8. With the ground prepared as we have seen, freethought was bound to progress in France in the age of Louis XV; but it chanced that the lead fell into the hands of the most brilliant and fecund of all the writers of the century. Voltaire[39] (1694–1778) was already something of a freethinker when a mere child. So common was deism already become in Paris at the end of the seventeenth century that his godfather, an abbé, is said to have taught him, at the age of three, a poem by J. B. Rousseau,[40] then privately circulated, in which Moses in particular and religious revelations in general are derided as fraudulent.[41] Knowing this poem by heart in his childhood, the boy was well on the way to his life’s work. It is on record that many of his school-fellows were, like himself, already deists, though his brother, a juvenile Jansenist, made vows to propitiate the deity on the small unbeliever’s behalf.[42] It may have been a general reputation for audacious thinking that led to his being charged with the authorship of a stinging philippic published in 1715, after the death of Louis XIV. The unknown author, a young man, enumerated the manifold abuses and iniquities of the reign, concluding: “I have seen all these, and I am not twenty years old.” Voltaire was then twenty-two; but D’Argenson, who in the poem had been called “the enemy of the human race,” finding no likelier author for the verses, put him under surveillance and exiled him from Paris; and on his imprudent return imprisoned him for nearly a year in the Bastille (1716), releasing him only when the real author of the verses avowed himself. Unconquerable then as always, Voltaire devoted himself in prison to his literary ambitions, planning his Henriade and completing his Œdipe, which was produced in 1718 with signal success.
Voltaire was thus already a distinguished young poet and dramatist when, in 1726, after enduring the affronts of an assault by a nobleman’s lacqueys, and of imprisonment in the Bastille for seeking amends by duel, he came to England, where, like Deslandes before him, he met with a ready welcome from the freethinkers.[43] Four years previously, in the powerful poem, For and Against,[44] he had put his early deistic conviction in a vehement impeachment of the immoral creed of salvation and damnation, making the declaration, “I am not a Christian.” Thus what he had to learn in England was not deism, but the physics of Newton and the details of the deist campaign against revelationism; and these he mastered.[45] Not only was he directly and powerfully influenced by Bolingbroke, who became his intimate friend, but he read widely in the philosophic, scientific, and deistic English literature of the day,[46] and went back to France, after three years’ stay, not only equipped for his ultimate battle with tyrannous religion, but deeply impressed by the moral wholesomeness of free discussion.[47] Not all at once, indeed, did he become the mouthpiece of critical reason for his age: his literary ambitions were primarily on the lines of belles lettres, and secondarily on those of historical writing. After his Pour et Contre, his first freethinking production was the not very heretical Lettres philosophiques or Lettres anglaises, written in England in 1728, and, after circulating in MS., published in five editions in 1734; and the official burning of the book by the common hangman, followed by the imprisonment of the bookseller in the Bastille,[48] was a sufficient check on such activity for the time. Save for the jests about Adam and Eve in the Mondain (1736), a slight satire for which he had to fly from Paris; and the indirect though effective thrusts at bigotry in the Ligue (1723; later the Henriade); in the tragedy of Mahomet (1739; printed in 1742), in the tales of Memnon and Zadig (1747–48), and in the Idées de La Mothe le Vayer (1751) and the Défense de Milord Bolingbroke (1752), he produced nothing else markedly deistic till 1755, when he published the “Poem to the King of Prussia,” otherwise named Sur la loi naturelle (which appears to have been written in 1751, while he was on a visit to the Margravine of Bayreuth), and that on the Earthquake of Lisbon. So definitely did the former poem base all morality on natural principles that it was ordered to be burned by the Parlement of Paris, then equally alarmed at freethinking and at Molinism.[49] And so impossible was it still in France to print any specific criticism of Christianity that when in 1759 he issued his verse translations of the Song of Solomon and Ecclesiastes they also were publicly burned, though he had actually softened instead of heightening the eroticism of the first and the “materialism” of the second.[50]
9. It is thus a complete mistake on the part of Buckle to affirm that the activity of the French reformers up to 1750 was directed against religion, and that it was thereafter turned against the State. Certainly there was much freethinking among instructed men and others, but it proceeded, as under Louis XIV, mainly by way of manuscripts and conversation, or at best by the circulation of English books and a few translations of these; and only guardedly before 1745 by means of published French books.[51] The Abbé Ranchon, in his MS. Life of Cardinal Fleury, truly says that “the time of the Regency was a period of the spirit of dissoluteness and irreligion”; but when he ascribes to “those times” many “licentious and destructive writings” he can specify only those of the English deists. “Precisely in the time of the Regency a multitude of those offensive and irreligious books were brought over the sea: France was deluged with them.”[52] It is incredible that multitudes of Frenchmen read English in the days of the Regency. French freethinkers like Saint Evremond and Deslandes, who visited or sojourned in London before 1715, took their freethought there with them; and the only translations then in print were those of Collins’s Discourse of Freethinking and Shaftesbury’s essays on the Use of Ridicule and on Enthusiasm. Apart from these, the only known French freethinking book of the Regency period was the work of Vroes, a councillor at the court of Brabant, on the Spirit of Spinoza, reprinted as Des trois imposteurs. Meslier died not earlier than 1729; the Histoire de la philosophie payenne of Burigny belongs to 1724; the Lettres philosophiques of Voltaire to 1734; the earlier works of d’Argens to 1737–38; the Nouvelles libertés de penser, edited by Dumarsais, to 1743; and the militant treatise of De la Serre, best known as the Examen de la Religion, to 1745.
