by Timothy Egan
I came home from my first year in college sounding like an evangelist for the Enlightenment. I was full of Rousseau, Diderot, and myself, the annoying nineteen-year-old who has just discovered philosophy. My dad rolled his eyes, sucked on a beer, and told me to save my breath—I might need it someday. My mother feigned interest. They were going through a rough patch, fighting a lot, mostly over money. My mom had to take a job, on her feet all day as a clerk at a department store, and then cleaning people’s homes as well. The last job was humiliating, because the houses were those of her neighbors. Her faith had gotten stronger, though. She wondered if I might go to Mass with her on Sunday. Mass? With Father Schwemin? Is God still way up there? Oh, no, she said. Father Schwemin was gone. The church had changed. The Mass was in English. Nuns got rid of their veils and picked up electric guitars and tambourines. People attended Sunday service in short skirts and bell-bottoms. Hell was still around, but eternal damnation was downsized and deemphasized. Purgatory seemed to have disappeared altogether. Our parish had a new priest, to go along with the new church, finally built, just across the street from our house on Indian Trail Road. My mother had forgiven the diocese for making her feel terrible about getting her uterus removed. And she was clearly taken by this fresh face in a Roman collar, a priest so good with the kids. “He’s young and funny and Irish,” said my mom. “You’re going to love Father Pat.” It was the first time I’d hear a name that would haunt our family.
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LIKE OUR NEW PRIEST, those who took the Age of Reason ideas to the barricades in Paris started off with so much promise. The Declaration of the Rights of Man could not be more commonsensical—and yet radical for its time. Liberty is “doing anything which does not harm others.” People are to be “presumed innocent until declared culpable.” And “the free communication of thoughts and of opinions is one of the most precious rights of man.” Representative democracy took its first steps in France with those words, though women and people without property were excluded. But tyranny was never far behind.
In 1783, the French launched a hot air balloon, one of many inventions they gave the world. A duck, a sheep, and a rooster were on board. The flight lasted fifteen minutes. Such lofty things could not hold their minds for long. All the backed-up hatred toward religion came bursting to the front of the Revolution. You can understand why the French clipped church power at the beginning of their great upheaval, and why one of the first orders of the new National Assembly was to grant Protestants full religious freedom. You can also see why there was so much rage against the Vatican’s reach. Intellectuals hated the church for its patent on piety. The poor hated it for the excess and hypocrisy in the highest clerical ranks, at a time when much of the country was starving. “The common people,” said one archbishop in 1789, on the eve of the Revolution, “speak of nothing but tearing our hearts out and eating them.” But none of that fury justifies the Terror that followed.
To eliminate the old order, the revolutionaries had to crush Catholicism. Churches and schools were nationalized, sold, or torn down. Monasteries and convents were dissolved. Clerics were hunted down and murdered—more than five thousand, by several estimates—some falling victim to traveling guillotines. During one massacre in Paris in 1793, priests were pulled from a prison and hacked to death, their heads put on spikes. During another killing at Nantes, men of faith were stripped naked, bound to a boat with holes punched in the bottom, and then drowned just offshore. These were “legal” executions, mind you, the kind of butchery that calls to mind the state crimes of ISIS or the Nazis. Extremists are alike in their self-righteous fury, and in how indiscriminate they are with their remedies.
I’d seen considerable evidence of this horror moment in French history, a time when mobs burned libraries simply because they housed the musings of men of faith, along the Via Francigena that was behind me. The holy ruins of the trail are a testament to the violent and lasting sweep of the Revolution—the shuttered, the vandalized, the destroyed, the vanished. In Arras, the town’s first cathedral, dating to the year 1030, was torn down by the militants. The Jacobins then tried to replace that church with something called the Temple of Reason. They had the same design for spiritually neutering the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris. “Dechristianization,” it was called. For a brief time, one official religion was even replaced by another: the atheistic Cult of Reason. In service of this new faith, an ex-seminarian named Joseph Fouché ordered all crucifixes removed from graveyards and declared that every cemetery bear this slogan: Death is an eternal sleep.
Eventually, religion was driven entirely out of public life, and the concept of laicité was written into the constitution in 1905. It’s used now to keep Muslims from being veiled and fully clothed at a public beach, Jews and Christians from displaying oversized symbols of their faith while on secular ground. All of this backstory, to this American mind, shows the pure genius of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution—guaranteeing freedom to worship in any faith but banning “an establishment of religion” by the state. This was a product of European thought. But it took the birthing of the United States to put the idea into practice.
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TO SEEK AN UNDERSTANDING of how all things work, more than 250 years ago, was a monumental undertaking; Diderot’s Encyclopédie was a breakthrough for the ages. But now it’s ho-hum. All knowledge is a few clicks away, and yet the average American is arguably less well-read and less well-informed than the French of Diderot’s day, who had high literacy rates. The philosopher from Langres thought that having the world’s knowledge in one place would set us free—truth, no longer monopolized. Science and culture would liberate humanity. But it hasn’t; just the opposite. The main social media platforms have been weaponized to sow confusion and turn people against one another. Mass murder has come with misinformation. There’s a community for every viper’s pit of falsehoods on the world wide web.
