by Will Durant
His friend and enemy Frederick the Great joined in these sentiments. “Why,” Frederick asked the Prince de Ligne in 1764,
why have they destroyed those repositories of the graces of Athens and Rome, those excellent professors of the humanities, and perhaps of humanity, the Jesuits? Education will suffer… . But as my brothers the Kings, most Catholic, most Christian, most faithful and apostolic, have tumbled them out, I, most heretical, gather as many as I can; I preserve the breed.67
When d’Alembert warned Frederick that he would regret this amiability, and reminded him that the Jesuits had opposed his conquest of Silesia, the King reproved the philosopher:
You need not be alarmed for my safety; I have nothing to fear from the Jesuits. They can teach the youth of the country, and they are better able to do that than anyone else. It is true that they were on the other side during the war, but as a philosopher you ought not to reproach one for being kind and humane to everyone of the human species, no matter what religion or society he belongs to. Try to be more of a philosopher and less of a metaphysician.68
When Pope Clement XIV dissolved the entire Society of Jesus in 1773 Frederick refused to allow the publication of the papal bull in his realm. The Jesuits were maintained in their property and functions in Prussia and Silesia.
Catherine II left undisturbed the Jesuits whom she found in that part of Poland which she appropriated in 1772, and she protected those who later entered Russia. There they labored patiently until their restoration (1814).
IV. EDUCATION AND PROGRESS
But who would educate French youth now that the Jesuits were gone? Here was chaos, but also an opening for a pedagogical revolution.
La Chalotais, still warm with his indictment of the Jesuits, seized the opportunity, and offered to France an Essai d’éducation nationale (1763) which the philosophes crowned with acclaim. His present plea was that the schools of France should not pass from one religious fraternity to another—for example, to the Christian Brothers or to the Oratorians. He was no atheist; at least he welcomed the support of religion for morality; he would have it taught and honored, but he would not have the clergy control education. He admitted that many ecclesiastics were excellent teachers, unrivaled in patience and devotion, but sooner or later, he argued, their domination of the classroom closed the mind to original thought, and indoctrinated pupils with loyalty to a foreign power. The rules of morality should be taught independently of any religious creed; “the laws of ethics take precedence over all laws, both divine and human, and would subsist even if these laws had never been declared.”69 La Chalotais too wanted indoctrination, but with nationalist ideals;70 nationalism was to be the new religion. “I demand for the nation an education that will depend upon the state alone.”71 The teachers should be laymen, or, if priests, they should belong to the secular clergy, not to a religious order. The aim of education should be to prepare the individual not for heaven but for life, and not for blind obedience but for competent service in the professions, in administration, and in the industrial arts. French, not Latin, should be the language of instruction; Latin should receive less time, English and German more. The curriculum should include plenty of science, and from the lowest grades; even children of five to ten years of age can absorb the elements of geography, physics, and natural history. History too should have a larger place in school studies; but “what is ordinarily lacking, both to those who write history and to those who read it, is a philosophic mind”;72 here La Chalotais handed Voltaire the palm. In later grades there should be instruction in art and taste. Greater provision should be made for the education of women, but it was unnecessary to educate the poor. The son of a peasant would not learn in school anything better than he would learn in the field, and further education would merely make him discontent in his class.
Helvétius, Turgot, and Condorcet were shocked by this last opinion, but Voltaire applauded it. He wrote to La Chalotais: “I thank you for forbidding laborers to study. I, who cultivate the earth, need manual workers, not tonsured clerics. Send me especially ignorant brothers to drive or harness my coaches.”73 And to Damilaville, who had proposed education for all: “I doubt if those who have only their muscle to live by will ever have time to become educated; they would die of hunger before becoming philosophers.… It is not the manual worker whom we must instruct, it is the urban bourgeoisie.”74 In other passages he condescended to favor primary education for all, but hoped that secondary education would be sufficiently restricted to leave a large class of manual workers to do the physical work of society.75 The first task of education, in Voltaire’s view, was to end the ecclesiastical indoctrination which he held responsible for the superstitions of the masses and the fanaticism of the crowd.
