Philosophie and Its Malcontents:

Relations between Upper and Lower Class Enlightenment Literature

Daniel J. Castellano

Diefendorf HI833

May 5, 2003

                Gracchus Babeuf, the fiery polemicist who hoped to abolish private property as thoroughly as the Revolution had eradicated feudal privilege, found himself hauled before the high court of Vendome on the charge of conspiracy in 1797. Engaging the futile task of his defense with defiance and bravado, Babeuf dared to invoke the most admired figures of the Enlightenment as his accomplices and mentors.

In condemning me, gentlemen of the jury, for the ideas which I openly espoused and advocated, you place these great thinkers, my masters and guides, in the dock. My ideas are the same as theirs; it was in their pages that I studied the principles of “plunder” which the prosecution has branded as subversive. And you should also convict the Bourbons for their weak-kneed failure to prosecute subversion as relentlessly as the first Republic, and for their failure to put a stop to the insidious writings of Mably, Helvetius, Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the rest.[1]

With these stirring words, Babeuf seemed to confirm some of the darkest anti-philosophe suspicions about the radical aims of the Enlightenment.  As skillfully as any royal apologist, he was able to scour philosophic writings for proof-texts of the direct link between philosophie and radical revolution.  For both the Right and the extreme Left, accentuating this putative bond served a powerful rhetorical purpose at the expense of accuracy.  Babeuf’s selection of philosophes is limited to those who were more socially egalitarian and hostile to private property, hence Voltaire and d’Alembert are omitted.  His citation of Diderot comes from a socialist treatise, Code de la nature, which was falsely ascribed to him.[2]  While caveats such as these expose the fallacy of simple causation between philosophie and Babouvism, it seems rash to deny any link between the philosophes and the many radicals who regarded themselves as their true heirs.  Exploration of the internal dynamics of Old Regime literary culture has been hampered by a scarcity of evidence; nonetheless, significant progress in recent decades has enabled us to discern the rough outlines of the complicated relationships between philosophes and libellistes, academics and revolutionaries.  Following the work of Robert Darnton, coupled with a study of “high” philosophie in its social context, I will show that there is ample evidence of social and intellectual connections between aristocratic philosophes and the pauvres diables disdained by Voltaire.  This complex literary community, for all its iconoclasm and clandestine activity, often operated in modes that were  familiar to Old Regime culture.  Professional and social networking were tolerated by the “weak-kneed” Bourbons and their somewhat sturdier police force.  Although the “low-life” of the Enlightenment might be fairly credited with the origins of radical Jacobinism and sans-culotte militance, radicalization occurred only when the bonds between philosophe and libelliste deteriorated, as all forms of patronage and privilege came to be despised as intolerable burdens.

            Chronology and logic require us to begin by discussing high philosophie, as the works of unmoneyed hacks were mostly derivative of ideas formulated in salons.  The highbrow Enlightenment is well mapped, owing to the public prominence of its members and the survival of most of their works.  Peter Gay has identified it as an intellectual movement united not by a single doctrine, but by an “organized habit of criticism”.[3]  Critical thinking, of course, was no eighteenth-century novelty; in fact, seventeenth-century Christian thought had been extraordinarily rationalistic, and the real work of abolishing medieval metaphysics was mostly accomplished by Locke and Descartes.  Enlightenment thought was distinguished by Diderot’s insistence that  “All [facts] are equally subject to criticism,”[4] a position which would not be circumscribed by any set of philosophical or religious dogmas, these being scorned as “systêmes” and “superstitions”.  This thoroughly critical and relativistic worldview favored an eclectic philosophical method and a policy of ideological tolerance.[5] 

Gay has explored in detail how the philosophes selectively extracted from classical literature the tools they needed to create an alternative to the dominant Christian cosmology.   This eclecticism yielded some strange results, such as the philosophes’ high estimation of Cicero, who was also admired among Christian thinkers.  Cicero’s natural pagan morality was presented as a viable worldview in its own right, rather than an imperfect precursor of Christian doctrine.  He could be invoked to the philosophic cause through his exposition of good government in De officiis and his severe criticism of Roman priestcraft in De natura deorum, while his Whole Duty of Man, which includes religious obligations, was politely ignored.  Philosophic usage of Epicureans and Stoics is similarly selective, from which it is clear that the philosophes were not disciples of the ancient pagans, but merely summoned them as witnesses much as they would be subpoenaed by Babeuf decades later.

