Diderot was known, then, to his contemporaries as the main editor of the most ambitious work of the age, and one of the most prestigious to boot—the work had obtained the approval of the royal censor (a privilège) and would attract more than four thousand fully paid-up subscribers (who, incidentally, thought they had signed up for a mere twelve volumes). Yet the ambition and the prestige of the work did nothing to place him and it beyond controversy. On the contrary, the ambition and prestige pretty much guaranteed it, not least from the Jesuits, commercial rivals in the publishing business, who were keen to quash any competition for their own Dictionnaire universel (Universal Dictionary, 1704). Moreover, the Encyclopédie was something of a Trojan horse; apparently an innocuous compendium of knowledge about the arts, sciences, and technology, it also contained many highly unorthodox views, and furthermore, it stimulated free-thinking by presenting the many and often contradictory views available on any subject, particularly metaphysical ones, and encouraging readers not only to weigh the evidence for themselves but also to enjoy the ironies created by the juxtaposition of so many differing views. Such a spirit of independent, rational inquiry, particularly when applied to questions of faith, could not fail to be incendiary, not least when the cross-references suggested to readers that they might, for instance, go from an article on cannibals or “Anthropophagists” to one on the Eucharist.
As a result, the Encyclopédie came under fire not only from the Jesuits but from other Catholic apologists too. Such attacks did not, however, land Diderot back in jail, and though they certainly made life difficult, the volumes continued to appear. In 1752, shortly after the publication of the second volume, the royal council decreed that the first two should be suppressed. The government, however, discreetly authorized the editors to continue their work, thanks in no small measure to the support of both Madame de Pompadour—who is to be seen seated next to several volumes of the Encyclopédie in her 1755 portrait by La Tour—and Malesherbes, the new directeur de la librairie, who is thought to have gone so far as to hide Diderot’s papers in his own father’s house to prevent them from being seized by the authorities. Certainly the extent to which the Encyclopédie smuggled in claims that were seditious and/or heretical was a major part of the battle, but there were accusations of literary crimes too. In some cases, these were no doubt a kind of pis aller—in 1756, Malesherbes made it clear that the journal Année littéraire (Literary year), edited by Elie Fréron who had powerful connections in the devout Catholic sections of the European aristocracy, had no more business declaring a work to be seditious, heretical, or morally offensive than the Parlement would have declaring one to be dull or ungrammatical, with the result that Fréron and others, notably Charles Palissot, accused the Encyclopédie of lèse-littérature, notably plagiarism, jargon, and sermonizing.
By the end of the 1750s, governmental support for the project was less forthcoming. The political climate had changed: early in 1757, an assassination attempt was made on Louis XV, and as the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) went on, the Encyclopédie became a useful scapegoat, a way of diverting public attention away from the country’s military and political difficulties—as Friedrich Melchior Grimm, the editor of Correspondance littéraire (Literary correspondence), observed in 1760: “You’d think that what led to defeat at the battles of Rosbach and Minden, and to the loss and destruction of our fleet was perfectly straightforward and obvious, but if you ask at Court, you’ll be told that such misfortunes are to be blamed on the new philosophy.” Indeed, in 1759, the Encyclopédie had its privilège revoked, and the work was banned, though when all ten remaining volumes nonetheless appeared in France six years later, Malesherbes seems to have turned a blind eye to the illegality of the publication, which the libraries, by contrast, playfully acknowledged on the title page, announcing the publisher as one “Samuel Fauche,” which is (nearly) to admit that his name was “False.”
This was the major querelle or culture war of the eighteenth century, and Diderot was firmly at the center of it. Moreover, it made a significant and lasting contribution to French culture by forging a new figure in the social, political, and cultural landscape—one that remains to this day central to French intellectual life or, more accurately, to the French and, most particularly, Parisian cultural imagination: the philosophe.
