[In the following essay, Starobinski analyzes arguments in Gibbon's Essai sur l'étude de la literature, an early work by the historian which concerns itself with the relationship between the decline in letters and the decline in nations.]

Gibbon included in his Memoirs of My Life a critique of his own first work, the Essai sur l'étude de la littérature. Among the things he singled out for disapproval was his imprecise use of the word littérature: “Instead of a precise and proper definition [of] the title itself, the sense of the word Littérature is loosely and variously applied. …”¹ He is, however, being rather hard on himself, for when he wrote his Essai the meaning of the term littérature in French had in fact been somewhat ambiguous. The preoccupation of French lexicographers and philosophers of the time with introducing a clear and precise definition and distinguishing among its various meanings was symptomatic of a more general feeling that revisions in concepts were needed, and the imprecision of which Gibbon a posteriori accused himself reflected that situation: the young author of the Essai by deciding to adopt the French language had necessarily also to submit to the ambiguities attached to its vocabulary.

In the seventeenth century, belles-lettres was a scholarly discipline defined as the “knowledge of the orators, poets, and historians.”² It was in that sense that the term was included into the name of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, which was founded in 1663. But when d'Alembert refers to belles-lettres in the Discours préliminaire de l'Encyclopédie, he does so in order to use it as a pendant for beaux-arts, thus making it a generic term for any original creation of the “beautiful” in the three fields of eloquence, poetry, and history. A more specific word was consequently required for designating knowledge of the works of the distant or more recent past, and this was how the concept of érudition acquired new significance: it came to refer to the detailed knowledge that was brought to bear on all documents from past times. By restricting belles-lettres to products of the “imagination,” d'Alembert had found himself obliged to find parallel names for the other two branches of the encyclopedic tree corresponding to the other two faculties of the mind—“memory” and “reason”; he chose “erudition” and “science.” The resulting triad was presented as part of a “contrasting” definition at the very beginning of the entry for “Erudition”:

This word [erudition], which comes from the Latin erudire [“to teach”], originally and literally meant “knowledge,” both systematic and in terms of a body of facts: but it has more aptly been applied to the latter, that is, to the acquisition of facts that results from much reading. The term science has been reserved for that knowledge which more immediately relies upon reasoning and reflection, such as physics, mathematics, etc., and that of belles-lettres for the pleasant productions of the mind, in which imagination plays the important part, such as eloquence, poetry, etc.³

Erudition is thus clearly distinguished from letters, for it involves a totally different faculty. To the degree that, according to d'Alembert, the discipline of erudition results from knowledge of books, it has to take letters into account; but erudition encompasses more, for it also includes non-literary documents from the past and other languages.⁴ In other words, the objects of erudite study are not limited to the repertory of eloquence, poetry, and history alone. To define the knowledge that applies only to them, another term was needed. The Encyclopédie—here under the authorship of Marmontel—uses the word “literature” to define that corpus of knowledge to which d'Alembert applied the term belles-lettres, and to establish the distinction between it and erudition.

There is a difference between erudition and literature. … Literature is the knowledge of letters; erudition is the knowledge of facts, places, times, and the monuments of antiquity, and it is the work of the erudite to clarify factual questions, define periods, and explain the monuments and writings of the ancients.

The man who cultivates letters profits from the work of the erudite. Thus enlightened, he has acquired the knowledge of great models in poetry, eloquence, history, moral and political philosophy—either of past centuries or more modern times—he is very much the littérateur. He may not know what the scholiasts have said of Homer, but he knows what Homer said. … The erudite may or may not be a good littérateur, for exquisite discernment and a good and carefully furnished memory require more than study alone. In the same way, a littérateur may lack erudition. Should both of these qualities be present, the result is a learned and cultivated man. But these two things do not produce a man of letters. The creative gift characterizes the man of letters: with wit, talent, and taste, he can produce ingenious works with no erudition at all and with very little knowledge of letters. Fréret was a profound erudite, Malesieux a great littérateur, and Marivaux a man of letters.⁵

The sense Marmontel conferred upon the word “literature” is closer to the meaning Montaigne gave it than it is to the one in use today.⁶ According to Marmontel's conception, literature was more than the simple knowledge of facts, but it did not include the capacity to “produce ingenious works.” Between the erudite and the man of letters, using the littérateur as intermediary, Marmontel proposes a gradation which runs from passive storage to active production. Set in an intermediate position, literature profits from erudition, but it does so in order to understand and enjoy what is essential, that is, a fuller comprehension of the “great models.” Today, we would define Marmontel's littérateur as an enlightened amateur, a cultivated man (the term is used by Marmontel)—a literate man. In the text we have just quoted, erudition is the necessary, if insufficient, condition for literature; but neither erudition nor even literature is required for the activity of the true writer. At best, erudition has a preliminary function, a preparatory role.

