ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE Enlightenment fe ALAN CHARLES KORS Editor in Chief VOLUME1 Abbadie-Enlightenment Studies OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 2003140 te aan PAAWORIUNTHTOT moet GMAPFOGERCHICHTE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dares Salaam Delhi Hong Kong. Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi ‘Sio Paulo Shanghai Singapore Talpet Tolyo Toronto Copyright © 2003 by Oxford University Press, Inc Published by Oxford University Press, Ine 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 worw.oup.com Oxford is a vegisterad trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, ‘elstronie, mechanical, photacopying, recording. or otherwise, ‘without the prior written permission of Oxford University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment / Alan Charles Kors, editor in chief Includes bibliographical references and indes. Contents: v. 1, Apbadie-Enlightenment Studies—v. 2. Enthusiasm-Lyceumms and Museums =v, 3. Mably-Rayseh —v. 4. Sade-Zoology. Index. ISBN 0-18-510430-7 (set: alk. paper) ISBN 0-19-510431-5 (w. I: all. paper) ISBN 0-19-510432-3 (v. 2: alk. paper) ISBN 0-19-510433-4 (v. 3 all. paper) ISBN 0-19-510434-X (x. 4 alk. paper) 1. Enlightenment—Encyelopedias. 2. Enlightenment —United ‘States—Enevelopedias, 3, Philosophy—Encyclopedias. 4 Europe Intellectual life 18th centurs 5. United States—Intellectual Me 18th century. I. Kors, Alan Chasles, 13802. E53 2003, 940.2'5—de21 2002003766 135798642 Printed in the United States of America ‘on aci-free paper418 ENLIGHTENED DESPOTISM. 1, Timms, pp: 1-21. Bdinburgh, 1991. Penetrating discussion both ofthe whole notion and of ane ofits wost celebrated exponents. Banning, TC. W. Joseph 11. London, 1994, The best single-wolume study ofa crucial igure Blaming, TC. W. Reform and Revolution in Mabie, 1743-1803. ‘Camiidge, 1974, 8 key carly monograph in the rediscovery of enlightened despotism ‘De Madara, Isabel Russia inthe Ageef Catherine he Great. London, 981, Largestale study of one of the most persuasive examples of enlightened despodsm in action, Ingo, Charles W. The Hessian Mercenary State: Ides, tntiurions Mond Reform wonder Prderick Il, 1760-1785. Cambridge, (987. A tnodslsiuly of Hesse-Caseel, shoving how reform resulted from the cooperation of rule, oficial, and estates Maswell, Kenneth. Portal: Paradox ofthe Enlightenment. Cambridge, 1995. Important examination of one sgnificent reformer anda book swith wide Smplications Root, Mare, The WellOndered Police States Social end Insitaiomal ‘Change Tarongh Lays inthe Germanies ard Reessia, 1000-800, New Haven, Conn, 1983. Important and widely influential, if not Siogethor persuasive, survey which argued for the importance of the implementation of cameralist policies by the bun the key to enlightened despotism. Schieder, Theodor. Fredrick the Great. Translaced by Sabina Berkeley val HLM. Scott London, 2000, English yranslation of Frit der Ghosse: Bi Konsum der Wiedersprithe, Gist publishedin 1983 andl recognized as the best modern biographe of sts subject. Contains {in chap. 7) an incisive discussion of enlightened desposism. Scott, HM, ed. Enlightened Absoltisi: Reforse and Reformers fn Later Eighteudh-Century Europe Basingstoke and Ano Arbor Mich. 1990, Collection of national essays, prefaced by an introduc tHon on the eoneept of enlightened despotism and the debate it has aroused. venturi, Feanco. Utopia anu Reform inthe Enlightenment, Cambri, O71, Discusive, bt crucial for understanding its sather’sditine tive anu widely nflvential approach Venturi, Feanco, “Church aad Reform in Enlightenment Raly: The ‘Satis of the Eightconth Century.” Jona! of Modem: History 138 (1976), 215-232. Summarizes Venturi’s view of tie offensive against the Catholic Church berwen 1758 and 1774, Hawistt Scort ENLIGHTENMENT STUDIES. The history of Enlightenment studies has been shaped by contests over the definition and especially the political meanings given to the term “Enlightenment.” From its very beginning in the 1690s, the Enlightenment drew vociferous supporters tnd equally outspoken opponents, and study of #€ a8 an. intellectual movement has almost always involved politi cal stakes, albeit of changing nature overtime. The history of Enlightenment studies can be divided into four broad temporal categories: the initial controversies of the eigh- teenth century, which set the parameters of much future debate: the three generations after 1789 in which conser~ sative reactions to the French Revolution put adherents of the Enlightenment on the defensive and discouraged study of it ia many places; the revival of interest in the Enlightenment with the spread of mass politics after 1870; and the twentieth-century debates, set off first by the rise of fascism and continuing in different registers with poststructuralism and feminism, about the rela- tionship between Enlightenment and modernity. Cutting across these temporal divisions are geographic differences. Enlightenment studies occupied an important place in intellectual life at certain times and in certain places (post 1945 United States, for example) but were strik- ingly absent in other times and places (nineteenth-cen Netherlands and Spain). These variations are still the subject of research and discussion. Initial Controversies. Although some scholars question the general applicability of the term “Enlightenment,” its cighteenth-century partisans did not hesitate to employ the metaphor of light and illumination. In English, use of “Enlightenment” to define the eighteenth-century intellec- twal movement only became common in the nineteenth century. Yet, as early as 1700, Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third earl of Shafiesbury, referred to the “light” coming from “our respective countries” as he wrote in favor of religious toleration to friend in the Dutch Republic. Ref erences to this “enlightened century” appeared frequently after 1750, especially in French. The Preliminary Discourse fof the Encyelopédie (3751) used lummidves lights) no less than nineteen times and “century of light” twice; Jean Le Rond d’ Alembert insisted, for example, that dietionaries could be eredited with spreading “general enlightenment.” Thus, when the Berlinische Monatsschrift provoked the ramous debate in 1783 on the question “What is Enlight- enment?” it could expect to receive immediate replies from many leading German intellectuals. A generation earlier 4 German cleric had even provided an “encyclopedia of freethinkers,” wherein the faithful could find ample cita tions to everyone from John Toland and Matthew Tindal to Voltaire, By the 1780s, then, even if the notion still provoked passionate debate, European intellectuals knew that an important intellectual movement had been under- ‘way forat least two or three decades. They could not know that it would remain a subject of recurrent controversy right up (o the twenty-first century. "Reform based on reason. Champions of Eniightenment ‘were the first to give the term specificity. They identified themselves as participants in an international campaign for reform based on reason. Theit use of the term “enlightened!” or “Enlightenment” served as a call to arms and almost always implied a historical narrative as well ‘They cast themselves as proponents of scientific study aimed at amelioration of life in this world and therefore as antagonists to the superstition, bigotry, and fanaticism of the past. In his article "Philasophe” (philosopher) in the Encyclopédie, Denis Diderot insists that the philosophe ‘acs in all things according toreason,” and considers “civil society. the only divinity that he recognizes on earth.”‘The gauntlet had been thrown down, According to Diderot, everything would be judged now by a “philosoph- ical spirit” of “observation and exactness,” which would inevitably challenge the authority of churches to resu- late the affairs of this world. Enlightenment writers, also known from the 1760s.as the eneyclopédistes because many ‘were affiliated with the Encyclopédie, portrayed themselves as supporters of reason, humanity, tolerance, and scien- tific progress. Opposing them and all they stood for, by their account, were the devout, the Jesuits, the Inq tion, the French parlements, and, in general, the enemies of science. Antimaterialism. The conilicts between encyclopédistes and their adversaries in the French state and the French Catholic hierarchy did much to define the Enlightenment as a movement and to set the terms for future debate aboutit. Many Enlightenment figures spent time in prison, and the Sorbonne, the parlements, and the Council of State rivaled each other's efforts to ban and burn their works, Although the Catholic cleray participated in the Enlightenment as both authors and readers (the example of the abbé Guillaume-Thomas de Raynal being only the ‘mosi prominent), they also led the charge against the Enlightenment. Jansenists and Jesuits alike railed against the supposed ‘materialism of the philosophes, especially after the publi- cation in 1758 of Claude-Adrien Helvétius's De esprit (On the Mind), The Jansenist, Abraham-Toseph de Chaumeix published a multivolume collection, Préiugés égitémes contre Encyclopédie (Legitimate Prejudices against the Encyclopédie, 1758-1759), in which he complains that “their philosophy is nothing but the gathering of pretexts for doubt.” In his satirical Cavéchisme et décisions de cas de conscience, 2Tusage des Cacouacs (Catechism and Deci- sions in Cases of Conscience for the Use of the Cacouaes, 1758), the abbé Giry de Saint-Cyr combined quotes from Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Helvétius, and the Bricy- <’lopédie to give the