The Crisis of the European Mind 1680-1715

by Paul Hazard

  The age-long conflict between Freedom and Authority, transferred on this occasion to the religious field, that day became acute. That day, the principles which men are called upon to choose as their guides through life, were brought into violent opposition. Claude and Bossuet, champions of the two conflicting causes, mighty men of valour, both of them, entered into combat, what time a woman, searching the inner recesses of her soul, and France, and the whole of Europe watched the progress of the duel. One upholds a man’s right to believe what he chooses, without let or hindrance; the right of the individual conscience to hold what it believes to be true, no matter what the rest of the world may say. The other puts forward the desire to share in a common belief, the austere joy of conforming to a rule of life once for all accepted, and, that life might continue its course, the need for recognizing a supreme authority.

  Claude was defending a cause which at that time seemed to be nearing defeat, Bossuet a cause that was on the up-grade. The tide of heterodoxy was on the ebb; Lutheranism was degenerating, losing vigour, waxing worldly; the most enlightened of its pastors confessed as much. In England, Protestantism was confronted by a twofold menace: on the one hand were the Catholics, who were loyal to the Stuarts; on the other the innumerable sects, the divisions and subdivisions, of the Protestants themselves. The offensive launched by the forces of the counter-reformation had won back a large part of central Europe to the Catholic cause, and never had the Jesuits, those peerless champions of law and order, wielded greater power than now.

  France, the most logical and, where ideas are in question, the most uncompromising of all nations, was bound to be carried away by this ideal of perfect unity. An all-powerful monarch who had settled the political problem by the simplest of formulas, was sure to feel a certain amount of dissatisfaction, a sense of frustration, so long as there lingered in the hearts of a section of his people any feeling of discord, so long as any form of sectarianism continued to claim the allegiance of the minority. To extend his control so as to bring within its orbit the religious beliefs of his subjects, to establish uniformity in the religious, as well as in the political, sphere, to have but one faith, one form of religion in what would then be a perfectly organized State, such was the dream of Louis XIV. His aim was to extinguish the so-called reformed religion, by argument, by voluntary conversions to begin with, but later on, where these failed, by the increasing application of force. He was told, and he was only too willing to believe it, that the Reformation, which in the past had ravaged the country with fire and sword, was now not only defenceless, abased, humiliated, but well-nigh crushed out of existence, virtually in its death throes. One more honest effort, wrote Père Maimbourg in his Histoire du Calvinisme, and “the disastrous conflagration which has wrought such ruin in France and of which to-day little more than the smoke remains, will soon be utterly extinguished. And as we are all united in this most Christian monarchy in the bond of a single law which constrains us to render fealty to the King whom God has appointed to rule over us, so I trust that we shall all be united by a single bond in one and the same faith”. France thus pointing the way, and France being the example which Europe followed, why should we not hope that England, too, would find her way back to the One True Fold? Père Maimbourg already seemed to catch a glimpse of such a conversion: “There are grounds for hoping that the day will come when God, dispelling by the light of His grace the darkness which heresy, born of a disastrous schism, has spread like a pall over England, will once again cause the sun of truth to shine upon the English people and so bring them back into the unity of that faith which St. Gregory the Great caused to be proclaimed to them”. Thus, by the good offices of the Most Glorious and Most Christian King, the erstwhile fair and seamless robe of Christ would be made whole once more; and thus would the triumph of orthodoxy be assured.

  When, in the month of October, 1685, Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, he was perfectly loyal to the logic of his principles. Where he fell short was in loyalty to the Christian spirit and in his understanding of the human conscience. That conscience will not brook coercion; wherein lies its glory and its pride. Oppression carried to extremes only drives it to revolt. And so, few measures were ever more decisive in their results, or exerted a weightier influence on the shape of things to come, than that fatal revocation. In so far as it is possible to assign dates to great trends of human thought, we may surely say that the year 1685 denotes the high-water mark of the counter-reformation. After that, the tide turned.

