yEmile Saisset (1814-1863) is a philosopher today altogether forgotten, though he was emblematic of the "eclectic school" that dominated the teaching of philosophy in France from the 1820 to the 1860s. Within this school it was he who maintained a constant dialogue with Catholicism, and was, moreover, one of the most important representatives of philosophical spiritualism. This dialogue is based in part on the desire to define a new magisterium in post-revolutionary society, which takes into account both the tradition carried on by Christianity and the need to face "modernity". He dreamed of a philosophical concordat with Christianity. This undertaking was not without a certain strategy, and his contemporaries, like the philosophers towards the end of the century, did not fail to see in it an element of hypocrisy. In reality, there was also in his approach a "metaphysical anxiety", based on the modalities of ordering between faith and reason in a regime of opinion society. If Emile Saisset has been forgotten, it is because the historical sequence he embodies was buried under republican secularism. And yet, his thought and his action bear witness to the French construction of a spiritual and philosophical sense of political government.
