J. M. Robertson

1. The fruits of the intellectual movement of the seventeenth century are seen beginning to take form on the very threshold of the eighteenth. In 1700, at the height of the reign of the King’s confessors, there was privately printed the Lettre d’Hippocrate À DamagÈte, described as “the first French work openly destructive of Christianity.” It was ascribed to the Comte de Boulainvilliers, a pillar of the feudal system.1 Thus early is the sound of disintegration heard in the composite fabric of Church and State; and various fissures are seen in all parts of the structure. The king himself, so long morally discredited, could only discredit pietism by his adoption of it; the Jansenists and the Molinists [i.e., the school of Molina, not of Molinos] fought incessantly; even on the side of authority there was bitter dissension between Bossuet and FÉnelon;2 and the movement of mysticism associated with the latter came to nothing, though he had the rare credit of converting, albeit to a doubtful orthodoxy, the emotional young Scotch deist Chevalier Ramsay.3 Where the subtlety of FÉnelon was not allowed to operate, the loud dialectic of Bossuet could not avail for faith as against rationalism, whatever it might do to upset the imperfect logic of Protestant sects. In no society, indeed, does mere declamation play a larger part than in that of modern France; but in no society, on the other hand, is mere declamation more sure to be disdained and derided by the keener spirits. In the years of disaster and decadence which rounded off in gloom the life of the Grand Monarque, with defeat dogging his armies and bankruptcy threatening his finances, the spirit of criticism was not likely to slacken. Literary polemic, indeed, was hardly to be thought of at such a time, even if it had been safe. In 1709 the king destroyed the Jansenist seminary of Port Royal, wreaking an ignoble vengeance on the very bones of the dead there buried; and more heretical thinkers had need go warily.

Yet even in those years of calamity, perhaps by reason of the very stress of it, some freethinking books somehow passed the press, though a system of police espionage had been built up by the king, step for step with some real reforms in the municipal government of Paris. The first was a romance of the favourite type, in which a traveller discovers a strange land inhabited by surprisingly rational people. Such appear to have been the Histoire de Calejava, by Claude Gilbert, produced at Dijon in 1700, and the imaginary travels of Juan de Posos, published at Amsterdam in 1708. Both of these were promptly suppressed; the next contrived to get into circulation. The work of Symon Tyssot de Patot, Voyages et Avantures de Jacques MassÉ, published in 1710, puts in the mouths of priests of the imaginary land discovered by the traveller such mordant arguments against the idea of a resurrection, the story of the fall, and other items of the Christian creed, that there could be small question of the deism of the author;4 and the prefatory Lettre de l’Éditeur indicates misgivings. The RÉflexions sur les grands hommes qui sont morts en plaisantant, by Deslandes, ostensibly published at Amsterdam in 1712, seems to have had a precarious circulation, inasmuch as Brunet never saw the first edition. To permit of the issue of such a book as Jacques MassÉ—even at Bordeaux—the censure must have been notably lax; as it was again in the year of the king’s death, when there appeared a translation of Collins’s Discourse of Freethinking. For the moment the Government was occupied over an insensate renewal of the old persecution of Protestants, promulgating in 1715 a decree that all who died after refusing the sacraments should be refused burial, and that their goods should be confiscated. The edict seems to have been in large measure disregarded.

2. At the same time the continuous output of apologetics testified to the gathering tide of unbelief. The Benedictine Lami followed up his attack on Spinoza with a more popular treatise, L’IncrÉdule amenÉ À la religion par la raison (1710); the AbbÉ Genest turned Descartes into verse by way of Preuves naturelles de l’existence de Dieu et de l’immortalitÉ de l’Âme (1716); and the Anti-Lucretius of Cardinal Polignac (1661–1741), though only posthumously published in full (1745), did but pass on to the next age, when deism was the prevailing heresy, a deistic argument against atheism. It is difficult to see any Christian sentiment in that dialectic performance of a born diplomatist.5

When the old king died, even the fashion of conformity passed away among the upper classes;6 and the feverish manufacture of apologetic works testifies to an unslackened activity of unbelief. In 1719 Jean Denyse, professor of philosophy at the college of Montaigu, produced La vÉritÉ de la religion chrÉtienne demontrÉe par ordre gÉomÉtrique (a title apparently suggested by Spinoza’s early exposition of Descartes), without making any permanent impression on heterodox opinion. Not more successful, apparently, was the performance of the AbbÉ Houteville, first published in 1722.7 Much more amiable in tone, and more scientific in temper, than the common run of defences, it was found, says an orthodox biographical dictionary, to be “better fitted to make unbelievers than to convert them,” seeing that “objections were presented with much force and fulness, and the replies with more amenity than weight.”8 That the AbbÉ was in fact not rigorously orthodox might almost be suspected from his having been appointed, in the last year of his life (1742), “perpetual secretary” to the AcadÉmie, an office which somehow tended to fall to more or less freethinking members, being held before him by the AbbÉ Dubos, and after him by Mirabaud, the AbbÉ Duclos,9 D’Alembert, and Marmontel. The TraitÉs des PremiÈres VeritÉz of the Jesuit Father Buffier (1724) can hardly have been more helpful to the faith.10 Another experiment by way of popularizing orthodoxy, the copious Histoire du peuple de Dieu, by the Jesuit Berruyer, first published in 1728,11 had little better fortune, inasmuch as it scandalized the orthodox by its secularity of tone without persuading the freethinkers. Condemned by the Bishop of Montpellier in 1731, it was censured by Rome in 1734; and the second part, produced long afterwards, aroused even more antagonism.

3. There was thus no adaptation on the side of the Church to the forces which in an increasing degree menaced her rule. Under the regency of OrlÉans (1715–1723), the open disorder of the court on the one hand and the ruin of the disastrous financial experiment of Law on the other were at least favourable to toleration; but under the Duc de Bourbon, put in power and soon superseded by Fleury (bishop of FrÉjus and tutor of Louis XV; later cardinal) there was a renewal of the rigours against the Protestants and the Jansenists; the edict of 1715 was renewed; emigration recommenced; and only public outcry checked the policy of persecution on that side. But Fleury and the king went on fighting the Jansenists; and while this embittered strife of the religious sections could not but favour the growth of freethought, it was incompatible alike with official tolerance of unbelief and with any effectual diffusion of liberal culture. Had the terrorism and the waste of Louis XIV been followed by a sane system of finance and one of religious toleration; and had not the exhausted and bankrupt country been kept for another half century—save for eight years of peace and prosperity from 1748 to 1755—on the rack of ruinous wars, alike under the regency of OrlÉans and the rule of Louis XV, the intellectual life might have gone fast and far. As it was, war after war absorbed its energy; and the debt of five milliards left by Louis XIV was never seriously lightened. Under such a system the vestiges of constitutional government were gradually swept away.

4. As the new intellectual movement began to find expression, then, it found the forces of resistance more and more organized. In particular, the autocracy long maintained the severest checks on printing, so that freethought could not save by a rare chance attain to open speech. Any book with the least tendency to rationalism had to seek printers, or at least publishers, in Holland. Huard, in publishing his anonymous translation of the Hypotyposes of Sextus Empiricus (1725), is careful to say in his preface that he “makes no application of the Pyrrhonian objections to any dogma that may be called theological”; but he goes on to add that the scandalous quarrels of Christian sects are well fitted to confirm Pyrrhonists in their doubts, the sects having no solid ground on which to condemn each other. As such an assertion was rank heresy, the translation had to be issued in Amsterdam, and even there without a publisher’s name.12 And still it remains clear that the age of Louis XIV had passed on to the next a heritage of hidden freethinking, as well as one of debt and misgovernment. What takes place thereafter is rather an evolution of and a clerical resistance to a growth known to have begun previously, and always feared and hated, than any new planting of unbelief in orthodox soil. As we have seen, indeed, a part of the early work of skepticism was done by distinguished apologists. Huet, dying in 1722, left for posthumous publication his TraitÉ philosophique de la faiblesse de l’esprit humain (1723). It was immediately translated into English and German; and though it was probably found somewhat superfluous in deistic England, and supersubtle in Lutheran Germany, it helped to prepare the ground for the active unbelief of the next generation in France.

5. A continuous development may be traced throughout the century. Montesquieu, who in his early Persian Letters (1721) had revealed himself as “fundamentally irreligious”13 and a censor of intolerance,14 proceeded in his masterly little book on the Greatness and Decadence of the Romans (1734) and his famous Spirit of Laws (1748) to treat the problems of human history in an absolutely secular and scientific spirit, making only such conventional allusions to religion as were advisable in an age in which all heretical works were suppressible.15 The attempts of La Harpe and Villemain16 to establish the inference that he repented his youthful levity in the Persian Letters, and recognized in Christianity the main pillar of society, will not bear examination. The very passages on which they found17 are entirely secular in tone and purpose, and tell of no belief.18 So late as 1751 there appeared a work, Les Lettres Persanes convaincues d’impiÉtÉ, by the AbbÉ Gaultier. The election of Montesquieu was in fact the beginning of the struggle between the Philosophe party in the Academy and their opponents;19 and in his own day there was never much doubt about Montesquieu’s deism. In his posthumous PensÉes his anti-clericalism is sufficiently emphatic. “Churchmen,” he writes, “are interested in keeping the people ignorant.” He expresses himself as a convinced deist, and, with no great air of conviction, as a believer in immortality. But there his faith ends. “I call piety,” he says, “a malady of the heart, which plants in the soul a malady of the most ineradicable kind.” “The false notion of miracles comes of our vanity, which makes us believe we are important enough for the Supreme Being to upset Nature on our behalf.” “Three incredibilities among incredibilities: the pure mechanism of animals [the doctrine of Descartes]; passive obedience; and the infallibility of the Pope.”20 His heresy was of course divined by the guardians of the faith, through all his panegyric of it. Even in his lifetime, Jesuits and Jansenists combined to attack the Spirit of Laws, which was denounced at an assembly of the clergy, put on the Roman Index, and prohibited by the censure until Malesherbes came into office in 1750.21 The Count de Cataneo, a Venetian noble in the service of the King of Prussia, published in French about 1751 a treatise on The Source, the Strength, and the True Spirit of Laws,22 in which the political rationalism and the ethical utilitarianism of Cumberland and Grotius were alike repelled as irreconcilable with the doctrine of revelation. It was doubtless because of this atmosphere of hostility that on the death of Montesquieu at Paris, in 1755, Diderot was the only man of letters who attended his funeral,23 though the AcadÉmie performed a commemorative service.24 Nevertheless, Montesquieu was throughout his life a figure in “good society,” and suffered no molestation apart from the outcry against his books. He lived under a tradition of private freethinking and public clericalism, even as did MoliÈre in the previous century; and where the two traditions had to clash, as at interment, the clerical dominion affirmed itself. But even in the Church there were always successors of Gassendi, to wit, philosophic unbelievers, as well as quiet friends of toleration. And it was given to an obscure Churchman to show the way of freethought to a generation of lay combatants.

6. One of the most comprehensive freethinking works of the century, the Testament of Jean Meslier, curÉ of EtrÉpigny, in Champagne (d. 1723, 1729, or 1733), though it inspired numbers of eighteenth-century freethinkers who read it in manuscript, was never printed till 1861–64. It deserves here some special notice.25 At his death, by common account, Meslier left two autograph copies of his book, after having deposited a third copy in the archives of the jurisdiction of Sainte-Menehould. By a strange chance one was permitted to circulate, and ultimately there were some hundred copies in Paris, selling at ten louis apiece. As he told on the wrapper of the copy he left for his parishioners, he had not dared to speak out during his life; but he had made full amends. He is recorded to have been an exceptionally charitable priest, devoted to his parishioners, whose interests he indignantly championed against a tyrannous lord of the manor;26 apropos of Descartes’s doctrine of animal automatism, which he fiercely repudiates, he denounces with deep feeling all cruelty to animals, at whose slaughter for food he winces; and his book reveals him as a man profoundly impressed at once by the sufferings of the people under heartless kings and nobles, and the immense imposture of religion which, in his eyes, maintained the whole evil system. Some men before him had impugned miracles, some the gospels, some dogma, some the conception of deity, some the tyranny of kings. He impugns all; and where nearly all the deists had eulogized the character of the Gospel Jesus, the priest envelops it in his harshest invective.

He must have written during whole years, with a sombre, invincible patience, dumbly building up, in his lonely leisure, his unfaltering negation of all that the men around him held for sacred, and that he was sworn to preach—the whole to be his testament to his parishioners. In the slow, heavy style—the style of a cart horse, Voltaire called it—there is an indubitable sincerity, a smouldering passion, but no haste, no explosion. The long-drawn, formless, prolix sentences say everything that can be said on their theme; and when the long book was done it was slowly copied, and yet again copied, by the same heavy, unwearying hand. He had read few books, it seems—only the Bible, some of the Fathers, Montaigne, the “Turkish Spy,” NaudÉ, Charron, Pliny, TournÉmine on atheism, and FÉnelon on the existence of God, with some history, and Moreri’s Dictionary; but he had re-read them often. He does not cite Bayle; and Montaigne is evidently his chief master. But on his modest reading he had reached as absolute a conviction of the untruth of the entire JudÆo-Christian religion as any freethinker ever had. Moved above all by his sense of the corruption and misrule around him, he sets out with a twofold indictment against religion and government, of which each part sustains the other, and he tells his parishioners how he had been “hundreds of times”27 on the point of bursting out with an indignant avowal of his contempt for the rites he was compelled to administer, and the superstitions he had to inculcate. Then, in a grimly-planned order, he proceeds to demolish, section by section, the whole structure.

