Merlo ROTO SM 600°(R45.19 - R45.

21) Service Manual, Mechanic Manual, Hydraulic & Elec

Merlo ROTO SM 600°(R45.19 - R45.21)

Service Manual, Mechanic Manual,
Hydraulic & Electrical Diagram DE
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**Merlo ROTO SM 600°(R45.19 - R45.21) Service Manual, Mechanic Manual,

Hydraulic & Electrical Diagram DE** Size: 128 MB Format: PDF Language:
Deutsch Brand: Merlo Type of machine: Telescopic Handler Type of document:
Service Manual, Mechanic Manual, Hydraulic & Electrical Diagram Model: Merlo
ROTO SM 600°(R45.19 - R45.21) Telescopic Handler Contents:
**Bedienungsanleitungen** Merlo TeleHandler ROTO 45.19 45.21 Operation and
Maintenance Manual SAV C029143 (ROTO45-02) Merlo TeleHandler ROTO
45.19 45.21 Operation and Maintenance Manual SAV B841401 (ROTO45-01)
**Diverse** LBR RELAY 048638 – LOW BATTERY RECOVERY FUNCTION
**Elektrik** _Elektrische Anlage_ Diagnostic for MERLIN ROTO R45.19 SM and
R45.21 SM Diagnostics Of Electronic System and The Sensors ROTO 38.14 38.16
40.18 45.19 45.21 50.10 dia-roto.03 MAINTENANCE AND REPAIR OPERATIONS
ON THE MERLO REMOTE CONTROL Electrical system micro switch Operation
and Maintenance Manual for ROTO 400 600 ab SAV C037142 (MAMCRT.02)
Electrical system micro switch Operation and Maintenance Manual for ROTO SM
SAV C037142 (MAMCRT.01) Electrical system Servo control Tecnord
SERVOTECNORD _Elektrofunktionsschemen_ Merlo Functionning Diagram
ROTO 45.19 SM 2008 (45959_3 DEUTSCH).pdf Merlo Functionning Diagram
ROTO 45.19 SM 2008 (45959_3).pdf Merlo Functionning Diagram ROTO 45.19
SM 2009 (45959_3).pdf Merlo Functionning Diagram ROTO 45.19 SM 2010
(45959_3A EN13000).pdf Merlo Functionning Diagram ROTO 45.19 SM 2013
(45959_3E).pdf Merlo Functionning Diagram ROTO 45.19 SM 2013
(45959_3F).pdf Merlo Functionning Diagram ROTO 45.19 SM 2014 (55784_3 -
ROTO 600° SM '14 TIER IV).pdf Merlo Functionning Diagram ROTO 45.19 SM V.2
2017 (55784_3A -- ROTO 600° SM '17) (TIER IV).pdf _Fehlermeldungen Electrical

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Merlo ROTO SM 600°(R45.19 - R45.21) Service Manual, Mechanic Manual, Hydraulic & Elec

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Signal (51151_3).pdf Merlo TeleHandler ROTO 45.19 45.21 SM Hydraulic
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R40.21 R45.21 Teleskopausleger Kabel R45.19 - R45.21 (MACA4521.01).pdf
Telescopic Boom Service Manual P40.16 P40.17 P45.18 R40.18 R45.19 R40.21
R45.21 Teleskopausleger R45.19 - R45.21 (MAB40-02).pdf
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learning, industry, and good faith, but unfortunately he did not
possess sufficient literary talent to execute the task entrusted to
him. The Abbé Guénée, on the contrary, was a fair match even for
Voltaire, but he did not attempt, perhaps it was too early to attempt,
anything more than skirmishing.
A bitter personal opponent of La Harpe, and a
famous man in literary history, was Fréron. Elie Fréron.
Catherine Fréron was born at Quimper in Britanny
in 1719, and was educated by the Jesuits. He began a critical journal
when he was only seven-and-twenty, under the title (not so strange
then as now) of Lettres de Madame la Comtesse de.... But he had
already contributed to the Observations and Jugements of
Desfontaines. The Lettres were suppressed in 1749, but continued
under another title, and at last, in 1754, became the celebrated
Année Littéraire, which for twenty years was full of gall and
wormwood for Voltaire and all his partisans. Voltaire was never slow
to retaliate in such matters, and his retorts culminated in the play of
L'Écossaise, in which Fréron was caricatured under the title Frélon
(hornet). Every effort was made by the Encyclopædists (who were
not in the least tolerant in practice) to procure the suppression of
the Année. But Fréron had solid supports in high places and held on
gallantly. It is said that his death, in 1776, was caused by a report
that the suppression had been at last obtained. He certainly suffered
both from gout and from heart disease, complaints not unlikely to
make a sudden shock fatal. Fréron, like his English prototype John
Dennis, has had the disadvantage that his adversaries were
numerous, witty, not too scrupulous, and on the winning side. His
personal character seems to have been none of the most amiable.
