The Clandestine Universe of the Early Eighteenth Century

by Prof. Margaret C. Jacob

Formal philosophers of the seventeenth century spawned informal and anonymous readers. Some of them got bold enough to put their ideas into print, albeit anonymously, and a new genre, that of clandestine books and manuscripts was born. The early stages of the Enlightenment were nurtured in that literature, and the persona of the philosophe took shape in the shadowy world of hidden printing presses, coteries of bold talkers, and aspirants to living by the fruits of one’s pen. It was not accidental that the first work ever to describe the new style of philosophizing, called Le Philosophe appeared anonymously, probably with a phony imprint on its title page (Amsterdam, 1743). By 1700 thousands of people were involved in everything from writing, printing and selling anonymous books, to buying them and passing them along to a friend. To this day we know very few names, and the ones we do know generally come from the records of censors or the police.

Being secretive about the more outrageous ideas associated with the Enlightenment was more than having fun. In every Western country prison loomed for those who violated the laws of blasphemy or evaded the official censors. Yet once printing presses existed that the authorities could not control, and people had enough money to buy the forbidden, no one could predict how outrageous, indiscreet, or witty books and journals might become. Never before in the Christian West had the beliefs of the literate and educated fractured so openly, so publicly, in matters not simply of doctrine - Protestants and Catholics had been quarreling for centuries - but around the very status of Christian belief, its value and proofs. By the late eighteenth century, during the life time of Immanuel Kant and Moses Mendelssohn, this same critical spirit would grip Judaism, engendering splits that endure to this day.[1]

Take a small city like Namur, in the highly censored Austrian Netherlands (what is today Belgium). It had about a dozen book stores. When the authorities raided them in the 1730s, they found what they labeled "bad books," French translations of works by the English advocate of revolution, John Locke and by Niccolò Machiavelli, the great Italian Renaissance theorist of power who wrote that the end justifies the means. The bookstores also yielded examples of the risque and the anonymously pornographic. Not just the wealthy bought them. A decade later, when a merchant-tanner of Namur died, his library contained works by Voltaire, as well as fashionable encyclopedias of the era.[2]

One of Marteau's books: Der galante Congress in der Stadt Utrecht, Cöln: Pierre Marteau, 1714 - the translation of Casimir Freschot's Histoire amoureuse et badine du Congrès et de la ville d'Utrecht, en plusieurs lettres, Liege, [1714].

But Belgium could not match France or the Dutch Republic for the outrageous. Near Paris in 1728 a humble parish priest was arrested for claiming that Jesus, Moses and Mohammed had been impostors.[3] He probably had gotten hold of the The Treatise on the Three Impostors that first began to circulate in the Dutch Republic around 1710. By 1728 the claim was actually old news. A good ten years earlier in far away Saxony, the German authorities had been searching the bookstores in the hope of confiscating the very same tract.[4] But unknown to the authorities, the culprits were neither in Paris nor Saxony but in the Dutch Republic. There, as far as current scholarship can tell, relatively obscure deists and pantheists - Rousset de Missy included - had written The Treatise. The charge that the founders of the three great world religions had been imposters stood out as the most outrageous ever made by advocates of the Enlightenment. They wrote it in French, the international language of the day, and Dutch publishers actually put the charges in print in 1719. The book incurred so much hostility from the authorities that most copies just disappeared. Only in 1985 at the library of the University of California in Los Angeles did a scholar, Silvia Berti, discover the first printed copy ever known to have survived the censors. It was not accidental that Jean Rousset de Missy, the young refugee turning iconoclastic radical and freemason, had a major hand in organizing, if not partially writing and guiding the Three Imposters into print. Decades after that escapade he would help to lead a revolution in 1747-48 in The Netherlands. The anger against organized religions that he and his work symbolized could also take deeply political directions.

