The French Eighteenth Century to the Revolution

18th Century History

Between 1700 and 1750 thousands of atheistic clandestine manuscripts circulated across Europe (although still only read by a very small minority), and the controversy ignited by Pierre Bayle over the possibility of a society of virtuous atheists continued to rage, despite the fact that no (or barely any) avowed atheists could yet be identified. However, the first declared philosophical atheists would soon come forth.

Presentation of Mahometan Credentials, or The Final Resource of the French Atheist, 1793.

(hand-coloured etching) by Gillray, James (1757-1815) © Courtesy of the Warden and Scholars of New College, Oxford/ The Bridgeman Art Library.

Various histories of atheism have claimed a range of French thinkers, ranging from Fontenelle (1657-1757), Saint-Evremond (1610-1703), Freret (1688-1749), Montesquieu (1689-1755), Voltaire (1694-1778), Meslier (1664-1729), La Mettrie (1709-1751), D'Alembert (1717- 1783), Diderot (1713-1784), Rousseau (1712-1778) and Robespierre (1758- 1794) (amongst other luminaries of the French Enlightenment) for the atheist camp. However, there were fewer philosophical atheists in the French Enlightenment than those histories employing a broad definition of atheism often suggest - most of these cannot be counted as atheists on the narrower (modern) definition of atheism and are better described as deists, even (as in the case, for example, of Diderot) if they had atheistic - or quasi-atheistic - phases.

Some, however, must certainly be counted as affirmed atheists, beginning with Meslier. Meslier died in 1729, leaving behind him a testament in which he made what many see as a very clear declaration of atheism. Meslier would be followed by La Mettrie (1709-1751), author of the celebrated Man-Machine (L'Homme machine 1747), and most famously Baron d'Holbach (1723-1789), whose System of Nature (Systeme de la nature 1770) is generally regarded as the original and paradigmatic manual of philosophical atheism. The System defended an uncompromising mechanistic materialism, from which d'Holbach derived a comprehensive atheistic worldview and a fully naturalistic morality. As Schroeder has noted, the System basically took over the older forms of anti-religious argument found in the clandestine manuscripts and other atheist works, synthesising and improving the older arguments and definitively taking atheism out of the obscurity of the anonymous clandestine literature and into public life.[1]

As scholars of early atheism have shown, the materialism of eighteenth century French atheism was indebted to the materialism of the anonymous authors of the clandestine manuscripts. The physician La Mettrie gave the idea of humans as mere mechanisms perhaps its most celebrated formulation in his Man Machine of 1747, in which he argued that the soul could be reduced without remainder to the physical organisation of the brain and body since the functions of the soul were completely dependent on the latter. La Mettrie's materialism rested on his medical study of human beings; however, it has also been shown by scholars that he owed much intellectually to the clandestine tradition.

The materialism of the French atheists was monistic: in conscious opposition to Cartesian dualism, human beings were not defined as thinking substances but rather as highly complex organisations of matter. Since French materialism rejected any sort of divine lawgiver, the basis of morality was established on purely human utilitarian principles. Most atheists (for example, d'Holbach) supposed that the individual's pursuit of happiness (i.e., pleasure) was compatible with the happiness of all. La Mettre was an exception here: in a move which his fellow atheists found disturbing, he defended a straightforwardly selfish and hedonistic 'morality' according to which one's own pursuit of pleasure took precedence over others' interests. According to La Mettrie, morality without God is founded in nature and seeks only to look after the interests of the individual. The true morality is purely naturalistic, and nature determines us to seek happiness in the satisfaction of our impulses.

La Mettrie was an exception in this respect among the 18th century materialist atheists. However, his atheism would anticipate a development of French Enlightenment atheism which would have horrified the abovementioned 'virtuous atheists', namely, the atheistic nihilism of De Sade.

The Marquis De Sade (1740-1814) introduced a new form of atheism into Europe. As Schroeder has noted, Sade presented the destruction of morality precisely as a project which the Enlightenment ideal of progress demanded, expressing this aim by availing himself of Enlightenment talk of an increase in freedom and rights.[2] According to Sade, philosophy helps us to extend our rights by freeing us from a heteronomous morality imposed from outside.[3] Morality as well as belief in God was to be subjected to the test of reason, and God's existence exposed as a 'chimera'; there are no spiritual substances but only matter in motion, and morality has no divine lawgiver to establish and guarantee it. Sade deprives moral norms of their traditional objective validity by exposing them as merely relative to our habits and prejudices.[4] Nothing stops us from pursuing our desires at the cost of others, and nothing is more satisfying than exercising our will to destroy and to inflict cruelty.[5] As Schroeder has pointed out, Sade regarded nature, which acts destructively, as demanding from us (as it were in the place of God) the harming and destruction of others. As the former notes, De Sade raises aggression and cruelty to a 'moral' norm that should be pursued, so that doing cruel things is made a requirement of a 'law' of nature: every failure to act with cruelty is a crime against nature.[6] This would establish a distinct tradition of atheist amoralism and which would find clear echoes in the atheistic work of Nietzsche in the nineteenth century.

The French Revolution (1789-94) would dramatically transform the power relationship between belief and unbelief in Europe: whereas before atheism had been 'high brow', discussed in the cafes and salons of Paris, henceforth it would set itself down among the people.[7] A strident unbelief became a real political factor in public life, as the anticlerical 'dechristianisation' period following the revolution would demonstrate.[8] The impact of the French Revolution in inspiring people to put the irreligious ideas of the Enlightenment into practice would extend beyond France to other European countries, and to the American colonies (although in the latter it would take a deistic rather than atheistic form). Through figures such as Thomas Paine (1737-1809) and Robert Owen (1771-1858) in Britain, and Emmanuel Kant in Germany the radical new ideas would find a voice, and throughout the nineteenth century practical atheism would keep its militant character.

References

Minois, Georges. Histoire de L'atheisme. La Fleche: Fayard, 1998.
Schroeder, Winfried. Moralischer Nihilismus: Radikale Moralkritik von den Sophisten bis Nietzsche. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005.
Schroeder, Winfried. Ursprunge des Atheismus: Untersuchungen zur Metaphysik- und Religionskritik des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts. Tubingen: Frommann-Holzboog, 1998.

Bibliography

Footnotes

[1]↑ Winfried Schroeder, Ursprunge des Atheismus: Untersuchungen zur Metaphysik- und Religionskritik des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts (Tubingen: Frommann-Holzboog, 1998), 87.
[2]↑ Moralischer Nihilismus: Radikale Moralkritik von den Sophisten bis Nietzsche (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005), 142.
[3]↑ Ibid.
[4]↑ Ibid., 143-4.
[5]↑ Ibid., 145.
[6]↑ Ibid., 146.
[7]↑ Georges Minois, Histoire de L'atheisme (La Fleche: Fayard, 1998), 411.
[8]↑ For the dechristianisation movement, see Ibid., chapter 14.

Top of Page