impression that all philosophes shared the same materialist principles: that is, that the existence of God cannot be proved, that superstition is more injuri- ous than atheism, that man does not differ from animals, and that divine and civil laws are only burdensome and imaginary chimeras employed to oppress people. Omer Joly de Fleury, a leading magistrate of the par- Jement of Paris, summarized the rising tide of clerically inspired denunciation in his official indictment of eight impious works on 23 January 1759: “Can we pretend that there is no premeditated plan, no organized group formed to sustain materialism, to destroy religion, to inspir pendence and nourish the corruption of morals’ Sorbonne and the parlement of Paris condemned De esprit, the Encyclopédie, and the six other works, and the ENLIGHTENMENT STUDIES 419 Council of State withdrew its permission for publication of the remaining volumes of the Eneyclopeéde. Church and state did not always work hand in glove against the Enlightenment. In the Austrian Netherlands, the authorities enlisted minor philosophes in their bat: tle with the local clergy. Predictably, the clergy of the bishopric of Litge condemned Pierre Rousseau's Jour nal encyclopédique, forcing him to flee to Brussels and eventually to Bouillon, where the duke finally gave him permission to resume publication. The Enlightenment writers often had unpredictable and changeable relation- ships with political regimes. in England the clergy hated John Toland, yet he worked for various Whig govern- ments. In the Dutch Republic, Jean Rousset de Missy, who helped circulate the treatise that labeled Jesus, Moses, and Mohammed as three great imposters, also worked on behalf of the House of Orange. Censorship and protection, Pictre Rousseau's exper- ence proved typical; Enlightenment writers sought out officials in high places, who could protect them even after they had been censured, banned, or exiled. When the French Council of State withdrew the Encyelopédie’s per- mission to publish in March 1759, Chrétien-Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, director of censorship and publication, nonetheless allowed the condemned work to resume publication, at first surreptitiously and then openly, Ina letter written at the end of April 1759, Diderot told Friedrich Melchior Grimm that he had been forced to “run to the head of the police, to the pros ecutors and leading officials of the Parlement of Paris, to show oneself, go back and forth, write, protest.” He wrote directly to Malesherbes, moreover, t0 insist that he was not the author of a parodic attack on Chaumeis, (Ménoive pour Abraham Chaumeix, contre les prétendus philosophes Diderot et d'Alembert [Memoir in Favor of ‘Abraham Chaumelx against the So-Called Philosophes Diderot and d’Alembert]) and maintained that the pam- phlet could only be the product of those who wished to discredit the Encyclopédie. While waging his campaign for respectability Diderot arranged for volumes to be pub- lished in the ever-ready Dutch publishing houses. Not only were the Enlightenment writers protected after 2 fashion, but their enemies faced sanctions, as well. Elie Fréron, editor of the Année letéraire, spent time in prison himself ane complained bitterly to Malesherbes that the censors prevented him from attacking the philosophes even while they allowed Voltaire and his friends to "vornit, slander” against him, Theencyclopédistes did in fact mount a largely successful campaign of vilification against Fréron uel many of their other critics, True, Frévon's comrade Charles Palissot de Montenoy managed to have his pl Les philosophes performed at the Comécie Francaise 1760. In it, Palissot depiets the enteyelopédistes as “adept420 ENLIGHTENMENT STUDIES charlatans and willing flatterers.” However, the other side could be at least as acerbic. In Le pauvre diable (The Poor Devil) of 1758 Fréron is called alittle worm. .ugly Giton” (a younger man kept by a homosexual) and Chaumeix is portrayed as a “persecutor, informer, spy,” and in The Russian in Paris “the Berthiers, the Chaumeix, and even the Frérons” are denounced in no uncertain termsas "birds ‘of the night, gathered together in their holes, exhaling the poisons of their jealous pride." Voltaire assailed Fréron obsessively during his last two decades, producing his play L’Ecossaise (The Scottish Girl) in 1760 in order to attack him on stage (as the ill-disguised "Frsion”) and continuing to vii him in public and private into the 1770s. ‘National battles, Even though the conflicts around Enlightenment prove on closer inspection to be much less straightforward than either its supporters or their opponents wanted to admit, the positions defined in var- ious national battles, in England early in the century and then in Franee in the 1750s and 1760s, influenced the debates about Enlightenment rigit through the nineteenth, century. In fact, virtually every defect attributed to the Enlightenment in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had already been proclaimed during the first decades of controversy. In 1697 a Boyle lecturer in London shrewdly observed that if “there is no God nor Religion...then all men are equal.” Another lecturer in the same series said that the deists and freethinkers saw "the Gospel as ." In 1749 Fréron grumbled about “this frivolous ‘and “these superficial minds,” assessments that appeared repeatedly in the nineteenth century. Poets, mys- tics, and early romantics of the 1760s and 1770s, such as Johann Georg Hamann, denounced the arid, philistine utilitarianism and faceless, abstracting rationalism of the ‘nlightenment. "God speaks to us in poetical words." insisted Hamann, “nat in abstractions for the leamted.” Already in the 1770s, Johann Gottfried Herder had begun to develop Hamann’s ideas about historical and cultural specificity into a kind of Counter-Enlightenment histori- cal narrative, In his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Ideas on the Philosophy of History of ‘Mankind, 1784-1791), he traced the emergence of Europe not to the recovery of intellectual nerve under the banner of reason but to some of the institutions most eriticized bby the Enlightenment, in particular, the guilds and the universities, Herder attributed increasing European dom inance to “its peculiar industry in the arts,” that is, to empirical inventions such as the magnetic compass, glass, gunpowder, printing, musical notes, and clocks. Abstract, categorizing, classifying reason played no role in his story. Like the clerical adversaries of the English freethinkers, the French enemies of the encyclopédistes had tarred them with the brush of materialism from the very beginning; the scandal and notoriety of the abbé Jean-Martin de Prades’s Sorbonne thesis of November 1751 coincided ‘with the appearance of the first volumes of the Ency- clopédie, and critics immediately linked the two. Prades had written the article “Certainty” published in volume ‘two and had shared quarters and intellectual collabora- tion with the abbé Claude Yvon, who wrote the articles, “Soul,” “Atheist,” and “God.” Joly de Fleury singled out the article “Soul” as teaching “pure materialism.’ Encyclopédie itself no longer excited much criti 1765, the encyclopédistes as a group remained the focus of attack. Anti-Enlightenment dictionaries and reviews of literary and philosophical history poured opprobrium on them for their presumed impiety, immorality, and sub- versiveness. In a typical attack published in the 1780s, the abbé Augustin Barrucl granted Voltaire’s literary tal- cents but took him to task for destroying Christian belief: “he [Voltaire] had hardly opened his mouth before the gods, Eve, Adam, and the Creation were covered with the ridicule that kept all the little ladies of the world from believing in Seripture.” ‘These charges resounded all over Europe. In 1751, the ‘Swiss poet and scientist Albrecht von Haller provided a lurid description of the world wrought by the new skeptical man who “restricts our happiness to the brief period of ‘our terrestrial life, in duration, and to the enjoyment of sensual pleasure in substance.” The skeptic never thought of God, did not believe in the afterlife, and feared only the hangman, Haller insisted. In the Austrian Netherlands, Chaumeix and Giry de Saint-Cyr had their counterparts in the Jesuits Claude Nonnotte and Frangois-Xavier de Feller, who published long and detailed criticisms of the atheist contagion they detected coming out of France. The German General Encylopedia of Authors and Literature {1778) called the Encyclopédie a “vast tomb," and an ‘immense and monstrous production,” and denigrated Diderot while praising Chaumeix. Fearful govemments prevented the importation of suspect French-language books and forbade translations of them. -Piedmontese authorities stopped the translation even of Montesquieu. The Spanish reformer Pablo Olavide was sentenced to eight years detention in 1778 by the Spanish Inquisition for being a disciple of Rousseau and Voltaire. When the Italian Benedictine, Cesareo Pozzi, published a book urging reform in Madrid that same year, the Inquisition denounced him and forced him to flee. Intolerance, political conspiracy, cosmopolitanism. Opponents of Enlightenment complained as well of the other side's intolerance of disagreement. In his Lettres critiques; ou, Analyse et réfutation de divers crits mod- emes contre la religion (Critical Letters, or Analysis and Refutation of Diverse Modern Writings against R rion, 1755-1763), the abbé Gabriel Gauchat denounces the “fanaticism” and “intolerance” of the philosophes.Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguet sounds a similar theme in Fanatisme des philosophes (The Fanatism of the Philosophers, 1764). ‘The Bavarian conservative Karl von Eckartshausen's 1785 speech, “Literary Intolerance of Our Century” asserts that the pamphleteers of the Enlight- ‘enment “shout imperiously: Think as we think! Or else wwe will brand you as obscurantists.” Even Edward Gil bon complained that the philosophes of Paris indulged in “intolerant zeal” and preached “atheism with the bigotry of dogmiaties.” ‘The spread of freemasonry and its various offshoots, which coincided with and reinforced the intellectual impact of the Enlightenment, led some to link the ‘movement with political conspiracy. In 1785 the Bavar- ian government suppressed the clandestinely organized, Masonic-like group known as the Mluminati on the grounds that it had infiltrated the bureaucracy with the intent of overthrowing the regime. In a book published in 1786, the Weimar official Ernst August Anton von Géchhausen alleged that the Illuminati aimed to spread deism and cosmopolitanism in order to undermine all forms of authority. In various forms, the charge had been present in the earliest atiacks on freemasonry from the papal condemnation of 1738 onward. Thus was born the first version of the Masonic conspiracy, closely tied to Enlightenment values. Géchhausen’s work, Enthiillung des Systems der Welt- biirger Republik (Exposure of the Cosmopolitan System), drew attention to a quality of Enlightenment thought that proved especially controversial in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Because the Enlightenment gave prominence to French as a lingua franca and to French letters as a model, and because Enlightenment writers’ advocacy of toleration appeared to include rights for reli- ‘tious minorities and in particular for the Jews, certain forms of nationalism and most versions of anti-Sernitism explicitly rejected the Enlightenment as excessively cos- ‘mopolitan in outlook. The rise of Spinozism as the sine qua non of clandestine literature allowed the more virulent ofits foes to attack all Jews. Before the French Revolution, however, such links remained tenuous: many Enlighten- ment writers shared the common prejudices against the Jews, so such sentiments cannot be exclusively attached to the Counter-Enlightenment, Still, the anticosmopolitan streak had already become visible. Although personally friendly with Moses Mendelssohn, Hamann linked the Jews as a group with the supposedly anti-Christian, secu- Jar, materialist, and rationalist culture epitomized in the ‘modern Babylon of Berlin. Herder proved more moderate, reserving his venom for the French. Though he wondered why the Jews did not return to Palestine to form a true nation, he focused most of his exhortations to the Germans ENLIGHTENMENT STUDIES 421 oon their slavishness to French models; “Germans, speak German! Spew out the Seine's ugly stime.” ‘The Enlightenment in the Wake of the French Revolution, The French Revolution raised the stakes of all the preexisting arguments about the Enlightenment. Grected initially with enthusiasm by most adherents of the Enlightenment, the Revolution soon provoked in those same quarters concern, distaste, and eventually for many, repugnanceand rejection. Few Enlightenment writers had advocated democracy, and many had explicitly expressed their fear of lower-class brutishness. Yet as carly as the 1690s the opponents of materialism had seen in it a justification for democracy, a linkage that redounded against the Enlightenment when democracy seemed to degenerate into government by terror and then to a version of military dictatorship. For opponents of the Enlightenment, the violence and upheaval of the French Revolution constituted nothing less than the proof of their previous charges. By 1795, the opponents had turned the tables on the supporters of Enlightenment; they now set the terms of debate. None of the intellectual movements of the nineteenth century, romanticism included, did as mach to undermine the reputation of the Enlightenment as did the French Revolution. Conspiracy theories, which can be traced at least as far back as the anti-Masonic literature of the 1730s and, 1740s and Joly de Fleury’ official indictment of 1759, almost immediately took on a much more systematic, cast. Edimund Burke in his Reflections om the Revolution in France (1790) fulminated against “the literary cabal, which “some years ago formed something like a regular plan for the destruction of the Christian religion.” In his, prospectus ‘or a new periodical in spring 1790, Thomas, ‘Maurice Royon, Fréron's brother-in-law, blasted “tl and clever philosophy,” which had set up “a terrible conspiracy” against throne and altar Barruel, like Royon a collaborator on Fréron’s Année littéraire, provided the full-blown version of such conspir: rey theories in his Mémoires pour servir a Uhistoice du jacobinisme (Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobin- ism, 1797). In Barrue!’s view, the French Revolution was, the product of a plot berween the encyclopédistes, the freemasons, and the illuminés who combined to create the Jacobins. The Enlightenment figures responsible for this “anti-Christian conspiracy” were Voltaire, Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, Frederick I, and Diderot. They made of the Encyclopédie “an immense storehouse of all the ‘errors, all the sophisms, all the slanders, that...could have been invented against religion.” Barmuel had visited Burke in England, and Burke wrote to Barruel endorsing his version of “the plot you have so well described.” ‘The German Lutheran pastor Johann August Starck echoed some of the same charges in his Triumph der422 ENLIGHTENMENT STUDIES Philosophie im 18. Jahrhundert (Triumph of Philosophy in the Fighteenth Century, 1803), The Enlightenment's insistent propaganda against Christianity and monarel cal government had sapped all the established forms of authority, he claimed, and then agents of the Muminati had taught French masons in Paris to form secret revo lutionary committees, which became the Jacobin Clubs. Once installed in France, the Jacobins then spread their message through secret networks all across Europe. Even before the claboration of Starck’s views, German rulers hhad turned decisively against the Enlightenment with intensified censorship and edicts against secret societies, student associations, and even reading clubs, Constitutional monarchists and republicans. In one of the very first works that analyzed the Enlighten- ment as a literary and philosophical movement (Cours de littérature (Course on Ancient and Modern Literature), 1799-1805), Jean-Francois de La Harpe, a leading intel- lectual of the Directory period, differentiated between the “first-class encyelopédistes” such as Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, Montesquieu, Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, d'Alembert, and Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, and the “sophists,” that is, Frangois Vincent Toussaint Helvétius, Diderot, and Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger. La Harpe's denunciation of Helvétius echoed the clerical reac- tion of 1758:""The book On the Mind is the first in which all the foundations of morality were attacked.” Diderot infil- trated materialism into his works without daring to pro- nnounce it as a dogma, but all he wrote, insisted La Harpe, “tends to reduce everything to the action of the senses in order to crush that of the soul.” Even Jean-Jacques Rousseau was nothing fundamentally but “a very clever ccharlatan who knows his audience.” La Harpe's course, ‘often republished, remained influential into the 1820s. Sui, at the same moment across the Chatinel in Scotland, Dugald Stewart saw through the fog generated by the French Revolution and looked back to eighteenth-century Edinburgh as an age of unprecedented intellectual vitality Aithotigh Napoleon Bonaparte initially gave some sup- port to the idéologues (moderate republican followers of the Enlightenment of the late 1790s), by 1801 the tide ‘was running strong in the other direction, As the Jour nnal des débats remarked in 1802, “Just a few years ago, those who called themselves philosopltes...dominated despotically. ... Today this is no longer the case: amongst the disciples of these despots many guard their silence, others retract their beliefs.” In 1804 the Institut proposed ‘a competition for analytical studies of eighteenth-century French literature. In one of the most influential responses, Tableau de ta linérature francaise au dix-huitiome siecle (Presentation of French Literature during the Bigh- teenth Century, 1809), the Napoleonic official Amable- Guillaumne-Prosper Brugiere, baron de Barante, castigated the Encyclopédie as an incomplete, useless, partisan work. that should be condemned for its atheism and impi- ousness. Diderot, he intoned, “was a writer as fatal for literature as for morality.” Similar views were developed by Napoleon's minister of religion Jean-Etienne-Marie Portals in De Usage et de Vabus de Fesprit philosophigue durant le dis-huitieme sigcle (On the Use and Abuse of the Philosophic Spirit during the Eighteenth Century, written in 1807 but published in 1820). Portalis insisted that “al of ‘our problems have their principal and continuing source in. ..adelirious philosophy,” whoseadherents “come close to believing they can do without morals and religion.” Conservatives. Even if they did not endorse the more fanciful conspiracy theories, conservatives shared the conviction that the Enlightenment had paved the way for the French Revolution by undermining the morals and institutions of the Old Regime. In his Essai historique, politique t moral sures révolutions (Essay on Revolutions) of 