The crystallization of counter-enlightenment and philosophe identities: theological controversy and catholic enlightenment in pre-revolutionary France

Church History, Dec, 2008 by Jeffrey D. Burson

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.

(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. (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. (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 Helvetius's De l'Esprit and Diderot's Encyclopedie, 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. (16)