This also holds true for d'Alembert. Placing the development of arts and letters in a historical perspective that begins with “the renaissance of letters,” he sees the various disciplines succeeding one another in a chronological order that at the same time corresponds to a hierarchy of values:

When we consider the progress of the mind since that memorable epoch, we find that this progress was made in the sequence it should naturally have followed. It was begun with erudition, continued with belles-lettres, and completed with philosophy.⁷

The principal justification for erudition was that it “was necessary to bring us to letters.”⁸ Of course erudition deserved to be defended from those who disparage it, and who, like certain great men, “are quite happy to be learned, so long as they need take no pains at it.”⁹ But d'Alembert does not spare the irony:

The realm of erudition and of facts is inexhaustible; the effortless acquisitions made in it lead one to think that one's substance is continually growing, so to speak. But the realm of reason and of discoveries is, on the contrary, rather small. Through study in that realm, men often succeed only in unlearning what they thought they knew, instead of learning what they did not know. That is why a scholar of most unequal merit must be much more vain than a philosopher or even perhaps a poet. For the inventive mind is always dissatisfied with its progress because it sees beyond, and for the greatest geniuses, even their self-esteem may harbor a secret but severe judge whom flattery may momentarily silence but can never corrupt. Thus we should not be surprised that the scholars of whom we speak gloried so proudly in practicing a science that was thorny, often ridiculous, and sometimes barbarous.¹⁰

Gibbon's entire Essai is, of course, a reply to these lines and to others like them. He does not follow the definitions proposed by the Encyclopedists. He uses the term belles-lettres in its early sense of “knowledge of eloquence, poetry, and history,” not in the later sense of “pleasant productions of the mind.” To him, littérature was synonymous with belles-lettres; he preferred the term littérateur to that of érudit—in a note he tells us that in 1721 the Abbé Massieu complained that érudit was a neologism. He willingly sacrificed what he called “a pedantic erudition”—one that compiles without reason.¹¹ But if he is ready to leave the activities of the imagination to others, he does not see why erudite memory and philosophical reflection cannot work together, contrary to the dichotomy formulated by d'Alembert. His ideal, expressed at the very beginning of the Essai, is erudite research “guided by the flame of philosophy.”¹² Far from conceding that an opposition existed between philosophy and erudition, Gibbon associated them with each other, and he saw in this association one of the characters of a true critic's activity: criticism is “a good species of logic.”¹³ He is convinced that literature can contribute to form a philosophical mind, through the habit of identifying with men of the past. “I conceive, however, that the study of literature, the habit of becoming by turns a Greek, a Roman, the disciple of Zeno and of Epicurus, is extremely proper to exercise [the] powers and display [the] merit [of the philosophical mind].”¹⁴

D'Alembert and Marmontel made the attempt to give erudition its due, to acknowledge its role as informant; but they soon left it behind as they came more and more to rely on those activities stemming from the reflective or the imaginative faculties of the mind. Gibbon, however, insisted upon thinking in terms of facts first accumulated through erudition, and he well understood that such fact-collecting is a process of intelligent selection. Chapter 49 of the Essai, in particular, emphasizes that facts cannot be blindly gathered: vigilance and thought must preside over the entire process from the beginnings of the historical inquiry to the presentation as evidence of those facts that are finally judged to be relevant. Facts must be neither over- nor underestimated. From the start, reflection must temper the collection of data. The notion that it would be possible to abandon “literature” to devote oneself entirely to “reason” was therefore manifestly absurd.

If one examines d'Alembert's theory a bit more closely, moreover, one soon discovers that even with him the separation between erudition and letters is not so radical as we first supposed. If erudition has its legitimate function in history, languages, and books, and if, according to traditional nomenclature, history, eloquence, and poetry constitute the field of letters, it becomes immediately apparent that there is contact—perhaps even a direct continuity—between historical erudition and history seen as a “pleasant product of the mind.”¹⁵ At the very least, nothing prevents the incorporation of solid erudition into works to be read by a large, “cultivated” public. Indeed, nothing does prevent it, even if, in practice, d'Alembert's theory equally justifies “philosophical” history of the kind produced by many French writers (first and foremost, by Voltaire)—history whose rather skimpy erudite baggage and documentary preparation allow it to rise too quickly and easily to the most sweeping generalizations.¹⁶

But if Gibbon rejects the validity of the idea that a distinction must be made between erudite activity and philosophical thought, he still agrees, in the Essai, with the general conclusion of d'Alembert and most of his contemporaries that all the evidence points to a decline in belles-lettres (in the sense of knowledge of the corpus of poets, orators, and historians), literature (cultivated comprehension of the great models), and erudition. Their practitioners are fewer, less brilliant, less honored; interest has turned elsewhere.¹⁷

So the diagnosis is the same. But while d'Alembert saw in the decline of erudition a phenomenon that conformed to the logic of the mind's development, Gibbon found in it only a manifestation of a new vogue—there was no justification for the present hegemony of physics and mathematics. Although they were latecomers, their modernity did not imply superiority. The picture he painted at the beginning of the Essai was one of a “hardly reasonable,” erratic favoring of one or another of the disciplines at one or another time. This succession of preferences was not guided by any inherent logic, nor was the temporary triumph of a particular discipline any indication of its greater legitimacy: “Natural philosophy and mathematics are not in possession of the throne: their sisters fall prostrate before them; are ignominiously chained to their car, or otherwise servilely employed to adorn their triumph. Perhaps their reign too is short, and their fall is approaching.”¹⁸

