Part 3 (2/2)

Voltaire's hatred was especially warm against the regular clergy.

”Religion,” he says, ”can still sharpen daggers. There is within the nation a people which has no dealings with honest folk, which does not belong to the age, which is inaccessible to the progress of reason, and over which the atrocity of fanaticism preserves its empire, like certain diseases which attack only the vilest populace.” The best monks are the worst, and those who sing ”Pervigilium Veneris” in place of matins are less dangerous than such as reason, preach, and plot. And in another place he says that ”a religious order should not a part of history.” But it is well to notice that Voltaire's hatred of Catholicism and of Catholic monks is not founded on a preference for any other church. He thinks that theocracy must have been universal among early tribes, ”for as soon as a nation has chosen a tutelary G.o.d, that G.o.d has priests.

These priests govern the spirit of the nation; they can govern only in the name of their G.o.d, so they make him speak continually; they set forth his oracles, and all things are done by G.o.d's express commands.”

From this cause come human sacrifices and the most atrocious tyranny; and the more divine such a government calls itself, the more abominable it is.

All prophets are imposters. Mahomet may have begun as an enthusiast, enamored of his own ideas; but he was soon led away by his reveries; he deceived himself in deceiving others; and finally supported a doctrine which he believed to be good, by necessary imposture. Socrates, who pretended to have a familiar spirit, must have been a little crazy, or a little given to swindling. As for Moses, he is a myth, a form of the Indian Bacchus. The Koran (and consequently the Bible) may be judged by the ignorance of physics which it displays. ”This is the touchstone of the books which, according to false religions, were written by the Deity, for G.o.d is neither absurd nor ignorant.” Several volumes are devoted by Voltaire to showing the inconsistencies, absurdities and atrocities of the Old and New Testaments, and the abominations of the Jews.

The positive religious opinions of Voltaire are less important than his negations, for the work of this great writer was mainly to destroy. He was a theist, of wavering and doubtful faith. He was well aware that any profession of atheism might be dangerous, and likely to injure him at court and with some of his friends. He thought that belief in G.o.d and in a future life were important to the safety of society, and is said to have sent the servant out of the room on one occasion when one of the company was doubting the existence of the Deity, giving as a reason that he did not want to have his throat cut. Yet it is probable that his theism went a little deeper than this. He says that matter is probably eternal and self-existing, and that G.o.d is everlasting, and self-existing likewise. Are there other G.o.ds for other worlds? It may be so; some nations and some scholars have believed in the existence of two G.o.ds, one good and one evil. Surely, nature can more easily suffer, in the immensity of s.p.a.ce, several independent beings, each absolute master of its own portion, than two limited G.o.ds in this world, one confined to doing good, the other to doing evil. If G.o.d and matter both exist from eternity, ”here are two necessary ent.i.ties; and if there be two there may be thirty. We must confess our ignorance of the nature of divinity.”

It is noticeable that, like most men on whom the idea of G.o.d does not take a very strong hold, Voltaire imagined powers in some respects superior to Deity. Thus he says above that nature can more easily suffer several independent G.o.ds than two opposed ones. Having supposed one or several G.o.ds to put the universe in order, he supposes an order anterior to the G.o.ds. This idea of a superior order, Fate, Necessity, or Nature, is a very old one. It is probably the protest of the human mind against those anthropomorphic conceptions of G.o.d, from which it is almost incapable of escaping. Voltaire and the Philosophers almost without exception believed that there was a system of natural law and justice connected with this superior order, taught to man by instinct.

Sometimes in their system G.o.d was placed above this law, as its origin; sometimes, as we have seen, He was conceived as subjected to Nature. ”G.o.d has given us a principle or universal reason,” says Voltaire, ”as He has given feathers to birds and fur to bears; and this principle is so lasting that it exists in spite of all the pa.s.sions which combat it, in spite of the tyrants who would drown it in blood, in spite of the impostors who would annihilate it in superst.i.tion. Therefore the rudest nation always judges very well in the long run concerning the laws that govern it; because it feels that these laws either agree or disagree with the principles of pity and justice which are in its heart.” Here we have something which seems like an innate idea of virtue. But we must not expect complete consistency of Voltaire. In another place he says, ”Virtue and vice, moral good and evil, are in all countries that which is useful or injurious to society; and in all times and in all places he who sacrifices the most to the public is the man who will be called the most virtuous. Whence it appears that good actions are nothing else than actions from which we derive an advantage, and crimes are but actions that are against us. Virtue is the habit of doing the things which please mankind, and vice the habit of doing things which displease it. Liberty, he says elsewhere, is nothing but the power to do that which our wills necessarily require of us.”[Footnote: Voltaire, xx. 439 (_Siecle de Louis XIV._, ch. x.x.xvii.), xxi. 369 (_Louis XV._), xv. 34, 40, 123, 316 (_Essai sur les moeurs_), xliii. 74 (_Examen important de Lord Bolingbroke_), x.x.xi. 13 (_Dict. philos. Liberte_) x.x.xvii. 336 (Traite de metaphysique_). For general attacks on the Bible and the Jews, see (_Oeuvres_, xv. 123-127, xliii. 39-205, x.x.xix.

454-464. Morley's _Diderot_, ii. 178). Notice how many of the arguments that are still repeated nowadays concerning the Mosaic account of the creation, etc. etc., come from Voltaire. Notice also that Voltaire, while too incredulous of ancient writers, was too credulous of modern travelers.]

The Church of France was both angered and alarmed by the writings of Voltaire and his friends, and did her feeble best to reply to them. But while strong in her organization and her legal powers, her internal condition was far from vigorous. Incredulity had become fas.h.i.+onable even before the attacks of Voltaire were dangerous. An earlier satirist has put into the mouth of a priest an account of the difficulties which beset the clergy in those days. ”Men of the world,” he says, ”are astonis.h.i.+ng. They can bear neither our approval nor our censure. If we wish to correct them, they think us ridiculous. If we approve of them, they consider us below our calling. Nothing is so humiliating as to feel that you have shocked the impious. We are therefore obliged to follow an equivocal line of conduct, and to check libertines not by decision of character but by keeping them in doubt as to how we receive what they say. This requires much wit. The state of neutrality is difficult. Men of the world, who venture to say anything they please, who give free vent to their humor, who follow it up or let it go according to their success, get on much better.

”Nor is this all. That happy and tranquil condition which is so much praised we do not enjoy in society. As soon as we appear, we are obliged to discuss. We are forced, for instance, to undertake to prove the utility of prayer to a man who does not believe in G.o.d; the necessity of fasting to another who all his life has denied the immortality of the soul. The task is hard, and the laugh is not on our side.”[Footnote: Montesquieu, _Lettres persanes_, i. 210, 211, Lettre lxi.]

The prelates appointed to their high offices by Louis XV. and his courtiers were not the men to make good their cause by spiritual weapons. There was no Bossuet, no Fenelon in the Church of France of the eighteenth century. Her defense was intrusted to far weaker men. First we have the archbishops, Lefranc de Pompignan of Vienne and Elie de Beaumont of Paris. Then come the Jesuit Nonnotte and the managers of the Memoires de Trevoux, the Benedictine Chaudon, the Abbe Trublet, the journalist Freron, and many others, lay and clerical. The answers of the churchmen to their Philosophic opponents are generally inconclusive.

Lefranc de Pompignan declared that the love of dry and speculative truth was a delusive fancy, good to adorn an oration, but never realized by the human heart. He sneered at Locke and at the idea that the latter had invented metaphysics. His objections and those of the Catholic church to that philosopher's teachings were chiefly that the Englishman maintained that thought might be an attribute of matter; that he encouraged Pyrrhonism, or universal doubt; that his theory of ident.i.ty was doubtful, and that he denied the existence of innate ideas. All these matters are well open to discussion, and the advantage might not always be found on Locke's side. But in general the Catholic theologians and their opponents were not sufficiently agreed to be able to argue profitably. They had no premises in common. If one of two disputants a.s.sumes that all ideas are derived from sensation and reflection, and the other, that the most important of them are the result of the inspiration of G.o.d, there is no use in their discussing minor points until those great questions are settled. The attempt to reconcile views so conflicting has frequently been made, and no writings are more dreary than those which embody it. But men who are too far apart to cross swords in argument may yet hurl at each other the missiles of vituperation, and there were plenty of combatants to engage in that sort of warfare with Voltaire, Rousseau, and the Encyclopaedists.