Religions in general he exhibits as tissues of error, illusion, and imposture, the endless sources of troubles and strifes for men. Their historical proofs and documentary bases are then assailed, and the gospels in particular are ground between the slow mill-stones of his dialectic; miracles, promises, and prophecies being handled in turn. The ethic and the doctrine are next assailed all along the line, from their theoretic bases to their political results; and the kings of France fare no better than their creed. As against the theistic argument of FÉnelon, the entire theistic system is then oppugned, sometimes with precarious erudition, generally with cumbrous but solid reasoning; and the eternity of matter is affirmed with more than AverroÏstic conviction, the Cartesians coming in for a long series of heavy blows. Immortality is further denied, as miracles had been; and the treatise ends with a stern affirmation of its author’s rectitude, and, as it were, a massive gesture of contempt for all that will be said against him when he has passed into the nothingness which he is nearing. “I have never committed any crime,” he writes,28 “nor any bad or malicious action: I defy any man to make me on this head, with justice, any serious reproach”; but he quotes from the Psalms, with grim zest, phrases of hate towards workers of iniquity. There is not even the hint of a smile at the astonishing bequest he was laying up for his parishioners and his country. He was sure he would be read, and he was right. The whole polemic of the next sixty years, the indictment of the government no less than that of the creed, is laid out in his sombre treatise.

To the general public, however, he was never known save by the “Extract”—really a deistic adaptation—made by Voltaire,29 and the re-written summary by d’Holbach and Diderot entitled Le Bon Sens du CurÉ Meslier (1772).30 Even this publicity was delayed for a generation, since Voltaire, who heard of the Testament as early as 1735, seems to have made no use of it till 1762. But the entire group of fighting freethinkers of the age was in some sense inspired by the old priest’s legacy.

7. Apart from this direct influence, too, others of the cloth bore some part in the general process of enlightenment. A good type of the agnostic priest of the period was the AbbÉ Terrasson, the author of the philosophic romance Sethos (1732), who died in 1750. Not very judicious in his theory of human evolution (which he represented as a continuous growth from a stage of literary infancy, seen in Homer), he adopted the Newtonian theory at a time when the entire Academy stood by Cartesianism. Among his friends he tranquilly avowed his atheism.31 He died “without the sacraments,” and when asked whether he believed all the doctrine of the Church, he replied that for him that was not possible.32 Another anti-clerical AbbÉ was Gaidi, whose poem, La Religion À l’AssemblÉ du ClergÉ de France (1762), was condemned to be burned.33

Among or alongside of such disillusioned Churchmen there must have been a certain number who, desiring no breach with the organization to which they belonged, saw the fatal tendency of the spirit of persecution upon which its rulers always fell back in their struggle with freethought, and sought to open their eyes to the folly and futility of their course. Freethinkers, of course, had to lead the way, as we have seen. It was the young Turgot who in 1753 published two powerful Lettres sur la tolÉrance, and in 1754 a further series of admirable Lettres d’un ecclÉsiastique À un magistrat, pleading the same cause.34 But similar appeals were anonymously made, by a clerical pen, at a moment when the Church was about to enter on a new and exasperating conflict with the growing band of freethinking writers who rallied round Voltaire. The small book of Questions sur la tolÉrance, ascribed to the AbbÉ TailhÉ or TailhiÉ and the canonist Maultrot (Geneva, 1758), is conceived in the very spirit of rationalism, yet with a careful concern to persuade the clergy to sane courses, and is to this day worth reading as a utilitarian argument. But the Church was not fated to be led by such light. The principle of toleration was left to become the watchword of freethought, while the Church identified herself collectively with that of tyranny.

Anecdotes of the time reveal the coincidence of tyranny and evasion, intolerance and defiance. Of Nicolas Boindin (1676–1751), procureur in the royal Bureau des Finances, who was received into the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres in 1706, it is told that he “would have been received in the French Academy if the public profession he made of being an atheist had not excluded him.”35 But the publicity was guarded. When he conversed with the young Marmontel36 and others at the CafÉ Procope, they used a conversational code in which the soul was called Margot, religion Javotte, liberty Jeanneton, and the deity Monsieur de l’Être. Once a listener of furtive aspect asked Boindin who might be this Monsieur de l’Être who behaved so ill, and with whom they were so displeased? “Monsieur,” replied Boindin, “he is a police spy”—such being the avocation of the questioner.37 “The morals of Boindin,” says a biographical dictionary of the period, “were as pure as those of an atheist can be; his heart was generous; but to these virtues he joined presumption and the obstinacy which follows from it, a bizarre humour, and an unsociable character.”38 Other testimonies occur on the first two heads, not on the last. But he was fittingly refused “Christian” interment, and was buried by night, “sans pompe.”

8. With the ground prepared as we have seen, freethought was bound to progress in France in the age of Louis XV; but it chanced that the lead fell into the hands of the most brilliant and fecund of all the writers of the century. Voltaire39 (1694–1778) was already something of a freethinker when a mere child. So common was deism already become in Paris at the end of the seventeenth century that his godfather, an abbÉ, is said to have taught him, at the age of three, a poem by J. B. Rousseau,40 then privately circulated, in which Moses in particular and religious revelations in general are derided as fraudulent.41 Knowing this poem by heart in his childhood, the boy was well on the way to his life’s work. It is on record that many of his school-fellows were, like himself, already deists, though his brother, a juvenile Jansenist, made vows to propitiate the deity on the small unbeliever’s behalf.42 It may have been a general reputation for audacious thinking that led to his being charged with the authorship of a stinging philippic published in 1715, after the death of Louis XIV. The unknown author, a young man, enumerated the manifold abuses and iniquities of the reign, concluding: “I have seen all these, and I am not twenty years old.” Voltaire was then twenty-two; but D’Argenson, who in the poem had been called “the enemy of the human race,” finding no likelier author for the verses, put him under surveillance and exiled him from Paris; and on his imprudent return imprisoned him for nearly a year in the Bastille (1716), releasing him only when the real author of the verses avowed himself. Unconquerable then as always, Voltaire devoted himself in prison to his literary ambitions, planning his Henriade and completing his Œdipe, which was produced in 1718 with signal success.

Voltaire was thus already a distinguished young poet and dramatist when, in 1726, after enduring the affronts of an assault by a nobleman’s lacqueys, and of imprisonment in the Bastille for seeking amends by duel, he came to England, where, like Deslandes before him, he met with a ready welcome from the freethinkers.43 Four years previously, in the powerful poem, For and Against,44 he had put his early deistic conviction in a vehement impeachment of the immoral creed of salvation and damnation, making the declaration, “I am not a Christian.” Thus what he had to learn in England was not deism, but the physics of Newton and the details of the deist campaign against revelationism; and these he mastered.45 Not only was he directly and powerfully influenced by Bolingbroke, who became his intimate friend, but he read widely in the philosophic, scientific, and deistic English literature of the day,46 and went back to France, after three years’ stay, not only equipped for his ultimate battle with tyrannous religion, but deeply impressed by the moral wholesomeness of free discussion.47 Not all at once, indeed, did he become the mouthpiece of critical reason for his age: his literary ambitions were primarily on the lines of belles lettres, and secondarily on those of historical writing. After his Pour et Contre, his first freethinking production was the not very heretical Lettres philosophiques or Lettres anglaises, written in England in 1728, and, after circulating in MS., published in five editions in 1734; and the official burning of the book by the common hangman, followed by the imprisonment of the bookseller in the Bastille,48 was a sufficient check on such activity for the time. Save for the jests about Adam and Eve in the Mondain (1736), a slight satire for which he had to fly from Paris; and the indirect though effective thrusts at bigotry in the Ligue (1723; later the Henriade); in the tragedy of Mahomet (1739; printed in 1742), in the tales of Memnon and Zadig (1747–48), and in the IdÉes de La Mothe le Vayer (1751) and the DÉfense de Milord Bolingbroke (1752), he produced nothing else markedly deistic till 1755, when he published the “Poem to the King of Prussia,” otherwise named Sur la loi naturelle (which appears to have been written in 1751, while he was on a visit to the Margravine of Bayreuth), and that on the Earthquake of Lisbon. So definitely did the former poem base all morality on natural principles that it was ordered to be burned by the Parlement of Paris, then equally alarmed at freethinking and at Molinism.49 And so impossible was it still in France to print any specific criticism of Christianity that when in 1759 he issued his verse translations of the Song of Solomon and Ecclesiastes they also were publicly burned, though he had actually softened instead of heightening the eroticism of the first and the “materialism” of the second.50

9. It is thus a complete mistake on the part of Buckle to affirm that the activity of the French reformers up to 1750 was directed against religion, and that it was thereafter turned against the State. Certainly there was much freethinking among instructed men and others, but it proceeded, as under Louis XIV, mainly by way of manuscripts and conversation, or at best by the circulation of English books and a few translations of these; and only guardedly before 1745 by means of published French books.51 The AbbÉ Ranchon, in his MS. Life of Cardinal Fleury, truly says that “the time of the Regency was a period of the spirit of dissoluteness and irreligion”; but when he ascribes to “those times” many “licentious and destructive writings” he can specify only those of the English deists. “Precisely in the time of the Regency a multitude of those offensive and irreligious books were brought over the sea: France was deluged with them.”52 It is incredible that multitudes of Frenchmen read English in the days of the Regency. French freethinkers like Saint Evremond and Deslandes, who visited or sojourned in London before 1715, took their freethought there with them; and the only translations then in print were those of Collins’s Discourse of Freethinking and Shaftesbury’s essays on the Use of Ridicule and on Enthusiasm. Apart from these, the only known French freethinking book of the Regency period was the work of Vroes, a councillor at the court of Brabant, on the Spirit of Spinoza, reprinted as Des trois imposteurs. Meslier died not earlier than 1729; the Histoire de la philosophie payenne of Burigny belongs to 1724; the Lettres philosophiques of Voltaire to 1734; the earlier works of d’Argens to 1737–38; the Nouvelles libertÉs de penser, edited by Dumarsais, to 1743; and the militant treatise of De la Serre, best known as the Examen de la Religion, to 1745.

The ferment thus kept up was indeed so great that about 1748 the ecclesiastical authorities decided on the remarkable step of adopting for their purposes the apologetic treatise adapted by Jacob Vernet, professor of belles lettres at Geneva, from the works of Jean-Alphonse Turrettin,53 not only a Protestant but a substantially Socinian professor of ecclesiastical history at the same university. The treatise is itself a testimony to the advance of rationalism in the Protestant world; and its adoption, even under correction, by the Catholic Church in France tells of a keen consciousness of need. But the dreaded advance, as we have seen, was only to a small extent yet traceable by new literature. The Examen critique des apologistes de la religion chrÉtienne of LÉvesque de Burigny was probably written about 1732, and then and thereafter circulated in manuscript, but it was not published till 1766; and even in manuscript its circulation was probably small, though various apologetic works had testified to the increasing uneasiness of the orthodox world. Such titles as La religion chrÉtienne demontrÉe par la Resurrection (by Armand de la Chapelle, 1728) and La religion chrÉtienne prouvÉe par l’accomplissement des prophÉties (by PÈre Baltus, 1728) tell of private unbelief under the Regency. In 1737 appeared the voluminous treatise (anonymous) of the AbbÉ de la Chambre, TraitÉ de la vÉritable religion contre les athÉes, les dÉistes, etc. (5 vols.). In 1747, again, there appeared a learned, laborious, and unintelligent work in three volumes (authorized in 1742), Le Libertinage combattu par la tÉmoignage des auteurs profanes, by an unnamed Benedictine54 of the Congregation of St. Vanne. It declares that, between atheism and deism, there has never been so much unbelief as now; but it cites no modern books, and is devoted to arraying classic arguments in support of theism and morals. Part of the exposition consists in showing that Epicurus, Lucian, and Euripides, whom modern atheists are wont to cite as their masters, were not and could not have been atheists; and the pious author roundly declares in favour of paganism as against atheism.

So much smoke tells of fire; but only in 1745 and 1746 did the printed Examen of De la Serre and the PensÉes philosophiques of Diderot begin to build up in France the modern school of critical and philosophic deism. When in 1751 the AbbÉ Gauchat began his series of Lettres critiques, he set out by attacking Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques, Diderot’s PensÉes philosophiques, the anonymous Discours sur la vie heureuse (1748), Les Moeurs55 (1748), and Pope’s Essay on Man; taking up in his second volume the Lettres Persanes of Montesquieu (1721), and other sets of Lettres written in imitation of them. In the third volume he has nothing more aggressive of Voltaire’s to deal with than La Henriade, the Mahomet, and some of his fugitive pieces. And the Bishop of Puy, writing in 1754 his La DÉvotion conciliÉe avec l’esprit, could say to the faithful: “You live in an age fertile in pretended esprits forts, who, too weak nevertheless to attack in front an invincible religion, skirmish lightly around it, and in default of the reasons they lack, employ raillery.”56 The chivalrous bishop knew perfectly well that had a serious attack been published author and publisher would have been sent if possible to the Bastille, if not to the scaffold. But his evidence is explicit. There is here no recognition of any literary bombardment, though there was certainly an abundance of unbelief.57

Buckle has probably mistaken the meaning of the summing up of some previous writer to the effect that up to 1750 or a few years later the political opposition to the Court was religious, in the sense of ecclesiastical or sectarian (Jansenist),58 and that it afterwards turned to matters of public administration.59 It would be truer to say that the early Lettres philosophiques, the reading of which later made the boy Lafayette a republican at nine, were a polemic for political and social freedom, and as such a more direct criticism of the French administrative system than Voltaire ever penned afterwards, save in the Voix du Sage et du Peuple (1750). In point of fact, as will be shown below, only some twenty scattered freethinking works had appeared in French up to 1745, almost none of them directly attacking Christian beliefs; and, despite the above-noted sallies of Voltaire, Condorcet comes to the general conclusion that it was the hardihood of Rousseau’s deism in the “Confession of a Savoyard Vicar” in his Émile (1762) that spurred Voltaire to new activity.60 This is perhaps not quite certain; there is some reason to believe that his “Sermon of the Fifty,” his “first frontal attack on Christianity,”61 was written a year before; but in any case that and other productions of his at once left Rousseau far in the rear. Even now he had no fixed purpose of continuous warfare against so powerful and cruel an enemy as the Church, which in 1757 had actually procured an edict pronouncing the death penalty against all writers of works attacking religion; though the fall of the Jesuits in 1764 raised new hopes of freedom. But when, after that hopeful episode, there began a new movement of Jansenist fanaticism; and when, after the age of religious savagery had seemed to be over, there began a new series of religious atrocities in France itself (1762–66), he girded on a sword that was not to be laid down till his death.

