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

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

Needless to say, this language, what I term elsewhere an `anti-philosophe discourse' was greatly overstated, grossly unfair.(36) Yet the fears it articulated were deadly earnest, and the frustration it expressed at the philosophes' seemingly inexorable advance no less real. Moreover, as Mornet clearly realized, such resistance -- this `bitter, violent, enduring' polemic against the philosophes -- was by no means confined solely to an unenlightened rump of reactionary devots.(37) Men of letters participated in these attacks, a fact that raises an enticing prospect. Was there a secular counterpart to these angry, clerical denunciations, a conservative public sphere that produced and consumed works other than the fulminations of priests and devout magistrates? Once again, it is worth asking if the case of Gilbert was merely an aberration.

All indications are that it was not. Consider, as another instructive example, the life of Antoine Sabatier (1742-1817).(38) Often referred to as the abbe de Castres or Sabatier de Castres, after his place of birth in the Midi, the young Antoine descended from a long line of magistrates. His parents, however, seemed not to have followed family tradition. To believe Voltaire, they were wig-makers. Jean Sgard's Dictionnaire des journalistes describes them somewhat less colourfully as `marchands'.(39) Whatever the case, Sabatier fils was undoubtedly intent on leaving life at a higher station than where he began.

Following a stint at the seminary in Castres, from which he was expelled for devoting inordinate time to secular literary pursuits, Sabatier made his way to Toulouse, breaking with his family and vowing to establish himself as an independent hommes de lettres. For a man barely into his twenties, without familial or other support, this was a daunting task. Yet Sabatier appears to have made a go of it in good hack fashion, seeing his first play, Les Eaux de Bagneres (1763), through to production at the Comedie de Toulouse and supplementing his meagre income with a variety of publications: epigrams, madrigals, epistles and licentious verse.(40) Encouraged by these early successes, he wrote to Helvetius on the recommendation of a mutual acquaintance, asking for assistance in 1765. Evidently impressed with the young abbe, the celebrated philosophe, wealthy and noted for his generosity to fledgling writers, extended Sabatier an offer to come to Paris with an annual stipend of 1,200 livres.(41) He presented himself in the capital the following year.

This was an auspicious beginning, enough, in any event, to take Sabatier off the pavement of Grub Street. But the aspiring philosophe from Castres had his sights trained on far bigger game. Not content with a mere pension, he set about trying to take the literary monde by storm. He made the rounds of the salons. He sought out the eminent writers of the day. He published glowing panegyrics of Voltaire.(42) But despite this determined effort, as well as the evident favour of Helvetius, Sabatier met with disappointment. His attempts to flatter the king of Ferney, and his overtures to the first minister of the intellectual world, d'Alembert, were bluntly refused. As d'Alembert later boasted in a letter to Voltaire, the perpetual secretary of the Academy had `chased' this `little vagabond' (gueux), `come from Castres in sabots', out of his house `like a lackey'.(43)