RAYNAL'S HISTORY OF THE INDIES.
"Since Montesquieu's _Esprit des Lois_," says Grimm in his chronicle,
"our literature has perhaps produced no monument that is worthier to
pass to the remotest posterity, and to consecrate the progress of our
enlightenment and diligence for ever, than Raynal's _Philosophical and
Political History of European settlements and commerce in the two
Indies_." Yet it is perhaps safe to say that not one hundred persons now
living have ever read two chapters of the book for which this immortal
future was predicted.
When the revolutionary floods gradually subsided, some of the monuments
of the previous age began to show themselves above the surface of the
falling waters. They had lost amid the stormy agitation of the deluge
the shining splendour of their first days; still men found something to
attract them after the revolution, as their grandfathers had done before
it, in the pages of the _Spirit of Laws_, of the _New Heloisa_, and the
endless satires, romances, and poems of the great Voltaire. Raynal's
book was not among these dead glories that came to life again. It
disappeared utterly. Nor can it be said that it deserved a kinder fate.
Its only interest now is for those who care to know the humour of men's
minds in those prae-revolutionary days, when they could devour a long
political and commercial history as if it had been a novel or a play,
and when the turn of men's interests made of such a book "the Bible of
two worlds for nearly twenty years."
Raynal is no commanding figure. Born in 1711, he came to Paris from
southern France, and joined the troop of needy priests who swarmed in
the great city, hopefully looking out for the prizes of the Church.
Raynal is the hero of an anecdote which is told of more than one abbe of
the time; whether literally true or not, it is probably a correct
illustration of the evil pass to which ecclesiastical manners had come.
He had, it was said, nothing to live upon save the product of a few
masses. The Abbe Prevost received twenty sous for saying a mass; he paid
the Abbe Laporte fifteen sous to be his deputy; the Abbe Laporte paid
eight sous to Raynal to say it in his stead. But the adventurer was not
destined to remain in this abject case, parasite humbly feeding on
parasite. He turned bookmaker, and wrote a history of the
Stadtholderate, a volume about the English Parliament, and, of all
curious subjects for a man of letters of that date, an account of the
divorce of King Henry the Eighth of England. He visited this country
more than once, and had the honour in 1754 of being chosen a fellow of
the Royal Society of London.[157] We have some difficulty in
understanding how he came by such fame, just as we cannot tell how the
man who had been glad to earn a few pence by saying masses, came shortly
to be rich and independent. He is believed to have engaged in some
colonial ventures, and to have had good luck. His enemies spread the
dark report that he had made money in the slave trade, but in those days
of incensed party spirit there was no limit to virulent invention. It is
at least undeniable that Raynal put his money to generous uses. Among
other things, he had the current fancy of the time, that the world could
be made better by the copious writing of essays, and he delighted in
founding prizes for them at the provincial academies. It was at Lyons
that he proposed the famous thesis, not unworthy of consideration even
at this day: _Has the discovery of America been useful or injurious to
the human race?_
[157] The _Biographie Universelle_, followed by the Encyclopaedia
Britannica, tells a story of Raynal visiting the House of Commons;
the Speaker, says the writer, learning that he was in the gallery,
"suspended the discussion until a distinguished place had been found
for the French philosopher." This must be set down as a myth. The
journals have been searched, and there is no official confirmation
of the statement, improbable enough on the face of it.
Raynal was one of the most assiduous of the guests at the philosophic
meals of Baron Holbach and Helvetius; he was very good-humoured, easy to
live with, and free from that irritable self-consciousness and self-love
which is too commonly the curse of the successful writer, as of other
successful persons. He did not go into company merely to make the hours
fly. With him, as with Helvetius, society was a workshop. He pressed
every one with questions as to all matters, great or small, with which
the interlocutor was likely to be familiar.[158] Horace Walpole met him
at "dull Holbach's," and the abbe at once began to tease him across the
table as to the English colonies. Walpole knew as little about them as
he knew about Coptic, so he made signs to his tormentor that he was
deaf. On another occasion Raynal dined at Strawberry Hill, and mortified
the vanity of his host by looking at none of its wonders himself, and
keeping up such a fire of talk and cross-examination as to prevent
anybody else from looking at them. "There never was such an impertinent
and tiresome old gossip," cried our own gossip.[159]
[158] Morellet, i. 221.
