Mededelingen van de Stichting Jacob Campo Weyerman. Jaargang 7

Margaret C. Jacob
The crisis of the European mind: Hazard revisited

1. The Crisis Identified

It is now nearly fifty years since the brilliant French historian, Paul Hazard, published his classic work, La crise de la conscience européenne 1680-1715 (1935). In it he propounded a thesis that has admirably withstood the passage of time and been capable of absorbing many, but not all, of the historical studies appearing since the Second World War. Briefly stated, Hazard discerned at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries (and we would no longer be so precise as he was in our dating), a crisis in the European mind, a moment of profound uncertainty, une zone uncertaine, malaisée. Out of that crisis emerged a new understanding of people and nature, of government, of religion in society which, as he saw it, prepared the way for the French Revolution. At that moment emerged a mentalité discernibly modern, one with which Hazard and his generation of liberal French intellectuals could still identify.

As we explore this crisis we shall return frequently to Hazard, to contrast his views with what contemporary historians would now describe as the sources of that crisis, its resolution, and its implications for eighteenth century thought and society. There can be no higher tribute to a historian of any generation than to acknowledge that he or she set the terms of a historical discussion. We simply cannot understand the extraordinary transformation that occurred within European thought in those decades without invoking the concept of la crise as first identi-

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fied by Hazard. We may assign different causes to it, and differ with him as to the nature of the culture it produced, but few deny the existence of a crisis which affected the educated classes in every European society with the possible exception of Russia and Spain where it would seem the process out of which the Enlightenment was born was considerably delayed.

Hazard defined the central feature of the crisis as entailing the shift from a civilization founded upon duty, to one founded upon rights. In the realm of political theory the formula works well enough. The retreat from any version of the theory of the divine right of kings as well as from a number of related assumptions about the obligations of their subjects, is well underway by the 1690's. In their place we see an increasing emphasis upon natural law, contract theory, classical republicanism, even, although very rarely, utopian communism. Yet in characterizing the culture produced by this crisis, Hazard's formula tends to slightly exaggerate the democratic implications of this transformation. Historians now see the crisis, in the first instance, as leading to the consolidation of a high European culture self-consciously distinct from popular culture and hostile to it. This crisis occurred among the literate classes, the readers and buyers of books, who in the course of the seventeenth century increasingly distinguished their values from the superstitions (as they saw them) of the non-literate as well as from the hegemony in intellectual and religious matters enjoyed by the clergy, particularly in Catholic countries. This does not mean that clergymen did not frequently play a major role in resolving this crisis. When they did, however, they addressed themselves to the interests and values of the literate and secular laity. The greatest clerical participation in this early stage of the Enlightenment occurred largely in anerastian and Protestant context. Not least, the high culture that emerged from this crisis was, as we now know, fundamentally dependent upon the new science, both of Descartes and Newton, on a body of learning inaccessible to the uneducated. By the 1720's we can see attempts being made to translate this high culture into simple lectures of treatises aimed at the barely educated, but that educative effort was hardly widespread in the first half of the eighteenth century.

Yet if the new science, when combined with the needs and interests of the educated laity, led to a resolution of the crisis - as well as also actually provoking it - we now see that the most fundamental cause of the crisis was political. Without the rise of French absolutism, coupled with the revolutionary upheaval in mid-seventeenth century England, and its important legacy for Continental opponents of absolutism, the crisis of the European mind would have been largely and simply a matter of shifting religious beliefs coupled with anti-clericalism. Its impact would never have been so general, encompassing every aspect of intellectual life, as to permit Hazard to relate it to the French Revolution. The crisis of the late seventeenth century brought the intellectual legacy of the first of the great modern revolutions into the mainstream of Continental thought where it merged with indigenous traditions of anti-clericalism, philosophical heresy, and anti-absolutism.

To anchor the origins of la crise in the political experience of revolution and the fear of absolutism, to proclaim, therefore, the centrality of politics and ideology is to depart significantly from the

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vision of Hazard. His method, so rooted in idealism and Ideengeschichte, rendered mental processes, les forces intellectuelles et morales into the essence of historical change, into those things which, in his words, commandent la vie and take precedence over les forces matérielles. Many contemporary historians no longer admit of such a discrete separation of human activities: the record of la vie matérielle survives in the language of the past and language mediates between the material order, and the order of ideas. The origins, as well as the resolution of la crise, grew out of opposition to the power of kings and churches, courts and their bureaucracies, out of an earlier, political crisis of the mid-seventeenth century which manifested itself in revolutions and rebellions throughout the European state system. Only the English Revolution of mid-century produced a body of political, religious and scientific thought so rich and complex that once discovered by the European opponents of absolutism it laid the foundations for a new synthesis, for the phenomenon we describe as the Enlightenment. Yet in their voyage across the Channel the political philosophies and new science brought forth by the English Revolution were transformed, sometimes beyond all recognition, and the resulting Enlightenment was more truly European, or Scottish, or French, even Dutch and German, than it was English. The deeper la crise the greater the tendency to radicalize ideas that nay have been revolutionary in their origin but which became strangely enervated or even forgotten in their country of origin.

2. The Political Origins of the Crisis

Three traditions of political discourse emerged from the English Revolution, and by the late seventeenth century all were antipathetic to Continental absolutism. The English Revolution, that social and political upheaval which began in 1640 and was only finally resolved in 1688-89, offered profoundly new and compelling justifications for the existence of the state just as it redefined who would have access to its power. In Leviathan (1651) Hobbes placed the origin of government among men grown weary of incessant internecine warfare, of endless competition that ceaseth only in the grave. In their exhaustion they would seek peace by making a contract among themselves to accept a sovereign whose power would be absolute within the limits of certain natural laws. Although in fact seeking a new and de facto foundation for the absolute state, Hobbes appeared to the next generation of his interpreters, particularly on the Continent, not as a supporter of absolutism, but rather as a brilliant theorist of government by contract and as a materialist. Hobbes took his materialism, his characterization of human beings as solely pieces of matter in motion, creatures driven by passions and interests, directly from the new mechanical science. He had little use for an independent clergy, those bugbears, he called them, who prick the sides of their princes. Hobbes (d. 1679) wrote in response to revolutionary upheaval and he was a royalist. But where we find Hobbism in European thought after 1680 it will be used largely to mock the clergy or to lay the materialist foundations of government by contract, or simply to assert a more naturalistic definition of human needs and passions.

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But the political legacy of the English Revolution was not confined to Hobbes. English republicans of the 1690's would look back to the Commonwealth of the 1650's and the theories of James Harrington (Oceana, 1656) to argue for republican principles of government as the only alternative to court-centered and oligarchic government. In a Continental setting their arguments proved particularly appealing against the danger of French absolutism. In the early eighteenth century these English freethinkers (as they called themselves) joined ideological forces in The Netherlands with the victims and opponents of French absolutism, the Huguenot refugees, as well as with the Dutch supporters of the English alliance. These agents of the Whig party could trace their republican ideals back to a time when government in England had been established as the result of regicide (the parliamentary execution of Charles I in 1649). That kind of revolutionary heritage gave one a certain cachet in the republic of letters where millenarians as well as republicans dreamt about king-killing, and the content of their fantasies were remarkably similar despite their profoundly different explanations of who ultimately justified the swinging of the axe. The last of the three legacies drawn from the English Revolution is more difficult to trace on the European Continent. We may describe it as levelling, or democratic, and in the case of Winstanley, communistic. Its transmission to the New World, to the colonies in New England as well as to the Caribbean has now been documented, but its European impact is as yet difficult to establish. The writings of Winstanley were in the library of the Quaker refugee, Benjamin Furly of Rotterdam, from at least the 1690's, if not earlier. With some justification modern British socialists have invoked the legacy of the Levellers and Diggers; indeed in the 1790's Welsh radicals were reading Winstanley while in the same decade the British supporters of the French Revolution were labelled levellers. Yet despite the attempts of the original Levellers to find converts at Calais during the 1650's, and despite the occasionally levelling sentiments found a generation later in the writings of that Whig agent and pantheist, John Toland - an English radical with a vast Continental reputation if not a following - la crise and its resolution apparently owed little to English ideas we may now rightly describe as democratic and communistic. Yet Continental spectatorial literature from this early period, for example, Le Censeur emanating from The Hague and quite possibly by Rousset de Missy, a follower of Toland, attacked private property, while the 1715 free translation into French of More's Utopia (by Gueudeville) preserved in toto the attack on private property. Yet the radically democratic response to la crise is a mere whimper by comparison to the nearly universal attack upon the beliefs, values, and educability of le peuple. In that sense Hazard's assumption that there is an easily established link between the resolution of la crise and the origins of the French Revolution - in all but its earliest phase - requires considerable qualification.

