Jonathan I. Israel

Libertas Philosophandi in the Eighteenth Century: Radical Enlightenment versus Moderate Enlightenment (1750–1776)

It is no easy matter to provide a general account of European debates on censorship and freedom of the press or speech during the High Enlightenment of the late eighteenth century. The indispensable starting point for any reasonably coherent and balanced general perspective, it seems to me, is to accept that the way to grasp and classify the overall play of forces in this controversy (as with most other key themes of the Enlightenment) is to begin with the dichotomy “Radical Enlightenment versus Moderate Enlightenment.”

Only one part of the Enlightenment, the radical Enlightenment, held that all men in society should be enlightened and that the entire truth of what is known to men should be expressed so as to be accessible and available to all. Hence, only the radical Enlightenment was inherently committed to the principle of full freedom of expression and liberty of the press. Against this, the moderate “mainstream” Enlightenment, especially as expressed by court officials and such figures as Voltaire and Frederick the Great, held that the vast majority of humanity (in one place Voltaire suggests nine-tenths of mankind) could not and indeed should not be enlightened and that the censorship policy of states thus required an essentially restrictive, two-tiered character. This distinction is important because many general surveys of the Enlightenment either misleadingly suggest that the Enlightenment as a whole was committed to full freedom of thought and expression or else, even more misleadingly, imply that the Enlightenment failed to argue for these freedoms. Both views are not just errors of interpretation in themselves but are also misconceptions that have inevitably given rise to much confusion and fundamentally distort our picture of what was one of the most crucial Enlightenment controversies.

It might be well to begin with an illustration of the working of two-tiered censorship in the field of Enlightenment science in order to provide an idea of how moderate Enlightenment conceptions of censorship worked in practice. In 1762, there was an interesting exchange of letters on the question of censorship between Charles Bonnet (1720–1793), the Genevan Swiss biologist and philosophe, and Malesherbes (1721–1794), the royal minister and director of the librairie in Paris.

Bonnet had achieved a considerable success that year with his book Considérations sur les corps organisés (1762), an elegant work of biology designed, first, to summarize the evidence that research with microscopes had thus far presented concerning the reproduction and development of living creatures; second, to attack epigenesis, the theory that the whole embryo is generated and its development fully determined by the embryo’s material context, a notion championed in particular by his opponent, Buffon; and third, to put forward Bonnet’s own theory of generation, palingenesis, a partly Leibnizian conception, according to which souls and bodies exist in pre-existent germs before generation, pass through many lives, and grow slowly more perfect while sharing a kind of immortality.

Bonnet’s work enjoyed the enthusiastic support of Albrecht von Haller (1708–1777), a Swiss teaching at Göttingen who was the most prestigious naturalist at the time in Germany, as well as the approval of the Prussian royal academy of sciences in Berlin. Despite such support the French Académie royale des sciences, after examining the text with great care, thought it best to ban the book in France. On their advice, Malesherbes ruled that the book’s sale should not be officially allowed, although, as he explained in one of his letters to Bonnet, no obstacle would be placed in the path of French scholars and naturalists obtaining a small number of copies from abroad for their own scientific purposes. In his reply Bonnet did not at all dispute that works of biology, any more than a whole range of other books, needed to be censored or that censorship was entirely necessary. He expressed amazement, however, that his own book should be banned: “comment est-il possible qu’un livre où il n’y a pas un seul mot qui choque le moins du monde la religion, le gouvernement, les moeurs soit interdit par des juges aussi éclairés qu’équitables!” (How is it possible for a book where not a single word occurs to shock in the least religion, government, and customs, to be banned by judges as enlightened as fair-minded!)1

In a further letter, of October 1762, Malesherbes willingly granted that Bonnet’s book was far too useful and important to be denied “aux physiciens et aux naturalistes”; but as he explained, even though Bonnet’s book contained no statements detrimental to religion or government, and though it was clearly essential reading matter for naturalists, the delicacy of the subject of generation and embryos in a work touching on metaphysics, as his book did, “peut en rendre la lecture dangereuse pour le public” (may render reading it dangerous to the public).2 What was fitting for specialists was simply not something that should be absorbed by the general population.

