Chapter XVII · FRENCH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

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of Law on the other were at least favourable to toleration; but under the Duc de Bourbon, put in power and soon superseded by Fleury (bishop of Fréjus and tutor of Louis XV; later cardinal) there was a renewal of the rigours against the Protestants and the Jansenists; the edict of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.

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.

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

The character of Voltaire is still the subject of chronic debate; but the old deadlock of laudation and abuse is being solved in a critical recognition of him as a man of genius flawed by the instability which genius so commonly involves. Carlyle (that model of serenity), while dwelling on his perpetual perturbations, half-humanely suggests that we should think of him as one constantly hag-ridden by maladies of many kinds; and this recognition is really even more important in Voltaire’s case than in Carlyle’s own. He was “a bundle of nerves,” and the clear light of his sympathetic intelligence was often blown aside by gusts of passion—often enough excusably. But while his temperamental weaknesses exposed him at times to humiliation, and often to sarcasm; and while his compelled resort to constant stratagem made him more prone to trickery than his admirers can well care to think him, the balance of his character is abundantly on the side of generosity and humanity.

One of the most unjustifiable of recent attacks upon him (one regrets to have to say it) came from the pen of the late Prof. Churton Collins. In his book on Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau in England (1908) that critic gives in the main an unbiassed account of Voltaire’s English experience; but at one point (p. 39) he plunges into a violent impeachment with the slightest possible justification. He in effect adopts the old allegation of Ruffhead, the biographer of Pope—a statement repeated by Johnson—that Voltaire used his acquaintance with Pope and Bolingbroke to play the spy on them, conveying information to Walpole, for which he was rewarded. The whole story collapses upon critical examination. Ruffhead’s story is, in brief, that Pope purposely lied to Voltaire as to the authorship of certain published letters attacking Walpole. They were by Bolingbroke; but Pope, questioned by Voltaire, said they were his own, begging him to keep the fact absolutely secret. Next day at court everyone was speaking of the letters as Pope’s; and Pope accordingly knew that Voltaire was a traitor. For this tale there is absolutely nothing but hearsay evidence. Ruffhead, as Johnson declared, knew nothing of Pope, and simply used Warburton’s material. The one quasi-confirmation cited by Mr. Collins is Bolingbroke’s letter to Swift (May 18, 1727) asking him to “insinuate” that Walpole’s only ground for ascribing the letters to Bolingbroke “is the authority of one of his spies ... who reports, not what he hears ... but what he guesses.” This is an absolute contradiction of the Pope story, at two points. It refers to a guess at Bolingbroke, and tells of no citation from Pope. To put it as confirming the charge is to exhibit a complete failure of judgment.

After this irrational argument, Mr. Collins offers a worse. He admits (p. 43) that Voltaire always remained on friendly terms with both Pope and Bolingbroke; but adds that this “can scarcely be alleged as a proof of his innocence, for neither Pope nor Bolingbroke would, for such an offence, have been likely to quarrel with a man in a position so peculiar as that of Voltaire. His flattery was pleasant....” Such an argument is worse than nugatory. That Bolingbroke spoke ill in private of Voltaire on general grounds counts for nothing. He did the same of Pope and of nearly all his friends. Mr. Collins further accuses Voltaire of baseness, falsehood, and hypocrisy on the mere score of his habit of extravagant flattery. This was notoriously the French mode in that age; but it had been just as much the mode in seventeenth-century England, from the Jacobean translators of the Bible to Dryden—to name no others. And Mr. Collins in effect charges systematic hypocrisy upon both Pope and Bolingbroke.

Other stories of Ruffhead’s against Voltaire are equally improbable and ill-vouched—as Mr. Collins incidentally admits, though he forgets the admission. They all come from Warburton, himself convicted of double-dealing with Pope; and they finally stand for the hatred of Frenchmen which was so common in eighteenth-century England, and is apparently not yet quite extinct. Those who would have a sane, searching, and competent estimate of Voltaire, leaning humanely to the side of goodwill, should turn to the Voltaire of M. Champion. A brief estimate was attempted by the present writer in the R. P. A. Annual for 1912.

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.