To illustrate further the dangers awaiting the historian who assumes a direct link between la crise and the late eighteenth century revolutions we need only investigate the career of John Locke (d. 1704) and his political writings. From any perspective Locke is central to the resolution of the constitutional crisis at the heart of the English

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Revolution. Yet his Two Treatises of Government published in 1689 was actually, as we now know, written before the Revolution of 1688, and therefore was never intended, at origin, to justify it. In that sense the post-1689 and largely Continental and American reading of Locke - in Europe almost always in French translation - missed his context and in some cases distorted his actual meaning. In 1935 Hazard saw Locke as having offered a resolution of la crise, and with regard to Lockean epistemology Hazard was undoubtedly correct. But he could not have known that Locke's major political treatise was written in the early 1680's when he was deeply involved in Whig party circles, conspiratorial and therefore treasonable in their opposition to Stuart absolutism. Not only is Locke's treatise more a symptom of la crise than an attempt to offer a magisterial resolution of it, it also purposefully eschewed the republican tradition of the earlier revolution just as it repudiated Hobbist materialism with its democratic implications. In his appeal to heaven for a dissolution of government Locke sought a revolution led by magistrates - if the Two Treatises may be read as a call to action - and it was intended to bring about a change of government initiated by the landed and propertied classes to secure legally their privileges and interests. His political thought is probably much more closely related to the writings of civil law theorists than it is to that body of mid-century political theory that provided social and historical justifications for revolution. Locke would have political transformations without social upheaval; a rearrangement of offices and responsibilities among the responsible opponents of tyranny, in a Continental sense, among the propertied members of the second and third estates intent upon guaranteeing their right to engage in free market transactions. The resolution of the English Revolution after 1660 depended upon political and intellectual leadership that feared above all else a turning of the world upside down such as had nearly occurred in the 1650's when the lower classes threatened the very foundation of property rights and hierarchical control over the standing army. In the first instance Locke belongs to that post-1660 reaction. A reading of John Locke which could not take into account what we now know about his English context permitted Hazard to relate him too readily to the French Revolution, despite the fact that Locke eschewed social upheaval. The revised account of Locke's influence on Continental radicalism is somewhat more complicated. The French Huguenots in the Dutch Republic seized upon Locke and in the process transformed him. David Mazel's French translation of the Two Treatises published in 1691, but reprinted in a multitude of editions, simply left out the first treatise, rearranged the second, and at every opportunity attempted to radicalize the text. The French Locke is more overtly antiabsolutist, given to forming opposition parties and interested in a wider system of representation than is the English Locke. Yet even after these adumbrations the French Huguenots and their friends would not leave the text alone, nor would they permit Locke's treatise to pass as a simple vindication of parliamentary government. In 1755 that now aged follower of Toland's pantheism, Jean Rousset de Missy (b. 1686), brought out in Amsterdam yet another edition of the French text of the Two Treatises, and in a new preface explained to his European and Dutch audience that Locke had actually been a republican and an opponent of all forms of oligarchic corruption. Indeed Rousset asserted

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his relevance to the Dutch Republic, while painting him as a supporter of natural law theory similar to that argued in the 1740's by Burlamaqui. A fellow freemason and Amsterdam publisher, Johan Schreuder, published that 1755 edition for Rousset, and it was the most widely circulated version of Mazel's translation on the Continent during the second half of the eighteenth century.

The path from the English Revolution to the age of democratic revolutions is by no means the straight forward intellectual process Hazard imagined it to be. We now know so much more about the first of the great modern revolutions, and therefore its legacy is far more complex than Hazard could have imagined. A political reading of the origins of la crise is now permitting an ideological, as well as an intellectual, history to be written. Locke, as well as Newton, Boyle, Toland, Bayle and the Huguenots, are being linked in new ways to both the political origins of la crise and to its resolution, that is, to the crisis provoked by seventeenth century absolutism as well as to the ideological origins of the democratic revolutions.

3. The Transcendence of Protestantism

The legacy of the English Revolution would have remained a largely British and American matter had it not been for the agressive policies initiated in the 1680's by Louis XIV and his government. All the cultural factors Hazard identified as precipitating the crisis - the new familiarity with the religions and peoples of the world, the increasing movement of books as well as travellers within Europe, the new biblical criticism, both Catholic and Protestant in origin - came together to provoke a massive repudiation of long cherished beliefs precisely because French absolutism threatened to destabilize the whole of Western Europe.

The revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) and the persecution of French Protestants revived in the minds of contemporaries the horrors of the late sixteenth century wars of religion, while French territorial expansionism threatened the survival of the Low Countries, north and south, as well as the territorial integrity of various German principalities. The return of absolutist policies in England in the form of James II (1685-88) made political crisis universal in Western Europe.

By the late 1680's we can discern a steady stream of anti-absolutist propaganda coming from the French language presses in the Dutch Republic and various German cities, especially Cologne. These frequently anonymous tracts denounced the murderous tyranny of Louis XIV, proclaimed the virtues of the surviving European republics and darkly hinted at the right of subjects to overthrow their tyrants. Some of this literature was in fact millenarian in origin and represented, particularly in the writings of the Huguenot refugee, Pierre Jurieu, a revival of Calvinist militancy of a late sixteenth century variety. This religiosity determined the character of the earliest stage of the crisis: fearful of religious persecution, militantly Protestant with theocratic elements, internationally linked through the Huguenot coteries, with their Anglican sympathizers, and finding its outlet in the exiled French language press. In the first instance the republic of letters was born out of that older international, Dutch, Swiss, German, English, and French provincial Protestant culture: urban,

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literate, professional and ministerial, ever hostile to the intolerance of absolutism in either its French or Spanish forms. But the new literary republic quickly transcended the parochialism and the piety of that older religious consensus, and produced a cosmopolitan culture more enlightened than it was Protestant.

This is never to imply that the crisis was solely a Protestant phenomenon. French aristocrats, frequently in touch with an older libertine tradition, humanistically-inclined Jansenists, itinerant Italian noblemen and abbés, possibly even Polish Socinians, participated significantly in la crise and contributed to its resolution in the earliest stirrings of the Enlightenment in Catholic Europe. But for reasons of length I must confine my remarks almost entirely to northern Europe. The eye of the storm, the psychological epicenter of la crise, lay in the Protestant mind, forced by the pressure of the international situation to articulate a new understanding of secular time and the material order if for no other reason than to preserve its social existence.

