France before the main battle in England began; and when a new
French campaign commenced with Voltaire, the defence against
that incomparable attack, so far as the system allowed of any,
was probably as good as it could have been made in England, save
insofar as the Protestants gave up modern miracles, while most of
the Catholics claimed them for their Church. Counterblasts such
as the essay of Linguet, Le Fanatisme des Philosophes (1764),
were but general indictments of rationalism; and other apologetic
treatises, as we saw, handled only the most prominent books on
the other side. It should be noted, too, that as late as 1764
the police made it almost impossible to obtain in Paris works
of Voltaire recently printed in Holland (Grimm, vii, 123, 133,
434). But, as Paley admitted with reference to Gibbon ("Who can
refute a sneer?"), the new attack was in any case very hard to
meet. A sneer is not hard to refute when it is unfounded, inasmuch
as it implies a proposition, which can be rebutted or turned by
another sneer. The Anglican Church had been well enough pleased by
the polemic sneers of Swift and Berkeley; but the other side had
the heavier guns, and of the mass of defences produced in England
nothing remains save in the neat compilation of Paley. Alison's
whole avowal might equally well apply to anything produced in
England as against Voltaire. The skeptical line of argument for
faith had been already employed by Huet and Pascal and Fénelon,
with visibly small success; Berkeley had achieved nothing with
it as against English deism; and Butler had no such effect in his
day in England as to induce French Catholics to use him. (He does
not appear to have been translated into French till 1821.)
An Oratorian priest, again, translated the anti-deistic essays
of President Forbes; and the Pensées Theologiques relatives aux
erreurs du temps of Père Jamin (1768; 4e édit. 1773) were thought
worthy of being translated into German, poor as they were. With
their empty affirmation of authority they suggest so much blank
cartridge, which could avail nothing with thinking men; and here
doubtless the English defence makes a better impression. But,
on the other hand, Voltaire circulated widely in England, and was
no better answered there than in France. His attack was, in truth,
at many points peculiarly baffling, were it only by its inimitable
wit. The English replies to Spinoza, again, were as entirely
inefficient or deficient as the French; the only intelligent
English answers to Hume on Miracles (the replies on other issues
were of no account) made use of the French investigations of the
Jansenist miracles; and the replies to Gibbon were in general
ignominious failures.
Finally, though the deeper reasonings of Diderot were over the
heads alike of the French and the English clergy, the Système
de la Nature of d'Holbach was met skilfully enough at many
points by G. J. Holland (1772), who, though not a Frenchman,
wrote excellent French, and supplied for French readers a
very respectable rejoinder; [1044] whereas in England there was
practically none. In this case, of course, the defence was deistic;
as was that of Voltaire, who criticized d'Holbach as Bolingbroke
attacked Spinoza and Hobbes. But the Examen du Matérialisme of the
Abbé Bergier (1771), who was a member of the Academy of Sciences,
was at least as good as anything that could then have been done in
the Church of England; and the same may be said of his reply to
Fréret's (really Burigny's) Examen. It is certainly poor enough;
but Bishop Watson used some of its arguments for his reply to
Paine. Broadly speaking, as we have said, much more of French
than of English intelligence had been turned to the dispute
in the third quarter of the century. In England, political and
industrial discussion relieved the pressure on creed; in France,
before the Revolution, the whole habit of absolutism tended to
restrict discussion to questions of creed; and the attack would
in any case have had the best of it, because it embodied all
the critical forces hitherto available. The controversy thus
went much further than the pre-Humian issues raised in England;
and the English orthodoxy of the end of the century was, in
comparison, intellectually as weak as politically and socially it
was strong. In France, from the first, the greater intellectual
freedom in social intercourse, exemplified in the readiness of
women to declare themselves freethinkers (cp. Jamin, as cited,
ch. xix, § 1), would have made the task of the apologists harder
even had they been more competent.
16. Above the scattered band of minor combatants rises a group of
writers of special power, several of whom, without equalling Voltaire
in ubiquity of influence, rivalled him in intellectual power and
industry. The names of Diderot, D'Holbach, D'Alembert, Helvétius, and
Condorcet are among the first in literary France of the generation
before the Revolution; after them come Volney and Dupuis; and in
touch with the whole series stands the line of great mathematicians
and physicists (to which also belongs D'Alembert), Laplace, Lagrange,
Lalande, Delambre. When to these we add the names of Montesquieu,
Buffon, Chamfort, Rivarol, Vauvenargues; of the materialists La Mettrie
and Cabanis; of the philosophers Condillac and Destutt de Tracy; of
the historian Raynal; of the poet André Chénier; of the politicians
Turgot, Mirabeau, Danton, Desmoulins, Robespierre--all (save perhaps
Raynal) deists or else pantheists or atheists--it becomes clear that
the intelligence of France was predominantly rationalistic before
the Revolution, though the mass of the nation certainly was not.
It is necessary to deprecate Mr. Lecky's statement (Rationalism
in Europe, i, 176) that "Raynal has taken, with Diderot, a place
in French literature which is probably permanent"--an estimate as
far astray as the declaration on the same page that the English
deists are buried in "unbroken silence." Raynal's vogue in his
day was indeed immense (cp. Morley, Diderot, ch. xv); and Edmond
Scherer (Études sur la litt. du 18e Siècle, 1891, pp. 277-78) held
that Raynal's Histoire philosophique des deux Indes had had more
influence on the French Revolution than even Rousseau's Contrat
Social. But the book has long been discredited (cp. Scherer,
pp. 275-76). A biographical Dictionary of 1844 spoke of it as
"cet ouvrage ampoulé qu'on ne lit pas aujourd'hui." Although the
first edition (1770) passed the censure only by means of bribery,
and the second (1780) was publicly burned, and its author forced to
leave France, he was said to reject, in religion, "only the pope,
hell, and monks" (Scherer, p. 286); and most of the anti-religious
declamation in the first edition of the Histoire is said to be
from the pen of Diderot, who wrote it very much at random, at
Raynal's request.
No list of orthodox names remotely comparable with these can be drawn
from the literature of France, or indeed of any other country of that
time. Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), the one other pre-eminent
figure, though not an anti-Christian propagandist, is distinctly on
the side of deism. In the Contrat Social, [1045] writing with express
approbation of Hobbes, he declares that "the Christian law is at bottom
more injurious than useful to the sound constitution of the State"; and
even the famous Confession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar in the Émile is
anti-revelationist, and practically anti-clerical. He was accordingly
anathematized by the Sorbonne, which found in Émile nineteen heresies;
the book was seized and burned both at Paris and at Geneva within a few
weeks of its appearance, [1046] and the author decreed to be arrested;
even the Contrat Social was seized and its vendors imprisoned. All
the while he had maintained in Émile doctrines of the usefulness of
religious delusion and fanaticism. Still, although his temperamental
way of regarding things has a clear affinity with some later religious
philosophy of a more systematic sort, he undoubtedly made for
freethought as well as for the revolutionary spirit in general. Thus
the cause of Christianity stood almost denuded of intellectually
eminent adherents in the France of 1789; for even among the writers
who had dealt with public questions without discussing religion, or
who had criticized Rousseau and the philosophes--as the Abbés Mably,
Morellet, Millot--the tone was essentially rationalistic.
It has been justly enough argued, concerning Rousseau (see
below, p. 287), that the generation of the Revolution made him
its prophet in his own despite, and that had he lived twenty
years longer he would have been its vehement adversary. But this
does not alter the facts as to his influence. A great writer of
emotional genius, like Rousseau, inevitably impels men beyond the
range of his own ideals, as in recent times Ruskin and Tolstoy,
both anti-Socialists, have led thousands towards Socialism. In
his own generation and the next, Rousseau counted essentially for
criticism of the existing order; and it was the revolutionaries,
never the conservatives, who acclaimed him. De Tocqueville
(Hist. philos. du règne de Louis XV, 1849, i, 33) speaks of his
"impiété dogmatique." Martin du Theil, in his J. J. Rousseau
apologiste de la religion chrétienne (2e édit. 1840), makes out
his case by identifying emotional deism with Christianity, as did
Rousseau himself when he insisted that "the true Christianity
is only natural religion well explained." Rousseau's praise of
the gospel and of the character of Jesus was such as many deists
acquiesced in. Similar language, in the mouth of Matthew Arnold,
gave rather more offence to Gladstone, as a believing Christian,
than did the language of simple unbelief; and a recent Christian
polemist, at the close of a copious monograph, has repudiated the
association of Rousseau with the faith (see J. F. Nourrisson,
J. J. Rousseau et le Rousseauisme, 1903, p. 497 sq.). What
is true of him is that he was more religiously a theist than
Voltaire, whose impeachment of Providence in the poem on the
Earthquake of Lisbon he sought strenuously though not very
persuasively to refute in a letter to the author. But, with
all his manifold inconsistencies, which may be worked down
to the neurosis so painfully manifest in his life and in his
relations to his contemporaries, he never writes as a believer
in the dogmas of Christianity or in the principle of revelation;
and it was as a deist that he was recognized by his Christian
contemporaries. A demi-Christian is all that Michelet will call
him. His compatriot the Swiss pastor Roustan, located in London,
directed against him his Offrande aux Autels et à la Patrie, ou
Défense du Christianisme (1764), regarding him as an assailant. The
work of the Abbé Bergier, Le Déisme refuté par lui-même (1765,
and later), takes the form of letters addressed to Rousseau, and
is throughout an attack on his works, especially the Émile. When,
therefore, Buckle (1-vol. ed. p. 475) speaks of him as not having
attacked Christianity, and Lord Morley (Rousseau, ch. xiv) treats
him as creating a religious reaction against the deists, they do
not fully represent his influence on his time. As we have seen,
he stimulated Voltaire to new audacities by his example.
17. An interlude in the critical campaign, little noticed at the time,
developed importance a generation later. In 1753 Jean Astruc, doctor
of medicine, published after long hesitation his Conjectures on the
original documents which Moses seems to have used in composing the
book of Genesis. Only in respect of his flash of insight into the
composite structure of the Pentateuch was Astruc a freethinker. His
hesitation to publish was due to his fear that les pretendus esprits
forts might make a bad use of his work; and he was quite satisfied
that Moses was the author of the Pentateuch as it stands. The denial
of that authorship, implied in the criticisms of Hobbes and Spinoza,
he described as "the disease of the last century." This attitude may
explain the lack of interest in Astruc's work shown by the freethinkers
of the time. [1047] Nonetheless, by his perception of the clue given
by the narrative use of the two names Yahweh and Elohim in Genesis,
he laid a new foundation of the Higher Criticism of the Bible in modern
times, advancing alike on Spinoza and on Simon. For freethought he had
"builded better than he knew."
