Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

XVI

ENLIGHTENMENT

1762: T

OULOUSE

On 13 October, the evening calm of the rue des Filatiers, a shop-lined street in the heart of Toulouse’s commercial district, was disturbed by a terrible howl of anguish. More cries followed. The screams were coming from a shop owned by Jean Calas, a cloth-merchant in his sixties. As a crowd began to build, he and his family, who occupied the two storeys above the shop, could be seen through the window, clustered around what appeared to be a body. A surgeon’s assistant arrived; then, towards midnight, a magistrate at the head of some forty soldiers. The accounts of what had happened that evening, as they emerged over the course of the next few days, were confused. First it was reported that Marc-Antoine, Jean Calas’ eldest son, had been found by his family lying dead on the shop floor. The surgeon’s assistant, pulling back the young man’s cravat, had found on his neck the unmistakable imprint of a rope. It appeared, then, that he had been garrotted. Yet this version of events, which derived from the father’s initial deposition, was soon being contradicted by Jean Calas himself. Changing his story, he declared that he had not, after all, found his son lying on the floor. Instead he had discovered Marc-Antoine hanging from a rope. He had taken down the corpse of his son. He had laid it on the floor. He had even – in the pathetic hope that his son might still be alive – sought to make him comfortable by providing him with a pillow. Marc-Antoine Calas had not been murdered. He had hanged himself.

How were these contradictions to be explained? There was one obvious answer. Calas, disoriented by grief, had been desperate to spare his son the posthumous ignominy of being condemned as a suicide: for then his corpse would be dragged through the streets, and slung into the municipal tip. The investigating magistrate, however, was unconvinced. He had a different hypothesis. Marc-Antoine had indeed been murdered – by his own father. It had not taken the magistrate long to unearth what seemed a literally killer fact. Calas, in a country where it was illegal to be anything other than Catholic, was a Protestant: a Huguenot. What if Marc-Antoine, brought up in his father’s heretical faith, had discovered the light? What if Calas, determined not to let his son convert to Catholicism, had killed him? What if all the talk of suicide were nothing but a cover-up? These suppositions, against a backdrop of growing hysteria in Toulouse, had soon come to take on the solidity of fact. On 8 November, amid awful and lachrymose solemnity, Marc-Antoine was commemorated in the city’s cathedral as a martyr for the Catholic faith. Ten days later, his father was condemned to death. The following March, after a failed appeal, the old man was readied for execution. First, in a vain attempt to make him confess his crime, he was water-boarded. Then he was led in chains to the place St-Georges, a square in the heart of Toulouse. There he was lashed to a wheel. His limbs were broken with an iron bar. For two hours he endured the agony of his splintered bones with a grim fortitude. ‘I die innocent,’ he declared. ‘I do not pity myself. Jesus Christ, who was innocence itself, died for me by even more cruel torments.’¹ By the time he breathed his last, even the priest who had been at his side, urging him to embrace the Catholic faith, felt moved to compare him to the martyrs of the early Church.

Jean Calas had been executed as a murderer, not a heretic. Four months later, a Catholic peasant convicted of parricide was similarly put to death in the place St-Georges – with the added refinement that his right hand was first cut off. Nevertheless, the centrality of Calas’ Calvinism to the case brought against him provoked widespread alarm among Huguenots. It did not take long for the news of his miserable fate to reach Geneva; nor, from there, to reach the estate just beyond the city walls where the most famous man in Europe had one of his three homes. Voltaire, France’s greatest writer, the confidant and adversary of kings, a man feared and admired in equal measure for the incomparable brilliance of his wit, immediately became obsessed by the case. Inclined at first to believe in Calas’ guilt, he had soon changed his mind. When two of Calas’ sons arrived in Geneva as refugees, he interviewed the younger of them – ‘a simple child, ingenuous, with the most gentle and interesting cast of features’² – at length. What the boy had to say left Voltaire convinced that a monstrous miscarriage of justice had taken place: a scandal that seemed conjured up from the blackest shadows of Toulouse’s past. To Voltaire, Calas seemed as much a victim of murderous fanaticism as the Albigensians had once been. Such a wrong could not be permitted to stand. Innocent blood cried out to heaven. The great writer, summoning all his immense reserves of talent and energy, set himself to winning a posthumous pardon for the executed Huguenot.

But Voltaire – baptised into the Catholic Church and educated by the Jesuits, whom he publicly lambasted as power-hungry paedophiles, but privately saluted for their learning – did not take up the cause out of any sympathy for Protestantism. That September, as he was busy preparing his case, a letter arrived which addressed him as ‘Antichrist’. The title was one appropriate to his often-sulphurous reputation. Voltaire, a gaunt, short man with a wide, mocking smile, had something of the look of a devil. His grin, though, was only the half of it. Even more shocking to devout opinion – Protestant no less than Catholic – was the dawning realisation that Europe’s most celebrated writer, a man whom even his enemies could not help but admire, viewed Christianity with a hatred that bordered on fixation. For decades he had veiled it, knowing just how far he could go, skilful like no other in deploying irony, the private joke, the knowing wink. Recently, though, he had become more forthright. With one property beyond the reach of the French authorities in Geneva, and two beyond the reach of the Genevan authorities in France, Voltaire felt secure as never before. Anonymously though he continued to publish his more shocking pasquinades, and publicly though he continued to insist on his membership of the Catholic Church, nobody was fooled. The deftness with which he mocked Christians for their god who could be eaten in a morsel of pastry, their scriptures rife with the most glaring contradictions and idiocies, their inquisitions, and scaffolds, and internecine wars, was too recognisably the work of Voltaire to be mistaken for that of anyone else. When he publicly called for l’infâme – ‘the abomination’ – to be smashed, he did not need to specify his target. The fanaticism that had brought Calas to his death, far from being an aberration, was the very essence of the Christian sect. Its entire history was nothing but a sorry record of persecution. Its bigotry and intolerance had served ‘to cover the earth with corpses’.³

