A Short History of Freethought, Volume 2 13 – Robertson · Verses Across
Freethought · History of freethought
A Short History of Freethought, Volume 2 13French Freethought in the Eighteenth Century (part 4)
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Freethought · History of freethought
A Short History of Freethought, Volume 2 13
French Freethought in the Eighteenth Century (part 4)
RobertsonEnglish
(a) That many of the leading men among the revolutionists were deists is true; and the fact goes to prove that it was chiefly the men of ability in France who rejected Christianity. Of a number of these the normal attitude was represented in the work of Necker, Sur l'importance des idées religieuses (1787), which repudiated the destructive attitude of the few, and may be described as an utterance of pious theism or Unitarianism. Orthodox he cannot well have been, since, like his wife, he was the friend of Voltaire. But the majority of the Constituent Assembly was never even deistic; it professed itself cordially Catholic; and the atheists there might be counted on the fingers of one hand.
The Abbé Bergier, in answering d'Holbach (Examen du Matérialisme, ii, ch. i, § 1), denies that there has been any wide spread of atheistic opinion. This is much more probable than the statement of the Archbishop of Toulouse, on a deputation to the king in 1775, that "le monstrueux athéisme est devenu l'opinion dominante" (Soulavie, Règne de Louis XVI, iii, 16; cited by Buckle, 1-vol. ed. p. 488, note). Joseph Droz, a monarchist and a Christian, writing under Louis Philippe, sums up that "the atheists formed only a small number of adepts" (Histoire du Règne de Louis XVI, éd. 1839, p. 42). And Rivarol, who at the time of writing his Lettres à M. Necker was substantially an atheist, says in so many words that, while Rousseau's "Confession of a Savoyard Vicar" was naturally very attractive to many, such a book as the "Système de la Nature," were it as attractive as it is tedious, would win nobody" (OEuvres, éd. 1852, p. 134). Still, it ran into seven editions between 1770 and 1780.
Nor were there lacking vigorous representatives of orthodoxy: the powerful Abbé Grégoire, in particular, was a convinced Jansenist Christian, and at the same time an ardent democrat and anti-royalist. He saw the immense importance to the Church of a good understanding with the Revolution, and he accepted the constitution of 1790. With him went a very large number of priests. M. Léonce de Lavergne, who was pious enough to write that "the philosophy of the eighteenth century had had the audacity to lay hands on God; and this impious attempt has had for punishment the revolutionary expiation," also admits that, "of the clergy, it was not the minority but the majority which went along with the Tiers État." Many of the clergy, however, being refractory, the Assembly pressed its point, and the breach widened. It was solely through this political hostility on the part of the Church to the new constitution that any civic interference with public worship ever took place. Grégoire was extremely popular with the advanced types, though his piety was conspicuous; and there were not a few priests of his way of thinking, among them being some of the ablest bishops. On the flight of the king, he and they went with the democracy; and it was the obstinate refusal of the others to accept the constitution that provoked the new Legislative Assembly to coerce them. Though the new body was more anti-clerical than the old, however, it was simply doing what successive Protestant monarchs had done in England and Ireland; and probably no Government in the world would then have acted otherwise in a similar case. Patience might perhaps have won the day; but the Revolution was fighting for its life; and the conservative Church, as all men knew, was eager to strangle it. Had the clergy left politics alone, or simply accepted the constitutional action of the State, there would have been no religious question. To speak of such a body of priests, who had at all times been eager to put men to death for heresy, as vindicating "liberty of conscience" when they refused fealty to the constitution, is somewhat to strain the terms. The expulsion of the Jesuits under the Old Régime had been a more coercive measure than the demand of the Assembly on the allegiance of the State clergy. And all the while the reactionary section of the priesthood was known to be conspiring with the royalists abroad. It was only when, in 1793, the conservative clergy were seen to be the great obstacle to the levy of an army of defence, that the more radical spirits began to think of interfering with their functions.
