Human Nature, Cultural Diversity, and the French Enlightenment

Human Nature, Cultural Diversity, and the French Enlightenment

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HUMAN NATURE, CULTURAL DIVERSITY, AND THE

FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT HENRY VYVEBJBERG

New York Oxford OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1989

Oxford University Press Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Petaling Jaya Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan

Copyright © 1989 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc., 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 30016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Vyverberg, Henry. Human nature, cultural diversity, and the French enlightenment Henry Vyverberg. p. cm. Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 0-19-505864-X 1. Enlightenment. 2. Ethnopsychology—History—48th century. 3. France—Intellectual life—18th century. I. Title. B 1925.E5V93 1989 194-dcl 9 89-2971 CIP

987654321 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

For Edward and Patricia Krupa

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Preface

It is more than two centuries since 1778, the year Voltaire and Rousseau died. Six years later came the death of Diderot, and five years after that, the outbreak of the French Revolution—a revolution that in some ways crowned the work of the Enlightenment, and in others presaged its end. The Revolution and its ruthless Napoleonic offshoots clearly revealed the stirring of a new nationalism and imperialism in the world, and a darker side of human nature than the Enlightenment had known. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries compounded the problems, practical and intellectual, of the modern western world. In many quarters, among thinking people, the most striking trends have been pervasive skepticism and relativism, and hitherto unimagined complexities have marked all areas of life and thought. As historical truisms, these facts require no elaboration here. What does deserve notice is how the infinitely varied modern scene has affected our vision of the eighteenth century and, more specifically, of the French Enlightenment. In its own day a vital, challenging movement of thought and an ambitious program for remaking mankind, the intellectual world of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot now can seem rather static, irrelevant, and oversimplified. How naive, we often find ourselves thinking, that the Enlightenment actually believed the world would be really amenable to rational manipulation and amelioration! How misguided and sad that it believed nature and reason would show the way toward indefinite human progress! How simple-minded

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that philosophes and Encyclopedists like Voltaire and Diderot could found embryonic historical and psychological theories on the quaint notion that human nature is the same everywhere! How pathetic that a narrow circle of the Enlightened could suppose its own rationalistic standards valid for the whole of mankind, in all places and all ages of history! In short, although the Enlightenment still deserved some limited recognition for its pursuit of rationality and freedom, its other goals and methods often seemed irrelevant in a modern age of infinitely more complex perceptions and challenges. There is, in fact, much to be said for this view—but not quite as much as is usually believed. In recent decades a new generation of scholars has been investigating the Enlightenment, and especially its prototypical French thinkers, more searchingly and sympathetically, sometimes finding its mainstream critics as guilty of simplistic interpretation as the Enlightenment may have been guilty of a simplistic worldview. Perhaps the outstanding synthesis of the newer, more sympathetic perceptions of the Enlightenment as a whole can be found in the writings of Peter Gay, to whom I owe a great deal for his example and insight. Other authors have contributed essential work in more circumscribed areas—on individual Enlightenment thinkers, for example—and then sometimes in substantial syntheses of their own. Here I owe much to studies by such scholars as J. H. Brumfitt, Lester G. Crocker, Georges Gusdorf, John Lough, Jacques Proust, Nelly Noemie Schargo, Virgil W. Topazio, and Arthur M. Wilson. More than three decades ago I made a modest contribution to the reassessment of alleged Enlightenment oversimplifications by raising doubts about the belief in progress as the natural, inevitable culmination of French eighteenthcentury thought (Historical Pessimism in the French Enlightenment, 1958). Over the years, further issues have suggested themselves to me and many other investigators. One group of issues that, I believe, calls for reconsideration is the presumed complete blindness of the French philosophes to the complexities of human nature, and their consequent utter failure to understand cultural and historical diversity. My book is dedicated to the exploration of these issues: human nature and the diversity of history and cultures, as these concepts were understood by eighteenth-century French thinkers. In writing this work I have received much encouragement and help from colleagues at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale—most notably from Howard W. Allen, H. Arnold Barton, John E. Dotson, David L. Wilson, and the late Donald L. Brehm. My pursuit of subject matter has been greatly facilitated, as I have already noted, by a great mass of dedicated modern scholarship. Ultimately, though, this study owes its substance to a band of writers whose intellectual enthusiasm was wide-ranging and contagious: the

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thinkers of the French Enlightenment itself. For many years I have lived with Diderot and Voltaire, with Rousseau, d'Holbach, Montesquieu, and a host of their contemporaries. Their writings, even when dated or lacking in depth, have seldom been less than stimulating. At their best, the philosophes' liveliness of mind has made the composition of this book a true pleasure, and for this they have my heartfelt gratitude. Carbondale, Illinois December 12, 1988

H.V.

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Contents Introduction, 3 1 From Nature to Human Nature, 20 NATURE AS FACT OR NORM, 20 NATURAL LAW AND THE LAWS OF NATURE, 24 H U M A N NATURE, 28

2

The Uniformity of Human Nature, 34

THE QUESTION, 34 REASON AND PASSION, 36 INSTINCTUAL ETHICS AND RELIGION, 40 UNIFORMITY AFFIRMED, 46

3

The Diversity of Human Beings, 53

THE ROLE OF EXPERIENCE, 53 EXPERIENTIAL RELIGION AND ETHICS, 55 UNIFORMITY CHALLENGED, 58

4 Physical and Moral Influences on National Character, 64 VOYAGES AND TRAVEL, 64 CLIMATE, 66 INSTITUTIONS AND INDIVIDUALS, 71 NATIONAL CHARACTER, 76

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Contents

Understanding Cultural Diversity, 88

THE QUESTION, 88 PROVISIONAL GENERALIZATIONS, 90

6 A Cultural Miscellany, 98 RUSSIANS AND OTHERS, 98 JEWS, 103 BLACKS AND NATIVE AMERICANS, 107

7

The Mildly Exotic East, 116

THE ISLAMIC WORLD,

116

INDIA, 119 CHINA AND THE CHINESE SAGE, 121 THE WANING OF THE CHINESE VOGUE,

126

8 Historical Diversity, 136 THE PLACE OF HISTORY, 136 VOLTAIRE AND HISTORY, 139 HISTORY IN THE ENCYCLOPEDIA,

9

The Case of Ancient Greece, 155

GREECE IN THE ENLIGHTENMENT, GREECE IN THE ENCYCLOPEDIA,

10

146

155 161

The Case of the Middle Ages, 174

AN ENLIGHTENMENT CONSENSUS?, 174 THE MIDDLE AGES IN THE ENCYCLOPEDIA, 185

Conclusion, 194 Bibliography, 207 Index, 217

Human Nature, Cultural Diversity, and the French Enlightenment

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Introduction

The European age of Enlightenment has long been considered the seedbed of the contemporary western mind, and among all eighteenth-century European thinkers the French have usually been taken as prototypes. It is not my purpose, in the study that follows, to question either of these venerable if somewhat dubious assumptions. This work does recognize, however, the crucial importance of the French philosophes in the evolution of modern western thought, whether as models to be cherished or as demons to be exorcised. Such authors as Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Diderot have left indelible marks in the pattern of modern intellectual history. One assumption that this study does make concerning the history of the human mind has become a subject of argument in recent decades—the assumption that the contribution of first-class minds is important in the human record. Probably only a handful of scholars today would categorically maintain the opposite—that first-class minds are wholly unimportant, and that it is only the mind of the masses that deserves commemoration. The new historians of mass culture have performed invaluable services, long overdue, in recording and analyzing the vast popular substructure of human thought and feeling; and indeed their labors have only begun. Few, however, among this new breed would deny any historical significance whatsoever to "elitist" thought. The aspirations and utterances of the masses have long cried out for their own historians, but much still remains to be done with the more high-powered thinkers. The present study is based on the premise that much can still be learned from the ideas of first- and second- and third-rate published authors, and that such analyses contribute truly significantly to an understanding of the mind and the world-view of any historical period, from top to bottom. Here the primary focus will be the philosophes of the French eighteenth

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HUMAN NATURE, CULTURAL DIVERSITY, AND THE FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT

century—those authors who, if not necessarily top-ranking philosophers or theorists, at least contributed most visibly to the liberal, antiauthoritarian movement in early modern thought that is known as the Enlightenment.' For support or contrast there will also be occasional references to antiphilosophes and to non-French writers of the eighteenth century. The rough chronological limits, with a few obvious exceptions, will be 1748 and 1778, the dates respectively of the appearance of Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws and the death of Voltaire; the dates also are very close to those of the gestation and completion of the great Encyclopedia of Denis Diderot. Sociological and psychological observation and analysis of mass currents in the history of these three decades are cheerfully left to other chroniclers and scholars: this study is an unabashed analysis of published texts, by an unregenerate historian of ideas. The purpose of this work is to examine, as open-mindedly as possible, several ideas that have long been considered central tenets of French Enlightenment thought. The first is the eighteenth-century concept of the uniformity of human nature. In this area the substance of modern charges has commonly been that the Enlightenment, or more specifically the French philosophes, possessed a fixed view of this uniformity, which blocked all, or virtually all, appreciation of cultural and historical diversity around the globe. The reader should realize at the outset that my investigation of these charges has been not exhaustive, but preliminary; that my intention has been not combative, but inquiring; and that the outcome of the search will be not dogmatic but, I hope, at least illuminating. The reigning scholarly perception of Enlightenment views on human nature has involved an assertion not only of its uniformity but of a degree of abstraction that allegedly made the Enlightenment blind to empirical reality. I have attempted to bring somewhat more subtlety to this perception. This study will ask, for example, how eighteenth-century views of human nature were developed, and how fixed they were. Further, it will inquire into the possibility that theoretical views were sometimes modified by empirical observation, both of past ages and of foreign peoples in the contemporary world. The raising of questions concerning human nature, incidentally, did not end with the eighteenth century. On the ingredients and the origins of human nature the discussion has in fact been especially lively in very recent years among sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists.2 My study certainly does not pretend to find direct eighteenth-century predecessors of recent speculations: dissimilarities between the centuries are too obvious, and intensive social and biological investigation has intervened to bring much greater understanding to modern scholars than the philosophes ever could attain. For one thing, present knowledge of the vital role and specific mechanisms of heredity, though certainly incomplete and possibly mistaken, has infinitely

Introduction

5

surpassed eighteenth-century speculation, which indeed rarely involved heredity at all. The critical Enlightenment divergence of opinion, however, over the relative roles of "climate"—or physical environment in general—and "moral" factors such as education and legislation is still echoed in recent debate. The French Enlightenment understanding, or misunderstanding, of human nature is, I believe, of genuine importance in the historical picture of the age: it throws light, first of all, on both of those concepts that were even more central to the philosophes' world-view—"nature" and "reason." The Enlightenment view of human nature, as modified if not basically shaken by a realization of the diversity of human individuals and groups, also illuminates the debate concerning the abstractness or the empirical realism of the philosophes . Most interesting of all is the relevance of Enlightened perceptions of human nature and diversity to the presumed total absorption of that age in its own standards and to its alleged inability to understand, or even want to understand, other peoples and other historical periods. These presumptions rank high among commonly received notions about the French Enlightenment, such as its cold rationalism, its lack of originality, its tendency toward oversimplification, and its natural, inevitable culmination in the idea of progress. All these notions have been challenged by modern scholarship, with varying degrees of success. This work attempts, in its middle and final chapters, to reappraise the perception of cultural and historical insularity in the French Enlightenment. This insularity was certainly very often evident, for reasons that will be advanced at the end of this study. But did the insularity have its limits and exceptions? I suggest that it did, and that the limits and exceptions are explicable by certain other assumptions and beliefs of the age. At the risk of sometimes straying a bit from concepts of human nature, but still in pursuit of ideas of cultural diversity, this survey attempts to summarize several specific Enlightenment views of varying peoples of the world outside western Europe. Of necessity in any cursory study this summary must be selective and suggestive rather than exhaustive and final. I have not investigated French Enlightenment views of all peoples and have not treated even my chosen samples in full detail. Certain trends, however, do become evident as we discover how the eighteenth century viewed, for example, Jews, blacks, native Americans, Asian Indians, and Chinese. Evidence of ideas of cultural diversity will be tentatively weighed against evidence of resistance to such ideas. Finally, my investigation arrives at Enlightenment views of history, and to that historical diversity the Enlightenment has often been accused of totally failing to acknowledge. Enlightenment receptivity to historical diversities

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HUMAN NATURE, CULTURAL DIVERSITY, AND THE FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT

certainly was, at least, limited—but was it totally absent? Not only is some of the evidence examined in the final chapters, but the question is raised of whether any serious attempts may have been made to understand and enter the spirit of past ages, and not simply to transplant Enlightenment preoccupations and standards to historically different periods. Here again the sampling is limited—restricted, in fact, to French Enlightenment views of ancient Greece and of the Middle Ages. These were representative historical ages on which nearly all writers of the time expressed opinions, usually firm ones, over the years. Such, then, are the major issues and a few of the pertinent questions asked in this study. Findings will prove to be mildly revisionist rather than radically revolutionary. They also, I repeat, will be tentative, since limitations are inherent both in the material studied and in the author himself. Ideally, perhaps, the material should cover every word published in the French Enlightenment, and especially every word in the massive Encyclopedia. What follows is the fruit, first of all, of having studied carefully the bulk of the Encyclopedia, and of having scanned the remainder. For the even more massive accumulation of French Enlightenment publication in general, the problem has been even more daunting. Nor, of course, can this author claim expertise on all subjects treated in the Encyclopedia and by its French contemporaries. I should also refer to the omission here of any computerized word, phrase, or subject counts—an omission that may be deplored by some readers.3 I can only say that I felt such methodology close to pointless in the intellectual history of an age that was so notoriously imprecise in its terminology and that dealt so cavalierly in abstractions. Tables and graphs, similarly, might have given this study a certain cachet, but I believe their utility would have been largely spurious. All in all, while recognizing the immense value elsewhere in recent scholarship of many newer historical techniques, I believe that the material of the present study is better served by the application of more standard procedures, and by the discretionary latitude of traditional scholarship. The reader of this study deserves not only this short apologia on goals and on methodology, but also a summary of the source materials to which the methodology has been applied. Such a summary may also serve to supply a framework of historical facts to the nonspecialist, and to give some notion of the conclusions of past scholarship on the significance of each principal source, as relevant to the subject of this study. In brief, the questions now to be addressed are these: what have been the sources used in this study, and what have other scholars seen as their relevance to the specific subjects to be examined here?

Introduction

1

This research project was at first conceived as a study of Diderot's great Encyclopedia alone, and this monumental work has remained one of its prominent concerns. Soon, however, it became evident that understanding of the Encyclopedia's position on human nature and cultural diversity, and on national and historical individuality, would be greatly enhanced by placing that work in its contemporary context. Other writings by such contributors as Diderot and d'Holbach would throw a more evenly distributed light on those authors, and might lead to a better understanding of the Encyclopedia's position relative to that of the whole Enlightenment movement. So too, obviously, would the introduction of some of those French Enlightenment authors who either contributed rather insignificantly or not at all to Diderot's ambitious enterprise. As more and more outside writing was investigated, the Encyclopedia slipped farther from being the study's only focus. The inevitable comparisons that remain between the Encyclopedia and its Enlightenment setting have come to parallel, with only somewhat greater emphasis, comparisons among individual authors in the entire French Enlightenment panorama. The emphasis still accorded here to the Encyclopedia is, however, amply justified by the prominence and symbolic status of that great enterprise in the mid-century French Enlightenment. Let us briefly recall its history and significance. The Encyclopedia project had been conceived in 1745, first simply as a translation of Chambers' Cyclopaedia. By the next year Diderot and d'Alembert were already involved, and in 1747 Diderot became the director of the work and d'Alembert his associate, also supervising its scientific and mathematical portions. The project by then had advanced well beyond the confines of mere translation, and in 1750 Diderot published the Prospectus for an expanded, truly new publication. The first volume of the Encyclopedia, or Reasoned Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts and Crafts, by a Society of Men of Letters was published in 1751. Largely because of conservative clerical influence on the government, publication came to a halt in 1759, after seven volumes had appeared. D'Alembert resigned his position but Diderot continued for many discouraging years the collecting and editing of further material. In 1765, with tacit consent of the authorities, the final ten volumes of text were published, together with five volumes of handsome plates. Other volumes of plates would follow, and Diderot's involvement did not wholly end until 1772. Five Supplement volumes under other direction would appear in 1776 and 1777, and a two-volume Index in 1780. By that time the original Paris edition in thirty-five volumes (some under a misleading Swiss imprint) was already being reprinted and pirated in several European cities. Some four thousand copies of the Paris edition were issued, but it has been

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HUMAN NATURE, CULTURAL DIVERSITY, AND THE FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT

estimated that by the outbreak of the French Revolution perhaps twenty thousand sets of various editions were available in Europe, of which something like fifteen thousand could be found in France. All told, several times that number of readers surely had access to the work—a very sizable segment of the literate and well-to-do population. The primary audience for the Encyclopedia, like most of its contributors, was middle-class, although in both categories there was substantial representation of the clergy (both Catholic and Protestant) and even some members of the aristocracy.4 Certainly the impressive Encyclopedia set was occasionally bought just for show, or consulted simply as a reference work. Given, however, the bitter and very public controversy surrounding its first decade, with conservative clerics leading the attack and liberals presenting heated rebuttals, most subscribers and readers must have been well aware of the project's reputation as a liberal organ—and other less well-informed users must have eventually discovered this nontraditional flavor on their own. A significant number of readers surely perused d'Alembert's celebrated Preliminary Discourse and must have taken it, as we do today, as an important manifesto of the rational and empirical, the scientific and at least implicitly progressive spirit of the Enlightenment.5 Unquestionably there were parts of the Encyclopedia that were essentially propaganda for the ideals of the French Enlightenment; in this sense the work was indeed the "war machine" that some historians and polemicists have found to be its preeminent function. It did in fact sometimes slyly ridicule organized religion; it did suggest or broadly hint at political, economic, and social reform; it did unabashedly lobby for science and technological progress. Certain contributors were, however, quite traditionalist, and others (more than most casual students realize) were able to ignore controversial topics and implications completely. Nearly all critics have agreed that the Encyclopedia avoided extremes, especially in religion and politics: neither atheism nor democracy was a characteristic doctrine in its pages—or, for that matter, in the French Enlightenment as a whole. One function of the present study will be to compare the Encyclopedia on specific points with its age: where were the greater radicalism and the greater originality to be found—or is the comparison meaningless? Would the Encyclopedia always lag well behind the insights of the most fertile minds of its day—and what, if anything, happened to that fertility when insightful writers themselves turned from their personal publications to Diderot's project? Was any consistency of orientation or polemics maintained in the Encyclopedic enterprise, aside from the utilitarian urge toward the improvement of self and society? Was anticlericalism, or negative Biblical criticism, or the professed goal of religious tolerance always evident in the Encyclopedia! Above all, for purposes of this study, was the work ever objective and detached, and could it ever see or empathize

Introduction

9

with cultures outside its own experience and preconceptions? Such are some of the questions to which this work must turn more than once. Despite the moderate tone of much of the Encyclopedia, and despite many omissions, inconsistencies, and other flaws in the completed work, the influence of the undertaking was undoubtedly extensive.6 Production of the work did bring together many of the best minds, and best stocked minds, of its time—among others, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, and d'Holbach, in addition to Diderot and d'Alembert—and in most respects, even with Rousseau's eventual estrangement, the project gave them some sense of common effort and achievement. The published Encyclopedia made few new contributions to knowledge, but it did help organize and make evident the interconnections amid a growing and already immense variety of information, theoretical and factual. Although by itself the Encyclopedia destroyed neither the Old Regime nor all traditional ways of thinking, it did publicize the mood and goals of the French Enlightenment, thus supplementing the work of many individual authors of that day, some of whom were never contributors to the project.7 Let us turn first to a sampling of the most important writers for the Encyclopedia, and to the significance that modern scholarship commonly accords their articles.8 Later I will summarize the accepted role of several of these same authors outside the Encyclopedia, and finally will comment briefly on significant contemporaries who contributed not at all to Diderot's enterprise. This introductory choice of writers is based not on any dubious ranking according to their overall importance, but simply on their relative prominence in this study. With this background information, the reader may better appraise the data that will appear later in this book. Little need be said of Jean Lerond d'Alembert (1717-1783), Diderot's associate for many years in the editing process. His specialty was mathematics, an area in which his competence has been commonly recognized. His Preliminary Discourse for the Encyclopedia, as noted above, is accepted as a prime embodiment of the values, ideals, and program of the French Enlightenment, not as an original contribution to knowledge, nor even as a wholly reliable summation of the western tradition in intellectual history. As for Denis Diderot (1713-1784), nobody has disputed his dogged editorial dedication and courage across the years. Much has been written on his degree of responsibility for various Encyclopedia articles. Except for his constant, enthusiastic promotion of utilitarian technologies, his special contributions have not, actually, received much attention. The usual assumption has seemed to be that Diderot's role as editor was invaluable, but that his own production of articles was characterized by hasty compilation, not personal insight.

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HUMAN NATURE, CULTURAL DIVERSITY, AND THE FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT

The extensive offerings of Paul-Henri Thiry, baron d'Holbach (17231789) to the Encyclopedia have been widely noted, but again there has been almost no credit given him for any originality. D'Holbach is generally viewed as a publicist for science and technology and a crude denigrator of Christianity; as an Encyclopedist he appears in modern histories mainly as a workhorse, like such lesser-known authors as the abbe Claude Yvon (1714-1791) and Antoine-Gaspard Boucher d'Argis (1708-ca. 1791). For his many articles on music, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) also has been commonly placed among the workhorses; his celebrated article Political Economy is a rare exception to this categorization. The contribution of Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755) came at the end of his life and is not usually considered original or important. The forty-odd articles by the patriarch among philosophies, Frangois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1694-1778), have been harder to dismiss, if only because of his great prestige in his own day and his extraordinarily potent symbolism in the modern perception of the Enlightenment. His Encyclopedia articles have not been much esteemed, but they did receive scholarly attention just before the Second World War.9 Voltaire's articles were mainly in the fields of literature, language, and history; on these articles Raymond Naves concluded, first of all, that the sources were rather insubstantial, but that the main interest of the essays lay not in their scholarship but in Voltaire's own views. The articles, Naves continued, were not offhand crumbs thrown to the editors, but fairly serious studies, offered to an Encyclopedic cause for which Voltaire's admiration was genuine. The articles on literary theory were of course conditioned by Voltaire's classicism, but were capable of subtlety. Those on philosophy and history were often passionately polemical; they served such favored Voltairean causes as "pragmatic fatalism, psychological sensualism, historical pyrrhonism, rationalist deism, and scorn for the common people."10 Throughout, Voltaire was more concerned with the broad education of the mind than with the accumulation of mere facts. Finally there are the voluminous contributions to the Encyclopedia by Louis, chevalier de Jaucourt (1704-1780), who in fact is scarcely remembered in any other context than in Diderot's great publication. Amazingly, de Jaucourt wrote over a quarter of the articles appearing in the original seventeen volumes of text, and nearly a quarter of the total text. The usual low opinion of these articles' quality has followed the estimate of the baron Grimm; this estimate, to be sure, specifically covers only the last ten volumes, prepared undercover and in relative haste. Wrote Grimm: "A great number of articles of all kinds, including the most essential, were abandoned to M. le chevalier de Jaucourt, a man of great zeal and an indefatigable worker, but a

Introduction

11

pitiless compiler who has simply put to use the best known and often the most mediocre books." 11 Recent attempts to rehabilitate the chevalier have stressed his zeal in the philosophic cause and have rather less enthusiastically sought to refurbish his scholarly credentials.12 De Jaucourt, as it now seems clear, did work rapidly and with far less meticulous concern for avoiding plagiarism than is customary today among reputable scholars. He was more than a compiler, though— at least in the sense that he frequently transformed neutral sources rather cleverly into philosophic propaganda. An aristocratic French Protestant background, and later, a very liberal, almost deistic religious faith would appear to have contributed heavily to his philosophic orientation toward reform. The subjects on which he wrote for Diderot covered an immense variety of fields, but his greatest enthusiasms were medicine (he himself had earned a doctorate in medicine but never practiced), all natural sciences, philosophy (he had written extensively on Leibniz), religious history, ethics, and ancient history. He tried to use reliable sources, although these were largely secondary, not primary.13 In summary, de Jaucourt has been seen as representing vigorously, if not profoundly, the humanitarian and moderate side of the Enlightenment. Such, in brief, are the prevailing views held by historians on the contributions of several prolific writers for the Encyclopedia. We may now turn to the qualities and characteristics of some of the same thinkers when they were writing outside that work, as they have been seen by latter-day historians. The first three philosophes—Voltaire, Diderot, and d'Holbach—were also well enough represented in the Encyclopedia to afford a real basis for comparing their approaches in the two sorts of publication: independent works and Encyclopedia articles. The last four philosophes—Montesquieu, Rousseau, Turgot, and Grimm—are too slightly represented by important Encyclopedia contributions to be categorized as true Encyclopedists, or to make comparisons with outside publication meaningful. Voltaire's position in the Enlightenment has always been regarded as central, although he has almost always been thought more a propagandist than an original thinker. Beyond this perception, modern critics have disagreed widely on his qualities and achievements. In religion, for example, most commentators have taken his proclamations of deism ("theism" was the term he most commonly used) at face value; others have found him to be either an agnostic or a crypto-atheist. Traditional historians have generally proclaimed him a genial apostle of tolerance; others have stressed his occasional or even characteristic dogmatism and have deplored his persistent anti-Semitism. Some have labeled him a partisan of enlightened despotism; others have emphasized his constitutionalism, republicanism, or even (on rare occasions)

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HUMAN NATURE, CULTURAL DIVERSITY, AND THE FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT

democratic sympathies. Most have highlighted his rationalism, others his empiricism, his capacity for passionate feeling, or even his "mysticism." There has also been disagreement on Voltairean approaches to subjects more directly pertinent to the present study, although usually it has been less jarring than the disagreement on those very broad issues just mentioned. Nearly all historians and critics have pronounced Voltaire a staunch supporter of a uniform "nature" and "natural law" (both ill-defined, to be sure) and of a uniform human nature. Most have been willing to admit his acknowledgment of considerable variety in human customs, specific moral directives, and personal and "national" characteristics—but the great majority have found any Voltairean acceptance of cultural diversity to be superficial, and definitely not as deeply felt as his unwavering basic belief in uniformity. It is, in fact, Voltaire's writing that is most often cited as the epitome, not only of selfrighteous Enlightenment certitude in general, but also of eighteenth-century Europocentrism and an almost total inability to understand, or even to seek honestly to understand, cultures departing from the reigning values of Enlightenment France. Voltaire's guilt on these charges has been accepted almost universally; mild argument has seemed possible only on the degree of guilt. The case of Diderot has ordinarily seemed more complex, just as his own character has usually been considered more multifaceted than Voltaire's. Scholarly differences over Diderot's religion and politics have, for example, sometimes paralleled those over Voltaire's—but Diderot's views are usually seen as evolving in a more complicated way. Elements of rationalism, empiricism, and sentiment have appeared to coexist, or to make war, in Diderot more than in Voltaire; certainly Diderot has seemed much less the "typical" cold Enlightenment rationalist than has Voltaire. Because of the rich complexity that most literate moderns have fancied to find within themselves, Diderot has commonly emerged in our day as a far more real and sympathetic presence than Voltaire, and at least for the moment, Diderot's reputation is on the upswing, while Voltaire's has tended to erode. Much of Diderot's growing stature, to be sure, has derived from his remarkably original posthumous works, known in his own day only in the narrowest circles—his "transformist," quasi-evolutionist speculations, for example, or the daring psychological insights of his novel The Nun, or the stunning experimentalism in literary form in Jacques the Fatalist.14 Despite all the modern analysis of his novels, despite all the discussion of Diderot as scientific or political theorist, and despite the many studies of his materialism and religious opinions, there has not been much specific discussion of his historical and sociological insights. Remarks on his general cosmopolitanism and humanitarian tolerance commonly have not been linked to

Introduction

13

any real investigation of his position on the differentiation of peoples or cultures.15 Perhaps this is only to say that Diderot was seldom a historian and only occasionally a sociologist. His curiosity, however, was undoubtedly wide-ranging, and his speculation adventurous; in the words of one of his biographers, "his mind was always open to alternate possibilities."16 Inevitably, therefore, in his writings he strewed many tidbits of speculation on the global and historical human adventure. Perhaps in this respect the present study can help fill a gap in Diderot scholarship. The third writer well represented both by individual publications and Encyclopedia articles was the baron d'Holbach. Actually, the independent works whose authorship he openly acknowledged were limited to translations of German scientific works; he is, however, known today primarily for his voluminous unsigned or pseudonymous works that vigorously expounded a materialistic, atheistic philosophy. By his contemporaries he was known as the host, for about thirty-five years, of the famous (and later over-dramatized) ''Holbachian Circle."17 Only the hard core of this group knew that the kindly baron had mounted an extensive and violent attack on contemporary religious systems. The members of d'Holbach's circle included Diderot, Grimm, Condillac, Raynal, and (for only a brief period) Rousseau. Rousseau would eventually inaccurately denounce the whole group as atheists; probably most members can better be described as skeptics. Among the most regular attendants at the baron's dinners and discussions was Diderot—and many instances of the influence of one man upon the other have been unearthed by modern scholarship. (It now seems unlikely, however, that Diderot contributed many actual words to d'Holbach's crucial System of Nature, as has often been alleged.18) Both writers were atheistic materialists in pursuit of a new nonreligious basis for morality, and both looked toward empirical scientific observation to unlock human potentialities. Both also examined the nature of social and political organization and recommended reforms; both were humanitarian and meliorist by nature. It was d'Holbach who particularly stressed the universal roles of matter and motion, and who devised elaborate schemes of educational and legislative action as the foundations, together with experimental science, for a ''universal morality.'' D'Holbach was a far more systematic thinker than Diderot, but also rather more plodding and certainly less original than his friend. Above all, d'Holbach has been remembered, like Voltaire, as a scourge of the Christian establishment, on grounds both of Biblical criticism and scorn for the allegedly repressive, unnatural side of the Christian moral code. For d'Holbach, "nature" was the preeminent rallying cry—a nature that was characterized by a uniform natural law throughout the universe, and that had

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HUMAN NATURE, CULTURAL DIVERSITY, AND THE FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT

no need for a Voltairean deist god as creator or regulator. The world, d'Holbach declared, was one, and it operated on purely naturalistic principles, in a deterministic mode. Under this system it has generally been assumed that d'Holbach must have believed in an absolutely uniform human nature, everywhere the same, with happiness and virtue as its universal objects. The historians have usually concluded that, all in all, the baron meant well, but that his world-view was much too mechanical and simplistic. Attempts to refurbish his independence of thought and to grant him some real subtlety19 have not received much general recognition. I can be more brief with several Enlightenment figures who will be cited frequently in this study but whose connections with the Encylopedic enterprise were tenuous. Montesquieu is one of the two in this category who were in fact at the very heart of the French Enlightenment, even though Montesquieu himself was notable for unusual caution and moderation. His main publications are well known, at least by reputation (for he is one of the least read of the philosophes), to those even most casually acquainted with the Enlightenment: the slightly titillating, definitely scandalous Persian Letters (1721); the vaguely scholarly but more obviously philosophical Considerations on the Causes of the Grandeur and Decadence of the Romans (1734); and finally the ponderous, heavily but unevenly researched Spirit of Laws (1748). The latter work, in addition to an early essay or so, is the main source of our knowledge of Montesquieu's views on cultural and historical diversity. These writings have often been cited for his notions of "climatic" and "moral" determinants of individual and "national" differences; the debate continues, though, on the extent of Montesquieu's objectivity, analytic skill, and adherence to empirical fact. On the great maverick of the French Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, problems of summarization and analysis are immense, from the seminal Discourses of mid-century, through the Social Contract and Emile, to the Confessions and Reveries of his later haunted years.20 The great subjects of debate concerning Rousseau have included his personality and his "romanticism"; the nature and degree of his consistency or unity of thought; the meaning of his political theory; and of course the thinker's influence in subsequent centuries. Some aspects of his thought on the nature of man and on social groups will be relevant to this book, but his historical interests were slight compared with those of Voltaire or Montesquieu. Two other writers may be summarily noted here—Turgot and Grimm; they, too, were associated only briefly with the Encyclopedia, but neither one was as significant in the Enlightenment record as was Montesquieu or Rousseau. Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727-1781) enters the confines of our study long before his brief moment of glory as an economic reformer under the

Introduction

15

young Louis XVI: our concern must be with the young scholar dreaming of a comprehensive, hopeful pattern to be found in human history. In these early studies, Turgot would not only contribute to the idea of progress but would show more historical empathy than was common in his day toward the spirit and achievement of medieval culture. Friedrich-Melchior Grimm (1723-1807), a very French author of German origin, is remembered today for two sets of facts—his connection with the rather hysterical private life of Rousseau, and his primary authorship and editorial supervision of a famous literary newsletter sent for decades, in manuscript form, to some of the more liberal or broad-minded princes of central Europe. The Literary Correspondence was a worthy effort to disseminate the values of the Enlightenment—but it has occurred to almost nobody to grant any personal distinction or originality to the thought of Grimm himself.21 That he was hardly a complete nonentity might be deduced, however, from the high esteem in which both Diderot and d'Holbach held him for many years. Grimm was a philosophical skeptic and something of a pessimist about human nature. Encyclopedists, together with their friends and sometime collaborators, determine the major focus of this study, but are not its sole concerns. Since the spotlight here does often seek out others in the French Enlightenment period, a bit of background information is advisable at least for those who will be cited rather frequently. Many, but by no means all, of these writers were not party to the Enlightenment, and in fact, among the many, some considered themselves its dedicated enemies. In this group would have been Father Lafitau (JosephFrancois Lafitau, 1681-1746), if the philosophic movement had crystallized sufficiently by 1724, when he produced the influential Customs and Morals of the American Savages. For him, the orthodox implications of Christian brotherhood and human unity under God would be sorely tried by the evidence of his own and his fellow-missionaries' senses. No such dogmatic preoccupations, however, seem to have troubled another observer of exotic lands, Pierre Poivre (1719-1786), who remained unaligned with either the Christian apologists or the philosophies as he described, rather sourly, the peoples of the Pacific and Indian Ocean regions. Much farther from the Enlightenment, though more deeply influenced by it than they would have admitted, were the editors of two great conservative literary journals of the middle and later eighteenth century, Father Berthier (Guillaume-Frangois Berthier, 1704-1782) and Elie-Catherine Freron (1718-1776).22 However, Berthier's usual moderation as editor (1745-1762) of the Jesuit Journal ofTrevoux won him a wide spectrum of readers throughout France and Europe; the journal was consulted even by Voltaire. Berthier

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HUMAN NATURE, CULTURAL DIVERSITY, AND THE FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT

insisted, not surprisingly, on a position of no doctrinal compromise; he was therefore distressed by those "climate" theories of religious development that cast doubt on the unique truth of Christianity. A dedicated enemy of the Encyclopedia and of Diderot's materialism, he nevertheless was able to defend the new science and technology and its use of reason and empirical observation. Freron's approach was similar in the Literary Year (Annee litteraire), which he edited from 1754 until his death. Like Berthier's journal, the Literary Year enjoyed a wide middle- and upper-class circulation and had a reputation for defending the Christian faith. Freron considered himself a true, "practical" philosophe and a defender of modern progress. Not Encyclopedists, but closer than Berthier or Freron to the philosophes, were Charles Duclos (1704-1772) and Charles-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon (1707-1788). Duclos was a novelist, historian, and moralist, famous especially for his Considerations on the Customs and Morals of This Century; his contemporaries commonly thought of him as a philosophe. He seems to have been an agnostic, indifferent toward religion. Buffon was an immensely celebrated and much admired literary stylist and a generalist in science, remembered today primarily as a zoologist. His great Natural History (17491788) embodied some idea of the unity of nature and most characteristically stressed the unity of the human species. Finally there are four well-known and full-fledged non-Encyclopedic representatives of the Enlightenment who are cited on occasion in this study. Claude-Adrien Helvetius (1715-1771) was a sensationalist psychologist known for a rather mechanistic view of the human animal. Also so known was Etienne Bonnot, abbe de Condillac (1714-1780); like Helvetius he was also something of a moralist. Reflecting the generalist aspirations common in the French Enlightenment, Condillac dabbled in historical writing, and not unintelligently. His elder brother Gabriel Bonnot, abbe de Mably (1709-1785) was a more original writer; his best-remembered works are on the subjects of government and political life, and of ethics, economics, and social organization. The celebrated life-work—the History of the Two Indies—of Guillaume-Thomas-Frangois Raynal (1713-1796) appeared mainly in a later period than that emphasized in this study; Diderot was among many contributors to the ever-expanding project. In these pages Raynal will be cited mainly as author of a predecessor of Grimm's Literary Correspondence—the Literary News of 1747 to 1755. Still other writers of the period in France are cited or referred to in this study, but with Raynal the cast of leading characters is complete. We are now in a position to proceed with our investigation of human nature and cultural diversity as reflected in the Encyclopedia and the writing of its French contemporaries. This investigation will confirm much that has already been sus-

Introduction

17

pected by historians—but it will also imply several revaluations of individual writers, and it will suggest a number of new questions and answers concerning that crucial phase of modern history, the French Enlightenment. NOTES 1. Liberalism and anti-authoritarianism seem to me the most fundamental—and perhaps the only invariable—characteristics of the Enlightenment. Definitions of that movement that are more comprehensive and/or detailed are likely to engender too many objections, reservations, and exceptions to be very useful. Of course one can list further tendencies and trends frequently encountered in the age of Enlightenment; they are, however, far from invariably present, or present to variable degrees, in different aspects of the movement. Examples of such trends and tendencies may be found in this work and in all other secondary sources that will be cited here. For a particularly handy, fairly detailed discussion of "the dominant values of the eighteenth century," see Georges Gusdorf, Les sciences humaines et la pensee occidentale, vol. 4: Les principes de la pensee au siecle des lumieres (Paris: Payot, 1971), pp. 293-461, with chapters on such values as enlightenment, progress, civilization, humanity, tolerance, and utility. 2. These recent studies were of course preceded by older ones—and also by some running discussion by intellectual historians of the Enlightenment idea of human nature. See, for example, Lester G. Crocker, An Age of Crisis: Man and World in Eighteenth Century French Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1959), pp. 196-98 and passim. Among many stimulating scientific studies, on a level appealing to the literate nonscientist, are these: Kenneth Bock, Human Nature and History: A Response to Sociobiology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980); Philip Kitcher, Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature (Cambridge, Massachusetts: M. I. T. Press, 1985); R. C. Lewontin et al., Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984); Charles J. Lumsden and Edward O. Wilson, Promethean Fire: Reflections on the Origin of Mind (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983); and Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. LeVine, eds., Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Professional philosophers also express views on human nature: for example, Mortimer J. Adler, in Ten Philosophical Mistakes (New York: Macmillan, 1985), pp. 156-66, concludes that human beings have no specific-content human nature, genetically or otherwise determined, but that they do share a common human nature in the sense of possessing an openness to human potentialities. 3. In any case, much new, very careful if not computerized analysis of the Encyclopedie, and especially of the authorship of its articles, has already been accomplished by other scholars—most notably Richard N. Schwab and his collaborators, in their monumental Inventory published in the early 1970s: Richard N. Schwab, Walter E. Rex, and John Lough, Inventory of Diderot's Encyclopedie, in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, ed. Theodore Besterman, vols. 80,

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HUMAN NATURE, CULTURAL DIVERSITY, AND THE FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT

83, 85, 91-93 (Thorpe Mandeville House near Banbury, Oxfordshire: The Voltaire Foundation, 1971-1972). This extraordinary accomplishment has greatly facilitated recent scholarship on the Encyclopedie, including my own. So, too, have the other works of John Lough and the studies by Jacques Proust mentioned in the following note and elsewhere in my bibliography. 4. On the clerical contributors, see, for example, Robert Shackleton, The 'Encyclopedie' and the Clerks (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1970). On the subscribers to the Paris edition, see John Lough, The "Encyclopedie" (New York: David McKay, 1971), pp. 57-60; Jacques Proust, L'Encyclopedie (Paris: A. Colin, 1965), pp. 102-103. 5. Robert Darnton, "The Encyclopedie Wars of Prerevolutionary France," American Historical Review, 78 (December 1973), pp. 1351-52. 6. For summary statements of the shortcomings of the Encyclopedie, see Lester G. Crocker, Diderot, the Embattled Philosopher (New York: Free Press, 1954), pp. 256-57; Frank Kafker, ed., Notable Encyclopedias of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries . . . , in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 194 (Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 1981), pp. 226-31. On the influence of the Encyclopedie see the Crocker study just cited, pp. 254-57; John Lough, "The Contemporary Influence of the Encyclopedie,'' in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 26 (Geneva: Institut et Musee Voltaire, 1963), pp. 1071-83; and John Lough, "New Light on the Encyclopedia of Diderot and D'Alembert," History Today, 15 (March 1965), pp. 169-75. 7. Among important figures of the French Enlightenment who did not join the Encyclopedic enterprise were Buffon, Condillac, Helvetius, Mably, and Raynal. 8. To avoid a further proliferation of notes, the reader is referred to citations for these authors later in this study, and to the very useful monograph by John Lough, The Contributors to the "Encyclopedie." (London: Grant & Cutler, 1973). 9. Raymond Naves, Voltaire et I'Encyclopedie (Paris: Les Editions des Presses Modernes, 1938), pp. 114-41. 10. Ibid., p. 139. 11. Friedrich Melchior Grimm et al., Correspondence litteraire, philosophique et critique par Grimm, Diderot, Raynal, Meister, etc., vol. 9, ed. Maurice Tourneux (Paris: Gamier, 1879), p. 206 (1 January 1771). 12. Georges A. Perla, "Le philosophe de Jaucourt dans YEncyclopedie," Revue de Synthese, vols. 101-2 (1981), pp. 27-46; Madeleine F. Morris, Le Chevalier de Jaucourt, un ami de la terre (1704-1780) (Geneva: Droz, 1979), pp. 2, 19-59. 13. Morris, Le Chevalier de Jaucourt, pp. 38-59. 14. All this was the product of Diderot's years after the text of the Encyclopedie was completed. There has been, incidentally, a predominant, not unanimous, tendency to skim rather quickly over the embarrassingly moralistic side of Diderot's art criticism. Among the handiest evaluations of Diderot's work and achievement is the recent study by Henri Lefebvre, Diderot ou les affirmations fondamentales du materialisme (Paris: L'Arche, 1983).

Introduction

19

15. Except in sexual habits and customs—see his Supplement au Voyage de Bougainville and the substantial attention given it in nearly all general Diderot studies. 16. Crocker, Diderot, the Embattled Philosopher, p. 399. 17. Alan Charles Kors, D'Holbach's Coterie: An Enlightenment in Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), pp. 3-11 and passim. 18. Virgil Topazio, D'Holbach's Moral Philosophy, Its Background and Development (Geneva: Institut et Musee Voltaire, 1956), pp. 112-16. 19. See Pierre Naville, D'Holbach et la philosophie scientifique au xviiie siecle (new ed.) (Paris: Gallimard, 1967). 20. Among modern interpretations of Rousseau are Maurice Cranston, JeanJacques: The Early Life and Work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712-1754 (New York: Norton, 1983) and the two volumes by Lester G. Crocker, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, vol. 1: The Quest (1712-1758) and vol. 2: The Prophetic Vision (1758-1778) (New York: Macmillan, 1968, 1973). Crocker's views concerning Rousseau's political theory have been sharply challenged, but they fall well outside the focus of the present study. 21. Grimm has been so little regarded as an Enlightenment figure in his own right that his name is never joined to those of Condorcet and Raynal as the sole well-known philosophe survivors into the French Revolutionary period. A short introduction to Grimm is in Correspondance inedite de Frederic Melchior Grimm, ed. Jochen Schlobach (Munich: Fink, 1972), pp. 9-29. 22. One can seldom be totally confident of their authorship of specific reviews in their journals. I will use their names, however loosely, to represent their respective periodicals—the Journal de Trevoux and the Annee litteraire. On Freron, one should be warned against the extreme partisanship of an older author, the canon Cornou; see, rather, Jean Balcou, Freron contre les philosophes (Geneva: Droz, 1975).

1 From Nature to Human Nature Nature as Fact or Norm Among the several concerns of this study, the French Enlightenment view of human nature will be one of the most central and most ubiquitous. To be sure, as the study will later demonstrate, the concept of human nature was sometimes introduced into Enlightened discourse more as a casual, unexamined assumption than as an operative force—but in any case, it was very much a part of the accepted verbal currency of the age. The actual significance, however, of the concept remains ambiguous. Above all, did the idea of human nature truly make impossible any Enlightenment appreciation of cultural and historical diversity, as many historians have believed? Before entering upon this subject so crucial to an understanding of the French philosophies, we must consider three other related, even more general concepts of the French eighteenth century: nature, natural law, and the laws of nature. Of these concepts, nature was clearly the most fundamental and inclusive, and it is this concept that must be the first object of my inquiry. Fortunately the historical groundwork for this survey has already been laid, and the superstructure already erected, by diligent modern scholarship.1 Within the broad eighteenth-century idea of nature are two important areas, science and esthetics, that are worthy of separate consideration here. Although they also have been the subjects of substantial studies,2 a summary review may throw significant light on the broader concept. Certainly among thinkers of the French Enlightenment the centrality and the authority of nature were seldom challenged. Despite more recent analyses of drastic ambiguity in this eighteenth-century concept, the age itself typically saw few problems in defining and accepting nature as reality. The idea of nature, in fact, was at the very heart of eighteenth-century science, or of what then was often termed "natural history." Natural history, moreover, had an

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important impact on the comprehensive world-view of the French Enlightenment.3 It was indeed a truism among thoughtful people, omitting only the most insistent apologists of the Christian faith, that science, not religion, was the indispensable medium for understanding the universe. Science, properly pursued, would offer not only truth but utility in refashioning the human order. Most often, of course, natural history was more a diversion or an occasional tool than a constant preoccupation: relatively few writers of the Enlightenment, after all, were scientists by temperament or inclination. Scientific dilettantes, however, were numerous: Voltaire and Montesquieu, and Rousseau in his botanizing moods, are eminent examples. The life sciences particularly attracted the attention of important Enlightenment figures, and sometimes in more profound ways than have been generally recognized.4 D'Holbach and, more significantly, Diderot possessed genuine scientific impulses and wrote quite extensively on scientific subjects in the Encyclopedia and elsewhere. It is noteworthy, however, that Diderot excluded his more original and radical insights—in his "transformist" speculations on the evolution of living creatures5—from the pages of the great Encyclopedic work. Science clearly offered a nature that was very much of this material world. For the Enlightenment, the luminous example of Isaac Newton symbolized the autonomy of a science freed from theology, even for those who, like Newton himself, remained Christians. Science was the study of nature and would limit itself, it was hoped, to the realm of natural fact. The supernatural, whether or not based upon any discernible evidence, was apart from nature and hence from science. Nature might be viewed as what was in a world of palpable reality.6 In esthetics, the concept of nature was more ambiguous, in part because of the dichotomy between classicist and romanticist approaches. Classicism, the heritage of the artistic and literary Renaissance and more directly of the seventeenth-century French stage and court, tended toward the static and the normative; romanticism, an attempt to transcend the abstractness and disciplined expression of classicism, tended toward the dynamic and the factual. Both could embody profound feeling, but romanticism looked with less favor than classicism did upon the expressive form and content of past ages, notably of ancient Greece and Rome. Greek and Roman models, said the classicists, were the most reliable criteria of the natural, of la belle nature. In practice, however, romanticism and classicism might overlap—as in the restless mind of Diderot, who could strive passionately for new insights and modes of expression while venerating the sages and poets of classical antiquity. Rationalism and emotionalism could coexist within both movements, although the preponderance of rationalism within classicism, as in Voltaire, and of emo-

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HUMAN NATURE, CULTURAL DIVERSITY, AND THE FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT

tionalism within romanticism, as in Rousseau, is seldom disputed. For the purposes of this study, in any case, the classicist-romanticist labels are less important than the overall richness of thought within the Enlightenment. For the idea of nature the richness is, in fact, redoubtable, as Arthur O. Lovejoy demonstrated in his classic 1927 essay, "Nature as Aesthetic Norm." The "norm" of which he wrote was not an invariable absolute but rather a touchstone in differing forms. The eighteen usages of "nature" that he diagnosed in eighteenth-century esthetic thought embraced not only Platonic essences, generic types, and intuitive standards of taste, but also empirical realities and those out-of-doors settings of human life that were least touched or spoiled by civilization. Lovejoy's classification, however, did stress generalities and abstractions—not only those noted above, but such attributes as simplicity, regularity, or uniformity in the cosmic whole, or spontaneous self-expression and freedom from tradition. As an esthetic standard, nature seems to have meant nearly all desirable things to the Enlightenment; only nature as man's enemy—a concept popularized in later, more disillusioned ages—was uncommon. A passing remark by Diderot concerning man's "constant enemy, nature," was truly exceptional.7 All in all, one may conclude that the generalized and the abstract within the concept of nature assumed great significance in Enlightened esthetic thought. This was not, to be sure, a full reversal of the trend in science toward nature as the actual or factual, but an important shift nonetheless. Nature and the natural in literature and the fine arts tended very often to represent not what was, but what should be; the words thus could refer either to the real or to the ideal. The worlds of science and of the arts were, of course, hardly the total framework of eighteenth-century thought. Political and economic thought, religion, and ethics were among the great array of additional topics engaging the philosophic enterprise. Nature became a central and commonplace concept, rivalled only by reason, in the realm of general intellectual discourse— and again (to borrow the terminology of Lester G. Crocker) it might be either a descriptive or a normative concept.8 This dichotomy can be found in Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, d'Holbach—Encyclopedists all, in varying degrees—and in virtually all other writers of the French Enlightenment. Moreover, disassociating nature from the desirable and good was a rare deviation: baron Grimm's voice cried in a near-wilderness when he wrote: "But what is nature? Is it not all that is? ... How can what is be contrary to nature?"9 A detailed answer to the question of whether the nature celebrated by the Enlightenment was necessarily an invariable unity is best deferred here until human nature is specifically discussed. That there was a powerful tendency in that direction, however, can hardly be denied: Voltaire's flat statements that

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nature is "everywhere the same"10 are typical. Agreement was nearly unanimous that nature's laws are fixed and invariable but that its operations are infinitely diverse. Only a few writers of "transformist" views discovered gradual changes in basic natural forms, while materialists like d'Holbach saw movement as the very essence of nature.11 Was nature essentially and necessarily moral? The French Enlightenment tended toward an affirmative answer, since nature was generally held to be good, and probably rational as well. Nature was in fact commonly moralized.12 Yet not all thinkers were convinced: Diderot, Rousseau, and (in Great Britain) David Hume were the most notable of those who questioned the general confusion between the natural and the moral.13 Diderot's evidently sincere attempts to reconcile nature and morality were a recurrent impulse, undermined, however, by his equally evident hopes for an autonomous, possibly even value-free science.14 Rousseau saw nature as the frequent opponent of morality, as did Hume;15 Hume indeed saw vice to be quite as natural as virtue.16 In the Encyclopedia explicit reflections of such atypical views of nature are rare. By and large, what one finds there, on this subject, are evidences of a great variety of more conventional Enlightenment views, with little attempt at precise definition or classification. Most references are brief and imply a rough understanding between author and reader on a broad spectrum of meanings such as Lovejoy would later summarize. For example, d'Alembert (in a compilation derived from Jean-Henri-Samuel Formey, 1711-1797) can refer casually to "the idea that we must form for ourselves of the unity and the simplicity of nature." The fact that he considered no defense or explanation necessary for either of these qualities attests to the contemporary acceptance of both unity and simplicity as characteristics of nature. On the other hand, and rather surprisingly, at least two serious attempts to define nature did appear in the Encyclopedia, The first, quite brief and not in Diderot's volumes but in the later Supplement, may be noted summarily; it is an article on "nature" in the fine arts, taken from Sulzer's General Theory of the Fine Arts. Here the difficulty of offering a single definition is recognized, with the author concluding that nature implies "the entire work of creation," or "the universal system of existing things," either as an original force or as its effects.17 The definition, although starting with the real world, quickly becomes very generalized indeed. The Encyclopedia's main effort to classify the various meanings of "nature" appears in the chevalier de Jaucourt's businesslike article "Nature (Philosophy)" in the original volumes.18 Recognizing that the word "nature" had been given many meanings, he classified the "principal" meanings as follows: "the world system, the machine of the universe, or the assemblage

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HUMAN NATURE, CULTURAL DIVERSITY, AND THE FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT

of all created things"; the nature of different categories of beings, including human nature; the essence or special attribute of a thing; the natural causal order of things, or the procession of cause and effect as established by God; the "united powers or faculties of a body"—for example, as observed by medical doctors; and finally, the overarching guidance of God's providence, "acting according to certain laws that He has established." De Jaucourt appends reflections on the supposition that nature can act independently of God—he concludes that it must act according to the divine "laws of movement"—and on the distinction between general and particular natures. Several observations should be made about de Jaucourt's article. First, despite its relative brevity (one full folio page of two long columns), it does attempt to sort out the popular meanings of "nature," and does so systematically. His summary goes well beyond the offhand, undefined uses of "nature" that predominated overwhelmingly in the intellectual discourse and common speech of his time. Second, all of his categories of usage pertain, at least ostensibly, to the empirical world of fact, although they do at times stretch toward the nebulously broad. The possibility of normative interpretation lurks throughout the list but is not explicitly admitted. De Jaucourt, moreover, resists any temptation to characterize nature as simple, or as necessarily, absolutely uniform in its action. Finally, in the Encyclopedia article there are no hints of the isolated, exceptional references found elsewhere in the Enlightenment, to nature as a possible enemy of humanity or of morality. Perhaps de Jaucourt was completely unaware of such deviant, intellectually subversive views—but even if he was in fact conscious of them, he would probably have suppressed them in the Encyclopedic context. In summary, the Encyclopedia's official presentation of "nature" appears both more systematic and less subtle, as well as more empirical, than the concept's broader usage in the French Enlightenment. It remains to be seen whether these characteristics apply to the treatment accorded by the Encyclopedia to the narrower question of human nature, and to other cultural and historical matters.

Natural Law and the Laws of Nature The concepts of natural law and of the laws of nature have seldom been precisely defined: though not strictly synonymous, they have overlapped confusingly in educated terminology. But even in our own age, so frequently impatient with nebulous abstractions,19 these concepts cannot simply be ignored in a discussion of historical ideas concerning human nature. Imprecise as the ideas of natural law and the laws of nature were in the French Enlight-

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enment and earlier, they had potential and actual significance in the formulation of ideas central to the present study. The western concepts of natural law and the laws of nature arose in ancient Greece when the universe was seen to be a cosmos, subject not to the whims of deities but to natural rules and patterns that were inherent and regular, and whose consequences were to a large extent predictable. In this secular world, universal laws of nature could be discerned—assuredly not just in human minds but also in the essential nature of things. In the later fourth century B.C., Aristotle complemented a vision of inherent purpose in the universe with an intermittently empirical study of the material world, but his emphasis fell on an encompassing natural law of justice and right. In Rome, Cicero allied natural law with right reason, both divine and human. Early and medieval Christianity stressed the place of natural law in the divine scheme, and the lack of any contradiction between specific revelation and the eternal, fundamental law deriving from divine, rational decree. Bodin in the sixteenth century and Grotius in the seventeenth loosened the ties of natural law with divinity and strengthened those with man's rational and sociable nature, while the speculations of Francis Bacon stressed scientific study of specific empirical phenomena. On the eve of the Enlightenment, John Locke was concerned with similar specifics but even more with natural law as the progenitor of the natural rights of life, liberty, and property—and with the rather hypothetical state of nature in which these rights already existed.20 In the Enlightenment itself, natural law as a generalization or abstraction yielded some of its potency to scientific investigation of actual phenomena and to the laws of nature that these revealed. The broader natural law, however, was seldom wholly forgotten. This is hardly surprising in view of the close alliance between nature and reason, and of both with morality. A typical summation is d'Alembert's, in his Elements of Philosophy: "That which belongs essentially and uniquely to reason and which consequently is uniform among all people, is our duty toward our fellow creatures. Consciousness of this duty is what is called morality. . . ."21 The patriarch of the philosophies, Voltaire, found two ideas basic to natural law—its fixed, eternal nature and its moral utility. Its central principle, he maintained, is justice. Although Voltaire could also write of the physical, scientific laws of nature, his usage of the term "natural law" is clearly ethical and normative in this typical summary from 1766: "I call natural laws those that nature . . . has engraved within our hearts. Everywhere theft, violence, homicide, ingratitude toward parental benefactors, perjury committed to harm not to help an innocent person, conspiracy against one's fatherland, are evident crimes, more or less severely suppressed but always justly so."22 Diderot, at his most typical, similarly stressed an eternal justice and, in

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general, the existence of a natural law that is eternal, universal, and invariable.23 "From 1745," wrote Jacques Proust, "for Diderot the world is one and is subject to universal law. Universal matter does not move by chance; it develops and changes according to an order not imposed from outside but immanent within itself. Nature, of which man is only a part, is not a chaos but a system."24 Diderot, like most of his contemporaries, found it hard to shake off—or, more likely, did not even wholly want to shake off—that corollary of nature designated as "state of nature." He often shared with others, moreover, a failure to distinguish this state of nature as an ideal state, as a historical phase, or as a condition found among contemporary primitive peoples. Thus again the Enlightenment view of nature wavered uncertainly between the factual, the theoretical, and the normative. In short, Diderot's views on the state of nature sometimes partook of the instability commonly ascribed to Rousseau's vision, shifting from empirical observation to idealized fiction and back again. The uncertainty and varying emphases of these viewpoints would, of course, be relevant to Enlightened assessments of uniformity in human nature. For the moment we may simply reiterate that the state of nature was by no means universally accepted as historical or anthropological fact during the Enlightenment. Not only did the British philosopher Hume question the actuality of a state of nature as well as other natural law theories, because of problems with reason and causality,25 but also the less daring, commonsensical Grimm could refer to the state of nature as "that chimerical state" and go on to attack the whole concept at considerable length as the centerpiece of a critique of Rousseau's Emile.26 How did natural law and the laws of nature fare in the Encyclopedia! First, it should be noted that one looks in vain for any attacks on natural law and the state of nature: once again the truly eccentric is missing in its pages. As to laws of nature, one finds the expected: d'Alembert's article "Nature, laws of" adopts the plural form and the scientific approach. These laws of nature, he wrote, are "general rules of movement and repose that natural bodies observe in the action they exert one upon the other, and in all the changes that come to their natural state."27 His examples are three Newtonian laws of physics. With natural law—that nebulous concept that so often seemed unconnected with scientific empiricism—the case is less simple. Here it will be useful to glance in turn at the Encyclopedia's three main authors on the subject— Boucher d'Argis, de Jaucourt, and Diderot. The legalist Boucher d'Argis wrote both on the "law of peoples" and the ' 'law of nature, or natural law. "28 The law of peoples, he explained, is based

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on "natural reason," and is observed everywhere. In its primitive state it is "as old as mankind" and is "as invariable as natural law"; it is then further developed in "civilized" nations.29 Natural law is similarly based on "natural reason" and includes "certain rules of justice and equity which natural reason alone has established among all men or, better expressed, which God has engraved within our hearts." The precepts of natural law include "living uprightly, not hurting anybody, and rendering to each person what belongs to him." This law, he added, is "perpetual and invariable" and does not include various customs "against the natural order, such as wars and types of servitude" that have entered the law of peoples.30 De Jaucourt's principal contribution to the Encyclopedia's view of natural law was his article "Natural, ([in] law)."31 Natural law, for him, is "a law that God imposes on all men, and that they can discover by the light of their reason." Natural laws "derive solely from the constitution of our being before the establishment of societies.'' The first natural law is the consciousness of a creator; others are the urge toward peace, the need for food, the imperative of sexual pleasure, and the desire to live in society. The three "general principles" of natural laws overlap with the laws themselves: they include religion and our consciousness of God as well as self-love and sociability. These all are "in the nature of man, in his constitution, and in the state in which God put him." Further, de Jaucourt listed several "essential characteristics" of natural laws: for example, "they are universal—that is, they oblige all men without exception," and they are "immutable and permitting no dispensation," even by God himself. Citing Cicero, de Jaucourt concluded that natural law is "universal, eternal, and immutable." Finally his article on "Duty"32 adopts a slightly different approach, stressing men's duties toward God, themselves, and others. The heavy emphasis that de Jaucourt placed upon the universality of natural law can also be found in Diderot's contributions.33 Diderot held that the notions of "just" and "unjust," concerning duties to our fellow human beings, are wholly natural. They precede governmental laws, which should be based on them; they are in fact "as old as man." To this Diderot added (probably without enthusiasm) a link with the "eternal truth" of God and with God's "own ideas."34 Elsewhere Diderot stressed "the human race" and the "general will," as against particular wills, as the bases for natural law.35 In his article "Natural law," Diderot declared that this law was "founded on the essential difference between good and evil." Here he confronted specifically, but very cursorily, the critics of this view—those who, he said, blur the lines between good and evil, those who cite the immense diversities of opinion among learned authorities, and those whose perceptions are dulled by longtime vice. Different laws in different ages and nations, he insisted, do

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not disprove the consensus of uncorrupted souls on the basic characteristics of virtue everywhere.36 Thus Diderot basically maintained the usual insistence of his age upon a set of universal absolutes as an assumption behind the concepts of nature and virtue. We should not be surprised to find the same universalism continuing in the general Enlightenment view of human nature.