18. In the select Parisian arena of the Académie, the intellectual
movement of the age is as it were dramatized; and there more clearly
than in the literary record we can trace the struggle of opinions,
from the admission of Voltaire (1746) onwards. In the old days
the Académie had been rather the home of convention, royalism,
and orthodoxy than of ideas, though before Voltaire there were some
freethinking members of the lesser Académies, notably Boindin. [1048]
The admission of Montesquieu (1728), after much opposition from
the court, preludes a new era; and from the entrance of Voltaire,
fourteen years after his first attempt, [1049] the atmosphere begins
perceptibly to change. When, in 1727, the academician Bonamy had read
a memoir On the character and the paganism of the emperor Julian,
partly vindicating him against the aspersions of the Christian Fathers,
the Academy feared to print the paper, though its author was a devout
Catholic. [1050] When the Abbé La Bletterie, also orthodox, read to
the Academy portions of his Vie de Julien, the members were not now
scandalized, though the Abbé's Jansenism moved the King to veto his
nomination. So, when Blanchard in 1735 read a memoir on Les exorcismes
magiques there was much trepidation among the members, and again the
Secretary inserted merely an analysis, concluding with the words of
Philetas, "Believe and fear God; beware of questioning." [1051] Even
such a play of criticism as the challenging of the early history
of Rome by Lévesque de Pouilly (brother of Lévesque de Burigny)
in a dissertation before the Académie in 1722, roused the fears and
the resentment of the orthodox; the Abbé Sallier, in undertaking to
refute him, insinuated that he had shown a spirit which might be
dangerous to other beliefs; and whispers of atheism passed among
the academicians. [1052] Pouilly, who had been made a freethinker
by English contacts, went again to England later, and spent his last
years at Rheims. [1053] His thesis was much more powerfully sustained
in 1738 by Beaufort, in the famous dissertation Sur l'incertitude des
cinq premiers siècles de l'histoire romaine; but Beaufort was of a
refugee-Huguenot stock; his book was published, under his initials,
at Utrecht; and not till 1753 did the Académie award him a medal--on
the score of an earlier treatise. And in 1748 the Religio veterum
Persarum of the English Orientalist Hyde, published as long before
as 1700, found a vehement assailant within the Academy in the Abbé
Foucher, who saw danger in a favourable view of any heathen religion.
Yet even in the time of Louis XIV the Abbé Mongault, tutor of the son
of the Regent, and noted alike for his private freethinking and for
the rigid orthodoxy which he instilled into his pupil, treated the
historic subject of the divine honours rendered to Roman governors
with such latitude as to elicit from Fréret, in his éloge of Mongault,
the remark that the tutor had reserved to himself a liberty of thought
which he doubtless felt to be dangerous in a prince. [1054] And after
1750 the old order can be seen passing away. D'Argenson notes in his
diary in 1754: "I observe in the Académie de belles-lettres, of which
I am a member, that there begins to be a decided stir against the
priests. It began to show itself at the death of Boindin, to whom our
bigots refused a service at the Oratory and a public commemoration. Our
deist philosophers were shocked, and ever since, at each election,
they are on guard against the priests and the bigots. Nowhere is
this division so marked, and it begins to bear fruits." [1055] The
old statesman indicates his own sympathies by adding: "Why has a bad
name been made of the title of deist? It is that of those who have
true religion in their hearts, and who have abjured a superstition
that is destructive to the whole world." It was in this year that
D'Alembert, who took nearly as much pains to stay out as Voltaire
had done to enter, [1056] was elected a member; and with two leading
encyclopédistes in the forty, and a friendly abbé (Duclos) in the
secretaryship (1755), and another zealous freethinker, Lévesque de
Burigny, admitted in 1756, [1057] the fortunes of freethought were
visibly rising. Its influence was thrown on the side of the academic
orator Thomas, a sincere believer but a hater of all persecution,
and as such offensive to the Church party. [1058]
19. In 1759 there came a check. The Encyclopédie, which had been
allowed to resume publication after its first suppression in 1752,
was again stopped; and the battle between philosophes and fanatics,
dramatized for the time being in Palissot's comedy Les Philosophes
and in Voltaire's rejoinder to Fréron, L'Écossaise, came to be
fought out in the Academy itself. The poet Lefranc de Pompignan,
[1059] elected in 1759 without any opposition from the freethinkers,
had in his youth translated Pope's "Deist's Prayer," and had suffered
for it to the extent of being deprived by D'Aguesseau of his official
charge [1060] for six months. With such a past, with a keen concern
for status, and with a character that did not stick at tergiversation,
Pompignan saw fit to signalize his election by making his discours
de réception (March, 1760) a violent attack on the whole philosophic
school, which, in his conclusion, he declared to be undermining
"equally the throne and the altar." The academicians heard him
out in perfect silence, leaving it to the few pietists among the
audience to applaud; but as soon as the reports reached Ferney there
began the vengeance of Voltaire. First came a leaflet of stinging
sentences, each beginning with Quand: "When one has translated
and even exaggerated the 'Deist's Prayer' composed by Pope ...,"
and so on. The maddened Pompignan addressed a fatuous memorial to
the King (who notoriously hated the philosophes, and had assented
only under petticoat influence to Voltaire's election [1061]); and,
presuming to print it without the usual official sanction, suffered
at the hands of Malesherbes the blow of having the printer's plant
smashed. Other combatants entered the fray. Voltaire's leaflet "les
quand" was followed by "les si, les pour, les qui, les quoi, les car,
les ah!"--by him or others--and the master-mocker produced in swift
succession three satires in verse, [1062] all accompanied by murderous
prose annotations. The speedy result was Pompignan's retirement into
provincial life. He could not face the merciless hail of rejoinders;
and when at his death, twenty-five years later, the Abbé Maury had
to pronounce his éloge, the mention of his famous humiliation was
hardly tempered by compassion. [1063]
20. Voltaire could not compass, as he for a time schemed, the election
of Diderot; but other philosophes of less note entered from time
to time; [1064] Marmontel was elected in 1763; and when in 1764
the Academy's prize for poetry was given to Chamfort for a piece
which savoured of what were then called "the detestable principles
of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Helvétius," and in 1768 its prize for
eloquence went to the same writer, the society as a whole had acquired
a certain character for impiety. [1065] In 1767 there had occurred
the famous ecclesiastical explosion over Marmontel's philosophic
romance Bélisaire, a performance in which it is somewhat difficult
to-day to detect any exciting quality. It was by a chapter in praise
of toleration that the "universal and mediocre Marmontel" [1066]
secured from the Sorbonne the finest advertisement ever given to a
work of fiction, the ecclesiastics of the old school being still too
thoroughly steeped in the past to realize that a gospel of persecution
was a bad warcry for a religion that was being more and more put on the
defensive. Only an angry fear before the rising flood of unlicensed
literature, combining with the long-baffled desire to strike some
blow at freethinking, could have moved the Sorbonne to select for
censure the duly licensed work [1067] of a popular academician and
novelist; and it should be remembered that it was at a time of great
activity in the unlicensed production of freethinking literature
that the attack was made. The blow recoiled signally. The book
was of course promptly translated into all the languages of Europe,
selling by tens of thousands; [1068] and two sovereigns took occasion
to give it their express approval. These were the Empress Catherine
(who caused the book to be translated by members of her court while
she was making a tour of her empire, she herself taking a chapter),
and the Empress Maria-Theresa. From Catherine, herself a freethinker,
the approbation might have been expected; but the known orthodoxy
and austerity of Maria-Theresa made her support the more telling. In
France a small literary tempest raged for a year. Marmontel published
his correspondence with the syndic of the Sorbonne and with Voltaire;
and in all there appeared some dozen documents pro and con, among
them an anonymous satire by Turgot, Les xxxvii verités opposées aux
xxxvii impiétés de Bélisaire, "Par un Bachelier Ubiquiste," [1069]
which, with the contributions of Voltaire, gave the victim very much
the best of the battle.
21. Alongside of the more strictly literary or humanist movement,
too, there went on one of a scientific kind, which divided into two
lines, a speculative and a practical. On the former the freelance
philosopher Julien Offray la Mettrie gave a powerful initial push by
his materialistic theses, in which a medical knowledge that for the
time was advanced is applied with a very keen if unsystematic reasoning
faculty to the primary problem of mind and body; and others after
him continued the impulse. La Mettrie produced his Natural History
of the Mind in 1745; [1070] and in 1746 appeared the Essay on the
Origin of Human Knowledge of the Abbé Condillac, both essentially
rationalistic and anti-theological works, though differing in their
psychological positions, Condillac being a non-materialist, though
a strong upholder of "sensism." La Mettrie followed up his doctrine
with the more definitely materialistic but less heedfully planned
works, L'Homme Plante and L'Homme Machine (1748), the second of which,
published at Leyden [1071] and wickedly dedicated to the pious Baron
von Haller, was burned by order of the magistrates, its author being
at the same time expelled from Holland. Both books are remarkable
for their originality of thought, biological and ethical. Though
La Mettrie professed to think the "greatest degree of probability"
was in favour of the existence of a personal God, [1072] his other
writings gave small support to the hypothesis; and even in putting
it he rejects any inference as to worship. And he goes on to quote
very placidly an atheist who insists that only an atheistic world can
attain to happiness. It is notable that he, the typical materialist of
his age, seems to have been one of its kindliest men, by the consent
of all who knew him, [1073] though heedless in his life to the point
of ending it by eating a monstrous meal out of bravado.
The conventional denunciation of La Mettrie (endorsed by Lord
Morley, Voltaire, p. 122) proceeds ostensibly upon those of his
writings in which he discussed sexual questions with absolute
scientific freedom. He, however, insisted that his theoretic
discussion had nothing whatever to do with his practice; and there
is no evidence that he lived otherwise than as most men did in his
age, and ours. Still, the severe censure passed on him by Diderot
(Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron, ed. 1782, ii, 22-24)
seems to convict him of at least levity of character. Voltaire
several times holds the same tone. But Diderot writes so angrily
that his verdict incurs suspicion.
