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

movement of the age is as it were dramatized; and there more clearly than in the literary record we can trace the struggle of opinions, from the admission of Voltaire (1746) onwards. In the old days the Académie had been rather the home of convention, royalism, and orthodoxy than of ideas, though before Voltaire there were some freethinking members of the lesser Académies, notably Boindin. [1048] The admission of Montesquieu (1728), after much opposition from the court, preludes a new era; and from the entrance of Voltaire, fourteen years after his first attempt, [1049] the atmosphere begins perceptibly to change. When, in 1727, the academician Bonamy had read a memoir On the character and the paganism of the emperor Julian, partly vindicating him against the aspersions of the Christian Fathers, the Academy feared to print the paper, though its author was a devout Catholic. [1050] When the Abbé La Bletterie, also orthodox, read to the Academy portions of his Vie de Julien, the members were not now scandalized, though the Abbé's Jansenism moved the King to veto his nomination. So, when Blanchard in 1735 read a memoir on Les exorcismes magiques there was much trepidation among the members, and again the Secretary inserted merely an analysis, concluding with the words of Philetas, "Believe and fear God; beware of questioning." [1051] Even such a play of criticism as the challenging of the early history of Rome by Lévesque de Pouilly (brother of Lévesque de Burigny) in a dissertation before the Académie in 1722, roused the fears and the resentment of the orthodox; the Abbé Sallier, in undertaking to refute him, insinuated that he had shown a spirit which might be dangerous to other beliefs; and whispers of atheism passed among the academicians. [1052] Pouilly, who had been made a freethinker by English contacts, went again to England later, and spent his last years at Rheims. [1053] His thesis was much more powerfully sustained in 1738 by Beaufort, in the famous dissertation Sur l'incertitude des cinq premiers siècles de l'histoire romaine; but Beaufort was of a refugee-Huguenot stock; his book was published, under his initials, at Utrecht; and not till 1753 did the Académie award him a medal--on the score of an earlier treatise. And in 1748 the Religio veterum Persarum of the English Orientalist Hyde, published as long before as 1700, found a vehement assailant within the Academy in the Abbé Foucher, who saw danger in a favourable view of any heathen religion. Yet even in the time of Louis XIV the Abbé Mongault, tutor of the son of the Regent, and noted alike for his private freethinking and for the rigid orthodoxy which he instilled into his pupil, treated the historic subject of the divine honours rendered to Roman governors with such latitude as to elicit from Fréret, in his éloge of Mongault, the remark that the tutor had reserved to himself a liberty of thought which he doubtless felt to be dangerous in a prince. [1054] And after 1750 the old order can be seen passing away. D'Argenson notes in his diary in 1754: "I observe in the Académie de belles-lettres, of which I am a member, that there begins to be a decided stir against the priests. It began to show itself at the death of Boindin, to whom our bigots refused a service at the Oratory and a public commemoration. Our deist philosophers were shocked, and ever since, at each election, they are on guard against the priests and the bigots. Nowhere is this division so marked, and it begins to bear fruits." [1055] The old statesman indicates his own sympathies by adding: "Why has a bad name been made of the title of deist? It is that of those who have true religion in their hearts, and who have abjured a superstition that is destructive to the whole world." It was in this year that D'Alembert, who took nearly as much pains to stay out as Voltaire had done to enter, [1056] was elected a member; and with two leading encyclopédistes in the forty, and a friendly abbé (Duclos) in the secretaryship (1755), and another zealous freethinker, Lévesque de Burigny, admitted in 1756, [1057] the fortunes of freethought were visibly rising. Its influence was thrown on the side of the academic orator Thomas, a sincere believer but a hater of all persecution, and as such offensive to the Church party. [1058]