Even so late as 1768, in his last letter to Damilaville (8 fÉv.), Voltaire expresses a revulsion against the aggressive freethought propaganda of the time which is either one of his epistolary stratagems or the expression of a nervous reaction in a time of protracted bad health. “Mes chagrins redoublent,” he writes, “par la quantitÉ incroyable d’Écrits contre la religion chrÉtienne, qui se succÉdent aussi rapidement en Hollande que les gazettes et les journaux.” His enemies have the barbarism to impute to him, at his age, “une partie de ces extravagances composÉes par de jeunes gens et par des moines dÉfroquÉs.” His immediate ground for chagrin may have been the fact that this outbreak of anti-Christian literature was likely to thwart him in the campaign he was then making to secure justice to the Sirven family as he had already vindicated that of Calas. Sirven barely missed the fate of the latter.

The misconception of Buckle, above discussed, has been widely shared even among students. Thus Lord Morley, discussing the “Creed of the Savoyard Vicar” in Rousseau’s Émile (1762), writes that “Souls weary of the fierce mockeries that had so long been flying like fiery shafts against the far Jehovah of the Hebrews, and the silent Christ of the later doctors and dignitaries,” may well have turned to it with ardour (Rousseau, ed. 1886, ii, 266). He further speaks of the “superiority of the sceptical parts of the Savoyard Vicar’s profession ... over the biting mockeries which Voltaire had made the fashionable method of assault” (p. 294). No specifications are offered, and the chronology is seen to be astray. The only mockeries which Voltaire could be said to have made fashionable before 1760 were those of his Lettres philosophiques, his Mondain, his DÉfense de Milord Bolingbroke, and his philosophically humorous tales, as Candide, Zadig, MicromÉgas, etc.: all his distinctive attacks on Judaism and Christianity were yet to come. [The AbbÉ Guyon, in his L’Oracle des nouveaux philosophes (Berne, 1759–60, 2 tom.), proclaims an attack on doctrines taught “dans les livres de nos beaux esprits” (Avert. p. xi); but he specifies only denials of (1) revelation, (2) immortality, and (3) the Biblical account of man’s creation; and he is largely occupied with Diderot’s PensÉes philosophiques, though his book is written at Voltaire. The second volume is devoted to Candide and the PrÉcis of Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon—not very fierce performances.] Lord Morley, as it happens, does not make this chronological mistake in his earlier work on Voltaire, where he rightly represents him as beginning his attack on “the Infamous” after he had settled at Ferney (1758). His “fierce mockeries” begin at the earliest in 1761. The mistake may have arisen through taking as true the fictitious date of 1736 for the writing of the Examen Important de Milord Bolingbroke. It belongs to 1767. Buckle’s error, it may be noted, is repeated by so careful a student as Dr. Redlich, Local Government in England, Eng. tr. 1903, i, 64.

10. The rest of Voltaire’s long life was a sleepless and dexterous warfare, by all manner of literary stratagem,62 facilitated by vast literary fame and ample acquired wealth, against what he called “the Infamous”—the Church and the creed which he found still swift to slay for mere variation of belief, and slow to let any good thing be wrought for the bettering of men’s lives. Of his prodigious literary performance it is probably within the truth to say that in respect of rapid influence on the general intelligence of the world it has never been equalled by any one man’s writing; and that, whatever its measure of error and of personal misdirection, its broader influence was invariably for peace on earth, for tolerance among men, and for reason in all things. His faults were many, and some were serious; but to no other man of his age, save possibly Beccaria, can be attributed so much beneficent accomplishment. He can perhaps better be estimated as a force than as a man. So great was the area of his literary energy that he is inevitably inadequate at many points. Lessing could successfully impugn him in drama; Diderot in metaphysic; Gibbon in history; and it is noteworthy that all of these men63 at different times criticized him with asperity, testing him by the given item of performance, and disparaging his personality. Yet in his own way he was a greater power than any of them; and his range, as distinguished from his depth, outgoes theirs. In sum, he was the greatest mental fighter of his age, perhaps of any age: in that aspect he is a “power-house” not to be matched in human history; and his polemic is mainly for good. It was a distinguished English academic who declared that “civilization owes more to Voltaire than to all the Fathers of the Church put together.”64 If in a literary way he hated his personal foes, much more did he hate cruelty and bigotry; and it was his work more than any that made impossible a repetition in Europe of such clerical crimes as the hanging of the Protestant pastor, La Rochette; the execution of the Protestant, Calas, on an unproved and absurdly false charge; the torture of his widow and children; the beheading of the lad La Barre for ill-proved blasphemy.65 As against his many humanities, there is not to be charged on him one act of public malevolence. In his relations with his fickle admirer, Frederick the Great, and with others of his fellow-thinkers, he and they painfully brought home to freethinkers the lesson that for them as for all men there is a personal art of life that has to be learned, over and above the rectification of opinion. But he and the others wrought immensely towards that liberation alike from unreason and from bondage which must precede any great improvement of human things.

Voltaire’s constant burden was that religion was not only untrue but pernicious, and when he was not dramatically showing this of Christianity, as in his poem La Ligue (1723), he was saying it by implication in such plays as ZaÏre (1732) and Mahomet (1742), dealing with the fanaticism of Islam; while in the Essai sur les moeurs (1756), really a broad survey of general history, and in the SiÈcle de Louis XIV, he applied the method of Montesquieu, with pungent criticism thrown in. Later, he added to his output direct criticisms of the Christian books, as in the Examen important de Milord Bolingbroke (1767), and the Recherches historiques sur le Christianisme (? 1769), continuing all his former lines of activity. Meanwhile, with the aid of his companion the Marquise du Chatelet, an accomplished mathematician, he had done much to popularize the physics of Newton and discredit the scientific fallacies of the system of Descartes; all the while preaching a Newtonian but rather agnostic deism. This is the purport of his Philosophe Ignorant, his longest philosophical essay.66 The destruction of Lisbon by the earthquake of 1755 seems to have shaken him in his deistic faith, since the upshot of his poem on that subject is to leave the moral government of the universe an absolute enigma; and in the later Candide (1759) he attacks theistic optimism with his matchless ridicule. Indeed, as early as 1749, in his TraitÉ de la MÉtaphysique, written for the Marquise du Chatelet, he reaches virtually pantheistic positions in defence of the God-idea, declaring with Spinoza that deity can be neither good nor bad. But, like so many professed pantheists, he relapsed, and he never accepted the atheistic view; on the contrary, we find him arguing absurdly enough, in his Homily on Atheism (1765), that atheism had been the destruction of morality in Rome;67 on the publication of d’Holbach’s System of Nature in 1770 he threw off an article Dieu: rÉponse au SystÈme de la Nature, where he argued on the old deistic lines; and his tale of Jenni; or, the Sage and the Atheist (1775), is a polemic on the same theme. By this time the inconsistent deism of his youth had itself been discredited among the more thoroughgoing freethinkers; and for years it had been said in one section of literary society that Voltaire after all “is a bigot; he is a deist!”68

But for freethinkers of all schools the supreme service of Voltaire lay in his twofold triumph over the spirit of religious persecution. He had contrived at once to make it hateful and to make it ridiculous; and it is a great theistic poet of our own day that has pronounced his blade the

sharpest, shrewdest steel that ever stabbed

To death Imposture through the armour joints.69

To be perfect, the tribute should have noted that he hated cruelty much more than imposture; and such is the note of the whole movement of which his name was the oriflamme. Voltaire personally was at once the most pugnacious and the most forgiving of men. Few of the Christians who hated him had so often as he fulfilled their own precept of returning good for evil to enemies; and none excelled him in hearty philanthropy. It is notable that most of the humanitarian ideas of the latter half of the century—the demand for the reform of criminal treatment, the denunciation of war and slavery, the insistence on good government, and toleration of all creeds—are more definitely associated with the freethinking than with any religious party, excepting perhaps the laudable but uninfluential sect of Quakers.

11. It is difficult to realize how far the mere demand for tolerance which sounds from Voltaire’s plays and poems before he has begun to assail credences was a signal and an inspiration to new thinkers. Certain it is that the principle of toleration, passed on by Holland to England, was regarded by the orthodox priesthood in France as the abomination of desolation, and resisted by them with all their power. But the contagion was unquenchable. It was presumably in Holland that there were printed in 1738 the two volumes of Lettres sur la religion essentielle À l’homme, distinguÉe de ce qui n’en est que l’accessoire, by Marie Huber, a Genevese lady living in Lyons; also the two following parts (1739), replying to criticisms on the earlier. In its gentle way, the book stands very distinctly for the “natural” and ethical principle in religion, denying that the deity demands from men either service or worship, or that he can be wronged by their deeds, or that he can punish them eternally for their sins. This was one of the first French fruits, after Voltaire, of the English deistic influence;70 and it is difficult to understand how the authoress escaped molestation. Perhaps the memory of the persecution inflicted on the mystic Madame Guyon withheld the hand of power. As it was, four Protestant theologians opened fire on her, regarding her doctrine as hostile to Christianity. One pastor wrote from Geneva, one from Amsterdam, and two professors from Zurich—the two last in Latin.71

From about 1746 onwards, the rationalist movement in eighteenth-century France rapidly widens and deepens. The number of rationalistic writers, despite the press laws which in that age inflicted the indignity of imprisonment on half the men of letters, increased from decade to decade, and the rising prestige of the philosophes in connection with the EncyclopÉdie (1751–72) gave new courage to writers and printers. At once the ecclesiastical powers saw in the EncyclopÉdie a dangerous enemy; and in January, 1752, the Sorbonne condemned a thesis “To the celestial Jerusalem,” by the AbbÉ de Prades. It had at first (1751) been received with official applause, but was found on study to breathe the spirit of the new work,72 to which the AbbÉ had contributed, and whose editor, Diderot, was his friend. Sooth to say, it contained not a little matter calculated to act as a solvent of faith. Under the form of a vindication of orthodox Catholicism, it negated alike Descartes and Leibnitz; and declared that the science of Newton and the Dutch physiologists was a better defence of religion than the theses of Clarke, Descartes, Cudworth, and Malebranche, which made for materialism. The handling, too, of the question of natural versus revealed religion, in which “theism” is declared to be superior to all religions si unam excipias veram, “if you except the one true,” might well arouse distrust in a vigilant Catholic reader.73 The whole argument savours far more of the scientific comparative method than was natural in the work of an eighteenth-century seminarist; and the principle, “Either we are ocular witnesses of the facts or we know them only by hearsay,”74 was plainly as dangerous to the Christian creed as to any other. According to Naigeon,75 the treatise was wholly the work of de Prades and another AbbÉ, Yvon;76 but it remains probable that Diderot inspired not a little of the reasoning; and the clericals, bent on putting down the EncyclopÉdie, professed to have discovered that he was the real author of the thesis. Either this belief or a desire to strike at the EncyclopÉdie through one of its collaborators77 was the motive of the absurdly belated censure. Such a fiasco evoked much derision from the philosophic party, particularly from Voltaire; and the Sorbonne compassed a new revenge. Soon after came the formal condemnation of the first two volumes of the EncyclopÉdie, of which the second had just appeared.78

D’Argenson, watching in his vigilant retirement the course of things on all hands, sees in the episode a new and dangerous development, “the establishment of a veritable inquisition in France, of which the Jesuits joyfully take charge,” though he repeatedly remarks also on the eagerness of the Jansenists to outgo the Jesuits.79 But soon the publication of the EncyclopÉdie is resumed; and in 1753 D’Argenson contentedly notes the official bestowal of “tacit permissions to print secretly” books which could not obtain formal authorization. The permission had been given first by the President Malesherbes; but even when that official lost the king’s confidence the practice was continued by the lieutenant of police.80 Despite the staggering blow of the suppression of the EncyclopÉdie, the philosophes speedily triumphed. So great was the discontent even at court that soon (1752) Madame de Pompadour and some of the ministry invited D’Alembert and Diderot to resume their work, “observing a necessary reserve in all things touching religion and authority.” Madame de Pompadour was in fact, as D’Alembert said at her death, “in her heart one of ours,” as was D’Argenson. But D’Alembert, in a long private conference with D’Argenson, insisted that they must write in freedom like the English and the Prussians, or not at all. Already there was talk of suppressing the philosophic works of Condillac, which a few years before had gone uncondemned; and freedom must be preserved at any cost. “I acquiesce,” writes the ex-Minister, “in these arguments.”81

Curiously enough, the freethinking Fontenelle, who for a time (the dates are elusive) held the office of royal censor, was more rigorous than other officials who had not his reputation for heterodoxy. One day he refused to pass a certain manuscript, and the author put the challenge: “You, sir, who have published the Histoire des Oracles, refuse me this?” “If I had been the censor of the Oracles,” replied Fontenelle, “I should not have passed it.”82 And he had cause for his caution. The unlucky Tercier, who, engrossed in “foreign affairs,” had authorized the publication of the De l’Esprit of HelvÉtius, was compelled to resign the censorship, and severely rebuked by the Paris Parlement.83 But the culture-history of the period, like the political, was one of ups and downs. From time to time the philosophic party had friends at court, as in the persons of the Marquis D’Argenson, Malesherbes, and the Duc de Choiseul, of whom the last-named engineered the suppression of the Jesuits.84 Then there were checks to the forward movement in the press, as when, in 1770, Choiseul was forced to retire on the advent of Madame Du Barry. The output of freethinking books is after that year visibly curtailed. But nothing could arrest the forward movement of opinion.