[159] _Walpole's Corresp._, vi. 147 and 445.
Raynal failed to give better men than Horace Walpole the sense of power.
When his greatest work took the public by storm, nobody would believe
that he had written it. Just as in the case of the _System of Nature_,
so people set down the _History of the Indies_ to Diderot, and even the
most moderate critics insisted that he had at any rate written not less
than one-third of it. Many less conspicuous scribes were believed to
have been Raynal's drudges. We can have no difficulty in supposing that
so bulky a work engaged many hands. There is no unity of composition, no
equal scale, no regularity of proportion; on the contrary, rhapsody and
sober description, history and moral disquisition, commerce, law,
physics, and metaphysics are all poured in, almost as if by hazard. We
seem to watch half a dozen writers, each dealing with matters according
to his own individual taste and his own peculiar kind of knowledge.
Indeed, it is a curious and most interesting feature in the literary
activity of France in the eighteenth century, that the egoism and vanity
of authorship were reduced by the conditions of the time to a lower
degree than in any other generation since letters were invented. The
suppression of self by the Jesuits was hardly more complete than the
suppression of self by the most brilliant and effective of the
insurgents against Jesuitry. Such intimate association as exists in our
day between a given book and a given personality, was then thoroughly
shaken by the constant necessity for secrecy. As we have seen, people
hardly knew who set up that momentous landmark, the _System of Nature_.
Voltaire habitually and vehemently denied every one of his most
characteristic pieces, and though in the buzz of Parisian gossip the
right name was surely hit upon for such unique performances as
Voltaire's, yet the fame was far too broken and uncertain to reward his
vanity, if the better part of himself had not been fully and sincerely
engaged in public objects in which vanity had no part. Rousseau was an
exception, but then Rousseau was in truth a reactionist, and not a loyal
member of the great company of reformers. As for Diderot, he valued the
author's laurel so cheaply, as we have seen, that with a gigantic
heedlessness and Saturnian weariness of the plaudits or hisses of the
audience, while supremely interested in the deeper movements of the
tragi-comic drama of the world, he left some of his masterpieces lying
unknown in forgotten chests. Again, in the case of the Encyclopaedia, as
we have also seen, Turgot as well as less eminent men bargained that
their names should not be made public. Wherever a telling blow was to be
dealt with the sword, or a new stone to be laid with the trowel, men
were always found ready to spend themselves and be spent, without taking
thought whether their share in the work should be nicely measured and
publicly identified, or absorbed and lost in the whole of which it was a
part.
Whatever may have been the secret of the authorship of Raynal's book,
and whether or no even the general conception of such a performance was
due to Raynal, it is at least certain that the original author, whoever
he may have been, divined a remarkable literary opportunity. This
divination is in authorship what felicity of experiment is to the
scientific discoverer. The book came into immediate vogue. It was
published in 1772; a second edition was demanded within a couple of
years, and it is computed that more than twenty editions, as well as
countless pirated versions, were exhausted before the universal
curiosity and interest were satisfied. As the subject took the writer
over the whole world, so he found readers in every part of the habitable
globe. And among them were men for whom destiny had lofty parts in
store. Zeal carried one young reader so far that he collected all the
boldest passages into a single volume, and published it as _L'Esprit de
Raynal_; an achievement for which, as he was a member of a religious
congregation, he afterwards got into some trouble.[160] Franklin read
and admired the book in London. Black Toussaint Louverture in his
slave-cabin at Hayti laboriously spelled his way through its pages, and
found in their story of the wrongs of his race and their passionate
appeal against slavery, the first definite expression of thoughts which
had already been dimly stirred in his generous spirit by the brutalities
that were every day enacted under his eyes. Gibbon solemnly immortalised
Raynal by describing him, in one of the great chapters of the _Decline
and Fall_, as a writer who "with a just confidence had prefixed to his
own history the honourable epithets of political and
philosophical."[161] Robertson, whose excellent _History of America_,
covering part of Raynal's ground, was not published until 1777,
complimented Raynal on his ingenuity and eloquence, and reproduced some
of Raynal's historical speculations.[162]
[160] Hedouin by name.
[161] Ch. xxi.
[162] _Works_, xii. 189 (edition of 1822).