As Lange notes, there has been much loose generalization as to
the place and bearing of La Mettrie in the history of French
thought. Hettner, who apparently had not thought it worth while
to read him, has ascribed his mental movement to the influence
of Diderot's Pensées philosophiques (1746), whereas it had
begun in his own Histoire naturelle de l'âme, published a year
before. La Mettrie's originality and influence in general have been
underestimated as a result of the hostility set up by disparagement
of his character. The idea of a fundamental unity of type in
nature--an idea underlying all the successive steps of Lamarck,
Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Goethe, and others, towards the complete
conception of evolution--is set forth by him in L'Homme Plante in
1748, the year in which appeared De Maillet's Telliamed. Buffon
follows in time as in thought, only beginning his great work
in 1749; Maupertuis, with his pseudonymous dissertation on the
Universal system of Nature, applies La Mettrie's conception in
1751; and Diderot's Pensées sur l'interprétation de la nature,
stimulated by Maupertuis, appeared only in 1754. La Mettrie
proceeded from the classification of Linnæus, but did not
there find his idea. In the words of Lange, "these forgotten
writings are in nowise so empty and superficial as is commonly
assumed." Gesch. des Materialismus, i, 328-29. Lange seems to
have been the first to make a judicial study of La Mettrie's work,
as distinguished from the scandals about his character.
22. A more general influence, naturally, attached to the
simple concrete handling of scientific problems. The interest
in such questions, noticeable in England at the Restoration
and radiating thence, is seen widely diffused in France after
the publication of Fontenelle's Entretiens, and thenceforward it
rapidly strengthens. Barren theological disputations set men not
merely against theology, but upon the study of Nature, where real
knowledge was visibly possible. To a certain extent the study took
openly heretical lines. The Abbé Lenglet du Fresnoy, who was four
times imprisoned in the Bastille, supplied material of which D'Argens
made much use, tending to overthrow the Biblical chronology and to
discredit the story of the Flood. [1074] Benoît de Maillet (1656-1738),
who had been for fifteen years inspector of the French establishments
in Egypt and Barbary, left for posthumous publication (1748) a work
of which the first title was an anagram of his name, Telliamed, ou
Entretiens d'un philosophe indien avec un missionaire français. Of
this treatise the thesis is that the shell deposits in the Alps and
elsewhere showed the sea to have been where land now was; and that the
rocks were gradually deposited in their different kinds in the fashion
in which even now are being formed mud, sand, and shingle. De Maillet
had thus anticipated the central conception of modern geology, albeit
retaining many traditional delusions. His abstention from publication
during his lifetime testifies to his sense of the danger he underwent,
the treatise having been printed by him only in 1735, at the age of
seventy-nine; and not till ten years after his death was it given to
the world, with "a preface and dedication so worded as, in case of
necessity, to give the printer a fair chance of falling back on the
excuse that the work was intended for a mere jeu d'esprit." [1075]
The thesis was adopted, indeed plagiarized, [1076] by Mirabaud in
his Le Monde, son origine et son antiquité (1751). Strangely enough,
Voltaire refused to be convinced, and offered amazing suggestions
as to the possible deposit of shells by pilgrims. [1077] It is not
unlikely that it was Voltaire's opposition rather than any orthodox
argumentation that retarded in France the acceptance of an evolutionary
view of the origin of the earth and of life. It probably had a more
practical effect on scientific thought in England [1078]--at least
as regards geology: its speculations on the modification of species,
which loosely but noticeably anticipate some of the inferences of
Darwin, found no acceptance anywhere till Lamarck. In the opinion
of Huxley, the speculations of Robinet, in the next generation, "are
rather behind than in advance of those of De Maillet"; [1079] and it
may be added that the former, with his pet theory that all Nature
is "animated," and that the stars and planets have the faculty of
reproducing themselves like animals, wandered as far from sound bases
as De Maillet ever did. The very form of De Maillet's work, indeed,
was not favourable to its serious acceptance; and in his case, as in
those of so many pioneers of new ideas, errors and extravagances and
oversights in regard to matters of detail went to justify "practical"
men in dismissing novel speculations. Needless to say, the common run
of scientific men remained largely under the influence of religious
presuppositions in science even when they had turned their backs
on the Church. Nonetheless, on all sides the study of natural fact
began to play its part in breaking down the dominion of creed. Even
in hidebound Protestant Switzerland, the sheer ennui of Puritanism is
seen driving the descendants of the Huguenot refugees to the physical
sciences for an interest and an occupation, before any freethinking
can safely be avowed; and in France, as Buckle has shown in abundant
detail, the study of the physical sciences became for many years
before the Revolution almost a fashionable mania. And at the start
the Church had contrived that such study should rank as unbelief,
and so make unbelievers.
When Buffon [1080] in 1749-50 published his Histoire Naturelle,
the delight which was given to most readers by its finished style
was paralleled by the wrath which its Théorie de la Terre aroused
among the clergy. After much discussion Buffon received early in 1751
from the Sorbonne an official letter specifying as reprehensible in
his book fourteen propositions which he was invited to retract. He
stoically obeyed in a declaration to the effect that he had "no
intention to contradict the text of Scripture," and that he believed
"most firmly all there related about the creation," adding: "I abandon
everything in my book respecting the formation of the earth." [1081]
Still he was attacked as an unbeliever by the Bishop of Auxerre in that
prelate's pastoral against the thesis of de Prades. [1082] During the
rest of his life he outwardly conformed to religious usage, but all
men knew that in his heart he believed what he had written; and the
memory of the affront that the Church had thus put upon so honoured
a student helped to identify her cause no less with ignorance than
with insolence and oppression. For all such insults, and for the long
roll of her cruelties, the Church was soon to pay a tremendous penalty.
23. But science, like theology, had its schisms, and the rationalizing
camp had its own strifes. Maupertuis, for instance, is remembered
mainly as one of the victims of the mockery of Voltaire (which he
well earned by his own antagonism at the court of Frederick); yet he
was really an energetic man of science, and had preceded Voltaire in
setting up in France the Newtonian against the Cartesian physics. In
his System of Nature [1083] (not to be confused with the later work of
d'Holbach under the same title) he in 1751 propounded a new version of
the hylozoisms of ancient Greece; developed the idea of an underlying
unity in the forms of natural life, already propounded by La Mettrie
in his L'Homme Plante; connected it with Leibnitz's formula of the
economy of nature ("minimum of action"--the germ of the modern "line
of least resistance"), and at the same time anticipated some of the
special philosophic positions of Kant. [1084] Diderot, impressed by
but professedly dissenting from Maupertuis's Système in his Pensées
sur l'interprétation de la nature (1754), promptly pointed out that
the conception of a primordially vitalized atom excluded that of a
Creator, and for his own part thereafter took that standpoint. [1085]
In 1754 came the Traité des Sensations of Condillac, in which is most
systematically developed the physio-psychological conception of man as
an "animated statue," of which the thought is wholly conditioned by the
senses. The mode of approach had been laid down before by La Mettrie,
by Diderot, and by Buffon; and Condillac is rather a developer and
systematizer than an originator; [1086] but in this case the process
of unification was to the full as important as the first steps; [1087]
and Condillac has an importance which is latterly being rediscovered
by the school of Spencer on the one hand and by that of James on
the other. Condillac, commonly termed a materialist, no more held
the legendary materialistic view than any other so named; and the
same may be said of the next figure in the "materialistic" series,
J. B. Robinet, a Frenchman settled at Amsterdam, after having been,
it is said, a Jesuit. His Nature (4 vols. 1761-1768) is a remarkable
attempt to reach a strictly naturalistic conception of things. [1088]
But he is a theorist, not an investigator. Even in his fixed idea
that the universe is an "animal" he had perhaps a premonition of
the modern discovery of the immense diffusion of bacterial life;
but he seems to have had more deriders than disciples. He founds
at once on Descartes and on Leibnitz, but in his Philosophical
Considerations on the natural gradation of living forms (1768)
he definitely sets aside theism as illusory, and puts ethics on a
strictly scientific and human footing, [1089] extending the arguments
of Hume and Hutcheson somewhat on the lines of Mandeville. [1090] On
another line of reasoning a similar application of Mandeville's thesis
had already been made by Helvétius in his Traité de l'Esprit [1091]
(1758), a work which excited a hostility now difficult to understand,
but still reflected in censures no less surprising.
One of the worst misrepresentations in theological literature is
the account of Helvétius by the late Principal Cairns (Unbelief
in the Eighteenth Century, 1881, p. 158) as appealing to
government "to promote luxury, and, through luxury, public good,
by abolishing all those laws that cherish a false modesty and
restrain libertinage." Helvétius simply pressed the consequences
of the existing theory of luxury, which for his own part he
disclaimed. De l'Esprit, Disc. ii, ch. xv. Dr. Pünjer (i, 462)
falls so far below his usual standard as to speak of Helvétius
in a similar fashion. As against such detraction it is fitting to
note that Helvétius, like La Mettrie, was one of the most lovable
and most beloved men of his time, though, like him, sufficiently
licentious in his youth.
It was at once suppressed by royal order as scandalous, licentious,
and dangerous, though Helvétius held a post at court as maître d'hôtel
to the Queen. Ordered to make a public retractation, he did so in a
letter addressed to a Jesuit; and this being deemed insufficient,
he had to sign another, "so humiliating," wrote Grimm, [1092]
"that one would not have been astonished to see a man take refuge
with the Hottentots rather than put his name to such avowals." The
wits explained that the censor who had passed the book, being an
official in the Bureau of Foreign Affairs, had treated De l'Esprit
as belonging to that department. [1093] A swarm of replies appeared,
and the book was formally burnt, with Voltaire's poem Sur la loi
naturelle, and several obscure works of older standing. [1094] The
De l'Esprit, appearing alongside of the ever-advancing Encyclopédie,
[1095] was in short a formidable challenge to the powers of bigotry.
Its real faults are lack of system, undue straining after popularity,
some hasty generalization, and a greater concern for the air of paradox
than for persuasion; but it abounds in acuteness and critical wisdom,
and it definitely and seriously founds public ethics on utility. Its
most serious error, the assumption that all men are born with equal
faculties, and that education is the sole differentiating force, was
repeated in our own age by John Stuart Mill; but in Helvétius the
error is balanced by the thoroughly sound and profoundly important
thesis that the general superiorities of nations are the result of
their culture-conditions and politics. [1096] The over-balance of his
stress on self-interest [1097] is an error easily soluble. On the other
hand, we have the memorable testimony of Beccaria that it was the work
of Helvétius that inspired him to his great effort for the humanizing
of penal laws and policy; [1098] and the only less notable testimony
of Bentham that Helvétius was his teacher and inspirer. [1099] It may
be doubted whether any such fruits can be claimed for the teachings
of the whole of the orthodox moralists of the age. For the rest,
Helvétius is not to be ranked among the great abstract thinkers; but it
is noteworthy that his thinking went on advancing to the end. Always
greatly influenced by Voltaire, he did not philosophically harden as
did his master; and though in his posthumous work, Les Progrès de la
Raison dans la recherche du Vrai (published in 1775), he stands for
deism against atheism, the argument ends in the pantheism to which
Voltaire had once attained, but did not adhere.