The philosophes were intellectually united by more than the practice of criticism and philosophical eclecticism.  Anti-Christianity, naturalistic philosophy, and an enlightened theory of history combined to reinforce the culture of criticism these men of letters sought to establish.  The virulent hatred of Christianity which permeates Enlightenment literature seems excessive, especially at a time when rationalist Christian thought was least “fanatical” and clerical misbehavior was slight in comparison with the scandals of previous ages.  Gay has argued this overreaction was necessary in order for the philosophes to extricate themselves from the dominant paradigm and establish an alternative.  Whatever its rationale, the fact of philosophic hostility to revealed religion was manifested in a theory of history that depicted the Christian era as a dark age of superstition between rational antiquity and a dawning siècle des lumières.  Another widely held paradigm was naturalism, the belief that the laws of nature are all-explanatory and immutable.  Diderot expressed this conviction when he affirmed, “All Paris could assure me that a dead man had been resurrected at Passy, and I would not believe a word of it.”[6]  Hume also denied that the laws of physics would admit of any exception.  This secular faith in the explanatory power of the natural sciences was a doorway to the sort of systêmes the philosophes had avoided in metaphysical matters.  As shown by treatises such as Holbach’s Systême de la nature and Condillac’s Traité des systêmes, Enlightenment thinkers sought to align human behavior and thought with “natural”, or scientific, principles.[7]

Philosophic focus on the natural world and empirical facts favored an emphasis on practical matters and the vita activa.  The centralizing tendencies of the Bourbon government stifled political activism, but men of letters could still practice Enlightenment principles in social circles.  Voltaire’s poetic elegance and wit are characteristic of a time when the art of conversation flourished in both spoken and written forms.  Style and cadence were as indispensable as substance, and even the bleakest atheistic worldview could be brightened by the joviality of Hume, a witticism of Voltaire, or a hymn to nature by Diderot.  Sociability was essential to the philosophic programme, for natural, or pagan, morality could only be realized in human society.  When Rousseau opted for the vita contemplativa, he did so only by deliberately dissociating himself from the philosophes, thereby provoking Diderot’s condemnation: “Interrogate your heart: it will tell you that the good man is in society, and that only the bad man is alone.”[8]

Enlightenment sociability consisted of much more than the art of ridicule and well-placed bon mots; it contained principles of discourse that merged existing social norms with philosophic ideals.  Parisian salons employed a traditional French social dynamic, in which men tended to center their conversation around their hostess, to create a progressive form of discourse where the salonnière moderated discussions of decidedly non-traditional content according to Enlightenment principles of tolerance and fraternity.  Deference to the salonnière’s authority facilitated discussion among men of different social rank in a collegial atmosphere.  The philosophes, for all their aspirations, remained men of the Old Regime, and tended to be extremely sensitive about perceived insults to their person or status.  Most had been educated in the intensely competitive Jesuit system, which produced belligerent styles of debate the salonnières sought to restrain.  The philosophes were generally satisfied with the results; Morellet went so far as to declare, “I have never seen consistently good conversation except where a salonnière [maîtresse de maison] was, if not the only woman, at least a sort of center of the society.”[9]  Dena Goodman has used the testimony of Morellet and others to show the salons remained the central institution of the French “Republic of Letters” until the late 1770s.