Frederick the Great began to read it, and for some days spoke
enthusiastically to his French satellites at dinner of its eloquence and
reason. All at once he became silent, and he never spoke a word about
the book again. He had suddenly come across half a dozen pages of
vigorous rhapsodising, delivered for his own good:
"Oh Frederick, Frederick! thou wast gifted by nature with a bold and
lively imagination, a curiosity that knew no bounds, a passion for
industry. Humanity, everywhere in chains, everywhere cast down, wiped
away her tears at the sight of thy earliest labours, and seemed to find
a solace for all her woes in the hope of finding in thee her avenger. On
the dread theatre of war thy swiftness, skill, and order amazed all
nations. Thou wast regarded as the model of warrior-kings. There exists
a still more glorious name: the name of citizen-king.... Once more open
thy heart to the noble and virtuous sentiments that were the delight of
thy young days." He then rebukes Frederick for keeping money locked up
in his military chest, instead of throwing it into circulation, for his
violent and arbitrary administration, and for the excessive imposts
under which his people groaned. "Dare still more; give rest to the
earth. Let the authority of thy mediation, and the power of thy arms,
force peace on the restless nations. The universe is the only country of
a great man, and the only theatre for thy genius; become then the
benefactor of nations."[163]
[163] Book v. Sec. 31.
In after days, when Raynal visited Berlin, overflowing with vanity and
self-importance, he succeeded with some difficulty in procuring an
interview with the King, and then Frederick took his revenge. He told
Raynal that years ago he had read the history of the Stadtholderate, and
of the English Parliament. Raynal modestly interposed that since those
days he had written more important works. "_I don't know them_," said
the king, in a tone that closed the subject.[164]
[164] _Thiebault_, iii. 172; where there is a long and most
disparaging account of Raynal, by no means incredible, though we
must remember that a competent judge has pronounced Thiebault to be
"stupid, incorrect, and the prey of stupidities."
More disinterested persons than Frederick set as low a value on Raynal's
performance. One writer even compares the book to a quack mounted on a
waggon, retailing to the gaping crowd a number of commonplaces against
despotism and religion, without a single curious thing about them except
their hardihood.[165] But the instinct of the gaping crowd was sound.
Measured by the standard and requirements of modern science, Raynal's
history is no high achievement. It may perhaps be successfully contended
that the true conception of history has on the whole gone back, rather
than advanced, within the last hundred years. There have been many signs
in our own day of its becoming narrow, pedantic, and trivial. It
threatens to degenerate from a broad survey of great periods and
movements of human societies into vast and countless accumulations of
insignificant facts, sterile knowledge, and frivolous antiquarianism, in
which the spirit of epochs is lost, and the direction, meaning, and
summary of the various courses of human history all disappear.
Voltaire's _Essai sur les Moeurs_ shows a perfectly true notion of what
kind of history is worth either writing or reading. Robertson's _View of
the Progress of Society in Europe from the Fall of the Roman Empire to
the Sixteenth Century_ is--with all its imperfections--admirably just,
sensible, and historic in its whole scope and treatment. Raynal himself,
though far below such writers as Voltaire and Robertson in judgment and
temper, yet is not without a luminous breadth of outlook, and does not
forget the superior importance of the effect of events on European
development, over any possible number of minute particularities in the
events themselves. He does not forget, for instance, in describing the
Portuguese conquests in the East Indies, to point out that the most
remarkable and momentous thing about them was the check that they
inflicted on the growth of the Ottoman Power, at a moment in European
history when the Christian states were least able to resist, and least
likely to combine against the designs of Solyman.[166] This is really
the observation best worth making about the Portuguese conquests, and it
illustrates Raynal's habit, and the habit of the good minds of that
century, of incessantly measuring events by their consequences to
western enlightenment and freedom, and of dropping out of sight all
irrelevancies of detail.
[165] Senac de Meilhan, 123.
[166] Book i. Sec. 7. Robertson works out this reflection in his
_Historical Disquisition concerning Ancient India_, iv. Sec. 8.