Dissatisfied, Bonnet wrote again to Malesherbes. Why does he label his book “un ouvrage de métaphysique” when it is solely concerned to argue that all living creatures are subject to the law of development and that what we call generation is only the evolution of a preformed tiny embryo, or germ? His main intention was to demonstrate the ever-present hand of the Supreme Being in all those wonderful productions of life the formation of which some writers had attributed to purely mechanistic cause and effect “as if an animal had the same origin as a piece of cheese” (comme si un animal avait la même origine qu’un fromage). Bonnet suggested that someone was trying to pull the wool over Malesherbes’ eyes in characterizing his work as one containing “des pensées métaphysiques et dangereuses” for the public, hinting that his rival Buffon might have had something to do with the decision to ban his work in France. In fact, Buffon was innocent and the ban was soon lifted, after a few weeks, but the principle that had motivated the ban and the two-tiered thinking it prompted in both Malesherbes’ and Bonnet’s minds nevertheless remained intact.

That the official Enlightenment of courts and churches could not dispense with a two-tiered conception, that is, one rule for specialists and an entirely different one for the general public, was made doubly clear in the wake of the single most unsettling clandestine publication event of the later Enlightenment, the appearance in rapid succession in 1770 of two of the most sweepingly radical books of the baron d’Holbach: the Essai sur les préjugés and the Système de la nature. The anonymous publication of these two books was of great historical as well as intellectual and philosophical importance because they almost immediately achieved an unprecedented degree of penetration and notoriety for works of an author generally unknown, stirring perhaps the biggest and widest public controversy of any radical works since the appearance of Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus exactly a century before, in 1670.

The Paris police pursued the Système de la nature, ou Des Loix du monde physique et du monde moral in particular with unprecedented energy. The Prussian roi philosophe Frederick the Great, for his part, was notably angry and disturbed, albeit less by d’Holbach’s atheistic materialism than by the social and political conclusions the author drew from them. D’Holbach’s principle, that the consent of the governed is the only source of legitimacy in politics, thought Frederick, threatened the entire edifice of Europe’s Old Regime institutions. Concerning the Système de la nature, Frederick was especially indignant about the author’s imagining “to himself treaties made between monarchs and ecclesiastics, by which the former promise to honor and support the priesthood, provided the priests will preach submission to the people.”3 In the case of the Essai sur les préjugés, ou De l’influence des opinions sur les mœurs et sur le bonheur des hommes (“Londres,” 1770), it is striking and particularly relevant in the present context that Frederick especially opposed d’Holbach’s claim that the truth should be told to all men. Examining d’Holbach’s text, in his palace at Potsdam, barely a month after its clandestine publication, the irate monarch at once took up his pen to compose a sharply critical and extremely negative reply, denouncing the unnamed d’Holbach as an “ennemi des rois” who had set out to make all monarchical government “odious,” a rabid hater of aristocracy, and a pillar of “philosophic pride” who with his overly optimistic hopes for the future had embarked on an absurdly naive quest bound needlessly to agitate the people and to end in disaster.

Frederick argued that the anonymous author was wrong to try to enlighten the common people and extend to them the freedoms and opportunities that can come only with education.4 “The author” evidently believed, like Diderot and Helvétius, that the gradual advance of reason, dissipating the errors and credulity of the people, is the veritable engine of human progress.5 Such a perspective is profoundly mistaken, contended Frederick, because not just religion and tradition but also “superstition” and credulity remain wholly essential to ordinary folk and hence also to the maintenance of the moral and social order. Without the power of popular credulity and church to hold sway over the lower orders, men’s fears and ignorant prejudices would have no firm anchorage. Without popular belief, prejudices, and simple faith in authority, royalty and aristocracy could not be secure; and, without royalty and nobility, there could be no order, only chaos.

