3. Freret's Examen Critique des Apologistes de la Religion Chrétienne, 1767.
4. The Examen Impartial des Principales Religions du Monde.
5. Baron d'Holbach's Contagion Sacrée, or l'Histoire Naturelle de la Superstition, 1768.
6. Holbach's Système de la Nature ou des Lois du Monde Physique et du Monde Moral.
7. Voltaire's Dieu et les Hommes; œuvre théologique, mais raisonnable (1769).
No one writer, indeed, of the eighteenth century contributed so many books to the flames as Voltaire. Besides the above work, the following of his works incurred the same fate:—(1) the Lettres Philosophiques (1733), (2) the Cantique des Cantiques (1759), (3) the Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764), also burnt at Geneva; (4) L'Homme aux Quarante Écus (1767), (5) Le Dîner du Comte de Boulainvilliers (1767). When we add to these burnings the fact that at least fourteen works of Voltaire were condemned, many others suppressed or forbidden, their author himself twice imprisoned in the Bastille, and often persecuted or obliged to fly from France, we must admit that seldom or never had any writer so eventful a literary career.
II. Turning now to the books that were burnt for their real or supposed immoral tendency, I may refer briefly in chronological order to the following as the principal offenders, though of course there is not always a clear distinction between what was punished as immoral and punished as irreligious. This applies to the four volumes of the works of the Carmelite Mantuanus, published at Antwerp in 1576, of which nearly all the copies were burnt. This facile poet, who is said to have composed 59,000 verses, was especially severe against women and against the ecclesiastical profession. In 1664, the Journal de Louis Gorin de Saint Amour, a satirical work, was condemned, chiefly apparently because it contained the five propositions of Jansenius. In 1623, the Parlement of Paris condemned Théophile to be burnt with his book, Le Parnasse des Poètes Satyriques, but the author escaped with his burning in effigy, and with imprisonment in a dungeon. I am tempted to quote Théophile's impromptu reply to a man who asserted that all poets were fools:—
"Oui, je l'avoue avec vous
Que tous les poêtes sont fous;
Mais sachant ce que vous êtes
Tous les fous ne sont pas poêtes."
Hélot also escaped with a burning in effigy when his L'Ecole des Filles was burnt at the foot of the gallows (1672). Lyser, who spent his life and his property in the advocacy of polygamy, was threatened by Christian V. with capital punishment if he appeared in Denmark, and his Discursus Politicus de Polygamia was sentenced to public burning (1677).
In the eighteenth century (1717) Gigli's satire, the Vocabulario di Santa Caterina e della lingua Sanese; Dufresnoy's Princesses Malabares, ou le Célibat Philosophique (1734); Deslandes' Pigmalion ou la Statue Animée (1741); the Jesuit Busembaum's Theologia Moralis (which defends as an act of charity the commission to kill an excommunicated person), (1757); Toussaint's Les Mœurs (1748); and the Abbé Talbert's satirical poem, Langrognet aux Enfers (1760),—seem to complete the list of the principal works burnt by public authority. And of these the best is Toussaint's, who in 1764 published an apology for or retraction of his Mœurs, which has far less claim upon public attention than was obtained and merited by the original work.
