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I: Before 1789

1: Royal Panegyrics In 1763 David Hume arrived in Paris to take up duties with Lord Hertford, Britain’s first peacetime ambassador to France since the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War. Author of a famous History of the Stuarts, David Hume, frequently hailed as the “English Tacitus,” was given an official and personal welcome such as few foreign authors have ever received in the French capital. The story of France’s adulation is too well known to need retelling here, although one example of it is particularly relevant to our purpose. Let us read Hume’s own account of his presentation at Versailles in 1763 to the children of the Dauphin, three future kings of France: The scene which passed today really pleased me without embarrassing me. I attended Lord Hertford to Versailles in order to be presented to the Dauphiness and the young Princes, the only part of the royal family whom we had not yet seen. When I was presented to the Duc de Berry, a child of ten years of age, he said to me, “Monsieur, you are much admired in this country; your name is very well-known; and it is with great pleasure that I welcome you.” Immediately upon which his brother the Comte de Provence, who is two Edition: current; Page: [2] years younger, advanced to me and said with great presence of mind, “Monsieur, you have been long and impatiently expected in this country: I count on having much enjoyment when I am able to read your fine history.” But what is more remarkable, when we were carried to make our bows to the Comte d’Artois, who is about five years of age, and to a young Madame of between two and three, the infant prince likewise advanced to me in order to make me his harangue, in which, though it was not very distinct, I heard him mumble the word Histoire, and some other terms of panegyric. With him ended the civilities of the royal family of France towards me; and I may say it did not end till their power of speech failed them: for the Princess was too young to be able to articulate a compliment. David Hume, we see, was merely flattered. At the time, he could not have known the extent to which events described so skilfully in his History would one day assume a new and urgent meaning in the political life of the French nation. Nor could he have known that, not quite thirty years later, the eldest of these charming children, condemned to die by the will of that same nation, would once more take up the famous Monsieur Hume’s great work as part of his last searching meditations.

2: The Science and Art of English History The quite unusual popularity of Hume’s History of England in eighteenth-century France requires perhaps some preliminary general explanation. His Political Discourses and Philosophical Essays introduced on the continent several years earlier had won him little more than the unflatteringly mild contempt of the devout and the intense but largely uncomprehending praise of a number of philosophes and salonnières. Originality in epistemological writings has rarely given any philosopher a great popular audience. The Edition: current; Page: [3] story is complicated too by the fact that the philosophes did not wish originality in a field which they believed had been definitively treated by Locke. But history was a very different matter. As a genre it represented to the eighteenth-century reading public the most digestible form of narrative and was contrasted frequently with the novel which, though equally appealing to the mass of readers, was rarely considered to be a serious or worthy vehicle of truth. Such was the reputed superiority of history as a vantage point from which to view the human passions that many good and bad novels of the day conventionally attempted to pass themselves off as personal histories, memoirs, or collections of letters. Voltaire, Hume, and Gibbon, the three greatest historians of the century, were in agreement that history represented the most popular species of writing. History was an art the models of which were best found in antiquity. To be called, as Hume often was, the Tacitus of the English was to receive, even in that “modern” period, the highest possible tribute. Seen not only as an art, history was viewed too as perhaps the most valuable of the human sciences—a unique storehouse of empirical facts without which no generalizations about man’s nature, his motivations and passions, were possible. Speculation on almost any subject other than the physical sciences was considered worthless unless Clio had first been heard. Grimm, pointing out in 1767 that not a single “line of history” was cited in a work by the economist Le Mercier de La Rivière, concluded: “That in itself proves what we must think of his work.” Similarly, Louis de Bonald singled out Rousseau’s Contrat social for attack “because the author . . . constantly sacrifices . . . history Edition: current; Page: [4] to his opinions.” De Bonald adds that “general or abstract propositions relating to society, that is to man, apply only through history, or the actions of man in society.” Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald’s spiritual ally in the counter-revolution, agreed: “History is applied politics, its only valid form; and as in physics, a hundred volumes of speculative theory can be reduced to nothing by a single experiment, similarly, in political science, no system can be accepted if it is not the probable corollary, more or less, of well-attested facts.” The idéologue Volney speaks of history as “the physiological science of governments” and as a “series of experiments that the human race conducts on itself,” the purpose of which is to find “a genealogical order of cause and effect, from which to deduce a theory of rules and principles appropriate for the guidance of both individuals and nations toward goals of survival or advancement.” History at its best was thus a pleasantly disguised form of social science long before Cambacérès triumphantly proclaimed to the Institut National on 25 February 1798 the advent of that new saviour: “Legislators, philosophers, jurisconsults, the age of social science has arrived, and, we might add, that of true philosophy.” I shall have occasion to come back to this view as well as to an important body of eighteenth-century thought which violently disagreed with it. For the moment it might be worthwhile to quote Hume’s own similar view of history’s purpose as expressed in the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748): Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature, by showing men in all varieties of circumstances and situations, and furnishing us with materials, from which Edition: current; Page: [5] we may form our observations, and become acquainted with the regular springs of human action and behaviour. These records of wars, intrigues, factions, and revolutions, are so many collections of experiments, by which the politician or moral philosopher fixes the principles of his science; in the same manner as the physician or natural philosopher becomes acquainted with the nature of plants, minerals, and other external objects, by the experiments, which he forms concerning them. Nor are the earth, water, and other elements, examined by Aristotle, and Hippocrates, more like to those, which at present lie under our observation, than the men, described by Polybius and Tacitus, are to those, who now govern the world. It should also be noted that Hume’s earlier writings in philosophy and economics could only add to his potential success and stature as an historian in the eyes of the eighteenth-century reader. History, as we know, had to be “philosophical”—l’histoire raisonnée as opposed to l’histoire simple. Only the profound thinker was judged worthy of attempting it and such non-professionals as Smollett did little more than anger the French with their amateurish and pretentious imitations. “How could Mr. Smollett take it into his head,” indignantly writes Chastellux in 1766, “to write his History at the same time as Mr. Hume is writing his! The match is not equal. . . .” That history ought to be written only by men “profoundly versed in the science of politics” is the corresponding sentiment expressed in the fashionable Mercure de France of 1763. To recapitulate, then, history in the eighteenth century was a very popular literary genre, vested also with an almost sacred function; and Hume was judged to be of a sufficiently reflective turn of mind to put a soul into its otherwise dead bones. Another explanation of Hume’s great success in this field lies undoubtedly in the fact that he had chosen to write a history of the English nation at a time when a strange anglomania was at its height on the continent. French interest in all things English from Edition: current; Page: [6] jurys to jockeys, from fist-fights to glorious naval battles, despite the frequently inane sacrifice of national pride involved, hardly subsided, even during the Seven Years’ War. Gibbon tells of his welcome in Paris in 1763 and speaks of how English opinions, fashions, even games were adopted in France at this time and of how every Englishman was viewed as a born patriot and philosopher. Garat gives an account of the phenomenon that conveys perhaps a special meaning to readers of our own space age: After Voltaire published his Letters on the English and Montesquieu his two chapters of the Esprit des Lois, a strange appetite developed in France for knowing everything that happened or might happen, or might be thought, spoken or dreamed of in England. If a telescope like Herschel’s and a listening device with similar range had existed at the time, these would have been pointed at England more often than at the moon and the other heavenly bodies. This enthusiasm was as much a matter of deeply reasoned admiration, as it was a kind of craze. British national history naturally reaped the benefits of the current mania and Hume is but the first in rank of many authors on the subject who were read widely in France at this time. In 1765 the Bibliothèque des Sciences et des Beaux-Arts, seeking an appropriate metaphor to describe the great number of recent publications in the field of English history, felt compelled to exclaim: “Histories of England are pouring down on us!” Anglomania, however, is not a sufficient explanation of this torrent. One must also bear in mind the fact that English history, per se, was judged to be peculiarly superior to all other modern national histories, both as an artistic theme-source and as a scientific repository. Hume himself had written to the Abbé Le Blanc in Edition: current; Page: [7] 1754 that he esteemed the Stuart period “both for signal events and extraordinary characters to be the most interesting in modern history.” Voltaire, who frequently complained of the “insipidness” of French history and wondered even if it were worth writing, agreed that the superiority of English events gave Hume an advantage in the field. Writing in 1769 to Gabriel-Henri Gaillard, he expressed the following bitter sentiments on the subject: I can see nothing, in short, from the time of Saint Louis to Henri IV. That is why the compilations of French history bore everyone to death, myself included. David Hume has a great advantage over the abbé Velly and his ilk, because he has written the history of the English, and in France no one has ever written the history of the French. Every husbandman of means in England is entirely familiar with that nation’s constitution and keeps a copy of Magna Carta in his home. As for our history, it is made up of petty court squabbles, great battles lost, small battles won, and lettres de cachet. Were it not for five or six famous assassinations, and especially the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, nothing could surpass us in insipidity. Note too that we have never invented anything; and, finally, truth to tell, we exist in the eyes of Europe only in the century of Louis XIV. I’m sorry, but that is how it is. Later on in the century, Soulavie, commenting on a similar view of the dullness of French history—this time expressed by Rousseau—showed to what extent the question of whether their subject truly “existed” or not had become a matter of serious concern to French historians. His conclusions were, however, rather hopeful: “Our circumstances . . . have been sufficiently varied, and human passions have exercised their power in our midst with enough energy and effect to provide interest and instruction for every age and every nation. However, even if we have so many literary Edition: current; Page: [8] masterpieces in every genre, we are still lacking a history that will do honour to France.” We see that a nation’s history, to be interesting and significant, had to present the greatest possible variety of human social situations; first, because such variety was aesthetically necessary in a literary composition and, second, because the greater the number of events permutated and combined, the greater the resulting information about man’s moral nature. English history best fulfilled both of these requirements according to an anonymous counter-revolutionary work of 1793: “The history of nations, and particularly that of Great Britain, instructs and interests by the variety of its tableaux and events; it is in that faithful mirror that one sees reflected the interplay of every passion that stirs the human heart.” The Journal Encyclopédique thirty years earlier had made the same point: “. . . no nation offers more varied scenes, characters more diverse or illustrious; no history provides a richer or more sweeping background of instruction, amazement and pleasure than the history of Great Britain. . . . ; what other European people has witnessed more frequent alteration in its manners, laws and government?” Perhaps the only serious competitor to English history was, as could well be expected in this neo-classical age, that of the ancients. Sénac de Meilhan in 1787 expressed his opinion on the problem in the following manner: “Few modern historians can be placed side-by-side with Thucydides, Xenophon, Sallust, Livy, and, especially, Tacitus: Hume and Robertson appear to have followed most closely in their footsteps; perhaps they would have even caught up with them had they written in their language and been provided with equally interesting scenes to depict.” Mme de Staël, writing some years later, agreed and also explained the superiority of the ancients in history by the superiority of their subject matter: Edition: current; Page: [ 9 ] “The historians of antiquity remain unsurpassed because no other period in history has witnessed superior men play such influential rôles in the affairs of their country.” English historians, however, were next in rank: “It is the nation in England that possesses greatness, more so even than any particular individual; that is why historians there are less dramatic but more philosophical than the ancients.” Other opinions expressed during the first decades of the nineteenth century suggest that this view of English national history still widely prevailed. We read the following observation, for example, in La Quotidienne of 1826: “Of all modern national histories, the most fascinating is unquestionably the history of England: as in a drama, suspense constantly increases, calamities and sudden shifts of fortune are at every moment renewed.” We see how important this largely eighteenth-century concept of the art of history still was in 1826—not just the art of the individual historian, but the dramatic art, as it were, of a nation’s own past in its unfolding. The great variety of events in English history and the order in which these had occurred seemed to permit a perfect fusion of both artistic and scientific elements in one literary genre. The modern world had, quite plainly, no greater or more significant story to tell. This view was to change only after a somewhat delayed realization came to Europe that the events of the French revolution had suddenly presented historians with an even greater story. We shall in the course of this study see that there are many additional reasons which explain why David Hume succeeded so well in eighteenth-century France as an historian. These are of a more particular nature and more complex to analyse. Generally, and perhaps truistically speaking, however, we might initially conclude that his great success was to a large extent founded on the fact that he could have chosen no other topic more suited to satisfy at the same time both the political curiosity and the artistic interests of most French readers of his day.

