These obstructive methods, however, could not dampen his enthusiasm. At last the work was finished and the “Encyclopédie” actually accomplished what Diderot had expected of it—it became the rallying point for all those who in one way or another felt the spirit of the new age and who knew that the world was desperately in need of a general overhauling.
It may seem that I have dragged the figure of the editor slightly out of the true perspective.
Who, after all, was this Denis Diderot, who wore a shabby coat, counted himself happy when his rich and brilliant friend, the Baron D’Holbach, invited him to a square meal once a week, and who was more than satisfied when four thousand copies of his book were actually sold? He lived at the same time as Rousseau and D’Alembert and Turgot and Helvétius and Volney and Condorcet and a score of others, all of whom gained a much greater personal renown than he did. But without the Encyclopédie these good people would never have been able to exercise the influence they did. It was more than a book, it was a social and economic program. It told what the leading minds of the day were actually thinking. It contained a concrete statement of those ideas that soon were to dominate the entire world. It was a decisive moment in the history of the human race.
France had reached a point where those who had eyes to see and ears to hear knew that something drastic must be done to avoid an immediate catastrophe, while those who had eyes to see and ears to hear yet refused to use them, maintained with an equal display of stubborn energy that peace and order could only be maintained by a strict enforcement of a set of antiquated laws that belonged to the era of the Merovingians. For the moment, those two parties were so evenly balanced that everything remained as it had always been and this led to strange complications. The same France which on one side of the ocean played such a conspicuous rôle as the defender of liberty and freedom and addressed the most affectionate letters to Monsieur Georges Washington (who was a Free Mason) and arranged delightful week-end parties for Monsieur le Ministre, Benjamin Franklin, who was what his neighbors used to call a “sceptic” and what we call a plain atheist, this country on the other side of the broad Atlantic stood revealed as the most vindictive enemy of all forms of spiritual progress and only showed her sense of democracy in the complete impartiality with which she condemned both philosopher and peasant to a life of drudgery and privation.
Eventually all this was changed.
But it was changed in a way which no one had been able to foresee. For the struggle that was to remove the spiritual and social handicaps of all those who were born outside the royal purple was not fought by the slaves themselves. It was the work of a small group of disinterested citizens whom the Protestants, in their heart of hearts, hated quite as bitterly as their Catholic oppressors and who could count upon no other reward than that which is said to await all honest men in Heaven.
The men who during the eighteenth century defended the cause of tolerance rarely belonged to any particular denomination. For the sake of personal convenience they sometimes went through certain outward motions of religious conformity which kept the gendarmes away from their writing desks. But as far as their inner life was concerned, they might just as well have lived in Athens in the fourth century B.C. or in China in the days of Confucius.
They were often most regrettably lacking in a certain reverence for various things which most of their contemporaries held in great respect and which they themselves regarded as harmless but childish survivals of a bygone day.
They took little stock in that ancient national history which the western world, for some curious reason, had picked out from among all Babylonian and Assyrian and Egyptian and Hittite and Chaldean records and had accepted as a guide-book of morals and customs. But true disciples of their great master, Socrates, they listened only to the inner voice of their own conscience and regardless of consequences, they lived fearlessly in a world that had long since been surrendered to the timid.