[240] Epistle to a Young Friend. [↑]
[241] Lecky, writing in 1865, and advancing on Burke, has said of the whole school, including Shaftesbury, that “the shadow of the tomb rests on all: a deep, unbroken silence, the chill of death, surrounds them. They have long ceased to wake any interest” (Rationalism in Europe, i, 116). As a matter of fact, they had been discussed by Taylor in 1853; by Pattison in 1860; and by Farrar in 1862; and they have since been discussed at length by Dr. Hunt, by Dr. Cairns, by Lange, by Gyzicki, by M. Sayous, by Sir Leslie Stephen, by Prof. Höffding, and by many others. [↑]
[242] Conway, introd. to Age of Reason, in his ed. of Paine’s Works, iv, 3. [↑]
Chapter XVII
FRENCH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
1. The fruits of the intellectual movement of the seventeenth century are seen beginning to take form on the very threshold of the eighteenth. In 1700, at the height of the reign of the King’s confessors, there was privately printed the Lettre d’Hippocrate à Damagète, described as “the first French work openly destructive of Christianity.” It was ascribed to the Comte de Boulainvilliers, a pillar of the feudal system.[1] Thus early is the sound of disintegration heard in the composite fabric of Church and State; and various fissures are seen in all parts of the structure. The king himself, so long morally discredited, could only discredit pietism by his adoption of it; the Jansenists and the Molinists [i.e., the school of Molina, not of Molinos] fought incessantly; even on the side of authority there was bitter dissension between Bossuet and Fénelon;[2] and the movement of mysticism associated with the latter came to nothing, though he had the rare credit of converting, albeit to a doubtful orthodoxy, the emotional young Scotch deist Chevalier Ramsay.[3] Where the subtlety of Fénelon was not allowed to operate, the loud dialectic of Bossuet could not avail for faith as against rationalism, whatever it might do to upset the imperfect logic of Protestant sects. In no society, indeed, does mere declamation play a larger part than in that of modern France; but in no society, on the other hand, is mere declamation more sure to be disdained and derided by the keener spirits. In the years of disaster and decadence which rounded off in gloom the life of the Grand Monarque, with defeat dogging his armies and bankruptcy threatening his finances, the spirit of criticism was not likely to slacken. Literary polemic, indeed, was hardly to be thought of at such a time, even if it had been safe. In 1709 the king destroyed the Jansenist seminary of Port Royal, wreaking an ignoble vengeance on the very bones of the dead there buried; and more heretical thinkers had need go warily.
Yet even in those years of calamity, perhaps by reason of the very stress of it, some freethinking books somehow passed the press, though a system of police espionage had been built up by the king, step for step with some real reforms in the municipal government of Paris. The first was a romance of the favourite type, in which a traveller discovers a strange land inhabited by surprisingly rational people. Such appear to have been the Histoire de Calejava, by Claude Gilbert, produced at Dijon in 1700, and the imaginary travels of Juan de Posos, published at Amsterdam in 1708. Both of these were promptly suppressed; the next contrived to get into circulation. The work of Symon Tyssot de Patot, Voyages et Avantures de Jacques Massé, published in 1710, puts in the mouths of priests of the imaginary land discovered by the traveller such mordant arguments against the idea of a resurrection, the story of the fall, and other items of the Christian creed, that there could be small question of the deism of the author;[4] and the prefatory Lettre de l’éditeur indicates misgivings. The Réflexions sur les grands hommes qui sont morts en plaisantant, by Deslandes, ostensibly published at Amsterdam in 1712, seems to have had a precarious circulation, inasmuch as Brunet never saw the first edition. To permit of the issue of such a book as Jacques Massé—even at Bordeaux—the censure must have been notably lax; as it was again in the year of the king’s death, when there appeared a translation of Collins’s Discourse of Freethinking. For the moment the Government was occupied over an insensate renewal of the old persecution of Protestants, promulgating in 1715 a decree that all who died after refusing the sacraments should be refused burial, and that their goods should be confiscated. The edict seems to have been in large measure disregarded.
2. At the same time the continuous output of apologetics testified to the gathering tide of unbelief. The Benedictine Lami followed up his attack on Spinoza with a more popular treatise, L’Incrédule amené à la religion par la raison (1710); the Abbé Genest turned Descartes into verse by way of Preuves naturelles de l’existence de Dieu et de l’immortalité de l’âme (1716); and the Anti-Lucretius of Cardinal Polignac (1661–1741), though only posthumously published in full (1745), did but pass on to the next age, when deism was the prevailing heresy, a deistic argument against atheism. It is difficult to see any Christian sentiment in that dialectic performance of a born diplomatist.[5]
When the old king died, even the fashion of conformity passed away among the upper classes;[6] and the feverish manufacture of apologetic works testifies to an unslackened activity of unbelief. In 1719 Jean Denyse, professor of philosophy at the college of Montaigu, produced La vérité de la religion chrétienne demontrée par ordre géométrique (a title apparently suggested by Spinoza’s early exposition of Descartes), without making any permanent impression on heterodox opinion. Not more successful, apparently, was the performance of the Abbé Houteville, first published in 1722.[7] Much more amiable in tone, and more scientific in temper, than the common run of defences, it was found, says an orthodox biographical dictionary, to be “better fitted to make unbelievers than to convert them,” seeing that “objections were presented with much force and fulness, and the replies with more amenity than weight.”[8] That the Abbé was in fact not rigorously orthodox might almost be suspected from his having been appointed, in the last year of his life (1742), “perpetual secretary” to the Académie, an office which somehow tended to fall to more or less freethinking members, being held before him by the Abbé Dubos, and after him by Mirabaud, the Abbé Duclos,[9] D’Alembert, and Marmontel. The Traités des Premières Veritéz of the Jesuit Father Buffier (1724) can hardly have been more helpful to the faith.[10] Another experiment by way of popularizing orthodoxy, the copious Histoire du peuple de Dieu, by the Jesuit Berruyer, first published in 1728,[11] had little better fortune, inasmuch as it scandalized the orthodox by its secularity of tone without persuading the freethinkers. Condemned by the Bishop of Montpellier in 1731, it was censured by Rome in 1734; and the second part, produced long afterwards, aroused even more antagonism.