But he was more frequently right than wrong in his criticisms on
detached points, and his literary standards were decidedly higher
and better than those of his enemies. He had moreover abundant
wit and an imperturbable temper, which enabled him to turn the
laugh against Voltaire in his criticism of the first representation of
L'Écossaise itself.
Two other adversaries of Voltaire who deserve notice as literary
critics were the Abbé Desfontaines (already mentioned) and Palissot.
Desfontaines was a man of doubtful character; but it is not certain
that he was in the wrong in the dispute which changed him from a
friend into an enemy of Voltaire, and, like Fréron, he very frequently
hit blots both in the patriarch's works and in those of his disciples.
Palissot was the author of a play called Les Philosophes, an
Écossaise on the other side, in which Rousseau, Diderot, and others
were outrageously ridiculed. There was no great merit in this, but
Palissot was not a bad critic in some ways, and his notes on French
classics, especially Corneille, frequently show much greater taste
than those of most contemporary annotators.
The leaders of the philosophes themselves gave
considerable attention to criticism. Voltaire wrote Philosophe
Criticism.
this, as he wrote everything, his principal critical D'Alembert,
work being his Commentary on Corneille, in which Diderot.
the constraint of general dramatic and poetic
theory which the critic imposes on himself, and the Les Feuilles de
merely conventional opinions in which he too often Grimm.
indulges, do not interfere with much acute criticism
on points of detail. D'Alembert distinguished Diderot's Salons
himself by his extraordinarily careful and polished
Éloges, or obituary notices, which remain among His General
the finest examples of critical appreciation of a Criticism.
certain kind to be found in literature. Although he
did not definitely attempt a new theory of criticism, D'Alembert's
vigorous intellect and unbiassed judgment enabled him to estimate
authors so different as (for instance) Massillon and Marivaux with
singular felicity. But the greatest of the Encyclopædists in this
respect was unquestionably Diderot. While his contemporaries, bent
on innovation in politics and religion, accepted without doubt or
complaint the narrowest, most conventional, and most unnatural
system of literary criticism ever known, he, in his hurried and
haphazard but masterly way, practically anticipated the views and
even many of the dicta of the Romantic school. Most of Diderot's
criticisms were written for Grimm's 'Leaves,' which thus acquired a
value entirely different from and far superior to any that their
nominal author could give them. Some of these short notices of
current literature are among the finest examples of the review
properly so called, though in point of mere literary style and
expression they constantly suffer from Diderot's hurried way of
setting down the first thing that came into his head in the first words
that presented themselves to clothe it. But everywhere there is to be
perceived the cardinal principle of sound criticism—that a book is to
be judged, not according to arbitrary rules laid down ex cathedra for
the class of books to which it is supposed to belong, but according
to the scheme of its author in the first place, and in the second to
the general laws of æsthetics; a science which, if the Germans
named it, Diderot, by their own confession, did much to create. Even
more remarkable in this respect than his book-criticisms are his
Salons, criticisms of the biennial exhibitions of pictures in Paris, also
written for Grimm. There are nine of these, ranging over a period of
twenty-two years, and they have served as models for more than a
century. Diderot did not adopt the old plan (as old as the Greeks) of
mere description more or less elaborate of the picture, nor the plan
of dilating on its merely technical characteristics, though, assisted by
artist friends, he managed to introduce a fair amount of
technicalities into his writing. His method is to take in the impression
produced by the painting on his mind, and to reproduce it with the
associations and suggestions it has supplied. Thus his criticisms are
often extremely discursive, and some of his most valuable reflections
on matters at first sight quite remote from the fine arts occur in
these Salons. Of drama Diderot had a formal theory which he
illustrated by examples not quite so happy as his precepts. This
theory involved the practical substitution of what is called in French
drame for the conventional tragedy and comedy, and it brought the
French theatre (or would have brought it if it had been adopted,
which it was not until 1830) much nearer to the English than it had
been. Diderot was moreover an enthusiastic admirer of English
novels, and especially of Richardson and Sterne, partly no doubt
because the sentimentalism which characterised them coincided with
his own sensibilité, but also (it is fair to believe) because of their
freedom from the artificiality and the strict observance of models
which pervaded all branches of literature in France. Of poetry proper
we have little formal criticism from Diderot. His own verses are few,
and of no merit, nor was the poetry of the time at all calculated to
excite any enthusiasm in him. But the æsthetic tendency which in
other ways he expressed, and which he was the first to express, was
that which, some forty years after his death, brought about the
revival of poetry in France, through recurrence to nature, passion,
truth, vividness, and variety of sentiment.
