ABSTRACT
This chapter defends the historical complexity of the early European Enlightenment and in the process to elaborate upon themes first presented in The Radical Enlightenment, Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans. The fact of Spinoza's being a Jew lurked in the background of so many polemic assaults on his character and his philosophy. The force of eighteenth-century materialism, and its corollary, atheism, lay precisely in the ability of those who promoted it to champion Newtonian science while walking away from the metaphysics that lay at its root. By 1700 French had become what English now is – the international lingua franca – and true to its stature the most virulent polemics advocating materialism belong to such texts produced in the Dutch Republic as well as France. The Marchand manuscripts in Leiden reveal that the leader of Amsterdam Freemasonry, Rousset de Missy, one of Marchand's closest friends, wrote openly to him about the eventual triumph of pantheism.
