136 Mesnard, pp. 67, 71, 73, 89. ↑
137 Le Pauvre Diable, ouvrage en vers aisés de feu M. Vadé, mis en lumière par Catherine Vadé, sa cousine (falsely dated 1758); La Vanité; and Le Russe à Paris. ↑
141 Lanson, Hist. de la litt. française, p. 725. ↑
142 The formal approval of a Sorbonnist was necessary. One refused it; another gave it. Marmontel, Mémoires, 1804, iii, 35–36. ↑
143 Marmontel mentions that while he was still discussing a compromise with the syndic of the Sorbonne, 40,000 copies had been sold throughout Europe. Mémoires, iii, 39. ↑
144 This satire was taken by the German freethinker Eberhard, in his New Apology for Socrates, as the actual publication of the Sorbonne. Barbier, Dict. des Ouvr. anon et Pseud., 2e édit., i, 468. ↑
145 Published pseudonymously as a translation from the English: Histoire naturelle de l’âme, traduite de l’Anglais de M. Charp, par feu M. H——, de l’Académie des Sciences. À La Haye, 1745. Republished under the title Traité de l’Âme. ↑
146 By Elie Luzac, to whom is ascribed the reply entitled L’Homme plus que Machine (1748 also). This is printed in the Œuvres philosophiques of La Mettrie as if it were his: and Lange (i, 420) seems to think it was. But the bibliographers ascribe it to Luzac, who was a man of culture and ability. ↑
147 L’Homme Machine, ed. Assézat, 1865, p. 97; Œuv. philos. ed. 1774, iii, 51. ↑
148 Lange, Gesch. des Materialismus, i, 362 sq. (Eng. tr. ii, 78–80); Soury, Bréviare de l’hist. du matérialisme, pp. 663, 666–68; Voltaire, Homélie sur l’athéisme, end. Frederick the Great, who gave La Mettrie harbourage, support, and friendship, and who was not a bad judge of men, wrote and read in the Berlin Academy the funeral éloge of La Mettrie, and pronounced him “une âme pure et un cœur serviable.” By “pure” he meant sincere. ↑
149 Salchi, Lettres sur le Déisme, 1759, pp. 177, 197, 239, 283 sq. ↑
150 Huxley, essay on Darwin on the Origin of Species; R. P. A. ed. of Twelve Lectures and Essays, p. 94. ↑
151 See the parallel passages in the Lettres Critiques of the Abbé Gauchat, vol. xv (1761), p. 192 sq. ↑
152 See his essay Des Singularités de la Nature, ch. xii, and his Dissertation sur les changements arrivés dans notre globe. ↑
154 Essay cited, p. 96. The criticism ignores the greater comprehensiveness of Robinet’s survey of nature. ↑
155 George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, 1707–1788. ↑
156 Lyell, Principles of Geology, 12th ed. 1875, i, 57–58. ↑
157 Suite de l’Apologie de M. l’Abbé De Prades, 1752, p. 37 sq. ↑
158 Dissertatio inauguralis metaphysica de universali naturæ systemate, published at Göttingen as the doctoral thesis of an imaginary Dr. Baumann, 1751. In French, 1753. ↑
159 Soury, p. 579. The later speculations of Maupertuis by their extravagance discredited the earlier. ↑
160 “Scheinbar bekämpft er Maupertuis desswegen, aber im geheimen stimmt er ihm bei”(Rosenkranz, i, 144). ↑
161 It should be noted that by Condillac’s avowal he was much aided by his friend Mdlle. Ferrand. ↑
162 Cp. Réthoré, Condillac, ou l’empirisme et le rationalisme, 1864, ch. i. ↑
163 Lange, ii, 27, 29; Soury, pp. 603–44. ↑
164 Soury, pp. 596–600; Lange, ii, 27. ↑
165 Oddly enough he became ultimately press censor! He lived till 1820, dying at Rennes at the age of 85. ↑
166 This may best be translated Treatise on the Mind. The English translation of 1759 (rep. 1807) is entitled De l’Esprit: or, Essays on the Mind, etc. ↑
167 Correspondance, ii, 262. ↑
170 At the time the pietists declared that Diderot had collaborated in De l’Esprit. This was denied by Grimm, who affirmed that Diderot and Helvétius were little acquainted, and rarely met; but his Secretary, Meister, wrote in 1786 that the finest pages in the book were Diderot’s. Id. p. 294, note. In his sketch À la mémoire de Diderot (1786, app. to Naigeon’s Mémoires, 1821, p. 425, note), Meister speaks of a number of “belles pages,” but does not particularize. ↑