  And abroad what a clamour, what cries of alarm, arose! The English revolution of 1688 was not wholly political in character, it had a religious side as well. The triumph of William of Orange was not only a victory for Parliament, it was a victory for the Reformers. In William, it was not only the defender of the people’s rights who was exalted, but the saviour of religion, the champion of the Protestant cause. To all the countries of the North, Louis XIV stood forth as the arch-enemy, the foe par excellence, of freedom of conscience. Over and over again it was insisted that this enactment of his was the convincing proof, the manifest symbol, of his tyranny, his injustice, his ruthlessness, his violence, his contempt for the most elementary human rights. This tyrant, this Machiavelli, this Beast of the Apocalypse, this Antichrist, not content with imposing his will upon the world by force of arms, not satisfied with his conquests and his so-called “protectorates”, now claimed dominion over the souls of men, and put his own decrees above the voice of God. So violent was the denunciation that its effect was felt even in the New World. Benjamin Franklin relates that, as a child, in the Old South Church in Philadelphia, he heard words of withering rage and scorn poured forth on that accursed old man, the persecutor of God’s people, Louis XIV.[2]

  And then all those Frenchmen who had been driven forth as exiles from their native land, what a ferment they must have caused in Protestant Europe! They called on the world to bear witness to the ills they were compelled to suffer. Year by year they had been frustrated, baulked, spied upon, and now, because they refused to forswear themselves, they were treated like common criminals. Leaving Geneva, Berlin, Budapest out of the count, Holland and England, both of which counted churches by the dozen and followers by the thousand, constituted veritable strongholds for defence and offence. These rugged, inflexible Frenchmen, who had so long been inured to resistance and conflict, bore the prestige of men who had suffered for their faith, and were the living evidence of the wrongs they had endured. They brought with them a bitter, rankling sense of grievance which would end only with their lives, and, even then, would still live on after they were dead, in the hearts of their descendants.

  What a change in the voice of Pastor Claude after Louis revoked the Edict of Nantes! The time was passed, said Claude, for meeting argument with argument, reason with reason, the time when, if a victory was won, it was by fair means, and in good faith. He had been deceived, he cried, he had been dragged from his church, and given twenty-four hours in which to quit his country as an exile. Terrible were the memories of those days; the arrival of the dragoons, who seized the gates and approaches to the towns, set guards upon them, and then, advancing with drawn swords, shouted “Kill, kill them if they won’t be Catholics!” “Amid a pandemonium of shouting and blasphemy, they strung up their victims, men or women, by their hair or by their feet, to the rafters in the roof, or the hooks in the chimney, and then set fire to bundles of mouldy hay heaped up beneath them. They plucked out their beards, and tore at their heads till not a hair was left. They flung them into huge fires which they lit for the purpose, and left them there till they were half-roasted. They fastened ropes underneath their arms, and lowered them into wells, pulling them up and down till they promised to change their religion.” Was the King of France then unaware that Faith is a gift that comes from on high, and that nothing that man can do can make or destroy it; that violence and coercion can only create unbelievers, or hypocrites, or else engender in the hearts of the sincere a staunchness, a longanimity that
no suffering which man can inflict will ever avail to overcome? Does he not know that by perpetrating such atrocities he has put himself beyond the pale, in the eyes of every European country: and that having scandalously violated both the solemn covenant of his predecessors, and the law of nations, his promises and his treaties will henceforth be credited by none?[3]

