A French journalist who visited my house during the summer, remarked:
"The ideas were great in the French Revolution; it was not the men." I
replied: "I believe that the men of the French Revolution were great,
but not the ideas."
Of all the philosophical literature of the pre-revolutionary period,
what remains today?
What books exert influence? In France, excerpts from Montesquieu,
Diderot and Rousseau are still read in the schools, but outside of
France, they are read nowhere.
Only an extraordinary person would go away for the summer with
Montesquieu's _Esprit des Lois_, or Jean Jacques Rousseau's
_Emile_ in his grip. Montesquieu is demonstration of the fact that
a book cannot live entirely by virtue of correctness of style.
Of all the writers who enjoyed such fame in the eighteenth century, the
only one who will bear reading today is Voltaire--the Voltaire of the
_Dictionnaire Philosophique_ and of the novels.
Diderot, whom the French consider a great man, is of no interest
whatsoever to the modern mind, at least to the mind which is not French.
He is almost as dull as Rousseau. _La Religieuse_ is an utterly
false little book. Some years ago I loaned a copy to a young lady who
had just come from a convent. "I have never seen anything like this,"
she said to me. "It is a fantasy with no relation to the truth." That
was my idea. _Jacques, le fataliste_ is tiresome; _Le Neveu de
Rameau_ gives at first the impression that it is going to amount to
something, to something powerful such as the _Satiricon_ of
Petronius, or _El Buscón_ of Quevedo; but at the end, it is
nothing.
The only writer of the pre-revolutionary period who can be read today
with any pleasure--and this, perhaps, is because he does not attempt
anything--is Chamfort. His characters and anecdotes are sufficiently
highly flavoured to defy the action of time.