(b) An à priori method has served alike in freethinkers' and in pietists' hands to obscure the facts. When Michelet insists on the "irreconcilable opposition of Christianity to the Revolution"--a thesis in which he was heartily supported by Proudhon --he means that the central Christian dogmas of salvation by sacrifice and faith exclude any political ethic of justice --any doctrine of equality and equity. But this is only to say that Christianity as an organization is in perpetual contradiction with some main part of its professed creed; and that has been a commonplace since Constantine. It does not mean that either Christians in multitudes or their churches as organizations have not constantly proceeded on ordinary political motives, whether populist or anti-populist. In Germany we have seen Lutheranism first fomenting and afterwards repudiating the movement of the peasants for betterment; and in England in the next century both parties in the civil war invoke religious doctrines, meeting texts with texts. Jansenism was in constant friction with the monarchy from its outset; and Louis XIV and Louis XV alike regarded the Jansenists as the enemies of the throne. "Christianity" could be as easily "reconciled" with a democratic movement in the last quarter of the eighteenth century as with the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew's Day in the sixteenth. If those Christians who still charge "the bloodshed of the French Revolution" on the spirit of incredulity desire to corroborate Michelet to the extent of making Christianity the bulwark of absolute monarchy, the friend of a cruel feudalism, and the guardian genius of the Bastille, they may be left to the criticism of their fellow-believers who have embraced the newer principle that the truth of the Christian religion is to be proved by connecting it in practice with the spirit of social reform. To point out to either party, as did Michelet, that evangelical Christianity is a religion of submission and preparation for the end of all things, and has nothing to do with rational political reform, is to bestow logic where logic is indomiciliable. While rationalism undoubtedly fosters the critical spirit, professed Christians have during many ages shown themselves as prone to rebellion as to war, whether on religious or on political pretexts.
(c) For the rest, the legend falsifies what took place. The facts are now established by exact documentary research. The Government never substituted any species of religion for the Catholic. The Festival of Reason at Nôtre Dame was an act not of the Convention but of the Commune of Paris and the Department; the Convention had no part in promoting it; half the members stayed away when invited to attend; and there was no Goddess of Reason in the ceremony, but only a Goddess of Liberty, represented by an actress who cannot even be identified. Throughout, the devoutly theistic Rousseau was the chief literary hero of the movement. The two executive Committees in no way countenanced the dechristianization of the Churches, but on the contrary imprisoned persons who removed church properties; and these in turn protested that they had no thought of abolishing religion. The acts of irresponsible violence did not amount to a hundredth part of the "sacrilege" wrought in Protestant countries at the Reformation, and do not compare with the acts charged on Cromwell's troopers. The policy of inviting priests and bishops to abdicate their functions was strictly political; and the Archbishop Gobel did not abjure Catholicism, but only surrendered his office. That a number of priests did gratuitously abjure their religion is only a proof of what was well known--that a good many priests were simple deists. We have seen how many abbés fought in the freethought ranks, or near them. Diderot in a letter of 1769 tells of a day which he and a friend had passed with two monks who were atheists. "One of them read the first draft of a very fresh and very vigorous treatise on atheism, full of new and bold ideas; I learned with edification that this doctrine was the current doctrine of their cloisters. For the rest, these two monks were the 'big bonnets' of their monastery; they had intellect, gaiety, good feeling, knowledge." And a priest of the cathedral of Auxerre, whose recollections went back to the revolutionary period, has confessed that at that time "philosophic" opinions prevailed in most of the monasteries. His words even imply that in his opinion the unbelieving monks were the majority. In the provinces, where the movement went on with various degrees of activity, it had the same general character. "Reason" itself was often identified with deity, or declared to be an emanation thereof. Hébert, commonly described as an atheist for his share in the movement, expressly denied the charge, and claimed to have exhorted the people to read the gospels and obey Christ. Danton, though at his death he disavowed belief in immortality, had declared in the Convention in 1793 that "we have not striven to abolish superstition in order to establish the reign of atheism." Even Chaumette was not an atheist; and the Prussian Clootz, who probably was, had certainly little or no doctrinary influence; while the two or three other professed atheists of the Assembly had no part in the public action.
(d) Finally, Robespierre was all along thoroughly hostile to the movement; in his character of Rousseauist and deist he argued that atheism was "aristocratic"; he put to death the leaders of the Cult of Reason; and he set up the Worship of the Supreme Being as a counter-move. Broadly speaking, he affiliated to Necker, and stood very much at the standpoint of the English Unitarianism of the present day. Thus the bloodshed of the Reign of Terror, if it is to be charged on any species of philosophic doctrine rather than on the unscrupulous policy of the enemies of the Revolution in and out of France, stands to the credit of the belief in a God, the creed of Frederick, Turgot, Necker, Franklin, Pitt, and Washington. The one convinced and reasoning atheist among the publicists of the Revolution, the journalist Salaville, opposed the Cult of Reason with sound and serious and persuasive argument, and strongly blamed all forcible interference with worship, while at the same time calmly maintaining atheism as against theism. The age of atheism had not come, any more than the triumph of Reason.