So long as the old régime lasted journalism was
naturally in a condition of suppression, but from Newspapers of
the Revolution.
the beginning of the Revolution it assumed at once
an important position in the state, and a position
still more important as a nursery of rising men of The Influence of
Journalism.
letters. At the time of the outbreak only two papers
of importance existed, the already mentioned Gazette de France,
and the Journal de Paris, in which Garat, André Chénier, Roucher,
and many other men of distinction, won their spurs. 1789, however,
saw the birth of numerous sheets, some of which continued almost
till our own days. The most important was the Gazette Nationale or
Moniteur Universel, in which not merely Garat and La Harpe, but
Ginguené, a literary critic of talent and a republican of moderate
principles, together with the future historian Lacretelle, and the
comic poet, fabulist, and critic Andrieux, took part. Rivarol,
Champcenetz, and Pelletier conducted the Royalist Actes des
Apôtres, Marat started his ultra-republican Ami du Peuple, Camille
Desmoulins the Courier de Brabant, Durozoy the Gazette de Paris.
Barrère and Louvet, both notorious, if not famous names, launched
for the first time a paper with a title destined to fortune, Le Journal
des Débats; and Camille Desmoulins changed his oddly-named
journal into one named more oddly still, Les Révolutions de France
et de Brabant. All these, and more, were the growth of the single
year 1789. The next saw the avowedly Royalist Ami du Roi of Royou,
the atrocious Père Duchêne of Hébert, the cumbrously-named
Journal des Amis de la Constitution, on which Fontanes, Clermont-
Tonnerre, and other future Bonapartists and Constitutionalists
worked. In 1791 no paper of importance, except the short-lived
Girondist Chronique du Mois, appeared. In the next year many
Terrorist prints of no literary merit were started, and one, entitled
Nouvelles Politiques, to which the veterans Suard and Morellet, with
Guizot, a novice of the time to come, Lacretelle, Dupont de
Nemours, and others, were contributors. In the later years of the
revolutionary period, the only important newspaper was what was
first called the Journal de l'Empire, and at the end of Napoleon's
reign the Journal des Débats, on which Fiévée, Geoffroy, and many
other writers of talent worked. In the early days of these various
journals political interests naturally engrossed them. But the literary
tastes and instincts of Parisians were too strong not to demand
attention, and by degrees the critical part of the newspaper became
of importance. Under the restoration this importance grew, and the
result was the Conservateur Littéraire and the Globe, in the former
of which Victor Hugo was introduced to the public, and in the latter
Sainte-Beuve. This sudden uprise of journalism produced a
remarkable change in the conditions of literary work, and offered
chances to many who would previously have been dependent on
individual patronage. But so far as regards literature, properly so
called, all its results which were worth anything appeared
subsequently in books, and there is therefore no need to refer
otherwise than cursorily to the phenomenon of its development. Put
very briefly, the influence of journalism on literature may be said to
be this: it opens the way to those to whom it might otherwise be
closed; it facilitates the destruction of erroneous principles; it assists
production; and it interferes with labour and care spent over the
thing produced.
From the crowd of clever writers whom this
outburst of journalism found ready to draw their Chamfort.
pens in one service or the other, two names
emerge as pre-eminently remarkable. Garat and Champcenetz were
men of wit and ingenuity, André Chénier was a great poet, and his
brother, Marie Joseph, a man of good literary taste and master of an
elegant style, Lacretelle a painstaking historian, and many others
worthy of note in their way. But Chamfort and Rivarol deserve a
different kind of notice from this. They united in a remarkable
fashion the peculiarities of the man of letters of the eighteenth
century with the peculiarities of the man of letters of the nineteenth,
and their individual merit was, though different and complementary,
almost unique. Chamfort was born in Auvergne, in 1741. He was the
natural son of a person who occupied the position of companion,
and legally possessed nothing but his baptismal name of Nicholas.
Like his rival, La Harpe, he obtained an exhibition at one of the Paris
colleges, and distinguished himself. After leaving school he lived for
a time by miscellaneous literature, and at last made his way to
society and to literary success by dint of competing for and winning
academic prizes. On the second occasion of his competition he
defeated La Harpe. Afterwards Madame Helvétius assisted him, and
at last he received from Chabanon (a third-rate man of letters, who
may be most honourably mentioned here) a small annuity which
made him independent. It is said that he married, and that his wife
died six months afterwards. He was elected to the Academy, and
patronised by all sorts of persons, from the queen downwards. But
at the outbreak of the Revolution he took the popular side, though
he could not continue long faithful to it. In the Terror he was
menaced with arrest, tried to commit suicide, and died horribly
mutilated in 1794. Chamfort's literary works are considerable in bulk,
but only a few of them have merit. His tragedies are quite worthless,
his comedy, La Jeune Indienne, not much better. His verse tales
exceed in licentiousness his models in La Fontaine, but fall far short
of them in elegance and humour. His academic essays are heavy and
scarcely intelligent. But his brief witticisms and his short anecdotes
and apophthegms hardly admit a rival. Chamfort was a man soured
by his want of birth, health, and position, and spoilt in mental
development by the necessity of hanging on to the great persons of
his time. But for a kind of tragi-comic satire, a saeva indignatio,
taking the form of contempt of all that is exalted and noble, he has
no equal in literature except Swift.