The secrecy of freemasonry perfectly symbolizes the nature of the clandestine as it emerged in the Enlightenment. Lifting the veil of the lodges, we find old and familiar symbols and ideas reworked and given new meanings. A lodge in Strasbourg, on the French-German border, had an altar in the center of its meeting room and in its "tabernacle" placed a copy of its written constitution. From a clerical point of view such a usage in secret could be interpreted as a mockery of the Eucharist and the Catholic altar. The freemasons probably meant it as a way of showing respect for their lodge and for constitutional governance, elections, voting and public speech-making. Later in the century German freemasons claimed that, glowing in the light of truth, freemasonry may have originated with the building of Noah’s ark. The lodges welcome all religions, "Jews, Turks, Heathen," and then the same tract claimed somewhat incongruously that the order was "bound together by the Christian religion."[5] In the new mental spaces filled by the enlightened, even words that once had a clear meaning, like Christian, could come to denote an alien experience - at least to the pious. Enclosed in the lodge men (and some women) like the great composer Mozart lounged and chatted in privacy and in an atmosphere made semi-religious by special costumes, rituals and candlelight.

It is little wonder that by the 1740s the French word, philosophe took on new meaning as a war between the godless and their critics erupted in France. From time out of mind a typical Western philosophe had carried himself with the hauteur of an aristocrat. Newton put it well when he explained that his Principia had been written technically to avoid his "being baited by little Smatterers in Mathematics."[6] A true philosopher of the seventeenth century loftily detached himself from worldly interests, even controversy, and sought contemplation and passivity. But in the 1740s le philosophe became engagé. One of the earliest indications of this trend appears in the previously mentioned tract of 1743. Dedicated to the memory of the English freethinker and republican Anthony Collins, Le Philosophe [The Philosopher] was probably written in Paris. The tract proclaimed le philosophe as one of those special people who saw through popular errors. One in particular required eradication. Le philosophe had figured out that God does not exist, and in his place people should put "civil society...the only deity he will recognize on earth."[7] Hard work and honesty coupled with a dedication to worldly concerns befit the new, enlightened philosophers.

By being dedicated to a notorious English republican, Le Philosophe signaled an international cosmopolitanism, as well as an active engagement with change in the political order. Its anonymity confirmed that its atheism still lay on the fringe, at the margin of acceptable opinion - even among the self-fashioned who imagined themselves as enlightened. The linkage between Le Philosophe and English freethinking only confirmed what a clerical opponent had written a few years earlier: a freethinker believes, "That the soul is material and mortal, Christianity an imposture, the Scriptures a forgery, the working of God superstition, hell a fable, and heaven a dream, our life without providence, and our death without hope like that of asses and dogs." The philosophers being championed by the clandestine presses would probably have agreed with the cleric, except for the part about our being like asses and dogs. Now human beings have new forms of sociability, and engage in bold communication through speech and print; therein lay the glory of their new worldly condition.

Claiming Amsterdam as the clandestine place of publication for Le Philosophe is also important. It reveals a basic truth about the use of French during the Enlightenment. French was as much the lingua franca of Huguenot refugees, business travelers, and the non-French elites, particularly in The Netherlands and the German speaking lands, as it was in France. Even those who spoke it poorly could almost certainly read it. The place of publication, even of writing, for a French text - sometimes the key to the evolution of its ideas - may not therefore be France at all. The Treatise on the Three Impostors came out of elite circles in the Dutch Republic where the speaking and writing of French denoted culture and civility. The reading market in French was vast throughout Europe - another reason for using it.

To illustrate the importance of French take the publications of Pierre Marteau. There never was a publisher by the name of Pierre Marteau and he certainly never lived in France. He was a pure fiction, invented by Dutch publishing houses, and made an imprint for anonymous books published as early as 1660 by "Pierre Marteau, Cologne." We may legitimately doubt that even the paper or ink for such books had ever seen the outskirts of German-speaking Cologne, across the Rhine from the Dutch Republic. Certainly if there was a taxpayer in Cologne by that name, he had no idea that his name was being used, probably by the Amsterdam publisher Elsevier, to promote some fairly outrageous ideas. How can the censors arrest you if they cannot find you? Today Elsevier is one of the largest publishing houses in the world. Sometimes crime pays.

More than one hundred books came from the imprint of "Pierre Marteau." With press runs of 500 copies, the norm at the time, the total output comes to about 50,000 copies. At the end of the eighteenth century we think that there were 25,000 copies of the multi-volume Encyclopedia by Diderot and his many re-printers. The Marteau books might be read at one sitting; encyclopedias were then, as they are now, reference works. The best collection of books by this false imprint can now be found at Young Research Library at UCLA in Los Angeles. By 1700 the quantity of anonymous works that can be laid to just one publisher’s door rivals what was being produced in the area of French encyclopedias - a full eighty years later.

