FRENCH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
1. The fruits of the intellectual movement of the seventeenth
century are seen beginning to take form on the very threshold of
the eighteenth. In 1700, at the height of the reign of the King's
confessors, there was privately printed the Lettre d'Hippocrate à
Damagète, described as "the first French work openly destructive
of Christianity." It was ascribed to the Comte de Boulainvilliers,
a pillar of the feudal system. [926] Thus early is the sound of
disintegration heard in the composite fabric of Church and State;
and various fissures are seen in all parts of the structure. The king
himself, so long morally discredited, could only discredit pietism by
his adoption of it; the Jansenists and the Molinists [i.e., the school
of Molina, not of Molinos] fought incessantly; even on the side of
authority there was bitter dissension between Bossuet and Fénelon;
[927] and the movement of mysticism associated with the latter came
to nothing, though he had the rare credit of converting, albeit
to a doubtful orthodoxy, the emotional young Scotch deist Chevalier
Ramsay. [928] Where the subtlety of Fénelon was not allowed to operate,
the loud dialectic of Bossuet could not avail for faith as against
rationalism, whatever it might do to upset the imperfect logic of
Protestant sects. In no society, indeed, does mere declamation play
a larger part than in that of modern France; but in no society, on
the other hand, is mere declamation more sure to be disdained and
derided by the keener spirits. In the years of disaster and decadence
which rounded off in gloom the life of the Grand Monarque, with
defeat dogging his armies and bankruptcy threatening his finances,
the spirit of criticism was not likely to slacken. Literary polemic,
indeed, was hardly to be thought of at such a time, even if it had
been safe. In 1709 the king destroyed the Jansenist seminary of Port
Royal, wreaking an ignoble vengeance on the very bones of the dead
there buried; and more heretical thinkers had need go warily.
Yet even in those years of calamity, perhaps by reason of the very
stress of it, some freethinking books somehow passed the press,
though a system of police espionage had been built up by the king,
step for step with some real reforms in the municipal government
of Paris. The first was a romance of the favourite type, in which a
traveller discovers a strange land inhabited by surprisingly rational
people. Such appear to have been the Histoire de Calejava, by Claude
Gilbert, produced at Dijon in 1700, and the imaginary travels of
Juan de Posos, published at Amsterdam in 1708. Both of these were
promptly suppressed; the next contrived to get into circulation. The
work of Symon Tyssot de Patot, Voyages et Avantures de Jacques Massé,
published in 1710, puts in the mouths of priests of the imaginary
land discovered by the traveller such mordant arguments against the
idea of a resurrection, the story of the fall, and other items of
the Christian creed, that there could be small question of the deism
of the author; [929] and the prefatory Lettre de l'éditeur indicates
misgivings. The Réflexions sur les grands hommes qui sont morts en
plaisantant, by Deslandes, ostensibly published at Amsterdam in 1712,
seems to have had a precarious circulation, inasmuch as Brunet never
saw the first edition. To permit of the issue of such a book as Jacques
Massé--even at Bordeaux--the censure must have been notably lax; as
it was again in the year of the king's death, when there appeared a
translation of Collins's Discourse of Freethinking. For the moment
the Government was occupied over an insensate renewal of the old
persecution of Protestants, promulgating in 1715 a decree that all
who died after refusing the sacraments should be refused burial,
and that their goods should be confiscated. The edict seems to have
been in large measure disregarded.
2. At the same time the continuous output of apologetics testified
to the gathering tide of unbelief. The Benedictine Lami followed
up his attack on Spinoza with a more popular treatise, L'Incrédule
amené à la religion par la raison (1710); the Abbé Genest turned
Descartes into verse by way of Preuves naturelles de l'existence de
Dieu et de l'immortalité de l'âme (1716); and the Anti-Lucretius of
Cardinal Polignac (1661-1741), though only posthumously published
in full (1745), did but pass on to the next age, when deism was the
prevailing heresy, a deistic argument against atheism. It is difficult
to see any Christian sentiment in that dialectic performance of a
born diplomatist. [930]
When the old king died, even the fashion of conformity passed
away among the upper classes; [931] and the feverish manufacture of
apologetic works testifies to an unslackened activity of unbelief. In
1719 Jean Denyse, professor of philosophy at the college of Montaigu,
produced La vérité de la religion chrétienne demontrée par ordre
géométrique (a title apparently suggested by Spinoza's early exposition
of Descartes), without making any permanent impression on heterodox
opinion. Not more successful, apparently, was the performance of the
Abbé Houteville, first published in 1722. [932] Much more amiable
in tone, and more scientific in temper, than the common run of
defences, it was found, says an orthodox biographical dictionary,
to be "better fitted to make unbelievers than to convert them,"
seeing that "objections were presented with much force and fulness,
and the replies with more amenity than weight." [933] That the
Abbé was in fact not rigorously orthodox might almost be suspected
from his having been appointed, in the last year of his life (1742),
"perpetual secretary" to the Académie, an office which somehow tended
to fall to more or less freethinking members, being held before him
by the Abbé Dubos, and after him by Mirabaud, the Abbé Duclos, [934]
D'Alembert, and Marmontel. The Traités des Premières Veritéz of the
Jesuit Father Buffier (1724) can hardly have been more helpful to
the faith. [935] Another experiment by way of popularizing orthodoxy,
the copious Histoire du peuple de Dieu, by the Jesuit Berruyer, first
published in 1728, [936] had little better fortune, inasmuch as it
scandalized the orthodox by its secularity of tone without persuading
the freethinkers. Condemned by the Bishop of Montpellier in 1731,
it was censured by Rome in 1734; and the second part, produced long
afterwards, aroused even more antagonism.
3. There was thus no adaptation on the side of the Church to the forces
which in an increasing degree menaced her rule. Under the regency of
Orléans (1715-1723), the open disorder of the court on the one hand
and the ruin of the disastrous financial experiment of Law on the
other were at least favourable to toleration; but under the Duc de
Bourbon, put in power and soon superseded by Fleury (bishop of Fréjus
and tutor of Louis XV; later cardinal) there was a renewal of the
rigours against the Protestants and the Jansenists; the edict of 1715
was renewed; emigration recommenced; and only public outcry checked
the policy of persecution on that side. But Fleury and the king went
on fighting the Jansenists; and while this embittered strife of the
religious sections could not but favour the growth of freethought,
it was incompatible alike with official tolerance of unbelief and
with any effectual diffusion of liberal culture. Had the terrorism and
the waste of Louis XIV been followed by a sane system of finance and
one of religious toleration; and had not the exhausted and bankrupt
country been kept for another half century--save for eight years
of peace and prosperity from 1748 to 1755--on the rack of ruinous
wars, alike under the regency of Orléans and the rule of Louis XV,
the intellectual life might have gone fast and far. As it was, war
after war absorbed its energy; and the debt of five milliards left
by Louis XIV was never seriously lightened. Under such a system the
vestiges of constitutional government were gradually swept away.
4. As the new intellectual movement began to find expression, then, it
found the forces of resistance more and more organized. In particular,
the autocracy long maintained the severest checks on printing, so that
freethought could not save by a rare chance attain to open speech. Any
book with the least tendency to rationalism had to seek printers, or
at least publishers, in Holland. Huard, in publishing his anonymous
translation of the Hypotyposes of Sextus Empiricus (1725), is careful
to say in his preface that he "makes no application of the Pyrrhonian
objections to any dogma that may be called theological"; but he goes
on to add that the scandalous quarrels of Christian sects are well
fitted to confirm Pyrrhonists in their doubts, the sects having no
solid ground on which to condemn each other. As such an assertion was
rank heresy, the translation had to be issued in Amsterdam, and even
there without a publisher's name. [937] And still it remains clear that
the age of Louis XIV had passed on to the next a heritage of hidden
freethinking, as well as one of debt and misgovernment. What takes
place thereafter is rather an evolution of and a clerical resistance
to a growth known to have begun previously, and always feared and
hated, than any new planting of unbelief in orthodox soil. As we
have seen, indeed, a part of the early work of skepticism was done
by distinguished apologists. Huet, dying in 1722, left for posthumous
publication his Traité philosophique de la faiblesse de l'esprit humain
(1723). It was immediately translated into English and German; and
though it was probably found somewhat superfluous in deistic England,
and supersubtle in Lutheran Germany, it helped to prepare the ground
for the active unbelief of the next generation in France.
5. A continuous development may be traced throughout the
century. Montesquieu, who in his early Persian Letters (1721) had
revealed himself as "fundamentally irreligious" [938] and a censor
of intolerance, [939] proceeded in his masterly little book on the
Greatness and Decadence of the Romans (1734) and his famous Spirit of
Laws (1748) to treat the problems of human history in an absolutely
secular and scientific spirit, making only such conventional allusions
to religion as were advisable in an age in which all heretical works
were suppressible. [940] The attempts of La Harpe and Villemain [941]
to establish the inference that he repented his youthful levity in the
Persian Letters, and recognized in Christianity the main pillar of
society, will not bear examination. The very passages on which they
found [942] are entirely secular in tone and purpose, and tell of
no belief. [943] So late as 1751 there appeared a work, Les Lettres
Persanes convaincues d'impiété, by the Abbé Gaultier. The election
of Montesquieu was in fact the beginning of the struggle between
the Philosophe party in the Academy and their opponents; [944]
and in his own day there was never much doubt about Montesquieu's
deism. In his posthumous Pensées his anti-clericalism is sufficiently
emphatic. "Churchmen," he writes, "are interested in keeping the
people ignorant." He expresses himself as a convinced deist, and,
with no great air of conviction, as a believer in immortality. But
there his faith ends. "I call piety," he says, "a malady of the heart,
which plants in the soul a malady of the most ineradicable kind." "The
false notion of miracles comes of our vanity, which makes us believe
we are important enough for the Supreme Being to upset Nature on
our behalf." "Three incredibilities among incredibilities: the pure
mechanism of animals [the doctrine of Descartes]; passive obedience;
and the infallibility of the Pope." [945] His heresy was of course
divined by the guardians of the faith, through all his panegyric of
it. Even in his lifetime, Jesuits and Jansenists combined to attack
the Spirit of Laws, which was denounced at an assembly of the clergy,
put on the Roman Index, and prohibited by the censure until Malesherbes
came into office in 1750. [946] The Count de Cataneo, a Venetian noble
in the service of the King of Prussia, published in French about 1751
a treatise on The Source, the Strength, and the True Spirit of Laws,
[947] in which the political rationalism and the ethical utilitarianism
of Cumberland and Grotius were alike repelled as irreconcilable
with the doctrine of revelation. It was doubtless because of this
atmosphere of hostility that on the death of Montesquieu at Paris, in
1755, Diderot was the only man of letters who attended his funeral,
[948] though the Académie performed a commemorative service. [949]
Nevertheless, Montesquieu was throughout his life a figure in "good
society," and suffered no molestation apart from the outcry against
his books. He lived under a tradition of private freethinking and
public clericalism, even as did Molière in the previous century; and
where the two traditions had to clash, as at interment, the clerical
dominion affirmed itself. But even in the Church there were always
successors of Gassendi, to wit, philosophic unbelievers, as well as
quiet friends of toleration. And it was given to an obscure Churchman
to show the way of freethought to a generation of lay combatants.
