D’Argenson, watching in his vigilant retirement the course of things on all hands, sees in the episode a new and dangerous development, “the establishment of a veritable inquisition in France, of which the Jesuits joyfully take charge,” though he repeatedly remarks also on the eagerness of the Jansenists to outgo the Jesuits.[79] But soon the publication of the Encyclopédie is resumed; and in 1753 D’Argenson contentedly notes the official bestowal of “tacit permissions to print secretly” books which could not obtain formal authorization. The permission had been given first by the President Malesherbes; but even when that official lost the king’s confidence the practice was continued by the lieutenant of police.[80] Despite the staggering blow of the suppression of the Encyclopédie, the philosophes speedily triumphed. So great was the discontent even at court that soon (1752) Madame de Pompadour and some of the ministry invited D’Alembert and Diderot to resume their work, “observing a necessary reserve in all things touching religion and authority.” Madame de Pompadour was in fact, as D’Alembert said at her death, “in her heart one of ours,” as was D’Argenson. But D’Alembert, in a long private conference with D’Argenson, insisted that they must write in freedom like the English and the Prussians, or not at all. Already there was talk of suppressing the philosophic works of Condillac, which a few years before had gone uncondemned; and freedom must be preserved at any cost. “I acquiesce,” writes the ex-Minister, “in these arguments.”[81]

Curiously enough, the freethinking Fontenelle, who for a time (the dates are elusive) held the office of royal censor, was more rigorous than other officials who had not his reputation for heterodoxy. One day he refused to pass a certain manuscript, and the author put the challenge: “You, sir, who have published the Histoire des Oracles, refuse me this?” “If I had been the censor of the Oracles,” replied Fontenelle, “I should not have passed it.”[82] And he had cause for his caution. The unlucky Tercier, who, engrossed in “foreign affairs,” had authorized the publication of the De l’Esprit of Helvétius, was compelled to resign the censorship, and severely rebuked by the Paris Parlement.[83] But the culture-history of the period, like the political, was one of ups and downs. From time to time the philosophic party had friends at court, as in the persons of the Marquis D’Argenson, Malesherbes, and the Duc de Choiseul, of whom the last-named engineered the suppression of the Jesuits.[84] Then there were checks to the forward movement in the press, as when, in 1770, Choiseul was forced to retire on the advent of Madame Du Barry. The output of freethinking books is after that year visibly curtailed. But nothing could arrest the forward movement of opinion.

12. A new era of propaganda and struggle had visibly begun. In the earlier part of the century freethought had been disseminated largely by way of manuscripts[85] and reprints of foreign books in translation; but from the middle onwards, despite denunciations and prohibitions, new books multiply. To the policy of tacit toleration imposed by Malesherbes a violent end was temporarily put in 1757, when the Jesuits obtained a proclamation of the death penalty against all writers who should attack the Christian religion, directly or indirectly. It was doubtless under the menace of this decree that Deslandes, before dying in 1757, caused to be drawn up by two notaries an acte by which he disavowed and denounced not only his Grands hommes morts en plaisantant but all his other works, whether printed or in MS., in which he had “laid down principles or sustained sentiments contrary to the spirit of religion.”[86] But in 1764, on the suppression of the Jesuits, there was a vigorous resumption of propaganda. “There are books,” writes Voltaire in 1765, “of which forty years ago one would not have trusted the manuscript to one’s friends, and of which there are now published six editions in eighteen months.”[87] Voltaire single-handed produced a library; and d’Holbach is credited with at least a dozen freethinking treatises, every one remarkable in its day. But there were many more combatants. The reputation of Voltaire has overshadowed even that of his leading contemporaries, and theirs and his have further obscured that of the lesser men; but a list of miscellaneous freethinking works by French writers during the century, up to the Revolution, will serve to show how general was the activity after 1750. It will be seen that very little was published in France in the period in which English deism was most fecund. A noticeable activity of publication begins about 1745. But it was when the long period of chronic warfare ended for France with the peace of Paris (1763); when she had lost India and North America; when she had suppressed the Jesuit order (1764); and when England had in the main turned from intellectual interests to the pursuit of empire and the development of manufacturing industry, that the released French intelligence[88] turned with irresistible energy to the rational criticism of established opinions. The following table is thus symbolic of the whole century’s development:—