The life of Rivarol was also an adventurous one,
but much less sombre. He was born about 1750, of Rivarol.
a family which seems to have had noble
connections, but which, in his branch of it, had descended to
innkeeping. Indeed it is said that Riverot, and not Rivarol, was the
name which his father actually bore. He himself, however, first
assumed the title of Chevalier de Parcieux, and then that of Comte
de Rivarol. The way to literary distinction in those days was either
the theatre or criticism, and Rivarol, with the acuteness which
characterised him, knowing that he had no talent for the former,
chose the latter. His translation (with essay and notes) of Dante is an
extraordinarily clever book, and his discourse on the universality of
the French tongue, which followed, deserves the same description.
It was not, however, in mere criticism that Rivarol's forte lay, though
he long afterwards continued to exhibit his acuteness in it by
utterances of various kinds. In 1788 (the year before the Revolution)
he excited the laughter of all Paris, and the intense hatred of the
hack-writers of his time, by publishing, in conjunction with
Champcenetz, an Almanach de nos Grands Hommes, in which, by a
mixture of fiction and fact, he caricatures his smaller contemporaries
in the most pitiless manner. When the Revolution broke out Rivarol
took the Royalist side, and contributed freely to its journals. He soon
found it necessary to leave the country, and lived for ten years in
Brussels, London, Hamburg, and Berlin, publishing occasionally
pamphlets and miscellaneous works. He died at the Prussian capital
in 1801. Not only has Rivarol a considerable claim as a critic, and a
very high position as a political pamphleteer, but he is as much the
master of the prose epigram as Chamfort is of the short anecdote.
Following the example of his predecessors, he put many of his best
things in a treatise, De l'Homme Intellectuel et Moral, which, as a
whole, is very dull and unsatisfactory, though it is lighted up by
occasional flashes of the most brilliant wit. His detached sayings,
which are not so much Pensées or maxims as conversational good
things, are among the most sparkling in literature, and, with
Chamfort's, occupy a position which they keep almost entirely to
themselves. It has been said of him and of Chamfort (who, being of
similar talents and on opposite sides, were naturally bitter foes) that
they 'knew men, but only from the outside, and from certain limited
superficial and accidental points of view. They knew books, too, but
their knowledge was circumscribed by the fashions of a time which
was not favourable to impartial literary appreciation. Hence their
anecdotes are personal rather than general, rather amusing than
instructive, rather showing the acuteness and ingenuity of the
authors than able to throw light on the subjects dealt with. But as
mere tale-tellers and sayers of sharp things they have few rivals.' It
may be added that they complete and sum up the merits and
defects of the French society of the eighteenth century, and that, in
so far as literature can do this, the small extent of their selected
works furnishes a complete comment on that society.
Contemporary with these two writers, though, from
the posthumous publication of his works years Joubert.
after the end of his long life, he seems in a manner
a contemporary of our own, was Joseph Joubert, the last great
Pensée-writer of France and of Europe. Joubert's birthplace was
Montignac, in Perigord, and the date of his birth 1754, three years
after that of Rivarol, and about twelve after that of Chamfort. He
was educated at Toulouse, where, without taking regular orders, he
joined the Frères de la Doctrine Chrétienne, a teaching community,
and studied and taught till he was twenty-two years old. Then his
health being, as it was all through his life, weak, he returned home,
and succeeding before long to a small but sufficient fortune, he went
to Paris. Here he became intimate with the second philosophe
generation (La Harpe, Marmontel, etc.), and is said to have for a
time been an enthusiastic hearer of Diderot, the most splendid talker
of that or any age. But Joubert's ideals and method of thought were
radically different from those of the Philosophes, and he soon found
more congenial literary companions, of whom the chief were
Fontanes and Chênedollé, while he found his natural home in the
salon of two ladies of rank and cultivation, Madame de Beaumont
and Madame de Vintimille. Before long he married and established
himself in Paris with a choice library, into which, it is said, no
eighteenth-century writer was admitted. His health became worse
and worse, yet he lived to the age of seventy, dying in 1824.
Fourteen years afterwards Chateaubriand, at the request of his
widow, edited a selection of his remains, and four years later still his
nephew, M. de Raynal, produced a fuller edition.
Joubert's works consist (with the exception of a few letters)
exclusively of Pensées and maxims, which rank in point of depth and
of exquisite literary expression with those of La Rochefoucauld, and
in point of range above them. They are even wider in this respect
than those of Vauvenargues, which they also much resemble. Ethics,
politics, theology, literature, all occupy Joubert. In politics he is, as
may be perhaps expected from his time and circumstances,
decidedly anti-revolutionary. In theology, without being exactly
orthodox according to any published scheme of orthodoxy, Joubert is
definitely Christian. In ethics he holds a middle place between the
unsparing hardness of the self-interest school and the somewhat
gushing manner of the sentimentalists. But his literary thoughts are
perhaps the most noteworthy, not merely from our present point of
view. All alike have the characteristic of intense compression (he
described his literary aim in the phrase 'tormented by the ambition
of putting a book in a page, a page into a phrase, and a phrase into
a word'), while all have the same lucidity and freedom from enigma.
