Caroline Massin (2 July 1802 – 27 January 1877) was a French seamstress known for her tempestuous marriage with the philosopher Auguste Comte during the most creative period of his life.

After his death Caroline encouraged a sympathetic biographer of Comte and helped launch a magazine devoted to his philosophy of positivism.

[3] She was running a bookshop or reading room in 1822 when Auguste Comte met her through a mutual friend, a young and liberal lawyer named Antoine Cerclet.

In the autumn of 1823 Comte began giving Caroline mathematics lessons at her apartment, and they became intimate.

His best friend Pierre Valat wrote that she had great charm and high intelligence, and was passionately loved by Comte.

She returned to Paris to get help from Cerclet, and he was able to find a place at the asylum run by the psychiatrist Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol.

[12] Louis Massin, Caroline's father, had appeared just before Comte's breakdown to ask her for money.

She refused, and in revenge he slandered her to Comte's very respectable parents, telling them her infidelities had driven their son mad.

The family tried to obtain an "interdiction", which would remove Comte's legal rights and place him under the care of his father.

[14] Rosalie Comte stayed in Paris for six months, spending much time with Caroline, and began to feel her daughter-in-law had been maligned.

In March 1827 Comte tried to kill himself by jumping into the Seine from a bridge, but was prevented by a passing royal guard.

[16] After his second attempt at suicide he decided he had been saved so he could undertake his life's work, the description of a positivist philosophy.

For seventeen years I have been married, as a result of an unfortunate love to a woman of rare moral and intellectual qualities, but brought up under blameworthy principles and with a false notion of the essential function that her sex must play in the human economy.

Her total lack of affection for me has never made it possible for me to overlook either her resistance to my authority or her despotic character.

There have been none of the compensations of a loving disposition, the only special quality in which women are irreplaceable, and the power of which modern anarchy prevents them from appreciating as they should.

Thus, my philosophical endeavors have been carried on and completed not only in the face of material difficulties, as you know, but also in the midst of more painful and absorbing disturbances, the result of an almost constant civil war of the most intimate kind, the confrontation in the home.

The event which has just taken place makes me hope that from now on, even if I lack the happiness at home for which I was made but which I had to give up a long time ago, I shall at least have the sad peace of my loneliness that now completely envelops me.

[28] After Comte was dismissed from the École Polytechnique in 1844, his English collaborator John Stuart Mill gave him some immediate funds and arranged for three of his wealthy friends to provide him with a pension.

[30] Due to the breakdown of their marriage, and because he had fallen in love with another woman, Clotilde de Vaux, Comte later tried to destroy her reputation.

[1] Comte blamed Caroline for causing his mental breakdown in 1826-27, which he claimed had cost him four years of lost productive time.

[31] [b] Caroline heard of Comte's death in September 1857 and attended the commemorative ceremony in his apartment, to the horror of his disciples.

The marriage contract between her and Comte said she had contributed 20,000 francs to the household, and she exerted the rights to this amount in cash or property.

She encouraged Littré to write a biography of Comte in which he would promote his scientific positivism, but discredit the last years of his life when his mind was degenerating.

[35] She also helped establish the Revue de la Philosophie Positive, which was effective in consolidating Comte's reputation.