Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

Opinions didn’t begin to change until the 1870s. In fact, the very first time that the English word Enlightenment was used to mean Aufklärung dates from 1865, in a book on Hegel by J. H. Stirling. But even here the word is pejorative – and it did not gain a fully favourable meaning until 1889, in Edward Caird’s study of Kant, where there is the first use of the phrase, the ‘Age of Enlightenment’.³³

But the man who really rescued the Enlightenment and its secular values from the negative territory to which they had been consigned, was John Morley, a journalist for the Fortnightly Review. It was Morley (who was also an MP) who felt that the British reaction to the excesses of 1789 had been generalised to the philosophes

, and that the romantics’ passion for the inner life had combined in what he called a form of philistinism to obscure the real achievements of the eighteenth century. He was stimulated to act, in a series of articles, because he saw about him the church trying to stifle positive science.³⁴

There was a parallel change in France. That country had had its equivalent of Carlyle in Joseph de Maistre, who wrote: ‘To admire Voltaire is the sign of a corrupt heart, and if anybody is drawn to his works, then be very sure that God does not love such an one.’³⁵

Napoleon, whose attitude to the church was erratic, nonetheless is said to have ordered his ranks of tame writers to attack Voltaire.

Then came Jules Michelet, the historian. In the early 1840s, together with a group of friends – Victor Hugo and Lamartine among them – Michelet attacked the Church head-on. Catholicism was unforgivably narrow, he said, celibacy was an ‘unnatural’ vice, confession was an abuse of privacy, the Jesuits were devious manipulators. These broadsides were delivered in a series of intemperate lectures at the Collège de France and, unlike elsewhere, the focus of his offensive was not science but ethics. Ironical, of course, since Voltaire had been fanatically opposed to the fanaticism he himself sparked. Michelet bombarded the churches ‘in the name of justice and freedom’, and it was as a result of these sorties that Voltaire became the focus of a vicious war of ideas in France.³⁶ For example, on Louis Napoleon’s accession in 1851 libraries everywhere were compelled to remove the volumes of Voltaire and Rousseau from their shelves. To give another example, an otherwise respected scholar, editing Voltaire’s papers, warned his readers that Voltaire had ‘caused’ 1789 and the Terror of 1793.³⁷

Matters came to a head in 1885, when rumours began to circulate in Paris that the remains of both Voltaire and Rousseau were not in the Panthéon, where they should have been, as the resting place of the illustrious.³⁸ It was alleged that, in 1814, a group of royalists, unable to stomach these remains in a sacred spot, had removed the bones in the dead of night and disposed of them on waste land. The rumours were not based on anything other than circumstantial evidence but they were so widely believed, and so outraged Voltaire’s supporters, that in 1897 a government committee was appointed to investigate. The investigation went so far as to have the tombs reopened and the remains examined. They were declared to be those of Voltaire and Rousseau.³⁹ People realised at last that this dispute had gone far enough and the bones were reinterred where they belonged. Following this all-round embarrassing episode, attitudes about the Enlightenment began to change, more or less to the view that we have now.