It is seldom appreciated how closely in hand Romanticism went with social reform and revolution. Artists took inspiration from a wide variety of utopian thinkers, each with their cadres of disciples, propagating their dreams and demands in the Paris between the revolutions of 1830 and 1848. Spiced with proto-feminism and fanciful theologies, a practical impetus led to such things as the issue of cheap sheet music editions of the classics, in reach of the poor, and the organization of workers' choral societies. Of the latter, the Ophéon movement of Guillaume Wilhelm (1781 - 1842) was the most influential, taking rise in the 1830s to spread in successive decades throughout France.

Though hardly unsympathetic, Berlioz stood sardonically aloof from volatile amalgams of art and politics. As made abundantly clear in his 1844 novelette, Euphonia, the real revolution lay through an intense cultivation of music—technically and spiritually—of which amateur societies could be but mockeries. His populist vein, however, was almost certainly touched by news of a concert in 1860 in the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, at which 4000 visiting French choristers concluded with "God Save the Queen" and were met by their English audience, 15,000 strong, answering with the "Marseillaise."

When Jean-François Vaudin, latter-day leader of the Paris Orphéonistes, in the same year proposed to Berlioz a choral piece for performance the following year in the same venue for a double male choir singing a hymn of brotherhood simultaneously in French and English, he accepted. Le Temple universel was completed by February 1861. Though it went into rehearsal in Paris, it is doubtful that the ill and overworked Berlioz heard it. In any case, a dispute between Vaudin and the organizers of the Crystal Palace choral festival effectively removed it from the program. Berlioz revised it for a cappella male chorus and shortened it by 36 bars, probably for the July 1867 Paris Exposition, though his Hymne à la France was performed instead. A substantial piece whose sentiments—including the prophetic "Europe shall one day fly a single flag"—are quite large, Le Temple universel looms as a rather foursquare detour from the composition of the incandescent Béatrice et Bénédict. It is revealing that Berlioz did not see fit to include it, beside the Hymne à la France or La Menace des francs, in his 1863 Collection de 32 Mélodies.

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