Charlotte Clotilde Josephine Marie was born in Paris on April 3, 1815. She was the daughter of Simon Marie an infantry captain in Napoleon's Grande Armée from a modest background, and Henriette Josephine de Ficquelmont, poor, but from the nobility of Lorraine. The financial situation of her father, retired Captain Marie, was dire for a household with a wife and three children: Clotilde, Maximilian and Leon therefore, her father was given the office of tax collector in Méru near Paris to help him. Clotilde spent her childhood in Méru with her two younger brothers Maximilien and Leon. Clotilde de Vaux was educated at the Maison d'éducation de la Légion d'honneur. In 1835 she had a marriage of convenience with an Amédée de Vaux, who helped her father at his office of tax collector in Méru, but her husband turned out to be nothing but a rogue. After incurring enormous gambling debts, he eventually left his wife and fled to Belgium. According to the Code Civil of the time, women were unable to remarry without previously being divorced and, since no divorce had been issued, Clotilde was forbidden to do so. Consequently, she returned to Paris, first living with her parents before moving to her own place in Marais' rue Payenne. One of her uncles Karl Ludwig von Ficquelmont, Minister-president of the Austrian Empire, granted her a housing allowance. Clotilde decided to begin a writer's career and wrote short stories for literary magazines. In October 1844, when visiting her brother, Clotilde met one of his Polytechnique's Professors, philosopher Auguste Comte. The first known letter from Comte to Clotilde is dated April 30, 1845 and from that day on it was very clear that he was in love with her, a love which Clotilde, a fervent Catholic, firmly rejected. Nonetheless she agreed to follow up with their correspondence and Comte's passionate love kept growing until Clotilde suddenly died of tuberculosis a year later. Comte, recognizing her as his muse, was highly impressed by her high morals which gave him the key to understand the religious dimension of the human condition. But if Clotilde was a fervent Catholic, Comte only considered Catholicism to be a step towards the positive stage. Nonetheless, Clotilde's faith persuaded him to create a religion for positivist societies in order to fulfill the cohesive function once held by traditional worship.
Birth of the Religion of Humanity
In mourning after Clotilde's death, Comte dedicated himself to reorganise his previous philosophical system into a new positivist secular religion: the Positivist Church or Religion of Humanity. Comte's secular religion is no vague effusion of humanistic piety, but a complete system of belief and ritual, with a calendar reform called the 'positivist calendar', liturgy and sacraments, priesthood and pontiff, all organized around the public veneration of Humanity, the Nouveau Grand-Être Suprême made after Clotilde de Vaux.
In Système de politique positive, Auguste Comte expressed his idea of a " religion of Humanity ", whose pillars are:
*altruism, leading to generosity and selfless dedication to others.
*order : Comte thought that after the French Revolution, society needed restoration of order.
*progress : the consequences of industrial and technical breakthroughs for human societies.
In Catéchisme positiviste, Comte defined the Church of Humanity's sacraments :
Comte's "Religion of Humanity" was rather unsuccessful in France but has been very influential in Latin America, especially in Brazil and has inspired the rise of the "Church of Humanity" in England and its variant in New York City, both being extremely small today.
Clotilde de Vaux's writings
Pensées d'une fleur, poems
Lucie, series of short stories published in Le National