Such blasphemies – while profoundly shocking to Christians – were to some a summons to battle. The letter in which Voltaire was hailed as Antichrist had been written not by an opponent, but by an admirer: a philosopher and notorious free-thinker by the name of Denis Diderot. It was tribute that the great man received as his due. There could be no place for any modesty or self-abasement in the war against fanaticism. Fame was a weapon and self-promotion an obligation. Influence such as Voltaire had come to wield in the courts and salons of Europe would only be wasted if not exploited to the full. This was why, fusing conviction with invincible self-regard, he insisted on his status as the patriarch of an entire ‘new philosophy’. Voltaire was far from alone in his contempt for Christianity. Diderot’s was, if anything, even more inveterate. Ranged alongside them were a whole host of philosophes – metaphysicians and encyclopaedists, historians and geologists – whose scorn for l’infâme was often no less than Voltaire’s. Whether in Edinburgh or in Naples, in Philadelphia or in Berlin, the men most celebrated for their genius were increasingly those who equated churches with bigotry. To be a philosophe was to thrill to the possibility that a new age of freedom was advancing. The demons of superstition and unwarranted privilege were being cast out. People that had been walking in darkness had seen a great light. The world was being born again. Voltaire himself, in his more sombre moments, worried that the malign hold of priestcraft might never be loosened; but in general he inclined to a cheerier take. His age was a siècle des lumières: ‘an age of enlightenment’. For the first time since the reign of Constantine, the commanding heights of European culture had been wrested from Christian intellectuals. The shock of Calas’ conviction was precisely that it had happened when la philosophie had been making such advances. ‘It seems, then, that fanaticism, outraged by the progress of reason, is thrashing about in a spasm of outrage.’⁴

Yet in truth, there was nothing quite so Christian as a summons to bring the world from darkness into light. When Voltaire joked that he had done more for his own age than Luther and Calvin had done for theirs, it was a typically feline display of ingratitude. His complaint that the two great reformers had only scotched the papacy, not killed it, echoed any number of Protestant radicals. Voltaire, as a young man, had spent time in England. There, he had seen for himself how faith, in the transformative potency of enlightenment, from aristocratic salons to the meeting halls of Quakers, had resulted in what appeared to him an enviable degree of tolerance. ‘If there were only one religion in England, there would be danger of tyranny; if there were two, they would cut each other’s throats; but there are thirty, and they live happily together in peace.’⁵ Voltaire, though, as he surveyed this religious landscape with an amused condescension, did not rest content with it. The impact of Calas’ execution was precisely that it served to jolt him out of any complacency. Christian sects were incorrigible. They would always persecute one another, given only half a chance. The ideal, then, was a religion that could transcend their mutual hatreds. The wise man, Voltaire wrote in the midst of his campaign to exonerate Calas, knows such a religion not only to exist, but to be ‘the most ancient and the most widespread’ of any in the world. The man who practises it does not quibble over points of doctrine. He knows that he has received no divine revelations. He worships a just God, but one whose acts are beyond human comprehension. ‘He has his brethren from Beijing to Cayenne, and he reckons all the wise his brothers.’⁶

Yet this, of course, was merely to proclaim another sect – and, what was more, one with some very familiar pretensions. The dream of a universal religion was nothing if not catholic. Ever since the time of Luther, attempts by Christians to repair the torn fabric of Christendom had served only to shred it further. The charges that Voltaire levelled against Christianity – that it was bigoted, that it was superstitious, that its scriptures were rife with contradictions – were none of them original to him. All had been honed, over the course of two centuries and more, by pious Christians. Voltaire’s God, like the Quakers’, like the Collegiants’, like Spinoza’s, was a deity whose contempt for sectarian wrangling owed everything to sectarian wrangling. ‘Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy, that is the very foolish daughter of a wise and intelligent mother.’⁷ Voltaire’s dream of a brotherhood of man, even as it cast Christianity as something fractious, parochial, murderous, could not help but betray its Christian roots. Just as Paul had proclaimed that there was neither Jew nor Greek in Christ Jesus, so – in a future blessed with full enlightenment – was there destined to be neither Jew nor Christian nor Muslim. Their every difference would be dissolved. Humanity would be as one.

‘You are all sons of God.’⁸ Paul’s epochal conviction that the world stood on the brink of a new dispensation, that the knowledge of it would be written on people’s hearts, that old identities and divisions would melt and vanish away, had not released its hold on the philosophes. Even those who pushed their quest for ‘the light of reason’⁹ to overtly blasphemous extremes could not help but remain its heirs. In 1719 – three years before the young Voltaire’s arrival in the Dutch Republic, on his first ever trip abroad – a book had been printed there so monstrous that its ‘mere title evoked fear’.¹⁰ The Treatise of the Three Imposters, although darkly rumoured to have had a clandestine existence since the age of Conrad of Marburg, had in reality been compiled by a coterie of Huguenots in The Hague. As indicated by its alternative title – The Spirit of Spinoza – it was a book very much of its time. Nevertheless, its solution to the rival understandings of religion that had led to the Huguenots’ exile from France was one to put even the Theological-Political Treatise in the shade. Christ, far from being ‘the voice of God’, as Spinoza had argued, had been a charlatan: a sly seller of false dreams. His disciples had been imbeciles, his miracles trickery. There was no need for Christians to argue over scripture. The Bible was nothing but a spider’s web of lies. Yet the authors of the Treatise, although they certainly aspired to heal the divisions between Protestants and Catholics by demonstrating that Christianity itself was nothing but a fraud, did not rest content with that ambition. They remained sufficiently Christian that they wished to bring light to the entire world. Jews and Muslims too were dupes. Jesus ranked alongside Moses and Muhammad as one of three imposters. All religion was a hoax. Even Voltaire was shocked. No less committed than any priest to the truth of his own understanding of God, he viewed the blasphemies of the Treatise as blatant atheism, and quite as pernicious as superstition. Briefly taking a break from mocking Christians for their sectarian rivalries, he wrote a poem warning his readers not to trust the model of enlightenment being peddled by underground radicals. The Treatise itself was an imposture. Some sense of the divine was needed, or else society would fall apart. ‘If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.’¹¹

