The counter-Enlightenment and the low-life of literature in pre-Revolutionary France

Past & Present, May, 1998 by Darrin M. McMahon

Gilbert's life was undoubtedly unique. But was his case unique as well? Did the poet from Lorraine, that is, possess comrades in arms -- men like him who came to the capital seeking philosophic glory, only to cross over, and to exit, from the right side of Grub Street? Or was he merely an aberration? Given the state of contemporary historiography, one is forced to admit that it is difficult to say. For despite the rich mining of eighteenth-century French intellectual life conducted in the last twenty-five years, few have gone in search of those who resisted the fashionable learning of the century. As Robert Palmer pointed out in 1939 in a book that stands as a notable exception to a general rule, `it must be confessed that the thought of the Age of Enlightenment, more than that of any equally important period in modern history, has been studied from writings which express only one side of the question'.(26) Over fifty years later, his assertion still holds largely true.

To acknowledge this fact is to admit that in many ways historians of the Enlightenment have been inclined to repeat its own catechisms. For like the philosophes themselves, we have tended to depict the eighteenth century as the steady advent of `light' at the expense of `darkness', viewing their opponents as did Voltaire -- as fanatics, reactionaries, the infame -- relegating them to obscurity, or neglecting them altogether. And though it is probably true that the century witnessed a gradual `deChristianization', along with both an absolute and relative decline in religious publication, as I hope this article will suggest, within these broad parameters the dynamics were more complicated than generally acknowledged.(27) Indeed, if one is to conceive of the Enlightenment as Margaret Jacob has argued, as a `vast cultural upheaval' similar in scope and repercussion to the Reformation, then it stands to reason that the many-levelled expansion of lumieres would have generated greater opposition than historians have appreciated.(28) Long ago, the great pioneer of the cultural history of the Enlightenment himself, Daniel Mornet, cautioned against such oversight. As he stressed in his ground-breaking Les Origines intellectuelles de la revolution francaise (1933), philosophie did not flow like an `unhindered river' (fleuve paisible), but rather was forced to carve its way through `immobile masses' and `hostile terrain' that forever impeded its course. This `passively hostile' countryside of `powerful and tenacious tradition', and the more activist writers who claimed to speak for it, formed a `never conquered resistance', Mornet affirmed, one that helped `to explain the future'.(29)