Human Nature For the French Enlightenment the transition from nature to human nature presented few problems: human beings, after all, were indubitably a part of nature as a whole. An eloquent spokesman for this view was Diderot.37 As he wrote in the Encyclopedia, one can scarcely doubt "that the universe is a sole, unique machine, where all is linked. . . ,"38 Although this passage refers to the chain of being and the difficulty of setting limits to the animal realm, the same continuity was commonly seen by Diderot and others, both outside and in the Encyclopedia, between mankind and the rest of nature. It did not follow from this that the crucial role of human nature was thereby diminished. On the contrary, the Enlightenment saw the study of mankind as the core of the sciences.39 As Hume believed, the science of man was the only foundation for the other sciences—and ''human nature is the only science of man."40 In France, Condillac's insights into human psychology, beginning with sensations alone, are the culmination of an emphasis dating back at least to the writings of John Locke. Condillac simplified more than some Enlightened writers in his analysis of human nature. Even so, his contemporaries tended to focus upon only a very few basic principles of human nature41—its essential goodness or badness; the centrality of reason, the feelings, or empiricism; the eternal quest for happiness; the opposition or cooperation of urges toward self-love and sociability; and the role of human choice. Omitting the rather peripheral issue of human nature as good or bad, I will later examine the importance of reason, empiricism, and the feelings in specific reference to the probable uniformity of human nature.42 The other basic principles require brief attention here. The pursuit of happiness was a theme reiterated throughout the Enlightenment.43 Indeed it became a truism of the age and would eventually be enshrined in the American colonies' Declaration of Independence. Happiness (generally left undefined) was of course essentially a matter of human feeling; thus its popularity as an ideal was tied in part to the Enlightenment's increasing recognition of the vital role of sentiment in human nature, as well as to the practical, utilitarian emphases of the time. To be sure, the possibility of happiness through the exercise of reason was seldom forgotten in a milieu

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of thinkers and writers owing much to the seventeenth-century Age of Reason. In any case it seemed clear to the Enlightenment that the search for happiness was inherent in human nature itself, a natural craving that could not and should not be suppressed. Such, too, was the opinion of the abbe Pestre in the pages of the Encyclopedia. His article "Happiness"44 enshrines the expected commonplaces on that state—a "tranquil state, interspersed here and there with enlivening pleasures." "All men are united," he wrote, "in the desire to be happy. Nature has made a law for everybody, the law of our own happiness. . . . " Happiness, in short, is "an ineradicable impression that nature has engraved within our hearts." Happiness was usually seen as a concern of individual human beings; hence it was often allied to the primal urge to advance one's own self-interest or to express one's self-love.45 The urge was a part of human nature that was virtually ineradicable in its entirety. To be sure, this basic urge might be tempered by an occasional denial of pleasure or even of momentary happiness, since fleeting sensations might need to make way for long-term goals of self-preservation, betterment, and enjoyment. More significantly, though, the self-love principle might be modified by a recognition of sympathetic sociability—the social instinct that also seemed a part of human nature. A typical Enlightenment view of this instinct for sociability is found in the Encyclopedia article on "Society (Ethics)," of uncertain authorship.46 Men, are made to live in society; if God's intention had been that each man live alone, separated from other men, He would have given to each man proper and sufficient qualities for that sort of solitary life. . . . Such in fact is the nature and constitution of man, that outside of society he would not know how to conserve his life, nor to develop and perfect his faculties and talents, nor achieve for himself a true, solid happiness.

This quest for happiness is universal. The social urge, however, does not rule out that other principle that God has "engraved upon our hearts" (a favorite Enlightenment phrase!): the Creator has placed there not only self-love, but the social instinct of "wishing our fellow-men well.'' God has put both urges within us and "has destined that they act in concert—to assist, not to destroy each other." Moreover, "the spirit of sociability must be universal," as a consequence of all men's "nature and state."47 Most of the rest of the long article is devoted to the role of religion as the fundamental source of morality and the ultimate restraint upon human beings.48 The idea of collaboration between self-love and the social instinct, if not an emphasis upon inevitable linkage between ethics and religion, was the ev-

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eryday currency of Enlightenment thought. Only the shifting of relative emphasis upon the two natural instincts differentiates these contemporary conceptions of human nature one from the other. It must be admitted that on this subject the French Enlightenment seldom rose above platitude. Finally, in any cursory survey of the Enlightened view of human nature, the question of the possibility of human choice must be noted. In essence, the question concerned the roles of freedom and necessity in the cosmic scheme and in the human mind and will.49 Free will and determinism in the universe and in the human microcosm were at stake, and no more was a consensus on this subject achieved in the Enlightenment than in previous or subsequent ages. Among such important thinkers (part-time Encyclopedists all) as Voltaire, Diderot, and d'Holbach, there was at least a slight tilt toward determinism as the eighteenth century wore on. Happily the metaphysical and psychological complexities of the determinist controversy can be bypassed here, for practical agreement was unanimous on one matter—the irrelevance of the issue, when all was said and done, vis-a-vis practical human thought and behavior. It was accepted that men do, after all, think and will and act as if they are free. This general proclivity, this presumption of freedom, to whatever degree indefensible in explicit eighteenthcentury theory or in actuality, was, it was felt, a trait of human nature that cannot be erased. In the French Enlightenment this was an omnipresent assumption, as much in the Encyclopedia as outside its pages. It was an assumption that was none the less real for being seldom stated. Perhaps no other characteristic would be, at least at a subconscious level, a more unshakable element in the assumed uniformity of human nature. NOTES 1. Among general works on the concept of nature in Enlightenment thought are: Crocker, An Age of Crisis', Jean Ehrard, L' idee de nature en France dans la premiere moitie du xviiie siecle, 2 vols. (Paris: SEVPEN, 1963); Georges Gusdorf, Les sciences humaines et la pensee occidentale, vol 5: Dieu, la nature, I'homme au siecle des lumieres (Paris: Payot, 1972); D. G. Charlton, New Images of the Natural in France: A Study in European Cultural History 1750-1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Robert Lenoble, Esquisse d'une histoire de I'idee de nature (Paris: Albin Michel, 1969); and, for Hume and Great Britain, Ronald W. Harris, Reason and Nature in the Eighteenth Century (London: Blandford Press, 1968). 2. On esthetics see, for example, these general works: Francis X. J. Coleman, The Aesthetic Thought of the French Enlightenment (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971); Wladyslaw Folkierski, Entre le classicisme et le romantisme: Etude sur I'esthetique et les estheticiens du xviiie siecle (Paris: H. Champion, 1969); Arthur O. Lovejoy, " 'Nature' as Aesthetic Norm," in Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore:

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Johns Hopkins Press, 1948), pp. 69-77; Daniel Mornet, Le sentiment de la nature en France de J.-J. Rousseau a Bernardin de Saint-Pierre . . . (Paris: Hachette, 1907); Paul Van Tieghem, Le sentiment de la nature dans le preromantisme europeen (Paris: A. G. Nizet, 1960). On science, see: Emile Callot, La philosophie de la vie au xviiie siecle . . . (Paris: Marcel Riviere, 1965); Colm Kiernan, The Enlightenment and Science in Eighteenth-Century France, in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 59A (Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 1973); Jacques Roger, Les sciences de la vie dans la pensee franyaise au xviiie siecle . . . (Paris: A. Colin, 1963). 3. See especially Gusdorf, Dieu, la nature, I'homme, pp. 243-69. 4. For the biological concerns of Montesquieu, Maupertuis, La Mettrie, Diderot, and d'Holbach, see Callot: La philosophie de la vie. 5. Lester G. Crocker, "Diderot and Eighteenth Century French Transformism," in Bentley Glass et al., eds., Forerunners of Darwin: 1745-1859 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1959), pp. 114-43; Crocker, Diderot, The Embattled Philosopher, pp. 136-45, 311-24. For a survey of hesitant eighteenth-century approaches to transformism, largely based on the problem of fossils—for example, in Linnaeus, Buffon, La Mettrie, and Robinet—see Gusdorf, Dieu, la nature, I'homme, pp. 331-54. 6. A lingering hesitancy, in the case of natural law, will be noted in the following section of this chapter. 7. Diderot, Oeuvres politiques, ed. Paul Verniere (Paris: Garnier Freres, 1963): Refutation d'Helvetius, p. 472. Crocker, An Age of Crisis, p. xvii, quotes Pierre Bayle, the seventeenth-century pioneer of Enlightenment, along similar lines: "But above all, the conclusion is not certain, this comes from nature, therefore this is good and right. We see in the human species many very bad things, although it cannot be doubted that they are the work of nature. . . . Nature is a state of sickness." Oeuvres diverses, vol. 1 (The Hague: 1737), 4ff., 95ff. 8. Crocker, An Age of Crisis, p. xviii. 9. Grimm et al., Correspondance litteraire . . . , vol. 9 (1879), p. 49 (June 1770). 10. Franjois-Marie Arouetde Voltaire, Oeuvres de Voltaire, ed. Beuchot, vol. 15: Essai sur les moeurs (Paris: Lefevre, 1829), pp. 14, 23. 11. Paul-Henri Thiry d'Holbach, Systeme de la nature, ou Des lois du monde physique et du monde moral, ed. Yvon Belaval (Paris: 1821), vol. 1, pp. 18, 24, 29, 43. 12. See later in this chapter, in connection with human nature. 13. Roger Mercier, La rehabilitation de la nature humaine, 1700-1750 (Villemonble: Editions La Balance, 1960), p. 15 and passim. 14. Ehrard, L'idee de nature, vol. 2, pp. 791-92; Callot, La philosophie de la vie, pp. 268-69. 15. Mercier, La rehabilitation de la nature humaine, p. 17. 16. Crocker, An Age of Crisis, p. xvii. 17. "NATURE (Beaux-Arts)," Supplement a l'Encyclopedie . . . (Amsterdam: M. Rey, 1776-1777), vol. 4 (1777), p. 19. 18. "NATURE, . . . (Philos.)," Encyclopedie, our Dictionnaire raisonne des

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sciences, des arts et des metiers, vol. 11 ("Neuchatel: Samuel Faulche," 1765), pp. 40-41. 19. For a recent defense of natural law, see Alessandro Passerin d'Entreves, Natural Law, 2nd ed. (London: Hutchinson Universal Library, 1970), pp. 119-72 and passim. 20. A multitude of historical works exist on religion, political theory, and science. For handy overviews of natural law, see Lester G. Crocker, Nature and Culture: Ethical Thought in the French Enlightenment (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1963), pp. 3-74, and Passerin d'Entreves, Natural Law, pp. 13-64 and passim. 21. Jean Lerond d'Alembert, Oeuvres, vol. 4: Essai sur les elemens de philosophie (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1967) (originally Paris: A. Belin, 1821-1822), pp. 207-8. 22. Oeuvres de Voltaire, ed. Beuchot, vol. 42: Commentaire sur le livre Des delits etdespeines . . . (1831), p. 450. 23. Jacques Proust, Diderot et I'Encyclopedic (Paris: Armand Colin, 1962), pp. 402, 405-8. 24. Ibid., p. 407. 25. Crocker, Nature and Culture, pp. 61-64. 26. Grimm et al., Correspondance litteraire, vol. 5: pp. 122, 121-27 (July 1762). 27. "NATURE, lois de la," Encyclopedie, vol. 11, p. 41. 28. "Law" seems the best translation here of "droit," in the articles "DROIT DES GENS" and "DROIT DE LA NATURE, ou DROIT NATUREL," Encyclopedie (Paris: Briasson, David 1'aine, Le Breton, Durand, 1755), vol. 5, pp. 126-29, 131-34. The "droits" popularized in the Revolutionary period are best translated as "rights." 29. "DROIT DES GENS," Encyclopedie, vol. 5, pp. 126, 127. 30. "DROIT DE LA NATURE, ou DROIT NATUREL," Encyclopedie, vol. 5, 131-32. 31. "NATURELLE, loi," Encyclopedie, vol. 11, pp. 46-47. 32. "DEVOIR," Encyclopedic, vol. 4 (1754), pp. 915-17. 33. These include the articles "JUSTE, INJUSTE," Encyclopedie, vol. 9 (1765), pp. 86-87; "DROIT NATUREL," vol. 5, pp. 115-16—not to be confused with de Jaucourt's "DROIT DE LA NATURE, ou DROIT NATUREL," above; and "LO1 NATURELLE," vol. 9, pp. 665-66. 34. "JUSTE, INJUSTE," Encyclopedie, vol. 9, pp. 86, 87. 35. "DROIT NATUREL," Encyclopedie, vol. 5, p. 116. 36. "LOI NATURELLE," Encyclopedie, vol. 9, pp. 665-66. 37. Michelle Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au siecle des lumieres: Buff on, Voltaire, Rousseau, Helvetius, Diderot (Paris: Flammarion, 1977), pp. 350-59. 38. "ANIMAL," Encyclopedie, vol. 1 (1751), p. 468; Diderot acknowledges that this idea comes from Buff on. 39. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment, An Interpretation, vol. 2: The Science of Freedom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), pp. 167-68ff. 40. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Biggs (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1888), p. 273.

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41. Mercier, La rehabilitation de la nature humaine, pp. 439-44 and passim. 42. See Chapters 2 and 3. 43. See the exhaustive study by Robert Mauzi, L'idee de bonheur dans la litterature et la pensee franqaise au xviiie siecle (2nd ed.) (Paris: Armand Colin, 1965), and also Simone Goyard-Fabre, La philosophie des lumieres en France (Paris: C. Klincksieck, 1972), pp. 213-34. 44. "BONHEUR," Encyclopedie, vol. 2 (1751), pp. 322-23. 45. Crocker, An Age of Crisis, pp. 256-324. 46. "SOCIETE, . . . (Morale)" Encyclopedie, vol. 15 (1765), pp. 252-58. Assezat and Tourneux assign this to Diderot; Schwab and Lough think it more likely to be by Boulanger. The heavy emphasis upon religion far surpasses mere lip-service and thus argues against Diderot's authorship; so too does the pedestrian style of the article. 47. Ibid., pp. 252, 254. 48. Ibid., pp. 254-58. 49. For a summary introduction to this question, see Ehrard, L'idee de nature en France, pp. 661-72.

2 The Uniformity of Human Nature The Question It would have been astonishing indeed if the Enlightenment had seldom or never concluded that human nature was uniform throughout time and space. Several presumptions favoring such uniformity have already been noted here—the frequent inclination to view nature as more normative than factual; the continuing attraction toward an abiding natural law, with its eternal precepts of human justice; and an appreciation for such universal ingredients of human nature as the quest for happiness, the persisting urges toward self-love and sociability, and the effective possibility of human choice and free will. A further boost to the uniformity of human nature was often available from the heritage of seventeenth-century classicism, still powerful in the Enlightenment. Certainly classicism always retained a predisposition toward an identical human nature throughout history—even if those most ardent of classicists, the partisans of the Ancients in the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, sometimes had been reduced to judging Homer by the human nature of his own day rather than of recent times.' In the eighteenth century, from the religious apologist Buffier to the radical philosophe Mably, there came a repeated, if not unchallenged, refrain: human nature has been uniform, or virtually so, across the centuries.2 Among the central figures of the French Enlightenment, even the famous naturalist Buffon defended (with qualifications to be noted later in these pages3) the basic unity of mankind. Physical variations, he wrote, such as different skin colors, "are only superficial." The human race is basically uniform, both physically and morally.4 From such writers as these, and from such greater luminaries (to be examined individually, later in this chapter) as Voltaire, Diderot, and d'Holbach, has come the rationale for a chorus of modern pronouncements on the uni-

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versality and uniformity of human nature as envisaged by the Enlightenment. Before turning more specifically to that age itself, a summary of several modern conclusions is in order—with the omnipresent caveat that summarizations must entail simplification. Carl Becker's delightful, much attacked Heavenly City of the EighteenthCentury Philosophers offers a classic statement of the uniformitarian thesis. The philosophes, wrote Becker, "were looking for 'man in general,' " who could "be found only by abstracting from all men in all times and all places those qualities which all men shared." Yet even Becker's philosophic, it should be noted, did not deny that there were differences among peoples; the philosophe, Becker wrote, would simply "cancel out. . . those that appeared to be merely local or temporary."5 Becker's distinguished compatriot Henry Steele Commager later advanced a similar view, with somewhat more specific evidence: human nature, he concluded, was in fact seen during the Enlightenment as the same everywhere.6 Other authors, both specialists and generalists, have often simply made casual reference to an Enlightenment assertion of the universal uniformity of human nature, as if this interpretation no longer requires documentation.7 A handful of historians, however, have taken a more cautious, more qualified position. Lester G. Crocker, for example, stated that any flat assertion of the Encyclopedists' uniformitarian view of human nature must be modified, for this view would have implied a conclusion seldom accepted at the time—that moral law was absolute in all its detail. There were then in actuality, Crocker asserted, "several types or degrees of universality in human nature. "8 On the most basic level, human nature did evince uniformity—in its "senses, mental faculties, desires, passions and needs." Thus a structural uniformity was seen in human nature, but not "any particular content" of common ideas or judgments. 9 Certain motives and needs were indeed universal, but they expressed themselves differently under different circumstances. Peter Gay also has exercised discretion. For the philosophes, he notes, "nature had built a certain uniformity into man's basic patterns of growth and behavior," but without foreclosing all variations. There was enough uniformity in human nature to serve, it was hoped, as the basis for sound historical and sociological generalizations, but not so much as to impose a deadening sameness upon humanity. 10 These analyses by Crocker and Gay seem essentially correct. Their documentation and amplification will be the purpose of this and other chapters. First, evidence will be adduced for the currently more conventional picture of the Enlightenment in general and also of the Encyclopedia—the eighteenthcentury view of a uniform human nature, with its foundations in universal

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reason and passion. This survey will be followed by an examination of several potential eighteenth-century challenges to this view, especially by way of empirical human experience. What will emerge is a picture of a limited but significant Enlightened appreciation for the actual diversities of the nature and condition of humanity.

Reason and Passion On reason, the Encyclopedia would put it bluntly: reason is "the taste that reigns the most universally . . . ; we must follow it in everything"—even, the anonymous author added, despite any contrary impulses from "our inclinations and passions."11 Although the inferiority of these latter urges would not always be assumed so lightly by the French Enlightenment, the central position of reason was seldom questioned: reason approached, at least, being a part of the movement's very definition. United with a frequent if not invariable assumption of simplicity in the universe, reason came to embody "systems of simple, rational values which were not subject to change. Reason and the values which it upheld were seen as constants. . . ,"12 Ernst Cassirer also was firm in seeing eighteenth-century reason linked with universal human nature: the reason of the Enlightenment, he wrote, "is the same for all thinking subjects, all nations, all epochs, and all cultures. From the changeability of religious creeds, of moral maxims and convictions, of theoretical opinions and judgments, a firm and lasting element can be extracted which is permanent in itself, and which in this identity and permanence expresses the real essence of reason."13 To be sure, this rightly pervasive reason in human nature was rarely seen as self-contained in man's ideational world, uncontaminated by emotions, empiricism, or utilitarian considerations.14 Common sense, practicality, sentiment, and observation frequently invaded the realm of abstract, deductive thought, and the philosophies normally regarded these intrusions as beneficial guarantees against dogmatic systematization. Only through their harmonious collaboration could human nature fully bloom. It is in this broader context that the frequent praise from Voltaire, Diderot, or d'Alembert for human reason should be viewed. Voltaire's "universal reason" is linked to social, moral, and even practical mechanical instincts.15 In the article "Encyclopedia," Diderot finds "right reason" linked with the "heart of man," both of them "the same in all ages."16 D'Alembert's own abstract mathematical preferences notwithstanding,17 his famous Preliminary Discourse for the Encyclopedia takes a more comprehensive view of human reason. Above all, reason must collaborate with the empirical study of phe-

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nomena—but also with the faculty of imagination.18 In all of this, the Encyclopedia seems quite in line with the Enlightenment in general. It is important to stress that the passions, and indeed the whole broad realm of human feeling and emotion, were by no means rejected as necessarily pernicious during the eighteenth century. Despite the omnipresent ideal of rationality, the feelings and passions too were seen as fruitful aspects of the total human personality. Cold reason was far less dominant during the Enlightenment than that movement's detractors have so often alleged. Attempts to rehabilitate the passions, in the manner of Vauvenargues early in the period,19 aroused little opposition as the century wore on; feeling and sentiment, together with certain concomitant deep passions, were very much a part of the Enlightenment mainstream and not merely idiosyncratic undercurrents. In the esthetic process,20 as in the formation of morality and religion, emotion was soon recognized as a legitimate, and truly central, component of the human condition.21 On the importance of feeling, and on the critical differentiation between good and bad feelings or passions, one might cite passages from all leading thinkers of the French Enlightenment. A few examples, first from outside the covers of the Encyclopedia, will suffice to cover an area of discussion in which general agreement often led to mere platitude. The usually rational Voltaire not only decried those uncontrolled passions that dominated much of religion, but mistrusted the whole realm of instinctual life. And instinct, he once remarked, "more than reason, conducts human life."22 D'Holbach found some passions useful to ourselves and our fellow human beings; they in fact contribute to the universal movement that, as a materialist, he believed characterizes nature in general.23 As for Rousseau, his frequent predilection for feeling over reason is well known, though popularly much exaggerated. He noted that conscience, for example, is a matter of feeling, not reasoning; it partakes not of the material side of man but of the spiritual. The passions, on the other hand, are manifestations of man's material side. It is the child's conscience and feeling that, together with an uncorrupted reason, must mold his ethical development.24 Diderot—often, certainly, the calm rationalist—could write compellingly of both feeling and passion. His early defense of the natural passions in the Philosophical Thoughts (1746) is well known: if certain passions, he wrote, are bad and hence require strict control, others raise men to the peaks of moral nobility and artistic creativity. It would not often have occurred to Diderot to consider most human passions as other than natural and ennobling. Moreover, like d'Holbach, Diderot assimilated the passions within that natural, physical process of movement that, he believed, is universal and perpetual.25 The relevant Encyclopedia articles seldom went this far—either for the

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more conservative contributors (as might be expected) or for the more liberal. Too much should not be made of the work's treatment of such easy targets as the self-evidently destructive and bad passions, but one may nonetheless note in passing that here the liberals were the more outspoken. De Jaucourt, for example, wrote angrily of "cruelty" as a "ferocious passion" and "detestable vice"—and incidentally noted that it could be quite "natural."26 More broadly he wrote of "prejudice" (also founded in, but distorting, nature) as the fitting accompaniment of ignorance, pride, narrow self-love, and passion.27 If de Jaucourt was aroused to decry certain passions as obstacles to enlightenment, so, too, was Diderot. "Intolerance," "hate," and "ferocity" were obvious specific targets,28 but so, too, on occasion, were the passions in general, whenever they were obstacles to the advance of "philosophy." In this case he agreed, of course, with de Jaucourt on the harmfulness of "prejudice" founded in passion—in clear contrast to calm reflection, reason, and observation.29 Though without explicit statement, the implication throughout is that the passions are an all-too-universal part of human nature. The abbe Yvon, a more conservative writer, was more moderate in writing of certain passions of a less violent sort—this mildness possibly being quite as significant as the abbe's relative conservatism. "Ambition," he wrote, is generally bad but not necessarily so. "Appetite" of the senses is a confused but fecund source of the passions; "rational appetite" is a clearer source, and the essence of all human willing. In general, passions have both good and bad triggering mechanisms and results, and, again by implication, they characterize mankind as a whole.30 Occasionally the nonclerical authors too praised the moderate passions. Louis de Cahusac (ca. 1700-1759: in the article "Enthusiasm") and de Jaucourt (in "The Pathetic") viewed one sort of passionate "enthusiasm" as a characteristic of creative genius.31 "Joy," as de Jaucourt pointed out, is a desirable passion. So too is "emulation"—a "noble and generous passion."32 The anonymous writer on "passion" as a medical phenomenon cautiously found it both good and bad, and definitely bad in excess.33 Again, these authors assume the universality of human passions. As for the master Encyclopedist, Diderot himself, there is no general defense of all the passions, nor should we expect to discover one in the Encyclopedia'& pages. He does, however, find merit in that aspect of human feeling known as instinct, and delights in the analysis of physiognomical representations of all the passions—hardly the same thing as approving of the passions themselves in toto.34 Thus far I have skirted the main Encyclopedia article on the passions— "Passions (Philosophy, Logic, Morality)," generally attributed to Diderot.35

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It is rather lengthy (over nine folio columns) and is worthy of summarization. First, passions are defined broadly, as "penchants, inclinations, desires, and aversions, pushed to a certain point of vivacity and joined to a confused sensation of pleasure or sorrow, occasioned or accompanied by a certain irregular movement of the blood and of the animal spirits. . . . " They can immobilize man's freedom and can be considered "illnesses of the soul." Their categories and consequences are several: "the pleasures and pains of the senses" are good or bad, "the pleasures of the mind or of the imagination" are good, and all derive from our creator and are part of human nature. Some passions, however, are useless, frivolous, or positively dangerous. Specific passions include admiration, curiosity, hope, fear, courage, remorse, and many others. There is a distinction between "love of oneself," which is good, and "self-love" (amour-propre), which is the pernicious "excess of a natural passion." The passions are "necessary to human nature," and in fact "natural. '' They are useful to human survival, but are often abused. They can take us far from truth, which nevertheless can be attained, one hopes, by an effort of vigilance and reason. This article confirms the impression, noted above in connection with the concept of nature, of the Encyclopedia's tendency to be somewhat more systematic and inclusive than was the Enlightenment in general, but to ignore or evade the exceptional or adventurous insights of contemporary thought. There is no emphatic, extended parallel in the Encyclopedia with the open materialism of d'Holbach or Diderot (although both wrote extensively for the project), or with the latter's occasional scandalous enthusiasm for the sensual passions.36 It is clear that precise, specific linkage between the passions and a universal human nature is seldom evident in the Encyclopedia, or in the French Enlightenment as a whole. One is tempted to conclude, however—and many commentators have indeed done so—that the universal invariability of human nature is a constant that underlies the whole body, or virtually the whole body, of Enlightenment thought. With a bow now and then to partial exceptions (for instance, Rousseau's rather eccentric individualism), historians continue to make blanket assumptions concerning universalist Enlightenment views. In many cases such assumptions do seem justified, to be sure, by the evidence of specific quotations. One of the more telling comes from de Jaucourt, in the Encyclopedia article on "prejudice" and passion noted earlier: "There are prejudices that are universal and, so to speak, hereditary in humanity." 37 Of course, as we have seen, by no means were all universal, "hereditary" characteristics of human nature considered bad by the Enlightenment. In addition to such admirable human qualities as reason and the benevolent passions, the Enlightenment sometimes stressed the existence of innate in-

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stincts in morality and religion. Indeed, these might seem to be among the most indisputable components of a uniform human nature throughout time and place. We must turn to these concepts of innate ethical and religious instincts and, more generally, of a universal morality, whatever its basis, before venturing even a preliminary general statement of the Enlightened affirmation of the uniformity of human nature.

Instinctual Ethics and Religion "The truth that I love," wrote Rousseau in 1761, "is not so much metaphysical as moral."38 All authors of the French Enlightenment shared this philosophical position. Ethics in fact tended to be the most vital, central concern of the movement.39 It was religion and philosophy that had defined the nature of ethical thought since the classical Greeks. Since the Enlightenment these foundations have been supplemented, shaken, or destroyed by anthropological insights and the many contentious schools of psychology.40 As for eighteenth-century France, secular liberal thought offered essentially three theories concerning the basis of humanity's ethical development: morality as an instinctual component of human nature, as the product of social experience, or as a combination of instinct and experience. A fuller discussion of the experiential sources of morality, with their strong potentialities for diversity in ethical development, will be deferred until later in this study;41 for the moment, I will limit myself to theories of an instinctual ethics, and of a uniform morality in general. Few Enlightened writers indeed were wholly immune to the appeal of innate moral sense theories, although sometimes these did appear in conjunction with theories of an experiential ethics. Pertinent to the present study is the fact that occasionally the postulated moral sense was seen, not only as an offshoot of human reason, or of the several passions discussed above, but also as a discrete, innate element within human beings that seemed to be part of the universal human psyche. Human beings, it was widely perceived, have at least a rudimentary intuitive sense of right and wrong—a sense that is a shared property of the species. In short, despite lurking doubts among sensualists and the proponents of nature as factual rather than normative, human nature and "virtue" were generally viewed in the French Enlightenment as closely allied, or even as almost synonymous.42 Evidence may be drawn from thinkers ranging from the relatively conservative abbe Jean Terrasson (died 1750) to the co-editor of the Encyclopedia, Jean d'Alembert.43 Ethical principles, wrote the latter, antedate all specific religions. These principles are, he admitted, linked with

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human reason and with social needs—intrusions, we might think, into the strictly autonomous instinctual realm of morality, and opening wedges for the experiential approach to ethics.44 The moral sense, in d'Alembert's opinion, was not simply a matter of universally valid inner feeling, but of intelligence and experience. Something of this same ambiguity touched even Voltaire, despite his alleged intransigent defense of an ethics so universal as to suggest an instinctual basis.45 Certainly in Voltaire's work there are many eminently quotable assertions concerning a universal morality. "The foundation of morality," he wrote in the Essay on Customs and Morals, "is the same among all nations." "Virtue," he added, "is everywhere the same, for it comes from God: all the rest comes from man." "Religion teaches the same morality to all peoples, with no exception."46 In his poem on Natural Law he declared: An ethics uniform in all ages and places Speaks forever in the name of this God. . . . From one end to the other it [nature] speaks and cries: "Adore one God, be just, and cherish your homeland." All men have received from heaven, along with intelligence, This restraining power of justice and conscience, The first fruit of nascent reason.47

These quotations, however, illustrate not only Voltaire's assertion of a universal morality, but also his reluctance to make it into an autonomous, innate instinct. A universal moral sense does indeed exist, he maintained, but it has developed step by step from man's God-given rational faculties. In reference to a universal sense of justice and injustice, Voltaire encapsulated his position as follows: Who has given us the feeling of the just and the unjust? It is God, who has given us a brain and a heart. But when does your reason teach you that vice and virtue exist?: at the same time that it teaches you that two and two make four. There is no innate knowledge, for the same reason that there is no tree that bears leaves and fruit as it first emerges from the ground. Nothing is what is called "innate," that is, born developed—but . . . God fashions us with organs that, as they develop, make us feel what our species must feel for its survival.

Even more briefly, he wrote that "one cannot repeat too often that all dogmas are different, and that morality is the same in all men who use their reason. Morality comes from God."48 Voltaire shared the view of the Enlightenment, noted earlier, that in practice a social sense must compete in mankind with self-love. Individual and

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social utility—in other words, enlightened self-interest—became for him very much a factor in the developing moral sense of individuals. This utilitarianism, of course, could well lead to varying, not uniform, specific ethical rules. All in all, although Voltaire's much-cited ethical universalism did indeed exist in rather abstract form, it was neither autonomous in origin nor absolute in application. Diderot similarly stressed the centrality of ethics in human life, and the quest for virtue as the best road to happiness. It is true that in writings unpublished in his lifetime, such as Rameau's Nephew and Jacques the Fatalist, he experimented profoundly with a moral nihilism that found no reliable source or intellectual certainty of ethical values in the world of nature.49 But Diderot, like most human beings, needed the support and the self-image of virtue, his rebellious sensuality and his probing intellect notwithstanding. The resultant ethical system—if one may so call his wide-ranging reflections—displays numerous similarities to Voltaire's. Both thinkers rejected innate ideas: in the Encyclopedia Diderot bluntly stated that "there is nothing innate except the faculty of feeling and thinking: all the rest is acquired."50 Diderot followed Voltaire in defending enlightened self-interest, the feelings, reason, and social instinct as sources of morality. Moreover, like Voltaire, he often concluded that there are basic moral principles that are valid everywhere. This universal ethics, he wrote, "has been the same in all past times and will be the same in all ages to come," and assuredly it is independent of those religious ideas that have differed so markedly throughout history. Where is the ultimate derivation of this unvarying basic morality to be found? "It is," he answered, "in man himself, in the like [physical] organization of all men, since all have the same needs, the same pleasures and pains, the same strengths and weaknesses."51 Yet with Diderot the road to this conclusion encountered too many serious doubts and hesitancies to invite full assent by all his readers. With the baron d'Holbach the case for a universal morality is somewhat more systematic and unqualified, although his position on innateness remains equivocal. The science of ethics, d'Holbach declared, must drop all baggage of innate ideas: "the true system of our duties must be that which results from our own nature, properly modified"—that is, modified by enlightened education and legislation.52 He nevertheless seems to uphold qualities, if not ideas, in human nature that are innate. D'Holbach's three-volume Universal Morality, or Man's Duties Founded on Nature develops a system based upon human happiness, reason, selfinterest, sociability, and—above all—experience.53 Neglect of experience, he asserted at the very beginning of Universal Morality, was the great defect of the ethical thought of classical antiquity, together with a love of supersti-

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tious marvels; from this flawed ethics we must adopt only the notions that conform to nature, experience, and "the never-changing utilitarian needs of men in all ages of history." Ethical rules must be simple and rational.54 This work and others by d'Holbach abound in statements of "universal nature" and of universal ethical codes, all of which "agree in basics." Although men's religions vary greatly, their duties and virtues "are the same for all those who inhabit this globe."55 As an enthusiastic atheist and materialist, d'Holbach firmly, and necessarily, maintained a complete separation between religion and ethics—a separation, of course, largely absent in writings of the deistic Voltaire and in Diderot's more public, circumspect moments. D'Holbach also based reason itself exclusively on human experience, thus distancing himself at least from one sort of innateness. "Man's reason," he believed, "can only be the delayed fruit of experience, knowledge of the true, and reflection." More aggressively and incautiously than most philosophies, d'Holbach asserted that human experience is truly uniform, and that the resultant "morality is the same for all the inhabitants of the world."56 And this morality—although he avoided drawing the parallel—turned out to be virtually the same, minus asceticism, as the traditional Christian morality, both for rulers and for citizens of all classes.57 An especially lengthy chapter of Universal Morality5* is devoted to the channeling and molding of youthful human nature by the educative process—an emphasis shared by that other optimistic celebrant of human nature, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. D'Holbach admitted, however, that children vary greatly in temperament, and that education cannot "do everything in man: it can only employ the materials that nature presents to it."59 In the Encyclopedia one finds an echo of the ethical thought of its age, generally excepting, of course, the more strident materialsm, skepticism, or atheism of the period. The existence of a natural ethics was admitted even by the conservative abbe Yvon in the long article "Atheists."60 Even without religion and even, indeed, in an atheistic system, the abbe confessed, an imperfect, partial knowledge of morality is possible, since an instinctual "moral sentiment" may be postulated, however weak and delicate in nature. Like his more secular contemporaries, Yvon stressed the roles of self- interest and social need in the elaboration of ethical principles; unlike them, he insisted that only religion can make morality truly flower.61 In the Encyclopedia Diderot added predictable references to the heart and to "common needs" as bases of ethics, and de Jaucourt made passing references (in the article "Mohammedanism") to that "morality which has always been basically the same among all men."62 The most systematic consideration of morality in the Encyclopedia is found in two articles of de Jaucourt, "Moral Sense" and "Morality."63 In "Moral

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Sense" he grants that this sense can be "independent of reason and reflection," and that, indeed, it can be called a "moral instinct"; he asserts that it comes from God Himself. In the longer article "Morality," he adds a recognition of ethical complexity; introduces the rational-experiential duality; separates ethics from religion, which is historically less important and more variable than morality; and states the certainty of such basic moral requirements as obedience to God and earthly rulers, and avoidance of harm to other human beings. Nothing in these cautious assessments adds to or strays from the middle of the Enlightened ethical road. From references to views of the greater uniformity of this world's morality than of religion, we might expect to find few serious attempts to demonstrate the uniformity of religious principle through time and space—yet we would be quite mistaken. Both in the whole French Enlightenment and in the Encyclopedia there is abundant evidence of the urge to view true religion as uniform and in fact natural to the human race.64 Dissident views, as we might readily surmise, would come primarily from the small minority of open and covert atheists. Historical support is required, however, to flesh the bones of such simple generalizations. Avoiding doctrinal detail and focusing on concepts of human nature, we need to glance quickly at the eighteenth-century concern for the origins and human evidences of natural religion. Above all, to what degree did the Enlightenment and the Encyclopedia consider the central tenet of all religions, a belief in a god or gods, "natural" to mankind—a very part, as it were, of human nature? For the moment, as with morality, I will largely limit myself to the affirmative answers—that is, to assertions that religion is indeed universally natural to human beings. The predominant Enlightenment view that nature and religion are, or rather should be, closely linked has been fully documented by other authors.65 For the Enlightened deist majority—that is, for believers in a simple natural and rational religion independent of specific revelation—it often seemed virtually self-evident that, in addition to rational demonstration, the natural feelings of mankind formed the basis of religion. Writers such as Montesquieu continued to confide to private journals, if not to write for general publication, their conviction that personal religious feeling and worship were the essence of true religion.66 Others turned to elementary anthropological evidence to support the assertion that primitive peoples possessed a natural knowledge of a god or gods. For several decades, a celebrated study of the 1720s, Customs and Morals of the American Savages, Compared with Those of Earliest Times, by the Jesuit Joseph-Frangois Lafitau, enjoyed some popularity, and was cited by religious liberals and conservatives alike for evidence that present-day American savages shared with their ancestors, the barbarians of classical antiquity,

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a belief in deity.67 Later authors did not have to subscribe to Lafitau's unusual anthropological theory to accept his apparent support for a universal natural belief in God. Often to be found among those individual figures of the Enlightenment who thought true religion to be natural to humanity was the ever-quotable Voltaire. In the Essay on Customs and Morals he declared that knowledge of God "is the fruit of cultivated reason"; man's "universal reason" leads humanity to God, whether in ancient Greece or in China, India, or Japan.68 As was the case in ethics, Voltaire avoided the concept of fully formed innate ideas and instead referred to the mediation of an apparently innate rational quality in men everywhere. The atheistic materialist d'Holbach, of course, insisted that man's defense of deity is not natural in any sense, but thoroughly, deplorably unnatural; natural religion, for him, is simply "the pretended natural religion."69 Mankind's mistaken ideas on God—which are not, in any case, universal, since atheists do exist—come from the dangers, evils, and accidents of life, and from human fear and ignorance. Fear and ignorance are all too common in history, but unnatural: they can be routed by knowledge and experience.70 Even, in fact, if the belief in God approaches universality, this still "proves nothing in favor of its truth," since a great many other "prejudices and gross errors" have received nearly universal assent throughout history.71 Not surprisingly, the Encyclopedia officially rejected such atheistic views: its own approach was a combination of traditional faith and deism—the "natural religion" d'Holbach scorned. As the anonymous author of the article "Religion" approvingly wrote: "Natural religion is the cult that reason, left to itself and to its own enlightened guidance, learns that it must render to the Supreme Being. . . ,"72 The article "God," for which Formey was responsible, turns to the near universality of a belief in the existence of God, "a truth," he declared, "that nature has put in the mind of all men who have not deliberately tried to disown their feelings"; "God is an imprint made by nature." Interestingly, although the article maintains that there have never existed any "atheistic nations," it states that in fact there have been some "barbaric and wild" peoples who have not recognized God's existence because their reason has not been awakened.73 Thus the belief in God would not seem to be autonomous, but a product of reason. Yet the idea of God, Formey repeated, comes not from education but from nature—a conclusion we might think not wholly logical, despite the writer's efforts at clarification. The abbe Yvon's long article "Atheists" follows a rather different line: atheism often comes from "ignorance and stupidity," which can be erased by education. "Some authors . . . look upon the idea of God as an idea innate and natural to man," with even all savages therefore recognizing a God. Yvon

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notes that we do not, however, have enough information to state with certainty whether or not savage races exist with no idea of God. "Let us," he added, "await better information from travel narratives." Yvon also admitted that reason, Formey's major medium for belief in God, had sometimes actually denied that belief—a denial from which he disassociated himself. In any case, he remarked rather lamely, atheists have never been truly numerous.74 The article "Divinity" by the abbe Edme Mallet (1713-1755) perpetuates the confusion. "Atheists," he writes, "maintain that knowledge of divinity is simply a political invention of the first law-givers, in order to insure . . . obedience to their laws. It is true that law-givers have profited from this idea that they found imprinted on the mind of peoples. History teaches this—but it does not teach at what point men began to have this idea. One can simply not establish that moment with any certainty."75 What are we to make of this mishmash in our sources? It seems safe to diagnose an honest belief in God in all three conservative writers chosen by Diderot to present the key articles on God and atheism. Apparently at least Formey wished to support a belief in God founded in human nature—but the two abbes were considerably less sure of this wholly natural basis of belief. It is also worth noting that when the anonymous author of the article "Theism" offered three reasons for the belief in God,76 not one of these was its innateness or its universality. If the urge to affirm a human nature that universally comprised a belief in God was strong in the Encyclopedia, the defense of this universality was hesitant and unsatisfactory.

Uniformity Affirmed Thus far this chapter has loosely woven a number of diverse Enlightenment threads to form a tentative pattern of a human nature that is uniform, or fairly uniform, throughout time and space. The contributions of human reason— and, somewhat more ambiguously, of the passions—to this pattern have been noted. Attempts to insert a uniform basic morality—and, less successfully, a basic religious belief—within this pattern have been considered.77 We must now begin to assess, in a very tentative way, the conclusions that Enlightened authors and Encyclopedists themselves arrived at from these and other arguments. For the moment I will limit myself to summarizing the arguments upholding the idea of a universal human nature, in the writing of Voltaire, Diderot, d'Holbach, Rousseau, and finally in the Encyclopedia. To seek for absolute consistency in the thought of Voltaire on the question of a uniform human nature (as on most if not all other complex issues) is both frustrating and misguided.78 Motive and circumstance varied from writing to

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writing and, indeed, sometimes within the same work. One theme, nevertheless, that does recur is the fundamental similarity, or virtual basic uniformity, of human nature throughout the world, past and present. And if, wrote Voltaire, reason speaks similarly to men throughout history whenever it is permitted to surface, its opponent, stupidity, is just as universal.79 In the Philosophic Dictionary, to counter the exclusivity of the tiny Hebraic nation, Voltaire linked the uniformity of human nature to God's own designs: no God can be for one province alone. "Divinity speaks to the heart of all men, and the bonds of charity must unite them from one end of the universe to the other." Likewise, self-esteem (amour-propre) links all mankind,80 as do numerous other human urges. Environmental forces may modify at least the expression of these urges—but it is difficult to deny Voltaire's impulse to impose an ultimate uniformity upon human nature in general. The case of Diderot, as we will see later, is more complex. Again, though, there are assertions of a uniform human nature. "At birth," he wrote, "we bring with us only some similarity of organization with other beings, the same needs, an attraction toward the same pleasures, a shared aversion toward the same pains; all this makes man what he is and must be the foundation of the sort of morality suitable to him."81 Although different men do behave differently, mankind as a whole loves pleasure, avoids pain, and is moved both by reason and by sociability. Perhaps Diderot's principal addition to these truisms is the distinction that his protagonist makes in the Supplement to Bougainville's Voyage—the distinction between natural man and artificial man. Still, taken together, Diderot's statements on the uniformity of human nature seem platitudinous to the point of being, possibly, rather half-hearted. D'Holbach, for his part, approached the uniformity of human nature on the basis of physiological and psychological structure. Man, like all of nature, is a material entity, so organized as to belong to "an order, a system, a class apart which differs from the animals." Man has his own particular nature82—which may or may not, I might add, imply a totally uniform nature. In contrast to d'Holbach, Rousseau omitted physiological analysis and, in fact, extensive theorizing of any sort on human nature as an entity. His main contribution to the subject (although it is usually more implicit than explicit in his writing) was his distinction between original, primitive, or savage human nature on the one hand, and true or essential human nature on the other. Popular views of Rousseau notwithstanding, the philosophe seems never to have glorified the "good savage," who was inclined, he felt, to be more like a ferocious beast. It was rather with early social organization that men became truly human, moral, and rational.83 With Diderot, of course, Rousseau agreed that this essential, benevolent human nature later had become overlaid with mischievous artificiality and affectation.

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In the Encyclopedia, explicit references to the uniformity of human nature are rare.84 A Supplement article on the "Ancients, Antiquity" mentions the "invariable attributes of the human mind," but immediately notes the many "accidental" varieties of beauty—these varieties being particularly worthy of study.85 In the earlier volumes, de Jaucourt stated that men of exceptional wisdom can escape the diversifying influences of climate or regional custom upon human nature.86 Much more common and typical are routine references to human qualities as (/they are universal—for example, urges toward preservation of self or family, the love of orderliness, or impulses to "command, obey, desire, and pursue."87 The offhandedness of such references may, at least now and then, indicate mere lip-service or indifference to the uniformity of human nature. Far more often, these infrequent and sketchy references may be witness to the wide currency of a concept no longer seeming to require justification. General acceptance, however, of such a concept as the uniformity of human nature does not necessarily imply that these are no challenges to its validity, or that such challenges as do exist are negligible. I must turn next to a significantly more revisionist aspect of this study—the origin and nature of qualifications and restrictions concerning this popular Enlightenment concept, the uniformity of human nature. NOTES 1. Roger Mercier, "La theorie des climats; des Reflexions critiques a L'esprit des lois," Revue d'histoire litteraire de la France 53 (1953), p. 18; and numerous histories of esthetics. 2. For Buffier, see Mercier, La rehabilitation de la nature humaine, pp. 240-42; for such more Enlightened writers as Mably, Helvetius, Boulanger, and Deslandes, see Crocker, An Age of Crisis, pp. 194-95, 189, 185. 3. See Chapter 4, "Climate." 4. Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, Oeuvres philosophiques, ed. Jean Piveteau (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954), p. xxiv. 5. Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932), pp. 99-100. 6. Henry Steele Commager, The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment (Garden City, New Jersey: Anchor Press/ Doubleday, 1977), pp. 72-75. 7. For example: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, The Origins of Physiocracy . . . (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), p. 44; Basil Guy, The French Image of China before and after Voltaire, in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 21 (Geneva: Institut et Musee Voltaire, 1963), pp. 326-27; Howard Mumford Jones, Revolution & Romanticism (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 62-63.

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8. Crocker, An Age of Crisis, p. 182. 9. Ibid., pp. 185-86. 10. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. 2: The Science of Freedom, pp. 168-69. 11. "SOCIETE . . . (Morale)," Encyclopedic, vol. 15, p. 254. 12. Henry Vyverberg, Historical Pessimism in the French Enlightenment (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1958), p. 3. 13. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, tr. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), p. 6. 14. For example, see Goyard-Fabre, La philosophic des lumieres en France, pp. 28-33; Mercier, La rehabilitation de la nature humaine, pp. 333-34; Vyverberg, Historical Pessimism, pp. 81-83. 15. Frangois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Les asuvres completes de Voltaire, ed. Theodore Besterman et al., vol. 59: Laphilosophie de I'histoire, ed. J. H. Brumfitt (Geneva: Institut et Musee Voltaire, 1969), pp. 110-14. 16. "ENCYCLOPEDIE," Encyclopedic, vol. 5, unnumbered page on reverse of p. 636. 17. Ronald Grimsley, Jean d'Alembert (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1963), pp. 6-7. 18. For an overview of the Preliminary Discourse, see Richard N. Schwab, ed., Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedic of Diderot, Introduction, pp. ix-1. On imagination, see pp. 50-51. 19. Mercier, La rehabilitation de la nature humaine, pp. 419-22; Vyverberg, Historical Pessimism, pp. 202-3. 20. See various studies of esthetics and, for early Enlightenment trends, Mercier, La rehabilitation de la nature humaine, pp. 387-407. 21. See Chapter 3, "Experiential Religion and Ethics,'' and also such overviews as in Crocker, An Age of Crisis, pp. 218-55; Crocker, Nature and Culture, pp. 206-15; Ehrard, L'idee de nature en France, vol. 1, pp. 349-96; Gay, The Enlightenment, An Interpretation, vol. 2, pp. 187-207; Jones, Revolution & Romanticism, pp. 81-115; Ira O. Wade, The Structure and Form of the French Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), vol. 1, pp. 603-18. 22. Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, ed. Raymond Naves (Paris: Gamier, 1967), pp. 181-82; Oeuvres completes de Voltaire, ed. Theodore Besterman, vol. 82: Third Paris Notebook (Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 1968), p. 489. 23. D'Holbach, Systeme de la nature . . . (London: 1774), vol. 1, p. 374; Mauzi, L'idee de bonheur, pp. 446-48. 24. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Correspondance complete, ed. R. A. Leigh (Geneva: Institut et Musee Voltaire, 1965- ), vol. 37 (1980), letter to Laurent Aymon de Franquieres, 15 January 1769, p. 17; Robert Derathe, Le rationalisme de J.-J. Rousseau (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948), pp. 100-2. For a full discussion of Rousseau's rationalism, see Derathe, pp. 1-8, 74-138 and passim. 25. Diderot, Oeuvres philosophiques, ed. Paul Verniere (Paris: Garnier, 1961): Pensees philosophiques, p. 10 and passim. See also Mauzi, L'idee de bonheur, pp.

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437-45; Jean Mayer, Diderot homme de science (Rennes: Imprimerie Bretonne, 1959), pp. 338-42; Lefebvre, Diderot ou les affirmations fondamentales du materialisme, pp. 185-90. 26. "CRUAUTE," Encyclopedic, vol. 4, p. 517. 27. "PREJUGE . . .(Logique);' Encyclopedic, vol. 13 (1765), pp. 284-85. 28. "INTOLERANCE," Encyclopedic, vol. 8 (1765), pp. 843-44; "MAINE," vol. 8, p. 26; "FEROCE," vol. 6 (1756), p. 541. 29. "PHILOSOPHIE," Encyclopedie, vol. 12 (1765), p. 515; "PHILOSOPHE," vol. 12, pp. 509-11. The latter article is a reworking of Le philosophe, an anonymous 1743 publication; see Herbert Dieckmann, Le Philosophe: Text and Interpretation (St. Louis: Washington University Studies, 1948), pp. 1-27. 30. "AMBITION," Encyclopedie, vol. 1, p. 32; "APPETIT," vol. 1, p. 549; "ATTENTION," vol. 1, p. 841. 31. "ENTHOUSIASME," Encyclopedie, vol. 5, pp. 719-21; "PATHETIQUE, le," vol. 12, p. 169. 32. "JOIE," Encyclopedie, vol. 8, p. 867; "EMULATION," vol. 5, p. 601. 33. "PASSION, (Med., Hyg., Pathol. Ther.)," Encyclopedie, vol. 12, pp. 149-50. 34. "THEOSOPHES, LES," Encyclopedie, vol. 16 (1765), pp. 253-54. 35. "PASSIONS . . . (Philos. Logique, Morale)," Encyclopedie, vol. 12, pp. 142-46. 36. Note also Diderot's notorious defense of passionate sensuality in works not published in his lifetime—occasional letters, for example, or his Supplement au Voyage de Bougainville. 37. "PREJUGE (Logique)," Encyclopedie, vol. 13, p. 284. 38. Rousseau, Correspondance complete, vol. 9 (1969), letter to Dom Leger-Marie Deschamps, 25 June 1761, p. 28. 39. The broadest summary of ethical thought in the French Enlightenment remains Lester G. Crocker, Nature and Culture; see also Ira O. Wade, The Structure and Form of the French Enlightenment, vol. 1, pp. 240-78. 40. Crocker, Nature and Culture, pp. 156-65, offers a handy summary of developments up to the 1960s. 41. See Chapter 3, "Experiential Religion and Ethics." 42. Mauzi, L'idee de bonheur, pp. 145-48. 43. Mercier, La rehabilitation de la nature humaine, pp. 243-45; Grimsley, Jean d'Alembert, pp. 265-68. 44. D'Alembert, Oeuvres, vol. 1: Essai sur les elemens de philosophie, pp. 208-9 and passim. 45. Rosemary Z. Lauer, The Mind of Voltaire: A Study in His "Constructive Deism" (Westminster, Maryland: Newman Press, 1961), pp. 70-87. 46. Oeuvres de Voltaire, ed. Beuchot, vol. 17 (1829): Essaie sur les moeurs, p. 366; vol. 15, p. 313; vol. 18 (1829), p. 486. 47. Ibid., vol. 12 (1833): "La loi naturelle," pp. 159, 164. 48. Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, ed. Naves, pp. 269, 326.

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49. See Crocker, Nature and Culture, pp. 372-90. 50. "INNE," Encyclopedic, vol. 8, p. 754. 51. Denis Diderot, Oeuvres completes, ed. J. Assezat and Maurice Tourneux (Paris: Gamier, 1875-1877), vol. 6 (1875): Fragments echappes duportefeuille d'un philosophe (1772), p. 444. 52. Paul-Henri Thiry, baron d'Holbach, La morale universelle, ou les devoirs de I'homme fondes sur la nature (Paris: Masson et fils, 1820), vol. 1, pp. x-xi. 53. See also Topazio, D'Holbach's Moral Philosophy. 54. D'Holbach, La morale universelle, vol. 1, pp. i, vii-viii, x. 55. D'Holbach, Systeme de la nature (London: 1774), vol. 1, p. 3; La morale universelle, vol. 1, pp. xv, xviii. 56. D'Holbach, La morale universelle, vol. 1, p. 47; vol. 2, p. 15. 57. Ibid., vol. 2, passim. 58. Ibid., vol. 3, pp. 55-117. 59. Ibid., p. 56. 60. "ATHEES," Encyclopedic, vol. 1, pp. 798-815. 61. Ibid., pp. 804-6. 62. "IRRELIGIEUX," Encyclopedic, vol. 8, p. 909; "MAHOMETISME," vol. 9, p. 864. 63. "SENS MORAL," Encyclopedic, vol. 15, pp. 28-29; "MORALE," vol. 10 (1765), pp. 699-702. 64. So, too, did superstition seem natural enough, in a more factual than normative sense, to such French authors as Voltaire—and of course also to Edward Gibbon. 65. A good introduction to the question can be found in Ehrard's ever-useful L'idee de nature en France, vol. 1, pp. 397-467. 66. Mercier, La rehabilitation de la nature humaine, pp. 423-25. 67. Joseph-Frangois Lafitau, Moeurs des sauvages americains comparees aux moeurs des premiers temps, 2 vols. (Paris: Saugrain I'ame, 1724). See also Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 57-62. 68. Voltaire, Oeuvres, vol. 15: Essai sur les moeurs, pp. 16, 34, 120, 273, 293, 295; vol. 17, p. 404. 69. D'Holbach, Systeme de la nature (London: 1774), vol. 2, p. 235. 70. Ibid., vol. 3, p. 362; vol. 2, pp. 1-27. 71. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 101. 72. "RELIGION," Encyclopedic, vol. 14 (1765), p. 78. 73. "DIEU," Encyclopedic, vol. 4, pp. 976, 977, 976. 74. "ATHEES," Encyclopedic, vol. 1, pp. 798-800. 75. "DIVINITE," Encyclopedic, vol. 4, p. 1073. 76. Theism's social utility, its support for political obedience, and its consoling qualities—"THEISME," Encyclopedic, vol. 16, p. 243. 77. The usually accepted modern perception of an eighteenth-century acceptance of uniformity in nature, and hence a neglect of "theories of cultural differences" is summed up in Bock, Human Nature and History, pp. 96-97 and passim.

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78. Lester G. Crocker, "Voltaire's Struggle for Humanism," in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 4 (Geneva: Institute et Musee Voltaire, 1957), pp. 137-69; Vyverberg, Historical Pessimism, p. 170. Crocker's analysis of motivation (pp. 140-41) is especially persuasive on Voltaire's changes of approach in his Traite de metaphysique. 79. Oeuvres de Voltaire, ed. Beuchot, vol. 15: Essai sur les moeurs, p. 23. 80. Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, ed. Naves, pp. 85, 22. 81. Diderot, Oeuvres philosophiques, ed. Verniere: Supplement au Voyage de Bougainville, p. 505. 82. D'Holbach, Systeme de la nature (London: 1774), vol. 1, p. 11. 83. Crocker, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Prophetic Voice, p. 161. 84. Incidentally, neither the Encyclopedic nor its Supplement has articles "Primitif" (except in grammar and jurisprudence) or "Sauvage." Diderot's peripherally relevant article "HUMAINE ESPECE" will be noted later. Also see Rene Hubert, Les sciences sociales dans I'Encyclopedic . . . (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1923), pp. 172-73. 85. "ANCIENS, ANTIQUITE, (Beaux-Arts)," Supplement a I'Encyclopedic, vol. 1 (1776), pp. 418-19. 86. "SAGE, le," Encyclopedic, vol. 14, p. 494. 87. "DOULEUR . . . en medecine," Encyclopedic, vol. 5, p. 83; "POUVOIR PATERNEL (Droit nat. & civil)" (de Jaucourt), vol. 13, p. 255; "HONNEUR . . . (Morale.)," vol. 8, p. 288; "ANACHIS" (Diderot), vol. 1, p. 395.