But what kind of God? By the time that Voltaire came to pen his celebrated aperçu, he had achieved a stunning victory in his campaign to have Jean Calas pardoned. In 1763, the queen herself had received Madame Calas and her daughters. A year later, the royal council had declared the conviction of Calas null and void. In 1765, on the anniversary of the death sentence pronounced against him, he was conclusively exonerated. Voltaire, exhilarated by this triumph, had then embarked on further campaigns. The memory of a young nobleman mutilated and beheaded for blaspheming a religious procession was fearlessly defended; a second Huguenot cleared of murder – and this time while he was still alive. The bigotry and cruelty of l’infâme had always provoked in Voltaire a particular revulsion. Now, prompted by the success of his campaign to overturn miscarriages of justice, he dared to imagine its final rout. The exoneration of Calas, an innocent man tortured to death before a mocking and bloodthirsty crowd, had not merely been a triumph for the cause of enlightenment, but a defeat for Christianity. ‘It is philosophy alone that is responsible for this victory.’¹²

Yet this was not necessarily how it appeared to Christians. There were many Catholics who saluted Voltaire’s intervention. Had there not been, his campaign would never have succeeded – for there were hardly enough philosophes in France to sway the country on their own. Even in Toulouse, the city cast by Voltaire as a hellhole of superstition, there were plenty who agreed with his warnings against religious intolerance, nor saw any contradiction between them and Catholic teaching. ‘Jesus Christ has given us examples for everything in his Bible,’ wrote the wife of one prominent politician in Toulouse to her son. ‘The one who looks for a strayed lamb does not bring it back by the whip; he carries it on his back, caresses it, and tries to attach it to himself by his benevolence.’¹³ The paradox that weakness might be a source of strength, that a victim might triumph over his torturers, that suffering might constitute victory, lay at the heart of the gospels. Voltaire, when he sketched a portrait of Calas broken on the wheel, could not help but evoke in the imaginings of his readers the image of Christ on the cross. The standards by which he judged Christianity, and condemned it for its faults, were not universal. They were not shared by philosophers across the world. They were not common from Beijing to Cayenne. They were distinctively, peculiarly Christian.

Even the most radical philosophes might on occasion betray an awareness of this. In 1762, during the first throes of the Calas affair, Diderot wrote admiringly of Voltaire’s readiness to deploy his genius in the cause of the persecuted family. ‘For what are the Calas to him? What is it that can interest him in them? What reason has he to suspend labours he loves, to occupy himself in their defence?’ Atheist though he was, Diderot was too honest not to acknowledge the likeliest answer. ‘If there were a Christ, I assure you that Voltaire would be saved.’¹⁴

The roots of Christianity stretched too deep, too thick, coiled too implacably around the foundations of everything that constituted the fabric of France, gripped too tightly its venerable and massive stonework, to be pulled up with any ease. In a realm long hailed as the eldest daughter of the Church, the ambition of setting the world on a new order, of purging it of superstition, of redeeming it from tyranny, could hardly help but be shot through with Christian assumptions. The dreams of the philosophes were both novel and not novel in the slightest. Many before them had laboured to redeem humanity from darkness: Luther, Gregory VII, Paul. Christians, right from the very beginning, had been counting down the hours to an upheaval in the affairs of the earth. ‘The night is nearly over; the day is almost here.’

Revolution, in the lands that were once Christendom, had been known to convulse churches and kingdoms before. Who was to say, then, that it might not do so again?

Woe to You who are Rich

It took effort to strip bare a basilica as vast as the one that housed Saint Martin. For a millennium and more after the great victory won by Charles Martel over the Saracens, it had continued to thrive as a centre of pilgrimage. A succession of disasters – attacks by Vikings, fires – had repeatedly seen it rebuilt. So sprawling had the complex of buildings around the basilica grown that it had come to be known as Martinopolis. But revolutionaries, by their nature, relished a challenge. In the autumn of 1793, when bands of them armed with sledge-hammers and pick-axes occupied the basilica, they set to work with gusto. There were statues of saints to topple, vestments to burn, tombs to smash. Lead had to be stripped from the roof, and bells removed from towers. ‘A sanctuary can do without a grille, but the defence of the Fatherland cannot do without pikes.’¹⁵ So efficiently was Martinopolis stripped of its treasures that within only a few weeks it was bare. Even so – the state of crisis being what it was – the gaunt shell of the basilica could not be permitted to go to waste. West of Tours, in the Vendée, the Revolution was in peril. Bands of traitors, massed behind images of the Virgin, had risen in revolt. Patriots recruited to the cavalry, when they arrived in Tours, needed somewhere to keep their horses. The solution was obvious. The basilica of Saint Martin was converted into a stable.

