History of Civilization in England, Vol. 2 of 3

by Henry Thomas Buckle

These considerations will enable the reader to see the immense importance of that revival of Jansenism, which took place in the French church during the eighteenth century. For, Jansenism being essentially Calvinistic,[993] those tendencies appeared in France by which Calvinism is marked. There appeared the inquisitive, democratic, and insubordinate spirit, which has always accompanied that creed. A further confirmation of the truth of the principles just laid down is, that Jansenism originated with a native of the Dutch Republic;[994] that it was introduced into France during the glimpse of freedom which preceded the power of Louis XIV.;[995] that it was forcibly repressed in his arbitrary reign;[996] and that before the middle of the eighteenth century, it again arose, as the natural product of a state of society by which the French Revolution was brought about.

The connexion between the revival of Jansenism and the destruction of the Jesuits, is obvious. After the death of Louis XIV., the Jansenists rapidly gained ground, even in the Sorbonne;[997] and by the middle of the eighteenth century, they had organized a powerful party in the French parliament.[998] About the same period, their influence began to show itself in the executive government, and among the officers of the crown. Machault, who held the important post of controller-general, was known to favour their opinions;[999] and a few years after his retirement, Choiseul was called to the head of affairs; a man of considerable ability, by whom they were openly protected.[1000] Their views were likewise supported by Laverdy, controller-general in 1764, and by Terray, controller of finances in 1769.[1001] The procureur-general, Gilbert des Voisins, was a Jansenist;[1002] so also was one of his successors, Chauvelin;[1003] and so was the advocate-general Pelletier de Saint-Fargeau;[1004] and so too was Camus, the well-known advocate of the clergy.[1005] Turgot, the greatest statesman of the age, is said to have embraced the same opinions;[1006] while Necker, who on two different occasions possessed almost supreme power, was notoriously a rigid Calvinist. To this may be added, that not only Necker, but also Rousseau, to whom a large share in causing the Revolution is justly ascribed, were born in Geneva, and drew their earliest ideas from that great nursery of the Calvinistic theology.

In such a state of things as this, it was impossible that a body like the Jesuits should hold their ground. They were the last defenders of authority and tradition, and it was natural that they should fall in an age when statesmen were sceptics, and theologians were Calvinists. Even the people had already marked them for destruction; and when Damiens, in 1757, attempted to assassinate the king, it was generally believed that they were the instigators of the act.[1007] This we now know to be false; but the existence of such a rumour is evidence of the state of the popular mind. At all events, the doom of the Jesuits was fixed. In April 1761, parliament ordered their constitutions to be laid before them.[1008] In August, they were forbidden to receive novices, their colleges were closed, and a number of their most celebrated works were publicly burned by the common hangman.[1009] Finally, in 1762, another edict appeared, by which the Jesuits were condemned without even being heard in their own defence;[1010] their property was directed to be sold, and their order secularized; they were declared ‘unfit to be admitted into a well-governed country,’ and their institute and society were formally abolished.[1011]

Such was the way in which this great society, long the terror of the world, fell before the pressure of public opinion. What makes its fall the more remarkable, is, that the pretext which was alleged to justify the examination of its constitutions, was one so slight, that no former government would have listened to it for a single moment. This immense spiritual corporation was actually tried by a temporal court for ill faith in a mercantile transaction, and for refusing to pay a sum of money said to be due![1012] The most important body in the Catholic church, the spiritual leaders of France, the educators of her youth, and the confessors of her kings, were brought to the bar, and sued in their collective capacity, for the fraudulent repudiation of a common debt![1013] So marked was the predisposition of affairs, that it was not found necessary to employ for the destruction of the Jesuits any of those arts by which the popular mind is commonly inflamed. The charge upon which they were sentenced, was not that they had plotted against the state; nor that they had corrupted the public morals; nor that they wished to subvert religion. These were the accusations which were brought in the seventeenth century, and which suited the genius of that age. But in the eighteenth century, all that was required was some trifling accident, that might serve as a pretence to justify what the nation had already determined. To ascribe, therefore, this great event to the bankruptcy of a trader, or the intrigues of a mistress,[1014] is to confuse the cause of an act with the pretext under which the act is committed. In the eyes of the men of the eighteenth century, the real crime of the Jesuits was, that they belonged to the past rather than to the present, and that by defending the abuses of ancient establishments, they obstructed the progress of mankind. They stood in the way of the age, and the age swept them from its path. This was the real cause of their abolition: a cause not likely to be perceived by those writers, who, under the guise of historians, are only collectors of the prattle and gossip of courts; and who believe that the destinies of great nations can be settled in the ante-chambers of ministers, and in the councils of kings.