This signal merit need not blind us to Raynal's shortcomings in the
other direction. There are very few dates. The total absence of
references and authorities was condemned by Gibbon as "the unpardonable
blemish of what is otherwise a most entertaining book." There is no
criticism. As Raynal was a mere literary compiler, it was not to be
expected that he should rise above the common deficiencies in the
thought and methods of his time. It was not to be expected that he
should deal with the various groups of phenomena among primitive races,
in the scientific spirit of modern anthropology. It is true that he was
contemporary with De Brosses, who ranks among the founders of the study
of the origins of human culture. One sentence of De Brosses would have
warned Raynal against a vicious method, which made nearly all that was
written about primitive men by him and everybody else of the same
school, utterly false, worthless, and deluding. "It is not in
possibilities," said De Brosses, "it is in man himself that we must
study man: it is not for us to imagine what man might have done, or
ought to have done, but to observe what he did." Of the origin and
growth of a myth, for example, Raynal had no rational idea. When he
found a myth, what he did was to reduce it to the terms of human action,
and then coolly to describe it as historical. The ancient Peruvian
legend that laws and arts had been brought to their land by two divine
children of the Sun, Manco-Capac and his sister-wife Manca-Oello, is
transformed into a grave and prosaic narrative, in which Manco-Capac's
achievements are minutely described with as much assurance as if that
sage had been Frederick the Great, or Pombal, or any statesman living
before the eyes of the writer. Endless illustrations, some of them
amusing enough, might be given of this Euhemeristic fashion of dealing
with the primitive legends of human infancy.
On the other hand, if Raynal turns myth into history, he constantly
resorts to the opposite method, and turns the hard prose of real life
into doubtful poetry. If he reduces the demi-gods to men, he delights
also in surrounding savage men with the joyous conditions of the
pastoral demi-gods. He can never resist an opportunity of introducing an
idyll. It was the fashion of the time, begun by Rousseau and perfected
by the author of _Paul and Virginia_. The taste for idylls of savage
life had at least one merit; it was a way of teaching people that the
life of savages is something normal, systematic, coherent, and not mere
chaos, formless, and void, unrelated to the life of civilisation. A
recent traveller had given an account of an annual ceremony in China,
which Raynal borrowed without acknowledgment.[167] M. Poivre had
described how the Emperor once every year went forth into the fields,
and there with his own hand guided the plough as it traced the long
furrows. Raynal elaborated this formality into a characteristic rhapsody
on peace, simplicity, plenty, and the father of his people. As a
caustic critic of M. Poivre remarked, if a Chinese traveller had arrived
at Versailles on the morning of Holy Thursday, he would have found the
King of France humbly washing the feet of twelve poor and aged men, yet,
as Frenchmen knew, this would be no occasion for rapturous exultation
over the lowliness and humanity of the French court.
[167] _Voyage d'un Philosophe, etc._; a work published in 1768, and
in great vogue for some time, partly because it furnished material
for the speculations of Raynal, Helvetius, and the rest. See _De
l'Homme_, II. xiii., etc. Grimm, v. 450.
In the same spirit Raynal made no scruple in filling his pages with the
sentimental declamations in which the reaction of that day against the
burden of a decaying system of social artifice found such invariable
relief and satisfaction. None of these imaginary pieces of high
sentiment was more popular than the episode of Polly Baker. It occurs in
the chapters which describe the foundation of New England.[168] The
fanaticism and intolerance of the Puritan Fathers of that famous land
are set forth with the holy rage that always moved the reformers of the
eighteenth century against the reformers of the seventeenth. Religion is
boldly spoken of as a dreadful malady, whose severity extended even to
the most indifferent objects. It may be admitted that the cruel
persecution of the Quakers, and the grotesque horrors of witch-finding
in New Salem, gave Raynal at least as good a text against Protestantism
as he had found against Catholicism in the infernal doings in the West
Indian Islands or in Peru. Even after this bloody fever had abated, says
Raynal, the inhabitants still preserved a kind of rigorism that savours
of the sombre days in which the Puritan colonies had their rise. He
illustrates this by the case of a young woman who was brought before the
authorities for the offence of having given birth to a child out of
wedlock. It was her fifth transgression. Raynal, conceiving history
after the manner of the author of the immortal speeches of Pericles, put
into the mouth of the unfortunate sinner a long and eloquent apology. At
the risk of her life, she cries, she has brought five children into
existence. "I have devoted myself with all the courage of a mother's
solicitude to the painful toil demanded by their weakness and their
tender years. I have formed them to virtue, which is only another name
for reason. Already they love their country, as I love it.... Is it a
crime, then, to be fruitful, as the earth is fruitful, the common mother
of us all?... And how am I not to cry out against the injustice of my
lot, when I see that he who seduced and ruined me, after being the cause
of my destruction, enjoys honour and power, and is actually seated in
the tribunal where they punish my misfortune with rods and with infamy?