3 The Diversity of Human Beings The Role of Experience It is hardly necessary today to assert at length the presence of empiricism in the thought of the French eighteenth century, and more specifically in the pages of Diderot's Encyclopedia. Modern scholarship has accepted as a truism that the Encyclopedic enterprise entertained high hopes for the practical utility of its work in the progress of civilization, as derived from studies of specific practical problems and processes. Further, one must not forget the immense volumes of plates in that great publication, nearly all of them not only implying past and future technological progress but also deriving from close empirical examination of the natural world and of human skills and technologies. More broadly, the Enlightenment defended again and again an approach to the world that combined rational, sometimes quite abstract thought, with empirical observation of earthly phenomena. The voice of Immanuel Kant, proclaiming a radical separation of the world of phenomena from that of eternal ideals—the one perceived in part by the senses, and the other the object of a special insight—sounded only late in the century and was heard not at all in the circle of Voltaire, Diderot, and d'Holbach. Nor could the later dire warnings of Edmund Burke, on the pernicious political effects of rational abstraction as against traditional, time-honored empiricism, be foreseen in the Encyclopedic age. For the mainstream of the French Enlightenment, the cooperation of reason and empiricism in analyzing the natural world, and in guiding the future course of mankind, was a virtually unquestioned assumption. How, indeed, could a contradiction between rationalism and empiricism exist? The universe itself was rational, for deists and materialists alike, and its empirical study could scarcely be expected to disturb the detached reason exercised by human

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beings, that most noble segment of the universe. Neither physical nor life sciences, nor the extremes of mathematical science as against practical technological investigation, could admit that empiricism would ever shatter the conclusions of enlightened, rational thought. Views differed, to be sure, on the degree of emphasis to be placed on such empirical matters as the study of past or primitive peoples, and conclusions differed inevitably, as we shall see,1 on the cultural significance of these findings. The central point, for the moment, is that no French Enlightenment thinker denied at least occasional relevance to empirical investigation of the natural, social, or historical worlds. On this general conclusion one finds no essential divergence of opinion between the Encyclopedia and the Enlightenment that nourished it. As for individual Enlightened authors, emphases predictably varied from one to the other, or even within the works of single authors. The tastes of Condillac, for example, ran toward an underlying rationalism embedded in a philosophy ostensibly empirical.2 Voltaire, who reasoned keenly and joyously if not with fastidious consistency, always insisted on a basically empirical epistemology that stressed sensations as the origin of whatever limited knowledge mankind can achieve concerning human beings, God, and the world.3 D'Alembert, similarly, combined rationalism and psychological sensationalism, again on the assumption that the universe is rationally organized and intelligible.4 His personal interest in experimental investigation, however, was slight.5 Although the contrast can be overdrawn, it is generally acknowledged that Diderot leaned more toward scientific empiricism than did d'Alembert.6 Here the main Diderot exhibits are two—the Refutation of Helvetius and his thoughts On the Interpretation of Nature.1 Their straightforward arguments for the centrality of empirical investigation culminate in a well-known passage predicting "a great revolution in the sciences" toward an experimental age and the relative eclipse of the mathematical sciences; observation, reflection, and experiment must combine as the wave of the future.8 Moreover, Diderot explicitly carried over this scientific methodology to history, political thought, and to the social studies in general.9 In the Encyclopedia the chorus acclaiming experiment and experience is similarly emphatic and, at least in matters secular and scientific, unchallenged. Even from the abbe Pestre (in the article "Baconism, or Philosophy of Bacon") there is praise for experience through the senses, as the starting point in the search for truth—and secular authors such as Cesar Chesneau Dumarsais (1676-1756), Francois Quesnay (1694-1774), and the chevalier de Jaucourt take up the refrain.10 Interestingly, d'Alembert himself hymns the praises of empiricism (defined by him as observation and experiment) when he writes in the pages of the Encyclopedia on scientific method. Later in the

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same article ("Experimental"), he readily extends the dominance of empiricism from science to the diverse studies of ethics, history, and public law.11

Experiential Religion and Ethics Among Enlightened thinkers so strongly attracted to empiricism, could the concept of the uniformity of human nature survive? The only honest answer to the question must be affirmative: the siren call of a single human nature re-echoed, either dimly or loudly, through the whole age of Enlightenment, both as an assumption and as an ideal. We have already noted the manifold bases of this uniformitarian concept. On the other hand, could the implications of empirical observations on the diversity of mankind be perpetually and wholly suppressed? Here a negative answer is unavoidable: the French Enlightenment did indeed repeatedly note the differences in human beings around the globe and across the centuries, as well as in its own civilization. Thus there existed a fundamental dichotomy in Enlightened thought. The main question concerning this dichotomy, of course, is its actual nature—and here there are several possible interpretations. Was the dichotomy only superficial? It may be alleged, after all, that the Enlightenment affirmed the oneness of human nature in its basic mental structure and drives, and that the basic oneness was simply expressed in a multitude of secondary combinations and dominances within this structure and among these drives. If so, how important were these differences? Answers to these questions have varied widely. At this point in my study, I can only do as the Enlightenment itself so often advised, and turn to the facts. Consideration of certain sources of Enlightenment empiricism, however, can best be considered later in these pages, under the heading of broad cultural differentiation.12 These sources include popular and serious travel narratives, and popular and scholarly historical writing. For now, though, let us look simply at several results, not at the sources, of this empiricism: what sorts of differences in human beings and behavior, more or less empirically observed, did the French Enlightenment most commonly cite?13 First of all should come a glance at perceived variations in religion and ethics as related to human nature. The question of religious feeling natural to mankind was, as we have seen, largely directed at a rather restricted question: is there a natural, perhaps innate human disposition to believe in a god or gods? Here the affirmatives carried the day, but by no means unanimously. Several further instances, beyond those mentioned in the previous chapter, may help focus the issue. In his Philosophic Dictionary, even the deist Voltaire felt obliged to admit that

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not all of mankind had believed in God: in the Dictionary article "Atheist, Atheism," Voltaire clearly posited the real existence of atheism, and indeed cited specific cases. In ancient Rome, for example, he saw the ruling classes as genuine atheists, "for the gods did not exist for men who neither feared nor hoped for anything from them. In the time of Caesar and Cicero the Roman Senate was thus truly an assembly of atheists"—a dangerous situation, he added, but certainly a historical fact. Atheism, he continued, is "almost always fatal to virtue"; happily there are fewer atheists today than ever before.14 The Encyclopedia was ambivalent on the reality of atheism. In addition to the several reluctant admissions of the existence of atheism noted earlier, we may cite two further articles—"Russia" and "Virtue . . . ([in] Political Morality)." In the first, the chevalier de Jaucourt included the assertion that "in more than one province [of medieval Russia] any sort of religion was unknown." In the second, Jean-Edme Romilly (1739-1779) granted that the belief in God is not quite universal, although "the number of true atheists is not as large as generally believed." This number includes, he wrote, not only the thoughtless, but such eminent authors as Epicurus, Lucretius, and Spinoza.15 It is noteworthy that, given the Enlightenment's usual tendency to see uniformity in human nature, it made so little use of what might have been a crucial supporting argument—a natural human urge to religion beyond simple belief in deity. There was, to be sure, occasional acknowledgment of a primitive fear of the unknown and the primitive desire to explain the unexplained—but there was very little recognition of a natural, positive human impulse toward the grandly mysterious, or of the urge simply to believe. Neither atheism and materialism, nor deism with its cool rationality, saw merit in such impulses—to the real impoverishment, many would feel today, of Enlightened religious anthropology. For most Enlightenment authors, the alleged machinations of priestcraft preying on human ignorance offered a much more gratifying explanation for the rise of traditional religions. That there were in fact a great many different religions was not, I should stress, a point in dispute, nor a point necessarily relevant to basic human nature. These religions were seen as unsurprising concomitants of many greatly varied world civilizations.16 For the moment we need note only that religious idiosyncrasies, from the European viewpoint, were recognized as numerous and profound, and that a few of them seemed to have little contact indeed with any Enlightenment-idealized basic human nature. For example, several religions (as in pre-Columbian America) demonstrated a ferocious cruelty that the Enlightenment thought uncharacteristic, at best, of mankind.17 In ethics as in religion, an empirical Enlightened examination of world

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history and social differentiation revealed a multitude of divergent practices and ideals. Again, a great deal depended on the individual settings of different cultures. Alternatively, ethical divergencies could be especially evident when observation suggested that the role of reason in human nature was minimal. Rousseau, for one, looked at human beings and saw feeling and passion dominant over reason. "The error of most moralists," he wrote in a fragment On Customs and Morals, "was always to take man as an essentially reasonable being. Man is only a creature of feeling who consults his passions when acting, and for whom reason serves only to mitigate the stupidities that the passions make him commit."18 An empirical study of ethical systems encouraged a mild or occasional ethical relativism especially when the author emphasized the utilitarian or experiential bases of ethical development itself.19 Voltaire, despite his yearnings for a universal ethics based on nature, also harbored utilitarian notions of ethical differentiation.20 "Virtue and vice," as he wrote in the Treatise on Metaphysics of 1734, "moral good and evil, in every country is ... what is useful or harmful to society."21 If this is true, one might expect to find varying ethical principles, at least in part, in varying circumstances. D'Holbach was more emphatic than Voltaire on the experiential basis of ethics, even as he, too, dreamed of a universal morality grounded in human nature.22 Utility, he wrote in his System of Nature, "must be the sole measure of men's judgments." Individuals and social conditions change a great deal, and men have different ideas of happiness. "Self-interest," he concluded, "is the only motive force in human actions"—although this self-interest, he implied, must be channeled according to the social context.23 It is clear that he also wished it to be channeled to follow his own preconceived, often neo-Christian ethical guidelines. With Diderot, ambiguities remained.24 Perhaps the main distinction between his ethical thought and that of d'Holbach is Diderot's minimizing of the role of self-interest in the elaboration of ethical systems: human motivation owes more, he maintained, to such uniquely human traits as natural social sympathies and a sense of justice than to even a tempered sort of self-interest. At the same time, he continued the experiential approach and deepened it, especially in his important Letter on the Blind of 1749. Here he used empirical data as well as speculative insight to demonstrate the critical importance of the several physical senses in producing certain ethical rules—and the significance especially of the subtraction of such a sense as that of sight.25 Diderot also believed firmly that morals can be modified by education and, though with greater difficulty, by legislation—that is, by experience deliberately directed from outside the individual's psyche.26 The social good must take precedence over self-interest or personal moral impulses and preferences.

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But Diderot followed d'Holbach in his confidence that ethics could and must be completely separated from religion. This separation would of course make possible for him the very un-Christian, though still socially directed, sensualism of his Supplement to Bougainville's Voyage. In these senses, then, the writings of Diderot point toward a sort of moral relativism. This was not, certainly, the usual lesson of the Encyclopedia. Yet, for once, it was in the Encyclopedia that Diderot made perhaps his most pointed statement against a uniform, universal morality. In the article "Hobbesism" one finds this forthright sentence: "The manners and morals which are virtuous in the judgment of some, are vicious in the judgment of others."27 Although this is a summarization of the opinion that Diderot assigned to Hobbes, it may well have been—considering his general defense of the earlier writer—a view in which Diderot found no small merit.

Uniformity Challenged At this point it is safe to conclude, at the very least, that the French Enlightenment case for a uniform, universal religious or moral sense was not unchallenged. But going beyond religion and ethics, what of the broader frequent assertion that human nature as a whole has been uniform throughout time and space? Again deferring a study specifically of cultural causes for differentiation, what does a preliminary investigation of the record reveal concerning further Enlightenment uncertainties about a universal, uniform human nature? First, one should note several representative authors' statements outside the covers of the Encyclopedia. Montesquieu's Essay on the Causes That Can Affect Mentalities and Characters is, as the title suggests, more concerned with causes than with effects. These effects concern not only physical structure and health but such contrasting qualities as vivacity versus slowness of mind and passion, or timidity as opposed to bravery. These qualities may seem to us rather superficial, and indeed they constitute only an equivocal case for any basic differentiation within human nature.28 Rousseau's case is stronger: despite common animal characteristics in human nature, like urges toward self-preservation and pleasure, men, he wrote, have an almost infinite capacity for variation.29 A child's nature, moreover, is not the same as a man's, nor man's nature the same as woman's.30 More significantly, Rousseau's Confessions and other autobiographical writings are impassioned pleas for his own individual and idiosyncratic development as a unique human being. In his many decades of voluminous writing, Voltaire is more ambivalent

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about the unity or complexity of human nature.31 Two major impulses—his belief in universal reason and his vision of a universal morality—impelled him throughout his career to find unity in human nature. Against this impulse, however, there often was the evidence (however valid or misguided) of his senses. Voltaire the rationalist and idealist was frequently superseded by Voltaire the keen observer of the multitudinous human scene—or, on occasion, by the slipshod generalizer, as when, in the manner of his time, he extended natural differentiations to racial categories. The nature of blacks, he believed, was not only different from that of whites, but essentially inferior.32 As for "orientals," he wrote: "Everything differs between them and us: religion . . . , customs and morals . . . , and ways of expressing themselves and of thinking. . . ,"33 A crucial passage in Voltaire's Essay on Customs and Morals (Essai sur les moeurs) commences with evident sympathy for the unity of mankind, but soon becomes ambivalent. Everything, he wrote: that is intimately linked to human nature is similar from one end of the world to the other; everything that can depend on custom is different, and only by chance are there resemblances. The empire of custom is much more vast than that of nature: it extends to customs and morals, and to all usages. Custom spreads variety over the universal scene, while nature spreads unity. Nature establishes everywhere a small number of invariable principles, and thus the foundation is always the same, while culture produces diverse fruits. 34 The distinction here between nature and custom cannot be ignored, but must not be exaggerated: it is clear that, for Voltaire, the "vast" realm of custom does in effect overlay basic human nature and thus create a kaleidoscopic variety of human beings. Voltaire saw, with more empirical acuity than many commentators have granted him, that human experiences are truly not the same everywhere, and that to a large extent human beings are created by their various environments and histories. Diderot's understanding of the fact of human variations was at least as healthy as Voltaire's, and probably more profound. Certainly he derived great satisfaction from the observation and analysis of widely different personalities and tastes, which gave spice to general social intercourse as well as to his own philosophic novels.35 But Diderot went beneath personality differences (which, after all, nobody had denied) to further differentiations. On ideas, for example, he wrote that nature determines only their limits, not their varied contents.36 His scientific, mainly physiological, speculations envisaged a materialistic basis for the profound individual variations that he celebrated in D'Alembert's Dream as well as in his extraordinary fictional tales Rameau's Nephew and Jacques the Fatalist.37

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In the 1770s, Diderot would summarize his views on human variations in the Refutation of Helvetius, as he reacted to the other writer's assertion that "innumerable experiments prove that men everywhere are essentially the same." To this, Diderot replied at some length. "If he is speaking of a comparison between one society of civilized and free men with another society of civilized and free men, then this is more or less true. If he means that everywhere man is a man and not a horse, then this is a platitude. If he means that a man in one society, no matter which one, is essentially equal to any other man, then that is an error." Human beings, he concluded, are essentially different in a physiological sense. "Can you easily persuade yourself that in such a machine as man, in which everything is so closely related to the rest, . . . one of its parts . . . can be defective without harming the others?"38 In short, men's bodies are very far from being constructed exactly like each other's. The materialist d'Holbach also espoused the physiological approach to human nature, finding not only many common traits in human beings but also multitudinous differences deriving from observable physical causes.39 His System of Nature develops the point extensively. "There exist," he wrote, "no two individuals of the human species who have the same traits, who feel in precisely the same manner, who think in conformity with each other, who see things with the same eyes, who have the same ideas or consequently the same system of conduct. The visible organs of men as well as their hidden organs do in fact possess analogies or general points of resemblance . . . , but their differences in detail are infinite." Thus arises "this striking diversity which we find among the intellects, faculties, passions, energies, tastes, imaginations, ideas, and opinions of mankind." This diversity among men results in an inequality that is "the foundation of society. If all men were equal in body and mind, they would have no need of each other." These differences in human beings are the fruit of both heredity and environment— the latter including food, air, education, and legislation.40 Appreciation for the diversity of human beings can also be found in the pages of the Encyclopedia. Here again the attractions of the idea of a universal human nature are countered by a realization of an actually complex diversity. The contexts of such references range from the narrow to the broad. The article "Comic" by Jean-Franc.ois Marmontel (1723-1799) points out the cultural relativism of the comic sense: "What is comic for one people, society, or individual cannot be so for another."41 Formey's article "Disputation" goes farther when it refers to "the unequal measure of enlightenment ("lumieres") that God has distributed to men; the astonishing variety of their characters, temperaments, prejudices, and passions; and the different ways in which they see the things around them."42 In his numerous contributions,

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de Jaucourt ran the same gamut, from the variety of distinctive characters among men to the host of different specific prejudices that they harbor, and that vary in individuals from physiological causes.43 He went, however, well beyond the common dichotomy between universal nature and differing customs, by finding that nature itself differs in different persons: nature, he clearly implied, has not "made all minds with the same stamp."44 More explicitly, he specified that our differing natures seem to be "born in us"; education can cultivate the good within our natures but cannot instill it in us.45 Within the compass of the Encyclopedia, Diderot made very similar points—without, of course, permitting his materialism to surface as boldly as in his unpublished works. "There are not two men on earth," he asserted, "who resemble one another either in [physiological] organization, in enlightenment, or in experience."46 In reference to the indulgence we should show toward the faults and vices of others, he listed the influences that make us different—physiology, education, national manners and morals, climate, and the other circumstances of our lives.47 Like de Jaucourt, Diderot, too, was capable, though, of seeing the variations of mankind not as simply the product of outside forces, but as "the natural [qualities] of the different peoples."48 Again, therefore, the Encyclopedia has avoided explicitly idiosyncratic and dangerous doctrine—materialism, in this case. It has, however, at least briefly pushed a bit farther than the Enlightenment as a whole toward new conclusions—this time concerning truly "natural" differences among human beings. Beyond these rough generalizations concerning Enlightenment views of human nature I can hardly go at present in this investigation. Several critical bases for these views have so far only been alluded to—above all the wideranging historical and sociological studies of the age. Subsequent chapters of this study must remedy these omissions, before further conclusions can be hazarded on the conceptions of human nature, as well as of cultural differentiation, that are revealed in the Encyclopedia and in the whole French Enlightenment. NOTES 1. See Chapters 5, 6, and 7. 2. Isabel F. Knight, The Geometric Spirit: The Abbe de Condillac and the French Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), pp. 16, 19, 26, and passim. 3. Oeuvres de Voltaire, ed. Beuchot, vol. 37 (1829): Traite de metaphysique, pp. 299-304; vol. 42 (1831), Le philosophe ignorant, pp. 542-61. 4. Grimsley, Jean d'Alembert, pp. 223-29. 5. Thomas L. Hankins, Jean d'Alembert: Science and the Enlightenment (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1970), pp. 3-5.

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6. Ibid., pp. 89-103; Elizabeth B. Potulicki, La modernite de la pensee de Diderot dans les oeuvres philosophiques (Paris: A. G. Nizet, 1980), passim; John Pappas, "L'esprit de finesse centre 1'esprit de geometric: un debat entre Diderot et Alembert," in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 89 (1972), pp. 1229-53. 7. Diderot, Oeuvres philosophiques, ed. Verniere, Refutation suivie de I'ouvrage d'Helvetius intitule I'Homme, pp. 563-620, and De I'interpretation de la nature, pp. 175-245. 8. Ibid., De I'interpretation de la nature, pp. 180, 189. 9. Crocker, Diderot, the Embattled Philosopher, pp. 379-85; Arthur M. Wilson, Diderot (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 438-39, 558, 634. 10. "BACONISME, ou PHILOSOPHIE DE BACON," Encyclopedic, vol. 2, p. 9; "EXPERIENCE . . . terme abstrait," vol. 6, p. 297; "SENS EXTERNES," "SENS INTERNES," vol. 15, p. 31; "EVIDENCE," vol. 6, p. 146. 11. "EXPERIMENTAL," Encyclopedic, vol. 6, p. 301. 12. See Chapter 4, etc. 13. See especially Ehrard, L'idee de nature en France, vol. 1, pp. 251-52 and vols. 1 and 2; passim. 14. Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, ed. Naves, pp. 41, 43. 15. "RUSSIE," Encyclopedic, vol. 14, p. 444; "VERTU, ( . . . Mor[ale] Polit[ique])," Encyclopedic, vol. 17 (1765), p. 179. 16. On characteristics of various religions covered in the Encyclopedic, see "RELIGION . . . (Theolog.)," vol. 14, pp. 78-79; "RELIGION NATURELLE," vol. 14, pp. 79-83; and miscellaneous articles on specific religions. 17. "TOPILZIN" (probably by d'Holbach), Encyclopedic, vol. 16, p. 417; "TOXCOATL," vol. 16, p. 501. 18. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres, ed. Bernard Gagnebin, Marcel Raymond, et al., vol. 3: Fragments politiques; Des moeurs (Paris: Gallimard/Pleiade, 1964), p. 554. 19. For a comprehensive study, see Crocker, Nature and Culture, pp. 91-165, 219-325, and passim. 20. Ibid., pp. 122-23. 21. Oeuvres de Voltaire, ed. Beuchot, vol. 37 (1829): Traite de metaphysique, p. 336. 22. Crocker, Nature and Culture, pp. 123-28; Topazio, D'Holbach's Moral Philosophy. 23. D'Holbach, Systeme de la nature, vol. 1, pp. 337-41. 24. Crocker, Nature and Culture, pp. 128-34; Arthur M. Wilson, "The Concept of Moeurs in Diderot's Social and Political Thought," in The Age of the Enlightenment: Studies Presented to Theodore Besterman, ed. W. H. Barber, et al. (Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1967), pp. 188-89. 25. Crocker, Nature and Culture, pp. 130-32, 128. 26. Wilson, "The Concept of Moeurs," pp. 192-95. 27. "HOBBISME," Encyclopedic, vol. 8, p. 236.

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28. Oeuvres completes de Montesquieu, ed. Roger Caillois, vol. 2: Essai sur les causes qui peuvent affecter les esprits et les caracteres (Paris: Gallimard/Pleiade, 1951), pp. 39-68. 29. Crocker, An Age of Crisis, pp. 191-92. 30. Rousseau, Oeuvres completes, ed. Gagnebin and Raymond, vol. 4: Emile, ou de ['education (1969), pp. 239-868. 31. For a handy summary, with citations, see Crocker, An Age of Crisis, pp. 183-85. Crocker stresses Voltaire's support for the uniformity of mankind. 32. Oeuvres de Voltaire, ed. Beuchot, vol. 17: Essai sur les moeurs, p. 394. 33. Ibid., vol. 18: Essai sur les moeurs, p. 483. 34. Ibid., p. 487. 35. Herbert Dieckmann, Inventaire du fonds Vandeul, et inedits de Diderot (Geneva: Droz, 1951), "Les pretensions, gouts, etc.," p. 203. 36. Crocker, Diderot, The Embattled Philosopher, p. 99. 37. For a useful summary, with citations, see Anthony Strugnell, Diderot's Politics . . . (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), pp. 18-19, 42-56. 38. Diderot, Oeuvres philosophiques, ed. Verniere; Refutation suivie de iouvrage d'Helvetius intitule I'Homme, pp. 611-12. 39. Callot, La philosophie de la vie au xviiie siecle, pp. 346-54; Naville, D'Holbach et la philosophic scientifique, pp. 279-80. 40. D'Holbach, Systeme de la nature (London: 1774), vol. 1, pp. 129-68, 314-36, especially pp. 130-33, 150-60. 41. "COMIQUE," Encyclopedie, vol. 3 (1753), p. 681. 42. "DISPUTE," Encyclopedie, vol. 4, p. 1044. 43. "PORTRAIT, (Peinture)," Encyclopedie, vol. 13, p. 153; "PREJUGE . . . (Logique)," vol. 13, pp. 284-85. 44. "PREJUGE (Logique)," Encyclopedie, vol. 13, p. 285. 45. "NATUREL, LE . . . (Morale)," Encyclopedie, vol. 11, p. 45. 46. "FAIT," Encyclopedie, vol. 6, p. 384. 47. Addendum to de Jaucourt's article "VICE," Encyclopedie, vol. 17, p. 235. 48. "HUMAINE ESPECE," Encyclopedie, vol. 8, p. 344.

4 Physical and Moral Influences on National Character Voyages and Travel The Enlightenment, in both France and the rest of Europe, offered an enthusiastic readership for travel literature—that is, for tales and descriptions of foreign, often exotic lands, usually written by those who had themselves visited these regions. It is not the purpose of this study to cultivate again this well-tilled ground.1 It is important, however, to summarize a few conclusions pertinent to the questions of human nature and cultural differentiation. The genre of travel-and-voyage narrative in the western world dates at least from Herodotus. Exotic narratives were not unknown during the Middle Ages, and hundreds of travel accounts were printed during the Renaissance. A burst of travel-and-voyage publication followed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It has been argued that such celebrated political theorists as Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau may well have formed their doctrines not just from preconceptions and wishful thinking, but also from their readings on non-European peoples, rather selectively chosen.2 Even that majority of generalist writers who avoided grand theoretical conclusions could hardly avoid reference to "the diversity of the world," as one Maximilien Misson put it in his New Voyage to Italy of 1688. "As one changes country," he wrote, "one has occasion to notice in all things the diversity that reigns in the world. . . . Custom and prejudice are the tyrants that govern the world . . ."3 Much description and narrative of bizarre foreign behavior was a staple of this literature, whether or not it touched on basic human nature. Words of caution, however, are necessary before reaching any conclusion concerning the universal importance of such travel narratives to the thought of the age. Clearly, many observers found in exotic lands only what they were looking for—and many philosophes saw little point in travel whatsoever.4 Still, though hardly the sole motive for travel and for travel narratives, em-

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pirical and speculative intellectual curiosity did often play a large part in the composition and reading of such narratives. At least occasional reflection, even serious reflection, was inevitable concerning the wide differences found among human beings throughout the globe. A new eighteenth-century era of exploration and discovery increased the store of knowledge about strange peoples and sometimes led to admissions that "natural man" was not everywhere what the philosophes generally led one to expect.5 The literature of travel and exploration was often an example of honest empirical observation in action, and always an immensely popular genre in the French eighteenth century.6 A few instances will be helpful. The important literary review the Literary Year (Annee litteraire), edited by the conservative Elie-Catherine Freron, rather frequently drew the attention of its readers to narratives of travel and exploration, as well as to histories of exotic lands.7 East Asia, the Caribbean, and South America were favorite subjects. A 1764 review of Thibault de Chanvalon's Voyage to Martinique notes that the author "observed with care the temperature of the air, the nature of the soil, the diversity of the inhabitants, their manners, morals, and customs. . . . " Of the native islanders of the West Indies, the review continues, "their reason is not extensive, they reflect little, and, although they feel all the passions, their laziness and indolence inspire more gentleness and taste for tranquility than with the savages of North America." The black slaves of the Caribbean "have scarcely more logic and solidity of thought than the natives, but they are much more active and hard-working.' '8 Frequently attention is drawn in the Literary Year to the varying customs, ethics, religions, governments, and social organizations of the world's peoples. Or let us glance at the writing of a specific French official abroad, Pierre Poivre. This traveler and governmental administrator, cited by a modern author as an example of those who saw overseas only what they expected to see,9 nevertheless reported a very considerable variety of customs among exotics, especially in Southeast Asia. He criticized, with examples, the superficiality of most travel tales concerning that region—hoping to create the assumption that he, Poivre, would now offer a true picture. His generalizations did, however, tend toward the preconceived and the trite: for example, he found some good and much evil in human beings everywhere. Exotic manners and morals were as bad as the European, and throughout the world luxury corrupted peoples. The "good savage," as far as he was concerned, was a myth: he found only different degrees of cruelty and barbarity among different nations.10 In his Encyclopedia article "Voyager," the chevalier de Jaucourt similarly warned of the prevalence of misleading travel narratives, inaccurate because

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they included so much information taken from previous accounts that was not personally verified.11 In the article "Voyage," de Jaucourt agreed with the ancient authors who found travel to be "the best school of life"—a "school where one learns the diversity of so many other lives. . . ." Travels in Europe today, outside France, are important in educating youth and giving experience to their elders. Travel "cures national prejudices"; it should serve to "examine the manners and morals, the customs, the genius of other nations, with their dominant tastes. . . ,"12 Clearly, for the French Enlightenment, travel often showed some significant degree of actual variation among the peoples of the world. Before turning to individual parts of the globe for specific examples, one must try to discover what, precisely, the Enlightenment considered to be the causes of all these variations. Most Enlightened authors turned, at one time or another, to those tantalizing theories of "climate" which will be explored in the next section of this study.

Climate The eighteenth-century obsession with climate theories of cultural differentiation has abated in subsequent centuries, but has by no means been wholly replaced by newer scientific concepts of sociological relevance. Studies of the relationship between climate and history, including social variation, still are conducted, and are described in sociological and historical literature.13 At the same time, one must recognize that Enlightenment theories of climate had their own long ancestry: they were certainly not an invention of the eighteenth century, either in France or elsewhere in Europe.14 Two predecessors in France itself may be briefly noted. In the sixteenth century Jean Bodin theorized on the effects of broad climatic differences on the peoples of the world: southern peoples, he wrote, are contemplative, northerners hard-working and warlike, and those in temperate climates creative in law and art. These qualities he related very broadly to physiological variations. Northerners, Bodin asserted, possess a "vehement internal heat" which strengthens their appetite and courage—and he cited historical examples that he believed proved the assertion.15 Later, in the seventeenth century, the libertine Saint-Evremond developed a rather vague though basically empirical and relativistic doctrine maintaining that human qualities and institutions vary according to climate. In eighteenth-century France such theories were much elaborated, if not with rigorous, scientifically satisfactory demonstration.16 Most typically, a generalized or fairly specific climate theory, such as Marmontel's,17 would be

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supplemented by a consideration of "moral" causes of human and social differentiation. These supplements, or even challenges, to the climate theory will be considered in the following chapter. For the moment, let us examine, with as few diversions as possible, the climate theory itself. In the first half of the eighteenth century, a major impetus for French speculation on climatic influences came from esthetic theory,18 largely as a concomitant of the partial disintegration of classical esthetics. Was it in fact true, these writers asked, that immutable rules in art and beauty existed and were forever enshrined, at their best and clearest, in the artistic and literary creations of classical antiquity? Was it not true, rather, that different peoples and periods expressed themselves differently since they varied in basic character? And could not these character differences have been caused, at least in part, by different and changing climates? The esthetic conclusions of this fundamentally relativistic school are only peripheral to the present study, but the climate theory of its leading representative, the abbe Jean-Baptiste Dubos (1670-1742), deserves summarization at this point. His Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting (1719)19 were widely read and much reprinted for decades, and were well known to such later theorists of climate as Montesquieu. The abbe admitted that "moral"—that is, primarily institutional—causes do affect artistic and literary expression. But the encouragement offered by kings, courts, and peoples, not to mention the inspiration and instruction of other creative minds, cannot alone explain the varying creativity of different ages and nations. The concurrent or indeed dominating influence of physical causes—by which he meant, above all, climate—could be demonstrated, he believed, in several ways. The visual and literary arts advanced and declined, he demonstrated, in ways which could not be explained by "moral" causes: institutional encouragement of English painting in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, or of French poetry in the fifteenth and sixteenth, had been wholly ineffective in producing distinguished results. The suddenness of artistic efflorescence and decadence, as well as the usual parallel flowering of all arts simultaneously, could not be accounted for, he believed, by institutional vagaries alone. Dubos referred to specific historical instances throughout these discussions. He also theorized concerning physical causes behind the otherwise inexplicable changes in successful artistic creativity, devoting many pages to the influence of the air upon bodies, and the importance of changing emanations from the earth into the air.20 Although later ages would find Dubos' speculations primitive, his efforts did embody at least a rough empiricism. Explaining the widely differing artistic expressions of mankind was only one occasion for the rise of climate theory in the earlier French eighteenth

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century. Other approaches focused more directly on what would become known as the psychological and social sciences—the study of human beings as individuals and in society. Here the influence of travel literature was especially strong; it was a rare travel narrative that did not include at least elementary and passing speculation on the presumed influence of the air (temperature, humidity, wind, and so on) upon national or group character. Occasionally, moreover, whole books would be devoted to national character, with a corresponding increase in climatic explanations. The abbe d'Espiard produced two such works—Essays on the Genius and Character of Nations (1743) and The Spirit of Nations (1753); his theories would become more widely known through the work of Jean-Louis Castilhon (ca. 1720-ca. 1793), Considerations on the Physical and Moral Causes of Diversity in the Genius, the Customs and Morals, and the Government of Nations (1769).21 Espiard maintained that climate was the "most universal, the most powerful" of causes for differing national characters.22 The greatest climatic areas were defined in terms of latitude north of the Equator—northern, southern, and median—with variations arising from such conditions as altitude, wind, and soil. Like Dubos he wrote of changes in the course of time; unlike him, Espiard saw the arts and sciences flourishing or declining, not in monolithic unity, but unevenly, through a process of mutual compensation, as climate bore first on one then on another type of creative expression. Most early eighteenth-century writers in the esthetic and social scientific schools admitted that there were complications and uncertainties in their broad generalizations on climate. Within a third school, that of the natural and experimental sciences, an attempt was made toward greater precision; here the effects of air, exemplified in temperature, humidity, density, and the like, were studied seriously if rather crudely by empirical investigators in England, France, and Italy.23 Of these, at least the Englishman John Arbuthnot24 may have directly influenced the theories of Montesquieu. Montesquieu's reflections on climate are among his best known theories;25 they range from broad generalizations to empirical detail, whether derived from personal observation26 or from the available medical, physiological literature. Montesquieu's thoughts on climate evolved from an early interest in historical changes in the air of ancient Rome, to speculations on changes in human "fibers" under different climatic conditions, and on to a broad view of interrelationships among climatic and "moral" influences upon human character and behavior. In his Essay on the Causes That Can Affect Minds and Characters and later in The Spirit of Laws, he discussed various aspects of influences from the temperature and movement of air (and from the soil also), and asserted that an important key to the varying development of human

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nature was in the coarseness or delicacy—that is, the sensitivity—of human fibers. Despite Montesquieu's pretensions to empirical accuracy and to conceptual caution, he also noted that once he had discovered his general "principles," everything that he was seeking "came to" him27—an approach, one might think, that was more intuitive than empirical. The insights that Montesquieu revealed were often, indeed, of a rather breathtaking brashness, though by no means wholly unprecedented in his age or earlier. For example, the people of the north, their fibers stimulated by cold, are forceful and courageous; "the peoples of warm countries are as timid as old men," but are quicker-wilted and more imaginative than those of cold regions. Institutional laws must vary according to different climates, not to supplement the natural human characteristics of different climate zones, but to counter and to compensate for them. Obviously, for Montesquieu, climate was not everything.28 For Voltaire (to move on into the second half of the century) climate was even less crucial. In the article "Climate" of his Questions on the Encyclopedia (1771), his tone was distinctly anti-Montesquieu, even to the extent of stating flatly that over human minds and bodies "climate has some power, government a hundred times more, and religion joined to government still more."29 Still this assertion granted some minimal importance to climate—as other remarks by Voltaire also attest. Climate, he wrote near the outset of his Essay on Customs and Morals, does affect certain physical and racial differences among human beings.30 Again in Questions on the Encyclopedia he noted that "climate and soil evidently impress upon men, as they do upon animals and plants, some marks that change not at all."31 Occasional references by Voltaire to climatic influences on specific peoples strengthen this position—as in the case of the East Indians, whose soft disposition he attributed to the warm climate of their homeland.32 Similar references, at least in passing, are not uncommon among Voltaire's contemporaries. The naturalist Buffon indeed insisted that climatic differences had caused variations in racial characteristics such as skin color; in fact, he wrote, "one can . . . regard climate as the first and almost unique cause of man's color." He added, however, that food resources had much more to do with the various bodily forms of the several races.33 This proviso, too, was common in the French Enlightenment: geographical location was recognized not only as governing climate but also, for example, as including different types of soil, thus affecting human nourishment and growth. D'Holbach, among others, subscribed to an even more generalized environmental determinism. Here we may note a passage from his System of Nature that I have paraphrased summarily in an earlier chapter: "The nourishment we take, the

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quality of the air we breathe, the climate we live in, the education we receive, the ideas and opinions we are given all modify . . . [our] temperament."34 Despite this frequent inclination of mid-eighteenth-century French authors to view climate as only one part, and often not a primary part, of a complex of circumstances affecting human nature and behavior, the concept of climatic influence would never be wholly forgotten. Such French writers of the 1770s and 1780s as Raynal and Pastoret would revive it; the German art historian Winckelmann would use it to help explain the physical beauty of his beloved Greeks; the mid-nineteenth-century English historian Buckle would cite climate, together with food and soil, as a vital source of variety in popular character and national differences;35 and, as we have already noted, climate still remains a scientific concern of the twentieth century. As for the eighteenth century, climatic theory was also given attention in the Encyclopedia. The "Climate (Geography)" article was by d'Alembert, but its central argument came quite unabashedly and proudly from Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws, that "excellent work" that had examined "the influence of climate on customs and morals, the character, and the laws of peoples." Part of d'Alembert's summation of Montesquieu's theory deserves direct quotation: After physical details on the effects of cold and warmth, he begins by explaining the contradiction that is found in the character of certain peoples. Warmth, he says, results on the one hand in a weak body, and on the other in a lively imagination: that is why [Asian] Indians have, in some respects, so much courage and, in others, so much weakness. Weakness of the body naturally makes one lazy; from this fact comes the attraction of these people to their traditional customs. Since this weakness leads to the neglect even of necessary labor, wise legislators must counter this by laws encouraging work instead of indolence.

D'Alembert continues his summation by offering further examples of the frequent need of legislation to compensate for vices derived from climatic pressures. The article ends with a defense of Montesquieu's belief that climate, though important, is only one of an ' 'almost infinite multitude of causes that influence laws and the character of peoples."36 An additional article, by Gabriel-Francois Venel (1723-1775), on the medical effects of climate,37 focuses on the ' 'incontestable influence of climate on the physical side of the passions, tastes, and customs and morals" of human beings, but admits that his generalized conclusions may have their exceptions. Although Venel never maintains, in so many words, that changes in basic human nature are effected by climate, in fact the variations of' 'temperament'' that he cites come close, at the very least, to constituting such changes.38 The

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most relevant article in the later Supplement—Marmontel's, on "Customs and Morals (Literature)"39—also emphasizes the influence of climate on human temperament. "Climate is decisive above all," wrote Marmontel, "on the degree of energy, of activity, of sensitivity, and of warmth in human character. '' His specifics do not precisely follow those of Montesquieu and d' Alembert, and they add reflections on the effects of maturing and aging, as well as of institutional influences.40 In the original volumes of the Encyclopedia the principal additions to climate theory are found in specific contexts, rather than in such generalizations as are found in the two "Climate" articles. Some articles, like that on "Language (Grammar)," concern climate as affecting anatomical structure, or moral causes of variation, rather than climatic influences on temperament.41 De Jaucourt's article on "Drunkenness" is more relevant: here he repeats a commonplace of the age, to the effect that drunkenness as a national trait is associated with cold climates.42 More important are the attempts to link climate, rather vaguely, with the religious impulse, as Diderot did with the ancient Egyptians.43 On early Christianity he struck a theme familiar outside the Encyclopedia—the occasional need for law, in this case religious law, to counter the natural effects of climate upon the temperament of peoples.44 Thus, when the Encyclopedia noted the role of climate in molding peoples, it was echoing a common theme, indeed a truism, of the French Enlightenment. Even the specifics, such as they were, varied little from one intellectual arena to the other. Moreover, despite the pervasive disinclination explicitly to attack the concept of a fundamental "human nature," it seems clear that it was often recognized, inside and outside the Encyclopedia, that not only individual human temperaments, customs, and morals, but group psyches did differ markedly from each other, and that sometimes these differences were caused by varying climates. Other factors that were thought to contribute to these differences will be the subject of the following section.

Institutions and Individuals Climate was seldom, if ever, held by the French Enlightenment to be the sole cause of individual or cultural variation. Nor could "physical" factors in general be held responsible—that is, all those forces arising from the natural, not specifically human, environment. These included not only climate but soil, to which several allusions have already been made. Further, even a consideration of means of subsistence45—commonly a combination of physical and institutional factors—would not suffice to explain the differences

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among individuals and societies. More and more it was suspected that a great complex of physical and human causes was at work—these human causes encompassing almost the whole of the cultural environment.46 What, in the view of the French eighteenth century, did this cultural environment include, beyond climate, soil, and perhaps means of subsistence? The most obvious candidates for inclusion were government and legislation, education, social structure, and religion47—that is, human institutions—all in addition to the influence of individual human beings. It was this combination of institutional and individual pressures that the eighteenth century designated as "moral" influences upon mankind.48 These moral influences, it should be noted, were stressed as much, in one restricted sense, by French writers opposing the Enlightenment as by the philosophes, in another sense. Indeed the antiphilosophes tended to stress what they considered to be proper, as against actual, moral influences even more heavily than did their opponents. The reasons seem clear: physical causes smacked too much of materialism, and moral causes included the religious forces of which the antiphilosophes approved. Let us look briefly at the positions of the two most prominent French publicists of the antiphilosophe movement, Father Berthier and Freron. Guillaume-Francois Berthier, the longtime editor of the influential Jesuit publication the Journal ofTrevoux, was a major opponent of climatic, relativistic theory. He insisted that ethical principles do not and cannot depend on latitude, nor can religions be viewed as popular customs dependent on climate.49 A principal focus of Berthier's distress in the later 1750s, not surprisingly, was still Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws.50 Although he maintained a fairly respectful attitude toward the deceased sage, Berthier's criticisms were none the less firm. Montesquieu, he wrote, had ignored the religious and ethical absolutism of true religious principle and had floundered in cultural relativism. He had reveled in speculation about the physical factors of climate and soil, following human and not divine reason, and had scorned universal truth and justice.51 Among moral causes of cultural differentiation, Montesquieu had emphasized the arbitrary customs of various peoples and nations and had thrust aside the eternal edicts of God. We are led to conclude that Berthier not only rejected the physical and moral causes of cultural differentiation then in vogue, but virtually denied the reality of that differentiation itself, at least in religion and government. In Freron's Literary Year, the criticism of Montesquieu and of physical and moral influences on individuals and society was more muted. The first volume of the Literary Year even joined forces with the philosophe Helvetius in criticizing Montesquieu's purportedly excessive emphasis upon climate. An anonymous contributor, quite possibly Freron himself, decried the general

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tendency toward extremes on the part of all disputants on physical and moral causes, before implying a fairly categorical position himself: "Would it not be simpler and more just to say that moral causes have always subjugated physical causes, though without ever destroying them?"52 Among the more liberal authors of the day there was Montesquieu himself, together with his predecessor Dubos. We have already noted that the climate theories of both were supplemented by discussion of nonphysical, or "moral," factors. Dubos, in evaluating the arts of various ages, had undeniably put his emphasis on climate, while referring rather casually to such moral influences as the example of other artists, and the state of patronage and public appreciation of the arts.53 Montesquieu's openness to moral causes was much more marked: to state that Montesquieu relegated everything beyond climate to a subordinate role is clearly incorrect.54 Three sentences in those musings by Montesquieu that were published long after his death convey his relative emphases more fairly. "Men are governed," he wrote, "by five different things—climate, manners (manieres), customs and morals (moeurs), religion, and laws. According to the way in which one of these acts more strongly in each nation, the others give way proportionately. Climate, almost alone, dominates among savages; manners govern the Chinese; laws tyrannize Japan; morals once gave the tone to Rome and to Sparta; and today religion does everything in the south of Europe."55 The second part of his Essay on the Causes That Can Affect Minds and Characters, devoted to moral causes, gives special attention to education but recognizes the great "complexity of causes that form the general character of a nation and decide the quality of its mind more than physical causes do."56 Several further pages elaborate the point, both with generalizations and with specific instances.57 In fact, very much the same list of writers cited in the preceding chapter as granting some role to climate in the molding of individual and group character can also be cited as giving at least as much importance to moral causes of variations. Buff on wrote of moral forces as well as of climate and human nourishment.58 Grimm, though not denying the role of climate, pointed out the immense complexity of physical and other concurrent influences, far beyond human comprehension or analysis.59 The Marquis de Mirabeau found climate to be less important than government in forming a people's character.60 As for Voltaire, we have already quoted his claim that government has a hundred times the influence of climate upon mankind;61 a mathematically different, more cautious statement can be found in his Essay on Customs and Morals: "Three things ceaselessly influence the minds of men—climate, government, and religion."62 Finally, the principal moral influences advanced by d'Holbach were education and legislation.63

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Three other authors, all of whom placed moral causes distinctly above climate, deserve somewhat closer attention—Condillac, Helvetius, and Diderot.64 In 1746, in his Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, Condillac found that the influence of climate in primitive times had later been superseded by a complex of other forces focusing on government. Two things combine to form the character of peoples—climate and government. The climate gives a people more vivacity or more sluggishness of temperament, and in that way it disposes them to one form of government or another. These dispositions, however, are altered by a thousand circumstances. The agricultural sterility or abundance of a country; its geographical situation; the interests of its inhabitants as compared to those of its neighbors; the unsettled spirits that trouble it as long as the government is not established on solid foundations; those rare men whose imagination conquers that of their fellow citizens—all these and various other causes contribute to alter and even sometimes to change altogether the original tastes that a nation once owed to its climate. The character of a people therefore undergoes virtually the same variations as its government does, and it does not take permanent shape until the government has taken a fixed form.65

Helvetius's celebrated work On Mind (De I'esprit, 1758) proposed a familiar mix of education and legislation to account for variations among individuals and peoples. His practical goal was to control human development— and in his view education and legislation were perfectly controllable, quite unlike the physical setting of climate and geography. The rhythm of national development and decline, moreover, followed the rise and fall of governments as they moved from democracy and monarchy—the most vital, advancing forms—to despotism in the decadent Orient; this trend bore no relation whatsoever to climate.66 On Mind thus sought to demonstrate that it is the changing interests of peoples that make for changing tastes, temperaments, and customs, and that these are expressed in forms of government that in turn mold national qualities of character. Physical factors, such as climate and geography, cannot account for national character: modern Greeks, for example, are quite different from ancient Greeks. Certainly the temperature explanation fancied by climate theorists cannot be the deciding factor, or the nation with the best climate would have acquired, "by cumulative progress, a great superiority over all the others"—and clearly this has not happened. No, Helvetius concluded, "it is moral causes that explain for us all the different phenomena of mind."67 At times, especially when he had in mind a particular program of governmental reform, Diderot could sound very much like Helvetius. Writing to the Empress Catherine of Russia he declared that "everywhere customs and

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morals are consequences of legislation and government. . . . People are slaves at the Pole where it is very cold; people are slaves in Constantinople where it is very warm." A bit later he admitted, however, that climate does have some influence on arts, customs, and morals.68 Diderot's most typical and well-known summations of his moderate position on climatic and moral causes of human differences are found in his 1773 Refutation of Helvetius: Instead of affirming that education, and education alone, makes men what they are . . . , say rather that laws, customs and morals, and government are the principal causes of the diversity of nations. . . . He [Helvetius] says: Climate has no influence on minds. Say rather: We assign it too much influence. He says: It is legislation and government which alone make a people stupid or enlightened. Say rather: I grant this, for the mass of people—but there was a Saadi, and there were great doctors, under the caliphs.69

To these many examples taken from some of the most prominent writers of the French mid-eighteenth century, not a great deal need be added from the pages of the Encyclopedia. In the previous chapter I have already noted that d'Alembert's article on "Climate," Marmontel's Supplement article on "Customs and morals," and the anonymous article on "Language" all granted that climatic conditions were only a partial cause of human variations, and that institutions also had a powerful impact upon peoples. In general this would be the position taken by the Encyclopedia—that physical and institutional (or "moral") factors cooperated in a complex process to make human beings what they are.70 Diderot, for example, insisted in the article "Human species" that even external racial characteristics have multiple causes— "nourishment, customs and morals, usages, and climates."71 Three other articles may be noted briefly. "Legislator," probably by St. Lambert, predictably emphasizes the role of legislation as against that of climate, although the latter must not, the author warned, be entirely ignored, since it imparts various degrees of vivacity and sensitivity to peoples. Legislators, he added, must also give due attention to religion and education, both as products and as creators of national character.72 The article "Man . . . (Ethics)," by LeRoi, cites the domestic influence of the family upon character, but finds this to be much less powerful than the customs and morals of the age.73 Finally there is the anonymous article "Customs and morals . . . , (Ethics)," which sums up the comprehensive, generalizing approach not only of the Encyclopedia but of the age. The variety of customs and morals "among the diverse peoples of the world," wrote the author, "depends on

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climate, religion, laws, government, human needs, education, manners, and examples. To the degree that in each nation one of these causes acts more powerfully, the others weaken to the same degree." His one illustrative example concerns the influence of different forms of government in temperate zones upon customs and morals: one notes the deliberate exclusion of the climate factor.74 Thus discussion of physical and moral influences upon individual and group characteristics was a commonplace during the French Enlightenment— and moral factors nearly always received the greater emphasis. On this point the Encyclopedia faithfully reflected its age. What is most truly significant is that the discussion took place at all. Despite the antiphilosophe attempt to uphold the absolutist line, the liberal thought of the age continued to insist that human beings, as individuals and as groups, do differ in major ways from one another, and that these differences are explicable on naturalistic, not supernatural, grounds. The physical and moral causes they wrote of, no matter in what exact proportion, were clearly forces of this world here below. Yet there remained no small degree of vagueness on the essential nature of these individual and group differences. Should one see these differences as largely trivial and at best superficial, or as important variations, or even as an attack upon the uniformity of human nature itself? For individual human beings, the first three chapters of this study have attempted to find at least tentative answers—beyond, that is, noting those individual character variations that, as I have already emphasized, nobody really denied. But group differentiation, or what might be fairly called "cultural" differentiation, was another matter, and a more controversial one. It was this cultural variation that could seem genuinely significant, even if not necessarily denying a basic sameness in human nature. This chapter has made passing references to one possible consequence of physical and moral influences—the establishment of national character. The next section must focus more directly on this muchdebated consequence, and thereby perhaps further illuminate the Enlightenment view of the potentialities of human nature itself, as well as reveal one aspect of its view of broad cultural group-differentiation.

National Character The subject of national character must have been a familiar one to the informed reader of eighteenth-century France. To be sure, the fateful concepts of Johann Gottfried Herder—the nation as cultural organism, and the irrepressible welling up of the instincts of the Volk—were as yet unknown, as was the worship of the integrated nation, stimulated especially by the struggles of

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the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods. None the less, rather surprisingly, the phrase "national character" already tripped lightly off the tongue by the mid-eighteenth century. For a representative sampling of French writers, what was meant by this term? I have already referred to the influential theories of Montesquieu on physical and moral causes of cultural diversity, up through the magisterial Spirit of Laws. In his 1750 Defense of the Spirit of Laws, Montesquieu returned to physical causes in reference to "national characteristics of mind" and heart. All effects whatsoever have causes: climate and other physical causes produce an infinite number of effects. . . . The whole question reduces itself to knowing whether, in far-apart countries, in different climates, there are national characteristics of mind. Now, such differences are established by the nearly universal opinion of books written on the subject. And, since the character of mind has great influence over the disposition of the heart, one can no longer doubt that there are certain qualities of the heart more frequently met in one country than in another. . . . 75

Even in the previous decade, in the Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, Condillac had come to similar conclusions, this time based on linguistic evolution. He summed up his views as follows: "By this history of the progress of language, everybody can see that languages, well understood, would portray the character and genius of each people. They would see how imagination has combined ideas according to prejudices and passions; they would see forming in each nation a different mind, in proportion to the less interaction there is between nations." In the long run each people has its own character.76 Two decades later (1767) Grimm's Literary Correspondance would be somewhat more specific. Though recognizing the difficulties of fairly characterizing the observed traits of peoples, the author thought the study nevertheless feasible. "The general character of a nation is necessarily out in the open: it leaves its mark on monuments continually visible to us; we can study it in the nature of its language, government, customs, usages, manners, arts, and climate." To describe this national character requires something between the intimate but jaded knowledge of the native and the startled glance of the foreign visitor. Clearly one must have a thorough knowledge of a nation's "language, religion, political organization, customs, morals, and usages" in order to capture "the tone of the country."77 It is true, wrote the same author, probably Grimm himself, that the modern age of knowledge and communications has made the European nations more and more alike. It is also true, he asserted, that we can know the nations of the modern world less through those "laws, customs, and religion" that

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reveal the character of ancient peoples so well, than through current theater, novels, and social tone. In the manner of his age, Grimm went on to use these sources to encapsulate the national characteristics of four different European peoples. The Spanish he found ingenious (because of their hot climate and the public restraints of custom and morality), the Italians sensitive and voluptuously imaginative, the English deep-thinking and melancholic, and the French facile and sprightly of wit because of their social orientation.78 Variations in national character were not, however, stressed by all contemporary writers. Although Voltaire's writings, for example, are certainly not free of quips and deft characterizations of various nations, he seems to have usually derived little real joy from the variegated scene of multitudinous national characters. Most commonly, Voltaire was too much an exponent of a leveling rationalism, and of the cosmopolitan fraternity of a right-thinking elite, to detect any consistent charm in the messy individuality of the world's nations and peoples.79 Helvetius and Diderot approached distinct national characteristics from alternative perspectives—not from the overall cosmopolitanism of Voltaire, but from an awareness of the varied subdivisions within each nation. Helvetius saw, at least in passing, that different classes within a nation may have quite different characters: thus the popular view of the French as a gay,witty people could hardly apply to the toiling French peasants. Desperate need, he remarked succinctly, "is never gay."80 For Diderot, on the other hand, the truest subdivisions within each nation are the individuals who compose it. Thus no nation, nor any other group of individuals, is or should be homogeneous. Diderot tended to go beyond the cultural complexity of different nations to the individual complexity of all humanity. Concerning individual peoples, Diderot's approach was generally cautious: he avoided national stereotypes more successfully than did many of his contemporaries, and insisted that, Helvetius to the contrary, human beings are neither perfectly equal at birth nor infinitely malleable by their social or national group. Despite all this, Diderot never wholly abandoned ideas of national differences as created by history, geography, climate, and moral causes.81 It should be added that presumably no writer of serious repute really expected that all people, without exception, of a given nationality would conform to the general national character. In Great Britain, Hume summarized best this rejection of a rigid categorization that, he said, only "the vulgar" could maintain. Men of sense condemn these undistinguishing judgments; though at the same time, they allow that each nation has a peculiar set of manners, and that some

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particular qualities are more frequently to be met with among one people than among their neighbors. The common people in Switzerland have probably more honesty than those of the same rank in Ireland; and every prudent man will, from that circumstance alone, make a difference in the trust he reposes in each. We have reason to expect greater wit and gaiety in a Frenchman than in a Spaniard; though Cervantes was born in Spain. . . . 82

Two French-speaking authors remain to be examined. They were among the firmest of all defenders of national character—Charles Duclos and JeanJacques Rousseau. Considerations on the Customs and Morals of This Century (1750), by Duclos, was one of the most celebrated books of its time; the significance of Rousseau's life-work hardly needs elaboration. "Peoples, like individuals," wrote Duclos, "have their distinctive characters"; these differences of character result from both physical and moral causes. "In this world there is always a nearly equal distribution of virtues and vices, but in different ages the shares of these vary from nation to nation, from one people to another.'' In order to estimate fairly the moral condition of a given nation, one must know "equally well the peoples with whom one would like to compare it. "83 Duclos evidently thought himself well qualified in this respect, for he proceeded to analyze with great confidence the character of the French nation. His view was neither approving nor particularly hopeful. Polished civilizations often are not the most virtuous, and France, he believed, was a case in point. The French character, moreover, had a generalized youthful nature, likeable enough but unsure of itself and given to frivolity and the pursuit of pleasure. Duclos did admit that groups of the French should be considered separately, not (as in Helvetius' case) on the basis of class but following a distinction between Paris and the provinces. It was, nevertheless, in Paris that the Frenchman was "more French than elsewhere," and it was on Paris that Duclos admittedly based most of his generalizations on the French character.84 Several sentences will give the tone of his discussion; Of all the peoples the Frenchman is the one whose character has changed the least in all periods. . . . This nation has always been lively, gay, generous, brave, sincere, presumptuous, inconstant . . . , and inconsiderate. The Frenchman's virtues come from the heart, his vices only from his mind. His good qualities correcting or balancing the bad, all his qualities concur perhaps equally in making the Frenchman the most sociable of all men. Sociability is his proper character. . . . 85

The main point of interest here is not the list of specific French characteristics but their reputed great durability; Duclos was obviously not writing of passing

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fads of personality and morality but of an enduring, even fixed national character. Rousseau was more interested than Duclos in the malleability of national character, though no less convinced of its reality; he became, in fact, one of the world's major prophets of modern nationality. Voltaire's usual ideal—the cosmopolitanism of a cultivated elite—was not for Rousseau. Rousseau's stress upon the "general will" may have been responsible for this: after all, the general will did imply a community of basic interests, feelings, and aspirations within a people. However, this national character, according to Rousseau, may be, at least in part, a deliberate creation as well as a natural phenomenon. His assignment of origin to one or the other was, unfortunately, not always clear. Governmental institutions, each type with a "spirit natural to it," should be founded, he wrote in his Constitutional Project for Corsica, on "national character." "Every people has or should have a national character—and, if it lacks one, we should begin [establishing governmental forms] by giving it one." The rudiments of a people's character were established in primitive times by its geography and soil: thus propensities toward hard work and good faith came in Corsica and Switzerland from rough, infertile terrain.86 But more than these primitive characteristics would apparently be comprised in true national character. At the very least, those characteristics must be maintained and strengthened: to the Corsicans he wrote that "it is less a matter of becoming something different from what you are than of conserving what you are."87 The uncertainties within Rousseau's basic position are forgotten when he enthusiastically tackles the task of creating new governmental institutions for Corsica or, in his Considerations on the Government of Poland, for the latter country. Peoples are indeed what their institutions make them: "It is national institutions that form the genius, character, tastes, and customs and morals of a people, . . . that inspire in it this ardent love of homeland founded on habits impossible to root out." These institutions are political forms and laws and, above all, national educational systems. In the Europe of Rousseau's day, he complained, all peoples were becoming homogeneous in passions, tastes, and morals: the Polish situation offered an opportunity to build a true national character on the foundations of that people's national inclinations.88 In any case, whether national character was natural or, at least in part, a deliberate creation, its reality was generally taken for granted in the French eighteenth century. This was as true within the Encyclopedia as outside it. The succinct, anonymous article "Nation" attests to the currency of the concept. Having defined nation as "a considerable number of people living in a certain delimited area and obeying the same government," the author states flatly that "each nation has its particular character. It is almost proverbial to

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say light-spirited as a Frenchman, jealous as an Italian, grave as a Spaniard, sly [mechant] as an Englishman, proud as a Scot, drunk as a German, lazy as an Irishman."89 Other contributors to the Encyclopedia generally followed lines already introduced in this study. De Jaucourt wrote of "national customs and morals," and stated that the type of government should conform to circumstances of climate, "as well as of the mind, genius, and character of the nation."90 The author of "Manner," probably St. Lambert, linked manners as well as customary morality to different types of government; these manners and morals, however, have always changed with time, even in the relatively stable ancient Sparta, or in modern France.91 The anonymous author of "Character of nations" explicitly recognized that not all individuals in a nation share the national character.92 D'Alembert, in "Character of societies or particular bodies," noted that some bodies within a nation may have a character "very different from that of the nation" as a whole.93 Finally, even the cosmopolitan Voltaire leaned distinctly toward national character differences in the article "Frenchmen," stating that "each people, like each man, has its character," and that "the basic part of character that comes from climate is always the same."94 The evidence seems overwhelming that the existence of national character was virtually a truism of the French Enlightenment. Whether different national characters meant basic changes in human nature was a point, however, left unspecified. Today, long after the eighteenth century, it seems extremely unlikely that the universal lack of clarification could have been a deliberate conspiracy of silence, covering any acute, conscious embarrassment over the subversion of the concept of a uniform human nature. In fact, as these investigations have already provisionally shown, human nature was not treated, in practice, as monolithically uniform. It was, after all, not unthinkable that individuals and peoples did differ, partially but very significantly, from one another, even in their fundamental human characteristics. The idea of a uniform human nature still received general lip-service, mainly because it was still commonly accepted in narrow terms, as comprising only a few basic passions and an ability to think rationally. In actuality, though, human nature became an amorphous, broad concept—a concept with which, for example, national character might easily be linked. Obviously different national characters did imply different sorts of people. But if the French eighteenth century was willing to consider individual differences that went beyond traditional "human nature," so too might it see differences among whole peoples that went beyond "national character." Cultural diversity might be a concept as broad and amorphous as was that of individual human nature. To gain some insight into this likelihood, and into

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the extent of cultural differentiation as seen by the French Enlightenment, will be the purpose of the next three chapters. NOTES 1. In the extensive literature examining Enlightenment travel narratives and consequent perceptions of exotic lands and peoples, one may note the following useful guides: Percy G. Adams, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1983), pp. 38-80; Gilbert Chinard, L'Amerique et le reve exotique dans la litterature francaise au xviie et au xviiie siecle (Paris: Droz, 1934); Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au siecle des lumieres; P. Laubriet, "Les guides de voyage au debut du xviiie siecle et la propagande philosophique," in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 32 (Geneva: Institut et Musee Voltaire, 1965), pp. 269-326; Rene Pomeau, "Voyage et lumieres dans la litterature francaise du xviiie siecle," in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 57 (1967), pp. 1269-89; and, for British writers, P. J. Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: Perceptions of New Worlds in the Age of Enlightenment (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982). 2. Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New York: Basic Books, 1980), p. 149. 3. Laubriet, "Les guides de voyage," pp. 271, 279. 4. Pomeau, "Voyage et lumieres," pp. 1278-80. 5. See Pomeau, "Voyage et lumieres," pp. 1286-87, on Bougainville's disconcerting failure to find natural equality and innocent camaraderie in Tahiti. 6. See Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire, pp. 40-102, for a good survey of eighteenth-century geographical explorations and the importance of travel-and-exploration literature in the libraries of the age. See also Commager, The Empire of Reason, pp. 50-70. 7. For example, Annee litteraire, 1754, vol. 1, pp. 73-92; 1757, vol. 2, pp. 73-92; 1764, vol. 1, pp. 3-26; 1767,vol. 3, pp. 3-21. A "compilation des historiens & des voyageurs les plus accredites" is reviewed in 1770, vol. 3, pp. 265-83. 8. Review of Voyage a la Martinique, in Annee litteraire, 1764, vol. 1, pp. 5, 9-10. 9. Pomeau, "Voyage et lumieres," p. 1286. 10. Pierre Poivre, Un manuscrit inedit de Pierre Poivre: Les memoires d'un voyageur, ed. Louis Malleret (Paris: Publications de 1'Ecole franchise de 1'ExtremeOrient, 1968), pp. 19-21, 24-26, 42, 57. See also Oeuvres complettes de P. Poivre (Paris: Fuchs, 1797). 11. "VOYAGEUR," Encyclopedic, vol. 17, p. 477. 12. "VOYAGE," Encyclopedic, vol. 17, pp. 476-77. 13. For example, Robert I. Rotberg and Theodore K. Rabb, eds., Climate and History: Studies in Interdisciplinary History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); H. H. Lamb, Climate, History, and the Modern World (New York: Methuen,

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1982). Particularly pertinent and fascinating are parts of a somewhat older study, Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). 14. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, pp. 3-18, 80-115, 254-87, 429-60. 15. Jean Bodin, Six Books of the Commonwealth, tr. and ed. M. J. Tooley (New York: Macmillan, 1955), pp. 145-49ff; see also Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, pp. 434-47. Louis Le Roy (d. 1575) also sketched a climate theory of human differentiation: see Werner L. Gundersheimer, The Life and Works of Louis Le Roy (Geneva: Droz, 1966), p. 98. 16. Mercier, "La theorie des climats," pp. 13-37, 159-74; Vyverberg, Historical Pessimism, pp. 136-37. 17. Vyverberg, Historical Pessimism, p. 137. 18. Mercier, "La theorie des climats," pp. 18-27. 19. Jean-Baptiste Dubos, Reflexions critiques sur la poesie et sur la peinture, 2 vols. in 1 (Paris: Mariette, 1719); see also Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, pp. 554-62. The abbe Dubos noted incidentally that climate affects not only esthetic productions but religious and ethical phenomena. 20. Dubos, Reflexions critiques, passim. See Mercier's summarization in La rehabilitation de la nature humaine, pp. 162-63. 21. Francois-Ignace d'Espiard de La Borde, Essais sur le genie et le caractere des nations, 3 vols. (Brussels: Leonard, 1743); Espiard, L'esprit des nations, 2 vols. (The Hague: Beauregard, Gosse, Van Daalen, 1752); Jean-Louis Castilhon, Considerations sur les causes physiques et morales de la diversite du genie, des moeurs et du gouvernement des nations (Bouillon: Societe Typographique, 1769). See also Mercier, "La theorie des climats," pp. 31-34. 22. Espiard, Essais, vol. 3, p. 5. 23. In "La theorie des climats," pp. 163-74, Mercier discusses such investigators as Hales, Astruc, Lancisi, Guyon, and Arbuthnot, and their possible significance in Montesquieu's thought. 24. John Arbuthnot, An Essay Concerning the Effects of Air on Human Bodies (London: Tonson, 1733). See also Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, pp. 562-65. 25. Good summaries include Thomas L. Pangle, Montesquieu's Philosophy of Liberalism: A Commentary on The Spirit of the Laws (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 163-74; Robert Shackleton, "The Evolution of Montesquieu's Theory of Climate," Revue Internationale de philosophic, 9 (1955), pp. 317-29; Robert Shackleton, Montesquieu: A Critical Biography (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 302-19; Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, pp. 568-81; Ehrard, L'idee de nature en France, vol. 2, pp. 718-36. For the principal original texts, see Oeuvres completes de Montesquieu, ed. Roger Caillois, vol. 2: Essai sur les causes qui peuvent affecter les esprits et les caracteres, pp. 39—68, and De I'esprit des lois, pp. 474-89.