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3: Jehovah Among the Hebrews Already in 1754, even before the English publication of his Stuarts, Hume had intimated to the Abbé Le Blanc, translator of his moderately successful Political Discourses, that the History would succeed well in France. Hume proposed at this same time that Le Blanc should also translate the History and Le Blanc accepted, although he later found it necessary to give up the translation, which was continued by the Abbé Prévost and published in 1760. There is a good deal of evidence to show that, even before the long-delayed appearance of Prévost’s translation, impatient readers in France had turned to the original English version. Morellet tells us how, imprisoned in the Bastille in 1760, he had asked Malesherbes to bring him a copy of Tacitus and Hume’s History in English. Chastellux the social historian declared to friends that he had learned English only to read Hume; and Turgot at this time felt the Stuarts important enough to justify a personal translation. Several hundred pages of excerpts from the Stuarts also appeared in various French journals before 1760. Additional proof of such pre-translation success is provided by the results of a survey which I carried out some years ago in the “Delta” series at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Out of 240 private library sale catalogues from the pre-revolutionary period chosen completely at random, 109 listed Hume’s historical writings. Of these 109, 12 included versions of the Stuarts in English as well as in French. This work, in fact, was already well enough known in France by 1759 for Hume Edition: current; Page: [11] to convey to his fellow-historian Robertson in March of that year the facetious warning that the latter would find it more difficult to thrust him out of his place in Paris than he had in London. Once Prévost’s translation was published in 1760, page after page of acclamatory notices appeared in the leading French journals. Similar editorial attention was generously accorded in 1763 and 1765 to Mme Belot’s translations of the Tudors and the Plantagenets. During this time too Hume received in his correspondence a great many tributes from distinguished continental readers. A letter in 1761 from the Comtesse de Boufflers is extreme in its praise but quite sincere; parts of it are worth quoting here as fairly typical of the reactions to Hume’s Stuarts among the fashionable Parisian nobility: I cannot find the words to convey to you what I feel as I read this work. I am moved, carried away, and the emotion it causes in me is so sustained that it becomes in a sense painful. My soul is uplifted, my heart is filled with sentiments of humanity and beneficence. . . . You are, Monsieur, a masterly painter. Your portrayals have a gracefulness, a genuineness and an energy that surpass what even the imagination can attain. But what expressions shall I employ to tell you how your divine impartiality affects me? I would have need of your own eloquence to express my thoughts fully on this subject. In truth, it is as though I have before my eyes the work of a celestial being, freed of all passions, who for the benefit of mankind has deigned to write an account of recent events. . . . Similar references to David Hume as the “angel of truth,” the “voice of pure reason,” the “voice of posterity,” are not uncommon at this time. Rousseau, who was soon to write of Hume in a different tone, made equally laudatory statements in a letter of February 1763 to the Scottish philosopher: “Your grand perspectives, your astonishing impartiality, your genius, would raise you too much above ordinary mortals, did not the kindness of your heart bring Edition: current; Page: [12] you once more near to them. . . .” Helvétius too wrote in 1763, bursting with enthusiasm for Hume’s “impartial philosophical spirit,” and a year later the Président de Brosses, who judged that Hume had surpassed even Tacitus, repeated the same sentiment: “You have painted with unparalleled impartiality a true picture of your country, its manners, its characters, its government.” In another letter Chastellux told Hume that his name had become “as estimable in the republic of letters as was that of Jehovah among the Hebrews.” The words impartial and impartiality seem to occur also in nearly every press review of Hume’s History at this time, whether of traditionalist or philosophe inspiration. Fréron, one of Voltaire’s greatest enemies, after making the usual comparison with Tacitus, affirmed that Hume was the first “English” author ever to have “done justice to our nation and to the ministers of our religion when he thought that the truth was favourable to them.” The Journal Encyclopédique pointed out that no historian of the Stuart period had been impartial before Hume. Most Englishmen had, like Burnet, written as paid propagandists of the usurper William of Orange. Foreign historians of the English revolution had not succeeded either. Some, like the Huguenot Rapin-Thoyras, were blinded by the prejudices of their religion and had interpreted events only in the light of an apology for Protestantism. Others, like le Père d’Orléans, though not unfavourable to the Catholic side, had shown an inadequate knowledge of the English system of government. “It has been said,” the journal goes on, “and experience has confirmed the maxim only too often, that nations would be supremely happy were they governed by philosopher kings. Let us add that history will never be well written except by philosopher Edition: current; Page: [13] historians; that is to say by men who, without regard to any country, any faction, any sect, have as their only ambition to write the truth. Our author comes very close to that model. . . .” Voltaire, the most important historian of the day, praised Hume on much the same grounds in a long review published in 1764: One can add nothing to the fame of this History, perhaps the best ever written in any language. . . . Never has the public so clearly sensed that only philosophers should write history. . . . The philosopher belongs to no country, to no faction. One would like to see the history of the wars between Rome and Carthage written by a man who was neither a Roman nor a Carthaginian. . . . . . . Mr. Hume, in his History, seems neither a parliamentarian, nor a royalist, nor an Anglican, nor a Presbyterian; we find in him only the fair-minded man. . . . The fury of parties has for a long time deprived England of both a good history and a good government. What a Tory wrote was denied by the Whigs, themselves given the lie in turn by the Tories. Only Rapin-Thoyras, a foreigner, seemed to have written an impartial history; but the stain of prejudice is yet visible even in the truths that Thoyras recounts; whereas in the new historian we find a mind that rises above his matter, one who speaks of failings, errors and barbarities in the same manner that a physician speaks of epidemic disease. The apparent total agreement of such unlike men as Voltaire, Fréron, and Rousseau on the subject of Hume’s impartiality should be enough to indicate in this respect the unanimity of opinion in France. Since, however, many of my later conclusions concerning the influence of the Hume image must stand or fall on the basis of a careful evaluation of that image, and since it is important to show that this view of Hume’s history persists in France with a few notable Edition: current; Page: [14] exceptions right up to the time of the Revolution, I may be permitted to labour this point a little longer. Dom Louis-Mayeul Chaudon in a work of 1772 again reviewed the three most widely read authors of English history: Hume, Rapin-Thoyras, and le Père d’Orléans. Rapin, as was usual in French Catholic estimates at this time, is accused of Huguenot prejudices: “He can be deservedly reproached for showing bias against the land of his birth, made hateful to Protestants by the harshness of Louis XIV, and for favouring the Puritans, those dangerous enthusiasts whose religious views are fit only to make men grimly ferocious and whose system of political independence is calculated only to manufacture malcontents and rebels.” As for le Père d’Orléans, Abbé Chaudon shows surprising frankness in judging his fellow-ecclesiastic: “He is too obviously biased in his treatment of the Stuart period. Most of this French Jesuit’s determinations are designed to fit either the interests of the papacy in Rome or the principles of the French monarchy.” Hume’s fairness is seen, on the other hand, as unique, quite without precedent: “Never before has any author raised himself so much above the sectarian bias and party prejudices that divide the kingdom; ever impartial, he seems to be the spokesman of posterity. . . .” Also defending Hume’s impartiality, the Reverend Samuel Formey, secretary of the Berlin Academy and formerly hostile editor of the French translation of Hume’s Philosophical Essays (1758), contrasted in 1777 the anticlericalism of the philosophes with Hume’s fairness toward the representatives of the church: There is nothing quite so curious as the relentless enmity directed against them by persons who, far from having any cause for complaint against them, owe them a genuine debt of gratitude, since it is they who in the majority of countries preserved learning and a foundation of humanity, beneficence, and charity throughout the centuries of barbarism; were it not for them, the lawlessness of those unhappy times would have been carried to a far greater degree of excess. Hume, whose testimony will not be challenged, formally acknowledges Edition: current; Page: [15] the fact with regard to England and this admission does honour to his impartiality. In contrast, we are roused to indignation when we encounter on every page of the writings of Helvétius those bitter ironies, those derisive and almost always furious sorties against a clergy that certainly deserved his consideration and who became the target of his displeasure only because they attempted to protect France from the venom of his doctrine. The section Histoire of the Encyclopédie Méthodique in 1788 gave perhaps the ultimate in praise to the impartiality of Hume’s History of England: “One of the finest pieces of history and philosophy that exists in any language, and perhaps the most impartial and most reasonable work that has come from the hand of man.” It is obviously impossible to say more!