The first significant philosophic attempt to establish a more formal marketplace of intellectual commerce was Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, begun in 1747 and outlawed in 1759.  At a time when the French Academy was still dominated by scholastic and Cartesian systêmes, empiricists had to look elsewhere to establish a collaborative intellectual community.  The encyclopedia would grow from contributions from throughout the literary world, and thereby serve as the center of intellectual correspondence.  Unlike the national academies, Diderot insisted, the Republic of Letters would not be constrained by corporative interests.[10]  The encyclopedic project exhibited a high degree of cooperation between the “high” and “low” Enlightenment, not only in the disparate social backgrounds of Diderot and d’Alembert, but in its appeal to contributions from “true scholars, distinguished artisans, and enlightened amateurs”.[11]  Publication was also at a stage of development that favored a republican spirit; works such as the Encyclopédie were financed by subscription, making the reader more of an active investor than a passive consumer.  Yet even the Encyclopédie needed a royal privilege in order to be published, as a humiliating reminder that the Republic of Letters remained a vassal of the French monarchy.

Although Diderot may have wished to render the academies irrelevant, many philosophes held positions by virtue of these and other Old Regime institutions.  Robert Darnton has made a point of emphasizing how the next generation of philosophes, or High Enlightenment, appeared to have become part of the establishment. Marmontel, Morellet, Suard, La Harpe, and others received government pensions as academicians or editors of royal journals.[12]  Goodman counters this view by showing how republican modes of discourse continued to prevail in the salons of the 1770s.  Social acceptance did not cause the men of the Enlightenment to abandon their principles, and this fact was not lost on the anti-philosophes who viewed with alarm Malesherbes’ directorship of the book trade (1750-1763), d’Alembert’s perpetual secretaryship of the French Academy (1772), and Voltaire’s coronation at the Comédie Française in 1778.

 Networks of patronage and privilege, so integral to Old Regime society, dominated the legitimate French press.  Legal publishers had been confined to a guild since 1618, so that by the 1780s there were still only thirty-six master printers and one hundred master booksellers in Paris, most of whom lived in luxury and pomp.  These masterships were family possessions, like most Old Regime offices.   To publish, one needed the legal “privilege” to print that particular book (free of taxes).  A “grace”, or exclusive right to sell a book, could itself be sold.[13]  Additionally, journals owned exclusive privileges to publish articles in their specializations. Anyone who wished to publish a journal without a privilege had to pay an indemnity to the journal that possessed it.[14]  Upper class writers received government pensions; for most others it was impossible to live by the pen, so they supplemented their incomes with other professions.

 Writers from lower social strata often relied on Old Regime-style patronage.  From 500 reports written from 1748 to 1753 by Joseph d’Hémery, a police inspector of books, Darnton has extracted a social profile of Parisian writers: roughly 17 percent noblemen, 12 percent clergy, 10 percent doctors or lawyers, 9 percent minor officials, 16 percent magistrates and other state officials, and 36 percent in “intellectual trades”, such as “journalists, tutors, librarians, secretaries, and actors”.[15]  Many of these positions were acquired as gifts from wealthy patrons who enjoyed their literary work. One report recounts the good fortune of François-Augustin Paradis de Moncrif:

He was a tax inspector in the provinces when M. d’Argenson was intendant. The pretty songs he composed made him noticed by d’Argenson, who brought him to Paris and gave him a position. From that time on, he [Moncrif] has always been attached to him…. He is also secretary general of the French postal service, a position that brings him in 6,000 livres a year and that M. d’Argenson gave to him as a present.[16]

Similar stories are related of an opera writer who won the favor of noble patrons and a lucrative government post, and of a penniless priest who tutored the prince de Turenne and became the highly paid Aumonier du Colonel Général de la Cavalerie.[17] The police inspector did not frown upon literary patronage or view it as conspiratorial; on the contrary, he was appalled when a protégé failed to defend his patron or attack his enemies.[18]  Some upper class writers, such as Voltaire and d’Alembert, were themselves patrons of other writers.  They found posts with steady incomes for their protégés, and sometimes helped them get started on literary projects.  Like the Encyclopédie, the patronage system was a meeting point of high and low philosophie, and a means of propagating the Enlightenment outside the salons, but while Diderot envisioned his encyclopedia as the embodiment of republican discourse, patronage and protection reeked of the worst abuses of the Old Regime. 