Mallet du Pan specifies, as among those who "since 1788 have pushed the blood-stained car of anarchy and atheism," Chamfort, Gronvelle, Garat, and Cerutti. Chamfort was as high-minded a man as Mallet himself, and is to-day so recognized by every unprejudiced reader. The others are forgotten. Gronvelle, who as secretary of the executive council read to Louis XVI his death-sentence, wrote De l'autorité de Montesquieu dans la révolution présente (1789). Garat was Minister of Justice in 1792 and of the Interior in 1793, and was ennobled by Napoleon. He had published Considérations sur la Révolution (1792) and a Mémoire sur la Révolution (1795). Cerutti, originally a Jesuit, became a member of the Legislative Assembly, and was the friend of Mirabeau, whose funeral oration he delivered.
28. The anti-atheistic and anti-philosophic legend was born of the exasperation and bad faith of the dethroned aristocracy, themselves often unbelievers in the day of their ascendancy, and, whether unbelievers or not, responsible with the Church and the court for that long insensate resistance to reform which made the revolution inevitable. Mere random denunciation of new ideas as tending to generate rebellion was of course an ancient commonplace. Medieval heretics had been so denounced; Wiclif was in his day; and when the Count de Cataneo attacked Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws, he spoke of all such reasonings as "attempts which shake the sacred basis of thrones." But he and his contemporaries knew that freethinkers were not specially given to mutiny; and when, later, French Churchmen had begun systematically to accuse the philosophers of undermining alike the Church and the throne, the unbelieving nobles, conscious of entire political conservatism, had simply laughed. Better than anyone else they knew that political revolt had other roots and motives than incredulity; and they could not but remember how many French kings had been rebelled against by the Church, and how many slain by priestly hands. Their acceptance of the priestly formula came later. In the life of the brilliant Rivarol, who associated with the noblesse while disdained by many of them because of his obscure birth, we may read the intellectual history of the case. Brilliant without patience, keen without scientific coherence, Rivarol in 1787 met the pious deism of Necker with a dialectic in which cynicism as often disorders as illuminates the argument. With prompt veracity he first rejects the ideal of a beneficent reign of delusion, and insists that religion is seen in all history powerless alike to overrule men's passions and prejudices, and to console the oppressed by its promise of a reversal of earthly conditions in another world. But in the same breath, by way of proving that the atheist is less disturbing to convention than the deist, he insists that the unbeliever soon learns to see that "irreverences are crimes against society"; and then, in order to justify such conformity, asserts what he had before denied. And the self-contradiction recurs. The underlying motive of the whole polemic is simply the grudge of the upper class diner-out against the serious and conscientious bourgeois who strives to reform the existing system. Conscious of being more enlightened, the wit is eager at once to disparage Necker for his religiosity and to discredit him politically as the enemy of the socially useful ecclesiastical order. Yet in his second letter Sur la morale (1788) he is so plainly an unbeliever that the treatise had to be printed at Berlin. The due sequence is that when the Revolution breaks out Rivarol sides with the court and the noblesse, while perfectly aware of the ineptitude and malfeasance of both; and, living in exile, proceeds to denounce the philosophers as having caused the overturn by their universal criticism. In 1787 he had declared that he would not even have written his Letters to Necker if he were not certain that "the people does not read." Then the people had read neither the philosophers nor him. But in exile he must needs frame for the émigrés a formula, true or false. It is the falsity of men divided against themselves, who pay themselves with recriminations rather than realize their own deserts. And in the end Rivarol is but a deist.