4: Papist or Pyrrhonian ? It is well known that the English at this time did not agree with the French about Hume’s impartiality. The strange combination of two reputations which Hume enjoyed in England, one as a foolish atheist, the other as a perverse Jacobite, was scarcely of a nature to please any large group in that country. In My Own Life Hume speaks of his disappointment at the domestic reception given the Stuarts: I was, I own, sanguine in my expectations of the success of this work. I thought that I was the only historian that had at once neglected present power, interest, and authority, and the cry of popular prejudices; and as the subject was suited to every capacity, I expected proportional applause. But miserable was my disappointment: I was assailed by one cry of reproach, disapprobation, and even detestation; Edition: current; Page: [16] English, Scotch, and Irish; Whig and Tory; churchman and sectary, freethinker and religionist; patriot and courtier, united in their rage against the man who had presumed to shed a generous tear for the fate of Charles I and the Earl of Strafford; and after the first ebullitions of this fury were over, what was still more mortifying, the book seemed to sink into oblivion. Mr. Millar told me, that in a twelvemonth he sold only forty-five copies of it. I scarcely, indeed, heard of one man in the three Kingdoms, considerable for rank or letters, that could endure the book. I must only except the Primate of England, Dr. Herring, and the Primate of Ireland, Dr. Stone; which seem two odd exceptions. These dignified prelates separately sent me messages not to be discouraged. Hume was, nevertheless, discouraged and he tells us in this same brief autobiographical sketch that, had not the war at that time been breaking out between France and England, he would have retired forever from England to some provincial French town. Horace Walpole clearly reflects the typical attitude to the History in England in a letter to Montague from Paris in 1765. Parisians, he affirmed, were totally lacking in literary taste: “. . . could one believe that when they read our authors, Richardson and Mr. Hume should be their favourites? The latter is treated here with perfect veneration. His History, so falsified in many points, so partial in as many, so very unequal in its parts, is thought the standard of writing. . . .” The French were fully aware of the discrepancy between their own estimates of Hume’s worth and those of the English. We read, for example, in the Journal Etranger of 1760 the following statement on that subject: Mr. Hume has been accused by his compatriots of striving too eagerly after singular opinions; it is not our function to debate this reproach. We will note only that, although Mr. Hume is English, a republican, and a Protestant, he has always spoken of the French with esteem, and of kings and Catholics with moderation; and it is possible that this singularity has offended a nation that is too much in the habit of seeing in monarchies only a herd of slaves and in papists Edition: current; Page: [17] only a band of fanatics; a nation, in short, that is too prone to denying the existence of liberty, virtue, and philosophy in any government but its own. To show how wrong they feel the English are with respect to Hume, the editors of this very orthodox ancien-régime journal do not hesitate to call his work “the only good history written in English, and undoubtedly one of the best to be found in any language.” Hume is also commended for being “the first English writer who has dared to state that monarchies are about as favourable to progress in the arts, in philosophy and in commerce as republics.” In a work intended for the instruction of Marie-Antoinette, the future Historiographe de France, Jacob-Nicolas Moreau, implied that Hume had probably carried impartiality to an undesirable extreme: “. . . he ought only to be impartial but he prides himself on the most exaggerated indifference. The English, who possess the Roman virtue of partiality for their country, have themselves blamed him for this fault and they think a good deal less of this author than we ourselves do.” It must be noted, however, that Moreau’s attempt to understand and forgive England’s hostility to Hume the historian is a French attitude rarely encountered at this time. Much more common is the indignant reaction of the former Jesuit and future speech writer for Mirabeau, Joseph-Antoine-Joachim Cerutti, who wrote in 1783: “Mr. Hume’s History could be given the title: The History of English Passions, as written by human reason. The English have reproached him for causing tears to be shed over the fate of Marie Stuart and of Charles I. They have called him ‘old woman Hume’ for it. This simple good heartedness makes his impartiality more noble and his philosophy more touching.” Edition: current; Page: [ 18 ] More angry still was the response of one of Hume’s French anthologists, Damiens de Gomicourt, who pointed out that the ungrateful English seemed to make more fuss over their racehorses than they did over a Hume. De Gomicourt makes astute conjectures as to the reasons for this neglect: “This dispassionate way of writing about his country and its enemies . . . is precisely what harms him most in the eyes of his fellow-countrymen; if they were as philosophical as M. de Voltaire says they are when he calls England the island of philosophers, they would not allow themselves to be carried away so frequently by their ruling anti-French passions; the good that Mr. Hume has to say about the French nation when he thinks praise is deserved, the moderation with which he speaks of the church of Rome, or of the unfortunate Stuarts, would not be a reason for them to accuse this author of popery, of Jacobitism, and of Francomania, and his works would be as famous in London as they are in Paris.” Popery, Jacobitism, and Francomania—three qualities well calculated to enhance an English historian’s reputation in France; their effect would, of course, be just the opposite in England. That Hume himself felt his history would hold a special appeal for Catholic, monarchical France is made clear in his original letter to Abbé Le Blanc in 1754 proposing a French translation of the Stuarts. “Considering,” Hume wrote, “some late transactions in France, your Ministry may think themselves obliged to a man, who, by the example of English history, discovers the consequences of puritanical and republican pretensions. You would have remarked in my writings, that my principles are, all along, tolerably monarchical, and that I abhor that low practice, so prevalent in England, of speaking with malignity of France.” One month later, Hume came back to this point, advising Le Blanc to make any necessary attenuations in his translation of the Stuarts: “If there be some strokes of the L’esprit fort too strong for your climate, you may soften them at your discretion. That I am a lover of liberty will be expected Edition: current; Page: [19] from my country, though I hope that I carry not that passion to any ridiculous extreme.” For an example of current French reactions to British historians who did indulge in “that low practice” of speaking with malignity of France, we have only to see what the French thought of Smollett’s History. A fairly typical review of it can be found in the Journal Encyclopédique of 1764: Mr. Smollett believes himself to be entirely above all national prejudice and jealousies; he sees himself as perfectly free of those unjust partisan sentiments that dishonour the works of several English historians; he assures the reader that no religious controversy, no political faction commands his ardent allegiance. . . . This manner of declaration appears to us all the more astonishing in that we can scarcely think of any historian who surpasses Mr. Smollett in partiality, whether in the various parallels he has drawn between the monarchs of France and the kings of Great Britain, or in the exaggerated praises he is forever heaping on his fellow-countrymen. More circumspect at times, but also more satirical and more caustic than Rapin de Thoyras, he rails against Catholicism, he dredges up everything that indecency and irreligion have expounded against the venerable bishops who brought renown to England; he sees their zeal as blind fanaticism, their candour as hypocrisy, their attachment to the Roman church as criminal, outrageously independent, an unpardonable felony. To find a French-language equivalent of English hostility to Hume’s history during this early period, it is necessary to look through the pages of the erudite “Dutch” journals, edited by Huguenot refugees. Here the similarity of views seems almost automatic. Maty, in the Journal Britannique, speaking of the first volume of Hume’s Stuarts, declared: “So little does the work I have before me seem a model to imitate that, quite to the contrary, I find in it the various defects that an author whom Mr. Hume would Edition: current; Page: [20] not disown as his master regards as incompatible with the duties of an historian.” Maty then cites Voltaire’s Défense du Siècle de Louis XIV on the necessity for the historian to stick to the truth. The Bibliothèque des Sciences et des Beaux-Arts, published at The Hague, spoke unfavourably of the same work in 1756: “We have said nothing of this History because nothing in it seems to us to be worthy of praise except the style, and we have no desire to be constantly at loggerheads with this author. . . . We have never before seen a history so dominated by the dangerous art that makes the most evil characters seem bearable by hiding certain traits and by softening what remains through the use of clever shading and nuances. But that is not all. Mr. Hume has here taken it upon himself to identify fanaticism as the Reformation’s distinctive characteristic. . . .” The year following, the same journal reviewed the second volume of the Stuarts and warned its readers again about Hume’s dangerous portraits: “. . . one must be always on one’s guard with his portraits! His taste for paradox and his partiality are often only too glaringly apparent in his character portrayals of several important personages. . . . The portrait of James II is so lacking in features resembling the original that one must needs have seen attached to it the name of this monarch to believe that it is he whom Mr. Hume has sought to depict as a prince who was steady in his counsels, diligent in his schemes, brave in his enterprises, faithful, sincere, and honourable in his dealings with all men.” Obviously, no continental “Whig” could accept such a picture of the monster who had been driven out by the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Quite to the contrary, the Huguenot editor asserts, James II had been, in fact, cruel, vindictive, cowardly and treacherous. A fairly similar tone predominates in this same journal’s review of the Tudors in 1759, although, for obvious reasons, now that the Jacobite question was left behind, the editors found, as had Edition: current; Page: [21] contemporary English readers, that Hume’s History was somewhat improved in quality: The partisan spirit that encumbered the author in his treatment of the Stuart period and caused him, in combination with his affectation of impartiality, to fall into so many revolting contradictions, hinders him less as he moves away from modern times. . . . But on the other hand, one would like to find these same improvements in what he has to say of the origins and progress of the Reformation and of the spirit that inspired the Reformers. There are passages where one is tempted to think that Mr. Hume is a papist, did we not already know him for a pyrrhonian. Hume points out in My Own Life that the English accorded at last “tolerable” success to the Plantagenets, the third and last part of the History. The Bibliothèque des Sciences et des Beaux-Arts, reviewing that work in 1761, naïvely confessed to a similar change of heart: “This history improves as the author moves away from our own times. A proper sense of historical writing that sets aside or touches only lightly the unessential, that selects and arranges interesting events judiciously and presents them clearly, can be detected everywhere in these two new volumes.” It is perhaps unnecessary to point out that any attacks Hume made against religious fanaticism in this part of the History which deals with the Middle Ages would not normally be interpreted as immoderately hostile by the Protestant editors. If we now compare these “Dutch” accounts with opinions expressed in the Catholic French journals, we find that the progression of ideas on the subject of Hume’s History of England is neatly reversed. The pious Mémoires de Trévoux enthusiastically devoted many pages to reviewing Hume’s Stuarts and commended Hume as an author who had written “without bias.” The manner in which Hume had dealt with the civil war period seemed especially appealing: Edition: current; Page: [ 22 ] The horrendous consequences of it are only too well known: all of Europe was horror-struck and roused to indignation: these just feelings are renewed in their entirety as we peruse this history. Possessing all the virtues of the good king, Charles I reappears here, hunted down, arrested, held a prisoner in captivity. This monarch, charged by unlawful procedure, judged without legitimate authority, condemned for no crime, here moves to tears all readers who will find him even greater on the scaffold, even more steadfast, generous, and virtuous than he had appeared during the triumphs and reversals that were the glory, as they were the misfortune, of his reign. Every passage in which Hume rehabilitates the names of English Catholics is underlined by the Jesuit editors. Concerning the London fire, attributed by certain historians to the malevolence of Catholics, they are especially pleased to note that Hume “accuses neither the Catholics nor the Presbyterians of it: he agrees that this imputation was nothing more than a calumny given countenance by popular prejudice.” As for the Popish plot, Hume “acknowledges its patent imposture without denying the unfortunate effect the gross absurdities of such an ill-constructed fable had on the English. . . .” On one occasion only do the Jesuit editors find Hume biased—when he is seen as “equally hostile to the enthusiasm of the Puritans as he is prejudiced against the Catholics.” More significant still were the “lessons” the Mémoires de Trévoux editors derived from their reading of Hume’s Stuarts. These lessons are quite explicit and, in part, anticipate some of the more eccentric and extreme interpretations of the work by counter-revolutionary thinkers after 1789: One has only to compare this history of the reign of Charles I with others that have also been written in accordance with Protestant prejudice, to sense Mr. Hume’s superior genius, style, accuracy, and impartiality. Without including in this comparison any Catholic Edition: current; Page: [23] writer, we can draw the following conclusions: 1. That since their separation from the Roman Church, Protestants, left to their own thinking, can have only an irresolute and uncertain doctrine which leaves them exposed to the most frightful aberrations, with no solid means to regulate their belief and bring it to true uniformity. 2. That the influence of their doctrine has given rise to the most horrible disruptions in England, and the most abominable crimes against sovereigns. 3. That under the cover of disputes over dogma among the Protestant sects, fanaticism, at first insidiously, and afterward with great clamour, put the finishing touches on the nation’s disorders. 4. That this heretical fanaticism not only spreads with great rapidity, it also provides a rich and inexhaustible breeding ground for dangerous monsters; since the Independents, had their leader Cromwell not forestalled the danger, were on the point of being subjugated by the Agitators, or the Levellers, a sect whose enthusiasm, grafted onto the fanaticism of these same Independents, aimed to introduce perfect equality among the citizens, and, consequently, the most monstrous confusion and anarchy in the government. 5. That debate, as Mr. Hume insinuates, even of a speculative nature, on the extent and limits of the royal prerogative, must never be brought before the people’s tribunal; that in such matters the strictest silence must be imposed, even among philosophical reasoners; and that in general it is safer to keep the people ignorant of the limits of their obedience, than it is to instruct them on the limits that sovereigns ought to observe. As I have already pointed out, the question of whether Hume really implies all this, whether the Jesuits made a correct or distorted interpretation of his intentions, is somewhat irrelevant to my purpose. The essential fact is that such interpretations were made and made frequently by an astonishing variety of readers in eighteenth-century France. Of course, the Mémoires de Trévoux editors are forced to dodge about rather awkwardly when they encounter passages inspired by Hume’s more frankly irreligious moods. Still, this aspect of the History was not seen as an insuperable problem. The Stuarts was after all by a “Protestant” and even a Hume must be expected to wander from the truth from time to time. The Protestant Bibliothèque des Sciences et des Beaux-Arts, we remember, Edition: current; Page: [24] had found Hume’s portrait of James II totally false. The Mémoires de Trévoux, on the other hand, did not find it sufficiently “false,” that is to say, sufficiently “true”: “We must not expect Mr. Hume to be strictly impartial in his treatment of this reign: he is too biased against the person, the court, and the religion of James II, as well as against France, Louis XIV, and all forms of zeal, to prevent his pen from leaving traces of his prejudices in this history.” Hume’s occasional lapses were seen as faults only in some absolute sense; on this question the journal concluded: “In any case, among Protestant historians who have dealt with English history of the last century, Mr. Hume is still the least biased against the Roman Church, and the least prejudiced in favour of the Protestant sects; for this he deserves due credit.” The same aspects of the Stuarts pleased Voltaire’s enemy Fréron in the Année littéraire. He points out first of all that Hume displays none of the “odious prejudices common to English authors, which even French historians show at times.” He notes with particular approval Hume’s treatment of Charles I’s trial and execution: “I would have to copy out several entire pages to present to your humanity and sense of outrage the horrifying scene in which this king was judged, condemned, and executed by his own subjects.” All the horrors surrounding the monster republican Cromwell, the regicide fanaticism of the hated Puritans, are evoked in this ancien-régime Frenchman’s review. Later, while examining the Tudors, Fréron shows the same highly favourable attitude to the Scottish historian’s impartiality. He underlines the fact that Hume, for example, “stoutly defends Cardinal Wolsey . . . against the attacks of Protestant writers who have sullied his memory.” On the question of Henry VIII’s divorce he is happy to point out also that Hume “pertinently justifies the Pope’s inflexible resistance to the Edition: current; Page: [25] English king’s imperious and threatening solicitations.” Along the same lines, Hume’s impartiality is contrasted with Burnet’s bias on the question of the suppression of monasteries: Doctor Burnet complacently relates all the infamies the monks were accused of in the reports prepared by the commissioners Henry VIII sent to all the religious houses to make inquiries regarding the conduct and morals of the nuns and friars. Mr. Hume, wiser and more circumspect in his judgements, does not rely much on the accuracy of these reports; ever on guard against the partisan spirit that dictated them, he acknowledges that in times of faction, especially of the religious variety, little truth is to be expected from even the most ostensibly authentic testimony. . . . He refuses as well to impute to the Catholic religion abuses that the Church in fact condemns, such as exposing false relics, and the pious impostures employed in some places by the monks to increase the devotion and consequently the contributions of the people. Such fooleries, he writes, as they are to be found in all ages and nations, and even took place during the most refined periods of antiquity, form no particular or violent reproach to the Catholic religion. It must be admitted, Monsieur, that nothing resembles less the ordinary rantings of Protestant writers than does such language. Fréron too admits that Hume experienced difficulty occasionally in stripping himself entirely of “English” ideas when speaking about religion; he states, however, that it would be ridiculous and unjust to judge the Scot “according to the principles received among us.” Hume is occasionally wrong, but he is wrong with sincerity: “It can be seen that he seeks the truth in a sincere manner and if he sometimes drifts from it, it is less the result of a premeditated intention to disguise or corrupt it, than it is a consequence of the fact that the human mind is not always capable of finding it.” It would be difficult to find any other subject on which Voltaire and Fréron seem to have been in such complete agreement. Edition: current; Page: [26] But even here we must make a distinction. Fréron’s praise so far has been for the Stuarts and the Tudors. Voltaire, when he extolled Hume’s virtues in the long review of 1764 already referred to, was judging the English edition of the History in its completed form—after, that is to say, the publication of the Plantagenets. It was especially this last section which permitted the French historian to praise the work as a more geographically restricted version of his own Essai sur les Moeurs. Conversely, when Fréron considered the Plantagenets in 1766, his admiration suddenly became considerably less warm: “Half of the first volume is only remotely connected to what is supposed to be its subject. If you remove from the remainder the author’s frequent attacks on the Church and its clergy . . . his harangues against the old Catholic religion, you will discover that this History of all the Plantagenet princes is very succinct.” There is no doubt that Fréron was genuinely surprised to find what appeared to be a wealth of insulting epithets and vulgar abuse directed against religion in this work. Hume no longer seemed to be the divinely impartial historian, that rare angel of truth. He is now accused of having failed in the first duty of an historian, and Fréron notes that it was not with works like the Plantagenets that Hume had built up his great reputation in the literary world. Just as many traditionalists in France had been disappointed in 1758 to see the free-thinking Philosophical Essays appear only a few years after the fairly orthodox Political Discourses of 1754, a number of conservative French admirers of the Stuarts and Tudors withdrew their support for the historian after the appearance of the Plantagenets. As in the case of the Philosophical Essays, however, a much smaller group, the philosophes, greeted Hume’s apparent return to sanity with a sigh of relief. To say that the philosophes liked the last part of Hume’s History with its à la Voltaire treatment of the Middle Ages, and disliked the Stuarts and the Tudors, would be to propose a rather neatly symmetrical but not entirely true simplification. One can note, however, among members of this group, a distinct preference for Edition: current; Page: [27] the more “philosophical” Hume who had angered the Frérons with his essay “Of Miracles,” his Natural History of Religion, and his Plantagenets. The philosophes too spoke admiringly of impartiality but felt, certainly, that it should never be allowed to develop to the point where it might become a source of comfort to the enemy. Lockian in their political outlook—one is very tempted to see in them a close French equivalent of the English Whigs—they were chary of the Tory flavour of Hume’s Stuarts. Grimm, perhaps the most critically astute and alertly orthodox of the “brotherhood,” accused Hume as early as 1754, while reviewing the Political Discourses, of having slightly unsound political views: “I have only one grievance against Mr. Hume, it is that he is rather too fond of paradox, a failing that sometimes leads his reasoning astray; he is also a Jacobite.” In the same year he expressed certain doubts concerning Hume’s over-all ability as an enlightened thinker and added: “Either I am mistaken, or his fellow-countrymen must reproach him his great fondness for the French, and the French should not feel too flattered by it since he does not really see them from their most estimable side. . . .” This same author was one of the first to express dissatisfaction several years later with those essays in the Understanding which did not attack miracles or Providence. Why, Grimm complained, did Hume feel it necessary to add to the confusion of the philosophic battle by discussing rather sceptically—and, yes, with an appalling lack of originality—the epistemological doctrines Locke had settled once and for all? Similarly, in the very year that Voltaire praised Hume’s History, the defender of Jean Calas confided to the Marquise Du Deffand: “I like, even much more than his historical writings, Mr. Hume’s philosophy. The best part of all this is that Helvétius, who in his book De l’esprit has not said one-twentieth of the wise, useful, and Edition: current; Page: [28] bold things for which we are grateful to Mr. Hume and twenty other Englishmen, has been persecuted in the land of the Welches [the French] and his book has been burned there. All of which goes to prove that the English are