The ferment thus kept up was indeed so great that about 1748 the ecclesiastical authorities decided on the remarkable step of adopting for their purposes the apologetic treatise adapted by Jacob Vernet, professor of belles lettres at Geneva, from the works of Jean-Alphonse Turrettin,[53] not only a Protestant but a substantially Socinian professor of ecclesiastical history at the same university. The treatise is itself a testimony to the advance of rationalism in the Protestant world; and its adoption, even under correction, by the Catholic Church in France tells of a keen consciousness of need. But the dreaded advance, as we have seen, was only to a small extent yet traceable by new literature. The Examen critique des apologistes de la religion chrétienne of Lévesque de Burigny was probably written about 1732, and then and thereafter circulated in manuscript, but it was not published till 1766; and even in manuscript its circulation was probably small, though various apologetic works had testified to the increasing uneasiness of the orthodox world. Such titles as La religion chrétienne demontrée par la Resurrection (by Armand de la Chapelle, 1728) and La religion chrétienne prouvée par l’accomplissement des prophéties (by Père Baltus, 1728) tell of private unbelief under the Regency. In 1737 appeared the voluminous treatise (anonymous) of the Abbé de la Chambre, Traité de la véritable religion contre les athées, les déistes, etc. (5 vols.). In 1747, again, there appeared a learned, laborious, and unintelligent work in three volumes (authorized in 1742), Le Libertinage combattu par la témoignage des auteurs profanes, by an unnamed Benedictine[54] of the Congregation of St. Vanne. It declares that, between atheism and deism, there has never been so much unbelief as now; but it cites no modern books, and is devoted to arraying classic arguments in support of theism and morals. Part of the exposition consists in showing that Epicurus, Lucian, and Euripides, whom modern atheists are wont to cite as their masters, were not and could not have been atheists; and the pious author roundly declares in favour of paganism as against atheism.
