Not yet in English
No public-domain English edition of this book exists. The original is free to read below, and our English edition is still to come.
Read the original ↗1842 · French original
Études philosophiques sur le christianisme
by Auguste Nicolas
About the text. In the free French scan at least 1 word in 3631 is damaged — a floor, since we can check the characters but not the words in French. The full French text is public domain and free — linked below.
On this page: a summary of Études philosophiques sur le christianisme, and which translation this edition uses.
Auguste Nicolas was a provincial magistrate who drifted into unbelief and reasoned his way back, then set the whole argument down in four volumes that ran through edition after edition across the nineteenth century and were translated into most European languages. It is the most complete French statement of the case as a convert of the period saw it. A nineteenth-century English translation is reported, but no copy of one has surfaced.
The convert behind the argument
Nicolas was a judge at Bordeaux who lost his faith and recovered it by argument rather than by crisis, and wrote the Études as the record of the process — an unusually orderly conversion, presented as a course of reasoning that any reader could follow step by step.
Summary
The Études move through the ground an educated French Catholic of the 1840s would expect: the religious constitution of man, the fact of revelation, the divinity of Christ, and the church — each treated as a philosophical question rather than a devotional one, and answered by a writer who takes the objections of his own former position seriously because he had held them.
Its success was extraordinary. The work went through many editions in France, was translated into several European languages, and was for decades the standard gift for a doubting young man in Catholic households. Its subsequent disappearance from view is one of the more complete collapses of reputation in the history of the genre.
No public-domain English translation has been located, which is why it appears here in French. The 1855 and 1845 printings are freely downloadable at Archive.org.
Who was Auguste Nicolas?
Auguste Nicolas (1807–1888) was a French magistrate, born at Bordeaux, who served as a judge and later in the ministry of justice. He was not a professional theologian; the Études were the work of a layman writing out the reasoning that had settled his own mind.
The book made him a considerable public figure in French Catholic life, and he followed it with further works on related subjects over the following decades.
Which translation of Études philosophiques sur le christianisme is this?
A nineteenth-century English translation is reported — the Catholic Encyclopedia lists English among the languages the Études were turned into — but no copy has surfaced in the public-domain archives, and we have not found one anywhere. The French original is free at Archive.org in several printings. We have no English edition of this title and do not claim one.
Common questions
- Is Études philosophiques sur le christianisme available in English?
- Possibly, once. The work was widely translated in the nineteenth century, and the Catholic Encyclopedia lists English among those languages — but no English copy has surfaced in the public-domain archives and we have not been able to find one. The French original is free to read at Archive.org.
- Who was Auguste Nicolas?
- A French magistrate (1807–1888) who lost his faith and argued his way back to it, then published the reasoning as the Études philosophiques — a book that was enormously popular in nineteenth-century France and is now almost entirely forgotten.
A note on the text. Études philosophiques sur le christianisme is in the public domain. Its public-domain text is the Frenchoriginal — the English translations still in print are under copyright, so we can’t reprint them. Our own English edition is still to be made. The original text is also available free here.
That free scan shows at least 0.4 errors per 1,000 characters (OCR mistakes, stray marks, broken words). We publish the measurement so you can judge the free scan for yourself.
Related reading
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The Conversion of Marie-Alphonse Ratisbonne
Théodore de Bussières · 1842
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Ernest Psichari · 1916
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The same tradition
Note sur M. Bergson et la philosophie bergsonienne
Charles Péguy · 1914
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