1797, Frangois-René de Chateaubriand asked, "What was then the character of this sect?” He gave the stock answer: "Destructiveness. ..a rage against the institutions of their country." In an article published in 1799, Jacques Mallet du Pan linked Diderot direcily to all the horrors of the Revolution: “He would have proclaimed equality before Marat, the rights of man before Sievés, holy insurrection before Mirabeau, and the massacre of priests before Lafayette.” The German historian of philosophy Goitlieb Tennemann (1819) took inspiration from Barante land characterized the “age of the Encyclopedists” as one of “immorality, superficiality, and hedonism.” In his view, Diderot and d'Alembert were only camouflaged atheists who aimed to annihilate all religion. Friedrich Christoph Schlosser added the charge of cosmopolitanism to that of atheism in his Geschichte des 18. Jahrhunderts (History of the Eighteenth Century, 1823). ‘The archconservative Joseph de Maistre differed only extending such judgments to all of the Enlightenment. In 1821 he wrote that Voltaire was like “that insect ...which only bites into the root of the most precious plants, [women and young people)...; he imbibes them with the poisons that he transmits in this fashion from one generation {0 another.” In Maistre’s view, the French Revolution had revealed the true danger of Enlightenment thought and demonstrated the need to restore divine immutability to monarchical and papal authority, When the Bourbon monarchy was restored in France in 1815, the ultraroyalists proclaimed the views of Maistre and Barruel as official doctrine. Catholic "missionaries" organized the burning of Enlightenment books in public rituals of expiation for the sins of the Revolution. ‘Some conservatives tried to separate Rousseau from the rest of the Enlightenment. Barruel, for example, regretted Rousseau's affiliation with the encyclopédistesIn Les Helviermtes (The Helvetians) he lamented, “Oh Jean-Jacques! Oh Rousseau! You who detested so the enexclopédistes, the Raynals, the Toussaints, the Diderois, the Helvétiuses, how could you then declare yourself so many times for their philosophy?” Chateaubriand, while denouncing “the pure atheism" of Diderot and “the immorality’ of Voltaire, considered Rousseau and Montesquieu “ofa caliber superior to the encyclopediste He deplored the subversive effect of the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar” but otherwise admired “the immoral Emile.” Attempts to rehabilitate Rousseau for the anticEnlightenment party culminated in the abbé Martin Du Theil’sJ.J. Rowssean, apologiste de la religion chrétienne GJ. Rousseau, Apologist for the Christian Religion, 1828). Other conservatives rejected this effort, however. Maistre considered Rousseau “one of the most dangerous sophists of his century.” For him, Voltaire presented the greater tragedy for intellectual life: "the great crime of Voltaire is the abuse of talent and the premeditated prostitution of a genius created to celebrate God and virtue.” While Maistre referred to Voltaire more than twice as often as he did to Rousseau, he ltarally deigned to discuss Diderot, much less Helvétius Rejecting radical enlightenment. By the 1820s, then, almost everyone on the political spectrum had excised Diderot, Heivétius, and Paul-Henry Thiry dHolbach from the canon of the reputable Enlightenment, when they did not dismiss the movement altogether. OF the 2.2 million, volumes of Enlightenment writings reprinted in France between 1818 and 1824, Voltaire accounted for 72 percent, Rousseau for 22 percent, Diderot for only two percent, and Helvétius and dHolbach even less. When reviewing the Grimm-Diderot correspondence for publication in 1829, the Russian censor in charge declared, “the most shameless unbelief, disgusting blasphemy, materialism and enmity towards the monarchical form of government are the characteristic qualities of their works, which are displayed in this correspondence.” ‘Through most of the nineteenth century, constitutional ‘monarchists and even republicans either ignored the Enlightenment as a movement or tried to draw a line between good and bad encyclopédistes, much in the man- ner of La Harpe, who himself remained a Voltairean Benjamin Constant de Rebecque (1813), for example, conceded that “their movement was noble, their goal gen- erous,” but he denounced those, such as Rousseau and Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, who believed they could simply reject the past. The inevitable result was a cespotic repub- lic subject to “popular furies.” Germaine Necker de Staél perfectly captured the defensive tone of the period when she concluded (1817) that “the reproaches directed at the writers of the eighteenth century should be tumed against this society itself” The accusers had so gained the upper ENLIGHTENMENT STUDIES 423 hand that neither she nor Constant devoted more than a passing mention to the Enlightenment, which had deeply influenced their vision of the world. Even in France, consequently, the Enlightenment attracted little sustained scholarly attention before the 1880s. In his Cours dhistoire de la philosophic moderne (Course on the History of Philosophy, 1829), the influential Sorbonne professor Victor Cousin rejected “the extrava- gances of Helvétius and d'Holbach” even while praising Diderot and the Encyclopédie as best representing the French eighteenth century “with all of its grandeur and boldness, and also with al of its excesses.” Cousin focused on the defects of sensationalism as metaphysical doctrine, but he did try to hold to a tenuous and politically suspect, (onder the Restoration) middle ground beuseen the "blind partisans” and the “blind adversaries” of the Enlighten- ment, Francois-Pierre-Guillaume Guizot and the leading intellectuals of the Oriéanist monarchy (1830-1848) chas- tised the eneyclopédistes for their “frivolity” and excessive love of wit; they preferred the practical approach of the Physiocrats and rejected any hint of materialisin. Even the French socialists rejected the atheism and material ism attributed to the Enlightenment. Charles Fourier and Claude-Henti de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon echoed the negative judgments of conservatives like Maistre and Louis de Bonald. Saint-Simon wrote, for example, “It is chiefly to the vicious direction followed by the ency- clopédisies in their works that one should attribute the insurrection that broke out in 1789, as well a the bloody character the Revolution assumed from its beginning.” As late as 1874 (La littérature franpaise [History of French Literature] by Paul Albert), literary historians were still railing against the immorality, obscenity, atheism, and materialism of Diderot and dHolbach. Romanticism and nationatism, Romanticism had a reinforcing effect on this neglect of the Enlightenment in historical studies, even though many of the quali ties considered defining of romanticism—emphasis on emotion over reason, the cult of the Middle Ages, the interest in folklore and the Gothic—can be traced back to the Enlightenment itselE. Once romanticism had taken, shape as a movernent in the nineteenth century, its pro- ponents tended to exaggerate their distance from the “arid” Enlightenment. In Die Christenheit oder Europa (Christianity or Europe, 1799), the influential German, romantic poet Novalis (pseudonym of Friedrich Leopold von Hardenberg) argued for a restoration of medieval ide- als of Christian love, mystical faith, and perpetual peace as a counterweight to the materialism and atheism of the French Enlightenment and Revolution. The Germans, alone, he insisted, could fulfill this promise. ‘The Schlegel brothers contrasted the radiance of the Romantic to the constricting confines of the merely424 ENLIGHTENMENT STUDIES modern writers such as Alexander Pope, Voltaire, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. In Great Britain, Samuel Tay- lor Coleridge, Robert Southey, and William Wordsworth all turned away from their youthful enthusiasm for the French Revolution and joined Thomas Carlyle in rejecting the French philosophy that had produced the cataclysm—what Carlyle termed “that volcano-crater, world-famous, world-appalling, world-maddening’—of the French Revolution. The French philosophes, Car- Iyle claimed in an essay on Diderot, had provided “the subterranean fire’ for the eruption. Only British liberty could withstand the tyranny of French abstractions, Of Diderot, Carlyle rather predictably complained that he was a “proselytising Atheist.” “a Polemic of decided character in the Mechanical Age,” and even more pejoratively, "he is ‘unclean, scandalous, shameless, sansculottic-samozidic.” Although some early-nineteenth-century nationalists, such as the Greeks Pheraios Rhigas and Adamantios Korais, incorporated Enlightenment ideals into their sec- ular and revolutionary versions of nationalism, the spread of ethnic nationalism in the nineteenth century eventually hhad the same effect of muting interest in Enlightenment, at least its French version. Leopold von Ranke, perhaps the greatest historian of the nineteenth century, consid- fered the Enlightenment only in so far as it influenced the Prussian state-building policies of Frederick the Great. Yet Ranke showed more sympathy for the French philosophes than most of his German colleagues of the nineteenth century, Heinrich von Sybel and Heinrich von Treitschke ‘wrote in almost entirely negative terms about the French Revolution and even about most things French, In his Geschichte der Revolutionszeit 1789-95 (History of the Revolutionary Era from 1789 to 1795, 1865-1879), Sybel devoted less than a paragraph to the influence of the Enlightenment, though