Frederick’s contention that it was better not to teach the truth to most men was, in turn, scathingly rejected by Diderot in a batch of private notes that he penned at this time on Frederick’s intervention. Quite the contrary, observed Diderot, vigorously siding with his friend and ally d’Holbach, albeit he was as much concerned with defending his own stance as that of his ally. There can be no doubt that man’s happiness and best interest “est fondé sur la verité.”6 If the Prussian monarch disagreed, why was he bothering to write at all or to complain that the Essai sur les préjugés was full of errors? What could be more incoherent than to claim that truth is not made for men and then to take up one’s pen to correct the errors of others? If the truth is valueless to humanity, held Diderot, “pourquoi les efforts successifs de l’esprit humain ont-ils eu quelques succès?” (Why did succeeding efforts of the human spirit achieve some successes?).7 Moreover, what could be more preposterous than to champion in print the arrogant pride of those with age-old coats of arms or to speak of the indispensability of ignorance, credulity, and superstition, which kings, aristocrats, and priests then went on systematically to exploit?8 From 1770, Diderot regularly condemned Frederick as a “tyrant” and “un monarque detestable” and, in 1774, vigorously reprimanded Helvétius for being an uncritical, or at least insufficiently critical, admirer of enlightened despotism.9 Unsurprisingly, Raynal’s Histoire philosophique included a fierce denunciation of Frederick, inspired doubtless by Diderot and d’Holbach, to which the king again took great offence and indirectly replied via a riposte published under the name of one of his academicians, the Berlin Huguenot pastor, Moulines.10

Another radical text penned in 1770 and vigorously assailing the Système’s adversaries, the “Discours préliminaire,” probably by Naigeon, entirely agreed with Diderot’s and d’Holbach’s great principle, so utterly rejected by Voltaire and Frederick, that the truth alone is capable “de procurer aux mortels un bonheur solide et permanent” (to give mortals a solid and enduring happiness).11 And if the common people were to learn the truth, this could happen only through the advancement of reason, held Naigeon, since reason alone enables man to distinguish between true and false, real and illusory, and the useful and damaging. Furthermore, if reason is to provide this service, society’s entire system of education has to be taken out of the hands of theologians and “religious fanatics” who, instead of forming children into “citoyens humains, magnanimes, vertueux,” turns them instead into fanatical and useless dévots, credulous and superstitious men, blind believers and opinionated ignoramuses, perfectly lacking in true morality.12

Another outspoken opponent of Frederick’s and Voltaire’s notion that the truth is only for a few was Condorcet.13 Even during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, periods the eighteenth-century radical philosophes regarded as highly oppressive, the triumph of superstition and theology had forced philosophers like Ibn Rushd, and later the Italian naturalists, to form hidden networks that were guided by reason alone and that rejected all credulity, cultivating “philosophy” and the “truth” in secret, and thus concealing the truth from the majority. But this exclusion occurred in circumstances in which clandestinity offered the only means of undertaking “le prosélytisme philosophique” and even then, argued Condorcet, such tactics had inevitably incurred undesirable moral and political consequences. Since what he called “the natural equality of men” is the chief basis of men’s rights, as well as “le fondement de toute vraie morale,” the concealment practiced by the secret adherents of Ibn Rushd and the Italian naturalists, even if more excusable than the attitude of eighteenth-century defenders of censorship, was bound to foment a hypocritcal politics and a secret morality.14

Moderate enlighteners, however, regarded Frederick the Great’s attitude, and the strategy of concealing the truth from most men, in a very different light. Praising the Prussian king for his vigorous refutation of the Système, a work that he too regarded as dangerous and undesirable, Voltaire took a grim view of the overall situation in which the philosophes now found themselves. (His standpoint was to a degree self-contradictory since he was on record as supporting liberty of the press but nevertheless thought most men would and should not be enlightened.) For decades, there had been a split between the materialists and the conservative deists like Voltaire, but this split had now become an open, public fact: “voilà une guerre civile entre les incrédules” (there you see, a civil war between unbelievers), he commented in a letter of July 27, 1770, to d’Alembert, noting that the king was growing restive and indignant because more than a few philosophes “ne soient pas royalistes” (are not royalists).15 What chiefly troubled Voltaire was not the philosophy of the radical philosophes as such (from which he was no longer as estranged as he had once been—his letters revealing that his old veneration for Locke and Newton had receded somewhat), but the fact that his radical critics were proposing to attack God, the devil, rulers, and priests, as he put it, all at the same time. Their strategy rendered a “civil war” among the philosophes unavoidable, one bound to be not just long and bitter but also irresolvable. Voltaire hastened to assure Frederick that he was firmly on his side, and indeed he emerged as one of the most outspoken opponents of radical thought in the 1770s anywhere in Europe.