Philosophe is a term that is not, in fact, best translated as “philosopher,” if by it we mean someone engaged in the solitary pursuit of knowledge and truth by rational means. Today, philosophe is commonly taken to refer to the figure that was triumphantly consecrated by the French Revolution, and which we find illustrated in the following description from Diderot’s comic novel, Jacques le fataliste: “[P]hilosophes are a breed who are anathema to powerful men to whom they refuse to kneel. They are anathema to magistrates, the licensed defenders of the very abuses philosophes attack; anathema to priests, who rarely see them bow their heads at their altars; anathema to poets, those unprincipled men who stupidly regard philosophie as taking a hammer to art, not to mention the ones who engage in the odious practice of satire and have therefore never been anything but vile flatterers; anathema to the people who are permanently enslaved by the tyrants who oppress them, the rogues who cheat them, and the jesters who keep them amused.” The philosophe is presented here as one who speaks truth to power in the name of equality, justice, and freedom, and is easily recognizable as the not-so-distant avatar of the modern figure of the engaged intellectual, who makes public interventions in social and political debates.
It is an image that stands in contrast to the following, taken from the entry “Philosophe” (1765) in the Encyclopédie:
The philosophical spirit is … one concerned to observe and be accurate, one that brings everything back to its true principles, but it is not only his spirit that the philosophe cultivates; his care and attention go further. … Reason … requires him to know, study and work at acquiring sociable qualities.
Our philosophe does not think he is in exile in the world; he does not believe he is in hostile terrain; he wishes to enjoy wisely and in moderation the fruits that nature affords him, to take pleasure in others and, in order to take any, he must give it in return. Thus he seeks to be agreeable to those with whom either chance or choice has led him to live, and at the same time, he finds in them what agrees with him. He is a civilized gentleman [honnête homme] who wishes to please and to make himself useful to others.
The contrast is striking: the article is certainly keen to ensure that the philosophe is not thought of as a philosopher engaged in the solitary pursuit of knowledge, but it is also no less keen to present him as a sociable figure, and so, whereas in Jacques le fataliste, the philosophe disagrees with—and is disagreeable to—pretty much everyone in his reforming zeal, here he is anathema to conflict, fundamentally agreeable to all those around him. And yet this image of the philosophe was one that itself generated a good deal of polemic, not least because it presents him as an honnête homme, a term that is notoriously hard to translate but which designates a figure that men of letters had fashioned for themselves so as to gain access to the protections afforded by the court and the aristocracy. And so the Encyclopédie defines the philosophe as one who is agreeable to those very same “powerful men” to whom he is said in the passage from Jacques to be outspokenly disagreeable and hostile. There would seem to be some kind of a contradiction here. If so, how are we to understand it?
Certainly the image of the philosophe as moving in high society has come to seem problematic to us today, and that is perhaps as much owing to the proto-republican image consecrated by the Revolution as it is to that projected by Rousseau, who made a great show of refusing royal protection and aristocratic patronage on the grounds that it was, precisely, patronizing, and who cultivated in public and in print, notably in his Confessions (1782), a counterfigure of the outsider—he was Swiss, not French—whose sincerity was guaranteed by his lack of connections to the rich and powerful, and by his status, which would come to be kn
own as “bohemian.” The success of the Rousseauian figure may have made it hard for us to see how relations with aristocratic protectors could be anything other than compromising, but, in fact, autonomy was very far from being the desired goal of most men of letters in the period. Indeed, a new elite space had emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the salon, which was not so much a mini republic of letters, independent of political power and in which writer-citizens freely debated ideas, as a kingdom of culture, in which the man of letters could make his fortune, both symbolic and economic, by means of his sparkling conversation and his learning, provided it was very lightly worn. Moreover, he might do so without ever doing anything so vulgar as addressing the public in print. As Voltaire puts it in the Encyclopédie entry “Men of Letters,” “There are many men of letters who are not authors, and they are probably the happiest.”