Pierre Marteau’s earliest French language publications were primarily anti-French and anti-Catholic polemics that could have been written by devout Protestants. Almost simultaneously, the genre of Marteau’s books became experimental, as if the authors were trying to write in the new fictional style we now call the novel. The precise nature of French corruption and decadence required narrative description: young nuns and Jesuits, readers were told, use dildos to give one another pleasure, although their actual intercourse finally occurs on the dunes near The Hague. The Capuchin monks are said to run a "university of cuckcoldry." Marteau’s books also particularly targeted the French aristocracy. Illicit love among the great and the noble clearly sold books. Indeed the very last book to be published, supposedly by "the successor of Pierre Marteau," was a salacious attack on the French queen, Marie Antoinette that appeared in the first year of the French Revolution, 1789. Four years later she would be executed, another victim of the Terror and the reaction against the aristocracy and their clerical supporters.

According to the clandestine literature no social group could be as debauched as the Catholic clergy. Sometimes a woman was claimed to be the author of a tell-all account of the passions of Catholic nuns, whether in Portugal or France. In these Marteau books monks appeared as especially evil sorts, and their erections and masturbation with one another - "all the diverse emotions are rendered visible by the erection . . . " - were recounted with relish for the supposedly naive public. One of Pierre Marteau’s many imitators, the anonymous "Jean L’Ingenu," printed books about love between priests and nuns and bound them with yet a more titillating exposé that told all about the salacious goings-on at the French court. In another Marteau work the author rose to new heights of anti-Catholic fury, claiming that the Bible is useless to Catholics. The Pope is the author of their faith, and for them the Virgin Mary is higher than God because she gave life to him.

Gradually, especially after 1685, one villain emerged as the ogre of choice among Marteau and his many anonymous imitators: Louis XIV, the Sun King, the persecutor of French Protestants who in the throes of an amorous liaison with a new mistress had suddenly become pious and devout. With the revocation of the Edict of Nantes the attacks on the French king and his Catholic clergy became menacing. An anonymous pamphlet declared that the revocation would be his undoing. It further claimed that Louis XIV made an alliance with the elite religious order controlled from Rome, the Jesuits. But, the argument went, they could not be trusted, as they oppose all sovereignty but their own. Then came the tract’s most telling line: "eyes that are enlightened by the light [can see] that France ... is in the grip of a Catholic fury." The metaphor of the enlightened owed as much to the early publishers as it did to the philosophes. This Marteau tract aimed at the enlightened went on to advocate duplicity as a means of survival. It argued that Protestants should do what the Jews did. When persecuted, they hid their religion but raised their children to be faithful. Just look around Amsterdam, the author said, to see how Judaism has survived. Louis XIV will have his kingdom reduced to ashes by his enemies, and the author further claimed they had been "sent by God and the celestial powers who have been profoundly irritated against the tyrannical Government that has been established in France." Sometimes the clandestine literature invoked the divine, if only as a warning to the enemies of toleration.

The odyssey revealed in the clandestine literature was first and foremost a Protestant one. Or put another way, how did a Protestant like Pierre Marteau start out merely as an anti-Catholic polemicist and wind up an irreligious publisher of pornographic novels? To answer the question we need to consider the complex relationship between Protestantism and the earliest stirring of the European Enlightenment. People generally do not wake up one morning and stop believing in God, or settle for deism or materialism when they have just been to church the previous Sunday. In the lost world represented by Pierre Marteau and his readers, a gradual metamorphosis appears to be happening to some literate people, many of whom are as unknown to us as are the authors of what was sold to them. People moved from believing in the reasonableness of the Protestant version of Christianity - vividly highlighted by the obvious irrationality of injustice and persecution in the 1680s - toward the belief that simply being reasonable held the key to virtuous living. If the pilgrim got to that place, the only thing to do on a Sunday morning was to read the newspaper or write letters.

