Note 253 — Chapter XVII · FRENCH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

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