By the mid-eighteenth century, the relationship between men of letters in the guise of honnêtes hommes and the aristocracy was well established, but the extent to which they should aim to please, as the Encyclopédie entry “Philosophe” says they do, began to be called into question. Diderot’s coeditor, d’Alembert, imagined how the man of letters might be excused from such a duty in his Essai sur la société des gens de lettres avec les grands (Essay on men of letters in high society, 1753). Certainly there is no question of the man of letters avoiding society completely—he is no antisocial misanthrope, and indeed, insofar as society is where he finds the material for his imaginative productions, it is necessary for him. Moreover, if he must pay court, as sometimes he must, d’Alembert’s man of letters goes along in good spirit and “laughs at the persona he is thereby obliged to adopt, without feeling any anger or scorn toward him,” but there is no need for him to prostrate himself to aristocrats, whose superiority is not innate, all men being naturally equal, and rests merely on birth and fortune, and not on talent. Moreover, he should be wary of patrons, who may appear generous but whose gifts actually involve taking possession of the man of letters, who is then required to be grateful, which he sometimes fails sufficiently to be, leading to what d’Alembert says are the often painful breakdowns in relationships between men of letters and patrons. And in any case, the man of letters should not fear poverty, and d’Alembert proposes the slogan, “Liberty, Equality, Poverty.” Indeed, he might even dare to be disagreeable in society; of his own work, d’Alembert says: “However careful I have been … to speak the truth in the least offensive way I can and without tempering it, I doubt it will have the good fortune of pleasing everyone,” and he later asserts: “Every age, and ours above all, could do with a Diogenes; the difficulty is finding men brave enough to do it, and others brave enough to put up with up with it.” So rather than being agreeable to his social superiors and supplying clever and witty conversation in return for real and symbolic riches, d’Alembert reconfigures the relationship between men of letters and the aristocracy such that the man of letters might earn those things by being borderline offensive, for, in protecting and supporting him, high society could appear suitably brave and unself-interested, and the man of letters, by virtue of his seeming bravely not to speak in such a way that was calculated to please, could have his authority guaranteed. The philosophe was just such a man of letters. And so whereas Kant would later sum up the Enlightenment in the motto Sapere aude (Dare to know), d’Alembert promoted “Dare to offend” with, as its crucial counterpart, “Dare not to be offended.”
It was a delicate, discursive balancing act, and if Rousseau would break with the philosophes in part because of their social elitism, then other opponents of the Encyclopédie, who were no less opposed to Rousseau, attacked both philosophes and their protectors for indulging in what they saw as a game of smoke and (halls of) mirrors. In his Petites lettres sur des grands philosophes (Little letters on great philosophers, 1757), Palissot speaks of the patrons of the philosophes as “aristocrats who enjoy slumming it,” and he famously likens them to “Muscovite wives who can only love the men who beat them,” adding that the “strategy has worked, and some aristocrats have accorded [the philosophes] some consideration precisely because [the philosophes] refused to accord it to them, which just goes to prove the ancient maxim which says that to succeed in high society, impudence is as good as flattery.” Moreover, for all the philosophes’ claims to be uninterested in power and glory, they have, Palissot says, set themselves up on “a kind of literary throne” from which they despotically anoint some and not others, and pompously decree, quoting Armande, one of “the learned ladies” in Molière’s play of the same name (1672), “None shall have wit save us and our friends.” The philosophes and their supporters are thus figured as a kind of sado-masochistic clique, trying to lord it over everyone else, monopolizing the public sphere, and claiming, to boot, that everyone is against them and that they are the very embodiment of “merit persecuted.”
A similar picture emerges in another text of the same year, Nouveaux mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des Cacouacs (New memoirs for use in the history of the Cacouacs, 1757) by Jacob-Nicolas Moreau, who worked in the legal department of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. “Cacouac” is a neologism that echoes the Greek kakos meaning “nasty” or “horrid,” and is used in the text—a fictional travel narrative—to designate a hitherto undiscovered race of people with shiny costumes and silver tongues who lure unsuspecting Frenchmen away from their decent Catholic, patriotic values with their incantatory scientific jargon and their nasty cosmopolitan, atheistic ways. Moreau strengthens his accusation about the undermining of French national identity by reference to an earlier culture war, known as the querelle des bouffons (1752–54), which had pitted Italian music against French, and in which some prominent collaborators on the Encyclopédie had made the case for the Italians. In his Lettre sur la musique française (Letter on French Music, 1753), Rousseau had gone so far as to say that “the French do not and cannot have music, or if ever they were to, they’d be sorry,” to which Moreau replies by having Cacouac music “instill terror” in his narrator. In the end, he manages somehow to escape and return home to France only to discover that the Cacouacs have overrun the country where they are known as … philosophes.