Lower class hacks were often forced into a humiliating, hypocritical existence in order to earn a living and get their writings published. Voltaire, who ranked the “canaille de la littérature” beneath prostitutes, mercilessly lampooned their cynical opportunism.[19]  Presumably he excluded from such contempt his own humble protégés, such as Gabriel-Henri Gaillard, a sub-librarian who received a tutoring position by Voltaire’s arrangement.[20]  Those who were not so fortunate had to resort to risky schemes, such as financing the publication of their works in advance, optimistically anticipating good sales.  Jacques-Pierre Brissot took this route, only to have the fifth volume of his Bibliothèque philosophique intercepted by the Paris police in 1784.  Rather than succumb to financial ruin, Brissot apparently became a police informant in exchange for the “favor” of getting his Bibliothèque permitted.[21] He further compromised his principles by marketing pornographic tracts he found morally offensive.[22]  A bookseller of the robe nobility named Mauvelain arranged for shipments of forbidden works to be smuggled into Troyes (1783-85) from a Swiss publishing house, the Societé Typographique de Neûchatel (STN).  He took care to bribe customs officials and cover insurance costs, yet he evaded payment to the publisher through skillful haggling and manipulation.[23]  Cynical survival tactics figure prominently in Voltaire’s poem “Le Pauvre Diable”, which satirizes the impoverished man of letters as one “sans bien, sans métier, sans génie” who desperately wants to become a writer, so he scribbles in journals or pointless compilations in order to eat, and would even don a monk’s habit to gain a little income.[24]  One of d’Alembert’s protégés, the unscrupulous abbé Le Senne, perfectly exemplified Voltaire’s pauvre diable.  Desperate to eke out a living, Le Senne marketed “philosophical” works (which often attacked the Church he nominally served) and compilations, and offered to work as a journalist or even a printer, while he sought to change orders to gain “a little benefice”.[25]  Barely a step ahead of his creditors and his ecclesiastical superiors, Le Senne was driven as much by profit as by devotion to philosophie, equally willing to print either atheistic (Holbach) or orthodox (a Cistercian breviary) materials if they would sell.[26]  Known in the underground as a rogue and a swindler, Le Senne personified the unsavory character who handled the dirty work of propagating the Enlightenment.

However a man like Le Senne may have stumbled into the good graces of a d’Alembert, it is clear that there were limits to what the protector would do for his protégé.  D’Alembert wished to use one of the STN’s journals to win public opinion against the anti-philosophes, but he would not condescend to write the articles, leaving this task for Le Senne.[27]  The STN wanted d’Alembert’s writings, but finally agreed to pay Le Senne for collecting articles from anonymous hacks.  To obtain permission for a journal to circulate, one needed the cooperation of a censor, the police, the Keeper of the Seals, and the foreign minister.  An indemnity had to be paid to the French journal that owned the relevant privilege, or the privilege had to be bought.  The STN was unable to cross the necessary hurdles, and d’Alembert decided against troubling Frederick II about the matter, despite Le Senne’s plea for support.[28]  Though he had recommended Le Senne, d’Alembert evidently did not care enough about the project to prevent its demise. An increasingly desperate Le Senne continued to claim the protection of d’Alembert, who wrote on the abbé’s behalf to the STN, and petitioned Frederick II to protect the “poor devil of a priest” from his bishop.[29]   Despite d’Alembert’s concern for his protégé, Le Senne was always on the run and nearly destitute as he vanished into obscurity shortly after his patron’s death in 1783.

This uninspiring example of the master-protégé relationship complicates Rousseau’s characterization of philosophic protégés as “emissaries” and “operatives” in some clandestine hierarchy.[30]  Patrons could demonstrate lukewarm concern for the success of their understudies, an attitude that is consistent with the disdain some philosophes felt toward the lower classes.  Voltaire is most notable in this regard: “Taste is like philosophy. It belongs to a very small number of privileged souls.... It is unknown in bourgeois families, where one is constantly occupied with the care of one’s fortune.”[31]  Even d’Alembert held that although “virtue and talent alone have a claim to our true homage, the superiority of birth and position [nonetheless] commands our deference and our respect”.[32]  D’Alembert argued for the continued supremacy of the French Academy and les grands over the literary community in his Essai sur les gens de lettres et les grands (1752).[33]  The relative indifference of some philosophes to the propagation of their beliefs in the lower classes was further evidenced by a reluctance to publish their own works in lesser journals, instead passing the task to a hack ghost writer, or even allowing a man of little talent like Le Senne to gather the sources himself.  This lack of supervision naturally resulted in a product that was a distorted image of high philosophie.

