Abstract
The anonymous author of the most outrageous clandestine manuscript of the eighteenth century, Traité des trois imposteurs (c.1710), addressed the capabilities of ordinary people directly: all men could know the truth, but they are duped by vain and ridiculous opinions put forward by “the partisans of these absurdities … if the people would learn into what an abyss of ignorance they have fallen,” they would soon rid themselves of the yoke of ignorance imposed upon them.1 They do not have to engage in “des hautes speculations,” nor penetrate the secrets of nature; they just have to have a little good sense. In contrast to the constraint endorsed by contemporary freethinkers like John Toland (d. 1722)—some ideas are meant to be kept “esoteric,” and others fit for the masses and may be classified as “exoteric”—the Traité consistently speaks in a populist voice. If ordinary people have one defect, it lies in their credulity. Hobbes would have agreed.
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Notes
Gianluca Mori and Alain Mothu, eds. Philosophes sans Dieu. Textes athées clandestins du xviiie siècle (Paris: Champion, 2010), p. 217, from Essais, “Tous les hommes ont une pente naturelle qui les porte à la recherche de la vérité.”
Jean Meslier, Testament. Memoir of the Thoughts and Sentiments of Jean Meslier (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009), p. 37
and quoted in Federico Barbierato, The Inquisitor in the Hat Shop. Inquisition, Forbidden Books and Unbelief in Early Modern Venice (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), p. xvii.
Gianluca Mori and Alain Mothu, eds. Philosophes sans Dieu. Textes athées clandestins du xviiie siècle (Paris: Champion, 2010), p. 33, in Le Philosophe and p. 34, Malgré les fables que le peuple croit du déluge, du feu du ciel tombé sur cinq villes, malgré les vives peintures des peines et récompenses éternelles, malgré tant de sermons et tant de prônes, le peuple est toujours le même. La nature est plus forte que les chimères: il semble qu’elle soit jalouse de ses droits …
I am borrowing the concept, but not the ideology found in Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
A similar point about the new sociability is made in Peter Clark, “Spaces, Circuits and Short-circuits in the ‘European Enlightenment,’” De Achttiende Eeuw, vol. 43, 2011, pp. 50–64.
The argument here is deeply indebted to my reading of Joan Dejean, Ancients against Moderns. Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siècle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 78–86.
Margaret Jacob, “Bernard Picart and the Turn to Modernity,” De Achttiende Eeuw, vol. 37, 2005, pp. 1–16. See Roger de Piles, The Principles of Painting. …, London, 1743, pp. 270–1, and 275 for the quotation; and on Aristotle, pp. 271–3; p. 278 on reasoning. For the engravings on ignorance and religion,
see Lynn Hunt, Margaret C. Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt, The Book That Changed Europe. Picart & Bernard’s Religious Ceremonies of the World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), pp. 59–60.
Dialogue sur le coloris (Paris: Langlois, 1699), pp. 5–6. Here I am using the 1699 edition of this work of 1673. See also Roger de Piles, The Principles of Painting …, (London, 1743), pp. 270–1. And on Aristotle, pp. 271–3; p. 278 on reasoning. See also Svetlana Alpers, “Roger de Piles and the History of Art,” in Peter Ganz, Martin Gosebruch, et al., eds., Kunst und Kunsttheorie 1400–1900 (Wiesbaden, Germany: Otto Harrassowitz, 1991), pp. 178–9.
E. Kegel-Brinkgreve and A. M. Luyendijk-Elshout, eds. Boerhaave’s Orations (Leiden, the Netherlands: Leiden University Press, 1983), p. 177; François de Neufchâteau, Circulaire aux Administrations centrales de Départements et Commissaires du Directoire exécutif près de ces Administrations, 9 Fructidor, Year VI, found in Archives Nationales, Paris, AN, F12 985: Ces arts, que l’idiome de l’ancien régime avait cru avilir en les nommant arts mécaniques, ces arts abandonnés longtemps à l’instinct et à la routine, sont pourtant susceptibles d’une étude profonde et d’un progrès illimité. Bacon regardait leur histoire comme une branche principale de la philosophie. Diderot souhaitait qu’ils eussent leur académie; mais que le despotisme était loin d’exaucer son viceu!
