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

passed for a Voltairean, did indeed claim to have "saved from the wreck an indestructible belief"; [1837] and Lamartine goes to the side of Christianity; but de Musset, the most inspired of décadents, was no more Christian than Heine, save for what a critic has called "la banale religiosité de l'Espoir en Dieu", [1838] and the pessimist Baudelaire had not even that to show. De Musset's absurd attack on Voltaire in his Byronic poem, Rolla, well deserves the same epithets. It is a mere product of hysteria, representing neither knowledge nor reflection. The grandiose theism of Victor Hugo, again, is stamped only with his own image and superscription; and in his great contemporary Leconte de Lisle we have one of the most convinced and aggressive freethinkers of the century, a fine scholar and a self-controlled pessimist, who felt it well worth his while to write a little Popular History of Christianity (1871) which would have delighted d'Holbach. It is significant, on the other hand, that the exquisite religious verse of Verlaine was the product of an incurable neuropath, like the later work of Huysmans, and stands for decadence pure and simple. While French belles lettres thus in general made for rationalism, criticism was naturally not behindhand. Sainte-Beuve, the most widely appreciative though not the most scientific or just of critics, had only a literary sympathy with the religious types over whom he spent so much effusive research; [1839] Edmond Scherer was an unbeliever almost against his will; Taine, though reactionary on political grounds in his latter years, was the typical French rationalist of his time; and though M. Brunetière, whose preferences were all for Bossuet, made "the bankruptcy of science" the text of his very facile philosophy, the most scientific and philosophic head in the whole line of French critics, the late Émile Hennequin, was wholly a rationalist; and even the rather reactionary Jules Lemaître did not maintain his early attitude of austerity towards Renan.