Montpellier

A southern French university city where Auguste Comte was born in 1798, into a devoutly Catholic and royalist family he would spend his adult life defining himself against, in the name of science and social progress.

Montpellier had one of the oldest medical schools in Europe and a long habit of religious argument, having been Protestant and then forcibly Catholic again. Comte was born there in 1798 to royalist and devout parents and broke with both commitments early. He went to Paris, coined the word sociology, and set out a scheme in which human thought passes from the theological through the metaphysical to the positive. He then founded a religion of humanity with its own calendar of saints, which embarrassed his followers considerably.