1700.Lettre d’Hypocrateà Damagète, attributed to the Comte deBoulainvilliers. (Cologne.) Rep. in BibliothèqueVolante, Amsterdam, 1700.
1700.
,,
[Claude Gilbert.] Histoire deCalejava, ou de l’isle des hommes raisonnables, avec leparallèle de leur morale et du Christianisme. Dijon.Suppressed by the author: only one copy known to have escaped.
1704.[Gueudeville.] Dialogues de M. leBaron de la Houtan et d’un sauvage dansl’Amérique. (Amsterdam.)
1709.Lettre sur l’enthousiasme(Fr. tr. of Shaftesbury, by Samson). La Haye.
1710.[Tyssot de Patot, Symon.] Voyages etAvantures de Jaques Massé. (Bourdeaux.)
1710.
,,
Essai sur l’usage de laraillerie (Fr. tr. of Shaftesbury, by Van Effen). La Haye.
1712.[Deslandes, A. F. B.] Reflexions surles grands hommes qui sont morts en plaisantant.[89](Amsterdam.)
1714.Discours sur la liberté depenser [French tr. of Collins’s Discourse ofFreethinking], traduit de l’anglois etaugmenté d’une Lettre d’un MédecinArabe. (Tr. by Henri Scheurléer and Jean Rousset.) [Rep.1717.][90]
1719.[Vroes.] La Vie et l’Esprit deM. Benoît de Spinoza.
1720.Same work rep. under the double title: De tribus impostoribus: Des trois imposteurs. Frankfort onMain.
1724.[Lévesque de Burigny.] Histoire de la philosophie payenne. La Haye, 2 tom.
1730.[Bernard, J.-F.] Dialogues critiqueset philosophiques. “Par l’Abbé deCharte-Livry.” (Amsterdam.) Rep. 1735.
1731.Réfutation des erreurs deBenoît de Spinoza, par Fénelon, le P. Laury,benédictin, et Boulainvilliers, avec la vie de Spinoza ... parColerus, etc. (collected and published by Lenglet du Fresnoy).Bruxelles (really Amsterdam). The treatise of Boulainvilliers is reallya popular exposition.
1732.Re-issue of Deslandes’s Réflexions.
1734.[Voltaire.] Lettresphilosophiques. 4 edd. within the year. [Condemned to be burned.Publisher imprisoned.]
1734.
,,
[Longue, Louis-Pierre de.] LesPrincesses Malabares, ou le Célibat Philosophique. Deisticallegory. [Condemned to be burned.]
1737.Marquis D’Argens. LaPhilosophie du Bon Sens. (Berlin: 8th edition, Dresden, 1754.)
1738.——, Lettres Juives.6 tom. (Berlin.)
1738.
,,
[Marie Huber.] Lettres sur lareligion essentielle à l’homme, distingue de ce quin’en est que l’accessoire. 2 tom. (Nominally London.)Rep. 1739 and 1756.
1739.——, Suite to theforegoing, “servant de réponse aux objections,” etc.Also Suite de la troisième partie.
1741.[Deslandes.] Pigmalion, ou la Statueanimée. [Condemned to be burnt by Parlement of Dijon,1742.]
1741.
,,
——, De la Certitude desconnaissances humaines ... traduit del’anglais par F. A. D. L. V.
1743.Nouvelles libertés depenser. Amsterdam. [Edited by Dumarsais. Contains the first printof Fontenelle’s Traité de laLiberté, Dumarsais’s short essays LePhilosophe and De la raison, Mirabaud’sSentimens des philosophes sur la nature del’âme, etc.]
1745.[Lieut. De la Serre.] La vraiereligion traduite de l’Ecriture Sainte, par permission de Jean,Luc, Marc, et Matthieu. (Nominally Trévoux,“aux dépens des Pères de laSociété de Jésus.”) [Appeared lateras Examen, etc. Condemned to be burnt by Parlement ofParis.]

[This book was republished in the same year with“demontrée par” substitutedin the title for “traduite de,” andpurporting to be “traduit de l’Anglais deGilbert Burnet,” with the imprint “Londres, G. Cock, 1745.” It appeared again in 1761 asExamen de la religion dont on cherchel’éclaircissement de bonne foi. Attribué àM. de Saint-Evremont, traduit, etc., with the same imprint. Itagain bore the latter title when reprinted in 1763, and again in theÉvangile de la Raison in 1764. Voltaire in 1763declared it to be the work of Dumarsais, pronouncing it to be assuredlynot in the style of Saint-Evremond (Grimm, iv, 85–88; Voltaire,Lettre à Damilaville, 6 déc. 1763), adding“mais il est fort tronqué etdétestablement imprimé.” This is true of thereprints in the Évangile de la Raison (1764,etc.), of one of which the present writer possesses a copy to whichthere has been appended in MS. a long section which had been lacking.The Évangile as a whole purports to be“Ouvrage posthume de M. D.M......y.”[91] But its first volumeincludes four pieces of Voltaire’s, and his abridged Testament de Jean Meslier. Further, De la Serre is recorded tohave claimed the authorship in writing on the eve of his death.Barbier, Dict. des Anonymes, 2e éd, No. 6158.He is said to have been hanged as a spy at Maestricht, April 11,1748.]

