The Enlightenment of Jean-Baptiste-Louis Gresset, Léger-Marie Deschamps, and Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguet
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
‘TOUCHSTONES OF TRUTH’: THE ENLIGHTENMENT OF JEAN-BAPTISTE-LOUIS GRESSET, LÉGER-MARIE DESCHAMPS, AND SIMON-NICOLAS-HENRI LINGUET DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Mircea Alexandru Platon, M.A. Graduate Program in History The Ohio State University 2012 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Dale K. Van Kley, Adviser Dr. Alice Conklin, Adviser Dr. Nicholas Breyfogle Copyright Mircea Alexandru Platon 2012 ABSTRACT My dissertation, “ ‘Touchstones of Truth’: The Enlightenment of J.-B.-L. Gresset, L.-M. Deschamps, and S.-N.-H. Linguet,” focuses on three key but little studied opponents of the philosophes. I argue that the writer Jean-Baptiste-Louis Gresset (1709- 1777), the philosopher Léger-Marie Deschamps (1716-1774), and the lawyer and political theorist Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguet (1736-1794) opposed the philosophes in the name of a set of universally valid principles against what they took to be the philosophes' superficial, self-serving, and haphazard politicization of language, philosophy and the social sciences. These three intellectuals warned that such politicization fostered economic, political, and intellectual inequality as well as cultural alienation, thereby undermining the Enlightenment’s own vision of a world of self-emancipated human beings and pushing France in the direction of a violent revolution. Gresset supported a “civic republican” political economy of virtue, and warned about the dangers of the consumer culture fostered by the philosophes. The roots of his cultural criticism lay in moral and political concerns that found expression in a patriotic discourse stressing the importance of social “harmony” and the common good while rejecting any temptation to belong to a “party.” In this spirit, Gresset defended the “ancient constitution” against idle monks, royal or ministerial despotism, parlementarian rebellion, and the philosophes. Radically egalitarian and idiosyncratically constructed from elements of scholastic theology and neoplatonic philosophy, Dom Deschamps’ critique of the philosophes’ dependence on the privileged serves as a useful guide for exploring the ii consistency and the limits of the second or theological phase of the French Enlightenment. Dom Deschamps stood at the center of a circle consisting of active soldiers and army veterans, most of them nobles, who combined cosmopolitanism, a serious knowledge of the natural sciences and of philosophy, political concerns, and a libertine life. Rural, castle-bound, and exclusively male, this Enlightenment was concerned not with reforming society, but with preserving a tradition of liberty and of free inquiry that escaped the philosophes’ consensus. While ultimately aimed at opening up a space for “true” Enlightenment within the Enlightenment, Deschamps’ own social connections shed light on the clandestine patronage networks that challenged both the Old-Regime establishment and the “philosophic” opposition to it. With Linguet, finally, my dissertation explores the political battles that led to the French Revolution. As a lawyer, economist and political journalist of European stature, Linguet argued that the systematic laissez-faire theories of “enlightened” political economists would dissolve the traditional ties of society and that only a politics of subsistence, welfare, and nurture would prevent the coming revolution. Linguet was embraced as a hero by the early French Revolutionary press, only to be executed as a defender of despotism in 1794. The choice of Gresset, Deschamps and Linguet permits my “coverage” to be comprehensive in both a chronological and a thematic sense, given that the French Enlightenment evolved from mainly literary quarrels in the 1730s-1750s, to theological battles in the late 1750s and 1760s, and on to political battles in the 1770s and 1780s. Each of my three characters “belongs” to one of these pivotal moments; collectively they delineate an even more radical Enlightenment than that prevalent in current scholarship. iii To the memory of Nicolae Pintilie iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A dissertation is, in many ways, the result of the concerted efforts of many contributors. I am enormously indebted to Dr. Dale K. Van Kley, who believed in this undertaking, and whose encouragements, friendship, and comments on all stages of the manuscript helped shape the present dissertation. I am also deeply grateful to Dr. Alice Conklin, whose selfless support and intellectual companionship helped me to stay grounded and my project to take flight. As members of my defense committee, Dr. Diane Birckbichler, and Dr. Nicholas Breyfogle made very valuable suggestions that helped me shape up my dissertation. I am truly thankful to both of them. I would also like to express my gratitude to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, to The Ohio State University, to The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and to the Mershon Center for Strategic Studies without whose financial support at crucial moments this dissertation could not have been completed. I have a special debt of gratitude to the staff of the Interlibrary Loan Department at The Ohio State University, who managed to locate and bring to the shore a great deal of obscure, very rare, or extremely expensive publications necessary for the completion of this dissertation. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Rada, and our two sons, Mihai, and Alexis, who patiently treaded along with me on my cross-cultural academic paths. v VITA June 23, 1974 ........................Born – Iasi, Romania 1996........................................B.A Law, Alexandru Ioan Cuza, Iasi 2004 .......................................M.A. French, McMaster University, Ontario 2005-2012..............................Graduate Student at The Ohio State University PUBLICATIONS “Physiocracy, Patriotism, and Reform Catholicism in Jean-Baptiste-Louis Gresset’s Anti- Philosophe Enlightenment,” French History 2011 (October, 2011). “Newtonian Science, Commercial Republicanism, and the Cult of the Great Men in La Beaumelle's Mes pensées (1752),” History of Political Economy 43: 3 (2011): 553-589. “Robespierre's Éloge de Gresset: Sources of Robespierre's Anti-philosophe Discourse,” Intellectual History Review, 20: 4 (2010), 479–502. FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: History vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract................................................................................................................................ii Dedication...........................................................................................................................iv Acknowledgements..............................................................................................................v Vita ......................................................................................................................................vi Chapters: Introduction.........................................................................................................................1 1. A Literary Enlightenment: Jean-Baptiste-Louis Gresset and the Enlightenment as Canonical Temptation ...................................................................................................26 2. Enlightenment as realist temptation: Gresset’s Literary Canon Revisited .................. 90 3. The Monastic Cell as Salon: Dom Deschamps and the Enlightenment Public Sphere ...................................................................................................................166 4. Dom Deschamps, Enemy of the Philosophes, or the Enlightenment as Ontological Temptation...............................................................................................223 5. Linguet, the Physiocrats, and the Politics of Simplicity...............................................286 6. Linguet and the Philosophe Culture........................................................................... 346 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 424 Bibliography.....................................................................................................................431 vii INTRODUCTION The French Enlightenment has long been characterized as the triumph of secular reason over faith, led by such well-known philosophes as Voltaire, Diderot and d'Alembert. Recent scholarship, however, has challenged this interpretation. A new generation is arguing that the Enlightenment is best understood not merely as a linear drive to replace a religious with a purely secular view of reality, but as a plurality of different answers to the problems raised by a nascent modernity characterized by popular politics, urbanization, industrialization and the development of the public sphere. 1 This revisionist “Age of Reason” looks increasingly like an “age of conflicting reasons” or arguments, in which heated public debate rather than the steady light of wisdom dispelled ignorance and darkness. One virtue of this historiographical turn is that it has taken the concept of “the Enlightenment” out of the realm of the history of ideas alone; historians now speak of “enlightenments,” understood as attempts to construct progressive, reformist discourses that need to be analyzed at the level of cross- 1 See Roy Sydney Porter, Mikuláš Teich, eds, The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: