Recent works of modern French history have found it fashionable, when focusing on the eighteenth century from across the jagged shoals of nineteenth- and twentieth-century France, to reductively treat Francophone national identity as the dialogical interaction of two related “imagined communities.”Footnote ¹ On the one hand, as scholars such as Joseph Byrnes have unconvincingly argued, French national identity after the Enlightenment and Revolutionary eras has been shaped by the more secular “Cult of the Nation,”Footnote ² nourished by the Revolutionary ethos of liberté, égalité, and fraternité; on the other hand, there is the identity of France as Europe's first, most Catholic people.Footnote ³ Such stark contrasts between opposing identities, which were in fact self-consciously nourished and cultivated by nineteenth-century writers, are overdrawn, and yet the increasingly dialogical character of French national identity in the centuries after the Revolution remains relevant to the subject of eighteenth-century historiography, for the definition of French national identity or identities is intricately intertwined with the unfolding of Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment identities that arose in various nuanced forms from the intellectual and religious history of France. Recently, provocative and timely work by Jonathan Israel, Dale Van Kley, and Darrin McMahon has taken up different aspects of these broader questions concerning why and when these competing visions may have sprung from the soil of eighteenth-century France. A remaining historiographical curiosity lingers as many historians of the French Revolution are quick to ascribe this dichotomy chiefly to the years after 1791 when the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the Oath of Allegiance made allegiance to the Revolutionary government more complicated for less Gallican, more ultramontane priests. On the other hand, historians of the French Enlightenment continue to focus on the inherently secular, scientific, and anticlerical nature of the siècle de lumières as though the Church were inevitably opposed to Enlightenment innovations after mid-century, preferring and harshly defending (as Jonathan Israel has recently and voluminously argued) a comfortable and cautious acceptance of Lockeanism and Newtonianism as the only forms of Enlightenment discourse considered acceptable and capable of synthesis with Catholic orthodoxy.Footnote ⁴ Differing historical perspectives on the relationship between the Enlightenment and religion remain central to the identity of participants in the French Enlightenment at various points throughout the eighteenth century and after, and such questions continue to inform the definition of what it means to be “French” today. As such, the historical processes of Enlightenment identity formation continue to require examination; such processes—one of many lietmotifs within the complex and invaluable conversations opened by the works of Israel, McMahon, and Van Kley—will be the subject of this article. For scholars remain far from a consensus on just what it meant to be Catholic and Enlightened together in the century preceding the French Revolution.

I. Radical, Moderate, and Counter-Enlightenment: Toward a New Interpretation of the French Enlightenment in Global Context

Continuing self-consciously in the tradition of Peter Gay, Jonathan Israel's most recent tome, Enlightenment Contested, analyzes the Enlightenment from a broader European and Atlantic World perspective, seeing within it a fundamental duality between the so-called “Moderate Mainstream” and the “Radical Enlightenment.” Israel's work (which is actually more nuanced than his self-proclaimed dichotomies would suggest) enthusiastically proclaims the essentially conservative nature of the moderate Enlightenment, which he sees as essentially dualistic and willing to countenance an epistemological role for both reason and tradition, empiricism and rationalism, natural religion and revealed religion. Under the rubric of the “moderate mainstream,” Israel casts a wide and often highly questionable net across the Continent and the Atlantic World, insisting that “Cartesian dualism, Lockean empiricism, Leibnizian monads, Malebranche's occasionalism, Bishop Huet's fideism, the London Boyle Lectures, Newtonian physico-theology, Thomasian eclecticism, German and Swedish Wolffianism” were “all methodologies of compromise” fundamentally at odds with the “Radical Enlightenment,” which Israel sees as fundamentally Spinozist and the harbinger of modernity.Footnote ⁵ The Radical Enlightenment, Israel contends, had no truck with revelation or philosophical dualism because of its essentially revolutionary, essentially anticlerical faith that philosophy was socially transformative because of Baruch Spinoza's idea that natural law, God's law, natural reason, and the universe itself were of one substance. This Radical Enlightenment, Israel then asserts, became dominant in France during the 1740s because the moderate mainstream “simply proved unable clearly and cogently to win the intellectual battle” in successive controversies spanning the decades of the 1730s–1760s in France.Footnote ⁶ However, though Israel's work is brilliant and destined to be a standard work of eighteenth-century intellectual historiography, his methodology does not adequately account for the dialogical evolution of Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment in France, and it is imbued with overconfidence in the inevitable modernity embodied by the victorious Radical Enlightenment. As this article demonstrates (in some respects elaborating on a much lengthier book-length manuscript on the topic that I am currently finalizingFootnote ⁷), the victory of Radical Enlightenment in France was not inevitable, but had much to do with the philosophical and institutional peculiarities of the manner in which Enlightenment thought was adopted by Catholic theologians in France. Though often hostile to Spinoza, philosophically inclined apologists, university theologians, and Jesuits, whom Israel might brand as moderate or even Counter-Enlightenment figures, were not exclusively Lockean and Newtonian in their natural philosophy but often Lockean and Malebranchian in their psychological and theological approaches as well. Many writers who would later be retrospectively branded as “radical,” “Spinozist,” or “Counter-Enlightenment” by their critics were in their own day passionately convinced that the body of revelation was, in toto, empirically verifiable—whether their arguments seem convincing to present-day historians or later critics is not precisely the point, if we are to avoid a whiggish interpretation of the French Enlightenment.

In short, the philosophical, theological, and sociocultural permeability of the first half of the eighteenth century makes it difficult to distinguish Radical Enlightenment from Moderate Enlightenment from Counter-Enlightenment until the 1750s. The questions, then, that my work addresses are the often uniquely French contingencies of the 1750s by which both Counter-Enlightenment and philosophe identity formation occurred. Israel does recognize that the Counter-Enlightenment often unintentionally played directly into the hands of the most radical writers, but he insists that this has much to do with their “faith-based hostility to philosophy”;Footnote ⁸ on the contrary, it is here argued that the Counter-Enlightenment was often a child of the very same moderate center, but an offspring beset by an identity crisis of its own creation. Passionately fearful of unbelief after the 1750s especially, and endlessly divided against themselves, Counter-Enlightenment partisans and apologists often argued for the social utility and rationality of church history and mystery while retrospectively condemning the epistemological bases for such arguments vested in the theological enlightenment of the early eighteenth century that had rhetorically synthesized certain Lockean and Cartesian principles.

Israel's work reminds us that advancing toward a more nuanced consensus that is attuned to the plurality of religious and secular Enlightenment discourses in France, and indeed Europe as a whole, necessitates a willingness to eschew reification. For example, though anticlericalism was a salient common denominator of the Enlightenment, and all Enlightenment writers were attuned to the voice of nature and deeply suspicious of the tendency for corrupt priesthoods to usurp and falsify God's voice in sectarian religions, not all Enlightenment writers throughout the eighteenth century believed that the voice of God was synonymous with the voice of nature. My own research into the intersection of religion and Enlightenment in France reveals the existence (pre-1750s) of a plurality of Enlightenments, often bisecting national boundaries or scholarly categories like “Radical,” “Moderate,” or “Counter-Enlightenment.” Some were more or less deistic, most were anticlerical in some sense, but most were also not intrinsically anti-Christian (anticlericalism does not equal anti-Christian—if it did, Erasmus and nearly every European writer as early as the Renaissance would have to be considered anti-Christian). Some Enlightenment discourses were more materialistic, while others wanted a purification of revealed religion more susceptible to natural science and reason, and not precisely the metaphysical abolition of revelation entirely. In short, legitimate and creatively enervating differences of scholarly opinion prevail on these matters, and rushing to define Enlightenment as inherently anticlerical, inherently modern, primarily deistic, or materialistic, and therefore anti-Catholic, is merely another form of reification in defiance of the fluid and nuanced discourses of early eighteenth-century France revealed in the sources themselves.

No less reductionist is the redefinition of Enlightenment as a variety of eighteenth-century courtly styles and institutions,Footnote ⁹ whose revolutionary impact is linked solely with changes to reading taste, histories of the book, and broadening networks of sociocultural exchange.Footnote ¹⁰ The Enlightenment may have been all of these things, but a holistic historiography of Enlightenment demands greater attention to the generation of new content in the fault lines created by the collision of culture, appropriation, and religio-political contingencies. This “controversialist approach,”Footnote ¹¹ as Jonathan Israel productively defines it, is adapted as the methodological fulcrum of this article, which focuses anew on the factional politics afflicting France from 1751–1764, and especially on the condemnations of De l'Esprit by Claude Adrien Helvétius, and of Denis Diderot's Encyclopédie. In using Israel's controversialist approach to intellectual history, I argue two related points that differ somewhat from his own conclusions: first, that the fundamentally secular, self-conscious Enlightenment identity was calcified (if not precisely created) by its opposition within the Catholic Church in France; second, that this more coherent, equally self-conscious religious opposition to Enlightenment was relatively new (a creation of the 1750s predominately). When these self-conscious anti-Enlightenment tendencies arose, they were generated by the mutual antagonism of contending factions within the Church itself (Jansenist versus Jesuit), with all sides eager to blame one another for the radicalization of the Enlightenment. The factions within the Gallican Church of the eighteenth century defined themselves by philosophical differences as well as by the more frequently studied differences of ecclesiology and moral theology, with Jansenists favoring Cartesian epistemology, and Jesuits often favoring a kind of epistemological sensationalism deriving from both John Locke and Nicolas Malebranche. As such, at least among many Jesuits, bishops, and Sorbonne professors, there was little inherently clerical opposition to Locke, Newton, or other lesser Enlightenment figures, as Israel notes as well. However, unlike Israel, this article demonstrates that the manner in which Locke's sensationalism, and Malebranche's occasionalism (defined subsequently), was employed by many professors, Jesuits, and apologists of the eighteenth century was fluid, adaptive, and not doomed to philosophical contradiction when confronted with the increasingly vitalistic, often Spinozan, discourses of the Radical Enlightenment. Contingent factors, instead, indirectly contributed to the mainstreaming of the Radical Enlightenment in France during the 1750s, for philosophical confrontations with the more assertively Cartesian Jansenists, whose popularity grew precipitously in the 1750s, and jurisdictional contests of secular versus sacral power of censorship, education, and sacrament administration all conspired to set the stage for the more polarizing identities of late eighteenth-century Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment France. Dale Van Kley has previously and extensively argued for the religious origins of the French Revolution; yet, it is no less essential to historicize the French Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment as twin movements arising from common origins, with the increasingly secular, increasingly radical French Enlightenment growing into a kind of religious movement of its own. Its defining moments and controversies, its persecutors and martyrs, and the historical genesis of its own evangelical sense of mission are the subject of this present article and my forthcoming book on the Jesuits, the Sorbonne, theology, and Enlightenment in France throughout the eighteenth century.Footnote ¹²