On the two sides, treatises, comedies, tales, and epigrams were written.

It was not difficult to point out that the sayings of the various opponents of the church were inconsistent with each other; that Rousseau contradicted Voltaire, that Voltaire contradicted himself. There were many weak places in the armor of those warriors. Pompignan discourses at great length, dwelling more especially on the wors.h.i.+p which the Philosophers paid to physical science, on their love of doubt, and on their mistaken theory that a good Christian cannot be a patriot.

Chaudon, perhaps the cleverest of the clerical writers, sometimes throws a well directed shaft. ”That same Voltaire,” he says, ”who thinks that satires against G.o.d are of no consequence, attaches great importance to satires written against himself and his friends. He is unwilling to see the pen s.n.a.t.c.hed from the hands of the slanderers of the Deity; but he has often tried to excite the powers that be against the least of his critics.” This was very true of Voltaire, who was as thin-skinned as he was violent; and who is believed to have tried sometimes to silence his opponents by the arbitrary method of procuring from some man in power a royal order to have them locked up. Palissot, in a very readable comedy, makes fun of Diderot and his friends. As for invective, the supply is endless on both sides. The Archbishop of Paris condemns the ”emile” of Rousseau as containing a great many propositions that are ”false, scandalous, full of hatred of the church and her ministers, erroneous, impious, blasphemous, and heretical.” The same prelate argues as follows: ”Who would not believe, my very dear brethren, from what this impostor says, that the authority of the church is proved only by her own decisions, and that she proceeds thus: `I decide that I am infallible, therefore so I am.' A calumnious imputation, my very dear brethren! The const.i.tution of Christianity, the spirit of the Scriptures, the very errors and the weakness of the human mind tend to show that the church established by Jesus Christ is infallible. We declare that, as the Divine Legislator always taught the truth, so his church always teaches it. We therefore prove the authority of the church, not by the church's authority, but by that of Jesus Christ, a process as accurate as the other, with which we are reproached, is absurd and senseless.”

The arguments of the clerical writers were not all on this level.

Chaudon and Nonnotte prepared a series of articles, arranged in the form of a dictionary, in which the Catholic doctrine is set forth, sometimes clearly and forcibly. But it is evident that the champions of Catholicism in that age were no match in controversy for her adversaries.[Footnote: Lefranc de Pompignan, i. 27 (_Instruction pastorale sur la pretendue philosophie des incredules). Dictionnaire antiphilosophique,_ republished and enlarged by Grosse under the t.i.tle _Dictionnaire d'antiphilosophisme,_ Palissot, _Les philosophes._ Beaumont's ”_mandement_” given in Rousseau, (_Oeuvres,_ vii. 22, etc. See also Barthelemy, _Erreurs et mensonges,_ 5e, l3e, 14e Serie, articles on _Freron, Nonnotte, Trublet,_ and _Patrouillet.

Confessions de Freron._ Nisard, _Les ennemis de Voltaire_). The superiority of the Philosophers over the churchmen in argument is too evident to be denied. Carne, 408.]

The strength of a church does not lie in her doctors and her orators, still less in her wits and debaters, though they all have their uses.

The strength of a church lies in her saints. While these have a large part in her councils and a wide influence among her members, a church is nearly irresistible. When they are few, timid and uninfluential, knowledge and power, nay, simple piety itself, can hardly support her.

In the Church of France, through the ages, there have been many saints; but in the reigns of Louis XVI. and his immediate predecessor there were but few, and none of prominence. The persecution of the Jansenists, petty as were the forms it took, had turned aside from ardent fellows.h.i.+p in the church many of the most earnest, religious souls in France. The atmosphere of the country was not then favorable to any kind of heroism. Such self-devoted Christians as there were went quietly on their ways; their existence to be proved only when, in the worst days of the Revolution, a few of them should find the crown of martyrdom.

CHAPTER VI.