13. It will be noted that after 1770—coincidently, indeed, with a renewed restraint upon the press—there is a notable falling-off in the freethinking output. Rationalism had now permeated educated France; and, for different but analogous reasons, the stress of discussion gradually shifted as it had done in England. France in 1760 stood to the religious problem somewhat as England did in 1730, repeating the deistic evolution with a difference. By that time England was committed to the new paths of imperialism and commercialism; whereas France, thrown back on the life of ideas and on her own politico-economic problems, went on producing the abundant propaganda we have noted, and, alongside of it, an independent propaganda of economics and politics. At the end of 1767, the leading French diarist103 notes that “there is formed at Paris a new sect, called the Economists,” and names its leading personages, Quesnay, Mirabeau the elder, the AbbÉ Baudeau, Mercier de la RiviÈre, and Turgot. These developed the doctrine of agricultural or “real” production which so stimulated and influenced Adam Smith. But immediately afterwards104 the diarist notes a rival sect, the school of Forbonnais, who founded mainly on the importance of commerce and manufactures. Each “sect” had its journal. The intellectual ferment had inevitably fructified thought upon economic as upon historical, religious, and scientific problems; and there was in operation a fourfold movement, all tending to make possible the immense disintegration of the State which began in 1789. After the Economists came the “Patriots,” who directed towards the actual political machine the spirit of investigation and reform. And the whole effective movement is not unplausibly to be dated from the fall of the Jesuits in 1764.105 Inevitably the forces interacted: Montesquieu and Rousseau alike dealt with both the religious and the social issues; d’Holbach in his first polemic, the Christianisme dÉvoilÉ, opens the stern impeachment of kings and rulers which he develops so powerfully in the Essai sur les PrÉjugÉs; and the EncyclopÉdie sent its search-rays over all the fields of inquiry. But of the manifold work done by the French intellect in the second and third generations of the eighteenth century, the most copious and the most widely influential body of writings that can be put under one category is that of which we have above made a chronological conspectus.

Of these works the merit is of course very various; but the total effect of the propaganda was formidable, and some of the treatises are extremely effective. The Examen critique of Burigny,106 for instance, which quickly won a wide circulation when printed, is one of the most telling attacks thus far made on the Christian system, raising as it does most of the issues fought over by modern criticism. It tells indeed of a whole generation of private investigation and debate; and the AbbÉ Bergier, assuming it to be the work of FrÉret, in whose name it is published, avows that its author “has written it in the same style as his academic dissertations: he has spread over it the same erudition; he seems to have read everything and mastered everything.”107 Perhaps not the least effective part of the book is the chapter which asks: “Are men more perfect since the coming of Jesus Christ?”; and it is here that the clerical reply is most feeble. The critic cites the claims made by apologists as to the betterment of life by Christianity, and then contrasts with those claims the thousand-and-one lamentations by Christian writers over the utter badness of all the life around them. Bergier in reply follows the tactic habitually employed in the same difficulty to-day: he ignores the fact that his own apologists have been claiming a vast betterment, and contends that religion is not to be blamed for the evils it condemns. Not by such furtive sophistry could the Church turn the attack, which, as Bergier bitterly observes, was being made by Voltaire in a new book every year.

As always, the weaker side of the critical propaganda is its effort at reconstruction. As in England, so in France, the faithful accused the critics of “pulling down without building up,” when in point of fact their chief error was to build up—that is, to rewrite the history of human thought—before they had the required materials, or had even mastered those which existed. Thus Voltaire and Rousseau alike framed À priori syntheses of the origins of religion and society. But there were closer thinkers than they in the rationalistic ranks. Fontenelle’s essay De l’origine des fables, though not wholly exempt from error, admittedly lays aright the foundations of mythology and hierology; and De Brosses in his treatise Du Culte des dieux fÉtiches (1760) does a similar service on the side of anthropology. Meister’s essay De l’origine des principes religieux is full of insight and breadth; and, despite some errors due to the backwardness of anthropology, essentially scientific in temper and standpoint. His later essay, De la morale naturelle, shows the same independence and fineness of speculation, seeming indeed to tell of a character which missed fame by reason of over-delicacy of fibre and lack of the driving force which marked the foremost men of that tempestuous time. Vauvenargues’s essay De la suffisance de la religion naturelle is no less clinching, granted its deism. So, on the side of philosophy, Mirabaud, who was secretary of the AcadÉmie from 1742 to 1755, handles the problem of the relation of deism to ethics—if the posthumous essays in the Recueil philosophique be indeed his—in a much more philosophic fashion than does Voltaire, arguing unanswerably for the ultimate self-dependence of morals. The Lettre de Thrasybule À Leucippe, ascribed to FrÉret, again, is a notably skilful attack on theism.

14. One of the most remarkable of the company in some respects is Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger (1722–1759), of whom Diderot gives a vivid account in a sketch prefixed to the posthumous L’AntiquitÉ dÉvoilÉe par ses usages (1766). At the CollÈge de Beauvais, Boulanger was so little stimulated by his scholastic teachers that they looked for nothing from him in his maturity. When, however, at the age of seventeen, he began to study mathematics and architecture, his faculties began to develop; and the life, first of a military engineer in 1743–44, and later in the service of the notable department of Roads and Bridges—the most efficient of all State services under Louis XV—made him an independent and energetic thinker. The chronic spectacle of the corvÉe, the forced labour of peasants on the roads, moved him to indignation; but he sought peace in manifold study, the engineer’s contact with nature arousing in him all manner of speculations, geological and sociological. Seeking for historic light, he mastered Latin, which he had failed to do at school, reading widely and voraciously; and when the Latins failed to yield him the light he craved he systematically mastered Greek, reading the Greeks as hungrily and with as little satisfaction. Then he turned indefatigably to Hebrew, Syriac, and Arabic, gleaning at best verbal clues which at length he wrought into a large, loose, imaginative yet immensely erudite schema of ancient social evolution, in which the physicist’s pioneer study of the structure and development of the globe controls the anthropologist’s guesswork as to the beginnings of human society. The whole is set forth in the bulky posthumous work Recherches sur l’origine du despotisme oriental (1761), and in the further treatise L’antiquitÉ dÉvoilÉe (3 tom. 1766), which is but the concluding section of the first-named.

It all yields nothing to modern science; the unwearying research is all carried on, as it were, in the dark; and the sleepless brain of the pioneer can but weave webs of impermanent speculation from masses of unsifted and unmanageable material. Powers which to-day, on a prepared ground of ascertained science, might yield the greatest results, were wasted in a gigantic effort to build a social science out of the chaos of undeciphered antiquity, natural and human. But the man is nonetheless morally memorable. Diderot pictures him with a head Socratically ugly, simple and innocent of life, gentle though vivacious, reading Rabbinical Hebrew in his walks on the high roads, suffering all his life from “domestic persecution,” “little contradictory though infinitely learned,” and capable of passing in a moment, on the stimulus of a new idea, into a state of profound and entranced absorption. Diderot is always enthusiastically generous in praise; but in reading and reviewing Boulanger’s work we can hardly refuse assent to his friend’s claim that “if ever man has shown in his career the true characters of genius, it was he.” His immense research was all compassed in a life of thirty-seven years, occupied throughout in an active profession; and the diction in which he sets forth his imaginative construction of the past reveals a constant intensity of thought rarely combined with scholarly knowledge. But it was an age of concentrated energy, carrying in its womb the Revolution. The perusal of Boulanger is a sufficient safeguard against the long-cherished hallucination that the French freethinking of his age was but a sparkle of raillery.

Even among some rationalists, however, who are content to take hearsay report on these matters, there appears still to subsist a notion that the main body of the French freethinkers of the eighteenth century were mere scoffers, proceeding upon no basis of knowledge and with no concern for research. Such an opinion is possible only to those who have not examined their work. To say nothing more of the effort of Boulanger, an erudition much more exact than Voltaire’s and a deeper insight than his and Rousseau’s into the causation of primitive religion inspires the writings of men like Burigny and FrÉret on the one hand, and Fontenelle and Meister on the other. The philosophic reach of Diderot, one of the most convinced opponents of the ruling religion, was recognized by Goethe. And no critic of the “philosophes” handled more uncompromisingly than did Dumarsais108 the vanity of the assumption that a man became a philosopher by merely setting himself in opposition to orthodox belief. Dumarsais, long scholastically famous for his youthful treatise Des Tropes, lived up to his standard, whatever some of the more eminent philosophes may have done, being found eminently lovable by pietists who knew him; while for D’Alembert he was “the La Fontaine of the philosophers” in virtue of his lucid simplicity of style.109 The Analyse de la religion chrÉtienne printed under his name in some editions of the Évangile de la Raison has been pronounced supposititious. It seems to be the work of at least two hands110 of different degrees of instruction; but, apart from some errors due to one of these, it does him no discredit, being a vigorous criticism of Scriptural contradictions and anomalies, such as a “Jansenist atheist” might well compose, though it makes the usual profession of deistic belief.

Later polemic works, inspired by those above noticed, reproduce some of their arguments, but with an advance in literary skill, as in the anonymous Bon Sens given forth (1772) by Diderot and d’Holbach as the work of Jean Meslier, but really an independent compilation, embodying other arguments with his, and putting the whole with a concision and brilliancy to which he could make no approach. PrÉmontval, a bad writer,111 contrives nonetheless to say many pungent things of a deistic order in his DiogÈne de d’Alembert, and, following Marie Huber, puts forward the formula of religion versus theology, which has done so much duty in the nineteenth century. Of the whole literature it is not too much to say that it covered cogently most of the important grounds of latter-day debate, from the questions of revelation and the doctrine of torments to the bases of ethics and the problem of deity; and it would be hard to show that the nineteenth century has handled the main issues with more sincerity, lucidity, or logic than were attained by Frenchmen in the eighteenth. To-day, no doubt, in the light of a century and a-half of scientific, historic, and philosophic accumulation, the rationalist case is put with more profundity and accuracy by many writers than it could be in the eighteenth century. But we have to weigh the freethinkers of that age against their opponents, and the French performers against those of other countries, to make a fair estimate. When this is done their credit is safe. When German and other writers say with Tholuck that “unbelief entered Germany not by the weapons of mere wit and scoffing as in France; it grounded itself on learned research,”112 they merely prove their ignorance of French culture-history. An abundance of learned research in France preceded the triumphant campaign of Voltaire, who did most of the witty writing on the subject; and whose light artillery was to the last reinforced by the heavier guns of d’Holbach. It is only in the analysis of the historical problem by the newer tests of anthropology and hierology, and in the light of latterly discovered documents, that our generation has made much advance on the strenuous pioneers of the age of Voltaire. And even in the field of anthropology the sound thinking of Fontenelle and De Brosses long preceded any equally valid work by rationalists in Germany; though Spencer of Cambridge had preceded them in his work of constructive orthodoxy.

15. Though the bibliographers claim to have traced the authorship in most cases, such works were in the first instance generally published anonymously,113 as were those of Voltaire, d’Holbach, and the leading freethinkers; and the clerical policy of suppression had the result of leaving them generally unanswered, save in anonymous writings, when they nevertheless got into private circulation. It was generally impolitic that an official answer should appear to a book which was officially held not to exist; so that the orthodox defence was long confined mainly to the classic performances of Pascal, Bossuet, Huet, FÉnelon, and some outsiders such as the Protestant Abbadie, who settled first in Berlin and later in London. The polemic of every one of the writers named is a work of ability; even that of Abbadie (TraitÉ de la VÉritÉ de la religion chrÉtienne, 1684), though now little known, was in its day much esteemed.114 In the age of Louis XIV those classic answers to unbelief were by believers held to be conclusive; and thus far the French defence was certainly more thorough and philosophical than the English. But French freethought, which in Herbert’s day had given the lead to English, now drew new energy from the English growth; and the general arguments of the old apologists did not explicitly meet the new attack. Their books having been written to meet the mostly unpublished objections of previous generations, the Church through its chosen policy had the air of utter inability to confute the newer propaganda, though some apologetic treatises of fair power did appear, in particular those of the AbbÉ Bergier.115 By the avowal of a Christian historian, “So low had the talents of the once illustrious Church of France fallen that in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when Christianity itself was assailed, not one champion of note appeared in its ranks; and when the convocation of the clergy, in 1770, published their famous anathema against the dangers of unbelief, and offered rewards for the best essays in defence of the Christian faith, the productions called forth were so despicable that they sensibly injured the cause of religion.”116

The freethinking attack, in fact, had now become overwhelming. After the suppression of the Jesuit Order (1764)117 the press grew practically more and more free; and when, after the accession of Pope Clement XIV (1769), the freethinking books circulated with less and less restraint, Bergier extended his attack on deism, and deists and clerics joined in answering the atheistic SystÈme de la Nature of d’Holbach. But by this time the deistic books were legion, and the political battle over the taxation of Church property had become the more pressing problem, especially seeing that the mass of the people remained conforming. The manifesto of the clergy in 1770 was accompanied by an address to the king “On the evil results of liberty of thought and printing,” following up a previous appeal by the pope;118 and in consideration of the donation by the clergy of sixteen million livres the Government recommended the Parlement of Paris to proceed against impious books. There seems accordingly to have been some hindrance to publication for a year or two; but in 1772 appeared the Bon Sens of d’Holbach and Diderot; and there was no further serious check, the Jesuits being disbanded by the pope in 1773.

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.

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,120 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,121 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.

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.122 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.123 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,124 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.125 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.”126 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.127 Pouilly, who had been made a freethinker by English contacts, went again to England later, and spent his last years at Rheims.128 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.129 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.”130 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,131 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 1756,132 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.133

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,134 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 charge135 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 election136); 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,137 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.138

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;139 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.140 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”141 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 work142 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;143 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,”144 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;145 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 Leyden146 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,147 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,148 though heedless in his life to the point of ending it by eating a monstrous meal out of bravado.

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.149 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.”150

The thesis was adopted, indeed plagiarized,151 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.152 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 England153—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”;154 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 Buffon155 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.”156 Still he was attacked as an unbeliever by the Bishop of Auxerre in that prelate’s pastoral against the thesis of de Prades.157 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 Nature158 (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.159 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.160

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;161 but in this case the process of unification was to the full as important as the first steps;162 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.163 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,164 extending the arguments of Hume and Hutcheson somewhat on the lines of Mandeville.165 On another line of reasoning a similar application of Mandeville’s thesis had already been made by HelvÉtius in his TraitÉ de l’Esprit166 (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,167 “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.168 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.169 The De l’Esprit, appearing alongside of the ever-advancing EncyclopÉdie,170 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.171 The over-balance of his stress on self-interest172 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;173 and the only less notable testimony of Bentham that HelvÉtius was his teacher and inspirer.174 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;175 and his biographer Naigeon, who at times overstated his positions but always revered him, was the most zealous atheist of his day.176

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.177 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.178 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;179 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 months180 in the ChÂteau de Vincennes. Both books had of course been published without licence;181 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.182

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.183 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 philosophiques184 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 denounced185 as the most injurious of all procedures against religion. And his, probably, is the peroration186 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.187

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,188 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;189 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;190 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.191

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 insincerities192 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.193 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;194 and his father bore a similar testimony, contrasting him with his pious brother.195 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,196 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.197 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.”198 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.”199 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,200 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;201 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;202 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.”203 It was the first published atheistic204 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,205 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,206 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 speaks207 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 suspended208 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.209 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.210 Orthodox he cannot well have been, since, like his wife, he was the friend of Voltaire.211 But the majority of the Constituent Assembly was never even deistic; it professed itself cordially Catholic;212 and the atheists there might be counted on the fingers of one hand.213

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.214 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.”215 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,216 though his piety was conspicuous;217 and there were not a few priests of his way of thinking,218 among them being some of the ablest bishops.219 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.220 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,221 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.222

(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 Proudhon223—he means that the central Christian dogmas of salvation by sacrifice and faith exclude any political ethic of justice224—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.225 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.226 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.”227 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.228 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.229 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.”230 Even Chaumette was not an atheist;231 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,232 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.