But while Voltaire agreed with Frederick that Enlightenment was not for the majority and that firm censorship policies were indispensable, he was also more than a little troubled by the king’s dogmatic insistence on excluding the great majority of men from access to the truth. Indeed, the question of how precisely to draw the line worried him more than a little. In his short text Jusqu’à quel point on doit tromper le peuple (1771), he calls it as “une très grande question” (a very great question) but one as yet little discussed, to ascertain precisely “jusqu’à quel degré le peuple, c’est à dire neuf parts du genre humain sur dix, doit être traité comme des singes” (up to what degree the people, that is, nine tenths of the human race, must be treated as monkeys).16 Whatever his reservations, however, he never departed from his view that the comprehensive, sweeping strategy of such works as the Système de la nature, attacking kings as well as priests, was neither desirable nor feasible and must have disastrous consequences, not least for the philosophes themselves.

By seeking to enlighten the majority and to politicize their struggle, Voltaire complained, Diderot and d’Holbach were bound to antagonize not just churchmen but also kings and aristocracy. That Louis XV and his ministers were now actively opposing la philosophie was, in his view, entirely the fault of the radical philosophes and their disciples. It filled him with deep pessimism and dismay. “Ce maudit Système de la nature” (This damned System of nature), he assured his ally d’Alembert, on January 18, 1771, has ruined us, “et nous voilà perdus pour un livre que tous les gens sensés méprisent” (and here we are lost on account of a book that all sensible people despise).17 Had the book been as good as it is actually bad, the “author” should still not have published it, but thrown it on the fire: we shall never recover, he predicted gloomily, from “cette blessure mortelle” (this mortal wound). The ideas of the Système, he wrote in January 1771 to the Prussian crown prince, Friedrich Wilhelm, had no basis in sound philosophy or science: “Spinosa lui-même admettait une intelligence universelle” (Spinoza himself admitted [the existence of] a universal intelligence). The great question bequeathed by Spinoza’s system to the philosophes was whether or not this “intelligence universelle” had a will and adhered to the path of justice. Yet it seems impertinent, to say the least, Voltaire added, to postulate “un Dieu injuste” (an injust God).18

Voltaire, like many others at the time, no doubt correctly regarded Spinoza’s philosophy as the philosophical backbone of the materialism of Diderot and d’Holbach. Spinoza had scarcely imagined that the majority of men were capable of absorbing correct ideas from philosophy, but he had nevertheless argued for a more comprehensive freedom of expression and of the press than any other great thinker of the late seventeenth century. From the moment Spinoza published his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus in 1670 there was a continuous, unbroken dispute within the European Enlightenment as to whether the publication and general discussion of the fundamental philosophical, religious, moral, and political issues was in fact beneficial or actually harmful to the general good.

Thus, the single most important of the Dutch Cartesian refutations of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus of the early 1670s, by the relatively liberal-minded Utrecht professor Regnerus van Mansvelt, not only insisted on the anonymous author’s (i.e., Spinoza’s) “utterly absurd confusion of God with his creation, and body with spirit,” but fiercely attacked his conception of “libertas philosophandi.” Despite the similarity of the wording, his adversary’s conception of freedom of thought, he pointed out, was completely different from that advocated by the Cartesians, including himself. What the Dutch Cartesians meant by “libertas philosophandi” was broadly a freedom such as that legitimated by the States of Holland’s decree on philosophy of 1656, namely, the freedom to philosophize about everything that does not impinge directly on the interpretation of Scripture and central issues of theology. What his adversary meant by the term, however, was scandalously different and broader: for he meant the right freely to overstep those limits and favor “errors of every kind, to defend and propagate a profane license.” Indeed, in van Mansvelt’s opinion, Spinoza expounds “principles such that no sooner would they be admitted than all peace of the republic would necessarily be overthrown.”19 Everywhere in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus he detected signs of deliberate subversion: “[A]nd seeing, how greatly the much sounder theses of recent philosophers daily discovered, by a legitimate method, from the principles most happily discovered by the most noble René Descartes, were approved by the wisest, he [i.e., Spinoza] substituted [for these] his most inept and most absurd chimaera which are completely alien to all truth and piety.”20