By addressing the historical origins of the philosophe and Counter-Enlightenment identities, and seeking them largely in the 1750s, I do not seek to reify categories out of nuanced historical movements with a long history dating, in fact, to the late seventeenth century. I am certainly not suggesting that the church suddenly awoke after 1752–1758 and said, “Behold, we have a materialist, anti-Catholic Enlightenment on our hands!” When Jansenists, Jesuits, the episcopacy, and the Sorbonne swiftly armed itself against the Encyclopédie in the 1750s, it was in fact recording a phenomenon that already, to some essential degree, had gradually occurred during the preceding half-century. What distinguishes the 1750s as a definitive moment in the self-conscious identity formation of the philosophes is not the fact that this or that isolated writer (Voltaire for his Lettres angloises, or Montesquieu for his Lettres persanes for example) was condemned for seditious potential; it is, instead, that prior to mid-century so many disparate Enlightenment writers had yet to self-consciously embrace a common and very public “mission statement” or esprit des corps provided by the symbol of the persecuted Encyclopédie. Similarly, many readers and most clergy, Jansenist and Jesuit alike, did not recognize strategic or rhetorical unity and coherence before the 1750s, for the Sorbonne, the Jansenist Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, and increasingly numerous Instructions pastorales had yet to target the esprits-forts as a kind of sect with characteristic doctrines often abstracted and condemned in globo with long lists of works sometimes inaccurately thought by censors to be “materialistic, impious, atheistic” or “spinozist.” As argued in what follows, the condemnation of Helvétius's De l'Esprit by the Sorbonne is one such “syllabus of errors” that did much to lend credence to the public perception of strategic coherence within esprit philosophe already nourished by Diderot in support of his much-persecuted Encyclopédie. Enlightenment writers, in other words, became conscious of themselves as being engaged in a historic drama wherein their work found secular apotheosis in a rejection of inherited sacral authority, and a devotion to the triune principles of utility, empiricism, and natural reason as the one true source of knowledge and values.

On the other hand, the galvanizing of a self-conscious, almost missionary ideology for the philosophes is fundamentally what distinguishes the self-conscious Enlightenment of the period after the late 1750s from its equally self-conscious ideological opposition—the Counter-Enlightenment, most masterfully addressed by Darrin McMahon's Enemies of the Enlightenment.Footnote ¹³ Indeed, before proceeding, several points of clarification are in order concerning the invaluable contribution already accomplished by McMahon. Though profoundly well-forged, and rapidly becoming a standard work on Counter-Enlightenment and Counter-Revolutionary ideology in France, McMahon's thesis leaves some room for revision. My intention is by no means to rewrite McMahon's thesis or criticize it as a whole. On the contrary, this article seeks only to augment and deepen the historical dialectic that gave rise to the Counter-Enlightenment itself. McMahon's work assumes that a “Counter-Enlightenment” response was inevitable throughout Europe, and that this response simply arose sooner in France, and had a continent-wide resonance due to the widespread currency of the French language in the eighteenth century and the highly developed networks of reading and circulation over which Francophone literature reigned supreme. While the cultural hegemony of France throughout much of the eighteenth century was certainly a vital factor, as McMahon's work brilliantly describes, the rise of a self-consciously anticlerical Enlightenment and its similarly self-conscious Counter-Enlightenment invites further study.Footnote ¹⁴ Along these lines, it is argued that distinctively French religious and cultural politics were necessary contingencies not present elsewhere in Europe. These contingencies drove the French Enlightenment in unique directions that were later internationalized and imposed on the rest of Europe as French religious and cultural divisions were exported by the French Revolutionary Wars.Footnote ¹⁵ Thus, while McMahon's work concerning itself chiefly with the period from 1776–1789 is truly masterful, I argue that the key decade in the development of anti-philosophe ideologies was much earlier. The decade of the 1750s, which climaxed with the condemnation of Helvétius's De l'Esprit and Diderot's Encyclopédie, was uniquely contentious for the history of French religion, and in fact the era after 1776 seems inexplicable without the polarization afforded by earlier events of the 1750s. Such a focus on earlier decades demonstrates that the Counter-Enlightenment was not, sui generis, somehow on the “Right” while the Enlightenment was somehow “Left.” Rather, Counter-Enlightenment derives from manifold origins that defy these later sociopolitical categories that have more to do with French Revolutionary discourse anachronistically applied. The seemingly paradoxical notion, therefore, of Counter-Enlightenment as arising from Enlightenment discourses themselves is in part the subject of what follows.Footnote ¹⁶

One final point of clarification is necessary in order to more precisely address what I mean by the “counter-enlightenment crystallization of the philosophes.” This article does not argue that the whole of the Enlightenment was invented by its opposition after the 1750s, most simply because I do not take the Enlightenment in France or anywhere else in Europe to be synonymous with the philosophes.Footnote ¹⁷ As I have defined them in a way reminiscent of J. S. Spink, Franco Venturi, and the late Robert Shackleton, the philosophes are, properly speaking, luminaries of Robert Darnton's “High Enlightenment” who acquired their ideological identities as apostles of tolerance, reason, and social reform in the process of rallying around the persecuted Encyclopédie, gradually becoming mainstream within the institutions of the Old Regime state and public sphere.Footnote ¹⁸ As a creature of church persecution, which suddenly escalated after the mid-1740s, the philosophe identity was, in one sense, created by its opposition—a religious opposition that in turn crystallized into an increasingly potent (though never fully) monolithic Counter-Enlightenment ideology by the dawn of the Revolution.Footnote ¹⁹ Thus, it is here argued that the creation of self-conscious Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment ideologies is attributable to the 1750s, but my work speaks only of catalysts, seeking to address why this process seems to have occurred so rapidly in the 1740s. My work similarly speaks of a recursive historical agency—that is, church factionalism and politics affecting the intellectual development of individual philosophes, who then coalesce around the Encyclopédie and, from the perspective of the Church anyway, seem to be “invented” as a party in that moment. Whether or not a few individual philosophes were conscious of a common project of humanity before the 1750s is not at issue, and it is nowhere denied. But, insofar as this article speaks of the Counter-Enlightenment creation of the philosophes, it does so only in the sense that esprit philosophe was not generally self-conscious, nor as oppositionally viewed by the French church that, at any rate, became relatively more philosophically inclined toward Counter-Enlightenment criticism after the 1750s.

II. Early Enlightenment Discourse and the Church, 1739–1752

Even if the mature, self-conscious philosophe was a creature of the immediate pre-Revolutionary decades in France, there did exist a considerably more permeable, not entirely self-conscious early Enlightenment milieu before the 1750s. This milieu, comprising a constellation of religious and political discourses by a variety of diverse writers, grew out of the neo-skeptical crisis of authority of the late seventeenth century.Footnote ²⁰ Universities, salons, clubs, provincial academies, and Masonic lodges, common to lay and clergy alike, were the institutional strongholds of this republic of letters, as recent work suggests.Footnote ²¹ The style and tropes arising from these institutions nourished the early careers of Voltaire, Diderot, Jean le Rond d'Alembert and others, and their genesis was directly occasioned by debates surrounding the appropriation of René Descartes, Spinoza, Pierre Bayle, and Locke by bishops, university theologians, and the Jesuits. From this early “Theological Enlightenment” (as I have elsewhere dubbed the clerical and often highly Jesuit contributions to early Enlightenment discourses) emerges a mid-century breakdown in dialogue among the theologians and with lay discourses of Enlightenment. The catalyst for the increasingly self-conscious polarization of French Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment identities after the 1750s is, thus, the potent split within the French Theological Enlightenment itself—a development vital to the subject of what follows, and elsewhere developed at great length in my forthcoming book-length manuscript on the rise and fall of theological enlightenment in France.Footnote ²²

Though still a relative newcomer to the religious history of Enlightenment and Revolution in France,Footnote ²³ much work on the so-called “Catholic Enlightenment” in France has fruitfully concerned the role of Gallicanism and Jansenism in limiting the power of the Catholic magisterium in favor of enhanced oversight of the church by secular authorities. This focus, embodied most lucidly and copiously in the ongoing research of Dale Van Kley especially, continues to be vitally important. Yet, the role of the Jesuits in the religious history of the Enlightenment (both philosophically and politically) requires further study after a long period of relative de-emphasis, for their contributions remain a vital part of the story this article seeks to tell.Footnote ²⁴ Often, when the relationship of the Enlightenment to the Jesuits has been considered, the analyses turn on specific aspects of Jesuit Enlightenment—the Jesuits and their alleged Aristotelianism, Cartesianism, or Newtonianism in scientific education, for example. Some monographs isolate various contributions of the Jesuits to the Enlightenment. Locke's influence on the Jesuits has been studied by me and more comprehensively by Ross Hutchison. The Jesuits and their relationship to the Encyclopédie is another topic that has received attention. Most commonly studied are Jesuit contributions to political thought, or their relationship to the institutions of Bourbon France. Yet no coherent consensus has emerged on even such apparently indispensable issues as whether and to what extent the Jesuits were Aristotelians, Cartesians, or full-blown sensationalists in the tradition of John Locke.Footnote ²⁵

As early as the turn of the eighteenth century, however, French Jesuits such as Claude G. Buffier, S.J., who published the Journal de Trévoux, freely made use of the insights of John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding in order to combat positions previously thought to be intellectual extremes that skeptics might use to attack the Catholic faith (namely extreme Cartesian and extreme Spinozan positions).Footnote ²⁶ Descartes, widely revered by Jansenists until as late as 1760,Footnote ²⁷ had inadvertently split the Aristotelian notion of “soul” (âme in French) into a separate, inherently cognitive, spiritual, and active substance totally distinct from the substance of matter.Footnote ²⁸ Suddenly, therefore, the interaction between mind and matter became philosophically and theologically possible only by relying on a near fideistic trust in revelation and providence. Yet, even providence was harder to sustain against the materialist pantheism associated with the appropriation of Baruch Spinoza's Tractatus theologo-politicus in northwestern Europe (Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire critique had ensured that Spinoza was already indirectly known in France by the early eighteenth century). Spinoza had taken Ockham's razor to Cartesian substantive dualism by arguing that natural law, divine providence, and reason were virtually one and the same, because the universe and the deity itself were consubstantial and coextensive. In this way, Spinoza solved the dilemmas of Cartesian dualism by invoking the pantheistic view that human reason could fully apprehend the divine reason animating natural law. Spinoza had been excommunicated by the Amsterdam rabbis as early as 1656, and his works were later condemned by the Catholic Church because his monistic notion of substance suggested that the sacred texts of the Catholic Church, as well as Jewish rabbis and Muslim imams, were little more than matters of secular policy and statecraft—useful as ethical and legal instruction for the ignorant, but essentially redundant as special revelations that stood alongside the ethics revealed by natural law.Footnote ²⁹

One Jesuit response to both Spinoza and Descartes would eventually prove exceptionally prominent and enduring throughout the eighteenth century. This response, crafted in various forms, especially by Claude Buffier, S.J., and Réné-Joseph Tournemine, S.J., was to argue, following Nicholas Malebranche, that true agency and causality in the universe rested only in God. When an individual perceives, senses, wills, and undertakes an action, it is in fact God who directly causes the perception, volition, and movement of the physical universe. Yet, because divine providence acts with predictable regularly at the occasion of our subjectively perceived desires, thoughts, and actions, from the vantage point of natural reason, then, ideas can be said to arise from the senses, and the possibility of empirical analysis, from the divinely willed regularity of the laws of nature.Footnote ³⁰ To this metaphysical occasionalism is rhetorically engrafted Locke's suggestion that all individuals have a “first idea”—a self-perception of the substantial difference between their spiritual, immortal, thinking soul on the one hand, and their physical self, on the other. This notion of the “first idea” is what Buffier and Tournemine use as their means of resurrecting the older scholastic notion of a common consent-based proof of God. Though the Thomistic argument for proof of God by common consent of humankind was impossible to seriously sustain by the end of the 1600s, adapting Locke to Aristotle made it possible, so Buffier argued, to deduce from a common-sense experience two key conclusions: first, that the spiritual mind and the material body were separate, and second, that matter behaved in accordance with general principles amenable to science.

Both Locke and Buffier thus insisted that experience is not knowledge of substances, as Aquinas had argued following Aristotle. Instead, perception remains a simple idea and, as such, Buffier writes that “the first source and principle of all truth of which we are susceptible is that intimate sentiment which … is the inherent proof of our own existence.” “Divine Revelation and human authority,” Buffier continued, can “make no impression” on individuals except “by the testimony of the senses.”Footnote ³¹ In other words, perception, first of one's existence as a being that thinks, then of the rest of the world by awareness of an experientially derived conclusion (that other beings share that same intimate self-awareness), is the dualistic foundation for Buffier's philosophy. Buffier thus updates the official Aristotelian orientation of the Scholastic Jesuits by rewriting the Cartesian first principle (cogito) into sensationalist language deriving from Locke. The whole of this epistemological synthesis therefore provides the Catholic Enlightenment with a substantial overhaul of Thomistic sensationism rephrased in Lockean as well as Cartesian terms—that is, that all ideas (even our ideas of God and the cogito, itself) derive from sense perception. Even without knowledge of essence, Buffier and other clerical intellectuals could continue to believe as had Albert the Great, following Aristotle, that nothing is in the intellect that does not first come through the senses. As such, even as the Jesuits continued to openly espouse Neo-scholastic Aristotelianism, they were in effect revising St. Thomas with a healthy and rather comfortably synthesized discourse, integrating both Locke and and Malebranchian forms of Cartesianism.

Thanks to Jesuit epistemological innovation, church doctrine could be empirically granted the status of a special revelation because the historical authenticity of its sacred texts and their corroboration by other ancient sources and a living tradition manifested by the church itself could be validated based on essentially Lockean proofs of historical certitude (so Buffier and later Enlightenment apologists would argue). Following the first generation of Jesuit editors of the Journal de Trévoux, then—a generation that included both Tournemine and Buffier—Jesuits continued to invoke Locke just as regularly as many other early eighteenth-century writers had done.Footnote ³² Contrary to existing work on the Jesuits, however, this was not mere fideism. Buffier had developed experiential a posteriori proofs of his seemingly trans-rational linkage of Malebranche and Locke. For, in an effort to refute Spinoza, Buffier and other Jesuits had argued that perceptions are always holistic, and ideas of matter (basic perceptions) reveal that matter is divisible. How then, they asked, could divisible matter be perceived by equally divisible matter? The essence of thought—as the many bishops, theological writers, and apologists schooled in the Jesuit epistemological synthesis argued—had to be therefore something other than matter.Footnote ³³

In the above manifold ways, Jesuits of the early eighteenth century had managed to create an extremely influential apologetical tool—a discourse of theological Enlightenment that I have elsewhere described as the “Jesuit Synthesis.”Footnote ³⁴ This Jesuit Synthesis was, in effect, a theological discourse comprising the rudiments of occasionalism and sensationalism. In large measure because of Buffier, the emphasis of theological argumentation in general shifted toward the following questions: to what extent was the New Testament a reliable historical account? To what extent had the New Testament been faithfully transmitted by the Church? This notion of “Theological Enlightenment” was not the only variety of clerical response to the Enlightenment, nor is it the sum total of Catholic Enlightenment in France. Moreover, that the pioneers of this Jesuit synthesis were Jesuits should not be taken to imply that all Jesuits used it; nor does it imply that only Jesuits used this synthesis of occasionalism and sensationalism. For the Jesuits and other eighteenth-century French writers who fashioned and refashioned these discourses through debate did not always identify themselves as Lockean or Malebranchian (although the pioneers of the Jesuit synthesis, Buffier and Tournemine, frequently attributed aspects of their work to Locke and Malebranche by name). Later Jesuits adopted Malebranchian or Lockean arguments as the rhetorical occasion demanded. Self-consciously or not, they frequently did so in order to update Aristotle who, as Kors, Northeast, and many other scholars have long noted, had been dealt a damaging blow by Cartesianism. The Jesuit Synthesis, as originally conceived by the Jesuits themselves, can then be considered an update of their prevailing Aristotelianism in order to meet the demands of Cartesian, Gassendo-Lockian, and Spinozistic extremes—another point I develop at great length in Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment. Even if Buffier was somewhat atypical among Jesuits in his day, and even if the official position of the Jesuits would remain Neo-Scholastic Aristotelianism throughout the eighteenth century, the Jesuit Synthesis itself was widely disseminated and came to have scientific and apologetical uses that transcended the confines of early eighteenth-century Jesuit theology—indeed, the Jesuit Synthesis transcended the Jesuit order itself by mid-century.

If the Jesuit synthesis had a geographical locus, it was the Jesuit collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris, where the tremendously widespread Mémoires de Trévoux was produced, and whence individual Jesuits like Buffier and Tournemine cut a striking presence in the republic of letters of the first thirty years of the eighteenth century. The Jesuit synthesis was successfully disseminated into the salons, academies, schools, and seminaries of the Old Regime, becoming in this way a foundational aspect of Enlightenment theology. This reorientation of theological arguments was manifestly apologetical and focused directly on the codification of doctrine in dialogue with skeptics of the bases of Christian tradition. In this way, many educated clergy of the mid-eighteenth century believed that if the Catholic revelation passed the common-sense tests of historical certitude, amenable to everyone's interior sense of what their perceptions demonstrated, then Catholic revelation could be called true (that is, reasonable if not exactly rational) according to Locke's own rendition of historical certitude. The Jesuit synthesis of Malebranche and Locke therefore galvanized the early Enlightenment—both lay and clerical alike—but it was to be gradually rejected by the radical Enlightenment after the 1750s.