See Benjamin Coole, Some Observations … Relating to Women’s Exercising Their Spiritual Gifts (London: Philip Gwillwim, 1716); Josiah Martin, A Letter to the Author … (London: B. Coole, 1716); B. Coole, Reflection on the Letter …, (London: P. Gwillwim, 1717); J. Martin, A Vindication of Women’s Preaching … (London: J. Sowle, 1717); see also Alan Sell, John Locke and the Divines (Cardiff, UK: University of Wales Press, 1997).
See Karen Offen, “Was Mary Wollstonecraft a Feminist? A Contextual Re-Reading of A Vindication of the Rights of Women, 1792–1992,” in Uma Parameswaran ed., Quilting a New Canon. Stitching Women’s Words (Toronto: Sister Vision, 1996), pp. 3–24.
Rex A. Barrell, ed. Anthony Ashley Cooper Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) and “le refuge français”—Correspondence, Studies in British History, vol. 15 (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1989), pp. 91–2, letter of March 1705–06 to Jean Le Clerc.
Allison Blakely, Blacks in the Dutch World. The Evolution of Racial Imagery in a Modern Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 225–7. For the reception of proselytes, see Prefecture of the Police, Paris, Aa/4/205, arrest of Simon Langlois, 1706.
Robert Collis, “Jolly Jades, Lewd Ladies and Moral Muses: Women and Clubs in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Journal for Research into Freemasonry and Fraternalism, vol. 2, no. 2, 2011, pp. 202–35.
Th. Pisvin, La Vie intellectuelle à Namur sous le Régime autrichien, (Louvain, Belgium: University of Louvain, 1963), pp. 202–3.
Dossier on “Vie de Louis Robert Hipolithe de Brehan comte de Plelo” where “de tribus impostoribus” is mentioned as a source for the ideas of the priest; see Archives Nationales, Paris, MS L10, dossier IV, no. 2–3, ff. 19–21. See S. Berti, “Unmasking the Truth: The Theme of Imposture in Early Modern European Culture, 1660–1730,” in James E. Force and David Katz, eds., Everything Connects. In Conference with Richard H. Popkin (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 1999), pp. 21–36.
Staatsarchiv Dresden, Geheimes Konsilium, loc. 7209, cited by Martin Mulsow, “Freethinking in Early Eighteenth-Century Protestant Germany: Peter Friedrich Arpe and the Traité des trois imposteurs,” in S. Berti et al., Heterodoxy, Spinozism and Free Thought in Early-Eighteenth-Century Europe (The Hague: Kluwer, 1996), p. 220.
See the precipitous dip in communion attendance in Edinburgh in the 1690s from which no recovery occurs; R. A. Houston, Social Change in the Age of Enlightenment: Edinburgh, 1660–1760 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 184.
Gareth Jones, History of the Law of Charity 1532–1827 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 122.
For the Watt brothers, see Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob, “The Affective Revolution in 1790s Britain,” Eighteenth Century Studies, vol. 34, 2001, pp. 491–521.
In the Wolfenbüttel library, it is possible to survey a quite large collection of books from just about every city in Europe. In the eighteenth century, the library was the second largest in Europe. A similar survey can be conducted at UCLAs Young Library, which has the largest collection of Marteau books in North America. See also, from the former DDR, Karl Klaus Walther, Die Deutschsprachige Verlagsproduktion von Pierre Marteau/Peter Hammer, Köln (Leipzig, Germany: VEB Bibliographisches Institut, 1983). It collects a number of German language books that bore the imprint.
(Claude Dûpré, name written in by hand in the margin), Le Jesuite secularisé (Cologne, Germany: Jacques Vilebard), 1683, pp. 187–90; pp. 223–4 on the Jesuits. Cf. Silvia Berti, “At the roots of unbelief,” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 56, no. 4, 1995, pp. 555–75.
See my book The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689–1720 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976); reprinted Gordon and Breach, 1990; cf. John C. Higgins-Biddle, ed. The Reasonableness of Christianity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999).
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© 2013 Margaret C. Jacob and Catherine Secretan
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Jacob, M.C. (2013). The Populist Voice of the Early Enlightenment. In: Jacob, M.C., Secretan, C. (eds) In Praise of Ordinary People. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137380524_8
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