6. One of the most comprehensive freethinking works of the century, the
Testament of Jean Meslier, curé of Etrépigny, in Champagne (d. 1723,
1729, or 1733), though it inspired numbers of eighteenth-century
freethinkers who read it in manuscript, was never printed till
1861-64. It deserves here some special notice. [950] At his death, by
common account, Meslier left two autograph copies of his book, after
having deposited a third copy in the archives of the jurisdiction of
Sainte-Menehould. By a strange chance one was permitted to circulate,
and ultimately there were some hundred copies in Paris, selling at ten
louis apiece. As he told on the wrapper of the copy he left for his
parishioners, he had not dared to speak out during his life; but he
had made full amends. He is recorded to have been an exceptionally
charitable priest, devoted to his parishioners, whose interests
he indignantly championed against a tyrannous lord of the manor;
[951] apropos of Descartes's doctrine of animal automatism, which he
fiercely repudiates, he denounces with deep feeling all cruelty to
animals, at whose slaughter for food he winces; and his book reveals
him as a man profoundly impressed at once by the sufferings of the
people under heartless kings and nobles, and the immense imposture of
religion which, in his eyes, maintained the whole evil system. Some
men before him had impugned miracles, some the gospels, some dogma,
some the conception of deity, some the tyranny of kings. He impugns
all; and where nearly all the deists had eulogized the character of
the Gospel Jesus, the priest envelops it in his harshest invective.
He must have written during whole years, with a sombre, invincible
patience, dumbly building up, in his lonely leisure, his unfaltering
negation of all that the men around him held for sacred, and
that he was sworn to preach--the whole to be his testament to his
parishioners. In the slow, heavy style--the style of a cart horse,
Voltaire called it--there is an indubitable sincerity, a smouldering
passion, but no haste, no explosion. The long-drawn, formless, prolix
sentences say everything that can be said on their theme; and when
the long book was done it was slowly copied, and yet again copied, by
the same heavy, unwearying hand. He had read few books, it seems--only
the Bible, some of the Fathers, Montaigne, the "Turkish Spy," Naudé,
Charron, Pliny, Tournémine on atheism, and Fénelon on the existence of
God, with some history, and Moreri's Dictionary; but he had re-read
them often. He does not cite Bayle; and Montaigne is evidently his
chief master. But on his modest reading he had reached as absolute a
conviction of the untruth of the entire Judæo-Christian religion as any
freethinker ever had. Moved above all by his sense of the corruption
and misrule around him, he sets out with a twofold indictment against
religion and government, of which each part sustains the other, and
he tells his parishioners how he had been "hundreds of times" [952]
on the point of bursting out with an indignant avowal of his contempt
for the rites he was compelled to administer, and the superstitions
he had to inculcate. Then, in a grimly-planned order, he proceeds to
demolish, section by section, the whole structure.
Religions in general he exhibits as tissues of error, illusion, and
imposture, the endless sources of troubles and strifes for men. Their
historical proofs and documentary bases are then assailed, and the
gospels in particular are ground between the slow mill-stones of
his dialectic; miracles, promises, and prophecies being handled in
turn. The ethic and the doctrine are next assailed all along the line,
from their theoretic bases to their political results; and the kings
of France fare no better than their creed. As against the theistic
argument of Fénelon, the entire theistic system is then oppugned,
sometimes with precarious erudition, generally with cumbrous but
solid reasoning; and the eternity of matter is affirmed with more than
Averroïstic conviction, the Cartesians coming in for a long series of
heavy blows. Immortality is further denied, as miracles had been; and
the treatise ends with a stern affirmation of its author's rectitude,
and, as it were, a massive gesture of contempt for all that will be
said against him when he has passed into the nothingness which he is
nearing. "I have never committed any crime," he writes, [953] "nor
any bad or malicious action: I defy any man to make me on this head,
with justice, any serious reproach"; but he quotes from the Psalms,
with grim zest, phrases of hate towards workers of iniquity. There
is not even the hint of a smile at the astonishing bequest he was
laying up for his parishioners and his country. He was sure he would
be read, and he was right. The whole polemic of the next sixty years,
the indictment of the government no less than that of the creed,
is laid out in his sombre treatise.
To the general public, however, he was never known save by the
"Extract"--really a deistic adaptation--made by Voltaire, [954] and
the re-written summary by d'Holbach and Diderot entitled Le Bon Sens
du Curé Meslier (1772). [955] Even this publicity was delayed for
a generation, since Voltaire, who heard of the Testament as early
as 1735, seems to have made no use of it till 1762. But the entire
group of fighting freethinkers of the age was in some sense inspired
by the old priest's legacy.
7. Apart from this direct influence, too, others of the cloth bore
some part in the general process of enlightenment. A good type of
the agnostic priest of the period was the Abbé Terrasson, the author
of the philosophic romance Sethos (1732), who died in 1750. Not very
judicious in his theory of human evolution (which he represented as a
continuous growth from a stage of literary infancy, seen in Homer),
he adopted the Newtonian theory at a time when the entire Academy
stood by Cartesianism. Among his friends he tranquilly avowed his
atheism. [956] He died "without the sacraments," and when asked whether
he believed all the doctrine of the Church, he replied that for him
that was not possible. [957] Another anti-clerical Abbé was Gaidi,
whose poem, La Religion à l'Assemblé du Clergé de France (1762),
was condemned to be burned. [958]
Among or alongside of such disillusioned Churchmen there must have
been a certain number who, desiring no breach with the organization
to which they belonged, saw the fatal tendency of the spirit of
persecution upon which its rulers always fell back in their struggle
with freethought, and sought to open their eyes to the folly and
futility of their course. Freethinkers, of course, had to lead the
way, as we have seen. It was the young Turgot who in 1753 published
two powerful Lettres sur la tolérance, and in 1754 a further series of
admirable Lettres d'un ecclésiastique à un magistrat, pleading the same
cause. [959] But similar appeals were anonymously made, by a clerical
pen, at a moment when the Church was about to enter on a new and
exasperating conflict with the growing band of freethinking writers who
rallied round Voltaire. The small book of Questions sur la tolérance,
ascribed to the Abbé Tailhé or Tailhié and the canonist Maultrot
(Geneva, 1758), is conceived in the very spirit of rationalism, yet
with a careful concern to persuade the clergy to sane courses, and is
to this day worth reading as a utilitarian argument. But the Church
was not fated to be led by such light. The principle of toleration
was left to become the watchword of freethought, while the Church
identified herself collectively with that of tyranny.
Anecdotes of the time reveal the coincidence of tyranny and evasion,
intolerance and defiance. Of Nicolas Boindin (1676-1751), procureur
in the royal Bureau des Finances, who was received into the Academy of
Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres in 1706, it is told that he "would have
been received in the French Academy if the public profession he made
of being an atheist had not excluded him." [960] But the publicity
was guarded. When he conversed with the young Marmontel [961] and
others at the Café Procope, they used a conversational code in which
the soul was called Margot, religion Javotte, liberty Jeanneton,
and the deity Monsieur de l'Être. Once a listener of furtive aspect
asked Boindin who might be this Monsieur de l'Être who behaved so ill,
and with whom they were so displeased? "Monsieur," replied Boindin,
"he is a police spy"--such being the avocation of the questioner. [962]
"The morals of Boindin," says a biographical dictionary of the period,
"were as pure as those of an atheist can be; his heart was generous;
but to these virtues he joined presumption and the obstinacy which
follows from it, a bizarre humour, and an unsociable character." [963]
Other testimonies occur on the first two heads, not on the last. But he
was fittingly refused "Christian" interment, and was buried by night,
"sans pompe."
8. With the ground prepared as we have seen, freethought was bound
to progress in France in the age of Louis XV; but it chanced that
the lead fell into the hands of the most brilliant and fecund of all
the writers of the century. Voltaire [964] (1694-1778) was already
something of a freethinker when a mere child. So common was deism
already become in Paris at the end of the seventeenth century that his
godfather, an abbé, is said to have taught him, at the age of three,
a poem by J. B. Rousseau, [965] then privately circulated, in which
Moses in particular and religious revelations in general are derided
as fraudulent. [966] Knowing this poem by heart in his childhood,
the boy was well on the way to his life's work. It is on record
that many of his school-fellows were, like himself, already deists,
though his brother, a juvenile Jansenist, made vows to propitiate
the deity on the small unbeliever's behalf. [967] It may have been
a general reputation for audacious thinking that led to his being
charged with the authorship of a stinging philippic published in
1715, after the death of Louis XIV. The unknown author, a young man,
enumerated the manifold abuses and iniquities of the reign, concluding:
"I have seen all these, and I am not twenty years old." Voltaire was
then twenty-two; but D'Argenson, who in the poem had been called
"the enemy of the human race," finding no likelier author for the
verses, put him under surveillance and exiled him from Paris; and on
his imprudent return imprisoned him for nearly a year in the Bastille
(1716), releasing him only when the real author of the verses avowed
himself. Unconquerable then as always, Voltaire devoted himself in
prison to his literary ambitions, planning his Henriade and completing
his OEdipe, which was produced in 1718 with signal success.