24. Over all of these men, and even in some measure over Voltaire,
Diderot (1713-1784) stands pre-eminent, on retrospect, for variety
of power and depth and subtlety of thought; though for these very
reasons, as well as because some of his most masterly works were never
printed in his lifetime, he was less of a recognized popular force
than some of his friends. In his own mental history he reproduces the
course of the French thought of his time. Beginning as a deist, he
assailed the contemporary materialists; in the end, with whatever of
inconsistency, he was emphatically an atheist and a materialist. One
of his most intimate friends was Damilaville, of whom Voltaire speaks
as a vehement anti-theist; [1100] and his biographer Naigeon, who at
times overstated his positions but always revered him, was the most
zealous atheist of his day. [1101]
Compare, as to Diderot's position, Soury's contention (p. 577)
that we shall never make an atheist and a materialist out of
"this enthusiastic artist, this poet-pantheist" (citing Rosenkranz
in support), with his own admissions, pp. 589-90, and with Lord
Morley's remarks, pp. 33, 401, 418. See also Lange, i, 310 sq.;
ii, 63 (Eng. tr. ii, 32, 256). In the affectionate éloge of his
friend Meister (1786) there is an express avowal that "it had been
much to be desired for the reputation of Diderot, perhaps even for
the honour of his age, that he had not been an atheist, or that he
had been so with less zeal." The fact is thus put beyond reasonable
doubt. In the Correspondance Littéraire of Grimm and Diderot, under
date September 15, 1765 (vii, 366), there is a letter in criticism
of Descartes, thoroughly atheistic in its reasoning, which is
almost certainly by Diderot. And if the criticism of Voltaire's
Dieu, above referred to (p. 231), be not by him, he was certainly
in entire agreement with it, as with Grimm in general. Rosenkranz
finally (ii, 421) sums up that "Diderot war als Atheist Pantheist,"
which is merely a way of saying that he was scientifically monistic
in his atheism. Lange points out in this connection (i, 310) that
the Hegelian schema of philosophic evolution, "with its sovereign
contempt for chronology," has wrought much confusion as to the
real developments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
It is recorded that Diderot's own last words in serious conversation
were: "The beginning of philosophy is incredulity"; and it may
be inferred from his writings that his first impulses to searching
thought came from his study of Montaigne, who must always have been
for him one of the most congenial of spirits. [1102] At an early stage
of his independent mental life we find him turning to the literature
which in that age yielded to such a mind as his the largest measure
both of nutriment and stimulus--the English. In 1745 he translated
Shaftesbury's Inquiry concerning Virtue and Merit; and he must have
read with prompt appreciation the other English freethinkers then
famous. Ere long, however, he had risen above the deistical plane of
thought, and grappled with the fundamental issues which the deists
took for granted, partly because of an innate bent to psychological
analysis, partly because he was more interested in scientific problems
than in scholarly research. The Pensées philosophiques, published
in 1746, really deserve their name; and though they exhibit him as
still a satisfied deist, and an opponent of the constructive atheism
then beginning to suggest itself, they contain abstract reasonings
sufficiently disturbing to the deistic position. [1103] The Promenade
du Sceptique (written about 1747, published posthumously) goes further,
and presents tentatively the reply to the design argument which was
adopted by Hume.
In its brilliant pages may be found a conspectus of the intellectual
life of the day, on the side of the religious problem. Every type
of thinker is there tersely characterized--the orthodox, the deist,
the atheist, the sheer skeptic, the scoffer, the pantheist, the
solipsist, and the freethinking libertine, the last figuring as
no small nuisance to the serious unbeliever. So drastic is the
criticism of orthodoxy that the book was unprintable in its day;
[1104] and it was little known even in manuscript. But ere long there
appeared the Letter on the Blind, for the use of those who see (1749),
in which a logical rebuttal alike of the ethical and the cosmological
assumptions of theism, developed from hints in the Pensées, is put
in the mouth of the blind English mathematician, Sanderson. It is not
surprising that whereas the Pensées had been, with some other books,
ordered by the Paris Parlement to be burnt by the common hangman,
the Lettre sur les Aveugles led to his arrest and an imprisonment
of six months [1105] in the Château de Vincennes. Both books had of
course been published without licence; [1106] but the second book was
more than a defiance of the censorship: it was a challenge alike to
the philosophy and the faith of Christendom; and as such could not
have missed denunciation. [1107]
But Diderot was not the kind of man to be silenced by menaces. In
the famous Sorbonne thesis of the Abbé de Prades (1751) he probably
had, as we have seen, some share; and when De Prades was condemned
and deprived of his licence (1752) Diderot wrote the third part of
the Apologie (published by De Prades in Holland), which defended his
positions; and possibly assisted in the other parts. [1108] The hand
of Diderot perhaps may be discovered in the skilful allusions to the
skeptical Demonstratio Evangelica of Huet, which De Prades professes
to have translated when at his seminary, seeking there the antidote
to the poison of the deists. The entire handling of the question of
pagan and Christian miracles, too, suggests the skilled dialectician,
though it is substantially an adaptation of Leslie's Short and Easy
Method with the Deists. The alternate eulogy and criticism of Locke
are likely to be his, as is indeed the abundant knowledge of English
thought shown alike in the thesis and in the Apologie. Whether he
wrote the passage which claims to rebut an argument in his own Pensées
philosophiques [1109] is surely doubtful. But his, certainly, is the
further reply to the pastoral of the Jansenist Bishop of Auxerre
against de Prades's thesis, in which the perpetual disparagement
of reason by Catholic theologians is denounced [1110] as the most
injurious of all procedures against religion. And his, probably,
is the peroration [1111] arraigning the Jansenists and imputing to
their fanaticism and superstition, their miracle-mongering and their
sectarian bitterness, the discredit which among thinking men had
latterly fallen upon Church and creed alike. [1112]
De Prades, who in his thesis and Apologie had always professed to be a
believing Christian, was not a useful recruit to rationalism. Passing
from Holland to Berlin, he was there appointed, through the influence
of Voltaire, reader and amanuensis to the King, [1113] who in 1754
arranged for him an official reconciliation with the Church. A formal
retractation was sent to the Pope, the Sorbonne, and the Bishop of
Montauban; [1114] and Frederick in due course presented him to a
Catholic canonry at Glogau. In 1757, however, he was put under arrest
on the charge, it is commonly said, of supplying military information
to his countrymen; [1115] and thereafter, returning to France in 1759,
he obtained a French benefice. Diderot, who was now a recognized
champion of freethought, turned away with indignation. [1116]
Thenceforward he never faltered on his path. It is his peculiar
excellence to be an original and innovating thinker not only in
philosophy but in psychology, in æsthetics, in ethics, in dramatic
art; and his endless and miscellaneous labours in the Encyclopédie,
of which he was the most loyal and devoted producer, represent an
extraordinary range of interests. He suffered from his position as a
hack writer and as a forced dissembler in his articles on religious
matters; and there is probably a very real connection between his
compulsory insincerities [1117] in the Encyclopédie--to say nothing
of the official prosecution of that and of others of his works--and
his misdeeds in the way of indecent fiction. When organized society
is made to figure as the heartless enemy of thinking men, it is no
great wonder if they are careless at times about the effect of their
writings on society. But it stands to his lasting honour that his
sufferings at the hands of priests, printers, and parlements never
soured his natural goodness of heart. [1118] Having in his youth known
a day's unrelieved hunger, he made a vow that he would never refuse
help to any human being; and, says his daughter, no vow was ever more
faithfully kept. No one in trouble was ever turned away from his door;
and even his enemies were helped when they were base enough to beg of
him. It seems no exaggeration to say that the bulk of his life was
given to helping other people; and the indirect effect of his work,
which is rather intellectually disinterested than didactic, is no
less liberative and humanitarian. "To do good, and to find truth,"
were his mottoes for life.
His daughter, Madame de Vandeul, who in her old age remained
tranquilly divided between the religion instilled into her by her
pious mother and the rationalism she had gathered from her father and
his friends, testified, then, to his constant goodness in the home;
[1119] and his father bore a similar testimony, contrasting him
with his pious brother. [1120] He was, in his way, as beneficent as
Voltaire, without Voltaire's faults of private malice; and his life's
work was a great ministry of light. It was Goethe who said of him in
the next generation that "whoever holds him or his doings cheaply is
a Philistine." His large humanity reaches from the planes of expert
thought to that of popular feeling; and while by his Letter on the
Blind he could advance speculative psychology and pure philosophy,
he could by his tale The Nun (La Religeuse, [1121] written about
1760, published 1796) enlist the sympathies of the people against
the rule of the Church. It belonged to his character to be generously
appreciative of all excellence; he delighted in other men's capacity as
in pictures and poetry; and he loved to praise. At a time when Bacon
and Hobbes were little regarded in England he made them newly famous
throughout Europe by his praises. In him was realized Bacon's saying,
Admiratio semen scientiae, in every sense, for his curiosity was as
keen as his sensibility.
25. With Diderot were specially associated, in different ways,
D'Alembert, the mathematician, for some years his special colleague
on the Encyclopédie, and Baron d'Holbach. The former, one of
the staunchest friends of Voltaire, though a less invincible
fighter than Diderot, counted for practical freethought by his
miscellaneous articles, his little book on the Jesuits (1765), his
Pensées philosophiques, his physics, and the general rationalism of
his Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopédie. It is noteworthy that
in his intimate correspondence with Voltaire he never avows theism,
and that his and Diderot's friend, the atheist Damilaville, died
in his arms. [1122] On Dumarsais, too, he penned an éloge of which
Voltaire wrote: "Dumarsais only begins to live since his death;
you have given him existence and immortality." [1123] And perpetual
secretary as he was of the Academy, the fanatical daughter of Madame
Geoffrin could write to him in 1776: "For many years you have set
all respectable people against you by your indecent and imprudent
manner of speaking against religion." [1124] Baron d'Holbach, a
naturalized German of large fortune, was on the other hand one of the
most strenuous propagandists of freethought in his age. Personally no
less beloved than Helvétius, [1125] he gave his life and his fortune
to the work of enlightening men on all the lines on which he felt
they needed light. Much of the progress of the physical sciences in
pre-revolutionary France was due to the long series--at least eleven
in all--of his translations of solid treatises from the German;
and his still longer series of original works and translations from
the English in all branches of freethought--a really astonishing
movement of intellectual energy despite the emotion attaching
to the subject-matter--was for the most part prepared in the same
essentially scientific temper. Of all the freethinkers of the period
he had perhaps the largest range of practical erudition; [1126] and
he drew upon it with unhasting and unresting industry. Imitating the
tactic of Voltaire, he produced, with some assistance from Diderot,
Naigeon, and others, a small library of anti-Christian treatises under
a variety of pseudonyms; [1127] and his principal work, the famous
System of Nature (1770), was put out under the name of Mirabaud,
an actual person, then dead. Summing up as it does with stringent
force the whole anti-theological propaganda of the age, it has been
described as a "thundering engine of revolt and destruction." [1128]
It was the first published atheistic [1129] treatise of a systematic
kind, if we except that of Robinet, issued some years before; and it
significantly marks the era of modern freethought, as does the powerful
Essai sur les préjugés, published in the same year, [1130] by its stern
impeachment of the sins of monarchy--here carrying on the note struck
by Jean Meslier in his manuscript of half-a-century earlier. Rather
a practical argument than a dispassionate philosophic research,
its polemic against human folly laid it open to the regulation
retort that on its own necessarian principles no such polemic was
admissible. That retort is, of course, ultimately invalid when the
denunciation is resolved into demonstration. If, however, it be termed
"shallow" on the score of its censorious treatment of the past, [1131]
the term will have to be applied to the Hebrew books, to the Gospel
Jesus, to the Christian Fathers, to Pascal, Milton, Carlyle, Ruskin,
and a good many other prophets, ancient and modern. The synthesis of
the book is really emotional rather than philosophic, and hortatory
rather than scientific; and it was all the more influential on that
account. To the sensation it produced is to be ascribed the edict
of 1770 condemning a whole shelf of previous works to be burnt along
with it by the common hangman.
