A Letter to M. Depont [1789]

Early in 1773, in order to place his son in a school at Auxerre, Burke visited France. While in Paris he was well received in the salon of Madame du Deffand and in the circle of the Duchess of Luxembourg. At the rival salon of Mademoiselle Lespinasse, where the philosophes and “enlightened” wits gathered, he probably met Diderot, whose Bible of the Enlightenment, the Encyclopedia, was at last recently completed. Burke spoke with the Parisian freethinkers in religion and innovators in politics, whom he was to denounce in 1790 as “the sophisters, economists and calculators” of the new revolutionary order. After his return to England, on March 17, 1773, in his first speech in Parliament, he expressed his habitual deep distrust and fear of speculative rationalist philosophers, as men who would “degrade us into brutes.” He noted that “the most horrid and cruel blow that can be offered to civil society is through atheism,” and that “under the systematic attacks of these people, I see some of the props of good government already begin to fail; I see propagated principles which will not leave to religion even a toleration.” Although the affairs of America, Ireland, and India were to absorb most of Burke’s energy during the next fifteen years, his visit to France had convinced him that strong speculative intellectual forces in France were preparing for a great social convulsion.