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.”233 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,234 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,235 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.236 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;237 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.238 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.239 But this spirit, which D’Argenson in large measure shared, while holding firmly by monarchy,240 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,241 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,242 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 RÉfugiÉz243 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,244 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.245 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 Esclave246 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.247

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 judgment248 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.249 “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.”250 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.”251 As Barante had previously ascribed the whole dissolution to the autocratic process under Louis XIV,252 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.”253 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.”254 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;255 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.256 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.257 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.”258

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’s259—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.260 The error is none the less plain. The philosophes had done nothing to promote anti-monarchism among the common people, who did not read.261 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.”262

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.263 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,264 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.265 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.”266 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.”267 And so the changes may be rung for ever. The final philosophy of history cannot be reached by any such artificial selection of factors;268 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.269 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.270

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.271 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.”272 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 Carlyle273 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.274 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.”275 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.”276 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.277 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,”278 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.279 Had he succeeded, he was capable of suppressing all manifestations of freethought in the interests of “order.”280 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.”281 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,282 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.

1 Lemontey, Hist. de la rÉgence et de la minoritÉ de Louis XV, 1835, ii, 358, note. In 1731 there was published under the name of Boulainvilliers (d. 1722) a so-called RÉfutation de Spinoza, which was “really a popular exposition.” Pollock, Spinoza, 2nd ed. p. 363. Sir F. Pollock assents to Voltaire’s remark that Boulainvilliers “gave the poison and forgot to give the antidote.”?

2 For a brief view of the facts, usually misconceived, see Lanson, pp. 610–11. FÉnelon seems to have been uncandid, while Bossuet, by common consent, was malevolent. There is probably truth, however, in the view of Shaftesbury (Characteristics, ed. 1900, ii, 214), that the real grievance of FÉnelon’s ecclesiastical opponents was the tendency of his mysticism to withdraw devotees from ceremonial duties.?

3 Now remembered chiefly through the account of his intercourse with FÉnelon (repr. in Didot ed. of FÉnelon’s misc. works), and Hume’s long extract from his Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion in the concluding note to the Essays. Cp. M. Matter, Le Mysticisme en France au temps de FÉnelon, 1865, pp. 352–54.?

4 Tyssot de Patot was Professor of Mathematics at Deventer. In his Lettres choisies, published in 1726, there is an avowal that “he might be charged with having different notions from those of the vulgar in point of religion” (New Memoirs of Literature, iv (1726), 267); and his accounts of pietists and unbelieving and other priests sufficiently convey that impression (id. pp. 268–84).?

5 Towards the close of his “poem” Polignac speaks of a defence of Christianity as a future task. He died without even completing the Anti-Lucretius, begun half a century before. Of him are related two classic anecdotes. Sent at the age of twenty-seven to discuss Church questions with the Pope, he earned from His Holiness the compliment: “You seem always to be of my opinion; and in the end it is yours that prevails.” Louis XIV gave him a long audience, after which the King said: “I have had an interview with a young man who has constantly contradicted me without my being able to be angry for a moment.” (Éloge prefixed to Bougainville’s trans., L’Anti-LucrÈce, 1767, i. 131.)?

6 Cp. Duvernet, Vie de Voltaire, ch. i. Rivarol (Lettres À Necker, in Œuvres, ed. 1852, p. 138) wrote that under Louis XV there began a “general insurrection” of discussion, and that everybody then talked “only of religion and philosophy during half a century.” But this exaggerates the beginnings, of which Rivarol could have no exact knowledge.?

7 La veritÉ de la religion chrÉtienne prouvÉe par les faits: prÉcÉdÉe d’un discours historique et critique sur la mÉthode des principaux auteurs qui ont Écrit pour et contre le christianisme depuis son origine, 1722. Rep. 1741, 3 vols. 4to., 4 vols. 12mo.?

8 Nouveau Dictionnaire historique portatif, 1771, art. Houteville, tom. ii.?

9 Whose ConsidÉrations sur les Moeurs (1751) does not seem to contain a single religious sentiment. Historiographer of France, he had not escaped the suppression of his Histoire de Louis XI, 1745.?

10 See above, p. 130. Buffier seems to have begun an attempt at spelling reform (by dropping doubled letters), followed in 1725 by Huard and later by PrÉmontval.?

11 7 vols. 4to., 10 vols. 12mo. Rep. with corrections 1733. Seconde partie, 1753, 8 vols. 12mo.?

12 A reprint in 1735 bears the imprint of London, with the note “Aux dÉpens de la Compagnie.”?

13 Lanson, p. 702. The Persian Letters, like the Provincial Letters of Pascal, had to be printed at Rouen and published at Amsterdam. Their freethinking expressions put considerable difficulties in the way of his election (1727) to the Academy. See E. Edwards, Chapters of the Biog. Hist. of the French Academy, 1864, pp. 34–35, and D. M. Robertson, Hist. of the French Academy, 1910, p. 92, as to the mystification about the alleged reprint without the obnoxious passages.?

14 Lettre 86.?

15 “Au point de vue religieux, Montesquieu tirait poliment son coup de chapeau au christianisme” (Lanson, p. 714). E.g. in the Esprit des Lois, liv. xxiv, chs. i, ii, iii, iv, vi, and the footnote to ch. x of liv. xxv. Montesquieu’s letter to Warburton (16 mai, 1754), in acknowledgment of that prelate’s attack on the posthumous works of Bolingbroke, is a sample of his social make-believe. But no religious reader could suppose it to come from a religious man.?

16 Also of E. Edwards, as cited above.?

17 See the notes cited on pp. 405, 407 of Garnier’s variorum ed. of the Esprit des Lois, 1871. La Harpe and Villemain seem blind to irony.?

18 The flings at Bayle (liv. xxiv, chs. ii, vi) are part of a subtly ironical vindication of ideal as against ecclesiastical Christianity, and they have no note of faith.?

19 Paul Mesnard, Hist. de l’acadÉmie franÇaise, 1857, pp. 61–63.?

20 PensÉes Diverses: De la religion.?

21 Lanson, p. 714, note.?

22 Tr. in English, 1753. It is noteworthy that Cataneo formally accepts Montesquieu’s professions of orthodoxy.?

23 Correspondance littÉraire de Grimm et Diderot, ed. 1829–31, i, 273. See the footnote for an account of the indecent efforts of the Jesuits to get at the dying philosopher. The curÉ of the parish who was allowed entry began his exhortation with: “Vous savez, M. le PrÉsident, combien Dieu est grand.” “Oui, monsieur,” returned Montesquieu, “et combien les hommes sont petits.”?

24 Mesnard, Hist. de l’acadÉmie franÇaise, p. 63.?

25 A full analysis is given by Strauss in the second Appendix to his Voltaire: Sechs VortrÄge, 2te Aufl. 1870.?

26 The details are dubious. See the memoir compiled by “Rudolf Charles” (R. C. D’Ablaing van Giessenburg), the editor of the Testament, Amsterdam, 3 tom. 1861–64. It draws chiefly on the MÉmoires secrets de Bachaumont, under date Sept. 30, 1764.?

27 Testament, as cited, i, 25.?

28 iii, 396.?

29 First published in 1762 [or 1764? See Bachaumont, Oct. 30], with the date 1742; and reprinted in the Évangile de la Raison, 1764. It was no fewer than four times ordered to be destroyed in the Restoration period.?

30 Probably Diderot did the most of the adaptation. “Il y a plus que du bon sens dans ce livre,” writes Voltaire to D’Alembert; “il est terrible. S’il sort de la boutique du SystÈme de la Nature, l’auteur s’est bien perfectionnÉ” (Lettre de 27 Juillet, 1775).?

31 “Il leur faut un Être À ces messieurs; pour moi, je m’en passe.” Grimm, Correspondance LittÉraire, ed. 1829–31, iv, 186.?

32 Grimm, as cited, i, 235. Grimm tells a delightful story of his reception of the confessor.?

33 “Cet ouvrage, dont les vers sont grands et bien tournÉs, est une satire des plus licencieuses contre les moeurs de nos ÉvÊques.” Bachaumont, MÉmoires Secrets, Juin 15, 1762.?

34 Bonet-Maury, Hist. de la lib. de conscience en France, 1900, p. 68.?

35 Nouveau dictionnaire historique-portatif ... par une SociÉtÉ de Gens de Lettres, ed. 1771, i, 314.?

36 Marmontel does not relate this in his MÉmoires, where he insists on the decorum of the talk, even at d’Holbach’s table.?

37 Chamfort, CaractÈres et Anecdotes.?

38 Nouveau dictionnaire, above cited, i, 315.?

39 Name assumed for literary purposes, and probably composed by anagram from the real name Arouet, with “le jeune” (junior) added, thus: A. R. O. V. E. T. L(e). I(eune).?

40 Not to be confounded with the greater and later Jean Jacques Rousseau. J. B. Rousseau became Voltaire’s bitter enemy—on the score, it is said, of the young man’s epigram on the elder poet’s “Ode to Posterity,” which, he said, would not reach its address. Himself a rather ribald freethinker, Rousseau professed to be outraged by the irreligion of Voltaire.?

41 See the poem in note 4 to ch. ii of Duvernet’s Vie de Voltaire. Duvernet calls it “one of the first attacks on which philosophy in France had ventured against superstition” (Vie de Voltaire, ed. 1797, p. 19).?

42 Duvernet, ch. ii. The free-hearted Ninon de l’Enclos, brightest of old ladies, is to be numbered among the pre-Voltairean freethinkers, and to be remembered as leaving young Voltaire a legacy to buy books. She refused to “sell her soul” by turning dÉvote on the invitation of her old friend Madame de Maintenon. Madame D’Épinay, Voltaire’s “belle philosophe et aimable Habacuc,” Madame du Deffand, and Madame Geoffrin were among the later freethinking grandes dames of the Voltairean period; and so, presumably, was the Madame de CrÉquÍ, quoted by Rivarol, who remarked that “Providence” is “the baptismal name of Chance.” As to Madame Geoffrin see the Œuvres Posthumes de D’Alembert, 1799, i, 240, 271; and the MÉmoires de Marmontel, 1804, ii, 102 sq. If Marmontel is accurate, she went secretly at times to mass (p. 104).?

43 Deslandes wrote some new chapters of his RÉflexions in London, for the English translation. Eng. tr. 1713, p. 99.?

44 Pour et Contre, ou Épitre À Uranie. It was of course not printed till long afterwards. Diderot, writing his Promenade du Sceptique in 1747, says: “C’est, je crois, dans l’allÉe des fleurs [of his allegory] entre le champagne et le tokay, que l’Épitre À Uranie prit naissance.” (L’AllÉe des Marronniers, ad init.) This seems unjust.?

45 He has been alternately represented as owing everything and owing very little to England. Cp. Texte, Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan Spirit, Eng. tr. p. 58. Neither view is just.?

46 In his Essay upon the Civil Wars of France, and ... upon Epick Poetry (2nd ed. 1728, “corrected by himself”), written and published in English, he begins his “Advertisement” with the remark: “It has the appearance of too great a presumption in a traveller who hath been but eighteen months in England, to attempt to write in a language which he cannot pronounce at all, and which he hardly understands in conversation.” As the book is remarkably well written, he must have read much English.?

47 Lord Morley (Voltaire, 4th ed. p. 40) speaks of the English people as having then won “a full liberty of thought and speech and person.” This, as we have seen, somewhat overstates the case. But discussion was much more nearly free than in France.?

48 Probably as much on political as on religious grounds. The 8th letter, Sur le Parlement, must have been very offensive to the French Government; and in 1739, moved by angry criticisms, Voltaire saw fit to modify its language. See Lanson’s ed. of the Lettres, 1909, i, 92, 110.?

49 Condorcet, Vie de Voltaire, ed. 1792, p. 92. In reprints the poem was entitled Sur la religion naturelle, and was so commonly cited.?

50 Condorcet, p. 99.?

51 See above, pp. 213–14, as to the works of Boulainvilliers, Tyssot de Patot, Deslandes, and others who wrote between 1700 and 1715.?

52 Cited by Schlosser, Hist. of the Eighteenth Century, Eng. tr. i, 146–7.?

53 TraitÉ de la veritÉ de la religion chrÉtienne, tirÉ en partie du latin de M. J. Alphonse Turrettin, professeur ... en l’acadÉmie de GÉnÈve, par M. J. Vernet, professeur de belles-lettres en la mÊme AcadÉmie. Revue et corrigÉ par un ThÉologien Catholique. 1e Éd. GÉnÈve, 1730. Rep. in 2 tom. 1753. Ecclesiastical approbation given 15 janv. 1749; privilÈge, juillet, 1751.?

54 Dom Remi Desmonts, according to Barbier.?

55 “Par Panage” (=Toussaint?). Rep. 1755 and 1767 (Berlin).?

56 Work cited, ed. 1755, p. 252.?

57 A glimpse of old Paris before or about 1750 is afforded by Fontenelle’s remark that the prevailing diseases might be known from the affiches. At every street corner were to be seen two, of which one advertised a TraitÉ sur l’incrÉdulitÉ. (Grimm, Corr. litt. iii, 373.)?

58 Thus Duruy had said in his Histoire de France (1st ed. 1852) that in the work of the Jansenists of Port Royal “l’esprit d’opposition politique se cacha sous l’opposition religieuse” (ed. 1880, ii, 298).?