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26. For Montesquieu's much-cited experiment with a frozen sheep tongue, see De I'esprit des lots, p. 476. 27. Oeuvres completes de Montesquieu, vol. 2: De I'esprit des lots, p. 231. 28. Ibid.: De I'esprit des lois, p. 475; Essai sur les causes, pp. 39-40; De I'esprit des lois, pp. 479-80. 29. Oeuvres de Voltaire, ed. Beuchot, vol. 28: Dictionnairephilosophique (1829), "Climat" (taken by Beuchot from Questions sur I'Encyclopedic), p. 116. See also Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, pp. 581-83. 30. Oeuvres completes de Voltaire, ed. Theodore Besterman et al., vol. 59: Philosophie de I'histoire (the Introduction to Essai sur les moeurs), p. 95. 31. Oeuvres de Voltaire, ed. Beuchot, vol. 29: Dictionnaire philosophique (1829), "Franc ou Franq: France, Francois, Francais" (taken by Beuchot from Questions sur I'Encyclopedic), p. 478. Voltaire added: "Those [marks] that depend on government, religion, and education do change: this explains how peoples have lost a part of their original character.'' 32. Ibid., vol. 15: Essai sur les moeurs, p. 294. 33. Buffon, Oeuvres philosophiques, ed. Piveteau: Histoire naturelle, p. 313; see also Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, pp. 587-91. 34. D'Holbach, Systeme de la nature (London: 1774), vol. 1, pp. 132-33. 35. Guillaume-Thomas-Frangois Raynal, Histoire philosophique et politique des etablissements et du commerce des Europeens dans les deux Index (Geneva, 1780), vol. 1, p. 38; Claude-Emmanuel Pastoret, Zoroastre, Confucius et Mahomet . . . (Paris: Buisson, 1787), p. 385; Wolfgang Leppmann, Winckelmann (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970); Henry Thomas Buckle, History of Civilization in England (New York: Hearst's International Library, 1913), vol. 1, p. 29. 36. "CLIMAT (Geog.)," Encyclopedie, vol. 3, p. 534. 37. "CLIMAT (Med.)," Encyclopedie, vol. 3, pp. 534-36. 38. "CLIMAT (Med.)," Encyclopedie, vol. 3, p. 534. 39. "MOEURS, . . . (Belles-Lettres)," Supplement a I'Encyclopedie, vol. 3 (1777), pp. 947-53. 40. Ibid., p. 947. 41. "LANGUE (Gramm.)," Encyclopedie, vol. 9, pp. 249-66. 42. "IVROGNERIE," Encydopedie, vol. 9, p. 83. 43. "EGYPTIENS, (Philosophie des)," Encyclopedie, vol. 5, p. 437. 44. "CHRISTIANISME," Encydopedie, vol. 3, p. 387. 45. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage, p. 135 and passim. The usual theory postulated hunting, pastoral, agricultural, and commercial stages in the development of means of subsistence. 46. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, pp. 554-95—including references for most of the individual writers cited in this section. See also Vyverberg, Historical Pessimism, pp. 132-38, especially pp. 135, 137. 47. Economic influences, at least outside means of subsistence, were not a major emphasis of the Enlightenment. Esthetic influences, important to some authors, are

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mainly peripheral to the focus of this study. These emphases were found outside as well as inside France. 48. David Hume in Great Britain, as well as most members of the German Enlightenment, stressed these moral factors, as opposed to climate, when discussing cultural differentiation and national character. See, for example, Marshall and Williams, The Great Map of Mankind, pp. 139-40; and Peter Hanns Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1975), pp. 136-89. 49. John N. Pappas, Berthier's "Journal de Trevoux" and the Philosopher, in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 3 (Geneva: Institut et Musee Voltaire, 1957), p. 79. 50. Review of Lettres critiques, ou Analyse & refutation de quelques ecrits modernes contre la religion, Journal de Trevoux, June 1757, pp. 1480-1508; review of Pecquet, Analyse raisonee de I'Esprit des lois, July 1758, pp. 1693-1705; review of Gauchat, Lettres critiques, October 1758, pp. 2501-33. 51. Review of Lettres critiques, Journal de Trevoux, June 1757, pp. 1489-90, 1492-93. 52. Anonymous letter on Helvetius, De Vesprit, etc., Annee litteraire, vol. 1 (1754), p. 64. 53. Vyverberg, Historical Pessimism, pp. 113-14. 54. See this chapter, note 25. 55. Oeuvres completes de Montesquieu, vol. 2: Mes pensees, p. 1458. 56. Ibid.: Essai sur les causes, pp. 53-58, 59. 57. Ibid., pp. 60, 61-65. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, p. 581, finds various inconsistencies in Montesquieu's complexities. 58. Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire, pp. 206-8. 59. Grimm, Correspondance litteraire, vol. 5, p. 497 (1 May 1764). 60. Fox-Genovese, The Origins of Physiocracy, p. 185. 61. See this chapter, note 29. 62. Oeuvres de Voltaire, ed. Beuchot, vol. 18: Essai sur les moeurs, p. 481. 63. D'Holbach, Systeme de la nature (London: 1774), vol. 1, pp. 150-60. As a determinist he maintained that "education ... is only necessity shown to children. Legislation is necessity shown to the members of a political body''—Systeme de la nature, vol. 1, p. 234. 64. Even these, however, did not go as far as Britain's David Hume: Hume denied virtually any role to climate or other physical causes of differences in national character. Moral causes, for him, reigned supreme, largely through the human propensity to imitate one's neighbors and countrymen. "If we run over the globe, or revolve the annals of history, we shall discover everywhere signs of a sympathy or contagion of manners, none of the influence of air or climate." In defense of this assertion he listed nine solidly empirical arguments. See David Hume, Essays, Literary, Moral, and Political (London: Ward, Lock, and Bowden, n.d.): Essay XX—"Of National Character," pp. 116-27, especially pp. 120-22. It has in fact

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been argued persuasively that, in the special case of racial distinctions, Hume rejected even moral causes of differentiation, in favor of a polygenetic theory: nature had simply created separate races at the creation of mankind—and some, the whites, are fitter than others. See Richard H. Popkin, "The Philosophical Bases of Modern Racism," in Philosophy and the Civilizing Arts, ed. Craig Walton and John P. Anton (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1974), pp. 142-44, 154-59. 65. Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Oeuvres philosophiques, ed. Georges Le Roy, vol. 1: Essai sur I'origine des connoissances humaines (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1947), p. 98. 66. David Warner Smith, Helvetius, A Study in Persecution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 13-14, 198. 67. Claude-Adrien Helvetius, Oeuvres completes d'Helvetius, vol. 2: De I'esprit (Paris: F. Didot, 1795), pp. 280-81; vol. 3, pp. 26, 87; vol. 5, pp. 57, 69, 84, 88. 68. Diderot, Oeuvres politiques, ed. Paul Verniere, Observations sur le Nakaz, pp. 349-50, 370. 69. Diderot, Oeuvres philosophiques, ed. Paul Verniere, Refutation suivie de I'oeuvre d'Helvetius intitule I'Homme, pp. 575, 601. 70. Useful summations are found in Hubert, Les sciences sociales dans I'Encyclopedic, pp. 89-90; and Ira O. Wade, The Structure and Form of the French Enlightenment, vol. 1, pp. 464-65. 71. "HUMAINE ESPECE," Encyclopedic, vol. 8, p. 348. 72. "LEGISLATEUR," Encyclopedic, vol. 9, pp. 357-60. 73. "HOMME . . . (Morale)," Encyclopedic, vol. 8, p. 278. 74. "MOEURS, . . . (Morale)," Encyclopedic, vol. 10, p. 611. 75. Oeuvres completes de Montesquieu, vol. 2, p. 1145. For useful summations of the views of Montesquieu, and of his contemporaries and successors, see again Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, pp. 565-95. 76. Condillac, Oeuvres philosophiques, vol. 1: Essai sur I'origine des connoissances humaines, p. 103. 77. Grimm et al., Correspondance litteraire, vol. 7 (15 March 1767), pp. 261-62. 78. Ibid., pp. 263-64. Montesquieu had similarly characterized several specific European nationalities in his random, unpublished jottings: the English were inconstant and impatient, the Germans lazy, the French vivacious, and the Dutch venal. See Oeuvres completes de Montesquieu, vol. 1 (1949): Pensees, pp. 1336, 1337, 1338. Montesquieu evidently had an unfortunate experience or so in Holland during a trip from 1728 to 1729. His travel notes, soon after arriving there, include this revelatory sentence: "Everything I had been told about the avarice, the cheating, the swindling of the Dutch is not overstated in the least: it is the pure truth." All commercial nations, he added, are venal. See Oeuvres completes, vol. 1: Voyage de Gratz a la Haye, pp. 863-64. He also, perhaps not consistently, thought the Dutch slow-witted. See Oeuvres completes, vol. 2 (1951), Essai sur les causes qui peuvent affecter les esprits et les caracteres, p. 39. 79. Still, Voltaire, in 1771, did acknowledge the existence of national character, with regional subtypes; see Oeuvres de Voltaire, ed. Beuchot, vol. 29: Dictionnaire

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philosophique (1829), "Franc ou Franq; France, Francois, Franfais," (taken by Beuchot from Questions sur ['Encyclopedic), p. 477. See the handy contrast between Voltaire's cosmopolitanism and Rousseau's nationalism in Carolyn H. Wilberger, Voltaire's Russia: Window on the East, in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 164 (Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 1976), pp. 231-33. See also this chapter, note 94. 80. Oeuvres completes d'Helvetius, vol. 2: De i'esprit, pp. 70-71. 81. Leon Schwartz, Diderot and the Jews (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1981), pp. 141-57. See the two preceding sections of this chapter, and also Wilson, "The Concept ofMoeurs in Diderot's Social and Political Thought," pp. 188-99. 82. Hume, Essays, Literary, Moral, and Political: "Of National Character," pp. 116-17. Italics in the text are mine. 83. Charles Pinot Duclos, Considerations sur les moeurs de ce siecle, ed. F. C. Green (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939), pp. 11, 57, 12. 84. Ibid., pp. 15-17, 13. 85. Ibid., p. 98. 86. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres, vol. 3: Projet de constitution pour la Corse, p. 913. 87. Ibid., p. 903. 88. Ibid., vol. 3: Considerations sur le gouvernement de Pologne, pp. 960-62. 89. "NATION," Encyclopedic, vol. 11, p. 36. 90. "MOEURS, (Poetique)," Encyclopedic, vol. 10, p. 612; "GOUVERNEMENT," Encyclopedic, vol. 7 (1757), p. 790. 91. "MANIERE," Encyclopedic, vol. 10, pp. 35-36. In connection with the stability of the French character, the author cites Duclos. 92. "CARACTERE DBS NATIONS," Encyclopedic, vol. 2, p. 666. 93. "CARACTERE des societes ou corps particuliers," Encyclopedic, vol. 2, p. 666. 94. "FRANCOIS, ou FRANCAIS," Encyclopedic, vol. 7, p. 285.

5 Understanding Cultural Diversity The Question By no means was national character always the issue during eighteenthcentury discussions of cultural diversity. National character, as we have seen, was an attribute of the national entity itself—the nation that was still conceived of as little more than a territory obeying a single government.1 There remained, however, many situations of cultural diversity that transcended the eighteenth-century nation—the nation that today would usually be labeled simply the "country." There were also cases when nations (in the eighteenthcentury sense) were indeed at issue, but when no special national character was claimed or even mentioned. A further expansion of horizons also occurred in the French Enlightenment period through the addition of, or with greater emphasis on, a historical dimension. Previous chapters bearing on cultural diversity have dealt with units that were almost wholly territorial, not temporal. Beginning with the present chapter it will be harder to exclude historical considerations. Even so, history will not yet be our main focus: that topic requires separate and special treatment later in the study.2 This chapter-division is occasioned, however, not primarily by new subject matter considered in the French Enlightenment, but by a new concern on the part of this study. Although topical division lines are necessarily indistinct, a shift of emphasis does appear with this new chapter. Previously, especially in the last chapter, the question has usually been this: what did the French eighteenth century think of as the major elements of cultural differences among human beings? That question cannot be wholly forgotten, but it will now give way, in part, to a new question: how seriously and comprehensively did eighteenth-century writers attempt to understand cul-

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tural entities outside their own time and space? Was, in fact, any serious attempt made truly to understand cultural units outside of contemporary western Europe? Was any real effort made to enter the spirit and mind of non-European peoples, or even of other European peoples than the French? Was it always true—certainly it was sometimes true—that the French authors took out of foreign cultures only what they wanted to find, only what suited the French viewpoint?3 Is it not, on the other hand, possible that real cultural diversity was sometimes recognized by the French eighteenth century and that efforts were made, with varying degrees of success, to pinpoint the nature of this diversity? I contend that more can be said for this alternative interpretation than has been generally accepted in studies of this period. It should be noted at the outset that eighteenth-century evidence for this view need not come from France alone. Recent scholarship has shown, for example, that British and German writers knew more about exotic lands than their predecessors had known, and participated in a certain real widening of intellectual horizons, despite the persistence of many prejudices and preconceptions, and a persistent tendency toward rash generalization.4 Moreover, none of what I will say here denies the clear reality of an important cosmopolitan trend in Enlightenment feeling. This came, as noted above, from a common eighteenth-century devotion, up to a point, to nature and reason, to classical esthetics, and to a search for a universal philosophy, ethics, humanitarianism, and natural religion.5 Nor will I deny the pervasiveness of the Enlightenment's pride in its own achievement, in its position as heir to the best from all the ages: the west was indeed generally viewed as the superior world-culture, and the Enlightenment was seen as its pinnacle. Such cultural pride, by the way, has not been unknown in later periods, even if, outside popular culture, it has become more and more qualified by skepticism. What will be implied in this discussion of the eighteenth-century view of cultural diversity is a certain degree of cultural relativism. This implication has hardly been prevalent in modern views of the Enlightenment, and such attempts as have been made in that direction have been resisted.6 What the subsequent sections and chapters may demonstrate is that in fact there was some significant appreciation, during the French eighteenth century, of the fact of cultural differentiation throughout the world, and that indeed there was, on occasion, a certain amount of satisfaction derived from this contemplation of human diversity.7 If no statement more categorical than this can be made, the credit or blame must lie in the very considerable diversity of the French eighteenth century itself.

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Provisional Generalizations Modern studies of the Enlightenment have generally granted the greatest, or perhaps the only, credit for recognizing cultural diversity to an Italian and a German author, not to any French thinker. Of course there is much to be said for the pivotal importance, for later ages, of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) and Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803). Vico, little known in his own day, would be rediscovered and praised in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a precursor of modern social and linguistic studies and of a cyclical concept of historical development. Herder, rather unfairly, would be enrolled in the mainstream of German nationalistic thought. In Vice's view, each great society or nation had its distinct cultural personality, although all followed a similar pattern of development and decay. Each civilization was a unique, integrated cultural whole, remaining largely self-sufficient and not basically changing, or being changed by, any other civilization. To reconcile this cultural differentiation with a fixed human nature was possible for Vico only in a very narrow sense.8 Much later in the century (1784-1791), Herder's Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind took a rather similar view of the organic individuality of world societies or nations. If no French philosophe developed quite the organic view of Vico and Herder's individualized cultures, less systematic programs for cultural diversity were frequently envisioned and are by no means historically insignificant. This section of my study will attempt to resuscitate several representative French theories of general cultural diversity. Later chapters will investigate applications of these theories to individual cultures. I have noted in the previous chapter the importance of voyage and travel narratives, and the case, for example, of the French administrative official Pierre Poivre.9 In his Voyages of a Philosophe, Poivre had stressed the varying climates, physical needs, means of subsistence, and human characteristics of different cultures.10 Material from travel narratives was incorporated into theories of the philosophies, some of whom could, like Poivre, draw upon their own direct observation of foreign lands. Among the more important philosophes who traveled rather extensively, though in Europe only, was Montesquieu. From 1728 to 1729, Montesquieu visited the Hapsburg domains of central Europe and then much of Italy north of Naples; from 1729 to 1732, he proceeded through Bavaria, Hanover, and Holland to England, where he spent a year and a half. 11 In all countries he already had, or now acquired, social connections with residents; these proved very useful in gaining an understanding of those lands. In addition Montesquieu was an enthusiastic empiricist in the study of industrial technologies (in Hungarian mines, for example) and especially of art and architecture, and of

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political and social systems. His focus and conclusions were certainly more aristocratic than plebeian, yet these travels, duly recorded in detailed journals, were among the most thoughtful of Enlightened "grand tours." His travels, as well as his extensive reading, became the basis of much of his later writing. Montesquieu's most enduring works of political and social, and broadly cultural, inquiry were the Persian Letters (1721) and The Spirit of Laws (1734-1748). The first antedated his important travels, but already made, beneath its wit, many probing observations on the nations and cultures of western Europe, and added at least a sketchy comparison between the life and thought of Persia and that of the western world. His satirical survey of European and eastern religious ideas and institutions suggested a sort of religious relativism that distressed the establishment of his time.12 Still more effective was his more mature, serious analysis of cultural diversity in The Spirit of Laws. 13 In this work Montesquieu dealt not only with formal political and social structures throughout the known world, but also tackled the complexities of general cultural diversity among peoples. The results, like the varied sources of information, of course were uneven in quality and erratic in emphasis and depth. In the book, however, Montesquieu offered observations and insights of the most varied sort on the vagaries of historical development, the power of tradition, and an array of such physical and moral causes of cultural differentiation as we have already noted. Above all, his delineation of the "general spirit" of different cultures is relevant to this study. His Part III, Book XIX is crucial: "Laws as Related to the Principles That Form the General Spirit, the Customs, Morals, and Manners of a Nation.''14 The two-paragraph, three-sentence chapter on ' 'What the General Spirit Is" deserves full quotation in this context, even though it is simply a refinement of those notebook jottings cited in the previous chapter:15 Several things govern man—climate, religion, laws, governmental maxims, examples of things past, customs, morals, and manners; from all these there results a general spirit. According to the way in which one of these causes acts more strongly in each nation, the others give way proportionately. Nature and climate, almost alone, dominate among savages, manners govern the Chinese, laws tyrannize Japan; morals once gave the tone to Sparta; governmental maxims and ancient customs and morals gave the tone to Rome.16

Subsequent chapters of The Spirit of Laws, several even shorter than this, continue the subject of this general spirit; they add little of substance to defining its nature, except for some rather general remarks concerning the sociability, pride, vanity, or venality of various nations. Montesquieu here is

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more interested in making the point that government should not try to change the general spirit of a nation: laws must relate to customs, morals, and manners. At the same time, in a circular process, laws can contribute at least to a cautious, gradual modification of these customs, morals, and manners—and Montesquieu cited numerous examples from history to support the point.17 "Every society," Montesquieu wrote in a fragment On Politics, "is a spiritual union [union d'esprit], and in it a common character is formed. This universal soul comes to express its thoughts in a particular manner—a manner that results from a chain of an infinite number of causes multiplying and combining from age to age."18 This soul or spirit does change gradually across the ages, but its components remain interrelated, perhaps integrated, in a cultural whole that (although he never used the term) is effectively organic in nature.19 This organic, relativistic concept is less explicit in several other authors of the French Enlightenment, but none the less real. In order to demonstrate his materialistic philosophical system, Julien Of fray de la Mettrie (1709-1751) maintained that morality depends utterly upon given individual and cultural situations, thus implying a pervasive cultural relativism.20 Helvetius constructed a cultural anthropology firmly set in human history; although his treatment was speculative and broad, it did use terms like "spirit of the time" and "spirit of the century," and implied the rise of different societies in different circumstances, and of somewhat different sorts of human beings.21 Cortdillac's excursion into the realms of ancient history, as he outlined a course of study for the young Prince of Parma in the 1760s, maintained a basic unity of human nature in ways of feeling and in a few primary needs, but went on to stress the effects of significant circumstances that "are different from people to people and from century to century." This changing character of different peoples, superimposed upon the basic "general character" of human beings, has been, Helevetius said, at the foundation of historical change, at least since primitive times.22 Even Voltaire, though usually clinging precariously to a vision of human unity, could not wholly escape the contagion of cultural relativism. In an extreme instance, in his Questions on the Encyclopedia entry on Gregory VII, he could indeed write that "everything . . . depends on the historical time, on the place where people are born, and on the circumstances in which they find themselves."23 Such forthrightness, however, was rare. Actually Voltaire's work offers one of the clearest cases in the Enlightenment of a thinker who, at least in his frequent optimistic moments, gloried in his own time and found its own, and his own, ways of thought to be the most truly rational and admirable of all.

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It is perverse not to recognize this very important side of Voltaire. But was there also another side? Evidence exists that there was. First of all, as I have sought to demonstrate in another work,24 Voltaire suffered quite frequent bouts of pessimism and disillusionment about the progressive path of history and the unassailable superiority of his own time. There were, he often felt, simply too many inadequacies and even horrors in the human story to permit unsullied confidence in mankind's advance or in any imminent or ultimate perfection. If eighteenth-century France was the heir of all the ages, this was a problematical heritage at best. Moreover, human reason itself was problematical: not only was it wrongly assaulted by nonrational, obscurantist elements, but rightly checked by empiricism and a realization of the dangers of abstract systematization. Nevertheless, was not reason, at least in principle, an immutable part of human nature? Was not human nature, as a fundamental whole, also immutable? I have already indicated that Voltaire was not always wholly confident of an affirmative response to either of these questions. Granted the insecurity of these philosophical foundations, it is not surprising that Voltaire was occasionally struck by the diversity of mankind, and not always unfavorably. His voracious interest in the human scene, wherever it became known to him, also came into play, as did the compulsion to explain this strangely variegated scene. It surely is not possible to maintain that Voltaire's exploration of the human condition was smothered in intellectual and moral disgust. He had moments of glee, certainly, over perverse human tratis and behavior that helped prove specific Voltairean points—for example, the need for a tolerant deism to counter the tyranny of dogmatic religion. Beyond snide glee in his attitude, however, there seems also to have been intellectual curiosity and satisfaction—a point impossible to prove at this late date, but more than compatible with what we know of the whole exuberant Voltairean career. If we cannot demonstrate conclusively today that Voltaire enjoyed and appreciated human diversity, it is grotesque to maintain that he never took joy in it. Thus we return to another question that can never be categorically answered: for Voltaire, were not all these cultural varieties of human behavior, after all, simply superficial customs that overlaid an unchanging nature? Here the notorious reluctance of the Enlightenment to deny explicitly the uniformity of human nature must again be recognized. Moreover, there are specific statements in Voltaire's writings that seem to imply his belief that the diversity of mankind should actually be transcended, so that human beings might become more alike in those qualities of humane rationalism that he admired. "Every man," he wrote in the Essay on Customs and Morals, "is formed by

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his age (siecle), but very few men raise themselves above the customs and morals of the time."25 Actual cultural divergences among peoples, though, are enormous, in Voltaire's opinion. Despite his own literary classicism he could nevertheless write, in the original English published version of "An Essay on Epic Poetry," that the arts forever change their modes of expression, and that he himself was "very far from thinking that one nation ought to judge of its production by the standard of another."26 Again in this instance, as so often with Voltaire, we are assaulted by contradictory evidence. Any fuller judgment must await examination of his degree of effort, enthusiasm, and objectivity in treating specific cultural and historical units. In the meantime, Voltaire, despite occasional general statements of a relativistic tone, must seem only a tentative proponent of desirable cultural diversity. Rousseau's position was equivocal also, though for different and more fundamental reasons than Voltaire's. In a lengthy footnote of his own to the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau asserted that cultures do differ because of "the powerful effects of diversity in climates, air, food, manner of living, general habits, and above all the astonishing strength of the same causes acting continuously over a long succession of generations." But we know, he said, much less than we think we do about peoples outside of Europe: in effect, "we know only Europeans." We have, he continued, a flood of information about non-European peoples—but from what sources? Nearly all our informants are either sailors, merchants, soldiers, or missionaries. The first three classes are hardly fit to be good observers, and missionaries must be preoccupied with saving souls, and are as prejudiced as the others simply by their position: certainly they are not about to become impartial observers out of "pure curiosity."27 This is the sort of objection that seems self-evident to a later century accustomed to professional sociology and anthropology, but one that received, understandably, almost no recognition in an age when these studies were largely unknown. Incidentally, in addition to this bit of rather unusual insight, there was another insight, not unique but rather uncommon, in the same long passage from Rousseau. Cultural diversity, he wrote, was becoming not more but less marked in his day because of the cultural interaction occasioned by commerce, voyages, and national conquests abroad. Thus ways of life were becoming internationally more alike. It is not clear whether Rousseau thought that this blurring of cultural distinctions extended beyond superficial habits. As with Voltaire, we must await further evidence from more specific references and applications. The same requisite caution applies to Diderot. Certainly in general terms he upheld the reality of cultural diversity. Through his last writings he continued

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to maintain that different cultures had different customs and morals, as he did in a full three-page section of the Essay on the Reigns of Claudius and Nero (1778-1782). "Is it," he began the section, "by our own customs and morals or by those of the age that we should judge actions? Is there no difference between one century's idea of virtue and a cloister's idea?" The examples that he proceeded to cite in the Essay all point toward the same conclusion—that each age, and indeed each broad social grouping, has its own customs and morals.28 Such, too, would seem to be one of the lessons of his Supplement to Bougainville's Voyage (1772)—a book that, if not precisely a contrast between sexual permissiveness in Tahiti and sexual rigidity in modern Europe, was at least a plea for recognition of the healthy sexuality in one culture as compared to the hypocritical austerities preached by another.29 Yet Diderot was not always a primitivist,30 nor did he always write as if he rejected all firm standards of right and wrong. Similar dichotomies pervade the Encyclopedia, and its Supplement volumes as well.31 Current European standards dominate, in reference both to space and to time, and there is usually little hesitation in passing judgment on right and wrong, or on truth and falsity. At the same time, a Supplement article (taken from Sulzer's General Theory of the Fine Arts) on "Character" states that "three different sorts of circumstances concur in modifying [a person's] character—first, the nation and century; then his age, life-style, and rank; and finally his individual genius and temperament. . . ."32 Marmontel's article on "Criticism" is typical of the original Encyclopedia volumes in stressing both the century and the country as cultural bases for judging human beings.33 In his article "Hobbesism, or Philosophy of Hobbes" Diderot offers a pithy summation: "For different times, different circumstances and philosophies."34 Such is the tone of many statements in the French Enlightenment—that is, statements of broad positions on cultural homogeneity and diversity. Obviously they vary widely. For this study, however, they are important above all in their occasional, even fairly frequent, recognition of cultural diversity. What remains to be seen is whether this recognition will carry over into the actual depiction of specific non-French cultures, and whether this depiction will reveal any significant signs of cross-cultural understanding and empathy. NOTES 1. See Chapter4, note 89. Montesquieu had written in his jottings: "I call 'genius of a nation' the customs, morals, and mental character of different peoples under the influence of the same court and the same capital" (Oeuvres completes de Montesquieu, vol. 1: Mes pensees, p. 1327).

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2. See Chapters 8-10. 3. For a representative statement of the traditional approach, see Guy, The French Image of China, pp. 431-32. 4. Marshall and Williams, The Great Map of Mankind, pp. 1-2 and passim; Gusdorf, Dieu, la nature, I'homme, pp. 394-404 and passim. 5. Thomas J. Schlereth, The Cosmopolitan Ideal in Enlightenment Thought: Its Form and Function in the Ideas of Franklin, Hume, and Voltaire, 1694—1790 (Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame Press, 1977). Georges Gusdorf, in Les sciences humaines et la pensee occidentals, vol. 6: L'avenement des sciences humaines au siecle des lumieres (Paris: Payot, 1973), pp. 273-86, surveys views of the west's relationship to oriental and especially Indo-European culture, both as part of a cultural whole and as resistance to western cultural chauvinism. 6. Peter Gay, for example, has argued for a limited Enlightenment relativism in its treatment of diverse cultures. He has been criticized by James A. Leith, "Peter Gay's Enlightenment," Eighteenth Century Studies, 5 (1971-1972), pp. 163-65, although Gay never viewed this relativism as either exclusive or comprehensive. Leith insists on the basic Enlightenment loyalty to absolute, not relative, values. 7. Vyverberg, Historical Pessimism, pp. 132-34. Especially for religious diversity, see Mercier, La rehabilitation de la nature humaine, pp. 175-80. I will not be further concerned, at any length, with the largely physiological diversity of peoples on a racial basis: see Popkin, "The Physiological Bases of Modern Racism," pp. 126-65. 8. For a handy summary of Vico's historical thought, see Ernst Breisach, Historiography, Ancient, Medieval, Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 203-4, 210-13. 9. See Chapter 4, notes 9 and 10. 10. Oeuvres complettes de P. Poivre: Voyages d'un philosophe, ou Observations sur les moeurs et les arts des peuples de l'Afrique, de l'Asie et de iAmerique, pp. 73-76 and passim. 11. Shackleton, Montesquieu, pp. 90-145. 12. Ibid., pp. 39-45. 13. Ibid., pp. 225-355; Melvin Richter, The Political Theory of Montesquieu (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 57-109; Oeuvres completes de Montesquieu, vol. 2: De I'esprti des lois, pp. 227-995. 14. Richter, The Political Theory of Montesquieu, pp. 98-101; Oeuvres completes de Montesquieu, vol. 2: De I'esprit des lois, pp. 556-83. 15. See Chapter 4, note 55. 16. Oeuvres completes de Montesquieu, vol. 2: De l'esprit des lois, p. 558. 17. Ibid., pp. 558-83. 18. Melanges inedits de Montesquieu, ed. A. de Montesquieu (Bordeaux: Societe des Bibliophiles de Guyenne, 1892), pp. 160-61. 19. Vyverberg, Historical Pessimism, pp. 161-64. 20. Ibid., pp. 219-20. 21. Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire, pp. 315-28.

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22. Oeuvres philosophiqu.es de Condillac, vol. 2 (1948): Cours d'etude pour I'instruction du Prince de Parme: Histoire ancienne, pp. 11-12. 23. Oeuvres de Voltaire, ed. Beuchot, vol. 30: Dictionnaire philosophique (1829): "Gregoire VII" (taken by Beuchot from Questions sur I'Encyclopedic), p. 143. 24. Vyverberg, Historical Pessimism, pp. 180-88. 25. Oeuvres de Voltaire, vol. 16: Essai sur les moeurs, p. 436. 26. Cited in Theodore Besterman, Voltaire (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1969), p. 151. 27. Rousseau, Oeuvres, vol. 3: Discours sur I'origine et les fondemens de Vinegalite parmi les hommes, note x, pp. 208, 212. 28. Oeuvres completes de Diderot, ed. Assezat and Tourneux, vol. 3 (1875): Essai sur les regnes de Claude et de Neron, pp. 73-76. 29. Diderot, Oeuvres philosophiques: Supplement au Voyage de Bougainville, pp. 456-516; Peter Gay, The Party of Humanity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), pp. 154-61; Wilson, Diderot, pp. 588-93. 30. Charles Rihs, Les philosophes utopistes: Le mythe de la cite communautaire en France au xviiie siecle (Paris: Marcel Riviere, 1970), pp. 356-64. 31. See Kathleen Hardesty's brief summation in The Supplement to the Encyclopedia (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), p. 87. 32. "CARACTERE (Beaux-Arts)," Supplement a I'Encyclopedic, vol. 2 (1776), p. 231. 33. "CRITIQUE," Encyclopedic, vol. 4, p. 494. 34. "HOBBISME, ou PHILOSOPHIE D'HOBBES," Encyclopedie, vol. 8, p. 241.

6 A Cultural Miscellany Russians and Others When arriving at specifics on individual cultures, the writers of the French eighteenth century formed no single school. In fact, foreign cultures were for some writers of little intrinsic interest, and if these cultures were mentioned at all, it might well be for polemical purposes alone. On occasion foreign cultures could certainly be mere objects of scorn, cited only to demonstrate the superiority of other cultures—usually the culture of contemporary France. Alternatively, foreign cultures might become objects of admiration, cited to display the defects and perversions of French life, ideas, and character. The tendency of recent historical scholarship has often been to accentuate this polemical use of non-French cultures, and hence to deny to the authors of the French Enlightenment any real understanding or appreciation of cultures differing from their own. In this study the existence of such eighteenth-century approaches will not be disputed. They did exist—and for that matter, similar attitudes exist today, as well. Quite undoubtedly Voltaire could flay remote heathen practices in order to condemn indirectly the intolerance of Roman Catholic France, and he could praise China as a noble contrast to the theologically dogmatic European world. The focus of this study will be different. Although it will acknowledge and indeed cite instances of mere polemicism and unquestionable cultural blindness, it will also investigate some of those attempts that were made toward cultural understanding and sympathy. It will, at the end, come up with no quantitative conclusions, not only because no modern scholar's cultural understanding and sympathy is unlimited, but especially because the attitudes and motivations of the eighteenth century itself were complex and not reducible to quantification. Perhaps, however, one can arrive at some greater insight into this complexity than has prevailed so far in scholarly and popular writing on the eighteenth century. A further warning is in order. An exploratory study such as this one cannot

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treat all of the foreign cultures cited inside and outside the Encyclopedia, and cannot treat alike all that are in fact cited. This essay will continue to deal with representative instances alone, and conflicting evidence will not be excluded. An earlier chapter has concerned itself with eighteenth-century views of national character, and has made a number of references to specific nations in Europe. Without retracing this ground, just one summary note may be added—on the French failure to appreciate properly the genius of Shakespeare. This, perhaps, has come to rank next only to the frequently cited treatment of China as evidence for cross-cultural blindness in the French Enlightenment. Although literary criticism is generally outside the purview of this study, the French blind spot concerning Shakespeare does bear some relationship to the French appreciation of a different culture, the English, and thus deserves several words here. Or was it indeed a blind spot? The evidence points rather to a case of astigmatism, with severity varying according to the particular eighteenthcentury commentator. Nearly everybody, it appears, who wrote on English culture felt impelled to contribute an observation or so on Shakespeare—but virtually all of them did recognize the basic genius of the English writer. The consensus, to be sure, was that his genius was seriously flawed—not an unexpected conclusion in an age where literary classicism remained a powerful influence. From literary amateurs like the abbe Jean-Bernard Le Blanc (1706-1781), who found Shakespeare to have been "a great painter" of the human scene, though full of irregularities and crudities,1 to Voltaire, the most celebrated playwright of the age—all found the English writer to have been ignorant of the classical rales and many other niceties of their own more enlightened time. Especially in his last decades, when his earlier Anglophilia was turning a bit sour, Voltaire found the appeal of Shakespeare to the English to be rather puzzling, since the earlier author was obviously so deficient in many of the verbal and theatrical proprieties.2 Henri (Jakob Heinrich) Meister (1744-1826), an important contributor to Grimm's Literary Correspondence, would sum up the eighteenth-century French view of Shakespeare in 1776. Meister envisaged Shakespeare as "a colossal statue whose conception is imposing and awe-inspiring, but whose execution is in turn brutal, negligent, and over-detailed." Shakespeare inspired in Meister "more astonishment than admiration,"3 and such was the playwright's impact on most other French commentators of the time. It seems unnecessary, however, to generalize from this that the French were utterly unable to understand English civilization. The Shakespeare question in eighteenth-century France is primarily an episode in the history of esthetic criticism. Contemporary French observation of the Russian world, on the other hand,

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could have involved a cultural perspective of some depth.4 A good deal of information was available on the country, though not on Russian literature and art, which were virtually unknown. For one thing, a number of Russians were more and more consistently on view in France, from the awesome Peter the Great, for two months in 1717, to the Grand Duke Paul in 1782; lesser visitors ranged from wealthy aristocrats to impoverished students. The French were flattered by the Russian thirst for information and social polish but somewhat scandalized by the often flagrant immorality of the small Russian colony. The French, however, studied the Russians in France much less than the Russians studied the French, and thus one sort of opportunity for understanding Russia was largely lost.5 Somewhat more was certainly learned about Russia by Frenchmen visiting Russia. Most of them—confirming Rousseau's observation about travel reporting in general6—were not good observers; many, for example, were in the country simply to seek an easy fortune. A few of the French did try seriously to understand the Russians, and wrote letters and memoirs on the subject; their analyses of the Russian character ranged from general approval, as in the memoirs of the diplomat La Messaliere, to disappointment and disgust, as in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's reaction to what he saw as the crudity and xenophobia of the people. In the 1770s both Grimm and Diderot visited Russia; their reactions will be noted below. It seems to have occurred to virtually nobody to try to learn Russian, or to look at all closely into the social or cultural institutions that were native to the land—not a totally surprising failure in view of the contemporary Russian attempt by court and upper classes to become as French (or sometimes as German or English) as possible.7 The same failure was evident among the many distinguished French correspondents of Catherine II, from Grimm and Diderot to Voltaire, Buffon, Marmontel, and the sculptor Falconet.8 What in fact the French found principally interesting in Russia was its political institutions and their potentialities for reform following French Enlightenment theory. A few were concerned with the religious situation in Russia, but primarily as an example, since Peter's time, of official religious toleration. On these matters there was a considerable literature available to the French, almost entirely by westerners and of course in western languages.9 A further hurdle confronting a serious and impartial understanding of Russia was the tendency of French writers to polarize dogmatically concerning that country as it was and as they hoped it might be. Here the question of westernization was uppermost—some, such as Montesquieu and Voltaire, applauding the attempt begun by Peter the Great to modernize and westernize the land, and others, like Condillac and Mably, sharing Rousseau's doubts about ever remaking Russia in the western image. Most of the argument,

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however, centered on political forms, with little if any attention paid to broader social or cultural issues.10 Among French philosophes, Voltaire may well have been the best and most widely informed on Russia, despite the fact that he himself never visited that land. His personal contacts with Russian intellectuals, and eventually with Catherine herself, were extensive.11 So, too, was his historical research on Russia; the results included two long works, one on Charles XII of Sweden, Peter's great antagonist, the other on Peter himself (History of the Russian Empire under Peter the Great, 1759-1763).12 On the relatively simple fact of interest in a foreign land, and in quantity both of information and of literary output on a foreign people, Voltaire must rank high among the eighteenthcentury French authors who wrote on Russia. Nor is it easy to denigrate the sincerity of his interest and of his written production: Voltaire was utterly serious about Russia, even to the extent of usually forswearing the flippant or caustic wit that enlivened, or trivialized, much of his writing about many other countries. In other words, although Voltaire's marks must be high on quantitative concern for Russian affairs, the quality, breadth, and depth of that concern can be very pointedly questioned. Voltaire's treatment of Russia is, as a matter of fact, a classic instance of putting the subject of a foreign civilization almost exclusively into a French Enlightenment perspective. Aside from the sheer delight in discovering historical facts and correlations, which it would be as churlish not to recognize in Voltaire as in any other good historian, it seems clear that his interest in Russia focused primarily on those concerns mentioned above that were typical of Russian studies in the Enlightenment— legislative reform and the religious toleration that could result from firm, enlightened state control over the religious establishment. On broader concerns of Russian culture, he was as uninformed and uninterested as other French Enlightenment commentators.13 For Russia, Voltaire was as much the hopeful cosmopolitan reformer as he was for most, if not all, other foreign lands. This hopefulness of Voltaire requires emphasis in the case of Russia, since the optimism of many of his contemporaries was more restrained. Here it was the criticism of Rousseau that struck most deeply, primarily because of Rousseau's greater concern for national character. Voltaire was not, as we have seen, always impervious to a recognition of national character, but Rousseau's recognition was certainly more comprehensive and wholehearted.14 Here the Swiss thinker, though not as fully informed or perhaps as professionally competent on the subject of Russia as was his rival, had the deeper insight into Russia's difference from the west, and had the dimmer hopes that Russia could be refashioned in the cosmopolitan mold. The westernization

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process begun by Peter the Great was fated never fully to succeed, for, wrote Rousseau, it was misguided at the outset.15 Other authors of the time took intermediate positions on the distinctiveness and the prospects of Russian civilization.16 Let us note specifically only the instances of two who actually made the uncomfortable eighteenth-century journey to Russia—Grimm and Diderot. Both were thoroughly charmed by Catherine, and both saw, or cared to see, little in Russia outside her court. Having spent nearly two years in Russia, Grimm in the late 1770s was even more remarkable than Voltaire in seeing nothing in Russia except the court and the country's encouraging prospects for western-type reform. One may speculate that if he had remained in the active editorship of the Literary Correspondence during his two visits, he might have left some broader written impressions of the country—but his general orientation does not lend serious encouragement to the idea. For a writer of occasional insight into differences elsewhere in national character, Grimm's writing on Russia is a nearly total disappointment.17 Diderot's performance is little better. As a generally keen observer of the human scene he did, though, at least recognize this deficiency. After his 1773-1774 visit, he wrote to Madame Necker on Russia that he really "did not see it," and that he was rather regretful that he had remained in Petersburg with the Empress and had never visited Moscow.18 Although Diderot professed admiration for the Russian people, he knew little about them, and his projects for Russian legislative reform in the Enlightenment manner were almost completely unrealistic.19 One approaches the Encyclopedia with few hopes for a deeper understanding of Russia.20 On the country's future, de Jaucourt, in the articles "Russia" and "Petersburg,"21 was less optimistic than Voltaire about successful westernization but did not reject the basic aim of the westernizing goal. (Certainly he was less adulatory of Peter the Great than were that monarch's western apologists.)22 The article on "Russia" consists of seven columns; a modest length, but long enough to make note of the great variety and complexity of the Russian land and people. De Jaucourt did recognize the vast diversity of lifestyles and beliefs in the immense Russian realm, and he did give several sentences of the article to many of them. Among pre-Petrine Russian customs and morals, he could find only a few to commend, asserting that "almost all the other customs were crude [grossiers]. "23 Very brief discussions of diverse Russian religions, diets, arts, and agricultural methods are included, but seldom any praise for Russian ways as being better than, or even as good as, western ways. One may conclude that the Encyclopedia's treatment of Russia is a bit more sympathetic and thorough than its readers had any right to expect, but that this treatment is still superficial.

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All in all, the Encyclopedia makes only a small gesture toward redressing the almost unanimous failure of the French Enlightenment to empathize with Russian civilization as something different from the western, or as anything approaching the latter in merit and dignity. During the Enlightenment serious and sometimes lengthy attention was indeed given to Russia, but seldom outside the legislative area. Would the same limitations apply to all exotic peoples? Would all the theoretical openings toward empathy with foreign ways be forgotten when it came to specific civilizations? Obviously, further pursuit of this subject is required.

Jews An instructive comparison and contrast may be drawn between the Russian and the Jewish peoples as viewed by the French eighteenth century. At the outset it must be granted that no parallel between the two groups can be exact. The Russians lived almost exclusively within Russian territorial boundaries; few were seen in France, and by no stretch of the imagination could these few foreigners constitute what would, later in history, be labeled a minority problem. The Jews, on the other hand, had no single existing territorial homeland in the eighteenth century, and tens of thousands of Jews (perhaps forty thousand) lived as subjects of the French monarchy. The crucial distinguishing feature of the Jewish people was nearly always thought to lie in their religious beliefs and practices, not in their racial bloodline; several views of consistent Jewish character do, however, seem to have gotten support from an assumption of racial inheritance. There was, moreover, not much recognition among non-Jews of the various distinctions and subdivisions of the Jewish people— less recognition, certainly, than de Jaucourt accorded the Russians in the most relevant Encyclopedia article.24 There was, interestingly, no truly dominant figure in eighteenth-century Jewry comparable to Peter the Great in Russia—no figure on whom nonJewish attention could focus, whether in admiration or dislike. From the 1760s, above all, French judgment of the Russians would be slanted by immoderate adulation of Empress Catherine, who surpassed all contemporary Jewish leaders not only in prominence but in avowed emulation of western, Enlightened ways of life and thought. Of course there were many ordinary or fairly prominent Jews who hoped, in varying degrees, for assimilation within non-Jewish western life—and it must be admitted that it was mainly the assimilationists, or at least the collaborationists, whom the French Enlightenment really knew and sometimes understood. The Enlightenment gave little serious, sustained attention to specifically Jewish life; the latter was reflected

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in mainstream Enlightenment writing most often simply in disparaging references or as the butt of unkind gibes. If that were the whole story of French Enlightenment attitudes toward the Jews, we could quickly bypass the subject and move on to more promising objects of study. Fortunately (or unfortunately, in view of the virulent denigration of the Jews to be found in Voltaire's writing and elsewhere) the story does not end with misunderstanding or with passing gibes. A few French writers of the age wrote significantly on the Jewish people, and a very few attempted a serious, sympathetic understanding of their characteristics and problems. Aside from the ever-recurrent prejudice in the history of mankind against peoples who are "different," the most serious obstacle to empathy with the Jewish people during the Enlightenment was undoubtedly their association, however distant, with that Christian heritage that distressed so many of the Enlightened. Insofar as the Judeo-Christian tradition foreshadowed the humanitarian virtues of eighteenth-century secular ethics, this tradition could be, and was, tolerated and even praised. Whenever, on the other hand, the ancient tradition seemed to involve superstition, irrationalism, or barbarism, it came under strenuous attack.25 Advocates of religious toleration did indeed sometimes apply this toleration to contemporary Jewry, with varying degrees of enthusiasm. In France, Montesquieu and Rousseau, among the leading lights, displayed the deepest empathy with the Jewish predicament and with Jewish traditions; they were joined by an occasional minor author such as Delisle de Sales, in his Philosophy of Nature (1770).26 Christian apologists, of course, had long praised the Jews of the Old Testament, but had become much less sympathetic concerning New Testament times, when Jews came to be associated with Christian persecution. Still, even in Christian ranks an occasional eighteenth-century writer would be somewhat sympathetic, beginning in 1706 with Jacques Basnage's History of the Jews, from Jesus Christ to the Present.27 Lack of sympathy, however, was more typical of the century. In this respect d'Holbach and Grimm deserve mention. The former, a militant atheist, found the Jewish role in religion to have been thoroughly deplorable: the Jews were the founders of intolerant dogmatism in western religion, and their character (a point on which he offered no serious evidence) was basically unchanging.28 As for Grimm, his general sympathy (1765) with Voltaire's Philosophy of History, later an integral part of the Essay on Customs and Morals, is obvious. "The late abbe Bazin," he wrote of the putative author— Grimm knew and stated that the actual author was Voltaire—"delves deep only when writing on the Jewish people. He examines thoroughly their history and extracts from it all the absurdities, all the ineptitudes, all the infamies, all

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the horrors, and always with the most profound respect [!] for the sacred books and for the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Put simply, his research demonstrates that God's chosen people . . . were the most stupid, the most disgusting, and the most abominable of all the earth's peoples."29 Do these strong and unpleasant words characterize Voltaire's position fairly? To this, the shortest answer would be: not quite, but very nearly. The forty-odd pages in The Philosophy of History concerning the Jews are ostensibly a critique of Jewish civilization in Biblical times.30 They treat ancient Jewish leaders as historical figures—that is, as natural forces rather than agents in the divine plan—and unflattering comments are fairly frequent. Voltaire wrote much more, however, on the Jews than these forty pages, and he rarely had much good to say of them. Occasionally he would urge toleration of the Jewish faith, but his general lack of sympathy with the Jewish people was quite clear to most of his contemporaries.31 He did, to be sure, most often attack the Jews in their Biblical context, as originators of the religious pettiness, irrationality, and obscurantism that they bequeathed, he said, to those enemies of Enlightenment, the Christian churches. Attacking, nevertheless, the undue prominence given to the Jews in Christian histories of the ancient world, Voltaire was in no mood to investigate carefully the ideas and culture of Jewry in his own day. The Jews, he implied again and again, were an overrated people both in ancient and in modern times. They were an exclusive, obnoxious group upon whom he would waste no serious investigation. Yet Voltaire returned repeatedly, almost obsessively, to the Jews, both in his published works and in that correspondence which he knew, in later years, would be at best semi-private, in view of Europe's greediness for Voltairean quotations. At the same time, he did not hold back even in his most ambitious published works. Although we should never forget the more widely humanitarian achievements of Voltaire, it is difficult to imagine a more mischievous and virulent comment on the Jews than one in the Philosophical Dictionary. In the article "Cannibals," we find these extraordinary sentences: "In fact, why should the Jews not have been cannibals? This might have been the only thing that God's people lacked for being the most abominable people on earth."32 Such Voltairean venom had no parallel in the writings of Diderot, even though Diderot shared some of the older author's distaste for the Jewish role in ancient times and in the rise of Christianity. A historical emphasis today, however, on Diderot's anti-Jewishness is quite certainly misplaced.33 Some of his time's anti-Semitism he undoubtedly shared, especially in his earlier writings; what is most notable, though, is that often he rose above it. Diderot agreed with Voltaire on the large Jewish share in later Christian superstition

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and intolerance, and also on the need to attack historical Jewish moral lapses as a way to undermine the special ethical excellence that tradition often ascribed to the Jewish people. Never, though, did Diderot fall into the vehement anti-Jewish bombast of Voltaire. In his last decades Diderot turned more and more to an almost-all-encompassing ideal of toleration, and to the indulgence of his wide-ranging curiosity about the varying peoples of the earth. Perhaps above all, Diderot's private writing, in his correspondence, reveals none of the Voltairean preoccupation with Jewish evil; he certainly did not dwell on that people as a prime root of modern ills.34 Beyond this negative argument for Diderot's relative breadth of vision is the fact that he did visit Jewish enclaves in Holland to observe their customs and religious practices, and that he then refrained from criticizing them. More and more he came to stress a broad cultural receptivity and tolerance, and to venture well beyond his contemporaries in approaching sympathetically the literary contributions of millennia of Jewry, for poetic insight if not for philosophical truth. Although he joined his non-Jewish contemporaries in being quite ignorant of traditional Jewish forms of art and music, he probed deeper than most into Jewish poetry, myth, and thought.35 These interests already are partly evident in Diderot's unusually long Encyclopedia article on "Philosophy of the Jews."36 Diderot found Jewish thought in Biblical times to have been rather primitive, and certainly sadly lacking in scientific understanding; the article's tone, however, is moderate— sometimes approving, sometimes mildly censorious. Diderot, even for the early period of Jewish history, apparently strove for overall objectivity, and the same is true for the even longer section on Jewish thought since the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans. Jewish ideas are the exclusive focus of the article; nowhere are the Jews discussed, for good or for ill, as a racial group. Nor are the Jews categorized or described racially in the shorter but even more significant Encyclopedia article by de Jaucourt, "The Jew, . . . [in] Ancient and Modern History."37 Here the Jewish people are considered a group mainly (aside from religion) for their key importance as objects of economic persecution and social injustice.38 The Jew, de Jaucourt wrote, is a "sectary of the Judaic religion," notable for his "inviolable attachment to the Mosaic law in the midst of opprobrium and vexations.'' There are two substantial paragraphs on Jewish survival across the centuries despite persecution; the Jews, wrote de Jaucourt, were "perpetual martyrs" for their beliefs in the Middle Ages, but have been somewhat better treated in modern times. All in all, the article is rather remarkable, in its day, for the degree of sympathy shown by a non-Jew for the Jewish people. We should note, on the other hand, that sympathy here is not associated with detailed understanding, and that, conversely, Diderot's more thorough

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understanding involved only moderate historical sympathy. One can, though, make a case, if on rather slender evidence, for the Encyclopedia's revealing itself as somewhat more historically sympathetic to the Jews than was the French Enlightenment as a whole—and of course far more sympathetic than Voltaire when aroused, as he often was, in anti-Jewish wrath. Enlightenment knowledge of the Jewish history and people was much deeper, in any case, than knowledge of Russia, since the Jewish destiny was more closely tied to that of the west. Our next concern must be with two peoples, not nationalities even in the loose eighteenth-century sense, whose cultural connections with the western world were more tenuous—the blacks of Africa and the "redskins" of the Americas.

Blacks and Native Americans With blacks and native Americans, more than with the Jewish people, the Enlightenment fixed and agreed on the importance of no single leaders such as Peter and Catherine among the Russians. If this meant less diversion of interest from the masses of each cultural group, and offered a potentially more just appreciation for the group itself, it also might seem to have implied, for the Enlightenment, a certain lack of cultural distinction for the people as a whole. History did reveal names, distinct personalities, and achievements of many Jewish leaders; on the other hand, it turned up almost no leaders of towering importance among blacks and native Americans. This difference rested partly, as later centuries have discovered, on simple ignorance. In turn, this ignorance, in part, derived from an obvious poverty of information—but it may well have been strengthened, among whites, by lower expectations for a race of markedly different skin color.39 This color line, however, was drawn far more distinctly for one race than for the others—that is, for blacks. The reason most often seems to have been frankly esthetic, on grounds that quite surpass the understanding of later ages: blacks were for most eighteenth-century Europeans intrinsically unattractive. "Not only" wrote Formey in the Encyclopedia article "Negro," "does their color set them apart, but they differ from other men in all their facial features: the broad and flattened noses, the big lips, and the wool in place of hair—all these seem to constitute a new species of man." And in Formey's next paragraph these features are directly associated with "ugliness."40 No such "ugliness" of features, we should note, was necessarily linked with Jews, or even with such peoples of racially distinctive skin pigmentation as native Americans or the Chinese and other "Orientals." Starting with a vision of blacks so hopelessly unflattering, the Enlighten-

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ment could find few, if any, redeeming qualities in that race—and apparently considered the search hardly worth the trouble. Thus we can pass rather quickly over an area with such relatively sparse documentation. The treatment of black slaves did of course receive humanitarian sympathy, and more and more of it as the century progressed. This sympathy, however, was broadly human and humane in nature; it was not a sympathy for specifically black characteristics or culture, and thus is not a subject for the present study. Moreover, whatever special attention was given to the blacks specifically as blacks was directed almost exclusively into physiological channels. Probably the emphasis on physical characteristics was sometimes related to the Enlightenment's simple failure to find any eminent cultural characteristics among blacks. To this author's knowledge there was not a single suggestion put forward seriously in eighteenth-century, pre-Revolutionary France to the effect that the blacks then possessed, or had ever possessed, a high culture of their own, whether in Africa or within those parts of the two hemispheres enjoying European civilization. In short, the blacks were portrayed as a primitive people in the most derogatory sense. To be sure, a focus on physiology would be scarcely surprising when an Encyclopedia article appeared under a scientific rather than a historical or sociological classification. For example, although the Encyclopedist JeanHenri-Samuel Formey was a Protestant minister, his article "Negro" was classified under "natural history." Except for separate entries on "White Negroes", "Slave Trade," and "Negroes Considered as Slaves in the American Colonies," no other articles exclusively concerned blacks as an entity— again an indication of the Encyclopedists' failure to recognize any concept or reality of a specifically black culture. To limit ourselves, as we must, to the physiological or racial characteristics of blacks as recognized in the French Enlightenment, we should note the occasional insistence upon the common humanity of all races—an insistence that may well have sometimes aimed at lingering suspicions that blacks were indeed not truly human at all.41 Buff on stressed the common humanity of peoples with varying skin pigmentation, and the superficiality of skin differences. There had been, he asserted, only one original species of man, and subsequent color darkening was the result of warm or tropical climates.42 Speculation on blacks did sometimes extend from the physiological to the moral, though still as a factor of racial character. Buffon above all, in his Natural History, would describe the moral traits of blacks in sympathetic if stereotypical terms. Blacks, he wrote, are happy and contented when well treated. They are "very sensitive to good deeds and to outrages." "They are naturally compassionate and tender toward their children, their friends, and their fellows. . . . Thus they have ... an excellent heart, and the germ of all

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the virtues." As we would expect, he led from this not into any discussion of black cultural achievement but to the broadly humanitarian feelings that his white contemporaries should harbor for black slaves.43 The case of the pre-Columbian peoples of Central and South America, focusing on Mexico and Peru, was necessarily somewhat different from that of "primitive" black peoples, even if Buffon himself considered the Mexicans and Peruvians to have been only recently and rather superficially civilized at the time of the Spanish conquests.44 The past glories of pre-Columbian civilizations did potentially lend a bit more cultural respectability to the Indians of Mexico and South America than could be granted, on the basis of eighteenth-century knowledge, to the blacks dispersed from Africa. Let us, however, look primarily—as the Enlightenment so often itself did—at the Indians of North America, many of whom still retained their pre-European identity and civilization. How did the Enlightenment perception of these native Americans resemble, or differ from, its perception of blacks? Here again, with American natives, racial characteristics were occasionally noted since, at the very least, another variant from the white norm in skin pigmentation was obviously involved.45 Since, however, somewhat more of a sociological nature was known of native Americans than of black African life, we may turn directly to these broader or less physiological matters. It should be stressed that throughout, despite the Europocentric vision of the Enlightenment, native Americans were seen as having a civilization, and sometimes a set of problems, of their own.46 As Gilbert Chinard demonstrated in his classic America and the Exotic Dream,41 the "redskins" of North America had become, by the eighteenth century, the objects of an exotic European dreamworld—a privilege, dubious though it was, that certainly was never accorded the blacks of Africa. For native Americans, primitivism had become, usually, not a mark of shame but actually of glory. It was they who probably best exemplified the "natural man" so eagerly sought by that faction of philosophes who believed in the natural goodness of man—or at least in his vast potentialities for goodness. This search for the "good savage," such as among North American natives, did exemplify the frequent Enlightenment tendency to stereotype. It was Rousseau and Voltaire who perhaps best exemplified a crucial contrast of temperaments and standards when evaluating primitive peoples. Rousseau's tendency to find an admirable natural simplicity in unsophisticated cultures is well known and requires no detailing in these pages. This tendency (it did have its exceptions) was subjective, but it was reinforced by a selective reading of those travel narratives available to him.48 On the other hand, Voltaire's reading and social orientation predisposed him to question Rousseau's frequently rosy picture of primitive peoples. Although Voltaire's basic

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sympathy for his "Huron" in The Ingenu is clear, we should recall that this Voltairean hero turned out to be of French, not native American, blood.49 Both Voltaire and Rousseau, in short, used primitives such as native Americans to externalize their personal feelings and philosophies. Their stereotypes were made superficially plausible, to be sure, by carefully selected evidence from travel and missionary narratives. Lacking, however, in openmindedness, their research was necessarily incomplete and inconclusive, and their conclusions were predictable and stereotyped. Few clearer cases can be found of a temperamental and ideological interpretation of a foreign culture, as against any honest attempt at an objective understanding of cultural complexity. But this is by no means the whole Enlightenment story of cultural analysis, even concerning such an ideologically perceived group as native Americans. Occasionally (as we have seen and will continue to see) Enlightenment stereotypes were transcended through serious, even first-hand studies of nonEuropean peoples. Among several substantial eighteenth-century works on North American natives let us look at one well-known example: JosephFrangois Lafitau's Customs and Morals of the American Savages, Compared with the Customs and Morals of the Earliest Times (1724).50 This Jesuit missionary had acquired no small amount of first and secondhand knowledge of the Indians of New France, as he was quick to point out early in his bulky two-volume study. "During the five years," he wrote, "that I passed in a mission among the Canadian savages, I wanted to instruct myself thoroughly on the mentality and customs of these peoples. Above all I have profited from the insights and knowledge of an old Jesuit missionary, Father Julien Gamier, who, having consecrated himself to missions from his novitiate onwards, passed more than sixty years in missionary endeavor. . . . He learned the Algonquin tongue quite well—the most widespread native language of North America—but he knows the Huron language especially perfectly, in addition to the five dialects of the Iroquois, among whom he has lived most of his life."51 The full title of Lafitau's study, noted above, suggests the two goals of the work—not only "to know the character of the savages, and to inform myself on their customs and practices," but also to discover in these customs and practices ' 'vestiges from the most remote antiquity.'' Particularly he would be concerned, he said, to show that the North American Indians had some "knowledge of divinity"; thus could one atheist argument be subverted, by helping to demonstrate the "unanimous agreement of all peoples in recognizing a Superior Being, and in honoring him in one manner or another. ..." Lafitau would draw parallels, not only with the Judeo-Christian tradition, but with the ancient mysteries of Bacchus, of Cybele the Mother of the Gods, and

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of Isis and Osiris.52 Fortunately, in actual fact, Lafitau did not devote most of his energies to this hazardous task, but rather to the native peoples whom he understood much better than he understood the ancient peoples of the other hemisphere. Moreover, Lafitau's concerns were much less exclusively religious than one might have expected. The resultant work became, in fact, a study of broad sociological interest and importance. Among the aspects of Indian life that he detailed at significant length were languages, warfare, domestic life, marriage, education, games, medicine, death, burial customs, and of course occupations of both sexes, with an emphasis on agriculture, hunting, fishing, and trade. From all this, what were Lafitau's conclusions on the natives of North America—or, more precisely, of the several tribes of New France that he was studying? Despite some cases of "crudeness in customs and morals," and their lack of literacy and science, these peoples, he wrote, were generally not "gross, stupid, ignorant, or ferocious, without any feeling for religion and humanity." On the contrary, "they have a good mind, lively imagination, an easy understanding, and an admirable memory. All have at least traces of an ancient, inherited religion and of a form of government. . . . " They are courageous and fearless and have "their own sort of civility"; they respect their elders, show deference toward their peers and hospitality toward strangers. They are, it is true, not lacking in certain serious faults, such as frivolity, extreme laziness, and a suspicious and vindictive nature. "They are," he added, "cruel to their enemies and brutal in their pleasures." At least their simplicity and poverty keep them from "all those refinements of vice that luxury and abundance brings" to other peoples.53 Although these conclusions smack of the stereotype, some of them do relate to actual observation and to the first-hand information available to Lafitau. In this single work, native North Americans received a much fuller—and a significantly more sympathetic—understanding than the black peoples received from eighteenth-century French writers. The same would be true in the pages of the Encyclopedia. From the Encyclopedia's curt summation of black "ugliness" cited earlier, it is already a great distance to the abbe Pestre's observation, in the article "Canadians (Philosophy of the)," that the natives of New France "have very regular features, with aquiline noses, and are in general very well built."54 The later Supplement, it is true, would turn for its main article on "America" to Cornelius de Pauw, a rather notorious opponent of the "good savage" school of thought. De Pauw's article itself, however, is relatively mild, contenting itself with a few remarks on Indian laziness and on the impurities—not the purity and simplicity—of native religion. The overwhelming emphasis of

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the article is on such matters as climate and population, mainly in South and Central America, not in the north.55 Pestre's article, in the original Encyclopedia, is more sympathetic, and somewhat more detailed on cultural characteristics, than is de Pauw's longer Supplement article. There is in Pestre, for example, a quite specific list of Indian religious principles. More generally, Pestre admitted that Canadian Indians do have a "ferocious glance, rustic bearing, and a simple and taciturn approach"; they are undemonstrative but also are good, affable, and charitably hospitable to strangers and unfortunates. They are tenacious and deliberate, honest and elevated in heart, and extremely courageous. Pestre's accompanying list of Indian defects quotes directly (without acknowledgement) from Lafitau, down to the same observation concerning avoidance of the "refinements of vice" that characterize more luxurious peoples. This rather brief article is, in fact, almost wholly derivative rather than original. Its key assertion, nevertheless, is rather new in its frankness; it is appended to a discussion of the Indian belief in immortality and in a perfect, not at all arbitrary deity. "All this," Pestre concluded, "is not so savage" after all.56 In any case, native Americans emerge in a far more sympathetic light from the Encyclopedia, and from the French eighteenth century in general, than do those peoples of still darker skin. Their life, moreover, was far better documented than that of blacks, and it often seemed to qualify as part of the ''good savage" tradition, though not without reservations. New questions and opportunities would present themselves to the French Enlightenment when it turned to exotic peoples who by no stretch of the imagination could be labeled as savage or primitive. These questions and opportunities must be the subject of a new chapter in this study. NOTES 1. Helene Monod-Cassidy, Un voyageur-philosophe an xviiie siecle: I'abbe Jean-BernardLe Blanc (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1941), pp. 287-89. 2. For summary discussions of a complex subject, see A. Owen Aldridge, Voltaire and the Century of Light (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 283-86; and Besterman, Voltaire, pp. 125-52. 3. Grimm et al., Correspondence litteraire, vol. 11 (1879), p. 218 (March 1776). 4. Much has already been written on this subject. See especially Dmitri S. von Mohrenschildt, Russia in the Intellectual Life of Eighteenth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936); Carolyn H. Wilberger, Voltaire's Russia: Window on the East, in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 164 (Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 1976). My paragraphs in this study owe much to both.

