Enemies of the Enlightenment by McMahon Darrin M.;

Author:McMahon, Darrin M.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2014-05-14T04:00:00+00:00

History

If in the microcosm of the family anti-philosophes found a rich source of principles from which to create their image of the well-constituted society, they turned with equal relish to history for instruction and guidance. “History,” the Journal des débats proclaimed, “is politics in action and morality in practice.”78 The font of wisdom and the record of lived experience, the past defined the parameters of the present. It is in history, the Mercure reaffirmed, that “one must investigate what we were, in order to know what, and why, we are.”79 This elemental truth—proclaimed endlessly by anti-philosophes—was one, they charged, that the philosophes of the eighteenth century had entirely ignored. “It is above all in the practice of history,” the Mercure asserted typically in a glowing review of the abbé Gérard’s Les Leçons de l’histoire, “that the philosophes displayed their extreme ignorance and recklessness.”80 Treating the past as a long chronicle of errors, the philosophes exploited history not to extract meaning and knowledge but to condemn the putative “darkness” that had preceded their shining “light”:

That which especially characterizes the philosophes is their absolute contempt for experience. They regarded all the lessons of the past as so many errors; the maxims consecrated by the wisdom of the centuries were only, in their eyes, superannuated stupidities. Their presumption put the most respectable traditions amongst the number of most ridiculous tales. Thus it was in vain that humanity has aged. Thus it was in vain that thousands of years amassed our knowledge, enriching the treasure chest of history and furnishing modern generations with resources of instruction….81

Four years later, the Journal des débats was still drumming this theme, lavishing scorn on the philosophes’ “manner of treating history”—one that reduced the record of human achievements to a morality tale, a “fable,” in which were recounted nothing but the “disorders, wars, public and private misfortunes, and other crimes carried out by Despotism and Superstition.”82

Such arrogant refusal to look honestly at the record of human achievement, anti-philosophes agreed, had not only distorted the past—slandering, to take but one prominent example, the notable contributions of Christianity to Western civilization—but had also deeply perverted the philosophes’ view of the present. Foregoing lived experience and concrete example, the philosophes based their theories on nebulous abstractions and false ideals, the most elemental being their appraisal of human nature. A former lawyer and member of the Council of Five Hundred, Joseph Bernardi, observed that “the fundamental error of the philosophes” was to treat men and women “not as they are, but as they had conceived them,” imputing an inherent goodness to humanity that flew in the face of the historical record.83 “When one leaves the cloudy regions of Philosophie” he continued, “putting aside all these dreams of the natural goodness of men to consider them in the light of the experience of all times, the scene becomes very different.” The record of history provided vivid testimony of human capacity for evil, offering a vast “tableau of the excesses, the outrages, and the cruelties which men in all times had carried out against their fellows.

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