century are seen beginning to take form on the very threshold of
the eighteenth. In 1700, at the height of the reign of the King's
confessors, there was privately printed the Lettre d'Hippocrate à
Damagète, described as "the first French work openly destructive
of Christianity." It was ascribed to the Comte de Boulainvilliers,
a pillar of the feudal system. [926] Thus early is the sound of
disintegration heard in the composite fabric of Church and State;
and various fissures are seen in all parts of the structure. The king
himself, so long morally discredited, could only discredit pietism by
his adoption of it; the Jansenists and the Molinists [i.e., the school
of Molina, not of Molinos] fought incessantly; even on the side of
authority there was bitter dissension between Bossuet and Fénelon;
[927] and the movement of mysticism associated with the latter came
to nothing, though he had the rare credit of converting, albeit
to a doubtful orthodoxy, the emotional young Scotch deist Chevalier
Ramsay. [928] Where the subtlety of Fénelon was not allowed to operate,
the loud dialectic of Bossuet could not avail for faith as against
rationalism, whatever it might do to upset the imperfect logic of
Protestant sects. In no society, indeed, does mere declamation play
a larger part than in that of modern France; but in no society, on
the other hand, is mere declamation more sure to be disdained and
derided by the keener spirits. In the years of disaster and decadence
which rounded off in gloom the life of the Grand Monarque, with
defeat dogging his armies and bankruptcy threatening his finances,
the spirit of criticism was not likely to slacken. Literary polemic,
indeed, was hardly to be thought of at such a time, even if it had
been safe. In 1709 the king destroyed the Jansenist seminary of Port
Royal, wreaking an ignoble vengeance on the very bones of the dead
there buried; and more heretical thinkers had need go warily.
Yet even in those years of calamity, perhaps by reason of the very
stress of it, some freethinking books somehow passed the press,
though a system of police espionage had been built up by the king,
step for step with some real reforms in the municipal government
of Paris. The first was a romance of the favourite type, in which a
traveller discovers a strange land inhabited by surprisingly rational
people. Such appear to have been the Histoire de Calejava, by Claude
Gilbert, produced at Dijon in 1700, and the imaginary travels of
Juan de Posos, published at Amsterdam in 1708. Both of these were
promptly suppressed; the next contrived to get into circulation. The
work of Symon Tyssot de Patot, Voyages et Avantures de Jacques Massé,
published in 1710, puts in the mouths of priests of the imaginary
land discovered by the traveller such mordant arguments against the
idea of a resurrection, the story of the fall, and other items of
the Christian creed, that there could be small question of the deism
of the author; [929] and the prefatory Lettre de l'éditeur indicates
misgivings. The Réflexions sur les grands hommes qui sont morts en
plaisantant, by Deslandes, ostensibly published at Amsterdam in 1712,
seems to have had a precarious circulation, inasmuch as Brunet never
saw the first edition. To permit of the issue of such a book as Jacques
Massé--even at Bordeaux--the censure must have been notably lax; as
it was again in the year of the king's death, when there appeared a
translation of Collins's Discourse of Freethinking. For the moment
the Government was occupied over an insensate renewal of the old
persecution of Protestants, promulgating in 1715 a decree that all
who died after refusing the sacraments should be refused burial,
and that their goods should be confiscated. The edict seems to have
been in large measure disregarded.