by Will Durant
Hearing of his infirmities, the Empress Catherine secured for him and his wife a splendid suite of rooms in the Rue de Richelieu. They moved into it about July 18. He smiled as he saw new furniture being carried in; he could use it, he said, for only a few days. He used it for less than two weeks. On July 31, 1784, he ate a hearty meal, had an attack of coronary thrombosis, and died at the table, aged seventy-one. His wife and his son-in-law persuaded a local priest to give Diderot a church burial despite his notorious atheism. The corpse was buried in the Church of St.-Roch, from which, at some unknown time, it mysteriously disappeared.
The procession continued. Mably died in 1785, Buffon in 1788, d’Holbach in 1789. Raynal, as we have seen, outlived the Revolution, denounced its barbarities, and surprised himself by dying a natural death (1796). Grimm met all strokes of fortune with Teutonic patience. In 1775 Joseph II made him a baron of the Holy Roman Empire, and in 1776 the Duke of Saxe-Gotha made him minister to France. His Correspondance littéraire, after 1772, was mostly written by his secretary Jakob Meister, but Grimm contributed trenchant articles on literature, art, religion, morals, politics, and philosophy. He was the only thorough skeptic among the philosophes, for he doubted philosophy too, and reason, and progress. While Diderot and others of the faithful looked toward posterity with utopia mirrored in their eyes, Grimm noted that this was a very ancient mirage, “an illusion which has been handed down from generation to generation”; and we have noted his prediction, in 1757, of an imminent “fatal revolution.”102 When the Revolution came and became murderous, he returned to his native Germany and settled in Gotha (1793). Catherine relieved his poverty and made him her minister at Hamburg (1796). On the death of his imperial benefactress he went to live with Émilie de Belsunce, granddaughter of his beloved Mme. d’Épinay. He survived till 1807, chiefly on memories of those exciting days when the mind of France was leading Europe to the dizzy brink of freedom.
IV. THE LAST PHILOSOPHE
Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, descendant of an ancient family in Dauphiné, was born in Picardy (1743), was educated by the Jesuits at Reims and Paris, and for many years thought only of becoming a great mathematician. At the age of twenty-six he was elected to the Académie des Sciences. Later, as its permanent secretary, he composed éloges of departed members, as Fontenelle had done for the French Academy. Voltaire liked these memorial eulogies so well that he told Condorcet: “The public wishes that an Academician might die every week or so that you might have a chance to write about him.”103 He visited Voltaire at Ferney (1770), edited an edition of Voltaire’s works for Beaumarchais, and wrote for it an ardent Vie de Voltaire. D’Alembert persuaded him to contribute to the Encyclopédie, and introduced him to Julie de Lespinasse, at whose receptions he became, despite his shyness, a principal figure. Indeed, in Julie’s view, he stood next only to d’Alembert in the range of his intellect, and perhaps above him in the warmth of his benevolence. He was among the first to join the campaign against slavery (1781). Julie helped to free him from his hopeless love for Mlle. d’Ussé, a coquette who took advantage of his devotion but did not return it. He consoled himself with the friendship of Jean-Baptiste Suard and Mme. Suard, and lived with them in a contented ménage átrois.
In 1785 he published an Essai sur l’ application de V analyse aux probabilités. In this he anticipated Malthus’ theory that the growth of population tends to outrun the production of food; but instead of advocating sexual abstinence as a remedy, he proposed birth control.104
He welcomed the Revolution as opening the door to a future of universal education, justice, and prosperity. In 1790 he was chosen to the municipal council that had taken over the administration of Paris. He was elected to the Legislative Assembly that ruled France from October 1, 1791, to September 20, 1792. As chairman of the Committee on Public Instruction he drew up a report advocating and outlining a national system of primary and secondary education, universal, free, equal for both sexes, and removed from ecclesiastical influence.105 He laid down the principle of the “welfare state”: “All social institutions should have for their aim the physical, intellectual, and moral betterment of the most numerous and poorest class” of the population.106 The report was presented to the Assembly on April 21, 1792; action on it was deferred by the Revolutionary Wars; but when Napoleon had established his power he made Condorcet’s report the basis of his epochal reorganization of education in France.
