1.
The leaders of thought in France did not look far forward into the
future or attempt to trace the definite lines on which the human race
might be expected to develop. They contented themselves with principles
and vague generalities, and they had no illusions as to the slowness of
the process of social amelioration; a rational morality, the condition
of improvement, was only in its infancy. A passage in a work of the Abbe
Morellet probably reflects faithfully enough the comfortable though not
extravagant optimism which was current. [Footnote: Reflexions sur les
avantages d'ecrire et d'imprimer sur les matieres de l'administration
(1764); in Melanges, vol. iii. p. 55. Morellet held, like d'Holbach,
that society is only the development and improvement of nature itself
(ib. p. 6).]
Let us hope for the amelioration of man's lot as a consequence of the
progress of the enlightenment (des lumieres) and labours of the
educated (des gens instruits); let us trust that the errors and even the
injustices of our age may not rob us of this consoling hope. The history
of society presents a continuous alternation of light and darkness,
reason and extravagance, humanity and barbarism; but in the succession
of ages we can observe good gradually increasing in ever greater
proportion. What educated man, if he is not a misanthrope or misled by
vain declamations, would really wish he had lived in the barbarous and
poetical time which Homer paints in such fair and terrifying colours?
Who regrets that he was not born at Sparta among those pretended heroes
who made it a virtue to insult nature, practised theft, and gloried in
the murder of a Helot; or at Carthage, the scene of human sacrifices,
or at Rome amid the proscriptions or under the rule of a Nero or a
Caligula? Let as agree that man advances, though slowly, towards light
and happiness.
But though the most influential writers were sober in speculating about
the future, it is significant of their effectiveness in diffusing the
idea of Progress that now for the first time a prophetic Utopia was
constructed. Hitherto, as I have before observed, ideal states
were either projected into the remote past or set in some distant,
vaguely-known region, where fancy could build freely. To project them
into the future was a new thing, and when in 1770 Sebastien Mercier
described what human civilisation would be in A.D. 2440, it was a
telling sign of the power which the idea of Progress was beginning to
exercise.
2.
Mercier has been remembered, or rather forgotten, as an inferior
dramatist. He was a good deal more, and the researches of M. Beclard
into his life and works enable us to appreciate him. If it is an
overstatement to say that his soul reflected in miniature the very
soul of his age, [Footnote: L. Beclard, Sebastien Mercier, sa vie,
son oeuvre, son temps (1903), p. vii.] he was assuredly one of its
characteristic products. He reminds us in some ways of the Abbe de
Saint-Pierre, who was one of his heroes. All his activities were urged
by the dream of a humanity regenerated by reason, all his energy devoted
to bringing about its accomplishment. Saint-Pierre's idea of perpetual
peace inspired an early essay on the scourge of war.
The theories of Rousseau exercised at first an irresistible attraction,
but modern civilisation had too strong a hold on him; he was too
Parisian in temper to acquiesce for long in the doctrine of Arcadianism.
He composed a book on The Savage to illustrate the text that the true
standard of morality is the heart of primitive man, and to prove that
the best thing we could do is to return to the forest; but in the
process of writing it he seems to have come to the conclusion that the
whole doctrine was fallacious. [Footnote: Mercier's early essay: Des
malheurs de la guerre et des avantages de la paix (1766). On the
savage: L'homme sauvage (1767). For the opposite thesis see the Songes
philosophiques (1768). He describes a state of perfect happiness in a
planet where beings live in perpetual contemplation of the infinite.
He appreciates the work of philosophers from Socrates to Leibnitz, and
describes Rousseau as standing before the swelling stream, but cursing
it. It may be suspected that the writings of Leibnitz had much to do
with Mercier's conversion.] The transformation of his opinions was the
work of a few months. He then came forward with the opposite thesis that
all events have been ordered for man's felicity, and he began to work on
an imaginary picture of the state to which man might find his way within
seven hundred years.
L'an 2440 was published anonymously at Amsterdam in 1770. [Footnote: The
author's name first appeared in the 3rd ed., 1799. A German translation,
by C. F. Weisse, was published in London in 1772. The English version,
by Dr. Hooper, appeared in the same year, and a new edition in 1802; the
translator changed the title to Memoirs of the year Two thousand five
hundred.] Its circulation in France was rigorously forbidden, because it
implied a merciless criticism of the administration. It was reprinted in
London and Neuchatel, and translated into English and German.
3.
