Note 82 — Chapter XVII · FRENCH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

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.