Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) (29 page)

Not all of Kant is this clear, by the way. He had a reputation for being hard to read, using 35 words when three would do — and German words at that. But “What is Enlightenment?” is a terrific, powerful piece, clear as a bell, and hugely influential.

Meeting of minds in coffeehouses and salons

Living in the Age of Enlightenment didn’t mean you had a license to blurt out your every thought in public. Plenty of ideas were still radical enough to get a person thrown in the Bastille or the Tower of London in the middle of the 18th century. Blasphemy, for example, was still illegal just about everywhere.

The definition of blasphemy was fuzzy enough to make anyone think twice before saying something off-center. France didn’t abolish its blasphemy laws until 1791. England was still merrily prosecuting for it into the 1840s. Discussing the shortcomings of the king was no wiser in the 18th century than it had been in the tenth.

So where were those with radical or even revolutionary ideas to go? In London and Oxford, they went to the coffeehouses; in France, to the
salons.

The English coffeehouse culture of the 18th century offered a safe space for discussions of all kinds, including Enlightenment staples such as liberty, the natural rights of man, social progress, and religious doubt — up to and including atheism.

In France, wealthy intellectuals and socialites held
salons
in their homes to have lively conversation. The hosts invited the most interesting and provocative thinkers in town to these salons,
and the best such events, like the twice-weekly meetings hosted by Baron d’Holbach, gathered great thinkers to present and develop great ideas. (D’Holbach was also famous for serving legendary spreads of food and wine, but I’m sure they came mostly for the conversation.) Whole social and intellectual movements were set in motion in the
salons
of Paris, and most historians credit the well-fed
salon
of d’Holbach with laying the foundation of the French Revolution.

A lot of the regular visitors to d’Holbach’s
salon
were prominent atheists, including Denis Diderot (see the next section). D’Holbach was an atheist and published several scathingly anti-religious books, including the hugely influential
System of Nature
(see
Chapter 11
). But he did so under a false name, which made it possible for him to die of natural causes.

Getting explicit in Paris: The incredible Encyclopédie

Think for a minute about the task Enlightenment thinkers had set for themselves. They wanted to strip the superstition out of human life and replace it with reason. That’s like trying to take the marinade out of a steak that’s been soaking for 5,000 years. Religion and superstition permeated humanity’s knowledge, habits, and even humanity’s understanding of itself.

The atheist philosopher Denis Diderot (1713–1784) saw the persistence of religion and superstition as a big problem in realizing the ideals of the Enlightenment. In order to “change the way people think,” he set about the incredible task of creating a comprehensive reference book that would reframe all human knowledge in reasonable, rational terms, leaving religion and superstition on the cutting room floor.

He called it simply the
Encyclopédie
— 35 volumes with more than 75,000 articles by nearly a hundred contributors. (One contributor, Louis de Jaucourt, wrote more than 17,000 articles totaling nearly 5 million words.)

Though it’s not on my bookshelf and probably isn’t on yours either, the
Encyclopédie
had an enormous influence on many of the books that
are
on those shelves, including some of the first arguments against slavery and in favor of basic human rights and freedoms. The set sold more than 25,000 copies. It laid some of the foundations for the French and American Revolutions.

Most important of all was the concept itself — the stunning idea of changing the lens through which humanity had come to see itself and the world.

Challenging the Powers That Be: The French Revolution

All the talk about challenging tradition and authority found a receptive audience in late 18th-century France. The poor were kept poor with huge taxes, while Louis XVI and his nobles — supported by those very same taxes — paraded their wealth and privilege to ridiculous extremes. And standing at the head of the privilege parade was the First Estate — the clergy of the Catholic Church.

In addition to propping up the monarchy with the divine right of kings, the Church was the single largest landowner in France. So a lot of the taxes paid by tenant farmers went straight into the coffers of the Church, as did their tithes. So when the philosophers
began filling the heads of the lower and middle classes with ideas about their natural rights to freedom and equality, little effort was required to connect the dots.

The French Revolution wasn’t just a revolt against political power — it was also a revolt against the power and ideas of the Catholic Church. The following sections touch on events in the Revolution that directly related to challenging the Church and religion itself.

Dechristianizing France

A process known as the
dechristianizing
of France began very shortly after the Revolution itself. The goal was to destroy not only the undue power and privilege of the Catholic Church in France but to replace religion with new practices and beliefs based in human reason. Over the course of several years:

All church land was confiscated.

The Church’s power to tax was revoked.

Priests lost all special privileges and became state employees without allegiance to the Pope. Those who didn’t consent to the change were subject to deportation or death.

Angered by the former Church policies, mobs massacred hundreds of priests and nuns. Thousands of other priests and nuns were forced to marry.

Crosses, statues, plaques, icons, and other religious symbols were removed from buildings and monuments throughout the country. Most churches were closed, destroyed, or converted to secular uses.

The religiously based calendar was replaced with a new one with natural rather than supernatural names for the months. Instead of saints’ feast days, each day celebrated a given animal, plant, mineral, or tool.