A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 / Third edition, Revised and Expanded, in two volumes

by J. M. Robertson

FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

The Reaction

All over the civilized world, as we have seen, the terrors of the French Revolution evoked an intellectual no less than a political reaction, its stress being most apparent and most destructive in those countries in which there had been previously the largest measure of liberty. Nowhere was it more intense or more disastrous than in England. In countries such as Denmark and Spain, only lately and superficially liberalized, there was no great progress to undo: in England, though liberty was never left without an indomitable witness, there was a violent reversal of general movement, not to be wholly rectified in half a century. Joined in a new activity with the civil power for the suppression of all innovating thought, the Church rapidly attained to an influence it had not possessed since the days of Sacheverel and a degree of wealth it had not before reached since the Reformation. The wealth of the upper class was at its disposal to an unheard-of extent, there being apparently no better way of fighting the new danger of democracy; and dissent joined hands with the establishment to promote orthodoxy.

The average tone in England in the first quarter of the century may be gathered from the language held by a man so enlightened, comparatively speaking, as Sydney Smith, wit, humourist, Whig, and clergyman. In 1801 we find him, in a preface never reprinted, prescribing various measures of religious strategy in addition “to the just, necessary, and innumerable invectives which have been levelled against Rousseau, Voltaire, D’Alembert, and the whole pandemonium of those martyrs to atheism, who toiled with such laborious malice, and suffered odium with such inflexible profligacy, for the wretchedness and despair of their fellow creatures.”[1] That this was not jesting may be gathered from his daughter’s account of his indignation when a publisher sent him “a work of irreligious tendency,” and when Jeffrey admitted “irreligious opinions” to the Edinburgh Review. To the former he writes that every principle of suspicion and fear would be excited in me by a man who professed himself an infidel”; and to Jeffrey: “Do you mean to take care that the Review shall not profess infidel principles? Unless this is the case I must absolutely give up all connection with it.”[2] All the while any semblance of “infidelity” in any article in the Review must have been of the most cautious kind.

In the Catholic countries, naturally, the reaction was no less violent. In Italy, as we saw, it began in Tuscany almost at once. The rule of Napoleon, it is true, secured complete freedom of the Press as regarded translation of freethinking books, an entire liberty of conscience in religious matters, and a sharp repression of clericalism, the latter policy going to the length of expelling all the religious orders and confiscating their property.[3] All this counted for change; but the Napoleonic rule all the while choked one of the springs of vital thought—to wit, the spirit of political liberty; and in 1814–15 the clerical system returned in full force, as it did all over Italy. Everywhere freethought was banned. All criticism of Catholicism was a penal offence; and in the kingdom of Naples alone, in 1825, there were 27,612 priests, 8,455 monks, 8,185 nuns, 20 archbishops, and 73 bishops, though in 1807 the French influence had caused the dissolution of some 250 convents.[4] At Florence the Censure forbade, in 1817, the issue of a new edition of the translated work of Cabanis on Les Rapports du physique et du moral; and Mascagni, the physiologist, was invited to delete from his work a definition of man in which no notice was taken of the soul.[5] It was even proclaimed that the works of Voltaire and Rousseau were not to be read in the public libraries without ecclesiastical permission; but this veto was not seriously treated.[6] All native energy, however, was either cowed or cajoled into passivity. If, accordingly, the mind of Italy was to survive, it must be by the assimilation of the culture of freer States; and this culture, reinforced by the writings of Leopardi, generated a new intellectual life, which was a main factor in the ultimate achievement of Italian liberation from Austrian rule.

Spain, under Charles IV, became so thoroughly re-clericalized at the very outbreak of the Revolution that no more leeway seemed possible; but even in Spain, early in the nineteenth century, the government found means to retrogress yet further, and the minister Caballero sent an order to the universities forbidding the study of moral philosophy. The king, he justly declared, did not want philosophers, but good and obedient subjects.[7]

In France, where the downfall of Napoleon meant the restoration of the monarchy, the intellectual reaction was really less powerful than in England. The new spirit had been too widely and continuously at work, from Voltaire onwards, to be politically expelled; and the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 gave the proof that even on the political side the old spirit was incapable of permanent recovery. In Germany, where freethinking was associated not with the beaten cause of the Revolution but in large measure with the national movement for liberation from the tyranny of Napoleon,[8] the religious reaction was substantially emotional and unintellectual, though it had intellectual representatives, notably Schleiermacher. Apart from his culture-movement, the revival consisted mainly in a new Pietism, partly orthodox, partly mystical;[9] and on those lines it ran later to the grossest excesses. But among the educated classes of Germany there was the minimum of arrest, because there the intellectual life was least directly associated with the political, and the ecclesiastical life relatively the least organized. The very separateness of the German States, then and later so often deplored by German patriots, was really a condition of relative security for freedom of thought and research; and the resulting multiplicity of universities meant a variety of intellectual effort not then paralleled in any other country.[10] What may be ranked as the most important effect of the reaction in Germany—the turning of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel in succession to the task of reconciling rational philosophy with religion in the interests of social order—was in itself a rationalistic process as compared with the attitude of orthodoxy in other lands. German scholarship, led by the re-organized university of Berlin, was in fact one of the most progressive intellectual forces in Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century; and only its comparative isolation, its confinement to a cultured class, prevented it from affecting popular thought as widely as deism had done in the preceding century. Even in the countries in which popular and university culture were less sharply divided, the German influence was held at bay like others.

But in time the spirit of progress regained strength, the most decisive form of recovery being the new development of the struggle for political liberty from about 1830 onwards. In England the advance thenceforward was to be broadly continuous on the political side. On the Continent it culminated for the time in the explosions of 1848, which were followed in the Germanic world by another political reaction, in which freethought suffered; and in France, after a few years, by the Second Empire, in which clericalism was again fostered. But these checks have proved impermanent.