Those who complained about the loss of erudition placed its origins somewhere around the end of the seventeenth century: “It is from this era,” Gibbon wrote, that letters “may date the commencement of their decline.”¹⁹ Then he calls his first witness, Jean Le Clerc, to support this claim; although he does not cite it directly, he refers to the Parrhasiana, a work published in two volumes in Amsterdam in 1699. A collection of miscellaneous remarks and thoughts, it is subtitled Random Thoughts on Matters of Criticism, History, Morality, and Politics and is signed with the pseudonym Théodore Parrhase. Following three sections dealing respectively with poetry, eloquence, and history, Le Clerc adds another entitled “On the Decadence of Letters”; it begins as follows:

Doubtless, there is decay in the republic of letters, and in several respects, although I wish to speak only of the decay of belles-lettres. It is certain that for more than a generation it has been impossible to find, in all of Europe, anyone to equal the illustrious critics of the last century or the beginning of this one. No one, for example, could equal, either in knowledge or application, or in the greatness or the quantity of their works the likes of Joseph Scaliger, Juste Lipse, Isaac Casaubon, Claude de Saumaise, Hugo Grotius, Jean Meursius, John Selden, and so many more whom I hardly need to mention.²⁰

Many of the famous names cited here by Le Clerc are also cited by Gibbon, who does attempt, however, to discriminate between the greater and lesser minds among them (Saumaise, for example, is “a pedant swollen by useless erudition”).²¹ For Le Clerc, the causes of decline are many and varied, and the learned must bear some of the responsibility. They have not facilitated access to knowledge: “The clever men in this branch of learning have not shown the slightest effort to make it accessible to others.”²² Good critical editions are lacking, commentary is often inappropriate. Excessive praise of the ancients has ultimately done a disservice to the humanities. The vainglory of the scholars has made them ridiculous. And, what is even more serious, letters have lost protectors from among the great and are now suspect, especially in the Catholic countries, for political reasons:

The supporters of the sovereign authority of the ecclesiastical monarchy, on the one hand, and those of the arbitrary power of the secular princes, on the other, have decided that, rather than heeding the works of pagan or Christian antiquity which have for so long been believed, it would be better if the republican ideas of the Greeks and Romans were forgotten and if the thoughts of ancient Christians of both East and West were to remain hidden by the veil of an unknown language. Men were sought who would obey without questioning, who would reason only to uphold and increase authority, both spiritual and temporal, without regard for the ideas of the past; soldiers without principle and without virtue and churchmen who are the blind slaves of authority, examine nothing, and execute any order given them now pass for the unshakable pillars of Church and State. No one will any longer listen to those who quote antiquity and who have principles independent of the will of the sovereign.²³

But Le Clerc does not stop at these discouraging conclusions. There are “reasons for once again cultivating letters,” and these reasons also have to do with politics:

But in places where people take pride in having no laws other than those founded upon natural equity, there is no reason to fear anything contrary in republican Antiquity; and so those who try to make it known to others, who try to profit from its lights, must be favored.²⁴

In Le Clerc's view, the teachings of republican antiquity fully agree with those of the scriptures. “The exact search for truth” is made in order to reveal them, and the results will also be beneficial to politics: “The better it [truth] is known, the greater the authority of the laws and the more justice will flourish.”²⁵

In the next chapter, entitled “Of Decadence in Several States,” Le Clerc touches upon a closely allied problem, although he establishes no direct link between the decline of letters and the decline of states: nations decline as their populations dwindle; they waste away as their industries and revenues shrink and from the effects of intolerance. A state can flourish only if “its members and those who govern it” are in agreement and seek “only the public good.”²⁶ It is harmful if the clergy and the nobility are too numerous and too privileged; those non-productive classes constitute a burden to the state. He directs some of his comments particularly toward Spain and France:

It cannot be denied, politically speaking, that a large number of secular and regular ecclesiastics, who have no industry to help their country flourish and who enjoy considerable revenue without paying any taxes, are a public burden; this is so because they greatly diminish the state's revenue, they prevent the state from being populated by those who would increase it, and they have no skill which might attract foreign money. …²⁷

The large numbers of nobles and of others who possess privileged positions have the same effect on the diminution of the state's income and on the industry that could increase it. …²⁸

Hence, we can conclude that wherever dignity is in the hands of the clergy or the nobility, wherever they hold the wealth of the country, it follows necessarily that the people are trod upon by those two parties, that they are disgusted by the state in which they live, and that those who are talented among them, or who have money, try to buy a noble title or to push their way to ecclesiastical dignity. All the while, the arts and industries which cause the state to flourish are neglected, public revenues diminish, and the state is weakened.²⁹

