century. Montesquieu, who in his early Persian Letters (1721) had
revealed himself as "fundamentally irreligious" [938] and a censor
of intolerance, [939] proceeded in his masterly little book on the
Greatness and Decadence of the Romans (1734) and his famous Spirit of
Laws (1748) to treat the problems of human history in an absolutely
secular and scientific spirit, making only such conventional allusions
to religion as were advisable in an age in which all heretical works
were suppressible. [940] The attempts of La Harpe and Villemain [941]
to establish the inference that he repented his youthful levity in the
Persian Letters, and recognized in Christianity the main pillar of
society, will not bear examination. The very passages on which they
found [942] are entirely secular in tone and purpose, and tell of
no belief. [943] So late as 1751 there appeared a work, Les Lettres
Persanes convaincues d'impiété, by the Abbé Gaultier. The election
of Montesquieu was in fact the beginning of the struggle between
the Philosophe party in the Academy and their opponents; [944]
and in his own day there was never much doubt about Montesquieu's
deism. In his posthumous Pensées his anti-clericalism is sufficiently
emphatic. "Churchmen," he writes, "are interested in keeping the
people ignorant." He expresses himself as a convinced deist, and,
with no great air of conviction, as a believer in immortality. But
there his faith ends. "I call piety," he says, "a malady of the heart,
which plants in the soul a malady of the most ineradicable kind." "The
false notion of miracles comes of our vanity, which makes us believe
we are important enough for the Supreme Being to upset Nature on
our behalf." "Three incredibilities among incredibilities: the pure
mechanism of animals [the doctrine of Descartes]; passive obedience;
and the infallibility of the Pope." [945] His heresy was of course
divined by the guardians of the faith, through all his panegyric of
it. Even in his lifetime, Jesuits and Jansenists combined to attack
the Spirit of Laws, which was denounced at an assembly of the clergy,
put on the Roman Index, and prohibited by the censure until Malesherbes
came into office in 1750. [946] The Count de Cataneo, a Venetian noble
in the service of the King of Prussia, published in French about 1751
a treatise on The Source, the Strength, and the True Spirit of Laws,
[947] in which the political rationalism and the ethical utilitarianism
of Cumberland and Grotius were alike repelled as irreconcilable
with the doctrine of revelation. It was doubtless because of this
atmosphere of hostility that on the death of Montesquieu at Paris, in
1755, Diderot was the only man of letters who attended his funeral,
[948] though the Académie performed a commemorative service. [949]
Nevertheless, Montesquieu was throughout his life a figure in "good
society," and suffered no molestation apart from the outcry against
his books. He lived under a tradition of private freethinking and
public clericalism, even as did Molière in the previous century; and
where the two traditions had to clash, as at interment, the clerical
dominion affirmed itself. But even in the Church there were always
successors of Gassendi, to wit, philosophic unbelievers, as well as
quiet friends of toleration. And it was given to an obscure Churchman
to show the way of freethought to a generation of lay combatants.