The English view that French orthodoxy made a “bad” defence to the freethinking attack as compared with what was done in England (Sir J. F. Stephen, Horæ Sabbaticæ, 2nd. ser. p. 281; Alison, as cited above) proceeds on some misconception of the circumstances, which, as has been shown, were substantially different in the two countries. Could the English clergy have resorted to official suppression of deistic literature, they too would doubtless have done so. Swift and Berkeley bitterly desired to. But the view that the English defence was relatively “good,” and that Butler’s in particular was decisive, is also, as we have seen, fallacious. In Sir Leslie Stephen’s analysis, as apart from his preamble, the orthodox defence is exhibited as generally weak, and often absurd. Nothing could be more futile than the three “Pastoral Letters” published by the Bishop of London (1728, 1730, 1731) as counterblasts to the freethinking books of this period. In France the defence began sooner, and was more profound and even more methodical. Pascal at least went deeper, and Bossuet (in his Discours sur l’Histoire Universelle) more widely, into certain inward and outward problems of the controversy than did any of the English apologists; Huet produced, in his Demonstratio Evangelica, one of the most methodical of all the defensive treatises of the time; Abbadie, as before noted, gave great satisfaction, and certainly grappled zealously with Hobbes and Spinoza; Allix, though no great dialectician, gave a lead to English apologetics against the deists (above, p. 97), and was even adapted by Paley; and Fénelon, though his Traité de l’Existence et des Attributs de Dieu (1712) and Lettres sur la Religion (1716) are not very powerful processes of reasoning, contributed through his reproduced conversations (1710) with Ramsay a set of arguments at least as plausible as anything on the English side, and, what is more notable, marked by an amenity which almost no English apologist attained.

The ground had been thus very fully covered by the defence in France before the main battle in England began; and when a new French campaign commenced with Voltaire, the defence against that incomparable attack, so far as the system allowed of any, was probably as good as it could have been made in England, save insofar as the Protestants gave up modern miracles, while most of the Catholics claimed them for their Church. Counterblasts such as the essay of Linguet, Le Fanatisme des Philosophes (1764), were but general indictments of rationalism; and other apologetic treatises, as we saw, handled only the most prominent books on the other side. It should be noted, too, that as late as 1764 the police made it almost impossible to obtain in Paris works of Voltaire recently printed in Holland (Grimm, vii, 123, 133, 434). But, as Paley admitted with reference to Gibbon (“Who can refute a sneer?”), the new attack was in any case very hard to meet. A sneer is not hard to refute when it is unfounded, inasmuch as it implies a proposition, which can be rebutted or turned by another sneer. The Anglican Church had been well enough pleased by the polemic sneers of Swift and Berkeley; but the other side had the heavier guns, and of the mass of defences produced in England nothing remains save in the neat compilation of Paley. Alison’s whole avowal might equally well apply to anything produced in England as against Voltaire. The skeptical line of argument for faith had been already employed by Huet and Pascal and Fénelon, with visibly small success; Berkeley had achieved nothing with it as against English deism; and Butler had no such effect in his day in England as to induce French Catholics to use him. (He does not appear to have been translated into French till 1821.)

An Oratorian priest, again, translated the anti-deistic essays of President Forbes; and the Pensées Theologiques relatives aux erreurs du temps of Père Jamin (1768; 4e édit. 1773) were thought worthy of being translated into German, poor as they were. With their empty affirmation of authority they suggest so much blank cartridge, which could avail nothing with thinking men; and here doubtless the English defence makes a better impression. But, on the other hand, Voltaire circulated widely in England, and was no better answered there than in France. His attack was, in truth, at many points peculiarly baffling, were it only by its inimitable wit. The English replies to Spinoza, again, were as entirely inefficient or deficient as the French; the only intelligent English answers to Hume on Miracles (the replies on other issues were of no account) made use of the French investigations of the Jansenist miracles; and the replies to Gibbon were in general ignominious failures.

16. Above the scattered band of minor combatants rises a group of writers of special power, several of whom, without equalling Voltaire in ubiquity of influence, rivalled him in intellectual power and industry. The names of Diderot, D’Holbach, D’Alembert, Helvétius, and Condorcet are among the first in literary France of the generation before the Revolution; after them come Volney and Dupuis; and in touch with the whole series stands the line of great mathematicians and physicists (to which also belongs D’Alembert), Laplace, Lagrange, Lalande, Delambre. When to these we add the names of Montesquieu, Buffon, Chamfort, Rivarol, Vauvenargues; of the materialists La Mettrie and Cabanis; of the philosophers Condillac and Destutt de Tracy; of the historian Raynal; of the poet André Chénier; of the politicians Turgot, Mirabeau, Danton, Desmoulins, Robespierre—all (save perhaps Raynal) deists or else pantheists or atheists—it becomes clear that the intelligence of France was predominantly rationalistic before the Revolution, though the mass of the nation certainly was not.

