Revolution. By that time all the great freethinking propagandists
and non-combatant deists of the Voltairean group were gone, save
Condorcet. Voltaire and Rousseau had died in 1778, Helvétius in
1771, Turgot in 1781, D'Alembert in 1783, Diderot in 1784. After
all their labours, only the educated minority, broadly speaking,
had been made freethinkers; and of these, despite the vogue of the
System of Nature, only a minority were atheists. Deism prevailed,
as we have seen, among the foremost revolutionists; but atheism
was relatively rare. Voltaire, indeed, impressed by the number of
cultured men of his acquaintance who avowed it, latterly speaks [1132]
of them as very numerous; and Grimm must have had a good many among
the subscribers to his correspondence, to permit of his penning or
passing the atheistic criticism there given of Voltaire's first reply
to d'Holbach. Nevertheless, there was no continuous atheistic movement;
and after 1789 the new freethinking works run to critical and ethical
attack on the Christian system rather than on theism. Volney combined
both lines of attack in his famous Ruins of Empires (1791); and the
learned Dupuis, in his voluminous Origin of all Cults (1795), took
an important step, not yet fully reckoned with by later mythologists,
towards the mythological analysis of the gospel narrative. After these
vigorous performances, the popular progress of French freethought was
for long practically suspended [1133] by the tumult of the Revolution
and the reaction which followed it, though Laplace went on his way
with his epoch-making theory of the origin of the solar system,
for which, as he told Napoleon, he had "no need of the hypothesis"
of a God. The admirable Condorcet had died, perhaps by his own hand,
in 1794, when in hiding from the Terrorists, leaving behind him his
Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain,
in which the most sanguine convictions of the rationalistic school
are reformulated without a trace of bitterness or of despair.