This remarkable text deserves a detailed commentary, but it must suffice here to emphasize the “economic” analysis of the dangers that a too numerous clergy represents for the state. The theme was to be found later in Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Gibbon, to mention only the more important. Thus we see that the decline of letters and the decline of states are treated side by side in one of the authors that young Gibbon most admired. There he found described that situation in scholarly studies with which he was to concern himself in the Essai. He also made note of those somewhat incidental reflections on the fall on the Eastern Empire in which Le Clerc made a comparison between the number of monks and the number of soldiers:

The great number of these people who did not feel obligated to help the state either with their wealth, or their industry, or their persons is a clear source of its decline. … It was without doubt … one of the causes of the ruin of the Eastern Empire, which would otherwise have cut the Saracens and Turks to pieces had it been able to muster half as many soldiers as it had monks and nuns, not counting other ecclesiastics.³⁰

We will find this argument repeated in the Decline and Fall—in chapter 20, for example: “The whole body of the Catholic clergy, more numerous perhaps than the legions, was exempted by the emperors from all service, private or public. …” And in chapter 68, before recounting the religious debates which distracted Constantinople's defenders from its imminent danger, Gibbon does not fail to mention the monks as being among those individuals unable to fight against the Turkish assault:

In her last decay, Constantinople was still peopled with more than a hundred thousand inhabitants; but those numbers are found in the account, not of war, but of captivity; and they mostly consisted of mechanics, of priests, of women, and of men devoid of that spirit which even women have sometimes exerted for the common safety.³¹

In the pages that Jean Le Clerc devoted to the decline of letters, he does not suggest that erudition was supplanted by other tastes or preoccupations; poorly served by pedants and arrogant fools, repressed by tyrannical powers, it simply faded: nothing had taken its place, it was not forced out. On several occasions, Pierre Bayle also treated this subject, but he suggested that erudition had been supplanted by other interests. In one of the famous notes of his Dictionnaire, he relates “what happened in a conversation between several men of letters in the year 1697” on the subject of the “decadence of erudition”; an anonymous character, no doubt of Bayle's invention, speaks at some length: To those who heap abuse on the Jesuits by saying that there are scarcely “any clever people among their numbers today,” he responds that the Protestant side is no better off, and he continues:

A change in taste is all that is involved in what you call the decline of erudition. The study of criticism has fallen off; people have turned to the accuracy of reasoning. The mind is cultivated more than the memory. The desire now is to think with delicacy and to express oneself politely. Such occupations do not produce those huge volumes which are so imposing to the public and build such great reputations; but in reality, they result in greater enlightenment and in a skill more estimable than the vast learning of the grammarians or the philologists.³²

Bayle then refers to a preceding note which reads:

While the reign of criticism and erudition lasted, several prodigies of erudition were seen throughout Europe. Now that the study of the new philosophy and that of living languages have introduced a new taste, this vast and profound literature has ceased to appear; but, in return, a certain finer wit has spread throughout the republic of letters, and it is accompanied by a more exquisite discernment. People today are less learned and more skilled.³³

These remarks seem to be totally in favor of philosophy and wit—in short of the new taste. But Bayle discerned the abuse that certain “superficial and lazy minds” could make of it; he undoubtedly foresaw that his own critical activity could be subjected to the same scorn that the “wits” were heaping upon erudition by identifying it with pedantry:

Times have changed. No account is made of an author who thoroughly knows mythology, the Greek poets, and their scholiasts and who uses his knowledge to interpret or correct difficult passages, chronological points, questions of geography or grammar, variants in narration, and the like. It is not enough to prefer new writings in which there is nothing which resembles the work of such authors; this kind of erudition is also treated as pedantry, and there is no better way to rebuff all those young men who would otherwise have the gifts necessary to succeed in the study of the humanities. … There can be no doubt whatsoever that one of the major reasons for the decline of letters is that certain so-called (or authentic) wits have made it a custom to condemn quotations from Greek authors and erudite observations as sophomoric and crassly pedantic. They have been so unjust as to include in their ridicule writers who display civility and a knowledge of the world. … After witnessing such treatment, who would think of displaying his reading and critical remarks if he aspired to the glory of wit?³⁴

Having designated philosophy, mental acuity, and accuracy of reasoning as the legitimate successors of erudition, Bayle denounced “wit” as a usurper. And if, in one respect, he anticipated Voltaire, he was not so far, in other respects, from the theses that the defenders of erudition would uphold in the first half of the eighteenth century.³⁵