And who is left defending science, philosophy, and enlightened inquiry? The pope. Well, this pope. Not long before I left for the Via Francigena, the Vatican invited leading scientists to explain the Big Bang theory, black holes, gravitational waves, and other subjects that would have led to stake burning in another era. Science and theology are not at odds with each other, said Pope Francis. To the contrary, the more the universe is demystified, the better. “I encourage you to persevere in your search for truth,” he told a group of astronomers, who are not easily astonished. “For we ought never to fear truth, nor become trapped in our own preconceived ideas, but welcome new scientific discoveries with an attitude of humility.” In a speech before a joint session of the Congress of the United States, the pope challenged those who don’t believe the earth is warming because of human folly. It’s become a major theme of the papacy of the man who took the name of the nature saint. “Whoever denies it, has to go to the scientists and ask them. They speak very clearly. Scientists are precise.” So, it has come to this: the church that put Galileo under house arrest for promoting sound science is now urging all skeptics to put their faith in science.
Diderot died an atheist. He had a huge falling-out with Rousseau, who came to believe that secular progress was just a new form of enslavement, and would lead to imperialism. But as someone who spent his life in rigorous search for higher meaning, Diderot was restless until the very end. Could Pope Francis have won him over? Hard to say. They certainly would have enjoyed each other’s company, as Francis seems to love nothing more than dialogue with nonbelievers. Diderot’s main complaint against religion was that it fostered ignorance and barbarism. That’s also the central argument of Christopher Hitchens, who’s now been replaced on my Kindle rotation by voices from the other side, Augustine among them. Hitchens concluded that belief in God goes hand in hand with a delusional view about the origins of life and the cosmos. Faith cannot stand up to reason. But he died before Francis became head of the church. I would love
to hear his take on a pope who embraces reason and promotes peer-reviewed science as a way to higher truth.
I step out of Diderot’s Maison des Lumières into the even greater light of early summer. I walk away with an appreciation of the man, his genius, his persistence. But I feel a little empty. I can’t . . . quite . . . put . . . my finger on it. Atheism, as it’s been said, is like nonalcoholic beer. It’s also human-centered, obsessed with self. The favorite atheist guide of modern Republican economic thought, Ayn Rand, believed that man “must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.” The motto that Fouché wanted emblazoned over every cemetery—Death is an eternal sleep—is a grim bookend to life. Diderot himself desperately wanted to believe that death was not the end. “Those people who are buried next to each other are perhaps not as crazy as one might think,” he wrote in a letter to a longtime lover. “Oh, my Sophie, I could touch you, feel you, love you, look for you, unite myself with you, and combine myself with you when we are no longer here. . . . Allow myself this fantasy.”
This temple of the Enlightenment in Langres is not soul-stirring, as was Erkembode’s tomb in Saint-Omer or the Smiling Angel in Reims. There’s also a whiff of condescension about the way the maison presents things: all was darkness until the Great Man of Reason came along and cleared everything up for the little people. Not true. Consider Erasmus—brilliant, humane, progressive, logical, and still a believer. Or even Dom Pérignon, observing nature, reflecting on it, and then experimenting with it to craft a most perfect thing. Diderot may have explained the universe, but surely he knew that wasn’t enough. And when his followers tried to replace belief in God with belief in reason, that wasn’t enough either. Robespierre himself, the dark knight of the Terror, called the Festivals of Reason staged in nationalized cathedrals “ridiculous farces.” After the Revolution, a popular philosopher created the Religion of Humanity, with its own sacraments and priests. It floundered for lack of followers. “Of all the failures of the French Revolution, none would be so inevitable and so dismal as the campaign of ‘dechristianization,’” wrote historian Simon Schama.
Predictably, I wander over to Saint Mammes Cathedral, which takes up an entire medieval block. The cloister was seized by the state; it’s now attached to a public library and decorated with bland, consensus-driven municipal art. The church is dedicated to a boy saint from the third century, born in a Roman prison and tortured by the emperor. Mammes escaped, made his way to the mountains, and lived for a time off his legend. When captured, he was thrown to the lions. But lo, he tamed them and escaped again, this time with a beast as his companion. The Romans finally got him with a giant fork—a trident—in the gut. His relics are here in Langres, inside a gold box. And there’s a statue of the child with the lion.
Diderot would disapprove of it all—the superstition, the box of seventeen-hundred-year-old bones, the dubious bonding of lion and lad. He despised myth. But there is something of Huck Finn in the kid who outwitted his tormentors and turned his predators into pals. To a ten-year-old boy sitting in church today, bored stiff by a clerical sermon, the tale of Mammes is electrifying. Religion is story, a narrative about a force much greater than us, enigmatic by nature. Most of us like to think that death is more than an eternal sleep. Until atheism can tell a story, it will always have trouble packing a house. But also, as Diderot said, “Only passions, great passions, can elevate the soul to great things.”
