writers of special power, several of whom, without equalling Voltaire
in ubiquity of influence, rivalled him in intellectual power and
industry. The names of Diderot, D'Holbach, D'Alembert, Helvétius, and
Condorcet are among the first in literary France of the generation
before the Revolution; after them come Volney and Dupuis; and in
touch with the whole series stands the line of great mathematicians
and physicists (to which also belongs D'Alembert), Laplace, Lagrange,
Lalande, Delambre. When to these we add the names of Montesquieu,
Buffon, Chamfort, Rivarol, Vauvenargues; of the materialists La Mettrie
and Cabanis; of the philosophers Condillac and Destutt de Tracy; of
the historian Raynal; of the poet André Chénier; of the politicians
Turgot, Mirabeau, Danton, Desmoulins, Robespierre--all (save perhaps
Raynal) deists or else pantheists or atheists--it becomes clear that
the intelligence of France was predominantly rationalistic before
the Revolution, though the mass of the nation certainly was not.
It is necessary to deprecate Mr. Lecky's statement (Rationalism
in Europe, i, 176) that "Raynal has taken, with Diderot, a place
in French literature which is probably permanent"--an estimate as
far astray as the declaration on the same page that the English
deists are buried in "unbroken silence." Raynal's vogue in his
day was indeed immense (cp. Morley, Diderot, ch. xv); and Edmond
Scherer (Études sur la litt. du 18e Siècle, 1891, pp. 277-78) held
that Raynal's Histoire philosophique des deux Indes had had more
influence on the French Revolution than even Rousseau's Contrat
Social. But the book has long been discredited (cp. Scherer,
pp. 275-76). A biographical Dictionary of 1844 spoke of it as
"cet ouvrage ampoulé qu'on ne lit pas aujourd'hui." Although the
first edition (1770) passed the censure only by means of bribery,
and the second (1780) was publicly burned, and its author forced to
leave France, he was said to reject, in religion, "only the pope,
hell, and monks" (Scherer, p. 286); and most of the anti-religious
declamation in the first edition of the Histoire is said to be
from the pen of Diderot, who wrote it very much at random, at
Raynal's request.
No list of orthodox names remotely comparable with these can be drawn
from the literature of France, or indeed of any other country of that
time. Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), the one other pre-eminent
figure, though not an anti-Christian propagandist, is distinctly on
the side of deism. In the Contrat Social, [1045] writing with express
approbation of Hobbes, he declares that "the Christian law is at bottom
more injurious than useful to the sound constitution of the State"; and
even the famous Confession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar in the Émile is
anti-revelationist, and practically anti-clerical. He was accordingly
anathematized by the Sorbonne, which found in Émile nineteen heresies;
the book was seized and burned both at Paris and at Geneva within a few
weeks of its appearance, [1046] and the author decreed to be arrested;
even the Contrat Social was seized and its vendors imprisoned. All
the while he had maintained in Émile doctrines of the usefulness of
religious delusion and fanaticism. Still, although his temperamental
way of regarding things has a clear affinity with some later religious
philosophy of a more systematic sort, he undoubtedly made for
freethought as well as for the revolutionary spirit in general. Thus
the cause of Christianity stood almost denuded of intellectually
eminent adherents in the France of 1789; for even among the writers
who had dealt with public questions without discussing religion, or
who had criticized Rousseau and the philosophes--as the Abbés Mably,
Morellet, Millot--the tone was essentially rationalistic.
It has been justly enough argued, concerning Rousseau (see
below, p. 287), that the generation of the Revolution made him
its prophet in his own despite, and that had he lived twenty
years longer he would have been its vehement adversary. But this
does not alter the facts as to his influence. A great writer of
emotional genius, like Rousseau, inevitably impels men beyond the
range of his own ideals, as in recent times Ruskin and Tolstoy,
both anti-Socialists, have led thousands towards Socialism. In
his own generation and the next, Rousseau counted essentially for
criticism of the existing order; and it was the revolutionaries,
never the conservatives, who acclaimed him. De Tocqueville
(Hist. philos. du règne de Louis XV, 1849, i, 33) speaks of his
"impiété dogmatique." Martin du Theil, in his J. J. Rousseau
apologiste de la religion chrétienne (2e édit. 1840), makes out
his case by identifying emotional deism with Christianity, as did
Rousseau himself when he insisted that "the true Christianity
is only natural religion well explained." Rousseau's praise of
the gospel and of the character of Jesus was such as many deists
acquiesced in. Similar language, in the mouth of Matthew Arnold,
gave rather more offence to Gladstone, as a believing Christian,
than did the language of simple unbelief; and a recent Christian
polemist, at the close of a copious monograph, has repudiated the
association of Rousseau with the faith (see J. F. Nourrisson,
J. J. Rousseau et le Rousseauisme, 1903, p. 497 sq.). What
is true of him is that he was more religiously a theist than
Voltaire, whose impeachment of Providence in the poem on the
Earthquake of Lisbon he sought strenuously though not very
persuasively to refute in a letter to the author. But, with
all his manifold inconsistencies, which may be worked down
to the neurosis so painfully manifest in his life and in his
relations to his contemporaries, he never writes as a believer
in the dogmas of Christianity or in the principle of revelation;
and it was as a deist that he was recognized by his Christian
contemporaries. A demi-Christian is all that Michelet will call
him. His compatriot the Swiss pastor Roustan, located in London,
directed against him his Offrande aux Autels et à la Patrie, ou
Défense du Christianisme (1764), regarding him as an assailant. The
work of the Abbé Bergier, Le Déisme refuté par lui-même (1765,
and later), takes the form of letters addressed to Rousseau, and
is throughout an attack on his works, especially the Émile. When,
therefore, Buckle (1-vol. ed. p. 475) speaks of him as not having
attacked Christianity, and Lord Morley (Rousseau, ch. xiv) treats
him as creating a religious reaction against the deists, they do
not fully represent his influence on his time. As we have seen,
he stimulated Voltaire to new audacities by his example.