The transformation within international Protestant culture which began in the 1680's is dramatically depicted in the social gatherings at the Rotterdam home of the Quaker refugee, Benjamin Furly. His father had been a Quaker republican of the previous generation and lord mayor of Colchester in Cromwell's time. In the 1660's the family left England because of religious and political persecution. In the late 1680's John Locke, hounded by clerical spies and fearful of his own arrest after so many of his Whig associates had perished, took refuge in Furly's home. Together they freely discussed politics and philosophy amid Furly's superb library which contained the writings of almost every major early modern political theorist, including rare works by Giordano Bruno and various clandestine manuscripts about Spinoza. They were joined by itinerant visitors from Germany, medical reformers like the van Helmonts, and eventually by newly arrived Huguenot refugees. Furly's contacts extended into the Holy Roman Empire where once again, partly under the impact of French aggression, we can see a revival of Protestant reformism with distinctively utopian associations. Indeed this German participation in la crise is not as yet fully documented. Although it possessed strongly pietistic and mystical elements, we should not forget there the lonely Peter Frederick Arpe, a pagan naturalist and follower of Vanini who was horrified by the excesses of the clergy. He wrote a Latin tract on the theme of Jesus the impostor which was often confused, even by Leibniz, with the more famous Traité des trois imposteurs. Arpe was also an hermeticist who corresponded with the younger generation of Huguenot refugees who frequented Furly's home and used his library, but he appears not to have known Furly or the van Helmonts.

It was the inner light mysticism of the Quakers that bound Furly to the van Helmonts; he wrote earnestly to William Penn in Philadelphia about van Helmont's doctrine of metempsychosis, that is, the transmigration of souls after death, arguing that this should never be confused with irreligion. But in the late seventeenth century mystical beliefs in the hands of merchants and doctors could take strange turns. The light that shone in the soul of Furly permitted the third earl of Shaftesbury to write him confidently in 1706 about the mighty light shining in England and Holland, about free thought and the end

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of superstition and enthusiasm, in short about the establishment of an entire Philosophical Liberty, the new Enlightenment. With Furly's inner circle or his library we may rightly associate some of the most important works of the early Enlightenment: Locke's Two Treatises, his Essay on Toleration (1690), Toland's Christianity not Mysterious (1696), and not least, the infamous Traité des trois imposteurs. This impious clandestine manuscript labelled Jesus, Moses and Mohammed, impostors, and it was extrapolated out of a manuscript text that the French Huguenot refugees, Charles Levier and Rousset de Missy, got in 1711 from Furly's library.

Each of these major works of the early Enlightenment is very different from the others, yet all reveal the failure of Protestantism as such, even Quakerism, to offer a resolution to the uncertainties and confusions of the late seventeenth century. When Toland arrived at Furly's home in 1693 he was studying for the Presbyterian ministry and fresh from his participation in the Edinburgh student riots in support of William of Orange. He was ingenious and free-spirited, as Furly described him to Locke. But in those Dutch cities, possibly in Furly's library, Toland's spirit took flight. He never accepted ordination in any religion, unless we choose to count his Socratic Brotherhood for which he later wrote pantheistic rituals that prepared the way for European Freemasonry. The step from free-spirited Christian belief based upon the light of reason to reasonable free-thought, devoid of any discernibly Christian content and even violently hostile to orthodox religiosity, was not easily taken, even at the height of la crise. Almost without exception those few Protestants, such as Toland, who took it did so for political reasons. You could not construct a policy free of tyranny and corruption, they believed, if some men were permitted transcendance on this earth. Private worship brought with it support for the public power of priests and for mystifications that permitted some men, especially kings, to imagine themselves immune from their own material interests. It was easier to see the public implications of private religiosity in a Calvinist republic where the majority of the clergy still supported theocracy and the publicly pious oligarchy hovered between civic pride - seldom civic virtue - and corruption.

How right Hazard was to see the Dutch Republic as the entrepôt wherein la crise first matured and found resolution. His Francophone characterization of The Netherlands was however based largely upon its geography and the strength of its French language press; it happened to be the place where the migration stopped and the English freethinkers first encountered the French Huguenot refugees. But the Republic was, as we now know, more than that. It was also the urban, commercial and diplomatic center of Western commercial capitalism in the late seventeenth century. Its small but powerful elite spoke and read French as well as Dutch, and the first stirrings of the Enlightenment on the Continent, the introduction of the new science, first in its Cartesian and then in its Newtonian forms, the violent pamphlet warfare against tyranny, the growth of spinozism and freethought, the emergence of a periodical and spectatorial press were Dutch phenomena before they were European ones. We need to know more about the early Enlightenment in the Dutch Republic, but we now know enough to say that here we found the first European intellectuals to come to terms with

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the moral and intellectual implications of commercial capitalism. That economic and social reality, more than any other factor, would seem to account for the particularly radical turn that the Enlightenment took there in its early years. The Huguenot refugees and their friends encountered what they came to see as republican decadence, and some of them such as Rousset responded by privately repudiating the Calvinism of the Dutch elite in all of its forms, and by using ideas developed in one revolution to foment another within the Republic itself.

Yet most Protestants affected by la crise did not adopt such a radical direction. The key to the nature of la crise as it affected the mainstream of the Protestant internationale seems to lie in what may be described as Calvinist rationalism. That paradoxical phrase captures the apparant contradictions, the ambiguities, common to such disparate seekers after new truths as the Anglican scientist, Isaac Newton, the Dutch Calvinist minister, Balthasar Bekker, and the Huguenot journalist, Pierre Bayle.

Calvinist rationalism permitted them to live in two worlds, to have their faith as well as their scientific enquiry, indeed to hold the tension of the crisis within their own minds without succumbing to intellectual madness, that is to either atheism or enthusiasm. Their brand of Protestantism derived historically from Calvin, and at its core was an extreme monotheism, a God for whom the law of universal gravitation according to Newton, is merely the divine will operating on the universe. Bekker described this Protestantism in his famous and brilliant treatise attacking magic, as a true monotheism. Such a God could be worshipped anywhere, in one's alchemical laboratory in Cambridge, or in the workroom of your publisher where you strove, as did the refugee Pierre Bayle, to keep body and soul together by compiling a universal dictionary. Exposure to such a God literally made salvation possible especially if you were a defrocked Benedictine monk living in Amsterdam where prostitution, and other temptations of a more cerebral sort, were legally tolerated. The spectatorial journalist and former monk, Nicolas Gueudeville, was saved from libertinage, as he recalled, only by the intervention of a devout Calvinist. You did not necessarily have to devote your life to such a God; in some cases it was sufficient just to know, as did Gueudeville, that he and his followers maintained an orderly existence.

With this God in your mind you could indulge your scepticism as did Bayle in his Dictionnaire (1697), or you could give assistance to younger, less pious, refugees. These young men's coffee-house flirtations with spinozism - if Bayle knew about them - could not obscure their Protestantism and they, in turn, long after they had begun trafficking in the forbidden wares of atheism and clandestine manuscripts, would honor Bayle as theirpatriarche. And the possession of such a heady theism, when reconciled to Cartesianism, made a Calvinist minister like Bekker despise his fellow clerics who continued to use their God to obfuscate the power of reason. It is not accidental that he dedicated all his treatises either to the burgermeesters or raden of Amsterdam, or to professors of mathematics, lawyers, and doctors. Their common sense and learning, he believed, distinguished them from the masses and the clergy who court the lower orders out of a compatible and comparable ignorance. Bekker compiled a massive, documented assault on the paganism of the masses, at home and abroad.

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Using the evidence of religious practices from the travel literature he denounced tovery en spokery - witchery and spookery. Bekker's purpose, as he put it in De Betoverde Weereld (The World Bewitched, 1691) was to banish the devil from the world and to bind him in hell so that the king Jesus may rule more freely on earth.