59 The case has been thus correctly put by M. Rocquain, who, however, decides that “de religieuse qu’elle Était, l’opposition devient politique” as early as about 1724–1733. L’Esprit rÉvolutionnaire avant la rÉvolution, 1878; table des matiÈres, liv. 2e. Duruy (last note) puts the tendency still earlier.?

60 “Cette hardiesse Étonna Voltaire, et excita son Émulation” (ed. cited, p. 118).?

61 Avertissement des Éditeurs, in Basle ed. of 1792, vol. xlv, p. 92.?

62 It has been counted that he used no fewer than a hundred and thirty different pseudonyms; and the perpetual prosecution and confiscation of his books explains the procedure. As we have seen, the Lettres philosophiques (otherwise the Lettres anglaises) were burned on their appearance, in 1734, and the bookseller put in the Bastille; the Recueil des piÈces fugitives was suppressed in 1739; the Voix du Sage et du Peuple was officially and clerically condemned in 1751; the poem on Natural Law was burned at Paris in 1758; Candide at Geneva in 1759; the Dictionnaire philosophique at Geneva in 1764, and at Paris in 1765; and many of his minor pseudonymous performances had the same advertisement. But even the Henriade, the Charles XII, and the first chapters of the SiÈcle de Louis XIV were prohibited; and in 1785 the thirty volumes published of the 1784 edition of his works were condemned en masse.?

63 Diderot, critique of Le philosophe ignorant in Grimm’s Corr. Litt. 1 juin 1766; Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, StÜck 10–12, 15; Gibbon, ch. i, note near end; ch. li, note on siege of Damascus. Rousseau was as hostile as any (see Morley’s Rousseau, ch. ix, § 1). But Rousseau’s verdict is the least important, and the least judicial. He had himself earned the detestation of Voltaire, as of many other men. In a moment of pique, Diderot wrote of Voltaire: “Cet homme n’est que le second dans tous les genres” (Lettre 71 À Mdlle. Voland, 12 aoÛt, 1762). He forgot wit and humour!?

64 Prof. Jowett, of Balliol College. See L. A. Tollemache, Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol, 4th ed. pp. 27–28.?

65 See details in Lord Morley’s Voltaire, 4th ed. pp. 165–70, 257–58. The erection by the French freethinkers of a monument to La Barre in 1905, opposite the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, Montmartre, Paris, is an expression at once of the old feud with the Church and the French appreciation of high personal courage. La Barre was in truth something of a scapegrace, but his execution was an infamy, and he went to his death as to a bridal. The erection of the monument has been the occasion of a futile pretence on the clerical side that for La Barre’s death the Church had no responsibility, the movers in the case being laymen. Nothing, apparently, can teach Catholic Churchmen that the Church’s past sins ought to be confessed like those of individuals. It is quite true that it was a Parlement that condemned La Barre. But what a religious training was it that turned laymen into murderous fanatics!?

66 M. Lanson seems to overlook it when he writes (p. 747) that “the affirmation of God, the denial of Providence and miracles, is the whole metaphysic of Voltaire.”?

67 Lord Morley writes (p. 209): “We do not know how far he ever seriously approached the question ... whether a society can exist without a religion.” This overlooks both the HomÉlie sur l’AthÉisme and the article AthÉisme in the Dictionnaire Philosophique, where the question is discussed seriously and explicitly.?

68 Horace Walpole, Letter to Gray, Nov. 19, 1765. Compare the mordant criticism of Grimm (Corr. litt. vii, 54 sq.) on his tract Dieu in reply to d’Holbach. “Il raisonne lÀ-dessus comme un enfant,” writes Grimm, “mais comme un joli enfant qu’il est.”?

69 Browning, The Two Poets of Croisic, st. cvii.?

70 Cp. StÄndlin, Gesch. des Rationalismus und Supernaturalismus, 1826, pp. 287–90. Hagenbach, Kirchengeschichte des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts, 2te Aufl. 1848, i, 218–20.?

71 Zimmerman, De causis magis magisque invalescentis incredulitatis, et medela huic malo adhibenda, Tiguri, 1739, 4to. Prof. Breitinger of Zurich wrote a criticism afterwards tr. (1741) as Examen des Lettres sur la religion essentielle. De Roches, pastor at Geneva, published in letter-form 2 vols. entitled DÉfense du Christianisme, as “prÉservatif contre” the Lettres of Mdlle. Huber (1740); and Bouillier of Amsterdam also 2 vols. of Lettres (1741).?

72 Cp. Bouillier, Hist. de la philos. cartÉs, ii, 624–25; D’Argenson, MÉmoires, ed. Jannet, iv. 63.?

73 See the thesis (Jerusalem Coelesti) as printed in the Apologie de M. l’AbbÉ De Prades, “Amsterdam,” 1752, pp. 4, 6.?

74 Id. p. 10.?

75 MÉmoires sur la vie et les ouvrages de Diderot, 1821, p. 160.?

76 Cp. Bachaumont, MÉmoires secrets, 4 fÉv. 1762; 22 avril, 1768. Tn the latter entry, Yvon is described as “poursuivi comme infidÈle, quoique le plus croyant de France.” In 1768, after the BÉlisaire scandal, he was refused permission to proceed with the publication of his Histoire ecclÉsiastique.?

77 This was de Prades’s own view of the matter (Apologie, as cited, p. v); and D’Argenson repeatedly says as much. MÉmoires, iv, 57, 65, 66, 74, 77.?

78 Rocquain, L’esprit revolutionnaire avant la rÉvolution, 1878, pp. 149–51; Morley, Diderot, ch. v; D’Argenson, iv, 78. The decree of suppression was dated 13 fÉv. 1752.?

79 MÉmoires, iv, 64, 74.?

80 Id. iv, 129, 140.?

81 Id. iv, 92–93.?

82 Maury, Hist. de l’ancienne AcadÉmie des Inscriptions, 1864, pp. 312–13.?

83 Journal historique de Barbier, 1847–56, iv, 304.?

84 Astruc, we learn from D’Alembert, connected their decline with the influence of the new opinions. “Ce ne sont pas les jansenistes qui tuent les jÉsuites, c’est l’EncyclopÉdie.” “Le maroufle Astruc,” adds D’Alembert, “est comme Pasquin, il parle quelquefois d’assez bon sens.” Lettre À Voltaire. 4 mai, 1762.?

85 Cp. pref. (La Vie de Salvien) to French tr. of Salvian, 1734, p. lxix. I have seen MS. translations of Toland and Woolston.?

86 MS. statement, in eighteenth-century hand, on flyleaf of a copy of 1755 ed. of the Grands hommes, in the writer’s possession.?

87 Lettre À D’Alembert, 16 Octobre, 1765.?

88 Of the works noted below, the majority appear or profess to have been printed at Amsterdam, though many bore the imprint Londres. All the freethinking books and translations ascribed to d’Holbach bore it. The ArÉtin of AbbÉ Dulaurens bore the imprint: “Rome, aux dÉpens de la CongrÉgation de l’Index.” Mystifications concerning authorship have been as far as possible cleared up in the present edition.?

89 Given by Brunet, who is followed by Wheeler, as appearing in 1732, and as translated into English, under the title Dying Merrily, in 1745. But I possess an English translation of 1713 (pref. dated March 25), entitled A Philological Essay: or, Reflections on the Death of Freethinkers.... By Monsieur D——, of the Royal Academy of Sciences in France, and author of the Poetae Rusticantis Literatum Otium. Translated from the French by Mr. B——, with additions by the author, now in London, and the translator. [A note in a contemporary hand makes “B” Boyer.] Barbier gives 1712 for the first edition, 1732 for the second. Rep. 1755 and 1776.?

90 There is no sign of any such excitement in France over the translation as was aroused in England by the original; but an Examen du traitÉ de la libertÉ de penser, by De Crousaz, was published at Amsterdam in 1718.?

91 This was probably meant to point to the AbbÉ de Marsy, who died in 1763.?

92 The AbbÉ Sepher ascribed this book to one Dupuis, a Royal Guardsman.?

93 This “prose poem” was not an intentional burlesque, as the ecclesiastical authorities alleged; but it did not stand for orthodoxy. See Grimm’s Correspondance, i, 113.?

94 “A eu les honneurs de la brÛlure, et toutes les censures cumulÉes des FacultÉs de ThÉologie, de la Sorbonne et des ÉvÊques.” Bachaumont, dÉc. 23, 1763. Marsy, who was expelled from the Order of Jesuits, was of bad character, and was hotly denounced by Voltaire.?

95 See Grimm, Corr. v. 15.?

96 A second edition appeared within the year. “Quoique proscrit presque partout, et mÊme en Hollande, c’est de lÀ qu’il nous arrive.” Bachaumont, dÉc. 27, 1764.?

97 Bachaumont, mai 7, 1767.?

98 “Se repand À Paris avec la permission de la police.” Bachaumont, 13 fÉv. 1766.?

99 “Il est facile de se convaincre que les parties les plus importantes et les plus solides de cet ouvrage sont empruntÉes aux travaux de Burigny.” L.-F. Alfred Maury, L’ancienne AcadÉmie des Incriptions et bellet-lettres, 1864, p. 316. Maury leaves it open question whether the compilation was made by Burigny or by Naigeon. The AbbÉ Bergier accepted it without hesitation as the work of FrÉret, who was known to hold some heretical views. (Maury, p. 317.) Barbier confidently ascribes the work to Burigny.?

100 The mystification in regard to this work is elaborate. It purports to be translated from an English version, declared in turn by its translator to be made “from the Greek.” It is now commonly ascribed to Naigeon. (Maury, as cited, p. 317.) Its machinery, and its definite atheism, mark it as of the school of d’Holbach, though it is alleged to have been written by FrÉret as early as 1722. It is however reprinted, with the Examen critique des Apologistes, in the 1796 edition of FrÉret’s works without comment; and Barbier was satisfied that it was the one genuine “philosophic” work ascribed to FrÉret, but that it was redacted by Naigeon from imperfect MSS.?

101 Notice sur Henri Meister, pref. to Lettres inÉdites de Madame de StaËl À Henri Meister, 1903, p. 17.?

102 “Deux nouveaux livres infernaux ... connus comme manuscrits depuis longtemps et gardÉs dans l’obscuritÉ des portefeuilles....” Bachaumont, 22 mars, 1769.?

103 Bachaumont, MÉmoires Secrets, dÉc. 20, 1767.?

104 Id. Jan. 18, 1768.?

105 So Pidansat de Mairobert in his preface to the first ed. (1777) of the MÉmoires Secrets of Bachaumont, continued by him. See pref. to the abridged ed. by Bibliophile Jacob.?

106 As to the authorship see above, p. 241.?

107 La Certitude des preuves du Christianisme (1767). 2e Édit. 1768, Avertissement.?

108 In the short essay Le Philosophe, which appeared in the Nouvelles LibertÉs de Penser, 1743 and 1750, and in the Recueil Philosophique, 1770. In the 1793 rep. of the Essai sur les prÉjugÉs (again rep. in 1822) it is unhesitatingly affirmed, on the strength of its title-page and the prefixed letter of Dumarsais, dated 1750, that that book is an expansion of the essay Le Philosophe, and that this was published in 1760. But Le Philosophe is an entirely different production, which to a certain extent criticizes les philosophes so-called. The Essai sur les prÉjugÉs published in 1770 is not the work of Dumarsais; it is a new work by d’Holbach. This was apparently known to Frederick, who in his rather angry criticism of the book writes that, whereas Dumarsais had always respected constituted authorities, others had “put out in his name, two years after he was dead and buried, a libel of which the veritable author could only be a schoolboy as new to the world as he was puzzle-headed.” (MÉlanges en vers et en prose de Frederic II, 1792, ii, 215). Dumarsais died in 1754, but I can find no good evidence that the Essai sur les prÉjugÉs was ever printed before 1770. As to d’Holbach’s authorship see the Œuvres de Diderot, ed. 1821, xii, 115 sq.—passage copied in the 1829–31 ed. of the Correspondance littÉraire of Grimm and Diderot, xiv, 293 sq. In a letter to D’Alembert dated Mars 27, 1773, Voltaire writes that in a newly-printed collection of treatises containing his own Lois de Minos is included “le philosophe de Dumarsais, qui n’a jamais ÉtÉ imprimÉ jusqu’À present.” This seems to be a complete mistake.?

109 Grimm (iv, 86) has some good stories of him. He announced one day that he had ound twenty-five fatal flaws in the story of the resurrection of Lazarus, the first being that the dead do not rise. His scholarly friend Nicolas Boindin (see above, p. 222) said: “Dumarsais is a Jansenist atheist; as for me, I am a Molinist atheist.”?

110 On two successive pages the title Messiah is declared to mean “simply one sent” and simply “anointed.”?

111 Like Buffier and Huard, however, he strives for a reform in spelling, dropping many doubled letters, and writing home, bone, acuse, fole, apelle, honÊte, afreux, etc.?

112 Abriss einer Geschichte der UmwÄlzung welche seit 1750 auf dem Gebiete der Theologie in Deutschland statt gefunden, in Tholuck’s Vermischte Schriften, 1839, ii, 5. The proposition is repeated pp. 24, 33.?

113 The exceptions were books published outside of France.?

114 Madame de SÉvignÉ, for instance, declared that she would not let pass a year of her life without re-reading the second volume of Abbadie.?

115 Le DÉisme refutÉ par lui-mÊme (largely a reply to Rousseau), 1765; 1770, Apologie de la religion chrÉtienne; 1773, La certitude des preuves du christianisme. In 1759 had appeared the Lettres sur le DÉisme of the younger Salchi, professor at Lausanne. It deals chiefly with the English deists, and with D’Argens. As before noted, the AbbÉ Gauchat began in 1751 his Lettres Critiques, which in time ran to 15 volumes (1751–61). There were also two journals, Jesuit and Jansenist, which fought the philosophes (Lanson, p. 721); and sometimes even a manuscript was answered—e.g. the RÉfutation du Celse moderne of the AbbÉ Gautier (1752), a reply to Mirabaud’s unpublished Examen critique.?

