Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger (1722-1759), of whom Diderot gives a vivid
account in a sketch prefixed to the posthumous L'Antiquité dévoilée par
ses usages (1766). At the Collège de Beauvais, Boulanger was so little
stimulated by his scholastic teachers that they looked for nothing from
him in his maturity. When, however, at the age of seventeen, he began
to study mathematics and architecture, his faculties began to develop;
and the life, first of a military engineer in 1743-44, and later
in the service of the notable department of Roads and Bridges--the
most efficient of all State services under Louis XV--made him an
independent and energetic thinker. The chronic spectacle of the corvée,
the forced labour of peasants on the roads, moved him to indignation;
but he sought peace in manifold study, the engineer's contact with
nature arousing in him all manner of speculations, geological and
sociological. Seeking for historic light, he mastered Latin, which he
had failed to do at school, reading widely and voraciously; and when
the Latins failed to yield him the light he craved he systematically
mastered Greek, reading the Greeks as hungrily and with as little
satisfaction. Then he turned indefatigably to Hebrew, Syriac, and
Arabic, gleaning at best verbal clues which at length he wrought into
a large, loose, imaginative yet immensely erudite schema of ancient
social evolution, in which the physicist's pioneer study of the
structure and development of the globe controls the anthropologist's
guesswork as to the beginnings of human society. The whole is set forth
in the bulky posthumous work Recherches sur l'origine du despotisme
oriental (1761), and in the further treatise L'antiquité dévoilée
(3 tom. 1766), which is but the concluding section of the first-named.
It all yields nothing to modern science; the unwearying research
is all carried on, as it were, in the dark; and the sleepless
brain of the pioneer can but weave webs of impermanent speculation
from masses of unsifted and unmanageable material. Powers which
to-day, on a prepared ground of ascertained science, might yield
the greatest results, were wasted in a gigantic effort to build a
social science out of the chaos of undeciphered antiquity, natural
and human. But the man is nonetheless morally memorable. Diderot
pictures him with a head Socratically ugly, simple and innocent of
life, gentle though vivacious, reading Rabbinical Hebrew in his
walks on the high roads, suffering all his life from "domestic
persecution," "little contradictory though infinitely learned,"
and capable of passing in a moment, on the stimulus of a new idea,
into a state of profound and entranced absorption. Diderot is always
enthusiastically generous in praise; but in reading and reviewing
Boulanger's work we can hardly refuse assent to his friend's claim
that "if ever man has shown in his career the true characters of
genius, it was he." His immense research was all compassed in a life
of thirty-seven years, occupied throughout in an active profession;
and the diction in which he sets forth his imaginative construction
of the past reveals a constant intensity of thought rarely combined
with scholarly knowledge. But it was an age of concentrated energy,
carrying in its womb the Revolution. The perusal of Boulanger is a
sufficient safeguard against the long-cherished hallucination that
the French freethinking of his age was but a sparkle of raillery.
Even among some rationalists, however, who are content to take
hearsay report on these matters, there appears still to subsist a
notion that the main body of the French freethinkers of the eighteenth
century were mere scoffers, proceeding upon no basis of knowledge and
with no concern for research. Such an opinion is possible only to
those who have not examined their work. To say nothing more of the
effort of Boulanger, an erudition much more exact than Voltaire's
and a deeper insight than his and Rousseau's into the causation of
primitive religion inspires the writings of men like Burigny and
Fréret on the one hand, and Fontenelle and Meister on the other. The
philosophic reach of Diderot, one of the most convinced opponents
of the ruling religion, was recognized by Goethe. And no critic of
the "philosophes" handled more uncompromisingly than did Dumarsais
[1033] the vanity of the assumption that a man became a philosopher
by merely setting himself in opposition to orthodox belief. Dumarsais,
long scholastically famous for his youthful treatise Des Tropes, lived
up to his standard, whatever some of the more eminent philosophes may
have done, being found eminently lovable by pietists who knew him;
while for D'Alembert he was "the La Fontaine of the philosophers"
in virtue of his lucid simplicity of style. [1034] The Analyse de la
religion chrétienne printed under his name in some editions of the
Évangile de la Raison has been pronounced supposititious. It seems
to be the work of at least two hands [1035] of different degrees
of instruction; but, apart from some errors due to one of these,
it does him no discredit, being a vigorous criticism of Scriptural
contradictions and anomalies, such as a "Jansenist atheist" might
well compose, though it makes the usual profession of deistic belief.
Later polemic works, inspired by those above noticed, reproduce some
of their arguments, but with an advance in literary skill, as in the
anonymous Bon Sens given forth (1772) by Diderot and d'Holbach as the
work of Jean Meslier, but really an independent compilation, embodying
other arguments with his, and putting the whole with a concision
and brilliancy to which he could make no approach. Prémontval, a
bad writer, [1036] contrives nonetheless to say many pungent things
of a deistic order in his Diogène de d'Alembert, and, following
Marie Huber, puts forward the formula of religion versus theology,
which has done so much duty in the nineteenth century. Of the whole
literature it is not too much to say that it covered cogently most
of the important grounds of latter-day debate, from the questions of
revelation and the doctrine of torments to the bases of ethics and the
problem of deity; and it would be hard to show that the nineteenth
century has handled the main issues with more sincerity, lucidity,
or logic than were attained by Frenchmen in the eighteenth. To-day, no
doubt, in the light of a century and a-half of scientific, historic,
and philosophic accumulation, the rationalist case is put with more
profundity and accuracy by many writers than it could be in the
eighteenth century. But we have to weigh the freethinkers of that
age against their opponents, and the French performers against those
of other countries, to make a fair estimate. When this is done their
credit is safe. When German and other writers say with Tholuck that
"unbelief entered Germany not by the weapons of mere wit and scoffing
as in France; it grounded itself on learned research," [1037] they
merely prove their ignorance of French culture-history. An abundance
of learned research in France preceded the triumphant campaign
of Voltaire, who did most of the witty writing on the subject; and
whose light artillery was to the last reinforced by the heavier guns
of d'Holbach. It is only in the analysis of the historical problem
by the newer tests of anthropology and hierology, and in the light
of latterly discovered documents, that our generation has made much
advance on the strenuous pioneers of the age of Voltaire. And even
in the field of anthropology the sound thinking of Fontenelle and
De Brosses long preceded any equally valid work by rationalists in
Germany; though Spencer of Cambridge had preceded them in his work
of constructive orthodoxy.