Similarly the best known, and longest remembered, among the early German refutations of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus was that published at Jena, with a preface dated April 1674, by Johann Musaeus, a ninety-six page tract, dedicated to Duke Johann Friedrich of Braunschweig-Lunenburg, entitled Tractatus Theologico-Politicus . . . Ad veritatis lancem examinatus. It was an academic dissertation directing much of its attack precisely against Spinoza’s freedom of thought and expression. Musaeus’ tract stands out indeed for the vivid way in which it alerts readers to the sweeping cultural, social, and intellectual implications of Spinoza’s “freedom to philosophize.” A declared defender of ecclesiastical authority and the princely court system of the time in Germany, Musaeus, citing numerous lengthy quotations from Spinoza’s text, held that the Tractatus sought to replace Christianity with a comprehensive Naturalismus that denied the possibility of miracles and everything supernatural,21 while at the same time being “second to none” in advocating a wide-ranging, pernicious toleration, like that, Musaeus added, to be found in Amsterdam. Spinoza’s freedom of thought, he complained, is one that would legitimize all strands of opinion and, therefore, one that removes all barriers presently enforced in the German states against wholly unacceptable theological positions, such as those of Socinianism and other forms of anti-Trinitarianism.

The Tractatus, in effect, by making the public the arbiter of everything, would lead to the complete destruction of ecclesiastical authority. What the author really means by “libertas philosophandi,” contended Musaeus, is the right of every individual to investigate every aspect of truth and to have his own opinion about the state, religion, and morality, making the laws of nature the sole and exclusive criterion of what is true.22 Natural law in the hands of Spinoza, he warned, was reduced to mere appetite and the striving for power and self-expression of each individual. Scripture, Musaeus held, does not grant liberty of thought; nor, quite rightly, does the princely state.23 The real role of the Christian state, insisted Musaeus, was by no means “freedom” as maintained by Spinoza, a “homo fanaticus” and someone alien to all religion, but rather to shepherd men either by fear of penalties or by exhortation and admonitions and other suitable means “ad agnitionem religionis verae, et ad virtutem inducere” (to acknowledge the true religion and to show the path to virtue). Nothing could be more apt to disrupt the peace of the state and tranquility of society, Musaeus contended, than the freedom of religion and of thought and opinion advocated by Spinoza.

Spinoza argued for freedom of expression, and especially of the press, as a principle beneficial to society because he thought it would minimize the restrictions on the power of reason to work on opinion and sway men’s minds. The removal of such restrictions was also the goal in the early 1770s of Diderot and d’Holbach and of such writers as Naigeon, Raynal, Deleyre, and others of their circle whom they enlisted to collaborate in the production of the stream of clandestine books that appeared in the wake of d’Holbach’s Système de la nature in 1770 and that had such a traumatic effect in Europe in the years shortly before the outbreak of the American Revolution. These are works that we know had a considerable impact right across Europe. Indeed, it was the goal, as can be seen from the text of his decree, behind the free press policy of the notorious Danish chief minister Johann Friedrich Struensee (1737–1772), who was overthrown in 1771 and executed after hideous mutilation in 1772.

The kingdom of Denmark-Norway was the first state in the history of the world to proclaim full freedom of the press and to declare it to be a public benefit. The German text of Struensee’s decree, issued in Copenhagen via a “cabinet order” dated September 4, 1770, makes it quite clear that the purpose of the removal of all censorship in Denmark-Norway was to further the enlightenment of the people and help remove all prejudices and errors from the people’s minds.

Wir sind des völligen Dafürhaltens, dass es der unpartheiischen Untersuchung der Wahrheiten ebenso nachtheilig, als der Entdeckung verjährter Irrthümer und Vorurtheile hinderlich ist, wenn redlich gesinnte, um allgemeine Wohl und wahre Beste ihrer Mitbürger besorgte Patrioten, durch Befehle und vorgefasste Meinungen abgeschreckt und behindert werden, nach Einsicht, Gewissen und Überzeugung frey zu schreiben, Missbräuche anzugreifen und Vorurtheile aufzudecken. So haben Wir nach reiflicher Überlegung beschlossen, in Unsern Reichen und Landen eine uneingeschränkte Freyheit der Presse solchergestalt zu gestatten, dass von nun an Niemand schuldig und verbunden seyn soll, seiner Bücher und Schriften, die er dem Drucke übergeben will, der bishero verordnet gewesenen Censur zu unterwerfen.24