Voltaire was thus already a distinguished young poet and dramatist
when, in 1726, after enduring the affronts of an assault by a
nobleman's lacqueys, and of imprisonment in the Bastille for seeking
amends by duel, he came to England, where, like Deslandes before him,
he met with a ready welcome from the freethinkers. [968] Four years
previously, in the powerful poem, For and Against, [969] he had
put his early deistic conviction in a vehement impeachment of the
immoral creed of salvation and damnation, making the declaration,
"I am not a Christian." Thus what he had to learn in England was
not deism, but the physics of Newton and the details of the deist
campaign against revelationism; and these he mastered. [970] Not
only was he directly and powerfully influenced by Bolingbroke, who
became his intimate friend, but he read widely in the philosophic,
scientific, and deistic English literature of the day, [971] and
went back to France, after three years' stay, not only equipped for
his ultimate battle with tyrannous religion, but deeply impressed by
the moral wholesomeness of free discussion. [972] Not all at once,
indeed, did he become the mouthpiece of critical reason for his age:
his literary ambitions were primarily on the lines of belles lettres,
and secondarily on those of historical writing. After his Pour et
Contre, his first freethinking production was the not very heretical
Lettres philosophiques or Lettres anglaises, written in England in
1728, and, after circulating in MS., published in five editions in
1734; and the official burning of the book by the common hangman,
followed by the imprisonment of the bookseller in the Bastille, [973]
was a sufficient check on such activity for the time. Save for the
jests about Adam and Eve in the Mondain (1736), a slight satire for
which he had to fly from Paris; and the indirect though effective
thrusts at bigotry in the Ligue (1723; later the Henriade); in the
tragedy of Mahomet (1739; printed in 1742), in the tales of Memnon
and Zadig (1747-48), and in the Idées de La Mothe le Vayer (1751) and
the Défense de Milord Bolingbroke (1752), he produced nothing else
markedly deistic till 1755, when he published the "Poem to the King
of Prussia," otherwise named Sur la loi naturelle (which appears to
have been written in 1751, while he was on a visit to the Margravine
of Bayreuth), and that on the Earthquake of Lisbon. So definitely did
the former poem base all morality on natural principles that it was
ordered to be burned by the Parlement of Paris, then equally alarmed
at freethinking and at Molinism. [974] And so impossible was it still
in France to print any specific criticism of Christianity that when
in 1759 he issued his verse translations of the Song of Solomon and
Ecclesiastes they also were publicly burned, though he had actually
softened instead of heightening the eroticism of the first and the
"materialism" of the second. [975]
9. It is thus a complete mistake on the part of Buckle to affirm
that the activity of the French reformers up to 1750 was directed
against religion, and that it was thereafter turned against the
State. Certainly there was much freethinking among instructed men
and others, but it proceeded, as under Louis XIV, mainly by way of
manuscripts and conversation, or at best by the circulation of English
books and a few translations of these; and only guardedly before 1745
by means of published French books. [976] The Abbé Ranchon, in his
MS. Life of Cardinal Fleury, truly says that "the time of the Regency
was a period of the spirit of dissoluteness and irreligion"; but when
he ascribes to "those times" many "licentious and destructive writings"
he can specify only those of the English deists. "Precisely in the
time of the Regency a multitude of those offensive and irreligious
books were brought over the sea: France was deluged with them." [977]
It is incredible that multitudes of Frenchmen read English in the days
of the Regency. French freethinkers like Saint Evremond and Deslandes,
who visited or sojourned in London before 1715, took their freethought
there with them; and the only translations then in print were those
of Collins's Discourse of Freethinking and Shaftesbury's essays on
the Use of Ridicule and on Enthusiasm. Apart from these, the only
known French freethinking book of the Regency period was the work of
Vroes, a councillor at the court of Brabant, on the Spirit of Spinoza,
reprinted as Des trois imposteurs. Meslier died not earlier than 1729;
the Histoire de la philosophie payenne of Burigny belongs to 1724;
the Lettres philosophiques of Voltaire to 1734; the earlier works
of d'Argens to 1737-38; the Nouvelles libertés de penser, edited by
Dumarsais, to 1743; and the militant treatise of De la Serre, best
known as the Examen de la Religion, to 1745.
The ferment thus kept up was indeed so great that about 1748 the
ecclesiastical authorities decided on the remarkable step of adopting
for their purposes the apologetic treatise adapted by Jacob Vernet,
professor of belles lettres at Geneva, from the works of Jean-Alphonse
Turrettin, [978] not only a Protestant but a substantially Socinian
professor of ecclesiastical history at the same university. The
treatise is itself a testimony to the advance of rationalism in the
Protestant world; and its adoption, even under correction, by the
Catholic Church in France tells of a keen consciousness of need. But
the dreaded advance, as we have seen, was only to a small extent yet
traceable by new literature. The Examen critique des apologistes de la
religion chrétienne of Lévesque de Burigny was probably written about
1732, and then and thereafter circulated in manuscript, but it was
not published till 1766; and even in manuscript its circulation was
probably small, though various apologetic works had testified to the
increasing uneasiness of the orthodox world. Such titles as La religion
chrétienne demontrée par la Resurrection (by Armand de la Chapelle,
1728) and La religion chrétienne prouvée par l'accomplissement des
prophéties (by Père Baltus, 1728) tell of private unbelief under the
Regency. In 1737 appeared the voluminous treatise (anonymous) of the
Abbé de la Chambre, Traité de la véritable religion contre les athées,
les déistes, etc. (5 vols.). In 1747, again, there appeared a learned,
laborious, and unintelligent work in three volumes (authorized in
1742), Le Libertinage combattu par la témoignage des auteurs profanes,
by an unnamed Benedictine [979] of the Congregation of St. Vanne. It
declares that, between atheism and deism, there has never been so
much unbelief as now; but it cites no modern books, and is devoted to
arraying classic arguments in support of theism and morals. Part of the
exposition consists in showing that Epicurus, Lucian, and Euripides,
whom modern atheists are wont to cite as their masters, were not and
could not have been atheists; and the pious author roundly declares
in favour of paganism as against atheism.
So much smoke tells of fire; but only in 1745 and 1746 did the printed
Examen of De la Serre and the Pensées philosophiques of Diderot begin
to build up in France the modern school of critical and philosophic
deism. When in 1751 the Abbé Gauchat began his series of Lettres
critiques, he set out by attacking Voltaire's Lettres philosophiques,
Diderot's Pensées philosophiques, the anonymous Discours sur la vie
heureuse (1748), Les Moeurs [980] (1748), and Pope's Essay on Man;
taking up in his second volume the Lettres Persanes of Montesquieu
(1721), and other sets of Lettres written in imitation of them. In the
third volume he has nothing more aggressive of Voltaire's to deal with
than La Henriade, the Mahomet, and some of his fugitive pieces. And
the Bishop of Puy, writing in 1754 his La Dévotion conciliée avec
l'esprit, could say to the faithful: "You live in an age fertile in
pretended esprits forts, who, too weak nevertheless to attack in front
an invincible religion, skirmish lightly around it, and in default of
the reasons they lack, employ raillery." [981] The chivalrous bishop
knew perfectly well that had a serious attack been published author
and publisher would have been sent if possible to the Bastille, if
not to the scaffold. But his evidence is explicit. There is here no
recognition of any literary bombardment, though there was certainly
an abundance of unbelief. [982]
Buckle has probably mistaken the meaning of the summing up of some
previous writer to the effect that up to 1750 or a few years later
the political opposition to the Court was religious, in the sense of
ecclesiastical or sectarian (Jansenist), [983] and that it afterwards
turned to matters of public administration. [984] It would be truer
to say that the early Lettres philosophiques, the reading of which
later made the boy Lafayette a republican at nine, were a polemic for
political and social freedom, and as such a more direct criticism of
the French administrative system than Voltaire ever penned afterwards,
save in the Voix du Sage et du Peuple (1750). In point of fact, as
will be shown below, only some twenty scattered freethinking works had
appeared in French up to 1745, almost none of them directly attacking
Christian beliefs; and, despite the above-noted sallies of Voltaire,
Condorcet comes to the general conclusion that it was the hardihood
of Rousseau's deism in the "Confession of a Savoyard Vicar" in his
Émile (1762) that spurred Voltaire to new activity. [985] This is
perhaps not quite certain; there is some reason to believe that his
"Sermon of the Fifty," his "first frontal attack on Christianity,"
[986] was written a year before; but in any case that and other
productions of his at once left Rousseau far in the rear. Even now he
had no fixed purpose of continuous warfare against so powerful and
cruel an enemy as the Church, which in 1757 had actually procured
an edict pronouncing the death penalty against all writers of works
attacking religion; though the fall of the Jesuits in 1764 raised new
hopes of freedom. But when, after that hopeful episode, there began
a new movement of Jansenist fanaticism; and when, after the age of
religious savagery had seemed to be over, there began a new series
of religious atrocities in France itself (1762-66), he girded on a
sword that was not to be laid down till his death.
Even so late as 1768, in his last letter to Damilaville (8 fév.),
Voltaire expresses a revulsion against the aggressive freethought
propaganda of the time which is either one of his epistolary
stratagems or the expression of a nervous reaction in a time of
protracted bad health. "Mes chagrins redoublent," he writes, "par
la quantité incroyable d'écrits contre la religion chrétienne, qui
se succédent aussi rapidement en Hollande que les gazettes et les
journaux." His enemies have the barbarism to impute to him, at his
age, "une partie de ces extravagances composées par de jeunes gens
et par des moines défroqués." His immediate ground for chagrin may
have been the fact that this outbreak of anti-Christian literature
was likely to thwart him in the campaign he was then making to
secure justice to the Sirven family as he had already vindicated
that of Calas. Sirven barely missed the fate of the latter.
The misconception of Buckle, above discussed, has been widely
shared even among students. Thus Lord Morley, discussing the
"Creed of the Savoyard Vicar" in Rousseau's Émile (1762), writes
that "Souls weary of the fierce mockeries that had so long been
flying like fiery shafts against the far Jehovah of the Hebrews,
and the silent Christ of the later doctors and dignitaries,"
may well have turned to it with ardour (Rousseau, ed. 1886, ii,
266). He further speaks of the "superiority of the sceptical parts
of the Savoyard Vicar's profession ... over the biting mockeries
which Voltaire had made the fashionable method of assault"
(p. 294). No specifications are offered, and the chronology is
seen to be astray. The only mockeries which Voltaire could be said
to have made fashionable before 1760 were those of his Lettres
philosophiques, his Mondain, his Défense de Milord Bolingbroke,
and his philosophically humorous tales, as Candide, Zadig,
Micromégas, etc.: all his distinctive attacks on Judaism and
Christianity were yet to come. [The Abbé Guyon, in his L'Oracle
des nouveaux philosophes (Berne, 1759-60, 2 tom.), proclaims an
attack on doctrines taught "dans les livres de nos beaux esprits"
(Avert. p. xi); but he specifies only denials of (1) revelation,
(2) immortality, and (3) the Biblical account of man's creation;
and he is largely occupied with Diderot's Pensées philosophiques,
though his book is written at Voltaire. The second volume is
devoted to Candide and the Précis of Ecclesiastes and the Song
of Solomon--not very fierce performances.] Lord Morley, as it
happens, does not make this chronological mistake in his earlier
work on Voltaire, where he rightly represents him as beginning his
attack on "the Infamous" after he had settled at Ferney (1758). His
"fierce mockeries" begin at the earliest in 1761. The mistake may
have arisen through taking as true the fictitious date of 1736
for the writing of the Examen Important de Milord Bolingbroke. It
belongs to 1767. Buckle's error, it may be noted, is repeated by
so careful a student as Dr. Redlich, Local Government in England,
Eng. tr. 1903, i, 64.
