(2003-05-22) Enlightenment's Errand Boy

David A Bell: Enlightenment's Errand Boy. The French Revolutionaries identified the Enlightenment as the work of a small, brave band of 18th-century philosophes.

On the other side of the political spectrum, angry defenders of religious and political orthodoxy accepted this image, but in photo-negative: for them, the wasteland was a happy garden; the rays of light were menacing shadows; and the angelic philosophes were demons

For two hundred years, these popular images of the Enlightenment have retained considerable force

In the 1960s, Peter Gay gave them new power in his brilliant extended essay The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. Gay recognised the international dimensions of the Enlightenment, and included Scots, English, Germans and Italians as well as French in what he called the ‘little flock of philosophes’. He recast it as a dialectic in which ‘modern paganism’ overcame Christianity and ushered in ‘the science of freedom’ –

Yet there have always been challenges to this view

Some critics have tried to expand the Enlightenment’s geographical and chronological boundaries. Others, more daringly, have denied its essential unity.

J.G.A. Pocock, in his ongoing study of the intellectual worlds of Edward Gibbon, insists on the existence of multiple Enlightenments, some of them remarkably conservative, religious and devoted to erudition. The most radical critics of all have gone far in the other direction, subsuming the Enlightenment into even larger, sweeping historical shifts. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s notorious (and notoriously abstruse) Dialectic of Enlightenment traced ‘Enlightenment’ thinking back to the age of Homer.

Subsequent authors have often mistaken these radical critiques for attacks on the Enlightenment of convention, and proceeded to blame the Parisian philosophes for all the ills of modernity, crediting them with a repressive, even proto-totalitarian ‘Enlightenment Project’. This sort of thinking amounts to vulgar Postmodernism, and enjoys an alarming degree of popularity on American and British university campuses.

L.W.B. Brockliss is no Postmodernist, vulgar or otherwise, and his elegantly instructive study falls into older traditions of critique

Brockliss wants to push the boundaries of the Enlightenment beyond the ‘little flock of philosophes’, and in particular to identify it with the intellectual phenomenon known as the ‘Republic of Letters’ – an international network of correspondents born in the late 17th century and committed to unfettered critical inquiry. Hazard made this argument by showing that the founders of the Republic anticipated the philosophes in many of their lines of thought.

‘The Enlightenment,’ he concludes, ‘should be subsumed within the Republic of Letters and the philosophes treated as the citizens of a singular mini-Republic within a broader federation.’ In fact, Brockliss would like to get rid of the term ‘Enlightenment’ altogether.

To make his case, Brockliss, rather than writing yet another sweeping survey, has chosen the path of microhistory, looking at the career of a single republican of letters about whom remarkably abundant information has survived: an Avignon doctor called Esprit Calvet.

Brockliss himself acknowledges that Calvet’s flesh was not the sort that made anyone thrill at its touch, at the time or since

Drawing on the material from the museum, the correspondence and records of Calvet’s possessions, Brockliss has been able to draw up a remarkably full portrait of this mildly unattractive man. In fact, Brockliss takes us about as far into the head of an 18th-century French person as we are ever likely to get, even if in this particular case the trip is disappointingly uneventful. But what does it have to do with the Enlightenment?

Conventional though Calvet may have been, his correspondence shows that he shared the outlook and principal goals of the philosophes. While he and his correspondents cared more immediately about antiquarianism and natural history, they nonetheless had a serious commitment to freedom of thought, religious toleration and unrestrained critical inquiry. They took broadly utilitarian views of social questions, and believed in the improvement of humanity.

Yet extrapolating from these similarities to the fundamental unity of the Enlightenment and Republic of Letters depends, it seems to me, on a misconception of the former.. the Paris Enlightenment was not an affair of sober statements of principle (nor could its members generally be persuaded to sit down with one another for more than a few minutes without squabbling). It produced very few significant philosophical treatises.

The great works of the French Enlightenment came rather, for the most part, in the form of fiction (Persian Letters, Candide, Julie), travel literature (The English Letters), dramatic dialogues (Rameau’s Nephew), child-rearing manuals (Emile), even pornography (such as Diderot’s The Indiscreet Jewels, whose title characters are talking vaginas).

The Republic of Letters first coalesced not around antiquarianism, but around the application of a critical gaze to traditional forms of superstition, prejudice and intolerance, and around the subjection of even sacred texts to critical analysis. Yet it remained mostly a genteel affair, and grew more genteel over time.

The Parisian philosophes, by contrast, felt they had a mission not merely to publish, but to publicise: to expose intolerance and injustice wherever they found it, and to the largest possible audience. They wanted not merely to express, but to enlighten

The French historian Daniel Roche has spent much of his productive career investigating the principal arena in which the Republic of Letters and the Enlightenment came together in France: the network of provincial academies where men like Calvet gathered to discuss ideas, hear lectures, take part in essay and poetry contests and sponsor projects for all manner of ‘improvements’ and charitable works

even if Diderot and Voltaire knew how to bend their knees to kings and emperors on occasion, they both retained an impressive capacity for rudeness when the cause of enlightenment demanded it.

Brockliss’s sources suggest is the large degree of separation between the Enlightenment and the Republic of Letters. For all that Calvet shared many of the philosophes’ ideas, he had little inclination for spreading them beyond his small circle of erudite correspondents, still less for engaging in deliberate and risky provocation

So should we, then, dispense with the term ‘the Enlightenment’? Brockliss points out that 18th-century French people themselves did not describe their age in this way (although they did write endlessly about ‘spreading enlightenment’). The term ‘Republic of Letters’, he writes, ‘would have made far more sense’ to them. True enough; but we do not insist on writing Aztec history in terms that would have made sense to the Aztecs

and from this point of view, for all of Brockliss’s erudition and careful analysis, Esprit Calvet’s story does little to disprove the utility of the label.

Its utility is underscored by a reading of Colin Jones’s new survey of 18th-century France. (The Great Nation)

Jones takes a very different view. In many respects it is the traditional view, in that his focus is squarely on the philosophes, and he underlines the extraordinary ambitions and provocations which set them apart from their predecessors in the Republic of Letters. If he offers something new, it is in his post-Marxist linkage of the Enlightenment to changes in France’s economy and social structure

Jones stresses a series of changes that left France increasingly prosperous and increasingly dependent on the production and sale of consumer goods (in his words, ‘the Great Chain of Buying and Selling’). Cash increasingly counted for more, and social rank for less.

Jones’s book has been needed for some time. The last comprehensive history of 18th-century France in English, covering both the Ancien Régime and the Revolution, appeared more than forty years ago, since when historians have changed their views on many aspects of the period.

If the book has a weakness, it is that Jones has a hard time sustaining his interest in the more familiar aspects of the story.

when he reaches the taking of the Bastille, he begs off with the excuse that the events feature in every ‘storybook history of France’ and ‘need little retelling’. My own experience teaching American undergraduates....

Still, the book does capture the essential drama of this remarkable time and place, and the way the cataclysm of 1789 overturned so many ancient beliefs, ancient institutions and comfortable little worlds