Victor Cousin

Victor Cousin, detail of an oil painting by L.-H. Mouchot; in the Musée National de Versailles et des Trianons, FranceCliché Musées Nationaux, Paris

Victor Cousin,  (born Nov. 28, 1792Paris—died Jan. 13, 1867Cannes, Fr.), French philosopher, educational reformer, and historian whose systematic eclecticism made him the best known French thinker in his time.

At the École Normale in 1811 Cousin was influenced by his studies of the philosophers P. Laromiguière, E.B. de Condillac, and John Locke. He was soon impressed also by the Common Sense school in Scottish philosophy and by François Maine de Biran and Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard, whose assistant he later became. After teaching briefly at the École Normale, Cousin travelled in Germany (1817–18), where he met and was influenced by G.W.F. Hegel and Friedrich Schelling. In 1820, after antiliberal political feeling grew in France, Cousin was deprived of his assistantship, and the École Normale was closed in 1822. He then went to Germany, where for six months he was imprisoned (1824–25) on a political charge still not identified. In the early 1820s he wrote Fragments philosophiques (1826), completed editions of the works of the Greek Neoplatonic philosopher Proclus and of René Descartes, and began his translation of the works of Plato.

Reinstated at the reopened École Normale (1826) in 1828, Cousin lectured on philosophy and won unprecedented popularity. For the next 20 years he dominated the field in France. He became a member of the council of public instruction (1830), of the Académie Française (1831), and of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques (1832). In 1832 he was named a peer of France and two years later was made a director of the École Normale. After a visit to Germany to study educational methods, he drafted the bill (presented by the statesman François Guizot in 1833) that brought about landmark reforms in French primary education. When Guizot became prime minister in 1840, Cousin was appointed minister of public instruction.

In addition to lectures and official duties, Cousin wrote prolifically. Although he developed no philosophical system uniquely his own but, rather, assembled a system from the works of others, he managed to change the emphasis in French philosophy from Materialism to Idealism. Positing God as creator and using the concept to unify disparate aspects of the world, he nevertheless turned to historical events to find evidence for God’s work in the world and was consequently attacked, particularly by Roman Catholics, for denying divine revelation. He has also been criticized for his arbitrary and simplistic division of all philosophy into four systematic types: sensualism, Idealism, Skepticism, and mysticism. He saw some truth in each of them. Stressing the need to embrace the areas of sensation, reason, and emotion in his own work, he borrowed from others those elements that best served his own purpose.

Among his other writings are De la métaphysique d’Aristote (1835); Du vrai, du beau et du bien (1836; “On the True, the Beautiful, and the Good”); Cours d’histoire de la philosophie moderne (1841–46; Eng. trans. 1852); and Des Pensées de Pascal (1843; “Of the Pensées of Pascal”). Cousin also wrote a series of studies of 17th-century women: Jacqueline Pascal (1845); La Jeunesse de Madame de Longueville (1853), with copious supplements; Madame de Sablé (1854); and Madame de Chevreuse et Madame de Hautefort (1856).