Such polemic circulated in printed pamphlets, but a new phase began when Palissot took the battle to the most significant cultural institution in Paris, the theater. Diderot had, in fact, already attempted to use the stage to defend the Encyclopédie (and was perhaps trying his hand at writing for the theater in case the Encyclopédie did go under). In his play, Le fils naturel (The natural son, 1757)—one line from which, “consult [your heart], and it will tell you that the decent man lives in society, and that only the wicked man is alone,” seems to have been what finally ended the friendship between Rousseau and Diderot—one of the female characters, Constance, speaks of “those men that the nation honors and the government must now protect more than ever.” Palissot’s play, Les philosophes (1760), is a riposte, and though it recycles much of the substance of the earlier attacks, its performance on the capital’s most prestigious stage, the Comédie-Française, suggested the anti-philosophes were gaining ground. It takes aim at precisely those men said to be honored by the nation and at their governmental protectors by drawing again on Molière, this time Tartuffe (1664), as well as Les femmes savantes (The Learned Ladies), and presenting the philosophes as impostors—hypocritical, self-interested, money-grabbing flatterers, whose gullible victim is a woman who has allowed them into her home where she hosts a salon. Moreover, the play crossed a line, and was allowed to so with impunity, in that it satirized individuals by name or, at least, by anagram: “Dorditius” barely disguises Diderot, who is the play’s main target, though it is perhaps most memorable for the behavior of the character of Crispin, who crawled around on all fours, munching lettuce (obviously supposed to be Rousseau gone back to nature, as his critics claimed his Discours sur les origines et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (Discourse on the Origins and Foundati
ons of Inequality among Men, 1755) had proposed). Another pamphlet war followed, as did another play, this one by Voltaire, who had not been mentioned by Palissot and was no doubt just as irritated at having been left out—all publicity being good publicity in Voltaire’s book—as he was moved by a sense of solidarity with those whom it was now starting to become an insult to call philosophes.
A conterfigure emerged here, one who would become known not only by the prosaic compound term “anti-philosophe” but also by the more memorable phrase, un pauvre diable. In the context of Voltaire’s play, Le café ou l’Ecossaise (The café, or The Scots lass, 1760), “poor devil” would be a rather overly sympathetic translation; “miserable scum” would come closer to capturing the character of Voltaire’s “Frélon,” his name a clear echo of “Fréron” but also of frelon meaning “hornet,” and of félon, meaning “traitor,” who makes up in obsequiousness, self-delusion, and bile what he lacks in social graces, connections, and talent. He is a creature whose natural habitat is not the private elite space of an aristocratic salon, but a London café, that characteristically bohemian space, where he is heard complaining bitterly that others have obtained grace and favor while he has not, and touting his services as a hired pen, specializing in stinging satire, flattery, and slander, for which he charges by the paragraph. In contrast to the man of letters, who plays down his writing and publishing activities, the pauvre diable is very much the scribbler, scraping a living. However, insofar as he lacks social graces and connections, such a figure is, from Voltaire’s perspective, not very far removed from the Rousseauian outsider. Certainly Rousseau’s down-and-out cultivates a deliberate disregard for such things, and he refuses to use his real talent to allow him to move in high society, but to Voltaire, this is as unacceptable as the talentless sycophancy of the pauvre diable, and he brands the citizen of Geneva a gueux or “beggar,” as well as “Diogenes’ ape.” Of course, from the perspective of the Rousseauian gueux, sycophancy is what characterizes the behavior of the philosophes in high society, and the pauvre (poor) in pauvre diable is not only a quality not to be feared, it is also to be positively championed.
A History of Modern French Literature Page 46