To be perfect, the tribute should have noted that he hated cruelty much more than imposture; and such is the note of the whole movement of which his name was the oriflamme. Voltaire personally was at once the most pugnacious and the most forgiving of men. Few of the Christians who hated him had so often as he fulfilled their own precept of returning good for evil to enemies; and none excelled him in hearty philanthropy. It is notable that most of the humanitarian ideas of the latter half of the century—the demand for the reform of criminal treatment, the denunciation of war and slavery, the insistence on good government, and toleration of all creeds—are more definitely associated with the freethinking than with any religious party, excepting perhaps the laudable but uninfluential sect of Quakers.

11. It is difficult to realize how far the mere demand for tolerance which sounds from Voltaire’s plays and poems before he has begun to assail credences was a signal and an inspiration to new thinkers. Certain it is that the principle of toleration, passed on by Holland to England, was regarded by the orthodox priesthood in France as the abomination of desolation, and resisted by them with all their power. But the contagion was unquenchable. It was presumably in Holland that there were printed in 1738 the two volumes of Lettres sur la religion essentielle à l’homme, distinguée de ce qui n’en est que l’accessoire, by Marie Huber, a Genevese lady living in Lyons; also the two following parts (1739), replying to criticisms on the earlier. In its gentle way, the book stands very distinctly for the “natural” and ethical principle in religion, denying that the deity demands from men either service or worship, or that he can be wronged by their deeds, or that he can punish them eternally for their sins. This was one of the first French fruits, after Voltaire, of the English deistic influence;70 and it is difficult to understand how the authoress escaped molestation. Perhaps the memory of the persecution inflicted on the mystic Madame Guyon withheld the hand of power. As it was, four Protestant theologians opened fire on her, regarding her doctrine as hostile to Christianity. One pastor wrote from Geneva, one from Amsterdam, and two professors from Zurich—the two last in Latin.71

From about 1746 onwards, the rationalist movement in eighteenth-century France rapidly widens and deepens. The number of rationalistic writers, despite the press laws which in that age inflicted the indignity of imprisonment on half the men of letters, increased from decade to decade, and the rising prestige of the philosophes in connection with the Encyclopédie (1751–72) gave new courage to writers and printers. At once the ecclesiastical powers saw in the Encyclopédie a dangerous enemy; and in January, 1752, the Sorbonne condemned a thesis “To the celestial Jerusalem,” by the Abbé de Prades. It had at first (1751) been received with official applause, but was found on study to breathe the spirit of the new work,72 to which the Abbé had contributed, and whose editor, Diderot, was his friend. Sooth to say, it contained not a little matter calculated to act as a solvent of faith. Under the form of a vindication of orthodox Catholicism, it negated alike Descartes and Leibnitz; and declared that the science of Newton and the Dutch physiologists was a better defence of religion than the theses of Clarke, Descartes, Cudworth, and Malebranche, which made for materialism. The handling, too, of the question of natural versus revealed religion, in which “theism” is declared to be superior to all religions si unam excipias veram, “if you except the one true,” might well arouse distrust in a vigilant Catholic reader.73 The whole argument savours far more of the scientific comparative method than was natural in the work of an eighteenth-century seminarist; and the principle, “Either we are ocular witnesses of the facts or we know them only by hearsay,”74 was plainly as dangerous to the Christian creed as to any other. According to Naigeon,75 the treatise was wholly the work of de Prades and another Abbé, Yvon;76 but it remains probable that Diderot inspired not a little of the reasoning; and the clericals, bent on putting down the Encyclopédie, professed to have discovered that he was the real author of the thesis. Either this belief or a desire to strike at the Encyclopédie through one of its collaborators77 was the motive of the absurdly belated censure. Such a fiasco evoked much derision from the philosophic party, particularly from Voltaire; and the Sorbonne compassed a new revenge. Soon after came the formal condemnation of the first two volumes of the Encyclopédie, of which the second had just appeared.78

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.

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 diarist103 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 afterwards104 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 Dumarsais108 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 hands110 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.