Enlightenment’s Errand Boy

David A. Bell

• Calvet’s Web: Enlightenment and the Republic of Letters in 18th-Century France by L.W.B. Brockliss
  Oxford, 471 pp, £55.00, July 2002, ISBN 0 19 924748 X
• The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon by Colin Jones
  Allen Lane, 651 pp, £25.00, August 2002, ISBN 0 7139 9039 2

The French Revolutionaries identified the Enlightenment as the work of a small, brave band of 18th-century philosophes, whom they rushed to entomb as heroes in the gloomy crypt of the Panthéon. In the corrupt and desolate wasteland of the Ancien Régime, the Revolutionaries proclaimed, the philosophes had cast welcoming rays of light and reason, stirring the dull roots of popular discontent. On the other side of the political spectrum, angry defenders of religious and political orthodoxy accepted this image, but in photo-negative: for them, the wasteland was a happy garden; the rays of light were menacing shadows; and the angelic philosophes were demons, casting Europe into perdition. Thus the fiery gospel of the abbé Barruel and Joseph de Maistre, to which reactionary Catholics and many others held fast throughout the 19th and much of the 20th centuries.