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Updated: June 16, 2025
There is a passage from Condorcet's Des Progr�s de l'esprit humain, which seems to have been written as a warning to our epoch: Le z�le religieux des philosophes et des grands n'�tait qu'une d�votion politique: et toute religion, qu'on se permet de d�fendre comme une croyance qu'il est utile de laisser au peuple, ne peut plus esp�rer qu'une agonie plus ou moins prolong�e.
These various opinions were seized on with youthful fanaticism by the little knot of young men of whom I was one: and we put into them a sectarian spirit, from which, in intention at least, my father was wholly free. The French philosophes of the eighteenth century were the examples we sought to imitate, and we hoped to accomplish no less results.
He says of an earlier visit: 'Alone, in a morning visit, I commonly found the artists and authors of Paris less vain and more reasonable than in the circles of their equals, with whom they mingle in the houses of the rich. Ib. p. 162. The savans I beg their pardon, the philosophes are insupportable, superficial, overbearing, and fanatic.
On the night of his election he went to Lord Saxingham's; but what there happened deserves another chapter. "Je connois des princes du sang, des princes etrangers, des grands seigneurs, des ministres d'etat, des magistrats, et des philosophes qui fileroient pour l'amour de vous. En pouvez-vous demander davantage?"* /Lettres de Madame de Sevigne/
He has sometimes been presented as a man of flabby character whose historical part was that of intermediary between impracticable French "philosophes" and the ruffians and swindlers that Martin Chuzzlewit encountered, who were all "children of liberty," and whose "boastful answer to the Despot and the Tyrant was that their bright home was in the Settin' Sun." He was nothing of the kind.
She sat, as usual, in the arm-chair by the window, looking out silently on that hopeless stretch of the Boulevard des Philosophes. When she spoke, a few lifeless words, it was of indifferent, trivial things. "For anyone who knows what the poor soul is thinking of, that sort of talk is more painful than her silence. But that is bad too; I can hardly endure it, and I dare not break it."
To hold up the crude democracy and turbulent assemblies common in a primitive state of society as evidence that the Russian people possessed at an early period of its history a beautifully organized constitutional system; to contend that the most absolute monarchy in existence has maintained itself for centuries, without encountering a single serious insurrection, in a nation whose distinguishing characteristic is its inability to endure a ruler; to treat the introduction of a totally different and far more complex system of government, the product elsewhere of elements that have no existence in Russia, and of long struggles supplemented by violent revolutions, as a thing that may be effected without danger or difficulty, the "method" being "really not of importance," all this strikes us as evincing a condition of mind that can only be regarded as a survival from the period when the theories and illusions of the eighteenth-century philosophes had not yet been dissipated by the French Revolution.
Till then we must have charity which is justice even for the philosophes of the eighteenth century.
At the last moment I hesitated as to going there at all. What was the good? The evening was already advanced when, turning into the Boulevard des Philosophes, I saw the light in the window at the corner. The blind was down, but I could imagine behind it Mrs.
I scarce know why, nor do I much, I confess, distinguish occasions but I see what I see: the long, the rattling car of the old open native form and the old harsh native exposure; the sense of arrival forever postponed, qualified however also by that of having in my hands a volume of M. Arsène Houssaye, Philosophes et Comédiennes, remarkably submitted by one of my relatives to my judgment.
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