1745.[La Mettrie.] Histoire naturelle del’âme. [Condemned to be burnt, 1746.] Rep. as Traité de l’âme.
1746.[Diderot.] Penséesphilosophiques. [Condemned to be burnt.]
1748.[P. Estève.] L’Originede l’Univers expliquée par un principe dematière. (Berlin.)
1748.
,,
[Benoît de Maillet.] Telliamed, ou Entretiens d’un philosophe indien avec unmissionaire français. (Printed privately, 1735; rep.1755.)
1748.
,,
[La Mettrie.] L’HommeMachine.
1750.Nouvelles libertés depenser. Rep.
1751.[Mirabaud, J. B. de.] Le Monde, sonorigine et son antiquité. [Edited by the Abbé LeMaserier (who contributed the preface and the third part) andDumarsais.]
1751.
,,
De Prades. Sorbonne Thesis.
1752.[Gouvest, J. H. Maubert de.] LettresIroquoises. “Irocopolis, chez lesVénérables.” 2 tom. (Rep. 1769 as Lettres cherakésiennes.)
1752.
,,
[Génard, F.] L’École de l’homme, ou Parallèle desPortraits du siècle et des tableaux de l’écrituresainte.[92] Amsterdam, 3 tom. [Author imprisoned.]
1753.[Baume-Desdossat, Canon of Avignon.] La Christiade. [Book suppressed. Author fined.][93]
1753.
,,
Maupertuis. Système de lanature.
1753.
,,
Astruc, Jean. Conjectures sur lesmémoires originaux dont il parait que Moïse s’estservi pour composer le livre de la Genèse. Bruxelles.
1754.Prémontval, A. I. le Guay de. Le Diogène de d’Alembert, ou Pensées libressur l’homme. Berlin. (2nd ed. enlarged, 1755.)
1754.
,,
Burigny, J. L. Théologiepayenne. 2 tom. (New ed. of his Histoire de laphilosophie, 1724.)
1754.
,,
[Diderot.] Pensées surl’interpretation de la nature.
1754.
,,
Beausobre, L. de (the younger). Pyrrhonisme du Sage. Berlin. (Burned by Paris Parlement.)
1755.Recherches philosophiques sur laliberté de l’homme. Trans. of Collins’sPhilosophical Inquiry concerning Human Liberty.
1755.
,,
[Voltaire.] Poème Sur la loinaturelle.
1755.
,,
Analyse raisonnée deBayle. 4 tom. [By the Abbé de Marsy. Suppressed.[94] Continued in 1773, in 4 new vols., byRobinet.]
1755.
,,
Morelly. Code de la Nature.
1755.
,,
[Deleyre.] Analyse de la philosophiede Bacon. (Largely an exposition of Deleyre’s ownviews.)
1757.Prémontval. VuesPhilosophiques. (Amsterdam.)

[In this year—apparently after one ofvigilant repression—was pronounced the death penalty against allwriters attacking religion. Hence a general suspension ofpublication. In 1764 the Jesuits were suppressed, and the policy ofcensorship was soon paralysed.]

1758.Helvétius. Del’Esprit. (Authorized. Then condemned.)
1759.[Voltaire.] Candide.(“Genève.”)
1759.
,,
Translation of Hume’s NaturalHistory of Religion and Philosophical Essays. (By Mérian.)Amsterdam.
1761.[N.-A. Boulanger.[95]]Recherches sur l’origine du despotisme oriental, etdes superstitions. “Ouvrage posthume de Mr. D. J. D. P. E.C.”
1761.
,,
Rep. of De la Serre’s La vraiereligion as Examen de la religion, etc.
1761.
,,
[D’Holbach.] Le Christianismedévoilé. [Imprint: “Londres, 1756.”Really printed at Nancy in 1761. Wrongly attributed to Boulanger and toDamilaville.] Rep. 1767 and 1777.

[Grimm (Corr. inédite,1829, p. 194) speaks in 1763 of this book in his notice ofBoulanger, remarking that the title was apparently meant to suggest theauthor of L’Antiquitédévoilée, but that it was obviously by another hand.The Antiquité, in fact, was the concludingsection of Boulanger’s posthumous DespotismeOriental (1761), and was not published till 1766. Grimm professedignorance as to the authorship, but must have known it, as didVoltaire, who by way of mystification ascribed the book to Damilaville.See Barbier.]