By the 1740s, in response to an escalation in the publication of previously clandestine texts with vaguely or openly materialist positions, vernacular apologists for Catholicism in France (Jesuit and non-Jesuit alike) continued to use sensationalism in their arguments against materialism.Footnote ³⁵ For writers such as the abbé d'Houtteville, apologetical utility became the chief, functional criteria for defenses of the Church against the rising tide of Radical Enlightenment in France. Throughout the four-volume edition of Houtteville's La Religion chrétienne prouvée par les faits (1744), the history of the early church was rewritten to reflect this new emphasis on pragmatic theological arguments. Hitherto controversial authors, like Pierre-Daniel Huet and even the Protestant Hugo Grotius, were treated favorably, while the apologetics more acceptable to Port Royal and Neo-Augustinian theologians like Blaise Pascal were criticized.Footnote ³⁶ Arguments like those of Houtteville abounded during the 1740s, and the merit of any arguments for Christianity were often judged by their historical-empirical practicality. A proof was deemed apologetically useful by theologians only insofar as it mollified the apparent distinction between divine mysteries and reason by arguing for the historicity of the revealed tradition as a whole (as opposed to earlier apologetical preoccupations with speculative proofs of individual doctrines). These arguments based on historicity and “les faits” became so common during the period 1720–1745 that the abbé d'Houtteville himself thought of his work as “neither new nor curious.”Footnote ³⁷

Theologians who looked favorably on these early eighteenth-century tendencies did not exist solely within the Jesuit Order. Nor were they to be found only among the ranks of the vernacular apologists of the 1730s–1740s. Recent scholarship on the University of Paris suggests that Newtonian science, the rising science of physiology, along with Lockean philosophy, had many partisans within the arts faculty by the late 1740s.Footnote ³⁸ The 1739 thesis of renowned Sorbonne theologian Luke Joseph Hooke addressed the nature and historicity of the evidence for the resurrection of Christ and passed without comment from the faculty (though it did not escape the opposition of the Parlement of Paris). Both Luke Joseph Hooke and his student, the controversial abbé Jean-Martin de Prades, figure prominently in my forthcoming work on theological enlightenment, which substantially revises existing treatments of both teacher and student. The role of Hooke as “Enlightenment theologian” has also been masterfully addressed in Thomas O'Connor's 1996 biography.Footnote ³⁹ By 1743, Hooke was appointed royal professor of theology at the Sorbonne, and his theological course was widely revered among bishops, archbishops, and Sorbonne faculty alike during the 1740s for its willingness to adopt Enlightenment theology; it was seen often among Paris divines and lay writers alike to be a triumph of effective apologetics.Footnote ⁴⁰ The University of Paris and many students who matriculated at the Sorbonne were also increasingly exposed to advances in natural philosophy. The first known university theses devoted entirely to experimental physics appeared in 1731 among the Jesuits of Louis-le-Grand (a date nearly contemporary with the popularization of Newtonian physics by Voltaire and the marquise du Châtelet in the academies and salons).Footnote ⁴¹ By 1740, the first class at the University of Paris with a focus on Newtonian experimental physics was taught by Pierre Sigorgne at the Collège du Plessis.Footnote ⁴² After taking his philosophy and theology degrees at the University of Paris, Sigorgne spoke out vehemently against the lingering reliance on Cartesian physics at the University.Footnote ⁴³ Among the Jesuits was Louis-Bertrand Castel, who taught at Louis-le-Grand. Father Castel was a friend of Montesquieu and Diderot and an editor of the Journal de Trévoux and, though not entirely favorable to Newton's optics, was otherwise a great admirer of Isaac Newton.Footnote ⁴⁴ As early as the 1730s, the medical faculty of Paris was also enthusiastic about new physiological understandings of the mind-body relationship coming out of both Italy and Britain.Footnote ⁴⁵ Indeed, after the expulsion of the Jansenists and appellants from the Paris Faculty of Theology and the 1746 replacement of Fleury by Mirepoix as the font of ecclesiastical patronage, the Sorbonne was populated with numerous theologians who were not only pro-Jesuit but also relatively nonchalant about such works as Montesquieu's Esprit des Loix and Buffon's Histoire naturelle. Footnote ⁴⁶

This engagement with the epistemological and scientific innovation characteristic of the Jesuits contrasts sharply with the relatively conservative Augustinian approach to moral theology and the still intensely Cartesian orientation of most Jansenist philosophy. The curriculum of the seventeenth-century Jansenist stronghold of Port-Royal relied heavily on Descartes. From 1729 onward, as Jansenism was “purified by force of arms” from “the citadel and sanctuary” of the Paris faculty, however, the pro-Jansenist forces were compelled to regroup as they became theologically and philosophically marginalized in the aftermath of their forcible exclusion from the Sorbonne.Footnote ⁴⁷ Yet while the Jansenists remained on the defensive throughout the period from 1729 to 1751, their ideological and organizational development during these years formed the basis, both of their resurgence during the refusal of the sacraments controversy, and their alliance with the Parlement of Paris throughout much of the period from 1751 to 1771.Footnote ⁴⁸ In addition, the Jansenists' Cartesian orientation continued to develop—with increasingly polemical self-consciousness—in diametrical opposition to the increasingly sophisticated use of Locke as a counterweight to Descartes by ultramontane writers preferring the Jesuit synthesis. As late as 1761, Jansenist expositions of Christian doctrine such as that of Méseguy continued to be written and widely read, and Jansenist canonists associated with the Sorbonne like Claude Mey spoke out against the invidiously heterodox system of John Locke from an unapologetically Cartesian perspective that appears quite out of step with the prevailing sensationalism of the mid-1750s.Footnote ⁴⁹ Claude Mey's Remarques sur une thèse soutenue le samedi 30 octobre 1751 par M. l'abbé de Brienne was, in fact, a poignant thirty-page indictment of one of the Sorbonne's most favored and prominent students, Loménie de Brienne. By implication, it indicted the entire Sorbonne for capitulating to the “dangerous” system of John Locke:

Mey's anti-Lockean jeremiad was later praised to the stars and partially reprinted by the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, and as early as 1752, Duport d'Auville, Superior of Philosophy at Saint Sulpice and one of the remaining crypto-Jansenists within the Sorbonne, was purported to have pulled a quarto translation of Locke from his pocket during an extraordinary meeting of the General Assembly of the Sorbonne faculty; holding the book aloft, he pronounced judgment on its author by proclaiming, “Behold, the atheist … it is sufficiently well known that if there are no innate ideas, there is no Christian religion.”Footnote ⁵²

It might, in effect, be argued (as Van Kley has suggested) that the transplantation of Lockean discourses into the heavily Cartesian Gallican tradition represented by the Jansenists made the increasingly prominent penchant for philosophical materialism characteristic of the late French Enlightenment after 1770 almost inevitable.Footnote ⁵³ If the sensate origin of thought is conceded, the Cartesian-Malebranchian tradition that separates spirit and matter, mind and body into separate substances cannot adapt. Either mind must be matter miraculously endowed with a property of thought as Gassendi and Locke suggested, and Voltaire argued; or, divine providence must be retained as a causal Deus ex machina for all natural law, movement, and human free will. However, this argument from philosophical inevitability assumes that the Jesuits really were 100 percent faithful Aristotelian peripatetics who had learned nothing from either Descartes or Locke. Yet, the Jesuit synthesis of sensationalism and occasionalism had provided a kind of provisional middle ground that gave way under the weight of factional church politics. The relative Cartesianism of the Jansenists juxtaposed to the relative sensationalism of the Jesuits certainly made political and ideological polarization more likely. But sociopolitical contingencies of the 1750s were necessary to actuate this latent inclination for polarity. To these contingent catalysts we now turn.

III. Contingent Forces in the Creation of Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment Identities

The broad dissemination of the Jesuit theological enlightenment throughout the lay and clerical public sphere notwithstanding, the theological synthesis of Lockean and Malebranchian epistemologies crafted by the Jesuits was ultimately victimized by polarization and theological polemics within the Gallican Church. As the Jansenists grew more vocal and openly favorable to a limited monarchy that respected the secular protection of the Gallican traditions of the French church, the Jesuits increasingly attacked them with heightened verve under Archbishop Beaumont and the pro-Jesuit confessor to the Dauphin, Bishop Mirepoix.Footnote ⁵⁴ In essence, pro-Jesuit, pro-Unigenitus prelates close to the court and dominant within the Sorbonne through the mid-1750s accused the Parlement of Paris—which had become highly favorable to the Jansenist cause by the dawn of the 1750s—of using the secular arm of justice to interfere with sacral jurisdiction over the sacraments and the enforcement of papal decrees. All the while, the Jansenist element within the Parlement did not trust the sincerity of the pro-Jesuit, sensationalist, and pro-Bull Sorbonne in their use of clerical censorship. In sum, religious conflict within the Gallican Church over the theological use of Enlightenment thought, over moral theology (MolinismFootnote ⁵⁵ versus Augustinianism), and over the relationship between sacred and secular power left the French Catholic Enlightenment hampered by undeclared religious conflict, and constantly shifting institutional bases. With the politically innovative, pro-Jansenist Catholic Enlightenment squaring off against Jesuits who also (somewhat ironically) had within their ranks the vanguard of Catholic Enlightenment science and epistemology, the French Theological Enlightenment was a house divided. The attendant crossfire undermined the middle ground created by the Jesuit synthesis of Locke and Malebranche—a synthesis that remained quite favorable to Lockean sensationalism and made the Jesuits themselves appear theologically heterodox by the latter years of the 1750s. In order to maintain the upper hand against their accusers (the Cartesian Jansenists vested in the Parlement of Paris), and in order to avoid the loss of their ensconced influence over the court (achieved after the 1729 victory over appellants of the Bull Unigenitus), the Sorbonne, and the episcopacy, the Jesuits and their pro-Unigenitus allies among the bishops went on the offensive against both Jansenists and encyclopédistes, with the latter becoming thereby more outspokenly anti-clerical as they cohered into a kind of parti philosophique by the late 1750s–1760s.

