beneficent truths would again become visible.
Nevertheless, as the century wore on, the expression of irreligious and materialist
sentiments became increasingly common, many writers going beyond deism to
voice a radical scepticism about the existence of God. These included such
influential figures as Diderot, La Mettrie, Helvétius, and the baron d’Holbach.
La Mettrie’s notorious L’Homme machine of 1747, for example, simply maintained
that all our ideas and sentiments resulted from the self-motivated movement of
matter. Accordingly, there was no substantial difference between men and animals
and it was a mistake to talk of the immateriality of the soul. For his part, Helvétius
argued in De l’Esprit of 1758 that man was primarily motivated by a desire to avoid
pain and seek pleasure. The supreme law of his nature was that of self-interest.
These atheistic conclusions were bolstered by the discoveries of natural scientists
such as Buffon which challenged the biblical chronology described in the book of
37 Bayle (1647–1706) was of the contrary view, maintaining that faith stood alone unaided by
reason. Bayle’s masterwork was his Dictionnaire historique et critique of 1697. Selections can be found
in English translation in Bayle, Political Writings (Cambridge, 2000).
38 Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (Cambridge, 1989). See books 24 and 25, where
Montesquieu not only refutes what he terms ‘Bayle’s paradox’ but also establishes the superiority of
Christianity over Islam.
39 Ibid. 460.
40 Voltaire, Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations (1963), i. 832.
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Genesis. All the evidence suggested that human life evolved first in the sea. And so,
over time, enlightened opinion increasingly dispensed with the notion of a distant
but purposeful deity and came to adopt what was often a thinly disguised atheistic
monism. Armed with a sensationalist epistemology introduced by Condillac, the
parti philosophique (as it came to be known by mid-century) dismissed divine
revelation and commandment as a guide to morality and set about the difficult
task of providing a purely secular and non-transcendental basis to ethics. No longer
was society to be held together by the threat of divine punishment and retribution.
The chosen vehicle for this campaign was to be the Encyclopédie, seventeen
volumes of which were published between 1751 and 1772. Its ambition, in the
words of its editor, Denis Diderot, was nothing less than to assemble all ‘the
knowledge scattered across the earth’ in order that ‘our descendants, in becoming
better informed, may be at the same time more virtuous and content’. Such a
project, Diderot avowed, could only be undertaken in ‘a philosophic age’ and by ‘a
society of men of letters’ joined together in the name of ‘the general interests of
humanity’. Everything was to be examined and investigated, without hesitation or
exception, free from the yoke of authority and precedent.41 From this vast enter-
prise was to be excluded any reliance upon organized religion and a providential
God. Whether Diderot and his collaborators merited Rousseau’s description of
them as ‘ardent missionaries of atheism’ is not clear, but when religion did find a
place in the Encyclopédie, it was largely intended to expose outworn and ridiculous
opinions. The entry on cannibalism, for example, cross-referenced the reader to
articles on the Eucharist and Holy Communion. The article on consecrated bread
estimated the huge cost of providing wafers for the celebration of the sacraments
and suggested that the money would be better spent in feeding the poor.42
Consequently, the philosophic spirit came to be seen as a concerted and relentless
assault upon Christian values and the Holy Church. And, to the extent that the
Revolution came to be seen as the vehicle and expression of a godless philosophy, it
too was imagined to be anti-Christian.43
No one gave clearer or stronger voice to the possibilities of a radiant future
without the Christian religion than the ill-fated Marie-Jean-Nicolas Caritat de
Condorcet.44 As he hid beneath the shadow of the guillotine, Condorcet sketched
out a plan for the indefinite progress of mankind of unrivalled optimism. The
purpose of his Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain, he
declared, was to show that ‘Nature has set no term to the perfection of the human
faculties; that the perfectibility of man is truly infinite; and that the progress of this
perfectibility. . . . has no other limit that the duration of the globe upon which
41 Diderot, ‘Encyclopédie’, in John Hope Mason and Robert Wokler (eds.), Denis Diderot: Political
Writings (Cambridge, 1992), 21–7.
42 See Joseph Edmund Barker, Diderot’s Treatment of the Christian Religion in the Encyclopédie
(New York, 1941).
43 See Nigel Aston, Religion and the Revolution in France 1780–1804 (Houndmills, 2000), 81–99.
44 See Keith Michael Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago,
1975).
Religion, Enlightenment, and Reaction
307
nature has cast us.’45 Whilst this progress might vary in speed, it could never be
permanently reversed. Moreover, the progress of knowledge was indissolubly linked
to that of liberty, virtue, and the rights of man.