men and the French are children.” Hume in his History perhaps flattered those naughty children too much. The more unified story of how English liberty had emerged from despotism as told in the Lettres philosophiques was a much better way to improve les Welches than shedding sympathetic tears for a beheaded king or making statements that the Mémoires de Trévoux could interpret as great lessons. There is more than a hint of the back-handed compliment in at least one of Voltaire’s recorded comments made during the guided tour he sometimes gave visitors through his vast library at Ferney. After pointing to the volumes of Shakespeare, Milton, Congreve, Rochester, Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke, Robertson, and Hume, Voltaire once turned to his guests and added for the last-mentioned author that David Hume had written his history “to be praised” and that he had attained his goal. The fact remains that the philosophes did identify or did their best to identify the historical efforts of Hume and Voltaire. They, as well as Dr. Samuel Johnson and Horace Walpole—though not with the same cranky and contemptuous hostility these two Englishmen affected—saw Hume as Voltaire’s pupil: an accusation which Hume, who held a fairly low opinion of Voltaire’s merit as an historian, frequently denied. There is no doubt that it was the occasional Voltairian tone of the History which appealed most to the encyclopédiste party. Helvétius, for example, writing to Hume on Prévost’s forthcoming translation of the Stuarts, characteristically expressed the fear that the Abbé would not dare “tell all.” In doing so he probably betrayed unwittingly an interpretation of Hume’s intentions which scarcely corresponds to the very complacent advice Hume had given Le Blanc to attenuate at will all Edition: current; Page: [29] strokes of esprit fort too strong for the French climate. Helvétius speaks of the boldness of the Stuarts but makes no particular mention, on the other hand, of the manner in which Hume had shed a tear for Charles I. Similarly, the Plantagenets aroused his greatest admiration, and in a letter to Hume of 1763 he especially commended that work for its “philosophical and impartial spirit.” Moreover, in his own bold composition, De l’homme, Helvétius made good use of the anti-clerical arsenal he was able to find in this part of the History. Perhaps no better evidence exists of this philosophe view of Hume as yet another soldier in the Voltairian war of propaganda against l’infâme than the numerous, almost urgent, appeals he received from his closest friends among the encyclopédistes to write an ecclesiastical history. In the same letter written to congratulate him on his “esprit philosophique” in the Plantagenets, Helvétius also begged the Scottish historian to continue his efforts with “the finest project in the world”—a history of the Church: “Only think,” he writes, “how worthy the subject is of you, and how you are worthy of the subject. It is therefore in the name of England, France, Germany, Italy, and in the name of posterity, that I entreat you to write this history. Remember that you alone are in a position to write it; that many centuries will pass before another Monsieur Hume is born, and that it is a benefit you owe to the universe, both present and future.” Grimm in 1766 formulated the same wish: “During his stay in France, we often begged M. Hume to write an ecclesiastical history. It would be, at this juncture, one of the finest of literary enterprises, and one of the greatest services rendered to philosophy and to humanity. . . . M. de Voltaire no longer has the sustained mental vigour required to undertake such a task; he would turn his subject too much in the direction of jesting and ridicule. . . .” Diderot, congratulating Hume for having finally retired from his public functions, added in a letter of 1768 the advice that it Edition: current; Page: [30] was now high time to get on with more serious matters: “Return, return quickly, my dear philosopher, to your books, to your pursuits. I much prefer seeing you whip in hand, dealing out justice to all those celebrated ruffians who have disturbed the peace of your country. . . .” After the Plantagenets, Hume abandoned English history. Although he had at one time thought of continuing the work, the plan was never realized. D’Alembert, writing to Hume in 1766, urged him on in this project and showed in his letter that he too saw Hume’s chief historical merit as a wielder of the philosophic scourge: “If you choose to, you will have some very pertinent truths to tell about all the stupidities committed by France and her enemies during the War of Succession, and about the causes of those stupidities. But no matter how interesting that subject might be in your hands, I would nevertheless have preferred to see you undertake an ecclesiastical history. It is a greater curiosity, it seems to me, to see men cutting each other’s throats for theological irrelevancies, than for provinces and kingdoms which are somewhat more deserving of the effort.” What the philosophes wanted from an ecclesiastical history is not a matter of doubt. D’Alembert himself had given only a year before an example of the best clichés of the genre in his anonymously published work, Sur la destruction des Jésuites en France (1765). Ecclesiastical history would show all manner of usurpation of the spiritual powers over the temporal, the hideous crimes and bloody wars caused by religious fanaticism, the persecutions and murders committed in the name of Christ—such were the gifts of Christianity to mankind that would be recorded in a good “philosophically” inspired ecclesiastical history. In a letter of 1773, d’Alembert once again solicited Hume on the subject and commiserated at the same time on the fate of that “poor lady” who is called Philosophy: “. . . those who would like to write on her behalf dare not—those like you who could, prefer to sleep and digest, Edition: current; Page: [31] and perhaps they have made the best choice. Still, I shall never get over being denied the ecclesiastical history I requested of you so many times, which you alone perhaps in Europe are capable of writing, which would be quite as interesting as Greek and Roman history, were you willing to give yourself the trouble of painting our holy mother the Church au naturel.” It is perhaps not strange that the practical implications of the Stuarts as interpreted by the Mémoires de Trévoux were largely ignored by the philosophes rather than overtly attacked or even commented on. Clearly it was the medieval section of the History which proved most useful to them. In the work, De la félicité publique, which Voltaire perversely judged as at least equal in merit to Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois, the philosophe Chastellux showed how valuable the Plantagenets could be if properly used—used, that is, as a work to supplement Voltaire’s more famous catalogue of medieval barbarities. A disciple of progress, Chastellux had no patience with those who rhapsodized (as Burke was to do twenty years later) on the glories of the age of chivalry, the former splendour of the nobility, the stability of feudal law, the exalted courage of the crusaders, &c. Those who superstitiously lamented the departure of those good old days could be cured by reading two authors especially: Edition: current; Page: [32] “Let them consult,” Chastellux advises, “l’Essai sur l’histoire générale, the model of historico-philosophical writings; let them consult Mr. Hume, illustrious in the same career. . . .” Delisle de Sales, another of Voltaire’s understudies but fond too of calling Hume “the Tacitus of England,” found materials for the good cause not only in the Plantagenets but in the Tudors and Stuarts as well. Particularly useful to his purposes was Hume’s account of the religious massacres in Ireland, seen by the French author as having been unequalled even by that of Saint Bartholomew’s Day, the event, we remember, which made French history almost worth writing about in the opinion of Voltaire. Delisle de Sales ignored, curiously enough, Hume’s own estimate of the number of victims, established in the History at the sufficiently horrifying figure of 40,000, and chose instead the more polemically useful figure of 200,000. As an illustration of how the same passage from Hume’s History could at times inspire both the philosophes and their enemies to reach completely antithetical conclusions, it is amusing to note that the Abbé Bergier, a Roman Catholic apologist to whom we shall refer again, discussed in 1767 this same massacre; and he was delighted to point out that religion was not the only, nor even the principal, cause of it: “Mr. Hume, a witness whose testimony will not be seen as suspect, admits in good faith that the inveterate animosity of the Irish toward the English, their attachment to freedom, property, and their ancient customs, their envy of the English recently transplanted to Ireland and fear that even worse mistreatment from them would follow, in short, dissatisfaction with Edition: current; Page: [33] the English government, these were the true causes of this civil war. Those who estimate the number of dead to be sixty or eighty thousand, exaggerate by half.” Quite obviously there were possibilities for distortion, in this and in other instances, by all sides, including Hume’s no doubt. The major conclusion that emerges from an examination of the evidence is, however, that the History, valuable as it may have seemed to the philosophes, proved to be infinitely more exploitable by the traditionalists. It is, in fact, quite possible that, as a group, the philosophes seriously misjudged Hume’s capacity to further their cause. An anonymous eighteenth-century commentator of the Hume-Rousseau quarrel obliquely suggested that this was the case: You are aware no doubt that our philosophers had fallen into great disrepute, at the time they concluded that David Hume would make a suitable recruit for their sect and would help to raise it up. He was a foreigner, imperturbably stolid, bold in his speculations, and sufficiently well behaved in his actions. He had written the History of his country for England, and four volumes of philosophy for France. His History, which had little success in London, succeeded very well in Paris, among our philosophers and their disciples, because of the four volumes of philosophy that buttressed their principles. They spoke of it with great enthusiasm: it was purchased, scarcely read, and praised to the skies. That Hume was more routinely praised than carefully read by the philosophe party is entirely possible. With the exception of the Turgot-Hume correspondence which we shall examine later and in which are clearly apparent the genuine differences that separated the Scottish philosopher’s rather pessimistic, perhaps complacent, acceptance of the status quo and the young Intendant’s eagerly optimistic hopes for change, the many letters Hume received from his philosophe friends seem strangely misdirected. Helvétius flatters himself, at the beginning of a letter to Hume in Edition: current; Page: [34] 1759, that he is in almost total agreement with his correspondent concerning ethical motivation. A few lines farther along in his letter, however, he shows that nothing could be more distant from the truth and displays an almost wilful tendency to ignore the fact that Hume’s Enquiry specifically combats such simplistic “self-interest” theories as his own. D’Holbach, in a letter of August 1763, calls Hume one of the greatest philosophers of any age. There is evidence to show too that he had read, or at least that he owned, all of Hume’s works and yet, again on the question of ethics, he maintained in several of his own compositions that only ignorant theologians deny self-interest as the basis of morality. We have perhaps another example of this basic lack of comprehension, I think, in Helvétius’s rather earnest reaction to Hume’s fairly ironically titled essay on the “perfect” commonwealth. Hume warns in his preliminary remarks that all plans of government that pre-suppose a great change in man’s nature are “imaginary.” He seems to intend, as he does so often in his epistemological inquiries, little more than a good intellectual exercise; but it is a game which we suspect Helvétius takes perhaps too seriously when he solemnly speculates in De l’homme on the practical applicability of the means Hume proposes. D’Alembert, though perhaps Hume’s closest friend in Paris, seems to labour under a somewhat similar misconception in a letter to the Scot introducing his neighbour and friend, the latitudinarian Abbé de Vauxcelles: “He is going to England,” d’Alembert writes without any excessive Edition: current; Page: [35] appearance of irony, “in order to have the pleasure of shouting along with you ‘Wilkes and Liberty!’. . . .” David Hume, it need hardly be said, never waved a mouchoir à la Wilkes!

