Publication during the ancien régime was not free; censorship was constant, though often ineffective, and the penalties serious. In consequence a thriving trade in all sorts of clandestine literature grew up; pornography was banned, but so were Pascal's Lettres provinciales. Most of the established canon of Enlightenment works (except for Rousseau's) was published anonymously and in some degree of secrecy, either outside France or without the permission to publish that was legally required.
Among works that long remained in manuscript form are, in philosophy, Voltaire's Traité de métaphysique, of about 1735, and in political thought d'Argenson's Considérations, not to mention some of Diderot's most important writings. The term ‘clandestine manuscripts’ has come to refer particularly, however, to works that were subversive or critical of established religion. Among them are some that now seem genuinely Christian, such as Pierre Cuppé's Le Ciel ouvert à tous les hommes (1712), which argues that none need go to Hell, but the majority are critical of religion or even violently hostile, such as the Traité des trois imposteurs, which accuses Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed of founding their religions on falsehood and fraud. Equally extreme and much more elaborate critiques of Catholic Christianity, one atheist, the other deistic, were made by Meslier and the ‘Militaire philosophe’. Madame
Perhaps the most typical example of these manuscripts is the widely disseminated Examen de la religion, dating from c.1705, another anonymous deist work that criticizes the Catholic apologists' arguments. Known in three versions, with varying titles, sometimes attributed to Saint-Évremond, it is virtually a collective work of early 18th-c. free thought: copying by hand gave opportunities for revision and addition as manuscripts circulated. Others too were ascribed to reputed free-thinkers, such as Boulainviller and Fréret, some of whose writings were certainly clandestine. After c.1760 many of the manuscripts were published (Meslier's by Voltaire and the Militaire philosophe's by Holbach), still clandestinely and with little regard for fidelity to the originals. Their presence is perceptible in the background of philosophe literature, such as Rousseau's Profession de foi du vicaire savoyard. One of the most interesting manuscripts, Le Philosophe, found its way into the Encyclopédie (article ‘Philosophe’). The manuscripts' significance remains debatable, but they do at least bear witness to widespread intellectual opposition to imposed religious orthodoxy at a date prior to the writings of the greatest philosophes.
[Christopher Betts]
Bibliography
- I. O. Wade, The Clandestine Organization and Diffusion of Philosophic Ideas in France from 1700 to 1750 (1938)