As the motto of his prophetic vision Mercier takes the saying of
Leibnitz that "the present is pregnant of the future." Thus the phase of
civilisation which he imagines is proposed as the outcome of the natural
and inevitable march of history. The world of A.D. 2440 in which a man
born in the eighteenth century who has slept an enchanted sleep awakes
to find himself, is composed of nations who live in a family concord
rarely interrupted by war. But of the world at large we hear little;
the imagination of Mercier is concentrated on France, and particularly
Paris. He is satisfied with knowing that slavery has been abolished;
that the rivalry of France and England has been replaced by an
indestructible alliance; that the Pope, whose authority is still august,
has renounced his errors and returned to the customs of the primitive
Church; that French plays are performed in China. The changes in Paris
are a sufficient index of the general transformation.
The constitution of France is still monarchical. Its population has
increased by one half; that of the capital remains about the same. Paris
has been rebuilt on a scientific plan; its sanitary arrangements have
been brought to perfection; it is well lit; and every provision has been
made for the public safety. Private hospitality is so large that inns
have disappeared, but luxury at table is considered a revolting crime.
Tea, coffee, and tobacco are no longer imported. [Footnote: In the
first edition of the book commerce was abolished.] There is no system of
credit; everything is paid for in ready money, and this practice has
led to a remarkable simplicity in dress. Marriages are contracted only
through mutual inclination; dowries have been abolished. Education is
governed by the ideas of Rousseau, and is directed, in a narrow spirit,
to the promotion of morality. Italian, German, English, and Spanish
are taught in schools, but the study of the classical languages has
disappeared; Latin does not help a man to virtue. History too is
neglected and discouraged, for it is "the disgrace of humanity, every
page being crowded with crimes and follies." Theatres are government
institutions, and have become the public schools of civic duties and
morality. [Footnote: In 1769 Mercier began to carry out his programme of
composing and adapting plays for instruction and edification. His theory
of the true functions of the theatre he explained in a special treatise,
Du theatre ou Nouvel Essai sur l'art dramatique (1773).]
The literary records of the past had been almost all deliberately
destroyed by fire. It was found expedient to do away with useless
and pernicious books which only obscured truth or contained perpetual
repetitions of the same thing. A small closet in the public library
sufficed to hold the ancient books which were permitted to escape the
conflagration, and the majority of these were English. The writings of
the Abbe de Saint-Pierre were placed next those of Fenelon. "His pen was
weak, but his heart was sublime. Seven ages have given to his great and
beautiful ideas a just maturity. His contemporaries regarded him as a
visionary; his dreams, however, have become realities."
The importance of men of letters as a social force was a favourite theme
of Mercier, and in A.D. 2440 this will be duly recognised. But the State
control which weighed upon them so heavily in 1770 is not to be entirely
abolished. There is no preventive censorship to hinder publication, but
there are censors. There are no fines or imprisonment, but there are
admonitions. And if any one publishes a book defending principles which
are considered dangerous, he is obliged to go about in a black mask.
There is a state religion, Deism. There is probably no one who does
not believe in God. But if any atheist were discovered, he would be put
through a course of experimental physics. If he remained obdurate in his
rejection of a "palpable and salutary truth," the nation would go into
mourning and banish him from its borders.
Every one has to work, but labour no longer resembles slavery. As there
are no monks, nor numerous domestics, nor useless valets, nor work-men
employed on the production of childish luxuries, a few daily hours of
labour are sufficient for the public wants. Censors inquire into men's
capacities, assign tasks to the unemployed, and if man be found fit for
nothing but the consumption of food he is banished from the city.
These are some of the leading features of the ideal future to which
Mercier's imagination reached. He did not put it forward as a final
term. Later ages, he said, will go further, for "where can the
perfectibility of man stop, armed with geometry and the mechanical
arts and chemistry?" But in his scanty prophecies of what science might
effect he showed curiously little resource. The truth is that this
had not much interest for him, and he did not see that scientific
discoveries might transmute social conditions. The world of 2440, its
intolerably docile and virtuous society, reflects two capital weaknesses
in the speculation of the Encyclopaedist period: a failure to allow
for the strength of human passions and interests, and a deficient
appreciation of the meaning of liberty. Much as the reformers acclaimed
and fought for toleration, they did not generally comprehend the value
of the principle. They did not see that in a society organised and
governed by Reason and Justice themselves, the unreserved toleration
of false opinions would be the only palladium of progress; or that
a doctrinaire State, composed of perfectly virtuous and deferential
people, would arrest development and stifle origiality, by its ungenial
if mild tyranny. Mercier's is no exception to the rule that ideal
societies are always repellent; and there are probably few who would
not rather be set down in Athens in the days of the "vile" Aristophanes,
whose works Mercier condemned to the flames, than in his Paris of 2440.