“The “new philosophy” Bayle spoke of was Cartesianism. As we know, Cartesianism advocated a geometric, mathematical approach to the natural world. For the erudite men of the eighteenth century, the favored rivals were philosophy, mathematics, and wit. At the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (with which Gibbon felt some solidarity), a defensive attitude prevailed, and the counterattack adopted was aimed at two very different targets: the outrageous pretensions of the “calculators” and the frivolous superficiality of the wit.³⁶ The partisans of belles-lettres and erudition declared themselves to be closer to the true philosophical spirit. As an example, we might mention the discourse presented to the Académie des Inscriptions in 1741 by the Abbé Du Resnel,³⁷ an analysis and summary of which appeared at the beginning of the sixteenth volume of the Histoire de l'Académie. Its title is already significant: “General Reflections on the Disadvantages Caused by the Exclusive Taste Which Seems to Be Established in Favor of Mathematics and Physics.”³⁸ The Abbé Du Resnel's “complaint is not so much that the exact sciences should have become so flourishing among us, but that letters should have ceased to be so; not so much that a new empire should have risen, but that it should have risen upon the ruins of another.”³⁹ Du Resnel approves of the philosophic mind. A new term must then be made available to designate the attitude of those who wish to extend immoderately the sway of the exact sciences:

We must be careful not to confuse the philosophical mind with the calculating mind, which by its very nature is enclosed in a circle and should not be allowed a greater radius. We will not hide the fact that our century is beginning to lose sight of this distinction; that in taking pride in geometry—or rather, in its desire to reduce everything to calculation, to apply that method everywhere, or to erect it as a universal instrument—our century has practically ceased to be philosophical.⁴⁰

In the Abbé Du Resnel's remarks, “false wit” is added to the calculating mind, and a conceptual and terminological pair is formed whose persistent presence in texts of the period can be found through careful reading. In his conclusion, Du Resnel offers the model for this association.

Letters are the only barrier capable of stopping the progress of false wit, of limiting the conquests of the calculating mind: the first tries to seduce us, the second to subjugate us. By maintaining the taste for truth which the Ancients gave us, letters will teach us not to mistake the tinsel of the first for gold: in the same way, they will teach us to contain the second within its limits.⁴¹

Occasionally, Du Resnel's “calculating mind” is replaced by the term “sophistic philosophy,” but in either case the object is to save the honor of “true philosophy,” which cannot be attacked and which no one wishes to regard as the enemy. In this way, the anti-philosophers are able to make common cause with the erudites, by taking on a combined adversary, “false” wit (or frivolity) and “false” philosophy (the calculating mind, geometry as usurper). Bishop Georges de Pompignan (the brother of the poet), in a book with the revealing title La Devotion réconciliée avec l'Esprit, writes about grammar as follows:

If this study … seems to have slowed down for some time now, at least as it concerns the classical tongues, and if it is to be feared that in future it will slow down even more and ultimately stop altogether, it is hardly to devotion that this decadence must be imputed. It can perhaps be ascribed to the modern taste, which is as opposed to devotion as it is to good literature. This is a taste for two things which appear contradictory, but which our century has secretly found a way of uniting: the frivolous, which is too excessively loved to permit the serious study of language, and a sophistic philosophy, which scorns the science of words (even though it prepares one for the science of things) as well as the knowledge of things written and thought during the most illustrious centuries and in the most enlightened nations.⁴²

In 1787, Rigoley de Juvigny, a resolute adversary of the Enlightenment and the philosophes, once more incriminates the geometry-wit pair by designating it as responsible for the ill-fated evolution of letters and mores. The metaphor he uses is that of an “epidemic,” an illness:

Geometry was attacked by Wit's disease. The sickness lasted so long that Geometry began to stray. It started, in fact, to imagine that it could set the laws for poetry and eloquence, that it could subject the happy transports of the Muses to Euclid's rules. Women, who set the tone in every trifle, left off their fans for Uranie's compass. But since they possess the power to transform everything, Galantry became Geometry's major attribute; and the dryest, most exact, most serious of sciences, no longer spoke anything but small talk.”⁴³

Who are the targets here? D'Alembert, without question, and Madame du Châtelet. But the main culprit—and Rigoley de Juvigny mentions him by name—is Fontenelle, with whom wit began its reign. A Cartesian (Rigoley refers to his attachment to the “chimerical hypothesis” of whirlwinds), a perpetual secretary of the Académie des Sciences, an author of operas, madrigals, and eclogues, Fontenelle was the embodiment of the “new taste” that the defender of erudition and letters considered so pernicious. Here is the rest of Rigoley's indictment: “Once wit, with its mincing graces, its trinkets, its pompoms became the idol of the multitude, it thought of nothing but establishing its empire by carrying Fontenelle to the throne of literature.”⁴⁴ The final tabulation for the century is distressing:

Ever since intrigue, spiteful gossip, and greed were introduced to letters, sciences, and arts by the ignorance of false wit and haughty philosophizing, we have had little choice but to put up with the flaws of our times. But an essential observation must be made: the more the positive sciences, geometry, algebra, and mathematics, and the rest, rise and become perfected, the more we lose in sentiment, the more taste will be lost, the more letters will waste away, and the more genius for the fine arts will flicker and die.⁴⁵

We could cite many such passages. They help us understand why “philosophers” and “wits” can be found in each other's company in chapter 6 of Gibbon's Essai. They allow us to observe the degree to which, in 1761, Gibbon espoused the modes of thinking and writing common to the Frenchmen he had read or met. The possessive “our” (nos) he used applies exclusively to the French intellectual universe:

Since that time [i.e., of the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns] our philosophers have been surprised that men could spend a lifetime compiling facts and words, in loading the memory instead of enlightening the mind. Our wits have felt the advantages the ignorance of their readers afforded them. They scorn the ancients and those who study them.⁴⁶

The paragraph quoted above is a rather good example, in the style of its construction, of Gibbon's imitations of Montesquieu: the sentences grow shorter as the paragraph goes on; parallel subjects are used in the first two sentences (“our philosophers” … “our wits”); a short last sentence seeks an epigrammatic effect. There is no obscurity here: Gibbon is thinking of other parts of his Essai when he deplores the “fatal” effect of his imitation of Montesquieu.⁴⁷ Nor was he the only young writer who succumbed to that influence in the years following the publication of the Esprit des lois. In his Essai de psychologie (1754), Charles Bonnet also adopted a choppy, disjointed style, for which the critics had reproached him, and he also recognized its source in his memoirs, which he wrote much later (1778): “I was too full of Montesquieu's manner for it not to have influenced my own.”⁴⁸

By the time he wrote his Memoirs, Gibbon no longer approved of the “sententious and oracular brevity” he sometimes used to dress up a “common idea.” These very criticisms had been aimed at the Essai at the time of its publication by the Journal Encyclopédique and the Critical Review.⁴⁹ Rousseau had said much the same thing in a letter to Moultou: “I have reviewed his book—he chases wit and puts on airs.”⁵⁰ Could the young Gibbon—who attacked “wits”—have been contaminated by wit? And did he not owe this contamination to the man he had taken as a model? We need only recall Voltaire's opinion: “Let us agree with Madame du Deffand that The Spirit of the Laws is often spirited wit about the laws,”⁵¹ and, elsewhere:

I sought a guide for a difficult road: I found a traveling companion hardly more knowledgeable than myself; I found an author of spirit and much wit, but rarely the spirit of the laws; he hops more than he walks, shines more than he enlightens; sometimes he satirizes more than he judges; and he makes one wish that so handsome a genius had more diligently sought to instruct rather than surprise.

It would be easy to attribute the following observations, presented by the Abbé Massieu in his preface to the works of Tourreil, to a surly, conservative, and even retrograde mind:

It seems that a conspiracy has been joined to overthrow our language and totally corrupt our taste. Pray, … what excesses are not committed these days? Not only do they want to tear from our hands the great models Antiquity has left us, but, worse, they would turn us away from the safe roads that excellent writers have traced out for fifty years. The works of such writers are now found to be too simple, too uniform, too careless. The natural beauties which were the main object of their attention are abandoned, and only elaborate ornament is sought. Their periodic and varied phrases are replaced by a choppy style devoid of harmony. For the happy irregularities our writers were careful to leave in their works and which contributed much to the energy and vivacity of their discourse, they substituted a depressing exactitude which only exasperates diction and makes it less fluent. Our prose and poetry today are filled only with quips and antitheses, affectations and refinements. No one wishes to say anything except with wit. So many words, so many witticisms. … Everything sparkles, everything bubbles. Instead of being tossed in small handfuls, as the masters of the art command, flowers are dumped by the bucketful. Words are made up by private authority; the ones that already exist are abused and so monstrously combined that readers are quite astonished to find them side by side. These are the same freedoms that destroyed one of the most beautiful languages that ever was—I refer to the one the Romans spoke. We fear that the times in which we live will be seen in the future as a period of the decadence of our language and that, just as the great men who preceded us were Ciceros and Virgils, in the eyes of posterity, we shall be Senecas and Lucians. One thing is certain and this is that in the peril which threatens French letters, those who love it and are concerned with the glory of our nation cannot make too great an effort to hold on to the good taste that is escaping us and to reject the bad taste which gains on us, in order at least to conserve our language at that level of perfection to which our fathers brought it.⁵²

These lines, written in the same year as the Lettres Persanes (1721),⁵³ very aptly describe the style that Montesquieu had so perfectly captured and offer quite a good description of the rococo in literature: wit seeks to reign, to increase its impact, to bedazzle. Gibbon's youthful fascination has led him to imitate it; but, according to those with whom Gibbon sympathized, it only hastened the decay of language and with it that of the nation. The obvious parallel that immediately came to mind was that of Rome.

Was Massieu's a rear-guard action? He was a partisan of the ancients and foresaw no good from the recent triumph of the moderns. But it was not simply a question of the fate of erudition or the fall into oblivion of the ancient models: the very life of the French language was at stake. And the decline of French, like that of Latin, forbode the decline of the nation generally. In Massieu, an author Gibbon knew and quoted, this theme is formulated, and it is the theme that would also serve as a point of departure for the Essai and would subsequently appear throughout the Decline and Fall.

But fears about the corruption of the language and obsessions about a future that could be likened to Roman decline were not restricted solely to the writings of the conservatives. As we know, the partisans of the moderns were also fond of organic metaphors—flowering, maturity, and the like. Although they held that modern writers were in no way inferior to the ancients, they stopped short of proclaiming an indefinite progress.⁵⁴ After the perfection attained by the moderns, there would necessarily be a decline.