1762.Rousseau. Émile.[Publicly burned at Paris and at Geneva. Condemned by theSorbonne.]
1762.
,,
Robinet, J. B. De la nature.Vol. i. (Vol. ii in 1764; iii and iv in 1766.)
1763.[Voltaire.] Saül.Genève.
1763.
,,
—— Dialogue entre unCaloyer et un honnête homme.
1763.
,,
Rep. of De la Serres’ Examen.
1764.Discours sur la liberté depenser. (Rep. of trans. of Collins.)
1764.
,,
[Voltaire.] Dictionnairephilosophique portatif.[96] [First form of the Dictionnaire philosophique. Burned in 1765.]
1764.
,,
Lettres secrètes de M. deVoltaire. [Holland. Collection of tracts made by Robinet, againstVoltaire’s will.]
1764.
,,
[Voltaire.] Mélanges, 3tom. Genève.
1764.
,,
[Dulaurens, Abbé H. J.] L’Arétin.
1764.
,,
L’Évangile de laRaison. Ouvrage posthume de M. D. M——y. [Ed. byAbbé Dulaurens; containing the Testament de JeanMeslier (greatly abridged and adapted by Voltaire);Voltaire’s Catéchisme del’honnête homme, Sermon des cinquante,etc.; the Examen de la religion, attribué àM. de St. Evremond; Rousseau’s VicaireSavoyard, from Émile; Dumarsais’sAnalyse de la religion chrétienne, etc. Rep.1765 and 1766.]
1765.Recueil Nécessaire, avecL’Évangile de la Raison, 2 tom.

[Rep. of parts of the Évangile. Rep. 1767,[97] 1768,with Voltaire’s Examen important de MilordBolingbroke substituted for that of De la Serre (attribué a M. de St. Evremond), and with a revised setof extracts from Meslier.]

1765.
,,
Castillon, J. L. Essai dephilosophic morale.
1766.Boulanger, N. A. L’Antiquité dévoilée.[98] 3 tom. [Recast by d’Holbach. Life ofauthor by Diderot.]
1766.Voyage de Robertson auxterres australes. Traduit sur le Manuscrit Anglois. Amsterdam.

[Barbier (Dict. des Ouvr. Anon.,2e éd. iii, 437) has a note concerning this Voyage whichpleasantly illustrates the strategy that went on in the issue offreethinking books. An ex-censor of the period, he tells us, wrote anote on the original edition pointing out that it contains (pp.145–54) a tirade against “Parlements.” This passagewas “suppressed to obtain permission to bring the book intoFrance,” and a new passage attacking the Encyclopédistesunder the name of Pansophistes was inserted at anotherpoint. The ex-censor had a copy of an edition of 1767, in 12mo, betterprinted than the first and on better paper. In this, at p. 87, line 30,begins the attack on the Encyclopédistes, which continues to p.93.

If this is accurate, there has taken place a doublemystification. I possess a copy dated 1767, in 12mo, in which no pagehas so many as 30 lines, and in which there has been no typographicalchange whatever in pp. 87–93, where there is no mention ofEncyclopédistes. But pp. 145–54 are clearly atypographical substitution, in different type, with fewer lines to thepage. Here there is a narrative about the Pansophistesof the imaginary “Australie”; butwhile it begins with enigmatic satire it ends by praising them forbringing about a great intellectual and social reform.

If the censure was induced to pass the book as it is inthis edition by this insertion, it was either very heedless or veryindulgent. There is a sweeping attack on the papacy (pp. 91–99),and another on the Jesuits (pp. 100–102); and it leans a gooddeal towards republicanism. But on a balance, though clearlyanti-clerical, it is rather socio-political than freethinking in itscriticism. The words on the title-page, traduit sur lemanuscrit anglois, are of course pure mystification. It is aromance of the Utopia school, and criticizes English conditionsas well as French.]