10. The rest of Voltaire's long life was a sleepless and dexterous
warfare, by all manner of literary stratagem, [987] facilitated by
vast literary fame and ample acquired wealth, against what he called
"the Infamous"--the Church and the creed which he found still swift to
slay for mere variation of belief, and slow to let any good thing be
wrought for the bettering of men's lives. Of his prodigious literary
performance it is probably within the truth to say that in respect
of rapid influence on the general intelligence of the world it has
never been equalled by any one man's writing; and that, whatever its
measure of error and of personal misdirection, its broader influence
was invariably for peace on earth, for tolerance among men, and for
reason in all things. His faults were many, and some were serious; but
to no other man of his age, save possibly Beccaria, can be attributed
so much beneficent accomplishment. He can perhaps better be estimated
as a force than as a man. So great was the area of his literary
energy that he is inevitably inadequate at many points. Lessing
could successfully impugn him in drama; Diderot in metaphysic;
Gibbon in history; and it is noteworthy that all of these men [988]
at different times criticized him with asperity, testing him by the
given item of performance, and disparaging his personality. Yet in
his own way he was a greater power than any of them; and his range,
as distinguished from his depth, outgoes theirs. In sum, he was the
greatest mental fighter of his age, perhaps of any age: in that aspect
he is a "power-house" not to be matched in human history; and his
polemic is mainly for good. It was a distinguished English academic
who declared that "civilization owes more to Voltaire than to all the
Fathers of the Church put together." [989] If in a literary way he
hated his personal foes, much more did he hate cruelty and bigotry;
and it was his work more than any that made impossible a repetition in
Europe of such clerical crimes as the hanging of the Protestant pastor,
La Rochette; the execution of the Protestant, Calas, on an unproved
and absurdly false charge; the torture of his widow and children;
the beheading of the lad La Barre for ill-proved blasphemy. [990]
As against his many humanities, there is not to be charged on him one
act of public malevolence. In his relations with his fickle admirer,
Frederick the Great, and with others of his fellow-thinkers, he and
they painfully brought home to freethinkers the lesson that for them
as for all men there is a personal art of life that has to be learned,
over and above the rectification of opinion. But he and the others
wrought immensely towards that liberation alike from unreason and
from bondage which must precede any great improvement of human things.
Voltaire's constant burden was that religion was not only untrue
but pernicious, and when he was not dramatically showing this of
Christianity, as in his poem La Ligue (1723), he was saying it by
implication in such plays as Zaïre (1732) and Mahomet (1742), dealing
with the fanaticism of Islam; while in the Essai sur les moeurs (1756),
really a broad survey of general history, and in the Siècle de Louis
XIV, he applied the method of Montesquieu, with pungent criticism
thrown in. Later, he added to his output direct criticisms of the
Christian books, as in the Examen important de Milord Bolingbroke
(1767), and the Recherches historiques sur le Christianisme (? 1769),
continuing all his former lines of activity. Meanwhile, with the aid of
his companion the Marquise du Chatelet, an accomplished mathematician,
he had done much to popularize the physics of Newton and discredit
the scientific fallacies of the system of Descartes; all the while
preaching a Newtonian but rather agnostic deism. This is the purport
of his Philosophe Ignorant, his longest philosophical essay. [991]
The destruction of Lisbon by the earthquake of 1755 seems to have
shaken him in his deistic faith, since the upshot of his poem on that
subject is to leave the moral government of the universe an absolute
enigma; and in the later Candide (1759) he attacks theistic optimism
with his matchless ridicule. Indeed, as early as 1749, in his Traité
de la Métaphysique, written for the Marquise du Chatelet, he reaches
virtually pantheistic positions in defence of the God-idea, declaring
with Spinoza that deity can be neither good nor bad. But, like so
many professed pantheists, he relapsed, and he never accepted the
atheistic view; on the contrary, we find him arguing absurdly enough,
in his Homily on Atheism (1765), that atheism had been the destruction
of morality in Rome; [992] on the publication of d'Holbach's System
of Nature in 1770 he threw off an article Dieu: réponse au Système
de la Nature, where he argued on the old deistic lines; and his tale
of Jenni; or, the Sage and the Atheist (1775), is a polemic on the
same theme. By this time the inconsistent deism of his youth had
itself been discredited among the more thoroughgoing freethinkers;
and for years it had been said in one section of literary society
that Voltaire after all "is a bigot; he is a deist!" [993]
But for freethinkers of all schools the supreme service of Voltaire lay
in his twofold triumph over the spirit of religious persecution. He
had contrived at once to make it hateful and to make it ridiculous;
and it is a great theistic poet of our own day that has pronounced
his blade the
sharpest, shrewdest steel that ever stabbed
To death Imposture through the armour joints. [994]
To be perfect, the tribute should have noted that he hated cruelty
much more than imposture; and such is the note of the whole movement of
which his name was the oriflamme. Voltaire personally was at once the
most pugnacious and the most forgiving of men. Few of the Christians
who hated him had so often as he fulfilled their own precept of
returning good for evil to enemies; and none excelled him in hearty
philanthropy. It is notable that most of the humanitarian ideas of
the latter half of the century--the demand for the reform of criminal
treatment, the denunciation of war and slavery, the insistence on
good government, and toleration of all creeds--are more definitely
associated with the freethinking than with any religious party,
excepting perhaps the laudable but uninfluential sect of Quakers.
The character of Voltaire is still the subject of chronic debate;
but the old deadlock of laudation and abuse is being solved
in a critical recognition of him as a man of genius flawed by
the instability which genius so commonly involves. Carlyle
(that model of serenity), while dwelling on his perpetual
perturbations, half-humanely suggests that we should think of
him as one constantly hag-ridden by maladies of many kinds; and
this recognition is really even more important in Voltaire's
case than in Carlyle's own. He was "a bundle of nerves," and
the clear light of his sympathetic intelligence was often blown
aside by gusts of passion--often enough excusably. But while his
temperamental weaknesses exposed him at times to humiliation,
and often to sarcasm; and while his compelled resort to constant
stratagem made him more prone to trickery than his admirers can
well care to think him, the balance of his character is abundantly
on the side of generosity and humanity.
One of the most unjustifiable of recent attacks upon him
(one regrets to have to say it) came from the pen of the late
Prof. Churton Collins. In his book on Voltaire, Montesquieu,
and Rousseau in England (1908) that critic gives in the main
an unbiassed account of Voltaire's English experience; but at
one point (p. 39) he plunges into a violent impeachment with
the slightest possible justification. He in effect adopts the
old allegation of Ruffhead, the biographer of Pope--a statement
repeated by Johnson--that Voltaire used his acquaintance with Pope
and Bolingbroke to play the spy on them, conveying information
to Walpole, for which he was rewarded. The whole story collapses
upon critical examination. Ruffhead's story is, in brief, that
Pope purposely lied to Voltaire as to the authorship of certain
published letters attacking Walpole. They were by Bolingbroke;
but Pope, questioned by Voltaire, said they were his own, begging
him to keep the fact absolutely secret. Next day at court everyone
was speaking of the letters as Pope's; and Pope accordingly knew
that Voltaire was a traitor. For this tale there is absolutely
nothing but hearsay evidence. Ruffhead, as Johnson declared, knew
nothing of Pope, and simply used Warburton's material. The one
quasi-confirmation cited by Mr. Collins is Bolingbroke's letter
to Swift (May 18, 1727) asking him to "insinuate" that Walpole's
only ground for ascribing the letters to Bolingbroke "is the
authority of one of his spies ... who reports, not what he hears
... but what he guesses." This is an absolute contradiction of the
Pope story, at two points. It refers to a guess at Bolingbroke,
and tells of no citation from Pope. To put it as confirming the
charge is to exhibit a complete failure of judgment.
After this irrational argument, Mr. Collins offers a worse. He
admits (p. 43) that Voltaire always remained on friendly
terms with both Pope and Bolingbroke; but adds that this "can
scarcely be alleged as a proof of his innocence, for neither
Pope nor Bolingbroke would, for such an offence, have been
likely to quarrel with a man in a position so peculiar as that
of Voltaire. His flattery was pleasant...." Such an argument is
worse than nugatory. That Bolingbroke spoke ill in private of
Voltaire on general grounds counts for nothing. He did the same of
Pope and of nearly all his friends. Mr. Collins further accuses
Voltaire of baseness, falsehood, and hypocrisy on the mere score
of his habit of extravagant flattery. This was notoriously the
French mode in that age; but it had been just as much the mode
in seventeenth-century England, from the Jacobean translators of
the Bible to Dryden--to name no others. And Mr. Collins in effect
charges systematic hypocrisy upon both Pope and Bolingbroke.
Other stories of Ruffhead's against Voltaire are equally improbable
and ill-vouched--as Mr. Collins incidentally admits, though he
forgets the admission. They all come from Warburton, himself
convicted of double-dealing with Pope; and they finally stand for
the hatred of Frenchmen which was so common in eighteenth-century
England, and is apparently not yet quite extinct. Those who would
have a sane, searching, and competent estimate of Voltaire,
leaning humanely to the side of goodwill, should turn to the
Voltaire of M. Champion. A brief estimate was attempted by the
present writer in the R. P. A. Annual for 1912.