Such a ferocious monotheism was the only creed capable of destroying Catholicism, both its priests and its doctrines. Newton's anti-Catholicism permeated his life as well as his natural philosophy; among other factors it made possible his rejection of scholasticism. Bayle's made him into an anti-cleric with a particular dislike for the pretensions of his own credal overseers, and Bekker wrote against the intervention of devils because he knew that the papist church is the kingdom of the devil. Incidentally that overt anti-Catholicism was carefully removed by Bekker from his French translation, Le monde échangé (1694). This may have lead Hazard and subsequent commentators to overstate his rationalism at the expense of his extreme Calvinism. What is central to the Protestant crises is the mélange, the interplay, indeed the fusion, of these only apparently contradictory impulses.

Among these Calvinist rationalists only Bayle escaped the historical logic of his position; he alone eschewed millenarianism. In so doing he illustrates the wisdom to be extracted from a direct personal experience of persecution at the hands of absolutists and theocrats alike. Predictably, the absence of overt millenarianism in Bayle is linked to his anti-clericalism. Bayle was a Calvinist who took human history seriously because he feared that clergymen and state bureaucracies were to be tne sole beneficiaries of the wars that must precede the apocalypse. Unknown in Hazard's time, Newton's millenarianism, so carefully buried in voluminous manuscript treatises, was his birthright as a true English Protestant who hated the Laudian pretension of the high church just as much as he feared the heresies of the vulgar. Bekker's millenarianism was probably missed because it lay buried in a Dutch treatise on the prophecy of Daniel which he wrote in the spring of 1688 when the outfitting of the Dutch fleet was plainly visible in the harbors. He knew at that moment that the French king would someday be smitten by the hand of God, just as he knew that natural science (Natuurkunde) permits us to know more the earth than the heaven... while the prophets teach us about the Messia. Such a God permits his followers to know what they choose to know with an appalling certainty.

It is not wrong to emphasize the rationalism in these various intellectual postures provided we permit the fideism its rightful place. Just because Newton was an alchemist and a millenarian, Bekker also a millenarian and Bayle, a fideist, does not justify our removing them from the early Enlightenment. Rather these facts - all the result of modern scholarship - require that we take the concept of la crise more seriously than ever; it also means that we must mold our definitions of the Enlightenment to fit the evidence as we now see it. In the eighteenth century reforming aristocrats could be pantheists, freemasons could be empiricists while worshipping at their secret rituals, and radical democrats, like Priestley, could be milleniarians because the categories in their minds had been inherited from the Protestant version of Christianity as transformed by the seven-

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teenth century revolutions, both political and intellectual, against absolutism.

But the new element that coincided with those revolutions was science, in particular, the new mechanical philosophy. Hazard saw its importance yet even he understated the case. As we have found new ways of interpreting the language of science, of discerning its ideological content, we have now come to a richer understanding of its role, both in percipitating and resolving la crise.

4. The New Science and the development of Liberal Christianaty

By the 1680's it could be said that the European elite had been badly served by the guardians of religious orthodoxy. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries both Catholic and Protestant theologians had based the metaphysical foundations of their doctrines, for example, the Trinity and transubstantiation, as well as consubstantiation, on scholasticism, that is, on the Aristotelianism of the schools and universities. But by the late 1630's after Galileo's confrontation with the Church, and the publication of Descartes' Discourse on Method (1637), it was clear that Aristotle and Ptolemy no longer adequately described the operations of the natural world, either celestial or terrestial. The Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century was, in essence, a philosophical revolution that replaced Aristotle with the rival explanation of a mechanical universe verified by experiment and observation. In the 1680's one could still find Aristotelians in any school in almost any country, but in Western Europe they were now on the defensive. Yet no consensus had emerged to replace the old theology with a Christianity compatible with science. Of course Galileo had been a devout Catholic who had the misfortune to know more about the heavens than his clerical opponents, and Descartes had also been a devout Christian, and probably a Catholic. But neither nad felt the need to offer solace to scholastic theologians desperately trying to maintain orthodoxy in the face of the destruction of Aristotelian natural philosophy. Neither could have imagined that eventually it would be necessary to construct a new Christian religiosity based in large measure upon mechanical assumptions. Yet that was precisely the synthesis developed in the second half of the seventeenth century by English Protestants forced under the impact of the English Revolution to rethink the relationship between the natural order, society and religion. Eventually all progressive Christians from Leibniz to pere Malebranche would be forced to restructure the philosophical foundations of Christianity to conform to one or another version of the new science.

English scientists of the mid-seventeenth century like Robert Boyle (1632-91) attacked Aristotelianism because they believed that the religion it was used to support went hand-in-hand with absolutism. They also believed that scholastic arguments about the inherent tendencies within bodies encouraged an indigenous naturalism among the masses. According to Boyle scholasticism leads people to believe there is an anima mundi which watches over the safety of the universe and that following from this they might believe that water, for example, has a tendency to move up in a hollow reed because such motion is natural to it. With ideas like that, Boyle believed, you could justify magic as well as transubstantiation; both were a threat from

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the 1640's to the 1680's for Protestant reformers who feared royal absolutism (and hence Catholicism) as much as they feared political agitation among the populace. As Christopher Hill has shown, popular beliefs, including materialism and the power they gave to lay preachers (or to the spirit within each individual) had indeed threatened to undermine the entire system of social order in revolutionary England. Out of the fears provoked by that experience Boyle and his friends in the Royal Society, coincidentally with Protestant theologians in Cambridge, worked out a synthesis between science and religion which was to have European-wide impact from the 1690's onward. It provided an alternative to the militant and purely Biblical Calvinism of the Puritan sectaries as well as to the doctrinal rigidity of Catholicism. Briefly stated, this new natural religion postulated a mechanical universe providentially controlled by God but operated according to laws, which were ordered, harmonious and comprehensible. In Restorian England, as well as in the republic of letters, this liberal Christianity was immensely appealing. Newton was taught it as a young Cambridge student, Locke and Furly embraced versions of it (and it permitted Furly to retain certain of his mystical beliefs), the French refugee and important journalist of Amsterdam, Jean Le Clerc, used his journals in the 1690's to promote it, while in the 1720's a young French poet named Voltaire learned his first lessons in metaphysics from reading the liberal theologian, Samuel Clarke, who in his Boyle Lectures of 1704-05 offered a solution out of the crisis which was based upon the science of Boyle and Newton.

What must be stressed about this liberal Christianity, whether it is found among the Cambridge Platonists of the 1670's, the Dutch Arminians of the 1690's, or liberal Italian Catholics of the 1720's, is the via media it provided through a thicket of religious beliefs which had been of immense political significance throughout much of the seventeenth century. It was seen to undermine scholasticism, hence to attack the ultramontane clergy (the Jesuits, for example), as well as to challenge absolutism. It repudiated popular religiosity with its radical associations; and it offered a moderate Protestant alternative to that radical Calvinism whose millenarianism and emphasis upon the separate power of the clergy had proved so divisive. And not least, it permitted, indeed encouraged, scientific observation and experimentation. Hence it fostered a revival of both the Baconian dream and the Cartesian proclamation that science would provide mastery over nature.