26. The death of d'Holbach (1789) brings us to the French
Revolution. By that time all the great freethinking propagandists
and non-combatant deists of the Voltairean group were gone, save
Condorcet. Voltaire and Rousseau had died in 1778, Helvétius in
1771, Turgot in 1781, D'Alembert in 1783, Diderot in 1784. After
all their labours, only the educated minority, broadly speaking,
had been made freethinkers; and of these, despite the vogue of the
System of Nature, only a minority were atheists. Deism prevailed,
as we have seen, among the foremost revolutionists; but atheism
was relatively rare. Voltaire, indeed, impressed by the number of
cultured men of his acquaintance who avowed it, latterly speaks [1132]
of them as very numerous; and Grimm must have had a good many among
the subscribers to his correspondence, to permit of his penning or
passing the atheistic criticism there given of Voltaire's first reply
to d'Holbach. Nevertheless, there was no continuous atheistic movement;
and after 1789 the new freethinking works run to critical and ethical
attack on the Christian system rather than on theism. Volney combined
both lines of attack in his famous Ruins of Empires (1791); and the
learned Dupuis, in his voluminous Origin of all Cults (1795), took
an important step, not yet fully reckoned with by later mythologists,
towards the mythological analysis of the gospel narrative. After these
vigorous performances, the popular progress of French freethought was
for long practically suspended [1133] by the tumult of the Revolution
and the reaction which followed it, though Laplace went on his way
with his epoch-making theory of the origin of the solar system,
for which, as he told Napoleon, he had "no need of the hypothesis"
of a God. The admirable Condorcet had died, perhaps by his own hand,
in 1794, when in hiding from the Terrorists, leaving behind him his
Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain,
in which the most sanguine convictions of the rationalistic school
are reformulated without a trace of bitterness or of despair.
27. No part of the history of freethought has been more distorted
than that at which it is embroiled in the French Revolution. The
conventional view in England still is that the Revolution was
the work of deists and atheists, but chiefly of the latter; that
they suppressed Christianity and set up a worship of a Goddess of
Reason, represented by a woman of the town; and that the bloodshed
of the Terror represented the application of their principles to
government, or at least the political result of the withdrawal
of religious checks. [1134] Those who remember in the briefest
summary the records of massacre connected with the affirmation of
religious beliefs--the internecine wars of Christian sects under
the Roman Empire; the vast slaughters of Manichæans in the East;
the bloodshed of the period of propagation in Northern Europe,
from Charlemagne onwards; the story of the Crusades, in which nine
millions of human beings are estimated to have been destroyed;
the generation of wholesale murder of the heretics of Languedoc by
the papacy; the protracted savageries of the Hussite War; the early
holocaust of Protestant heretics in France; the massacres of German
peasants and Anabaptists; the reciprocal persecutions in England; the
civil strifes of sectaries in Switzerland; the ferocious wars of the
French Huguenots and the League; the long-drawn agony of the war of
thirty years in Germany; the annihilation of myriads of Mexicans and
Peruvians by the conquering Spaniards in the name of the Cross--those
who recall these things need spend no time over the proposition that
rationalism stands for a removal of restraints on bloodshed. But it
is necessary to put concisely the facts as against the legend in the
case of the French Revolution.
(a) That many of the leading men among the revolutionists were
deists is true; and the fact goes to prove that it was chiefly the
men of ability in France who rejected Christianity. Of a number of
these the normal attitude was represented in the work of Necker,
Sur l'importance des idées religieuses (1787), which repudiated the
destructive attitude of the few, and may be described as an utterance
of pious theism or Unitarianism. [1135] Orthodox he cannot well have
been, since, like his wife, he was the friend of Voltaire. [1136]
But the majority of the Constituent Assembly was never even deistic;
it professed itself cordially Catholic; [1137] and the atheists there
might be counted on the fingers of one hand. [1138]
The Abbé Bergier, in answering d'Holbach (Examen du Matérialisme,
ii, ch. i, § 1), denies that there has been any wide spread of
atheistic opinion. This is much more probable than the statement
of the Archbishop of Toulouse, on a deputation to the king
in 1775, that "le monstrueux athéisme est devenu l'opinion
dominante" (Soulavie, Règne de Louis XVI, iii, 16; cited by
Buckle, 1-vol. ed. p. 488, note). Joseph Droz, a monarchist and a
Christian, writing under Louis Philippe, sums up that "the atheists
formed only a small number of adepts" (Histoire du Règne de Louis
XVI, éd. 1839, p. 42). And Rivarol, who at the time of writing
his Lettres à M. Necker was substantially an atheist, says in
so many words that, while Rousseau's "Confession of a Savoyard
Vicar" was naturally very attractive to many, such a book as the
"Système de la Nature," were it as attractive as it is tedious,
would win nobody" (OEuvres, éd. 1852, p. 134). Still, it ran into
seven editions between 1770 and 1780.
Nor were there lacking vigorous representatives of orthodoxy:
the powerful Abbé Grégoire, in particular, was a convinced
Jansenist Christian, and at the same time an ardent democrat and
anti-royalist. [1139] He saw the immense importance to the Church
of a good understanding with the Revolution, and he accepted
the constitution of 1790. With him went a very large number of
priests. M. Léonce de Lavergne, who was pious enough to write that
"the philosophy of the eighteenth century had had the audacity to
lay hands on God; and this impious attempt has had for punishment
the revolutionary expiation," also admits that, "of the clergy,
it was not the minority but the majority which went along with the
Tiers État." [1140] Many of the clergy, however, being refractory,
the Assembly pressed its point, and the breach widened. It was solely
through this political hostility on the part of the Church to the
new constitution that any civic interference with public worship ever
took place. Grégoire was extremely popular with the advanced types,
[1141] though his piety was conspicuous; [1142] and there were not a
few priests of his way of thinking, [1143] among them being some of
the ablest bishops. [1144] On the flight of the king, he and they went
with the democracy; and it was the obstinate refusal of the others to
accept the constitution that provoked the new Legislative Assembly to
coerce them. Though the new body was more anti-clerical than the old,
however, it was simply doing what successive Protestant monarchs had
done in England and Ireland; and probably no Government in the world
would then have acted otherwise in a similar case. [1145] Patience
might perhaps have won the day; but the Revolution was fighting for
its life; and the conservative Church, as all men knew, was eager to
strangle it. Had the clergy left politics alone, or simply accepted
the constitutional action of the State, there would have been no
religious question. To speak of such a body of priests, who had at
all times been eager to put men to death for heresy, as vindicating
"liberty of conscience" when they refused fealty to the constitution,
[1146] is somewhat to strain the terms. The expulsion of the Jesuits
under the Old Régime had been a more coercive measure than the demand
of the Assembly on the allegiance of the State clergy. And all the
while the reactionary section of the priesthood was known to be
conspiring with the royalists abroad. It was only when, in 1793,
the conservative clergy were seen to be the great obstacle to the
levy of an army of defence, that the more radical spirits began to
think of interfering with their functions. [1147]
(b) An à priori method has served alike in freethinkers' and in
pietists' hands to obscure the facts. When Michelet insists on the
"irreconcilable opposition of Christianity to the Revolution"--a
thesis in which he was heartily supported by Proudhon [1148]--he
means that the central Christian dogmas of salvation by sacrifice and
faith exclude any political ethic of justice [1149]--any doctrine
of equality and equity. But this is only to say that Christianity
as an organization is in perpetual contradiction with some main
part of its professed creed; and that has been a commonplace since
Constantine. It does not mean that either Christians in multitudes
or their churches as organizations have not constantly proceeded on
ordinary political motives, whether populist or anti-populist. In
Germany we have seen Lutheranism first fomenting and afterwards
repudiating the movement of the peasants for betterment; and in
England in the next century both parties in the civil war invoke
religious doctrines, meeting texts with texts. Jansenism was in
constant friction with the monarchy from its outset; and Louis
XIV and Louis XV alike regarded the Jansenists as the enemies of
the throne. "Christianity" could be as easily "reconciled" with a
democratic movement in the last quarter of the eighteenth century as
with the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew's Day in the sixteenth. If those
Christians who still charge "the bloodshed of the French Revolution"
on the spirit of incredulity desire to corroborate Michelet to the
extent of making Christianity the bulwark of absolute monarchy, the
friend of a cruel feudalism, and the guardian genius of the Bastille,
they may be left to the criticism of their fellow-believers who have
embraced the newer principle that the truth of the Christian religion
is to be proved by connecting it in practice with the spirit of social
reform. To point out to either party, as did Michelet, that evangelical
Christianity is a religion of submission and preparation for the end
of all things, and has nothing to do with rational political reform,
is to bestow logic where logic is indomiciliable. While rationalism
undoubtedly fosters the critical spirit, professed Christians have
during many ages shown themselves as prone to rebellion as to war,
whether on religious or on political pretexts.