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5. Von Mohrenschildt, Russia, pp. 29-58. 6. See Chapter 5, note 27. 7. Von Mohrenschildt, Russia, pp. 59-130. 8. Ibid., pp. 131-55. 9. Ibid., pp. 159-235. 10. Ibid., pp. 238-48; Wilberger, Voltaire's Russia, pp. 199-273. 11. Wilberger, Voltaire's Russia, pp. 135-83. 12. Ibid., pp. 23-133. 13. Ibid., pp. 13-16, 275-79 and passim. 14. Ibid., pp. 199-233. 15. Ibid., pp. 200-1, 204-7, 221-23. 16. Ibid., pp. 235-73. 17. Ibid., pp. 235-36. 18. Diderot, Correspondance, ed. Georges Roth (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1955-1970), vol. 14 (1968): letter to Mme Necker, 6 September 1774, p. 78. 19. Von Mohrenschildt, Russia, pp. 76-83. 20. Wilberger, Voltaire's Russia, pp. 238-39. 21. "RUSSIE," Encyclopedie, vol. 14, pp. 442-45; "PETERSBOURG," vol. 12, pp. 463-64. 22. "PETERSBOURG," Encyclopedie, vol. 12, p. 464. There is nothing in this article on Russian character or society. 23. "RUSSIE," Encyclopedie, vol. 14, p. 443. 24. For Enlightenment approaches to the Jews, see: Arthur Hertzberg, The French Enlightenment and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968); Paul H. Meyer, "The Attitude of the Enlightenment toward the Jews," in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 26 (Geneva: Institut et Musee Voltaire, 1963), pp. 1161-1205. Hertzberg's work includes a long bibliography, pp. 369-91. The 40,000 figure is given in Meyer, p. 1167. A recent, rather intemperate condemnation of Enlightenment blindness on Jewry is found in Pierre Pluchon, Negres et Juifs au xviiie siecle: le racisme au siecle des lumieres (Paris: Tallandier, 1984), especially pp. 64-82. 25. Post-Biblical Jewish writings also were attacked as obscurantist; see, for example, Meyer, "The Attitude of the Enlightenment," p. 1170. 26. Meyer, "The Attitude of the Enlightenment," pp. 1172-81; Hertzberg, The French Enlightenment and the Jews, cites only anti-Semitic comments by Rousseau. 27. Hertzberg, The French Enlightenment and the Jews, pp. 47, 248-67. 28. Meyer, "The Attitude of the Enlightenment," p. 1180; Hertzberg, The French Enlightenment and the Jews, p. 309. 29. Grimm et al., Correspondance litteraire, vol. 6, p. 271 (1 May 1765). 30. Les oeuvres completes de Voltaire, ed. Theodore Besterman et al., vol. 59: La philosophie de I'histoire, pp. 220-62. 31. It has been persuasively argued that in his own day Voltaire was usually interpreted, both inside and outside Jewry, and inside and outside the Enlightenment, as an enemy of the Jews: Hertzberg, The French Enlightenment and the Jews, pp.

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286-99. See Hertzberg, pp. 280-308, for a very unsympathetic, only slightly overdrawn portrayal of Voltaire's anti-Jewish stance. See Pluchon, Negres et Juifs, especially pp. 69-71, for further citations from Voltaire. 32. Voltaire, Dictionnaire phitosophique, p. 26. 33. Such is the persuasive argument (1981) of Leon Schwartz's Diderot and the Jews, pp. 17-20 and passim. 34. Ibid., pp. 66-99. 35. Ibid., pp. 100-23. 36. "JUIFS, Philosophie des," Encyclopedie, vol. 9, pp. 25-51. Much of this is a compendium from such earlier writers as Basnage. Pluchon finds the Encyclopedie article cold toward the Jews and fundamentally anti-Semitic: Negres et Juifs, pp. 73-74. 37. "JUIF, (Hist. anc. & mod.)," Encyclopedie, vol. 9, pp. 24-25. 38. Schwartz, Diderot and the Jews, pp. 127-29. 39. For a general discussion of the Enlightenment view of blacks, see Pluchon, Negres et Juifs, especially pp. 116-57. Pluchon's harsh criticism of Enlightenment views on blacks seems to me more solidly founded than in the case of the Jews. 40. "NEGRE," Encyclopedie, vol. 11, p. 76. 41. The eighteenth-century British debate on whether the black was properly a human being at all is discussed in Marshall and Williams, The Great Map of Mankind, pp. 227-55. 42. See Jean Piveteau's introductory summation in Buffon, Oeuvres philosophiques, pp. xxiv-xxv. The eighteenth century however, had not wholly forgotten a different, polygenetic theory of racial differentiation: the theory that blacks and other dark-skinned peoples had not degenerated in the course of time from an original human prototype, but dated back to still earlier, pre-Adamite creations, and that races were forever fixed and basically different one from another. See Popkin, "The Philosophical Bases of Modern Racism," pp. 134, 139-42. 43. Buffon, Oeuvres philosophiques, Varietes dans iespece humaine (from Histoire naturelle), pp. 312-13. 44. Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire, pp. 155-56. For the subject of native Americans in general, see pp. 154-60, 210-15. 45. Buffon volunteered such curious specifics as these: that the genital organs of native Americans were "feeble and small," and that Indian males were lacking in "ardor for their females": p. 213. 46. Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire, p. 159. 47. Chinard, L'Amerique et le reve exotique dans la litterature franc,aise au xviie et au xviiie siecle (1913). 48. Ibid., pp. 341-65. 49. Ibid., pp. 367-74. 50. Joseph-Francois Lafitau, Moeurs des sauvages americains comparees am moeurs des premiers temps, 2 vols. (Paris: Saugrain 1'aine, 1724). See also Chinard, L'Amerique et le reve exotique, pp. 315-26. For other clerical travel analyses, see Chinard, pp. 313-15, 326-40.

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51. Lafitau, Moeurs des sauvages americains, vol. 1, pp. 2-3. 52. Ibid., pp. 3, 6-9. 53. Ibid., pp. 537, 105-6. 54. "CANADIENS (PHILOSOPHIE DES)," Encyclopedie, vol. 2, p. 581. 55. "AMERIQUE (Hist. & Geographie)," Supplement a l'Encyclopedie, vol. 1, pp. 343-54. 56. "CANADIENS (PHILOSOPHIE DES)," Encyclopedie, vol. 2, p. 582. On the treatment of America in general in the Encyclopedie—much more on geography, botany, etc., than on the cultural characteristics of the natives—see Richard Switzer, "America in the Encyclopedic," in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 58 (1967), pp. 1481-99.

7 The Mildly Exotic East The Islamic World One can accuse neither the Enlightenment nor the Encyclopedia of absolute ignorance of the peoples and civilizations of Asia. Knowledge and interest, however, are no guarantees of true understanding, and they guaranteed no such understanding in the eighteenth century. The question therefore is one of degree: how much cross-cultural understanding did the French Enlightenment display in its investigation of the nature of Asian life and culture? This chapter will touch upon three representative areas which, aside from ancient Palestine, were the best known and most often cited in Enlightenment writing. First of all, attempts to characterize the whole, or most, of Asia were by no means unknown. This daunting enterprise is best exemplified in the work of Voltaire. In this matter, as elsewhere, the patriarch of philosophes was willing to advance confident, if not necessarily well-founded, cultural generalizations both in public and in private. A draft in his Notebooks exemplifies also the general, more public Voltairean approach. After a denial of any true literary eloquence in a society typified by the terse commands of masters to slaves, Voltaire takes up a somewhat different approach to the matter of Asian lack of literary delicacy and subtlety: In the Orient, people have always said more than they mean: this is the bloated style. They make the hills leap and the mountains recede. There has never been finesse in the writings of Orientals. The slavery which elsewhere has cramped mind and spirit has here expanded it beyond all bounds. Orientals who prodigally give titles to their masters treat everything else the same way. Their king, whose dusty footsteps they kiss, is brother to the sun. What would they say of the sun itself?1

In the Encyclopedia article "Taste," Voltaire firmly denied, on cultural grounds, all taste to Asia in the literary arts:

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There are vast lands where taste has never gained access: they are those where society has not perfected itself, where men and women have nothing in common, where certain arts like sculpture and figure painting are forbidden by religion. When there is so little social life, the mind and spirit is narrowed, its point is blunted, and there is no basis for forming taste. When several fine arts are lacking, the others have little to sustain themselves, since all are linked and depend one upon the other. This is one of the reasons that Asians have never had well-put-together works in any field, and that taste has been shared only by certain European peoples.2

The case for a European monopoly on advanced art and taste could not be put more baldly. It was also a case for cultural differences, if hardly for cross-cultural understanding. Voltaire would show somewhat more moderation in his Essay on Customs and Morals. On the characteristics of "Orientals," however, he remained basically firm: All these peoples resemble us only in their passions and in that universal reason which counterbalances the passions and which impresses this law on all hearts: Do not to others what you would not wish them to do to you. These [passions and universal reason] are the two characteristics that nature has imprinted on all different human races. . . . All the rest comes from the physical environment and from custom. 3

One specific Asian culture (or in this case a predominantly Asian culture), the Islamic world, received spotty attention in the French Enlightenment. Again it was Voltaire who, among the leading thinkers, was most willing to generalize on cultural characteristics. However superficial most of his comments may seem today, it must not be forgotten that Voltaire's judgments on Islam were components of an attempted world-view that was unusual indeed in its ambitious breadth.4 Voltaire's interest in the Islamic peoples was, of course, not unprecedented. His writing would echo the praises sung earlier in the century by the Comte de Boulainvilliers, who found the Arabs, in particular, to be a noble, proud, and enlightened race.5 Voltaire's view eventually swung toward similar affirmations, despite his earlier (1739-1741) propagandistic attack on Islamic fanaticism in the tragedy Muhammad. Even in his definitive view, however, a substantial coloring of propaganda remained: in praising Islam he could handily attack the character and religion of the ancient Jews. Judaism became the villain that had taught little but superstition to its Christian heirs; the Muslims, on the contrary, had become the teachers of Europe in the arts and especially the sciences. For Voltaire, the Islamic faith was riddled with fraud and fanaticism, but its notion of God was basically an elevated one,

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worthy of modern admiration. As a people—contrasted with the Jews, so niggardly and cruel—the Arabic peoples were hospitable, proudly courageous, magnanimous, and respectful of women and children.6 Voltaire presented only superficial documentation for these views. Bringing the Islamic peoples—including, of course, the Moors of medieval Spain—within the embrace of a universal history and sociology was a Voltairean achievement far greater than his cultural understanding of Islamic particulars. In the Encyclopedia one can find some of the same merits and defects. The longest Encyclopedic treatment of the Arabs was reserved for the Supplement, in the article "Arabs (History of the)" by Frangois-Rene Turpin (1709-1799).7 Here a fuller analysis of the Arab character is presented than in Voltaire's Essay on Customs and Morals. The Arabs, wrote Turpin, were a haughty people, scornful of other nations. Healthy and with well-developed physiques, they developed qualities appropriate to their harsh desert climate. Unaccustomed to social warmth and grace, they had become solitary and grave—characteristics not born within them but rather the fruit of geographical circumstance. Arabs could go beyond simple unconcern for others to a ferocious cruelty, all the while being tenderly devoted to their own families and hospitable toward strangers.8 In Diderot's original volumes, the Islamic peoples received somewhat less attention. Diderot's article "Saracens" largely concerned Islamic philosophy and theology, stopping short of racial generalizations.9 In his article "Arabia," however, he had anticipated this omission with a vengeance: with atypical lack of subtlety or nuance he pronounced that' 'the Arabs are thievish and bellicose."10 One could hardly find a flatter, or less well supported, statement than this of racial or national character. Other Encyclopedia articles did occasionally point to specific Islamic achievements—great medieval libraries, for example (in Diderot's article "Library"), and the polish, magnificence, and luxury of Moorish Spain (in de Jaucourt's "Mohammedanism"). 11 By and large, the Encyclopedia presents no impressive understanding of Near or Middle Eastern peoples and civilizations. Even relatively subtle authors such as Diderot and de Jaucourt tended to present only the broadest generalizations. The unsigned article "Asians, Philosophy of the," probably by Diderot, is a fair representation of the whole—a hasty summary of Asian philosophies from Arabia to Japan. Its view of these varied peoples may be characterized as straightforward but hardly sympathetic. Somewhat more detail is furnished in de Jaucourt's article on Turkey, which recognizes (as his article "Russia" had done for the Russians) different racial characteristics in

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different parts of the Ottoman domain.12 For other Asian lands of interest to the Encyclopedia and to the Enlightenment in general, one must move farther east.

India On the vast subcontinent of India there was a significant body of information available to the French Enlightenment, especially in the form of travel and missionary reports. A modern scholar lists fifty-eight books on India in Voltaire's library.13 These, of course, do not include an unedited manuscript of the industrious French civil servant and traveler Pierre Poivre, in which he, in common with most other voyagers, was quite willing to sketch the Indian character in general terms. '' The character of the Indian," he wrote, " is to be superstitious, lazy, voluptuous, thievish because of poverty, ignorant, proud, timid. . . . His greatest virtue is humaneness. The Indians are gentle and like to oblige."14 India was, however, by no means as commonly cited by the philosophes as was China. Again, the most prominent writer on the subject was Voltaire.15 Daniel Hawley's recent conclusion concerning Voltaire's India seems fully justified—that Voltaire made use of India more than he actually studied it. India, for Voltaire, became yet another cudgel against the Jews, who, he said, derived much of the wisdom they possessed from Indian sources. From Voltaire's early view of India as a rather exotic, superstitious land, he moved by the late 1760s to a far more favorable approach. The ancient Brahmins now represented a "sublime" ethical code based on that "universal reason" that Voltaire found at least faintly glimmering across the globe and throughout the ages. By consulting seriously only three of his fifty-eight references, Voltaire was able to demonstrate the validity, for India, of his assumption of universal traits in human nature.16 Any assertion of Voltaire's superficiality on Indian culture does, nevertheless, require qualification. First, one should underline the important support lent by Voltaire to Indian studies in France: India became, for a time, at least a minor fad on the French scene. Again Voltaire helped extend the educated cultural horizons of the age, as in his popularization of the Islamic and Chinese worlds.17 A further point is that Voltaire found, not only a certain universality in Indian thought, but also several characteristics that were specific, he maintained, to the subcontinent. His reflections on India may be found most notably in Historical Fragments on India and in his Essay on the Customs,

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Morals, and Spirit of Nations.18 In the Essay, for example, he noted the relative absence in India of that warlike fury that had gripped so much of the western world throughout history.19 More than twenty pages of the Essay are devoted specifically to India—its religion, government, and institutions in general.20 Here Voltaire recognized, not only the elevated Brahmin idea of one God, but also the superstitious, fabulous mythology current among the common people. He judged the Indians to be characteristically gentle in nature—the effect of the persistently warm climate and of an obligingly rich soil. Indian vices, he concluded, were "milder than ours."21 Although Voltaire's picture of the peoples of India is sketchy and onesided, the portrayal by Diderot in the Encyclopedia marks no great advance. After making a quick bow to the elevated "moral philosophy" of certain Indian sages, Diderot became much more critical—less, however, of the superstition of the masses sometimes acknowledged by Voltaire than of the quietistic repose idealized in Indian thought. Possibly in this he came closer than Voltaire to Indian reality, but in so doing he demonstrated a total incomprehension of one side of the Indian mind. This failure, to be sure, has remained characteristic of many western commentators on India who, rightly or wrongly, have found Indian quietism unfathomable. Three Encyclopedia articles by Diderot convey his own approach: "Indians, Philosophy of the," "Malabars, Philosophy of the," and "Brahmins."22 It is an "absurd quietism" that he condemns—an approach that lowers man even beneath the animals.23 Repose as a "perfect state" made little sense to this lively Encyclopedist.24 Brahmin perfection means, he said, "the deepest, deadening slumber of the mind, the calming of all vital force, the absolute suspension of the senses. This state so strongly resembles sleep that it seems that a few grains of opium would sanctify a Brahmin much more surely than do all of his actual efforts."25 As often happens in the pages of the Encyclopedia, de Jaucourt's summations are less vivid but a bit more comprehensive than Diderot's. De Jaucourt's three columns on India26 refer to the primitive monotheistic elevation of Indian religion and to Indian quietism, but they also glance at some more practical Indian contributions in games, astronomy, and mathematics, as well as at the causes of Indian religious belief. The nature of the climate, which has given these people a feebleness that renders them timid, has at the same time given them such a vivid imagination that everything strikes them excessively. This delicacy and sensitivity of their organs makes them flee or suffer all perils. For the same reason of climate they believe that repose and nothingness are the foundation and the ultimate goal of all things. In these lands where excessive heat is oppressive, repose is so delicious that whatever reduces the heart to pure emptiness appears natural. . . . 27

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Even this, of course, is an extraordinarily brief summarization of the spirit of a whole subcontinent. Moreover, it generalizes for a vast region and lacks the recognition of regional subdivisions that de Jaucourt could bring to other Encyclopedia subjects. Still, although the cultures of India are hardly a strong feature in the consciousness of either the Encyclopedia or its age, a broadly recognizable and special vision of a great land and its people does emerge. It is a picture, however inaccurate or briefly sketched, of a people quite different from all others. Although no absolutely unique Indian "human nature" may appear to the eighteenth-century European eye, its peoples do seem to incline, at the very least, to a distinctive approach to the world and its problems. In short, the Indians appear to the Enlightenment to be truly different from Europeans, and from other Asian peoples as well.

China and the Chinese Sage Far more seriously studied than India, and far better known to the French Enlightenment, was the immense nation of China.28 The medieval travel report of Marco Polo, fanciful as well as factual, had never lost its charm for European readers, who enjoyed many reprints of the narrative in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For those desirous of more reliable and up-to-date facts, there was, from the earlier seventeenth century onward, a wealth of accounts by Jesuit missionaries, who often were interested in scientific, geographical, political, and cultural information as well as in the saving of souls. Merchants brought Chinese ceramics and items of interior decoration, as well as tea and silk, to Europe, and writers on China introduced speculations on world chronology and on comparative ethics, as well as adaptations and, by the end of the seventeenth century, translations of Chinese literature. In the early eighteenth century, the Jesuits were still the principal, but not the sole, purveyors of Chinese thought and institutional history to France and to the rest of Europe. To most Jesuits in China in the later seventeenth and earlier eighteenth centuries, it seemed clear that the Chinese were too much devoted to their native ways of thought and belief to accept a slavish conformity to European religious practice. Thus, for the greater glory of God and the salvation of souls, the Jesuits were willing to compromise a bit with Chinese ways, admitting, for example, the substantial indelibility of ancestor worship in the Chinese consciousness. Certain continuing Chinese ceremonies, or rites, were thus tolerated—to the horror of Jansenists and other presumably orthodox upholders of European Christianity. The orthodox pointed with alarm to what they considered the basic atheism of the Chinese, and especially of those

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Confucianists to whom the Jesuits almost always referred; the Jesuits consequently found themselves defending the reality of a Chinese belief in God. In addition to this consciousness of a natural religion or deism, the Jesuits would, of course, require Chinese acceptance of the special Christian revelation, while their opponents demanded a more inclusive and thorough Chinese dogmatism. Vestiges of the "Chinese rites" controversy, together with the dispute over native Chinese atheism or deism, continued into the Encyclopedic age and even much later.29 Consciousness of China, or rather of certain aspects of China, increased in the eighteenth century even as the virulent conflict among religious scholars and apologists became less intense. Already in the late seventeenth century an excited discussion of China had spread beyond Christian controversialists to more secular observers. It was especially the Libertines, or free-thinkers, of the age who became advocates of the Chinese wisdom they discovered, as did the Jesuits, primarily in Confucianism. (Buddhists and Taoists were largely ignored by all parties, as representatives of hidebound superstition.) Thus arose the somewhat legendary figure of the Chinese sage—a figure who remained to haunt the dreams of a substantial segment of the Enlightenment. Also inherited from the Libertines was the awareness of a fairly complex, at least mildly exotic Chinese culture, which differed in thought, customs, and institutions from the western world but at the same time shared a basically humane orientation and perhaps a fundamental awareness of a higher power presiding over the universe. In any case, it was asserted that Chinese thought, whether deist or atheist, had achieved a high degree of refinement and an elevated moral sense that could survive on its own, without dogmatic Christian intervention. Pierre Bayle, above all, seemed to furnish ammunition for cultural relativism and for the happy separation of morality from any formal, superstitious, miracle-mongering religion/'0 In the meantime, genuine scholarship on Chinese civilization was appearing, aside from the religious controversies of the ecclesiastics and the interested motives of deist and atheist philosophies. Nicolas Freret (1688-1749) was one of the most prominent and erudite scholars, although he never visited China; he drew upon published narratives and studies and upon a learned Chinese friend in France, while avoiding clerical controversies and diligently pursuing factual accuracy. Freret believed the Chinese to be basically indifferent toward religion, but otherwise they shared, he thought, most of the national characteristics frequently cited by other commentators—peacefulness, humane civility, slyness, and too much emphasis on face-saving.31 Freret published some of his writings in the 1730s and 1740s, and other works appeared after his death. French consciousness of China at mid-century certainly depended less, though, on scholarship than on popularization, and

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on such material imports from China as were noted above. The artistic "chinoiseries" of the age have become notorious—the Europeanized adaptations of Chinese motifs in ceramics, fans, screen paintings, and other luxury items. What appeared to represent exotic whimsy came, to many, as a welcome relief from the all-too-familiar restraints of classical inspiration. Even outof-doors, in pagoda-like pavilions and in landscape gardening, Europe enthusiastically welcomed (perhaps more in England and Prussia than in France) the fancies of the picturesque Chinese imagination.32 The Chinese fad in the arts was supplemented only rarely by serious comment on authentic Chinese artistic creativity, or by any genuine appreciation of Chinese art. An interesting hint of an exception was noted in Father Berthier's Journal ofTrevoux in January 1750: several comments on a new work entitled Edifying and Curious Letters Written from Foreign Missions by Several Jesuit Missionaries. In reference to the attempts of two missionaries, French and Italian, to introduce European ideas into the Chinese art world, the writer (himself a former missionary) complained that "There is no point in praising Greek and Roman architecture to these Chinese, nor in speaking to them of the different [architectural] orders whose combination so enchants us. This Asian world is a world apart. Yet if we believe the author of this letter [by Father Patouillet, in the published collection], if his eyes and his taste which have become a bit Chinese have not misled him, this world with which we have so little contact has some graces in its architecture and some delicacy in its manner of interior decoration."33 This virtual admission of cultural uniqueness—and indeed of a degree of independent merit in Chinese art, implying cultural relativism—was uncommon in eighteenth-century France. But we must turn from the visual arts back to the world of verbalized ideas, and more specifically to ideas, already briefly noted, about the Chinese sage. For the mid-eighteenth century, as in fact earlier, the most admired and prototypical sage was, of course, Confucius himself. He and his more admirable followers represented for the French Enlightenment the reasonable man of common sense, an embodiment of pure thought as opposed to dogmatic enthusiasm. The essential Chinese sage was tolerant, just, charitable, and benevolent. Only cautiously recognized by Christians, he could and did become a near-idol for the philosophies, almost the perfect role-model for Enlightened man everywhere.34 The sage embodied not only the general virtues stressed by the Enlightenment: he upheld a moral scheme derived, not from superstitious religious fancies, but from a humane civic sense and from secular political idealism. That the figure of the Chinese sage was in large part a European philosophic phantasm far removed from Chinese reality can hardly be denied. At the same time, one must remember that no philosophe seems seriously to have thought

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of the sage as the average Chinese of the modern age or of any other historical period. Some undoubtedly dreamed of a Chinese nation of philosopher-sages: none, to this author's knowledge, systematically extended such sinophilia to the world of literal everyday reality in China. The sage remained an ideal—an ideal of secular rationalism and common sense who represented only one side of Chinese culture. Undeniably, though, this was the side that the philosophes emphasized, to the substantial detriment, very often, of any broader cultural understanding of China. It is true that some readers find in Voltaire's play The Chinese Orphan (1755) a picture of a nation of sages. If so, the cultural identification is far more a literary conceit than a serious philosophical position. It is the culmination of decades of Voltairean sinophilia, perhaps stemming from the writer's lifelong, if grudging, nostalgia for his early Jesuit schooling. Evidence exists, moreover, for Voltaire's continuing awareness of newer Jesuit contributions to Chinese studies.35 Certainly he always believed, as did the Jesuits, in the historical Chinese rejection of atheism, and in some genuine merit in Chinese philosophical and ethical thought. Almost to the end of his career he frequently used Chinese references and anecdotes, factual or invented, as a piquant seasoning for his writing and as an occasional support for serious philosophical or sociological argument. It is excessive to maintain, as one scholar has done, that Voltaire's view of China was "the mainspring and stay of his historical thought in all its implications";36 this assertion ignores far too many other sources and convolutions of the patriarch's thought. On the other hand, Voltaire did transcend the rather casual "chinoiserie" approach at least once in his long career—in his Essay on Customs and Morals. Here Voltaire did seem to go beyond his normal function as propagandist for Enlightenment religion and paternalistic absolutism;37 he wove an evaluation of China into his general view of cultural development, while seeing China also as a worthy object of study in itself. Both in the Essay's. Introduction (which also stood as the independent Philosophy of History) and in the first two chapters of the main text, he saw China as the first of all world civilizations. The vast antiquity of Chinese civilization might serve, Voltaire implied, to humble the historical arrogance of a basically provincial Judaism and Christianity. Yet even in the Essay Voltaire never wholly forgot his polemical purposes; these do cast an almost constant shadow over any tendency toward an autonomous treatment of China. For him, China was above all a model of happy paternalism in government, honoring justice and warding off religious intolerance and fanaticism. It was a model as well for other philosop'hic ideals: "In general the spirit of order and moderation, the taste for sciences, the culture

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of all the arts useful to life, a prodigious number of inventions which rendered the crafts easier—these were the essence of Chinese wisdom." He implied throughout, however, that these were merits of a rational Chinese elite, not of the masses.38 The great sage Confucius was Voltaire's model for the enlightened deist, humanitarian and tolerant. Buddhists and Taoists did exist in China, of course, but were remnants of priestcraft and superstition. If Confucius was Voltaire's model for enlightened deism, these other religions were, by implication, dull mirror-images of Christian dogmatism and obscurantism.39 Voltaire did admit, on the other hand, certain defects, even grave ones, in the Chinese picture: on occasion he could exemplify his own dictum in the Philosophical Dictionary that "one must not be fanatical about the merit of the Chinese." The general Chinese populace, he wrote, is petty and superstitious, and progress in the arts and crafts was arrested centuries ago.40 As he remarked in the Essay, Chinese civilization had become static, as compared to the western world's striving for improvement. This Chinese failing would seem to be the effect of some natural intellectual defect: certain races, he felt, are simply inferior to others. In the literary and visual arts, the Chinese, he added, have been notably inferior. "They write in general as they paint: their pictures up to now are destitute of order, perspective, and chiaroscuro. Their writings have the same weaknesses. Still it does appear that there is some wisdom in their mediocrity, a simple truthfulness that is not inflated or bombastic in the manner of other Orientals."41 One hardly needs to stress the inadequacies of this Voltairean viewpoint in the eyes of more widely informed and broadly sensitized westerners (not to mention easterners), two and more centuries later. It is impossible to transform Voltaire into a twentieth-century man. Part of his problem, to be sure, derived from the limitations and defects of sources available to him—limitations and defects that he rarely acknowledged.42 But always the deeper problem, from a modern perspective, was Voltaire's own intellectual and esthetic formation and constitution. He could never fully transcend the classicism or the rationalism of his age and of his own temperament. At the same time, one must not forget Voltaire's valiant attempt to place China in its proper historical position, and his popularization of several Chinese ideals. It is true that he did not "understand" China, but his effort to do so was probably as honest as that of any other figure of the French Enlightenment. In his later years, sinophilia was increasingly under philosophic attack—presumably a reason for Voltaire's own relative neglect of China in his old age—but his earlier publicizing of China demands more than the scorn that it has often received in modern times.

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The Waning of the Chinese Vogue The gradual decay in the 1760s of the Chinese vogue was hardly hindered by the fact that sinophilia had never been universal in the French Enlightenment. In the long run the fading of the benign Chinese mirage would help pave the way for a broader understanding of Chinese civilization. In the early eighteenth century, however, it was accompanied, more often than not, by an attack upon supposed Chinese achievements. In 1718 the abbe Eusebe Renaudot, for example, had cast serious doubts upon Jesuit claims for the extent and antiquity of Chinese science and philosophy, and even of Chinese political and moral wisdom.43 Within the Enlightenment itself, the doubts of the great Montesquieu concerning the Chinese cultural record were much more far-reaching than the reservations of Renaudot. In his Spirit of Laws, so widely known among the philosophes, Montesquieu attacked the Jesuit view of an admirably "mixed" Chinese government. Rather, he wrote, the Chinese are subject to "the cruelest of tyrannies": they live in "a despotic state whose principle is fear." Moreover, even the firm hand of ceremony and custom has not been able to raise the Chinese people from a despicable moral turpitude: they are a nation of cheaters and deceivers.44 Anti-Chinese feeling—or often simply the growing neglect of China— spread in the decades following the appearance of Montesquieu's celebrated study. In part, the change was attributable to the emergence of increasingly popular cultural rivals, notably the world of classical antiquity, with its stern models of civic responsibility and moral duty, and a miscellany of primitive peoples with their charming naturalness, simplicity, and sensuality.45 The third quarter of the eighteenth century, apart from Voltaire, saw an increasing neglect of the Chinese dream and especially of the rather fanciful Chinese sage. Of course, neglect is often strictly negative; it becomes a positive factor pertinent to the present study only when it is openly justified by a rationale. And occasionally an attack upon Chinese achievements and ideals would lead to greater cultural realism than had been involved in the narrower concept of the Chinese sage.46 Thus neglect and ignorance were not the only sources of the new denigration of China. One positive addition to the Chinese bibliography was a very large part (about one-half) of an anonymous four-volume work published in 1749, Collection of Curious Observations on the Customs, Morals, Usages, etc. . . . of Asia, Africa, and America. Here the author calmly discussed, among other matters, details of Chinese medicine, scholarship, crafts, industry, agriculture, journalism, finance, and jurisprudence, in addition to the customary subject of the Chinese sage.47 A particularly solid contribution to

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the growing body of information on China was the first volume (1754) of the abbe F. M. de Marsy's Modern History of the Chinese, the Japanese . . . ; this study was usually well-informed and factual on matters of contemporary Chinese science, religion, education, government, and other institutions. For its period it was a remarkably well balanced study of China.48 Supported by such works, several prominent figures of the Enlightenment could contribute to dispelling a one-sided vision of Chinese perfection. Among these figures were Raynal, Helvetius, d'Holbach, Grimm, Rousseau, Mably, and Diderot. Not one of these, of course, was a scholar of Chinese civilization, but all of them to some degree, whether in asides, brief discussions, or emphatic polemic, drew pictures of China quite unlike the Voltairean image.49 A sampling of this Enlightenment trend against sinophilia may begin with Raynal's Literary News—a predecessor of Grimm's Literary Correspondence—of October, 1754. One should be surprised, wrote Raynal, at how markedly little progress the Chinese have made in three thousand years. "They know neither the literary arts nor physics," and little geometry or astronomy. He continued: They introduced printing before we did, but only from simple wood blocks, and they know nothing at all about using characters in movable type. . . . They are acquainted with gunpowder and the compass, but from the first they make only fireworks, and they do not know how to use the second. . . . We have come ten times farther in the arts and sciences in three hundred years than the Chinese have come in three thousand. Nevertheless the history of this people is a marvellous thing when one considers the duration of an immense empire, civilized for four thousand years amidst a whole crowd of nations that have always been barbarous. . . . 50

This is a revisionism of sinophilia with a vengeance; its cursory broadening of the European picture of China is more than matched by its overwhelmingly negative appraisal. For fuller yet still more negative judgments on China, one may turn to Helvetius and d'Holbach. In his major works On Mind and On Man Helvetius interjected attacks on Chinese political despotism, religious intolerance, and (more fundamentally, in his opinion) educational prejudice and stagnation.51 D'Holbach, whose acquaintance with research on China was more extensive than that of Helvetius, chose to focus on Chinese superstition and despotism, and occasionally upon Confucius, the most prominent of the Chinese sages but, according to d'Holbach, a sage deplorably trite and superficial in his teaching.52 At least as well informed as d'Holbach, and much more cautious in his critique of China, was the baron Grimm in his Literary Correspondence. In

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truth, Grimm's treatment of China is among the best arguments for his independence of mind and his frequent carefulness and honesty of analysis.53 Certainly he was more perceptive and candid than most of his Enlightenment contemporaries when he admitted that the Chinese were a people of whom one "can have knowledge only of a very superficial sort."54 The attention given by Grimm to China was of course only intermittent, as it was activated only by a few newly published books to which he believed his correspondents should be alerted. Since Grimm's discussions of China were rare, and seldom exceeded a few pages of commentary, his unusually long notice of 15 September 1766 deserves excerpting at some length.55 He prefaced his remarks by casting doubt on conventional praise for China. In our time the empire of China has become a particular object of attention, study, research, and reasoning. At first it was the missionaries who aroused the interest of public curiosity by marvellous narratives about a very distant country that could neither confirm their truthfulness nor protest against their lies. Then came the philosophers to claim this subject-matter and, following their usual practice, to draw from it a surprising conclusion—support for revolt against the abuses that they thought fit for destruction in their own country. Finally came the prattlers who imitated the chirping of the philosophers, in order to buttress their commonplaces by amplification drawn from China. In this way, that country has quickly become the [idealized] refuge for virtue, wisdom, and happiness. Its government has become the best possible, as well as the oldest; its ethics has come to be the most pure and beautiful ever known, and similarly its laws, policing, arts, and industry have become models proposed for all the other people of the earth.56

Grimm proceeded forthwith to mock the sublime European mania for finding all perfection in the paternalistic governmental institutions of China, for deducing the high place of Chinese agriculture from the yearly ceremonial plowing by the emperor, and for assigning central importance to ethics and belles lettres in China. The ethical teachings of Confucius, wrote Grimm summarizing the view of these panegyrists, are on a level with the teachings of Jesus, and the vestiges of Chinese superstition are negligible. The happiness and wisdom of the Chinese are demonstrated, Grimm continued ironically, simply by the "prodigious population of that empire." In fact, the Chinese would seem to have a better right than the ancient Hebrews to be considered the chosen people of God.57 Against this whole glowing picture, Grimm pointed out that a solid, reflective, empirical mind might be permitted a large measure of doubt.58 A wise man indeed would require suspension of judgment on the Chinese, and twenty years of cautious personal experience in China, before framing a true appraisal of that land. Quite possibly he would discover, for example, that the

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custom of the emperor's annual plowing is no more meaningful than the Venetian doge's annual wedding with the sea. Moreover, if so many of the Chinese people remain superstitious, in what way is enlightened Confucianism more important for China than is the most elevated Christian thought in the western world?59 It was in this spirit and with these qualifications that Grimm finally reached the specific occasion for his reflections. "To be able to assure ourselves," he wrote, ' 'of a few truths concerning the Chinese, without having examined that land with our own eyes, we would need to have in hand more monuments of their literature. A single book, even a bad one, would teach us more than all the tales of missionaries—but we have only several formless extracts furnished by Father du Halde,'' such as the tale reworked by Voltaire concerning the Chinese orphan. There now had appeared, however, a complete Chinese novel (romari), the Hau Kiou Chouan, with every appearance of authenticity. In it, unfortunately, Grimm continued, we find reflections of the same "odious means" employed in Chinese life that we also find exemplified in western behavior. "When you have read this book," he concluded, "you will be able to decide on the goodness of the Chinese government and on the beauty of its customs and morals, and you will see whether we poor European devils should follow such people as models, as we are so often asked to do."60 After all this, of course, Grimm did not in fact travel to China for long study, or become, even at home, a scholarly expert on things Chinese. He would return, however, to the subject of China, if not with the verve of his September, 1766, letter. By February, 1783, a newly published travel narrative occasioned a scant two pages of review, in which a negative estimate of China seemed merely routine. A brief and mild chiding of earlier panegyrists was quickly followed by more extensive comments on the underpopulation and economic underdevelopment of China, on political and social despotism, and by a parting shot at Chinese arts and learning.61 Thus, through his long career of literary correspondence, Grimm's estimate of China ranged from fairly impartial criticism to offhand condemnation. The most to be said for his occasional efforts in this field is that he brought a new degree of intelligence and candor to the hothouse environment of sinomania in France. If he "understood" China no better than did Voltaire, he did help create, for his small circle of readers, a somewhat more balanced view of that civilization. If Grimm's view of China was equivocal, thus theoretically permitting some nuances of judgment, the views of Rousseau and Mably were so comprehensively negative that there seemed to them to be little point in pursuing any study whatsoever of the Chinese people or achievement. Across his career

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Rousseau for some time seemed undecided on China, but eventually he came down firmly on the side of sinophobia.62 In The New Heloise, his condemnation of China was categorical. China, he wrote, had been attacked and conquered again and again, and this pattern would continue forever. "I have," he wrote, "found it worthy of its fate, not even having the courage to groan under its burden. Lettered, cowardly, hypocritical, a nation of charlatans speaking much while saying nothing; full of wit without genius, abundant in signs but sterile in ideas; polite, fawning, adroit, crafty, and roguish; a nation that puts all its duties into outward behavior (etiquette), all morality into pretense, and knowing nothing of humanity beyond salutations and reverences"—such a nation was hardly worth a civilized person's attention.63 Mably's views, in his Doubts Proposed to the Economist Philosophers . . . of 1768, are similar. "Of all policed nations the Chinese are the least capable of thinking, because no other people has been so superstitiously attached to the puerile minutiae of their ceremonies, rites, and routines. It is despotism that has succeeded in imposing this crushing yoke upon them. Two thousand years ago the Chinese had the same amount of knowledge that they have today." To this pronouncement Mably appended comments, equally severe, on the "very restricted circle of ideas" among the Chinese, and their strong fear of novelty.64 Obviously, for him the destruction of the ideal Chinese sage was unaccompanied by any fuller positive critique. The position of Diderot was predictably more complex,65 even with its occasional blanket negatives. Of these, several quotations from the political fragment On China are typical. "One does well," he wrote, "to observe that the fine arts and sciences have made no progress in China, and that this nation has produced neither any grand edifice nor any statue, poem, musical work, painting, or literary eloquence" in the midst of a degree of luxury virtually unknown to Asians in ancient times, and even with the aid of printing and of good communications throughout the empire. Such achievements come only in a society enjoying some significant degree of comfort. In poverty-stricken China there is only "one science toward which reflective minds should turn: this is ethics, together with legislation and the policing of society." But these subjects flourish in a Chinese nation "empty of all enthusiasm."66 For a more sympathetic assessment by Diderot, one must turn to his long Encyclopedia article, "Chinese (Philosophy of the)." Here he noted the difficulties in definitively ascribing either polytheism, atheism, or deism to the Chinese, but managed to produce fifty-eight principles of their thought, especially valid for the Chinese middle ages. He found that the Chinese did make some "progress in the arts," and that they applied their wisdom to philosophy and political thought. Confucian ethics was a reasonable system, much superior to that sage's metaphysics and physics. What had most gen-

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erally held back progress among the Chinese was their language and their writing, with its almost infinite number of characters. Apparently (Diderot did avoid categorical statements here) the Chinese had had no great orators or poets. They had, however, produced some excellent cloth and porcelain, although their decorative treatment of materials was lacking in proper form and taste. Above all, the Chinese lacked creative, innovative curiosity and energy.67 This assessment at least offers some grays, and perhaps whites, among the blacks of Diderot's sketch of the Chinese. It is certainly an advance over his flat judgment in the article "Human Species," where he characterized the Chinese simply as "in general soft, peaceful, indolent, superstitious, submissive, slavish, and ceremonious."68 Nor were the Encyclopedia articles by other authors much more encouraging. For example, the utter failure of the French Enlightenment to find any serious merit in Chinese art is reflected in the article "Chinese Painting," probably by de Jaucourt. The article consists of merely two sentences: Chinese painting, the author noted, "is a sort of painting that the Chinese do on fans or on porcelain, where they represent flowers, animals, landscapes, figures, etc., with fine and brilliant colors. The only merit of their painting is a certain neatness and a certain taste for servile imitation, but in this painting one notes neither genius, design, invention, nor correctness."69 Two-and-a-half centuries later, it is hardly necessary to stress the scandalous inadequacy of this Enlightenment picture of China—an inadequacy shared by the Encyclopedia and its contemporaries. In retrospect, however, we can judge the age not completely inauspicious for the appearance of an accurate, full-length portrait of Chinese civilization. There was a fair amount of empirically obtained information on China available to the Enlightenment. There was an exploratory frame of mind that might have led to the utilization of this information. There was a spirit of rationalism in the air that might have derived satisfaction from constructing a complex synthesis of Chinese civilization. There was the evident pride of the Chinese in their own culture that may have lent the latter more inherent dignity than the Enlightenment diagnosed in such civilizations as the Jewish and the Russian, with their many eager westernizers and assimilationists. There was, perhaps above all, the general Enlightenment recognition, documented in these pages, of the great variety of human beings and cultures on this earth. Yet no serious recognition of the complexity and uniqueness of Chinese civilization took hold in the French Enlightenment. Of course, many portrayals of the Chinese and of their exotic ways did find their way into print—but the exoticism was, at its best, superficial and really rather mild. Underneath their picturesque garb and habits the Chinese seemed all too obviously like

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human beings everywhere—the "everywhere" meaning, actually, Paris, or Bordeaux, or Ferney. The quirks of the Chinese became warnings of dangers to the west, while the admirable traits and beliefs of the Chinese became exemplars or guidelines for Europeans who yearned to make for themselves a more just society and a purer religion. Nevertheless it would be unfair to the French Enlightenment to end on that note alone. Most of the Enlightenment did take China seriously, probably more seriously than it took any other non-European nation. The cult of China was a fad, but not just a fad—and some writers rejected the fad altogether. A great deal of information was gathered and recorded concerning China, and was presented as being of more value than the satisfaction of idle curiosity. The French saw what they wanted to see when they looked at China—and who does not sometimes do the same today when looking at other peoples than our own? French Enlightenment authors wanted, usually, to find a deist under the Chinese skin; today we variously want to find an agnostic, an atheist, an exotic sage, or perhaps simply a person of as much complexity as we flatter ourselves to possess. Or perhaps we wish to find something else as yet undefined, since a society's assumptions are seldom evident in its own day. What does again deserve emphasis is that the French Enlightenment did often try, and try honestly, to discover China, and certain other alien civilizations as well. The outcome was far from totally successful, as is easy to see in a later age. But the French Enlightenment did catch fleeting glimpses of the challenge, and it suggested a few provisional answers. We should never totally dismiss its efforts. NOTES 1. Les oeuvres completes de Voltaire, ed. Besterman et al., vol. 82 (1968): Leningrad and Piccini Notebooks, pp. 454, 513-14. 2. "GOUT," Encyclopedic, vol. 7, p. 761. 3. Oeuvres de Voltaire, ed. Beuchot, vol. 17: Essai sur les moeurs, pp. 377-78. 4. For an overview of Voltaire's universalism, see Charles Rihs, Voltaire: Recherches sur les origines du materialisme historique (Geneva: E. Droz, 1962), pp. 120-23, including pp. 125-27 on the Arabs. More will be said on the Enlightenment view of history in Chapters 8-10. The best study of Voltaire and Islam is Magdy Gabriel Badir, Voltaire et I'Islam, in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 125 (Banbury: The Voltaire Foundation, 1974). 5. Badir, Voltaire et l'lslam, pp. 60-70. 6. Ibid., pp. 147-82; Oeuvres de Voltaire, ed. Beuchot, vol. 15: Essai sur les moeurs, pp. 316-46. 7. "ARABES(Histoiredes)," in Supplement a l'Encyclopedic, vol. 1 (1776), pp. 500-5.

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8. Ibid., pp. 500-1. 9. "SARRASINS, ou ARABES, philosophic des," Encyclopedic, vol. 14, pp. 663-78. Nor did the unauthorized cuts in the text by Diderot's publisher Le Breton include any racial generalizations; see Douglas H. Gordon and Norman L. Torrey, The Censoring of Diderot's Encyclopedia and the Re-established Text (New York: Columbia University Press, 1947), pp. 78-81. 10. "ARABIE," Encyclopedie, vol. 1, p. 570. 11. "BIBLIOTHEQUE," Encyclopedie, vol. 2, p. 233; "MAHOMETISME," Encyclopedic, vol. 9, p. 867. 12. "TURQU1E, (Geographie moderne)," vol. 16, pp. 755-59, especially pp. 757-58. Turkey was a fairly popular subject in eighteenth-century literature, as at least one extended book review in Father Berthier's Journal de Trevoux attests: review of Guer, Moeurs & Usages des Turcs, leur religion, leur gouvernement civil, militaire & politique . . . , in Journal de Trevoux, April, 1747, pp. 672-93; May, 1747, pp. 973-91. This reports, for the non-Arabic Turks, much the same characterization as the Arabs generally received, with an emphasis on military valor, cruelty, and superstition. 13. Daniel S. Hawley, "L'lnde de Voltaire," in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 120 (Banbury: The Voltaire Foundation, 1974), pp. 175-78. For a study of the linguistic and literary bases for Enlightenment knowledge of India, see Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe's Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680-1880 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984—originally publ. in 1950, as La renaissance orientate). No translations from Indie languages to European tongues were available before 1771 (Schwab, p. 7). 14. Un manuscrit inedit de Pierre Poivre, ed. L. Malleret, p. 111. 15. The best recent study of Voltaire's views on India is the Hawley article "L'lnde de Voltaire," pp. 139-78. 16. Ibid., pp. 139-73. 17. Hawley himself recognizes this: "L'lnde de Voltaire," p. 173. 18. Brief summarizations of Voltaire's views are included in J. H. Brumfitt, Voltaire Historian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. 80-82; Rihs, Voltaire: Recherches . . . , pp. 123-24. 19. Oeuvres de Voltaire, ed. Beuchot, vol. 18: Essai sur les moeurs, p. 483. 20. Ibid., vol. 15, pp. 282-305. (Although pp. 282-94 are assigned to the "hides," or Indies, the chapter is primarily on India itself.) 21. Ibid., p. 294. 22. "INDIENS, Philosphie des," Encyclopedic, vol. 8, pp. 674-75; "MALABARES, Philosophie des," vol. 9, pp. 921-25; "BRAMINES . . . ," vol. 2, pp. 393-94. 23. "MALABARES," Encylcopedie, vol. 9, p. 922. 24. "INDIENS," Encyclopedie, vol. 8, p. 675. 25. "BRAMINES," Encydopedie, vol. 2, p. 393. 26. "INDE," Encydopedie, vol. 8, pp. 660-62. 27. Ibid., p. 662.

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28. Comprehensive studies include Basil Guy, The French Image of China before and after Voltaire, in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 21 (Geneva: Institut et Musee Voltaire, 1963), and Virgile Pinot, La Chine et la formation de I'esprit philosophique en France (1640-1740) (Paris: Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1932). See also Walter W. Davis, "China, the Confucian Ideal, and the European Age of Enlightenment," Journal of the History of Ideas, 44 (OctoberDecember 1983), pp. 523-48; Danielle Elisseeff-Poisle, Nicolas Freret, 1688-1749: Reflexions d'un humaniste du xviiie siecle sur la Chine (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1979), pp. 1-33. This and the next two paragraphs of text are deeply indebted especially to Guy's study. 29. For the "Chinese rites" controversy, see George Minamiki, The Chinese Rites Controversy from Its Beginning to Modern Times (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1985), pp. ix-xvi, 25-97 and passim. 30. Guy, The French Image of China, p. 127. 31. Elisseeff-Poisle, Nicolas Freret, pp. 54, 63, and passim. 32. Guy, The French Image of China, pp. 160-75. 33. Review of Lettres edifiantes & curieuses ecrites des missions etrangeres, par quelques missionnaires de la Compagnie de Jesus, Journal de Trevoux, vol. 27 (1750), pp. 96-113, especially pp. 104-6 (January 1750). 34. Guy, The French Image of China, pp. 146—50. 35. Ibid., pp. 217, 273-75. 36. Ibid., p. 15. 37. Davis, "China, the Confucian Ideal," pp. 544-45. The best study of Voltaire's sinophilia in general, and of the Essai sur les moeurs in particular, is in Guy, The French Image of China, pp. 214-84. 38. Oeuvres de Voltaire, ed. Beuchot, vol. 17: Essai sur les moeurs, pp. 476-77. 39. Guy, The French Image of China, pp. 264-68; Brumfitt, Voltaire Historian, pp. 78-80. 40. Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, p. 108. 41. Oeuvres de Voltaire, ed. Beuchot, vol. 17: Essai sur les moeurs, p. 476. 42. Guy, The French Image of China, pp. 254—58. 43. Eusebe Renaudot, Anciennes relations des Indes et de la Chine de deux voyageurs mahometans qui y allerent dans le neuvieme siecle . . . , avec cinq dissertations sur la science des Chinois (Paris: 1718), pp. xxviii, 373, 377, as cited and discussed in Guy, The French Image of China, pp. 194-96. 44. Oeuvres completes de Montesquieu, vol. 2: De I'esprit des lois, pp. 365-68, 568-71. 45. Guy, The French Image of China, pp. 15-16, 412-25. 46. Ibid., pp. 285-340. 47. Recueil d'observations curieuses sur les moeurs, les coutumes, les usages, etc. . . . de Asie, de I'Afrique et de I'Amerique (Paris: 1749), 4 vols., as noted in Guy, The French Image of China, pp. 291-92. 48. F. M. de Marsy et al., Histoire moderne des Chinois, des Japonais, des Indiens, des Persans, des Russiens, etc. pour servir de suite a I'Histoire ancienne de

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M. Rollin (Paris; 1754-1778), 30 vols., as noted in Guy, The French Image of China, pp. 300-4. 49. For a variety of French eighteenth-century studies on China, mainly dating from a bit later, in the 1770s and 1780s, see Guy, The French Image of China, pp. 371-429. 50. Guillaume-Thomas-Francois Raynal, Nouvelles litteraires, vol. 2, pp. 192-93 (10 October 1754). 51. Guy, The French Image of China, pp. 314-18. 52. Ibid., pp. 314, 318-23. 53. Ibid., pp. 310-14. 54. Grimm et al., Correspondance litteraire, vol. 4 (1878), p. 141 (15 September 1759). 55. Ibid., vol. 7 (1879), pp. 112-18. 56. Ibid., p. 112. 57. Ibid., p. 113. 58. Ibid., p. 113. 59. Ibid., pp. 114-15. 60. Ibid., pp. 116-17. 61. Ibid., vol. 13 (1880), pp. 274-75. 62. Guy, The French Image of China, pp. 338-40. 63. Rousseau, Julie, ou la nouvelle Heloi'se, cited in Guy, The French Image of China, p. 339. 64. Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, Oeuvres completes de I'abbe de Mably (London: 1789), vol. 11: Doutes proposes aux philosophes economistes sur l'ordre naturel et essentiel des societes politiques, pp. 105-8. 65. Guy, The French Image of China, pp. 331-38. 66. Oeuvres completes de Diderot, ed. J. Assezat and M. Tourneux, vol. 4 (1875): Fragments politiques, pp. 45-48. 67. "CHINOIS (Philosophie des)" Encyclopedie, vol. 3, pp. 341-48. 68. "HUMAINE ESPECE," Encyclopedie, vol. 8, p. 345. 69. "PEINTURE CHINOISE," Encyclopedie, vol. 12, p. 278.

8 Historical Diversity The Place of History In previous chapters a consideration of geographical differences, most notably in non-European cultures, has been central in this investigation of Enlightenment views concerning the diversity of human beings on this earth. Although, as we have seen, the French eighteenth century was reluctant to abandon the theoretical concept of a basic human nature throughout the world, it was far from unaware of actual cultural differentiation among diverse peoples. Special geographical and cultural conditions undoubtedly did lead, in the eyes of many observers, to a broad range of qualities and traits, both individual and sociological. A common humanity emphatically did not rule out cultural variation—and two or three generations of French authors found it perfectly acceptable, and even necessary, to distinguish the qualities of Russians, Jews, blacks, native Americans, and several distinct peoples of Asia, from the more familiar human patterns of western Europe. Of course it was recognized that more than geographical differentiation was involved. The influence of heredity was only rarely glimpsed, and then fleetingly; the focus of attention, rather, was on the effects of varied social and moral pressures on different peoples. It was indeed granted that circumstances differed in spatial terms—that is, in different parts of the globe. But frequently circumstances also varied in time—and these temporal, or historical, circumstances similarly could not be ignored. Thus historical development has also intruded inevitably into our discussion of cultural differentiation as viewed by the French Age of Enlightenment. No consideration, for example, of the spirit of Judaism or even of the presumably slow-moving Chinese psyche could omit entirely this notion of the passage of historical time. On other occasions in eighteenth-century thought, temporal, historical change shifted from a peripheral to a central role—and most clearly so when geography and climate remained relatively constant, as it was assumed they did in the best-known portions of the European continent. There were, of

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course, certain physical differences between Germany and France, or between England and Italy—but basically, this core of the continent (as those lands themselves viewed it) shared not only a temperate climate but many of the same interrelated cultural characteristics. Here, then, the outstanding, if seldom the sole, focus of differentiation would be historical in origin. One of the favorite studies, in fact one of the passions, of the Enlightenment period would be history, and above all (despite such excursions as we have noted into Asian and American cultures) the history of western Europe. Thus the dominant concern of this study must now shift to eighteenthcentury historical writing, primarily on the relatively familiar subject of western Europe through the ages. Much has already been written by others on this subject, and some of the facts to be summarized initially are thrice-familiar to specialists. It will not, however, be my purpose to review all the characteristics of eighteenth-century historical writing, or indeed to encompass the full historical horizons even of the French Enlightenment or of the Encyclopedia itself; these interesting harvests have already been reaped.1 What these chapters do propose to do, after a bit of preliminary orientation, is to offer a few guideposts to the connections between eighteenth-century historical writing and the concepts of individual and cultural differentiation I have already begun to investigate. The central question will be this: did history reveal merely the basic similarities of human beings across the centuries, or did it sometimes take seriously their real differences? At the outset one should be reminded of the traditional, and sometimes justified, inclination of recent historians to credit eighteenth-century Germany, or indeed the Italy of Vico or the England of Gibbon, with greater historical subtlety and sensitivity than could be found in contemporary France. As noted in Chapter 5, some Germans, especially by the time of Herder, were tending toward a concept of national individuality or cultural personality that arose, not only in a special geographical and cultural setting, but as the fruit of a unique line of historical development. Moreover, modern scholarship has found, even before Herder, an emerging emphasis on the development of national consciousness in history, and on the crucial importance of historicism in human affairs—that is, the centrality of historical change and development in the formation of modern peoples.2 French enthusiasm for history was hardly less evident than was German in the eighteenth century, although its emphases were sometimes different. The conclusions of Daniel Mornet's classic sampling of private French libraries still seem essentially sound, including his estimate that more than a quarter of their books were historical studies.3 There was an avid readership for historical writing in eighteenth-century France, and history was clearly a vital part of the cultural consciousness of most educated people.