4.
That Bohemian man of letters, Restif de la Bretonne, whose unedifying
novels the Parisians of 2440 would assuredly have rejected from their
libraries, published in 1790 a heroic comedy representing how marriages
would be arranged in "the year 2000," by which epoch he conceived that
all social equalities would have disappeared in a fraternal society
and twenty nations be allied to France under the wise supremacy of "our
well-beloved monarch Louis Francois XXII." It was the Revolution that
converted Restif to the conception of Progress, for hitherto his master
had been Rousseau; but it can hardly be doubted that the motif and title
of his play were suggested by the romance of Mercier. L'an 2440 and L'an
2000 are the first examples of the prophetic fiction which Mr. Edward
Bellamy's Looking Backward was to popularise a hundred years later.
The Count de Volney's Ruins was another popular presentation of the
hopes which the theory of Progress had awakened in France. Although
the work was not published till after the outbreak of the Revolution,
[Footnote: Les Ruines des empires, 1789. An English translation ran to
a second edition (1795).] the plan had been conceived some years before.
Volney was a traveller, deeply interested in oriental and classical
antiquities, and, like Louis Le Roy, he approached the problem of man's
destinies from the point of view of a student of the revolutions of
empires.
The book opens with melancholy reflections amid the ruins of Palmyra.
"Thus perish the works of men, and thus do nations and empires vanish
away... Who can assure us that desolation like this will not one day be
the lot of our own country?" Some traveller like himself will sit by the
banks of the Seine, the Thames, or the Zuyder Zee, amid silent ruins,
and weep for a people inurned and their greatness changed into an empty
name. Has a mysterious Deity pronounced a secret malediction against the
earth?
In this disconsolate mood he is visited by an apparition, who unveils
the causes of men's misfortunes and shows that they are due to
themselves. Man is governed by natural invariable laws, and he has only
to study them to know the springs of his destiny, the causes of his
evils and their remedies. The laws of his nature are self-love, desire
of happiness, and aversion to pain; these are the simple and prolific
principles of everything that happens in the moral world. Man is the
artificer of his own fate. He may lament his weakness and folly; but "he
has perhaps still more reason to be confident in his energies when he
recollects from what point he has set out and to what heights he has
been capable of elevating himself."
The supernatural visitant paints a rather rosy picture of the ancient
Egyptian and Assyrian kingdoms. But it would be a mistake to infer from
their superficial splendour that the inhabitants generally were wise
or happy. The tendency of man to ascribe perfection to past epochs is
merely "the discoloration of his chagrin." The race is not degenerating;
its misfortunes are due to ignorance and the mis-direction of self-love.
Two principal obstacles to improvement have been the difficulty of
transmitting ideas from age to age, and that of communicating them
rapidly from man to man. These have been removed by the invention of
printing. The press is "a memorable gift of celestial genius." In time
all men will come to understand the principles of individual happiness
and public felicity. Then there will be established among the peoples of
the earth an equilibrium of forces; there will be no more wars, disputes
will be decided by arbitration, and "the whole species will become one
great society, a single family governed by the same spirit and by common
laws, enjoying all the felicity of which human nature is capable." The
accomplishment of this will be a slow process, since the same leaven
will have to assimilate an enormous mass of heterogeneous elements, but
its operation will be effectual.
Here the genius interrupts his prophecy and exclaims, turning toward the
west, "The cry of liberty uttered on the farther shores of the Atlantic
has reached to the old continent." A prodigious movement is then visible
to their eyes in a country at the extremity of the Mediterranean;
tyrants are overthrown, legislators elected, a code of laws is drafted
on the principles of equality, liberty, and justice. The liberated
nation is attacked by neighbouring tyrants, but her legislators propose
to the other peoples to hold a general assembly, representing the whole
world, and weigh every religious system in the balance. The proceedings
of this congress follow, and the book breaks off incomplete.
It is not an arresting book; to a reader of the present day it is
positively tedious; but it suited contemporary taste, and, appearing
when France was confident that her Revolution would renovate the earth,
it appealed to the hopes and sentiments of the movement. It made no
contribution to the doctrine of Progress, but it undoubtedly helped to
popularise it.