All are alike polished in form and style according to the best models
of the seventeenth century; but whereas study and reflection might
have been sufficient to give Joubert the material of his other
thoughts, the wide difference between his literary judgments and
those of his time is less easily explicable. No finer criticism on style
and on poetry in the abstract exists than his, and yet his reading of
poetry cannot have been very extensive. He is even just to the
writers of the eighteenth century, whose manner he disliked, and
whose society he had abjured. He seems, indeed, to have had
almost a perfect faculty of literary appreciation, and wherever his
sayings startle the reader it will generally be found that there is a
sufficient explanation beneath. There is probably no writer in any
language who has said an equal number of remarkable things on an
equal variety of subjects in an equally small space, and with an
equally high and unbroken excellence of style and expression. This is
the intrinsic worth of Joubert. In literary history he has yet another
interest, that of showing in the person of a man living out of the
literary world, and far removed from the operation of cliques, the
process which was inevitably bringing about the great revolution of
1830.
Like Joubert, Paul Louis Courier had a great dislike
and even contempt for the authors of the Courier.
eighteenth century, but curiously enough this
dislike did not in the least affect his theological or political opinions.
He was born at Paris, in 1772, being the son of a wealthy man of the
middle class. His youth was passed in the country, and he early
displayed a great liking for classical study. As a compromise between
business, which he hated, and literature, of which his father would
not hear, he entered the army in 1792. He served on the Rhine, and
not long after joining broke his leave in a manner rather
unpleasantly resembling desertion. His friends succeeded in saving
him from the consequences of this imprudence, and he served until
Wagram, when he finally left the army, again in very odd
circumstances. He then lived in Italy (where his passion for the
classics led him into an absurd dispute about an alleged injury he
had caused to a manuscript of Longus) until the fall of the Empire.
When he was forty-five years old he was known in literature only as
a translator of classics, remarkable for scholarship and for careful
modelling of his style upon the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
rather than upon the eighteenth. Although he had hitherto taken
little active part in politics, the so-called 'ideas of 89' had sunk
deeply into him. Impelled, not by any wide views on the future of
the nation, but apparently by the mere bourgeois hatred of titles, old
descent, and the other privileges of the aristocracy, he began a
series of pamphlets to the success of which there is no rival except
that of the Letters of Junius, while Junius falls far short of Courier in
intrinsic literary merit. There are, indeed, few authors whose merit
resides so wholly in their style and power of expression as Courier's.
His thought is narrow in the extreme; even where its conclusions are
just it rests rather on the jealousies of the typical bourgeois than on
anything else. But in irony he has, with the exception of Pascal and
Swift, no superior. He began by a Pétition aux Deux Chambres. Then
he contributed a series of letters to Le Censeur, a reform journal;
then he published various pamphlets, usually signed 'Paul Louis,
Vigneron,' and ostensibly addressed to his neighbours and fellow
villagers. He had established himself on a small estate in Touraine,
which he farmed himself. But he was much in Paris, and his political
writings made him acquainted with the prison of Sainte Pélagie. His
death, in April 1825, was singular, and indeed mysterious. He was
shot, the murderer escaping. It was suspected to be one of his own
servants, to whom he was a harsh and unpopular master, and the
suspicion was confirmed some years afterwards by the confession of
a game-keeper. His Simple Discours against the presentation of
Chambord to the Duc de Bordeaux, his Livret de Paul Louis, his
Pamphlet des Pamphlets, are all models of their kind. Nowhere is the
peculiar quality which is called in French narquois displayed with
more consummate skill. The language is at once perfectly simple and
of the utmost literary polish, the arguments, whether good or bad,
always tellingly expressed. But perhaps he has written nothing
better than the Lettre à M. Renouard, in which he discusses the
mishap with the manuscript of Longus, and the letter to the
Académie des Inscriptions on their refusal to elect him. The style of
Courier is almost unique, and its merits are only denied by those
who do not possess the necessary organ for appreciating it.