SIXTEEN
UNITED EUROPE’S TICKING CLOCK
Without the Via Francigena, I would never have spent a day and a night in a city obsessed with time. Besançon is tucked into a fold that heralds the foothills of the Jura Mountains, with tall, orange-roofed stone houses sprouting chimneys that are distinct enough to be protected by law. The tidy sheen makes it feel like Switzerland, which is barely an hour away. But then you run into middle-aged men in tight red pants, a welcome assurance that you’re still very much in France. A horseshoe bend of the River Doubs wraps around the old town, which is topped by a citadel built during the golden era of fortifications in the seventeenth century. A Gallic tribe from the Bronze Age, Julius Caesar, the Holy Roman Empire, Burgundy, Spain, Austria, and the Nazis all had control at one point. Now Besançon lives in contented obscurity, 120,000 people in the city proper, known for its watches, clocks, and gongs—all the ticking reminders of quantifiable time.
“Gorgeous city,” I say to the young woman who stamps my pilgrim passport on a delicious morning, the heat finally starting to back off. “I’d never heard of Besançon.”
“We’re often overlooked.”
“Do you get many visitors from the States?”
“No, none at all. Not that I can remember.”
“None?”
“I beg your pardon: two. An American couple came through here last month. They might have been lost. Will you sign the guest book? Not even the French visit Besançon.”
Pity. It’s another gem on the road to Rome, though one apparently lacking in self-esteem. And the last chance to talk to myself for a while. My son, Casey, will join me in Lausanne. He doesn’t really get why I’m on the V.F. But when I described the route, he perked up. He’s always game to see someplace new.
Today I want to meet the Franciscans who live on a hill above town, to see the famed astronomical clock, and to stop by Victor Hugo’s house. My hotel is an easy walk from anything I need for short-term happiness. Long term, well, maybe the Brothers of St. Francis can offer some advice on that, after eight hundred years of trying to live humble lives within the arms of nature. I stroll past storefronts displaying Besançon-made watches. Not just one storefront or two, but many. This does not count the retailers of sundials, clocks, and various things that chime or chirp on the hour. Nor the Museum of Time. Nor the Observatoire de Besançon, a 140-year-old institution that relies on the stars to certify the accuracy of your chronometer. Nor the glass-fronted workshop in Old Town, where you can watch a watchmaker make a watch.
The house where Hugo was born, in 1802, is just up a hill on Grande Rue, a stately, multistory maison. After he died, his coffin lay in state under the Arc de Triomphe, and two million people turned out to pay honor to a writer. Hugo is buried in the Panthéon, the great secular mausoleum in Paris, a fitting place for the playwright, poet, essayist, novelist, exile, politician, and man of sustained moral outrage whose name is attached to a street in nearly every town in France. Baby Hugo spent only six weeks here, which was long enough for Besançon to claim a substantial part of his legacy. Inside the house are quotes from his life’s work and the themes that animated him. For all his prodigious output, Hugo was brilliant at capturing a complex truth in just a few words:
“He who opens a school door closes a prison.”
“All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.”
“It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.”
“Death has revelations: the great sorrows which open the heart, open the mind as well. . . . As for me, I have faith. I believe in a future life. How could I do otherwise? My daughter was a soul. I saw this soul. I touched it.”
This last quote is curious, since Hugo is said to have been an atheist. When he said that he touched the soul of his daughter, it was a reference to his child who drowned in the Seine at a young age. It seems he was more like Diderot, in constant search of self and God, advancing Enlightenment thought in the wreckage after the Revolution. He flirted for many years with Catholicism and Deism, telling a census taker that he was a “freethinker,” never parked permanently in one theological slot. No one would ever look at the greatest cathedral in France the same way after Hugo wrote The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. And no one has created a purer soul than the bishop who takes in a thief in Les Misérables. I’ve found his observations about pos
trevolutionary Christian ruins to be spot on. But he was also a political visionary. And as I wheeze my way up the hill to view the Mother of All Clocks, I’m thinking about the fragile construct of modern Europe, which he prophesied.
In 1870, Hugo planted a tree outside the home where he lived in political exile, on the island of Guernsey off the coast of Normandy. By the time the sapling had grown into a mighty oak, Europe would be a unified political entity, Hugo hoped, all the nationalistic bile and religious hatred squeezed out of it. He presented this vision in a speech. “A day will come when you France, you Russia, you Italy, you England, you Germany, you all, nations of the continent, without losing your distinct qualities and your glorious individuality, will be brotherhood,” he said. “A day will come when the only fields of battle will be markets opening up to trade. A day will come when the bullets and the bombs will be replaced by votes.”
The oak tree still stands outside Hugo’s Hauteville House. And the Day Has Come, indeed, when Europe is trying to be more than its parts. A French dignitary in 1949 envisioned a “great experiment” that would “put an end to war.” That part has come true: never before have the major nations of the Continent gone so long without warring with one another. This, let us not forget, followed the near annihilation of the Old World in the past century. The European Union is a reasonable representation of Hugo’s United States of Europe. “My revenge is fraternity,” he said. The problem is that a common currency and a common market may not be enough to overcome uncommon political bonds.