THE n.o.bILITY.

The second order in the state was the n.o.bility. It is a mistake, however, to suppose that this word bears on the Continent exactly the same meaning as in England. Where all the children of a n.o.bleman are n.o.bles, a strict cla.s.s is created. An English peerage, descending only to the eldest son, is more in the nature of an office. The French _n.o.blesse_ in the latter years of the old monarchy comprised nearly all persons living otherwise than by their daily toil, together with the higher part of the legal profession. While the clergy had political rights and a corporate existence, and acted by means of an a.s.sembly, the n.o.bility had but privileges. This, however, was true only of the older provinces, the ”Lands of Elections,” whose ancient rights had been abolished. In some of the ”Lands of Estates,” which still kept a remnant of self-government, the order was to some extent a political body with const.i.tutional rights.

The n.o.bility have been reckoned at about one hundred thousand souls, forming twenty-five or thirty thousand families, owning one fifth of the soil of France. Only a part of this land, however, was occupied by the n.o.bles for their gardens, parks, and chases. The greater portion was let to farmers, either at a fixed rent, or on the _metayer_ system, by which the landlord was paid by a share of the crops. And beside his rent or his portion, the n.o.ble received other things from his tenants: payments and services according to ancient custom, days of labor, and occasional dues. He could tramp over the ploughed lands with his servants in search of game, although he might destroy the growing corn.

The game itself, which the peasant might not kill, was still more destructive. Such rights as these, especially where they were harshly enforced, caused both loss and irritation to the poor. Although there were far too many absentees among the great families, yet the larger number of the n.o.bles spent most of their time at home on their estates, looking after their farms and their tenants, attending to local business, and saving up money to be spent in visits to the towns, or to Paris. When they were absent, their bailiffs were harder masters than themselves. Unfortunately the eyes of the n.o.ble cla.s.s were turned rather to the enjoyments of the city and the court than to the duties of country life on their estates, an inevitable consequence of their loss of local power.

If the n.o.bles had few political rights, they had plenty of public privileges. They were exempt from the most onerous taxes, and the best places under the government were reserved for them. Therefore every man who rose to eminence or to wealth in France strove to enter their ranks, and since n.o.bility was a purchasable commodity, through the multiplication of venal offices which conferred it, none who had much money to spend failed to secure the coveted rank. Thus the order had come to comprise almost all persons of note, and a great part of the educated cla.s.s. To describe its ideas and aspirations is to describe those of most of the leaders of France. n.o.bility was no longer a mark of high birth, nor a brevet of distinction; it was merely a sign that a man, or some of his ancestors, had had property. Of course all persons in the order were not equal. The descendants of the old families, which had been great in the land for hundreds of years, despised the mushroom n.o.blemen of yesterday, and talked contemptuously of ”n.o.bility of the gown.” Theirs was of the sword, and dated from the Crusades. And under Louis XVI., after the first dismissal of Necker, there was a reaction, and ground gained by the older n.o.bility over the newer, and by both over the inferior cla.s.ses. As the Revolution draws near and financial embarra.s.sment grows more acute, the pickings of the favored cla.s.s have become scarcer, while the appet.i.te for them has increased. Preferment in church or state must no longer go to the vulgar.

There is a distinction among n.o.bles quite apart from the length of their pedigree. We find a higher and a lower n.o.bility, with no clear line of division between them. They are in fact the very rich, whose families have some prominence, and the moderately well off. For it may be noticed that among n.o.bles of all times and countries, although wealth unaided may not give t.i.tles and place, it is pretty much a condition precedent for acquiring them. A man may be of excellent family, and poor; but to be a great n.o.ble, a man must be rich. In old France the road to preferment was through the court; but to s.h.i.+ne at court a considerable income was required; and so the _n.o.blesse de cour_ was more or less identical with the richer n.o.bility.

In this small but influential part of the nation, both the good and the bad qualities which are favored by court life had reached a high degree of development. The old French n.o.bility has sometimes been represented as exhibiting the best of manners and the worst of morals. I believe that both sides of the picture have been painted in too high colors. The courtier was not always polite, nor were all great n.o.bles libertines.

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