116 Alison, History of Europe, ed. 1849, i, 180–81.?

117 The Jesuits were expelled from Portugal in 1759; from Bohemia and Denmark in 1766; from the whole dominions of Spain in 1767; from Genoa and Venice in the same year; and from Naples, Malta, and Parma in 1768. Officially suppressed in France in 1764, they were expelled thence in 1767. Pope Clement XIII strove to defend them; but in 1773 the Society was suppressed by papal bull by Clement XIV; whereafter they took refuge in Prussia and Russia, ruled by the freethinking Frederick and Catherine.?

118 See the Correspondance de Grimm, ed. 1829–31, vii, 51 sq.?

119 This apologetic work, after having been praised by the censor and registered with privilÈge du roi in November, 1772, was officially suppressed on Jan. 17, 1773, and, it would appear, reissued in that year.?

120 Liv. i. ch. viii.?

121 Bachaumont, juin 22; juillet 9, 20, 27; novembre 14, 1762.?

122 Grimm notices Astruc’s Dissertations sur l’immortalitÉ, l’immaterialitÉ, et la libertÉ de l’Âme, published in 1755 (Corr. i, 438), but not his Conjectures. At his death (1766) he pronounces him “un des hommes les plus decriÉs de Paris,” “Il passait pour fripon, fourbe, mÉchant, en un mot pour un trÈs-malhonnÊte homme.” “Il Était violent et emportÉ, et d’une avarice sordide.” Finally, he died “sans sacremens” after having “fait le dÉvot” and attached himself to the Jesuits in their day of power. Corr. v, 98. But Grimm was a man of many hates, and not the best of historians.?

123 Cp. Maury, L’ancienne AcadÉmie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, 1864, pp. 55–56.?

124 Voltaire’s various stratagems to secure election are not to his credit. See Paul Mesnard, Histoire de l’acadÉmie franÇaise, 1857, pp. 68–74. But even Montesquieu is said to have resorted to some questionable devices for the same end. Id. p. 62.?

125 Maury, L’ancienne AcadÉmie des inscriptions, pp. 54–55, 94, 308.?

126 Id. p. 93.?

127 Id. pp. 116–20.?

128 Where he was lieutenant-gÉnÉral, and died in 1750.?

129 Maury, pp. 53, 86–87.?

130 MÉmoires, ed. Jannet, iv, 181.?

131 Cp. Mesnard, as cited, pp. 79–80.?

132 Maury, p. 315.?

133 Id. pp. 82–84. It is noteworthy that the orthodox Thomas, and not any of the philosophes, was the first to impeach the Government in academic discourses. Mesnard, pp. 82–84, 100 sq.?

134 “L’excellent Pompignan,” M. Lanson calls him, p. 723.?

135 “Les provisions de sa charge pendant six mois en 1736.” Voltaire, Lettre À Mme. D’Épinay, 13 juin, 1760. “Je le servis dans cette affaire,” adds Voltaire.?

136 Mesnard, pp. 67, 71, 73, 89.?

137 Le Pauvre Diable, ouvrage en vers aisÉs de feu M. VadÉ, mis en lumiÈre par Catherine VadÉ, sa cousine (falsely dated 1758); La VanitÉ; and Le Russe À Paris.?

138 Mesnard, pp. 86–92.?

139 Id. pp. 93–94.?

140 Id. pp. 95–96.?

141 Lanson, Hist. de la litt. franÇaise, p. 725.?

142 The formal approval of a Sorbonnist was necessary. One refused it; another gave it. Marmontel, MÉmoires, 1804, iii, 35–36.?

143 Marmontel mentions that while he was still discussing a compromise with the syndic of the Sorbonne, 40,000 copies had been sold throughout Europe. MÉmoires, iii, 39.?

144 This satire was taken by the German freethinker Eberhard, in his New Apology for Socrates, as the actual publication of the Sorbonne. Barbier, Dict. des Ouvr. anon et Pseud., 2e Édit., i, 468.?

145 Published pseudonymously as a translation from the English: Histoire naturelle de l’Âme, traduite de l’Anglais de M. Charp, par feu M. H——, de l’AcadÉmie des Sciences. À La Haye, 1745. Republished under the title TraitÉ de l’Âme.?

146 By Elie Luzac, to whom is ascribed the reply entitled L’Homme plus que Machine (1748 also). This is printed in the Œuvres philosophiques of La Mettrie as if it were his: and Lange (i, 420) seems to think it was. But the bibliographers ascribe it to Luzac, who was a man of culture and ability.?

147 L’Homme Machine, ed. AssÉzat, 1865, p. 97; Œuv. philos. ed. 1774, iii, 51.?

148 Lange, Gesch. des Materialismus, i, 362 sq. (Eng. tr. ii, 78–80); Soury, BrÉviare de l’hist. du matÉrialisme, pp. 663, 666–68; Voltaire, HomÉlie sur l’athÉisme, end. Frederick the Great, who gave La Mettrie harbourage, support, and friendship, and who was not a bad judge of men, wrote and read in the Berlin Academy the funeral Éloge of La Mettrie, and pronounced him “une Âme pure et un coeur serviable.” By “pure” he meant sincere.?

149 Salchi, Lettres sur le DÉisme, 1759, pp. 177, 197, 239, 283 sq.?

150 Huxley, essay on Darwin on the Origin of Species; R. P. A. ed. of Twelve Lectures and Essays, p. 94.?

151 See the parallel passages in the Lettres Critiques of the AbbÉ Gauchat, vol. xv (1761), p. 192 sq.?

152 See his essay Des SingularitÉs de la Nature, ch. xii, and his Dissertation sur les changements arrivÉs dans notre globe.?

153 Eng. tr. 1750.?

154 Essay cited, p. 96. The criticism ignores the greater comprehensiveness of Robinet’s survey of nature.?

155 George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, 1707–1788.?

156 Lyell, Principles of Geology, 12th ed. 1875, i, 57–58.?

157 Suite de l’Apologie de M. l’AbbÉ De Prades, 1752, p. 37 sq.?

158 Dissertatio inauguralis metaphysica de universali naturÆ systemate, published at GÖttingen as the doctoral thesis of an imaginary Dr. Baumann, 1751. In French, 1753.?

159 Soury, p. 579. The later speculations of Maupertuis by their extravagance discredited the earlier.?

160 “Scheinbar bekÄmpft er Maupertuis desswegen, aber im geheimen stimmt er ihm bei”(Rosenkranz, i, 144).?

161 It should be noted that by Condillac’s avowal he was much aided by his friend Mdlle. Ferrand.?

162 Cp. RÉthorÉ, Condillac, ou l’empirisme et le rationalisme, 1864, ch. i.?

163 Lange, ii, 27, 29; Soury, pp. 603–44.?

164 Soury, pp. 596–600; Lange, ii, 27.?

165 Oddly enough he became ultimately press censor! He lived till 1820, dying at Rennes at the age of 85.?

166 This may best be translated Treatise on the Mind. The English translation of 1759 (rep. 1807) is entitled De l’Esprit: or, Essays on the Mind, etc.?

167 Correspondance, ii, 262.?

168 Id. p. 263.?

169 Id. p. 293.?

170 At the time the pietists declared that Diderot had collaborated in De l’Esprit. This was denied by Grimm, who affirmed that Diderot and HelvÉtius were little acquainted, and rarely met; but his Secretary, Meister, wrote in 1786 that the finest pages in the book were Diderot’s. Id. p. 294, note. In his sketch À la mÉmoire de Diderot (1786, app. to Naigeon’s MÉmoires, 1821, p. 425, note), Meister speaks of a number of “belles pages,” but does not particularize.?

171 De l’Esprit, Disc, iii, ch. 30.?

172 Cp. Morley’s criticism. Diderot, ed. 1884, pp. 331–32.?

173 Beccaria’s Letter to Morellet, cited in ch. i of J. A. Farrer’s ed. of the Crimes and Punishments, p. 6. It is noteworthy that the partial reform effected earlier in England by Oglethorpe, on behalf of imprisoned debtors (1730–32), belongs to the time of propagandist deism there.?

174 Morley, Diderot, p. 329.?

175 Lettre À d’Alembert, 9 janvier, 1773.?

176 Cp. Rosenkranz, Vorbericht, p. vi.?

177 Cp. Morley, Diderot, ed. 1834, p. 32.?

178 E.g. § 21.?

179 A police agent seized the MS. in Diderot’s library, and Diderot could not get it back. Malesherbes, the censor, kept it safe for him!?

180 According to Naigeon (MÉmoires, 1821, p. 131), three months and ten days.?

181 The Lettre purports, like so many other books of that and the next generation, to be published “A Londres.”?

182 Diderot’s daughter, in her memoir of him, speaks of his imprisonment in the Bastille as brought about through the resentment of a lady of whom he had spoken slightingly; and her husband left a statement in MS. to the same effect (printed at the end of the MÉmoires by Naigeon). The lady is named as Madame DuprÉ de Saint-Maur, a mistress of the King, and the offence is said to have been committed in the story entitled Le Pigeon blanc. Howsoever this may have been, the prosecution was quite in the spirit of the period, and the earlier PensÉes were made part of the case against him. See Delort, Hist. de la dÉtention des philosophes, 1829, ii, 208–16. M. de Vandeul-Diderot testifies that the Marquis Du Chatelet, Governor of Vincennes, treated his prisoner very kindly. Buckle (1-vol. ed. p. 425) does not seem to have fully read the Lettre, which he describes as merely discussing the differentiation of thought and sensation among the blind.?

183 His friend Meister (À la mÉmoire de Diderot, 1786, app. to Naigeon’s MÉmoires de Diderot, 1821, p. 424) writes as if Diderot had written the whole Apologie “in a few days.” The third part, a reply to the pastoral of the Bishop of Auxerre, appeared separately as a Suite to the others.?

184 Apologie, as cited, 2e partie, p. 87 sq.?

185 Observations sur l’instruction pastorale de Mons. l’ÉvÊque d’Auxerre, Berlin, 1752, p. 17.?

186 Id. p. 102 sq.?

187 Cp. Morley, Diderot, pp. 98–99.?

188 Carlyle, Frederick, bk. xviii, ch. ix, end.?

189 D’Argenson, MÉmoires, iv, 188.?

190 Carlyle, as cited.?

191 “Quelle abominable homme!” he writes to Mdlle. Voland (15 juillet, 1759); and Lord Morley pronounces de Prades a rascal (Diderot, p. 98). Carlyle is inarticulate with disgust—but as much against the original heresy as against the treason to Frederick. As to that, ThiÉbault was convinced that de Prades was innocent and calumniated. Everybody at court, he declares, held the same view. Mes Souvenirs de vingt ans de sÉjour À Berlin, 2e Édit. 1805, v, 402–404.?

192 It is not clear how these are to be distinguished from the mutilations of the later volumes by his treacherous publisher Le Breton. Of this treachery the details are given by Grimm, Corr. litt. ed. 1829. vii, 144 sq.?

193 Buckle’s account of him (1-vol. ed. p. 426) as “burning with hatred against his persecutors” after his imprisonment is overdrawn. He was a poor hater.?

194 Madame Diderot, says her daughter, was very upright as well as very religious, but her temper, “Éternellement grondeur, faisait de notre intÉrieur un enfer, dont mon pÈre Était l’ange consolateur” (Letter to Meister, in Notice pref. to Lettres InÉdites de Mme. de StaËl À Henri Meister, 1903, p. 62).?

195 “HÉlas! disait mon excellent grand-pÈre, j’ai deux fils: l’un sera sÛrement un saint, et je crains bien que l’autre ne soit damnÉ; mais je ne puis vivre avec le saint, et je suis trÈs heureux du temps que je passe avec le damnÉ” (Letter of Mme. de Vandeul, last cited). Freethinker as he was, his fellow-townsmen officially requested in 1780 to be allowed to pay for a portrait of him for public exhibition, and the bronze bust he sent them was placed in the hÔtel de ville (MS. of M. de Vandeul-Diderot, as cited).?

196 Madame de Vandeul states that this story was motived by the case of Diderot’s sister, who died mad at the age of 27 or 28 (Letter above cited; Rosenkranz, i, 9).?

197 Lettre de Voltaire À D’Alembert, 27 aoÛt, 1774.?

198 Lettre de 2 dÉcembre, 1757.?

199 Œuvres posthumes de D’Alembert, 1799, i, 240.?

200 D’Holbach was the original of the character of Wolmar in Rousseau’s Nouvelle HÉloÏse, of whom Julie says that he “does good without recompense.” “I never saw a man more simply simple” was the verdict of Madame Geoffrin. Corr. litt. de Grimm (notice probably by Meister), ed. 1829–31, xiv, 291.?

201 Marmontel says of him that he “avoit tout lu et n’avoit jamais rien oubliÉ d’interessant.” MÉmoires, 1804, ii, 312.?

202 See a full list of his works (compiled by Julian Hibbert after the list given in the 1821 ed. of Diderot’s Works, xii, 115, and rep. in the 1829–31 ed. of Grimm and Diderot’s Correspondance, xiv, 293), prefixed to Watson’s ed. (1834 and later) of the English translation of the System of Nature.?

203 Morley, Diderot, p. 341. The chapter gives a good account of the book. Cp. Lange, i, 364 sq. (Eng. trans, ii, 26 sq.) as to its materialism. The best pages were said to be by Diderot (Corr. de Grimm, as cited, p. 289; the statement of Meister, who makes it also in his Éloge). Naigeon denied that Diderot had any part in the SystÈme, but in 1820 there was published an edition with “notes and corrections” by Diderot.?

204 It is to be noted that the English translation (3 vols. 3rd ed. 1817; 4th ed. 1820) deliberately tampers with the language of the original to the extent of making it deistic. This perversion has been by oversight preserved in all the reprints.?

205 Mirabeau spoke of the Essai as “le livre le moins connu, et celui qui mÉrite le plus l’Être.” Even the reprint of 1793 had become “extremely rare” in 1822. The book seems to have been specially disquieting to orthodoxy, and was hunted down accordingly.?

206 So Morley, p. 347. It does not occur to Lord Morley, and to the Comtists who take a similar tone, that in thus disparaging past thinkers they are really doing the thing they blame.?

