[663] where decline of belief can be seen proceeding after as before
the definite adoption of pietistic courses by the king, under the
influence of Madame de Maintenon. Abbadie, writing his Traité de
la verité de la religion chrétienne at Berlin in 1684, speaks of an
"infinity" of prejudiced deists as against the "infinity" of prejudiced
believers [664]--evidently thinking of northern Europeans in general;
and he strives hard to refute both Hobbes and Spinoza on points
of Biblical criticism. In France he could not turn the tide. That
radical distrust of religious motives and illumination which can be
seen growing up in every country in modern Europe where religion led
to war, was bound to be strengthened by the spectacle of the reformed
sensualist harrying heresy in his own kingdom in the intervals of
his wars with his neighbours. The crowning folly of the revocation of
the Edict of Nantes [665] (1685), forcing the flight from France of
some three hundred thousand industrious [666] and educated inhabitants
for the offence of Protestantism, was as mad a blow to religion as to
the State. Less paralysing to economic life than the similar policy
of the Church against the Moriscoes in Spain, it is no less striking
a proof of the paralysis of practical judgment to which unreasoning
faith and systematic ecclesiasticism can lead. Orthodoxy in France was
as ecstatic in its praise of the act as had been that of Spain in the
case of the expulsion of the Moriscoes. The deed is not to be laid at
the single door of the king or of any of his advisers, male or female:
the act which deprived France of a vast host of her soundest citizens
was applauded by nearly all cultured Catholicism. [667] Not merely the
bishops, Bossuet and Fénelon [668] and Masillon, but the Jansenist
Arnauld; not merely the female devotees, Mademoiselle de Scudéry
and Madame Deshoulières, but Racine, La Bruyère, and the senile la
Fontaine--all extolled the senseless deed. The not over-pious Madame de
Sévigné was delighted with the "dragonnades," declaring that "nothing
could be finer: no king has done or will do anything more memorable";
the still less mystical Bussy, author of the Histoire amoureuse des
Gaules, was moved to pious exultation; and the dying Chancelier le
Tellier, on signing the edict of revocation, repeated the legendary
cry of Simeon, Nunc dimitte servum tuum, Domine! To this pass had the
Catholic creed and discipline brought the mind of France. Only the
men of affairs, nourished upon realities--the Vaubans, Saint Simons,
and Catinats--realized the insanity of the action, which Colbert
(d. 1683) would never have allowed to come to birth.
The triumphers, doubtless, did not contemplate the expatriation of the
myriads of Protestants who escaped over the frontiers in the closing
years of the century in spite of all the efforts of the royal police,
"carrying with them," as a later French historian writes, "our arts,
the secrets of our manufactures, and their hatred of the king." The
Catholics, as deep in civics as in science, thought only of the
humiliation and subjection of the heretics--doubtless feeling that
they were getting a revenge against Protestantism for the Test Act and
the atrocities of the Popish Plot mania in England. The blow recoiled
on their country. Within a generation, their children were enduring
the agonies of utter defeat at the hands of a coalition of Protestant
nations every one of which had been strengthened by the piously exiled
sons of France; and in the midst of their mortal struggle the revolted
Protestants of the Cévennes so furiously assailed from the rear that
the drain upon the king's forces precipitated the loss of their hold
on Germany.
For every Protestant who crossed the frontiers between 1685 and 1700,
perhaps, a Catholic neared or crossed the line between indifferentism
and active doubt. The steady advance of science all the while
infallibly undermined faith; and hardly was the bolt launched against
the Protestants when new sapping and mining was going on. Fontenelle
(1657-1757), whose Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686)
popularized for the elegant world the new cosmology, cannot but
have undermined dogmatic faith in some directions; above all by
his graceful and skilful Histoire des Oracles (also 1686), where
"the argumentation passes beyond the thesis advanced. All that he
says of oracles could be said of miracles." [669] The Jesuits found
the book essentially "impious"; and a French culture-historian sees
in it "the first attack which directs the scientific spirit against
the foundations of Christianity. All the purely philosophic arguments
with which religion has been assailed are in principle in the work of
Fontenelle." [670] In his abstract thinking he was no less radical,
and his Traité de la Liberté [671] established so well the determinist
position that it was decisively held by the majority of the French
freethinkers who followed. Living to his hundredth year, he could
join hands with the freethought of Gassendi and Voltaire, [672]
Descartes and Diderot. Yet we shall find him later, in his official
capacity of censor of literature, refusing to pass heretical books,
on principles that would have vetoed his own. He is in fact a type of
the freethought of the age of Louis XIV--Epicurean in the common sense,
unheroic, resolute only to evade penalties, guiltless of over-zeal. Not
in that age could men generate an enthusiasm for truth.