We need only recall Voltaire's declarations: “By the time of Louis XIV's death, nature seemed to be taking a rest. … And the multitude of masterpieces has resulted in a feeling of surfeit. … It would be wrong to imagine that one can go on indefinitely creating new and striking forms of great tragic passions and sentiments. There are limits to everything. … So genius can only belong to a single age, and after that it is bound to degenerate.”⁵⁵ As to what happens next, Voltaire proposes two theses, sometimes successively, sometimes simultaneously: The first, the optimistic one, emphasizes the rise of the philosophy and enlightenment that follow the great products of poetic genius. It invites the reader to console himself for his losses (which included—almost as an afterthought—erudition) with his gains. The second, the pessimistic one, emphasizes literary decline and, albeit jocularly, announces the approach of barbarism—as in the last verses of his Epistle to Mademoiselle Claron:

From the age in which we live, what can we expect?
Enlightenment, it's true, grows in respect;
With fewer talents, one is more informed:
But taste has been lost, and the mind's gone astray.
This ridiculous century is one of brochures,
Of songs, of excerpts, but mostly of boors.
Barbarism approaches and Apollo outraged
Leaves the happy shores where his laws held sway.(56)

Voltaire, as he so frequently did, combined these two theses: the rise of reason and the fall of letters in fact go hand in hand. As for the French language, although it is threatened by corruption—as any widely spoken language would be—Voltaire does not seem concerned about its fate: “It contributes, throughout Europe, to one of the greatest pleasures of life.”⁵⁷

D'Alembert, however, cries out in alarm:⁵⁸ “Our language is denatured and degraded.” By allowing themselves to be won over by “an ephemeral branch of society,” “our authors” have moved away from the “true” and the “simple.” Are they still able to come back to them? “Perhaps … the happy times will never return. It appears that similar circumstances irrevocably corrupted the language of Augustus's century.” Like the Abbé Massieu in 1721, d'Alembert detects the signs of a serious alteration in the French tongue, and he sees the coming of a decline on the very model of the Roman one. For him, the cause is not simply a change in taste. In the very title of his essay, he indicts the “society of men of letters and of the powerful.” He incriminates the dependency of writers on aristocratic and rich protectors. D'Alembert is no more indulgent of frivolity than are the champions of erudition, but he seeks for it a social origin, and he finds it in the salons of the rich and powerful. It is there that “our authors” go to seek a “twisted, impure, and barbaric language.” This argument is based on a social criticism which has an undeniably prerevolutionary tone. But one can also detect in it traces of the ideas set forth in Tacitus's Dialogus de oratoribus and in chapter 15 of the Pseudo-Longinus: Eloquence degenerates and vanishes when political liberty disappears. It was with Diderot, in chapter 10 of his Vie de Sénèque (1778), a true autobiography by “projection,” that the link between political and linguistic decadence was most clearly affirmed in terms that are at once very “Roman” and very prerevolutionary:

Tryanny stamps a base character on productions of all kinds. Language itself is not protected from its influence: Can it be a matter of indifference whether a child hears around its cradle the timorous murmurs of servitude or the noble and proud strains of freedom? … Oratorical art could not survive even among a great people if it were not concerned with lofty affairs and did not ultimately lead to the dignity of the State. Seek true eloquence only among the Republicans.⁵⁹

Diderot is more reassuring about contemporary French: “The French we speak is not corrupt.”⁶⁰ How could he despair of his own language after having worked for so long to enrich it with his many terms for the “arts and professions”? But Diderot also assures us that “there is a point in the sciences beyond which they will not be able to go,” and he even comes to imagine “some great revolution” that will interrupt “the progress of science, the work of art,” and cast back “into the shadows a portion of our hemisphere.”⁶¹

It is in Rousseau—specifically in the last chapter of the Essai sur l'origine des langues (composed for the most part between 1755 and 1762)—that we must seek a radical expression of a triple decline affecting public freedom, language, and eloquence in contemporary France:

Societies have reached their final form; nothing can change any longer except by arms or wealth. And since the only thing that is said to the people is “Give money,” it can be said by placards on the corners of the streets or by soldiers going from house to house. No one need be assembled for that—on the contrary, people must be kept apart: that is the first maxim of modern politics.

There are languages favorable to liberty. They are sonorous, harmonious languages, rich in prosody, whose discourse can be heard from afar. Our own languages are made for buzzing at each other on divans. … Now I say that any language with which one cannot make oneself understood by the assembled people is a servile language. It is impossible for a people to remain free and to speak such a language.⁶²

The weakening of language and the disappearance of eloquence are closely connected with the loss of political freedom. Such a loss would be the most important of all; the alteration of language is only symptomatic of it. For Diderot and Rousseau, it is not knowledge that is at stake (Rousseau actually considers its accumulation harmful) nor is it the creation of oratorical masterpieces; at issue is civil freedom, conceived as the exercise of democracy. Thus, for Diderot and particularly for Rousseau, the diagnosis of the present state of things is so serious that the prognosis for the immediate future becomes one of two alternatives: either bloody disorder and irrevocable catastrophe or regeneration. For only something like a resurrection can bring civil society back to its true principles⁶³ and restore its lost freedom.