29. If any careful attempt be made to analyse the situation, the stirring example of the precedent revolution in the British American colonies will probably be recognized as counting for very much more than any merely literary influence in promoting that of France. A certain "republican" spirit had indeed existed among educated men in France throughout the reign of Louis XV: D'Argenson noted it in 1750 and later. But this spirit, which D'Argenson in large measure shared, while holding firmly by monarchy, was simply the spirit of constitutionalism, the love of law and good government, and it derived from English example and the teachings of such Englishmen as Locke, insofar as it was not spontaneous. If acceptance of the doctrine of constitutional government can lead to anarchy, let it be avowed; but let not the cause be pretended to be deism or atheism. The political teaching for which the Paris Parlement denounced Rousseau's Émile in 1762, and for which the theologians of the Sorbonne censured Marmontel's Bélisaire in 1767, was the old doctrine of the sovereignty of the people. But this had been maintained by a whole school of English Protestant Christians before Bossuet denounced the Protestant Jurieu for maintaining it. Nay, it had been repeatedly maintained by Catholic theologians, from Thomas Aquinas to Suarez, especially when there was any question of putting down a Protestant monarch. Protestants on their part protested indignantly, and reciprocated. The recriminations of Protestants and Catholics on this head form one of the standing farces of human history. Coger, attacking Marmontel, unctuously cites Bayle's censure of his fellow Protestants in his Avis aux Réfugiéz for their tone towards kings and monarchy, but says nothing of Bayle's quarrel with Jurieu, which motived such an utterance, or of his Critique Générale of Maimbourg's Histoire du Calvinisme, in which he shows how the Catholic historian's principles would justify the rebellion alike of Catholics in every Protestant country and of Protestants in every Catholic country, though all the while it is assumed that true Christians never resort to violence. And, unless there has been an error as to his authorship, Bayle himself, be it remembered, had in his letter Ce que c'est que la France toute catholique sous le règne de Louis le Grand passed as scathing a criticism on Louis XIV as any Protestant refugee could well have compassed. Sectarian hypocrisies apart, the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people--for opposing which the freethinker Hobbes has been execrated by generations of Christians--is the professed political creed of the very classes who, in England and the United States, have so long denounced French freethinkers for an alleged "subversive" social teaching which fell far short of what English and American Protestants had actually practised. The revolt of the American colonies, in fact, precipitated democratic feeling in France in a way that no writing had ever done. Lafayette, no freethinker, declared himself republican at once on reading the American declaration of the Rights of Man. In all this the freethinking propaganda counted for nothing directly and for little indirectly, inasmuch as there was no clerical quarrel in the colonies. And if we seek for even an indirect or general influence, apart from the affirmation of the duty of kings to their people, the thesis as to the activity of the philosophes must at once be restricted to the cases of Rousseau, Helvétius, Raynal, and d'Holbach, for Marmontel never passed beyond "sound" generalities.
As for the pretence that it was freethinking doctrines that brought Louis XVI to the scaffold, it is either the most impudent or the most ignorant of historical imputations. The "right" of tyrannicide had been maintained by Catholic schoolmen before the Reformation, and by both Protestants and Catholics afterwards, times without number, even as they maintained the right of the people to depose and change kings. The doctrine was in fact not even a modern innovation, the theory being so well primed by the practice--under every sort of government, Jewish and pagan in antiquity, Moslem in the Middle Ages, and Christian from the day of Pepin to the day of John Knox--that a certain novelty lay on the side of the "divine right of kings" when that was popularly formulated. And on the whole question of revolution, or the right of peoples to recast their laws, the general doctrine of the most advanced of the French freethinkers is paralleled or outgone by popes and Church Councils in the Middle Ages, by Occam and Marsiglio of Padua and Wiclif and more than one German legist in the fourteenth century, by John Major and George Buchanan in Scotland, by Goodman in England, and by many Huguenots in France, in the sixteenth; by Hotman in his Francogallia in 1574; by the author of the Soupirs de la France Esclave in 1689; and by the whole propagandist literature of the English and American Revolutions in the seventeenth and eighteenth. So far from being a specialty of freethinkers, "sedition" was in all these and other cases habitually grounded on Biblical texts and religious protestations; so that Bacon, little given as he was to defending rationalists, could confidently avow that "Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation ... but superstition dismounts all these, and erecteth an absolute monarchy in the minds of men. Therefore atheism did never perturb states.... But superstition hath been the confusion of many states." For "superstition" read "sectarianism," "fanaticism," and "ecclesiasticism." Bacon's generalization is of course merely empirical, atheism being capable of alliance with revolutionary passion in its turn; but the historical summary holds good. Only by men who had not read or had forgotten universal history could the ascription of the French Revolution to rationalistic thought have been made.
30. A survey of the work and attitude of the leading French freethinkers of the century may serve to settle the point once for all. Voltaire is admittedly out of the question. Mallet du Pan, whose resistance to the Revolution developed into a fanaticism hardly less perturbing to judgment than that of Burke, expressly disparaged him as having so repelled men by his cynicism that he had little influence on their feelings, and so could not be reckoned a prime force in preparing the Revolution. "Mably," the critic adds, "whose republican declamations have intoxicated many modern democrats, was religious to austerity: at the first stroke of the tocsin against the Church of Rome, he would have thrown his books in the fire, excepting his scathing apostrophes to Voltaire and the atheists. Marmontel, Saint-Lambert, Morellet, Encyclopedists, were adversaries of the revolution." On the other hand, Barante avows that Mably, detesting as he did the freethinking philosophers of his day, followed no less than others "a destructive course, and contributed, without knowing it, to weaken the already frayed ties which still united the parts of an ancient society." As Barante had previously ascribed the whole dissolution to the autocratic process under Louis XIV, even this indictment of the orthodox Mably is invalid. Voltaire, on the other hand, Barante charges with an undue leaning to the methods of Louis XIV. Voltaire, in fact, was in things political a conservative, save insofar as he fought for toleration, for lenity, and for the most necessary reforms. And if Voltaire's attack on what he held to be a demoralizing and knew to be a persecuting religion be saddled with the causation of the political crash, the blame will have to be carried back equally to the English deists and the tyranny of Louis XIV. To such indictments, as Barante protests, there is no limit: every age pivots on its predecessor; and to blame for the French Revolution everybody but a corrupt aristocracy, a tyrannous and ruinously spendthrift monarchy, and a cruel church, is to miss the last semblance of judicial method. It may be conceded that the works of Meslier and d'Holbach, neither of whom is noticed by Barante, are directly though only generally revolutionary in their bearing. But the main works of d'Holbach appeared too close upon the Revolution to be credited with generating it; and Meslier, as we know, had been generally read only in abridgments and adaptations, in which his political doctrine disappears.