Horse shit steaming in what had once been one of the holiest shrines in Christendom gave to Voltaire’s contempt for l’infâme a far more pungent expression than anything that might have been read in a salon. The ambition of France’s new rulers was to mould an entire ‘people of philosophes’.¹⁶ The old order had been weighed and found wanting. The monarchy itself had been abolished. The erstwhile king of France – who at his coronation had been anointed with oil brought from heaven for the baptism of Clovis, and girded with the sword of Charlemagne – had been executed as a common criminal. His decapitation, staged before a cheering crowd, had come courtesy of the guillotine, a machine of death specifically designed by its inventor to be as enlightened as it was egalitarian. Just as the king’s corpse, buried in a rough wooden coffin, had then been covered in quicklime, so had every division of rank in the country, every marker of aristocracy, been dissolved into a common citizenship. It was not enough, though, merely to set society on new foundations. The shadow of superstition reached everywhere. Time itself had to be recalibrated. That October, a new calendar was introduced. Sundays were swept away. So too was the practice of dating years from the incarnation of Christ. Henceforward, in France, it was the proclamation of the Republic that would serve to divide the sweep of time.

Even with this innovation in place, there still remained much to be done. For fifteen centuries, priests had been leaving their grubby fingerprints on the way that the past was comprehended. All that time, they had been carrying ‘pride and barbarism in their feudal souls’.¹⁷ And before that? A grim warning of what might happen should the Revolution fail was to be found in the history of Greece and Rome. The radiance that lately had begun to dawn over Europe was not the continent’s first experience of enlightenment. The battle between reason and unreason, between civilisation and barbarism, between philosophy and religion, was one that had been fought in ancient times as well. ‘In the pagan world, a spirit of toleration and gentleness had ruled.’¹⁸ It was this that the sinister triumph of Christianity had blotted out. Fanaticism had prevailed. Now, though, all the dreams of the philosophes were coming true. L’infâme was being crushed. For the first time since the age of Constantine, Christianity was being targeted by a government for eradication. Its baleful reign, banished on the blaze of revolution, stood revealed as a nightmare that for too long had been permitted to separate twin ages of progress: a middle age.

This was an understanding of the past that, precisely because so flattering to sensibilities across Europe, was destined to prove infinitely more enduring than the makeshift calendar of the Revolution. Nevertheless, just like many other hallmarks of the Enlightenment, it did not derive from the philosophes. The understanding of Europe’s history as a succession of three distinct ages had originally been popularised by the Reformation. To Protestants, it was Luther who had banished shadow from the world, and the early centuries of the Church, prior to its corruption by popery, that had constituted the primal age of light. By 1753, when the term ‘Middle Ages’ first appeared in English, Protestants had come to take for granted the existence of a distinct period of history: one that ran from the dying years of the Roman Empire to the Reformation. The revolutionaries, when they tore down the monastic buildings of Saint-Denis, when they expelled the monks from Cluny and left its buildings to collapse, when they reconsecrated Notre Dame as a ‘Temple of Reason’ and installed beneath its vaulting a singer dressed as Liberty, were paying unwitting tribute to an earlier period of upheaval. In Tours as well, the desecration visited on the basilica was not the first such vandalism that it had suffered. Back in 1562, when armed conflict between Catholics and Protestants had erupted across France, a band of Huguenots had torched the shrine of Saint Martin and tossed the relics of the saint onto the fire. Only a single bone and a fragment of his skull had survived. It was hardly unsurprising, then, in the first throes of the Revolution, that many Catholics, in their bewilderment and disorientation, should initially have suspected that it was all a Protestant plot.

In truth, though, the origins of the great earthquake that had seen the heir of Clovis consigned to a pauper’s grave extended much further back than the Reformation. ‘Woe to you who are rich.’ Christ’s words might almost have been the manifesto of those who could afford only ragged trousers, and so were categorised as men ‘without knee-breeches’: sans-culottes. They were certainly not the first to call for the poor to inherit the earth. So too had the radicals among the Pelagians, who had dreamed of a world in which every man and woman would be equal; so too had the Taborites, who had built a town on communist principles, and mockingly crowned the corpse of a king with straw; so too had the Diggers, who had denounced property as an offence against God. Nor, in the ancient city of Tours, were the sans-culottes who ransacked the city’s basilica the first to be outraged by the wealth of the Church, and by the palaces of its bishops. In Marmoutier, where Alcuin had once promoted scripture as the inheritance of all the Christian people, a monk in the twelfth century had drawn up a lineage for Martin that cast him as the heir of kings and emperors – and yet Martin had been no aristocrat. The silken landowners of Gaul, offended by the roughness of his manners and his dress, had detested him much as their heirs detested the militants of revolutionary France. Like the radicals who had stripped bare his shrine, Martin had been a destroyer of idols, a scorner of privilege, a scourge of the mighty. Even amid all the splendours of Martinopolis, the most common depiction of the saint had shown him sharing his cloak with a beggar. Martin had been a sans-culotte.

There were many Catholics, in the first flush of the Revolution, who had recognised this. Just as English radicals, in the wake of Charles I’s defeat, had hailed Christ as the first Leveller, so were there enthusiasts for the Revolution who saluted him as ‘the first sans-culotte’.¹⁹ Was not the liberty proclaimed by the Revolution the same as that proclaimed by Paul? ‘You, my brothers, were called to be free.’ This, in August 1789, had been the text at the funeral service for the men who, a month earlier, had perished while storming the Bastille, the great fortress in Paris that had provided the French monarchy with its most intimidating prison. Even the Jacobins, the Revolution’s dominant and most radical faction, had initially been welcoming to the clergy. For a while, indeed, priests were more disproportionately represented in their ranks than any other profession. As late as November 1791, the president elected by the Paris Jacobins had been a bishop. It seemed fitting, then, that their name should have derived from the Dominicans, whose former headquarters they had made their base. Certainly, to begin with, there had been little evidence to suggest that a revolution might precipitate an assault on religion.

