by Will Durant
Raynal had entered Paris as a poor priest. A legend that reveals the gay mood of the rebels ascribed his escape from starvation to the fact that the Abbé Prévost had received twenty sous to say a Mass for a dead soul; that Prévost had paid the Abbé de Laporte fifteen sous to say it in his stead; and that Laporte had paid Raynal eight sous to say it in his stead.79 Raynal was glad to eat at the tables of Helvétius and d’Holbach; he proved to be pleasant company, and seems to have secured the aid of several authors besides Diderot in collecting material, even in writing sections of his book. Rousseau, who-quarreled with all and sundry, found Raynal unquarrelable, and thanked him, in the Confessions, for unswerving friendship and financial aid.80
Raynal must have made money somehow, for he is said to have bribed the censor for permission to issue his book.81 Twenty years of labor had gone into its preparation. It detailed and denounced the greed, treachery, and violence of the Europeans in dealing with the natives of the East and West Indies, and it warned the white man of the terrible revenge that the colored races might take if ever they came to power.82 It was the first French indictment of colonial exploitation; it was among the first books to stress the importance of commerce in determining modern history; it contributed, in passing, to the idealization of Indian natives, and to the cult of Chinese civilization by European liberals. Running through the diffuse volumes were the dominant themes of the Enlightenment: hatred of superstition and priestcraft, and resentment of state-and-Church tyranny over life and thought. Raynal passionately subscribed to the view that Catholicism was an imposture by which prelates and rulers had joined forces to support each other through myths, miracles, propaganda, oppression, and massacre. He appealed to the rulers of Europe to dissociate themselves from all ecclesiastical ties, to allow freedom of speech and publication, and to prepare the way for democratic government. He did not spare Protestantism; this too, he said, had been guilty of intolerance; and he described the fanaticism of the Puritans in New England, the “witch” persecution in Salem.
Despite its long preparation, Raynal’s book was ultimately condemned to oblivion by its faults. Careless in its facts, it mistook legends for history, neglected dates, gave no references to authorities, confused its materials, and engaged (or allowed Diderot to engage) in oratorical effusions and emotional appeals hardly becoming in a work of history. But those were no times for calm impartiality; a book was a weapon, and could not be dulled by presenting opposed sides; literature was war. The French government so assumed; the Parlement of Paris ordered the book to be burned, and Raynal was ordered to leave France. He fled to the Netherlands, but thought it safe to return in 1784 under the mildest of Bourbon kings.
He was one of the few philosophes to see and survive the Revolution. He was shocked by its violence and its use of all the old machinery of intolerance. On May 31, 1791, aged seventy-eight, he addressed to the Constituent Assembly a letter warning it against excesses. “I have long dared to tell kings of their duties,” he wrote; “let me today tell the people of its errors.” He pointed out that the tyranny of the populace could be as cruel and unjust as the despotism of monarchs. He defended the right of the clergy to preach religion, so long as the opponents of priestcraft were left free to speak their minds; he protested against the laws enforcing a state religion, and against the outrages of the mob upon priests. Robespierre persuaded the Assembly to let the old man escape the guillotine, but Raynal’s property was confiscated by the government, and he died in destitution (1796) amid the triumphs and terrors of the Revolution.
III. D’HOLBACH
1. The Amiable Atheist
The best-beloved of all the philosophes in Paris was a German, born (1723) at Edesheim in the episcopal principality of Speyer. He was baptized as Paul Heinrich Dietrich von Holbach, and was reared as a Roman Catholic. His grandfather had made a fortune by introducing ipecac from Holland to Versailles. At Leiden Paul studied science and learned English. After the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748) he settled in Paris, became a French subject, married into a family of financiers, and achieved nobility by investing 110,000 livres at five per cent in the “Company of Secretaries of the King.” He was called “Baron” by his circle because he owned an estate in Westphalia, which brought him sixty thousand livres per year. Altogether he had an annual income of 200,000 livres—“a fortune,” said Morellet, “which no one has ever used more nobly, nor with greater benefit to science and art.”83 He played Maecenas to Marivaux and other authors; he collected a large library, paintings, drawings, and natural-history specimens.
