by Catalan himself at the end of his life, entitled Miettes littéraires et politiques, par un vieux mathématicien (Liège, 1889); second, Catalan’s correspondence, covering several decades, and preserved at the Manuscripts Department of the University of Liège; third, a journal kept by Catalan during the years 1858 to 1862, entitled Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris.
An in-depth analysis of these sources allows us to discover Catalan’s own perception of his political and philosophical commitments, the reasons behind his involvement in the revolutionary uprisings of 1830, 1848 and 1851, the exact nature of his activism, his interpretation of the republican ideal, his political hopes and deceptions, his view on both French and European social and political realities, his struggle with the Catholic Church, the meaning of his engagement in Freemasonry.