This chapter may perhaps be most appropriately
concluded by the notice of a singular writer who, Sénancour.
although longer lived, was contemporary with
Courier. Étienne Pivert de Sénancour may be treated almost
indifferently as a moral essayist, or as a producer of the peculiar
kind of faintly narrative and strongly ethical work which Rousseau
had made fashionable. The infusion of narrative in his principal and
indeed only remarkable work, Obermann, is however so slight, that
he will come in best here, though in his old age he wrote a
professed novel, Isabella. Sénancour was born in 1770, his father
being a man of position and fortune, who lost both at the
Revolution. The son was destined for the Church, but ran away and
spent a considerable time in Switzerland, where he married,
returning to France towards the end of the century. He then
published divers curious works of half-sentimental, half-speculative
reflection, by far the most important of which, Obermann, appeared
in 1804. Then Sénancour had to take to literary hack-work for a
subsistence; but in his later years Villemain and Thiers procured
pensions for him, and he was relieved from want. He died in 1846.
Obermann has not been ill described by George Sand as a René with
a difference; Chateaubriand's melancholy hero feeling that he could
do anything if he would but has no spirit for any task, Sénancour's
that he is unequal to his own aspirations. No brief epigram of this
kind can ever fully describe a book; but this, though inadequate, is
not incorrect so far as it goes. The book is a series of letters, in
which the supposed writer delivers melancholy reflections on all
manner of themes, especially moral problems and natural beauty.
Sénancour was in a certain sense a Philosophe, in so far that he was
dogmatically unorthodox and discarded conventional ideas as to
moral conduct; but he is much nearer Rousseau than Diderot.
Indeed, he sometimes seems to the reader little more than an echo
of the former, until his more distinctly modern characteristics
(characteristics which were not fully or generally felt or reproduced
till the visionary and discouraged generation of 1820-1850) reappear.
It is perhaps not unfair to say that the pleasure with which this
generation recognised its own sentiments in Obermann gave rise to
a traditional estimate of the literary value of that book which is a
little exaggerated. Yet it has considerable merit, especially in the
simplicity and directness with which expression is given to a class of
sentiments very likely to find vent in language either extravagant or
affected. Its form is that of a series of letters, dated from various
places, but chiefly from a solitary valley in the Alps in which the hero
lives, meditates, and pursues the occupations of husbandry on his
small estate.
 CHAPTER VI.
PHILOSOPHERS.

The entire literary and intellectual movement of the

eighteenth century is very often called the The philosophe
movement.
philosophe movement, and the writers who took
part in it les philosophes. The word 'philosopher' is, however, here
used in a sense widely different from its proper and usual one.
Philosophie, in the ordinary language of the middle and later
seventeenth century, meant simply freethinking on questions of
religion. This freethinking, of which Saint-Evremond was the most
distinguished representative, involved no revolutionary or even
reforming attitude towards politics or practical affairs of any kind. As
however the next century advanced, the character of French
scepticism became altered. Contact with English Deism gave form
and precision to its theological or anti-theological side. The reading
of Locke animated it against Cartesianism, and the study of English
politics excited it against the irresponsible despotism and the
crushing system of ecclesiastical and aristocratic privilege which
made almost the entire burden of government rest on the shoulders
least able to bear it. French 'philosophism' then became suddenly
militant and practical. Toleration and liberty of speculation in religion,
constitutional government in politics, the equalisation of pressure in
taxation, and the removal of privilege, together with reform in legal
procedure, were the objects which it had most at heart. In merely
speculative philosophy, that is to say, in metaphysics, it was much
less active, though it had on the whole a tendency towards
materialism, and by a curious accident it was for the most part
rigidly conservative in literary criticism. But it was eager in the
cultivation of ethics from various points of view, and busy in the
study both of the philosophy of history, which may be said to date
from that period, and of physical science, in which Newton took the
place of Locke as guide. The almost universal presence of this
practical and reforming spirit makes it not by any means so easy to
subdivide the branches of literature, as is the case in the
seventeenth century. La Bruyère had said, in the days of
acquiescence in absolutism, that to a Frenchman 'Les grands sujets
sont défendus,' meaning thereby theology and politics. The general
spirit of the eighteenth century was a vigorous denial of this, and an
eager investigation into these 'grands sujets.' This spirit made its
appearance in the most unexpected quarters, and in the strangest
forms. It converted (in the hands of Voltaire) the stiffest and most
conventional form of drama ever known into a pamphlet. It
insinuated polemics under the guise of history, and made the
ponderous and apparently matter-of-fact folios of a Dictionary of Arts
and Manufactures the vehicles of arguments for reform. It
overflowed into every department of literary occupation. Some of the
chief prose manifestations of this spirit have been discussed and
arranged in the two previous chapters under the head of history and
essay writing. The rest will be dealt with here. A certain distinction
of form, though it is often rather arbitrary than real, renders such a
subdivision possible, while it is desirable in the interest of clearness.