Diderot, at the request of Catherine II, drew up in 1773 a Plan d’une université pour le gouvernement de la Russie. Like La Chalotais, he denounced the traditional curriculum, in terms that we hear today:
In the Faculty of Arts there are still taught … two dead languages, which are of use to only a small number of citizens, and these languages are studied for six or seven years without being learned. Under the name of rhetoric the art of speaking is taught before the art of thinking; under the name of logic the head is filled with Aristotelian subtleties; … under the name of metaphysics trifling and knotty points are discussed, laying the foundation of both skepticism and bigotry; under the name of physics there is an endless dispute about matter and the system of the world, but not a word of natural history [geology and biology], of chemistry, of the movements and gravitation of bodies; there are very few experiments, still less anatomical dissection, and no geography.76
Diderot called for state control of education, for lay teachers, and for more science; education should be practical, producing good agronomists, technicians, scientists, and administrators. Latin should be taught only after the age of seventeen; it could be omitted altogether if the student had no prospect of using it; but “it is impossible to be a man of letters without a knowledge of Greek and Latin.”77 Since genius may arise in any class, the schools should be open to all, without charge; and poor children should receive books and food free.78
So belabored, the French government struggled to avert the educational interregnum threatened by the expulsion of the Jesuits. The confiscated property of the order was largely applied to a reorganization of the five hundred colleges of France. These were made part of the University of Paris; the Collège Louis-le-Grand became a normal school to train teachers; salaries were established at what seemed a reasonable rate; teachers were exempted from municipal duties, and were promised a pension on completing their term of service. Benedictines, Oratorians, and Christian Brothers were accepted as teachers, but the philosophes campaigned against them, and with some effect. Catholic doctrine was still a substantial part of the curriculum, but science and modern philosophy began to displace Aristotle and the Scholastics, and some lay teachers managed to convey the ideas of the philosophes.79 Laboratories were set up in the colleges, with professors of experimental physics, and technical and military schools were opened in Paris and the provinces. There were several warnings that the new curriculum would improve intellect rather than character, would weaken morality and discipline, and lead to revolution.80
The philosophes, however, pinned all their hopes for the future on the reform of education. Generally they believed that man was by nature good, and that some false or wicked turns of priestcraft or politics had depraved him; all he had to do was to cleanse himself of artifice and go back to “nature”—which no one satisfactorily defined. This, as we shall see, was the essence of Rousseau. We have noted Helvétius’ faith that “education can change everything.”81 Even the skeptical Voltaire, in some moods, thought that “we are a species of monkey that can be taught to act reasonably or unreasonably.”82 The belief in the indefinite possibilities of progress through the improvement and extension of education became a sustaining dogma of the new religion. Heaven and utopia are t
he rival buckets that hover over the well of fate: when one goes down the other goes up; hope draws up one or the other in turn. Perhaps when both buckets come up empty a civilization loses heart and begins to die.
Turgot formulated the new faith in a lecture at the Sorbonne on December 11, 1750, on “The Successive Advances of the Human Mind.”
The human race, viewed from its earliest beginning, presents itself to the eye of the philosopher as a vast whole which, like every individual being, has its time of childhood and progress… . Manners become gentler; the mind becomes more enlightened; nations, hitherto living in isolation, draw nearer to one another; trade and political relations link up the various quarters of the globe; and the whole body of mankind, through vicissitudes of calm and tempest, of fair days and foul, continues its onward march, albeit with tardy steps, toward an ever-nearing perfection.83
Voltaire hesitantly agreed:
We may believe that reason and industry will always progress more and more; that the useful arts will be improved; that of the evils which afflict men, prejudices—which are not their least scourge—will gradually disappear among all those who govern nations; and that philosophy, universally diffused, will give some consolation to the human spirit for the calamities which it will experience in all ages.84
The dying philosophe hailed Turgot’s rise to power in 1774, for he had no faith in the masses, and had attached his hopes to the enlightenment of kings. We cannot educate the canaille, as he called the commonalty of mankind; they are worn out with toil before they learn to think; but we can educate a few men who, nearing the top, may educate the monarch. This dream of “enlightened despots” as the leaders of human advance was the precarious these royale upon which most of the philosophes rested their vision of progress. They had many premonitions of revolution, but they feared rather than desired it; they trusted that reason would win the governing class, that ministers and rulers would listen to philosophy, and that they would effect the reforms that would avert revolution and set mankind on the road to happiness. So they hailed the reforms of Frederick II; they forgave the sins of Catherine II; and had they lived they would have rejoiced in Joseph II of Austria. And what is our faith in government but that hope revived?
V. THE NEW MORALITY
A tantalizing problem remained. Could a state survive without a religion to buttress social order with supernatural hopes and fears? Could popular morality be maintained without popular belief in the divine origin of the moral code, and in a God who saw everything, who rewarded and avenged? The philosophes (excepting Voltaire) claimed that such motives were not needed for morality; granting that this might be true about the cultured few, was it true about the rest? And was the morality of the cultured few an ethical echo of the faith they had lost, of the religious rearing they had received?
The philosophes gambled on the efficacy of a natural ethic. Voltaire had his doubts about it, but Diderot, d’Alembert, Helvétius, d’Holbach, Mably, Turgot, and others argued for a morality that would be independent of theology, and therefore strong enough to survive the vicissitudes of belief. Bayle had led the way by arguing that atheists would be just as moral as believers; but he had defined morality as the habit of conformity with reason, he had assumed that man is a rational animal, and he had left reason undefined. Should society or the individual be judge of what was reasonable? If “society” and the individual disagreed, what but force could decide between them? Would social order be merely a contest between the enforcement and the evasion of the law, and would morality merely calculate the chances of detection? F. V. Toussaint had expounded a natural ethic in Les Moeurs (1748); he too had defined virtue as “fidelity in fulfilling the obligations imposed by reason”;85 but how many men could reason, or did reason if they could? And was not character (which determined action) formed before reason developed, and was not reason the harlot of the strongest desire? These were some of the problems that confronted a natural ethic.