It is necessary to deprecate Mr. Lecky’s statement (Rationalism in Europe, i, 176) that “Raynal has taken, with Diderot, a place in French literature which is probably permanent”—an estimate as far astray as the declaration on the same page that the English deists are buried in “unbroken silence.” Raynal’s vogue in his day was indeed immense (cp. Morley, Diderot, ch. xv); and Edmond Scherer (Études sur la litt. du 18e Siècle, 1891, pp. 277–78) held that Raynal’s Histoire philosophique des deux Indes had had more influence on the French Revolution than even Rousseau’s Contrat Social. But the book has long been discredited (cp. Scherer, pp. 275–76). A biographical Dictionary of 1844 spoke of it as “cet ouvrage ampoulé qu’on ne lit pas aujourd’hui.” Although the first edition (1770) passed the censure only by means of bribery, and the second (1780) was publicly burned, and its author forced to leave France, he was said to reject, in religion, “only the pope, hell, and monks” (Scherer, p. 286); and most of the anti-religious declamation in the first edition of the Histoire is said to be from the pen of Diderot, who wrote it very much at random, at Raynal’s request.

It has been justly enough argued, concerning Rousseau (see below, p. 287), that the generation of the Revolution made him its prophet in his own despite, and that had he lived twenty years longer he would have been its vehement adversary. But this does not alter the facts as to his influence. A great writer of emotional genius, like Rousseau, inevitably impels men beyond the range of his own ideals, as in recent times Ruskin and Tolstoy, both anti-Socialists, have led thousands towards Socialism. In his own generation and the next, Rousseau counted essentially for criticism of the existing order; and it was the revolutionaries, never the conservatives, who acclaimed him. De Tocqueville (Hist. philos. du règne de Louis XV, 1849, i, 33) speaks of his “impiété dogmatique.” Martin du Theil, in his J. J. Rousseau apologiste de la religion chrétienne (2e édit. 1840), makes out his case by identifying emotional deism with Christianity, as did Rousseau himself when he insisted that “the true Christianity is only natural religion well explained.” Rousseau’s praise of the gospel and of the character of Jesus was such as many deists acquiesced in. Similar language, in the mouth of Matthew Arnold, gave rather more offence to Gladstone, as a believing Christian, than did the language of simple unbelief; and a recent Christian polemist, at the close of a copious monograph, has repudiated the association of Rousseau with the faith (see J. F. Nourrisson, J. J. Rousseau et le Rousseauisme, 1903, p. 497 sq.). What is true of him is that he was more religiously a theist than Voltaire, whose impeachment of Providence in the poem on the Earthquake of Lisbon he sought strenuously though not very persuasively to refute in a letter to the author. But, with all his manifold inconsistencies, which may be worked down to the neurosis so painfully manifest in his life and in his relations to his contemporaries, he never writes as a believer in the dogmas of Christianity or in the principle of revelation; and it was as a deist that he was recognized by his Christian contemporaries. A demi-Christian is all that Michelet will call him. His compatriot the Swiss pastor Roustan, located in London, directed against him his Offrande aux Autels et à la Patrie, ou Défense du Christianisme (1764), regarding him as an assailant. The work of the Abbé Bergier, Le Déisme refuté par lui-même (1765, and later), takes the form of letters addressed to Rousseau, and is throughout an attack on his works, especially the Émile. When, therefore, Buckle (1-vol. ed. p. 475) speaks of him as not having attacked Christianity, and Lord Morley (Rousseau, ch. xiv) treats him as creating a religious reaction against the deists, they do not fully represent his influence on his time. As we have seen, he stimulated Voltaire to new audacities by his example.

The conventional denunciation of La Mettrie (endorsed by Lord Morley, Voltaire, p. 122) proceeds ostensibly upon those of his writings in which he discussed sexual questions with absolute scientific freedom. He, however, insisted that his theoretic discussion had nothing whatever to do with his practice; and there is no evidence that he lived otherwise than as most men did in his age, and ours. Still, the severe censure passed on him by Diderot (Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron, ed. 1782, ii, 22–24) seems to convict him of at least levity of character. Voltaire several times holds the same tone. But Diderot writes so angrily that his verdict incurs suspicion.