Mallet du Pan, striking in all directions, indicts alternately Rousseau, whose vogue lay largely among religious people, and the downright freethinkers. The great fomenter of the Revolution, the critic avows, was Rousseau. "He had a hundred times more readers than Voltaire in the middle and lower classes.... No one has more openly attacked the right of property in declaring it a usurpation.... It is he alone who has inoculated the French with the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, and with its most extreme consequences." After this "he alone," the critic obliviously proceeds to exclaim: "Diderot and Condorcet: there are the true chiefs of the revolutionary school," adding that Diderot had "proclaimed equality before Marat; the Rights of Man before Siéyès; sacred insurrection before Mirabeau and Lafayette; the massacre of priests before the Septembrists." But this is mere furious declamation. Only by heedless misreading or malice can support be given to the pretence that Diderot wrought for the violent overthrow of the existing political system. Passages denouncing kingly tyranny had been inserted in their plays by both Corneille and Voltaire, and applauded by audiences who never dreamt of abolishing monarchy. A phrase about strangling kings in the bowels of priests is expressly put by Diderot in the mouth of an Éleuthéromane or Liberty-maniac; which shows that the type had arisen in his lifetime in opposition to his own bias. This very poem he read to the Prince von Galitzin, the ambassador of the Empress Catherine and his own esteemed friend. The tyranny of the French Government, swayed by the king's mistresses and favourites and by the Jesuits, he did indeed detest, as he had cause to do, and as every man of good feeling did with him; but no writing of his wrought measurably for its violent overthrow. D'Argenson in 1751 was expressing his fears of a revolution, and noting the "désobeissance constante" of the Parlement of Paris and the disaffection of the people, before he had heard of "un M. Diderot, qui a beaucoup d'esprit, mais qui affecte trop l'irreligion." And when he notes that the Jesuits have secured the suppression of the Encyclopédie as being hostile "to God and the royal authority," he does not attach the slightest weight to the charge. He knew that Louis called the pious Jansenists "enemies of God and of the king."
Mallet du Pan grounds his charge against Diderot almost solely on "those incendiary diatribes intercalated in the Histoire philosophique des deux Indes which dishonour that work, and which Raynal, in his latter days, excised with horror from a new edition which he was preparing." But supposing the passages in question to be all Diderot's --which is far from certain--they are to be saddled with responsibility for the Reign of Terror only on the principle that it was more provocative in the days of tyranny to denounce than to exercise it. To this complexion Mallet du Pan came, with the anti-Revolutionists in general; but to-day we can recognize in the whole process of reasoning a reductio ad absurdum. The school in question came in all seriousness to ascribe the evils of the Revolution to everything and everybody save the men and classes whose misgovernment made the Revolution inevitable.
Some of the philosophers, it is true, themselves gave colour to the view that they were the makers of the Revolution, as when D'Alembert said to Romilly that "philosophy" had produced in his time that change in the popular mind which exhibited itself in the indifference with which they received the news of the birth of the dauphin. The error is none the less plain. The philosophes had done nothing to promote anti-monarchism among the common people, who did not read. It was the whole political and social evolution of two generations that had wrought the change; and the people were still for the most part believing Catholics. Frederick the Great was probably within the mark when in 1769 he privately reminded the more optimistic philosophers that their entire French public did not number above 200,000 persons. The people of Paris, who played the chief part in precipitating the Revolution, were spontaneously mutinous and disorderly, but were certainly not in any considerable number unbelievers. "While Voltaire dechristianized a portion of polite society the people remained very pious, even at Paris. In 1766 Louis XV, so unpopular, was acclaimed because he knelt, on the Pont Neuf, before the Holy Sacrament."