he did admit that it had been necessary in order “to tear Europe away from the most terrible barbarism.” The negative side of these doctrines, he insisted, was their rejection ofall authority. Despite their concerns about materialism, those French historians, like Guizot, who wanted to rehabilitate aspects of the French Revolution also a:tempted to redeem some clements of the Enlightenment. In his multivolume his- tory of France, Guizot devoted many pages to recounting the lives of Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, Buffon, and Rousseau. often with considerable sympathy. Ihe disliked the Enlightenment’ “doubt, egotism, (and) materialism,” “the weakness of its morals,” and “the frivolity of its forms,” he nonetheless applauded its faith in humanity, in the truth, and in the Fight of society to perfect itself. Michelet described in entirely positive terms the "wrans- formation of minds” produced by the Enlightenment, and integrated the struggles of Voltaire and Rousseau into his, history of eighteenth-century France. Between 1750 and 1760, he wrote, the Encyclopédie, Voltaire, Diderot, are the Physiocrats “cleared out a world of out-dated notions and embarked on the right road of thought and activity. The Enlightenment continued to be much more prob- lematic, however, for those who fundamentally disliked the Revolution. Alexis de Tocqueville's L’Ancient Régime er la Révolution (The Old Regime and the Revolution) elab- rated many of the arguments about the Enlightenment first put forward by Burke in 1790, His contempt for “these writers” was palpable. He recognized the impact of "the spirit of Voltaire.” but he certainly did not like i, Once he teased a correspondent by suggesting that if he had come to visit him, “you might have rehabilitated Voltaire and the eighteenth century in my mind." ‘Mt least the French and Germans acknowledged that there had been an Enlightenment. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel concluded his lectures on the philosophy of history with a consideration of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, arguing that the French Revolution put the Enlightenment's principle of freedom into practice ‘but ultimately failed to achieve its goal. In the beginning, in 1789, the effort represented “a glorious mental dawn”; “a spiritual enthusiasm thrilled through the world.” In the end, however, according to Hegel, the French could not accomplish the needed revolution in spirit because ‘of Catholicism; “with the Catholic Religion no rational constitution is possible,” since the state and religion are slways in tension with each other. The French gained conly “formal” freedom based on abstract philosophical principles, not the real freedom afforded by emancipation of the conscience (through the Protestant Reformation), which then subjects itself voluntarily to the laws of the state. Like many who followed him in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Hegel domesticated the Enlighten- ment by putting it into 2 national and nationalist context; the principles of freedom and reason were European, he ranted, but the attempt to give them practical effect was specifically French. Disappearance of the Enlightenment. In many places in the nineteenth century, the Enlightenment simply disappeared from the intellectual landscape. In the Nether- lands, for example, nineteenth-century historians empha- sized the contribution of the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to an endu ing Dutch national character. The Enlightenment played no significant role in their accounts and was moreover associated with the decline of the country as a world power in the eighteenth century. The works of Baruch de Spinoza suffered the same fate as those of Diderot, dHolbach, and Helvétius in France; Spinora’s writings were either banned or ignored as irrelevant to Dutch intellectual life. Nineteenth-century Dutch debates on positivism, idealism, and socialism drew almost entirelyfrom contemporary German sources and never from a reexamination of the Spinozist brand of radical Dutch Enlightenment that had been so important to the foun- dation of the Enlightenment as a general European intel- Jectual movement. This neglect was not overcome in the Netherlands until the 1970s, when the secularization of Dutch society and the waning, of traditional national- ism opened the door to an international historiography that once again emphasized the contributions of Spinoza, Balthasar Bekker, and other radical Cartesians. ‘The result was the same in Spain but for different rea- sons. Whereas local control of publishing had allowed the Duich Republic to become a center for the publication and dissemination of works forbidden elsewhere, the Spanish government rivaled the Inquisition in its efforts to control publication. In the 1770s and 1780s, reforming ministers had occasionally tried to encourage new ideas and even allowed the publication, doctored to remove the more offending passages, of Raynal’s Histoire philosophigue et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes (Philosophical and Political History of the Settlemenis and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies), Everything changed in 1789, as, censorship of ideas coming from France assumed almost ‘maniacal proportions. Books with Francia in the title could not be published, positive references to France led to prohibition, as did any attempt to recount the Amer- ican War for Independence. The censors even removed passages about the ancient Greeks if they seemed to call royal authority into question. During the nineteenth century, Spanish conservatives charged suspected Voltaireans not only with atheism but also with the insidious promotion of French hegemony, charge made all the more resonant by the Napoleonic occupation between 1808 and 1813. In response, liberals and moderates insisted on the originality of the Span- ish version of the Enlightenment. During the Franco era, Enlightenment was still explicitly linked in govern- ment propaganda with free thought, freemasonry, and cosmopolitanism, Interest in the Spanish Enlightenment revived in the 1950s with the publication of works in French and English and expanded even further in the 1970s after the death of Franco and the liberalization of the regime, ‘Mass Politics and the Revival of Enlightenment Studies. The revival of republicanism in France after 1870 gave the Enlightenment a new lease on life but also new kinds of problems. French republicans wanted to mobilize the Enlightenment heritage as an intellectual foundation for the regime and therefore vigorously promoted its study, By 1910, the republican rehabilitation had been so successful that the deputy Joseph Fabre could publish a book with the title, Les péres de la Revolution de Bayle & ENLIGHTENMENT STUDIES — 425 Condorcet (The Fathers of the Revolution: From Bayle to Condorcet). The rise of socialism, however, created new claims on the legacy, especially the materialist strand, and even more determined opponents. As the French Revolution of 1789 receded into the background, the red scare took its place as the béte noire of the conservatives. Even ay conservatives raged against the cosmopolitanisin and anticlericalism republicans had inherited from the Enlightenment, some socialists and communists began to distance themselves from the “bourgeois ideology” they saw lurking in Enlightenment values. In 1871, as the Third Republic was being estab- lished, Léo-Michel Gambetta explained that republicans intended “to derive the political and social system from the idea of reason rather than that of grace.” Gambetta thas announced an Enlightenment program that was also implicitly anticlerical. The republican program had been favored by subtle changes occurring in the teaching of literature, Already by the 1850s literature textbooks in French Iyeées (for example, Morceaux choises des clas. sigues frangais, & Uusage des classes superieures [Extracts of French Classics), edited by Léon and Gaston Feugere first published 1852) devoted as much as a third of their selections to the eighteenth century with the Iion’s share of those going to Voltaire, albeit a Voltaire stripped of his, more irreverent passages. In their journal for 1863, the brothers Edmond-Louis-Antoine and Jules-Alfred Huot de Goncourt told of rereading Diderot, whom they called a genius. “Tremendous objection against the justice of pos terity,” they pronounced, for Diderot was nothing less than the Homer of “modern thought.” After the establishment of the Third Republic on firm footingin 1877 and the pas- sage of the Ferry educational laws in the 1880s, Voltaire in particular soared in pedagogical estimation. In 1884, for example, Voltaire for the Schools brought his works to the primary-school system, and readers for the Iyeées, now included selections from Candide for the first time. Emest Lavisse's history reader of 1884 presented Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau as intellectual martyrs and republican precursors. For republicans, the Enlighten- ‘ment had to be studied as a crucial step on the road to secularization, tolerance, and democracy. ‘The positivism derived from Auguste Comte deeply influenced the new republican order and reinforced the positive reevaluation of the Enlightenment, even though Comte had absorbed his mentor Saint-Simon's view of the Enlightenment as a destructive force. However, Comte cast this destructiveness as an essential step toward his own “positive system.” He therefore criticized Voltaire and Rousseau for being “incomplete demolishers” and claimed to be @ descendant of the “school” of Diderot, David Hume, and Condorcet, all three of whom, he insisted, had