1766.De Prades. Abrégé del’histoire ecclésiastique de Fleury. (Berlin.) Pref.by Frederick the Great. (Rep. 1767.)
1766.
,,
[Burigny.] Examen critique desApologistes de la religion chrétienne. Published (by Naigeon?) under the name of Fréret.[99] [Twice rep. in 1767. Condemned to be burnt,1770.]
1766.
,,
[Voltaire.] Le philosopheignorant.
1766.
,,
[Abbé Millot.] Histoirephilosophique de l’homme. [Naturalistic theory of humanbeginnings.]
1767.Castillon. AlmanachPhilosophique.
1767.
,,
Doutes sur la religion(attributed to Gueroult de Pival), suivi del’Analyse du Traité théologique-politique deSpinoza (by Boulainvilliers). [Rep. with additions in 1792 underthe title Doutes sur les religionsrévélées, adressés à Voltaire,par Émilie du Chatelet. Ouvrage posthume.]
1767.
,,
[Dulaurens.] L’antipapismerévélé.
1767.
,,
Lettre de Thrasybule àLeucippe. [Published under the name of Fréret (d. 1749).Written or edited by Naigeon.[100]]
1767.[D’Holbach.] L’Imposturesacerdotale, ou Recueil de pièces sur la clergé,traduites de l’anglois.
1767.
,,
[Voltaire.] Collection des lettressur les miracles.
1767.
,,
—— Examen important demilord Bolingbroke.
1767.
,,
Marmontel. Bélisaire.(Censured by the Sorbonne.)
1767.
,,
[Damilaville.] L’honnêtetê théologique.
1767.
,,
Reprint of Le Christianismedévoilé. [Condemned to be burnt, 1768 and 1770.]
1767.
,,
[Voltaire.] Questions sur lesMiracles. Par un Proposant.
1767.
,,
Seconde partie of the Recherches sur l’origine du despotisme.
1768.Meister, J. H. De l’originedes principes religieux.

[Author banished from his native town, Zurich,“in perpetuity” (decree rescinded in 1772), and bookpublicly burned there by the hangman.[101] Meisterpublished a modified edition at Zurich in 1769. Orig. rep. in theRecueil Philosophique, 1770.]

1768.Catalogue raisonné desesprits forts, depuis le curé Rabelais jusqu’aucuré Meslier.
1768.
,,
[D’Holbach.] La Contagionsacrée, ou histoire naturelle de la superstition. [Condemnedto be burnt, 1770.]
1768.
,,
—— Lettresphilosophiques sur l’origine des préjugés,etc., traduites de l’anglois (of Toland).
1768.
,,
—— Lettres àEugénie, ou preservatif contre les préjugés. 2tom.
1768.
,,
—— ThéologiePortative. “Par l’abbé Bernier.” [Alsoburnt, 1776.]
1768.
,,
Traité des troisImposteurs. (See 1719 and 1720.) Rep. 1775, 1777, 1793.
1768.
,,
Naigeon, J. A. Le militairephilosophe. [Adaptation of a MS. The last chapter byd’Holbach.]
1768.
,,
D’Argens. Œuvrescomplètes, 24 tom. Berlin.
1768.
,,
Examen des prophéties quiservent de fondement à la religion chrétienne (tr.from Collins by d’Holbach).
1768.
,,
Robinet. Considérationsphilosophiques.
1769–1780.L’Évangile du jour.18 tom. Series of pieces, chiefly by Voltaire.
1769.[Diderot. Also ascribed to Castillon.] Histoire générale des dogmes et opinionsphilosophiques ... tirée du Dictionnaireencyclopédique. Londres, 3 tom.
1769.
,,
[Mirabaud.] Opinions des anciens surles juifs, and Réflexions impartiales surl’Évangile[102] (rep. in 1777 as Examen critique du Nouveau Testament).
1769.
,,
[Isoard-Delisle, otherwise Delisle de Sales.]De la Philosophie de la Nature. 6 tom. [Authorimprisoned. Book condemned to be burnt, 1775.]
1769.
,,
[Seguier de Saint-Brisson.] Traité des Droits de Génie, dans lequel on examinesi la connoissance de la verité est avantageuse aux hommes etpossible au philosophe. “Carolsrouhe,” 1769. [Astrictly naturalistic-ethical theory of society. Contains an attack onthe doctrine of Rousseau, in Émile, on theusefulness of religious error.]
1769.L’enfer détruit,traduit de l’Anglois [by d’Holbach.]
1770.[D’Holbach.] Histoire critiquede Jésus Christ.
1770.
,,
—— Examen critique de lavie et des ouvrages de Saint Paul (tr. from English of PeterAnnet).
1770.
,,
—— Essai sur lesPréjugés. (Not by Dumarsais, whose name on thetitle-page is a mystification.)
1770.
,,
—— Système de laNature. 2 tom.
1770.
,,
Recueil Philosophique. 2 tom.[Edited by Naigeon. Contains a rep. of Dumarsais’s essaysLe Philosophe and De la raison, anextract from Tindal, essays by Vauvenargues and Fréret (orFontenelle), three by Mirabaud, Diderot’s Pensées sur la religion, several essays byd’Holbach, Meister’s De l’origine desprincipes religieux, etc.]
1770.
,,
Analyse de Bayle. Rep. of thefour vols. of De Marsy, with four more by Robinet.
1770.
,,
L’Esprit du Judaisme.(Trans. from Collins by d’Holbach.)
1770.
,,
Raynal (with Diderot and others). Histoire philosophique des deux Indes. Containing atheisticarguments by Diderot. [Suppressed, 1772.]