This decree, needless to say, caused quite a sensation, and by no means only in Denmark-Norway. As the news of this unprecedented development spread across Europe, Voltaire was among those who responded enthusiastically, penning an Épitre à sa majesté le Roi de Danemarc, sur la Liberté de la Presse accordée dans ses États, which was immediately printed in both French and Danish versions in Copenhagen.25 Unaware that it was not the king himself but rather a hitherto unknown doctor from Altona who had rapidly risen to supreme power in Denmark (while facing fierce opposition from much of the court) who was the true author of the decree, Voltaire praised the mentally unstable monarch to the skies even including the line: “je me jette à tes pieds, au nom du genre humain” (I throw myself at your feet, in the name of the human race), which also appeared in the published Danish version of Voltaire’s text.26

Within the kingdom of Denmark-Norway, the immediate consequence of Struensee’s decree instituting freedom of the press was an avalanche of publications of a sort that had not been allowed before. Struensee and his colleagues had intended the appearance of tracts advocating new approaches to government and taxation, as well as pleas for more religious toleration and expression of a variety of religious points of views, but there was also a torrent of complaint about the state of Denmark and, especially, a wave of vehement press attacks on Struensee himself and his actions and ideas.

Yet we should not be surprised by the angry reaction. Struensee’s press law and the stated principles behind it were bound to transform Danish and Norwegian society fundamentally. Hence the majority of the tracts published in response to the new law, inspired by piety, tradition, and conservative values, were scathing about Struensee, press freedom, and the spread of radical intellectual influence in Danish society more generally. There was talk that the Danes were lost in a madhouse garden of ideas “from which no one could find the exit.”27 One contribution colorfully protested against the vast number of publications proliferating since the introduction of “freedom of the press,” conjuring up the nightmarish vision of an immense square crammed with a vast and stinking heap of writings on every imaginable topic, financial writings, “project writings” and also “Machiavellian, Spinozistic writings” of which there were a great many and from which the stink was allegedly “so dreadful” that the author could not bear it.28 Ole Smedesvends Begraedelse over Rissengrød (Ole Smedesvends Complaint over Rice Porridge) protested about the “Dutch Jew who was supposed to be learned but wanted people to believe that the world had made itself,” which was as much a lie as if the tract’s author had tried to make people believe that his doors could lock themselves: “This fellow was called Spinach or Spinos.”29 The tract also vehemently complained about the “French fool” called La Mettrie.

It turned out that connecting Struensee with Spinozistic influence amounted to something more than mere calumny. The fact that he had lived for many years in Altona and been a close friend of the Sephardic Jewish doctor Hartog Gerson, a known admirer of Spinoza, was not of itself proof of “Spinozism.” Though very little survives from Struensee’s own pen, there is some rather more solid evidence. A German preacher, Balthasar Münter, was assigned in 1772 the care of Struensee’s soul after his arrest and imprisonment by conspirators among the court aristocracy instigated by the queen-mother. After their first interview Münter recorded that Struensee confided to him that he was “no Christian” during the time (1770–1771) that he held supreme power in Denmark-Norway (though he had become one since) and that he had never been able to convince himself that “man consists of two substances” or that there is immortality of the soul. Rather, Struensee had told him that he had “considered himself and all men to be pure machines” and that after death nothing survives. “He had not taken this hypothesis from La Mettrie,” his confessor was assured, “whom he had never read,” but rather had worked it out for himself.30 He had totally rejected the possibility of miracles, but was specifically a Spinozist, and not a follower of La Mettrie: he also fervently believed in the reality of morality, albeit this was something existing solely in relations between people, that is, as something that exists “nur insofern sie für die Gesellschaft Folgen hätten” (solely insofar as it has consequences for society).31

Struensee, according to Münter, made no mention of Spinoza while in prison; nor did his confessor. But it emerged not only that he was well acquainted with Voltaire, Bonnet, Rousseau, and Reimarus but also that a text which had particularly impressed him and helped shape his radical opinions was Boulanger’s Antiquité dévoilée.32 Struensee also confided to Münter, an “enlightened” Lutheran (in Münter’s own words) who highly valued Newton’s views on religion and miracles as well as the learning of Boerhaave, Stahl, Haller, and Hoffmann, that during his visit to Paris, in the entourage of the king, Struensee had met and conversed with d’Alembert and discussed his views about religion with him. Struensee’s admission concerning Boulanger’s Antiquité dévoilée is interesting, for it was one of the very first radical works to politicize the radical project and broaden the radical Enlightenment’s attack into a general campaign for the reform of society and institutions.