11. It is difficult to realize how far the mere demand for
tolerance which sounds from Voltaire's plays and poems before he
has begun to assail credences was a signal and an inspiration to new
thinkers. Certain it is that the principle of toleration, passed on
by Holland to England, was regarded by the orthodox priesthood in
France as the abomination of desolation, and resisted by them with all
their power. But the contagion was unquenchable. It was presumably in
Holland that there were printed in 1738 the two volumes of Lettres sur
la religion essentielle à l'homme, distinguée de ce qui n'en est que
l'accessoire, by Marie Huber, a Genevese lady living in Lyons; also the
two following parts (1739), replying to criticisms on the earlier. In
its gentle way, the book stands very distinctly for the "natural" and
ethical principle in religion, denying that the deity demands from men
either service or worship, or that he can be wronged by their deeds,
or that he can punish them eternally for their sins. This was one
of the first French fruits, after Voltaire, of the English deistic
influence; [995] and it is difficult to understand how the authoress
escaped molestation. Perhaps the memory of the persecution inflicted
on the mystic Madame Guyon withheld the hand of power. As it was,
four Protestant theologians opened fire on her, regarding her doctrine
as hostile to Christianity. One pastor wrote from Geneva, one from
Amsterdam, and two professors from Zurich--the two last in Latin. [996]
From about 1746 onwards, the rationalist movement in eighteenth-century
France rapidly widens and deepens. The number of rationalistic
writers, despite the press laws which in that age inflicted the
indignity of imprisonment on half the men of letters, increased
from decade to decade, and the rising prestige of the philosophes
in connection with the Encyclopédie (1751-72) gave new courage to
writers and printers. At once the ecclesiastical powers saw in the
Encyclopédie a dangerous enemy; and in January, 1752, the Sorbonne
condemned a thesis "To the celestial Jerusalem," by the Abbé de
Prades. It had at first (1751) been received with official applause,
but was found on study to breathe the spirit of the new work, [997]
to which the Abbé had contributed, and whose editor, Diderot, was his
friend. Sooth to say, it contained not a little matter calculated
to act as a solvent of faith. Under the form of a vindication of
orthodox Catholicism, it negated alike Descartes and Leibnitz; and
declared that the science of Newton and the Dutch physiologists was
a better defence of religion than the theses of Clarke, Descartes,
Cudworth, and Malebranche, which made for materialism. The handling,
too, of the question of natural versus revealed religion, in which
"theism" is declared to be superior to all religions si unam excipias
veram, "if you except the one true," might well arouse distrust in a
vigilant Catholic reader. [998] The whole argument savours far more
of the scientific comparative method than was natural in the work
of an eighteenth-century seminarist; and the principle, "Either we
are ocular witnesses of the facts or we know them only by hearsay,"
[999] was plainly as dangerous to the Christian creed as to any
other. According to Naigeon, [1000] the treatise was wholly the work of
de Prades and another Abbé, Yvon; [1001] but it remains probable that
Diderot inspired not a little of the reasoning; and the clericals,
bent on putting down the Encyclopédie, professed to have discovered
that he was the real author of the thesis. Either this belief or a
desire to strike at the Encyclopédie through one of its collaborators
[1002] was the motive of the absurdly belated censure. Such a fiasco
evoked much derision from the philosophic party, particularly from
Voltaire; and the Sorbonne compassed a new revenge. Soon after came
the formal condemnation of the first two volumes of the Encyclopédie,
of which the second had just appeared. [1003]
D'Argenson, watching in his vigilant retirement the course of things
on all hands, sees in the episode a new and dangerous development,
"the establishment of a veritable inquisition in France, of which the
Jesuits joyfully take charge," though he repeatedly remarks also on
the eagerness of the Jansenists to outgo the Jesuits. [1004] But soon
the publication of the Encyclopédie is resumed; and in 1753 D'Argenson
contentedly notes the official bestowal of "tacit permissions to print
secretly" books which could not obtain formal authorization. The
permission had been given first by the President Malesherbes; but
even when that official lost the king's confidence the practice was
continued by the lieutenant of police. [1005] Despite the staggering
blow of the suppression of the Encyclopédie, the philosophes speedily
triumphed. So great was the discontent even at court that soon (1752)
Madame de Pompadour and some of the ministry invited D'Alembert and
Diderot to resume their work, "observing a necessary reserve in all
things touching religion and authority." Madame de Pompadour was in
fact, as D'Alembert said at her death, "in her heart one of ours,"
as was D'Argenson. But D'Alembert, in a long private conference with
D'Argenson, insisted that they must write in freedom like the English
and the Prussians, or not at all. Already there was talk of suppressing
the philosophic works of Condillac, which a few years before had gone
uncondemned; and freedom must be preserved at any cost. "I acquiesce,"
writes the ex-Minister, "in these arguments." [1006]
Curiously enough, the freethinking Fontenelle, who for a time (the
dates are elusive) held the office of royal censor, was more rigorous
than other officials who had not his reputation for heterodoxy. One
day he refused to pass a certain manuscript, and the author put the
challenge: "You, sir, who have published the Histoire des Oracles,
refuse me this?" "If I had been the censor of the Oracles," replied
Fontenelle, "I should not have passed it." [1007] And he had cause for
his caution. The unlucky Tercier, who, engrossed in "foreign affairs,"
had authorized the publication of the De l'Esprit of Helvétius,
was compelled to resign the censorship, and severely rebuked by
the Paris Parlement. [1008] But the culture-history of the period,
like the political, was one of ups and downs. From time to time the
philosophic party had friends at court, as in the persons of the
Marquis D'Argenson, Malesherbes, and the Duc de Choiseul, of whom
the last-named engineered the suppression of the Jesuits. [1009]
Then there were checks to the forward movement in the press, as when,
in 1770, Choiseul was forced to retire on the advent of Madame Du
Barry. The output of freethinking books is after that year visibly
curtailed. But nothing could arrest the forward movement of opinion.
12. A new era of propaganda and struggle had visibly begun. In
the earlier part of the century freethought had been disseminated
largely by way of manuscripts [1010] and reprints of foreign books in
translation; but from the middle onwards, despite denunciations and
prohibitions, new books multiply. To the policy of tacit toleration
imposed by Malesherbes a violent end was temporarily put in 1757,
when the Jesuits obtained a proclamation of the death penalty
against all writers who should attack the Christian religion,
directly or indirectly. It was doubtless under the menace of this
decree that Deslandes, before dying in 1757, caused to be drawn
up by two notaries an acte by which he disavowed and denounced not
only his Grands hommes morts en plaisantant but all his other works,
whether printed or in MS., in which he had "laid down principles
or sustained sentiments contrary to the spirit of religion." [1011]
But in 1764, on the suppression of the Jesuits, there was a vigorous
resumption of propaganda. "There are books," writes Voltaire in 1765,
"of which forty years ago one would not have trusted the manuscript
to one's friends, and of which there are now published six editions
in eighteen months." [1012] Voltaire single-handed produced a
library; and d'Holbach is credited with at least a dozen freethinking
treatises, every one remarkable in its day. But there were many more
combatants. The reputation of Voltaire has overshadowed even that of
his leading contemporaries, and theirs and his have further obscured
that of the lesser men; but a list of miscellaneous freethinking works
by French writers during the century, up to the Revolution, will serve
to show how general was the activity after 1750. It will be seen that
very little was published in France in the period in which English
deism was most fecund. A noticeable activity of publication begins
about 1745. But it was when the long period of chronic warfare ended
for France with the peace of Paris (1763); when she had lost India
and North America; when she had suppressed the Jesuit order (1764);
and when England had in the main turned from intellectual interests to
the pursuit of empire and the development of manufacturing industry,
that the released French intelligence [1013] turned with irresistible
energy to the rational criticism of established opinions. The following
table is thus symbolic of the whole century's development:--
1700. Lettre d'Hypocrate à Damagète, attributed to the Comte de
Boulainvilliers. (Cologne.) Rep. in Bibliothèque Volante,
Amsterdam, 1700.
1700. [Claude Gilbert.] Histoire de Calejava, ou de l'isle des hommes
raisonnables, avec le parallèle de leur morale et du
Christianisme. Dijon. Suppressed by the author: only one copy
known to have escaped.
1704. [Gueudeville.] Dialogues de M. le Baron de la Houtan et d'un
sauvage dans l'Amérique. (Amsterdam.)
1709. Lettre sur l'enthousiasme (Fr. tr. of Shaftesbury, by Samson).
La Haye.
1710. [Tyssot de Patot, Symon.] Voyages et Avantures de Jaques Massé.
(Bourdeaux.)
1710. Essai sur l'usage de la raillerie (Fr. tr. of Shaftesbury, by
Van Effen). La Haye.
1712. [Deslandes, A. F. B.] Reflexions sur les grands hommes qui sont
morts en plaisantant. [1014] (Amsterdam.)
1714. Discours sur la liberté de penser [French tr. of Collins's
Discourse of Freethinking], traduit de l'anglois et augmenté
d'une Lettre d'un Médecin Arabe. (Tr. by Henri Scheurléer and
Jean Rousset.) [Rep. 1717.] [1015]
1719. [Vroes.] La Vie et l'Esprit de M. Benoît de Spinoza.
1720. Same work rep. under the double title: De tribus impostoribus:
Des trois imposteurs. Frankfort on Main.
1724. [Lévesque de Burigny.] Histoire de la philosophie payenne. La
Haye, 2 tom.
1730. [Bernard, J.-F.] Dialogues critiques et philosophiques. "Par
l'Abbé de Charte-Livry." (Amsterdam.) Rep. 1735.
1731. Réfutation des erreurs de Benoît de Spinoza, par Fénelon, le P.
Laury, benédictin, et Boulainvilliers, avec la vie de Spinoza
... par Colerus, etc. (collected and published by Lenglet du
Fresnoy). Bruxelles (really Amsterdam). The treatise of
Boulainvilliers is really a popular exposition.
1732. Re-issue of Deslandes's Réflexions.
1734. [Voltaire.] Lettres philosophiques. 4 edd. within the year.
[Condemned to be burned. Publisher imprisoned.]
1734. [Longue, Louis-Pierre de.] Les Princesses Malabares, ou le
Célibat Philosophique. Deistic allegory. [Condemned to be
burned.]
1737. Marquis D'Argens. La Philosophie du Bon Sens. (Berlin: 8th
edition, Dresden, 1754.)
1738. ----, Lettres Juives. 6 tom. (Berlin.)
1738. [Marie Huber.] Lettres sur la religion essentielle à l'homme,
distingue de ce qui n'en est que l'accessoire. 2 tom.
(Nominally London.) Rep. 1739 and 1756.
1739. ----, Suite to the foregoing, "servant de réponse aux
objections," etc. Also Suite de la troisième partie.
1741. [Deslandes.] Pigmalion, ou la Statue animée. [Condemned to be
burnt by Parlement of Dijon, 1742.]
1741. ----, De la Certitude des connaissances humaines ... traduit de
l'anglais par F. A. D. L. V.
1743. Nouvelles libertés de penser. Amsterdam. [Edited by Dumarsais.
Contains the first print of Fontenelle's Traité de la Liberté,
Dumarsais's short essays Le Philosophe and De la raison,
Mirabaud's Sentimens des philosophes sur la nature de l'âme,
etc.]
1745. [Lieut. De la Serre.] La vraie religion traduite de l'Ecriture
Sainte, par permission de Jean, Luc, Marc, et Matthieu.
(Nominally Trévoux, "aux dépens des Pères de la Société de
Jésus.") [Appeared later as Examen, etc. Condemned to be burnt
by Parlement of Paris.]
This book was republished in the same year with "demontrée par"
substituted in the title for "traduite de," and purporting to be
"traduit de l'Anglais de Gilbert Burnet," with the imprint "Londres,
G. Cock, 1745." It appeared again in 1761 as Examen de la religion
dont on cherche l'éclaircissement de bonne foi. Attribué à M. de
Saint-Evremont, traduit, etc., with the same imprint. It again bore
the latter title when reprinted in 1763, and again in the Évangile
de la Raison in 1764. Voltaire in 1763 declared it to be the work
of Dumarsais, pronouncing it to be assuredly not in the style of
Saint-Evremond (Grimm, iv, 85-88; Voltaire, Lettre à Damilaville,
6 déc. 1763), adding "mais il est fort tronqué et détestablement
imprimé." This is true of the reprints in the Évangile de la Raison
(1764, etc.), of one of which the present writer possesses a copy to
which there has been appended in MS. a long section which had been
lacking. The Évangile as a whole purports to be "Ouvrage posthume
de M. D. M......y." [1016] But its first volume includes four pieces
of Voltaire's, and his abridged Testament de Jean Meslier. Further,
De la Serre is recorded to have claimed the authorship in writing on
the eve of his death. Barbier, Dict. des Anonymes, 2e éd, No. 6158. He
is said to have been hanged as a spy at Maestricht, April 11, 1748.
1745. [La Mettrie.] Histoire naturelle de l'âme. [Condemned to be
burnt, 1746.] Rep. as Traité de l'âme.
1746. [Diderot.] Pensées philosophiques. [Condemned to be burnt.]
