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In this connection, many among us, disciples of the encyclopedists, constitute Reason a divinity, and honor her with a system of worship; but it is plain that they personify an abstraction; their improvised goddess is simply an allegorical phantom; none of them see in her the intelligent cause of the world; in the depths of their hearts they deny this Supreme Cause, their pretended religion being merely a show or a sham.
She was profoundly interested in the New Philosophy and the intellectual movement in France, was in correspondence with Voltaire and the Encyclopedists, and a student of the theories of Rousseau.
It has been said that the French Revolution was the work of Voltaire, Rousseau and the Encyclopedists.
Then the philosophic era dawned, and the sarcasms of the encyclopedists withered the monarchical intolerance of Louis XIV and Charles IX. Thereupon the Protestants resumed their preaching, baptized their children and buried their dead, commerce flourished once more, and the two religions lived side by side, one concealing under a peaceful exterior the memory of its martyrs, the other the memory of its triumphs.
The earlier thinkers, such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, D'Alembert, Diderot and the Encyclopedists, whose admiration for England was unbounded, aimed at reforming the rotten state of France on the basis of the English parliamentary and monarchical system: it was a middle-class movement for the assertion of its interests in the state and for political freedom.
They were not yet fated to be realized; the Insurrection Committee had already organized a force which they had entitled the National Guard, and of which they had conferred the command on the Marquis de La Fayette, And at the gates of the city the king was met by him and the mayor, a man named Bailly, who had achieved a considerable reputation as a mathematician and an astronomer, but who was thoroughly imbued with the leveling and irreligious doctrines of the school of the Encyclopedists.
An author of less eminence, and belonging rather to the class of encyclopedists than of historians, is Pompeius Trogus, the descendant of a family of Narbonese Gaul, which had for two generations enjoyed the Roman citizenship.
"Uneven and ill-proportioned," in the phrase of Jerome, this work follows neither the elaborate rhetoric of the early African school, nor the chaster and more polished style of Cyprian, but rather renews the inferior and slovenly manner of the earlier antiquarians and encyclopedists.
The charming irresponsible gaiety and frivolity of the old régime gave place to more serious preoccupation with political movements. The fusing power of Rousseau's genius had melted all hearts; the solvent wit of Voltaire and the precise science of the Encyclopedists were a potent force even among the courtiers themselves.
Never did a man have such popularity; never did a famous writer leave so little to posterity which posterity can value. While Voltaire was indirectly undermining the religious convictions of mankind, the Encyclopedists more directly attacked the sources of religious belief, and openly denied what Voltaire had doubted.
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