The State of Society in France Before the Revolution of 1789 / And the Causes Which Led to That Event

by Alexis de Tocqueville

But, besides these general reasons, the literary men of France had more special, and, so to say, personal reasons for attacking the Church in the first instance. The Church represented precisely that portion of the Government which stood nearest and most directly opposed to themselves. The other powers of the State were only felt by them from time to time; but the ecclesiastical authority being specially employed in keeping watch over the progress of thought, and the censorship of books, was a daily annoyance to them. By defending the common liberties of the human mind against the Church, they were combating in their own cause, and they began by bursting the shackles which pressed most closely upon themselves.

Moreover, the Church appeared to them to be, and was, in fact, the most open and the worst defended side of all the vast edifice which they were assailing. Her strength had declined at the same time that the temporal power of the Crown had increased. After having been first the superior of the temporal powers, then their equal, she had come down to be their client; and a sort of reciprocity had been established between them. The temporal powers lent the Church their material force, whilst the Church lent them her moral authority; they caused the Church to be obeyed, the Church caused them to be respected—a dangerous interchange of obligations in times of approaching revolution, and always disadvantageous to a power founded not upon constraint but upon faith.

Although the Kings of France still called themselves the eldest sons of the Church, they fulfilled their obligations towards her most negligently: they evinced far less ardour in her protection than in the defence of their own government. They did not, it is true, permit any direct attack upon her, but they suffered her to be transfixed from a distance by a thousand shafts.

The sort of semi-constraint which was at that time imposed upon the enemies of the Church, instead of diminishing their power, augmented it. There are times when the restraint imposed on literature succeeds in arresting the progress of opinions; there are others when it accelerates their course: but a species of control similar to that then exercised over the press, has invariably augmented its power a hundredfold.

Authors were persecuted enough to excite compassion—not enough to inspire them with terror. They suffered from that kind of annoyance which irritates to opposition, not from the heavy yoke which crushes. The prosecutions directed against them, which were almost always dilatory, noisy, and vain, appeared less calculated to prevent their writing than to excite them to the task. A complete liberty of the press would have been less prejudicial to the Church.

‘You consider our intolerance more favourable to the progress of the mind than your unlimited liberty,’ wrote Diderot to David Hume in 1768. ‘D’Holbach, Helvetius, Morelet, and Suard, are not of your opinion.’ Yet it was the Scotchman who was right; he possessed the experience of the free country in which he lived. Diderot looked upon the matter as a literary man—Hume, as a politician.

If the first American who might be met by chance, either in his own country or abroad, were to be stopped and asked whether he considered religion useful to the stability of the laws and the good order of society, he would answer, without hesitation, that no civilised society, but more especially none in a state of freedom, can exist without religion. Respect for religion is, in his eyes, the greatest guarantee of the stability of the State and of the safety of the community. Those who are ignorant of the science of government know that fact at least. Yet there is not a country in the world where the boldest doctrines of the philosophers of the eighteenth century, on political subjects, have been more adopted than in America: their anti-religious doctrines alone have never been able to make way there, even with the advantage of an unlimited liberty of the press.

As much may be said of the English.[71] French irreligious philosophy had been preached to them even before the greater part of the French philosophers were born. It was Bolingbroke who set up Voltaire. Throughout the eighteenth century infidelity had celebrated champions in England. Able writers and profound thinkers espoused that cause, but they were never able to render it triumphant as in France; inasmuch as all those who had anything to fear from revolutions eagerly came to the rescue of the established faith. Even those who were the most mixed up with the French society of the day, and who did not look upon the doctrines of French philosophy as false, rejected them as dangerous. Great political parties, as is always the case in free countries, were interested in attaching their cause to that of the Church; and Bolingbroke himself became the ally of the bishops. The clergy, animated by these examples, and never finding itself deserted, combated manfully in its own cause. The Church of England, in spite of the defects of its constitution, and the abuses of every kind that swarmed within it, supported the shock victoriously. Authors and orators rose within it, and applied themselves with ardour to the defence of Christianity. The theories hostile to that religion, after having been discussed and refuted, were finally rejected by the action of society itself, and without any interference on the part of the Government.

It is not necessary, however, to seek examples beyond France itself. What Frenchman would ever think in our times of writing such books as those of Diderot or Helvetius? Who would read them now? and, it may almost be said, who even knows their titles? The imperfect experience of public life which France has acquired during the last sixty years has been sufficient to disgust the French with this dangerous literature. It is only necessary to see how much the respect for religion has gradually resumed its sway among the different classes of the nation, according as each of them acquired that experience in the rude school of Revolution. The old nobility, which was the most irreligious class before 1789, became the most fervent after 1793: it was the first infected, and the first cured. When the bourgeoisie felt itself struck down in its triumph, it began also, in its turn, gradually to revert to religious faith. Little by little, respect for religion penetrated to all the classes in which men had anything to lose by popular disturbances; and infidelity disappeared, or at least hid its head more and more, as the fear of revolutions arose.