In the National Convention that replaced the Legislative Assembly Condorcet had less prominence, for he was distrusted by the conservative Girondins as a republican, and by the radical Jacobins as an aristocrat who was trying to keep the Revolution under middle-class control.107 He voted to condemn Louis XVI as guilty of treason, but voted against his execution. Appointed with eight others to a commission to formulate a new constitution, he submitted a draft that was rejected as too favorable to the bourgeoisie. When the Convention, dominated by the Jacobins, adopted a more radical constitution, Condorcet wrote an anonymous pamphlet advising the citizens to repudiate it. On July 8, 1793, the Convention ordered his arrest.
For nine months he hid himself in a pension kept by the widow of the painter Claude-Joseph Vernet. There, to distract his mind from fear of apprehension, he wrote the little book that served both as a summary of the Enlightenment and as a blueprint of the coming utopia. The manuscript bears the title Prospectus d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain.108 He called it also Esquisse—a sketch; apparently he hoped someday to write a fuller exposition of his philosophy.
He took his inspiration from the lecture in which Turgot, then a seminarian (December 11, 1750), had outlined “The Successive Advances of the Human Mind.”109 Condorcet divided history into ten stages: (1) the union of families into tribes; (2) pastoralism and agriculture; (3) invention of writing; (4) the flowering of Greek culture to the time of Alexander; (5) the development of knowledge during the rise and decline of Rome; (6) the Dark Ages, from A.D. 476 to the Crusades; (7) the growth of science between the Crusades and the invention of printing; (8) from Gutenberg to Bacon, Galileo, and Descartes, who “shook off the yoke of authority”; (9) from Descartes to the foundation of the American and French republics; (10) the age of the liberated mind.110
Condorcet, like Voltaire, had no appreciation of the Middle Ages; he thought of them as the domination of European thought by the Church, the hypnotism of the people by the magic of the Mass, and the resurrection of polytheism through the worship of the saints.111 Though, again like Voltaire, he retained a deistic belief in God, he relied on the progress and dissemination of knowledge to undermine the power of the Church, to extend democracy, and even to improve morals; sin and crime, he felt, were largely the result of ignorance.112 “The time will come when the sun will shine only upon free men who know no other master but their reason.”113 He lauded Voltaire for emancipating the mind, and Rousseau for inspiring men to build a juster social order. He pictured the cornucopia that would flow in the nine teenth and twentieth centuries from the labors of the eighteenth; universal education, freedom of thought and expression, liberation of colonies, equality before the law, and the redistribution of wealth. He vacillated a bit on universal suffrage: generally he wished to limit the vote to owners of property, however little this might be;114 at times he feared that the simplicity of the masses would enable a moneyed minority to indoctrinate them at will, and so create a bourgeois oligarchy behind a democratic front;115 but the flight of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette to Varennes, and fear that the powers would seek to restore autocratic monarchy in France, led him back to the advocacy of universal suffrage, including women.116
From his hunted isolation he looked out in imagination upon a future of glorious fulfillments. He predicted the rise of journalism as a check on governmental tyranny; the development of a welfare state through national insurance and pensions; the stimulation of culture by the emancipation of women; the lengthening of human life by the progress of medicine; the
spread of federation among states; the transformation of colonialism into foreign aid by developed to underdeveloped countries; the lessening of national prejudices by the spread of knowledge; the application of statistical research to the illumination and formation of policies; and the increasing association of science with government.117 Since each age would add new goals to its achievements, there could be no foreseeable end to progress; not that man will ever become perfect, but that he will endlessly seek improvement. “Nature has set no term to the perfection of human faculties; the perfectibility of man is indefinite; and the progress of this perfectibility—henceforth independent of any power that might wish to halt it—has no other limit than the duration of the globe upon which nature has cast us.”118
Toward the end of the Prospectus Condorcet faced the problem that Malthus was to pose four years later in An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798):
Might there not come a moment … when, the number of people in the world exceeding the means of subsistence, there will in consequence ensue a continual diminution of happiness, … or at best an oscillation between good and bad? Will it not show that a point has been reached beyond which still further improvement is impossible—that the perfectibility of the human race has, after long years, arrived at a term beyond which it may never go? . . .