Who was that barbarous lawgiver who, deciding between the two sexes,
kept all his wrath for the weaker; for that luckless sex which pays for
a single pleasure by a thousand dangers,"--and so forth. It need hardly
be said that this is far too much in the vein, and almost in the words
of Diderot, to have any authenticity. And as it happens, there is a
piece of external evidence on the matter, which illustrates Raynal's
curious lightheartedness as to historic veracity. Franklin and Silas
Deane were one day talking together about the many blunders in Raynal's
book, when the author himself happened to step in. They told him of what
they had been speaking. "Nay," says Raynal, "I took the greatest care
not to insert a single fact for which I had not the most unquestionable
authority." Deane then fell on the story of Polly Baker, and declared of
his own certain knowledge that there had never been a law against
bastardy in Massachusetts. Raynal persisted that he must have had the
whole case from some source of indisputable trustworthiness, until
Franklin broke in upon him with a loud laugh, and explained that when he
was a printer of a newspaper, they were sometimes short of news, and to
amuse his customers he invented fictions that were as welcome to them as
facts. One of these fictions was the legend of Raynal's heroine. The
abbe was not in the least disconcerted. "Very well, Doctor," he replied,
"I would rather relate your stories than other men's truths."[169]
[168] Book xvii.
[169] Jefferson, quoted in Parton's _Life of Franklin_, ii. 418.
When all has been said that need be said about the glaring shortcomings
of the _History of the Indies_, its popularity still remains to be
accounted for. If we ask for the causes of this striking success, they
are perhaps not very far to seek. For one thing, the book is remarkable
both for its variety and its animation. Horace Walpole wrote about it to
Lady Aylesbury in terms that do not at all overstate its liveliness: "It
tells one everything in the world; how to make conquests, invasions,
blunders, settlements, bankruptcies, fortunes, etc.; tells you the
natural and historical history of all nations; talks commerce,
navigation, tea, coffee, china, mines, salt, spices; of the Portuguese,
English, French, Dutch, Danes, Spaniards, Arabs, caravans, Persians,
Indians, of Louis XIV. and the King of Prussia, of La Bourdonnais,
Dupleix, and Admiral Saunders; of rice, and women that dance naked; of
camels, gingham, and muslin; of millions of millions of lires, pounds,
rupees, and cowries; of iron cables and Circassian women; of Law and the
Mississippi; and against all governments and religions."[170]
[170] _Walpole's Letters_, v. 421.
All this is really not too highly coloured. And Raynal's cosmorama
exactly hit the tastes of the hour. The readers of that day were full of
a new curiosity about the world outside of France, and the less known
families of the human stock. It was no doubt more like the curiosity of
keen-witted children than the curiosity of science. Montesquieu first
stirred this interest in the unfamiliar forms of custom, institution,
creed, motive, and daily manners. But while Montesquieu treated such
matters fragmentarily, and in connection with a more or less abstract
discussion on polity, Raynal made them the objects of a vivid and
concrete picture, and presented them in the easier shape of a systematic
history. Again, if the reading class in France were intelligently
curious, it must be added, we fear, that they were not without a
certain lubricity of imagination, which was pleasantly tickled by
sensuous descriptions of the ways of life that were strange to the iron
restraints of civilisation. Finally, the public of that day always chose
to veil and confuse the furtive voluptuousness of the time by moral
disquisition, and a light and busy meddling with the insoluble
perplexities of philosophy. Here too the dexterous Raynal knew how to
please the fancies of his patrons, and whether Diderot was or was not
the writer of those pages of moral sophism and paradox, there is
something in them which incessantly reminds us of his _Supplement to
Bougainville's Voyages_.
Among the superficial causes of the popularity of Raynal's _History_, we
cannot leave out the circumstance that it was composed after a very
interesting and critical moment in the colonial relations of France. The
Seven Years' War ended in the expulsion of the French from Canada and
from their possessions in the East Indies. When the peace of 1763 was
made, this was counted the most disastrous part of that final record and
sealing of misfortune. When we see with what attachment the ordinary
Frenchman of to-day regards what is as yet the thankless possession of
Algeria, we might easily have guessed, even if the correspondence of the
time had set it forth less distinctly than it does, with what deep
concern and mortification the French of that day saw the white flag and
its lilies driven for ever from the banks of the St. Lawrence in the
west, and the coast of Coromandel in the east. Raynal himself tells us
with what zealous impatience the government attempted to make the nation
forget its calamities, by stirring the hope of a better fortune in the
region to which they gave the magnificent name of Equinoctial France.
