A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 by J. M. Robertson

[663] where decline of belief can be seen proceeding after as before the definite adoption of pietistic courses by the king, under the influence of Madame de Maintenon. Abbadie, writing his Traité de la verité de la religion chrétienne at Berlin in 1684, speaks of an "infinity" of prejudiced deists as against the "infinity" of prejudiced believers [664]--evidently thinking of northern Europeans in general; and he strives hard to refute both Hobbes and Spinoza on points of Biblical criticism. In France he could not turn the tide. That radical distrust of religious motives and illumination which can be seen growing up in every country in modern Europe where religion led to war, was bound to be strengthened by the spectacle of the reformed sensualist harrying heresy in his own kingdom in the intervals of his wars with his neighbours. The crowning folly of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes [665] (1685), forcing the flight from France of some three hundred thousand industrious [666] and educated inhabitants for the offence of Protestantism, was as mad a blow to religion as to the State. Less paralysing to economic life than the similar policy of the Church against the Moriscoes in Spain, it is no less striking a proof of the paralysis of practical judgment to which unreasoning faith and systematic ecclesiasticism can lead. Orthodoxy in France was as ecstatic in its praise of the act as had been that of Spain in the case of the expulsion of the Moriscoes. The deed is not to be laid at the single door of the king or of any of his advisers, male or female: the act which deprived France of a vast host of her soundest citizens was applauded by nearly all cultured Catholicism. [667] Not merely the bishops, Bossuet and Fénelon [668] and Masillon, but the Jansenist Arnauld; not merely the female devotees, Mademoiselle de Scudéry and Madame Deshoulières, but Racine, La Bruyère, and the senile la Fontaine--all extolled the senseless deed. The not over-pious Madame de Sévigné was delighted with the "dragonnades," declaring that "nothing could be finer: no king has done or will do anything more memorable"; the still less mystical Bussy, author of the Histoire amoureuse des Gaules, was moved to pious exultation; and the dying Chancelier le Tellier, on signing the edict of revocation, repeated the legendary cry of Simeon, Nunc dimitte servum tuum, Domine! To this pass had the Catholic creed and discipline brought the mind of France. Only the men of affairs, nourished upon realities--the Vaubans, Saint Simons, and Catinats--realized the insanity of the action, which Colbert (d. 1683) would never have allowed to come to birth. The triumphers, doubtless, did not contemplate the expatriation of the myriads of Protestants who escaped over the frontiers in the closing years of the century in spite of all the efforts of the royal police, "carrying with them," as a later French historian writes, "our arts, the secrets of our manufactures, and their hatred of the king." The Catholics, as deep in civics as in science, thought only of the humiliation and subjection of the heretics--doubtless feeling that they were getting a revenge against Protestantism for the Test Act and the atrocities of the Popish Plot mania in England. The blow recoiled on their country. Within a generation, their children were enduring the agonies of utter defeat at the hands of a coalition of Protestant nations every one of which had been strengthened by the piously exiled sons of France; and in the midst of their mortal struggle the revolted Protestants of the Cévennes so furiously assailed from the rear that the drain upon the king's forces precipitated the loss of their hold on Germany. For every Protestant who crossed the frontiers between 1685 and 1700, perhaps, a Catholic neared or crossed the line between indifferentism and active doubt. The steady advance of science all the while infallibly undermined faith; and hardly was the bolt launched against the Protestants when new sapping and mining was going on. Fontenelle (1657-1757), whose Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686) popularized for the elegant world the new cosmology, cannot but have undermined dogmatic faith in some directions; above all by his graceful and skilful Histoire des Oracles (also 1686), where "the argumentation passes beyond the thesis advanced. All that he says of oracles could be said of miracles." [669] The Jesuits found the book essentially "impious"; and a French culture-historian sees in it "the first attack which directs the scientific spirit against the foundations of Christianity. All the purely philosophic arguments with which religion has been assailed are in principle in the work of Fontenelle." [670] In his abstract thinking he was no less radical, and his Traité de la Liberté [671] established so well the determinist position that it was decisively held by the majority of the French freethinkers who followed. Living to his hundredth year, he could join hands with the freethought of Gassendi and Voltaire, [672] Descartes and Diderot. Yet we shall find him later, in his official capacity of censor of literature, refusing to pass heretical books, on principles that would have vetoed his own. He is in fact a type of the freethought of the age of Louis XIV--Epicurean in the common sense, unheroic, resolute only to evade penalties, guiltless of over-zeal. Not in that age could men generate an enthusiasm for truth.