One of the first European responses to French militancy, both political and religious, had been to advocate a sort of European-wide invisible college whose purpose would be to encourage applied science and the establishment of an ecumenical Christianity. The German Protestant scientist, Leibniz, had advocated that utopian scheme in the 1680's but it came to nothing. Yet a mere decade later liberal English Protestantism based upon Newtonian science provided a more realistic foundation for a cosmopolitan consensus. Natural religion appealed to the laity outside of Germany far more than did the abstract and highly metaphysical natural philosophy proposed by Leibniz. After 1689 liberal or latitudinarian Christianity became associated in the minds of Europeans with two extraordinary developments. The first was a successful and bloodless English revolution which removed

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an absolutist king, established parliamentary sovereignity, forced the Dutch stadholder, William of Orange, to accept a Bill of Rights as the condition for his kingship, and established a limited religious toleration for all English Protestants, although not for Catholics or anti-Trinitarians. The second innovation was Newtonian science. In the early 1690's latitudinarian Anglican clergymen championed both the political settlement of 1689 and the Newtonian synthesis, and related one to the other. Suddenly a new consensus had been forged in England: a viable national church remained amid limited religious toleration, clergymen offered justification for revolution and constitutional government, and experimental science had uncovered previously unknown and universal laws. The Newtonian system of the world could be championed as the model for the stable, harmonious, moderately Christian polity ruled by law, not by an arbitrary and capricious will. This was a scientific and political synthesis that repudiated the materialism of Hobbes, ignored the republicanism of Harrington, and labelled radical sectaries, Levellers, Diggers, Quakers, etc. as disorderly magicians. It justified political revolution without social upheaval. That new natural religion permitted Locke to argue for the reasonableness of Christianity against the deism of Toland, and it also permitted this guardian of respectable contract theory to lobby among his parliamentary friends for the abolition of the censorship laws. Partly as a result of Locke's efforts parliament permitted the Licensing Act to lapse in 1695, and the printing press in England acquired a freedom only rivalled by the French language press in the Dutch Republic. With liberal, Newtonian Christianity as its centerpiece the English model of society and government captured the imagination of thousands of educated, largely urban, Europeans who frequently heard about it in the first instance from French language journals - or translations of English texts - undertaken by Huguenot refugees or Dutch scientists such as 's-Gravesande. By the second decade of the eighteenth century a new form of social gathering had been invented to celebrate this God of Newtonian science, the Grand Architect as he was called, to extend informally the limits of toleration, and to celebrate English empiricism with its passion to classify and collect. In a formal sense Freemasonry began in London in 1717 and it was led by Newtonians and Whigs, but its roots stretch back to the 1690's, rather predictably to freethinking circles found within the Whig party. As early as 1710 Huguenot refugees in The Hague with the assistance of Toland had discovered a version of the masonic gathering, the earliest Continental lodge was probably in Rotterdam in 1720, and by the 1730's freemasonry could be found in Paris, much to the distress of the authorities. Its official appearance in The Netherlands was not until 1734, and by then masons formed the core of the Anglo-Dutch lobby. Italian aristocrats in Naples set up lodges in the 1740's, and despite persecution in Catholic countries, Freemansonry flourished well into the age of democratic revolutions. Indeed in a social sense it became one of the most important links between the liberal solution to la crise and the Continental breeding ground for the visionaries and the disillusioned of the later period.

Despite the enormous success of liberal Christianity both at home and abroad it never entirely obliterated the radicalism of the revolution that had given birth to it. The English freethinkers, Toland, Collins

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and Tindal, made sure of its survival, and as late as 1752 Amsterdam freemasons writing in Dutch were forced to deny that their views bore any resemblance to the anticlericalism found in the writings of the English deist, Mathew Tindal.

5. Science and Heterodoxy

Yet just as the science of Newton wedded to liberal Protestantism, - a new natural religion - offered one resolution of la crise, the new mechanical philosophy of the early seventeenth century had been one of its causes. The great intellectual revolutionary of that century had been René Descartes (d. 1650). In the Discourse on Method he argued that all enquiry begins within the mind of the individual and not in the prescriptions or dogmas offered by the clergy, so easily subjected as they had been to the mockery of the sceptics. According to Descartes science sprang from the individual's assumption that God would not deceive and systematically distort our perception of nature. The goal of science became the mathematical expression of mechanical laws that genuinely conform to physical reality. Descartes constructed a cosmic picture of the mechanical universe based upon logical formulations and hypotheses, and with that achievement he left problematic the exact role of continuing experimentation. Cartesianism offered no solace to the scholastics, and it separated matter from spirit so drastically as to render irrelevant that anima mundi also attacked by Boyle.

Indeed this separation was the great danger in Cartesianism: how to reunite matter and spirit in such a way as to guarantee the dominance of spirit over matter, of God over nature, of Christianity over pagan naturalism? Descartes and his immediate French followers such as Malebranche thought they had found an answer in fideism coupled with occasionalism, that is, with the belief in constant divine intervention.

European Protestants in both England and The Netherlands during the 1640's and well beyond also thought that Cartesianism refuted the scholastics while permitting a Christian science to flourish. Indeed on the Continent that Protestant Cartesianism, of which Bekker is one of the most elegant representatives, flourished among the laity and their clerical allies in the universities. Biblicist Protestants like the Calvinist minister of Utrecht, Voet, attacked Cartesianism as atheism and enthusiasm, and tried to rally the populace against the lay magistrates who supported the teaching of Descartes within the university. Voet warned the people that their elders would desert their obligations to the Reformation in a world governed solely by impersonal mechanical laws.

The controversies that erupted over the implications of Cartesianism from the 1650's onwards foreshadow la crise. These were particularly intense in the Dutch cities, but there by the late 1660's at the University of Leiden and elsewhere, Cartesianism had become accepted. Calvinist rationalists saw it as a more than adequate explanation for the laws that govern the material order, and the necessity for constant experimentation in a world made comfortable by the fruits of merchant capitalism seemed hardly a priority. When Leiden established a laboratory it was used solely to illustrate the laws of Cartesian science.

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Only in England during the 1650's did the linkage between Cartesia nism and atheism seem clearly apparant. The English flirtation with Descartes, led in the first instance by the Cambridge Platonists, turned sour for reasons that were local and unique to their experience of social revolution. When the English scientists and philosophers turned on Descartes they did so within the context of the materialist and mortalist heresies thrown up by Hobbes and the radical sectaries. Nowhere else in Protestant Europe at this time did such a complete repudiation occur within scientific circles. One of its not-incidental by-products came in the ease with which a young Cambridge undergraduate like Newton, could turn his back on Descartes precisely in the 1660's because as he put it, his philosophy leads directly to atheism. Newton was no more or less a devout Christian than Bekker or the natural philosophers at Leiden, but his social universe had been far less stable than the one governed by the burgermeesters and regenten.

Above all else, the Cartesian material order is rigidly stable; indeed its God possesses many absolutist qualities, and the laws of nature hang largely upon his perceived honesty. Not surprisingly, Cartesianism made slow but steady inroads within the bastion of anti-Christ, the kingdom of Louis XIV. While the schools and universities of France continued relentlessly to teach Aristotle, by the 1670's Parisian theorists brought Cartesianism to the society of the salons; it became both aristocratic and bourgeois, as well as polite. Cartesianism provided arguments for absolutism as well as for the domination over society by those same groups capable of mastering the new science. In La Pluralité des Mondes (1686) Fontenelle, an academician and Cartesian, presented his natural philosophy as the cosmic justification for the status quo; for absolutism and the rigid social system it supported. The book went through dozens of French editions, as well as foreign translations. While Cartesianism may have shaken the foundations of scholasticism and hence provoked secular vs. clerical tensions within French intellectual life, in the first instance it offered an escape from doubt to its believers that rendered their crisis a mild affair by comparison to that experienced in the 1680's by French Huguenots, Dutch republicans, or English Whigs. But while Cartesianism was being used by the French scientific community to support absolutism, not surprisingly a French Protestant, Denis Vairasse, was one of the first to attack the solace that these new scientific mandarins offered to the pretensions of monarchy (in Histoire des Sévarambes, 1677-78).