achieved emancipation in both religion and polities. Under426 ENLIGHTENMENT STUDIES the Third Republic, positivists organized the eelebration of the centenary of Diderot’s death in 1884, In 1912 the French government organized an official commemoration of the bicentennial of Rousseau’ birth (it could not bring, itself to do the same for Diderot the next year, however) With the rise of literature as a discipline within the univer sity system, the Enlightenment slso found an important place in literary histories, such as those of Emile Faguet and Gustave Lanson. French positivsts had an easier row to hoe when they chose to celebrate Diderot than did their counterparts in Britain, There, in 1859, the Full meaning of the materialism inherited from the Enlightenment hit liberals as well as conservatives like a bomb. It was delivered by Charles Darwin's Origin of Species. Darwin hid his metaphysics beneath lengthy descriptions of pigeons and finches, but it was there for any educated person to ascertain. The ensuing controversy about the status of humankind and its imagined descent from the primate population threw Anglicanism inte a state of nearly permanent crisis. Ithad. been long in coming. As early as the 1820s conservative Anglicans in Cambridge, the birthplace of Newtonian science, had attacked all natural philosophy, exempting, oly mathematics, because of itsrole in fostering the reign of reason associated now with the dreams of Condorcet and Jeremy Bentham. The target pure and simple was the Enlightenment, beginning with John Locke. Had they but foreseen the horrors that lurked in the mind of the scon to appear young undergraduate Charles Darwin, He had inherited the materialism of his paternal grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, « physician and latter-day hilosophe who traveled in the epicenter of enlightened circles in England, From his mother Darwin had learned the rational religiosity associated with Unitarianism, the enlightened form of British Protestantism. Darwinianism made concrete the dangers that lurked within the most radical of the Enlightenment’s many heresies. Materialism was essential to evolutionary theory. Darwin's effect was greatest in the English-speaking world, where for a century cleries had delighted in using the otder and regularity of nature to “prove” God's existence and benevolence. On both sides of the Atlantic, Darwinianism became a battle ery and the universities became war zones. Founded by Ezra Cornell in 1865, Comell University was intended to be # mecca for secularism and it refused to allow the teaching of religion. This stood in contrast to the religious affiliation of almost every American college and university ofthe dy. Cornell's first president, Andrew Dickson White, avidly collected enlightened writers from the eighteenth century nd wrote about the permanent state of warfare that he believed to exist between science and theology. In a rural wilderness bounded by lakes and deep gorges, he became the Enlightenment redux, Back in Britain, Leslie Stephen, a follower of John Stuart Mill and Darwin (and father of Virginia Woolf), celebrated the Humean, freethinking tradition in his magisterial History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876). In a later work, Stephen tied to work out the ethical implications of evolutionary thinking, a project clearly shaped by his feeling of kinship with te Enlightenment. ‘Anarchists and socialists also looked back to the Enlight- ‘enment with renewed interest, but unlike republicans they ‘embraced the previously reviled materialist strand in the Enlightenment. Karl Marx pronounced that “French mate- rialism flows directly into socialism and commmumisnr,” and though he did not comment much on the Enlightenment, Diderot’s Le nevew de Ranteau (Rameau's Nephew) was cone of his favorite books (as it had been of Hegel). Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin read Condillac, d'Holbach, La Mettrie, Helvétius, and Diderot during his Siberian exile, ‘The Spanish anarchists of Revista blanca (1898-1905) established a long materialist genealogy for their polit- feal agenda, but they still cited Voltaire and Rousseau most often among Enlightenment writers. For them, Voltaire was the hero of opposition to the Inquisition, and Rousseau the ancestor of socialism and democracy. By the end of the nineteenth century, many social- ists and communists believed that they had superseded their Enlightenment precursors. Friedrich Engels warned against “vulgat” materialism, derived from the materialists of the eighteenth century whe had an “obsolete outlook fon nature” (Dialektik der Natur [Dialectics of Nature}, first published 1925), He also laid down an enduring line of, Marxist historical interpretation when he insisted that ‘this kingdom of reason was nothing more than the ide- alised kingdom of the bourgeoisie.” The values of rights of man, equality, and the social contract could only lead to “a democratic bourgeois republic.” not true prole- tarian revolution (Entwicklung des Soziatismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft (Socialism: Utopian and Scien: tific], 1880). “The French materialists,” Engels concluded, “ere the true philosophers of the bourgeoisie” (Letter to C. Schmidt, 1890). Lenin continued the same line of inter- pretation, He endorsed Engels's call for the translation of “the militant atheist literature of the late eighteenth cen- tury” and its distribution to the masses, even if there was “nuch that is unscientific and naive” in those writings. Conservatives now had even more reason to worry. The ‘most influential late-nineteenth-century literary critic and historian, Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine, still ried to maintain a distinction between a good and bad Enlightenment, but now atheism and materialism were cast as the foundations for socialism. “Installed in narrow brains,” Taine asserted, Enlightenment principles tumed into “a cold or furious monomania,” which “unfetters insurrection and justifiesdictation; all to end in a social antagonism, resembling now a baechanalian orgy of madmen, and now a Spartan, conventual group.” Even more categorically, Augustin Cochin denounced the “fanaticism” and “nihilism” of “philosophisnee” (1911), and historian Gustave Gautherot devoted an entire book on the French Revolution to the thesis that Christian civilization depended on the defeat of “encyclopédisme” and “philosophismee” (1911). As the more vociferous conservatives moved toward anti-Semitism and ullranationalism, they developed a more virulent version of Barruel's conspiracy theory of the 1790s and continued to attack the Enlightenment. Charles Maurras, leader of the royalist Action Francais argued that France had been run by intellectuals since the ‘nlightenment and that four groups—Jews, Protestants, Freemasons, and foreigners—now controlled the French republic. In 1912 he fulminated against the idea of commemorating the birth of Rousseau, whom he termed a “madman,” "woe [foreigner),” and apostle of political, social, and religious anarchy. The idea of commemorating Diderot prompted the Revue catholique et royaliste to denounce him as an “immoral, bestial anarchist.” When the idea of an official celebration fizzled, Maurras exulted, “we are nauseated by the Encyclopedic spirit.” For and against Modernity in the Twentieth Century. ‘The rise of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s transformed the debates that had been perpetuated since the eigh- teenth century. Although the Italian fascists and German Nazis denounced the Enlightenment in terms derived from Maurras and developed their own fierce attach- ment to conspiracy theories about Masons, Jews, and Bolsheviks, they did not aliga their views with those of devout Catholicism (as did, for example, Franco in Spain). Unlike the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics of the Enlightenment, they did not advocate a return to traditional religious teachings. To counter fascist ideol ogy, antifascists in western Europe explicitly drew on the Enlightenment as the common Western foundation of freedom and democracy. For example, Piero Gobet young Italian antifascist later murdered by Mussolini's henchmen, propounded iluminismo (Enlightenment) a5 1 form of principled opposition to fascism. The term itself ‘came into use in Italian only in the early twentieth cen- tury and soon became closely associated with antifascist politics. In reaction to the rise of fascism, many Jewish intellectuals emigrated to the United States during the 1930s and helped rekindle interest in the Enlightenment there. In the struggle over fascism, as a consequence, the Enlightenment became a kind of ideological touchstone of liberal, humanist, secular values. The rise of fascism had little impact, however, on scholars in communist coun tries who continued to focus on Diderot as the precursor to dialectical materialism and scientific sociatisin while ENLIGHTENMENT STUDIES 427 rejecting the broader Enlightenment as “bourgeois.” With the decline of Marxism as an ideological force culminat- {ng in the breakup of the Soviet Union, poststructuralists, post-nodernists, feminists, and other crities of Western ‘modernity took up the charge against the Enlightenment from new positions. These critiques had the ultimate effect, paradoxically, of revivifying interest in the Enlight enment because they took as their point of departure the centrality of the Enlightenment to modernity. French fascism developed the most explicit repudiation of the Enlightenment. The Action Frangaise in France defined itself primarily by its opposition to the Enlighten: ment and the French Revolution. A pamphlet published