And much from across the Atlantic to suggest the opposite. There, thirteen years before the storming of the Bastille, Britain’s colonies in North America had declared their independence. A British attempt to crush the revolution had failed. In France – where the monarchy’s financial backing of the rebels had ultimately contributed to its own collapse – the debt of the American revolution to the ideals of the philosophes appeared clear. There were many in the upper echelons of the infant republic who agreed. In 1783, six years before becoming their first president, the general who had led the colonists to independence hailed the United States of America as a monument to enlightenment. ‘The foundation of our Empire,’ George Washington had declared, ‘was not laid in the gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition, but at an Epoch when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined than at any former period.’²⁰ This vaunt, however, had implied no contempt for Christianity. Quite the opposite. Far more than anything written by Spinoza or Voltaire, it was New England that had provided the American republic with its model of democracy, and Pennsylvania with its model of toleration. That all men had been created equal, and endowed with an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, were not remotely self-evident truths. That most Americans believed they were owed less to philosophy than to the Bible: to the assurance given equally to Christians and Jews, to Protestants and Catholics, to Calvinists and Quakers, that every human being was created in God’s image. The truest and ultimate seedbed of the American republic – no matter what some of those who had composed its founding documents might have cared to think – was the book of Genesis.

The genius of the authors of the United States constitution was to garb in the robes of the Enlightenment the radical Protestantism that was the prime religious inheritance of their fledgling nation. When, in 1791, an amendment was adopted which forbade the government from preferring one Church over another, this was no more a repudiation of Christianity than Cromwell’s enthusiasm for religious liberty had been. Hostility to imposing tests on Americans as a means of measuring their orthodoxy owed far more to the meeting houses of Philadelphia than to the salons of Paris. ‘If Christian Preachers had continued to teach as Christ & his Apostles did, without Salaries, and as the Quakers now do, I imagine Tests would never have existed.’²¹ So wrote the polymath who, as renowned for his invention of the lightning rod as he was for his tireless role in the campaign for his country’s independence, had come to be hailed as the ‘first American’. Benjamin Franklin served as a living harmonisation of New England and Pennsylvania. Born in Boston, he had run away as a young man to Philadelphia; a lifelong admirer of Puritan egalitarianism, he had published Benjamin Lay; a strong believer in divine providence, he had been shamed by the example of the Quakers into freeing his slaves. If, like the philosophes who much admired him as an embodiment of rugged colonial virtue, he dismissed as idle dogma anything that smacked of superstition, and doubted the divinity of Christ, then he was no less the heir of his country’s Protestant traditions for that. Voltaire, meeting him in Paris, and asked to bless his grandson, had pronounced in English what he declared to be the only appropriate benediction: ‘God and liberty.’²² Franklin, like the revolution for which he was such an effective spokesman, illustrated a truth pregnant with implications for the future: that the surest way to promote Christian teachings as universal was to portray them as deriving from anything other than Christianity.

In France, this was a lesson with many students. There, too, they spoke of rights. The founding document of the country’s revolution, the sonorously titled ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen’, had been issued barely a month after the fall of the Bastille. Part-written as it was by the American ambassador to France, it drew heavily on the example of the United States. The histories of the two countries, though, were very different. France was not a Protestant nation. There existed in the country a rival claimant to the language of human rights. These, so it was claimed by revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic, existed naturally within the fabric of things, and had always done so, transcending time and space. Yet this, of course, was quite as fantastical a belief as anything to be found in the Bible. The evolution of the concept of human rights, mediated as it had been since the Reformation by Protestant jurists and philosophes, had come to obscure its original authors. It derived, not from ancient Greece or Rome, but from the period of history condemned by all right-thinking revolutionaries as a lost millennium, in which any hint of enlightenment had at once been snuffed out by monkish, book-burning fanatics. It was an inheritance from the canon lawyers of the Middle Ages.

Nor had the Catholic Church – much diminished though it might be from its heyday – abandoned its claim to a universal sovereignty. This, to revolutionaries who insisted that ‘the principle of any sovereignty resides essentially in the Nation’,²³ could hardly help but render it a roadblock. No source of legitimacy could possibly be permitted that distracted from that of the state. Accordingly, in 1791 – even as legislators in the United States were agreeing that there should be ‘no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof’²⁴ – the Church in France had been nationalised. The legacy of Gregory VII appeared decisively revoked. Only the obduracy of Catholics who refused to pledge their loyalty to the new order had necessitated the escalation of measures against Christianity itself. Even those among the revolutionary leadership who questioned the wisdom of attempting to eradicate religion from France never doubted that the pretensions of the Catholic Church were insupportable. By 1793, priests were no longer welcome in the Jacobins. That anything of value might have sprung from the mulch of medieval superstition was a possibility too grotesque even to contemplate. Human rights owed nothing to the flux of Christian history. They were eternal and universal – and the Revolution was their guardian. ‘The Declaration of Rights is the Constitution of all peoples, all other laws being variable by nature, and subordinated to this one.’²⁵