Yet there was a dark side to Cartesianism that continued to disturb even its most enthusiastic and absolutist supporters. Were there not difficulties in reconciling spirit with matter when material vortices whirled through space in constant collision only with other material bodies? The danger in the new mechanical philosophy had always been its potential for turning into materialism. In the first half of the century Hobbes had demonstrated the danger much to the horror of all his Christian opponents. By the 1680's it was clear that the greatest philosopher of the preceding generation had begun by reading Descartes and ended up with a new and extraordinary form of materialism. Benedictus Spinoza (1632-1677) cut the gordian knot of the spirit-matter dichotomy by arguing that there is only one substance and it is both

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material and spiritual.

Out of the Jewish community in Amsterdam with its Cabalistic traditions of learning, Spinoza worked his way into metaphysical definitions that he himself labelled political (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, 1670). If our spirit and body are one, then necessity rules our fate, and to live out one's destiny requires freedom, not only to trade but also to believe and read, to participate in civic institutions, to worship as one pleases provided political tranquility is maintained. Contemporaries labelled this philosophy of freedom, atheism; spinozism or pantheism were less pejorative contemporary descriptions, the latter term invented by a supporter, John Toland in 1705. Spinozism is central to la crise. It was what you might embrace after you had left scholasticism (if you had ever belonged), dabbled in the new scientific literature, discovered Descartes and found him compelling for a time, but then became disillusioned with the absolutist tendencies of the French Cartesians. You might have been prepared for it by Hobbes' materialism, although not by his politics, and you were probably a doctor, or a lawyer, or a journalist - a layman of professional status and some university training - who did not much like clergymen telling you what to think. Spinozism appealed to freethinkers, or created them, within every segment of the literate classes, first in The Netherlands, then in England and finally in France. By the 1680's Spinoza's ideas had been translated out of Latin into English or made available in various clandestine manuscripts written in simple French in the Dutch Republic. We still have an imperfect understanding of the sources of this early spinozism, of its actual believers and transmittors, but we now know it to have been widespread.

By the 1720's pantheism was everywhere, its growth an unintended byproduct of the new science. Without Descartes there would have been no Spinoza; without Spinoza, no pantheism; however many other intellectual traditions, including the writings of Giordano Bruno, we can legitimately point to as sources for this most virulent heresy of the early Enlightenment.

The new science in all its forms pried open minds that might otherwise have been content to explain nature by reference to its inherent properties, to what one sees on a daily basis. It also provided an alternative to seventeenth century scepticism which was itself one civilized response to the endemic religious wars of the early modern period. Science also elevated God's work to the status of his word, and in the process made a literal reading of the Bible less necessary if not also, when it came to heliocentricity, simply impossible. To that extent it downgraded Biblical language and muted the message of sectarian groups with their special readings of the Bible.

The new science was the single most important source of arguments against witches, miracles, and special illuminations. One of the most visible symptoms of la crise in the 1680's was the European-wide assault on what contemporaries called enthusiasm. This was mysticism in one's religious piety; the appeal to the inner light in the hands of sectaries. When the French prophets, a group of Huguenots from the Savoy, rose in rebellion against Louis XIV during the early years of the War of Spanish Succession (1702-13), English and Dutch Protestants praised their heroism and the most millenarian among them took the

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uprising as a sign that the end of the world was near. When the prophets actually turned up on the streets of London assisted by Isaac Newton's close friend, Fatio de Duillier, the authorities arrested them, the doctors denounced them as mad, and the freethinkers labelled them as deluded by superstition. Liberal Anglicans argued that the new science provided the foundation for natural religion, for a social cement which rendered the disciplined public experience of divinity infinitely preferable to the private illuminations of the saint. The exiled French prophets took to wandering England, Scotland and finally The Netherlands and Germany in a lonely search for converts. When Benjamin Furly saw them preach in Rotterdam he was appalled by their enthusiasm.

It should be emphasized that the use of science to repudiate magic was frequently not the work of the scientists themselves. Both Boyle and Newton accepted some sort of apocalypse; Boyle believed in magical cures while denouncing the pretensions of the alchemists; Newton secretly practiced alchemy all his life. In Germany Leibniz dabbled in astrology. Their clerical friends worried that if one stopped prosecuting witches in the courts, religion might suffer. Yet by the late seventeenth century English magistrates did stop prosecuting witches while in the Netherlands by the early 1730's the Calvinist clergy engaged in violent persecution of libertines and homosexuals, witches having all but disappeared from their list of concerns.

It was the new science as interpreted by the educated laity of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that forever banished the superstitions (as they saw them) of the people from polite discourse. It was what individuals made of the natural philosophies of Descartes, Spinoza, Boyle and Newton that provoked la crise; what resolved it was the creation of an elite and enlightened culture, one that might still in many cases be Christian but that recoiled from any form of personal illumination or magical power.

6. The Social and Economic Foundations of La Crise

Hazard and also many of the post-war historians of the Enlightenment wrote in a tradition of literary or philosophical history that for all of its achievements nevertheless rendered la crise and its resolution into a series of ideas to be tested, accepted or rejected. More recent historiography, influenced by the writings of Franco Venturi, among others, has attempted to place ideas in their social milieu, to concentrate attention on individuals and groups, their interests, their social organization, political affiliations and aspirations, as well as their intellectual heritage. With this approach the early Enlightenment acquires a texture and complexity and so too does la crise. We now see the earliest supporters of religious toleration in England as political men - indeed the English Whigs first used the word politician to describe themselves - who supported a limited toleration for all Protestants as the only way to form a coalition which could both defeat absolutism and insure social stability and the maintenance of elite hegemony. Those in the 1690's who went further than this toleration permitted and attacked Christianity itself, possessed strongly republican leanings. They saw churches and clergymen as the primary obstacles to the creation of a civil religion suitable for both country squires and city merchants. Once we are aware

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of the spectrum of political interests, Newtonianism, as it entered the Enlightenment tied to the social vision of liberal Anglican clergymen, may be seen as one rather conservative answer to la crise. Yet all these disparate groups in the late seventeenth century were also responding to the growth of a market society. When clergymen preached Newton's system of the world they called it a model for a stable society where self-interest could be both Christian and lead to success. When European journalists or minor government officials privately embraced pantheism they sometimes did so because they saw the providential God of the Christians - in the words of an early pantheist - as the God of the lazy. For deists and pantheists also favored the market and they juxtaposed its freedom to the monopolistic powers sought by monarchs and churches.

We must see the increasing prosperity of Western elites, and possibly large segments of the European population in the late seventeenth century - the English apparently achieved an agricultural surplus by 1700 - as an important contributing factor to the intellectual crisis. The anti-clericalism that united so many of the leaders of the early Enlightenment was a complex phenomenon to be sure, yet it easily appealed to prosperous laymen who resented the elite status and privilege of the clergy. The travel literature with its keen eye for religious ceremony was of course also a direct byproduct of the expansion of Western commercial capitalism, as was the market at home for books and journals. Market transactions required an increasing literacy and numeracy, and by the late 1720's teaching books for English artisans and mechanics had begun to include the basic laws of Newtonian science. Indeed from the mid-seventeenth century onward the new science became identified with the interests and activities of the leaders of commercial society. When the Zwolle apothecary, Hendrik Smeeks, invented his European voyager stranded in the mythical kingdom of Krinke Kesmes (1708) he had him teach Descartes to the natives, while the author's characterization of the origin and purpose of religion is remarkable for its Hobbesian elements. The new natural philosophies offered universal principles independent of any particular doctrinal creed that helped to explain the new and mysterious. When taught in the coffee houses or by itinerant lectures the specifically Newtonian version of the new science, as presented by Hauksbee and Desaguliers in London, 's-Gravesande in Leiden or the abbé Nollet in Paris, was molded to fit the interests of the commercially and industrially minded. The lectures concentrated on weights, levers, pulleys, the measurement of force, the extraction of water from mines, on mechanisms of every kind. One way of characterizing the scientific aspect of la crise which resulted in displacement of Cartesianism by Newtonianism, might be to see the latter in its popularized form as a science much better suited to a more industrial version of commercial capitalism.