by its central office in 1914 attacked the French repub- lic for glorifying the Revolution and Rousseau, which constituted nothing Jess, the pamphlet claimed, than “an incitement to all the crimes against society and the father. land.” Because of its abhorrence of Marxist and especially Bolshevik communism, French fascists, and after them, alian fascists and German Nazis, repuciiated material- ism, which they traced to the Enlightenment and linked subsequently to the internationalist, humanitarian, paci- fist ideals of democracy. Fascists wanted to replace the “mechanistic” explanation of the world with an “organic” ‘one that favored history, folk, race, and! nation over ratio- nalism and individualism. Even though Maurras himself initially denounced Ger- man National Socialism as the “Islam of the North,” he embraced the Vichy regime of Philippe Pétain as the best expression of his ideals. Pétain’s regime included many of Maurras’ followers, and Maurras soon endorsed, all the regime’s anti-Semitic measures. In this way, the attack on the Enlightenment became associated with a defense of the worst aspects of anti-Semitism, Bernard Fay, director of the Bibliotheque Nationale and author of La franc-maconneri et la révolution intellectuelle dea XVIE Siecle (Freemasonry and the Intellectual Revolution of the Eighteenth Century, 1935), a restatement of the Masonic conspiracy thesis, ran Pétain’s special service to eli Masonry. In 1946 he was sentenced to life impriso for his role in the collaboration with the Nazi occupation. Fascists outside of France demonized the French Rewo- lution and devoted much less attention to the Enlight enment, The Nazi propagandist Alfred Rosenberg, for example, included only 2 few lines on the Enlighten ment in Der Myihus des 20, Jahrhunderts (The Myth of the Twentieth Century, 1930), For him Rousseati and Voltaire “lacked genuine nobility of mind” because their “intellectualism was abstract and divorced from life” in comparison with “true and full-blooded” revolution of the French Huguenots of the sixteenth century. Rosen- berg reserved his real venom, however, for the “swarthy Jacobin rabble,” who dragged to the scaffold “anyone who428 ENLIGHTENMENT STUDIES ‘was slender and blond.” Similarly, in 1936 the German Theodor Deimel published a doctoral dissertation in phi- Iosophy, “Carlyle and National Socialism,” in which he argued that Carlyle’s repudiation of materialism and cel- bration of the hero in history had paved the way for German National Socialism, He enlisted Cariyle as the eru= cial predecessor in opposing the rights of man and every other principle associated with the French Revolution. Antifascism. Akhough Italian fascists and Nazis said relatively little about the Enlightenment, antifascists immediately seized on the movement as the key ¢o their oppositional stance. Ernst Cassirer published what is still regarded as the single most influential analysis of the Enlightenment in 1932, Die Philosophie der Aujklarung (The Philosophy of the Enlightenment), and lefi Germany for exile soon afterward. He had been elected the first Jew- ish rector of a German university in 1929 and defended the values of the Weimar Republic. Although he never wrote at length about his political views, in the preface to his ‘book he insisted, “we must take courage and measure our powers against those of the age of the Enlightenment The age which vencrated reason and science as man’s highest faculty cannot and must not be lost even for us.” Cassirer’s account emphasized the philosophical coher- ence and international unity of the Enlightenment. Its chapters on science, psychology and epistemology, reli- tron, history, law and social contract, and aestheties (in that order) all unfold in a similar sequence: classical Cartesianism is threatened first by new English discov- cries (Newton and Locke), which are then explored in their social dimensions by the French, and finally resolved by the Germans in a philosophical and aesthetic vein (Kant and Lessing). Even though Cassiter never discusses Immanuel Kant’s work in any systematic fashion in this book, the Kinigsberg professor haunts both its overall intellectual structure and virwally every chapter. Cas- sirer describes Kant’s philosophy as an “edifice which overshadows the Enlightenment even while It represents its final glorification.” Despite justifiable criticisms that Cassirer left politics and much of social and economic criticism out of his rendition, he did succeed in restoring the Enlightenment's reputation for philosophical serious- ness and in drawing attention to the intellectual virtues of cosmopolitanism, As one anonymous Berlin critic noted in the Vossische Zeitung of 13 March 1933, in the same issue that announced the appointment of Joseph Goebbels, 1s minister for the enlightenment of the people, Cassirer's book offers “a quiet apology for the Enlightenment and in this fashion provides the greatest service to the present.” Tn France and Tialy, too, antifascists turned to the Enlightenment to ground their positions. Before his death in 1944, Paul Hazard completed the second volume of his studies on the Enlightenment, La pensée européenne (European Thought from Montesquieu to Lessing, 1946). In 1935 he had published La crise de la conscience européenne, 1680-1715 (The Crisis of the European Con- science, 1680-1715), which pushed the origins of the Enlightenment back into the 1680s, In both books, as the titles themselves indicate, Hazard emphsizes the Euro- pean and cosmopolitan nature of the Enlightenment. As 2 reviewer in Les langues moderns exclaimed just after the publication of La crise, the book was “a veritable monument of integral huwmanism” and marked an impor- tant moment in the history of European thought an civilization, Hazard was also one of the founders of the Revue de littérature comparée. Although he wrote on a ‘wide range of literary topies from Petrarch to Alessandro Manzoni, his works on the Enlightenment took pride of place during the dark days of the rise of fascism and the occupation of France. Born not far fom the no:themn border, already as a boy Hazard knew Flemish as well 2s French, Soon he mastered Italian, English, and German, Although the succession of section titles in Hazard’s 1946 book—"Christianity on Trial,” “The City of Men,” and *Disaggregation’—indicate that his narrative did not eul- minate in happy sesclution ofall philosophical problems, nis account was basically celebratory; eighteenth-century hought was characterized by “an effervescence and a dif- fusion of ideas so remarkable in its nature, so far-reachi in fts extent as tobe without parallel in history.” Surveying the wars, revolutions, and catastrophes that followed the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, Hazard nev- ertheless concluded that “Europe indeed must have some indestructible vital principle,” which he identified with the eighteenth-century’s restless quest For truth ‘A student of Hazard while in exile in Paris, the Ital ian antifascist Franco Venturi wrote early on Diderot and the French Enlightenment. Escaping the German advance on Paris, Venturi spent time in Franco's prisons in Spain before joining the Italian resistance in Turin in 1943, After dhtee years as cultural attaché in the Italian embassy in Moscow in the late 1940s, where he completed research for a book on Russian populism, he returned to Italy and began a systematic program of research on the Italian Enlightenment. Ventur’s aim was to recover the importance of Italian reformers, such as Lodovico Anto- rio Muratori, Ferdinando Galiani, the brothers Pietro and Alessandro Verri, and Cesare Beccaria, to the European Enlightenment and to the Italian democratic tradition, Afier publishing a series of studies of Italian Enlight fenment writers, Venturi turned to a more general and cosmopolitan multivolume analysis of the influence of eighteenth-century reform and revolutionary movements from Russia to North America as seen through the eyes of Italian journalists and pamphleteers. Throughout his long career (he died in 1994), Venturi tirelessly expoundedEnlightenment values. As he said in an interview in 1992, “Man must construct society from his own reason; he ‘must construct his life Irom his own reason, from his own knowledge and from science. Certainly he must not fail recognize that it is difficult and sometimes dangerous, as \we well know; but the consciousness of the risks rmust not stop us.” ‘The strands of analysis developed by Cassirer, Hazard, and Venturi all came together in the work of another refugee from fascism, Peter Gay. Only sixteen at the out- break of Would War It and educated entirely in the United States, Gay nonetheless shared much with his antifa cist predecessors, including an ambition for synthes which culminated in his two-volume work, The Enligh- enmert: Am Interpretation (1966, 1968). Like Cassirer, Gay aimed to restore the Enlightenment’s reputation for intellectual seriousness. Like Hazard, he underlined the cosmopolitanism of what he called the "party of human- ity." Like Venturi, he insisted that the flock of philosophes devoted considerable energy to practical political and social reforms. And like all three of them, Gay wrote pro= lifcally on many other subjects as well, inchuding in his case Sigmund Freud, Weimer culture, and Victorianism. More explicitly even than his predecessors, Gay empha- sized the association between Enlightenment ancl moder nity. Although the subtitle of his second volume is "The Science of Freedom,” all ten chapters of actual analysis in that volume appear under the rubric of hook three, “The Pursuit of Modernity.” What did the philosophes contribute to the project of