A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

320 Ch. 9 • Enlightened Thought And The Republic Of Letters

occur? But Voltaire nonetheless believed that religion was beneficial because
it offered people hope, and therefore made their lives more bearable. It also
kept them in line: “If God did not exist, one would have to invent him. I want
my attorney, my tailor, my servants, even my wife to believe in God, and I
think that I shall then be robbed and cuckholded less often.”
Voltaire’s fame spread when he took up the cause of a man who seemed
wrongly accused of murder. In 1761, Jean Calas, a Protestant from Toulouse,
stood accused of killing his son, who had been found hanging in the family
basement. The young Calas had intended to convert to Catholicism. Con­
victed by the Parlement of Toulouse, the father was tortured to death,
though it seemed likely that his son had committed suicide. Several years
later, the parlement reversed its earlier decision—too late, alas, for Jean
Calas. But the Calas Affair helped put the philosophies’ critique of reli­
gious intolerance into the limelight of public opinion.
Voltaire’s energetic interest in the Calas Affair reflected his insistence that
progress is somehow inevitable without human action. He concludes Can­
dide with the famous, though seemingly ambiguous, advice that “one must
cultivate one’s own garden,” as he did at his rural retreat. But Voltaire was
counseling anything but a withdrawal into the sanctuary of introspection.
He called for each person to follow the path of light and do battle with those
institutions that seemed to stand in the way of humanity’s potential. In 1764
he predicted, “Everything I see scatters the seeds of a revolution which will
definitely come.... Enlightenment has gradually spread so widely that it
will burst into full light at the first right opportunity, and then there will be a
fine uproar. Lucky are the young, for they will see great things.”

Diderot

Denis Diderot’s monumental Encyclopedia best reflected the collaborative

nature of the Enlightenment, as well as its wide influence. Diderot (1713—

1784), the son of an artisan, was something of a jack-of-all-trades, a man of

letters who wrote plays, art criticism, history, theology, and philosophy.

Educated by the Jesuits (like Voltaire), he flirted with the idea of becoming

a priest, and for a time supported himself by writing sermons for bishops.

Unlike Montesquieu and Voltaire, Diderot underwent a rugged apprentice­

ship in the “republic of letters.” He penned a pornographic novel to earn

enough to indulge the fancies of his mistress. But he also questioned how,

through centuries of male domination, women, despite their capacity for

reproduction, had come to be considered inferior to men. Diderot claimed

that laws that limited the rights of women were counter to nature.

The Encyclopedia, on which Diderot worked for twenty-five years and to

which he contributed 5,000 articles, stands as the greatest monument of the

Enlightenment. At the heart of the project lay the philosophies’ insistence

that knowledge is rational and that it follows the laws of nature. Social and

political institutions should be submitted to standards of rationality. All