So declared Maximilien Robespierre, most formidable and implacable of the Jacobin leaders. Few men were more icily contemptuous of the claims on the future of the past. Long an opponent of the death penalty, he had worked fervently for the execution of the king; shocked by the vandalising of churches, he believed that virtue without terror was impotent. There could be no mercy shown the enemies of the Revolution. They bore the taint of leprosy. Only once they had been amputated, and their evil excised from the state, would the triumph of the people be assured. Only then would France be fully born again. Yet there hung over this a familiar irony. The ambition of eliminating hereditary crimes and absurdities, of purifying humanity, of bringing them from vice to virtue, was redolent not just of Luther, but of Gregory VII. The vision of a universal sovereignty, one founded amid the humbling of kings and the marshalling of lawyers, stood recognisably in a line of descent from that of Europe’s primal revolutionaries. So too their efforts to patrol dissidence. Voltaire, in his attempt to win a pardon for Calas, had compared the legal system in Toulouse to the crusade against the Albigensians. Three decades on, the mandate given to troops marching on the Vendée, issued by self-professed admirers of Voltaire, echoed the crusaders with a far more brutal precision. ‘Kill them all. God knows his own.’ Such was the order that the papal legate was reputed to have given before the walls of Béziers. ‘Spear with your bayonets all the inhabitants you encounter along the way. I know there may be a few patriots in this region – it matters not, we must sacrifice all.’²⁶ So the general sent to pacify the Vendée in early 1794 instructed his troops. One-third of the population would end up dead: as many as a quarter of a million civilians. Meanwhile, back in the capital, the execution of those condemned as enemies of the people was painted by enthusiasts for revolutionary terror in recognisably scriptural colours. Good and evil locked in a climactic battle, the entire world at stake; the damned compelled to drink the wine of wrath; a new age replacing the old: here were the familiar contours of apocalypse. When, demonstrating that its justice might reach even into the grave, the revolutionary government ordered the exhumation of the royal necropolis at Saint-Denis, the dumping of royal corpses into lime pits was dubbed by those who had commissioned it the Last Judgement.

The Jacobins, though, were not Dominicans. It was precisely the Christian conviction that ultimate judgement was the prerogative of God, and that life for every sinner was a journey towards either heaven or hell, that was the object of their enlightened scorn. Even Robespierre, who believed in the eternity of the soul, did not on that count imagine that justice should be left to the chill and distant deity that he termed the Supreme Being. It was the responsibility of all who cherished virtue to work for its triumph in the here and now. The Republic had to be made pure. To imagine that a deity might ever perform this duty was the rankest superstition. In the gospels, it was foretold that those who had oppressed the poor would only receive their due at the end of days, when Christ would return in glory, and separate ‘the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats’.²⁷ But this would never happen. A people of philosophes could recognise it to be a fairy tale. So it was that the charge of sorting the goats from the sheep, and of delivering them to punishment, had been shouldered – selflessly, grimly, implacably – by the Jacobins.

This was why, in the Vendée, there was no attempt to do as the friars had done in the wake of the Albigensian crusade and apply to a diseased region a scalpel rather than a sword. It was why as well, in Paris, the guillotine seemed never to take a break from its work. As the spring of 1794 turned to summer, so its blade came to hiss ever more relentlessly, and the puddles of blood to spill ever more widely across the cobblestones. It was not individuals who stood condemned, but entire classes. Aristocrats, moderates, counter-revolutionaries of every stripe: all were enemies of the people. To show them mercy was a crime. Indulgence was an atrocity; clemency parricide. Even when Robespierre, succumbing to the same kind of factional battle in which he had so often triumphed, was himself sent to the guillotine, his conviction that ‘the French Revolution is the first that will have been founded on the rights of humanity’²⁸ did not fade. There needed no celestial court, no deity sat on his throne, to deliver justice. ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.’²⁹ So Christ, at the day of judgement, was destined to tell those who had failed to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to visit the sick in prison. There was no requirement, in an age of enlightenment, to take such nonsense seriously. The only heaven was the heaven fashioned by revolutionaries on earth. Human rights needed no God to define them. Virtue was its own reward.

The Misfortunes of Virtue

‘The darkness of the middle ages exhibits some scenes not unworthy of our notice.’³⁰ Condescension of this order, an amused acknowledgement that even amid the murk of the medieval past the odd flickering of light might on occasion be observed, was not unknown among the philosophes. To committed revolutionaries, however, compromise with barbarism was out of the question. The Middle Ages had been a breeding ground of superstition, and that was that. Unsurprisingly, then, there was much enthusiasm among Jacobins for the customs and manners that had existed prior to the triumph of Christianity. The role played by the early Church in the imaginings of the Reformation was played in the imaginings of the French Revolution by classical Greece and Rome. Festivals designed to celebrate the dawning of the new age drew their inspiration from antique temples and statuary; the names of saints vanished from streets in Paris, to be replaced by those of Athenian philosophers; revolutionary leaders modelled themselves obsessively on Cicero. Even when the French Republic, mimicking the sombre course of Roman history, succumbed to military dictatorship, the new regime continued to plunder the dressing-up box of classical antiquity. Its armies followed eagles to victories across Europe. Its victories were commemorated in Paris on a colossal triumphal arch. Its leader, a general of luminescent genius named Napoleon, affected the laurel wreath of a Caesar. The Church meanwhile – grudgingly tolerated by an emperor who had invited the pope to his coronation, but then refused to be crowned by him – functioned effectively as a department of state. Salt was rubbed into the wound when a saint named Napoleon was manufactured in honour of the emperor, and given his own public fête. Augustus would no doubt have approved.