Struensee was thoroughly decried by the very Danish press that he himself had liberated, but not all the Danish tracts that followed on the decree of 1770 rejected radical opinions. One that noted the impact of “philosophy” on the Danish capital in a somewhat more positive fashion was En Grønlaendes Beskrivelse over Kiøbenhavn (A Greenlander’s Description of Copenhagen), which stands out for the remarkable mildness of its condemnation of those persons in Copenhagen who had “torn themselves from and denied all religion” and believed the world has existed as it is since all eternity. These people, the tract states, “take as their model a Dutch Jew by the name of Spinoza who in a thick, tedious book of metaphysical Latin tried to prove that all of nature is only one substance and that all Nature’s parts are only just so many modifications of it, so that all that one sees in the whole of nature, was equally as divine, as royal, as grand, so that the writer and his pen were equally important, both alike modifications of nature’s whole.”33 Yet while seemingly deriding this strange doctrine, this pamphlet also noted, with remarkable honesty, that while these Danish disciples of Spinoza recognized no sin or any punishment for sin, they nevertheless sometimes “live more virtuously and show more charity than the rest [of society] who pretend to follow and be loyal to their heaven-sent book [the Bible], which is something [i.e., their good morality] which these followers have in common with their originator [i.e., Spinoza].”

Liberty of the press, as Claude-Adrien Helvétius repeated his view of the matter and that of his allies in his posthumously published De l’homme of 1772, needed to be viewed as a tool with which society could discover moral and political as well as scientific truth by testing propositions in the proving ground of public discussion and debate. It may often not be in the interest of individuals or of particular interest groups that the truth be openly told in this way; but, according to Helvétius, it is always in the interest of society.34 Doubtless freedom of the press will stimulate the circulation of all kinds of bizarre and ridiculous notions, but what does that matter, argued Helvétius, rather optimistically? Block-headed notions, no sooner uttered, will be destroyed by reason and will not harm society. In short, for Helvétius, “la verité n’a pour ennemis que les ennemis même du bien public” (truth’s only enemies are the very enemies of the general good).35

In the social, moral, and political revolution envisaged by the radical philosophes,36 it was necessary to proclaim and promote freedom of expression and publication, what d’Holbach called “la liberté dans les écrits” (freedom in writings). In the manner of Helvétius, Struensee, and Spinoza earlier, he argued that the truth always gains from being publicly discussed, and it is truth, as he saw it, that would change the world. Only lies and impostures suffer, he was certain, from the risk of being publicly exposed. D’Holbach agreed that it could be extremely distressing for particular individuals wherever an unlimited right of publication enables the malicious to damage those they detest with calumnies motivated by hatred and envy. But an unlimited right to publish is nevertheless, he insisted, the best and most constructive thing for society as a whole, adding (rather too optimistically) that “tout auteur d’un ouvrage injuste ne tarde pas à être châtié” (any author of an unjust work is punished before long).37 The indignation of the public, he expected, would revenge all unjustified insult and, if it failed to do so, then it was still better to suffer that inconvenience than to limit in any way the freedom of the citizenry to write about and discuss “des objets importans à leur felicité” (items important to its happiness).38

Notes

1. Charles Bonnet, Mémoires autobiographiques, ed. Raymond Savioz (Paris: J. Vrin, 1948), 213.

2. Ibid., 214.

3. Frederick the Great, “A Critical Examination of the System of Nature,” in the Posthumous Works of Frederic II, King of Prussia, trans. Thomas Holcroft (London, 1789), vol. 5, 147–75, here 165; Ch. Louis Richard, La défense de la religion, de la morale […] et de la société (Paris, 1775), 211, 213–14, 222–23, 231; Roland Mortier, Les combats des Lumières: Recueil d’études sur le dix-huitième siècle (Ferney-Voltaire: Centre international du XIIIe siècle, 2000), 199.

4. Frederick the Great, Examen de l’Essai sur les préjugés (“Londres” [Berlin], 1770).

5. Robert Mauzi, L’idée du Bonheur dans la littérature et la pensée françaises au XVIIIe siècle (Paris : Librairie Armand Colin, 1960), 572.