A bold imprint from the shop of Marteau documents the metamorphosis from Protestant to enlightened deist quite concretely. Le Jesuite secularisé [The Secularized Jesuit,1683] wanted the world to know how evil the Jesuits had become. A Jesuit should be exposed as an assassin in disguise in the employ of Spain, and not least as "un pedagogue sodomite." The tract claimed that by comparison to Jesuits, Calvinists acted reasonably in their congregations. Suddenly the author stops to think about who should be seen as reasonable: surely all sorts of believers could be described as reasonable. It may be argued that reason also belongs to the Socinians, that is, to those who deny the divinity of Christ. Simply not being fanatical might be the key to true religious sentiment, and complex doctrines like the Trinity create situations ripe for intolerance. In one book on the Jesuits, the anonymous author has made the migration from anti-clericalism to the fringes of religious heresy.

Not all late seventeenth century writiers were willing to take things this far. A decade after Le Jesuite secularisé, John Locke published a tract intended to bolster Christianity, The Reasonableness of Christianity (London, 1695) in which he tried to pare Protestant Christianity down to essentials. The following year, when Parliament had removed pre-publication censorship, the deist soon to turn pantheist, John Toland, answered him with Christianity not Mysterious (1696). Why should we have religious doctrines or dogmas at all, the fallen away Presbyterian, John Toland asked? Why not just find a set of reasonable principles founded on nature’s laws on which everyone could agree? The persecutions, and the efforts to impose absolutism on the unwilling, put pressure on all Protestants to decide how to defend the virtues of religious belief and practice. We now know that Locke wrote The Reasonableness after he had seen a pre-publication, manuscript copy of Toland’s manifesto for an unmysterious deism.

Both Toland and Locke belonged to the Whig party. Toland had even trained for the Presbyterian ministry - briefly - at Leiden in The Netherlands. Locke, like Newton, secretly did not believe in the doctrine of the Trinity. But both Newton and Locke were horrified at where excessive rationality, coupled with a grasp of the new science, could take people like Toland, especially if they had reason to be angry at the high and the mighty. Toland had probably started out as some kind of believer. A London congregation had even paid to send him to Leiden. It must have ended up regretting that particular scholarship.

Sorting out the twists and turns of Protestantism in the late seventeenth century requires further nuancing. Partly because of tensions within its diverse doctrinal groupings, but largely because of the pressure put on Protestants by absolutism or the fear of its return, its various denominations splintered ever more widely. It is useful to think of an emerging, conservative Protestant version of the Enlightenment that appeared in Britain, the American colonies after 1700, The Netherlands, and parts of Germany. Its advocates endorsed religious toleration, at least for all Protestants, and they were receptive to the new science. They had no time for deism or the bawdy escapades so beloved by the publishers. Pierre Marteau would not have been welcomed in such a congregation, but he might have found a home among "fringe" Protestants, sects like the Mennonites and the Collegiants in The Netherlands or the Quakers in England and Philadelphia, especially if they could not trace the bawdy works to his print shop. Such fringe sects had roots in the so-called Radical Reformation, where emphasis was laid on the "inner light" and the dictates of individual conscience. All downplayed the authority of the clergy. Believing, but enlightened Protestants might be conservatives by comparison to deists or atheists, but in the eyes of devout Methodists or Catholics they were on a very slippery slope. Such enlightened men and women could belong to debating societies, support freedom for the theatre and publishers, and yet, as one Unitarian group in Birmingham put it, also believe that "want of religion is the cause of the increase of criminal offences." Marteau might even have agreed with its judgment. Publishing bawdy literature did not have to mean endorsing it as a way of life; business can sometimes just be business.

Marteau’s books appealed to a wide, if still largely Protestant and Continental audience. Many may first have felt a deeply personal anger. Louis XIV, Charles II, and James II - aided and abetted by their loyal clergies - put rage on the Protestant agenda. Imprisonment, or even the threat of it, was a serious matter. The unsanitary conditions alone could kill. The threat of prison made people suspicious of all-powerful Catholic clerics or of any legally established church. The persecution went on everywhere. The only hope for the freethinking or the persecuted was to appeal to the court of public opinion, a term being invented as much out of necessity as out of the leisure and relative affluence that undergirded the new sociability. Surely, it began to be argued, somewhere, someone must have figured out how to constitute societies where people were allowed to live their beliefs relatively unencumbered.

