Note 137 — Chapter XIX · FREETHOUGHT IN THE REMAINING EUROPEAN STATES

During the period we have been surveying, up to the French Revolution, Switzerland, which owed much of new intellectual life to the influx of French Protestants at the revocation of the Edict of Nantes,137 exhibited no less than the other European countries the inability of the traditionary creed to stand criticism. Calvinism by its very rigour generated a reaction within its own special field; and the spirit of the slain Servetus triumphed strangely over that of his slayer. Genevan Calvinism, like that of the English Presbyterians, was transmuted first into a modified Arminianism, then into “Arianism” or Socinianism, then into the Unitarianism of modern times. In the eighteenth century Switzerland contributed to the European movement some names, of which by far the most famous is Rousseau; and the potent presence of Voltaire cannot have failed to affect Swiss culture. Before his period of influence, indeed, there had taken place not a little silent evolution of a Unitarian and deistic kind; Socinianism, as usual, leading the way. Among the families of Italian Protestant refugees who helped to invigorate the life of Switzerland, as French Protestants did later that of Germany, were the Turrettini, of whom Francesco came to Geneva in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. One of his sons, Benedict, made a professor at twenty-four, became a leading theologian and preacher of orthodox Calvinism, and distinguished himself as an opponent of Arminianism.138 Still more distinguished in his day was Benedict’s son François (1623–1687), also a professor, who repeated his father’s services, political and controversial, to orthodoxy, and combated Socinianism, as Benedict had done Arminianism. But François’s son Jean-Alphonse, also a professor (whose Latin work on Christian evidences, translated into French by a colleague, we have seen adopted and adapted by the Catholic authorities in France), became a virtual Unitarian139 (1671–1737), and as such is still anathematized by Swiss Calvinists. Against the deists, however, he was industrious, as his grandfather, a heretic to Catholicism, had been against the Arminians, and his father against the Socinians. The family evolution in some degree typifies the theological process from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century; and the apologetics of Jean-Alphonse testify to the vogue of critical deism among the educated class at Geneva in the days of Voltaire’s nonage. He (or his translator) deals with the “natural” objections to the faith, cites approvingly Locke, Lardner, and Clarke, and combats Woolston, but names no other English deist. The heresy, therefore, would seem to be a domestic development from the roots noted by Viret nearly two centuries before. One of Turrettini’s annotators complacently observes140 that though deists talk of natural religion, none of them has ever written a book in exposition of it, the task being left to the Christians. The writer must have been aware, on the one hand, that any deist who in those days should openly expound natural religion as against revealed would be liable to execution for blasphemy in any European country save England, where, as it happened, Herbert, Hobbes, Blount, Toland, Collins, Shaftesbury, and Tindal had all maintained the position, and on the other hand he must have known that the Ethica of Spinoza was naturalistic. The false taunt merely goes to prove that deists could maintain their heresy on the Continent at that time without the support of books. But soon after Turrettini’s time they give literary indication of their existence even in Switzerland; and in 1763 we find Voltaire sending a package of copies of his treatise on Toleration by the hand of “a young M. Turretin of Geneva,” who “is worthy to see the brethren, though he is the grandson of a celebrated priest of Baal. He is reserved, but decided, as are most of the Genevese. Calvin begins in our cantons to have no more credit than the pope.”141 For this fling there was a good deal of justification. When in 1763 the Council of Geneva officially burned a pamphlet reprint of the Vicaire Savoyard from Rousseau’s Émile there was an immediate public protest by “two hundred persons, among whom there were three priests”;142 and some five weeks later “a hundred persons came for the third time to protest.... They say that it is permissible to every citizen to write what he will on religion; that he should not be condemned without a hearing; and that the rights of men must be respected.”143 All this was not a sudden product of the freethinking influence of Voltaire and Rousseau, which had but recently begun. An older leaven had long been at work. The Principes du Droit Naturel of J. J. Burlamaqui (1748), save for its subsumption of deity as the originator of all human tendencies, is strictly naturalistic and utilitarian in its reasoning, and clearly exhibits the influence of Hobbes and Mandeville.144 Voltaire, too, in his correspondence, is found frequently speaking with a wicked chuckle of the Unitarianism of the clergy of Geneva,145 a theme on which D’Alembert had written openly in his article Genève in the Encyclopédie in 1756.146 So early as 1757, Voltaire roundly affirms that there are only a few Calvinists left: “tous les honnêtes gens sont déistes par Christ.”147 And when the younger Salchi, professor at Lausanne, writes in 1759 that “deism is become the fashionable religion.... Europe is inundated with the works of deists; and their partisans have made perhaps more proselytes in the space of eighty years than were made by the apostles and the first Fathers of the Church,”148 he must be held to testify in some degree concerning Switzerland. The chief native service to intellectual progress thus far, however, was rendered in the field of the natural sciences, Swiss religious opinion being only passively liberalized, mainly in a Unitarian direction.