5: The Scottish Bossuet Ideally for the philosophes, Hume’s presentation of England in the History should have confirmed most of the polemical doctrine of Voltaire’s famous Lettres philosophiques, holding up the English to the French as an enlightened, tolerant, politically and religiously emancipated nation. There is very little in the pages of Voltaire’s Letters which was calculated to give comfort to the French except perhaps the general message that Corneille and Racine wrote better tragedies than Shakespeare. But, quite to the contrary, there is much evidence to suggest that Hume’s History was often used to show how wrong Voltaire actually was and to illustrate to the French how lucky they were not to be English. Gallic self-esteem, in the thirty years following the first appearance of the Lettres philosophiques, had taken some very hard knocks from France’s intellectual leaders. Reaction was inevitable. An example of how Hume’s History was used by traditionalists to combat the philosophes’ exploitation of England as a propaganda symbol can be found in the Dictionnaire social et patriotique of the French lawyer Claude-Rigobert Lefebvre de Beauvray. Published in 1770, his work, bearing the epigraph “Be English in London and French in Paris,” was intended as a remedy for the disease of philosophisme anglais, seen thirty years later by some extreme commentators of the Right as one of the chief causes of the Revolution. Edition: current; Page: [ 36 ] Voltaire had spoken of the English as tolerant in religion, moderate and free in politics and, most important of all, profound in their philosophical thinking. If only, Voltaire seemed to be saying, France took England for its model, then all would be well. Lefebvre de Beauvray disagreed vehemently. Quoting as evidence Hume’s sentiments on England’s lack of an equivalent of the French Academy, he stated that the city of Paris by itself had more to offer the intellectual than the whole of Great Britain. As for England’s hideous “republican” liberty, so often praised by the encyclopédistes, de Beauvray proposed the following counterarguments in his article “Frondeurs”: We are harangued every day on how little liberty is afforded under monarchical government. . . . To silence these critics, I shall ask them only to weigh the following considerations, set out in good faith by Mr. Hume himself, in his Histoire de la Maison de Stuart, volume III, page 429 [VIII. 143-44]: “Government is instituted in order to restrain the fury and injustice of the people; and being always founded on opinion, not on force, it is dangerous to weaken, by these speculations, the reverence which the multitude owe to authority. . . . Or should it be found impossible to restrain the license of human disquisitions, it must be acknowledged that the doctrine of obedience ought alone to be inculcated and that the exceptions, which are rare, ought seldom or never to be mentioned in popular reasonings and discourses. Nor is there any danger that mankind, by this prudent reserve, should universally degenerate into a state of abject servitude.” The bloody revolutions of England’s history strongly suggest to de Beauvray that liberty is not a worthwhile political goal. Hume’s paraphrased opinion of the British parliamentary leaders during the Civil War is seen as sufficient proof of this point: “If one cannot deny that the first group (the extreme supporters of English liberty) had more noble aims and held views more advantageous Edition: current; Page: [37] to mankind, it must also be admitted that their methods are more difficult to justify. . . . Obliged to curry favour with the Populace, they saw themselves obliged to applaud its folly, or to fall in with its rage. . . .” (Hist. de la Maison de Stuart, t. 1 & 6.) Hume is especially commended as a “judicious writer” for having analysed with great truth and force the character of the usurper Cromwell. Cromwell was not just the worst of these parliamentary leaders; no man since Mohammed, de Beauvray affirms, had exhibited to the same degree such a harmful mixture of genius and low cunning. Voltaire had painted a very rosy picture of religious toleration in England; each Englishman, we remember, is seen as going to heaven by the road of his choice. Hume, in his descriptions of the Civil War period, gives us a rather different version of things and, still according to Lefebvre de Beauvray, his picture is one which deprives the British people of any right to accuse other nations of religious persecution: Never was there an Inquisition like that instigated by the Puritans of England and the Covenanters of Scotland. The supposedly religious confederation known as the Covenant brought fire and sword to all parts of the Three Kingdoms. It was, in a sense, this league that prepared the horrific tragedy whose outcome was so fatal to the royal family and still causes sons to lament the crime of their fathers. Never, perhaps, has any writer preached humanity in harsher tones, or liberty in more despotic terms, than the author of the Émile. Similarly, those who make a great show of tolerance often reveal a most intolerant character. Without themselves deigning to tolerate anyone, they want everyone to tolerate them. We are confirmed in this opinion by the singular admission of an English historian: “It must be acknowledged, to the disgrace of that age and of the British Isles, that the disorders in Scotland entirely, and those in England mostly, proceeded from so mean and contemptible an origin, such as aversion to the surplice, the rails placed about the altar, the liturgy, embroidered copes, the use of Edition: current; Page: [38] the ring in marriage and of the cross in baptism.” (See l’Histoire de la Maison de Stuart sur le trône d’Angleterre, t. 2, p. 327.) De Beauvray also cites Hume on the advantages of the monarchical form of government as compared with the English “republican” system. In support of such anti-liberal views, the article “Liberté” of the Dictionnaire reproduces a long quotation from Hume which de Beauvray interprets as a lesson to the French on the worthlessness of England’s much-vaunted Magna Carta. Intellectually backward, intolerant in religion and bloody in politics, the English are seen by de Beauvray as perversely wrong even in the way that they treat their only good historian, the judicious David Hume: “It is far from being the case that Mr. Hume’s work has received an equally favourable welcome from all Englishmen. Some reproach him his Scottish birth and his predilection for the Court party. As a consequence they deny him the acclaim his writings and research deserve. If they persist in the assertion that Mr. Hume is not a good historian, then England does not yet have a national history and can never have one.” Not only is Hume a great historian, he is, “among all the political philosophers, the one who is most familiar with the interests and resources of his country.” We see that it was only too easy, albeit with a certain measure of misrepresentation, for anti-philosophes like de Beauvray to interpret much of Hume as supporting the cause of the ancien régime against the lessons of Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques. Voltaire had Edition: current; Page: [39] also praised the English for their civic virtues. He had especially applauded the English nobility for its modern commercial spirit and contrasted its efforts at honest capitalism with the nonexistent contributions of the foppishly ornamental French petits-maîtres who refused to engage in trade and commerce because of feudal prejudices. To show his feelings in this respect, Voltaire had even set a precedent in French theatre by dedicating his tragedy Zaïre to an English businessman. But was England really such a model island of patriots and philosophers? Another French lawyer, Basset de la Marelle, asked the question in a speech delivered in 1762 to the Académie de Lyon. His answer, given while the Seven Years’ War was still in progress, was, of course, vehemently negative. What is significant for us is that he too found proofs for his arguments in the impartial Mr. Hume. Hume frankly admitted, for example, that the English at the time of the Norman Conquest showed very little of that patriotism which they liked to boast of as almost hereditary in their nation. Moreover, there was little to admire in Britain’s modern commercial conquests. The British attitude to trade formed the basis of a vicious imperialism and was a constant cause of England’s unjust wars. The British Cabinet had always known that its unruly subjects had either to be amused or to be feared: To avoid being reduced to this last extremity, it seeks to keep its restless population occupied. If the people fall into a state of calm, it is always a sign of danger ahead, of stormy times or revolution; it seeks therefore to engage them on the continent in matters foreign to their interests, matters it represents to them as their own; it holds up the dominion of the seas as an Englishman’s natural right, to the exclusion of all other nations; it tempts the greed of its citizens with projects to capture, to the detriment of all other nations, through commercial enterprise in both the New World and the Old, the wealth of the entire universe. . . . And if such enterprises turn out to be ruinous for the nation, it lulls the people with celebrations of these glorious triumphs that in fact exhaust it. That is why one of the most astute political thinkers of England (Mr. Hume, Of the Balance Edition: current; Page: [40] of Power) states that above half of England’s wars with France, and all its public debts, are owing more to its own imprudent vehemence than to the ambition of its neighbours. . . . Let us proceed now to examine the writings of a number of French traditionalists who exploited Hume’s impartiality as they defended not only the ancien régime’s national self-esteem and its politics but its religion as well. Here too the philosophes’ false brother, David Hume, was deemed to have made valuable contributions. Immediately after the French publication of his Philosophical essays, for example, he was recognized by yet another enemy of Voltaire, the Abbé Trublet, as a useful source of ideas against the current irreligion. Voltaire and the philosophes had made a great man of John Locke and had praised especially Locke’s rejection of innate ideas. In the Journal Chrétien of 1758 Abbé Trublet applauded the “judicious” Hume for having shown at last that Locke’s ideas on this subject, as well as on many other subjects, were totally confused. It is a strange irony that the philosophes, who at this time praised Hume so highly as a kindred spirit, had failed to recognize his originality in epistemology even as Christian apologists, however insincerely, were using Hume’s theory of knowledge to attack the very basis of Enlightenment philosophy. Hume’s scepticism, perhaps even charitably viewed as an unavoidable first step toward fideism, seemed particularly useful to Trublet against the dogmatic conclusions of rationalism. In the same way, the French abbé had earlier defended Berkeley against the charge made by some Catholic