Most of the philosophes accepted the universality of self-love as the basic source of all conscious action, but they trusted that education, legislation, and reason could turn self-love to mutual co-operation and social order. D’Alembert confidently rested natural morality on
one single and incontrovertible fact—the need that men have of one another, and the reciprocal obligations which that need imposes. This much being granted, all the moral laws follow from it in orderly and ineluctable sequence. All questions that have to do with morals have a solution ready to hand in the heart of each one of us—a solution which our passions sometimes circumvent, but which they never destroy. And the solution of each particular question leads … to the parent stem, and that, of course, is our own self-interest which is the basic principle of all moral obligations.86
Some of the philosophes recognized that this assumed a general predominance of reason in the generality of men—that is, a self-interest sufficiently “enlightened” to see the results of the ego’s choice in a perspective large enough to reconcile the selfishness of the individual with the good of the group. Voltaire did not share this trust in the intelligence of egoism; reasoning seemed to him a very exceptional operation. He preferred to base his ethic on the reality of an altruism independent of self-love, and he derived this altruism from a sense of justice infused into men by God. The frères condemned him as surrendering the case to religion.
Having assumed the universality of self-love, the philosophes in general concluded that happiness is the supreme good, and that all pleasures are permissible if they do no harm to the group or to the individual himself. Borrowing the methods of the Church, Grimm, d’Holbach, Mably, and Saint-Lambert wrote catechisms expounding the new morality. Saint-Lambert addressed his Catéchisme universel to children of twelve or thirteen years:
Q. What is man?
A. A being possessed of feeling and understanding.
Q. That being so, what should he do?
A. Pursue pleasure and avoid pain.
Q. Is this not self-love?
A. It is the necessary effect thereof.
Q. Does self-love exist in all men alike?
A. It does, because all men aim at self-preservation and at attaining happiness.
Q. What do you understand by happiness?
A. A continuous state in which we experience more pleasure than pain.
Q. What must we do to attain this state?
A. Cultivate our reason and act in accord therewith.
Q. What is reason?
A. The knowledge of truths that conduce to our well-being.
Q. Does not self-love always lead us to discover those truths and act in accord with them?
A. No, for all men do not know how self-love should be practiced.
Q. What do you mean by that?
A. I mean that some men love themselves rightly, and others wrongly.
Q. Who are those who love themselves rightly?
A. Those who seek to know one another, and who do not separate their own happiness from the happiness of others.87
In their practical ethics the philosophes built upon their memories of Christian morality. For the worship of God, Mary, and the saints, which had indirectly aided morality, they substituted direct devotion to mankind. The Abbé de Saint-Pierre had proposed a new word for an old virtue—bienfaisance, which we weakly translate as beneficence, but which meant active mutual aid, and co-operation with others in common beneficent tasks. Along with this the philosophes stressed humanité, which meant humaneness, humanitarianism. This had its roots in the second of the two commandments enunciated by Christ. Raynal, when he branded as inhuman the cruelty of Europeans to Negroes and Indians (East and West), must have known that a Spanish bishop, Las Casas, had led the way in such condemnation in 1539. But the fresh enthusiasm for helping the poor, the sick, and the oppressed was due chiefly to the philosophes, and above all to Voltaire. To his persistent campaigns was due the reform of law in France. The French clergy had been noted for their charity, but they now had th
e experience of seeing the practical ethics of Christianity preached with remarkable success by the philosophes. Morality grew more independent of religion; in the fields of humaneness, sympathy, toleration, philanthropy, and peace it passed from a theological to a secular basis, and influenced society as seldom before.
Faced with the moral problems generated by war, the philosophes avoided pacifism while counseling peace. Voltaire admitted wars of defense, but he argued that war is robbery, that it impoverishes the victorious nation as well as the defeated, that it enriches only a few princes, war contractors, and royal mistresses. He protested Frederick’s invasion of Silesia and probably had it in mind when, in a passionate article, “War,” in the Dictionnaire philosophique , he explained how easily a royal conscience can be reconciled to aggression:
A genealogist proves to a prince that he descends in a direct line from a count, whose parents made a family compact three or four centuries ago with a house the memory of which does not even exist. That house had distant pretensions to a province… . The prince and his council see his right at once. This province, which is some hundred leagues distant from him, in vain protests that it knows him not, that it has no desire to be governed by him, that to give laws to its people he must at least have their consent… . He immediately assembles a great number of men who have nothing to lose, dresses them in coarse blue cloth, … makes them turn to the right and left, and marches to glory.
Nevertheless, Voltaire advised Catherine II to take up arms and drive the Turks from Europe; he wrote a patriotic elegy for the officers who had died for France in 1741; and he blessed the army of France in its victory at Fontenoy.