After the fall of the Jesuits, there seemed to be nothing remaining which could save the French church from immediate destruction.[1015] The old theological spirit had been for some time declining, and the clergy were suffering from their own decay even more than from the attacks made upon them. The advance of knowledge was producing in France the same results as those which I have pointed out in England; and the increasing attractions of science drew off many illustrious men, who in a preceding age would have been active members of the spiritual profession. That splendid eloquence, for which the French clergy had been remarkable, was now dying away, and there were no longer heard the voices of those great orators, at whose bidding the temples had formerly been filled.[1016] Massillon was the last of that celebrated race who had so enthralled the mind, and the magic of whose fascination it is even now hard to withstand. He died in 1742; and after him the French clergy possessed no eminent men of any kind, neither thinkers, nor orators, nor writers.[1017] Nor did there seem the least possibility of their recovering their lost position. While society was advancing they were receding. All the sources of their power were dried up. They had no active leaders; they had lost the confidence of government; they had forfeited the respect of the people; they had become a mark for the gibes of the age.[1018]

It does, at first sight, seem strange that, under these circumstances, the French clergy should have been able, for nearly thirty years after the abolition of the Jesuits, to maintain their standing, so as to interfere with impunity in public affairs.[1019] The truth, however, is, that this temporary reprieve of the ecclesiastical order was owing to that movement which I have already noticed, and by virtue of which the French intellect, during the latter half of the eighteenth century, changed the ground of its attack, and, directing its energies against political abuses, neglected in some degree those spiritual abuses to which its attention had been hitherto confined. The result was, that in France the government enforced a policy which the great thinkers had indeed originated, but respecting which they were becoming less eager. The most eminent Frenchmen were beginning their attacks upon the state, and in the heat of their new warfare they slackened their opposition to the church. But in the mean time, the seeds they had sown germinated in the state itself. So rapid was the march of affairs, that those anti-ecclesiastical opinions which, a few years earlier, were punished as the paradoxes of designing men, were now taken up and put into execution by senators and ministers. The rulers of France carried into effect principles which had hitherto been simply a matter of theory; and thus it happened, as is always the case, that practical statesmen only apply and work out ideas which have long before been suggested by more advanced thinkers.

Hence it followed, that at no period during the eighteenth century did the speculative classes and practical classes thoroughly combine against the church: since, in the first half of the century, the clergy were principally assailed by the literature, and not by the government; in the latter half of the century, by the government, and not by the literature. Some of the circumstances of this singular transition have been already stated, and I hope clearly brought before the mind of the reader. I now purpose to complete the generalization, by proving that a corresponding change was taking place in all other branches of inquiry; and that, while in the first period attention was chiefly directed towards mental phenomena, it was in the second period more directed towards physical phenomena. From this, the political movement received a vast accession of strength. For the French intellect, shifting the scene of its labours, diverted the thoughts of men from the internal to the external, and concentrating attention upon their material rather than upon their spiritual wants, turned against the encroachments of the state an hostility formerly reserved for the encroachments of the church. Whenever a tendency arises to prefer what comes from without to what comes from within, and thus to aggrandize matter at the expense of mind, there will also be a tendency to believe that an institution which hampers our opinions is less hurtful than one which controls our acts. Precisely in the same way, men who reject the fundamental truths of religion, will care little for the extent to which those truths are perverted. Men who deny the existence of the Deity and the immortality of the soul, will take no heed of the way in which a gross and formal worship obscures those sublime doctrines. All the idolatry, all the ceremonials, all the pomp, all the dogmas, and all the traditions by which religion is retarded, will give them no disquietude, because they consider the opinions that are checked to be equally false with those that are favoured. Why should they, to whom transcendental truths are unknown, labour to remove the superstitions which darken the truths? Such a generation, so far from attacking ecclesiastical usurpations, would rather look on the clergy as convenient tools to ensnare the ignorant and control the vulgar. Therefore it is that we rarely hear of a sincere atheist being a zealous polemic. But if that should occur, which a century ago occurred in France; if it should happen that men of great energy, and actuated by the feelings I have described, were to find themselves in the presence of a political despotism,—they would direct against it the whole of their powers; and they would act with the more determined vigour, because, believing that their all was at stake, temporal happiness would be to them not only the first, but also the sole consideration.

It is from this point of view that the progress of those atheistical opinions, which now rose in France, becomes a matter of great though painful interest. And the date at which they appeared, fully corroborates what I have just said respecting the change that took place in the middle of the eighteenth century. The first great work in which they were openly promulgated, was the celebrated Encyclopædia, published in 1751.[1020] Before that time such degrading opinions, though occasionally broached, were not held by any men of ability; nor could they in the preceding state of society have made much impression upon the age. But during the latter half of the eighteenth century, they affected every department of French literature. Between 1758 and 1770, atheistical tenets rapidly gained ground;[1021] and in 1770 was published the famous work, called the System of Nature; the success, and, unhappily, the ability of which, makes its appearance an important epoch in the history of France. Its popularity was immense;[1022] and the views it contains are so clearly and methodically arranged, as to have earned for it the name of the code of atheism.[1023] Five years later, the Archbishop of Toulouse, in a formal address to the king on behalf of the clergy, declared that atheism had now become the prevailing opinion.[1024] This, like all similar assertions, must have been an exaggeration; but that there was a large amount of truth in it, is known to whoever has studied the mental habits of the generation immediately preceding the Revolution. Among the inferior class of writers, Damilaville, Deleyre, Maréchal, Naigeon, Toussaint, were active supporters of that cold and gloomy dogma, which, in order to extinguish the hope of a future life, blots out from the mind of man the glorious instincts of his own immortality.[1025] And, strange to say, several even of the higher intellects were unable to escape the contagion. Atheism was openly advocated by Condorcet, by D'Alembert, by Diderot, by Helvétius, by Lalande, by Laplace, by Mirabeau, and by Saint Lambert.[1026] Indeed, so thoroughly did all this harmonize with the general temper, that in society men boasted of what, in other countries, and in other days, has been a rare and singular error, an eccentric taint, which those affected by it were willing to conceal. In 1764 Hume met, at the house of Baron d'Holbach, a party of the most celebrated Frenchmen then residing in Paris. The great Scotchman, who was no doubt aware of the prevailing opinion, took occasion to raise an argument as to the existence of an atheist, properly so called; for his own part, he said, he had never chanced to meet with one. ‘You have been somewhat unfortunate,’ replied Holbach; ‘but at the present moment you are sitting at table with seventeen of them.’[1027]

