exasperation and bad faith of the dethroned aristocracy, themselves
often unbelievers in the day of their ascendancy, and, whether
unbelievers or not, responsible with the Church and the court for
that long insensate resistance to reform which made the revolution
inevitable. Mere random denunciation of new ideas as tending to
generate rebellion was of course an ancient commonplace. Medieval
heretics had been so denounced; Wiclif was in his day; and when the
Count de Cataneo attacked Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws, he spoke
of all such reasonings as "attempts which shake the sacred basis of
thrones." [1158] But he and his contemporaries knew that freethinkers
were not specially given to mutiny; and when, later, French Churchmen
had begun systematically to accuse the philosophers of undermining
alike the Church and the throne, [1159] the unbelieving nobles,
conscious of entire political conservatism, had simply laughed. Better
than anyone else they knew that political revolt had other roots and
motives than incredulity; and they could not but remember how many
French kings had been rebelled against by the Church, and how many
slain by priestly hands. Their acceptance of the priestly formula came
later. In the life of the brilliant Rivarol, who associated with the
noblesse while disdained by many of them because of his obscure birth,
we may read the intellectual history of the case. Brilliant without
patience, keen without scientific coherence, [1160] Rivarol in 1787
met the pious deism of Necker with a dialectic in which cynicism as
often disorders as illuminates the argument. With prompt veracity he
first rejects the ideal of a beneficent reign of delusion, and insists
that religion is seen in all history powerless alike to overrule
men's passions and prejudices, and to console the oppressed by its
promise of a reversal of earthly conditions in another world. But in
the same breath, by way of proving that the atheist is less disturbing
to convention than the deist, he insists that the unbeliever soon
learns to see that "irreverences are crimes against society"; and
then, in order to justify such conformity, asserts what he had before
denied. And the self-contradiction recurs. [1161] The underlying
motive of the whole polemic is simply the grudge of the upper class
diner-out against the serious and conscientious bourgeois who strives
to reform the existing system. Conscious of being more enlightened,
the wit is eager at once to disparage Necker for his religiosity
and to discredit him politically as the enemy of the socially useful
ecclesiastical order. Yet in his second letter Sur la morale (1788)
he is so plainly an unbeliever that the treatise had to be printed
at Berlin. The due sequence is that when the Revolution breaks out
Rivarol sides with the court and the noblesse, while perfectly aware of
the ineptitude and malfeasance of both; [1162] and, living in exile,
proceeds to denounce the philosophers as having caused the overturn
by their universal criticism. In 1787 he had declared that he would
not even have written his Letters to Necker if he were not certain
that "the people does not read." Then the people had read neither the
philosophers nor him. But in exile he must needs frame for the émigrés
a formula, true or false. It is the falsity of men divided against
themselves, who pay themselves with recriminations rather than realize
their own deserts. [1163] And in the end Rivarol is but a deist.