Democratic Enlightenment

154 The Radical Challenge
Montesquieu too acquired an increasingly favourable image among the antiphilosophes
as time went on, partly due to his well-publicized reconciliation with
the Church, on his death-bed, but especially to the Esprit des loix’s claim that
Christian states and society exhibit a general moral superiority over, and greater
moderation than, other societies due to the gospel’s exhorting charity and love for
one’s neighbour. 79 His well-publicized refutation of Bayle’s claim that a truly Christian
society could not long maintain itself likewise counted in his favour, though
Bergier thought Rousseau, in his Émile, had eclipsed him in this respect. 80 Like
Descartes, Montesquieu struck Condorcet as a prime instance of a thinker whose
writings provoked intense opposition among theologians and all those ruled by
‘prejudice’ when they first appeared, but for later generations, on the contrary,
became an arsenal where ‘prejudice’ found its most formidable weapons against
reason. 81 Voltaire was never ‘pardoned’ to the extent Montesquieu and Rousseau
were, his post-1755 attack on Christianity being too fierce and sustained for that. Yet,
he too could be forgiven up to a point and sometimes quoted approvingly for
championing God’s existence, divine creation and regulation of the world, the
divinely given character of morality, inertness of matter, and the ordering and
separation of species. These contradictory responses of censure and approval were
reconciled by stressing Voltaire’s alleged incoherence. To illustrate this Nonnotte
derides Voltaire’s eulogy of Chinese wisdom and the supposed vast antiquity of
their empire, complaining he offers no proof Chinese history really stretches back
over 4,000 years, something that seemed incredible to him. 82
While Nonnotte, Guyon, and Countess de Genlis discuss Voltaire at length, this
was uncharacteristic of anti-philosophie overall. Indeed, some major works of antiphilosophie,
like the six volumes of Maleville’s La Religion naturelle et la révéléeétablie
sur les principes de la vraie philosophie (6 vols., Paris, 1756), scarcely mention Voltaire,
Rousseau, or Montesquieu at all. Although some anti-philosophes, like Madame de
Genlis, pronounced Voltaire the founder of the ‘philosophic sect’, from an antiphilosophique
standpoint choosing him entailed appreciable disadvantages. For one
thing it meant playing down the political aspects of the movement: for stressing
Voltaire’s role at once removed the alleged threat to society and lessened emphasis on
the atheism and necessitarianism of la philosophie moderne as Voltaire invariably
affirms providence, free will, and the soul’s immortality. Indeed, the only way to
make Voltaire patriarch of the philosophique sect with some show of cogency was
chiefly to stress the sect’s incoherence, contending that philosophisme ‘enrolled
indifferently atheists and deists’. ‘The sect formed by M. de Voltaire’, asserts Genlis,
‘having no fixed principles, could not have a plan; but it had an aim, that of
persuading men and of domineering and reigning over their minds; and the means
79
Chaudon, Dictionnaire anti-philosophique, i, p. xxxviii; Lamourette, Pensées, 203; Shackleton,
Montesquieu, 392–8.
80
Bergier, Apologie, i. 10–11, 161–7, 405 and ii. 127–8, 132.
81
Condorcet, ‘Essai sur la constitution’, in Œuvres, viii. 186–7.
82
Nonnotte, Dictionnaire, 77–91; Genlis, Religion, ii. 16; Pomeau, Religion de Voltaire, 344.