171 De l’Esprit, Disc, iii, ch. 30. ↑
172 Cp. Morley’s criticism. Diderot, ed. 1884, pp. 331–32. ↑
173 Beccaria’s Letter to Morellet, cited in ch. i of J. A. Farrer’s ed. of the Crimes and Punishments, p. 6. It is noteworthy that the partial reform effected earlier in England by Oglethorpe, on behalf of imprisoned debtors (1730–32), belongs to the time of propagandist deism there. ↑
174 Morley, Diderot, p. 329. ↑
175 Lettre à d’Alembert, 9 janvier, 1773. ↑
176 Cp. Rosenkranz, Vorbericht, p. vi. ↑
177 Cp. Morley, Diderot, ed. 1834, p. 32. ↑
179 A police agent seized the MS. in Diderot’s library, and Diderot could not get it back. Malesherbes, the censor, kept it safe for him! ↑
180 According to Naigeon (Mémoires, 1821, p. 131), three months and ten days. ↑
181 The Lettre purports, like so many other books of that and the next generation, to be published “A Londres.” ↑
182 Diderot’s daughter, in her memoir of him, speaks of his imprisonment in the Bastille as brought about through the resentment of a lady of whom he had spoken slightingly; and her husband left a statement in MS. to the same effect (printed at the end of the Mémoires by Naigeon). The lady is named as Madame Dupré de Saint-Maur, a mistress of the King, and the offence is said to have been committed in the story entitled Le Pigeon blanc. Howsoever this may have been, the prosecution was quite in the spirit of the period, and the earlier Pensées were made part of the case against him. See Delort, Hist. de la détention des philosophes, 1829, ii, 208–16. M. de Vandeul-Diderot testifies that the Marquis Du Chatelet, Governor of Vincennes, treated his prisoner very kindly. Buckle (1-vol. ed. p. 425) does not seem to have fully read the Lettre, which he describes as merely discussing the differentiation of thought and sensation among the blind. ↑
183 His friend Meister (À la mémoire de Diderot, 1786, app. to Naigeon’s Mémoires de Diderot, 1821, p. 424) writes as if Diderot had written the whole Apologie “in a few days.” The third part, a reply to the pastoral of the Bishop of Auxerre, appeared separately as a Suite to the others. ↑
184 Apologie, as cited, 2e partie, p. 87 sq. ↑
185 Observations sur l’instruction pastorale de Mons. l’Évêque d’Auxerre, Berlin, 1752, p. 17. ↑
187 Cp. Morley, Diderot, pp. 98–99. ↑
188 Carlyle, Frederick, bk. xviii, ch. ix, end. ↑
189 D’Argenson, Mémoires, iv, 188. ↑
191 “Quelle abominable homme!” he writes to Mdlle. Voland (15 juillet, 1759); and Lord Morley pronounces de Prades a rascal (Diderot, p. 98). Carlyle is inarticulate with disgust—but as much against the original heresy as against the treason to Frederick. As to that, Thiébault was convinced that de Prades was innocent and calumniated. Everybody at court, he declares, held the same view. Mes Souvenirs de vingt ans de séjour à Berlin, 2e édit. 1805, v, 402–404. ↑
192 It is not clear how these are to be distinguished from the mutilations of the later volumes by his treacherous publisher Le Breton. Of this treachery the details are given by Grimm, Corr. litt. ed. 1829. vii, 144 sq. ↑
193 Buckle’s account of him (1-vol. ed. p. 426) as “burning with hatred against his persecutors” after his imprisonment is overdrawn. He was a poor hater. ↑
194 Madame Diderot, says her daughter, was very upright as well as very religious, but her temper, “éternellement grondeur, faisait de notre intérieur un enfer, dont mon père était l’ange consolateur” (Letter to Meister, in Notice pref. to Lettres Inédites de Mme. de Staël à Henri Meister, 1903, p. 62). ↑