It will be noticed that while the attack is voluminous and manifold,
the defence is almost unrepresented in literature. This is one of the
most remarkable facts in literary history. In England, from which the
philosophe movement borrowed so much, the Deists had not only
not had their own way in the literary battle, but had been beaten all
along the line by the superior intellectual and literary prowess of the
defenders of orthodoxy. The case in France went otherwise and
almost by default. The only defender of orthodoxy whose name has
survived in literature—for Fréron, despite his power, was little more
than a literary critic—is the Abbé Guénée. In so singular a state was
the church of France that scarcely a single preacher or theologian,
after Massillon's death in 1742, could challenge equality with even
third- or fourth-rate men of letters; while, after the death of the
Chancellor d'Aguesseau in 1751, no layman of eminence can be
named until Joseph de Maistre, nearly half a century later, who was
at once a considerable writer and a declared defender of religion.
Indeed no small proportion of the enemies of ecclesiasticism were
actually paid and privileged members of the Church itself. Thus little
opposition, except that of simple vis inertiae, was offered to the new
views and the crusade by which they were supported. This crusade,
however, had two very different stages. The first, of which the
greatest representatives are Montesquieu and in a way Voltaire
himself, was critical and reforming, but in no way revolutionary; the
second, of whom the Encyclopædists are the representatives, was,
consciously or unconsciously, bent on a complete revolution. We
shall give an account first of the chief representatives of these two
great classes of the general movement, and then of those offshoots
or schools of that movement which busied themselves with the
special subjects of economics, ethics, and metaphysics, as
distinguished from general politics.
Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu et de
la Brède, was born at the château, which gave him Montesquieu.
the last-named title, in the neighbourhood of
Bordeaux, on the 18th of January, 1689. His family was not of the
oldest, but it had, as he tells us, some two or three centuries of
proved noblesse to boast of, and had been distinguished in the law.
He himself was destined for that profession, and after a youth of
laborious study became councillor of the parliament of Bordeaux in
1714, and in a year or two president. In 1721 he produced the
Lettres Persanes, and four years later the curious little prose poem
called the Temple de Gnide. Some objection was made by the
minister Fleury, who was rigidly orthodox, to the satirical tone of the
former book in ecclesiastical matters, but Montesquieu was none the
less elected of the Academy in 1728. He had given up his position at
the Bordeaux Parlement a few years before this, and set out on an
extensive course of travel, noting elaborately the manners, customs,
and constitution of the countries through which he passed. Two
years of this time were spent in England, for which country,
politically speaking, he conceived a great admiration. On his return
to France he lived partly in Paris, but chiefly at his estate of La
Brède, taking an active interest in its management, and in the
various occupations of a country gentleman, but also working
unceasingly at his masterpiece, the Esprit des Lois. This, however,
was not published for many years, and was long preceded by the
book which ranks second in importance to it, the Grandeur et
Décadence des Romains, 1734. This was Montesquieu's first serious
work, and it placed him as high among serious writers as the Lettres
Persanes had among lighter authors. The Esprit des Lois itself did
not appear till 1748. Montesquieu, whose life was in no way
eventful, lived for some years longer, dying in Paris on the 10th of
February, 1755. Besides the works mentioned he had written several
dialogues and other trifles, a considerable number of Pensées, and
some articles for the earlier volumes of the Encyclopædia.
Montesquieu probably deserves the title of the
greatest man of letters of the French eighteenth Lettres Persanes.
century, the superior versatility and more
superficial brilliancy of Voltaire being compensated Gradeur et
in him by far greater originality and depth of Décadence
Romains
des

thought. His three principal works deserve to be

considered in turn. The Lettres Persanes, in which the opinions of a
foreigner on French affairs are given, is not entirely original in
conception; the idea of the vehicle being possibly suggested by the
Amusements Divers of Dufresny the comic author. The working out,
however, is entirely Montesquieu's, and was followed closely enough
by the various writers, who, with Voltaire and Goldsmith at their
head, have adopted a similar medium for satire and criticism since.
It is not too much to say that the entire spirit of the philosophe
movement in its more moderate form is contained and anticipated in
the Lettres Persanes. All the weaknesses of France in political,
ecclesiastical, and social arrangements are here touched on with a
light but sure hand, and the example is thus set of attacking 'les
grands sujets.' From a literary point of view the form of this work is
at least as remarkable as the matter. Voltaire himself is nowhere
more witty, while Montesquieu has over his rival the indefinable but
unquestionable advantage of writing more like a gentleman. There is
no single book in which the admirable capacity of the French
language for jesting treatment of serious subjects is better shown
than in the Lettres Persanes. Montesquieu's next important work was
of a very different character. The Considérations sur les Causes de la
Grandeur et de la Décadence des Romains is an entirely serious
work. It does not as yet exhibit the magnificent breadth of view and
the inexhaustible fertility of explanation which distinguish the Esprit
des Lois, but it has been well regarded as a kind of preliminary
exercise for that great work. Montesquieu here treats an extensive
but homogeneous and manageable subject from the point of view of
philosophical history, after a method which had been partially tried
by Bossuet, and systematically arranged by Vico in Italy, but which
was not fully developed till Turgot's time. That is to say, his object is
not merely to exhibit, but to explain the facts, and to explain them
on general principles applicable with due modifications to other
times and other histories. Accordingly, the style of the Grandeur et
Décadence is as grave and dignified as that of the Lettres Persanes
is lively and malicious. It is sometimes a little too sententious in
tone, and suffers from the habit, induced probably by Pensée-
writing, of composing in very brief paragraphs. But it is an excellent
example of its kind, and especially remarkable for the extreme
clearness and lucidity with which the march and sequence of events
in the gross is exhibited.