The establishment of a free and national population among the scented
forests and teeming swamps of Guiana, was to bring rich compensation for
the icy tracts of Canada. This utopia of a brilliant settlement in
Guiana has steadily invested the minds of French statesmen from Choiseul
down to Louis Napoleon, and its history is a striking monument of
perversity and folly. But from 1763 to 1770, while Raynal was writing
his book, men's minds were full of the heroic design, and this augmented
their interest in the general themes which Raynal handled--colonisation,
commerce, and the overthrow and settlement of new worlds by the old.
However much all these things may have quickened the popularity of
Raynal's _History_, yet the true source of it lay deeper; lay in the
fuel which the book supplied to the two master emotions of the hour--the
hatred and contempt for religion, and the passion for justice and
freedom. The subject easily lent itself to these two strong currents. Or
we may say that hatred of religion, and passion for justice and freedom,
were in fact the subjects, and that the commercial establishments and
political relations of the new worlds in the east and west were only the
setting and framework. Raynal was perhaps the first person to see that
the surest way of discrediting Catholicism was to write some chapters of
its history. Gibbon resorted to the same device shortly afterwards, and
found in the contemptuous analysis of heresies, and the selfish and
violent motives of councils and prelates, as good an occasion of
piercing the Church as Raynal found in painting the abominable fraud and
cruelty that made the presence of Christians so dire a curse to the
helpless inhabitants of the new lands. And the same reproachful
background which Gibbon so artistically introduced, in the humane,
intelligent, and happy epoch of the pagan Antonines, Raynal invented for
the same purpose of making Christianity seem uglier, in the imaginary
simplicity and unbroken gladness of the native races whose blood was
shed by Christian aggressors as if it had been water.
It would perhaps have been singular at a moment when men were looking
round on every side for such weapons as might come to their hand, if
they had missed the horrible action of Catholicism when brought into
contact with the lower races of mankind. There is no more deplorable
chapter in the annals of the race, and there is none which the historian
of Christianity should be less willing to pass over lightly. The
ruthless cruelty of the Spanish conquerors in the new world is a
profoundly instructive illustration of the essential narrowness of the
papal Christianity, its pitiful exclusiveness, its low and bad morality,
and, above all, its incurable unfitness for dealing with the spirit and
motives of men in face of the violent temptations with which the wealth
of the new world now assailed and corrupted them. Catholicism had held
triumphant possession of the conscience of Europe for a dozen centuries
and more. The stories of the American Archipelago, of Mexico, of Peru,
even if told by calmer historians than Raynal, show how little power,
amid all this triumph of the ecclesiastical letter, had been won by the
Christian spirit over the rapacity, the lust, the bloody violence of the
natural man. They show what a superficial thing the professed religion
of the ages of faith had been, how enormous a task remained, and how
much the most arduous part of this task was to make Catholicism itself
civilised and moral. For it is hardly denied that Christianity had done
worse than merely fail to provide an effective curb on the cruel
passions of men. The Spanish conquerors showed that it had nursed a
still more cruel passion than the rude interests of material selfishness
had ever engendered, by making the extermination or enslavement of these
hapless people a duty to the Catholic Church, and a savoury sacrifice in
the nostrils of the Most High.
It is true that a philosophic historian will have to take into account
the important consideration that the reckless massacres perpetrated by
the subjects of the Most Catholic King were less horrible and less
permanently depraving than the daily offering of the bleeding hearts of
human victims in the temples of Huitzilopochtli and Tezcatlipuk. He
would have to remember, as even Raynal does, that if the slave-drivers
and murderers were Catholics, so also was Las Casas, the apostle of
justice and mercy. Still the fact remains, that the doctrine of moral
obligations towards the lower races had not yet taken its place in
Europe, any more than the doctrine of our obligation to the lower
animals, our ministers and companions, has yet taken its place among
Italians and Spaniards. The fact remains, that the old Christianity in
the sixteenth century was unable to deal effectively with the new
conditions in which the world found itself. As Catholicism now in France
in the eighteenth century proved itself unable to harmonise the new
moral aspirations and new social necessities of the time with the
ancient tradition, Raynal was right in telling over again the afflicting
story of her earlier failure, and in identifying the creed that murdered
Calas and La Barre before their own eyes, with the creed that had
blasted the future of the fairest portion of the new world two centuries
before.
