renewed restraint upon the press--there is a notable falling-off in the
freethinking output. Rationalism had now permeated educated France;
and, for different but analogous reasons, the stress of discussion
gradually shifted as it had done in England. France in 1760 stood to
the religious problem somewhat as England did in 1730, repeating the
deistic evolution with a difference. By that time England was committed
to the new paths of imperialism and commercialism; whereas France,
thrown back on the life of ideas and on her own politico-economic
problems, went on producing the abundant propaganda we have noted,
and, alongside of it, an independent propaganda of economics and
politics. At the end of 1767, the leading French diarist [1028] notes
that "there is formed at Paris a new sect, called the Economists,"
and names its leading personages, Quesnay, Mirabeau the elder, the
Abbé Baudeau, Mercier de la Rivière, and Turgot. These developed the
doctrine of agricultural or "real" production which so stimulated
and influenced Adam Smith. But immediately afterwards [1029] the
diarist notes a rival sect, the school of Forbonnais, who founded
mainly on the importance of commerce and manufactures. Each "sect"
had its journal. The intellectual ferment had inevitably fructified
thought upon economic as upon historical, religious, and scientific
problems; and there was in operation a fourfold movement, all tending
to make possible the immense disintegration of the State which began
in 1789. After the Economists came the "Patriots," who directed
towards the actual political machine the spirit of investigation and
reform. And the whole effective movement is not unplausibly to be
dated from the fall of the Jesuits in 1764. [1030] Inevitably the
forces interacted: Montesquieu and Rousseau alike dealt with both
the religious and the social issues; d'Holbach in his first polemic,
the Christianisme dévoilé, opens the stern impeachment of kings and
rulers which he develops so powerfully in the Essai sur les Préjugés;
and the Encyclopédie sent its search-rays over all the fields of
inquiry. But of the manifold work done by the French intellect in
the second and third generations of the eighteenth century, the
most copious and the most widely influential body of writings that
can be put under one category is that of which we have above made a
chronological conspectus.
Of these works the merit is of course very various; but the total
effect of the propaganda was formidable, and some of the treatises
are extremely effective. The Examen critique of Burigny, [1031] for
instance, which quickly won a wide circulation when printed, is one of
the most telling attacks thus far made on the Christian system, raising
as it does most of the issues fought over by modern criticism. It
tells indeed of a whole generation of private investigation and
debate; and the Abbé Bergier, assuming it to be the work of Fréret,
in whose name it is published, avows that its author "has written
it in the same style as his academic dissertations: he has spread
over it the same erudition; he seems to have read everything and
mastered everything." [1032] Perhaps not the least effective part
of the book is the chapter which asks: "Are men more perfect since
the coming of Jesus Christ?"; and it is here that the clerical reply
is most feeble. The critic cites the claims made by apologists as
to the betterment of life by Christianity, and then contrasts with
those claims the thousand-and-one lamentations by Christian writers
over the utter badness of all the life around them. Bergier in reply
follows the tactic habitually employed in the same difficulty to-day:
he ignores the fact that his own apologists have been claiming a vast
betterment, and contends that religion is not to be blamed for the
evils it condemns. Not by such furtive sophistry could the Church
turn the attack, which, as Bergier bitterly observes, was being made
by Voltaire in a new book every year.
As always, the weaker side of the critical propaganda is its effort at
reconstruction. As in England, so in France, the faithful accused the
critics of "pulling down without building up," when in point of fact
their chief error was to build up--that is, to rewrite the history
of human thought--before they had the required materials, or had even
mastered those which existed. Thus Voltaire and Rousseau alike framed
à priori syntheses of the origins of religion and society. But there
were closer thinkers than they in the rationalistic ranks. Fontenelle's
essay De l'origine des fables, though not wholly exempt from error,
admittedly lays aright the foundations of mythology and hierology;
and De Brosses in his treatise Du Culte des dieux fétiches (1760)
does a similar service on the side of anthropology. Meister's essay
De l'origine des principes religieux is full of insight and breadth;
and, despite some errors due to the backwardness of anthropology,
essentially scientific in temper and standpoint. His later essay,
De la morale naturelle, shows the same independence and fineness of
speculation, seeming indeed to tell of a character which missed fame
by reason of over-delicacy of fibre and lack of the driving force
which marked the foremost men of that tempestuous time. Vauvenargues's
essay De la suffisance de la religion naturelle is no less clinching,
granted its deism. So, on the side of philosophy, Mirabaud, who was
secretary of the Académie from 1742 to 1755, handles the problem of the
relation of deism to ethics--if the posthumous essays in the Recueil
philosophique be indeed his--in a much more philosophic fashion than
does Voltaire, arguing unanswerably for the ultimate self-dependence
of morals. The Lettre de Thrasybule à Leucippe, ascribed to Fréret,
again, is a notably skilful attack on theism.