Note 167 — Chapter XVII · FRENCH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

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.