apologists that the Irish bishop’s strange idealism was impious. British philosophers, it had to be admitted, could be rather eccentric but they were “unequally erroneous” and proper distinctions had to be made if one rejected them. With such distinctions Edition: current; Page: [41] in mind, Trublet and other eighteenth-century apologists occasionally attempted to revive the old technique of retortion, the rhetorical engine of war that had earlier been used with success against the Protestants and rationalists of the Renaissance. David Hume’s scepticism, with its dialectic based on the maximum multiplication of view-points, was particularly vulnerable to exploitation by this technique. The philosophes were not to be allowed the satisfaction of thinking that all of modern philosophy supported their cause. They prided themselves on having recourse to reason alone, but if a sceptic could show, as David Hume, for example, had shown, that many of their arguments were based on Lockian “acts of faith,” then that sceptic, though not a religious man, could be useful in the defence of religion. Hume was not really an angel of truth, but he could be spirited away from his evil brothers and put to work against their incredulity. “Monsieur Trublet’s purpose in most of the articles that appear throughout this journal,” notes the Abbé Joannet, editor of the Journal Chrétien, “. . . has always been to remove from the rosters of impiety and irreligion the men of letters whom our so-called philosophers have had the vanity to list as supporters of materialism and incredulity.” In 1768, although all of Hume’s works were by then on the Index, the future cardinal, Hyacinthe-Sigismond Gerdil, showed that even some of the higher church officials were on occasion able to view David Hume in this same friendly light. In his Discours sur la divinité de la religion chrétienne, for example, Gerdil attacked the philosophes for their irreverent views on the lives of the Christian saints. Happily, there was a remedy for their blindness: More judicious authors have remedied this failing with more accurate studies, based on authentic documentation. If among those persons who have fallen away from religion because of unfortunate prejudices there can be found minds of rectitude and equity and hearts inclined to virtue, what better way for them to be cured of their prejudices and reconciled to Christianity than by reading the life of Jesus Christ and the lives of the saints who, imbued with the spirit of Jesus Christ, have exemplified in all of their conduct the Edition: current; Page: [42] grandeur and simplicity of the Gospels? There they will find human nature ennobled by the most exalted virtues, practiced in full brilliance and without ostentation. Apparently a perusal of Hume could be added profitably to readings from the gospels. Gerdil continues: “The portrait that Mr. Hume has sketched of the celebrated Lord Chancellor Thomas More can serve to substantiate the idea we bring forward of Christian justice in all of life’s stations and situations.” Gerdil then quotes Hume’s portrait of the English saint at length. In a much more significant work of 1769, the Discours philosophiques sur l’homme considéré relativement à l’état de nature et à l’état social, Gerdil once again returned to Hume for inspiration and anticipated in his use of the Scot’s political ideas the almost identical lines of reasoning proposed later on by such counter-revolutionary ideologists as Maury, Ferrand, de Bonald, and de Maistre. Already author of an anti-Emile and an anti-Contrat social, Gerdil set out again to attack the artificiality of contract theory. Society, he asserted, is a moral and political fact of man’s nature. Quoting Hume’s own analysis of the subject, Gerdil agreed that man is not solely motivated by self-interest. Man is born for society; the contracts of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau are false, the concept of natural equality is a harmful myth; ultimately, the organization of man in society is a reflection of the government of God. One is not surprised to find this learned ecclesiastic defending theocracy as the true basis of government. What is mildly astonishing, however, is the way he transforms David Hume’s social naturalism into a specific defence of the divine-right doctrine attacked by Hume in the same essay in which he assails contract theory. Little more than a clever transition is required to perform this textual miracle. Society, it is agreed, is not based on an arbitrary contract but on the natural fact of man’s sociability. The origin of Edition: current; Page: [43] public authority does not rest, then, in the free consent of individuals who have given up for this purpose part of their natural rights. Public authority takes all its force from the right that nature implicitly gives every society to see to its well-being and survival: Sovereign power in society is thus established by nature’s law, and since natural law is decreed by God, it follows that sovereign power is founded on the very order established by God for the preservation and well-being of mankind: Qui potestati resistit, ordinationi Dei resistit [Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God]: thus spoke the Apostle. Mr. Hume pays homage to this truth in his twenty-fifth moral and political essay: Once we admit a general providence, he writes, “and allow that all events in the universe are conducted by an uniform plan, and directed to wise purposes,” we cannot deny that the Deity is the ultimate author of all government. And “as it is impossible for the human race to subsist, at least in any comfortable or secure state, without the protection of government, this institution must certainly have been intended by that beneficent Being, who means the good of all his creatures: And as it has universally, in fact, taken place, in all countries, and all ages, we may conclude, with still greater certainty, that it was intended by that omniscient Being, who can never be deceived by any event or operation.” Gerdil applauds this argument as entirely solid. Unfortunately, Hume spoils his line of reasoning somewhat by his subsequent conclusions. Gerdil then quotes the passage in Hume’s essay “Of the Original Contract,” which his friend, the Abbé Maury, another “Hume-inspired” future Cardinal of the Church, did not dare cite later while debating the concept of sovereignty with Mirabeau on the floor of the Assemblée Nationale. If the nature of things and providential arrangement are equated, the authority exercised by a pirate or a common robber is, Hume archly contends, as inviolable as that of any lawful prince. Gerdil gives the obviously confused but no doubt well-intentioned Monsieur Hume a kindly correction on this point: Edition: current; Page: [ 44 ] “God who means the good of all his creatures, also intends that they be governed”: that is Mr. Hume’s principle. The establishment of government conforms to the intentions of the omniscient Being, and the sovereign occupies a place in society that is designated expressly by Providence; but the abuse that a bandit makes of his physical power in order to rob the passerby is a crime against the laws of God, who, while allowing this evil, disapproves of it, condemns and punishes it. How then could Mr. Hume suggest that the authority of the most lawful prince is not more sacred, or more inviolable than that of a brigand? After thus disposing of this minor lapse in what is otherwise seen as a brilliant argument, Gerdil returns to base his conclusion on Hume’s authority: We must therefore look upon the establishment of government not only as the simple effect of this secret influence that animates all of nature but also as an institution that God desires, that conforms to the intentions of the all wise Being and to his supreme beneficence. This conformity that Mr. Hume acknowledges is revealed to us by right reason, informs us by clear and immediate logic that we cannot attack the sovereign authority of government without at the same time defying the intentions, the laws, and the will of the omniscient Being. This proves sufficiently that such authority is sacred and inviolable. What reason demonstrates on this subject is fully confirmed by the testimony of the Scriptures which reveal to us in a more distinct and authentic manner the will of the Supreme Being. To be entirely convinced on this point, one has only to read the third book of Bossuet’s Politique tirée de l’Ecriture Sainte. It can be easily imagined how Hume’s alleged testimony in favour of what is in fact a full-blown system of theocracy was seen as all the more valuable by religious conservatives precisely because it did not come from Bossuet but rather from the sceptical and therefore “impartial” Hume. Joseph de Maistre, who was later probably even more thoroughly “influenced” by Hume in this direction, expressed the belief that one could trust such a man to Edition: current; Page: [45] speak the truth because, as he tells us, “Hume . . . believed in nothing and consequently held back nothing.” On another matter, the Jesuit Claude-François Nonnotte, remembered today especially as an adversary of Voltaire’s Essai sur les Moeurs and Dictionnaire philosophique, also occasionally invoked the testimony of David Hume. In the article “Christianisme” of his own antidotal Dictionnaire philosophique de la religion, Nonnotte set out to disprove the common philosophes’ contention that Christ’s kingdom has been the scene of mankind’s bloodiest wars. Christianity, he maintained to the contrary, has been a civilizing and beneficial factor in good government throughout the ages: . . . Christianity has had a civilizing effect on customs, it has checked the spirit of sedition, it has uprooted and destroyed the seeds of civil war. It is therefore undeniable that it has been a force for good in the universe. These same frenzied tubthumpers who constantly proclaim Christianity to be a religion of disorder and discord, a disruptive force that overturns states, kingdoms, and empires, also seek to depict it as a bloodthirsty religion, the most dangerous to crowned heads. In that, they are not of the same opinion as one of the most celebrated learned men of this century who, though a Protestant, acknowledges that, of all religions, Catholicism is the most favourable to sovereigns. (Hume, Hist. de la Maison de Stuart.) Nonnotte also attacks Voltaire for what he considers to be the French historian’s too favourable attitude to the hypocritical assassin Cromwell and to the entire Puritan rebellion. Moreover, Voltaire lies in his teeth when he praises Elizabeth as tolerant and attacks Mary as a persecutor: that “wise author, Monsieur Hume” Edition: current; Page: [46] in his “excellent Histoire” easily proves how wrong the great infidel is in both cases. In an article attacking d’Alembert’s eulogy of George Keith, Hereditary Earl Marischal of Scotland and Governor of Neuchâtel, the future counter-revolutionary journalist Abbé Royou also illustrated how it was possible to appeal to Hume for aid in protecting the ideological inertia of the ancien régime. D’Alembert in his Eloge had spoken disparagingly