1748. [P. Estève.] L'Origine de l'Univers expliquée par un principe
de matière. (Berlin.)
1748. [Benoît de Maillet.] Telliamed, ou Entretiens d'un philosophe
indien avec un missionaire français. (Printed privately, 1735;
rep. 1755.)
1748. [La Mettrie.] L'Homme Machine.
1750. Nouvelles libertés de penser. Rep.
1751. [Mirabaud, J. B. de.] Le Monde, son origine et son antiquité.
[Edited by the Abbé Le Maserier (who contributed the preface
and the third part) and Dumarsais.]
1751. De Prades. Sorbonne Thesis.
1752. [Gouvest, J. H. Maubert de.] Lettres Iroquoises. "Irocopolis,
chez les Vénérables." 2 tom. (Rep. 1769 as Lettres
cherakésiennes.)
1752. [Génard, F.] L'École de l'homme, ou Parallèle des Portraits du
siècle et des tableaux de l'écriture sainte. [1017] Amsterdam,
3 tom. [Author imprisoned.]
1753. [Baume-Desdossat, Canon of Avignon.] La Christiade. [Book
suppressed. Author fined.] [1018]
1753. Maupertuis. Système de la nature.
1753. Astruc, Jean. Conjectures sur les mémoires originaux dont il
parait que Moïse s'est servi pour composer le livre de la
Genèse. Bruxelles.
1754. Prémontval, A. I. le Guay de. Le Diogène de d'Alembert, ou
Pensées libres sur l'homme. Berlin. (2nd ed. enlarged, 1755.)
1754. Burigny, J. L. Théologie payenne. 2 tom. (New ed. of his
Histoire de la philosophie, 1724.)
1754. [Diderot.] Pensées sur l'interpretation de la nature.
1754. Beausobre, L. de (the younger). Pyrrhonisme du Sage. Berlin.
(Burned by Paris Parlement.)
1755. Recherches philosophiques sur la liberté de l'homme. Trans. of
Collins's Philosophical Inquiry concerning Human Liberty.
1755. [Voltaire.] Poème Sur la loi naturelle.
1755. Analyse raisonnée de Bayle. 4 tom. [By the Abbé de Marsy.
Suppressed. [1019] Continued in 1773, in 4 new vols., by
Robinet.]
1755. Morelly. Code de la Nature.
1755. [Deleyre.] Analyse de la philosophie de Bacon. (Largely an
exposition of Deleyre's own views.)
1757. Prémontval. Vues Philosophiques. (Amsterdam.)
In this year--apparently after one of vigilant repression--was
pronounced the death penalty against all writers attacking
religion. Hence a general suspension of publication. In 1764 the
Jesuits were suppressed, and the policy of censorship was soon
paralysed.
1758. Helvétius. De l'Esprit. (Authorized. Then condemned.)
1759. [Voltaire.] Candide. ("Genève.")
1759. Translation of Hume's Natural History of Religion and
Philosophical Essays. (By Mérian.) Amsterdam.
1761. [N.-A. Boulanger. [1020]] Recherches sur l'origine du
despotisme oriental, et des superstitions. "Ouvrage posthume de
Mr. D. J. D. P. E. C."
1761. Rep. of De la Serre's La vraie religion as Examen de la
religion, etc.
1761. [D'Holbach.] Le Christianisme dévoilé. [Imprint: "Londres,
1756." Really printed at Nancy in 1761. Wrongly attributed to
Boulanger and to Damilaville.] Rep. 1767 and 1777.
Grimm (Corr. inédite, 1829, p. 194) speaks in 1763 of this book
in his notice of Boulanger, remarking that the title was apparently
meant to suggest the author of L'Antiquité dévoilée, but that it was
obviously by another hand. The Antiquité, in fact, was the concluding
section of Boulanger's posthumous Despotisme Oriental (1761), and
was not published till 1766. Grimm professed ignorance as to the
authorship, but must have known it, as did Voltaire, who by way of
mystification ascribed the book to Damilaville. See Barbier.
1762. Rousseau. Émile. [Publicly burned at Paris and at Geneva.
Condemned by the Sorbonne.]
1762. Robinet, J. B. De la nature. Vol. i. (Vol. ii in 1764; iii and
iv in 1766.)
1763. [Voltaire.] Saül. Genève.
1763. ---- Dialogue entre un Caloyer et un honnête homme.
1763. Rep. of De la Serres' Examen.
1764. Discours sur la liberté de penser. (Rep. of trans. of Collins.)
1764. [Voltaire.] Dictionnaire philosophique portatif. [1021] [First
form of the Dictionnaire philosophique. Burned in 1765.]
1764. Lettres secrètes de M. de Voltaire. [Holland. Collection of
tracts made by Robinet, against Voltaire's will.]
1764. [Voltaire.] Mélanges, 3 tom. Genève.
1764. [Dulaurens, Abbé H. J.] L'Arétin.
1764. L'Évangile de la Raison. Ouvrage posthume de M. D. M----y. [Ed.
by Abbé Dulaurens; containing the Testament de Jean Meslier
(greatly abridged and adapted by Voltaire); Voltaire's
Catéchisme de l'honnête homme, Sermon des cinquante, etc.; the
Examen de la religion, attribué à M. de St. Evremond;
Rousseau's Vicaire Savoyard, from Émile; Dumarsais's Analyse de
la religion chrétienne, etc. Rep. 1765 and 1766.]
1765. Recueil Nécessaire, avec L'Évangile de la Raison, 2 tom.
Rep. of parts of the Évangile. Rep. 1767, [1022] 1768, with
Voltaire's Examen important de Milord Bolingbroke substituted for that
of De la Serre (attribué a M. de St. Evremond), and with a revised
set of extracts from Meslier.
1765. Castillon, J. L. Essai de philosophic morale.
1766. Boulanger, N. A. L'Antiquité dévoilée. [1023] 3 tom. [Recast by
d'Holbach. Life of author by Diderot.]
1766. Voyage de Robertson aux terres australes. Traduit sur le
Manuscrit Anglois. Amsterdam.
Barbier (Dict. des Ouvr. Anon., 2e éd. iii, 437) has a note
concerning this Voyage which pleasantly illustrates the strategy that
went on in the issue of freethinking books. An ex-censor of the period,
he tells us, wrote a note on the original edition pointing out that
it contains (pp. 145-54) a tirade against "Parlements." This passage
was "suppressed to obtain permission to bring the book into France,"
and a new passage attacking the Encyclopédistes under the name of
Pansophistes was inserted at another point. The ex-censor had a copy
of an edition of 1767, in 12mo, better printed than the first and on
better paper. In this, at p. 87, line 30, begins the attack on the
Encyclopédistes, which continues to p. 93.
If this is accurate, there has taken place a double mystification. I
possess a copy dated 1767, in 12mo, in which no page has so many as 30
lines, and in which there has been no typographical change whatever
in pp. 87-93, where there is no mention of Encyclopédistes. But
pp. 145-54 are clearly a typographical substitution, in different
type, with fewer lines to the page. Here there is a narrative about
the Pansophistes of the imaginary "Australie"; but while it begins
with enigmatic satire it ends by praising them for bringing about a
great intellectual and social reform.
If the censure was induced to pass the book as it is in this edition by
this insertion, it was either very heedless or very indulgent. There is
a sweeping attack on the papacy (pp. 91-99), and another on the Jesuits
(pp. 100-102); and it leans a good deal towards republicanism. But on
a balance, though clearly anti-clerical, it is rather socio-political
than freethinking in its criticism. The words on the title-page,
traduit sur le manuscrit anglois, are of course pure mystification. It
is a romance of the Utopia school, and criticizes English conditions
as well as French.
1766. De Prades. Abrégé de l'histoire ecclésiastique de Fleury.
(Berlin.) Pref. by Frederick the Great. (Rep. 1767.)
1766. [Burigny.] Examen critique des Apologistes de la religion
chrétienne. Published (by Naigeon ?) under the name of Fréret.
[1024] [Twice rep. in 1767. Condemned to be burnt, 1770.]
1766. [Voltaire.] Le philosophe ignorant.
1766. [Abbé Millot.] Histoire philosophique de l'homme. [Naturalistic
theory of human beginnings.]
1767. Castillon. Almanach Philosophique.
1767. Doutes sur la religion (attributed to Gueroult de Pival), suivi
de l'Analyse du Traité théologique-politique de Spinoza (by
Boulainvilliers). [Rep. with additions in 1792 under the title
Doutes sur les religions révélées, adressés à Voltaire, par
Émilie du Chatelet. Ouvrage posthume.]
1767. [Dulaurens.] L'antipapisme révélé.
1767. Lettre de Thrasybule à Leucippe. [Published under the name of
Fréret (d. 1749). Written or edited by Naigeon. [1025]]
1767. [D'Holbach.] L'Imposture sacerdotale, ou Recueil de pièces sur
la clergé, traduites de l'anglois.
1767. [Voltaire.] Collection des lettres sur les miracles.
1767. ---- Examen important de milord Bolingbroke.
1767. Marmontel. Bélisaire. (Censured by the Sorbonne.)
1767. [Damilaville.] L'honnêtetê théologique.
1767. Reprint of Le Christianisme dévoilé. [Condemned to be burnt,
1768 and 1770.]
1767. [Voltaire.] Questions sur les Miracles. Par un Proposant.
1767. Seconde partie of the Recherches sur l'origine du despotisme.
1768. Meister, J. H. De l'origine des principes religieux.
Author banished from his native town, Zurich, "in perpetuity"
(decree rescinded in 1772), and book publicly burned there by the
hangman. [1026] Meister published a modified edition at Zurich in
1769. Orig. rep. in the Recueil Philosophique, 1770.
1768. Catalogue raisonné des esprits forts, depuis le curé
Rabelais jusqu'au curé Meslier.
1768. [D'Holbach.] La Contagion sacrée, ou histoire naturelle de
la superstition. [Condemned to be burnt, 1770.]
1768. ---- Lettres philosophiques sur l'origine des préjugés,
etc., traduites de l'anglois (of Toland).
1768. ---- Lettres à Eugénie, ou preservatif contre les
préjugés. 2 tom.
1768. ---- Théologie Portative. "Par l'abbé Bernier." [Also
burnt, 1776.]
1768. Traité des trois Imposteurs. (See 1719 and 1720.) Rep.
1775, 1777, 1793.
1768. Naigeon, J. A. Le militaire philosophe. [Adaptation of a
MS. The last chapter by d'Holbach.]
1768. D'Argens. OEuvres complètes, 24 tom. Berlin.
1768. Examen des prophéties qui servent de fondement à la
religion chrétienne (tr. from Collins by d'Holbach).
1768. Robinet. Considérations philosophiques.
1769-1780. L'Évangile du jour. 18 tom. Series of pieces, chiefly by
Voltaire.
1769. [Diderot. Also ascribed to Castillon.] Histoire générale
des dogmes et opinions philosophiques ... tirée du
Dictionnaire encyclopédique. Londres, 3 tom.