(c) For the rest, the legend falsifies what took place. The facts
are now established by exact documentary research. The Government
never substituted any species of religion for the Catholic. [1150]
The Festival of Reason at Nôtre Dame was an act not of the Convention
but of the Commune of Paris and the Department; the Convention had
no part in promoting it; half the members stayed away when invited to
attend; and there was no Goddess of Reason in the ceremony, but only
a Goddess of Liberty, represented by an actress who cannot even be
identified. [1151] Throughout, the devoutly theistic Rousseau was the
chief literary hero of the movement. The two executive Committees in
no way countenanced the dechristianization of the Churches, but on the
contrary imprisoned persons who removed church properties; and these
in turn protested that they had no thought of abolishing religion. The
acts of irresponsible violence did not amount to a hundredth part of
the "sacrilege" wrought in Protestant countries at the Reformation,
and do not compare with the acts charged on Cromwell's troopers. The
policy of inviting priests and bishops to abdicate their functions
was strictly political; and the Archbishop Gobel did not abjure
Catholicism, but only surrendered his office. That a number of priests
did gratuitously abjure their religion is only a proof of what was
well known--that a good many priests were simple deists. We have seen
how many abbés fought in the freethought ranks, or near them. Diderot
in a letter of 1769 tells of a day which he and a friend had passed
with two monks who were atheists. "One of them read the first draft
of a very fresh and very vigorous treatise on atheism, full of new
and bold ideas; I learned with edification that this doctrine was the
current doctrine of their cloisters. For the rest, these two monks
were the 'big bonnets' of their monastery; they had intellect, gaiety,
good feeling, knowledge." [1152] And a priest of the cathedral of
Auxerre, whose recollections went back to the revolutionary period,
has confessed that at that time "philosophic" opinions prevailed in
most of the monasteries. His words even imply that in his opinion the
unbelieving monks were the majority. [1153] In the provinces, where
the movement went on with various degrees of activity, it had the same
general character. "Reason" itself was often identified with deity,
or declared to be an emanation thereof. Hébert, commonly described
as an atheist for his share in the movement, expressly denied the
charge, and claimed to have exhorted the people to read the gospels
and obey Christ. [1154] Danton, though at his death he disavowed
belief in immortality, had declared in the Convention in 1793 that
"we have not striven to abolish superstition in order to establish the
reign of atheism." [1155] Even Chaumette was not an atheist; [1156]
and the Prussian Clootz, who probably was, had certainly little or no
doctrinary influence; while the two or three other professed atheists
of the Assembly had no part in the public action.
(d) Finally, Robespierre was all along thoroughly hostile to the
movement; in his character of Rousseauist and deist he argued
that atheism was "aristocratic"; he put to death the leaders of
the Cult of Reason; and he set up the Worship of the Supreme Being
as a counter-move. Broadly speaking, he affiliated to Necker, and
stood very much at the standpoint of the English Unitarianism of the
present day. Thus the bloodshed of the Reign of Terror, if it is to
be charged on any species of philosophic doctrine rather than on the
unscrupulous policy of the enemies of the Revolution in and out of
France, stands to the credit of the belief in a God, the creed of
Frederick, Turgot, Necker, Franklin, Pitt, and Washington. The one
convinced and reasoning atheist among the publicists of the Revolution,
the journalist Salaville, [1157] opposed the Cult of Reason with sound
and serious and persuasive argument, and strongly blamed all forcible
interference with worship, while at the same time calmly maintaining
atheism as against theism. The age of atheism had not come, any more
than the triumph of Reason.
Mallet du Pan specifies, as among those who "since 1788 have
pushed the blood-stained car of anarchy and atheism," Chamfort,
Gronvelle, Garat, and Cerutti. Chamfort was as high-minded a
man as Mallet himself, and is to-day so recognized by every
unprejudiced reader. The others are forgotten. Gronvelle,
who as secretary of the executive council read to Louis XVI
his death-sentence, wrote De l'autorité de Montesquieu dans la
révolution présente (1789). Garat was Minister of Justice in 1792
and of the Interior in 1793, and was ennobled by Napoleon. He had
published Considérations sur la Révolution (1792) and a Mémoire
sur la Révolution (1795). Cerutti, originally a Jesuit, became a
member of the Legislative Assembly, and was the friend of Mirabeau,
whose funeral oration he delivered.
28. The anti-atheistic and anti-philosophic legend was born of the
exasperation and bad faith of the dethroned aristocracy, themselves
often unbelievers in the day of their ascendancy, and, whether
unbelievers or not, responsible with the Church and the court for
that long insensate resistance to reform which made the revolution
inevitable. Mere random denunciation of new ideas as tending to
generate rebellion was of course an ancient commonplace. Medieval
heretics had been so denounced; Wiclif was in his day; and when the
Count de Cataneo attacked Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws, he spoke
of all such reasonings as "attempts which shake the sacred basis of
thrones." [1158] But he and his contemporaries knew that freethinkers
were not specially given to mutiny; and when, later, French Churchmen
had begun systematically to accuse the philosophers of undermining
alike the Church and the throne, [1159] the unbelieving nobles,
conscious of entire political conservatism, had simply laughed. Better
than anyone else they knew that political revolt had other roots and
motives than incredulity; and they could not but remember how many
French kings had been rebelled against by the Church, and how many
slain by priestly hands. Their acceptance of the priestly formula came
later. In the life of the brilliant Rivarol, who associated with the
noblesse while disdained by many of them because of his obscure birth,
we may read the intellectual history of the case. Brilliant without
patience, keen without scientific coherence, [1160] Rivarol in 1787
met the pious deism of Necker with a dialectic in which cynicism as
often disorders as illuminates the argument. With prompt veracity he
first rejects the ideal of a beneficent reign of delusion, and insists
that religion is seen in all history powerless alike to overrule
men's passions and prejudices, and to console the oppressed by its
promise of a reversal of earthly conditions in another world. But in
the same breath, by way of proving that the atheist is less disturbing
to convention than the deist, he insists that the unbeliever soon
learns to see that "irreverences are crimes against society"; and
then, in order to justify such conformity, asserts what he had before
denied. And the self-contradiction recurs. [1161] The underlying
motive of the whole polemic is simply the grudge of the upper class
diner-out against the serious and conscientious bourgeois who strives
to reform the existing system. Conscious of being more enlightened,
the wit is eager at once to disparage Necker for his religiosity
and to discredit him politically as the enemy of the socially useful
ecclesiastical order. Yet in his second letter Sur la morale (1788)
he is so plainly an unbeliever that the treatise had to be printed
at Berlin. The due sequence is that when the Revolution breaks out
Rivarol sides with the court and the noblesse, while perfectly aware of
the ineptitude and malfeasance of both; [1162] and, living in exile,
proceeds to denounce the philosophers as having caused the overturn
by their universal criticism. In 1787 he had declared that he would
not even have written his Letters to Necker if he were not certain
that "the people does not read." Then the people had read neither the
philosophers nor him. But in exile he must needs frame for the émigrés
a formula, true or false. It is the falsity of men divided against
themselves, who pay themselves with recriminations rather than realize
their own deserts. [1163] And in the end Rivarol is but a deist.
29. If any careful attempt be made to analyse the situation, the
stirring example of the precedent revolution in the British American
colonies will probably be recognized as counting for very much more
than any merely literary influence in promoting that of France. A
certain "republican" spirit had indeed existed among educated men in
France throughout the reign of Louis XV: D'Argenson noted it in 1750
and later. [1164] But this spirit, which D'Argenson in large measure
shared, while holding firmly by monarchy, [1165] was simply the spirit
of constitutionalism, the love of law and good government, and it
derived from English example and the teachings of such Englishmen
as Locke, [1166] insofar as it was not spontaneous. If acceptance
of the doctrine of constitutional government can lead to anarchy,
let it be avowed; but let not the cause be pretended to be deism or
atheism. The political teaching for which the Paris Parlement denounced
Rousseau's Émile in 1762, and for which the theologians of the Sorbonne
censured Marmontel's Bélisaire in 1767, was the old doctrine of the
sovereignty of the people. But this had been maintained by a whole
school of English Protestant Christians before Bossuet denounced the
Protestant Jurieu for maintaining it. Nay, it had been repeatedly
maintained by Catholic theologians, from Thomas Aquinas to Suarez,
[1167] especially when there was any question of putting down a
Protestant monarch. Protestants on their part protested indignantly,
and reciprocated. The recriminations of Protestants and Catholics on
this head form one of the standing farces of human history. Coger,
attacking Marmontel, unctuously cites Bayle's censure of his fellow
Protestants in his Avis aux Réfugiéz [1168] for their tone towards
kings and monarchy, but says nothing of Bayle's quarrel with Jurieu,
which motived such an utterance, or of his Critique Générale of
Maimbourg's Histoire du Calvinisme, in which he shows how the
Catholic historian's principles would justify the rebellion alike
of Catholics in every Protestant country and of Protestants in every
Catholic country, [1169] though all the while it is assumed that true
Christians never resort to violence. And, unless there has been an
error as to his authorship, Bayle himself, be it remembered, had in
his letter Ce que c'est que la France toute catholique sous le règne
de Louis le Grand passed as scathing a criticism on Louis XIV as any
Protestant refugee could well have compassed. Sectarian hypocrisies
apart, the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people--for opposing
which the freethinker Hobbes has been execrated by generations of
Christians--is the professed political creed of the very classes
who, in England and the United States, have so long denounced
French freethinkers for an alleged "subversive" social teaching
which fell far short of what English and American Protestants had
actually practised. The revolt of the American colonies, in fact,
precipitated democratic feeling in France in a way that no writing had
ever done. Lafayette, no freethinker, declared himself republican at
once on reading the American declaration of the Rights of Man. [1170]
In all this the freethinking propaganda counted for nothing directly
and for little indirectly, inasmuch as there was no clerical quarrel
in the colonies. And if we seek for even an indirect or general
influence, apart from the affirmation of the duty of kings to their
people, the thesis as to the activity of the philosophes must at
once be restricted to the cases of Rousseau, Helvétius, Raynal,
and d'Holbach, for Marmontel never passed beyond "sound" generalities.