His home became, as one wit put it, “the Café d’Europe”; his dinners and salon in Paris or at his country villa, Grandval, made him, in Horace Walpole’s phrase, the “maître d’hôtel of philosophy.” On Thursdays and Sundays Mme. d’Holbach prepared the table for twelve guests, not always the same, but most frequently the leaders of the anti-Christian war: Diderot, Helvétius, d’Alembert, Raynal, Boulanger, Morellet, Saint-Lambert, Marmontel; sometimes Buffon, Turgot, and Quesnay. Rousseau came, too, but shuddered at the atheism bubbling around him. There Diderot was at his wildest, and the Abbé Galiani kept philosophy on the ground by puncturing theory with wit. The “Synagogue,” as the Baron called these gatherings, met at two o’clock, talked, ate, and talked till seven or eight; those were the days when conversation was unwritten literature, not a chaos of interruptions and trivialities. No topics were barred there; “that was the place,” said Morellet, “to hear the freest, most animated, and most instructive conversation that ever was … in regard to philosophy, religion, and government; light pleasantries had no place there.… It was there, above all, that Diderot lighted our minds and warmed our souls.”84 Diderot himself reported to Mlle. Volland that they talked “of art, poetry, the philosophy of love, … the sentiment of immortality, of men, gods, and kings, of space and time, of death and life.”85 “Sometimes,” said Marmontel, “I thought I heard the disciples of Pythagoras or Plato.”86 Or,
when the fine weather came, we sometimes exchanged these dinners for philosophical walks … along the banks of the Seine; the repast on those days was a large dinner of fish; and we went by turns to the places most celebrated for the supply of that article, commonly to St.-Cloud. We went down early in a boat, breathing the air of the river, and we returned in the evening through the Bois de Boulogne.87
D’Holbach’s salon became so famous that foreigners visiting Paris pulled wires to get an invitation. So, at divers times, came Hume, Sterne, Garrick, Horace Walpole, Franklin, Priestley, Adam Smith, Beccaria. They were somewhat disturbed by the number of atheists they found there; how many times have we heard the story (told by Diderot to Romilly) that when Hume doubted the actual existence of atheists, the Baron assured him, “Here you are at table with seventeen.”88 Gibbon related that the philosophes of Paris “laughed at the cautious skepticism of Hume, preached the tenets of atheism with the bigotry of dogmatists, and damned all believers with ridicule and contempt.”89 Priestley also reported that “all the philosophical persons to whom I was introduced at Paris [were] unbelievers in Christianity, and even professed atheists.”90 However, Morellet noted, “a goodly number of us were theists, and not ashamed of it; and we defended ourselves vigorously against the atheists, though we loved them for being such good company.””91 Walpole found d’Holbach’s “pigeon house of philosophers” offensive to his English taste. He was so disgusted by perceiving that Raynal knew more than he about English commerce and colonies that he pretended to be deaf. Hume’s own account was perhaps too accommodating: “The men of letters here [in Paris] are really very agreeable; all of them men of the world, living in entire, or almost entire, harmony among themselves, and quite irreproachable in their morals. It would give you great satisfaction to find that there is not a single deist among them.”92 The evidence is rather confusing.