Judging from the profile of the STN’s 28,000 sales from 1769 to 1789[34], it appears that the provincial bourgeoisie had a remarkably different literary experience of the Enlightenment from what a reading of classic texts would indicate.  “Philosophic” works seldom referred to political treatises by prominent philosophes, but often were salacious libelles and pornographic writings with some Enlightenment teachings bizarrely inserted at the erotic climax. Unlike libelles of previous ages, these were often lengthy works with extended arguments.  Thérèse philosophe (1748?) is filled with prurient detail, yet it should not be regarded as a merely pornographic work.  Amidst the vulgarity, it contains the essentials of Enlightenment thought: the omnipotence of criticism (“for everything that comes from men should be subjected to our reason”[35]), social activism (“Man is not made to be inactive: he must busy himself with some activity which has as its goal his own personal advantage in concert with the general good.”[36]), and a naturalistic metaphysics with wide-ranging implications.  Adopting a position of strong physical determinism, the author denies free will, holding that human actions are determined by reason and desires imbued by “the immutable laws of nature”.  Natural desires may be acted upon as long as they do not “disturb the social order”.[37]  Religions were invented by men to maintain social order, and still have the practical value of controlling the masses who can only be motivated by “the fear of damnation and the hope of eternal reward”, whereas only a small elite of “thinking men” are enlightened enough to be driven solely by “honor” and “public interest”.[38]  Although the genre is different, and the specifics may differ from doctrines of particular philosophes as much as they differed amongst themselves, clandestine best-sellers by obscure authors could still convey the essential principles of Enlightenment thought.

Political libelles were forms of public slander that threatened Old Regime orthodoxy on several levels. A scandal could undermine a person’s status and good credit, so the police regarded all libelles as dangerous. Libelles could be especially damaging to the monarchy, since the sanctity of the institution was intertwined with the sanctity of the king’s person.  Among the most popular libelles were Les fastes de Louis XV and Anecdotes sur Mme. la Contesse du Barry (1775).  Works on Louis XV’s private life gained popularity after the king had died (1774), so these libelles did not act as much to slander individuals as to discredit the way of life of the court.  In the Anecdotes, a false virgin is repeatedly “deflowered” by members of every respectable class: “the Church, the nobility, the magistracy, and high finance”.[39]  Works such as the Anecdotes and the Vie privée de Louis XV presented themselves as impartial accounts of events at court, rather than titillating pieces of gossip.  In fact, they often propagated rumors already current among the general population.  Since there were no real newspapers, but only topical journals that avoided politics, news was only to be had by rumor and libelle.

L’An 2440 (1771), Louis-Sebastién Mercier’s utopian vision of philosophie triumphant, expresses Rousseauian political concepts in a direct narrative.  Rousseau himself had chosen this course when he expressed his ideas on education and politics in Emile and La nouvelle Héloîse, for which he was more widely known and adored than for Du contrat social.  This is but one more way that Rousseau straddled the high and low Enlightenment.  Mercier’s interpretation of Rousseau is far from Babeuf’s; his ideal future has a government composed of a constitutional monarchy, a senate, and a biennially meeting Estates-General. Disparity of wealth persists, but the king and nobility are more approachable and compassionate toward the poor, and parasitic courtiers are no more.  Though Mercier later claimed to have predicted the Revolution, the “revolution” in L’An 2440 is effected by an enlightened philosopher-king who relinquishes the claims of absolute monarchy and gives the Estates “their ancient prerogatives”.[40] Standard Rousseauian phrases abound: law is “the expression of the General Will”, and man, while naturally good, had been corrupted by cruel laws that falsely placed the “good of the individual” at odds with the “good of the state”.[41] Like Rousseau, Mercier opposes most philosophes in affirming that the immortality of the soul is evident to reason.  He also posits a peculiar hypothesis of reincarnation on other planets based on one’s level of enlightenment, thereby reconciling the soul’s immortality with Enlightenment notions of perfectibility and progress.[42]  Mercier is singularly convinced of the power of the written word.  “Freedom of the press is the true measure of civil liberty,” and public opinion is the sole judge of a work.  Everyone learns the Encyclopédie and works of the philosophes, especially Rousseau, and at the end of life each man leaves behind a book of his finest thoughts.[43]