As for the pretence that it was freethinking doctrines that brought
Louis XVI to the scaffold, it is either the most impudent or the
most ignorant of historical imputations. The "right" of tyrannicide
had been maintained by Catholic schoolmen before the Reformation,
and by both Protestants and Catholics afterwards, times without
number, even as they maintained the right of the people to depose and
change kings. The doctrine was in fact not even a modern innovation,
the theory being so well primed by the practice--under every sort of
government, Jewish and pagan in antiquity, Moslem in the Middle Ages,
and Christian from the day of Pepin to the day of John Knox--that a
certain novelty lay on the side of the "divine right of kings" when
that was popularly formulated. And on the whole question of revolution,
or the right of peoples to recast their laws, the general doctrine
of the most advanced of the French freethinkers is paralleled or
outgone by popes and Church Councils in the Middle Ages, by Occam and
Marsiglio of Padua and Wiclif and more than one German legist in the
fourteenth century, by John Major and George Buchanan in Scotland, by
Goodman in England, and by many Huguenots in France, in the sixteenth;
by Hotman in his Francogallia in 1574; by the author of the Soupirs
de la France Esclave [1171] in 1689; and by the whole propagandist
literature of the English and American Revolutions in the seventeenth
and eighteenth. So far from being a specialty of freethinkers,
"sedition" was in all these and other cases habitually grounded on
Biblical texts and religious protestations; so that Bacon, little
given as he was to defending rationalists, could confidently avow that
"Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety,
to laws, to reputation ... but superstition dismounts all these,
and erecteth an absolute monarchy in the minds of men. Therefore
atheism did never perturb states.... But superstition hath been the
confusion of many states." For "superstition" read "sectarianism,"
"fanaticism," and "ecclesiasticism." Bacon's generalization is of
course merely empirical, atheism being capable of alliance with
revolutionary passion in its turn; but the historical summary holds
good. Only by men who had not read or had forgotten universal history
could the ascription of the French Revolution to rationalistic thought
have been made. [1172]
30. A survey of the work and attitude of the leading French
freethinkers of the century may serve to settle the point once
for all. Voltaire is admittedly out of the question. Mallet du Pan,
whose resistance to the Revolution developed into a fanaticism hardly
less perturbing to judgment [1173] than that of Burke, expressly
disparaged him as having so repelled men by his cynicism that he had
little influence on their feelings, and so could not be reckoned a
prime force in preparing the Revolution. [1174] "Mably," the critic
adds, "whose republican declamations have intoxicated many modern
democrats, was religious to austerity: at the first stroke of the
tocsin against the Church of Rome, he would have thrown his books
in the fire, excepting his scathing apostrophes to Voltaire and the
atheists. Marmontel, Saint-Lambert, Morellet, Encyclopedists, were
adversaries of the revolution." [1175] On the other hand, Barante
avows that Mably, detesting as he did the freethinking philosophers
of his day, followed no less than others "a destructive course,
and contributed, without knowing it, to weaken the already frayed
ties which still united the parts of an ancient society." [1176] As
Barante had previously ascribed the whole dissolution to the autocratic
process under Louis XIV, [1177] even this indictment of the orthodox
Mably is invalid. Voltaire, on the other hand, Barante charges with
an undue leaning to the methods of Louis XIV. Voltaire, in fact, was
in things political a conservative, save insofar as he fought for
toleration, for lenity, and for the most necessary reforms. And if
Voltaire's attack on what he held to be a demoralizing and knew to be
a persecuting religion be saddled with the causation of the political
crash, the blame will have to be carried back equally to the English
deists and the tyranny of Louis XIV. To such indictments, as Barante
protests, there is no limit: every age pivots on its predecessor; and
to blame for the French Revolution everybody but a corrupt aristocracy,
a tyrannous and ruinously spendthrift monarchy, and a cruel church,
is to miss the last semblance of judicial method. It may be conceded
that the works of Meslier and d'Holbach, neither of whom is noticed
by Barante, are directly though only generally revolutionary in their
bearing. But the main works of d'Holbach appeared too close upon
the Revolution to be credited with generating it; and Meslier, as we
know, had been generally read only in abridgments and adaptations,
in which his political doctrine disappears.
Mallet du Pan, striking in all directions, indicts alternately
Rousseau, whose vogue lay largely among religious people, and the
downright freethinkers. The great fomenter of the Revolution,
the critic avows, was Rousseau. "He had a hundred times more
readers than Voltaire in the middle and lower classes.... No one
has more openly attacked the right of property in declaring it a
usurpation.... It is he alone who has inoculated the French with
the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, and with its most
extreme consequences." [1178] After this "he alone," the critic
obliviously proceeds to exclaim: "Diderot and Condorcet: there are
the true chiefs of the revolutionary school," adding that Diderot had
"proclaimed equality before Marat; the Rights of Man before Siéyès;
sacred insurrection before Mirabeau and Lafayette; the massacre of
priests before the Septembrists." [1179] But this is mere furious
declamation. Only by heedless misreading or malice can support be
given to the pretence that Diderot wrought for the violent overthrow
of the existing political system. Passages denouncing kingly tyranny
had been inserted in their plays by both Corneille and Voltaire,
and applauded by audiences who never dreamt of abolishing monarchy. A
phrase about strangling kings in the bowels of priests is expressly put
by Diderot in the mouth of an Éleuthéromane or Liberty-maniac; [1180]
which shows that the type had arisen in his lifetime in opposition to
his own bias. This very poem he read to the Prince von Galitzin, the
ambassador of the Empress Catherine and his own esteemed friend. [1181]
The tyranny of the French Government, swayed by the king's mistresses
and favourites and by the Jesuits, he did indeed detest, as he had
cause to do, and as every man of good feeling did with him; but no
writing of his wrought measurably for its violent overthrow. [1182]
D'Argenson in 1751 was expressing his fears of a revolution, and
noting the "désobeissance constante" of the Parlement of Paris and the
disaffection of the people, before he had heard of "un M. Diderot,
qui a beaucoup d'esprit, mais qui affecte trop l'irreligion." And
when he notes that the Jesuits have secured the suppression of the
Encyclopédie as being hostile "to God and the royal authority," he
does not attach the slightest weight to the charge. He knew that Louis
called the pious Jansenists "enemies of God and of the king." [1183]
Mallet du Pan grounds his charge against Diderot almost solely on
"those incendiary diatribes intercalated in the Histoire philosophique
des deux Indes which dishonour that work, and which Raynal, in
his latter days, excised with horror from a new edition which he
was preparing." But supposing the passages in question to be all
Diderot's [1184]--which is far from certain--they are to be saddled
with responsibility for the Reign of Terror only on the principle
that it was more provocative in the days of tyranny to denounce
than to exercise it. To this complexion Mallet du Pan came, with
the anti-Revolutionists in general; but to-day we can recognize in
the whole process of reasoning a reductio ad absurdum. The school
in question came in all seriousness to ascribe the evils of the
Revolution to everything and everybody save the men and classes whose
misgovernment made the Revolution inevitable.
Some of the philosophers, it is true, themselves gave colour to the
view that they were the makers of the Revolution, as when D'Alembert
said to Romilly that "philosophy" had produced in his time that change
in the popular mind which exhibited itself in the indifference with
which they received the news of the birth of the dauphin. [1185]
The error is none the less plain. The philosophes had done nothing
to promote anti-monarchism among the common people, who did not
read. [1186] It was the whole political and social evolution of
two generations that had wrought the change; and the people were
still for the most part believing Catholics. Frederick the Great
was probably within the mark when in 1769 he privately reminded the
more optimistic philosophers that their entire French public did
not number above 200,000 persons. The people of Paris, who played
the chief part in precipitating the Revolution, were spontaneously
mutinous and disorderly, but were certainly not in any considerable
number unbelievers. "While Voltaire dechristianized a portion of polite
society the people remained very pious, even at Paris. In 1766 Louis
XV, so unpopular, was acclaimed because he knelt, on the Pont Neuf,
before the Holy Sacrament." [1187]
And this is the final answer to any pretence that the Revolution was
the work of the school of d'Holbach. Bergier the priest, and Rivarol
the conservative unbeliever, alike denied that d'Holbach's systematic
writings had any wide public. Doubtless the same men were ready to
eat their words for the satisfaction of vilifying an opponent. It
has always been the way of orthodoxy to tell atheists alternately
that they are an impotent handful and that they are the ruin of
society. But by this time it ought to be a matter of elementary
knowledge that a great political revolution can be wrought only by
far-reaching political forces, whether or not these may concur with
a propaganda of rationalism in religion. [1188] If any "philosopher"
so-called is to be credited with specially promoting the Revolution,
it is either Rousseau, who is so often hailed latterly as the engineer
of a religious reaction, and whose works, as has been repeatedly
remarked, "contain much that is utterly and irreconcilably opposed"
to the Revolution, [1189] or Raynal, who was only anti-clerical,
not anti-Christian, and who actually censured the revolutionary
procedure. When he published his first edition he must be held to have
acquiesced in its doctrine, whether it were from Diderot's pen or his
own. Rousseau and Raynal were the two most popular writers of their
day who dealt with social as apart from religious or philosophical
issues, and to both is thus imputed a general subversiveness. But
here too the charge rests upon a sociological fallacy. The Parlement
of Paris, composed of rich bourgeois and aristocrats, many of them
Jansenists, very few of them freethinkers, most of them ready to burn
freethinking books, played a "subversive" part throughout the century,
inasmuch as it so frequently resisted the king's will. [1190] The
stars in their courses fought against the old despotism. Rousseau was
ultimately influential towards change because change was inevitable
and essential, not because he was restless. The whole drift of things
furthered his ideas, which at the outset won no great vogue. He
was followed because he set forth what so many felt; and similarly
Raynal was read because he chimed with a strengthening feeling. In
direct contradiction to Mallet du Pan, Chamfort, a keener observer,
wrote while the Revolution was still in action that "the priesthood
was the first bulwark of absolute power, and Voltaire overthrew
it. Without this decisive and indispensable first step nothing
would have been done." [1191] The same observer goes on to say that
Rousseau's political works, and particularly the Contrat Social,
"were fitted for few readers, and caused no alarm at court.... That
theory was regarded as a hollow speculation which could have no
further consequences than the enthusiasm for liberty and the contempt
of royalty carried so far in the pieces of Corneille, and applauded
at court by the most absolute of kings, Louis XIV. All that seemed
to belong to another world, and to have no connection with ours;
... in a word, Voltaire above all has made the Revolution, because
he has written for all; Rousseau above all has made the Constitution
because he has written for the thinkers." [1192] And so the changes
may be rung for ever. The final philosophy of history cannot be
reached by any such artificial selection of factors; [1193] and the
ethical problem equally evades such solutions. If we are to pass any
ethico-political judgment whatever, it must be that the evils of the
Revolution lie at the door not of the reformers, but of the men, the
classes, and the institutions which first provoked and then resisted
it. [1194] To describe the former as the authors of the process is as
intelligent as it was to charge upon Sokrates the decay of orthodox
tradition in Athens, and to charge upon that the later downfall of
the Athenian empire. The wisest men of the age, notably the great
Turgot, sought a gradual transformation, a peaceful and harmless
transition from unconstitutional to constitutional government. Their
policy was furiously resisted by an unteachable aristocracy. When at
last fortuitous violence made a breach in the feudal walls, a people
unprepared for self-rule, and fought by an aristocracy eager for blood,
surged into anarchy, and convulsion followed on convulsion. That is
in brief the history of the Revolution.