But all agreed that the Baron and his wife were perfect hosts and lovable characters. Mme. d’Holbach, according to Grimm, lived only for her husband; o
nce she had welcomed and nourished his guests, she retired to a corner with her knitting and took no further part in the conversation.93 She died in 1754, in the prime of her life; for a time d’Holbach remained “in a state of utter despair.”94 Two years later he married her sister, who proved equally devoted. He was so unassuming in his manners, so amiable in argument, so secret in his beneficence,95 that hardly anyone suspected him of writing so powerful a defense of atheism as the Système de la nature. “I never saw a man more simply simple,” said his salonnière rival, Mme. Geoffrin.96 Rousseau, who learned to hate nearly all the philosophes, retained such admiration for d’Holbach’s character that he used him as a model for the virtuous agnostic Wolmar in La Nouvelle Héloïse. Grimm, who analyzed everyone but Rousseau with calm objectivity, wrote:
It was natural for Baron d’Holbach to believe in the empire of reason, for his passions (and we always judge others by ourselves) were such as in all cases to give the ascendancy to virtue and correct principles. It was impossible for him to hate anyone; yet he could not, without an effort, dissemble his professed horror of priests.… Whenever he spoke of these his naturally good temper forsook him.97
So d’Holbach warmly supported the Encyclopédie, contributed money and articles to it, and gave Diderot comfort and courage when even d’Alembert and Voltaire were deserting the enterprise. His articles were mostly on natural science, for in that field the Baron was probably the best-informed of all the philosophes. “I have never met with a man more learned,” wrote Grimm in 1789, “and I have never seen anyone who cared so little to pass for learned in the eyes of the world.”98 He translated many scientific treatises from the German, aided by Naigeon. For this work he was made a member of the academies of Berlin and St. Petersburg. He never sought admission to the French Academy.
Fascinated by science, and expecting from it a rapid betterment of human life, d’Holbach looked with unrelenting hostility upon the Church, whose control of education seemed to bar the way to the development of scientific knowledge. He lost no chance of attacking the clergy. He wrote the articles “Prêtres” and “Théocratie” for the Encyclopédie. From 1766 onward he organized with Naigeon a veritable factory of anti-Christian literature. In quick succession appeared Le Tableau des saints, De l’Imposture sacerdotale, Prêtres démasqués, De la Cruauté religieuse, L’Enfer détruit; here was a new apostle of glad tidings—hell had been destroyed.
In 1761 there issued from what some called “this laboratory of atheism” a volume entitled Christianisme dévoilé (Christianity Exposed), written chiefly by d’Holbach but ascribed on the title page to “the late M. Boulanger.” For selling this book a peddler was branded and sent to the galleys for five years; for buying and reselling it a boy was branded and sent to the galleys for nine years.99 It was a frontal assault upon the alliance of Church and state, and quite anticipated Marx’s description of religion as the “opium of the people.”
Religion is the art of intoxicating men with enthusiasm [this word in the eighteenth century meant religious fervor], to prevent them from dealing with the evils with which their governors oppress them.… The art of reigning has become nothing more than that of profiting from the errors and abjection of mind and soul into which superstition has plunged the nations.… By means of threatening men with invisible powers, they [Church and state] force them to suffer in silence the miseries with which visible powers afflict them. They are made to hope that if they agree to being unhappy in this world, they will be happy in the next.100
D’Holbach thought this union of Church and state the fundamental evil in France. “It is as a citizen that I attack religion, because it seems to me harmful to the happiness of the state, hostile to the mind of man, and contrary to sound morality.”101
Instead of morality the Christian is taught the miraculous fables and inconceivable dogmas of a religion thoroughly hostile to right reason. From his very first step in his studies he is taught to distrust the evidence of his senses, to subdue his reason, … and to rely blindly on the authority of his master.… Those who have shaken themselves free from these notions find themselves powerless against errors sucked in with their mother’s milk.102
To rest morality upon religious beliefs, d’Holbach argued, is a risky procedure, for such beliefs are subject to change, and their fall may damage the moral code allied with them.
Everyone who has discovered the weakness or falsity of the evidence upon which his religion is based … will be tempted to believe that the morality is as chimerical as the religion it is founded on.… That is how it is that the words infidel and libertine have become synonymous. There would be no such disadvantage if a natural morality were taught instead of a theological. Instead of prohibiting debauchery, crime, and vice because God and religion forbid them, we ought to say that all excess is harmful to man’s conservation, makes him despicable in the eyes of society, is forbidden by reason, … and is forbidden by nature, which wants him to work for his lasting happiness.103
It is hard to understand how a man so burdened with money should have found time or urge to write so many books. In 1767 he sent forth a Théologie portative earnestly making fun of Christian doctrines and reducing all theology to the ecclesiastical will to power. In 1768 he published La Contagion sacrée, ou histoire naturelle de la superstition, ostensibly translated “from the English of Jean Trenchard”; and in the same year he issued Lettres à Eugénie, ou préservatif contre les préjugés, which pretended to be by an Epicurean philosopher in Sceaux. In 1769 came an Essai sur les préjugés, par M. du Marsais, explaining that the only cure for the evils of religion was the spread of education and philosophy. And in 1770 the busy Baron published his chef-d’oeuvre, the most powerful single volume issued in the campaign against Christianity.