Authors like Mercier fulfilled an important role in the propagation of basic Enlightenment ideas, despite their many differences with the philosophes.  “Gutter Rousseaus” were naturally more concerned with social justice and equity for the lower classes, yet they remained quite conservative by Jacobin standards. Although radicals like Hebert and Marat seethed with hatred for the intellectual elites, most sung the praises of the philosophes.  Conversely, Voltaire and d’Alembert (and their anti-philosophe counterparts) keenly recognized the importance of hack protégés in winning public opinion (though their conception of the public varied according to their elitism).  Men like Diderot and Rousseau traversed the artificial boundary between “philosophe” and “hack”, yet there was clearly a social divide between those who were admitted to the salons and those who were not.  The latter, such as Brissot, could only petition philosophic patrons as they would any seigneur. 

The French literary world underwent transformation on several levels in the 1780s, resulting in a more socially divided community.  Among les grands, salon culture began to deteriorate. Philosophes had long proven vulnerable to the Old Regime foible of conflating disagreement with personal attack, as shown by the grain trade dispute between Galiani and Morellet in 1770, occasioned by the latter’s uncompromising defense of the physiocrats.[44]  By adopting an orthodoxy and a disputatious approach that was inherently combative rather than cooperative, Morellet, the great advocate of salon discourse, had publicly abandoned its principles.  Philosophes gradually deserted the salons in favor of increasingly popular lycées, musées, and Masonic lodges.   The underground publishing world was comparably transformed by a proliferation of anti-monarchical libelles, as legitimate booksellers took greater risks to compensate for losses inflicted by Vergennes’ misguided policy (1783) of requiring foreign books to be inspected in Paris.[45]  These libelles, as much as they railed against “despotism” and emphasized republican values, stopped short of a call to revolutionary action.[46]  This modest radicalization did not occur at the behest of les grands, but by following Rousseau (as he was variously interpreted) in his reaction against them.

Extensive social and ideological connections between philosophes and lower class hacks did not prevent the literary world of the latter from developing in relative independence, especially during the last few years before the Revolution.  Still, both high and low philosophie were politically and socially conservative by the standards of 1790.  Even “gutter Rousseaus” could be content with some form of monarchy.  Certainly there were a few radical thinkers such as the socialist Mably (d. 1785), and others who, like Babeuf, could combine the egalitarianism of Helvetius with Rousseau’s concept of collective absolute sovereignty into a recognizably radical system.  These exceptions are a product of the Republic of Letters only insofar as principles of free discourse encouraged men to publish thoughts that were unrestrained by prevailing orthodoxies.  Enlightenment influence on the radicals is also visible in their emphasis on civic action, antipathy to revealed religion, and naturalistic determinism.  Uneducated writers who had little access to the classics (e.g., Babeuf, who did not know Socrates had defended himself[47]), instead gleaned ideas to their liking from the modern classics of the Enlightenment.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Babeuf, Gracchus. The Defense of Gracchus Babeuf,  trans. John Anthony Scott (New York: Schocken Books, 1967).

Darnton, Robert. The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1996).

–––––––. The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1984).

 –––––––. The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982).

Gay, Peter. The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, Vol. 1 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966).

Goodman, Dena. The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).

McMahon, Darrin M. Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).