some part in the general process of enlightenment. A good type of
the agnostic priest of the period was the Abbé Terrasson, the author
of the philosophic romance Sethos (1732), who died in 1750. Not very
judicious in his theory of human evolution (which he represented as a
continuous growth from a stage of literary infancy, seen in Homer),
he adopted the Newtonian theory at a time when the entire Academy
stood by Cartesianism. Among his friends he tranquilly avowed his
atheism. [956] He died "without the sacraments," and when asked whether
he believed all the doctrine of the Church, he replied that for him
that was not possible. [957] Another anti-clerical Abbé was Gaidi,
whose poem, La Religion à l'Assemblé du Clergé de France (1762),
was condemned to be burned. [958]
Among or alongside of such disillusioned Churchmen there must have
been a certain number who, desiring no breach with the organization
to which they belonged, saw the fatal tendency of the spirit of
persecution upon which its rulers always fell back in their struggle
with freethought, and sought to open their eyes to the folly and
futility of their course. Freethinkers, of course, had to lead the
way, as we have seen. It was the young Turgot who in 1753 published
two powerful Lettres sur la tolérance, and in 1754 a further series of
admirable Lettres d'un ecclésiastique à un magistrat, pleading the same
cause. [959] But similar appeals were anonymously made, by a clerical
pen, at a moment when the Church was about to enter on a new and
exasperating conflict with the growing band of freethinking writers who
rallied round Voltaire. The small book of Questions sur la tolérance,
ascribed to the Abbé Tailhé or Tailhié and the canonist Maultrot
(Geneva, 1758), is conceived in the very spirit of rationalism, yet
with a careful concern to persuade the clergy to sane courses, and is
to this day worth reading as a utilitarian argument. But the Church
was not fated to be led by such light. The principle of toleration
was left to become the watchword of freethought, while the Church
identified herself collectively with that of tyranny.
Anecdotes of the time reveal the coincidence of tyranny and evasion,
intolerance and defiance. Of Nicolas Boindin (1676-1751), procureur
in the royal Bureau des Finances, who was received into the Academy of
Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres in 1706, it is told that he "would have
been received in the French Academy if the public profession he made
of being an atheist had not excluded him." [960] But the publicity
was guarded. When he conversed with the young Marmontel [961] and
others at the Café Procope, they used a conversational code in which
the soul was called Margot, religion Javotte, liberty Jeanneton,
and the deity Monsieur de l'Être. Once a listener of furtive aspect
asked Boindin who might be this Monsieur de l'Être who behaved so ill,
and with whom they were so displeased? "Monsieur," replied Boindin,
"he is a police spy"--such being the avocation of the questioner. [962]
"The morals of Boindin," says a biographical dictionary of the period,
"were as pure as those of an atheist can be; his heart was generous;
but to these virtues he joined presumption and the obstinacy which
follows from it, a bizarre humour, and an unsociable character." [963]
Other testimonies occur on the first two heads, not on the last. But he
was fittingly refused "Christian" interment, and was buried by night,
"sans pompe."