A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 by J. M. Robertson
30. A survey of the work and attitude of the leading French
1865 words | Chapter 235
freethinkers of the century may serve to settle the point once
for all. Voltaire is admittedly out of the question. Mallet du Pan,
whose resistance to the Revolution developed into a fanaticism hardly
less perturbing to judgment [1173] than that of Burke, expressly
disparaged him as having so repelled men by his cynicism that he had
little influence on their feelings, and so could not be reckoned a
prime force in preparing the Revolution. [1174] "Mably," the critic
adds, "whose republican declamations have intoxicated many modern
democrats, was religious to austerity: at the first stroke of the
tocsin against the Church of Rome, he would have thrown his books
in the fire, excepting his scathing apostrophes to Voltaire and the
atheists. Marmontel, Saint-Lambert, Morellet, Encyclopedists, were
adversaries of the revolution." [1175] On the other hand, Barante
avows that Mably, detesting as he did the freethinking philosophers
of his day, followed no less than others "a destructive course,
and contributed, without knowing it, to weaken the already frayed
ties which still united the parts of an ancient society." [1176] As
Barante had previously ascribed the whole dissolution to the autocratic
process under Louis XIV, [1177] even this indictment of the orthodox
Mably is invalid. Voltaire, on the other hand, Barante charges with
an undue leaning to the methods of Louis XIV. Voltaire, in fact, was
in things political a conservative, save insofar as he fought for
toleration, for lenity, and for the most necessary reforms. And if
Voltaire's attack on what he held to be a demoralizing and knew to be
a persecuting religion be saddled with the causation of the political
crash, the blame will have to be carried back equally to the English
deists and the tyranny of Louis XIV. To such indictments, as Barante
protests, there is no limit: every age pivots on its predecessor; and
to blame for the French Revolution everybody but a corrupt aristocracy,
a tyrannous and ruinously spendthrift monarchy, and a cruel church,
is to miss the last semblance of judicial method. It may be conceded
that the works of Meslier and d'Holbach, neither of whom is noticed
by Barante, are directly though only generally revolutionary in their
bearing. But the main works of d'Holbach appeared too close upon
the Revolution to be credited with generating it; and Meslier, as we
know, had been generally read only in abridgments and adaptations,
in which his political doctrine disappears.
Mallet du Pan, striking in all directions, indicts alternately
Rousseau, whose vogue lay largely among religious people, and the
downright freethinkers. The great fomenter of the Revolution,
the critic avows, was Rousseau. "He had a hundred times more
readers than Voltaire in the middle and lower classes.... No one
has more openly attacked the right of property in declaring it a
usurpation.... It is he alone who has inoculated the French with
the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, and with its most
extreme consequences." [1178] After this "he alone," the critic
obliviously proceeds to exclaim: "Diderot and Condorcet: there are
the true chiefs of the revolutionary school," adding that Diderot had
"proclaimed equality before Marat; the Rights of Man before Siéyès;
sacred insurrection before Mirabeau and Lafayette; the massacre of
priests before the Septembrists." [1179] But this is mere furious
declamation. Only by heedless misreading or malice can support be
given to the pretence that Diderot wrought for the violent overthrow
of the existing political system. Passages denouncing kingly tyranny
had been inserted in their plays by both Corneille and Voltaire,
and applauded by audiences who never dreamt of abolishing monarchy. A
phrase about strangling kings in the bowels of priests is expressly put
by Diderot in the mouth of an Éleuthéromane or Liberty-maniac; [1180]
which shows that the type had arisen in his lifetime in opposition to
his own bias. This very poem he read to the Prince von Galitzin, the
ambassador of the Empress Catherine and his own esteemed friend. [1181]
The tyranny of the French Government, swayed by the king's mistresses
and favourites and by the Jesuits, he did indeed detest, as he had
cause to do, and as every man of good feeling did with him; but no
writing of his wrought measurably for its violent overthrow. [1182]
D'Argenson in 1751 was expressing his fears of a revolution, and
noting the "désobeissance constante" of the Parlement of Paris and the
disaffection of the people, before he had heard of "un M. Diderot,
qui a beaucoup d'esprit, mais qui affecte trop l'irreligion." And
when he notes that the Jesuits have secured the suppression of the
Encyclopédie as being hostile "to God and the royal authority," he
does not attach the slightest weight to the charge. He knew that Louis
called the pious Jansenists "enemies of God and of the king." [1183]
Mallet du Pan grounds his charge against Diderot almost solely on
"those incendiary diatribes intercalated in the Histoire philosophique
des deux Indes which dishonour that work, and which Raynal, in
his latter days, excised with horror from a new edition which he
was preparing." But supposing the passages in question to be all
Diderot's [1184]--which is far from certain--they are to be saddled
with responsibility for the Reign of Terror only on the principle
that it was more provocative in the days of tyranny to denounce
than to exercise it. To this complexion Mallet du Pan came, with
the anti-Revolutionists in general; but to-day we can recognize in
the whole process of reasoning a reductio ad absurdum. The school
in question came in all seriousness to ascribe the evils of the
Revolution to everything and everybody save the men and classes whose
misgovernment made the Revolution inevitable.