And this is the final answer to any pretence that the Revolution was the work of the school of d'Holbach. Bergier the priest, and Rivarol the conservative unbeliever, alike denied that d'Holbach's systematic writings had any wide public. Doubtless the same men were ready to eat their words for the satisfaction of vilifying an opponent. It has always been the way of orthodoxy to tell atheists alternately that they are an impotent handful and that they are the ruin of society. But by this time it ought to be a matter of elementary knowledge that a great political revolution can be wrought only by far-reaching political forces, whether or not these may concur with a propaganda of rationalism in religion. If any "philosopher" so-called is to be credited with specially promoting the Revolution, it is either Rousseau, who is so often hailed latterly as the engineer of a religious reaction, and whose works, as has been repeatedly remarked, "contain much that is utterly and irreconcilably opposed" to the Revolution, or Raynal, who was only anti-clerical, not anti-Christian, and who actually censured the revolutionary procedure. When he published his first edition he must be held to have acquiesced in its doctrine, whether it were from Diderot's pen or his own. Rousseau and Raynal were the two most popular writers of their day who dealt with social as apart from religious or philosophical issues, and to both is thus imputed a general subversiveness. But here too the charge rests upon a sociological fallacy. The Parlement of Paris, composed of rich bourgeois and aristocrats, many of them Jansenists, very few of them freethinkers, most of them ready to burn freethinking books, played a "subversive" part throughout the century, inasmuch as it so frequently resisted the king's will. The stars in their courses fought against the old despotism. Rousseau was ultimately influential towards change because change was inevitable and essential, not because he was restless. The whole drift of things furthered his ideas, which at the outset won no great vogue.
He was followed because he set forth what so many felt; and similarly Raynal was read because he chimed with a strengthening feeling. In direct contradiction to Mallet du Pan, Chamfort, a keener observer, wrote while the Revolution was still in action that "the priesthood was the first bulwark of absolute power, and Voltaire overthrew it. Without this decisive and indispensable first step nothing would have been done." The same observer goes on to say that Rousseau's political works, and particularly the Contrat Social, "were fitted for few readers, and caused no alarm at court.... That theory was regarded as a hollow speculation which could have no further consequences than the enthusiasm for liberty and the contempt of royalty carried so far in the pieces of Corneille, and applauded at court by the most absolute of kings, Louis XIV. All that seemed to belong to another world, and to have no connection with ours; ... in a word, Voltaire above all has made the Revolution, because he has written for all; Rousseau above all has made the Constitution because he has written for the thinkers." And so the changes may be rung for ever. The final philosophy of history cannot be reached by any such artificial selection of factors; and the ethical problem equally evades such solutions. If we are to pass any ethico-political judgment whatever, it must be that the evils of the Revolution lie at the door not of the reformers, but of the men, the classes, and the institutions which first provoked and then resisted it. To describe the former as the authors of the process is as intelligent as it was to charge upon Sokrates the decay of orthodox tradition in Athens, and to charge upon that the later downfall of the Athenian empire. The wisest men of the age, notably the great Turgot, sought a gradual transformation, a peaceful and harmless transition from unconstitutional to constitutional government. Their policy was furiously resisted by an unteachable aristocracy. When at last fortuitous violence made a breach in the feudal walls, a people unprepared for self-rule, and fought by an aristocracy eager for blood, surged into anarchy, and convulsion followed on convulsion.
That is in brief the history of the Revolution.
31. While the true causation of the Revolution is thus kept clear, it must not be forgotten, further, that to the very last, save where controlled by disguised rationalists like Malesherbes, the tendency of the old régime was to persecute brutally and senselessly wherever it could lay hands on a freethinker. In 1788, only a year before the first explosion of the Revolution, there appeared the Almanach des Honnêtes Gens of Sylvain Maréchal, a work of which the offence consisted not in any attack upon religion, but in simply constructing a calendar in which the names of renowned laymen were substituted for saints. Instantly it was denounced by the Paris Parlement, the printer prosecuted, and the author imprisoned; and De Sauvigny, the censor who had passed the book, was exiled thirty leagues from Paris.
