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

Restoration period. [955] Probably Diderot did the most of the adaptation. "Il y a plus que du bon sens dans ce livre," writes Voltaire to D'Alembert; "il est terrible. S'il sort de la boutique du Système de la Nature, l'auteur s'est bien perfectionné" (Lettre de 27 Juillet, 1775). [956] "Il leur faut un Être à ces messieurs; pour moi, je m'en passe." Grimm, Correspondance Littéraire, ed. 1829-31, iv, 186. [957] Grimm, as cited, i, 235. Grimm tells a delightful story of his reception of the confessor. [958] "Cet ouvrage, dont les vers sont grands et bien tournés, est une satire des plus licencieuses contre les moeurs de nos évêques." Bachaumont, Mémoires Secrets, Juin 15, 1762. [959] Bonet-Maury, Hist. de la lib. de conscience en France, 1900, p. 68. [960] Nouveau dictionnaire historique-portatif ... par une Société de Gens de Lettres, ed. 1771, i, 314. [961] Marmontel does not relate this in his Mémoires, where he insists on the decorum of the talk, even at d'Holbach's table. [962] Chamfort, Caractères et Anecdotes. [963] Nouveau dictionnaire, above cited, i, 315. [964] Name assumed for literary purposes, and probably composed by anagram from the real name Arouet, with "le jeune" (junior) added, thus: A. R. O. V. E. T. L(e). I(eune). [965] Not to be confounded with the greater and later Jean Jacques Rousseau. J. B. Rousseau became Voltaire's bitter enemy--on the score, it is said, of the young man's epigram on the elder poet's "Ode to Posterity," which, he said, would not reach its address. Himself a rather ribald freethinker, Rousseau professed to be outraged by the irreligion of Voltaire. [966] See the poem in note 4 to ch. ii of Duvernet's Vie de Voltaire. Duvernet calls it "one of the first attacks on which philosophy in France had ventured against superstition" (Vie de Voltaire, ed. 1797, p. 19). [967] Duvernet, ch. ii. The free-hearted Ninon de l'Enclos, brightest of old ladies, is to be numbered among the pre-Voltairean freethinkers, and to be remembered as leaving young Voltaire a legacy to buy books. She refused to "sell her soul" by turning dévote on the invitation of her old friend Madame de Maintenon. Madame D'Épinay, Voltaire's "belle philosophe et aimable Habacuc," Madame du Deffand, and Madame Geoffrin were among the later freethinking grandes dames of the Voltairean period; and so, presumably, was the Madame de Créquí, quoted by Rivarol, who remarked that "Providence" is "the baptismal name of Chance." As to Madame Geoffrin see the OEuvres Posthumes de D'Alembert, 1799, i, 240, 271; and the Mémoires de Marmontel, 1804, ii, 102 sq. If Marmontel is accurate, she went secretly at times to mass (p. 104). [968] Deslandes wrote some new chapters of his Réflexions in London, for the English translation. Eng. tr. 1713, p. 99. [969] Pour et Contre, ou Épitre à Uranie. It was of course not printed till long afterwards. Diderot, writing his Promenade du Sceptique in 1747, says: "C'est, je crois, dans l'allée des fleurs [of his allegory] entre le champagne et le tokay, que l'épitre à Uranie prit naissance." (L'Allée des Marronniers, ad init.) This seems unjust. [970] He has been alternately represented as owing everything and owing very little to England. Cp. Texte, Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan Spirit, Eng. tr. p. 58. Neither view is just. [971] In his Essay upon the Civil Wars of France, and ... upon Epick Poetry (2nd ed. 1728, "corrected by himself"), written and published in English, he begins his "Advertisement" with the remark: "It has the appearance of too great a presumption in a traveller who hath been but eighteen months in England, to attempt to write in a language which he cannot pronounce at all, and which he hardly understands in conversation." As the book is remarkably well written, he must have read much English. [972] Lord Morley (Voltaire, 4th ed. p. 40) speaks of the English people as having then won "a full liberty of thought and speech and person." This, as we have seen, somewhat overstates the case. But discussion was much more nearly free than in France. [973] Probably as much on political as on religious grounds. The 8th letter, Sur le Parlement, must have been very offensive to the French Government; and in 1739, moved by angry criticisms, Voltaire saw fit to modify its language. See Lanson's ed. of the Lettres, 1909, i, 92, 110. [974] Condorcet, Vie de Voltaire, ed. 1792, p. 92. In reprints the poem was entitled Sur la religion naturelle, and was so commonly cited. [975] Condorcet, p. 99. [976] See above, pp. 213-14, as to the works of Boulainvilliers, Tyssot de Patot, Deslandes, and others who wrote between 1700 and 1715. [977] Cited by Schlosser, Hist. of the Eighteenth Century, Eng. tr. i, 146-7. [978] Traité de la verité de la religion chrétienne, tiré en partie du latin de M. J. Alphonse Turrettin, professeur ... en l'académie de Génève, par M. J. Vernet, professeur de belles-lettres en la même Académie. Revue et corrigé par un Théologien Catholique. 