Nevertheless, the notion that antiquity offered the present nothing save for models of virtue, nothing save for exemplars appropriate to an enlightened and progressive age, had limitations. In 1797, a book was published in Paris that provided a very different perspective. Emphasis on the ‘toleration and gentleness’ of the ancients there was not. The Persians, ‘the world’s most ingenious race for the invention of tortures’,³¹ had devised the scaphe. The Greeks, when they captured a city, had licensed rape as a reward for valour. The Romans had stocked their households with young boys and girls, and used them as they pleased. Everyone in antiquity had taken for granted that infanticide was perfectly legitimate; that to turn the other cheek was folly; that ‘Nature has given the weak to be slaves’.³² Over many hundreds of pages, the claim that empires in the remote past had regarded as perfectly legitimate customs that under the influence of Christianity had come to be regarded as crimes was rehearsed in painstaking detail. Provocatively, it was even suggested that a relish for displays of suffering – such as in ancient Rome had been staged as public entertainments in the very heart of the city – had been a civic good. ‘Rome was mistress of the world all the while she had these cruel spectacles; she sank into decline and from there into slavery as soon as Christian morals managed to persuade her that there was more wrong in watching men slaughtered than beasts.’³³

This reflection was not altogether an original one: the thesis that Christianity had contributed to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire was popular among historically minded philosophes. In other ways, though, the author had indeed pushed originality to an extreme. So shocking was his book that it was published without any hint of his name. The New Justine was not a work of history at all, but of fiction. Its observations on the character of ancient civilisations formed merely one strand in a vast tapestry, woven to demonstrate a disorienting proposition: that ‘virtue is not a world of priceless worth, it is just a way of behaving that varies according to climate and consequently has nothing real about it’.³⁴ To think otherwise was imbecility. The plot of the novel – which related the adventures of two sisters, one virtuous, the other libertine – demonstrated this in obscene and relentless detail. Justine, ever trusting in the essential goodness of humanity, was repeatedly raped and brutalised; Juliette, ever contemptuous of any hint of virtue, whored and murdered her way to spectacular wealth. Their respective fortunes demonstrated the way of the world. God was a sham. There was only Nature. The weak existed to be enslaved and exploited by the strong. Charity was a cold and pointless process, and talk of human brotherhood a fraud. That anyone should ever have thought otherwise was due solely to a monstrous scam. ‘The religion of that wily little sneak Jesus – feeble, sickly, persecuted, singularly desirous to outmanoeuvre the tyrants of the day, to bully them into acknowledging a doctrine of brotherhood from whose acceptance he calculated to gain some respite – Christianity sanctioned these laughable fraternal ties.’³⁵

The scandal of the novel was sufficient, when the identity of its author was finally uncovered by Napoleon’s chief of police in 1801, to have him flung into jail. The blasphemy, though, was only incidentally against Christianity. The Marquis de Sade was a man who had been brought up in the bosom of the Enlightenment. Schooled from an early age in the writings of the philosophes, and with an uncle who had been a close friend of Voltaire, he had always been a free-thinker. Freedom, though, had its limits. Sade’s refusal to submit to convention was complicated by the often violent character of his desires. Born in 1741, he had spent his sexual prime frustrated by laws that decreed that even prostitutes and beggars had a right not to be kidnapped, or whipped, or force-fed Spanish fly. Titled though the Marquis was, his escapades in the years before the fall of the Bastille had culminated in his incarceration in France’s most notorious prison. There, denied his much-cherished liberty, he had found himself with no lack of time to dwell on the contemptibility of Christian teaching. ‘The doctrine of loving one’s neighbour is a fantasy that we owe to Christianity and not to Nature.’³⁶ Yet even once Sade, set free by the Revolution, had found himself living under ‘the reign of philosophy’,³⁷ in a republic committed to casting off the clammy hold of superstition, he had found that the pusillanimous doctrines of Jesus retained their grip. Specious talk of brotherhood was as common in revolutionary committee rooms as it had been in churches. In 1793 – following his improbable election as president of a local committee in Paris – Sade had issued instructions to his fellow citizens that they should all paint slogans on their houses: ‘Unity, Indivisibility of the Republic, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’.³⁸ Sade himself, though, was no more a Jacobin than he was a priest. The true division in society lay not between friends and enemies of the people, but between those who were naturally masters and those who were naturally slaves. Only when this was appreciated and acted upon would the taint of Christianity finally be eradicated, and humanity live as Nature prescribed. The inferior class of man, so a philosophe in The New Justine coolly observed, ‘is simply the species that stands next above the chimpanzee on the ladder; and the distance separating them is, if anything, less than that between him and the individual belonging to the superior caste’.³⁹

Yet if this was the kind of talk that would see Sade spend his final years consigned to a lunatic asylum, the icy pitilessness of his gaze was not insanity. More clearly than many enthusiasts for enlightenment cared to recognise, he could see that the existence of human rights was no more provable than the existence of God. In 1794, prompted by rebellion in Saint-Domingue, a French-ruled island in the West Indies, and by the necessary logic of the Declaration of Rights, the revolutionary government had proclaimed slavery abolished throughout France’s colonies; eight years later, in a desperate and ultimately futile attempt to prevent the blacks of Saint-Domingue from establishing their own republic, Napoleon reinstated it. The shamelessness of this would not have surprised Sade. Those in power were hypocrites. Throughout The New Justine, there was not an abbot, not a bishop, not a pope who did not prove to be an atheist and a libertine. Nor, when Sade contemplated the slave trade, was he any the more convinced by the godliness of Protestants. English plantation-owners in the Caribbean – masters of life and death over their human chattels as they were – were among the few contemporaries worthy to be compared to the ancients. ‘Wolves eating lambs, lambs devoured by wolves, the strong killing the weak, the weak falling victim to the strong, such is Nature, such are her designs, such is her plan.’⁴⁰ The English, like the Spartans or the Romans, understood this. It was why, Sade wrote, they were in the habit of chopping up their slaves and boiling them in vats, or else crushing them in the sugar-cane mills – ‘as slow a way to die as it is dreadful’.⁴¹ There was only the one timeless language: the language of power.