[In this year there were condemned to be burnedseven freethinking works: d’Holbach’s Contagion Sacrée; Voltaire’s Dieu etles Hommes; the French translation (undated) of Woolston’sDiscourses on the Miracles of Jesus Christ; Fréret’s(really Burigny’s) Examen critique de la religionchrétienne; an Examen impartial des principalesreligions du monde, undated; d’Holbach’s Christianisme dévoilé; and his Système de la Nature.]

1772.Le Bon Sens. [Adaptation fromMeslier by Diderot and d’Holbach. Condemned to be burnt,1774.]
1772.
,,
De la nature humaine. [Trans. ofHobbes by d’Holbach.]
1773.Helvétius. Del’Homme. Ouvrage posthume. 2 tom. [Condemned to be burnt,Jan. 10, 1774. Rep. 1775.]
1773.
,,
Carra, J. L. Système de laRaison, ou le prophète philosophe.
1773.
,,
[Burigny (?).] Recherches sur lesmiracles.
1773.
,,
[D’Holbach.] La politiquenaturelle. 2 tom.
1773.
,,
——. SystèmeSociale. 3 tom.
1774.Abauzit, F. Réflexionsimpartiales sur les Évangiles, suivies d’un essai surl’Apocalypse. (Abauzit died 1767.)
1774.
,,
[Condorcet.] Lettres d’unThéologien. (Atheistic.)
1774.
,,
New edition of TheologiePortative. 2 tom. [Condemned to be burnt.]
1775.[Voltaire.] Histoire de Jenni, ou LeSage et l’Athée. [Attack on atheism.]
1776.[D’Holbach.] La moraleuniverselle. 3 tom.
1776.
,,
—— Ethocratie.
1777.Examen critique du NouveauTestament, “par M. Fréret.” [Not byFréret. A rep. ofMirabaud’s Réflexions impartiales surl’Évangile, 1769, which was probably written about1750, being replied to in the Réfutation du Celsemoderne of the Abbé Gautier, 1752 and 1765.]
1777.
,,
Carra. Esprit de la morale et de laphilosophie.
1778.Barthez, P. J. Nouveauxéléments de la science de l’homme.
1779.Vied’Apollonius de Tyane par Philostrate, avec les commentairesdonnés en anglois par Charles Blount sur les deux premierslivres. [Trans. by J.-F. Salvemini de Castillon, Berlin.]Amsterdam, 4 tom. (In addition to Blount’s pref. and notes thereis a scoffing dedication to Pope Clement XIV.)
1780.Duvernet, Abbé Th. J. L’Intolérance religieuse.
1780.
,,
Clootz, Anacharsis. La Certitude despreuves du Mahométisme. [Reply by way of parody toBergier’s work, noted on p. 250.]
1780.
,,
Second ed. of Raynal’s Histoire philosophique, with additions. (Condemned to beburnt, 1781.)
1781.Maréchal, Sylvain. Le nouveauLucrèce.
1783.Brissot de Warville. Lettresphilosophiques sur S. Paul.
1784.Doray de Longrais. Faustin, ou lesiècle philosophique.
1784.
,,
Pougens, M. C. J. de. Récréations de philosophie et de morale.
1785.Maréchal. Livreéchappé au Déluge. [Author dismissed.]
1787.Marquis Pastoret. Zoroastre,Confucius, et Mahomet.
1788.Meister. De la moralenaturelle.
1788.
,,
Pastoret. Moïseconsidéré comme legislateur et comme moraliste.
1788.
,,
Maréchal. Almanach deshonnêtes gens. [Author imprisoned; book burnt.]
1789.Volney. Les Ruines desEmpires.
1789.
,,
Duvernet, Abbé. LesDévotions de Madame de Betzamooth.
1789.
,,
Cerutti (Jesuit Father). Bréviaire Philosophique, ou Histoire du Judaisme, duChristianisme, et du Déisme.
1791–3.Naigeon. Dictionnaire de laphilosophie ancienne et moderne.
1795.Dupuis. De l’origine de tousles Cultes. 5 tom.
1795.
,,
La Fable de Christdévoilée; ou Lettre du muphti de Constantinople àJean Ange Braschy, muphti de Rome.
1797.Rep. of d’Holbach’s Contagion sacrée, with notes by Lemaire.
1798.Maréchal. Pensées libres sur les prêtres. A Rome, et setrouve à Paris, chez les Marchands de Nouveautés.L’An Ier de la Raison, et VI de la RépubliqueFrançaise.