Some of the philosophers, it is true, themselves gave colour to the
view that they were the makers of the Revolution, as when D'Alembert
said to Romilly that "philosophy" had produced in his time that change
in the popular mind which exhibited itself in the indifference with
which they received the news of the birth of the dauphin. [1185]
The error is none the less plain. The philosophes had done nothing
to promote anti-monarchism among the common people, who did not
read. [1186] It was the whole political and social evolution of
two generations that had wrought the change; and the people were
still for the most part believing Catholics. Frederick the Great
was probably within the mark when in 1769 he privately reminded the
more optimistic philosophers that their entire French public did
not number above 200,000 persons. The people of Paris, who played
the chief part in precipitating the Revolution, were spontaneously
mutinous and disorderly, but were certainly not in any considerable
number unbelievers. "While Voltaire dechristianized a portion of polite
society the people remained very pious, even at Paris. In 1766 Louis
XV, so unpopular, was acclaimed because he knelt, on the Pont Neuf,
before the Holy Sacrament." [1187]
And this is the final answer to any pretence that the Revolution was
the work of the school of d'Holbach. Bergier the priest, and Rivarol
the conservative unbeliever, alike denied that d'Holbach's systematic
writings had any wide public. Doubtless the same men were ready to
eat their words for the satisfaction of vilifying an opponent. It
has always been the way of orthodoxy to tell atheists alternately
that they are an impotent handful and that they are the ruin of
society. But by this time it ought to be a matter of elementary
knowledge that a great political revolution can be wrought only by
far-reaching political forces, whether or not these may concur with
a propaganda of rationalism in religion. [1188] If any "philosopher"
so-called is to be credited with specially promoting the Revolution,
it is either Rousseau, who is so often hailed latterly as the engineer
of a religious reaction, and whose works, as has been repeatedly
remarked, "contain much that is utterly and irreconcilably opposed"
to the Revolution, [1189] or Raynal, who was only anti-clerical,
not anti-Christian, and who actually censured the revolutionary
procedure. When he published his first edition he must be held to have
acquiesced in its doctrine, whether it were from Diderot's pen or his
own. Rousseau and Raynal were the two most popular writers of their
day who dealt with social as apart from religious or philosophical
issues, and to both is thus imputed a general subversiveness. But
here too the charge rests upon a sociological fallacy. The Parlement
of Paris, composed of rich bourgeois and aristocrats, many of them
Jansenists, very few of them freethinkers, most of them ready to burn
freethinking books, played a "subversive" part throughout the century,
inasmuch as it so frequently resisted the king's will. [1190] The
stars in their courses fought against the old despotism. Rousseau was
ultimately influential towards change because change was inevitable
and essential, not because he was restless. The whole drift of things
furthered his ideas, which at the outset won no great vogue. He
was followed because he set forth what so many felt; and similarly
Raynal was read because he chimed with a strengthening feeling. In
direct contradiction to Mallet du Pan, Chamfort, a keener observer,
wrote while the Revolution was still in action that "the priesthood
was the first bulwark of absolute power, and Voltaire overthrew
it. Without this decisive and indispensable first step nothing
would have been done." [1191] The same observer goes on to say that
Rousseau's political works, and particularly the Contrat Social,
"were fitted for few readers, and caused no alarm at court.... That
theory was regarded as a hollow speculation which could have no
further consequences than the enthusiasm for liberty and the contempt
of royalty carried so far in the pieces of Corneille, and applauded
at court by the most absolute of kings, Louis XIV. All that seemed
to belong to another world, and to have no connection with ours;
... in a word, Voltaire above all has made the Revolution, because
he has written for all; Rousseau above all has made the Constitution
because he has written for the thinkers." [1192] And so the changes
may be rung for ever. The final philosophy of history cannot be
reached by any such artificial selection of factors; [1193] and the
ethical problem equally evades such solutions. If we are to pass any
ethico-political judgment whatever, it must be that the evils of the
Revolution lie at the door not of the reformers, but of the men, the
classes, and the institutions which first provoked and then resisted
it. [1194] To describe the former as the authors of the process is as
intelligent as it was to charge upon Sokrates the decay of orthodox
tradition in Athens, and to charge upon that the later downfall of
the Athenian empire. The wisest men of the age, notably the great
Turgot, sought a gradual transformation, a peaceful and harmless
transition from unconstitutional to constitutional government. Their
policy was furiously resisted by an unteachable aristocracy. When at
last fortuitous violence made a breach in the feudal walls, a people
unprepared for self-rule, and fought by an aristocracy eager for blood,
surged into anarchy, and convulsion followed on convulsion. That is
in brief the history of the Revolution.
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