195 “Hélas! disait mon excellent grand-père, j’ai deux fils: l’un sera sûrement un saint, et je crains bien que l’autre ne soit damné; mais je ne puis vivre avec le saint, et je suis très heureux du temps que je passe avec le damné” (Letter of Mme. de Vandeul, last cited). Freethinker as he was, his fellow-townsmen officially requested in 1780 to be allowed to pay for a portrait of him for public exhibition, and the bronze bust he sent them was placed in the hôtel de ville (MS. of M. de Vandeul-Diderot, as cited). ↑
196 Madame de Vandeul states that this story was motived by the case of Diderot’s sister, who died mad at the age of 27 or 28 (Letter above cited; Rosenkranz, i, 9). ↑
197 Lettre de Voltaire à D’Alembert, 27 août, 1774. ↑
198 Lettre de 2 décembre, 1757. ↑
199 Œuvres posthumes de D’Alembert, 1799, i, 240. ↑
200 D’Holbach was the original of the character of Wolmar in Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse, of whom Julie says that he “does good without recompense.” “I never saw a man more simply simple” was the verdict of Madame Geoffrin. Corr. litt. de Grimm (notice probably by Meister), ed. 1829–31, xiv, 291. ↑
201 Marmontel says of him that he “avoit tout lu et n’avoit jamais rien oublié d’interessant.” Mémoires, 1804, ii, 312. ↑
202 See a full list of his works (compiled by Julian Hibbert after the list given in the 1821 ed. of Diderot’s Works, xii, 115, and rep. in the 1829–31 ed. of Grimm and Diderot’s Correspondance, xiv, 293), prefixed to Watson’s ed. (1834 and later) of the English translation of the System of Nature. ↑
203 Morley, Diderot, p. 341. The chapter gives a good account of the book. Cp. Lange, i, 364 sq. (Eng. trans, ii, 26 sq.) as to its materialism. The best pages were said to be by Diderot (Corr. de Grimm, as cited, p. 289; the statement of Meister, who makes it also in his Éloge). Naigeon denied that Diderot had any part in the Système, but in 1820 there was published an edition with “notes and corrections” by Diderot. ↑
204 It is to be noted that the English translation (3 vols. 3rd ed. 1817; 4th ed. 1820) deliberately tampers with the language of the original to the extent of making it deistic. This perversion has been by oversight preserved in all the reprints. ↑
205 Mirabeau spoke of the Essai as “le livre le moins connu, et celui qui mérite le plus l’être.” Even the reprint of 1793 had become “extremely rare” in 1822. The book seems to have been specially disquieting to orthodoxy, and was hunted down accordingly. ↑
206 So Morley, p. 347. It does not occur to Lord Morley, and to the Comtists who take a similar tone, that in thus disparaging past thinkers they are really doing the thing they blame. ↑
207 Lettres de Memmius à Cicéron (1771); Histoire de Jenni (1775). In the earlier article, Athée, in the Dictionnaire Philosophique, he speaks of having met in France very good physicists who were atheists. In his letter of September 26, 1770, to Madame Necker, he writes concerning the Système de la Nature: “Il est un peu honteux à notre nation que tant de gens aient embrassé si vite une opinion si ridicule.” And yet Prof. W. M. Sloane, of Columbia University, still writes of Voltaire, in the manner of English bishops, as “atheistical” (The French Revolution and Religious Reform, 1901, p. 26). ↑
208 Though in 1797 we have Maréchal’s Code d’une Société d’hommes sans Dieu, and in 1798 his Pensées libres sur les prêtres. ↑
209 Thus Dr. Cairns (Unbelief in the Eighteenth Century, p. 165) gravely argues that the French Revolution proves the inefficacy of theism without a Trinity to control conduct. He has omitted to compare the theistic bloodshed of the Revolution with the Trinitarian bloodshed of the Crusades, the papal suppression of the Albigenses, the Hussite wars, and other orthodox undertakings. ↑