Who will take it upon himself to predict the condition to which the art of converting the elements to the use of man may in time be brought? … Even if we agree that the limit will one day arrive, … consider that, before all this comes to pass, the progress of reason will have kept pace with that of the sciences, and that the absurd prejudices of superstition will have ceased to corrupt and degrade the moral code by its harsh doctrines. … We can assume that by then men will know that they have a duty toward those that are not yet born, a duty not to give them [mere] existence but happiness.119
Condorcet’s optimism was not quite blind. “We still see the forces of enlightenment in possession of no more than a very small portion of the globe, and the truly enlightened vastly outnumbered by the great mass of men, who are still given over to ignorance and prejudice. We still see vast areas in which men groan in slavery.”120 But “the friend of humanity” must not lose hope in the face of these difficulties; think of the many noble things that have already been done, of the immense development of knowledge and enterprise; what may not a continuance and dissemination of these accomplishments produce? And so Condorcet ended his book with a vision that provided his support in adversity, and served him, and a million others, in place of a supernatural faith. This is the final and culminating word of the Enlightenment:
How consoling for the philosopher—who laments the errors, the crimes, the injustices which still pollute the earth, and of which he is so often the victim-is this view of the human race, emancipated from its shackles, … advancing with a firm and sure step along the path of truth, virtue, and happiness! It is the contemplation of this prospect that rewards him for all his efforts to assist the progress of reason and the defense of liberty. … Such contemplation is for him an asylum into which the memory of his persecutors cannot pursue him. There he lives in thought with man restored to his natural right and dignity, and forgets man tormented and corrupted by greed, fear, or envy. There he lives with his peers in an Elysium created by reason, and graced by the purest pleasures known to the love of mankind.121
This profession of faith was almost the cry of a man conscious that death was seeking him. Fearing that Mme. Vernet might suffer if she were found sheltering him, Condorcet deposited his manuscript with her, and, over her protests, left her house in disguise. After wandering on the outskirts of Paris for several days, he asked for food at an inn. His appearance, and his lack of identifying papers, aroused suspicion; he was soon identified as an aristocrat, was arrested, and was taken to a jail in the town of Bourg-la-Reine (April 7, 1794). The next morning he was found dead in his cell. His first biographer thought that Condorcet had carried poison in a ring, and had swallowed the poison; but the report of the medical officer who examined the body ascribed Condorcet’s death to a clot in a blood vessel.122 The Convention, having secured and read the Prospectus, ordered three thousand copies of it to be printed by the state, and to be disseminated throughout France.
V. THE PHILOSOPHERS AND THE REVOLUTION
Burke, de Tocqueville,123 and Taine124 agreed that the philosophers of France, from Bayle to Mably, were a major factor in bringing on the Revolution. Can we accept the conclusions of these brilliant conservatives?
All the prominent philosophers were opposed to revolution against the existing governments of Europe; on the contrary, several of them put their faith in kings as the most practical instruments of reform; Voltaire, Diderot, and Grimm maintained relations of friendship, if not of adoration, for one or the other of the most absolute contemporary rulers—Frederick II, Catherine II, Gustavus III; and Rousseau was happy to receive Joseph II of Austria. Diderot, Helvétius, and d’Holbach declaimed against kings in general, but never, in their extant works, advocated the overthrow of the French monarchy.125 Marmontel and Morellet explicitly opposed revolution;126 Mably, the socialist, declared himself a royalist;127 Turgot, idol of the philosophes, labored to save, not to destroy, Louis XVI. Rousseau advanced republican ideas, but only for small states; the Revolution accepted his theories and neglected his warning. When the revolutionists made France a republic they did so in terms not of the French philosophers but of Plutarch’s Greek and Roman heroes; their idol was not Ferney but Sparta and republican Rome.