The mere circumstance, however, that the book was one long and powerful
innuendo against the Church, would not have been enough to secure its
vast popularity. Attacks on the Church had become cheap by this time.
The eighteenth century, as it is one of the chief aims of these studies
to show, had a positive side of at least equal importance and equal
strength with its negative side. As we have so often said, its writers
were inspired by zeal for political justice, for humanity, for better
and more equal laws, for the amelioration of the common lot,--a zeal
which in energy, sincerity, and disinterestedness, has never been
surpassed. Raynal's work was perhaps, on the whole, the most vigorous
and sustained of all the literary expressions that were given to the
great social ideas of the century. It wholly lacked the strange and
concentrated glow that burned in the pages of the Social Contract; on
the other hand, it was more full of movement, of reality, of vivid and
picturesque incident. It was popular, and it was concrete. Raynal's
story went straight to the hearts of many people, to whom Rousseau's
arguments were only half intelligible and wholly dreary. It was that
book of the eighteenth century which brought the lower races finally
within the pale of right and duty in the common opinion of France. The
engravings that face the title-page in each of the seven volumes give
the keynote to the effect that the seven volumes produced. In one we see
a philosopher writing on a column those old words of dolorous pregnancy,
_Auri sacra fames_, while in the distance Spanish and Portuguese ships
ride at anchor, and on the shore white men massacre blacks. In another
we see a fair woman, typifying bounteous Nature, giving her nourishment
to a white infant at one breast, and to a black infant at the other,
while she turns a pitiful eye to a scene in the background, where a gang
of negro slaves work among the sugar-canes, under the scourge and the
goad of ruthless masters. A third frontispiece gives us the story of
Inkle and Yarico, which Raynal sets down to some English poet, but as no
English poet is known to have touched that moving tale until the
younger Colman dramatised it in 1787, we may suspect that Raynal had
remembered it from Steele's paper in the _Spectator_. The last of these
pieces represents a cultivated landscape, adorned with villages, and its
ports thronged with shipping; in the foreground are two Quakers, one of
them benignly embracing some young Indians, the other casting
indignantly away from him a bow and its arrows, the symbols of division
and war.
The most effective chapters in the book were, in truth, eloquent sermons
on these simple and pathetic texts. They brought Negroes and Indians
within the relations of human brotherhood. They preached a higher
morality towards these poor children of bondage, they inspired a new
pity, they moved more generous sympathies, and they did this in such a
way as not merely to affect men's feelings about Indians and Negroes,
slave-labour, and the yet more hateful slave-trade, but at the same time
to develop and strengthen a general feeling for justice, equality, and
beneficence in all the arrangements and relations of the social union
all over the world. The same movement which brought the suffering blacks
of the new world within the sphere of moral duty, and invested them with
rights, intensified the same notion of rights and duties in association
with the suffering people of France. This was the sentiment that reigned
during the boyhood and youth of those who were destined, some twenty
years after Raynal's book was first placed in their hands, to carry
that sentiment out into a fiery and victorious reality.
Montesquieu had opened the various questions connected with slavery. We
can have no better measure of the increased heat in France between 1750
and 1770 than the difference in tone between two authors so equal in
popularity, if so unequal in merit, as Raynal and Montesquieu. The
latter, without justifying the abuses or even the usage of slavery in
any shape, had still sought to give a rational account of its growth as
an institution.[171] Raynal could not read this with patience. He
typifies all the passion of the revolt against the historic method.
"Montesquieu," he says, "could not make up his mind to treat the
question of slavery seriously. In fact, it is a degradation of reason to
employ it, I will not say in defending, but even in combating an abuse
so contrary to all reason. Whoever justifies so odious a system deserves
from the philosopher the deepest contempt, and from the negro a
dagger-stroke. 'If you put a finger on me, I will kill myself,' said
Clarissa to Lovelace. And I would say to the man that should assail my
freedom: If you come near me, I poniard you.... Will any one tell me
that he who seeks to make me a slave, is only using his rights? Where
are they, these rights? Who has stamped on them a mark sacred enough to
silence mine? If thou thinkest thyself authorised to oppress me, because
thou art stronger and craftier than I--then do not complain when my
strong arms shall tear thy breast open to find thy heart; do not
complain when in thy spasm-riven bowels thou feelest the deadly doom
which I have passed into them with thy food. Be thou a victim in thy
turn, and expiate the crime of the oppressor."[172]
[171] Book xv. of the _Esprit des Lois_.