Within this ten-stage chronology of human development, organized religion
unambiguously figured as one of those ‘widespread errors which have somewhat
retarded or suspended the progress of reason and which have, as often as political
events, even caused man to fall back into ignorance’.46 The art of deceiving men,
Condorcet suggested, was established early and there soon emerged a class of men
expert in the mysteries of religion and the practices of superstition. They sought
truth in order to propagate error. They exploited the vices of ordinary language to
play upon the meanings of words and to confuse. Christianity was no exception to
this rule. Its triumph, Condorcet wrote, ‘was the signal for the complete decadence
of philosophy and the sciences’.47 The human mind went into dramatic decline.
‘Man’s only achievements’, he added, ‘were theological day-dreams and supersti-
tious impostures; his only morality was religious intolerance.’48
Yet, Condorcet argued, the priests were powerless to prevent the spread of the
spirit of liberty and of free inquiry. Little by little, and in face of relentless
persecution meted out by ‘armies of fanatics’, the human mind gradually recovered
its strength and energy. The moral depravity and scandalous greed of the priests
could no longer be hidden beneath the mask of hypocrisy. Over time, ‘men of good
sense’ came to see that all religions were incapable of combating the vices and
passions of mankind. The practice of writing in Latin declined and the use of the
vernacular spread, further reducing the domination of the priests. Philosophy and
science now shook off the yoke of authority and reason moved towards its ‘moment
of liberation’. The key figures here for Condorcet were Bacon, Galileo, and
Descartes. They demonstrated that, if ‘the human
mind was not yet free, it was
formed to be so’.49 Next came the discovery that man was ‘a sentient being, capable
of reasoning and acquiring moral ideas’.50 From this, it had been possible to
‘deduce’ the true rights of man and to conclude that ‘the maintenance of these
rights was the sole object for which men came together in political societies’.51 The
world could no longer be divided into those born to obey and those born to rule.
It was at this moment that John Locke made his decisive contribution to the
progress of human knowledge. ‘At last’, Condorcet wrote, ‘Locke seized the thread
by which [philosophy] was to be guided: he showed that an exact and precise
analysis of ideas, by reducing them step by step to other ideas of more immediate
origin or of simpler composition, was the only means of avoiding being lost in the
chaos of incomplete, incoherent and indeterminate notions which chance has
presented to us randomly and which we have accepted unthinkingly.’52 Locke, in
short, was the first philosopher to establish the nature of the truths we could come
to know and the objects that we could comprehend, and his method was quickly
adopted by all philosophers. Not only this, but this same method destroyed the
45 Condorcet, Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (1795), 4.
46 Ibid. 15.
47 Ibid. 136.
48 Ibid. 144.
49 Ibid. 231.
50 Ibid. 240.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid. 249–50.
308
Religion, Enlightenment, and Reaction
prejudices of the masses and taught them that they were not forever condemned to
accept their opinions from others. There emerged then a new philosophy, trans-
ported across Europe by ‘the almost universal French language’, and which became
a ‘common faith’ guiding public opinion. Preached by a ‘solid phalanx’ of philo-
sophers united against all forms of error and tyranny, at its core was a belief in
‘reason, toleration, and humanity’.53 Such, Condorcet proclaimed, was the new
philosophy and such, he implied, was the philosophy that was to inspire the French
Revolution. A great revolution, he believed, was simply inevitable.
Whatever the explanation, Condorcet’s optimism proved unfounded and the
policies pursued by the Revolution towards the Church proved to be an abject
failure as well as a political disaster.54 After an initial move towards religious
toleration, the attempt to institute the Civil Constitution of the Clergy led not
only to schism with the papacy but also proved to be the point at which Louis XVI
resolved that no further compromises could be made. The effect was to divide
the country and to radicalize the Revolution, leading ultimately to what amounted
to a veritable war against Christianity and those who stubbornly persisted in the
maintenance of their faith.55 With the fall of the Jacobins, the campaign of
de-Christianization eased but the hostility remained. Indeed, it continued under
the Directory, where the Thermidorian leaders showed no enthusiasm to repeal
existing legislation directed against the Church or to allow the public expression
of religious worship. In line with the policy of neutrality in religious matters so
admired by Aulard, state funding of the Church was withdrawn. The armies of the
Directory carried these reforms with them across Europe, looting churches as they
went and banning the celebration of religious ceremonies. After the fall of Rome
in 1798, Pope Pius VI was imprisoned in Valance (where he remained until his
death a year later). Yet, as Aulard had also observed, the period of the Directory saw
a marked religious revival, and one fuelled by popular sentiment. Priests came back
to France and the laity (often unaided by the clergy) did their utmost to resurrect
the frequently archaic religious practices and public rituals of the ancien régime.
