Conflicts with Church and State
Madame Geoffrin did not approve of discussions that attacked the Catholic church, but elsewhere voices against organized religion could be heard. Criticisms of religion required daring because the church, whatever its denomination, wielded enormous power in society, and most influential people considered religion an essential foundation of good society and government. Defying such opinion, the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) boldly argued in The Natural History of Religion (1755) that belief in God rested on superstition and fear rather than on reason.
At the time, most Europeans believed in God. After Newton, however, and despite Newton’s own deep religiosity, people could conceive of the universe as an eternally existing, self-perpetuating machine, in which God’s intervention was unnecessary. In short, such people could become either atheists (people who do not believe in God) or deists (people who believe in God but give him no active role in earthly affairs). For the first time, writers claimed the label atheist and disputed the common view that atheism led inevitably to immorality.
Deists continued to believe in a benevolent, all-knowing God who had designed the universe and set it in motion. But they usually rejected the idea that God directly intercedes in the functioning of the universe, and they often criticized the churches for their dogmatic intolerance of dissenters. Voltaire was a deist, and in his influential Philosophical Dictionary (1764) he attacked most of the claims of organized Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant. Christianity, he argued, had been the prime source of fanaticism and brutality among humans. Throughout his life, Voltaire’s motto was Écrasez l’infâme—“Crush the infamous thing” (the “thing” being bigotry and intolerance). French authorities publicly burned his Philosophical Dictionary.
Criticism of religious intolerance involved more than simply attacking the church. Critics also had to confront the states to which churches were closely tied. In 1762, a judicial case in Toulouse provoked an outcry throughout France that Voltaire soon joined. When the son of a local Calvinist was found hanged (he had probably committed suicide), magistrates accused the father, Jean Calas, of murdering him to prevent his conversion to Catholicism. (Since Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, it had been illegal to practice Calvinism publicly in France.) The all-Catholic parlement of Toulouse tried to extract the names of accomplices through torture—using a rope to pull up Calas’s arm while weighing down his feet and then pouring water down his throat—but Calas refused to confess. The torturers then executed him by breaking every bone in his body with an iron rod. Voltaire launched a successful crusade to rehabilitate Calas’s good name and to restore the family’s properties, which had been confiscated after his death. Voltaire’s efforts eventually helped bring about the extension of civil rights to French Protestants and encouraged campaigns to abolish the judicial use of torture.
Critics also assailed state and church support for European colonization and slavery. One of the most popular books of the time was the Philosophical and Political History of European Colonies and Commerce in the Two Indies, published in 1770 by the abbé Guillaume Raynal (1713–1796), a French Catholic clergyman. Raynal and his collaborators described in excruciating detail the destruction of native populations by Europeans and denounced the slave trade. Despite the criticism, the slave trade continued. So did European exploration. British explorer James Cook (1728–1779) charted the coasts of New Zealand and Australia, discovered New Caledonia, and visited the ice fields of Antarctica.
The Enlightenment belief in natural rights helped fuel the antislavery movement, which began to organize political campaigns against slavery in Britain, France, and the new United States in the 1780s. Advocates of the abolition of slavery encouraged freed slaves to write the story of their enslavement. One such freed slave, Olaudah Equiano, wrote of his kidnapping and enslavement in Africa and his long effort to free himself. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, published in 1788, became an international best seller. Armed with such firsthand accounts of slavery, abolitionists began to petition their governments for the abolition of the slave trade and then of slavery itself.
Enlightenment critics of church and state usually advocated reform, not revolution. For example, though he resided near the French-Swiss border in case he had to flee, Voltaire made a fortune in financial speculations and ended up being celebrated in his last years as a national hero even by many former foes. Other philosophes also believed that published criticism, rather than violent action, would bring about necessary reforms. The philosophes generally regarded the lower classes—“the people”—as ignorant, violent, and prone to superstition; as a result, they pinned their hopes on educated elites and enlightened rulers.