210 The book was accorded the Monthyon prize by the French Academy. In translation (1788) it found a welcome in England among Churchmen by reason of its pro-Christian tone and its general vindication of religious institutions. The translation was the work of Mary Wollstonecraft. See Kegan Paul’s William Godwin, 1876, i, 193. Mrs. Dunlop, the friend of Burns, recommending its perusal to the poet, paid it a curious compliment: “He does not write like a sectary, hardly like a Christian, but yet while I read him, I like better my God, my neighbour, Monsieur Necker, and myself.” Robert Burns and Mrs. Dunlop, ed. by W. Wallace, 1898, p. 258. ↑
211 See Voltaire’s letters to Madame Necker, Corr. de Grimm, ed. 1829, vii, 23, 118. Of the lady, Grimm writes (p. 118): “Hypathie Necker passe sa vie avec des systématiques, mais elle est devote à sa manière. Elle voudrait être sincèrement hugenote, ou socinienne, ou déistique, ou plutôt, pour être quelque chose, elle prend le parti de ne se rendre compte sur rien.” “Hypathie” was Voltaire’s complimentary name for her. ↑
212 Cp. Aulard, Le Culte de la Raison et le Culte de l’Être Suprême, 1892, pp. 17–19. M. Gazier (Études sur l’histoire religieuse de la révolution française, 1877, pp. 48, 173, 189 sq.) speaks somewhat loosely of a prevailing anti-Christian feeling when actually citing only isolated instances, and giving proofs of a general orthodoxy. Yet he points out the complete misconception of Thiers on the subject (p. 202). ↑
213 Cp. Prof. W. M. Sloane, The French Revolution and Religious Reform, p. 43. ↑
214 Gazier, as cited, pp. 2, 4, 12, 19–21, 71, etc. ↑
215 Les Assemblées Provinciales sous Louis XVI, 1864, pref. pp. viii–ix. ↑
219 Léonce de Lavergne, as cited. ↑
220 The authority of Turgot himself could be cited for the demand that the State clergy should accept the constitution of the State. Cp. Aulard, Le Culte de la Raison, p. 12; Tissot, Étude sur Turgot, 1878, p. 160. ↑
222 Aulard, Culte, pp. 19–20. ↑
223 Michelet, Hist. de la révolution française, ed. 8vo 1868 and later, i, 16. Cp. Proudhon’s De la justice, 1858. ↑
224 “Tout jugement religieux ou politique est une contradiction flagrante dans une religion uniquement fondée sur un dogme étranger à la justice.” Ed. cited, introd. p. 60. ↑
225 The grave misstatement of Michelet on this head is exposed by Aulard, Culte, p. 60. ↑
226 Yet it is customary among Christians to speak of this lady in the most opprobrious terms. The royalist (but malcontent) Marquis de Villeneuve, who had seen the Revolution in his youth, claimed in his old age to have afterwards “conversed with the Goddess Reason of Paris and with the Goddess Reason of Bourges” (where he became governor); but, though he twice alludes to those women, he says nothing whatever against their characters (De l’Agonie de la France, 1835, i, 3, 19). Prof. W. M. Sloane, with all his religious prejudice, is satisfied that the women chosen as Goddesses of Reason outside of Paris were “noted for their spotless character.” Work cited, p. 198. ↑
227 Mémoires, ed. 1841, ii, 166. ↑
228 Père F.-J.-F. Fortin, Souvenirs, Auxerre, 1867, ii, 41. ↑
229 See the speech in Aulard, Culte, p. 240; and cp. pp. 79–85. ↑
230 “Le peuple aura des fêtes dans lesquelles il offrira de l’encens à l’Être Suprême, au maître de la nature, car nous n’avons pas voulu anéantir la superstition pour établir le règne de l’athéisme.” Speech of Nov. 26, 1793, in the Moniteur. (Discours de Danton, ed. André Fribourg, 1910, p. 599.) ↑
231 Aulard, Culte, pp. 81–82. ↑
232 Concerning whom see Aulard, Culte, pp. 86–96. ↑
233 The Source, the Strength, and the True Spirit of Laws, Eng. tr. 1753, p. 6. ↑
234 E.g., in the Arrêt du Parlement of 9 juin, 1762, denouncing Rousseau’s Émile as tending to make the royal authority odious and to destroy the principle of obedience; and in the Examen du Béllisaire de M. Marmontel, by Coger (Nouv. éd. augm. 1767, p. 45 sq. Cp. Marmontel’s Mémoires, 1804, iii, 46, as to his being called ennemi du trône et de l’autel). This kind of invective was kept up against the philosophes to the moment of the Revolution. See for instance Le vrai religieux, Discours dédié à Madame Louise de France, par le R. P. C. A. 1787, p. 4: “Une philosophie orgueilleuse a renversé les limites sacrées que la main du Très-Haut avoit elle-même élevées. La raison de l’homme a osé sonder les décrets de Dieu.... Dans les accès de son ivresse, n’a-t-elle pas sapé les fondemens du trône et des lois,” etc. ↑