1769. [Mirabaud.] Opinions des anciens sur les juifs, and
Réflexions impartiales sur l'Évangile [1027] (rep. in 1777
as Examen critique du Nouveau Testament).
1769. [Isoard-Delisle, otherwise Delisle de Sales.] De la
Philosophie de la Nature. 6 tom. [Author imprisoned. Book
condemned to be burnt, 1775.]
1769. [Seguier de Saint-Brisson.] Traité des Droits de Génie,
dans lequel on examine si la connoissance de la verité est
avantageuse aux hommes et possible au philosophe.
"Carolsrouhe," 1769. [A strictly naturalistic-ethical
theory of society. Contains an attack on the doctrine of
Rousseau, in Émile, on the usefulness of religious error.]
1769. L'enfer détruit, traduit de l'Anglois [by d'Holbach.]
1770. [D'Holbach.] Histoire critique de Jésus Christ.
1770. ---- Examen critique de la vie et des ouvrages de Saint
Paul (tr. from English of Peter Annet).
1770. ---- Essai sur les Préjugés. (Not by Dumarsais, whose name
on the title-page is a mystification.)
1770. ---- Système de la Nature. 2 tom.
1770. Recueil Philosophique. 2 tom. [Edited by Naigeon. Contains
a rep. of Dumarsais's essays Le Philosophe and De la
raison, an extract from Tindal, essays by Vauvenargues and
Fréret (or Fontenelle), three by Mirabaud, Diderot's
Pensées sur la religion, several essays by d'Holbach,
Meister's De l'origine des principes religieux, etc.]
1770. Analyse de Bayle. Rep. of the four vols. of De Marsy, with
four more by Robinet.
1770. L'Esprit du Judaisme. (Trans. from Collins by d'Holbach.)
1770. Raynal (with Diderot and others). Histoire philosophique
des deux Indes. Containing atheistic arguments by Diderot.
[Suppressed, 1772.]
In this year there were condemned to be burned seven freethinking
works: d'Holbach's Contagion Sacrée; Voltaire's Dieu et les Hommes; the
French translation (undated) of Woolston's Discourses on the Miracles
of Jesus Christ; Fréret's (really Burigny's) Examen critique de la
religion chrétienne; an Examen impartial des principales religions
du monde, undated; d'Holbach's Christianisme dévoilé; and his Système
de la Nature.
1772. Le Bon Sens. [Adaptation from Meslier by Diderot and
d'Holbach. Condemned to be burnt, 1774.]
1772. De la nature humaine. [Trans. of Hobbes by d'Holbach.]
1773. Helvétius. De l'Homme. Ouvrage posthume. 2 tom. [Condemned to
be burnt, Jan. 10, 1774. Rep. 1775.]
1773. Carra, J. L. Système de la Raison, ou le prophète philosophe.
1773. [Burigny (?).] Recherches sur les miracles.
1773. [D'Holbach.] La politique naturelle. 2 tom.
1773. ----. Système Sociale. 3 tom.
1774. Abauzit, F. Réflexions impartiales sur les Évangiles, suivies
d'un essai sur l'Apocalypse. (Abauzit died 1767.)
1774. [Condorcet.] Lettres d'un Théologien. (Atheistic.)
1774. New edition of Theologie Portative. 2 tom. [Condemned to be
burnt.]
1775. [Voltaire.] Histoire de Jenni, ou Le Sage et l'Athée. [Attack
on atheism.]
1776. [D'Holbach.] La morale universelle. 3 tom.
1776. ---- Ethocratie.
1777. Examen critique du Nouveau Testament, "par M. Fréret." [Not
by Fréret. A rep. of Mirabaud's Réflexions impartiales sur
l'Évangile, 1769, which was probably written about 1750,
being replied to in the Réfutation du Celse moderne of the
Abbé Gautier, 1752 and 1765.]
1777. Carra. Esprit de la morale et de la philosophie.
1778. Barthez, P. J. Nouveaux éléments de la science de l'homme.
1779. Vie d'Apollonius de Tyane par Philostrate, avec les
commentaires donnés en anglois par Charles Blount sur les
deux premiers livres. [Trans. by J.-F. Salvemini de
Castillon, Berlin.] Amsterdam, 4 tom. (In addition to
Blount's pref. and notes there is a scoffing dedication to
Pope Clement XIV.)
1780. Duvernet, Abbé Th. J. L'Intolérance religieuse.
1780. Clootz, Anacharsis. La Certitude des preuves du Mahométisme.
[Reply by way of parody to Bergier's work, noted on p. 250.]
1780. Second ed. of Raynal's Histoire philosophique, with
additions. (Condemned to be burnt, 1781.)
1781. Maréchal, Sylvain. Le nouveau Lucrèce.
1783. Brissot de Warville. Lettres philosophiques sur S. Paul.
1784. Doray de Longrais. Faustin, ou le siècle philosophique.
1784. Pougens, M. C. J. de. Récréations de philosophie et de
morale.
1785. Maréchal. Livre échappé au Déluge. [Author dismissed.]
1787. Marquis Pastoret. Zoroastre, Confucius, et Mahomet.
1788. Meister. De la morale naturelle.
1788. Pastoret. Moïse considéré comme legislateur et comme
moraliste.
1788. Maréchal. Almanach des honnêtes gens. [Author imprisoned;
book burnt.]
1789. Volney. Les Ruines des Empires.
1789. Duvernet, Abbé. Les Dévotions de Madame de Betzamooth.
1789. Cerutti (Jesuit Father). Bréviaire Philosophique, ou Histoire
du Judaisme, du Christianisme, et du Déisme.
1791-3. Naigeon. Dictionnaire de la philosophie ancienne et moderne.
1795. Dupuis. De l'origine de tous les Cultes. 5 tom.
1795. La Fable de Christ dévoilée; ou Lettre du muphti de
Constantinople à Jean Ange Braschy, muphti de Rome.
1797. Rep. of d'Holbach's Contagion sacrée, with notes by Lemaire.
1798. Maréchal. Pensées libres sur les prêtres. A Rome, et se
trouve à Paris, chez les Marchands de Nouveautés. L'An Ier de
la Raison, et VI de la République Française.
13. It will be noted that after 1770--coincidently, indeed, with a
renewed restraint upon the press--there is a notable falling-off in the
freethinking output. Rationalism had now permeated educated France;
and, for different but analogous reasons, the stress of discussion
gradually shifted as it had done in England. France in 1760 stood to
the religious problem somewhat as England did in 1730, repeating the
deistic evolution with a difference. By that time England was committed
to the new paths of imperialism and commercialism; whereas France,
thrown back on the life of ideas and on her own politico-economic
problems, went on producing the abundant propaganda we have noted,
and, alongside of it, an independent propaganda of economics and
politics. At the end of 1767, the leading French diarist [1028] notes
that "there is formed at Paris a new sect, called the Economists,"
and names its leading personages, Quesnay, Mirabeau the elder, the
Abbé Baudeau, Mercier de la Rivière, and Turgot. These developed the
doctrine of agricultural or "real" production which so stimulated
and influenced Adam Smith. But immediately afterwards [1029] the
diarist notes a rival sect, the school of Forbonnais, who founded
mainly on the importance of commerce and manufactures. Each "sect"
had its journal. The intellectual ferment had inevitably fructified
thought upon economic as upon historical, religious, and scientific
problems; and there was in operation a fourfold movement, all tending
to make possible the immense disintegration of the State which began
in 1789. After the Economists came the "Patriots," who directed
towards the actual political machine the spirit of investigation and
reform. And the whole effective movement is not unplausibly to be
dated from the fall of the Jesuits in 1764. [1030] Inevitably the
forces interacted: Montesquieu and Rousseau alike dealt with both
the religious and the social issues; d'Holbach in his first polemic,
the Christianisme dévoilé, opens the stern impeachment of kings and
rulers which he develops so powerfully in the Essai sur les Préjugés;
and the Encyclopédie sent its search-rays over all the fields of
inquiry. But of the manifold work done by the French intellect in
the second and third generations of the eighteenth century, the
most copious and the most widely influential body of writings that
can be put under one category is that of which we have above made a
chronological conspectus.
Of these works the merit is of course very various; but the total
effect of the propaganda was formidable, and some of the treatises
are extremely effective. The Examen critique of Burigny, [1031] for
instance, which quickly won a wide circulation when printed, is one of
the most telling attacks thus far made on the Christian system, raising
as it does most of the issues fought over by modern criticism. It
tells indeed of a whole generation of private investigation and
debate; and the Abbé Bergier, assuming it to be the work of Fréret,
in whose name it is published, avows that its author "has written
it in the same style as his academic dissertations: he has spread
over it the same erudition; he seems to have read everything and
mastered everything." [1032] Perhaps not the least effective part
of the book is the chapter which asks: "Are men more perfect since
the coming of Jesus Christ?"; and it is here that the clerical reply
is most feeble. The critic cites the claims made by apologists as
to the betterment of life by Christianity, and then contrasts with
those claims the thousand-and-one lamentations by Christian writers
over the utter badness of all the life around them. Bergier in reply
follows the tactic habitually employed in the same difficulty to-day:
he ignores the fact that his own apologists have been claiming a vast
betterment, and contends that religion is not to be blamed for the
evils it condemns. Not by such furtive sophistry could the Church
turn the attack, which, as Bergier bitterly observes, was being made
by Voltaire in a new book every year.
As always, the weaker side of the critical propaganda is its effort at
reconstruction. As in England, so in France, the faithful accused the
critics of "pulling down without building up," when in point of fact
their chief error was to build up--that is, to rewrite the history
of human thought--before they had the required materials, or had even
mastered those which existed. Thus Voltaire and Rousseau alike framed
à priori syntheses of the origins of religion and society. But there
were closer thinkers than they in the rationalistic ranks. Fontenelle's
essay De l'origine des fables, though not wholly exempt from error,
admittedly lays aright the foundations of mythology and hierology;
and De Brosses in his treatise Du Culte des dieux fétiches (1760)
does a similar service on the side of anthropology. Meister's essay
De l'origine des principes religieux is full of insight and breadth;
and, despite some errors due to the backwardness of anthropology,
essentially scientific in temper and standpoint. His later essay,
De la morale naturelle, shows the same independence and fineness of
speculation, seeming indeed to tell of a character which missed fame
by reason of over-delicacy of fibre and lack of the driving force
which marked the foremost men of that tempestuous time. Vauvenargues's
essay De la suffisance de la religion naturelle is no less clinching,
granted its deism. So, on the side of philosophy, Mirabaud, who was
secretary of the Académie from 1742 to 1755, handles the problem of the
relation of deism to ethics--if the posthumous essays in the Recueil
philosophique be indeed his--in a much more philosophic fashion than
does Voltaire, arguing unanswerably for the ultimate self-dependence
of morals. The Lettre de Thrasybule à Leucippe, ascribed to Fréret,
again, is a notably skilful attack on theism.