But first, in order for the sociopolitical contingencies of the 1750s afflicting the Gallican Church to be most fully apprehended, a short diversion into the history of the doctrinal and institutional divisions of the French Church during the previous century is needed. In the middle of the seventeenth century, Jansenists in France had combined an Augustinian pessimism about the corruption wrought by original sin on the soul of individual believers with a conciliarist ecclesiology hearkening back to the fifteenth century and disavowed sharply by the papacy after the Council of Trent. Yet, French Jansenism supported the notion that the whole Church, vested in general councils, was entitled to pronounce doctrine along with (and in extraordinary cases, in spite of) papal bulls and proclamations. These notions found fertile ground in France because of the Gallican heritage of French Catholicism initially reconfirmed by Louis XIV in the Gallican Liberties of 1682. By the 1690s, however, the papacy alongside Louis XIV as well had both grown alarmed by the neo-conciliarist, and perhaps even crypto-Calvinist, tendencies of the Jansenist movement in France. Anxious to preserve papal support for his bid to assert himself in Europe as Most Christian King (and perhaps even acquire the mantle of Holy Roman EmperorFootnote ⁵⁶), Louis XIV actively engaged in undermining customary legal courts (such as the Parlement of Paris) and provincial estates capable of limiting his royal prerogatives. As such, when Clement XI reaffirmed earlier pronouncements against Jansenism by condemning (globally versus point-by-point refutation) some 101 propositions from a popular French devotional book by Pasquier Quesnel in the bull Unigenitus (1713), Louis XIV fully supported the papacy. In so doing, Louis and his successors bypassed the Gallican custom of consulting the bishops of France completely, allowing proper debate and registration of the papal proclamation only by the Parlement of Paris. Fearing the growth of papal and royal absolutism over the supposedly ancient and customary constitution of France, the newly assertive Parlement of Paris found an ally in the persecuted French Jansenists whose partisans within the Sorbonne formally (albeit quixotically) appealed Unigenitus to a general council in 1717. After years of haggling over the appeal, the young Louis XV's chief minister, Cardinal Fleury, then orchestrated the wholesale purge of appellants and Pro-Jansenist clerics from the Sorbonne and every choice benefice in the realm. Once accomplished by 1729, the Sorbonne and many French bishops in the period from ca. 1730–1750 were dominated by a faction of French clerics that may be conveniently be referred to as pro-Unigenitus and pro-Jesuit. By 1749, the Pro-Unigenitus partisans were not only dominant at court but had the support of the archbishop of Paris, Christophe de Beaumont. After Fleury's death, this pro-Jesuit element had even resorted to refusing last rights to anyone who had not pledged their conscience and their external obedience to Unigenitus, hitherto proclaimed a law of the state and doctrine of the church essentially by royal fiat. This refusal of sacraments controversy reached a crescendo in the early-to-middle 1750s, while on the other hand, the Jansenists, now ousted from the Sorbonne and marginalized among the episcopacy, resorted increasingly to mustering public opinion in their favor while garnering aid from the Parlement of Paris, which championed their cause in the hopes of limiting what they perceived as encroaching Bourbon absolutism. It must be distinctly understood that Jansenists nursed a grudge against the Sorbonne throughout the 1730s–1740s; they constantly relished every opportunity to reclaim the distinguished faculty from the supposedly illicit control of the Jesuits and pro-Unigenitus factions.Footnote ⁵⁷

Two serious and unforeseen events intervened to alter the balance of power between the pro-Jansenist and pro-Jesuit arms of French Catholicism; these events provided the catalyst for the scuttling of early theological enlightenment among Jesuits, vernacular apologists, and the Sorbonne. The first event was publication of volume 1 of the Encyclopédie by Denis Diderot, the maverick author of Pensées philosophiques (1746) whose growing popularity, fascination with new physiology, and abiding distaste for Old Regime Catholicism had recently drawn the ire of even the most liberally minded Jesuits like Father Berthier, editor of the Journal de Trévoux. As of 1751, the Jesuits were in fact more concerned by the religious implications and personnel of the Encyclopédie than the Sorbonne, and feared the kind of crypto-materialism and occasionally flippant rhetorical anticlericalism of Diderot that they perceived in his editorship. In addition, the Jesuits' own encyclopedic project, the Dictionnaire de Trévoux, stood in jeopardy of being outsold by Diderot's Encyclopédie—one might therefore accuse the Jesuits of a kind of jalousie de métier that had more to do with the eighteenth-century book trade than with strictly theological matters.Footnote ⁵⁸ These many factors colored their judgment, and matters took an unexpected turn when one of the Sorbonne bachelors, the abbé Jean-Martin de Prades, then wrote a controversial thesis in which he was accused by Jansenists and a handful of more Augustinian Sorbonne faculty of plagiarizing Diderot, d'Alembert, and Voltaire for the three-fold purpose of using Lockean arguments to deny the intrinsic divinity of Jesus' miracles, to question the spirituality of the soul, and to deny the validity of revealed religion. The Jesuits, who saw their influence over the Sorbonne threatened by Prades's affiliation with Diderot as a contributor to the forthcoming second volume of the Encyclopédie, thought Prades's doctoral thesis a golden opportunity to stop the Encyclopédie project.Footnote ⁵⁹

On January 26, 1752, the Sorbonne caved to Jesuit pressure and the popular disgust stirred up by Jansenist writings (which possessed Cartesian leanings) and condemned Prades's thesis while also revoking his degrees. Not to be outdone, the Parlement of Paris issued arrêts against the Encyclopédie, and a pris de corps against the abbé de Prades, who had already secured passage into Prussia. At this point, for the sake of clarity, it is important to stress the factionalizing tendencies that increasingly were to afflict the Gallican Church. Strong within the Sorbonne throughout the 1740s and 1750s were many theologians who were clients of either the archbishop of Paris or the king's Jesuit confessor and keeper of the feuille des benefices, Bishop Mirepoix. These Jesuit or Jesuit clients among the episcopacy who owed their careers to Beaumont and Mirepoix supported sacral jurisdiction over the administration of the sacraments and the unquestioned enforcement of the anti-Jansenist bull Unigenitus. Not all of these Jesuits and secular clergy were dévots, however. As argued above, many of them affiliated with the Sorbonne and the Journal de Trévoux were favorable toward the Jesuit synthesis and, therefore, reservedly favorable to Locke, Newton, and much of what scholars now consider emblematic of Enlightenment science. Yet what united them was their shared concern with the Parlement of Paris.Footnote ⁶⁰ Supported by its own Jansenist element, on the other hand, the Parlement's jurists now argued (with enhanced popularity in Paris itself) for greater oversight of the Sorbonne, censorship, and sacrament administration. Yet, the feud that was initially between Diderot as editor of the Encyclopédie and the Jesuits of the Journal de Trévoux became increasingly the cause of the Jansenists in Parlement by the mid-1750s as well, for the more liberal Jesuits and their partisans within the Sorbonne were influenced by the Jesuit synthesis and Molinism; they were accused by Jansenists of being partisans of “unbelief” alongside Diderot, Prades, and the Encyclopédie.

Thus, in order to protect themselves, Jesuits, the archbishop, Mirepoix, and the Sorbonne closed ranks in a campaign against the Encyclopédie on the one hand, and opponents of Unigenitus on the other, in the process alienating more liberally minded Jesuits and theological writers. For the sake of convenience, therefore, this article refers to this new, ideologically charged sociopolitical constellation as the pro-Bull dévots to distinguish them from anti-Bull or pro-Jansenist partisans on the other. Though a comprehensive study of the dévot movement in eighteenth-century France remains to be written, it may well be that a coherent ideology of the Counter-Enlightenment—the identity of the parti dévot, itself—arose among both pro-Jansenist and pro-Jesuit interests during the 1750s. A common convergence between the two varieties of dévot sentiment seems to have arisen from 1755–1765 as the earlier theological divide over Unigenitus receded in the aftermath of the Helvétius and Encyclopédie condemnations on the one hand, and the expulsion of the Jesuits, on the other.Footnote ⁶¹

IV. Pro-Bull Forces Outspend their “Political Capital” and the Sorbonne Declines, 1752–1757

The Sorbonne reemerged from the condemnation of the abbé de Prades bitterly divided but with an ephemeral confidence on borrowed time. By condemning Prades, it narrowly managed to censure a thesis that was widely demonized by the more Cartesian Jansenists as a conspiracy of encyclopédistes bent on undermining Christianity in France. By the swift mobilization of their clients within the Sorbonne, both Archbishop Christophe de Beaumont and Mirepoix had rescued the Pro-Bull factions within the faculty from disgrace, and the Sorbonne, for its part, had yet to be further compromised by any further loss of its privileges to the Parlement of Paris.Footnote ⁶² The price for the Sorbonne, however, was that the Jesuit campaign against the Encyclopédie had become its own. The faculty as a whole would now have to appear more proactive in its pursuit of suspect writers in order to ward off the similar efforts of the Parlement of Paris, often steered by zealous Jansenist clergy anxious to discredit Mirepoix, Beaumont, and the Sorbonne for not taking the threat of radical writers seriously.