  Many another pastor, weeping by the waters of Babylon, voiced his abhorrence of such enormities, calling down curses on the head of the evil-doer: Jacques Basnage, Jacques Saurin the gifted orator, Élie Benoist, Isaac Jaquelot. But to form a notion of the lengths to which ungovernable fury could carry a man, we must listen for a moment to Pierre Jurieu. Nature had made him a fighter, but so long as he remained on his native soil he kept himself within bounds. No sooner, however, did he find himself an exile, than he fell to raving like a man possessed. What others said with dignity and restraint, he flung out in wild and whirling words, harming rather than helping his cause by the outrageous extravagance and reckless irrelevancies of his words, though the feelings which inspired his ravings he shared with many another. From his look-out on the ramparts, he kept ceaseless watch and ward, thundering anathema at the Council of Trent, belauding the Reformation, stirring up his co-religionists to revolt; exhorting them never to yield to force, and circulating pastoral letters among them like those which the Bishops of the early church had been wont to distribute among their persecuted flock. He spoke with the voice of the prophets: the day is nigh when the reign of Antichrist shall come to an end; the fall of Satan is at hand, and his kingdom shall go down in headlong ruin, and God’s true Church shall regain its crown of glory. By 1710 or, at the latest, by 1715, all that was to come about, and the Protestants would return to France in triumph. There were people who believed him, who hung upon his words and solemnly exchanged views as to the exact date when the auspicious home-coming would come to pass: in 1720, or 1730, the exiles would regain possession of Jerusalem.

  But these tirades, these frenzied outbursts, these delirious ravings were not enough for him. He must needs take up arms against France in the service of the Elector of Brandenburg and the King of England; he incited the Protestants in various parts of the country to revolt; he organized a spy-ring that was to operate in his own country; his agents were constantly coming and going, and it was he who found the money for these activities. Such were the depths to which the bitterness of hatred had brought him, such was the rôle he played, and continued to play, till the day of his death in 1713.

  Now the true spirit of these French pamphleteers in Holland, the spirit we have been endeavouring to capture, is really this: they are organs of nonconformity, they are the mouthpieces of heterodoxy.

  In the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres there is nothing about tragedies, or comedies, or romances, or odes, or epistles. Nor is there in the Bibliothèque universelle any mention of such things. The Histoire des ouvrages des savants begins by giving a little space to belles-lettres, but not much, and without any fixed plan. To be sure, we shall observe progress in one direction. As the years pass by and England becomes richer in authors of talent and genius, the field will widen; but, prior to 1715, the essential interest for them was not so much literature as a fine art, but literature as a vehicle of ideas. These journalists were all brought up in Protestant seminaries. No sooner did they hear people talking about morals, or some matter concerning religious doctrine, than they began to quiver with excitement; such things were what they had had to learn about in their academies, and remembering their studies and their meditations, they recognized once again the sort of thing they were born for. They seized the pen, and on those old familiar themes, began to improvise at large. Don’t for a moment mistake them for dilettantes eagerly on the look-out for works of beauty to appraise as artists, rolling them, so to speak, on the critical palate, like literary epicures. For beauty they do not care two straws. The great works of M. Arnauld, M. Nicole; the exegetics of M. Richard Simon; and, if we must bring England into the picture, the treatises of Isaac Barrow, Thomas Brown, Gilbert Burnet and Henry Dodwell, put them on their mettle. Those are the sort of writers with whom they have something in common. They know what such people are driving at; those controversies are the breath of life to them, their daily bread. Jansenism or Molinism, Free-will or Predestination, Providence or Blind Fate, those are the sort of things that are in their line. The law of the three unities offers a very pale interest indeed compared with the philosophical exploration of the universe. Nor have they by nature any cosmopolitan leanings. They belong to a different category from that of the travellers and globe-trotters; an ardent tribe, they include commentators on the Bible, the Fathers of the Church, heresiarchs, the Renaissance philosophers, the instigators of the Reformation, the judges of the Inquisition, the doctrines of the Council of Trent; while, among those of their living adversaries whom they encounter in the flesh, are Père Maimbourg, François Lamy, Bossuet: in a word, they are of the tribe of the theologians.

  To keep alive, and in the plenitude of its vigour, the animating spirit of the Reformation, such was the primary aim of the gazeteers of Holland. They carried on the work of their Huguenot ancestors, while broadening its scope, and lending a new tone to its message. Neither France nor Rome is under any illusion regarding them. Despite Bayle’s efforts to soft-soap the authorities and the King, his journal was banned in Paris and condemned in Rome. Let us glance a little closely at Jean Le Clerc, the author of the three Bibliothèques, a man of inexhaustible fertility. His volumes pile up and up, and the sight of them warms his heart. He gives out that he is weary, but in reality he is mightily content. In addition to his journalistic activities, he turns out a prodigious number of books. He represents a type of which there were many examples in these days, learned men who, after writing all day, must have gone on writing all night, otherwise how could they have contrived to leave such stacks of printed matter behind them? His output included criticism, exegesis, philosophy, history; he edited Erasmus and Grotius; he translated portions of the Scriptures, and all this takes no account of his miscellanea; all formidable tasks which even included a revision of Moreri’s Dictionary. . . .