235 Cp. the admissions of Curnier (Rivarol, sa vie et ses œuvres, 1858, p. 149) in deprecation of Burke’s wild likening of Rivarol’s journalism to the Annals of Tacitus. ↑
236 Œuvres, ed. cited, pp. 136–40, 147–55. ↑
237 Cp. the critique of Sainte-Beuve, prefixed to ed. cited, pp. 14–17, and that of Arsène Houssaye, id. pp. 31–33. Mr. Saintsbury, though biassed to the side of the royalist, admits that “Rivarol hardly knows what sincerity is” (Miscellaneous Essays, 1892, p. 67). ↑
238 Charles Comte is thus partly inaccurate in saying (Traité de Législation, 1835, i, 72) that the charge against the philosophers began “on the day on which there was set up a government in France that sought to re-establish the abuses of which they had sought the destruction.” What is true is that the charge, framed at once by the backers of the Old Régime, has always since done duty for reaction. ↑
239 Mémoires, ed. Jannet, iii, 313; iv, 70; v, 346, 348. ↑
241 D’Argenson, noting in his old age how “on n’a jamais autant parlé de nation et d’État qu’aujourd’hui,” how no such talk had been heard under Louis XIV, and how he himself had developed on the subject, adds, “cela vient du parlement et des Anglois.” He goes on to speak of a reissue of the translation of Locke on Civil Government, originally made by the Jansenists (Mémoires, iv, 189–90). ↑
242 Hallam, Lit. of Europe, ed. 1872, iii, 160–63. ↑
243 Œuvres diverses de Pierre Bayle, La Haye, 4 vols. fol. 1737, ii, 564 sq. ↑
244 This Critique appears in the very volume to which Coger refers for the Avis aux Réfugiéz. See Lett. viii, xiii, xvii, etc., vol. and ed. cited, pp. 36, 54, 71, etc. ↑
245 Cp. the survey of Aulard, Hist. polit. de la rév. française, 2e édit. 1903, pp. 2–23. ↑
246 Probably the work of a Jansenist. ↑
247 On the whole question of the growth of abstract revolutionary doctrine in politics cp. W. S. McKechnie on the De Jure Regni apud Scotos in the “George Buchanan” vol. of Glasgow Quatercentenary Studies, 1906, pp. 256–76; Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Ages, Maitland’s tr. 1900, p. 37 sq. ↑
248 Mallet actually reproaches the philosophes in the mass—while admitting the hostility of many of them to the Revolution—with “having accelerated French degeneration and depravation ... by rendering the conscience argumentative (raisonneuse), by substituting for duties inculcated by sentiment, tradition, and habit, the uncertain rules of the human reason and sophisms adapted to passions,” etc., etc. (B. Mallet, as cited, p. 360). With all his natural vigour of mind, Mallet du Pan thus came to talk the language of the ordinary irrationalist of the Reaction. Certainly, if the stimulation of the habit of reasoning be a destructive course, the philosophes stand condemned. But as Christians had been reasoning as best they could, in an eternal series of vain disputes, for a millennium and a-half before the Revolution, with habitual appeal to the passions, the argument only proves how vacuous a Christian champion’s reasoning can be. ↑
249 Art. in Mercure Britannique, No. 13, Feb. 21, 1799; cited by B. Mallet in Mallet du Pan and the French Revolution, 1902, App. p. 357. ↑
251 Tableau littéraire du dix-huitième siècle, 8e édit. pp. 112, 113. ↑
255 Cp. Morley, Diderot, p. 407. Lord Morley points to the phrase in another form in a letter of Voltaire’s in 1761. It really derives from Jean Meslier, who quotes it from an unlettered man (Testament, i. 19). ↑