Thus, on February 12, 1752, the same day the Parlement of Paris issued its pris de corps for Prades, the Sorbonne made a public reaffirmation of its orthodoxy in the form of a commencement discourse pronounced by the abbé Loménie de Brienne before the Sorbonne. This discourse was customarily given by a theological student who was particularly favored by the Faculty, and it generally featured a declamation against specific contemporary abuses and mores. Before an audience that included prominent dignitaries and, on this occasion, the archbishop of Paris, Brienne showed Paris that, instead of the Jansenists and the Parlement, it was instead the pro-Jesuit, pro-Unigenitus dévots closest to Mirepoix and the archbishop, acting through the Sorbonne, who stood ready to combat illicit assaults on religion from suspect writers. This choice of Brienne was all the more significant because his thesis had also been flagged by Jansenist critics for containing a materialist epistemology. In short, Brienne had a personal, and the Sorbonne a collective, incentive to exonerate each other.Footnote ⁶³ Brienne concluded with an “appeal to the papal nuncio who was present, to the bishops, and to the doctors of the Sorbonne, that they channel all of their powers toward the maintenance of the Christian religion in all its purity, at a time when its very foundations were under assault from impious and detestable principles found to be so widespread in the public.”Footnote ⁶⁴ These theatrics at the Sorbonne, however, were quickly upstaged by a Jansenist counter-reaction in the form of the originally anonymous brochure penned by a Jansenist close to the Parlement of Paris named Claude Mey. Mey's Observations sur la thèse soutenue par M. l'abbé de Brienne, discussed above, was a shrill attack on Brienne and the Sorbonne for adapting the “system of Locke” for apologetical and theological use.Footnote ⁶⁵

Brienne's address notwithstanding, Mey's pamphlet shows that the initiative in the fight against anti-religious philosophy was evading the Sorbonne. Initiative fell to the pro-Jansenist Parlement of Paris on the one hand, and to the pro-Unigenitus bishops on the other, as part of the wider conflict over secular versus clerical jurisdiction of the sacraments. The bishops rallied behind Beaumont's call for spiritual jurisdiction over the sacraments and pleaded with the king to defend them against the unruly Parlement, which sought, in its turn, to oppose clerical enforcement of the bull by denying last rites to those without billets de confessions that might certify their internal and external obedience to Unigenitus.Footnote ⁶⁶ Because the Parlement feared the archbishop of Paris' position of strength among the bishops and in the Sorbonne after the Prades condemnation, it redoubled its efforts to control the Sorbonne's powers of censorship in the years after 1752. The moment for the Parlement of Paris came on October 25, 1752, when it condemned a theology thesis written by a Carmelite Seminarian of Lyons for having questioned the orthodoxy of the Gallican Propositions of 1682. When the Carmelites of Lyons issued a retraction, the Parlement of Paris insisted (January 26, 1753) that the retraction and the arrêt be incorporated into the faculty registers of all universities in the realm. When the Sorbonne refused compliance by insisting that the Parlement had no right to interfere in the condemnation of theology theses, a representative of the procureur général marched into the Maison de la Sorbonne on March 15, 1753, to force the faculty to register the arrêts.Footnote ⁶⁷ After much delay and prevarication, the Sorbonne finally capitulated, signaling yet another victory of the Parlement's secular jurisdiction over the Sorbonne's traditional privileges of doctrinal oversight.Footnote ⁶⁸ By the mid-1750s, as Thomas O'Connor writes, “Practically every thesis was being subjected to the scrutiny of the Parlement and its theological advisors,” and the three additional faculty censor positions established in the aftermath of the Prades condemnation tended to side with more Augustinian or even crypto-Jansenist theses.Footnote ⁶⁹

This erosion of the Sorbonne's sacral jurisdiction after 1752 took place within the wider context of the escalating power of pro-Unigenitus dévots and bishops backed by Jesuits. The ability of bishops and Jesuits to censor philosophical books and enforce Unigenitus in defiance of the royal privileges vested in the Parlement of Paris had alarmed Jansenists and encyclopédistes alike; for these two considerably different forces of opposition, the hardline, pro-Unigenitus element seemed “to harass kings and endanger magistrates” in an alarmingly high-handed fashion.Footnote ⁷⁰ That pro-Unigenitus faction, however, also held within its ranks the majority of theologians and bishops most favorable to the new physiology and Lockean epistemology in the form of the Jesuit synthesis. The refusal of the sacraments controversies, the sparring between the Sorbonne and the Parlement over thesis censorship, and subsequent conflicts over episcopal immunities from 1749–1758 provided pro-Unigenitus factions close to Mirepoix, Beaumont, and the Jesuits with the opportunity to consolidate their influence at court and over the Sorbonne. Since February 1752, these same forces felt sufficiently secure at the court of Louis XV to railroad more sweeping practices of sacrament refusal through the kingdom in defiance of the Parlement.Footnote ⁷¹ Because the Sorbonne was still a bastion of support for pro-Unigenitus factions throughout 1752–1753, it became imperative for the Parlement to undermine its privileges further, thus challenging the sphere of influence over the Sorbonne that the court and the pro-Unigenitus episcopacy had so recently fortified. In the attendent crossfire, the Sorbonne's attempt to reclaim the initiative in the attack on incrédulité by further reliance on Beaumont and the Jesuits collapsed in early 1753. By May 1755, the Parlement demanded that a series of decrees be placed in the faculty registers; these decrees were tantamount to a de facto capitulation of the Sorbonne's right to censor its own theses. Despite faculty protest, the Sorbonne was finally compelled to enter the decrees into the registers from the floor of the Parlement itself.Footnote ⁷² With this humiliation, the Sorbonne closed down completely for a time, and when it reopened by the express order of the Parlement of Paris it remained unsuccessful in reacquiring its privileged right to censure university theses. The faculty's privileged sacral jurisdiction had become just another spoil of the undeclared religious war over Unigenitus. Footnote ⁷³

Throughout this time of troubles from 1755–1757, when the Sorbonne was partially on strike and seldom able to conduct business normally, its jurisdictional rights were defended only by the bishops at successive General Assemblies in 1755 and 1757, but their support was largely self-interested.Footnote ⁷⁴ The archbishop of Paris, for his part, desired maximum possible oversight over the condemnation of suspect writing, and he continued his practice of favoring his own clients for important posts within the Sorbonne. In general, bishops also succeeded in undermining the Sorbonne through their continued support for diocesan and Parisian seminaries, often championed in alliance with the Jesuits and Sulpicians. The pedagogical importance of the Sorbonne was, thus, greatly undermined by the growth and relative curricular strength of Lazarist, Sulpician, and Jesuit seminaries that benefited greatly from these close relationships to the high clergy. The bishops were therefore increasingly able to control the content of theological education and their concern over safeguarding the clergy against esprits-forts grew precipitously during the 1750s.Footnote ⁷⁵ The results of greater cooperation between the dévots among both Jesuits and bishops in controlling Old Regime education were not positive.Footnote ⁷⁶ The abbé Baston, who took his philosophy with the Jesuits, wrote in his memoirs of the declining quality of Jesuit instruction by the mid-1750s.Footnote ⁷⁷ Theological instruction in France, increasingly dominated by the prelacy's enhanced control of seminaries after 1755, was also becoming increasingly remote from the otherwise gradual adaptation of Enlightenment thought into French university education during the 1750s–1760s.Footnote ⁷⁸

The situation took a turn for the worse as the outbreak of the Seven Years' War in 1754 made the king's financial situation more dangerously strained. With the Parlement of Paris effectively on strike from 1753–1754 and continually recalcitrant throughout 1755–1756, Louis XV had little choice but to secure badly needed revenue by accepting a free gift from the General Assembly of the Clergy convened in 1755. In exchange for the timely generosity of the episcopacy, the clergy were granted full exemption from the vingtième (income tax) and a final settlement of the sacrament controversy.Footnote ⁷⁹ The General Assembly of the Clergy not only rallied behind Beaumont, therefore, but it championed the Sorbonne's right to censor philosophic works against the similar rights claimed by the Parlement of Paris. Because the 1755 General Assembly effectively bailed out the king's finances while Parlement was on strike, clerical immunities were secured, the Sorbonne returned from its own strike in 1756, and it looked as though doctrine and censorship would continue to follow a drumbeat set by the pro-Bull bishops instead of the Parlement of Paris.Footnote ⁸⁰ Having secured papal authorization for his policy and a free gift from the 1755 General Assembly of the Clergy, and with the Jesuits and pro-Unigenitus dévot bishops on his side, Louis XV secured his badly needed wartime revenue from Parlement by a lit de justice held on August 21, 1756. By the end of the year, most of the Parlement of Paris had resigned, and it seemed as though the battle over secular interference with the bishops' administration of the sacraments and enforcement of Unigenitus had been lost by the Parlement.Footnote ⁸¹

But victory was snatched away from the Pro-Bull element by an unexpected attempt on the life of the king by Pierre Damiens.Footnote ⁸² As Dale Van Kley has argued, despite a lack of substantive connection between the assassination attempt and the Jesuits, the Damiens Affair radically realigned the religious politics of France. The Jansenists and Parlement again gained the upper hand in the fight against incrédulité after effectively blaming the assassination attempt, first, on the pernicious influence of the philosophy of the Encyclopédie (which was newly attacked in connection with the condemnation of Claude Adrien Helvétius's De l'Esprit the following year), and second, on the Jesuits because of the relative liberality toward the philosophes characteristic of earlier Jesuit apologists such as Berruyer, or even the current editor in chief of the Journal de Trévoux, Guillaume-François Berthier.Footnote ⁸³ The earlier association of the Jesuits with the regicidal politics of the Catholic League made the political thought of the Jesuits especially vulnerable to attack. Now after 1757, the undue influence of Jesuits over court, collège, and seminary—an escalating trend throughout the 1750s—was effectively attacked by both Parlement and philosophes as treachery. Moreover, earlier Jesuit engagement with the philosophy of John Locke was now tainted by the association of the Encyclopédie with Lockean sensationalism. The Jesuit attack on the Encyclopédie was thus more effectively portrayed by Jansenists as hypocritical treachery of another kind: clandestine collusion with the new philosophy in a manner that paralleled their supposed collusion with the king's would-be assassin.Footnote ⁸⁴ As such, the campaign against the Jesuits had become suddenly more credible in the aftermath of the Damiens Affair, and it gained additional support from many increasingly angry young writers incensed by half a decade's worth of severe persecution. The balance of cultural power had shifted decisively toward the Jansenists, the Parlement of Paris, and the philosophes, who all collaborated in the expulsion of the Jesuits from France in 1762–1764.