Almost simultaneously Europeans were discovering two new worlds: one in the heavens as detailed by Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton; the other on the earth as recounted or experienced by merchants, slave traders, and missionaries. Along with the books about science a new genre of literature appeared, one that remains a vital part of publishing and leisure time reading to this day. Travel literature described peoples and places never seen in detail before. Generally the authors treated the distant peoples as exotic, inferior, or odd. But some commentators also saw the linkage between travel and empire, and they used the accounts of travel to point out the injustice that could accompany discovery. In complex ways travel literature fed the impulse toward Enlightenment, and it allowed authors to be inventive, to create imaginary worlds where true enlightenment naturally existed. The impulse to create such utopias came from a simple observation: Might not the problem of religious hatred be systemic, lying deep in the European consciousness, and not simply the result of a few bad monarchs and their overweening clergy? It now became possible to use the imagination unlocked by travel to suggest new systems of social or political organization, and to tell of these fictional worlds as if they were fact.

By 1700 the discontented in Europe seized upon a new way to imagine their world, by invoking an imaginary one, a geographically distant utopia. For example, the anonymous Le Nouveau Voyage de la terre australe [A New Voyage to the Land of Australia, 1693] invented a land of androgynous Australians, that is people who simultaneously possess the two sexes. Among them patriarchs are unknown and the word "father" does not even exist. Hence mothers and children are not subordinated to fathers, and "the great empire that man has usurped over woman, has been rather the effect of an odious tyranny and not a legitimate authority." Once tyranny came under attack, its definition could be broadened fairly easily. Where some writers had seen the high and mighty as libertines, why not endow whole peoples with the right to sexual license? Earlier a Marteau tract on travel to Africa said that there love is made freely, without shame. The travel literature may have contributed to sexual stereotypes that equated the foreign, or people of color, with the libertine, but that had not been the primary intention of authors who used the genre to hold a mirror up to European mores and to declare them in need of reform.

The essence of humankind, according to the Australian philosophe narrating the tract of 1693, is liberty. That being so, the imaginary Australians had dispensed with details about God. They are vague about him: "they believe that this incomprehensible being is all there is and they give him all the veneration imaginable." They never, however, talk about religion. The Australian storyteller then turned into a European materialist and explained that the universe is composed of atoms in motion, nothing more. In the journey to an imagined new world the passage from deism to materialism has become virtually effortless. In another account of an imaginary journey to Tartary written around the same time, an anonymous English traveler discovered "Death to be nothing else but a Cessation from the Motions of Action and Thought." The Tartars clearly do not believe in an afterlife. If anyone asks the traveler his religion say, "I am a shepherd.

By the 1720s the French philosophes like Charles Louis de Secondat Montesquieu, François Marie Arouet Voltaire, and Denis Diderot had taken up the genre of travel literature. Given their literary and imaginative skill, they elevated it to great and canonical status. In the Persian Letters Montesquieu reversed the genre. His Persians visit Europe and find much that is irrational and comic. Voltaire became an actual traveler, and his Letters concerning the English Nation, published in French in 1733 and translated into English in 1734 depicted England as the utopia sought by reformers - a mere twenty-two miles across the Channel. Nowadays some French people travel to England to set up restaurants. In the 1730s Voltaire instructed them to cross the Channel to find out how to reinvent society and government.

According to the philosophes foreign places could also permit the bawdy and the outrageous. In The Indiscreet Jewels [Les bijoux indiscrets, 1748], the French philosophe Denis Diderot invented a mythical kingdom in the Congo where despots exploited the land and the people, particularly women. They in turn fight back as the narrators; their jewels [i.e., their private parts] tell the reader about perfidy, pomposity, and lavish waste - all in the service of rulers and their massive egos. The book, among others from his pen, briefly landed Diderot in jail.

Undeterred, many years later Diderot wrote another saga about travel. Written in 1772, Diderot’s Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage owed a debt to countless narrations about distant places. But Diderot put a twist on their generally pro-European accounts. He purposely sought to cast the Europeans as exploiters. The Supplement belongs to the same literary genre of utopian travel fiction that had been invented decades earlier by the authors of the fanciful tales about Australia and Tartary. As we have seen, utopian travel literature had been originally intended to teach ir-religion and to open up new vistas of disbelief. Diderot now used the genre to attack the entire Western imperial enterprise.