Progress, that venerable Christian ideal that Abelard had cherished and Milton hymned, was no less a fantasy for having provided revolution with its battle-cry. In 1814, eleven years after Sade’s incarceration in a lunatic asylum, the monarchy was restored to France. Napoleon, whose ambitions had shaken thrones across Europe, was exiled to an island off Italy. Aristocrats returned to Paris. That September, when foreign ministers arrived in Vienna to negotiate a new balance of power in Europe, there was no wild talk of a brotherhood of man. Too many doors that should have been kept locked had been prised open. It was time to close them again, and slide the bolts across. Sade, who knew what it was to be consigned to a prison, would not have been unduly surprised at the end to which a century of enlightenment had come. That November, when his cousin visited him on his sickbed, and spoke to him of liberty, he did not reply. On 2 December he breathed his last. Meanwhile, in Vienna, amid the glittering of diamonds and the smashing of wine bottles, emperors and kings continued to draw lines on maps, and to work at making Europe secure against progress.

Yet even amid the concert of the great powers there was evidence that it lived on as an ideal. That June, on his return from preparatory negotiations in Paris, the British Foreign Secretary had been greeted by his fellow parliamentarians with a standing ovation. Among the terms of the treaty agreed by Lord Castlereagh had been one particularly startling stipulation: that Britain and France would join in a campaign to abolish the slave trade. This, to Benjamin Lay, would have been fantastical, an impossible dream. The treaty, though, in the view of some in the British parliament, did not go nearly far enough. Castlereagh, anxious not to destabilise France’s recently restored monarchy, had agreed that French merchants should be permitted to continue trafficking slaves for a further five years. This, it had turned out, was a concession too far. Within days of the Foreign Secretary’s seemingly triumphant return from Paris, an unprecedented campaign of protest had swept Britain. Petitions on a scale never before witnessed had deluged Parliament. A quarter of all those eligible to sign them had added their names. Never before had the mass of the British public committed themselves so manifestly to a single issue. It had become for them, the French Foreign Minister noted in mingled bemusement and disdain, ‘a passion carried to fanaticism, and one which the ministry is no longer at liberty to check’.⁴² Castlereagh, negotiating with his opposite numbers at Vienna, knew that his hands were tied. He had no option but to secure a treaty against the slave trade.

Barely sixty years had passed since the Philadelphia Friends had banned Quakers from dealing in slaves. In that short space of time, a cause that had rendered Benjamin Lay an object of mockery had evolved to shape the counsels of nations. Both in the United States and in Britain, dread that slavery ranked as a monstrous sin, for which not just individuals but entire nations were certain to be chastised by God, had come to grip vast swathes of the population. ‘Can it be expected that He will suffer this great iniquity to go unpunished?’⁴³ Such a question would, of course, have bewildered earlier generations of Christians. The passages in the Bible that appeared to sanction slavery remained. Plantation-owners – both in the West Indies and in the southern United States – did not hesitate to quote them. But this had failed to stem the rising swell of protest. Indeed, it had left slave-owners open to a new and discomfiting charge: that they were the enemies of progress. Already, by the time of the American Revolution, to be a Quaker was to be an abolitionist. The gifts of the Spirit, though, were not confined to Friends. They had come to be liberally dispensed wherever English-speaking Protestants were gathered. Large numbers of them, ranging from Baptists to Anglicans, had been graced with good news: euangelion. To be an Evangelical was to understand that the law of God was the law not only of justice, but of love. No one who had felt the chains of sin fall away could possibly doubt ‘that slavery was ever detestable in the sight of God’.⁴⁴ There was no time to lose. And so it was, in 1807, in the midst of a deadly struggle for survival against Napoleon, that the British parliament had passed the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade; and so it was, in 1814, that Lord Castlereagh, faced across the negotiating table by uncomprehending foreign princes, had found himself obliged to negotiate for the eradication of a business that other nations still took for granted. Amazing Grace indeed.

To Sade, of course, it all had been folly. There was no brotherhood of man; there was no duty owed the weak by the strong. Evangelicals, like Jacobins, were the dupes of their shared inheritance: their belief in progress; their conviction in the potential of reform; their faith that humanity might be brought to light. Yet it was precisely this kinship, this synergy, that enabled Castlereagh, faced by the obduracy of his fellow foreign ministers, to craft a compromise that was, in every sense of the word, enlightened. Unable to force through an explicit outlawing of the slave trade, he settled instead for something at once more nebulous and more far-reaching. On 8 February 1815, eight powers in Europe signed up to a momentous declaration. Slavery, it stated, was ‘repugnant to the principles of humanity and universal morality’.⁴⁵ The language of evangelical Protestantism was fused with that of the French Revolution. Napoleon, slipping his place of exile three weeks after the declaration had been signed, and looking to rally international support for his return, had no hesitation in proclaiming his support for the declaration. That June, in the great battle outside Brussels that terminally ended his ambitions, both sides were agreed that slavery, as an institution, was an abomination. The twin traditions of Britain and France, of Benjamin Lay and Voltaire, of enthusiasts for the Spirit and enthusiasts for reason, had joined in amity even before the first cannon was fired at Waterloo. The irony was one that neither Protestants nor atheists cared to dwell upon: that an age of enlightenment and revolution had served to establish as international law a principle that derived from the depths of the Catholic past. Increasingly, it was in the language of human rights that Europe would proclaim its values to the world.