Dale Van Kley has argued that elimination of the Jesuits in 1762–1764 was a pyrrhic victory for the Jansenists, whose Augustinian theology was “more remote and unintelligible to the philosophes.” In effect, Van Kley suggests that the association of religion with superstition monotonously reasserted by the philosophes became more credible in France without the Jesuits around.Footnote ⁸⁵ In contrast to Van Kley, however, it is perhaps just as precise to argue that the discrediting of the Jesuits began with their rather monomaniacal campaign against the Encyclopédie. The intellectual position of the Jesuits in France was thereafter untenable. With their left hand, the Jesuits continued to act with reserved indulgence toward the Enlightenment in their Journal de Trévoux throughout the 1750s.Footnote ⁸⁶ But with their right hand, they supported the pro-Bull dévots in leading the charge against the Encyclopédie throughout the 1750s, while quite ruthlessly supporting pro-Bull bishops in their bid for control over the Sorbonne, over the censorship of suspect books, and over high-handed policies of sacrament refusal emanating from Beaumont and Mirepoix. In short, the Jesuits had simply outspent their political capital and rather suddenly in 1757 found themselves well on their way toward losing the support of public opinion to the Jansenists on the one hand, and a more self-conscious, increasingly anticlerical Enlightenment on the other. A group of writers and philosophers with a now well-defined esprit des corps clustered around the Encyclopédie and faced off against a church now more decisively aligned with the Jansenists who had been objecting to the association between sound doctrine and Lockean discourses of Enlightenment since at least the 1730s.Footnote ⁸⁷

Despite their aversion to Lockean discourses, the Jansenists had gained credibility throughout the period from 1757–1764 for their defense of the traditional constitution of France against royal and ultramontane autocracy.Footnote ⁸⁸ But as fiscal and political reform became dominant public concerns after 1763, the philosophes were ultimately far better able to appeal to moderate voices in Parlement and at court. Associating themselves with those victimized by religious factionalism and the plight of the persecuted in general, the philosophes fashioned themselves into a kind of “fourth estate,” standing above and astride confessional politics, and desiring nothing but public utility and improvement. Because of pyrrhic victories won, first, by pro-Bull forces from 1752–1757, then by Jansenists from 1757–1764, the Gallican authorities lost the theological and political debate to a more self-conscious, radical enlightenment movement that had, in turn, crept closer to the mainstream of the republic of letters in France.Footnote ⁸⁹ The creation of philosophe and Counter-Enlightenment Catholic identities in France can thus be said to date to the 1750s; to the formation of these identities we now turn.

V. The Philosophe Identity, 1751–1759

The condemnation of Claude Adrien Helvétius in 1758 for his work De l'Esprit was the culmination of the campaign of censorship begun in 1751–1752, and it would prove decisive in the self-fashioning of philosophe identity. The campaign began in 1751–1752 by pitting the Jesuits and the forces of the pro-Bull bishops against the Jansenists who remained strong within the Parlement of Paris. After 1756, as argued above, the Sorbonne's ability to act independently of either the Parlement or the General Assembly of the Clergy was badly strained, and those closest to Diderot and the Encyclopédie were further impelled to harden their vitriol against the Church for what they considered to be a politically motivated inquisition having more to do with internecine rivalry within the church than with any particular danger from new philosophies of Enlightenment. The years 1756–1759 can therefore be viewed as yet another turning point when the repressive tendencies unleashed after the first assaults on the Encyclopédie in 1752 peaked, and the initiative passed away from the Jesuits, the Sorbonne, and the pro-Bull contingent of dévots, and into the hands of the Jansenists on the one hand, and the philosophes on the other. The attempted assassination of Louis XV was the first of two causes célèbres from 1756–1759; the second was the storm over Helvétius.

Helvétius was a fermier général closely connected at court, and for this reason, perhaps, his work seemed all the more alarming.Footnote ⁹⁰ Helvétius's De l'Esprit posed the question of whether the attributes of mind (thought, passion, volition) are “modifications of a spiritual or material substance.” In response to this query, Helvétius assumed the view of many physiologists and of Voltaire, himself, that “mind [esprit] accords equally well with either hypothesis”—that “physical sensibility and memory … alone produce all our ideas.”Footnote ⁹¹ The essence of mind was a matter of faith for Helvétius, not of reason or empirical examination. Thus, Helvétius took a position decidedly in line with what Israel and Jacobs have referred to as the Radical Enlightenment, but in implicit opposition to the tradition of Enlightenment hitherto acceptable to Jesuits, theologians, and apologists. Helvétius's celebration of the passions as directly linked to physical sensibility and more foundational to human behavior than Lockean ideation was equally alarming. What for Locke had been first ideas had become, in De l'Esprit, instinctive or affective drives.Footnote ⁹²

Helvétius's most alarming departure was his open articulation of the principle that the sovereign judge of any philosophical viewpoint, of true religion, or of justice, was nothing but social utility.Footnote ⁹³ Helvétius argued that “the whole of the lawmaker's art consists in forcing men via their sentiment of amour-propre to be forever more just to one another,” thus, social morality needs no organized religion.Footnote ⁹⁴ By stressing personal interest as the basis of sound morality, and social utility as the “principle of all human virtues and the foundation of all laws,” Helvétius rendered not only the church socially irrelevant, but leveled a charge against it that could not be soundly refuted once utility was accepted as the measure of all things.Footnote ⁹⁵ The focus on social utility as the quintessential criterion of truth immediately gave the philosophes the upper hand, for any religion that created division, social strife, or endemic warfare was, therefore, out of the running as true religion. In a France still reeling from the religious and political divisions over Unigenitus, Helvétius seemed very credible to some, and very dangerous to others. Deny Helvétius his focus on utility, and the church would look hypocritical; concede Helvétius's point—that social utility is the measure of all truth—and Christian apologetics would collapse. The only immediate response to Helvétius was to condemn him, and as in 1752 with the first attempt to censor the Encyclopédie, all factions within the Gallican Church felt they had a stake in appearing to be first in war and last in peace.

As such, the condemnation of Helvétius displays the same headlong race toward condemnation on the part of the Old Regime religious authorities that characterized the Encyclopédie.Footnote ⁹⁶ An Arrêt du Conseil du Roi (10 August 1758) ordered De l'Esprit suppressed; thereafter, just days after the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques had attacked Helvétius for the first time, Beaumont issued his own archiepiscopal condemnation against Helvétius calling for suppression, not only of De l'Esprit, but of as many irreligious writings as possible.Footnote ⁹⁷ Not to be outdone, the Jansenists now took to attacking Beaumont's own pastoral instruction, as two articles in the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques (1 January and 13 February 1759), at least partially written by the famous avocat of the Parlement of Paris, Adrien LePaige.Footnote ⁹⁸ These articles in the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques have been studied by J. M. Rogister, and his conclusions are instructive. Le Paige's “only reference to Helvétius's work on the subject of royal authority,” Rogister notes, “consists of an expression of surprise that Beaumont could find it in his conscience to exaggerate lapses in De l'esprit when at the same time he tolerated the regicidal notions … of Jesuits like Busenbaum, Lacroix, and Zaccheria.”Footnote ⁹⁹ The articles in the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques appear to have little to do with Helvétius at all, and almost everything to do with tying Beaumont's own condemnation of Helvétius to the perceived hypocrisy of the Jesuits now erroneously suspected of abetting Damiens's attempted regicide. The condemnation of Helvétius, therefore, became a sort of free-for-all, where the archbishop, the Jansenists, and the Parlement all rushed headlong into the fray in order to trump the opposing faction's zeal against incrédulité. As Van Kley has adroitly argued already, the Helvétius condemnation was used to great effect by the Jansenists in order to refocus attention on the treachery of the Jesuits for their toleration of radical or even regicidal ideas that contributed to the attempt on the king's life in 1757.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