So much smoke tells of fire; but only in 1745 and 1746 did the printed Examen of De la Serre and the Pensées philosophiques of Diderot begin to build up in France the modern school of critical and philosophic deism. When in 1751 the Abbé Gauchat began his series of Lettres critiques, he set out by attacking Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques, Diderot’s Pensées philosophiques, the anonymous Discours sur la vie heureuse (1748), Les Mœurs[55] (1748), and Pope’s Essay on Man; taking up in his second volume the Lettres Persanes of Montesquieu (1721), and other sets of Lettres written in imitation of them. In the third volume he has nothing more aggressive of Voltaire’s to deal with than La Henriade, the Mahomet, and some of his fugitive pieces. And the Bishop of Puy, writing in 1754 his La Dévotion conciliée avec l’esprit, could say to the faithful: “You live in an age fertile in pretended esprits forts, who, too weak nevertheless to attack in front an invincible religion, skirmish lightly around it, and in default of the reasons they lack, employ raillery.”[56] The chivalrous bishop knew perfectly well that had a serious attack been published author and publisher would have been sent if possible to the Bastille, if not to the scaffold. But his evidence is explicit. There is here no recognition of any literary bombardment, though there was certainly an abundance of unbelief.[57]
Buckle has probably mistaken the meaning of the summing up of some previous writer to the effect that up to 1750 or a few years later the political opposition to the Court was religious, in the sense of ecclesiastical or sectarian (Jansenist),[58] and that it afterwards turned to matters of public administration.[59] It would be truer to say that the early Lettres philosophiques, the reading of which later made the boy Lafayette a republican at nine, were a polemic for political and social freedom, and as such a more direct criticism of the French administrative system than Voltaire ever penned afterwards, save in the Voix du Sage et du Peuple (1750). In point of fact, as will be shown below, only some twenty scattered freethinking works had appeared in French up to 1745, almost none of them directly attacking Christian beliefs; and, despite the above-noted sallies of Voltaire, Condorcet comes to the general conclusion that it was the hardihood of Rousseau’s deism in the “Confession of a Savoyard Vicar” in his Émile (1762) that spurred Voltaire to new activity.[60] This is perhaps not quite certain; there is some reason to believe that his “Sermon of the Fifty,” his “first frontal attack on Christianity,”[61] was written a year before; but in any case that and other productions of his at once left Rousseau far in the rear. Even now he had no fixed purpose of continuous warfare against so powerful and cruel an enemy as the Church, which in 1757 had actually procured an edict pronouncing the death penalty against all writers of works attacking religion; though the fall of the Jesuits in 1764 raised new hopes of freedom. But when, after that hopeful episode, there began a new movement of Jansenist fanaticism; and when, after the age of religious savagery had seemed to be over, there began a new series of religious atrocities in France itself (1762–66), he girded on a sword that was not to be laid down till his death.
Even so late as 1768, in his last letter to Damilaville (8 fév.), Voltaire expresses a revulsion against the aggressive freethought propaganda of the time which is either one of his epistolary stratagems or the expression of a nervous reaction in a time of protracted bad health. “Mes chagrins redoublent,” he writes, “par la quantité incroyable d’écrits contre la religion chrétienne, qui se succédent aussi rapidement en Hollande que les gazettes et les journaux.” His enemies have the barbarism to impute to him, at his age, “une partie de ces extravagances composées par de jeunes gens et par des moines défroqués.” His immediate ground for chagrin may have been the fact that this outbreak of anti-Christian literature was likely to thwart him in the campaign he was then making to secure justice to the Sirven family as he had already vindicated that of Calas. Sirven barely missed the fate of the latter.
The misconception of Buckle, above discussed, has been widely shared even among students. Thus Lord Morley, discussing the “Creed of the Savoyard Vicar” in Rousseau’s Émile (1762), writes that “Souls weary of the fierce mockeries that had so long been flying like fiery shafts against the far Jehovah of the Hebrews, and the silent Christ of the later doctors and dignitaries,” may well have turned to it with ardour (Rousseau, ed. 1886, ii, 266). He further speaks of the “superiority of the sceptical parts of the Savoyard Vicar’s profession ... over the biting mockeries which Voltaire had made the fashionable method of assault” (p. 294). No specifications are offered, and the chronology is seen to be astray. The only mockeries which Voltaire could be said to have made fashionable before 1760 were those of his Lettres philosophiques, his Mondain, his Défense de Milord Bolingbroke, and his philosophically humorous tales, as Candide, Zadig, Micromégas, etc.: all his distinctive attacks on Judaism and Christianity were yet to come. [The Abbé Guyon, in his L’Oracle des nouveaux philosophes (Berne, 1759–60, 2 tom.), proclaims an attack on doctrines taught “dans les livres de nos beaux esprits” (Avert. p. xi); but he specifies only denials of (1) revelation, (2) immortality, and (3) the Biblical account of man’s creation; and he is largely occupied with Diderot’s Pensées philosophiques, though his book is written at Voltaire. The second volume is devoted to Candide and the Précis of Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon—not very fierce performances.] Lord Morley, as it happens, does not make this chronological mistake in his earlier work on Voltaire, where he rightly represents him as beginning his attack on “the Infamous” after he had settled at Ferney (1758). His “fierce mockeries” begin at the earliest in 1761. The mistake may have arisen through taking as true the fictitious date of 1736 for the writing of the Examen Important de Milord Bolingbroke. It belongs to 1767. Buckle’s error, it may be noted, is repeated by so careful a student as Dr. Redlich, Local Government in England, Eng. tr. 1903, i, 64.
10. The rest of Voltaire’s long life was a sleepless and dexterous warfare, by all manner of literary stratagem,[62] facilitated by vast literary fame and ample acquired wealth, against what he called “the Infamous”—the Church and the creed which he found still swift to slay for mere variation of belief, and slow to let any good thing be wrought for the bettering of men’s lives. Of his prodigious literary performance it is probably within the truth to say that in respect of rapid influence on the general intelligence of the world it has never been equalled by any one man’s writing; and that, whatever its measure of error and of personal misdirection, its broader influence was invariably for peace on earth, for tolerance among men, and for reason in all things. His faults were many, and some were serious; but to no other man of his age, save possibly Beccaria, can be attributed so much beneficent accomplishment. He can perhaps better be estimated as a force than as a man. So great was the area of his literary energy that he is inevitably inadequate at many points. Lessing could successfully impugn him in drama; Diderot in metaphysic; Gibbon in history; and it is noteworthy that all of these men[63] at different times criticized him with asperity, testing him by the given item of performance, and disparaging his personality. Yet in his own way he was a greater power than any of them; and his range, as distinguished from his depth, outgoes theirs. In sum, he was the greatest mental fighter of his age, perhaps of any age: in that aspect he is a “power-house” not to be matched in human history; and his polemic is mainly for good. It was a distinguished English academic who declared that “civilization owes more to Voltaire than to all the Fathers of the Church put together.”[64] If in a literary way he hated his personal foes, much more did he hate cruelty and bigotry; and it was his work more than any that made impossible a repetition in Europe of such clerical crimes as the hanging of the Protestant pastor, La Rochette; the execution of the Protestant, Calas, on an unproved and absurdly false charge; the torture of his widow and children; the beheading of the lad La Barre for ill-proved blasphemy.[65] As against his many humanities, there is not to be charged on him one act of public malevolence. In his relations with his fickle admirer, Frederick the Great, and with others of his fellow-thinkers, he and they painfully brought home to freethinkers the lesson that for them as for all men there is a personal art of life that has to be learned, over and above the rectification of opinion. But he and the others wrought immensely towards that liberation alike from unreason and from bondage which must precede any great improvement of human things.
Voltaire’s constant burden was that religion was not only untrue but pernicious, and when he was not dramatically showing this of Christianity, as in his poem La Ligue (1723), he was saying it by implication in such plays as Zaïre (1732) and Mahomet (1742), dealing with the fanaticism of Islam; while in the Essai sur les mœurs (1756), really a broad survey of general history, and in the Siècle de Louis XIV, he applied the method of Montesquieu, with pungent criticism thrown in. Later, he added to his output direct criticisms of the Christian books, as in the Examen important de Milord Bolingbroke (1767), and the Recherches historiques sur le Christianisme (? 1769), continuing all his former lines of activity. Meanwhile, with the aid of his companion the Marquise du Chatelet, an accomplished mathematician, he had done much to popularize the physics of Newton and discredit the scientific fallacies of the system of Descartes; all the while preaching a Newtonian but rather agnostic deism. This is the purport of his Philosophe Ignorant, his longest philosophical essay.[66] The destruction of Lisbon by the earthquake of 1755 seems to have shaken him in his deistic faith, since the upshot of his poem on that subject is to leave the moral government of the universe an absolute enigma; and in the later Candide (1759) he attacks theistic optimism with his matchless ridicule. Indeed, as early as 1749, in his Traité de la Métaphysique, written for the Marquise du Chatelet, he reaches virtually pantheistic positions in defence of the God-idea, declaring with Spinoza that deity can be neither good nor bad. But, like so many professed pantheists, he relapsed, and he never accepted the atheistic view; on the contrary, we find him arguing absurdly enough, in his Homily on Atheism (1765), that atheism had been the destruction of morality in Rome;[67] on the publication of d’Holbach’s System of Nature in 1770 he threw off an article Dieu: réponse au Système de la Nature, where he argued on the old deistic lines; and his tale of Jenni; or, the Sage and the Atheist (1775), is a polemic on the same theme. By this time the inconsistent deism of his youth had itself been discredited among the more thoroughgoing freethinkers; and for years it had been said in one section of literary society that Voltaire after all “is a bigot; he is a deist!”[68]