By the early eighteenth century commercial capitalism, at least in the Netherlands, had created a class of urban aristocrats and renteniers grown fat from the profits of trade in goods and slaves. And it is precisely in that place, at that moment when the new literature of enlighted, cosmopolitan society took a particularly vicious turn. At its origin spectatorial literature was an invention of English Whigs comfortable in the city, not adverse to the pleasures of the country, but primarily enamoured of their new found freedom to publish, to

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trade, to gather and converse and especially to gossip. The Spectator cast a sardonic, never a really vicious eye, at the comings and goings of the rich and well-born, their deals and speculations, habits and search for refinement. Its Whig editors were never too critical on the subject of commerce and its practitioners; they were simply too fascinated. That genre quickly crossed the Channel, predictably to the Dutch cities where it was seized upon by French and Dutch journalists alike. Doubtless it would have had a bright future in Paris as well, but censorship made that sort of periodical literature a commodity for importation rather than home production. Some of these first journals in the Dutch republic, such as Nouvelles littéraires or De Mensch ontmaskert (1718) simply imitated The Spectator, although the Nouvelles editor, Jean Frederic Bernard, also contributed to the transformation of this genre. For as the spectatorial style crossed the Channel to the heartland of commercial capitalism, its mood changed. There the merchants were the aristocrats; no regent would ever refer to himself as a bourgeois.

While it is true that Dutch capitalism had always rewarded the earnest and plain spoken, however rich he might become, something had changed by the early eighteenth century. In the 1690's English visitors could still hear wanton republican expressions being shouted on the floor of the Amsterdam stock exchange - one suspects the morals of the French court got a particularly rough going over - but by the 1720's there is a growing sense among the observers of polite society that something was rotten in the republic. It is that social context that shifts the mood of the spectatorial press; the gossip turns vicious and the Enlightenment acquires the ability to be socially dangerous.

In the important spectatorial journals of the Dutch writer, Jacob Campo Weyerman, that viciousness predominates. There is an element of hatred in his gossip and his irreligion barely stays beneath the surface. His Rotterdamsche Hermes published during the 1720's was also aggressively libertine, with the clergy bearing the brunt of his sexual sarcasm. His contemporary in Amsterdam, Jean Frederic Bernard, whose writings influenced Montesquieu, also used a spectatorial style in his Réflexions morals, satiriques et comiques (1713). In the style of La Rochefoucauld he catalogued the amour propre of his age; but there is malice in his humour. His approach to religion resembles that of Hobbes, and over and over again he speaks of interestand avidity; his pastors are all rich and content, his merchants buy books to decorate their homes, never to be read. By comparison his Persians are more interesting; they are relatively honest and uncorrupted. The travel literature made possible by the expansion of commercial capitalism had turned on the culture that spawned it. By the second decade of the eighteenth century the examples of paganism used to disabuse Europeans of their superstitions have given way to fascination for these same pagans, at moments even envy. Bernard with his associate, the refugee engraver, Bernard Picart, initiated in 1723 the multi-volumed first encyclopedia of all the religions of the world. In this instance cynicism and alienation led to the creation of anthropology.

Throughout the eighteenth century pagan religiosity would frighten both the godly and the enlightened; yet for those who contrasted pagan societies with even the most enlightened European regimes, there was

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a strong temptation to portray the former as utopian, to create Eldorado. The republic of letters staggered through the wars against absolutism, repudiated religious fanaticism and enthusiasm, discovered science and deism as respectable alternatives, only to emerge at the end of la crise with the realization that all Continental societies were in some sense ancien régimes. For some decades the philosophers believed that the alternative lay across the Channel in the social and political order sanctioned by Newton and the Revolution Settlement. That at least was what Voltaire preached, and the French Protestant press did everything in its power to preserve the illusion. Given the light that had once shone from that direction it was an illusion with considerable merit.

Bibliography

1.

The basic book on the subject of the crisis of the European mind remains Paul Hazard: La Crise de la conscience européenne, 1680-1715. Paris, Boivin, 1935. Hazard followed this work by an examination of the resolution of the crisis. La Pensée euvonéenne au XVIII eme siècle. De Montesquieu à Lessing. Paris; Boivin, 1946. 3 vols. To begin with the most recent attempt to restate the crisis, in this case in Marxist terms, there is Erica Harth: Ideology and Culture in Seventeenth Century France. Ithaca (New York); Cornell University Press, 1983. In English culture recent revisions of this problem, especially as it relates to science, can be found in James R. Jacob: Robert Boyle and the English Revolution. New York; Burt Franklin, 1977, and Margaret C. Jacob: The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1688-1720. Ithaca (New York); Cornell University Press, 1976. In Italian culture the reader should consult Vincenzo Ferrone: Scienza, Natura, Religione. Mondo Newtoniano et cultura italiana nel primo settecento. Naples 1982. There are two general works for France and the crisis that are also useful: Bernard Magné: La Crise de la littérature française sous Louis XIV. Paris; Champion, 1976, and Lionel Rothkrug: Opposition to Louis XIV: The Political and Social Origins of the French Enlightenment. Princeton; Princeton University Press, 1965.

2.

For the political traditions of the English Revolution consult George H. Sabine: A History of Political Theory. London; Harrap, 1949; C.B. Macpherson: The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke; Christopher Hill: The World Turned Upside Down. London 1972. The relationship between science and the English Revolution is explored in James R. Jacob and Margaret C. Jacob; ‘The Anglican origins of modern science’. In: Isis 71 (1980), pp. 251-67. The career of John Toland can be found in Chiara Giuntini: Pantheismo e ideologia republicana: John Toland (1670-1722). Bologna; Il Mulino, 1979. A good general book in John Locke is by Geraint Parry: John Locke. London; Allen & Unwin, 1978. English republicanism can be best understood by reading Caroline Robbins: The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman. New York; Atheneum, 1968. William Hull: Benjamin Furly & Quakerism in Rotterdam. Philadelphia; Swarthmore College Monographs, 1941. The contact between the English republicans and the French Huguenot refugees is described in Margaret C. Jacob: The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans. London; Allen & Unwin, 1981. The history