modernity? "They undertook to devise forms —a social, ethical, political, and aesthetic program—for the sake of freedom.” Gay did not offer a fundamentally new interpretation of the Enlightenment in these pages; rather he made accessible and system- atic a vision of the Enlightenment as the foundation for modem secular values. In so doing, he endorscd the philosophes’ own version of historical progression. Echo- ing e’Alembert’s preface to the Encyclopédie, Gay insisted that the eighteenth century was “a century of decline in mysticism, of growing hope for life and trust in effort, of commitment to inquiry and criticism, of interest in social reform, of increasing secularism, aad a growing willingness to take risks.” Postmodernism and feminism. Even as this antifascist celebration of the Enlightenment took shape, new strains of criticism of the Enlightenment were also emerging ‘The American historian Carl L. Becker sounded the first new note in The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932) when he denied the “essentially mod- cern? temper of the philosophes. In his view, they were “less emancipated from the preconceptions of medieval Christian thought than they quite realized orwe have com- monly supposed.” Writing with the prospect ofthe spread ENLIGHTENMENT STUDIES 429 ‘of communism very much in mind, Becker traced the revolutionary “faith” of the Bolsheviks back to the French, Revolution and the utopia of reason bequeathed to them by the Enlightenment, The philosophes'faith in humanity fueled a religious crusade whose long-term consequences only became apparent with the Russian Revolution of 1917. Two German-Tewish émigrés to the United States took this criticism into a different but related chan: nel; where Becker had worried about the connection between Enlightenment utopianism and communism, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno drew the link instead to fascism. In a text composed in Los Angeles in 1944, Dialectic of Enlightenment, they argued that Enlight cenment itself had become a kind of myth, “Enlightenment is totalitarian,” they insisted, because the reason of the Enlightenment had become an instrument of domine: tion devoted to the mastery not only of nature but also of ‘humans themselves. Echoing Martin Heidegger's assertion that “reason, glorified for centuries, is the most stiff necked adversary of thought,” Horkheimer and Adorno ‘considered the siarquis de Sade’s Juliite a metaphor for “the history oF thought as an organ of domination.” By ‘encouraging mechanization and the spread of the admin- istrative stale, the Enlightenment had itself germinated fascist barbarism. Thus, although writing with different wajectories in mind, together Becker and Horkheimer and Adorno essentially drafted the new bill of indictment against the Enlightenment: its conception of reason pointed not toward liberation and progress but toward more insidious forms of totalitarian control, Post-modernist and feminist critics simply elaborated on this fundamental charge. In the 1960s and 1970s, the French philosopher Michel Eou- cault published an in‘luential series of works that might be read as a further development of the Horkheimer and Adorno critique. He portrayed Fnlightenment-era human: itarian reforms of mental asylums and criminal justice, for instance, as, above all, more effective forms of social con- trol. The application of reason led not to freedom but tothe carceral society. Even the autonomy of the individual self was nothing more than the product of new technologies of power invented in the eighteenth century Most crucially, Foucault reversed the usual Enlighten- ment understanding of knowledge; rather than knowledge conferring power and hence freedom, “we should rather admit that power produces knowledge... the subject who knows, the objects to be known and the modalities of knowledge must be regarded as so many effects of these fundamental implications of power-knowledge.” Moder- nity became associated in his analysis with the negative effects of “medicalization,” “normalization,” and social discipline, not the emancipation of human potential430 ENLIGHTENMENT STUDIES ‘Yet throughout his life, from his review of the French translation of Cassirer in 1966 to his preoccupation with Kant in his last years, Foucault remained deeply engaged with the Enlightenment. As he said in his 1966 review, we are all in some sense neo-Kantians. Foucault thus avoided the caricatured representation of the Enlightenment that could be found in some of the works of postmodernists, Feminist critics also adopled the Horkheimer and Adorno line of analysis, sometimes quite self-consciously. ‘The literary critic Naomi Schor, for example, claimed in 1995 that “following Max Horkheimer and Theodor ‘Adorno, the Enlightenment Jeads to Auschwitz; after ‘Auschwitz, the Enlightenment is a bankrupt, discred- ited, blighted dialectic.” Although few scholars would endorse such a blanket condemnation, fen ies of specific Enlightenment figures, such as Rousseau or Kant, or of particular social forms, such as Masonic lodges and musées, have often found the Enlightenment wanting. Jean Bethke Elshtain, for example, criticized Rousseau's failure "to experience empathic identification when women were denied the dignity that is attendant ‘upon publie participation and speech.” Because Enlighten- ment writers such as Montesquieu and Rousseau worried about the corrupting influence of women on public life, Joan Landes argued, the eighteenth century actually wit- nessed a reinforcement of public-private oppositions “in ‘ways that foreclosed women’s earlier independence in the street, in the marketplace, and, for elite women, in the public spaces of the court and aristocratic household’ Even eighteenth-century feminists, such as Mary Woll- stonecraft, came in for eriticism; more than one feminist scholar insisted that Wollstonecraft’s search for a neutral voice of rationality led her defensively to deny female sexuality, If Enlightenment writers could be faulted for their inability co support feminist ideals, they could also be taken to task for their incipient racism. The Enlighten- ment’s emphasis on tolerance did not necessarily extend to racial difference, even though the notion of race itself ‘was still far from fixed. Hume's pronouncements on the natural superiority of whites and the Encyelopédie's refer ence to the ugliness of Negroes are embarrassing to most contemporary reader Centrality of the Enlightenment, For all their venom, however, the twentieth-century assaults upon the Enlight- enment ended up confirming its centrality to Western naivatives of modernity. As Foucault said in 1983 to an audience at one of his last lectures, “modern philosophy is the philosophy that is attempting to answer the ques- tion raised so imprudently two centuries ago: What is Enlightenment?” Even as scholars of the Enlightenment tended to focus on their individual studies of specific ist stad thinkers, social groups and institutions, or countries, the critics assumed the coherence and pan-European unity of the Enlightenment as a movement. After Gay's synthetic, reconstruction of the 1960s, only the debunkers of Enlight- enment offered global reassessments, Defenders tended to criticize the critics for their lack of historical under. standing rather than attempting to offer their own new synthetic views. In part, this state of affairs merely reflects the grow- ing fragmentation and specialization of knowledge; in a scholarly environment in which specialized journals are devoted to Rousseau, Diderot, Montesquieu, Lessing, and Samuel Johnson, how can any one scholar hope to master, the Enlightenment? Scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s tended to emphasize the disunities of the E or even its relative unimportance. John Pocock argued that schola:s should speak only of “enlightenments,” not “The Enlightenment.” Robert Darnton showed that Grub, Street authors, rather than the philosophes, dorninated much of the trade in forbidden books, and Roger Chartier argued that the French Revolution “invented” the Enlight- cenment “by attempting to root its legitimacy in a corpus of texts and founding authors.” Perhaps the appearance of this new Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment will herald a new era of endeavors to reassess the significance of one of history's defining moments [See also Cassirer, Ernst; Feminist Theory; Foucault Michel; Frankfurt School; French Revolution: Gay, Peter: Hazard, Paul; Koselleck, Reinhart; Philosophes; Post- Structuralism and Post-Modernism:; and Romanticism] htenment Breviocrarny Baker, Keith Michael, and Peter Hanns Reill, eds, Whar Left of Eulightenmnont? A Postmodern Question. Stanford, Calif, 2001 Includes an especially luminasing essay on Cassirer by Tohnson Kent Wright Bled, Stephen, eiventiong Vetere Te Politics ef Commemoration Ninetovth-Centtay Frote. Oxiord, 2000. Denby, David. "Crise des Lumires, crise de la modemive?” Die hutone Sidele 30 (1998), 257-270. MeMahon, Darrin M. Enemies of the Bnllyhienment: The Prevclt Counter Enlightenment and the Making of Modemsity. Osford and New Yotk, 2001. One of the fit studies to examine the early enemies of the Ealightonment in depth Ricuperat, Gluseppe. "Paul Hazardela storografa del Muay Rivietasoren salina 86 (1979), 372-404 ‘icuperati, Giuseppe. “The Bistoriographical Legacy of Franco Ven tori (1914-1998)." Journal of Modems Halian Studies 2 (1997), 97-88, Sarai, Jean, Espagne lave de a seconde moité du XVII stele. Paris, 1954, inaugurated medera studies ofthe Enlightenment in Spain ‘Schaneler Jean-Piene, Les uerprétasions de Condorcet: Syboles et ‘anceps, 1794-1894. Oxford, 2000, Lywn HON, WITH MARGARET Jacou