Some idea of the intensity of the tyranny over all literature in France under the Old Régime may be gathered from Buckle's compendious account of the books officially condemned, and of authors punished, during the two generations before the Revolution. Apart from the record of the treatment of Buffon, Marmontel, Morellet, Voltaire, and Diderot, it runs: "The ... tendency was shown in matters so trifling that nothing but the gravity of their ultimate results prevents them from being ridiculous. In 1770, Imbert translated Clarke's Letters on Spain, one of the best works then existing on that country. This book, however, was suppressed as soon as it appeared; and the only reason assigned for such a stretch of power is that it contained some remarks respecting the passion of Charles III for hunting, which were considered disrespectful to the French crown, because Louis XV himself was a great hunter. Several years before this La Bletterie, who was favourably known in France by his works, was elected a member of the French Academy. But he, it seems, was a Jansenist, and had moreover ventured to assert that the Emperor Julian, notwithstanding his apostasy, was not entirely devoid of good qualities. Such offences could not be overlooked in so pure an age; and the king obliged the Academy to exclude La Bletterie from their society. That the punishment extended no further was an instance of remarkable leniency; for Fréret, an eminent critic and scholar, was confined in the Bastille because he stated, in one of his memoirs, that the earliest Frankish chiefs had received their titles from the Romans. The same penalty was inflicted four different times upon Lenglet du Fresnoy. In the case of this amiable and accomplished man, there seems to have been hardly the shadow of a pretext for the cruelty with which he was treated; though on one occasion the alleged offence was that he had published a supplement to the History of De Thou.
"Indeed, we have only to open the biographies and correspondence of that time to find instances crowding upon us from all quarters. Rousseau was threatened with imprisonment, was driven from France, and his works were publicly burned. The celebrated treatise of Helvétius on the Mind was suppressed by an order of the Royal Council; it was burned by the common hangman, and the author was compelled to write two letters retracting his opinions. Some of the geological views of Buffon having offended the clergy, that illustrious naturalist was obliged to publish a formal recantation of doctrines which are now known to be perfectly accurate. The learned Observations on the History of France, by Mably, were suppressed as soon as they appeared: for what reason it would be hard to say, since M. Guizot, certainly no friend either to anarchy or to irreligion, has thought it worth while to republish them, and thus stamp them with the authority of his own great name. The History of the Indies, by Raynal, was condemned to the flames, and the author ordered to be arrested. Lanjuinais, in his well-known work on Joseph II, advocated not only religious toleration, but even the abolition of slavery; his book, therefore, was declared to be 'seditious'; it was pronounced 'destructive of all subordination,' and was sentenced to be burned. The Analysis of Bayle, by Marsy, was suppressed, and the author was imprisoned. The History of the Jesuits, by Linguet, was delivered to the flames; eight years later his journal was suppressed; and, three years after that, as he still persisted in writing, his Political Annals were suppressed, and he himself was thrown into the Bastille. Delisle de Sales was sentenced to perpetual exile and confiscation of all his property on account of his work on the Philosophy of Nature. The treatise by Mey, on French Law, was suppressed; that by Boncerf, on Feudal Law, was burned. The Memoirs of Beaumarchais were likewise burned; the Éloge on Fénelon, by La Harpe, was merely suppressed. Duvernet, having written a History of the Sorbonne, which was still unpublished, was seized and thrown into the Bastille, while the manuscript was yet in his own possession.
The celebrated work of De Lolme on the English constitution was suppressed by edict directly it appeared. The fate of being suppressed or prohibited also awaited the Letters of Gervaise in 1724; the Dissertations of Courayer in 1727; the Letters of Montgon in 1732; the History of Tamerlane, by Margat, also in 1732; the Essay on Taste, by Cartaud, in 1736; The Life of Domat, by Prévost de la Jannès, in 1742; the History of Louis XI, by Duclos, in 1745; the Letters of Bargeton in 1750; the Memoirs on Troyes, by Grosley, in the same year; the History of Clement XI, by Reboulet, in 1752; The School of Man, by Génard, also in 1752; the Therapeutics of Garlon in 1756; the celebrated thesis of Louis, on Generation, in 1754; the treatise on Presidial Jurisdiction, by Jousse, in 1755; the Ericie of Fontenelle in 1768; the Thoughts of Jamin in 1769; the History of Siam, by Turpin, and the Éloge of Marcus Aurelius, by Thomas, both in 1770; the works on Finance by Darigrand, in 1764, and by Le Trosne in 1779; the Essay on Military Tactics, by Guibert, in 1772; the Letters of Boucquet in the same year; and the Memoirs of Terrai, by Coquereau, in 1776. Such wanton destruction of property was, however, mercy itself compared to the treatment experienced by other literary men in France. Desforges, for example, having written against the arrest of the Pretender to the English throne, was, solely on that account, buried in a dungeon eight feet square and confined there for three years. This happened in 1749; and in 1770, Audra, professor at the College of Toulouse, and a man of some reputation, published the first volume of his Abridgement of General History. Beyond this the work never proceeded; it was at once condemned by the archbishop of the diocese, and the author was deprived of his office. Audra, held up to public opprobrium, the whole of his labours rendered useless, and the prospects of his life suddenly blighted, was unable to survive the shock. He was struck with apoplexy, and within twenty-four hours was lying a corpse in his own house."
