ABSTRACT
One of the most striking features of the French Enlightenment was its hostility to Christianity, especially as represented by the Catholic Church, a hostility which went far beyond the mere loss of faith produced by the scientific and philosophical developments discussed in the previous chapter. To some extent it was on social and humanitarian grounds. First and foremost, the principle of religious intolerance and the practice of imprisoning or even burning dissidents were abhorrent to most Enlightenment thinkers. Many, too, condemned the Church for its vast wealth and the financial privileges it enjoyed, at the same time as it damaged the country’s economy by removing so many men from the workforce, and even (at a time when population was perceived as a measure of prosperity) by preventing them from having children. There were even those like d’Holbach (1723-89), who, in works such as La Contagion sacrée (1768), anticipated the Marxist view of religion in seeing the Church as having always been in league with oppressive rulers to help keep the people in a state of submission. Some of these criticisms were no doubt unfair, and related more to excesses and abuses than to the essence of Christianity. But excesses and abuses aside, it may be argued that the Church stood for everything the Enlightenment was struggling to liberate itself from. The Church represented authority and restriction; it expounded a doctrine that could not be questioned, it told men what to believe and imposed on them a fixed view of the world and of their role in it. Whereas Enlightenment thinkers enthusiastically sought knowledge and gloried in the achievements and capacities of man, Christian morality was based on the original sin of tasting the fruit of the tree of knowledge, condemned the sin of pride and appeared to deplore most of man’s natural inclinations.