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At the same time, it is possible to demonstrate that the French Enlightenment often showed a radical lack of true historical sense. Too often history became simply a source for nuggets of preconceived theory and didactic example. Alternatively or simultaneously it might afford a dark panorama of misfortunes and evils that might best be briefly noted and then forgotten in modern times. Still other eighteenth-century French writers preferred to trace the gradual emergence of the rational and the humane across past centuries: history not only taught by experience, but was itself, at its best, a revelation of human potentialities.4 Some of this revealed, and some obscured, the potential role of history as the chronicling and ordering of empirical fact. Historical method undoubtedly did advance in the course of the eighteenth century, even while, on occasion, serving the interests of special pleading, either philosophic or conservative.5 History took on various roles for different historical investigators during the Enlightenment, whether professional historians or not—and it was almost always considered an important study, whether by truth seekers or by excited partisans. Only a sampling of French historical writing will be considered here. For example, d'Holbach and d'Alembert, among authors who were not primarily historians, left some indications concerning historical method. D'Holbach's strictures against religious superstition aside, the thrust toward empiricism is the most prominent feature of his advice to historians and other analysts of social phenomena. History, like science, should strive to discover those tiny, barely noticed causes (causes insensibles) in nature behind human actions.6 D'Alembert, as mathematician and scientist, could well have written the same, but chose more often to generalize on the mere probabilism of history (since only mathematics can achieve certainty),7 and to stress the intellectual and moral utility of historical study.8 "Philosophy properly understood," he added in the Encyclopedia, is the foundation of "all our knowledge," presumably of history as well as of ethics.9 Among authors who concentrated on history, the abbe Raynal may be taken as typical of those who emphasized the utilitarian approach to that study. Hans Wolpe has handily summarized Raynal's views as follows: "To do useful work as a historian is to rectify errors, destroy prejudices, check abuses, and combat tyrants. Everything must be subordinated ... to the amelioration of the human condition. Grandiloquent, empty rhetoric has had its day. The new historian as philosopher and citizen, with the light of reason, the force of truth, and the majesty of justice on his side, must dare confront all despotisms."10 The benevolent utilitarianism and didacticism of historical writing could scarcely be summarized more forthrightly. Raynal was, of course, very much a "philosophe engage" of the Enlight-

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enment, as well as a historian. His utilitarian, didactic approach, so widespread in his age, requires the corrective of a less partial, more strictly scholarly orientation. As a proponent of such an orientation, Nicolas Lenglet Du Fresnoy (1674-1755) is certainly a prime candidate. Lenglet was a conscientious writer of an older generation and a contributor to the earlier volumes of the Encyclopedia, presumably recruited by Diderot as a respected elder scholar uncompromised by any radical inclinations. His life work was directed primarily toward criticism of sources and toward methodology in history and in the allied fields of government, law, and constitutional institutions. His source work in documents was well known, as were his cool evaluations of documentary bias. 11 For the present study, Lenglet's greatest interest lies in his blunt assertion of the rights of the past over the present. It is all too easy for historians, he wrote, to transfer the interests and attitudes of the present day to the object of their historical research, often far in the past. Human viewpoints change, even within single centuries, and all the more over longer periods of time. (Lenglet's specialty was fifteenth- and sixteenth-century France.) The past is not the present, and the past must be honestly recognized as often alien to our own spirit. History may have moral utility, but it is far from being simply a mine of moral lessons for a basically identical present day: history must also reveal an autonomous past with its own dignity and value. And in fact Lenglet's moral didacticism is rare, generally brief, and seemingly rather perfunctory. Although Lenglet's interpretation of the past was more secular than religious, he gave little comfort to later secular materialists like d'Holbach with their often violent anticlericalism. For example, he rejected religious fraud as the historical explanation of Joan of Arc's visions; he wrote instead in terms of psychological phenomena, and of Joan's practical courage and determination. This refusal to fall into easy anticlericalism would be uncommon among the Enlightened themselves, but its occasional appearance does deserve recognition.

Voltaire and History Seemingly at a quite different historiographical pole from Lenglet Du Fresnoy was Voltaire, with his frequent orientation toward the philosophical utility of historical study. Voltaire's case merits close attention most obviously because of his virtually unchallenged preeminence among history writers of the French Enlightenment. The utilitarian rationale for historical study that he, among others, professed would be the main obstacle to a more genuinely historicist approach to the human past, and because of this, his rare but real deviations from present-oriented utilitarianism became all the more significant.12

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A prominent deviation must in fact be noted at the very outset—Voltaire's professed admiration for the historical writing and method of Lenglet Du Fresnoy. Lenglet, he wrote, was a praiseworthy critic of sources and an exemplar of historical objectivity. Still, Voltaire had obvious reservations about the inclusiveness of Lenglet's critical objectivity: he himself preferred simply to ignore the old superstitions, traditions, and popular tales that Lenglet prized as revelations of past ways of thought, and that Voltaire found simply misleading and unworthy of public notice. In deliberately omitting many presumably benighted past beliefs, Voltaire thought that he was advancing a rational view of history: what he did not recognize was that he was also thereby excising from history many characteristics of past thought that rendered the past distinctive, or culturally differentiated from other ages, including his own. If Voltaire's exclusion of the rationally incredible from history did in one sense advance historical objectivity, it also detracted from the richness and multiple cultural individualities of the historical record.13 Voltaire's reaction to another older contemporary far better remembered today than Lenglet is rather similarly instructive. Montesquieu's significance, after all, lies not only in his cultural sociology but also in his history, and Voltaire was already aware of this significance.14 As far as Montesquieu shared in the goals of the Enlightenment, and as far as he was in the broadest sense an empiricist, Voltaire felt a real kinship with the older writer. However, on important specifics, Voltaire frequently took exception to Montesquieu's assertions. Not only were there, he said, many inaccuracies in Montesquieu's factual information-careless quotation and even anachronisms— but also a lack of arrangement and order, overconfidence in dubious sources, and a tendency toward unjustified theorizing. We have already noted Voltaire's occasional objections to Montesquieu's climate theories, and his occasional rejection of the importance of national character among the world's peoples. Thus Voltaire's doubts concerning Montesquieu's view of world history and sociology could and did take two sometimes incompatible forms—a questioning of excessive historical and cultural differentiation and a rejection of incautious generalizations about grand historical patterns. Yet these views did not prevent Voltaire from indulging in some generalizations of his own, even to the point of lending verbal support to a sort of historical relativism akin to Lenglet's. In the Philosophic Dictionary article "Ezechiel," Voltaire could even state bluntly that "we know today well enough that we must not judge ancient usages by modern."15 He would honor this directive far more often in the breach than in the observance—but he did make the statement, and made it in a major polemical work. By general consent, Voltaire's most distinguished historical works were his

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Age of Louis XfV and the Essay on Customs and Morals. Behind their publication dates (1751 and 1756 respectively) lay long periods, almost two decades in each case, of reflection and drafting that contributed to making them more mature products of his mind than his histories, for example, of Charles XII, Louis XV, or Russia under Peter the Great. It was also in the Louis XfV and Essay volumes (including the latter's 1765 Introduction entitled The Philosophy of History) that he pioneered in social, intellectual, and general cultural history, thus earning him his crucial position in European historiography. From all these sources, and from still others, including the celebrated Encyclopedia article on "History," one can indicate some of those elements that contributed to the Voltairean conception—and often rejection— of historical change and cultural differentiation.16 On Voltaire's own view of historical method, we may limit ourselves to a cursory summation of points generally accepted by modern writers.17 These points must include, first of all, those frequent Voltairean professions of admiration for factual historical empiricism already mentioned here, and actual adherence, on occasion, to these professions. Even recent analysts who have not entirely sympathized ideologically with Voltaire have paid tribute to his "vast investigation on the basis of a direct observation of facts.'' 18 As for his professed adherence to historical empiricism Voltaire was customarily unequivocal. In this connection, his Encyclopedia article on "History"19 comments on both ancient and modern historians. "In order to know with certainty anything in ancient history, there is only one method—to see if there remain some incontestable relics [monuments]." With modern historians—as compared to, for example, Tacitus— "one requires . . . more details, more verifiable facts, some precise dates, some real authorities. . . ."20 And on Voltaire's own professional practice as historian one may add that more credit is now commonly given than a century ago to his general historical accuracy and his respect for sources.21 The word "general" is crucial in another sense as well. It is difficult to view Voltaire the historian, except in scattered instances, as other than a generalist. He roamed avidly across the whole historical record of mankind and seldom had the time or the inclination to investigate individual areas with utter thoroughness. Moreover, the quest for factual accuracy often gave way to other, more pressing concerns. As J. H. Brumfitt has said of Voltaire's historical endeavors as a whole and of The Philosophy of History in particular, his predominant aims included the struggle against religious intolerance, an assertion of the universal human religious conscience, and a vindication of universal human reason.22 An emphasis on any one of these could and did surely eclipse, on occasion, the more chaste goal of empirical accuracy. Still, the goal was seldom wholly forgotten, even if sometimes his claim to it may

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have been more politic than heartfelt, in view of the practical realities of book publishing and censorship in eightenth-century France. The infdme could not always be attacked frontally: an impression of historical evenhandedness must be maintained in print if not in Voltaire's private correspondence. An overemphasis on this practical point, with an implication of Voltairean expediency and even historical flippancy, must, however, be avoided. For Voltaire, history was more than propaganda, and more than a toy. History came close, indeed, to being an obsession for him, and it was a subject on whose goals and theory he could write with some perception and profundity. This is not the place to report extensively Voltaire's reflections concerning, for instance, historical causation and determinism, since his conclusions bear only indirectly on his views of historical and cultural diversity. His determinism—increasingly prominent in his later years—did, however, become linked with his insistence on the rich multiplicity of facts and events in history, and may have contributed to his expansion of the subject matter of history in what seemed to him its full cultural range.23 Similarly, Voltaire's views concerning historical causation did sometimes bear on his acknowledgement of historical complexity.24 The near-imperceptibility that he often diagnosed in the many small causes within historical development should have led him, and sometimes did lead him, to a recognition of the uniqueness of historical events and hence to a perception of genuine cultural diversity. Voltaire's historical approach did imply a theory of historical and cultural uniqueness, even though he seldom actualized the theory satisfactorily in historical specifics. More often Voltaire's view of the complexities of historical causation led to generalized statements on such very broad types of causation as fatality, great men's actions, "climate," or "moral" influences on human beings in areas such as religion and government.25 A related outcome of his musings on causality was his theory of historical probabilism, as against any all-embracing claims for factual certainty. Historical certainty is, he wrote, often utterly impossible: the best that we attain in such situations is historical probability.26 Physics or mathematics is another matter, but in history, probability is the best and indeed the sole guide.27 The section on "certainty in history," in the Encyclopedia article "History," begins with a flat statement: "All certainty that is not mathematical demonstration is only extreme probability. There is no other historical certainty."28 (A further exception, in the case of Christian "miracles," hardly needs to be taken seriously, considering the source.29 But one must return always from theory to practice in Voltaire's historical work. Reserving his detailed treatment of specific ages of European history for later chapters, we may first say a bit more on the broad lines of his actual

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historical practice. What must still be noted about the scope of Voltaire's historical writing, its "philosophical" approach, and its evident purpose? Again, the accessibility of detailed modern research on these matters will permit brevity here. Voltaire wrote on all periods of western history, including, as we will see, the ancient and medieval worlds. His main interest, however, was in the three centuries before his own, beginning with the Renaissance. In the early Remarks on History he had already shown his hand in the advice he gave to average young men: it would be best, he wrote, for such readers "to have some slight acquaintance with those distant times [antiquity and the Middle Ages], but I would wish them to begin a serious study of history at that time when it becomes truly interesting for us. This seems to me to be toward the end of the fifteenth century.' '30 Even in his Essay on Customs and Morals, the most expansive of his historical works, Voltaire made no claim of writing a literally "universal" history, either in temporal or geographic terms. Nor (as a later century can see) was his history universal in its purview of social classes: Voltaire, like the Enlightenment as a whole, slighted the massive base of the social pyramid, as well as such general areas of later special attention as economic, social, demographic, and psychological history. With all these reservations one must still be startled by the scope of Voltaire's historical interests, from Europe and the Americas to Egypt and India and China. Especially did he decry the blinkered pretensions of Bishop Bossuet, in whose "universal" history the whole of the ancient nonEuropean world had revolved about the tiny Jewish nation. 31 In parts of Voltaire's historical writing, we have already observed, and will later observe again, serious limitations—such as his notorious lack of sympathy with the Middle Ages. Yet one must repeat that he ventured well beyond the customaiy limits of previous historical writing, confined as it was, almost invariably, to political, diplomatic, and military affairs and to picturesque incident. Above all, Voltaire always maintained that his historical concerns were those whose discussion was of use to the human race. Names and dates, he insisted, must remain subordinate to useful information on the arts and sciences and to the requirements of human well-being and enlightenment. War, politics, and court gossip formed the sum of the old history; the new must include such useful matters as the wealth of nations and its origins, and the shifts of populations.32 On this subject he could be quite explicit on specific questions that a historian should address. A page of typical questions that Voltaire deemed useful begins as follows: "I would like to know what were the strengths of a country before a war, and if that war augmented or dimin-

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ished them. Was Spain richer before the conquest of the new world than it is today? By how much did its population under Charles V exceed that under Philip IV?"33 More generally, wrote Voltaire, "true history is that of customs and morals, of laws, of arts, and of the progress of the human mind. "34 It is not often noted in modern histories, however, that after starting out bravely with similar claims in his Age of Louis XIV, that work included twenty-four chapters on military history and only four on the arts and sciences. Nor is it always remarked that—perhaps not surprisingly in a pre-Darwinian century—Voltaire's history of the culture of Louis XIV's reign displays, not an evolutionary development, but rather a static situation over a unitary period of many decades. These several limitations that one must assign to the Voltairean historical corpus are assuredly results not only of the frequent drag of tradition even upon innovators, but also of the emphases of the Enlightenment itself. Above all they represent the not dishonorable, though quite possibly misguided, Enlightened tendency toward generalized, static rationalism and its philosophic ideals. The Enlightenment was engaged in idealistic, righteous battle against what it believed to be the unreason and superstition of the past. The historical analysis offered by its quintessential champion, Voltaire, can hardly be expected to display a disinterested indifference toward the outcome of this struggle, but rather to utilize the past as a weapon against the past.35 As he wrote in the celebrated Encyclopedia article "History": "One cannot go too far in placing again before people's eyes the crimes and evils caused by [history's] absurd quarrels. It is certain that through renewing the memory of these quarrels one will prevent their rebirth." The article's section on "the utility of history" concludes with an appeal to the earth's rulers to take to heart the lessons of history.36 Voltaire's dedication to the rational and ethical significance of history and his occasional confidence in human progress through reason were bound to stand in the path of any stirring of his toward cool historical objectivity. Voltaire's history was often transparently didactic to a degree that discomfits and embarrasses many latter-day historians who can be more subtle in promoting their biases. Certainly Voltaire, at his most typical, did not lack confidence in his own Enlightened program and ideals, and history would be a key element in identifying the enemies and evils to be overcome, and sometimes the goals to be achieved. History would be both a warning and a beacon for the future, and all this mattered far more than antiquarian puttering and the exposing of the past simply for its own sake. It should hardly startle us that Voltaire often was much more concerned with finding an object lesson

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in the past than with presenting a past scene as a discrete historical artifact, as a subject for historical empathy rather than an exhibit for Enlightenment. Thus it is a serious temptation to sum up Voltaire's efforts at history writing as didactic propaganda alone, rather than as a sympathetic re-creation of past attitudes and cultures. Such a conclusion, however, is not altogether fair to this intelligent and often perceptive thinker.37 One may indeed accept Virgil Topazio's judgment that, on the whole, Voltaire's "didacticism is much too overt and the personal intervention undisguised, especially in the numerous sections dealing with religion"38—as long as one recognizes, as did Topazio, that this is not the whole story. Of all modern studies of this issue to date, J. H. Brumfitt's "History and Progapanda in Voltaire" has come closest in thoroughness and judiciousness to "the whole story."39 Carefully citing chapter and verse as he proceeds, Brumfitt concludes that the element of propaganda in Voltaire's historical writing was very substantial, and that Voltaire often admitted as much, notably in his correspondence. Undoubtedly history should be, Voltaire believed, both an example and a warning for mankind. Voltaire, however, was often restrained from forthright propaganda by the desirability of caution with the authorities, most obviously in cases where open publication in France was envisaged, and above all, in his major historical works, by genuine ideals of truth and objectivity. Voltaire did occasionally encounter a case of conscious choice between objectivity and current utility—and here utility usually triumphed. More often, though, he saw no basic conflict between the two: they seemed to him cooperating aspects of a common reality and a common historical enterprise. None of this, of course, demonstrates that Voltaire did in fact, on occasion, see the past strictly as the past, with its own values and culture. What the occasional brave forswearing of propaganda in favor of historical accuracy and impartiality does imply is that it did make possible for Voltaire at least intermittent glimpses of a history for history's sake, of a past for the past's sake. In other chapters we will see that such glimpses were indeed occasionally achieved, but that they were relatively rare. Much more often Voltaire saw the past in the light of the present; he commonly saw little value in tradition as such, and little value in the past as simply an object of antiquarian interest or emotional identification. Fundamentally the lessons of the past could be pertinent to the present day because in most ways human beings in past times were similar to those in the eighteenth century, both in thought and impulse, in weakness and strength. When history might seem to show the contrary, Voltaire all too often refused to see: historical empathy was not, to put it gently, his most characteristic scholarly quality.

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History in the Encyclopedia If there existed any statement of an "official" Encyclopedic position on the nature, limitations, and goals of historical writing, it can be said to be Voltaire's own substantial article "History."40 For an introduction to the Encyclopedia's historical approach, we may well begin with this essay, noting several points not yet considered in these pages. The article opens with a simple statement that may strike the modern reader either as misguided or as a shallow truism. History, Voltaire asserted, "is the recital of facts presented as true—contrary to fable, which is the recital of facts presented as untrue." The article then establishes several different areas of historical subject-matter. There is the history of opinions, which is scarcely more than a collection of human errors; the history of arts and crafts [arts], perhaps the most useful of all histories when it links the understanding of inventions, and of the progress of arts and crafts, with the description of their mechanism; and natural history, improperly called history, and which is an essential part of science [physique]. The history of events is divided into sacred and profane history. Sacred history is a result of divine and miraculous operations, by which it once pleased God to lead the Jewish nation, and by which it pleases Him today to exercise our faith. I will not [Voltaire concluded, presumably with eyes atwinkle] touch this respected subject.41

The inclusion of all these categories of history was fully justified, and would continue to be justified, by the actual content of the Encyclopedia: there were indeed articles on intellectual history ("the history of opinions"), an extraordinary number of articles and plates on arts and crafts, a great deal on science, and much secular and also (despite a common impression nowadays) much sacred history. The one surprise in Voltaire's categorization is his downgrading of intellectual history—though here he surely made mental reservations for his own and many other contemporary "opinions," now presumably upgraded to factual status. The article then proceeds to a warning against all ancient fables about the origins of peoples, and on to ancient and medieval times (discussion of which is reserved to the following chapters of this study). The next section, on the utility of history, falls back on the hoary notion of history as an education for princes—a point not otherwise much mentioned in the Encyclopedia, whose sympathies were often a bit less clearly monarchical than Voltaire's. His section on "the certitude of history" and then its "incertitude" brings up matters of probabilism and historical skepticism, some of them already mentioned in these pages; this skepticism would in fact often be forgotten by

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enthusiastic or harried contributors to the Encyclopedia. The final section of the article appeals for a broad range of historical writing, with significant attention to "usages, laws, customs and morals, commerce, finances, agriculture, and population"—all of which were indeed included in the Encyclopedia. Most interesting for our present study is Voltaire's requirement that "the history of a foreign country not be cast in the same mold of your own country"—an appeal, at least briefly and indirectly, to recognize the cultural individuality of nations. The question of whether this dubious trumpet was heard by other Encyclopedia contributors will receive some attention later in this study. Nonetheless, history—except in the most inclusive sense of all that had happened or been thought in the past—was really not a central concern of the Encyclopedia. The most succinct statement of the downplaying of history as such in the Encyclopedia is perhaps an anonymous addendum at the end of several articles on national or regional schools of painting. In all likelihood the words are by Diderot himself: "The Encyclopedia must pass lightly over facts that are purely historical, because these kinds of facts are not its essential and immediate object.' >42 In fact, more frank attention to conventional history would be given, proportionately, in the four post-Diderot Supplement volumes than in the original Encyclopedia.43 Partly this greater Supplement emphasis on history can be ascribed to the fact that the practice now was admitted of including articles directly on individuals and alphabetized as such. Individually, these articles (mainly on rulers, and on heroes from Classical Antiquity and the Bible) were generally organized chronologically as historical narrative. In the volumes edited by Diderot, biographies and other historical narrative had appeared less systematically, usually buried in rather unlikely spots—for example, in ostensibly geographical articles. Substantial portions of the article "Pontoise" are devoted to the careers of Philip the Bold, Frangois Villon, and others; nearly the whole of "Wantage" is on Alfred the Great; and the whole of "Voorhout" is dedicated to its famous son Boerhaave.44 Articles on branches of learning, such as "Geometry" by d'Alembert, usually involve their history.45 Articles on the professions often include biographies of their distinguished practitioners, as in de Jaucourt's essay "Engraver."46 Many of the lengthiest discussions of history are found under institutional or legalistic headings. Thus the extended articles by Boucher d'Argis, "Tithe," "Garde des Sceaux in France," and "Cours des Aides of Paris," include more or less chronological, historical accounts of the taxes and the institutions they describe—not to mention his book-length essay on the "Parlement of Paris."47 Only rarely is the title of an article forthrightly historical, introducing an

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expected narrative: the anonymous "Sicilian Vespers" and de Jaucourt's long "Triumvirate" are examples of this uncommon practice.48 So it was that, sometimes directly but more often indirectly, the actual historical content of the original seventeen Encyclopedia volumes was very substantial. Nellie Schargo's classic study of History in the "Encyclopedic" found that nearly one-tenth of the more than sixty thousand articles were historical in nature.49 Nor can it be maintained that history was always strictly peripheral to the Encyclopedic enterprise, or that it was simply blundered into along the way. Both d'Alembert in the Preliminary Discourse and Diderot in the Prospectus and his "Encylcopedia" article specifically praised the role of historical memory in the progressive advance of humanity.50 It is not necessary to repeat here the analysis of history in the Encyclopedia contributed by Schargo in the 1940s, or by other scholars before and after.51 On historical method, on historical interpretation, and on the role of history (as educator, naturally) the Encyclopedia'?, remarks are generally unsurprising and unexceptionable, quite in line with Voltairean prescriptions in the article "History." Let us consider only an illustrative sampling of specifics. The indefatigable de Jaucourt wrote for Diderot on history as (it may seem) on virtually everything else. In his article "Narrative [Recit], [in] History, Apologetics, Oratory, Epic," his description of the genre was straightforward. "The narrative," he wrote, "is an exact and faithful exposition of an event—that is to say, an exposition that renders the event in its entirety and exactly as it is. For if it renders it more or less it is not at all exact, and if it renders it other than it is it is not faithful to fact."52 Here one detects no doubts, no hesitations, no epistemological uneasiness: according to de Jaucourt a historian can indeed discover and narrate exactly what happened. Nonetheless, in a roughly contemporaneous article, "Historical Narrative," de Jaucourt admitted to some salutary doubts: "In a general history, where it is necessary that the facts observe orderliness and the course of history, and where the [historical] chain is often broken by vast blank spaces (for there are empty spaces in history, as there are deserts in world maps), one can often present only conjectures instead of certitudes. . . ,"53 If a certain historical skepticism thus could invade the Encyclopedia on occasion, it never shook the utilitarian creed behind the work. Diderot and d'Alembert, like Voltaire, were convinced of the usefulness of their labors for mankind. But let us observe the utilitarian argument in a lesser contributor— Paris de Meyzieu (1718-1778), an official at the Royal Military School. In his article "Military School,"54 de Meyzieu praised history in terms probably acceptable by his Enlightened colleagues. "History," he wrote, "is at the same time one of the most agreeable sorts of knowledge and one of the most useful. . . . We cannot understand by what bizarre peculiarity it is taught in

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not one of our schools ..." although it is in the schools of foreign countries. It is true, he continued, that "the lifetime of a man is not enough for studying all history in detail. Thus one must limit himself to what can be related to his state in life. A magistrate [for example] will determine to study the spirit and origin of the laws which he administers." (One is tempted to find in this argument for confining history to specific vocational areas precisely one reason for its not being pedagogically quite acceptable in the eighteenth century as a general discipline.) A broader view of the utility of history is taken, not unexpectedly, by de Jaucourt. In the article "War" he appealed to the lamentable history of warfare to induce a very utilitarian concern for its horrendous evils. Although the article begins by making certain distinctions among wars, its conclusions are unequivocal. De Jaucourt defended those "eternal laws that are made for all time, for all peoples, and that are inscribed in nature. But war smothers the voice of nature, justice, religion, and humaneness. It gives birth only to brigandage and crime—and, with war, fear, famine, and desolation march together. War tears asunder the souls of mothers, wives, and children; it ravages the countryside, depopulates provinces, and reduces cities to ashes. It exhausts the most successful, flourishing states . . . ; it depraves the morals of all nations. . . . Such are the fruits of war"—and the lessons of the history of warfare.55 Clearly, strong feelings are involved here—and they are typical feelings of the Enlightenment. Sometimes a single, pregnant word will convey a similarly stern value judgment, such as that favorite epithet of the day, "barbarous." Thus is condemned, without hesitation or recourse, an institution of the not-so-distant past, "that barbarous custom" of the judicial duel56—and thus would often be condemned, as we will see, a whole period of European history, the Middle Ages. With fairly frequent, easy usage of such terms, and with the common penchant of the Encyclopedists toward righteous indignation over the defective past, it is perhaps surprising that any historical empathy survived at all in the Encyclopedia. Yet, almost as clear as the strong feelings and the occasional strong invective, a certain amount of objectivity and elemental fairness did survive. Let us consider for a moment that worst-possible-case exhibit for defending the Encyclopedia's historical fairness and sympathy—its treatment of the history of religion. Amid all the undoubted distaste for supernatural religions, were any efforts ever made to understand the generally deplorable religions of past centuries? Outside the articles on the Judeo-Christian tradition, the search for such efforts is not very rewarding. The history of those faiths outside the mainstream of European history was, after all, the safest ammunition for the

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Enlightened onslaught against superstition—including the superstition of conventional Christianity. The article "Priests," probably by the atheist d'Hoibach, is perhaps the handiest illustration of how, with no historical sympathy whatsoever, the presumed chicanery and greed of priestcraft were attacked without mercy.57 The reverse of the same coin is visible in the article "Celts, Philosophy of the," by the abbe Yvon, one of the Encyclopedia's moderate defenders of Christianity.'' Among the Druids,'' the abbe observed, " I see not philosophers but frauds who, solely from self-interest and the quest for glory and reputation, labored to enslave their imbecilic nation under the yoke of a shameful ignorance.'' From there he continued an attack on the luxury of the Druids, their retailing of fables, and their lamentable idolatry and polytheism.58 Most other articles on non-Judeo-Christian faiths are similarly severe in their judgments. Muhammad, for example, is characterized by Diderot as an impostor and an enemy of human reason.59 Yet there are glimmerings here and there of understanding, or at least fitful attempts at sympathetic understanding, of exotic or ancient religions. De Jaucourt was not wholly unsympathetic toward Islamic fasting, and Diderot granted that ancient Egyptian superstition had some justification in the periodic, apparently miraculous floodings of the Nile valley.60 It is, in fact, in articles by Diderot and de Jaucourt that one is most likely to find gestures of historical understanding of exotic religions. In "Osiris," de Jaucourt tempered his findings of contradiction and overactive imagination in Egyptian legend with an attempt to include the known facts.61 In "Samaneen," concerning a philosophic sect of India, his attempt is still more thorough, even resisting any temptation to ridicule that easy Enlightenment target, the concept of Nirvana.62 And Diderot, after his attack on Muhammad as an impostor, could proceed to a detailed, notably evenhanded treatment of Islamic philosophy, scholarship, art, and religion.63 On the beliefs and aspirations of Christianity, the Encyclopedia was more sympathetic than one might at first expect. Editorial caution may of course have accounted for much of this apparent sympathy: certainly the work generally comes down squarely on the side of French Catholicism whenever deviations and heresies are in question. With rare exceptions, no sympathy is lavished on heterodoxy. Articles on the primacy of the Pope, the horrors of the Arian heresy, and the "pretended Reformation" of Luther and Calvin all attest to Roman Catholic power and to philosophic caution.64 Again, as with more exotic religions, attempts at fairness and historical sympathy are most often to be found in articles by de Jaucourt, and perhaps by Diderot. Diderot (if his probable authorship of the unsigned "Puritans" article is accepted as correct) sympathized with the Puritans as objects of persecution, although he

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condemned them for their own persecution of dissident opinions;65 his views, of course, may have been related much less closely to historical sympathy than to the opportunity to support Enlightened doctrine concerning religious toleration. The evidence from de Jaucourt is a bit more persuasive: for example, he supplemented a mild discussion of the Priscillianist heresy with a passing reference to the "lies which have been retailed from all time against heretics."66 Toward the Quakers he was unabashedly sympathetic, probably because of their pacifist inclinations.67 From all this one can extract no strong case for the cultural catholicity or historical empathy of the Encyclopedists as a group. The Encyclopedia did indeed most often transmit an impression of the historical superiority of the eighteenth century or, to be less charitable, an impression of Enlightened cultural insularity. What this sampling does suggest is that these attitudes were not totally and perpetually monolithic. Attempts were made in the French eighteenth century, even if fitfully and briefly, to see portions of the past as admirable, or at least not simply as foils for Enlightened ways. Even in the field of religion, in which the Encyclopedists were not notably tolerant, there was an occasional hint that Enlightened assumptions might not be the sole key to the historical past. Could it even be that whole periods of the past might sometimes be judged on their own, with their own values? The thesis requires further testing in the following chapters. NOTES 1. Among many useful references, see Sherman B. Barnes, "Historians in the Age of the Enlightenment," in Kent State University Bulletin (Kent, Ohio, 1952), pp. 7-35; Ernst Breisach, Historiography, Ancient, Medieval, & Modern, pp. 199-227; J. H. Brumfitt, Voltaire Historian' Rene Hubert, Les sciences sociales dans /'"Encyclopedic,"; Peter Hanns Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism; R. V. Sampson, Progress in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1956); Nellie Noennie Schargo, History in the "Encyclopedic" (New York: Columbia University Press, 1947); Roland N. Stromberg, "History in the Eighteenth Century," Journal of the History of Ideas, 12 (1951), pp. 295-304; and Hugh Trevor-Roper, "The Historical Philosophy of the Enlightenment," in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 27 (Geneva: Institut et Musee Voltaire, 1963), pp. 1667-87. 2. Reill, The German Enlightenment, pp. 2, 31-47, 213, 219. 3. Daniel Mornet, "Les enseignements des bibliotheques privees (1750-1780)," Revue d'histoire litteraire de la France, 17 (1910), pp. 449-96. 4. Vyverberg, Historical Pessimism in the French Enlightenment, pp. 105-6. 5. Stromberg, "History in the Eighteenth Century," pp. 297-98. 6. D'Holbach, Systeme de la nature (London: 1774), vol. 1, pp. 271-72.

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7. Judith N. Shklar, "Jean d'Alerabert and the Rehabilitation of History," Journal of the History of Ideas, 42 (1981), pp. 656-57. 8. Grimsley, Jean d'Alembert, p. 264. 9. "ELEMENS DBS SCIENCES," Encyclopedic, vol. 5, p. 496. 10. Hans Wolpe, Raynal et sa machine de guerre: "L'histoire des deux Indes" et ses perfectionnements (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), p. 43. 11. This and the following paragraphs are deeply indebted to Lester A. Segal, "Nicolas Lenglet Du Fresnoy: Tradition and Change in French Historiographical Thought of the Early Eighteenth Century," in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 98 (Banbury: The Voltaire Foundation, 1972), pp. 69-117. 12. See the works cited in note 1, especially the Brumfitt and the Rihs titles. See also: J. H. Brumfitt, "History and Propaganda in Voltaire," in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 24 (Geneva: Institut et Musee Voltaire, 1963), pp. 271-87; Jerome Rosenthal, "Voltaire's Philosophy of History," Journal of the History of Ideas, 16 (1955), pp. 153-78; Virgil W. Topazio, Voltaire: A Critical Study of His Major Work (New York: Random House, 1967), pp. 61-85. 13. Segal, "Nicolas Lenglet Du Fresnoy," pp. 114-15. 14. For specifics, see Brumfitt, Voltaire Historian, pp. 111-21. See the same work, pp. 8-45, for several other notable influences on Voltaire's history writing. 15. Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, p. 190. 16. The most thorough studies of Voltaire's historical methodology remain those of J. H. Brumfitt, in Voltaire Historian and in the "Introduction" to his edition of La philosophie de I'histoire, in Les oeuvres completes de Voltaire, ed. Theodore Besterman, vol. 59 (1969), pp. 13-78. 17. See especially Brumfitt, Voltaire Historian, pp. 129-47. 18. Rihs, Voltaire: Recherches sur les origines du materialisme historique, p. 113. 19. "HISTOIRE," Encyclopedic, vol. 8, pp. 220-25. 20. Ibid., pp. 221, 225. 21. Topazio, Voltaire, pp. 77, 84. 22. Brumfitt, "Introduction," La philosophie de I'histoire, pp. 28-58. 23. Brumfitt, Voltaire Historian, pp. 121-25. 24. Rihs, Voltaire: Recherches sur les origines du materialisme historique, pp. 141-62; Brumfitt, Voltaire Historian, pp. 104-11. 25. Brumfitt, Voltaire Historian, pp. 166-67. 26. Ibid., p. 99. See also Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, pp. 99-100. 27. Oeuvres de Voltaire, ed. Beuchot, vol 15: Essai sur les moeurs, p. 255. 28. "HISTOIRE," Encyclopedic, vol. 8, p. 223. 29. Ibid., p. 224. 30. Oeuvres historiques de Voltaire, ed. Rene Pomeau (Paris: Gallimard, 1957): Remarques sur I'histoire, pp. 43-44. 31. Oeuvres de Voltaire, ed. Beuchot, vol. 15: Essai sur les moeurs, pp. 246-47. See also Brumfitt, "Introduction," La philosophie de I'histoire, pp. 32-35. 32. Oeuvres historiques de Voltaire, ed. Pomeau: Nouvelles considerations sur I'histoire, pp. 47-48; Voltaire, Correspondance, ed. Theodore Besterman (Geneva:

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Institut et Musee Voltaire, 1953-1965), vol. 38 (1958): letter to Saverio Bettinelli, 18 October 1759, p. 46. 33. Oeuvres historiques de Voltaire: Nouvelles considerations sur I'histoire, pp. 47-48. 34. Voltaire, Correspondence, vol. 65 (1961): letter to Francois, baron de Tott, 23 April 1767, p. 171. 35. See the long analysis, often sensible, in Rihs, Voltaire: Recherches sur les origines du materialisme historique, pp. 3-112. 36. "HISTOIRE," Encyclopedie, vol. 8, p. 223. 37. Much in the following two paragraphs parallels the conclusions of J. H. Brumfitt, in "History and Propaganda in Voltaire," pp. 271-87. 38. Topazio, Voltaire, p. 83. Topazio also recognizes that this, by itself, is an oversimplification, and that Voltaire's histories are "living and useful works"; p. 84. 39. Brumfitt, "History and Propaganda in Voltaire," pp. 271-87. 40. "HISTOIRE," Encyclopedic, vol. 8, pp. 220-25. 41. Ibid., pp. 220-21. 42. Note after "ECOLE VENITIENNE," Encyclopedic, vol. 5, p. 333. 43. Hardesty, The "Supplement" to the "Encyclopedia," pp. 49-57; Lough, The Contributors to the "Encyclopedic," pp. 62-68. 44. "PONTOISE ou PONT-OYSE," Encyclopedic, vol. 13, pp. 82-83; "WANTAGE," Encyclopedic, vol. 17, pp. 586-89; "VOORHOUT," Encyclopedic, vol. 17, pp. 468-71. 45. "GEOMETRIE," Encyclopedic, vol. 7, pp. 629-38. 46. "GRAVEUR," Encyclopedie, vol. 7, pp. 866-70. 47. "DECIME," Encyclopedic, vol. 4, pp. 670-79; "GARDES DBS SCEAUX DE FRANCE," Encyclopedic, vol. 7, pp. 495-507; "COURS DBS AIDES DE PARIS," Encyclopedie, vol. 4, pp. 356-72; "PARLEMENT DE PARIS," Encyclopedic, vol. 12, pp. 1-36. 48. "VEPRES SICILIENNES," Encyclopedie, vol. 17, p. 38; "TRIUMVIRAT . . . ," vol. 16, pp. 667-81. 49. Schargo, History in the "Encyclopedic," pp. 11-12. Much of what follows in this section parallels and often is indebted to this important monograph. 50. Ibid., pp. 10-11. 51. In addition to Schargo, passim, see Hubert, Les sciences sociales dans I'"Encyclopedic," pp. 24-26, 156-60; Proust, L'Encyclopedic, pp. 142-57. 52. "RECIT (Hist. Apolog. Oraison, Epopee)," Encyclopedie, vol. 13, p. 852. 53. "RELATION Historique," Encyclopedie, vol. 14, p. 63. 54. "ECOLE MILITAIRE," Encyclopedie, vol. 5, pp. 307-13. 55. "GUERRE, (Droit naturel & politique)" Encyclopedie, vol. 7, pp. 995-98. 56. "DUEL" (Boucher d'Argis), Encyclopedie, vol. 5, p. 159. 57. "PRETRES . . . (Religion & Politique)," Encyclopedie, vol. 13, pp. 340-41. 58. "CELTES (Philosophic des)" Encyclopedie, vol. 2, pp. 808-11. 59. "SARRASlNSouARABES,philosophic des," Encyclopedie, vol. 14, p. 664. 60. "RAMADANS ou RAMAZAN . . . (Religion des Turcs)," Encyclopedie, vol.

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13, pp. 780-81; "EGYPTIENS (PHILOSOPHIE DBS,)" Encyclopedie, vol. 5, p. 436. 61. "OSIRIS," Encyclopedic, vol. 11, pp. 683-84. 62. "SAMANEENS," Encyclopedic, vol. 14, pp. 590-92. 63. "SARRASINS ou ARABES, philosophie des," vol. 14, pp. 664-69. 64. "PRIMAUTE DU PAPE" (anonymous), Encyclopedic, vol. 13, pp. 365-67; "ARIANISME" (abbe Mallet), Encyclopedic, vol. 1, pp. 649-50; "REFORMATION" (anonymous), Encyclopedie, vol. 13, pp. 890-91; "CALVINISME" (anonymous) and "CALVINISTES" (abbe Mallet), Encyclopedie, vol. 2, p. 566. 65. "PURITAINS," Encyclopedie, vol. 13, pp. 581-82. 66. "PRISCILLIANITE," Encyclopedie, vol. 13, pp. 378-80. 67. "QUAKER," Encyclopedie, vol. 13, pp. 648-50.

9 The Case of Ancient Greece Greece in the Enlightenment Like any modern age that occasionally looks backward, the French Enlightenment often found itself not only choosing and reconstructing its past but also making historical judgments. Having sketched several Enlightenment positions, whether public or unavowed in print, on the interpretation of history in general, we may now turn to specific periods in the European past. In a study that is suggestive rather than exhaustive I will not attempt to consider the Enlightenment view of all ages of western history but will choose samples only. The two periods chosen here—ancient Greece and the European Middle Ages—were major recipients of attention in the Encyclopedic age, both within and outside Diderot's massive project.1 As for ancient Greece,2 one must recognize at the outset that the French eighteenth century knew much less than the twentieth would know, and that it lacked, totally or in part, several research tools now in routine use. Modern psychology was as yet unborn, and Montesquieu's scatter-shot efforts in sociology by no means inaugurated a systematic discipline. Above all, the Enlightenment knew little of archaeology.3 Not until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would the careful and systematic archaeological study of Asia Minor, for example, or even of the Athenian acropolis, be possible. A further handicap of the Enlightenment was more obviously self-imposed, but none the less real—its reluctance or sheer inability to recognize the central role of religion in Greek life—perhaps especially, as we will see, in the evolution of Greek drama. To be sure, even the traditional Christian perspective had seldom given much credit for cultural efflorescences to faiths outside the Christian tradition. Now came professional religion-baiters and anticlericals like d'Holbach and Voltaire—but even their Enlightened contemporaries, somewhat less belligerent or thoroughgoing in their opposition to traditional religions, were conditioned to secular-mindedness in the study of past cultures. The philosophes were more likely to acknowledge environmental

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factors like a favorable climate, and "moral" factors like free government, than to delve into unappealing religious superstitions as the origin of the Greek achievement. Still another source seen by the eighteenth century for the historical Greek flowering was foreign influence. The philosophes often spoke of Greek contacts with earlier civilizations, such as the Egyptian and the Phoenician. Despite linguistic limitations (discovery and interpretation of the Rosetta stone were still well in the future) the Enlightenment was almost overeager to find historical precedents for the Greek genius.4 Perhaps the usual, but not unanimous, Enlightenment quest for consecutive, progressive development across the centuries made it underestimate the unique role later times have often assigned to the Greeks. Certainly the eighteenth-century approach was not one of uncritical admiration for ancient Greece, at least outside the occasional near-blind enthusiasm for Spartan laws and institutions that has become so mysterious to the later liberal tradition among historians. Toward Greece as a whole, and especially toward its Athenian touchstone, the Enlightenment view was somewhat more complex than conventional wisdom allows. Even though the French Enlightenment would grant at times that the Greeks had formulated an essentially new culture out of multiple influences, its admiration was often tempered by ambivalence. Thus, while Socrates was frequently praised for his championing of self-knowledge and the intellectual life, his philosophic approach was often questioned as being more metaphysical than scientific. Plato, similarly, was admired for his rationalism, but condemned as unintelligible for his more mystical flights.5 And of course Aristotle was forever under suspicion for having been extravagantly admired (and extravagantly utilized) by the medieval Scholastics; anybody who was so often cited by the theologian Aquinas could not be all good. With very limited archaeological information and no systematic anthropology or sociology, the philosophes had little but their own presuppositions and the available Greek literary evidence to rely upon. Even this latter evidence was often considered suspect, as in the case of Herodotus and the other ancient historians. But let us turn from generalization to a few specifics—to several individual eighteenth-century writers. Sometimes here the theory, by later standards, was impeccable. Already we have noted elements of cultural relativism in Montesquieu. A historical dimension is prominently added in a remark of his on Greek literature: "To judge the beauties of Homer, we must place ourselves in the camp of the Greeks, not in a French army."6 If he and his Enlightened colleagues had scrupulously followed this directive in all its implications, there would have been little question of the historical and cultural empathy of the Enlightenment, and little need for the present study.

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Enlightenment reactions to the Greeks ranged from uncritical acceptance to flat rejection, as in comments respectively by Grimm and Mably. In both cases, however, the reaction was directed toward one part of the Greek heritage, not the whole; aside from cursory, almost inherently aphoristic remarks, this author knows of no sustained judgments by the Enlightenment on the entirety of Greek history, for simple good or ill. Grimm's concern was Sparta: his was a typical panegyric of Lacedaemonian laws and of "that sublime legislator" Lycurgus.7 Mably, on the other hand, reacted vigorously against the picture of an early-Greek golden age. This picture, found in Plato and elsewhere, was of a glorious age of justice, happiness, and pleasant leisure; the actuality, wrote Mably, was a primitive scene characterized by "the most profound ignorance of the duties of humanity." The overall tone, however, of his Observations on the History of the Greeks was moderate and in general carried out his announced intention to seek out "general and particular causes of [Greek] prosperity and misfortunes."8 The Enlightenment perception of Greek drama deserves specific notice here, especially as it illumines the reactions of several individual French writers to Greek culture. Raymond Trousson's essay on this subject9 is highly pertinent for its statement of the central facts—the availability since 1730 of many of the Sophoclean and Euripidean tragedies in French translation; the general rejection of Aeschylus as too simple and crude to be worthy of notice (the first translations appeared only in 1770); the general consensus that Sophocles' works were harmonious and restrained and Euripides' dramas were moving and psychologically acute. Some commentators saw Greek tragedy as reflecting a virile Greek discipline, as against the more refined manners of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reflected in French tragedy. Diderot, in a letter of 1772, was unusual in clearly aligning himself here with the Greeks: he praised the "austerity of the Athenians" as against the "soft indulgence" of amatory delights in French drama.10 Comments such as these were more appreciative than most others on Greek theater. As Trousson demonstrates, the usual failure of the French Enlightenment to comprehend the unique vision of Greek tragedy was due in large part to the Enlightenment's inability to place this drama in its context of religious ritual. Small wonder, above all, that Enlightened criticism rejected Aeschylus not only for his "crudity" but also for his profoundly religious moral sensibility. Small wonder that it found incomprehensible the dark Greek message of subjection to fate. The crushing of man by destiny was a vision, wrote Marmontel, that happily had been superseded in modern times by the acceptance of free will and a turning by tragic authors to the analysis of human passions. The upshot was that, to the amazement of later ages, the French Enlightenment commonly found Greek tragedy philosophically defec-

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live and morally disagreeable, as well as literarily primitive. Greek drama was seen as a foretaste—honorable but still only a faint foretaste—of the more perfect French theater of later times.11 Dissenting voices on this subject were rare in the French Enlightenment— and of these, the most prominent was that of Diderot. Outside the pages of the Encyclopedia his comments on the ancient theater versus the modern were notable. In his Essay on Dramatic Poetry (1758) he advanced, more bluntly than his contemporaries, the proposition that "in general, the more a people is civilized and polished, the less its customs and morals are poetic; everything becomes weaker as it becomes milder and softer." But this was not simply the generalized judgment that others in Diderot's day sometimes made: he then added a page of precise examples of drama-filled situations that could have inspired Greek tragedy. This was a time, he began, "when children tear their hair beside the bed of a dying father, when a mother bares her bosom and implores her son by the breasts that nursed him; when a friend cuts his hair and spreads it on the corpse of his friend; . . . when the first move made by a son who, after having left his parents, returns after a long absence, is to clasp their knees and, prostrate, await their blessing. . . ." "I do not say," Diderot added, "that these customs are good, but only that they are poetic." His conclusion was that "poetry demands situations that are excessive, barbarous, and savage."12 Further, Diderot glimpsed the Greek tragic message that the Enlightenment generally refused to countenance—the dominance of "fate or the will of the gods." Often, said Diderot, Greek tragic heroes found their destiny "abandoned to superior beings . . . whose hand follows them and strikes them when they seem in the fullest security. If," he continued, "there is anything moving to us, it is the spectacle of a man who becomes blameworthy and unhappy through no fault of his own." 13 This, he admitted in 1773, was a message too stern for popularity in a more delicately emotional modern world—in such "a delicate, vaporish, sensitive nation" as France in the eighteenth century.14 Grimm, too, believed that his contemporaries misunderstood and underestimated the Greek tragic stage. His four-page letter of 1 June 1757 in the Literary Correspondence is a sustained attack on what he considered the grave misapprehensions of Voltaire concerning Greek comedy and tragedy alike. After conventional tribute to the "masculine and sublime beauties" of the Greek poets, Grimm speculated that perhaps Voltaire had not really paid much attention to those poets since his schooldays; in any case the modern French spirit was more polite, fine, and delicate than that of the ancient poets with their "touching and often . . . sublime simplicity." Grimm contrasted the intellectuality and jaded emotions of the contemporary French theater-

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going public with the primal emotional abandon that he believed had been awakened in the ancient-Greek audiences. He prayed that modern readers and theater-goers might never fail to give real credit to the Greek theater—even to Greek comedy. A fuller understanding of the language of Aristophanes might lead to greater appreciation for his comedy: he deserved, said Grimm, at least a suspended judgment. Moreover, Aristophanes was not the whole of Greek comedy, and Menander and his Roman imitator Terence wrote as fine comedy as any from Moliere's pen.15 The insights of Grimm and Diderot were not, however, typical of the mid-century French Enlightenment. The views of Voltaire—Grimm's foil in the letter cited above—were far more common. For Voltaire the ancient Greeks were inventors in the infancy of drama, as had been Homer before them in heroic verse. As Voltaire wrote in the Piccini Notebooks: "In Homer there was not a single refined idea (idee fine), but there were a thousand in Tasso" more than two millennia later.16 As for the comic dramatist Aristophanes, again Voltaire's standards were of his own, not of Aristophanes' day: "This comic poet, who is neither comic nor a poet, would not have been admitted among us to give farces at the fair of St. Lawrence. To me he seems much lower and more contemptible than Plutarch portrays him." 17 When Voltaire ventured beyond theater in his assessment of the Greeks his judgment was sometimes more charitable and his cross-cultural understanding fitfully more insightful. Both his judgment and his understanding, however, fell short of what one might perhaps expect from his placing of Periclean Athens among the four greatest ages of mankind. Certainly in literature,. ancient Greece, in his opinion, fell far below the achievements of the Italian Renaissance: Ariosto as well as Tasso surpassed Homer by far. The Italians, moreover, decisively surpassed ancient Greece in painting and apparently music, and came close to the Greeks in sculpture. As for "true philosophy," neither Greece nor any other nation possessed any until the end of the sixteenth century, in the time of Galileo.18 Voltaire's estimate of the Greeks was somewhat milder in The Philosophy of History (which, as we have noted earlier, eventually served as the introduction to the Essay on Customs and Morals). Greek philosophical speculations, he wrote there, "reveal the wisdom and the folly of the human mind, its grandeur and its weakness."19 This aphorism promises an evenhanded assessment of ancient Greece, at least in philosophy—and possibly an attempt to see Greece in itself, not just as a dim forerunner of the Enlightenment. The reality does not go very far toward fulfilling these hopes. Significantly, a substantial majority of the thirty-odd pages on the Greeks in The Philosophy of History20 deal with Greek religion alone—a subject on which one neither

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expects nor finds much objectivity or cross-cultural understanding on Voltaire's part. Voltaire wavered in these pages between condemnation of the unworthy fables that he found at the base of Greek religion and, on the other hand, his fond belief that, after all, this religion was monotheistic in tendency and essence, since it put Zeus in the position of master over gods and men.21 The main conclusion he extracted from Greek religious history was propagandistic—that ancient Greece permitted religious toleration and freedom of thought. Yet this is not quite the entirety of Voltaire's analysis of ancient Greece in The Philosophy of History. There is, to be sure, very little indeed on those much-celebrated glories of Greece in the realms of literature and the fine arts; nearly all his relevant comments are in two brief paragraphs. The point of the first paragraph is that the early Greeks seem to have been "born with organs more favorable to the fine arts than those of all other peoples"—at least a vague intimation of the cultural individuality of ancient Greece. Of the two sentences in the second paragraph, the longer is as follows: "Beautiful architecture, a perfected sculpture, painting and good music, true poetry and true eloquence, the proper way to write good history, and finally even philosophy, although it was still formless and obscure—all this came to the nations of the world only through the Greeks."22 These points, one may feel, are not a bad start toward recognizing the distinctive Greek achievement—but certainly they are only a start. Beyond this, and beyond the many pages on religion, Voltaire's summary of Greek civilization in The Philosophy of History consists of a page or so on Greek origins (stressing early myths and the Phoenician influence) and several pages on language, legislation, and philosophy. On the last subject, Voltaire remarked that "all the philosophers were unintelligible" and Plato as unintelligible as the rest, although some fine ideas were scattered here and there in his works. Moreover, the rulers of Greece did permit freedom of philosophizing as well as of religion, except in the one case of Socrates, after which the Athenians soon repented of what they had done. As for the Greek language, Voltaire insisted here as he did elsewhere on the distinctive characteristic of harmony, and he hinted that this may have been a characteristic of the Greek mind in general.23 It must be recognized, though, that Voltairean references to Greek cultural individuality were rare, brief, and vague. I believe, however, that their existence is worth noting. They were, on the other hand, quite peripheral to the main thrust of Voltaire's view of the Greeks—a view that nearly always was conditioned by Voltaire's own Enlightenment circumstances and his essentially propagandistic aims. Again Voltaire stood, with all his wit and all his ostensibly broad scholarly apparatus, squarely in the path of any attempt to

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understand periods of past history in terms of some real cultural independence and identity. There were, as we have seen, several moves made to circumvent the Voltairean example, most notably by Diderot and Grimm as they tried to understand Greek theater. Although these efforts were stronger and more determined than Voltaire's rare and parenthetical unorthodox insights, even they do not add up to any truly broad Enlightenment attempt to understand the whole Greek achievement as the creation of a unique cultural configuration. Our first investigation of historical understanding of specific past periods of western history—ancient Greece as seen by the French Enlightenment outside the Encyclopedia—has been fruitful in only a very limited area.

Greece in the Encyclopedia Some of the Encyclopedia'?, most enthusiastic praise, and some of its most careful assessment, of ancient Greek civilization would appear in the Supplement, after Diderot's stewardship had ended. Two articles on Athens were very laudatory, and Marmontel's discussion of the Ancients presented a perceptive summation of conclusions in the long-standing, now virtually exhausted, "quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns."24 Marmontel made the usual distinction between "progressive knowledge," as in science and history, and those realms in which "talent, genius, and taste" were central: in the first area cumulative progress was obvious, but in the second it was not. Partisans of the Ancients, he wrote, diagnosed an admirable cultural flowering in Greece but took unfair advantage of the much longer period (including the many Roman centuries) they dealt with, as against the short post-Renaissance era. As for ancient Greek drama, Marmontel displayed some momentary sympathy. Although Sophocles and Euripides (and no doubt Aeschylus, whom he did not even mention) were inferior to Corneille and Racine in plot development, character interplay, and the plumbing of human passions, the Greek tragedians excelled in naturalness, energy, and pathos. A summary assessment of Marmontel's two-page Supplement article would include modest credits for cross-cultural sympathy and understanding within the context of a very brief exposition. Our principal subject here, however, must be the Encyclopedia under Diderot's editorship. It may be noted first of all that Voltaire's contribution here was minimal. The main substance of his remarks on Greece in the "History" article was the question of historical reliability in Herodotus. Herodotus, Voltaire maintained, was entirely untrustworthy in the fable-filled period before the Persian Wars; the Greek writer became, on the other hand, almost

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instantaneously credible with the outbreak of that conflict. For Voltaire, Herodotus, like Homer, was primarily a forerunner of greater things to come. After these comments on Herodotus and a word on Thucydides, Voltaire's only additional comment of interest on Greece is his remark that Greek genius in the arts flourished most notably during the grave disturbances of the Peloponnesian War, just as a blossoming of the arts in ancient Rome came during civil war, and in the Italian Renaissance at a time of invasion and warfare.25 In its broad lines, the overall Encyclopedic estimation of ancient Greece is an extention of the views that prevailed in the French Enlightenment as a whole. Again, no "Greek miracle" was seen, and (outside Sparta) the Encyclopedists tended to be extremely critical. Greek religion and philosophy, they asserted, included, respectively, much superstition and metaphysical nonsense. Although the record of the arts was impressive, the Greek citystates left a deplorable legacy of narrow-minded particularism and military destructiveness that made Greek decline inevitable.26 But let us look for confirmation or qualification at several specific examples, reserving the two most important writers on the subject, Diderot and de Jaucourt, for the end. For example, in the article "Barbarians," the abbe Yvon criticized the Greek people's view of their own origins and uniqueness. The term "barbarians," he wrote, "is the name that the Greeks scornfully gave to all the nations who did not speak their language, or who at least did not speak it as well as the Greeks did." The Greeks used the word to underline "the extreme opposition between themselves and the other nations that had not shed their primitive roughness, whereas . . . [the Greeks] had perfected their taste and had contributed much to the progress of the human mind. Thus all the [other] nations were reputed 'barbarous' because they had neither the polish and politeness of the Greeks, nor a language as pure, fecund, or harmonious" as Greek. The Romans imitated the Greeks in this attitude, as have the modern French, "who regard as crude everything different from their own ways. The Greeks and the Romans were more jealous of dominating by their minds than by the force of their arms, just as we wish to dominate by imposing the ways fashionable with us." 27 Yvon had drawn from historical example a broad condemnation of cultural exclusivity applicable also to his own time. The early Christians, the abbe continued, pointed out to the Greeks and the Romans that these proud peoples actually owed a great deal to "barbarian" thought. Although Yvon seems to have sympathized, the point gave rise to a further reflection, this time in favor of the Greeks. "The philosophy of other peoples . . . was . . . only a conglomeration of maxims handed down by tradition. ... It was only in Greece that one dared to reason—and this was also the only country where subtle and refined intellect gave birth to

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systems." "The Greeks were the first inventors of that systematic philosophy which, standing up to all authority, wants only to let itself be led by the light of evidence in its search for truth."28 In less than one Encyclopedia page, Yvon had contrived to combine both criticism and praise of the Greeks with a critique of cultural insularity. Perhaps the good abbe's incisiveness and subtlety have been underestimated by historians writing on the Encyclopedic circle.29 Most other Encyclopedia comments (outside Diderot and de Jaucourt) on the Greeks are less subtle or far-reaching. The anonymous author of "Stage ... [in literature]" criticized Greeks and Romans alike for remnants of primitive ferocity, as reflected in violent episodes in their drama.30 The abbe Mallet was highly indignant at the "disorders" and "abominations" in the Greek cult of Bacchus.31 In the article "Encaustic," Monnoye noted that Greece had excellent sculpture and mediocre painting, and implied that not all the arts proceed at the same pace in any given civilization.32 The anonymous author of the article "Letters" implied a more even rise and fall, at least of the literary arts, since their fate in ancient Greece was tied to that of the sciences: Greece indeed "owed its lustrous achievement to that happy concurrence. Literature and the sciences marched together at an equal pace and supported each other." "Letters and the sciences," he added, "enriched each other through the intimacy of their relationship." Again, then, from Greek and Roman example an Encyclopedist had drawn general rules for all civilizations, and a parallel, incidentally, with the age of Louis XIV. "The sciences cannot survive," he asserted, "in a country where letters are not cultivated." Obversely, "the sciences, for their part, cooperate in the perfecting of letters. ... To make the latter flourish, the philosophic spirit is necessary."33 None of these reflections in the article "Letters" amounts to any special insight into ancient Greece; in fact, by stressing the close parallels between Greece and other nations, the article nearly rules out any real uniqueness on the part of the Greeks. Moreover, everything up to the last paragraphs of the article is on a rather dismaying level of generalization. Eventually, though, the author did include some specifics on Greek authors. Socrates, he asserted, "cultivated equally philosophy, eloquence, and poetry. . . . On merely hearing the name of Plato one thinks of scientific genius and literary amenities. Aristotle, that universal genius, brought light not only to all branches of literature but to all realms of the sciences."34 Although this author's inclination to admire the Greeks is undeniable, one can hardly find any real feeling here for their distinctiveness as a cultural group. But let us turn to articles by the chevalier de Jaucourt and Diderot, respectively the most prolific and the most insightful of Encyclopedia authors.

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Prolific writing, we should recognize at the start, does not necessarily imply mindless writing, nor is all writing by nonspecialists (in this instance including both Diderot and de Jaucourt) negligible. Let us begin with de Jaucourt, who clearly enjoyed writing about the Greeks, and did so voluminously. One of the Encyclopedia's longest discussions of group character and customs is by de Jaucourt: his analysis of the ancient Athenians requires seven long columns35 in—of all places—his essay on Paris. Several people of much wit and understanding, he noted, had already drawn a parallel between ancient Athenians and modern Parisians, without entering into specifics; it is at this point that he began his own long analysis of the Athenians, ostensibly leaving all conclusions on parallelism to the reader, but rather transparently bestowing his seal of approval on the parallels. All points concerning the character of the Athenians—for example, their lively and inquisitive minds, their frivolity and shallowness, their vanity and their love of ease and luxury—are not made just by generalized assertion, but by the evidence of documentary samplings from ancient sources. The article notes contradictions (alternating toughness and softness, for instance) in the Athenian character, and in general paints a group portrait carrying a degree of conviction. Unfortunately some of the conviction is dissipated by de Jaucourt's manifest desire to present a picture as much of Paris as of Athens. But even as our estimation of de Jaucourt's feeling for Athenian uniqueness is thereby greatly lowered, we may still give him credit for substituting some fairly substantial documentation for the more customary vague dicta that purported, here and outside the Encyclopedia, to constitute genuine cultural analysis. On the other hand, we encounter no unusual insights whatsoever in de Jaucourt's treatment of ancient Greek religion. Here are all the standard characterizations of that religion—from the unintelligibility of its myths and the credulity of its believers, to the overall clouds of superstition that engulfed it.36 The chevalier did note more than once, however, that wise men in ancient Greece (and Rome also) knew better than to take omens or oracles seriously, although they did repeat such tales in order not to seem to attack prevailing religious beliefs.37 His long article "Religion of the Greeks and the Romans" compares Greek religion unfavorably with its pagan Roman offshoot, which, following the abbe Coyer, he found more respectable in both its theology and its ethics, and more sensible in its worship.38 All in all, de Jaucourt could summon up only very minimal sympathy for Greek religion. Toward most other aspects of Greek culture, de Jaucourt's views were much more favorable, especially when literature and the fine arts were involved. In "Republic of Athens" he gave credit, somewhat cautiously, to the democratic regime that existed during most of the fifth century before Christ, and granted that it was during these seven decades in Athens that there

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appeared "its greatest captains, its most celebrated philosophers, its first orators, and its most skillful artists." After this, unfortunately, "since riches and fine arts lead to corruption, Athens corrupted itself very promptly and marched quickly to its ruin."39 In his article "Greeks, [in] Ancient History and Literature," de Jaucourt rated the Greeks generally above the Romans: Greek genius, he believed, soared beyond the reach of the judicious, more earthbound Roman temper. Greece, not Rome, was "the most illustrious nation of antiquity" and was indisputably supreme in literature and the arts. "The Greeks have had absolutely no rivals" in the fine arts—witness the invariable superiority of original Greek statues over their Roman copies.40 From these assertions, de Jaucourt moved on to an attempted explanation. After a ritual obeisance to the temperate climate and clear sky of Greece, he praised the pure, fine blood of the Greeks—a rather rare observation among the predominantly environmental preoccupations of Enlightenment sociology. He praised the exercises and athletic games of the Greeks, and the loosefitting garments that contrasted with the disfiguring restraints of eighteenthcentury costume. Bodily beauty was, moreover, on daily display among the Greeks—a model and inspiration for artists whether in gymnasia or in public festivals, games, dances, or the theater. In addition, state policy encouraged literature as well as the visual arts; talent was openly recognized and rewarded.41 De Jaucourt was more explicit on the last point in his article "Prizes for music and poetry, ([in] Greek Antiquity)." One never recalls the history and character of the Greeks without admiring the image of those celebrated competitions in which, in all fields, there appeared productions of wit and talent, all competing nobly with one another to please the most intelligent of all peoples. Not only did dexterity and strength of body seek to win immortal fame in these contests, but historians, sophists, orators, and poets read their works in solemn competition and received prizes for their contributions. Following their example, painters showed their paintings in competition, and sculptors submitted to the public the masterpieces created to ornament the temples of the gods.42 Thus did de Jaucourt sketch the rudiments of a cultural sociology of the ancient Greeks. It was, to be sure, a rough sketch, but it did attempt not only to draw outlines but also to go beyond them to historical explanation and causation. Outside religion, in which transcendence of customary Enlightenment views was so rare, de Jaucourt's sketch was unusually coherent and sympathetic for its day. Ancient Greece was at least starting to appear to be an admirable culture developing its own characteristics in its own way.