of the Stuart kings and had referred specifically to James II as Jesuit-inspired and intolerant. As we have already noted, eighteenth-century French Catholics seemed to find it particularly important to defend James II’s memory: “. . . the Jesuitism of King James,” Abbé Royou insists, “is one of those popular opinions that are spawned by hatred and adopted through gullible malevolence; it has, however, never been testified to by any credible witness. Hume does not speak of it. . . .” As for the alleged intolerance of James II, that too, Royou affirms, is a malicious lie. Quite to the contrary, James was forced to leave the English throne because he was excessively tolerant. “Had he favoured the atrocious and sanguinary laws of the Anglican sect, he and his family would still be enjoying the entire affection of his subjects, earned for him from the beginning by his virtues. But he wished to grant complete freedom of conscience to all sects within his kingdom, and to mitigate the harshness of the laws against Catholics, without, however, as he persisted in asserting to his last breath (Hume, t. 6, p. 536), intruding on the Edition: current; Page: [47] privileges and prerogatives of the Protestants. That was the source of his misfortunes!” D’Alembert’s radical view of Stuart intolerance inspired this brother-in-law of Fréron and future editor of the counter-revolutionary journal l’Ami du Roi to attack the philosophes generally for endlessly speaking of tolerance and, at the same time, for being highly intolerant toward Catholics. Coming back to d’Alembert’s portrait of James II, he proposed to show what that monarch was really like: “Let us contrast this truly odious and culpable depiction of the conduct of King James with the portrait drawn by Mr. Hume: a Protestant in origin, an unbeliever by profession, a subject and partisan of the House of Hanover: his authority should not be suspect to our panegyrist. Here is how he ends his history of James II. . . .” Royou’s attack concludes with a triumphant confrontation of the impartial Hume and his vanquished philosophe friend d’Alembert. The last example we will consider with regard to the influence of Hume’s conservative image in the pre-revolutionary period is much along the same lines. It cannot be ignored, however, because of the sheer quantity of references to Hume’s works involved and because of the importance of the Abbé Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier, the apologist in question. Abbé Bergier saw himself as rather like a new Samson sent by God to destroy the Philistines of eighteenth-century French philosophy. Some idea of the stature of his attacks may be had, perhaps, from the fact that, for a time, he frequented the d’Holbach côterie and that rival apologists occasionally complained that he treated his philosophe opponents with more respect and temperance than he accorded the Jansenists. The extent of Hume’s philosophical influence on Bergier, Edition: current; Page: [48] following in the tradition already established by Trublet, is a question that need not detain us here. More important to our purpose is an examination of the religious, social, and political image of David Hume that emerges from the mass of references found in the Abbé’s works published between 1765 and the Revolution. Any statement made by Hume that could be construed or, to be quite frank, half-construed and even misconstrued as testifying in favour of religion or of the Catholic Church is laboriously noted down in Bergier’s works. The Abbé records emphatically, for example, that Hume “has expressed himself in a most forceful manner on the beneficial effects of religion: ‘Those who attempt to disabuse mankind of religious prejudices, may, for aught I know, be good reasoners, but I cannot allow them to be good citizens and politicians; since they free men from one restraint upon their passions and make the infringement of the laws of equity and of society, in this respect, more easy and secure.’ ” Like Voltaire quoting the Bible, Bergier does not hesitate to repeat his favourite Hume passages and he used this particular one, wrenched from the essay “Of Providence,” in at least four different works. The philosophes maintain that religion is unnecessary in a well-run society. But, objects Bergier, “no nation since the beginning of the world has possessed good civil laws, sound polity and government, without religion. No legislator has set out to bring under the rule of law a people deprived of a belief in God and in a future life. It is sheer folly to consider feasible an enterprise that no sage has ever dared to attempt. ‘Look out for a people, entirely destitute of religion,’ states Mr. Hume; ‘if you find them at all, be assured, Edition: current; Page: [49] that they are but a few degrees removed from brutes.’ (Hist. nat. de la relig., p. 133). . . . From this undeniable fact we may conclude that religion is an integral part, so to speak, of man’s constitution. . . .” Hume is also cited against those who maintain that religion takes its origins in the duplicity of priests and the credulity of the masses: “It would be fruitless to reply to the noisy clamours of those who claim that religion was invented by priests out of self-interest. First of all, it is absurd to suppose that there were priests before there was religion. Mr. Hume, who is anything but biased in their favour, acknowledges in good faith that they are not the original authors of religion or of superstition; that at most they may have helped to foster it. (Hist. nat. de la relig., [section] 14, p. 127.)” Bergier defends religious belief as a normal part of man’s nature. Is it sensible, then, he asks, to spend one’s lifetime questioning a duty which is born with us, which makes for the happiness of virtuous people and determines our eternal fate? Even Hume—for the moment a Hume pascalisant—was forced to admit that no good can come of religious scepticism: “David Hume, a zealous partisan of philosophical scepticism, after setting forth all the sophisms he could devise for its foundation, is forced to admit that no good can come of it, that it is ridiculous to attempt to destroy reason by argument and ratiocination; that nature, more powerful than philosophical pride, will always maintain its rights over all abstract speculations. We can conclude without hesitation that the same is true of religion, since it is grafted on nature. . . .” Even a certain fanaticism in a nation is preferable to the total absence of religion: “Fanaticism occurs, moreover, only when the people are much agitated and religion appears to be in peril; it is a passing frenzy that grows weak from its own efforts, and its crises cannot be frequent. ‘Its fury,’ writes Mr. Hume, ‘is like that of thunder and tempest, which exhaust themselves in a little time, and leave the air more calm and pure than before.’ Atheism is a slow Edition: current; Page: [50] poison that destroys the principle of social being and its effects are incurable. . . .” With Hume defending religious fanaticism in small doses and even proving to the Abbé’s satisfaction that the ancients were very much in need of Christ’s mission, let us now turn to hear what he has to say, still according to Bergier, specifically in defence of Christianity and the Catholic Church. Bergier quotes from Hume’s Tudors to show the important rôle played by the Church during the Dark Ages: “The barbarian nations that ravaged Europe in the fifth century and afterwards would have smothered even the last vestige of human knowledge, had religion not opposed barriers to their fury. . . . If some traces of humanity, morals, order, and learning are to be found in the fifteenth century, it is undeniably to Christianity that we must be grateful.” We remember that the Protestant minister Formey had cited Hume to the same effect. The clergy, Hume is quoted as maintaining, also served during this time as a barrier against political despotism. Attacking the Reformation, Bergier finds himself able to quote profitably page after page of Hume’s works. Not only did the clergy of the pre-Reformation Church stand as a barrier against despotism, but the union of the Western Churches under one sovereign pontiff facilitated commerce and was a highly desirable, politically unifying principle. The wealth and splendour of the Church had the effect of encouraging the arts. Though some corruption in the Church indeed existed, it was not the main cause of the Reformation, nor was the issue of religion the main cause of the massacres which took place in England, Scotland, and Ireland at that time. After giving consecutively five “impartial” Hume quotations to support this view, Bergier adds: “Here, it seems to me, is confirmation of everything we have already said about the so-called Edition: current; Page: [51] Reformation, and it is a Protestant who provides it for us.” Were the Protestants right, Bergier asks, to attack the Church for depriving the faithful of scripture in the vernacular? “David Hume tells us that in England, after the advent of the so-called Reformation, access to the English translation of the Bible had to be withdrawn from the people for fear of the consequences and the fanaticism fostered by such readings. (Tudor, II. p. 426.)” Hume also states that the destruction of the monasteries at the time of the Reformation in England did no possible good to the country: “A fine lesson,” Bergier adds, “for those who would seek to reform the wealth of the clergy!” For his defence of the utility of convents and for his denial that the celibacy of priests has base political motives, Hume receives once again the French Abbé’s benediction. The Scot had shown on these matters “more discernment than our philosophes.” Like Louis de Bonald later on, Bergier also cites Hume’s authority to support his arguments against divorce. One last example of Bergier’s use of Hume must suffice although it by no means exhausts the list of references scattered throughout the Abbé’s voluminous works. After stating on the great historian’s authority that the philosophes were wrong to attach intolerance exclusively to religious opinions, that, in fact, any opinions men hold dear, whether out of vanity or self-interest, can occasion intolerance and that, consequently, atheists can be found who are just as intolerant as believers, Bergier approached the problem of toleration in seventeenth-century France: The question is to determine whether the Calvinists had a legitimate claim, whether the government was obligated, in terms of natural law, to satisfy it, and whether it could do so as a matter of sound Edition: current; Page: [52] policy. In this regard, we invite dispassionate consideration of the following: . . . The character of the first Calvinist ministers is well known, as is the nature of their doctrine; they taught that the Catholic religion was an abomination and that its adherents were denied salvation . . . that the Church of Rome was the whore of Babylon and the Pope the antichrist; that it was necessary to abjure, proscribe, and exterminate that religion by all possible means. . . . David Hume acknowledges that in Scotland, in the year 15