256 Rosenkranz, Diderot’s Leben und Werke, 1866, ii, 380–81. ↑
257 As Lord Morley points out, Henri Martin absolutely reverses the purport of a passage in order to convict Diderot of justifying regicide. ↑
258 Mémoires, ed. Jannet, iv, 44, 51, 68, 69, 74, 91, 93, 101, 103. ↑
259 Mallet du Pan says he saw the MS., and knew Diderot to have received 10,000 livres tournois for his additions. This statement is incredible. But Meister is explicit, in his éloge, as to Diderot having written for the book much that he thought nobody would sign, whereas Raynal was ready to sign anything. ↑
260 Memoirs of Sir Samuel Romilly, 3rd ed. 1841, i, 46. ↑
261 When D’Argenson writes in 1752 (Mémoires, éd. Jannet, iv, 103) that he hears “only philosophes say, as if convinced, that even anarchy would be better” than the existing misgovernment, he makes no suggestion that they teach this. And he declares for his own part that everything is drifting to ruin: “nulle réformation ... nulle amélioration.... Tout tombe, par lambeaux.” ↑
262 Aulard, Hist. polit. de la révol. p. 24. ↑
263 This is the sufficient comment on a perplexing page of Lord Morley’s second monograph on Burke (pp. 110–11), which I have never been able to reconcile with the rest of his writing. ↑
264 Lecky, Hist. of England in the Eighteenth Century, small ed. vi, 263. ↑
265 D’Argenson notes this repeatedly, though in one passage he praises the Parlement as having alone made head against absolutism (déc. 1752; ed. cited, iv, 116). ↑
266 Maximes et Pensées, ed. 1856, p. 72. ↑
268 Chamfort in another passage maintains against Soulavie that the Academy did much to develop the spirit of freedom in thought and politics. Id. p. 107. And this too is arguable, as we have seen. ↑
269 On this complicated issue, which cannot be here handled at any further length, see Prof. P. A. Wadia’s essay The Philosophers and the French Revolution (Social Science Series, 1904), which, however, needs revision; and compare the argument of Nourrisson, J.-J. Rousseau et le Rousseauisme, 1903, ch. xx. ↑
270 Correspondance de Grimm, ed. cited, xiv, 5–6. Lettre de janv. 1788. ↑
271 Lettre de Voltaire à D’Alembert, 27 août, 1774. ↑
272 Histoire du mariage des prêtres en France, par M. Grégoire, ancien évêque de Blois, 1826, p. v. Compare the details in the Appendice to the Etudes of M. Gazier, before cited. That writer’s account is the more decisive seeing that his bias is clerical, and that, writing before M. Aulard, he had to a considerable extent retained the old illusion as to the “decreeing of atheism” by the Convention (p. 313). See pp. 230–260 as to the readjustment effected by Grégoire, while the conservative clergy were still striving to undo the Revolution. ↑
273 Heroes and Hero-Worship: Napoleon. ↑
274 See the Sentiments de Napoléon sur le Christianisme: conversations recueillies à Sainte-Hélène par le Comte de Montholon, 1841. Many of the utterances here set forth are irreconcilable with Napoleon’s general tone. ↑
275 O’Meara, Napoléon en Exil, ed. Lacroix, 1897, ii, 39. ↑
276 Ph. Gonnard, Les origines de la légende Napoléonienne, 1906, p. 258. ↑
278 Pasquier, cited by Rose, Life of Napoleon, ed. 1913, i, 282. The Concordat was bitterly resented by the freethinkers in the army. Id. p. 281. ↑
279 See Jules Barni’s Napoléon Ier. ed. 1870, p. 83, as to the amazing Catechism imposed by Napoleon on France in 1811. For the history of its preparation and imposition see De Labone, Paris sous Napoléon: La Religion, 1907, p. 100 sq. ↑
280 As to the Napoleonic censorship of literature, cp. Madame de Staël, Considérations sur la révolution française, ptie. iv, ch. 16; Dix Années d’Exil, préf.; Welschinger, La Censure sous le premier Empire, 1882. ↑
281 Las Cases, Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, 19 août, 1816. ↑
282 Mignet, Hist. de la révolution française, 4e édit. ii, 340. ↑