2. The System of Nature
Système de la nature, ou des lois du monde physique et du monde moral was printed professedly in London, actually in Amsterdam, in two large volumes, and bore, as the name of the author, “M. Mirabaud.” This man, now ten years dead, had been secretary to the French Academy. An introduction gave a sketch of his life and works. No one believed that the good and exemplary Mirabaud had written so scandalous a book.
The quadrennial Assembly of the Clergy (1770), after voting a grant of money to the King, appealed to him to suppress the anti-Christian literature that was circulating in France. Louis XV ordered his prosecutor to act at once. The Parlement of Paris condemned seven books, among them d’Holbach’s Christianisme dévoilé and the Système de la nature, as “impious, blasphemous, and seditious, tending to destroy all idea of divinity, to rouse the people to revolt against religion and government, to overthrow all the principles of public security and morality, and to turn subjects away from obedience to their sovereign.” The books were to be burned, the authors were to be arrested and severely punished. Morellet tells us that ten men knew that d’Holbach was the author, and that they kept the secret for twenty years. The “Synagogue” continued its meetings, and to some of them Mme. d’Holbach invited Canon Bergier, who had just received a pension from the clergy for his scholarly articles defending the Catholic Church. Many suspected Diderot of having written parts of the book. It was, as a whole, too orderly and solemn to have come from his pen, but he may have contributed the flowery apostrophe to Nature at the end. In any case, Diderot felt unsafe in Paris, and thought it wise to visit Langres.
The Système, smuggled in from Holland, was bought eagerly by a wide public, including, says Voltaire, “scholars, the ignorant, and women.”104 Diderot was delighted with it. “What I like,” he said, “is a philosophy clear, definite, and frank, such as you have in the System of Nature. The author is not an atheist on one page and a deist on another. His philosophy is all of one piece”105—quite unlike Diderot’s. What he really liked was that d’Holbach was an atheist on every page. And yet the book was infused with an almost religious devotion to the happiness of mankind. D’Holbach, seeing so much misery in a world ruled by kings and prie
sts, concluded that men would be happier if they turned their backs upon priests and kings, and followed scientists and philosophers. The opening sentences of the book announce its spirit and theme:
The source of man’s unhappiness is his ignorance of nature. The pertinacity with which he clings to blind opinions imbibed in his infancy, … [and] the consequent prejudice that warps his mind, … appear to doom him to continual error.… He takes the tone of his ideas on the authority of others, who are themselves in error, or who have an interest in deceiving him. To remove this Cimmerian darkness, … to guide him out of this Cretan labyrinth, requires the clue of Ariadne, with all the love she could bestow on Theseus.… It exacts a most undaunted courage, … a persevering resolution. …
The most important of our duties, then, is to seek means by which we may destroy delusions that can never do more than mislead us. The remedies for these evils must be sought in Nature herself. It is only in the abundance of her resources that we can rationally expect to find antidotes to the mischief brought upon us by an ill-directed, an overpowering enthusiasm. It is time these remedies were sought; it is time to look the evil boldly in the face, to examine its foundations, to scrutinize its superstructure. Reason, with its faithful guide experience, must attack in their entrenchments those prejudices of which the human race has been too long the victim. …
Let us try to inspire man with courage, with respect for his reason, with an inextinguishable love for truth, to the end that he may learn to consult his experience, and no longer be the dupe of an imagination led astray by authority; … that he may learn to found his morals on his nature, on his wants, on the real advantage of society; that he may dare to love himself; that he may become a virtuous and rational being, in which case he cannot fail to be happy.106