For its part, the sweeping 22 January 1758 arrêt of the Parlement of Paris was drawn up by a commission that, as Malesherbes later wrote, was packed with avocats known for their political devotion to the parti janséniste.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The arrêt accurately saw affinities between the utilitarian morality and glorification of the passions in De l'Esprit, and similar statements by Diderot in Pensées philosophiques and Promenade du sceptique. Thus, despite Diderot's own attack on Helvétius, the Parlement argued that De l'Esprit was merely the inevitable consequence of the materialism of the Encyclopédie taken to extremes.Footnote ¹⁰² However, the last to act against Helvétius was the Sorbonne. Brought to heel by the Parlement of Paris from 1755–1757, the Sorbonne extended the earlier Parlement arrêt by including a vast assortment of books upheld as “poisoned sources” from which Helvétius and the Encyclopédie had drawn their inspiration. Even a cursory glance at the list of suspect books that the Sorbonne earmarked for suppression, in a bilingual censure running to 79 pages, reveals that much of what used to be alternatively glorified and demonized as the so-called canon of Enlightenment appears to have been set down by the enemies of Helvétius and the Encyclopédie as early as 1759. The document is so thorough that one might well use it even today as the basis for any standard undergraduate syllabus in a course on the Enlightenment! Divided topically according to propositions condemned in Helvétius, the censure lists the books, authors, page numbers, and select articles of the Encyclopédie earmarked for their damnable statements.Footnote ¹⁰³ The 1759 censure similarly manifests the extent to which hitherto tolerated works were tainted as heterodox by 1759.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Eight years after the Jansenists had polemically opened fire on the Sorbonne for its complicity in passing the Prades thesis, the parti janséniste finally got what it wanted from the Sorbonne: a sweeping censure of the Enlightenment that included even portions of Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding once used openly by some Jesuits and apologists of the first third of the eighteenth century as part of the earlier synthesis of sensationalism and occasionalism. No one author is treated systematically in the Sorbonne censure. Instead, in the preamble, all suspect works subsequently listed are condemned in globo for supposedly sharing a common credo of Lockean epistemology now vilified as tending toward heresy.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ So outlandish did this crackdown on the “doctrine” associated with the Encyclopédie seem to many writers that the abbé Coyer would satirize Berthier, the Jesuit editor in chief of the Journal de Trévoux, by calling him the “Generalissimo of the Anti-Materialist Army” who would do well to forbid children to watch marionettes because puppet shows might lead to dangerous speculation on the materiality of the soul.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Some even blamed the Encyclopédie for the military disasters afflicting France during the darkest days of the Seven Years' War, and the philosophes replied in kind by reminding France that Britain was generally more enlightened, far more tolerant of religious dissent and, not incidentally, winning the war.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Such persecution merely affirmed Diderot's crusading zeal to keep the Encyclopédie afloat, despite the very opposition he had come to expect from religious authorities.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The in globo attack on so many works by disparate authors who were often far from the opinions of Helvétius or Diderot was an exaggerated maneuver that did more harm than good. Turgot's letter to the former Jesuit abbé Millot in 1762 proved tragically accurate; in his praise for Millot's moderation, Turgot complains that “theologians have, by their intolerance, reached a point where they can no longer defend themselves and discover the attacks of their adversaries without drawing unto themselves the revulsion of all honorable men.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In effect, the harshness of the church's reaction to many Enlightenment writers in the middle to late 1750s appears to have alienated many moderate Enlightenment clergy besides Turgot and Millot. The abbé de Condillac, for example, had had his earliest works approved (if not in fact taught) at the Sorbonne. In the 1746 edition of his Essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines, he carefully notes that “when I will say that we have no ideas which do not come to us from the senses, it must be distinctly understood that I am only speaking of the current state of things after original sin.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ Yet, after 1755 with the publication of Traité des sensations, Condillac was making his peace with a more materialist causality of human perception.Footnote ¹¹¹

Despite the immoderate reaction of the Church, however, the affinities between Helvétius and Diderot were quite real by 1758. Ironically, this affinity—the fruits of Diderot's own increased radicalization and sharpened focus on utilité as the criterion of truth—grew up during the harshest days of persecution over his leadership of the Encyclopédie after 1752. Shortly after 1753, Diderot penned a pathetic but assertive plea to his elder brother (a canon of the church), later printed in 1760 and, according to Jacques-André Naigeon, partially published as the article “Intolerance” in the Encyclopédie. This letter from one estranged brother to another was tied directly to his feeling of being hunted by the Christian church in France, and it is among Diderot's most assertive statements of a moral philosophy akin to Helvétius at exactly the same time he wrote the biting anticlerical satire Promenade du sceptique, which makes many of these same points.Footnote ¹¹² Diderot roundly declares that “any means which releases people from the bonds of nature, distances fathers from sons, brother from brother, and sister from sister is impious.” Then, quoting Paul's epistles to the Thessalonians back to his brother, Diderot adds, “‘Do not treat as an enemy one who disagrees with you, but admonish him in the spirit of brotherhood’ … If your opinions authorize you to hate me, why do my opinions not also authorize me to hate you? … Behold the results of your principles, and tremble! … Be assured that everything you have given yourself permission to do is an abomination in the eyes of God and of all mankind.”Footnote ¹¹³ The persecution Diderot sustained accelerated a considerable change in his philosophical views that was already under way in 1746. By 1754, in an article on the crusades, Diderot obliquely identified his enterprise with the victims of religious persecution, and by 1760 he had come to argue that “the contradiction was not between the foundations of moral philosophy found in the gospels and the acts of those who put them into practice,” but rather, the contradiction “is at the heart of Christian morality, itself.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ In Diderot's judgment, the Church had proven itself incapable of living by gospel morality and, as such, could not possibly be a valid revelation. At the heart of Diderot's moral utilitarian judgment of Christianity was the conviction he shared with Claude Adrien Helvétius that passions and sentiments were the true basis of society and morality, not simply Lockean first ideas. For, if the moral life were, as Diderot held, the highest incarnation of the physiological instinct of self-preservation and the urge for happiness, then Christianity could not possibly be any more true than it is useful because it denies that passions are the single, most necessary source of reason, judgment, and society.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Because Malesherbes had helped ensure the survival of the Encyclopédie by securing the protection of Mme. de Pompadour through the young abbé de Bernis and the duc de Choiseul, Diderot was able to widely disseminate his convictions, and he persuaded many to submit contributions simply by framing his work as an epic struggle of enlightenment and social improvement against a superstitious priesthood.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Despite constant complaints from the aging bishop of Mirepoix, under Malesherbes's protection the number of subscriptions swelled to three thousand; even Voltaire was convinced to come on board in volume 5 (although it must be noted that Voltaire later distanced himself from the project when writing his Dictionnaire philosophique).Footnote ¹¹⁷ Many contributors, in fact, wrote articles without any prospect of financial reward, perhaps simply because Diderot's editorial mission seemed credible to a generation of vastly different writers who found themselves indiscriminately condemned in globo as a monolithic “doctrine” of irreligion.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Diderot summarizes his strategy to Voltaire in early 1758, writing, “What are we to do then? Only that which is fitting for courageous men: to despise our enemies, to pursue them and profit, as we have already done, from the imbecility of our censors. Should we dare forget what we owe to ourselves and to the public?”Footnote ¹¹⁹ Four years later (in a style reminiscent of a Pauline epistle with a dash of Urban II at Clermont), Diderot again wrote to Voltaire, “Our motto is no quarter to the superstitious, the fanatics, the ignorant, or the fools, neither for the vicious and tyrannical … What pleases me is to see my brethren almost entirely united, not so much by the hatred and despise of that which you have called infamy, but by the love of truth.”Footnote ¹²⁰

Voltaire, for his part, dramatized the condemnation of the Encyclopédie as the heroic struggle of philosophical reason against dogmatic religious authorities in his adaptation of the originally English play, Socrate, which debuted in 1759. Rather tellingly, Anitus (who represents the Jansenist partisan and procurator general of the Parlement of Paris, Joly de Fleury) schemes the demise of Socrates for reasons of personal jealousy rather than from any deeply held principle.Footnote ¹²¹ The advice Anitus gives to his fellow conspirator, Acros, is humorously revealing of the perception many writers had of Catholic authorities in France after the second condemnation of the Encyclopédie and the condemnation of Helvétius by the Sorbonne:

Voltaire's temporary affection for the Encyclopédie extended further, as he unsuccessfully tried to convince Diderot to relocate the Encyclopédie to Clèves. He implored Diderot, Helvétius, and other “brethren” to join him in an apocalyptic literary campaign to end priest craft and persecution forever.Footnote ¹²³ Along similar lines, Voltaire's article on the definition of “Philosophe” in the 1765 edition of the Encyclopédie was adapted directly from an earlier clandestine piece by Du Marsais from the 1740s, and it praises the philosophe as holding an ancient role akin to that of an apostle; philosophers, he writes, bring “love of wisdom” into a world darkened by the presence of theologians and priests who anciently and illegitimately arrogated to themselves the name of philosophers. Only by avoiding slavish devotion to ancient systems of philosophy could the new philosopher reclaim his historic role of enlightening the public.Footnote ¹²⁴ Yet, by 1764 when Voltaire issued the first edition of his own encyclopedia, the Dictionnaire philosophique, he is far more assertive. In an article on “Les bornes de l'esprit humain,” Voltaire triumphantly proclaims the inscrutability (if not outright materiality) of the soul while issuing a veiled assault on the intellectual arrogance of university philosophers and theologians:

In Voltaire's entry on Ame or “soul,” he is even more stalwart in the certain verdict of his skepticism. “We cry to you along with the respectable Gassendi and Locke that you know nothing of the Creator by your own efforts. Are you therefore so many gods who know everything?”Footnote ¹²⁶ Then donning a kind of mock fideism in order to reduce the clerical arguments ad absurdum, Voltaire continues, arguing that “we can understand neither the nature nor destiny of the soul except by revelation. What! This revelation is not sufficient for you? It appears necessary for you to be enemies of this revelation to which we appeal, for you persecute those who rest completely in it and believe only in it.”Footnote ¹²⁷ Voltaire concludes that philosophy, itself, “laughs in peace” at the “vain efforts” of the clergy.Footnote ¹²⁸

The efforts of the clergy were “vain,” as William Everdell astutely argued, because of the “triumph of utility” after 1758. Even among writers of Christian apologetics, both clerical and lay, the principle of utility—that the moral value (or indeed, authenticity) of Christianity was dependent on how useful it was to individual human nature and civil society—became dominant. But, as Everdell's highly comprehensive study of Christian apologetics from the late 1730s to the dawn of the nineteenth century argues, the grounds of utility was a dead end.Footnote ¹²⁹ In the eighteenth century, arguments favoring both the salutary and derogatory effects of Christianity through history abounded and, empirically, both arguments had much to recommend them.Footnote ¹³⁰ Everdell's study provides an elegant taxonomy of major apologetical endeavors throughout the Enlightenment era; nevertheless, Everdell neglects to consider the contingent catalysts that drove former theological enlightenment writers away from more epistemologically sophisticated apologies for Catholicism reminiscent of the Jesuit synthesis.Footnote ¹³¹ As I have argued above and elsewhere, with so many earlier concessions to Lockean sensationalism (and even Locke's Essay, itself) lumped together as heterodox alongside Helvétius, the only orthodox grounds remaining to Jesuits, Jansenists, bishops, and lay apologists alike were the rather one-sided and ambivalent defenses of the faith based on its moral utility.Footnote ¹³²