The philosophers provided the ideological preparation for the Revolution. The causes were economic or political, the phrases were philosophical; and the operation of the basic causes was smoothed by the demolition work of the philosophers in removing such obstacles to change as belief in feudal privileges, ecclesiastical authority, and the divine right of kings. Until 1789 all European states had depended upon the aid of religion in inculcating the sanctity of governments, the wisdom of tradition, the habits of obedience, and the principles of morality; some roots of earthly power were planted in heaven, and the state considered God as the chief of its secret police. Chamfort, while the Revolution was in process, wrote that “the priesthood was the first bulwark of absolute power, and Voltaire overthrew it.”128 De Tocqueville in 1856 thought that “the universal discredit into which all religious belief fell at the end of the eighteenth century exercised, without doubt, the greatest influence upon the whole course of the Revolution.”129
Gradually the skepticism that had riddled the old theology passed to the scrutiny of secular institutions and affairs. The philosophers denounced poverty and serfdom as well as intolerance and superstition, and labored to reduce the power of feudal lords over the peasantry. Some aristocrats acknowledged the force of the satires that attacked them, and many lost confidence in their inborn superiority and traditional rights. Hear Comte Louis-Philippe de Ségur:
We were scornful critics of the old customs, of the feudal pride of our fathers and their severe etiquette. … We felt disposed to follow with enthusiasm the philosophical doctrines professed by witty and bold writers. Voltaire attracted our intellect, and Rousseau touched our hearts. We took secret pleasure in seeing them assail the old framework. … We enjoyed at the same time the advantages of the patriciate and the amenities of a plebeian philosophy.130
These conscience-stricken nobles included such influential persons as Mirabeau père and fils, La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, Lafayette, Vicomte Louis-Marie de Noailles, and “Philippe Égalité,” Duc d’Orléans; and recall the aid and comfort given to Rousseau by the Maréchal de Luxembourg and Louis-François de Bourbon, Prince de Conti. This liberal minority, spurred by peasant raids on feudal property, led the seigneurs, in the Constituent Assembly, to renounce, for redemptions, most of their feudal dues (August 4, 1789). Even the royal family was touched by the semirepublican ideas that the philosophers had helped to spread. The father of Louis XVI memorized many passages from Montesq
uieu’s Spirit of Laws, read Rousseau’s Social Contract, and judged it “largely sound” except for its criticism of Christianity. He taught his sons (three of whom became kings) that “the distinctions which you enjoy were not given you by nature, which has created all men equal.”131 Louis XVI, in his edicts, acknowledged “natural law” and “the rights of man”132 as following from man’s nature as a rational being.
The American Revolution gave added prestige to republican ideas. That Revolution, too, took its force from economic realities like taxation and trade, and its Declaration of Independence owed as much to English thinkers as to French; but it was noted that Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson had been molded to free thought by the philosophes. Through those American sons of the French Enlightenment, republican theories graduated into a government victorious in arms, recognized by a French King, and proceeding to establish a constitution indebted in some measure to Montesquieu.
The French Revolution had three phases. In the first the nobles, through the parlements, tried to recapture from the monarchy that dominance which they had lost to Louis XIV; those nobles were not inspired by the philosophers. In the second stage the middle classes won control of the Revolution; they had been deeply permeated by the notions of the philosophers, but what they meant by “equality” was the equality of the bourgeois with the aristocrat. In the third stage the directors of the city populace seized the mastery. The masses remained pious, but their leaders had lost respect for priests and kings; the masses loved Louis XVI to the end, but the leaders cut off his head. After October 6, 1789, the Jacobins controlled Paris, and Rousseau was their god. On November 10, 1793, the triumphant radicals celebrated in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame the Feast of Reason. At Tours the revolutionaries replaced the statues of saints with new figures called Mably, Rousseau, and Voltaire. At Chartres in 1795, in the famous cathedral, a Feast of Reason was opened by a drama in which Voltaire and Rousseau were shown united in a campaign against fanaticism.133