207 Lettres de Memmius À CicÉron (1771); Histoire de Jenni (1775). In the earlier article, AthÉe, in the Dictionnaire Philosophique, he speaks of having met in France very good physicists who were atheists. In his letter of September 26, 1770, to Madame Necker, he writes concerning the SystÈme de la Nature: “Il est un peu honteux À notre nation que tant de gens aient embrassÉ si vite une opinion si ridicule.” And yet Prof. W. M. Sloane, of Columbia University, still writes of Voltaire, in the manner of English bishops, as “atheistical” (The French Revolution and Religious Reform, 1901, p. 26).?

208 Though in 1797 we have MarÉchal’s Code d’une SociÉtÉ d’hommes sans Dieu, and in 1798 his PensÉes libres sur les prÊtres.?

209 Thus Dr. Cairns (Unbelief in the Eighteenth Century, p. 165) gravely argues that the French Revolution proves the inefficacy of theism without a Trinity to control conduct. He has omitted to compare the theistic bloodshed of the Revolution with the Trinitarian bloodshed of the Crusades, the papal suppression of the Albigenses, the Hussite wars, and other orthodox undertakings.?

210 The book was accorded the Monthyon prize by the French Academy. In translation (1788) it found a welcome in England among Churchmen by reason of its pro-Christian tone and its general vindication of religious institutions. The translation was the work of Mary Wollstonecraft. See Kegan Paul’s William Godwin, 1876, i, 193. Mrs. Dunlop, the friend of Burns, recommending its perusal to the poet, paid it a curious compliment: “He does not write like a sectary, hardly like a Christian, but yet while I read him, I like better my God, my neighbour, Monsieur Necker, and myself.” Robert Burns and Mrs. Dunlop, ed. by W. Wallace, 1898, p. 258.?

211 See Voltaire’s letters to Madame Necker, Corr. de Grimm, ed. 1829, vii, 23, 118. Of the lady, Grimm writes (p. 118): “Hypathie Necker passe sa vie avec des systÉmatiques, mais elle est devote À sa maniÈre. Elle voudrait Être sincÈrement hugenote, ou socinienne, ou dÉistique, ou plutÔt, pour Être quelque chose, elle prend le parti de ne se rendre compte sur rien.” “Hypathie” was Voltaire’s complimentary name for her.?

212 Cp. Aulard, Le Culte de la Raison et le Culte de l’Être SuprÊme, 1892, pp. 17–19. M. Gazier (Études sur l’histoire religieuse de la rÉvolution franÇaise, 1877, pp. 48, 173, 189 sq.) speaks somewhat loosely of a prevailing anti-Christian feeling when actually citing only isolated instances, and giving proofs of a general orthodoxy. Yet he points out the complete misconception of Thiers on the subject (p. 202).?

213 Cp. Prof. W. M. Sloane, The French Revolution and Religious Reform, p. 43.?

214 Gazier, as cited, pp. 2, 4, 12, 19–21, 71, etc.?

215 Les AssemblÉes Provinciales sous Louis XVI, 1864, pref. pp. viii–ix.?

216 Gazier, L. ii, ch. i.?

217 Id. p. 67.?

218 Id. p. 69.?

219 LÉonce de Lavergne, as cited.?

220 The authority of Turgot himself could be cited for the demand that the State clergy should accept the constitution of the State. Cp. Aulard, Le Culte de la Raison, p. 12; Tissot, Étude sur Turgot, 1878, p. 160.?

221 Gazier, p. 113.?

222 Aulard, Culte, pp. 19–20.?

223 Michelet, Hist. de la rÉvolution franÇaise, ed. 8vo 1868 and later, i, 16. Cp. Proudhon’s De la justice, 1858.?

224 “Tout jugement religieux ou politique est une contradiction flagrante dans une religion uniquement fondÉe sur un dogme Étranger À la justice.” Ed. cited, introd. p. 60.?

225 The grave misstatement of Michelet on this head is exposed by Aulard, Culte, p. 60.?

226 Yet it is customary among Christians to speak of this lady in the most opprobrious terms. The royalist (but malcontent) Marquis de Villeneuve, who had seen the Revolution in his youth, claimed in his old age to have afterwards “conversed with the Goddess Reason of Paris and with the Goddess Reason of Bourges” (where he became governor); but, though he twice alludes to those women, he says nothing whatever against their characters (De l’Agonie de la France, 1835, i, 3, 19). Prof. W. M. Sloane, with all his religious prejudice, is satisfied that the women chosen as Goddesses of Reason outside of Paris were “noted for their spotless character.” Work cited, p. 198.?

227 MÉmoires, ed. 1841, ii, 166.?

228 PÈre F.-J.-F. Fortin, Souvenirs, Auxerre, 1867, ii, 41.?

229 See the speech in Aulard, Culte, p. 240; and cp. pp. 79–85.?

230 “Le peuple aura des fÊtes dans lesquelles il offrira de l’encens À l’Être SuprÊme, au maÎtre de la nature, car nous n’avons pas voulu anÉantir la superstition pour Établir le rÈgne de l’athÉisme.” Speech of Nov. 26, 1793, in the Moniteur. (Discours de Danton, ed. AndrÉ Fribourg, 1910, p. 599.)?

231 Aulard, Culte, pp. 81–82.?

232 Concerning whom see Aulard, Culte, pp. 86–96.?

233 The Source, the Strength, and the True Spirit of Laws, Eng. tr. 1753, p. 6.?

234 E.g., in the ArrÊt du Parlement of 9 juin, 1762, denouncing Rousseau’s Émile as tending to make the royal authority odious and to destroy the principle of obedience; and in the Examen du BÉllisaire de M. Marmontel, by Coger (Nouv. Éd. augm. 1767, p. 45 sq. Cp. Marmontel’s MÉmoires, 1804, iii, 46, as to his being called ennemi du trÔne et de l’autel). This kind of invective was kept up against the philosophes to the moment of the Revolution. See for instance Le vrai religieux, Discours dÉdiÉ À Madame Louise de France, par le R. P. C. A. 1787, p. 4: “Une philosophie orgueilleuse a renversÉ les limites sacrÉes que la main du TrÈs-Haut avoit elle-mÊme ÉlevÉes. La raison de l’homme a osÉ sonder les dÉcrets de Dieu.... Dans les accÈs de son ivresse, n’a-t-elle pas sapÉ les fondemens du trÔne et des lois,” etc.?

235 Cp. the admissions of Curnier (Rivarol, sa vie et ses oeuvres, 1858, p. 149) in deprecation of Burke’s wild likening of Rivarol’s journalism to the Annals of Tacitus.?

236 Œuvres, ed. cited, pp. 136–40, 147–55.?

237 Cp. the critique of Sainte-Beuve, prefixed to ed. cited, pp. 14–17, and that of ArsÈne Houssaye, id. pp. 31–33. Mr. Saintsbury, though biassed to the side of the royalist, admits that “Rivarol hardly knows what sincerity is” (Miscellaneous Essays, 1892, p. 67).?

238 Charles Comte is thus partly inaccurate in saying (TraitÉ de LÉgislation, 1835, i, 72) that the charge against the philosophers began “on the day on which there was set up a government in France that sought to re-establish the abuses of which they had sought the destruction.” What is true is that the charge, framed at once by the backers of the Old RÉgime, has always since done duty for reaction.?

239 MÉmoires, ed. Jannet, iii, 313; iv, 70; v, 346, 348.?

240 Id. iii, 346–47.?

241 D’Argenson, noting in his old age how “on n’a jamais autant parlÉ de nation et d’État qu’aujourd’hui,” how no such talk had been heard under Louis XIV, and how he himself had developed on the subject, adds, “cela vient du parlement et des Anglois.” He goes on to speak of a reissue of the translation of Locke on Civil Government, originally made by the Jansenists (MÉmoires, iv, 189–90).?

242 Hallam, Lit. of Europe, ed. 1872, iii, 160–63.?

243 Œuvres diverses de Pierre Bayle, La Haye, 4 vols. fol. 1737, ii, 564 sq.?

244 This Critique appears in the very volume to which Coger refers for the Avis aux RÉfugiÉz. See Lett. viii, xiii, xvii, etc., vol. and ed. cited, pp. 36, 54, 71, etc.?

245 Cp. the survey of Aulard, Hist. polit. de la rÉv. franÇaise, 2e Édit. 1903, pp. 2–23.?

246 Probably the work of a Jansenist.?

247 On the whole question of the growth of abstract revolutionary doctrine in politics cp. W. S. McKechnie on the De Jure Regni apud Scotos in the “George Buchanan” vol. of Glasgow Quatercentenary Studies, 1906, pp. 256–76; Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Ages, Maitland’s tr. 1900, p. 37 sq.?

248 Mallet actually reproaches the philosophes in the mass—while admitting the hostility of many of them to the Revolution—with “having accelerated French degeneration and depravation ... by rendering the conscience argumentative (raisonneuse), by substituting for duties inculcated by sentiment, tradition, and habit, the uncertain rules of the human reason and sophisms adapted to passions,” etc., etc. (B. Mallet, as cited, p. 360). With all his natural vigour of mind, Mallet du Pan thus came to talk the language of the ordinary irrationalist of the Reaction. Certainly, if the stimulation of the habit of reasoning be a destructive course, the philosophes stand condemned. But as Christians had been reasoning as best they could, in an eternal series of vain disputes, for a millennium and a-half before the Revolution, with habitual appeal to the passions, the argument only proves how vacuous a Christian champion’s reasoning can be.?

249 Art. in Mercure Britannique, No. 13, Feb. 21, 1799; cited by B. Mallet in Mallet du Pan and the French Revolution, 1902, App. p. 357.?

250 Id. p. 359.?

251 Tableau littÉraire du dix-huitiÈme siÈcle, 8e Édit. pp. 112, 113.?

252 Id. p. 72.?

253 Work cited, p. 358.?

254 Id. p. 359.?

255 Cp. Morley, Diderot, p. 407. Lord Morley points to the phrase in another form in a letter of Voltaire’s in 1761. It really derives from Jean Meslier, who quotes it from an unlettered man (Testament, i. 19).?

256 Rosenkranz, Diderot’s Leben und Werke, 1866, ii, 380–81.?

257 As Lord Morley points out, Henri Martin absolutely reverses the purport of a passage in order to convict Diderot of justifying regicide.?

258 MÉmoires, ed. Jannet, iv, 44, 51, 68, 69, 74, 91, 93, 101, 103.?

259 Mallet du Pan says he saw the MS., and knew Diderot to have received 10,000 livres tournois for his additions. This statement is incredible. But Meister is explicit, in his Éloge, as to Diderot having written for the book much that he thought nobody would sign, whereas Raynal was ready to sign anything.?

260 Memoirs of Sir Samuel Romilly, 3rd ed. 1841, i, 46.?

261 When D’Argenson writes in 1752 (MÉmoires, Éd. Jannet, iv, 103) that he hears “only philosophes say, as if convinced, that even anarchy would be better” than the existing misgovernment, he makes no suggestion that they teach this. And he declares for his own part that everything is drifting to ruin: “nulle rÉformation ... nulle amÉlioration.... Tout tombe, par lambeaux.”?

262 Aulard, Hist. polit. de la rÉvol. p. 24.?

263 This is the sufficient comment on a perplexing page of Lord Morley’s second monograph on Burke (pp. 110–11), which I have never been able to reconcile with the rest of his writing.?

264 Lecky, Hist. of England in the Eighteenth Century, small ed. vi, 263.?

265 D’Argenson notes this repeatedly, though in one passage he praises the Parlement as having alone made head against absolutism (dÉc. 1752; ed. cited, iv, 116).?

266 Maximes et PensÉes, ed. 1856, p. 72.?

267 Id. pp. 73–74.?

268 Chamfort in another passage maintains against Soulavie that the Academy did much to develop the spirit of freedom in thought and politics. Id. p. 107. And this too is arguable, as we have seen.?

269 On this complicated issue, which cannot be here handled at any further length, see Prof. P. A. Wadia’s essay The Philosophers and the French Revolution (Social Science Series, 1904), which, however, needs revision; and compare the argument of Nourrisson, J.-J. Rousseau et le Rousseauisme, 1903, ch. xx.?

270 Correspondance de Grimm, ed. cited, xiv, 5–6. Lettre de janv. 1788.?

271 Lettre de Voltaire À D’Alembert, 27 aoÛt, 1774.?

272 Histoire du mariage des prÊtres en France, par M. GrÉgoire, ancien ÉvÊque de Blois, 1826, p. v. Compare the details in the Appendice to the Etudes of M. Gazier, before cited. That writer’s account is the more decisive seeing that his bias is clerical, and that, writing before M. Aulard, he had to a considerable extent retained the old illusion as to the “decreeing of atheism” by the Convention (p. 313). See pp. 230–260 as to the readjustment effected by GrÉgoire, while the conservative clergy were still striving to undo the Revolution.?

273 Heroes and Hero-Worship: Napoleon.?

274 See the Sentiments de NapolÉon sur le Christianisme: conversations recueillies À Sainte-HÉlÈne par le Comte de Montholon, 1841. Many of the utterances here set forth are irreconcilable with Napoleon’s general tone.?

275 O’Meara, NapolÉon en Exil, ed. Lacroix, 1897, ii, 39.?

276 Ph. Gonnard, Les origines de la lÉgende NapolÉonienne, 1906, p. 258.?

277 Id. p. 260.?

278 Pasquier, cited by Rose, Life of Napoleon, ed. 1913, i, 282. The Concordat was bitterly resented by the freethinkers in the army. Id. p. 281.?

279 See Jules Barni’s NapolÉon Ier. ed. 1870, p. 83, as to the amazing Catechism imposed by Napoleon on France in 1811. For the history of its preparation and imposition see De Labone, Paris sous NapolÉon: La Religion, 1907, p. 100 sq.?

280 As to the Napoleonic censorship of literature, cp. Madame de StaËl, ConsidÉrations sur la rÉvolution franÇaise, ptie. iv, ch. 16; Dix AnnÉes d’Exil, prÉf.; Welschinger, La Censure sous le premier Empire, 1882.?

281 Las Cases, MÉmorial de Sainte-HÉlÈne, 19 aoÛt, 1816.?

282 Mignet, Hist. de la rÉvolution franÇaise, 4e Édit. ii, 340.?