As Lange notes, there has been much loose generalization as to the place and bearing of La Mettrie in the history of French thought. Hettner, who apparently had not thought it worth while to read him, has ascribed his mental movement to the influence of Diderot’s Pensées philosophiques (1746), whereas it had begun in his own Histoire naturelle de l’âme, published a year before. La Mettrie’s originality and influence in general have been underestimated as a result of the hostility set up by disparagement of his character. The idea of a fundamental unity of type in nature—an idea underlying all the successive steps of Lamarck, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Goethe, and others, towards the complete conception of evolution—is set forth by him in L’Homme Plante in 1748, the year in which appeared De Maillet’s Telliamed. Buffon follows in time as in thought, only beginning his great work in 1749; Maupertuis, with his pseudonymous dissertation on the Universal system of Nature, applies La Mettrie’s conception in 1751; and Diderot’s Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature, stimulated by Maupertuis, appeared only in 1754. La Mettrie proceeded from the classification of Linnæus, but did not there find his idea. In the words of Lange, “these forgotten writings are in nowise so empty and superficial as is commonly assumed.” Gesch. des Materialismus, i, 328–29. Lange seems to have been the first to make a judicial study of La Mettrie’s work, as distinguished from the scandals about his character.

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.

Compare, as to Diderot’s position, Soury’s contention (p. 577) that we shall never make an atheist and a materialist out of “this enthusiastic artist, this poet-pantheist” (citing Rosenkranz in support), with his own admissions, pp. 589–90, and with Lord Morley’s remarks, pp. 33, 401, 418. See also Lange, i, 310 sq.; ii, 63 (Eng. tr. ii, 32, 256). In the affectionate éloge of his friend Meister (1786) there is an express avowal that “it had been much to be desired for the reputation of Diderot, perhaps even for the honour of his age, that he had not been an atheist, or that he had been so with less zeal.” The fact is thus put beyond reasonable doubt. In the Correspondance Littéraire of Grimm and Diderot, under date September 15, 1765 (vii, 366), there is a letter in criticism of Descartes, thoroughly atheistic in its reasoning, which is almost certainly by Diderot. And if the criticism of Voltaire’s Dieu, above referred to (p. 231), be not by him, he was certainly in entire agreement with it, as with Grimm in general. Rosenkranz finally (ii, 421) sums up that “Diderot war als Atheist Pantheist,” which is merely a way of saying that he was scientifically monistic in his atheism. Lange points out in this connection (i, 310) that the Hegelian schema of philosophic evolution, “with its sovereign contempt for chronology,” has wrought much confusion as to the real developments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The Abbé Bergier, in answering d’Holbach (Examen du Matérialisme, ii, ch. i, § 1), denies that there has been any wide spread of atheistic opinion. This is much more probable than the statement of the Archbishop of Toulouse, on a deputation to the king in 1775, that “le monstrueux athéisme est devenu l’opinion dominante” (Soulavie, Règne de Louis XVI, iii, 16; cited by Buckle, 1-vol. ed. p. 488, note). Joseph Droz, a monarchist and a Christian, writing under Louis Philippe, sums up that “the atheists formed only a small number of adepts” (Histoire du Règne de Louis XVI, éd. 1839, p. 42). And Rivarol, who at the time of writing his Lettres à M. Necker was substantially an atheist, says in so many words that, while Rousseau’s “Confession of a Savoyard Vicar” was naturally very attractive to many, such a book as the “Système de la Nature,” were it as attractive as it is tedious, would win nobody” (Œuvres, éd. 1852, p. 134). Still, it ran into seven editions between 1770 and 1780.

Mallet du Pan specifies, as among those who “since 1788 have pushed the blood-stained car of anarchy and atheism,” Chamfort, Gronvelle, Garat, and Cerutti. Chamfort was as high-minded a man as Mallet himself, and is to-day so recognized by every unprejudiced reader. The others are forgotten. Gronvelle, who as secretary of the executive council read to Louis XVI his death-sentence, wrote De l’autorité de Montesquieu dans la révolution présente (1789). Garat was Minister of Justice in 1792 and of the Interior in 1793, and was ennobled by Napoleon. He had published Considérations sur la Révolution (1792) and a Mémoire sur la Révolution (1795). Cerutti, originally a Jesuit, became a member of the Legislative Assembly, and was the friend of Mirabeau, whose funeral oration he delivered.

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.”