6. Denis Diderot, Pages inédites contre un tyran, ed. Franco Venturi (n.p., 1937), 2.

7. Ibid., 8; Anthony Strugnell, Diderot’s Politics: A Study of the Evolution of Diderot’s Political Thought after the Encyclopédie (The Hague: M. Nijhof, 1973) , 130–34.

8. Diderot, Pages inédites, 23.

9. Ibid.; Denis Diderot, Réfutation du livre ‘De l’homme’ d’Helvétius, 381, 394, 412, and Lettre apologétique de l’Abbé Raynal à Monsieur Grimm, 150–51, in Textes politiques, ed. Yves Benot (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1960).

10. Carlantonio Pilati, Lettere di un viaggiatore filosofo: Germania, Austria, Svizzera, 1774 (Bergamo: Pierluigi Lubrina editore, 1990), 70–71.

11. [Jacques-André Naigeon?], Discours préliminaire (1770), appendix to Jeroom Vercruysse, Bicentenaire du Système de la nature, textes holbachiens peu connus (Paris: Lettres modernes, 1970), 39–56, here 51.

12. Ibid., 47, 51.

13. Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (Paris, Year III [1795]), 268–69.

14. Ibid., 203–205.

15. Voltaire, Correspondence and Related Documents, ed. Theodore Besterman (Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1968–77), vol. 36, 354; Mortier, Les combats des Lumières, 199.

16. Roland Mortier, Le coeur et la raison: Recueil d’études sur le dix-huitième siècle (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1990), 98.

17. Voltaire, Correspondence, vol. 37, 216; Mortier, Les combats des Lumières, 202–203.

18. Voltaire, Correspondence, vol. 37, 208.

19. Regnerus van Mansvelt, Adversus anonymum Theologico-Politicum (Amsterdam, 1674), 4.

20. Ibid.

21. Johann Musaeus, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus […] Ad veritatis lancem examinatus (Jena, 1674).

22. Ibid., 5.

23. Ibid., 27.

24. “We are entirely of the opinion that it is as detrimental to the impartial investigation of truths, as it is obstructive to the disclosure of entrenched errors and prejudices, if upright patriots, concerned for the common good and the true best interest of their fellow citizens, are deterred and hindered by ordinances and preconceived opinions from freely writing in accordance with their insight, conscience and conviction, and from attacking abuse and unmasking prejudice. We have therefore decided, after careful consideration, to permit unlimited freedom of the press in Our realms and territories in such a way that, from now on, no one shall be obligated or required to submit books and writings that he wishes to send to press to the hitherto decreed censorship.” Stefan Winkle, Struensee und die Publizistik (Hamburg: Christians, 1982), 81–82.

25. Edvard Holm, Nogle Hovedtraek af Trykkefrihedstidens historie, 1770–1773 (Copenhagen: J.H. Schultz, 1885), 27.

26. Winkle, Struensee und die Publizistik, 82.

27. See the collection of ephemera in the Royal Library, Copenhagen, entitled Luxdorphs Samling af Trykke-frihedens Skrifter, vols. 14–15: Anekdoten eines reisenden Russsen, A3v.

28. Ibid., vol. 15, no. 6, 14.

29. Ibid., vol. 15, no. 9, 7; John Christian Laursen, “Spinoza in Denmark and the Fall of Struensee, 1770–1772,” Journal of the History of Ideas 61 (2000): 189–202, here 198. See also the essay in this volume by John Christian Laursen.

30. Balthasar Münter, Bekehrungsgeschichte des vormaligen Grafen und Königlichen Dänischen Geheimen Cabinetsministers Johann Friedrich Struensee (Copenhagen, 1772), 10.

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid., 132–33.

33. Luxdorphs Samling af Trykke-frihedens Skrifter, vol. 15: En Grønlaendes Beskrivelse over Kiøbenhavn, 5.

34. Claude-Adrien Helvétius, De l’homme : De ses facultés intellectuelles et de son éducation (1773; repr. Paris: Fayard, 1989), vol. 2, 797–99, 807.

35. Ibid., 799.

36. Paul Henri Thiry, baron d’Holbach, La politique naturelle, ou discours sur les vrais principes du gouvernement (1773; repr. Paris, 1998), 288–89.

37. Ibid., 291.

38. Ibid.