Pilgrimages and the celebration of saints’ day festivals made their return.56
Faced with this unexpected resurgence and convinced of a continuing incom-
patibility between Catholicism and the Revolution, the leaders of the Directory
renewed their efforts to instil a republican culture among the French population.
Civic education was to be fostered by a new set of republican festivals, the culte
décadaire, replete with its own secular catechisms and covering everything from
birth and marriage to the seasons and the founding moments of the Republic.57
The government also promoted a new religion: theophilanthropy. Described by
53 Condorcet, Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (1795), 259.
54 See John McManners, The French Revolution and the Church (London, 1969).
55 See Aston, Religion and the Revolution, 122–276.
56 See Suzanne Desan, Reclaiming the Sacred: Lay Religion and Popular Politics in Revolutionary
France (Ithaca, NY, 1990); Desan, ‘The French Revolution and Religion, 1795–1815’, in Brown and
Tackett, Cambridge History of Christianity, vii. 556–64; and Aston, Religion and the Revolution,
279–315.
57 See Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 106–283.
Religion, Enlightenment, and Reaction
309
Nigel Aston as ‘the crankiest religious manifestation of the 1790s’,58 this amounted
to an eclectic mix of moral teachings drawn from the world’s religions and the
histories of ancient republics served up as a reconstituted, lukewarm deism.59 The
doctrine of original sin was explicitly denied and its creed was to be one of extreme
simplicity: there was to be no dressing up in priestly costumes and temples were to
be austere. Above all, the purpose of theophilanthropy was to enhance the civic
commitment of the population. Apart from a few misguided writers and poets, few
people took it (or the new festivals) seriously, although many people were no doubt
either bemused or annoyed by official attempts to ban fish markets on Fridays.
Of far greater significance was the establishment in 1795 of the Institut National
des Sciences et des Arts. If the name had been invented by Talleyrand, the
pedagogical blueprint for this project had been set out by the Marquis de Con-
dorcet in 1792. Intended to replace the learned academies of the ancien régime, all
of which had been abolished in 1793, the second of its three classes was designated
as the ‘Classe des Sciences morales et politiques’. The first and third classes were to
be devoted to the physical and mathematical sciences and to literature and the fine
arts respectively. The second class was itself subdivided into six sections: the analysis
of sensations and ideas; ethics; social science and legislation; political economy;
history; and geography. The establishment of the Institut was directly linked to
plans to found a national scheme of public and secular education.
If members of the Idéologue circle did not constitute the majority of the second
class, they certainly were a vocal minority, being both disproportionately active
in its deliberations and providing its most coherent intellectual programme.60 No
one more than they could claim to be the intellectual descendants of Helvétius,
Condillac, and Condorcet and no one dis
played a greater commitment to the
development of a science of morals than the two most prominent members of the
circle, Destutt de Tracy and Pierre Cabanis.61 The moralist and the doctor,
Cabanis ventured in his Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme,62 had an
equal interest in the study of man as a physical mechanism. Physical sensitivity, he
concluded, was the source of all the ideas and habits that made up the mental and
moral existence of man.
As we have seen, the primary purpose of idéologie was to purge our moral and
political concepts of the unsound and disordered accretions of the past, a task
achieved through the decomposition of complex ideas into their simplest elements.
The intellectual possibilities and practical applications of this new analytical science
appeared almost limitless.63 Its end result would be the perfection and the
58 Aston, Religion and the Revolution, 280.
59 The best study remains Albert Mathiez, La Théophilanthropie et le Culte Décadaire 1796–1801:
Essai sur l’histoire religieuse de la Révolution (1904).
60 See Martin S. Staum, Minerva’s Message: Stabilizing the French Revolution (Montreal and Kingston,
1996), 33–55.
61 See Martin S. Staum, Cabanis: Enlightenment and Medical Philosophy in the French Revolution
(Princeton, NJ, 1980).
62 Cabanis, Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme (1830), i. 5–20. This work consisted of
twelve memoirs written between 1796 and 1802.
63 See Cabanis, Du Degré de certitude de la médecine (1798), 2–8.
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happiness of man. This was so because the moral and political sciences could
achieve the same level of certainty as the physical sciences and, upon this basis,
society could be reformed without fear of descent into anarchy. Beginning with an
analysis of the self and our sensations, idéologie, as set out by Destutt de Tracy
himself, would first explore grammar (the science of communicating ideas), then
logic (the science of discovering new truths), before moving on to investigate
education, morality, and, ultimately, politics. From the perspective of a unified
scientific method, therefore, it was idéologie, and not religion or the accidental
opinions of an earlier age, which would be our infallible guide. Philosophers and
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