[172] Book xi. Sec. 30.
Raynal then asks the political question, how we can hope to throw down
an edifice that is propped up by universal passion, by established laws,
by the rivalries of powerful nations, and by the force of prejudices
more powerful still. To what tribunal, he cries, shall we carry the
sacred appeal? He can find no better answer than that of Turgot and the
Economists. It is to Kings that we must look for the redress of these
monstrous abominations. It is for Kings to carry fire and sword among
the oppressors. "Your armies," he cries, anticipating the famous
expression of a writer of our own day, "will be filled with the holy
enthusiasm of humanity." In a more practical vein, Raynal then warns his
public of the terrible reckoning which awaits the whites, if the blacks
ever rise to avenge their wrongs. The Negroes only need a chief
courageous enough to lead them to vengeance and carnage. "Where is he,
that great man, whom Nature owes to the honour of the human race? Where
is he, that new Spartacus who will find no Crassus? Then the Black Code
will vanish; how terrible will the White Code be!" We may easily realise
the effect which vehement words like these had upon Toussaint, and upon
those for whom Toussaint reproduced them.
Men have constantly been asking themselves what the great literary
precursors of the Revolution would have thought, and how they would have
acted, if they could have survived to the days of the Terror. What would
Voltaire have said of Robespierre? How would Rousseau have borne himself
at the Jacobin Club? Would Diderot have followed the procession of the
Goddess of Reason? To ask whether these famous men would have sanctioned
the Terror, is to insult great memories; but there is no reason to
suppose that their strong spirits would have faltered. One or two of the
younger generation of the famous philosophic party did actually see the
break-up of the old order. Condorcet faced the storm with a heroism of
spirit that has never been surpassed: disgust at the violent excesses of
bad men could never make him unfaithful to the beneficence of the
movement which their frenzy distorted.
Raynal was of weaker mould, and showed that there had been a stratum of
cant and borrowed formulas in his eloquence. He lived into the very
darkest days, and watched the succession of events with a keen eye. His
heart began to quail very early. Long before the bloodier times of the
internecine war between the factions, and on the eve of the attempted
flight of the king, he addressed a letter to the National Assembly (May
31, 1791). The letter is not wanting in firm and courageous phrases. "I
have long dared," he began, "to tell kings of their duties. Let me
to-day tell the people of its errors, and the representatives of the
people of the perils that menace us all." He then proceeded to inveigh
in his old manner, but with a new purpose and a changed destination.
This time it was not kings and priests whom he denounced, but a
government enslaved by popular tyranny, soldiers without discipline,
chiefs without authority, ministers without resources, the rudest and
most ignorant of men daring to settle the most difficult political
questions. How comes it, he asks, that after declaring the dogma of the
liberty of religious opinions, you allow priests to be overwhelmed by
persecution and outrage because they do not follow your religious
opinions? In the same energetic vein he protests against the failure of
the Constituent Assembly to found a stable and vigorous government, and
to put an end to the vengeances, the seditions, the outbreaks, that
filled the air with confusion and menace. It was in short a vigorous
pamphlet, written in the interest of Malouet and the constitutional
royalists. The Assembly listened, but not without some rude
interruptions. Robespierre hastened to the tribune. After condemning the
tone of Raynal's letter, he disclaimed any intention of calling down the
severity either of the Assembly or of public opinion upon a man who
still preserved a great name; he thought that a sufficient excuse for
the writer's apostasy might be found in his advanced age. The Assembly
agreed with Robespierre, and passed to the order of the day.[173]
[173] Hamel's _Robespierre_ i. 456-458.
Raynal lived to see his predictions fulfilled with a terrible bitterness
of fulfilment. In spite of the anger which he had roused in the breasts
of powerful personages, the aged man was not guillotined; he was not
even imprisoned. All his property was taken from him, and he died in
abject poverty in the spring of 1796. Let us hope that the misery of his
end was assuaged by the recollection that he had once been a powerful
pleader for noble causes.