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	of European Freemasonry has not always been well written, either by dévots or by the paranoid representatives of the conspiracy theory. But the best work on the subject that can be read with profit is by Pierre Chevallier: La première profanation du temple maçonnique ou Louis XV et la fraternité, 1737-1755. Paris; Vrin, 1968. Also enjoyable is Lesley Lewis: Connoisseurs and Secret Agents in Eighteenth Century Rome. London; Chatto & Windus, 1961. Nicolas Gueudeville is a perfect representative of the crisis and there is now a good monograph on him: Aubrey Rosenberg: Nicolas Gueudeville and his Work (1652-172?). The Hague; Nijhoff, 1982.
3.	The importance of Descartes for the crisis can be explored in Aram Vartanian: Diderot and Descartes. A Study of Scientific Naturalism in the Enlightenment. Princeton; Princeton University Press, 1953 and in A.J. Krailsheimer: Studies in Self-Interest. From Descartes to La Bruyere. Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1962. Spinoza made an enormous impact in French, and European thought in general. For that impact see Paul Vernière: Spinoza et la pensée française avant la révolution. Paris; Presses Universitaires de France, 1954. For the English deists we can still read with profit Norman L. Torrey: Voltaire and the English Deists. New Haven (Connecticut); Yale University Press, 1938. And for one case study of the impact of Newtonian science see René Pomeau: La Réligion de Voltaire. Paris; Nizet, 1956.
4.	One of the most extraordinary developments since Hazard wrote has been the many studies on the ‘little men’ of the early Enlightenment, the journalists, hack-writers, propagandists, and spies. The best of these studies are: Jean Sgard (ed.): Dictionnaire des Journalistes 1600-1789. Grenoble; Presses Universitaires, 1976; David T. Pottinger: The French Book Trade in the Ancien Régime, 1500-1791. Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1958; H. Bots [et al.]: De Bibliothèque Universelle et Historique (1686-93). Amsterdam 1981; I.H. van Eeghen: De Amsterdamse Boekhandel, 1689-1725. Amsterdam; Scheltema-Holkema, 1962-67 (and in French translation). For Anglo-Dutch relations among liberal Christians consult Rosalie Colie: Light and Enlightenment. A Study of the Cambridge Platonists and the Dutch Arminians. Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1957. If you want to read the treatise on the three impostors, there is a modern edition: P. Retat (ed.): Traité des trois imposteurs. Grenoble; Universités de la Région Rhone-Alpes, 1973. The relationship between the crisis and the origins of Diderot's great Encycopédie is discussed in Franco Venturi: Le origini dell' enciclopedia. Rome 1946. The early impact of travel literature is discussed in Geoffrey Atkinson: The Extraordinary Voyage in French Literature before 1700. New York; Columbia University Press, 1920.
5.	For the Enlightenment in Catholic Europe, in the first instance France, one should learn something about the power of the monarchy to control ideas. For that see Joseph Klaits: Printed Propaganda under Louis XIV. Absolute Monarchy and Public Opinion. Princeton; Princeton University Press, 1978. For Boulainvillier, see R. Simon: Henry de Boulainvillier, historien, politique, philosophe, astrologue, 1658-1722. Paris: Boivin, 1941. On French freethinking there is a good general study to be found in J.S. Spink: French Free-Thought from Gassendi to Voltaire. New York; Greenwood, 1969 (a

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reprint). For Italy the reader should consult the book by V. Ferrone mentioned earlier, or Eric Cochrane: Tradition and Enlightenment in the Tuscan Academies, 1690-1800. Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 1961. For Giannone, see G. Ricuperati (ed.): Il Triregno. Milan; Einaudi, 1971.

Samenvatting

Het was Paul Hazard, die in zijn La crise de la conscience européenne, 1680-1715 de veranderingen in het europees bewustzijn beschreef. In deze tijd veranderde de visie op mens en natuur, staat en godsdienst; aldus werd de weg vrijgemaakt voor de franse revolutie. Hazards werk (uit 1935) was decennia lang te verenigen met alle nieuw onderzoek, en de resultaten daarvan. Toch leidt Hazard té rechtstreeks geschiedkundige veranderingen af uit de veranderingen van de ideeën. Hij legt tezeer het accent op de ‘forces intellectuelles’. Oorzaak van de eindrevolutie was oorspronkelijk het konkreet verzet tegen koning en kerk, gedurende de engelse revoluties van 1640 tot 1688/89. Toén werden er teksten van politieke, godsdienstige en wetenschappelijke aard geproduceerd, die, eenmaal de zee overgestoken, als resultaat de ‘Verlichting’ tot gevolg hadden; deze was nadien echter meer europees, frans of hollands gekleurd dan eigenlijk engels.

Wat beïnvloedde de crisis?

In het politieke hadden drie engelse stromingen invloed. Daar was de richting-Hobbes, die wel het recht van de vorst verdedigde, maar uitsluitend op basis van een ‘contract’. Er waren de denkers uit het Commonwealth van de jaren '50, die een republikeins principe huldigden. Deze vrij-denkers kregen in de Nederlanden kontakt met de voor het franse absolutisme gevluchte hugenoten. Tenslotte waren er de ‘levellers’ (Winstanley, Toland); hun invloed valt in de Nederlandse Republiek terug te vinden in kringen rond Furly, en Rousset de Missy. Door de laatste werden politieke geschriften van Locke zodanig geëditeerd dat deze een radicaal anti-absolutist scheen (ed. Amsterdam 1755).

Hiernaast had het agressief absolutisme van Lodewijk XIV zijn eigen tegenreactie gecreëerd. De contrapropaganda kwam voornamelijk vanuit de bedreigde republiek. Gevoed vanuit oude urbane, geletterde tradities in het protestantse milieu, ontstond als tegenwicht de ‘république des lettres’, uiteindelijk meer verlicht-kosmopolitisch dan protestants, die zich ook in katholieke gebieden kon verbreiden. Belangrijk is het milieu rond de Rotterdammer Furly, waar een boek als het Traité des trois imposteurs (Jesus, Mohammed en Moses) kon ontstaan. De republiek was in zekere zin de hoofdstad van Europa: hier ligt het begin van de groei van het vrije denken, de groei van de opiniepers, de strijd tegen de tirannie. Hier ook vond de eerste verzoening met het commercieel kapitalisme plaats. Radicalisme bleef echter uitzondering. De hoofdstroom werd een soort calvinistisch rationalisme, waarin God de beheerser werd van de wetten in het heelal. Mensen als Bayle, Bekker passen hierin. Overigens kon men van alles zijn: pantheist, empirist, vrijmetselaar, aristokraat, millenniarist, radikaal. Er ontwikkelt zich een soort liberaal christendom, van verlichte zijde uitgedacht als een soort compromis tussen wetenschap en religie. Er

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was een nieuw, mechanisch universum, gecontroleerd door God, maar beheerst volgens ordelijke en begrijpelijke wetten. Dit is de wereld van Newton en Locke, van Furly en Jean le Clerc (de laatste een bekend Amsterdams journalist); zó werd het bekend aan Voltaire. Dít liberale christendom had verlokkinq zelfs voor een italiaans katholiek. Tegelijk was het een wapen tegen het absolutisme, en tegen de verouderde scholastiek der jezuieten. Met voorliefde dacht men aan een europa-breed, oecumenisch christendom. De nieuwe God, volgens de newtoniaanse versie (de Grote Architect) werd in een nieuw type vereniging geëerd: de vrijmetselarij (officieel bestaand in Londen sinds 1717; de eerste continentale loge te Rotterdam in 1720). Het Spinozisme (dat geest en materie niet langer scheidde, maar hen tot één en dezelfde kracht verklaarde) genoot grote belangstelling. De nieuwe wetenschap was tevens het arsenaal waaruit men kon putten voor aanvallen op allerlei soorten mysticisme.

Het sociale en politieke milieu van de denkers tijdens de crisis kan tevens bij de beschouwing betrokken worden: het gaat niet aan alleen maar de ideeën zelf te bespreken, als zouden slechts die uitgetest worden. De groei van welvaart begon te werken tégen het orthodox christendom. De handel eiste allerlei kennis en eruditie; en die kennis was in toenemende mate newtoniaans (in een verhaal als de Krinke Kesmes wordt in het Zuidland de inboorlingen ook een soort kennis onderwezen, zij het nog in de sfeer van het cartesianisme). Rond 1700 ontstaat er een soort klasse van burgers (in de Nederlanden wás die er al) die zich bezighield met de commercie. Precies op dat moment start de literatuur van een verlichte, kosmopolitische gemeenschap. De spectatoriale literatuur past daarin. In de Republiek blijft het zelfs niet beperkt tot een expressie van tevredenheid met zichzelf: de geschriften geven blijk van een zekere afkeer van het heersende bewind (Bernard, Weyerman). Aan het einde van de crisis had men ontdekt dat op het continent eigenlijk álle regimes ‘ancien régimes’ waren. Vandaar dat in de eerste decennia van de 18e eeuw Engeland gezien werd als de model-staat. (red.)