  The way was long and varied, but the man himself never changed. Jean Le Clerc is scarcely to be called a man of letters; his prose style is completely devoid of grace and charm, and he is apparently quite insensitive to the music of words. Bulk and weight are his main desiderata. Jean Le Clerc was a preacher; but he was also a man of action. He studied at Geneva, his birthplace, and in due time became a minister of religion. He also went through a course at the Saumur Academy, did duty in the Walloon church and subsequently at the chapel of the Savoy in London. At last he came to anchor in Amsterdam, and for twenty-seven years he was professor of philosophy, humane letters and Hebrew at the Armenian College in that city. “He specialised in three subjects: belles-lettres, philosophy, and theology . . .” As he was in life, so he was in his books and in his articles. He seized every possible opportunity of discussing religion and expounding his views thereon. “He was devoid alike of personal magnetism and of the teacher’s art, things far above mere knowledge.”[4] The truth is, he was indifferent to these things, and never troubled about them, his great object being, as he explained in the preface to his Bibliothèque ancienne et moderne, not to amuse people, but to teach them virtue and truth.

  It was the same with book-production. Holland turned out books as fast as she could. “In the whole world there are not more than ten or a dozen cities where books are printed on any considerable scale. In England there are London and Oxford; in France, Paris and Lyons; in Holland, Amsterdam, Leyden, Rotterdam, The Hague, and Utrecht; in Germany, Leipzig; and that is about the sum of it.”[5] Five great centres of publishing, whereas England and France can barely muster two apiece! A pretty fine contrast if you like! There were, we are told, some four hundred printers or booksellers in Amsterdam. They were not exclusively Dutch, but included German, French, English and Jews. Among them, too, were men
of notable intelligence, men by no means wholly absorbed in the commercial side of their business; there were also book-pirates. The Journal des Savants for the 29th June, 1682, calls attention to a barefaced piece of piracy, and not of piracy only, but of gross misrepresentation, on the part of a publisher in Amsterdam. It is especially indignant because the work has not only been stolen, but shamelessly travestied in Holland. “That is just the sort of thing they do”, complained Bayle in 1693. “They pay the author practically nothing at all, particularly when the copy lends itself to being printed in Paris. They just await their opportunity and then pirate it over here, making no payment whatever to the author.”

  The consequence was that books came out in swarms; some you could get elsewhere, some you could not. A very daring manuscript had no great chance of getting published in France, unless, indeed, the authorities turned a blind eye to the proceedings, a thing that was not altogether out of key with the popular temperament. It was harder still in Italy; while in Spain and Portugal it was practically hopeless to make the attempt. On the other hand a book that had been rejected by the censors and banned by the public authorities would have no difficulty in finding a printer in Holland and a bookseller to push it. Fénelon, when he was sent into Poitou to catechize the new converts, hinted that it might be no bad thing if some books of Catholic apologetic were issued with the imprint, fictitious of course, of some town or other in Holland; such a label would inspire confidence in readers who still had something of the Protestant left in them. That a Catholic like Arnauld should get his books published in Holland was, in Jurieu’s eyes, a scandalous, an abominable thing. Holland was the Land of Saints, the Citadel of God, and ought, in his view, to be closed to the Papists: Catholic books in France; Protestant books in Holland. Occasionally, some French free-thinker would have a current account at The Hague. Out there you could speak your mind freely; a writer was not obliged to trim his sails to the breath of political prejudice, or theological dogma. That, then, was the place for a man of independent ideas to make his supply base.