This, sad as it is, only forms a single aspect of that immense movement, by which, during the latter half of the eighteenth century, the French intellect was withdrawn from the study of the internal, and concentrated upon that of the external world. Of this tendency, we find an interesting instance in the celebrated work of Helvétius, unquestionably the ablest and most influential treatise on morals which France produced at this period. It was published in 1758;[1028] and, although it bears the title of an essay on ‘the Mind,’ it does not contain a single passage from which we could infer that the mind, in the sense in which the word is commonly used, has any existence. In this work, which, during fifty years, was the code of French morals, principles are laid down which bear exactly the same relation to ethics that atheism bears to theology. Helvétius, at the beginning of his inquiry, assumes, as an incontestable fact, that the difference between man and other animals is the result of a difference in their external form; and that if, for example, our wrists, instead of ending with hands and flexible fingers, had merely ended like a horse's foot, we should have always remained wanderers on the face of the earth, ignorant of every art, entirely defenceless, and having no other concern but to avoid the attacks of wild beasts, and find the needful supply of our daily food.[1029] That the structure of our bodies is the sole cause of our boasted superiority, becomes evident, when we consider that our thoughts are simply the product of two faculties, which we have in common with all other animals; namely, the faculty of receiving impressions from external objects, and the faculty of remembering those impressions after they are received.[1030] From this, says Helvétius, it follows, that the internal powers of man being the same as those of all other animals, our sensibility and our memory would be useless, if it were not for those external peculiarities by which we are eminently distinguished, and to which we owe every thing that is most valuable.[1031] These positions being laid down, it is easy to deduce all the essential principles of moral actions. For, memory being merely one of the organs of physical sensibility,[1032] and judgment being only a sensation,[1033] all notions of duty and of virtue must be tested by their relation to the senses; in other words, by the gross amount of physical enjoyment to which they give rise. This is the true basis of moral philosophy. To take any other view, is to allow ourselves to be deceived by conventional expressions, which have no foundation except in the prejudices of ignorant men. Our vices and our virtues are solely the result of our passions; and our passions are caused by our physical sensibility to pain and to pleasure.[1034] It was in this way that the sense of justice first arose. To physical sensibility men owe pleasure and pain; hence the feeling of their own interests, and hence the desire of living together in societies. Being assembled in society, there grew up the notion of a general interest, since, without it, society could not hold together; and, as actions are only just or unjust in proportion as they minister to this general interest, a measure was established, by which justice is discriminated from injustice.[1035] With the same inflexible spirit, and with great fullness of illustration, Helvétius examines the origin of those other feelings which regulate human actions. Thus, he says that both ambition and friendship are entirely the work of physical sensibility. Men yearn after fame, on account either of the pleasure which they expect the mere possession of it will give, or else as the means of subsequently procuring other pleasures.[1036] As to friendship, the only use of it is to increase our pleasures or mitigate our pains; and it is with this object that a man longs to hold communion with his friend.[1037] Beyond this, life has nothing to offer. To love what is good for the sake of the goodness, is as impossible as to love what is bad for the sake of the evil.[1038] The mother who weeps for the loss of her child, is solely actuated by selfishness; she mourns because a pleasure is taken from her, and because she sees a void difficult to fill up.[1039] So it is, that the loftiest virtues, as well as the meanest vices, are equally caused by the pleasure we find in the exercise of them.[1040] This is the great mover and originator of all. Every thing that we have, and every thing that we are, we owe to the external world; nor is Man himself aught else except what he is made by the objects which surround him.[1041]

The views put forward in this celebrated work I have stated at some length; not so much on account of the ability with which they are advocated, as on account of the clue they furnish to the movements of a most remarkable age. Indeed, so completely did they harmonize with the prevailing tendencies, that they not only quickly obtained for their author a vast European reputation,[1042] but, during many years, they continued to increase in influence, and, in France in particular, they exercised great sway.[1043] As that was the country in which they arose, so also was it the country to which they were best adapted. Madame Dudeffand, who passed her long life in the midst of French society, and was one of the keenest observers of her time, has expressed this with great happiness. The work of Helvétius, she says, is popular, since he is the man who has told to all their own secret.[1044]