13. It will be noted that after 1770—coincidently, indeed, with a renewed restraint upon the press—there is a notable falling-off in the freethinking output. Rationalism had now permeated educated France; and, for different but analogous reasons, the stress of discussion gradually shifted as it had done in England. France in 1760 stood to the religious problem somewhat as England did in 1730, repeating the deistic evolution with a difference. By that time England was committed to the new paths of imperialism and commercialism; whereas France, thrown back on the life of ideas and on her own politico-economic problems, went on producing the abundant propaganda we have noted, and, alongside of it, an independent propaganda of economics and politics. At the end of 1767, the leading French diarist[103] notes that “there is formed at Paris a new sect, called the Economists,” and names its leading personages, Quesnay, Mirabeau the elder, the Abbé Baudeau, Mercier de la Rivière, and Turgot. These developed the doctrine of agricultural or “real” production which so stimulated and influenced Adam Smith. But immediately afterwards[104] the diarist notes a rival sect, the school of Forbonnais, who founded mainly on the importance of commerce and manufactures. Each “sect” had its journal. The intellectual ferment had inevitably fructified thought upon economic as upon historical, religious, and scientific problems; and there was in operation a fourfold movement, all tending to make possible the immense disintegration of the State which began in 1789. After the Economists came the “Patriots,” who directed towards the actual political machine the spirit of investigation and reform. And the whole effective movement is not unplausibly to be dated from the fall of the Jesuits in 1764.[105] Inevitably the forces interacted: Montesquieu and Rousseau alike dealt with both the religious and the social issues; d’Holbach in his first polemic, the Christianisme dévoilé, opens the stern impeachment of kings and rulers which he develops so powerfully in the Essai sur les Préjugés; and the Encyclopédie sent its search-rays over all the fields of inquiry. But of the manifold work done by the French intellect in the second and third generations of the eighteenth century, the most copious and the most widely influential body of writings that can be put under one category is that of which we have above made a chronological conspectus.

Of these works the merit is of course very various; but the total effect of the propaganda was formidable, and some of the treatises are extremely effective. The Examen critique of Burigny,[106] for instance, which quickly won a wide circulation when printed, is one of the most telling attacks thus far made on the Christian system, raising as it does most of the issues fought over by modern criticism. It tells indeed of a whole generation of private investigation and debate; and the Abbé Bergier, assuming it to be the work of Fréret, in whose name it is published, avows that its author “has written it in the same style as his academic dissertations: he has spread over it the same erudition; he seems to have read everything and mastered everything.”[107] Perhaps not the least effective part of the book is the chapter which asks: “Are men more perfect since the coming of Jesus Christ?”; and it is here that the clerical reply is most feeble. The critic cites the claims made by apologists as to the betterment of life by Christianity, and then contrasts with those claims the thousand-and-one lamentations by Christian writers over the utter badness of all the life around them. Bergier in reply follows the tactic habitually employed in the same difficulty to-day: he ignores the fact that his own apologists have been claiming a vast betterment, and contends that religion is not to be blamed for the evils it condemns. Not by such furtive sophistry could the Church turn the attack, which, as Bergier bitterly observes, was being made by Voltaire in a new book every year.

As always, the weaker side of the critical propaganda is its effort at reconstruction. As in England, so in France, the faithful accused the critics of “pulling down without building up,” when in point of fact their chief error was to build up—that is, to rewrite the history of human thought—before they had the required materials, or had even mastered those which existed. Thus Voltaire and Rousseau alike framed à priori syntheses of the origins of religion and society. But there were closer thinkers than they in the rationalistic ranks. Fontenelle’s essay De l’origine des fables, though not wholly exempt from error, admittedly lays aright the foundations of mythology and hierology; and De Brosses in his treatise Du Culte des dieux fétiches (1760) does a similar service on the side of anthropology. Meister’s essay De l’origine des principes religieux is full of insight and breadth; and, despite some errors due to the backwardness of anthropology, essentially scientific in temper and standpoint. His later essay, De la morale naturelle, shows the same independence and fineness of speculation, seeming indeed to tell of a character which missed fame by reason of over-delicacy of fibre and lack of the driving force which marked the foremost men of that tempestuous time. Vauvenargues’s essay De la suffisance de la religion naturelle is no less clinching, granted its deism. So, on the side of philosophy, Mirabaud, who was secretary of the Académie from 1742 to 1755, handles the problem of the relation of deism to ethics—if the posthumous essays in the Recueil philosophique be indeed his—in a much more philosophic fashion than does Voltaire, arguing unanswerably for the ultimate self-dependence of morals. The Lettre de Thrasybule à Leucippe, ascribed to Fréret, again, is a notably skilful attack on theism.