The Esprit des Lois is, however, a far greater book
than either of these, and far more original. The title Esprit des Lois.
may be thought to be not altogether happy, and
indeed rather ambiguous, because it does not of itself suggest the
extremely wide sense in which the word law is intended to be taken.
An exact if cumbrous title for the book would be 'On the Relation of
Human Laws and Customs to the Laws of Nature.' The author begins
somewhat formally with the old distinction of politics into democracy,
aristocracy, and monarchy. He discusses the principles of each and
their bearings on education, on positive law, on social conditions, on
military strength, offensive and defensive, on individual liberty, on
taxation and finance. Then an abrupt return is made from the effects
to the causes of constitutions and polity. The theory of the influence
of physical conditions, and especially of climate, on political and
social institutions—a theory which is perhaps more than any other
identified with the book—receives special attention, and a somewhat
disproportionate space is given to the question of slavery in
connection with it. From climate Montesquieu passes to the nature
of the soil, as in its turn affecting civil polity. He then attacks the
subject of manners and customs as distinct from laws, of trade and
commerce, of the family, of jurisprudence, of religion. The book
concludes with an elaborate examination of the feudal system in
France. Throughout it the reader is equally surprised at the varied
and exact knowledge of the author, and at his extraordinary fertility
in general views. This fertility is indeed sometimes a snare to him,
and leads to rash generalisation. But what has to be remembered is,
that he was one of the pioneers of this method of historical
exploration, and that hundreds of principles which, after correction
by his successors, have passed into general acceptance, were
discovered, or at least enunciated, by him for the first time. Nothing
is more remarkable in Montesquieu, and nothing more distinguishes
him from the common run of his somewhat self-satisfied and short-
sighted successors, than the steady hold he keeps on the continuity
of history, and his superiority to the shallow view of his day
(constantly put forward by Voltaire), according to which the middle
ages were a dark period of barbarism, the study of which could be
of no use to any one but a mere curiosity hunter. Montesquieu too,
almost alone of his contemporaries, had a matured and moderate
plan of political and social reform. While some of them indulged in
an idle and theoretical Republicanism, and others in the old
unpractical frondeur spirit, eager to pull down but careless about
building up, Montesquieu had conceived the idea of a limited
monarchy, not identical with that of England, but in many ways
similar to it; an ideal which in the first quarter of the eighteenth
century might have been put in practice with far better chance of
success than in the first quarter of the nineteenth. The merely
literary merits of this great book are equal to its philosophical merits.
The vast mass of facts with which the author deals is selected with
remarkable judgment, and arranged with remarkable lucidity. The
style is sober, devoid of ornament, but admirably proportioned and
worked out. There are few greater books, not merely in French but
in literature, than the Esprit des Lois.
With Voltaire the case is very different. Very many
of his innumerable works have directly Voltaire.
philosophical titles, but no one of them is a work of
much interest or merit. His 'Philosophic Letters,' 1733, published
after his return from England, and the source of much trouble to
him, are the lively but not very trustworthy medium of a contrast
between English liberty and toleration and French arbitrary
government. His 'Discourses on Man,' and other verse of the same
kind, are verse-philosophy of the class of Pope's. The pompously
named 'Treatise on Metaphysics,' 1734, is very much the same in
substance if not in form. The remarks on Pascal's Pensées are
unimportant contributions to the crusade against superstition; the
Philosophical Dictionary, 1764, is a heterogeneous collection of
articles with the same object. The Essai sur les Mœurs, 1756,
composed not improbably in rivalry with Montesquieu, contains
much acute reflection on particulars, but is injured by the author's
imperfect information as to the subjects of which he was treating, by
his entirely unphilosophical contempt for the 'Dark Ages,' and indeed
by the absence of any general conception of history which can be
called philosophical. Voltaire's real importance, however, in
connection with the philosophe movement is to be found, not in the
merit or value of any one of his professedly philosophical books, but
in the fact that all his works, his poems, his plays, his histories, his
romances, his innumerable flying essays and papers of all sorts,
were invariably saturated with its spirit, and helped to communicate
it to others. It cannot be said that Voltaire had any clear conception
of the object which he wished to attain, except in so far as the
famous watchword 'Écrasez l'Infâme' goes. This means not, as has
been erroneously thought, 'crush Christianity,' but 'crush persecuting
superstition.' He was by no means in favour of any political reform,
except as far as private rights were concerned. He would have liked
the exaggerated political privileges of the Church (which enabled it