1e éd. Génève, 1730. Rep. in 2 tom. 1753. Ecclesiastical approbation given 15 janv. 1749; privilège, juillet, 1751. [979] Dom Remi Desmonts, according to Barbier. [980] "Par Panage" (=Toussaint?). Rep. 1755 and 1767 (Berlin). [981] Work cited, ed. 1755, p. 252. [982] A glimpse of old Paris before or about 1750 is afforded by Fontenelle's remark that the prevailing diseases might be known from the affiches. At every street corner were to be seen two, of which one advertised a Traité sur l'incrédulité. (Grimm, Corr. litt. iii, 373.) [983] Thus Duruy had said in his Histoire de France (1st ed. 1852) that in the work of the Jansenists of Port Royal "l'esprit d'opposition politique se cacha sous l'opposition religieuse" (ed. 1880, ii, 298). [984] The case has been thus correctly put by M. Rocquain, who, however, decides that "de religieuse qu'elle était, l'opposition devient politique" as early as about 1724-1733. L'Esprit révolutionnaire avant la révolution, 1878; table des matières, liv. 2e. Duruy (last note) puts the tendency still earlier. [985] "Cette hardiesse étonna Voltaire, et excita son émulation" (ed. cited, p. 118). [986] Avertissement des éditeurs, in Basle ed. of 1792, vol. xlv, p. 92. [987] It has been counted that he used no fewer than a hundred and thirty different pseudonyms; and the perpetual prosecution and confiscation of his books explains the procedure. As we have seen, the Lettres philosophiques (otherwise the Lettres anglaises) were burned on their appearance, in 1734, and the bookseller put in the Bastille; the Recueil des pièces fugitives was suppressed in 1739; the Voix du Sage et du Peuple was officially and clerically condemned in 1751; the poem on Natural Law was burned at Paris in 1758; Candide at Geneva in 1759; the Dictionnaire philosophique at Geneva in 1764, and at Paris in 1765; and many of his minor pseudonymous performances had the same advertisement. But even the Henriade, the Charles XII, and the first chapters of the Siècle de Louis XIV were prohibited; and in 1785 the thirty volumes published of the 1784 edition of his works were condemned en masse. [988] Diderot, critique of Le philosophe ignorant in Grimm's Corr. Litt. 1 juin 1766; Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, Stück 10-12, 15; Gibbon, ch. i, note near end; ch. li, note on siege of Damascus. Rousseau was as hostile as any (see Morley's Rousseau, ch. ix, § 1). But Rousseau's verdict is the least important, and the least judicial. He had himself earned the detestation of Voltaire, as of many other men. In a moment of pique, Diderot wrote of Voltaire: "Cet homme n'est que le second dans tous les genres" (Lettre 71 à Mdlle. Voland, 12 août, 1762). He forgot wit and humour! [989] Prof. Jowett, of Balliol College. See L. A. Tollemache, Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol, 4th ed. pp. 27-28. [990] See details in Lord Morley's Voltaire, 4th ed. pp. 165-70, 257-58. The erection by the French freethinkers of a monument to La Barre in 1905, opposite the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, Montmartre, Paris, is an expression at once of the old feud with the Church and the French appreciation of high personal courage. La Barre was in truth something of a scapegrace, but his execution was an infamy, and he went to his death as to a bridal. The erection of the monument has been the occasion of a futile pretence on the clerical side that for La Barre's death the Church had no responsibility, the movers in the case being laymen. Nothing, apparently, can teach Catholic Churchmen that the Church's past sins ought to be confessed like those of individuals. It is quite true that it was a Parlement that condemned La Barre. But what a religious training was it that turned laymen into murderous fanatics! [991] M. Lanson seems to overlook it when he writes (p. 747) that "the affirmation of God, the denial of Providence and miracles, is the whole metaphysic of Voltaire." [992] Lord Morley writes (p. 209): "We do not know how far he ever seriously approached the question ... whether a society can exist without a religion." This overlooks both the Homélie sur l'Athéisme and the article Athéisme in the Dictionnaire Philosophique, where the question is discussed seriously and explicitly. [993] Horace Walpole, Letter to Gray, Nov. 19, 1765. Compare the mordant criticism of Grimm (Corr. litt. vii, 54 sq.) on his tract Dieu in reply to d'Holbach. "Il raisonne là-dessus comme un enfant," writes Grimm, "mais comme un joli enfant qu'il est." [994] Browning, The Two Poets of Croisic, st. cvii. [995] Cp. Ständlin, Gesch. des Rationalismus und Supernaturalismus, 1826, pp. 287-90. Hagenbach, Kirchengeschichte des 18. und