32. Among many other illustrations of the passion for persecution in the period may be noted the fact that after the death of the atheist Damilaville his enemies contrived to deprive his brother of a post from which he had his sole livelihood. It is but one of an infinity of proofs that the spirit of sheer sectarian malevolence, which is far from being eliminated in modern life, was in the French Church of the eighteenth century the ruling passion. Lovers of moderate courses there were, even in the Church; but even among professors of lenity we find an ingrained belief in the virtue of vituperation and coercion. And it is not until the persecuted minority has developed its power of written retaliation, and the deadly arrows of Voltaire have aroused in the minds of persecutors a new terror, that there seems to arise on that side a suspicion that there can be any better way of handling unbelief than by invective and imprisonment. After they had taught the heretics to defend themselves, and found them possessed of weapons such as orthodoxy could not hope to handle, we find Churchmen talking newly of the duty of gentleness towards error; and even then clinging to the last to the weapons of public ostracism and aspersion. So the fight was of necessity fought on the side of freethought in the temper of men warring on incorrigible oppression and cruelty as well as on error. The wonder is that the freethinkers preserved so much amenity.
33. This section would not be complete even in outline without some notice of the attitude held towards religion by Napoleon, who at once crowned and in large measure undid the work of the Revolution. He has his place in its religious legend in the current datum that he wrought for the faith by restoring a suppressed public worship and enabling the people of France once more to hear church-bells. In point of fact, as was pointed out by Bishop Grégoire in 1826, "it is materially proved that in 1796, before he was Consul, and four years before the Concordat, according to a statement drawn up at the office of the Domaines Nationaux, there were in France 32,214 parishes where the culte was carried on." Other commonplaces concerning Napoleon are not much better founded. On the strength of a number of oral utterances, many of them imperfectly vouched for, and none of them marked by much deliberation, he has been claimed by Carlyle as a theist who philosophically disdained the "clatter of materialism," and believed in a Personal Creator of an infinite universe; while by others he is put forward as a kind of expert in character study who vouched for the divinity of Jesus. In effect, his verdict that "this was not a man" would tell, if anything, in favour of the view that Jesus is a mythical construction. He was, indeed, by temperament quasi-religious, liking the sound of church bells and the atmosphere of devotion; and in his boyhood he had been a rather fervent Catholic. As he grew up he read, like his contemporaries, the French deists of his time, and became a deist like his fellows, recognizing that religions were human productions. Declaring that he was "loin d'être athée," he propounded to O'Meara all the conventional views--that religion should be made a support to morals and law; that men need to believe in marvels; that religion is a great consolation to those who believe in it; and that "no one can tell what he will do in his last moments." The opinion to which he seems to have adhered most steadily was that every man should die in the religion in which he had been brought up.
And he himself officially did so, though he put off almost to the last the formality of a deathbed profession. His language on the subject is irreconcilable with any real belief in the Christian religion: he was "a deist à la Voltaire who recalled with tenderness his Catholic childhood, and who at death reverted to his first beliefs." For the rest, he certainly believed in religion as a part of the machinery of the State, and repeated the usual platitudes about its value as a moral restraint. He was candid enough, however, not to pretend that it had ever restrained him; and no freethinker condemned more sweepingly than he the paralysing effect of the Catholic system on Spain. To the Church his attitude was purely political; and his personal liking for the Pope never moved him to yield, where he could avoid it, to the temporal pretensions of the papacy. The Concordat of 1802, that "brilliant triumph over the genius of the Revolution," was purely and simply a political measure. If he had had his way, he would have set up a system of religious councils in France, to be utilized against all disturbing tendencies in politics. Had he succeeded, he was capable of suppressing all manifestations of freethought in the interests of "order." He had, in fact, no disinterested love of truth; and we have his express declaration, at St. Helena, on the subject of Molière's Tartufe: "I do not hesitate to say that if the piece had been written in my time, I would not have permitted its representation." Freethought can make no warm claim to the allegiance of such a ruler; and if the Church of Rome is concerned to claim him as a son on the score of his deathbed adherence, after a reign which led the Catholic clergy of Spain to hold him up to the faithful as an incarnation of the devil, she will hardly gain by the association. Napoleon's ideas on religious questions were in fact no more noteworthy than his views on economics, which were thoroughly conventional.