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Diderot's articles in the Encyclopedia supplemented those of de Jaucourt, usually without attempting to cover the same ground. To Greek mythology and religion he often brought a degree of sympathy not shown by his less imaginative colleague. It is true that in his article "Philosophy of the Greeks" he applied the word "superstition" several times to early Greek myths and fables.43 On the other hand, the essay "Bacchus" offers neither praise nor blame, although one senses some empathy with the deity who brought "the culture of the vine" to mankind.44 In his article on Apollo one again detects a glimmer of sympathy, although his treatment is not judgmental: certainly no pejoratives such as "unintelligible" or "incredible" are to be found here. The article is primarily a string of mythological anecdotes; several origins of the Apollonian myth are also briefly stated, but there is no attempt to assess any deeper significance of Apollo for the Greek mind.45 It seems safe to characterize Diderot's understanding of Greek religion as superficial but by no means totally hostile. Diderot's principal Encyclopedia contribution to understanding the Greeks came in the field of philosophy. Here his long article "Philosophy of the Greeks" must be our point of departure.46 After an early precautionary statement ("The Hebrews knew the true God"), which certainly was not intended to be taken very seriously, Diderot set out to describe three phases or aspects of Greek philosophy: the "fabulous" or mythical stage, political philosophy, and "sectarian" philosophy. He does not define this last term, but evidently means all other Greek philosophy, primarily scientific and ethical. Diderot's disproportionate emphasis on the first phase and the skeletal brevity of the third section are balanced by important additional articles of his, such as those on the Ionian school, the Socratic and Platonic philosophies, Epicureanism, and skepticism. The mythological period of Greek philosophy, he eventually admitted, saw no true philosophy at all, but only a chaos of fables and inchoate ideas: it knew no systematic thought. Diderot confessed quite frankly that modern knowledge of this period was sketchy and dim. Many of its myths and concepts came, he noted, from outside Greece, but they were transformed by the "bold method of thinking" that marked the Greeks then and in their later systematic philosophy. Diderot summarized in straightforward terms the cluster of mythology that accumulated around the figure of Orpheus, including the fabulous descent to the Underworld. Diderot went so far as to characterize bluntly such tales as "puerilities."47 The article's section on "political" philosophy is less judgmental. Most notably, Diderot's treatment of Lycurgus omits the usual Enlightenment encomia. On Solon he did bestow his blessing: Solon, he asserted, taught the lessons that we still teach our children and that we should follow as adults,

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such as the importance of following reason alone and of shunning evil. In the sages of sixth-century Greece he found few distinctive or important ideas, but commended their usefulness to the Greeks at that phase of their civilization—an elementary recognition at least, we might think today, of cultural context.48 The third section, on all other types of philosophy among the pagan Greeks, presents in bare outline their systematic thought from the Ionian school to Pyrrhonism. Thales, he said, was the first real philosopher in the modern sense, because "he introduced the scientific method into philosophy." With proper caution, since Thales' philosophic remains were so fragmentary, Diderot did not ascribe "systematic" thought to that thinker, as he did to Socrates and many later schools of Greek thought. For the Socratic and other schools the reader was referred to specialized articles elsewhere in the Encyclopedia. This introduction to Greek philosophy concludes with praise for Alexander the Great, who not only spread Greek philosophy far and wide but also did not scorn to talk to "barbarians" who had the reputation of being wise.49 One leaves "Philosophy of the Greeks" with an impression that Diderot had some sense of historical context, and above all that he sympathized with mature Greek thought and was making an attempt, whether successful or not, to be fair to it and possibly even to its contemporary ' 'barbarian'' competitors. These impressions are confirmed by Diderot's more specialized essays on Greek philosophy. Let us glance at several of these essays. The article "Ionian Sect" substantiates Diderot's admiration for the great Ionian pioneers of Greek philosophy.50 Again Diderot admitted to a lack of precise information, since so much of the original writing had been lost, and since much that his time did possess had come through the distortions of post-Ionian writers. Diderot clearly had much admiration for Thales, although often his praise is veiled discreetly. Thales was, for Diderot, an honorable initiator of later "natural philosophy." The teachings of Anaximander and Anaximenes were summarized in detailed outline form, as were those of Anaxagoras, for whom Diderot also had specific praise in connection with his "firmness of soul" under Athenian persecution.51 The substantial article "Socratic Philosophy . . . " was unsigned but is almost certainly by Diderot.52 It is an unqualified endorsement of Socrates. Ignoring completely the frequent Enlightenment charges against Socrates of metaphysical conjecture and system-spinning, the essay characterizes Socrates as an ethical teacher after centuries of general neglect of moral theory. Socrates "saw that one must work to make men good before beginning to make them learned." Philosophy before Socrates had had its head among the stars, not among the people; it was he who brought philosophy

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down to earth. " He spoke,'' wrote Diderot, " of the soul, of passions, of vices and virtues, of moral beauty and ugliness, of society, and of the other things immediately linked to our actions and our happiness. ... He listened only to experience, reason, and the law of honesty and justice. ... He drew our ancestors out of dusty shadow and made citizens of them."53 But for Diderot this was just an introduction to the man. The article continues with a word on historical sources and then a biography of the philosopher—an opportunity to praise his bravery in war, his self-control, his clearheaded judgment and his attention to family duties. Diderot stressed Socrates' desire to be useful to society and especially to the young; he praised his thought as high-minded and subtle, his method as ironic and inductive, and his death as noble and serene. "He detested flattery," and his benevolence was similar to that of the Supreme Being. In a peroration typical of Diderot at his most unabashedly personal (and at his most embarrassing to many modern readers) Diderot could exclaim: "O Socrates, how little I resemble you! But at least you make me weep with admiration and joy!"54 There is much more of the same in this article, before Diderot's calmer listing of Socrates' teachings in various areas, and a brief discussion of the later Socratic school of thought. Certainly Diderot was sympathetic with his subject. He did omit those more transcendent, metaphysical speculations of whose existence he may have been well aware at less lyrical moments— unless he privately ascribed them all to Plato rather than to Socrates himself. In any case, most of the modern world, a few skeptics aside, has chosen to sympathize with Diderot in elevating Socrates to the peak of philosophic virtue. From this viewpoint Diderot's position can seem not only unusually sympathetic but also rather remarkably prescient. The long article on Platonism is somewhat less laudatory than that on Socratic philosophy; it, too, is unsigned but is generally accepted as being by Diderot.55 Before the usual long section summarizing Plato's philosophy and reviewing the Platonic school of thought, there are several comments of interest. "Plato," the author asserted, "was a man of genius, a hard worker, continent and sober, grave in his speech and demeanor, patient and affable." The Symposium, which some had criticized for licentiousness, must be seen in the context of its philosophic goal, and as a product of its own time: we must go back to the time and place of any artistic creation to understand it. On the mystical metaphysics of Plato, Diderot's comments are only indirect and brief: when Plato, he wrote, tried to "go back to the origin of things . . . , he lost himself in speculation and is often obscure." There is, moreover, one still graver cautionary note in the article: perhaps Plato is "less for reading to get at things" than for appreciating his manner of saying what he did. Still, Diderot added, there are "some general truths" in Plato that belong to a

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"profound and true philosophy."56 These conclusions, right or wrong, would join the mainstream of later centuries' histories of philosophy; as cursory judgments they could hardly be more up-to-date today. The other major articles on Greek philosophy that are definitely or nearly certainly by Diderot follow much the same broad pattern, with variations. "Epicureanism," identifiably Diderot's work by the familiar asterisk before its title, has fewer general remarks and less on the school of thought than do the others; mainly it is a summary, in integrated paragraphs, of philosophic principles, rather than the listing of separate ideas that he included in other articles.57 Diderot's opening statement, though brief, is very sympathetic toward its subject and deserves quotation in full. "The Eleatic sect," he began, gave birth to the Epicurean sect. Never has a philosophy been less understood and more calumniated than that of Epicurus. This philosopher was accused of atheism although he admitted the existence of the gods, frequented the temples, and showed no repugnance toward prostrating himself at their altars. He was regarded as the apologist of debauchery—he whose life was a continual practice of all the virtues and especially of temperance. The prejudice was so general that one must confess . . . that the Epicureans were very fine [honnetes] people who have had the very worst reputation.58

To take this stand publicly, not anonymously, in eighteenth-century France required not only perceptiveness but some degree of courage. For a final illustration of Diderot's stance on ancient Greek thought, we may turn to the long article "Pyrrhonist or Skeptic Philosophy."59 At first glance the essay seems quite different from the others in its stark negativism. In the second paragraph, Greek skepticism is dismissed as "pusillanimous," and in the third it is asserted that Pyrrho "reasoned like a man out of his senses" even while conducting himself like everybody else. The following paragraph introduces a partial justification for skepticism—the extraordinary proliferation of contradictory philosophic sects in Greek antiquity, each claiming truth for itself.60 After this point the discussion becomes more balanced, with pros and cons succeeding each other in kaleidoscopic fashion. Clearly neither Diderot nor the Enlightenment as a whole could wholly subscribe for more than a moment to the skeptical doctrine as summarized by Diderot: "If good and bad are nothing in themselves, there no longer exists order or morality or life." Yet almost immediately Diderot proceeded to itemize several beneficial results of skepticism—its investigation of the roots of philosophic error; the marking of limits to our understanding; the adoption of caution on subjects that at first seemed clearest; realization of the sobering effects of reason, and of the need

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to be indulgent of other people's ways. Then come, a few sentences later, further doubts, notably on the viability of a doctrine that sometimes presented intellectual arguments of one sort while permitting behavior of a different tendency. After then discussing several modern skeptics, including the two admirable Frenchmen Montaigne and Bayle, Diderot concluded that it is true, as skepticism has asserted, that we can never reach a full, perfect understanding of anything—since everything is linked, and we can never know everything. Thus it is natural to doubt, and even to doubt the reality of objects of our sensations: is it possible in fact that we can know nothing but those sensations themselves? It is, Diderot decided, a paradox that is both absurd and profound—but one that we must not let immobilize us. We have to go on living, thinking, and being as useful as possible.61 Thoughtful people of later centuries have often found themselves in agreement with this modest if intellectually inelegant conclusion. In closing this chapter surveying the Enlightenment view of the ancient Greeks, my own conclusions must share some of the same inelegant inconclusiveness in which Diderot could at times be suspended. What is important is that indeed there was no monolithic approach to ancient Greece either in the Enlightenment or in the Encyclopedia. More specifically, it becomes evident that the pagan Greeks and their culture were not invariably pawns of the philosophic game, with no individuality or historical dignity of their own. Even though running contrary to the powerful present-minded pragmatism of such writers as Voltaire, a few significant writers like Diderot, Grimm, and de Jaucourt could at times investigate Greece as a world of its own, not just as a forerunner of the Enlightenment, or alternatively as its antithesis. Crosscultural historical understanding could never be total, or even predominant, in the French eighteenth century—but it did have some limited presence in the complex known as the Enlightenment, at least when that movement confronted its Greek predecessors. NOTES 1. A period given comparable attention in the French Enlightenment was of course ancient, pagan Rome. For a good summary and fine evaluation, see Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. 1: The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), pp. 94-121. 2. The handiest and most perceptive overview is found in Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. 1, pp. 72-87, to which this present study is much indebted. 3. It knew little, but not nothing: see Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. 1, pp. 84-85. 4. Ibid., pp. 77-79.

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5. Ibid., pp. 81-83. Among the most admiring of Enlightenment assessments of Greek philosophy were those of the young Turgot: Ronald L. Meek, ed. and trans., Turgot on Progress, Sociology and Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973): A Philosophical Review of the Successive Advances of the Human Mind, pp. 49-50; Sketch of the Second Discourse, p. 94. 6. Oeuvres completes de Montesquieu, vol. 1 (1949): Pensees, p. 1023. His remarks on Greek philosophy, however, were unflattering and dismissive—p. 1545. 7. Grimm et al., Correspondance litteraire, vol. 3, p. 124 (15 November 1755). 8. Oeuvres completes de I'abbe de Mably (London: 1789), vol. 4: Observations sur I'histoire de la Grece, pp. 2-4; "Preface," p. ii. 9. Raymond Trousson, "Le theatre tragique grec au siecle des lumieres," in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 155 (Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 1976), pp. 2113-36. 10. Diderot, Correspondance, vol. 12 (1965): letter to Viallet, 6 January 1772, p. 16. 11. Trousson, "Le theatre tragique grec," pp. 2121-28. Trousson notes (p. 2129) that the Enlightenment view was founded less on full acquaintance with the Greek tragedies than with Aristotle and other theoreticians. 12. Oeuvres completes de Diderot, ed. Assezat and Tourneux, vol. 7: De lapoesie dramatique, pp. 370-71. 13. Ibid., pp. 329-30. 1 do not, incidentally, maintain that this is the only present-day interpretation of the Greek tragedians, for it is not. I am saying only that Diderot faced more squarely than his contemporaries one possible interpretation that they found distasteful. 14. Ibid., vol. 8: Paradoxe sur le comedien, p. 393. 15. Grimm et al., Correspondance litteraire, vol. 3, pp. 376-78 (1 June 1757). 16. Les oeuvres completes de Voltaire, ed. Besterman et al., vol. 82: Leningrad and Piccini Notebooks, p. 514. 17. Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, p. 36. 18. Oeuvres de Voltaire, ed. Beuchot, vol. 17: Essai sur les moeurs, pp. 187-88. 19. Les oeuvres completes de Voltaire, ed. Besterman et al., vol. 59: La philosophic de I'histoire, p. 179. 20. Ibid., pp. 171-200, 215-19; pp. 200-15 deal intermittently with Greece. 21. Ibid., pp. 173, 180. 22. Ibid., pp. 174, 175. 23. Ibid., pp. 179-80, 175. On "harmony," see also vol. 82: Third Paris Notebook, p. 491: "The Greek genius, more turned toward harmony than that of all other peoples." 24. "ATHENES, (Geographic)," ("T. D. G."), Supplement a VEncyclopedic, vol. 1, pp. 669-71; "ATHENES, (Histoire ancienne)" (Turpin), vol. 1, pp. 671-76; "ANCIENS, . . . (Belles-Lettres)," (Marmontel), vol. 1, pp. 416-18. 25. "HISTOIRE," Encyclopedie, vol. 8, pp. 222-23. 26. The best overview of these and related matters is still that in Hubert, Les sciences satiates dans I'Encyclopedic, pp. 64-75.

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27. "BARBARES, (Philosophic)," Encyclopedie, vol. 2, p. 68. 28. Ibid., p. 69. 29. Yvon was also the probable author of the unsigned, nearly book-length article "AR1STOTELISME," Encyclopedie, vol. 1, pp. 652-73. Here the abbe, being only on the fringes of the philosophic movement, was less condemnatory of Aristotle than was the Enlightenment in general. He barely mentioned Aristotelianism in the Middle Ages, passing almost directly from ancient times to the Renaissance (p. 661). In general, Yvon's treatment of tendentious questions is moderate and sensible. He declared, for example, that Aristotle was not an atheist but did have tendencies in that direction (pp. 659-60); one should not try to Christianize the ancient pagan philosophers (p. 660); and Aristotle did sometimes proceed without evidence, putting words in place of things. 30. "SCENE . . . (Literature)," Encyclopedie, vol. 14, p. 753. 31. "BACCHANALES," Encyclopedic, vol. 2, p. 5. 32. "ENCAUSTIQUE," Encyclopedie, vol. 5, p. 608. 33. "LETTRES, les, (Encyclopedie}" Encyclopedie, vol. 9, pp. 409, 410. 34. Ibid., p. 410. 35. "PARIS," Encyclopedic, vol. 11, pp. 956-60. 36. "PONT, le (Mythol.)," Encyclopedie, vol. 12, p. 74; "TELCHINES," Encyclopedic, vol. 16, p. 35; "PARIS," Encyclopedic, vol. 11, p. 958. 37. "PRESAGE," Encyclopedic, vol. 13, pp. 308-9; "PRODIGE PHYSIQUE," Encyclopedie, vol. 13, p. 423. 38. "RELIGION des Grecs & des Romains," Encyclopedie, vol. 14, p. 83. 39. "REPUBLIQUE D'ATHENES," Encyclopedie, vol. 14, p. 151. 40. "GRECS, (Hist. anc. & litterature)," Encyclopedie, vol. 7, p. 917. 41. Ibid., pp. 917-18. 42. "PRIX de musique & de poesie," Encyclopedie, vol. 13, p. 393. 43. "GRECS (philosophic des)," Encyclopedie, vol. 7, p. 905. For an overview of Diderot's articles on philosophy—including sources, and contemporary criticism of the articles—see Lough, The "Encyclopedic," pp. 145-56. 44. "BACCHUS," Encyclopedie, vol. 2, p. 6. 45. "APOLLON," Encyclopedie, vol. 1, p. 531. 46. "GRECS (philosophie des)," Encyclopedie, vol. 7, pp. 904-12. Much of Diderot's Encyclopedie writing on philosophy was, however, not really original, but an adaptation from Brucker's Historia Critica Philosophiae. 47. "GRECS (philosophie des)," Encyclopedie, vol. 7, pp. 905—6. Concerning foreign influence on Greek thought and its modification by the Greeks, see also "CHALDEENS, Philosophie des)," vol. 3, p. 20: "The dogmas of the other nations, as they passed through . . . [the Greek] imagination, took on ... [the Greek] manner of thinking, and never entered . . . [Greek] writing without undergoing a major alteration." We are never left to doubt Diderot's conviction that Greek thought was greatly superior to the "barbarian" sources that influenced it. 48. "GRECS (philosophie des)," Encyclopedie, vol. 7, pp. 909-10. 49. Ibid., pp. 910-12.

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50. "IONIQUE, Secte," Encyclopedie, vol. 8, pp. 876-79. 51. Ibid., pp. 877, 879. 52. "SOCRATIQUE, PH1LOSOPHIE, ou HISTOIRE DE LA PHILOSOPHIE DE SOCRATE," Encyclopedie, vol. 15, pp. 261-65. 53. Ibid., p. 261. 54. Ibid., pp. 261-63. The final quotation is pure Diderot. 55. "PLATONISME, ou PHILOSOPHIE DE PLATON," Encyclopedie, vol. 12, pp. 745-52. 56. Ibid., p. 746. 57. "EPICUREISME ou EPICURISMS," Encyclopedie, vol. 5, pp. 779-85. 58. Ibid., p. 779. Diderot is less judgmental or partisan in "STOICISME, ou SECTE STOICIENNE ou ZENONISME," Encyclopedie, vol. 15, pp. 525-33. This anonymous article is universally assigned to Diderot. 59. "PYRRHONIENNE ou SCEPTIQUE PHILOSOPHIE," Encyclopedie, vol. 13, pp. 608-14. The article was seriously cut without Diderot's knowledge or consent by his publisher Le Breton, but only in its treatment of modern skepticism: see Gordon and Torrey, The Censoring of Diderot's Encyclopedie, pp. 74-78. 60. "PYRRHONIENNE," Encyclopedie, vol. 13, p. 608. 61. Ibid., pp. 608-11.

10 The Case of the Middle Ages An Enlightenment Consensus? Perhaps no historical doctrine of the French Enlightenment is more firmly established in the minds of historians and critics than the general Enlightenment denigration of the Middle Ages. This Enlightenment onslaught upon a thousand years of history has long been accepted as a truism—so much so that it no longer attracts much serious examination.1 This whole episode within Enlightenment thought has been regarded as a major blot on that age, a cause not only for alternate scorn and glee among medievalists but for abject apologies from defenders of our not-so-distant eighteenth-century ancestors. Indeed, evidence for this perception of Enlightenment historiography is massive and frequently convincing. However, like most presumed absolutes in the historical record, this, too, deserves at least a modicum of skepticism. We may not wish or expect to shake significantly such a well established and respectable generalization—but re-examination of received opinion may at times reveal small but significant cracks in present-day historiographical dogma. This chapter will investigate the applicability of this statement to the French Enlightenment's view of the Middle Ages. Charges against the Enlightenment attack upon medieval times are serious. The Middle Ages, according to today's general indictment, were seen in the eighteenth century as bringing down a curtain of gloom upon the high hopes of Greek and Roman civilization, the civilization that only in the Renaissance would be rediscovered as the natural ancestor of human progress. To speak, in the Enlightenment, of "medieval civilization" was almost, if not quite, a contradiction in terms: the medieval centuries were deemed to have swallowed up in decadence and barbarism nearly all the admirable philosophy, science, art, and literature of classical antiquity, and the obscurantism of medieval religion was presumed to have stifled the sensible secularism with which Greece and Rome had pointed toward an enlightened future. Established religion, said the Enlightenment, had annihilated its opposition through

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misguided dogma and brutal political force, and the bright prospects of toleration in all areas had been crushed almost irretrievably. In addition to this damning summation of Enlightenment belief, the indictment has spread even to the antiphilosophes. These champions of religious orthodoxy themselves, it is charged, were dismayed and baffled by medieval ignorance of proper— that is, classical—norms of artistic expression and social polish. For the whole eighteenth century, in short, the Middle Ages were a thoroughly shameful blot on the historical record. Specific inspirations of this overall indictment are in fact legion in works of the century. A handful of citations at random will exemplify the general approach. Helvetius, in the celebrated treatise On Mind, referred repeatedly to the Middle Ages as the "centuries of ignorance."2 In an escalation of terminology Rousseau found "several [medieval] centuries in a state worse than ignorance," because it was ignorance masquerading under "the name of knowledge." It was not, he continued, until "the stupid Muslim" [so much for one potential area of cross-cultural understanding!] conquered Constantinople and sent Greek scholars scurrying westward, that Italy and other European nations returned to enlightenment and common sense.3 Grimm's condemnation of that medieval "time of darkness" was a bit fuller—a time, he wrote, when "reason and the science of wisdom had entirely disappeared from our climes." The "Gothic" mentality, he maintained, had put Europe in the thrall of an outdated Judeo-Christian tradition. On another occasion Grimm would be equally blunt in ascribing medieval darkness to ' 'the establishment of Christianity."4 Then, of course, there was Voltaire, the century's preeminent scourge both of Christianity and of the Middle Ages—two categories that often he must have thought of as virtually coextensive. Since his day, from the Romantic movement onward, it has been generally accepted that Voltaire's antimedieval bias had two preeminent sources: his distaste for the Christian church and his classical training and temperament.5 As a summary judgment the analysis seems beyond reproach and hardly in need of insistent demonstration. However, a further, if distinctly secondary, cause of Voltaire's dislike for the Middle Ages does deserve some passing notice—the historian's suspicion of an age for much of which the historical sources were very dim and incomplete. This is a point made by Voltaire in the same well-known Encyclopedia article "History"6 that has already been cited many times in this study. The particularly relevant long column begins, to be sure, with a typical denunciation of the medieval scene. The medieval order of things, Voltaire asserted, was a history of barbarism, of "barbaric peoples who, having become Christians, did not thereby become better." Turning then to his main concern, the

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weakness of primary medieval sources, he deplored those "ridiculous chronicles" that were mainly local histories written in monasteries. "To penetrate the shadowy labyrinth of the Middle Ages," he continued, "one needs the help of archives—and these are almost completely non-existent. Some old monasteries have preserved charters and diplomas containing donations whose authority is sometimes contested; this is not a collection that enlightens one on political history. ..." Fortunately England does possess, he admitted, a collection of old and fairly complete records, collated in the days of Queen Anne—and sometimes "they throw much light on the history [also] of France."7 In the earlier Middle Ages Voltaire saw only two partial exceptions to the general barbarous darkness—the ages of Charlemagne and of Alfred the Great.8 Until Charlemagne, beginning with the reign of Clovis, Prankish history was "only a tissue of crimes, massacres, devastations, and the founding of monasteries, all of which inspire horror and pity. And after a close examination of the Prankish government one scarcely finds any more clearly recognized law than the law of the strongest."9 Still, Voltaire's perception of some redeeming value in the Carolingian period does provide one small entering wedge into his distaste for the Middle Ages. Another wedge, only dimly recognized, if at all, should have been his realization that not all human progress had come in periods of rationalism and "sound philosophy." In fact, most of the human arts and skills were born, he wrote, in barbarous ages: the discovery of fire, for example, or the arts of making bread and founding metals. "It is in the most barbarous ages that the most useful discoveries have been made. It seems to have been the lot of the most enlightened times ... to reason concerning what ignorant men have invented." Voltaire then proceeded, in his Philosophic Letters, not to apply this principle to the Middle Ages (which usually qualified for him as "barbarous") but to the need for modern scientists to unite practice with speculation.10 Por most of the signs of conscious cracking in Voltairean antimedievalism, as well as for his more fully documented antipathy toward that period, one may turn specifically to the celebrated Essay on Customs and Morals. l1 After, he wrote, "the general decadence" of pre-Carolingian times, there came Charlemagne and the eventual establishment of peace in western Europe. But even this welcome relief could not completely "return men to polite civilization and the arts. Corrosion by barbarism was too far advanced, and the succeeding ages extended it still farther."12 Voltaire did, however, detect some feeble beginnings of "the sciences and fine arts" in Charlemagne's time.13 As for the tenth and eleventh centuries, France was still, for Voltaire, in

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"the childhood of humanity in all that concerns government, religion, commerce, arts, and citizen rights." Ignorance, popular superstition, and moral crudeness abounded. Finally, in the thirteenth century, "the ignorance of savages" gave way to "the ignorance of scholastics."14 With the fourteenth century—still a barbarous age—Voltaire detected civilizing influences in the full flowering of chivalry. Chivalry, he maintained, was a "counterweight to the general ferocity of customs and morals; . . . honor and generosity, joined to gallantry, were its principles." Even before this century, notably in the thirteenth, there had been some "useful inventions," such as clocks with wheels and paper made with linen.15 To consider the "sciences and fine arts in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries" Voltaire felt obliged, though, to turn from France to Italy.16 Dante's famous Comedy was a "bizarre poem" containing a number of "natural beauties, in which some parts were written as purely as in the later time of Ariosto and Tasso." Petrarch and Boccaccio further refined the Tuscan tongue, while the fine arts in Italy were being reborn from "the ruins of barbarism." Giotto, for example, "painted pictures that still can be viewed with pleasure," and lamentable Gothicism in architecture was overcome in the fifteenth century by Brunelleschi.17 It seems clear, however, that Voltaire thought of the innovative Italian writers and artists as harbingers of the Renaissance, and thus not typical of the Middle Ages. And when he turned back from these early flowers of the Renaissance to medieval scholasticism, his condemnation of its "barbarous jargon" was devastating. "Scholastic theology, the bastard daughter of an Aristotelian philosophy that was badly translated and understood, did more harm to reason and to sound scholarship than the Huns and the Vandals had done." Outside Italy one could find only "barbarous, feudal customs . . . , duels, tourneys, scholastic theology, and magicians."18 So wrote Voltaire at one point in his Essay—but not always. When he went on to note certain high medieval developments in political and economic life, the picture changed rather substantially for him. Above all, in a chapter on "Liberties, town privileges, and estates-general" he described at some length the birth of "the inestimable good of human freedom," even in this age of general anarchy and disaster. Other parts of the Essay dealt with commendable medieval advances in economic life and judicial administration.19 In still other passages, concerning medieval Christianity, Voltaire could even bring himself to find a number of virtues in monastic orders, whose "disorders and vices" had been exaggerated, he said, by some historians. "Great virtues" and "admirable souls," he granted, were often found in monastic establishments; the great pity was that they were buried in a sterile environment instead of being "useful to the world."20 And in a social and economic context

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Voltaire could actually bring himself to praise a medieval pope: "The man who perhaps, in the crude times that one calls the Middle Ages, deserved best of the human race was pope Alexander III. It was he who, in a twelfth-century council, abolished servitude as far as was possible."21 Passages such as these only begin to tip the scales against wholesale Voltairean condemnation of the Middle Ages. Even the smallest fissures, though, in an apparently solid structure are of some significance. It remains, nevertheless, of still greater significance that Voltaire's treatment of the medieval period did possess elements of scholarly breadth. His diatribes and glancing blows against medieval Christianity, and against medieval cultural crudity and barbarism, are well known; far less often recognized are his attempts to cover something of the technology, the feudal and judicial institutions, and the economic and social life of the Middle Ages.22 Despite Voltaire's often welldeserved reputation as flogger of the medieval world, that world was not invariably his whipping boy; it could also be, on occasion, an object of his broad historical curiosity. Voltaire did intermittently harbor a view of a medieval cultural entity, and did at least glimpse, from time to time, an understanding of its cultural and historical ramifications. Now and again Voltaire was a professional historian, and at least two of his lengthy historical studies remain landmarks in early modern historiography. Many other figures of the French Enlightenment merely dabbled in historical writing but doubtless sometimes took their historical interests seriously. Such, for example, was the psychologist Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, who produced in the 1760s the long Course of Study for the Instruction of the Prince of Parma. This compilation is more typical of general Enlightenment views on the course of history, medieval and otherwise, than Voltaire's monuments of historical literature, his Essay and The Age of Louis XIV. Let us glance, then, at what Condillac wrote concerning the Middle Ages in those particularly relevant books in his Course of Study entitled "On Letters in the Middle Ages" and "On the State of the Arts and Sciences in Italy from the End of the Tenth Century to the End of the Fifteenth."23 Condillac's early reference to the intellectual backwardness of the Middle Ages is typical: although the Arabs preserved some knowledge in these "centuries when thick darkness spread over everything," Muslim methods and opinions were so unenlightened as to shackle further the European mind. Already ignorance had steadily advanced, from the decadence of Rome through the sixth century, when at last it reigned over the whole area of the former Western Empire. Darkness became still deeper through the seventh century and until the time of Charlemagne. This ruler reestablished old schools and founded new ones, but many of the best classical sources remained inaccessible and "the new schools were too bad to dissipate igno-

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ranee." After Charlemagne, even these ineffective schools declined, and cultural darkness was deepest of all in the tenth century.24 In the eleventh century, Condillac continued, darkness still reigned, aided by a Church that wished to keep its members ignorant in order to strengthen ecclesiastical power. The following two centuries saw "interminable disputes" on questions encouraged by a pointless, frivolous Aristotelianism. Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon did show promise: they should have been born, sighed Condillac, in a better age. All the schools and doctors of the Church (Condillac barely mentioned Aquinas) only slowed down "the progress of the human mind." The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were no better, what with monkish obscurantism and pervasive absurd metaphysics.25 At last, wrote Condillac, came the first stirrings of the Renaissance in Italy. He pointed out, however, that the fall of Constantinople, with the westward flight of its scholars, actually retarded the advance of letters, by imposing classical pedantry (in Greek studies, primarily) upon the national Italian genius and vernacular literature. Condillac discussed the early Renaissance with only brief references to such features of Italian economic life as commercial activity.26 In all this, Condillac's condemnation of the Middle Ages was somewhat less virulent than Voltaire's on the pernicious influence of the Church, and considerably more narrow than the rather wide-ranging opinions of the patriarch on the dynamics of medieval history. Although Voltaire possessed greater historical curiosity than did Condillac, even he was hardly a true medievalist in orientation. Thus it may be instructive to turn at this point to a fully professional eighteenth-century medievalist—and here our attention may profitably focus on the dean of medieval scholars in that age, Jean-Baptiste de la Curne de Sainte-Palaye (1697-1781). Sainte-Palaye, moreover, was not unique in his medieval interests: many others in his day, especially from an aristocratic background like his own, were drawn toward medieval scholarship. Their views were, incidentally, not necessarily antiphilosophe. Sainte-Palaye, for example, could fit fairly comfortably within the early, conservative phase of the Enlightenment.27 Sainte-Palaye's pursuit of medieval studies was broader and more serious than that of most fellow-members of the Academy of Inscriptions and BellesLettres; the "sheer scope" of his work (writes his principal biographer) is most impressive.28 His medieval scholarship extended from the collecting and cataloging of French and Provencal literature, and its restoration and criticism, to chronological reconstruction of medieval history and to institutional analyses, and indeed to a study of French antiquities in general. Although he went beyond erudition to attempt a broad view of medieval ideas and society, his main contributions lay in careful factual study—in the identification and analysis of sources, and in the publication of historical and literary texts.

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In all of this there is certainly something to be said for Sainte-Palaye's empathy with the thousand years he was examining, from the late Roman empire to the first stirrings of the Renaissance—something, but unfortunately not a great deal. He did, obviously, revel in the picturesque side of chivalry, as did many readers in his day. He went farther than his predecessors in admiring the troubadours, in whom he saw real passion as well as charming naivete. His perception of an admirable richness in medieval vernacular language was clearer than the usual eighteenth-century view, and his diagnosis of modern linguistic impoverishment was unusual in a classicist age. All in all, Sainte-Palaye did perceive, at least dimly, the merits of a more naive, exuberant period, as against the social and literary niceties of his own more polished and artificial century.29 Undoubtedly, Saint-Palaye did bring things medieval to the consciousness of readers who would otherwise have remained less knowledgeable. There was often, however, more an air of pedantry than of true enthusiasm in his approach. As for literature (his biographer concedes), Sainte-Palaye ' 'ferreted out the manuscripts, read them, classified them, and did not love them."30 In the architecture and other visual art of the Middle Ages he could ordinarily see only a lamentable "Gothicism"—a term that, in the manner of his century, he applied to the entirety of art from late Roman decadence through early Christian and Romanesque styles down to and including what later stages would sort out as specifically Gothic.31 One may conclude that, all in all, the Middle Ages were less a real passion for Sainte-Palaye than an intellectual and scholarly diversion. It is hard to imagine this eighteenth-century gentleman being willingly transported back in time to the age he so coolly analyzed and indeed publicized. If even a true seventeenth-century medievaliast could be largely immune to the deeper attractions of medieval culture, it is not surprising that the more celebrated generalists of the philosophic Enlightenment were similarly immune; indeed, such small cracks in medieval phobia as we have noted in Voltaire become all the more startling. Let us consider the case of the baron de Montesquieu, whose relative sympathy for the Middle Ages has often been noted.32 Indications of the need for caution, however, abound at the outset, even for this author so supportive of aristocratic medieval roots. The cautionary note sounds most obviously of all with Montesquieu's repeated references to medieval "barbarism." Again and again in The Spirit of Laws, for example, he noted the "barbarism" of the Germanic peoples; at least, however, this usage by Montesquieu was usually in the context of the Franks before Charlemagne, not (except in art) for the later Middle Ages. For Charlemagne himself, Montesquieu, even more than Voltaire, had great ad-

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miration. Charlemagne kept "the power of the nobility within its [proper] limits. ... He made admirable rules and, better, put them into execution. His genius spread throughout his empire. . . . Nobody has possessed to a higher degree the art of doing the grandest things with ease, and the difficult things with dispatch."33 Toward medieval Christianity Montesquieu rarely shared the virulence of Voltairean animosity—surely a crucial factor in the older author's milder view of the general medieval scene. "Religion," he wrote, "should soften the customs and the morals of men"—and the Christian religion certainly inspired a more moderate form of government in the medieval west than did Islam in the east. His long discussion of ecclesiastical law, moreover, is notably free of anticlerical diatribe and name-calling. In his miscellaneous Thoughts Montesquieu could point out a number of ways in which historical Christianity had been useful to the world.34 As for medieval civil law, Montesquieu was most often nonjudgmental, although he did disapprove of the practice of judicial ordeal. Judicial combat he approached somewhat more sympathetically, since he believed that the exposure of cowardice might imply other vices. Toward the complex system of chivalry he was still more sympathetic, since it had systematically regulated the passions of love and honor; he also delighted, as Sainte-Palaye did, in the picturesque, fantastic side of chivalry. For the whole system of feudal law he penned a much-cited appreciation in The Spirit of Laws: "It is a beautiful spectacle, this spectacle of feudal law. An ancient oak tree rises; the eye sees from afar its foliage and, from a closer vantage point, its limbs and trunk, though not its roots." For these roots he proceeded calmly to investigate Julius Caesar and Tacitus, and eventually a variety of medieval sources. In all of this he successfully avoided any appearance of antimedieval bias.35 On the other hand, toward "Gothic" art and architecture (that is, toward medieval art styles in general) Montesquieu could manage to produce little beyond minimal praise. He was, to be sure, one of the better-traveled French philosophes, having spent substantial time abroad, mainly in Italy, Germany, the Low Countries, and England. Sometimes, moreover, he examined medieval art and architecture rather closely, as we know from his personal travel narratives; he seems to have had considerably deeper interest in the visual arts than did Voltaire and most of his other philosophic contemporaries. Very little of this interest, however, was permitted to surface in his major published works; it is evident almost exclusively in his travel diaries and in a single essay, On the Gothic Style. In these last writings it soon is clear that by "Gothic," Montesquieu understood all primitive or degenerate art. Even the best ancient Egyptian art,

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he declared, was Gothic, as were certainly the long centuries from the imperial Roman decadence until the Renaissance. Gothic, he wrote in the late 1720s, "is the manner of the birth or the end of art"; it lacks grace, variety of human posture, and—above all—proportion.36 Occasionally, however, when Montesquieu dealt with specifics, he could be a bit more charitable. In Pisa, for example, he was willing to grant that the cathedral (in later times classified as Romanesque) was "large and beautiful." Moreover, concerning the little church of the Spina in the same city, he recorded his unexpected impression of "surprising lightness." The church was, he wrote, "the most fully realized" Gothic structure that he had ever seen; it possessed "as much beauty" as a style in "bad taste" can ever have. As for the paintings in the Pisan Campo Santo, the "paintings by ... Giotto appear to be in better taste than the others."37 It was not, though, until the fifteenth-century Renaissance that Masaccio's Brancacci Chapel frescoes in Florence "opened the way to good painting."38 Two great "Gothic" structures in Florence had more appeal to Montesquieu than did the cathedral complex in Pisa. Although, as he reminded himself, Gothic is "the taste [arising out] of ignorance," the Florentine Baptistery was an early building in passably good taste. (Presumably this was due to its relatively simple lines and its reminiscences of the antique.) The Duorno (cathedral) was indeed "one of the great existing structures, and one of the best pieces that Gothic architecture has been able to achieve." In the Duomo, at last, there reigned "simple grandeur" and "majestic beauty," though hardly the "grand taste" of Michelangelo's sacristy at San Lorenzo.39 In all this, we can see that the barrier erected against Gothic was hardly overthrown by Montesquieu, but a few significant cracks in the structure had in fact made their appearance in his writing. Appreciation for medieval art and architecture was less evident in that other French writer of mid-century whose name today is generally linked with that of Montesquieu as showing some real sympathy with the Middle Ages, AnneRobert-Jacques Turgot (1727-1781).40 While still in his twenties, the future financier and economic theorist penned several discourses on the pattern of human history that are milestones in the eighteenth-century development of the idea of progress—most notably A Philosophical Review of the Successive Advances of the Human Mind (ca. 1748) and the long essay On Universal History (ca. 1751).41 These are products of wide reading and considerable insight (if not of rich philosophical maturity) and also of early salon association with Grimm, d'Holbach, and other philosophies. The young Turgot, it should be noted, also contributed to the Encyclopedia. Turgot's references to "Gothic" art and architecture are few and sketchy: they were, in all likelihood, simple parroting of received opinion, and the

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result of no special concern or interest on his part. A sample paragraph may be quoted in full: Architecture offers us an example of the reciprocal independence of taste and mechanical operations in the arts. There are no buildings at all that are in worse taste than Gothic structures; and there are none at all that are more durable, or whose construction demanded more vigor and more practical knowledge of the methods of carrying it out, although these methods could only be the result of a multitude of tentative attempts, since the mathematical sciences were then in their infancy, and the thrust of the arches and roofs could not be calculated with precision.42

Here, at least, the pervasive Enlightenment condemnation of Gothic bad taste is coupled with tempered admiration for medieval engineering. In his treatment of medieval Christianity, the young Turgot was almost as perfunctory, though more positive. This attitude in itself may account for much of his modest enthusiasm for the medieval period: he gave full credit to religion for its civilizing role during that long period, and especially for preserving the Latin language and ancient literature, even as "ignorance and vulgarity ruled everywhere" in the early Middle Ages.43 The efforts of Charlemagne to revive the west were short-lived, but some dim sparks of civilization survived; Turgot came closer to a concept of continuity of civilization across the millennia than did his philosophe contemporaries. For, wrote Turgot, "amid all the ignorance [in the Middle Ages], progress is imperceptibly taking place and preparing for the brilliant achievements of later centuries. . . . " Here he cited the growth of towns and commerce, of benevolent feudal and princely government, of the infusion of Muslim learning, and of a host of old and new mechanical arts and inventions. All these arts were not only utilitarian but also brought increasing understanding of nature and its scientific potentialities. Still other seeds of progress could be found in the Crusaders' contacts with the East, and in the revival here and there of royal authority.44 Thus did young Turgot go well beyond the conventional views of Gothic and the traditional absorption in Christianity in his appreciation for the Middle Ages. Whether his own views involved any real respect for medieval times as a cultural entity, rather than as a mere transmitter of civilization to modern times, is much more questionable. At least his vision of cultural continuity did lead to an assessment of the period that was much more charitable than that of most of the philosophes. For Turgot the Middle Ages were far more than sheer historical gloom and darkness, even if not yet one of the truly great western periods of material progress and cultural creativity. For an instance of additional Enlightened appreciation, however cursory,

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for the Middle Ages, we may conclude this section with an unexpected sentence or so from a mature and committed philosophe, the baron Grimm— the same author already cited as attacking medieval Christianity. Elsewhere in his Literary Correspondence Grimm could, however, be surprisingly appreciative, at least momentarily, of the civilizing potential, even the inherent elevation, of the medieval Christian ideal. Although confessing that he found the public spirit of pagan Greece and Rome still more appealing, he declared that "the Christian system . . . also had its force and its beauty. A system able to endure so many centuries, [a system] that could change all minds and all ideas, that brought a whole new order of principles, a new turn of thought in religion, customs and morals, laws, law-observance, studies, and arts throughout Europe—whatever its outcome may be, this system cannot fail to excite astonishment."45 In the next four or five pages, however, of this same letter of 1 December 1764, the hopeful promise of these words on the "force" and "beauty" of Christianity soon was engulfed in an analysis more typical of his pen and of the whole French Enlightenment. Christianity, he admitted, did tame the bellicosity of the barbarians, and it did lead to a scholarly revival in the eleventh century. But theological and juridicial terminology triumphed over "the spirit of primitive Christianity," and the Church became involved in a ferocious struggle for domination over temporal rulers. Modern times have seen, he continued, a restoration of secular leadership, but the Church has remained a threatening social power, especially after the appearance of "that frightful St. Dominic" and the Holy Inquisition. That Christian faith which, as Julian the Apostate said, could not find a single convert outside the dregs of humanity in its first two centuries, had become an overwhelming force in the Middle Ages and was still a formidable one, said Grimm, in his own day.46 What may we conclude from this far-from-exhaustive investigation of the French Enlightenment view of the Middle Ages? The summary judgment of modern historians—that the Enlightenment did not and could not really penetrate the medieval spirit—is, I believe, essentially confirmed: both the antiChristian bias and the classicism of the age militated against much medievalist empathy. On the other hand, the antimedievalism of the Enlightenment was far from monolithic: fissures in the structure are apparent even in Voltaire, the very symbol of antimedievalism; in significant writers like Condillac, Grimm, and Sainte-Palaye; and most strongly in Montesquieu and Turgot. Certainly, then, Enlightenment cross-cultural understanding and sympathy were not wholly absent toward the Middle Ages. It remains to be seen whether the pages of the Encyclopedia ever imply the same conclusion.

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The Middle Ages in the Encyclopedia Several fairly striking exceptions to the Enlightenment denigration of the Middle Ages would be encouraged in the Encyclopedia's Supplement volumes by a new policy of Diderot's successors: the inclusion of articles directly and specifically on historical individuals. Thus Castilhon's essay on Alfred the Great would denominate that venerable, very medieval king "the greatest of kings," "the wisest and most enlightened of law-givers." Alfred, wrote Castilhon, was notable for his "warlike virtues," "the profound wisdom of his legislation," "the breadth of his learning, the variety of his talents, his taste for literature," and "the solidity of his philosophy"—all especially remarkable in an age when neither the sciences, belles-lettres, nor philosophy flourished.47 On "Canute," Claude-Louis-Michel de Sacy (1749-1794) would similarly praise that later English and Danish king for his good qualities in an unworthy century (although he was over-generous to monks!).48 The great thirteenth-century monarch Frederick II would be called by CharlesClaude de Montigny (1744-1818) "the greatest genius of his century, courageous to the point of intrepidity, generous, magnificent [in display and generosity], and one of the most learned men on earth. He was the friend and protector of celebrated artists . . . ," and the founder of many cities.49 All these rulers, it is true, were seen as far more distinguished than their times— yet the Middle Ages did give birth to them and permitted them to exist and flourish. As for any medievalism in the original volumes edited by Diderot, we are given reason to hope for some complexity and subtlety by Rene Hubert, author of the standard volume The Social Sciences in the Encyclopedia. In the Encyclopedists' approach to the Middle Ages, as in other areas, the discussion, wrote Hubert, was more varied and subtle than it has been traditionally presented. And again, as in other fields, a significant degree of empirical knowledge was involved. These points granted, Hubert nevertheless came to the not-unexpected conclusion that the Middle Ages seemed to the Encyclopedists an era of "darkness and decadence"—a bleak, lamentable interruption in the historical march toward human progress.50 To test and validate this conclusion we must of course turn to the Encyclopedia itself. In the article "History," we have already noted Voltaire's condemnation of medieval "barbarism" and his critique of medieval sources, together with his recognition of at least two areas of relative light amid the medieval gloom.51 Most other miscellaneous Encyclopedia articles (reserving the comments of d'Alembert, Diderot, and de Jaucourt for later) fit well enough within these Voltairean guidelines. Here, first of all, we encounter the

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century's usual inability to see anything but barbaric tastelessness in the "Gothic" style of art and architecture. The historical article under that title (by Mallet), to be sure, begins its brief discussion of architecture rather promisingly: "Gothic architecture is often very solid, very heavy, very massive; sometimes, on the other hand, it is extremely fine and subtle [deliee], delicate, and rich." The sentence immediately following this, however, quickly squelches any serious recognition of Gothic merit: "Its principal characteristic is that it is burdened with ornamentation that possesses neither good taste nor proportion."52 But what of chivalry, sometimes an object of interest, even in the eighteenth century, for its esthetic or anecdotal appeal? Here the author of "Chivalric Vows" found little appeal indeed. Such vows had been undertaken, he noted, out of consideration for "honor, religion, and—most of all—fanaticism." All vows, general or specific, arose from "the superstition of the age."53 The author of "Chemistry," Gabriel-Francois Venel (1723-1775), on the other hand, did discern some light in the medieval darkness, although he did so for clearly interested reasons. "Chemistry," he wrote, "is little cultivated among us," whereas even the Middle Ages had their Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon. Albert and Bacon belong, he declared, "to all the sciences. . . . They lived in a time when the deepest ignorance reigned around them; they possessed, nevertheless, a universality of knowledge so uncommon [even] in our enlightened century that they would still pass today for prodigies of nature . . . ; they were both men of genius."54 Again, while hardly flattering the Middle Ages, an eighteenth-century author was at least granting this long period its insightful, creative spirits. But let us turn to several Encyclopedists of higher rank, and first of all to d'Alembert. To the main body of Mallet's noncommittal article "Chivalry," d'Alembert added a paragraph that declined to praise or blame the spirit of chivalry. Chivalry's combining of the gallantry of love with the sense of the "marvellous" and all its "magicians, enchantments, and enchanted heroes," is recorded by d'Alembert with no strictures on irrationality or absurdity—a bare beginning, at least, toward objectivity on the medieval period.55 On medieval trial by combat, d'Alembert (in his addendum, again, to an article by Mallet, "Champion") was more obviously torn—here between that "monstrous" custom and its naturalistic origins and "a certain prudence" found in its application (note the probable influence of Montesquieu).56 On the Scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages, d'Alembert was a typical figure of the Enlightenment in his nearly total incomprehension and condemnation. We see this in both specific and general Encyclopedia articles. In the article "Substantial Form"—a "barbarous term of the old Scholastic philos-

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ophy"—he expressed amazement that "forms" had once been thought to be simultaneously "material" and yet not "matter." "We will not," he added in disgust, "try to explain what that means."57 D'Alembert's important article entitled "Philosophy of the [Scholastic] School" requires a bit more substantial excerpting for its more comprehensive approach to medieval thought. This thought, he wrote, "born from wit and ignorance," "substituted words for things, and frivolous or ridiculous questions for the grand objects of true philosophy." Further, it "explains unintelligible things in barbarous terminology. . . . " The "most brilliant period" of Scholastic thought was the twelfth century [we again note the slighting of Aquinas], when the "dearth of knowledge . . . , the lack of books and empirical observation . . . turned minds on all sides to frivolous questions. One reasoned then on abstractions instead of real things; one created for the new sort of study a new language, and one thought himself learned if he learned this language."58 All this, of course, echoes d'Alembert's famous Preliminary Discourse for the Encyclopedia.59 In neither case are there the slightest doubts indicated, the least uncertainty; this is pure, straightforward Enlightenment doctrine—as also is d'Alembert's identification of Descartes as the crucial thinker who "shook off the yoke of this [Scholastic] barbarism."60 But d'Alembert's "Philosophy of the [Scholastic] School" is a minor production compared with Diderot's much lengthier article "Scholastics, Philosophy of the Scholastics.'' Except for a passing reference to Scholasticism's "barbarous" nature, the first column or so of the article presents a calm, relatively detached summary of this movement, which, Diderot stated, first appeared in recognizable, developed form in the eleventh century. Diderot warmed to his subject with William of Champeaux, on whom he effectively introduced irony, and especially with Abelard, whose persecution by "the gentle and pious St. Bernard" of Clairvaux repelled him. By the thirteenth century, Diderot continued, theology was thoroughly infected by "futilities." Albertus Magnus possessed great breadth of knowledge, but he introduced dialectical and metaphysical "subtleties into theology, whose corruption he advanced." Aquinas then rates only a brief paragraph before Diderot's lengthy discussion of St. Bonaventure. Nearly a full column is given to Roger Bacon: an enlightened, empirical thinker and a figure much maligned by the "superstition and ignorance" of his age. Later, Diderot continued, there came the preposterous, pointless subtleties and witless categories and distinctions of Duns Scotus, and the occasional good sense of William of Ockham, plus a host of lesser, deplorable thinkers. Finally in the article there is an itemized list of eighteen grave charges against Scholasticism—without, of course, a single good aspect noted. Scholasticism, Diderot concluded, is a festering

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sore on the human mind, and the main obstacle to a sound moral training for the young. 41 At no point in the Encyclopedia was Diderot more thoroughly a crusader and an intellectual absolutist than when he so passionately attacked the Scholasticism of the Middle Ages. This was, in fact, the mindset of virtually all his writing on that long period in the historical record. Gone are the questionings, the hesitancies, the subtleties that marked so much of his other writing. Two brief examples in the Encyclopedia may be briefly cited to further display the new tone: Diderot's flat rejection of the Gothic style with its "outrageous variety," and his blanket condemnation of the medieval period, "buried for [so] long in the grossest ignorance."62 Undoubtedly behind most of this lay his opposition to Christianity—an adversary not always conveniently attacked in Diderot's own world, but just as effectively and much more safely combatted in its medieval flowering, many centuries in the past. Moreover, it was in that earlier age, not in recent times, that Christianity was most closely linked to the despicable ideal of theocracy, which exalted the Church over the state, and found enough "superstitious imbecility" among the people to be accepted for a time under Popes Gregory VII and Boniface VIII.63 It is not surprising to find the loyal chevalier de Jaucourt sharing a portion of this approach in his multitudinous Encyclopedia contributions. Again, for example, Scholasticism is condemned in his articles. A sample may be extracted from "Realists and Nominalists": the reference is to these "two sects of Scholastic dialecticians who caused a schism among eleventh-century philosophers, and who troubled all schools by their pointless subtleties."64 And like Diderot, de Jaucourt found moral thought to have been the greatest victim of Scholastic barbarism. "The ethical thought of the Scholastics," he wrote in the article "Ethics," "is a confused body of pieces, without rules or basic principle, a mixture of Aristotelian thought, civil and canon law, and maxims from Holy Scripture and the Church Fathers. Good and bad are mixed together, but in a way to include much more that is bad than what is good." Finally in the Renaissance Francis Bacon would restore the sciences and furnish the basis for a better system of morality and natural rights.65 On the "Gothic" style in the arts, de Jaucourt followed the standard line. His article "Gothic Manner in Painting" is dismissive in its brevity and wholly negative in substance. Its single long sentence may be quoted nearly in full. This "Gothic" style of painting, he wrote, "is a manner that recognizes no rule, that is guided by no study of the antique, and in which one can glimpse only whims without any nobility; this barbarous manner infected the fine arts from 611 until 1450, that forever memorable time when one began to look for the beautiful in nature and in the works of the ancients."66

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Toward literature de Jaucourt's approach was a degree more sympathetic than toward painting. For the English scholar Alcuin he offered measured praise, as the propagator of literature and "the sciences" at Charlemagne's court. Alcuin's available works, de Jaucourt noted, were "all rather mediocre"—but Alcuin did write "with more purity than the [other] authors of his time." Still, "his style in reality is hard and barbarous."67 Chivalric romances also fared dubiously in de Jaucourt's comments. In the "Song of Roland" he found ludicrous exaggerations, such as the bursting of Roland's horn at its last blast. On the other hand, such romances did have their educational role in a crude age: they helped tame men's ferocity by introducing such virtues as "honor, justice, defense of widow and orphan, and finally love for ladies."68 In the morality plays of late-medieval France de Jaucourt found no saving graces at all: "These pious farces were a monstrous mixture of impieties and simple-mindedness, which neither the authors nor the spectators had the wit to recognize as such."69 De Jaucourt was somewhat more understanding of twelfth and thirteenthcentury fabliaux, the best of which he found elegant if nai've. They were morally indelicate, though—"too free to be cited" in the Encyclopedia—and included "long, pious tirades from the Old Testament. Can such simplemindedness," he concluded rhetorically, "flatter our forefathers?"70 On the subject of Chaucer, to whom a full page of the article "Woodstock" is devoted, de Jaucourt came closer than in his other essays to real empathy with medieval literature. Chaucer, for the chevalier, was a "likeable poet whose natural verses shine through those Gothic clouds of time and language that would obscure his beautiful genius." "All persons of taste in England," added de Jaucourt, perhaps grudgingly, "give high praise to Chaucer." "However, one must agree that Chaucer's verses are not harmonious." "Still, Chaucer proved in his Canterbury Tales that he knew how to paint different characters. . . . Their differences are those demanded by their time, their vocation, and their education. . . . Even the libertinage of low characters has its nuances which produce variety."71 Philosophy, art, and literature did not exhaust de Jaucourt's reactions concerning the Middle Ages. A brief miscellany of further citations may conclude our examination of this author's approach. On several occasions, for example, de Jaucourt made the standard exceptions of his day concerning medieval darkness. Charlemagne, for one, was praised for his "valor" and his "brilliant reign."72 Alfred the Great received the warmest encomium of all, in the ostensibly geographical article "Wantage." Alfred was pronounced by de Jaucourt "the most accomplished man and the greatest king who ever mounted a throne. Perhaps there has never been on earth any mortal more worthy of the respect of posterity." Nor was this statement simply vague

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rhetoric: the chevalier added six long columns of specifics, including such a highly dubious one as Alfred's designation as founder of Oxford University.73 On medieval "Tournaments," de Jaucourt walked a wary line between approval and disapproval. (Incidentally, he admitted that this article was drawn from the "charming work on Ancient Chivalry by M. de la Curne de Sainte-Palaye," the definitive work, he said, on the subject.) These tournaments, wrote de Jaucourt, were designed to "show men's skill and valor"; they were also an exercise in "gallantry, that perpetual fabrication [mensonge] of love." Clearly de Jaucourt found them colorful and exciting, although he also noted that they had their pernicious and ridiculous side. They could be expressions of immoral libertinage, and were so extravagant as to ruin a large part of the medieval nobility.74 Finally, for de Jaucourt, we should note the tiny article entitled "Centuries of Ignorance." What is surprising in this single paragraph is that it does not refer to the whole medieval period; in fact it never mentions, even for comparison, what now are considered the high Middle Ages. Rather, de Jaucourt here proposed that "the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries are the true centuries of ignorance. Ignorance was so profound in that time that hardly kings, princes, and lords . . . knew how to read; they knew [even] their own possessions [only] by customary use. . . . " The point de Jaucourt wished to make was that only churchmen were literate in that day, and thus they gathered power into their hands. "In all ages," he concluded, "it is the clever who have dominated over the ignorant."75 It would be a mistake to over-stress this isolated instance of special, anticlerical pleading, as evidence that de Jaucourt did not view the entire medieval period as an age of ignorance. Actually, as the above paragraphs show, he had already handed down at least a tentative, rather equivocal judgment— that there were in fact some feeble, sporadic glimmerings of beauty in the Middle Ages. This is not an assessment that would even begin to satisfy a twentieth-century medievalist, but it does imply some small, limited success in empathy with a much-maligned historical age. It does not bring the Encyclopedia quite abreast of the occasional medievalist insights of Montesquieu or Turgot, or up to Voltaire's institutional insights, but it does just barely rescue the Encyclopedia from the depths of total incomprehension of the importance and dignity of the medieval centuries. Yet, as we conclude this sampling of French Enlightenment reactions to two great historical periods—the ancient Greek and the medieval worlds—it is difficult to maintain either that the Encyclopedia caught up fully with the insights and sympathies of the best historical writing of the French Enlightenment, or that even this more accomplished writing demonstrated any truly deep or broad understanding of historical differences among ages and peoples.

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The occasional real insights of the century into the cultural diversity of human beings do not seem to have been satisfactorily applied, more than minimally, to the historical spectrum. NOTES 1. A handy summary of the Enlightenment view, as well as the Encyclopedic view, of the Middle Ages is in Rene Hubert, Les sciences societies dans iEncyclopedie, pp. 128-43. 2. Oeuvres completes d'Helvetius, vol. 3: De Vesprit, pp. 4, 8, 9. 3. Rousseau, Oeuvres, vol. 3 (1949): Discours . . . [sur les arts et les sciences], p. 6. 4. Grimm et al., Correspondence litteraire, vol. 3, pp. 99-100 (1 October 1755), p. 260 (15 April 1763). 5. For example, in Topazio, Voltaire, p. 80. 6. "HISTOIRE," Encyclopedic, vol. 8, pp. 220-25. 7. Ibid., p. 223. 8. Ibid., p. 223. 9. Oeuvres de Voltaire, ed. Beuchot, vol. 22 (1829): Histoire du Parlement, p. 3. 10. Ibid., vol. 37: Lettresphilosophiques, pp. 174, 273-74. 11. For commentary on the Essai's treatment of the Middle Ages, see Brumfitt, Voltaire Historian, pp. 65-70. 12. Oeuvres de Voltaire, ed. Beuchot, vol. 15: Essai sur les moeurs, pp. 391, 417. 13. Ibid., p. 432. 14. Ibid., vol. 16, pp. 22, 71, 74, 260. 15. Ibid., pp. 376, 417. 16. Ibid., pp. 422-38. 17. Ibid., pp. 423-27. 18. Ibid., pp. 428-31. 19. Ibid., pp. 438-57. 20. Ibid., vol. 17 (1829), p. 325. 21. Ibid., vol. 18 (1829), p. 478. 22. Further examples are well summarized in Brumfitt, Voltaire Historian, pp. 66-70. 23. Oeuvres philosophiques de Condillac, vol. 2: Cours d'etudes pour I'instruction du prince de Parme, pp. 129-55, 161-67. 24. Ibid., pp. 131, 135-38. 25. Ibid., pp. 138-47. 26. Ibid., pp. 161-67. 27. On Sainte-Palaye, my debt is great to Lionel Gossman's monograph, Medievalism and the Ideologies of the Enlightenment: The World and Work of La Curne de Sainte-Palaye (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1968). Nearly all of the following three paragraphs derive from his study. 28. Gossman, Medievalism, p. xi.