14. One of the most remarkable of the company in some respects is
Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger (1722-1759), of whom Diderot gives a vivid
account in a sketch prefixed to the posthumous L'Antiquité dévoilée par
ses usages (1766). At the Collège de Beauvais, Boulanger was so little
stimulated by his scholastic teachers that they looked for nothing from
him in his maturity. When, however, at the age of seventeen, he began
to study mathematics and architecture, his faculties began to develop;
and the life, first of a military engineer in 1743-44, and later
in the service of the notable department of Roads and Bridges--the
most efficient of all State services under Louis XV--made him an
independent and energetic thinker. The chronic spectacle of the corvée,
the forced labour of peasants on the roads, moved him to indignation;
but he sought peace in manifold study, the engineer's contact with
nature arousing in him all manner of speculations, geological and
sociological. Seeking for historic light, he mastered Latin, which he
had failed to do at school, reading widely and voraciously; and when
the Latins failed to yield him the light he craved he systematically
mastered Greek, reading the Greeks as hungrily and with as little
satisfaction. Then he turned indefatigably to Hebrew, Syriac, and
Arabic, gleaning at best verbal clues which at length he wrought into
a large, loose, imaginative yet immensely erudite schema of ancient
social evolution, in which the physicist's pioneer study of the
structure and development of the globe controls the anthropologist's
guesswork as to the beginnings of human society. The whole is set forth
in the bulky posthumous work Recherches sur l'origine du despotisme
oriental (1761), and in the further treatise L'antiquité dévoilée
(3 tom. 1766), which is but the concluding section of the first-named.
It all yields nothing to modern science; the unwearying research
is all carried on, as it were, in the dark; and the sleepless
brain of the pioneer can but weave webs of impermanent speculation
from masses of unsifted and unmanageable material. Powers which
to-day, on a prepared ground of ascertained science, might yield
the greatest results, were wasted in a gigantic effort to build a
social science out of the chaos of undeciphered antiquity, natural
and human. But the man is nonetheless morally memorable. Diderot
pictures him with a head Socratically ugly, simple and innocent of
life, gentle though vivacious, reading Rabbinical Hebrew in his
walks on the high roads, suffering all his life from "domestic
persecution," "little contradictory though infinitely learned,"
and capable of passing in a moment, on the stimulus of a new idea,
into a state of profound and entranced absorption. Diderot is always
enthusiastically generous in praise; but in reading and reviewing
Boulanger's work we can hardly refuse assent to his friend's claim
that "if ever man has shown in his career the true characters of
genius, it was he." His immense research was all compassed in a life
of thirty-seven years, occupied throughout in an active profession;
and the diction in which he sets forth his imaginative construction
of the past reveals a constant intensity of thought rarely combined
with scholarly knowledge. But it was an age of concentrated energy,
carrying in its womb the Revolution. The perusal of Boulanger is a
sufficient safeguard against the long-cherished hallucination that
the French freethinking of his age was but a sparkle of raillery.
Even among some rationalists, however, who are content to take
hearsay report on these matters, there appears still to subsist a
notion that the main body of the French freethinkers of the eighteenth
century were mere scoffers, proceeding upon no basis of knowledge and
with no concern for research. Such an opinion is possible only to
those who have not examined their work. To say nothing more of the
effort of Boulanger, an erudition much more exact than Voltaire's
and a deeper insight than his and Rousseau's into the causation of
primitive religion inspires the writings of men like Burigny and
Fréret on the one hand, and Fontenelle and Meister on the other. The
philosophic reach of Diderot, one of the most convinced opponents
of the ruling religion, was recognized by Goethe. And no critic of
the "philosophes" handled more uncompromisingly than did Dumarsais
[1033] the vanity of the assumption that a man became a philosopher
by merely setting himself in opposition to orthodox belief. Dumarsais,
long scholastically famous for his youthful treatise Des Tropes, lived
up to his standard, whatever some of the more eminent philosophes may
have done, being found eminently lovable by pietists who knew him;
while for D'Alembert he was "the La Fontaine of the philosophers"
in virtue of his lucid simplicity of style. [1034] The Analyse de la
religion chrétienne printed under his name in some editions of the
Évangile de la Raison has been pronounced supposititious. It seems
to be the work of at least two hands [1035] of different degrees
of instruction; but, apart from some errors due to one of these,
it does him no discredit, being a vigorous criticism of Scriptural
contradictions and anomalies, such as a "Jansenist atheist" might
well compose, though it makes the usual profession of deistic belief.
Later polemic works, inspired by those above noticed, reproduce some
of their arguments, but with an advance in literary skill, as in the
anonymous Bon Sens given forth (1772) by Diderot and d'Holbach as the
work of Jean Meslier, but really an independent compilation, embodying
other arguments with his, and putting the whole with a concision
and brilliancy to which he could make no approach. Prémontval, a
bad writer, [1036] contrives nonetheless to say many pungent things
of a deistic order in his Diogène de d'Alembert, and, following
Marie Huber, puts forward the formula of religion versus theology,
which has done so much duty in the nineteenth century. Of the whole
literature it is not too much to say that it covered cogently most
of the important grounds of latter-day debate, from the questions of
revelation and the doctrine of torments to the bases of ethics and the
problem of deity; and it would be hard to show that the nineteenth
century has handled the main issues with more sincerity, lucidity,
or logic than were attained by Frenchmen in the eighteenth. To-day, no
doubt, in the light of a century and a-half of scientific, historic,
and philosophic accumulation, the rationalist case is put with more
profundity and accuracy by many writers than it could be in the
eighteenth century. But we have to weigh the freethinkers of that
age against their opponents, and the French performers against those
of other countries, to make a fair estimate. When this is done their
credit is safe. When German and other writers say with Tholuck that
"unbelief entered Germany not by the weapons of mere wit and scoffing
as in France; it grounded itself on learned research," [1037] they
merely prove their ignorance of French culture-history. An abundance
of learned research in France preceded the triumphant campaign
of Voltaire, who did most of the witty writing on the subject; and
whose light artillery was to the last reinforced by the heavier guns
of d'Holbach. It is only in the analysis of the historical problem
by the newer tests of anthropology and hierology, and in the light
of latterly discovered documents, that our generation has made much
advance on the strenuous pioneers of the age of Voltaire. And even
in the field of anthropology the sound thinking of Fontenelle and
De Brosses long preceded any equally valid work by rationalists in
Germany; though Spencer of Cambridge had preceded them in his work
of constructive orthodoxy.
15. Though the bibliographers claim to have traced the authorship in
most cases, such works were in the first instance generally published
anonymously, [1038] as were those of Voltaire, d'Holbach, and the
leading freethinkers; and the clerical policy of suppression had
the result of leaving them generally unanswered, save in anonymous
writings, when they nevertheless got into private circulation. It was
generally impolitic that an official answer should appear to a book
which was officially held not to exist; so that the orthodox defence
was long confined mainly to the classic performances of Pascal,
Bossuet, Huet, Fénelon, and some outsiders such as the Protestant
Abbadie, who settled first in Berlin and later in London. The polemic
of every one of the writers named is a work of ability; even that of
Abbadie (Traité de la Vérité de la religion chrétienne, 1684), though
now little known, was in its day much esteemed. [1039] In the age of
Louis XIV those classic answers to unbelief were by believers held
to be conclusive; and thus far the French defence was certainly more
thorough and philosophical than the English. But French freethought,
which in Herbert's day had given the lead to English, now drew new
energy from the English growth; and the general arguments of the
old apologists did not explicitly meet the new attack. Their books
having been written to meet the mostly unpublished objections of
previous generations, the Church through its chosen policy had the
air of utter inability to confute the newer propaganda, though some
apologetic treatises of fair power did appear, in particular those
of the Abbé Bergier. [1040] By the avowal of a Christian historian,
"So low had the talents of the once illustrious Church of France fallen
that in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when Christianity
itself was assailed, not one champion of note appeared in its ranks;
and when the convocation of the clergy, in 1770, published their
famous anathema against the dangers of unbelief, and offered rewards
for the best essays in defence of the Christian faith, the productions
called forth were so despicable that they sensibly injured the cause
of religion." [1041]
The freethinking attack, in fact, had now become overwhelming. After
the suppression of the Jesuit Order (1764) [1042] the press grew
practically more and more free; and when, after the accession of Pope
Clement XIV (1769), the freethinking books circulated with less and
less restraint, Bergier extended his attack on deism, and deists and
clerics joined in answering the atheistic Système de la Nature of
d'Holbach. But by this time the deistic books were legion, and the
political battle over the taxation of Church property had become
the more pressing problem, especially seeing that the mass of the
people remained conforming. The manifesto of the clergy in 1770 was
accompanied by an address to the king "On the evil results of liberty
of thought and printing," following up a previous appeal by the pope;
[1043] and in consideration of the donation by the clergy of sixteen
million livres the Government recommended the Parlement of Paris
to proceed against impious books. There seems accordingly to have
been some hindrance to publication for a year or two; but in 1772
appeared the Bon Sens of d'Holbach and Diderot; and there was no
further serious check, the Jesuits being disbanded by the pope in 1773.
The English view that French orthodoxy made a "bad" defence
to the freethinking attack as compared with what was done in
England (Sir J. F. Stephen, Horæ Sabbaticæ, 2nd. ser. p. 281;
Alison, as cited above) proceeds on some misconception of the
circumstances, which, as has been shown, were substantially
different in the two countries. Could the English clergy have
resorted to official suppression of deistic literature, they
too would doubtless have done so. Swift and Berkeley bitterly
desired to. But the view that the English defence was relatively
"good," and that Butler's in particular was decisive, is also,
as we have seen, fallacious. In Sir Leslie Stephen's analysis,
as apart from his preamble, the orthodox defence is exhibited as
generally weak, and often absurd. Nothing could be more futile
than the three "Pastoral Letters" published by the Bishop of
London (1728, 1730, 1731) as counterblasts to the freethinking
books of this period. In France the defence began sooner, and
was more profound and even more methodical. Pascal at least went
deeper, and Bossuet (in his Discours sur l'Histoire Universelle)
more widely, into certain inward and outward problems of the
controversy than did any of the English apologists; Huet produced,
in his Demonstratio Evangelica, one of the most methodical of all
the defensive treatises of the time; Abbadie, as before noted,
gave great satisfaction, and certainly grappled zealously with
Hobbes and Spinoza; Allix, though no great dialectician, gave a
lead to English apologetics against the deists (above, p. 97),
and was even adapted by Paley; and Fénelon, though his Traité de
l'Existence et des Attributs de Dieu (1712) and Lettres sur la
Religion (1716) are not very powerful processes of reasoning,
contributed through his reproduced conversations (1710) with
Ramsay a set of arguments at least as plausible as anything on
the English side, and, what is more notable, marked by an amenity
which almost no English apologist attained.