31. While the true causation of the Revolution is thus kept clear,
it must not be forgotten, further, that to the very last, save where
controlled by disguised rationalists like Malesherbes, the tendency
of the old régime was to persecute brutally and senselessly wherever
it could lay hands on a freethinker. In 1788, only a year before
the first explosion of the Revolution, there appeared the Almanach
des Honnêtes Gens of Sylvain Maréchal, a work of which the offence
consisted not in any attack upon religion, but in simply constructing
a calendar in which the names of renowned laymen were substituted for
saints. Instantly it was denounced by the Paris Parlement, the printer
prosecuted, and the author imprisoned; and De Sauvigny, the censor
who had passed the book, was exiled thirty leagues from Paris. [1195]
Some idea of the intensity of the tyranny over all literature
in France under the Old Régime may be gathered from Buckle's
compendious account of the books officially condemned, and
of authors punished, during the two generations before the
Revolution. Apart from the record of the treatment of Buffon,
Marmontel, Morellet, Voltaire, and Diderot, it runs: "The
... tendency was shown in matters so trifling that nothing but
the gravity of their ultimate results prevents them from being
ridiculous. In 1770, Imbert translated Clarke's Letters on Spain,
one of the best works then existing on that country. This book,
however, was suppressed as soon as it appeared; and the only
reason assigned for such a stretch of power is that it contained
some remarks respecting the passion of Charles III for hunting,
which were considered disrespectful to the French crown, because
Louis XV himself was a great hunter. Several years before this
La Bletterie, who was favourably known in France by his works,
was elected a member of the French Academy. But he, it seems,
was a Jansenist, and had moreover ventured to assert that the
Emperor Julian, notwithstanding his apostasy, was not entirely
devoid of good qualities. Such offences could not be overlooked
in so pure an age; and the king obliged the Academy to exclude
La Bletterie from their society. That the punishment extended no
further was an instance of remarkable leniency; for Fréret, an
eminent critic and scholar, was confined in the Bastille because he
stated, in one of his memoirs, that the earliest Frankish chiefs
had received their titles from the Romans. The same penalty was
inflicted four different times upon Lenglet du Fresnoy. In the
case of this amiable and accomplished man, there seems to have
been hardly the shadow of a pretext for the cruelty with which
he was treated; though on one occasion the alleged offence was
that he had published a supplement to the History of De Thou.
"Indeed, we have only to open the biographies and correspondence
of that time to find instances crowding upon us from all
quarters. Rousseau was threatened with imprisonment, was driven
from France, and his works were publicly burned. The celebrated
treatise of Helvétius on the Mind was suppressed by an order of the
Royal Council; it was burned by the common hangman, and the author
was compelled to write two letters retracting his opinions. Some
of the geological views of Buffon having offended the clergy,
that illustrious naturalist was obliged to publish a formal
recantation of doctrines which are now known to be perfectly
accurate. The learned Observations on the History of France, by
Mably, were suppressed as soon as they appeared: for what reason
it would be hard to say, since M. Guizot, certainly no friend
either to anarchy or to irreligion, has thought it worth while to
republish them, and thus stamp them with the authority of his own
great name. The History of the Indies, by Raynal, was condemned
to the flames, and the author ordered to be arrested. Lanjuinais,
in his well-known work on Joseph II, advocated not only religious
toleration, but even the abolition of slavery; his book,
therefore, was declared to be 'seditious'; it was pronounced
'destructive of all subordination,' and was sentenced to be
burned. The Analysis of Bayle, by Marsy, was suppressed, and the
author was imprisoned. The History of the Jesuits, by Linguet,
was delivered to the flames; eight years later his journal was
suppressed; and, three years after that, as he still persisted
in writing, his Political Annals were suppressed, and he himself
was thrown into the Bastille. Delisle de Sales was sentenced to
perpetual exile and confiscation of all his property on account
of his work on the Philosophy of Nature. The treatise by Mey, on
French Law, was suppressed; that by Boncerf, on Feudal Law, was
burned. The Memoirs of Beaumarchais were likewise burned; the Éloge
on Fénelon, by La Harpe, was merely suppressed. Duvernet, having
written a History of the Sorbonne, which was still unpublished,
was seized and thrown into the Bastille, while the manuscript
was yet in his own possession. The celebrated work of De Lolme
on the English constitution was suppressed by edict directly it
appeared. The fate of being suppressed or prohibited also awaited
the Letters of Gervaise in 1724; the Dissertations of Courayer in
1727; the Letters of Montgon in 1732; the History of Tamerlane,
by Margat, also in 1732; the Essay on Taste, by Cartaud, in 1736;
The Life of Domat, by Prévost de la Jannès, in 1742; the History
of Louis XI, by Duclos, in 1745; the Letters of Bargeton in 1750;
the Memoirs on Troyes, by Grosley, in the same year; the History
of Clement XI, by Reboulet, in 1752; The School of Man, by Génard,
also in 1752; the Therapeutics of Garlon in 1756; the celebrated
thesis of Louis, on Generation, in 1754; the treatise on Presidial
Jurisdiction, by Jousse, in 1755; the Ericie of Fontenelle in 1768;
the Thoughts of Jamin in 1769; the History of Siam, by Turpin,
and the Éloge of Marcus Aurelius, by Thomas, both in 1770;
the works on Finance by Darigrand, in 1764, and by Le Trosne in
1779; the Essay on Military Tactics, by Guibert, in 1772; the
Letters of Boucquet in the same year; and the Memoirs of Terrai,
by Coquereau, in 1776. Such wanton destruction of property was,
however, mercy itself compared to the treatment experienced
by other literary men in France. Desforges, for example, having
written against the arrest of the Pretender to the English throne,
was, solely on that account, buried in a dungeon eight feet square
and confined there for three years. This happened in 1749; and in
1770, Audra, professor at the College of Toulouse, and a man of
some reputation, published the first volume of his Abridgement of
General History. Beyond this the work never proceeded; it was at
once condemned by the archbishop of the diocese, and the author
was deprived of his office. Audra, held up to public opprobrium,
the whole of his labours rendered useless, and the prospects of
his life suddenly blighted, was unable to survive the shock. He
was struck with apoplexy, and within twenty-four hours was lying
a corpse in his own house."
32. Among many other illustrations of the passion for persecution in
the period may be noted the fact that after the death of the atheist
Damilaville his enemies contrived to deprive his brother of a post
from which he had his sole livelihood. [1196] It is but one of an
infinity of proofs that the spirit of sheer sectarian malevolence,
which is far from being eliminated in modern life, was in the French
Church of the eighteenth century the ruling passion. Lovers of moderate
courses there were, even in the Church; but even among professors of
lenity we find an ingrained belief in the virtue of vituperation and
coercion. And it is not until the persecuted minority has developed
its power of written retaliation, and the deadly arrows of Voltaire
have aroused in the minds of persecutors a new terror, that there
seems to arise on that side a suspicion that there can be any better
way of handling unbelief than by invective and imprisonment. After
they had taught the heretics to defend themselves, and found them
possessed of weapons such as orthodoxy could not hope to handle, we
find Churchmen talking newly of the duty of gentleness towards error;
and even then clinging to the last to the weapons of public ostracism
and aspersion. So the fight was of necessity fought on the side of
freethought in the temper of men warring on incorrigible oppression
and cruelty as well as on error. The wonder is that the freethinkers
preserved so much amenity.
33. This section would not be complete even in outline without some
notice of the attitude held towards religion by Napoleon, who at once
crowned and in large measure undid the work of the Revolution. He
has his place in its religious legend in the current datum that he
wrought for the faith by restoring a suppressed public worship and
enabling the people of France once more to hear church-bells. In
point of fact, as was pointed out by Bishop Grégoire in 1826, "it
is materially proved that in 1796, before he was Consul, and four
years before the Concordat, according to a statement drawn up at the
office of the Domaines Nationaux, there were in France 32,214 parishes
where the culte was carried on." [1197] Other commonplaces concerning
Napoleon are not much better founded. On the strength of a number of
oral utterances, many of them imperfectly vouched for, and none of them
marked by much deliberation, he has been claimed by Carlyle [1198] as
a theist who philosophically disdained the "clatter of materialism,"
and believed in a Personal Creator of an infinite universe; while by
others he is put forward as a kind of expert in character study who
vouched for the divinity of Jesus. [1199] In effect, his verdict
that "this was not a man" would tell, if anything, in favour of
the view that Jesus is a mythical construction. He was, indeed, by
temperament quasi-religious, liking the sound of church bells and
the atmosphere of devotion; and in his boyhood he had been a rather
fervent Catholic. As he grew up he read, like his contemporaries,
the French deists of his time, and became a deist like his fellows,
recognizing that religions were human productions. Declaring that he
was "loin d'être athée," he propounded to O'Meara all the conventional
views--that religion should be made a support to morals and law; that
men need to believe in marvels; that religion is a great consolation
to those who believe in it; and that "no one can tell what he will do
in his last moments." [1200] The opinion to which he seems to have
adhered most steadily was that every man should die in the religion
in which he had been brought up. And he himself officially did so,
though he put off almost to the last the formality of a deathbed
profession. His language on the subject is irreconcilable with
any real belief in the Christian religion: he was "a deist à la
Voltaire who recalled with tenderness his Catholic childhood, and
who at death reverted to his first beliefs." [1201] For the rest,
he certainly believed in religion as a part of the machinery of the
State, and repeated the usual platitudes about its value as a moral
restraint. He was candid enough, however, not to pretend that it had
ever restrained him; and no freethinker condemned more sweepingly
than he the paralysing effect of the Catholic system on Spain. [1202]
To the Church his attitude was purely political; and his personal
liking for the Pope never moved him to yield, where he could avoid it,
to the temporal pretensions of the papacy. The Concordat of 1802,
that "brilliant triumph over the genius of the Revolution," [1203]
was purely and simply a political measure. If he had had his way,
he would have set up a system of religious councils in France, to
be utilized against all disturbing tendencies in politics. [1204]
Had he succeeded, he was capable of suppressing all manifestations
of freethought in the interests of "order." [1205] He had, in fact,
no disinterested love of truth; and we have his express declaration,
at St. Helena, on the subject of Molière's Tartufe: "I do not hesitate
to say that if the piece had been written in my time, I would not
have permitted its representation." [1206] Freethought can make no
warm claim to the allegiance of such a ruler; and if the Church of
Rome is concerned to claim him as a son on the score of his deathbed
adherence, after a reign which led the Catholic clergy of Spain to
hold him up to the faithful as an incarnation of the devil, [1207]
she will hardly gain by the association. Napoleon's ideas on religious
questions were in fact no more noteworthy than his views on economics,
which were thoroughly conventional.