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29. Ibid., pp. 273-324, 175-211, 340. 30. Ibid., p. 170. 31. Here Sainte-Palaye did not come close to matching the enthusiasm of such a true lover of Gothic as the obscure Jean Le Beuf, who dared even to find classicism crude and cold. See Gossman, Medievalism, p. 29. 32. Including by this author, in Historical Pessimism, p. 157. The statement there that "Montesquieu possessed ... a feeling for the Middle Ages . . ."is cautious, but perhaps not cautious enough. 33. Oeuvres completes de Montesquieu, ed. Caillois, vol. 2: De l'esprit des lois, pp. 547, 548, 551, 555, etc.; 968-70. 34. Ibid., vol. 2: pp. 718, 716, 714-77; vol. 1: Mespensees, pp. 1562-67. 35. Ibid., vol. 2: De l'esprit des lois, pp. 810-17, 822-23; 883-84. 36. Ibid., vol. 1: De la maniere gothique, pp. 966-72. 37. Ibid. Voyage de Grate a la Haye (1728-1729), pp. 637-38. 38. Ibid. Florence: Galeries du Grand-Due (1729), p. 955. 39. Ibid. Florence (1729), pp. 951-52, 954. 40. Hubert, Les sciences sociales dans I'Encyclopedic, pp. 128-30; Vyverberg, Historical Pessimism, p. 65. 41. These are readily available in English translation in Ronald L. Meek, ed. and trans., Turgot on Progress, Sociology and Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 41-59 and 61-118, respectively. For comment on these works and for this early period of Turgot's development in general, see Meek's "Introduction," pp. 1-13, and Douglas Dakin, Turgot and the "Ancien Regime" in France (London; Methuen, 1939), pp. 282-86, 1-19. 42. Turgot, On Universal History, in Meek, ed. and trans., Turgot on Progress, p. 116. 43. Turgot, A Philosophical Review, in Meek, ed. and trans., Turgot on Progress, pp. 53-54. 44. Ibid., pp. 55-57. 45. Grimm et al., Correspondance litteraire, vol. 6, p. 127 (1 December 1764). 46. Ibid., pp. 127-31 (1 December 1764). 47. "ALFRED LE GRAND," Supplement a lEncyclopedic, vol. 1, p. 276. 48. "CANUT II . . ." Supplement a l'Encyclopedic, vol. 2, p. 219. 49. "FREDERIC II ... ," Supplement a l' Encydopedie, vol. 3, p. 140. 50. Hubert, Les sciences sociales dans l'Encyclopedic, pp. 110, 111, 126, 128, 128-43. 51. See this chapter, notes 6 through 8. 52. "GOTHIQUE . . . (Hist, mod.)," Encydopedie, vol. 7, p. 749. The article "ARCHITECTURE," Encydopedie, vol. 1, p. 617, adds nothing of significance to the discussion. 53. "VOEUX DE CHEVALERIE . . . ," Encydopedie, vol. 17, pp. 414-15. 54. "CHYMIE ou CHIMIE," Encydopedie, vol. 3, pp. 408, 429. 55. "CHEVALERIE . . . (Hist, mod.)" Encydopedie, vol. 3, p. 309. 56. "CHAMPION . . . (Hist, mod.)" Encydopedie, vol. 3, p. 85.

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57. "FORME SUBSTANTIELLE," Encyclopedic, vol. 7, p. 176. 58. "ECOLE (Philosophie de I')," Encyclopedie, vol. 5, p. 304. 59. Jean Lerond d'Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedie of Diderot, pp. 71-74. 60. "ECOLE (Philosophicde l')," Encyclopedie, vol. 5, p. 304. Sir Francis Bacon also is given much credit in the Preliminary Discourse, pp. 74-77. 61. "SCHOLASTLQUES, philosophie des scholastiques," Encyclopedie, vol. 14, pp. 770-77. The article is unsigned but is universally given to Diderot. 62. "PASSIONS . . . (Philos., Logique, Morale)," Encyclopedie, vol. 12, p. 142; "BIBLIOTHEQUE," Encyclopedie, vol. 2, p. 232. 63. "THEOCRATIE . . . (Hist. anc. Apolitiq.)," Encyclopedie, vol. 16, p. 247. This unsigned article could be by d'Holbach but is usually attributed to Diderot; it is characteristic of the ideas of both writers. 64. "REAUX & NOMINAUX," Encyclopedie, vol. 13, p. 838. Diderot's publisher Le Breton cut de Jaucourt's entire article "THEOLOGIE SCHOLASTIQUE (Theol. barbare)" from the published first edition (note the revelatory subtitle!): see Gordon and Torrey, The Censoring of Diderot's Encyclopedie, pp. 58-59, 84-89. 65. "MORALE," Encyclopedie, vol. 10, p. 701. 66. "GOTHIQUE, (maniere) en Peint.," Encyclopedie, vol. 7, p. 749. 67. "YORCK-SHIRE, (Geog. mod.)," Encyclopedie, vol. 17, pp. 672-73. 68. "ROMAN de chevalerie, (Belles-Lettres)," Encyclopedie, vol. 14, pp. 34243. 69. "MORALITES, (Theatre frangois)," Encyclopedie, vol. 10, p. 703. 70. "FABLIAUX," Encyclopedic, vol. 6, p. 349. 71. 'WOODSTOK, (Geog. mod.)," Encyclopedie, vol. 17, pp. 636-37. 72. "ROMAN de chevalerie," Encyclopedie, vol. 14, p. 342. 73. "WANTAGE, (Geog. mod.)" Encyclopedie, vol. 17, pp. 586-89. 74. "TOURNOIS . . . (Hist, de la Cheval.)," Encyclopedie, vol. 16, pp. 486-89. 75. "SIECLES D'IGNORANCE," Encyclopedie, vol. 15, p. 172.

CONCLUSION

Among the best-known quotations from David Hume, the great Scottish contemporary of Voltaire and Diderot, are two sentences from his Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding. "Mankind," he wrote, "are so much the same in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature. . . ."1 This apparent Humeian assumption of the uniformity of human nature has been widely blamed for the much publicized "flaw" in Hume's approach to history, and this in turn has often been taken as typical of general Enlightenment historiographical theory and practice. This interpretation of Hume reigned from J. B. Black's celebrated study The Art of History through Collingwood's Idea of History and beyond.2 In recent years the traditional significance and interpretation of the two sentences from Hume quoted above have been seriously and forcefully questioned.3 Typical of the evidence used by the revisionist camp are such passages as these from Hume's essay "Of Eloquence": "Those who consider the periods and revolutions of human kind, as represented in history, are entertained with a spectacle full of pleasure and variety, and see with surprise the manners, customs, and opinions of the same species susceptible of such prodigious changes in different periods of time''—most notably in intellectual rather than political history. And Hume continued: "Interest and ambition, honor and shame, are the prime movers in all public transactions, and these passions are of a very stubborn and untractable nature, in comparison of the sentiments and understanding, which are easily varied by education and example."4 In short, if human passions have remained basically the same— and virtually nobody has questioned either the general principle or Hume's assertion thereof—human beings have in fact become widely differentiated

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sociologically and historically. Emphasis on this second side of Hume has not completely replaced the traditional view in the historical and philosophical community, but it has received much support5—and it seems to me very persuasive. Hume himself gave a great deal less credit for this cultural and historical differentiation among human beings to "climate" than to "moral" causes.6 In this study we have, of course, seen several variations on this emphasis. For whatever causes, the basic theme of differentiation certainly did surface rather frequently in the French Enlightenment. The time now has come for a summary of my suggestions on this matter.7 A fundamental assumption of the French Enlightenment, both inside and outside Diderot's Encyclopedia, clearly was an acceptance of a human nature that was in some important sense uniform throughout space and time. But how far did this acceptance extend, and how was it conditioned by the assumptions and speculations behind it? The earlier pages of this study approached these questions through a cursory review of Enlightenment concepts of nature itself. The essential attributes of nature were commonly thought by the French Enlightenment (following, for example, the Newtonian precedent) to be unity and simplicity—a view that had obvious implications for the vital subcategory of nature, human nature. Nature was not only an objective, scientific concept, but also a normative force: nature was most often considered fundamentally moral. The descriptive, empirical approach to nature was seldom wholly forgotten, but it was generally overlaid with an idealizing urge that would also characterize Enlightenment concepts of human nature. If the Encyclopedia attempted to define nature a bit more systematically and empirically than did the French Enlightenment as a whole, it still suffered from its age's inability to decide firmly in favor of either a scientific, descriptive view of nature, or a universalizing picture of nature as an ideal rather than as a complex of facts. To sway the usual outcome of this indecisiveness concerning the descriptive versus the idealizing essence of nature, there was the virtually unanimous Enlightenment assumption of the uniformity of natural law throughout the universe. From this there could follow, and generally did follow, the crucial view that human nature also was uniform, through both time and space. Self-love and the pursuit of happiness, as well as some degree of human sympathy or social instinct, were thought to be basically the same everywhere: the Encyclopedists and their contemporaries essentially agreed on these basics. Nor was there significant dissent on the inclusion of both reason and passions in human nature, although their proper balance was the subject of much discussion. Hume, for one, was suspicious of human reason, as was Rousseau; on the other hand, Voltaire and many run-of-the-mill Encyclopedia articles decried the passions. In any case a consensus existed on one conclu-

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sion: that both reason and the most basic passions were universal. The fundamental uniformity of reason and passion throughout the human race in fact made sociological and historical generalization possible: no appearance of a new human breed would occur to upset that new science of man of which Hume and his contemporaries fondly dreamed. A consensus on the fundamental stability of human reason and the passions was supplemented, moreover, by agreement on a common human possession of instinctual ethical principles: nature, as 1 have said, was generally believed to be moral. Moreover, only a handful of atheists and the disillusioned denied the existence of a universal, or nearly universal, belief in God. Religion of some sort, like ethics, was usually thought natural to human beings. From all these observations and assumptions it is hardly surprising that the Enlightenment generally affirmed, or simply assumed, the uniformity of human nature. Thus far, for Chapters I and 2, this resume of French Enlightenment doctrine falls well within the mainstream of historical interpretation. The same will be true of much, but not all, of what follows. Subsequent chapters contain varying proportions of material that has sometimes been ignored, or that often is or can be interpreted in diverse ways. Most, to be sure, of the mildly revisionist thrust of this study, and of the summarization and synthesis of Chapters 3 through 8 that I am about to undertake, does not deny the wide, often tacit acceptance by the French Enlightenment of the doctrine of the uniformity of human nature; certainly this doctrine was grounded too firmly in the Enlightenment world-view to encourage frontal attack. What, I believe, has required demonstration is that some lighter but still significant blows against the doctrine were delivered by the Encyclopedists and their contemporaries—or, at least as often, that there might be no attack at all, but simply a new angle of vision. The principle of uniformity in human nature was generally left standing, but new assumptions or new facts could sometimes render the principle partly, or even largely, irrelevant. However significantly the French Enlightenment echoed its predecessors, Cartesian or otherwise, on the importance of human reason, it seldom wholly failed to reinforce rationalism with empiricism. If empirical observation of humanity around the globe could reveal some evidence of an underlying uniformity of human nature, it also revealed substantial actual differences from one people to another. In religion and ethics, for example, it was discovered that at least some peoples might not invariably believe in deity: similarly, moral rules seemed to certain authors oddly fluid. Custom, culture, and "climate" did apparently, after all, produce rather different human beings. Both the Encyclopedists and their contemporaries admitted,

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on occasion, this substantial modification of accepted views concerning the uniformity of human nature. It was, for example, virtually a truism that the "climate" of various geographical areas might aid in molding the national or group character of human beings. "Climate"—including not only air but soil and general geographical conditions—was stressed more by some authors than by others, but was seldom completely disallowed as a factor in group differentiation. The inclination of the age, to be sure, was to stress other types of influence, especially "moral" factors; but in either case the fact of actual human diversity was not denied. "Moral" influences were seen as primarily institutional: they included, not physical conditions, but modes of education, legislation, and religion, and general social structure as well. But was diversity among groups comparable to those variations among individuals that nobody denied? Quite sensibly there were almost no attempts (indeed none at all to this author's knowledge) to quantify or make precise this parallel between individual and group differences. Rather, the usual object of interest was the diversity to be found in "national character." Although Voltaire, the cosmopolitan rationalist, was usually not enchanted by the diversity of the world scene, and although others stressed the variegation of subgroups or individuals within a nation, the existence of national character was a truism of the French Enlightenment. It could indeed, as in Rousseau's case, be a central ingredient of a world-view; at the very least it was one of the frequent sociological assumptions of the period. When a writer of the time went beyond noting a handful of general human traits, notably the power of reason and the presence of a few basic passions, diversity became almost inevitably obvious. Although lip service, at least, was paid to the idea of a uniform human nature, the relevance of this concept was restricted by counter-generalizations concerning national character—generalizations at least purporting to be based on real observation of the world. The argument was not necessarily restricted to the existence of differing national characters: cultural diversity could be discussed in other terms, either broader or more specific. The crucial question, however, may be the extent and depth of Enlightenment investigation of different peoples, often remote from the French eighteenth century. Did Voltaire, for example, or Diderot or his Encyclopedia, make any genuine attempt to investigate other cultural entities, first of all among non-French peoples partly or wholly contemporary with the Enlightenment? Cosmopolitan feeling at this time is undeniable—the cosmopolitanism that undoubtedly often saw its own ideas and ideals as the proper standard for all others—but was this self-centered cosmopolitanism ever supplemented by a genuine curiosity about other

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cultures? This study has suggested the possibility of a limited affirmative answer to these questions. A broad spectrum of Enlightenment views inevitably arose out of the dichotomy between, on the one hand, an intellectual and emotional attachment to the uniformity of human nature and, on the other, a recognition of the cultural diversity of the world's peoples. A natural curiosity about the multiplicity of races and customs observable around the globe could not be repressed—and this curiosity was buttressed, as we have seen, by theories of climatic and institutional differentiation. Elements of these theories are evident in such important and very different writers as Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot, and even Voltaire. From these theories and impulses there arose a wide variety of approaches to specific peoples and nations of the world— theories and impulses that often owed some degree of indebtedness to factual, empirical investigation. The actual results were spotty and unsatisfactory. Although polemical aims were often dominant in these Enlightenment portrayals of different peoples, some solid observation, sensible analysis, and genuine interest in cultural diversity did unquestionably creep through. In connection with the Russian and the Jewish peoples, to be sure, the achievement was minimal. De Jaucourt, in the Encyclopedia, was a rare exception to the usual unsympathetic picture of these two undifferentiated masses, but his treatment was hasty and superficial. Diderot did look a bit into the Jewish cultural heritage, and on the Russians he at least admitted that his observations were hopelessly slanted toward the westward-looking court and barely touched the life and spirit of the rest of Russia. Among "uncivilized" peoples, the blacks of Africa and their descendents in white societies received virtually no sympathetic study except as arguments for humanitarian reform; black peoples were universally considered backward and physically unappealing—a primitive people without any serious culture of their own. Native Americans were somewhat better understood. Although becoming, for some observers, almost abstract exemplars of the natural, unspoiled human virtues, their actual culture did receive some detailed, serious, and insightful study. The study of the Islamic world was usually more superficial and tended to be strictly polemical in intent, even with authors like de Jaucourt and Diderot who elsewhere could be rather more thorough, balanced, and subtle. On the Indians of Asia, Enlightenment attention was sometimes a bit more careful, and acknowledgment of the subcontinent's special character a bit more explicit. Still, the Enlightenment picture of India remained limited and tended (not just in Voltaire) to be polemically oriented. All in all, with certain interesting but minor exceptions, Enlightenment appreciation of these four specific cultures on three continents lagged disap-

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pointingly behind the frequent Enlightenment recognition, on a generalized level, of cultural diversity in the world. The case of China as seen by the French Enlightenment was more complex and a degree more encouraging to the modern cultural pluralist. From Jesuits and traders there had come significant information on China even well before the eighteenth century; by the middle of that century there had emerged not only the stock figure of the "Chinese sage" but some genuine scholarship on China. If the semi-mythical Chinese sage had become an ideal, a role model for the Enlightenment, a good amount of authentic information was also becoming available, together with the recognition of serious defects (from the western viewpoint) in Chinese civilization. Indeed, when the Chinese vogue waned in the later Enlightenment, sometimes a more serious, better balanced view of China emerged than at the height of sinomania. However, the rationalism, classicism, and overwhelmingly European orientation of the age always stood in the way of any deep cross-cultural understanding (especially in the fine arts), or of any full recognition and defense of Chinese complexity and uniqueness. All too often, the Chinese were seen mainly as examples or warnings for Europe, even as they were being studied rather seriously. Hints of a China with its own independent cultural dignity and worth can be found in the French Enlightenment, but they would fall far short of satisfying more recent western students of Chinese history and culture. French Enlightenment cross-cultural studies of exotic peoples inevitably took on an occasional historical dimension—and history assumes a still more central role in the final three chapters of this study. In these chapters, the Enlightenment understanding of its own European past has been the main concern. Here the question might seem to have been this: within a framework of assumed stability in "climate" and in certain outward circumstances, had the passage of time caused changes in human behavior? In fact, however, this question was seldom addressed. Thus the focus of our attention shifts primarily to a related question: how earnest and genuine was the Enlightenment's attempt to comprehend the culture of past ages? Was the western past more than a mine of examples, and did past ages possess any dignity and value of their own? Affirmative answers to these questions have sometimes been suggested in this study, though usually with stern limitations. Perhaps the answers most encouraging to the cultural pluralist can be found in the professional historian Lenglet Du Fresnoy, who carefully studied the late medieval and early modern worlds and specifically defended their independent character and worth. Voltaire, a far more important writer, expressed admiration for Lenglet's methodology, but in practice often steered clear of the messy historical diversity of cultures. Still, Voltaire was a historical empiricist on occasion, and he did come to some recognition of cultural

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complexities in Europe across the ages. In this he was aided by a sporadic concern for objectivity, and by a breadth of historical vision that was most uncommon in the French Enlightenment. Voltaire did glimpse intermittently the concept of a history that revealed the past for its own sake, that possessed its own importance beyond the furnishing of lessons to the eighteenth century. In the Encyclopedia, to be sure, Voltaire was impelled to stress heavily the "utility" of history. Since his colleagues usually did the same in their Encyclopedia attacks on the often lamentable past, it is gratifying to find at least fitful historical empathy in the work's pages. There were occasional attempts even to understand old and exotic religions, and to recognize some complexity in the history of Christianity itself. Hints were dropped that possibly the historical development of religion contained nuggets that were of value in themselves, not just for attacking or defending eighteenth-century religion. The final chapters of this study have presented two case-studies in the Enlightenment effort to investigate and perhaps empathize with two specific past ages in European history: ancient Greece and Middle Ages. In both cases, writers suffered from a factual foundation that was much slighter than it would be two and more centuries later, and also from a more obviously self-imposed (if often unconscious) limitation—the reluctance of the Enlightenment to consider the possibly beneficent role of religion in cultural achievement. Notwithstanding this reluctance there existed a variety of modest ambiguities in the French view of ancient Greece. Again, however, Enlightenment historical practice failed to live up to the potentialities of its own vision of human and cultural diversity, and certainly to Montesquieu's view of the need to enter the Greek spirit in order to understand things Greek. Here the usual Enlightenment failure to comprehend the importance and profundity of Greek tragedy is especially notable and significant. Although Voltaire, for example, could demonstrate some limited feeling for Greek cultural individuality, he failed utterly to find much more in Greek drama than a crude predecessor of the tragic stage in France under Louis XIV and XV. For Voltaire, as for most of his contemporaries, the Greek tragic insights, partly religion-based, concerning suffering and fate remained primitive and incomprehensible. Diderot and Grimm were rare exceptions in their glimpses of a simple, forthright, and primal spirit that helped make the Greek theater a unique landmark in western cultural history. In the pages of Diderot's Encyclopedia we find echoed the century's general reluctance to grant much more than a rather crude pioneering role to ancient Greek civilization. No picture, certainly, of real Greek cultural individuality emerges. Once again the Enlightenment wholly missed the chance for any incisive religious understanding. The fine arts, literature, and philosophy of Greece were, however, investigated more attentively and thoroughly,

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notably by de Jaucourt and Diderot. De Jaucourt, especially, did at least sketch a dim cultural and historical sociology of the Greek world. And on Greek religion Diderot, rather surprisingly, was not unremittingly hostile. Both authors discovered a Greek scene that possessed some elementary cultural and historical individuality, with some real dignity of its own. For Diderot it was Greek philosophy that was most admirable; his investigation of this realm now and again displayed much genuine sympathy and understanding. It is impossible, I feel, to deny to the Encyclopedists and their contemporaries any empathy whatsoever for the Greek spirit and special accomplishments. If Greek cultural achievement was seen too often as a mere precursor of a more polished modern age, it did transcend that role on occasion and did offer some rudiments of cross-cultural understanding. As we proceed to the eighteenth-century view of the Middle Ages, the Greeks may indeed seem to hold a rather privileged position in Enlightened eyes. Chapter 10 of this study does not attempt to demolish the traditional assertion that the Enlightenment usually viewed the Middle Ages with distaste and misunderstanding: this view is all too well documented. For the French Enlightenment, the Middle Ages commonly did symbolize barbarism: they marked a catastrophic lapse from the rational, reasonable, and humanistic ancient world of Greece and Rome. Voltaire's approach has been pictured for two centuries as the epitome of this antimedieval prejudice, and I have willingly summarized the case against him and against some of his contemporaries. This study has, however, insisted that the antimedievalism even of Voltaire himself was not monolithic. For him as for most others in his day there were, first of all, a number of exemplary individual figures who stood well above their medieval setting. More important were a number of useful medieval inventions, and also the civilizing influences of chivalry. Still more significant were medieval innovations in political, judicial, and economic life, resulting most memorably in a growth of human freedom. Voltaire's investigation of the Middle Ages possessed remarkable breadth for its time and even implied the concept of a medieval civilization which, though certainly not always admirable, at least constituted an entity with real historical significance. What rendered the medieval period ultimately impenetrable for Voltaire and others was the same deterrent, in more virulent form, that frequently prevented full Enlightenment empathy with the ancient Greek world. The mental block that refused to see the vital role of religion in pagan Greece became now a violent antipathy toward the medieval Christian faith that still seemed to be the major obstacle to enlightenment in the eighteenth century. Although modern historians have tended more heavily than their predecessors

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to stress the secular ingredients of medieval life, all of them grant to some degree the centrality of medieval institutional religion. The anticlerical, rational, and humanist enthusiasm of the Enlightenment thus became, nearly always, an impenetrable barrier to a full understanding of the Middle Ages. Even such a professional medievalist as Sainte-Palaye could not cause that barrier, and others, to disappear. An isolated comment such as Grimm's on "the force and . . . beauty of Christianity" weighed only lightly against the anti-Christian prejudice of the Enlightenment. The support given by Montesquieu to the Middle Ages was arguably no more important than Voltaire's, when Voltaire assumed the guise of defender of certain medieval secular institutions. On the other hand, in reference to religion, Montesquieu was more tolerant of the Middle Ages than was Voltaire; Montesquieu even saw some positive good in Christianity. Feudal law also had its fascination for Montesquieu, and he found a handful of "Gothic" monuments not displeasing. It is hard, though, to see those exceptions as more than dim rays of light in a fairly gloomy picture of the medieval world. As for Turgot, only in several youthful essays do we see much evidence for a real appreciation of the medieval contribution to the historical continuum. While this appreciation was a sign of increased empathy with the Middle Ages, it may at the same time have weakened the concept of a medieval entity with value in itself. If the French Enlightenment as a whole could never really comprehend the medieval spirit, the same must be said of the Encyclopedia, and perhaps doubly so. For its contributors, almost without exception, the Middle Ages stood for barbarism in political and economic life, tastelessness in art and architecture, and futility in Scholastic thought. On these points, even the usually more receptive minds of Diderot and de Jaucourt were almost always closed. De Jaucourt, however, did see at least some merit in certain types of medieval literature and did find reason to praise isolated instances of medieval political leadership. For him, ignorance in the Middle Ages was pervasive but not totally unrelieved. However, de Jaucourt was distinctly less perceptive and less sympathetic toward medieval culture than he had been toward the ancient Greeks or even toward the Russian peoples of his own day. All in all, the Encyclopedia was only rarely successful in paralleling the more perceptive historical and cultural insights that did surface, on occasion, elsewhere in the French Enlightenment. De Jaucourt did have his glimpses of some diversity and complexity in peoples of past ages and different climes, but most such perceptions in the Enlightenment came outside the Encyclopedia. For some of these perceptions we have particularly cited such authors as Lenglet Du Fresnoy for his "assertion of the rights of the past over the present";8 Voltaire for his recognition, after all, of some complexity in world

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history and culture; Grimm for his ironic sense of balance; and Diderot for a degree of cultural and historical subtlety not common in his time. All of these writers, in my view, deserve whatever recognition they have received thus far in historical studies on the Enlightenment, and indeed more. This study has presented a case for a limited and sporadic French Enlightenment view of cultural and historical diversity, based on a recognition of actual differences among individuals and groups. This view was, to some degree, in fact inevitable, granted the frequent emergence of empirical curiosity about human differentiation. Although the uniformity of basic human nature continued to be an article of faith and reason, the actual diversity within humanity was too evident to be wholly ignored. More important, the intrusion of empiricism into the thought of the Enlightenment was not simply a peripheral embarrassment for a system that has sometimes been held to have been fundamentally abstract and dogmatic. Despite the theoretical absolutism that has sometimes been seen in Enlightenment thought, this thought also had its essential skeptical, even relativistic side. The French Enlightenment quite consciously was often struggling against old absolutes, especially in science, religion, and statecraft. In this struggle an empirical investigation of social and historical facts had a necessary and crucial role. It was this sort of empiricism that revealed the obvious diversity of humanity. When entrenched institutions came under Enlightenment attack, entrenched views on human uniformity were not likely to remain wholly untouched. "Criticism," as Peter Gay9 and others have insisted, had a central role in the Enlightenment—and criticism could have important unintended consequences. These consequences were, however, rather strictly limited—and such was assuredly the case with the realization of human diversity, whether cultural, historical, or both. Although empirical observation clearly showed the diversity of human beings, the impact on views of group diversity throughout time and space was much less potent than recent sociologists and historians would expect. To be sure, by no means has even the modern world been wholly converted, rightly or wrongly, to views of cultural and historical diversity— and not just in the eyes of the uninformed. Later centuries still hear from a variety of sources that "human nature never changes," and still they suffer from blinkered, egocentric views of other ages and peoples. We must not take too much comfort from these modern parallels, for informed opinion has indeed advanced very significantly since the eighteenth century in appreciating cultural and historical diversity, and even in truly empathizing with past ages and varied cultures. It is only fair, as we conclude our study, to ask why the French Enlightenment stopped so far short of what we usually consider our own still more enlightened appreciation for diverse

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civilizations. Three possible explanations, or categories of explanation, suggest themselves. All three have at least been implied already in these pages, but they now deserve summarization together. First of all, of course, there is the prodigious information explosion of the centuries after the Enlightenment. The eighteenth century had only a tiny fraction of the modern database in sociology, anthropology, and psychology, and these fields in fact were then barely coming into view as disciplines. Even in such a long-established area as history, the available information has multiplied fantastically. As empirical information on early and non-western peoples in general has expanded, so, too, has the realization of vast human and social differences within this exploding framework. Like any other past period, the Enlightenment can hardly be fairly blamed for not knowing what it could not know—a sort of indulgence that we may hope will one day be extended to our own defective century. We need continually to remind ourselves of the limited horizons of even that forward-looking movement known as the Enlightenment. Europocentrism was almost unquestioned, except occasionally by such writers as Voltaire, possibly much more for shock-value than from deep conviction. Moreover, temporal horizons were even more sharply restricted than were geographical and cultural ones. With all the occasional talk about needing to know more about exotic peoples and obscure regions of history, it occurred to hardly anybody in the Enlightenment that those peoples might be equal in dignity to westerners, or that this history extended back much farther than the several thousand years summarized in the Hebrew and Christian Bible. All human beings were descended, and not very distantly, from those common progenitors Adam and Eve: was it surprising that usually less diversity was seen, or looked for, in their descendants than across the millions of years later postulated for the history of the human race and its near-human predecessors? In addition to these limitations imposed upon cultural and historical horizons by what we may ungraciously call "ignorance," there was also a selfimposed limitation within the mindset of the Enlightenment: its antireligious bias, or more precisely, its opposition to established religions and its reluctance to find the traditional religious spirit admirable. The program of the Enlightenment was humanistic, secular, and rationalist—and all too often the entrenched religions of the world seemed to be, and sometimes truly were, antagonistic to this program. For the French Enlightenment, established religion was the enemy, an ugly barricade against earthly improvement. It is not surprising, then, that opposition to religion became one of the biggest stumbling blocks in the path of appreciation for human diversity, and one of the most obvious impediments to empathy with earlier times and exotic civilizations. We have seen how this religious blind spot, or even antireligious

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obsession, contributed to a radical misunderstanding of ancient Greek civilization—especially of Greek theater—and to the low regard in which the long medieval period was commonly held. Antireligious bias was significant in the underestimation of exotic cultures—and certainly its positive counterpart, deism, led to the distortions of the "good Brahmin" and the "Confucian sage," who often seemed to sum almost the whole of Indian and Chinese cultures, respectively, to the immense detriment of a rounded appreciation of those cultures. A third explanation of the French Enlightenment's imperfect understanding of human, cultural, and historical diversity is related to the self-centeredness implied in my first two points. This limitation involved, however, more than the unconscious pressures of ignorance of other ages and cultures, and the religious or antireligious biases of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment embodied, in effect, a conscious and deliberate break with past errors and with the deficiencies of exotic, primitive peoples. Against these presumed claims upon the human spirit the Enlightenment proposed a new and exciting positive force: the power of human reason. Reason became the medium through which human beings could and should deliberately distance themselves from superstition, obscurantism, and a whole litany of imperfect or malignant beliefs, practices, and institutions across the ages and throughout the world. If this glorification of human reason (often supplemented, to be sure, by empiricism, passion, or social instinct) might sometimes oversimplify and distort views of the human condition, it was also very often an agent of cleansing clarity and a servant of generous ideals. Often, of course, it was pressed into service as a polemical device—for the Enlightenment was indeed unabashedly polemical. The philosophes used reason and empiricism and feeling to construct, at least in theory, a better world, to argue for abandoning the lamentable defects of past and present. The Enlightenment saw defective beliefs as inherent in their time and civilization, while seldom reflecting that its own ideals might be culturally conditioned. Along the way, as we have seen, Enlightenment curiosity and partial perceptiveness concerning the world's differing peoples and cultures inevitably led, on occasion, to the sorts of insight that this study has attempted to document. Too often these cross-cultural insights have been wholly ignored in histories of the period, and too often these histories have presented a view of the French Enlightenment as a dreary wasteland of utter cross-cultural and historical blindness to the diversities within the human race. This study has undertaken a tentative and partial corrective to received historical opinion. These pages have not, on the other hand, aspired to offer much more than a corrective adjustment. All in all, the French eighteenth century hardly

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witnessed a resounding victory for cross-cultural understanding. Such a victory was ultimately frustrated by what we can now see as relative sociological and historical ignorance, by a narrow opposition to established religions and to the traditional religious spirit, and by a self-centered confidence in the Enlightenment's ability to transcend outmoded histories and cultures, and to make over the world in its own image. Cross-cultural understanding again and again was indeed thwarted or at least muffled by the limitations and special perceptions of its century. Yet the occasional appeal of such understanding also arose from the intellectual climate of the time, especially its empiricism and its distrust of authorities and absolutes—but potential empathy with other ages and peoples simply could not compete on equal terms with the surge of enthusiastic Enlightenment rationalism and meliorism. The relative submergence of ideas on human diversity and of cross-cultural understanding in the French Enlightenment was as inevitable as had been its hesitant appearance and its occasional limited victories. NOTES 1. David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1955), p. 93. 2. For a summary of this common interpretation of Hume, see S. K. Wertz, "Hume, History, and Human Nature," Journal of the History of Ideas, 36 (JulySeptember 1975), pp. 481-96, especially pp. 481-84. Other specific authors are cited in his note 7, p. 483. 3. Ibid., pp. 484-96; Duncan Forbes, Hume's Philosophical Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 102-21. 4. Hume, Essays, Literary, Moral, and Political, p. 55. Ernst Cassirer was one of the first to note that the "solid substratum" of human passions was less important to Hume than the historical process of change: The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, p. 226. 5. For example, from Peter Gay in The Enlightenment: An Interpretation: vol. 2: The Science of Freedom, especially pp. 381-82. Gay finds "the germs of historicism" in Hume's approach, and a historical sense not as far from Ranke's as has usually been asserted. 6. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, pp. 585-87. 7. The general sequence of principal points in this Conclusion follows the sequence in Chapters 1 through 10; constant endnote references here would duplicate those in the text and would be more disruptive than helpful. 8. See Chapter 8, "The Place of History." 9. Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. 1, pp. 127-59.

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Diderot, Denis. Oeuvres politiques. Edited by Paul Verniere. Paris: Gamier, 1963. Diderot, Denis. Inventaire dufonds Vandeul, et inedits de Diderot. Edited by Herbert Dieckmann. Geneva: Droz, 1951. Dubos, Jean-Baptiste, abbe. Reflexions critiques sur la poesie et sur la peinture. 2 vols. in 1. Paris: Mariette, 1719. Duclos, Charles Pinot. Considerations sur les moeurs de ce siecle. Edited by F. C. Green. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939. Encyclopedie, ou Dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des arts, et des metiers, par une societe de gens de lettres. Vols. 1-7: Paris: Briasson, David 1'aine, Le Breton, and Durand, 1751-1757. Vols. 8-17: "Neuchatel: Samuel Faulche" [Paris: Le Breton], 1765. Supplement a l'Encyclopedic, ou Dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des arts, et des metiers, par une societe de gens de lettres. 4 vols. Amsterdam: M. Rey, 1776-1777. Espiard de la Borde, Frangois-Ignace d'. L'esprit des nations. 2 vols. The Hague: Beauregard, Gosse, Van Daalen, 1752. Espiard de la Borde, Francois-Ignace d'. Essais sur le genie et le caractere des nations. 3 vols. Brussels: Leonard, 1743. Grimm, Frederic-Melchior, baron. Correspondance inedite de Frederic Melchior Grimm. Edited by Jochen Schlobach. Munich: Fink, 1972. Grimm, Frederic-Melchior, baron, et al. Correspondance litteraire, philosophique et critique, par Grimm, Diderot, Raynal, Meister, etc. Edited by Maurice Tourneux. 16 vols. Paris: Gamier, 1877-1882. Helvetius, Claude-Adrien. Oeuvres completes d'Helvetius. 14 vols. Paris: F. Didot, 1795; reprint ed., Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1969. Herder, Johann Gottfried von. Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Mankind. Translated by T. Churchill. New York: Bergman, 1966. D'Holbach, Paul Thiry, baron. La morale universelle, ou les devoirs de l'homme fondes sur la nature. 3 vols. Paris: Masson et fils, 1820. D'Holbach, Paul Thiry, baron. Systeme de la nature, ou des lois du monde physique & du monde moral. 2 vols. London: 1774. D'Holbach, Paul Thiry, baron. Systeme de la nature. ... 2 vols. Paris: 1821; reprint ed., Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1966. Hume, David. Essays, Literary, Moral, and Political. London: Ward, Lock, & Bowden, n.d. Hume, David. An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Charles W. Hendel. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1955. [Journal de Trevoux] Memoirs pour l' histoire des sciences et des beaux-arts [and other titles]. Edited by Guillaume-Francois Berthier from 1745. Trevoux and Paris: 1701-1767. Lafitau, Joseph-Francois. Moeurs des sauvages americains comparees aux moeurs des premiers temps. 2 vols. Paris: Saugrain l aine, 1724. Mably, Gabriel Bonnot, abbe de. Oeuvres completes de l'abbe de Mably. 12 vols. London: 1789.

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Index

Abstraction. See Rationalism Adler, Mortimer )., 17 n2 Aeschylus, 157 Albertus Magnus, 179, 186, 187 Alcuin, 189 d'Alembert, Jean Lerond: chivalry, 186; "climate," 70; empiricism, 54-55; ethics, 40—41; historical probabilism, 138; on history, 138, 147, 148; medieval law, 186; national character, 81; natural law, 25; nature, 23; Preliminary Discourse, 8, 9, 187; rationalism and empiricism, 54; role in Encyclopedia, 7-8, 9; Scholasticism, 186-87 Alexander the Great, 167 Alexander III, pope, 178 Alfred the Great, 176, 185, 189-90 Aquinas, Thomas, 187 Anaxagoras, 167 Anaximander, 167 Anaximenes, 167 Anticlericalism, 13 Antiphilosophes, 4, 72-73, 175 Arbuthnot, John, 68 Ariosto, 159, 177 Aristophanes, 159 Aristotle, 25, 156, 163, 172 n29 Asia, understanding of, 116-17 Asians, inferiority of, 59 Atheism, 196; d'Holbach, 13, 45; Yvon, 43 Atheism, existence of: in Encyclopedia, 56; de Jaucourt, 56; Romilly, 56; Voltaire, 55-56 Bacon, Francis, 25 Bacon, Roger, 179, 186, 187 Basnage, Jacques, 104

Bayle, Pierre, 31 nl, 122, 170 Becker, Carl L., 35 Bernard of Clairvaux, 187 Berthier, Guillaume-Francois, Journal of Trevoux, 15-16, 72, 123 Black, J. B., 194 Blacks, 107; inferiority of, 59; understanding of, 107-9, 114 n39, 198 Boccaccio, 177 Bodin, Jean, 25, 66 Bonaventure, 187 Boniface VIII, 188 Bossuet, Jacques-Benigne, 143 Boucher d'Argis, Antoine-Gaspard, 10, 26-27, 147 Brumfitt, J. H., 145, 152 n16 Brunelleschi, 177 Buckle, Henry Thomas, 70 Buffon, Charles-Louis Leclerc, comte de, 16; "climate," 69; "moral" causes of diversity, 73; Natural History, 16; understanding of American Indians, 114 n45; uniformity of human nature, 34, 108 Cahusac, Louis de, 38 Canada, 115 n56 Canute, 185 Cassirer, Ernst, 36, 206 n4 Castilhon, Jean-Louis, 68, 185 Catherine II, 100, 101, 102, 103 Chanvalon, Thibault, 65 Charlemagne, 176, 178-79, 181, 189 Chaucer, 189 China, 121-32; Collection of Curious Observations, 126; compared with Russians and Jews, for understanding, 131; Diderot, 130-31; in Encyclopedia,

218

INDEX

China (continued) 130-31; Grimm, 127-29; Helvetius, 127; cl'Holbach, 127; de Jaucourt, 131; Mably, 129-30; de Marsy, 126-27; Montesquieu, 126; Rousseau, 129-30; understanding of, 121-32, 199; Voltaire, 124-25 Chinard, Gilbert, 109 Chinese rites controversy, 121—22 "Chinese sage," 121-25, 130, 199 "Chinoiseries," 123 Chivalry, 186, 201; d'Alembert, 186; de Jaucourt, 189, 190; Montesquieu, 181; Sainte-Palaye, 180; Voltaire, 177 Christianity. See Religion; specific authors Christianity, history of, 175, 200, 201-2 Cicero, 25 Classicism, 21, 125, 126; criticism of, 180; Diderot, 21; uniformity of human nature, 34; Voltaire, 21 "Climate," 5, 14, 66-71, 197; d'Alembert, 70; Bodin, 66; Buckle, 70; Buffon, 69; Condiilac, 74; Diderot, 71, 75; Dubos, 67; in Encyclopedia, 70-71; Helvetius, 74; d'Holbach, 69-70; Hume, 195; de Jaucourt, 71; Marmontel, 66-67, 71; Montesquieu, 68-69, 70; Pastoret, 70; Raynal, 70; Saint-Evremond, 66; Voltaire, 69; Winckelmann, 70 Clovis, 176 Collection of Curious Observations, 126 Collingwood, R. G., 194 Commager, Henry Steele, 35 Condiilac, Etienne Bonnot, abbe de, 16; causes of diversity, 74; Course of Study, 178; Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, 74, 77; Islam, 178; Middle Ages, 178—79; national character, 77; rationalism and empiricism, 54; Renaissance, 179; Scholasticism, 179 Confucius, 123, 125, 128, 130. See also "Chinese sage" Corneille, 161 Cosmopolitanism, 78, 87 n79, 89, 197-98 Crocker, Lester G., 19 n20, 35, 52 n78 Cross-cultural understanding. See Cultural diversity; specific nations and groups Cultural diversity, 5, 71-76, 88-95, 136, 197-98, 203, 205-6; Diderot, 57, 58, 94-95; Dubos, 67; in Encyclopedia, 95; Helvetius, 92; Herder, 90; Hume, 194-95; Misson, 64; Montesquieu, 90-92; Poivre, 65, 90; reasons for limits, 203-5; Rousseau, 94; Vico, 90; Voltaire, 92-94.

See also Foreign cultures; specific nations and groups Customs, diversity of, 59 Decadence, 165, 176, 201 Deism. See Religion, natural Delisle de Sales, 104 Descartes, 187 Determinism, 30, 142 Diderot, Denis, 12-13; D'Alembert's Dream, 59; art criticism, 18 n14; "climate," 71, 75; cultural diversity, 12-13, 94-95; diversity of ethics, 58; diversity of human nature, 59—60, 61; education and legislation, 57; empiricism and rationalism, 54; Epicureanism, 169; Essay on Dramatic Poetry, 158; Essay on the Reigns, 95; ethics, 42, 57; fiction of, 12; Greece, 166-70, 172 n47; Greek drama, 158-59, 161; Greek philosophy, 166-70, 201; Greek religion, 166, 201; historical diversity, 167-70; and d'Holbach, 13; Ionian Greek philosophy, 167; Jacques the Fatalist, 42, 59; legislation, 74-75; Letter on the Blind, 57; Middle Ages, 187-88; national character, 78; natural law, 25—26; nature, 22, 23; On China, 130; On the Interpretation of Nature, 54; passions, 37, 38-39, 50 n36; Plato, 168-69; Rameau's Nephew, 42, 59; rationalism, 12, 36; Refutation of Helvetius, 54, 60; religion, 150-51; role in Encyclopedia, 7; role in Enlightenment, 12; Scholasticism, 187; skepticism, 169-70; Socrates, 167-68; Supplement to Bougainville's Voyage, 47, 58, 95; Thales, 167; transformism, 12; understanding of China, 130-31; understanding of India, 120; understanding of Islamic world, 118; understanding of Jews, 105-7; understanding of Russia, 100, 102; uniformity in ethics, 42, 43; uniformity of human nature, 47; uniformity of natural law, 26, 27-28 Diversity in ethics, 92 Diversity of human nature, 53-61, 65; Diderot, 59—60, 61; in Encyclopedia, 60-61; Formey, 60; d'Holbach, 60; de Jaucourt, 60-61; Montesquieu, 58; Rousseau, 58; Voltaire, 58-59 Drama, Greek. See Greek drama Druids, 150 Dubos, Jean-Baptiste, 67, 73 Duclos, Charles, 16, 79-80

Index Du Halde, 129 Dumarsais, Cesar Chesneau, 54 Duns Scotus, 187 Economic causes of diversity, 84 n47 Edifying and Curious Letters, 123 Education, 5; Diderot, 57-58; Helvetius, 74; d'Holbach, 13, 43; Montesquieu, 73; Rousseau, 43. See also "Moral" causes of diversity Empiricism, 4, 53-58, 196, 203, 205; d'Alembert, 36-37; Francis Bacon, 25; Condillac, 54; Diderot, 54; in Encyclopedia, 54-55, 195; historical, 138, 141, 145, 179, 185, 199; Lafitau, 111; Montesquieu, 68-69; and rationalism, 53—54; and relativism, 196-97; Voltaire, 54 Encyclopedia, 7-9; contributors to, 9-10; empiricism, 195; and the Enlightenment, 7—8; as Enlightenment propaganda, 8; history of, 7-8, 133 n9, 193 n64; importance of, 8, 9; lack of adventurous insights, 24, 39, 45, 61, 190, 202; moderate views, 8; scholarly objectivity, 8-9; systematic approach, 24, 39, 195 Encyclopedia, Supplement to. See Supplement to Encyclopedia Enlightenment, 3, 4, 85 n48, 90; French, vii-viii, 3-216 Environment, 5 Epicureanism, 169 d'Espiard, abbe, 68 Ethics, 40-44; experiential, 56-58, 196; instinctual, 40-46, 196; and religion, 44-46; utility of, 57. See also Uniformity in ethics Euripides, 157, 161 Europocentrism, 12, 89, 92-93, 204 Experience. See Diversity of human nature; Empiricism Florence: Baptistery, 182; Cathedral (Duomo), 182 Foreign cultures, 98-112, 116-32; polemical use of, 98, 110, 123-25, 132, 198, 199, 205 Formey, Jean-Henri-Samuel, 23, 45, 60, 108 Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, 185 Free will, 30 French Revolution, vii Freret, Nicolas, 122 Freron, Elie-Catherine, Literary Year, 15-16, 65, 72-73

219

Gay, Peter, viii, 35, 96 n6, 206 n5 Gibbon, Edward, 137 Giotto, 177 God, belief in, 44-46, 55-56, 196 "Good savage." See Primitivism "Gothicism," 202; Diderot, 188; Grimm, 175; de Jaucourt, 188; Le Beuf, 192 n31; Mallet, 186; Montesquieu, 181-82; Sainte-Palaye, 180; Turgot, 182-83 Greece, 155-70; in Encyclopedia, 161-70, 200-201; foreign influences on, 156; historical diversity in, 170; history of, 155-70; progress in, 162; superiority of, 172 n47; understanding of, 155-70, 200-201 Greek drama, 157-59, 161, 171 n1l, 171 n13, 200 Greek philosophy, 166-70, 201 Gregory VII, 188 Grimm, Friedrich Melchior, 15; Greece, 157; Greek drama, 158-59, 161; historical breadth, 129; on de Jaucourt, 10-11; Literary Correspondence, 15, 127—29, 184; medieval Christianity, 175, 184; Middle Ages, 175; "moral" causes of diversity, 73; national character, 77-78; nature, 22; role in Enlightenment, 15; understanding of China, 127-29; understanding of Jews, 104—5; understanding of Russia, 100, 102 Grotius, Hugo, 25 Happiness, 28-29, 195 Hawley, Daniel, 119 Helvetius, Claude-Adrien, 16; causes of diversity, 74; cultural diversity, 92; Middle Ages, 175; national character, 78; On Man, 127; On Mind, 74, 127, 175; understanding of China, 127 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 76, 137; cultural diversity, 90; Ideas on the History of Mankind, 90 Heredity, 4-5 Herodotus, 64, 156, 161-62 Historical causation, 142 Historical diversity, 5-6, 136-37, 139, 145, 151, 200; Diderot, 158, 167-70; Greece, 165-70; Hume, 194-95; Marmontel, 161; Middle Ages, 184, 191; reasons for limits, 203-5; Voltaire, 140, 142, 147, 199-200 Historical probabilism, 138, 142, 146 Historical relativism, 156 Historical time, 204 History, 136-51, 155-70, 174-91,

220

INDEX

History (continued) 199-203; empiricism, 138, 141, 145; in Encyclopedia, 138, 146-51, 200; Greece, 155-70; of ideas, 3-4; Middle Ages, 174-91; polemical use of, 138, 139-45, 148, 149, 160-61, 200; rationalism, 144; understanding of, 136-51, 155-70, 174-91, 199-203. See also specific authors d'Holbach, Paul-Henri Thiry, baron, 13-14; atheism, 45; "climate," 69-70; and Diderot, 13; diversity of human nature, 60; on education, 43; ethics, 42; on history, 138; "moral" causes of diversity, 85 n63; nature, 13-14; passions, 37; religion, 13-14, 155; role in Encyclopedia, 10; role in Enlightenment, 13; System of Nature, 13, 57, 60, 69-70; understanding of China, 127; understanding of Jews, 104; uniformity in ethics, 42-43; uniformity of human nature, 47; uniformity of natural law, 13; Universal Morality, 42-43; utility of ethics, 57 Holbachian circle, 13 Hubert, Rene, 185 Human nature, 28-30; Condillac, 28; Diderot, 28; in Encyclopedia, 29-30; Hume, 28; Rousseau, 47; views since eighteenth century, 4-5. See also Diversity of human nature; Uniformity of human nature Hume, David: "climate," 85-86 n64; 194-95; historical diversity, 194-95; human nature, 28; inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 194; "moral" causes of diversity, 85 n48, 85-86 n64; national character, 78-79; nature, 23; "Of Eloquence," 194; uniformity of human nature, 194 India, understanding of, 119-21, 133 n13, 198; Diderot, 120; in Encyclopedia, 120-21; de Jaucourt, 120-21; Poivre, 119; Voltaire, 119-20 Indians, American: Buffon's understanding of, 114-45; compared with blacks, for understanding of, 112; compared with Russians, for understanding of, 107; in Encyclopedia, 111-12; Lafitau's understanding of, 110-11; general understanding of, 198 Information explosion, modern, 204

Institutional causes of diversity. See "Moral" causes of diversity Islam, in Encyclopedia, 150 Islamic world, understanding of, 117-19, 133 n12, 198; Diderot, 118; in Encyclopedia, 118-19; de Jaucourt, 118-19; Voltaire, 117-18 de Jaucourt, Louis, chevalier: chivalry, 189; "climate," 71; diversity of human nature, 60-61; Greece, 164-65, 201; historical breadth, 121; on history, 147, 148, 149; medieval literature, 189; Middle Ages, 188-90, 202; national character, 81; natural law, 27; nature, 23-24; passions, 38-39; religion, 150-51, 164; role in Encyclopedia, 10—11; travel narratives, 65-66; understanding of China, 131; understanding of India, 120-21; understanding of Islamic world, 118-19; understanding of Jews, 106; understanding of Russia, 102; uniformity in ethics, 43-44; uniformity of human nature, 48 Jesuit missionaries, 121-22, 124 Jews, understanding of, 103-7, 113 n24, 114 n36, 114 n39, 198; compared with that of Russians, 103-4, 107; Diderot, 105-7; in Encyclopedia, 106-7; Grimm, 104-5; d'Holbach, 104; de Jaucourt, 106; Montesquieu, 104; Rousseau, 104 Judeo-Christian tradition. See Religion Julian the Apostate, 184 Julius Caesar, 181 Kant, Immanuel, 53 Lafitau, Joseph-Francois, Customs and Morals of the American Savages, 15, 44-45, 110-11 La Messaliere, 100 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, 92 Law, medieval, 181, 186 Leblanc, Jean-Bernard, 99 Legislation, 5; Condillac, 74; Diderot, 57-58, 74-75; Helvetius, 74; d'Holbach, 13; Montesquieu, 92. See also "Moral" causes of diversity Lenglet Du Fresnoy, Nicolas, 139, 140, 199 LeRoi, 75 Libertines, 122 Locke, John, 25 Lovejoy, Arthur O., 22 Lycurgus, 166

Index Mably, Gabriel Bonnot, abbe de, 16; Doubts Proposed to the Economist Philosophers, 130; Greece, 157; Observations on the Greeks, 157; understanding of China, 129-30 Mallet, Edme, 46, 163 Marmontel, Jean-Francois, 157; causes of cultural diversity, 66-67; "climate," 71; comic sense, 60; Greece, 161 Marsy, F. M. de, 126-27 Masaccio, 182 Medievalists, professional, 179-80 Meister, Henri, 99 Menander, 159 Meyzieu, Paris de, 148-49 Michelangelo, 182 Middle Ages, understanding of, 174-91, 201-2; in Encyclopedia, 185-91, 202 Mirabeau, marquis de, 73 Misson, Maximilien, 64 Monnoye, 163 Montaigne, Michel de, 170 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron, 14; causes of diversity, Berthier's critique of, 72; chivalry, 181; "climate," 14, 68-69, 70; Considerations on the Causes, 14; cultural diversity, 90-92; Defense of the Spirit of the Laws, 77; diversity of human nature, 58; on education, 73; empiricism, 68-69; Essay on the Causes, 58, 68-69, 73; Greece, 156; historical relativism of, 156; legislation, 92; Middle Ages, 180-82, 202; moderation of, 14; "moral" causes of diversity, 14, 73; national character, 77, 86 n78, 95 n1; natural religion, 44; On the Gothic Style, 181-82; Persian Letters, 14, 91; role in Encyclopedia, 10; sociology, 155; Spirit of the Laws, 14, 68-69, 91-92, 126, 181; understanding of China, 126; understanding of Jews, 104; Voltaire on, 140 Montigny, Claude de, 185 "Moral" causes of diversity, 5, 14, 71-76, 197; Buffon, 73; Condillac, 74; Dubos, 73; in Encyclopedia, 75—76; Grimm, 73; Hume, 195; LeRoi, 75; Mirabeau, 73; Montesquieu, 69, 73; Voltaire, 73, 84 n31 Morality. See Ethics; Uniformity in ethics Morality plays, 189 Mornet, Daniel, 137 National character, 68, 76-81, 197; d'Alembert, 81; Condillac, 77; Diderot,

221

78; Duclos, 79-80; in Encyclopedia, 80-81; Espiard, 68; Grimm, 77-78; Helvetius, 78; Hume, 78-79; de Jaucourt, 81; Montesquieu, 77, 86 n78, 95 n1; Rousseau, 80; Saint-Lambert, 81; Voltaire, 78, 81 Native Americans. See Indians, American Natural history. See Science Natural law, 24-28; d'Alembert, 25; Boucher d'Argis, 26-27; Diderot, 25-26; in Encyclopedia, 26-28; Greece, 25; de Jaucourt, 27; Locke, 25; Voltaire, 25. See also Uniformity of natural law Nature, 20-24; in Encyclopedia, 23-24, 195; as enemy of man, 22, 31 n7; in esthetics, 21-22; as fact or norm, 20-24, 195; Grimm, 22; d'Holbach, 13-14; laws of, 24-28 Necessity. See Determinism Newton, Isaac, 21 Passions, 37-40, 195-96; Diderot, 37, 38-39; in Encyclopedia, 37; d'Holbach, 37; de Jaucourt, 38-39; Rousseau, 37, 57; Vauvenargues, 37; Voltaire, 37; Yvon, 38 Pastoret, 70 de Pauw, Cornelius, 111-12 Pessimism, historical, 93 Pestre, abbe, 29, 54, 1 1 1 , 112 Peter the Great, 100, 101, 102, 103 Petrarch, 177 Philosophes. See Enlightenment, French; specific authors Philosophy, Greek, 166-70 Physical causes of diversity. See "Climate" Pisa, 182 Plato, 156, 160, 163; Diderot, 168-69 Poivre, Pierre, 15; cultural diversity, 65, 90; understanding of India, 119; Voyages of a Philosophe, 90 Poly genesis, racial, 114 ;;42 Priests, 56 Primitivism, 109-10, 112 Progress, 5, 15, 176; in arts, 163 Pyrrhonism. See Skepticism Quesnay, Francois, 54 Racine, 161 Rationalism, 36-37, 125, 195-96, 205-6; d'Alembert, 36-37; Diderot, 36; and empiricism, 53-54; in Encyclopedia, 54-55; in history, 144; Voltaire, 36 Raynal, Guillaume-Thomas-Frangois, 16;

222

INDEX

Raynal, (continued) "climate," 70; on history, 138-39; Literary News, 16, 127 Reason. See Rationalism Relativism, vii, 196-97, 203, 206 Religion: appreciation of role of, 158; blindness on role of, 155-56, 174-75, 200, 204-5; Diderot, 150-51, 166; in Encyclopedia, 149-51, 200; and ethics, 44-46; experiential, 55-56; de Jaucourt, 164 Religion, natural, 44-46, 196; in Encyclopedia, 45-46; Montesquieu, 44; Voltaire, 45 Religious feeling, 44-46, 56 Renaissance, 162, 179, 180 Renaudot, Eusebe, 125 Romanticism, 21-22 Rome, 162, 170 n\ Romilly, Jean-Edme, atheism, 56 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 14; Confessions, 14, 58; Considerations on Poland, 80; Constitutional Project for Corsica, 80; cultural diversity, 94; Discourses, 14; diversity of human nature, 58; education, 43; Emile, 14; ethics, 40; human nature, 47; Middle Ages, 175; national character, 80, 87 n79; nature, 23; New Heloi'se, The, 130; On Customs and Morals, 57; passions, 37, 57; primitivism, 109-10; Reveries, 14; role in Encyclopedia, 10; role in Enlightenment, 14; Social Contract, 14; understanding of China, 129-30; understanding of Jews, 104; understanding of Russia, 101-2 Russia, understanding of, 99-103, 198; Condillac, 100; Diderot, 100, 102; in Encyclopedia, 102-3; Grimm, 100, 102; de Jaucourt, 102; Mably, 100; Montesquieu, 100; Rousseau, 101-2; Voltaire, 100, 101-2 de Sacy, Claude-Louis-Michel, 185 Sainte-Palaye, La Curne de, 179-80, 190 Saint-Evremond, 66 Saint-Lambert, 75, 81 Saint-Pierre, Bernardin de, 100 Schargo, Nellie, 148 Scholasticism, 179, 186-88 Science, 21-22 Shakespeare, understanding of, 99 Skepticism, vii, 169-70 Sociability and self-love, 28-30, 195 Socrates, 156, 160, 163; Diderot, 167-68

Solon, 166 Sophocles, 157, 161 Sparta, 156, 157, 162 State of nature, 26 Sulzer, General Theory of the Fine Arts, 23, 95 Supplement to Encyclopedia, 7, 147, 161, 185 Tacitus, 181 Tasso, 159, 177 Terence, 159 Terrasson, abbe, 40 Thucydides, 162 Toleration, 106 Topazio, Virgil, 145 Transformism, 23. See also Diderot Travel narratives. See Voyages and travel Trousson, Raymond, 157 Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques, 14-15; Greece, 171 n5; idea of progress, 15; medieval Christianity, 183; Middle Ages, 182-83, 203; On Universal History, 182; Philosophical Review, A, 182 Turpin, Francois-Rene, 118 Uniformity in ethics, 40-46 Uniformity of human nature, 4, 34-48, 51 n77, 55, 195, 196, 203; Buffier, 34; Buffon, 34; Diderot, 47; in Encyclopedia, 48; d'Holbach, 14, 47; de Jaucourt, 48; Hume, 194; Mably, 34; Voltaire, 46-47, 119 Uniformity of natural law, 25-28, 195; Diderot, 26, 27-28; d'Holbach, 13; de Jaucourt, 27; Voltaire, 25 Uniformity of nature, 22-23, 39-40 Vauvenargues, 37 Venel, Gabriel-Francois, 70, 186 Vico, Giambattista, 90, 137 Voltaire, Francois-Marie Arouet de, 11—12; Age of Louis XIV, 141, 144; anti-Semitism, 11; Chinese Orphan, The, 124; "climate," 69; cosmopolitanism, 78, 87 n79; cultural diversity, 12, 92-94; cultural uniformity, 12; Dante's Comedy, 177; decadence, 176; determinism, 142; diversity of customs, 59; diversity of human nature, 58-59; empiricism, 59; Essay on Customs and Morals, 41, 45, 59, 69, 73, 93-94, 104, 117, 119-20, 124-25, 141, 143, 176, 177; "Essay on Epic Poetry, An," 94; Europocentrism,

Index 92-93; Greece, 159-61, 161-62; Greek drama, 159, 200; historical breadth, 118, 119, 125, 143, 147, 178, 200, 201; historical causation, 142; historical diversity, 140, 142, 147, 199-200; Historical Fragments on India, 119-20; historical pessimism, 93; historical probabilism, 142, 146; historical sources, 176; on history, 139-45, 146-47, 199; History of Peter the Great, 101; Ingenu, The, 110; on Lenglet Du Fresnoy, 140; medieval Christianity, 175; medieval freedoms, 177; Middle Ages, 175-78, 185, 201; on Montesquieu. 140; "moral" causes of diversity, 73, 84 n31; Muhammad, 117; national character, 78, 81, 86 n79; natural law, 12, 25, 41; natural religion, 45; nature, 12; Notebooks, 116, 151; passions, 37; Philosophic Dictionary, 47, 55-56, 105, 125, 140; Philosophic letters, 176; Philosophy of History, 104-5, 159-60; political ideas, 11-12; primitivism, opposition to, 109-10; progress in barbarous ages, 176; Questions on the Encyclopedia, 69; rationalism, 36; rationalism and empiricism, 54; religion,

223

11, 155; Remarks on History, 143; role in Encyclopedia, 10; role in Enlightenment, 11-12; Scholasticism, 177; toleration, 11; Treatise on Metaphysics, 57; understanding of Asia, 116-17; understanding of China, 124-25; understanding of India, 119-20; understanding of Islamic world, 117-18; understanding of lews, 104-5, 113-14 n31; understanding of Russia, 101-2; understanding of Shakespeare, 99; uniformity in ethics, 41-42; uniformity of human nature, 46-47, 119; uniformity of natural law, 25; utility of ethics, 57 Voyages and travel, 64-66, 68 Vyverberg, Henry: Historical Pessimism, viii, 192 n32 William of Champeaux, 187 William of Ockham, 187 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 70 Yvon, Claude, 10; Aristotle, 172 n29; atheism, 43; Greece, 162-63; natural religion, 45-46; passions, 38; religion, 150; Rome, 162