It just suited the "philosophes," male and female, interchanging their airy epigrams in salons, which had about as much likeness to the Academy or to the Stoa, as the "philosophes" had to the philosophers of antiquity.
I do not forget the existence of men of the type of Montesquieu or D'Argenson in the France of the eighteenth century, when I take this as a fair representation of the enlightened public of that day. The unenlightened public, on the other hand, the people who were morally and physically debased by sheer hunger; or those, not so far dulled or infuriated by absolute want, who yet were maddened by the wrongs of every description inflicted upon them by a political system which, so far as its proper object, the welfare of the people, was concerned, was effete and powerless; the subjects of a government smitten with paralysis for everything but the working of iniquity and the generation of scandals; these naturally hailed with rapture the appearance of the teacher who clothed passion in the garb of philosophy; and preached the sweeping away of injustice by the perpetration of further injustice, as if it were nothing but the conversion of sound theory into practice.
It is true that any one who has looked below the surface[1] will hardly be disposed to join in the cry which is so often raised against the "philosophes" that their "infidel and leveling" principles brought about the French Revolution. People, like the Marquis d'Argenson, with political eyes in their heads, saw that the revolution was inevitable before Rousseau wrote a line. In truth, the Bull "Unigenitus," the interested restiveness of the Parliaments, and the extravagancies and profligacy of the court had a great deal more influence in generating the catastrophe than all the "philosophes" that ever put pen to paper. But, undoubtedly, Rousseau's extremely attractive and widely read writings did a great deal to give a color of rationality to those principles of '89[2] which, even after the lapse of a century, are considered
- ↑ Those who desire to do so with ease and pleasure should read M. Rocquain's "L'esprit révolutionnaire en France avant la Révolution." It is really a luminous book, which ought to be translated for the benefit of our rising public men, who, having had the advantage of a public-school education, are so often unable to read French with comfort. For deeper students there is, of course, the great work of M. Taine, "Les origines de la France contemporaine."
- ↑ Sir H. Maine observes that the "strictly judicial axiom" of the lawyers of the Antonine era ("omnes homines naturâ æquales sunt"—all men are by nature equal), after passing through the hands of Rousseau, and being adopted by the founders of the Constitution
positive law, impatience of experience, and the preference of a priori to all other reasoning" (pp. 89-92). I shall often have to quote "Ancient Law." The first edition of this admirable book was published in 1861, but now, after eighteen years of growing influence on thoughtful men, it seems to be forgotten, or willfully ignored, by the ruck of political speculators. It is enough to make one despair of the future that Demos and the Bourbons seem to be much alike in their want of capacity for either learning or forgetting.
