Cleric and Philosophe

Battle lines are never, in reality, as clean as we see them in retrospect. Some 700 of the 20,000 freemasons in pre-Revolutionary France were Catholic clergy, and Michael Burleigh reports that “revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries, clergy and laity shared a taste for the same authors. In 1778 Marie Antoinette attended the opening night of Voltaire’s last play . . . . Her consort, Louis XVI, read Montesquieu and Voltaire, along with Corneille and La Fontaine, in the Temple where he was imprisoned. Clerics were avid readers of the philosophes, and mixed easily in the provincial academies and masonic lodges, which, together with salons, were the institutional hubs of englightenment. The Jesuit monthly Journal de Trevoux included admiring and intelligent reviews of Diderot’s Encyclopedie , archly indicating which entried had been lifted from a Jesuit encyclopedia, and a Jesuit philosophy without appropriate acknowledgement. Counter-Enlightenment authors were not slow to adopt Rousseau when it came to challenging the icy supremacy of reason over faith and feeling.”