14. One of the most remarkable of the company in some respects is Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger (1722–1759), of whom Diderot gives a vivid account in a sketch prefixed to the posthumous L’Antiquité dévoilée par ses usages (1766). At the Collège de Beauvais, Boulanger was so little stimulated by his scholastic teachers that they looked for nothing from him in his maturity. When, however, at the age of seventeen, he began to study mathematics and architecture, his faculties began to develop; and the life, first of a military engineer in 1743–44, and later in the service of the notable department of Roads and Bridges—the most efficient of all State services under Louis XV—made him an independent and energetic thinker. The chronic spectacle of the corvée, the forced labour of peasants on the roads, moved him to indignation; but he sought peace in manifold study, the engineer’s contact with nature arousing in him all manner of speculations, geological and sociological. Seeking for historic light, he mastered Latin, which he had failed to do at school, reading widely and voraciously; and when the Latins failed to yield him the light he craved he systematically mastered Greek, reading the Greeks as hungrily and with as little satisfaction. Then he turned indefatigably to Hebrew, Syriac, and Arabic, gleaning at best verbal clues which at length he wrought into a large, loose, imaginative yet immensely erudite schema of ancient social evolution, in which the physicist’s pioneer study of the structure and development of the globe controls the anthropologist’s guesswork as to the beginnings of human society. The whole is set forth in the bulky posthumous work Recherches sur l’origine du despotisme oriental (1761), and in the further treatise L’antiquité dévoilée (3 tom. 1766), which is but the concluding section of the first-named.

It all yields nothing to modern science; the unwearying research is all carried on, as it were, in the dark; and the sleepless brain of the pioneer can but weave webs of impermanent speculation from masses of unsifted and unmanageable material. Powers which to-day, on a prepared ground of ascertained science, might yield the greatest results, were wasted in a gigantic effort to build a social science out of the chaos of undeciphered antiquity, natural and human. But the man is nonetheless morally memorable. Diderot pictures him with a head Socratically ugly, simple and innocent of life, gentle though vivacious, reading Rabbinical Hebrew in his walks on the high roads, suffering all his life from “domestic persecution,” “little contradictory though infinitely learned,” and capable of passing in a moment, on the stimulus of a new idea, into a state of profound and entranced absorption. Diderot is always enthusiastically generous in praise; but in reading and reviewing Boulanger’s work we can hardly refuse assent to his friend’s claim that “if ever man has shown in his career the true characters of genius, it was he.” His immense research was all compassed in a life of thirty-seven years, occupied throughout in an active profession; and the diction in which he sets forth his imaginative construction of the past reveals a constant intensity of thought rarely combined with scholarly knowledge. But it was an age of concentrated energy, carrying in its womb the Revolution. The perusal of Boulanger is a sufficient safeguard against the long-cherished hallucination that the French freethinking of his age was but a sparkle of raillery.

Even among some rationalists, however, who are content to take hearsay report on these matters, there appears still to subsist a notion that the main body of the French freethinkers of the eighteenth century were mere scoffers, proceeding upon no basis of knowledge and with no concern for research. Such an opinion is possible only to those who have not examined their work. To say nothing more of the effort of Boulanger, an erudition much more exact than Voltaire’s and a deeper insight than his and Rousseau’s into the causation of primitive religion inspires the writings of men like Burigny and Fréret on the one hand, and Fontenelle and Meister on the other. The philosophic reach of Diderot, one of the most convinced opponents of the ruling religion, was recognized by Goethe. And no critic of the “philosophes” handled more uncompromisingly than did Dumarsais[108] the vanity of the assumption that a man became a philosopher by merely setting himself in opposition to orthodox belief. Dumarsais, long scholastically famous for his youthful treatise Des Tropes, lived up to his standard, whatever some of the more eminent philosophes may have done, being found eminently lovable by pietists who knew him; while for D’Alembert he was “the La Fontaine of the philosophers” in virtue of his lucid simplicity of style.[109] The Analyse de la religion chrétienne printed under his name in some editions of the Évangile de la Raison has been pronounced supposititious. It seems to be the work of at least two hands[110] of different degrees of instruction; but, apart from some errors due to one of these, it does him no discredit, being a vigorous criticism of Scriptural contradictions and anomalies, such as a “Jansenist atheist” might well compose, though it makes the usual profession of deistic belief.