In the revival of the body social (if Rousseau is to be believed), the legislator's words have a role to play. Called upon for so solemn an occasion, as if a choice had to be made between death and rebirth, language must recover the strength it has dissipated. By force of will, an end can be made to decadence and dissolution. The basic word, soon supported in its use by all individuals who had become citizens again, imposes a completely new beginning. Among those writers who sympathize with what will later be called the “first revolution”—I am thinking of André Chénier here—this myth of a new beginning is joined with the fervor of Winckelmann's neoclassicism: the arts are born of freedom alone. The Greek world possessed simultaneously a profound intimacy with nature and a free democracy. Chénier entrusted to French poetry the task of bringing freedom back to life. To make this possible, the writer would have to infuse or transfuse new life into French verse. For this, the will alone was not enough—one must find in the past the “flame” and its warming strength, and Greek poetry, itself the fruit of liberty, would be its major source. In the program Chénier sets forth (scattered unsystematically throughout many texts),⁶⁴ a renaissance of erudition was sought, but erudition that would contribute to the renaissance of great poetry, which in its turn would inaugurate the reign of a new freedom where all the arts that flowered under the ancient freedom would be reborn.

As we can see, this system of thought is governed by a taste for dichotomy: it starkly opposes servitude and freedom. It uses themes set forth by Tacitus and Longinus to reach a verdict that could not be appealed. The decline of eloquence was a gauge for the extent of the nation's servility, and only radical change—a revolution—could bring back both eloquence and freedom.⁶⁵ The present state of society, painted in the most somber hues, was the very opposite of what reason dictated; consequently the institutions that were responsible for man's unhappiness had to be overthrown. Perceived in terms of this extreme dichotomy, the future could only hold either absolute disorder or a return to order. The writer, the philosopher, the poet could only oppose, so that their efforts could prepare the advent of the contrary of what was.

Faced with such appeals for regeneration, Gibbon was more reserved; although he deplored the decline of erudition in his Essai and although the present fate of England might have inspired his interest in the decline and fall of Rome, he nonetheless rejected these melodramatic interpretations of the present. He was not the sort to think in terms of all-or-nothing, nor to see the future played out in terms of salvation or perdition. He remained too removed from the religious spirit to allow himself to be seduced by a historiosophy that brought the promise of redemption to human history. He seems to have decided in favor of the superiority of the ancients, both in poetry and in the products of the imagination more generally, but this superiority, far from representing the flourishing of an admirable state of liberty, was the result of imperfect political institutions, less advanced than his own, that allowed violence and passion to prevail:

The manners of the ancients were more favourable to poetry than ours; which is a strong presumption they surpassed us in that sublime art. …

The ancient republics of Greece were ignorant of the first principles of good policy. The people met in tumultuous assemblies rather to determine than to deliberate. Their factions were impetuous and lasting; their insurrections frequent and terrible; their most peaceful hours full of distrust, envy, and confusion: The citizens were indeed unhappy; but their writers, whose imaginations were warmed by such dreadful objects, described them naturally as they felt. A peaceable administration of the laws, those salutary institutions, which, projected in the cabinet of a sovereign or his council, diffuse happiness over a whole nation, excite only the poet's admiration, the coldest of all the passions.⁶⁶

In these lines, which clearly echo the thesis openly defended by Maternus in the Dialogus de oratoribus, Gibbon, to say the least, does not invite us to regret the passing of the Greek world. It was not a good place to live, even if its poetry had risen to unsurpassed heights. Gibbon preferred the periods during which efficient and orderly institutions prevailed, and his political model for them was the Empire under the Antonines: he did not allow himself to be dazzled by golden ages; he was not inclined to embellish the image of the democracies of antiquity,⁶⁷ nor did he believe in the joys of the pastoral life⁶⁸ any more than he believed in the golden age that he thought the French revolutionaries wanted to establish.⁶⁹ Rousseau was able to bring his indictment down upon the arts and sciences by opposing them to a world of frugality and virtue, “a happy shore toward which the eyes turn constantly, which one regrets to leave.”⁷⁰ If this was the lost past, the “earliest time,” then our society with all its luxuries had to be seen as “degenerate.” The young Gibbon replied by rejecting the antithesis and by refusing the condemnation:

The sciences, it is said, take their rise from luxury, an enlightened must be always a vicious people. For my part, I cannot be of this opinion. The sciences are not the daughters of luxury, but both the one and the other owe their birth to industry. The arts, in their rudest state, satisfied the primitive wants of men. In their state of perfection they suggest new ones, even from Vitellius's shield of Pallas, to the philosophical entertainments of Cicero. But in proportion as luxury corrupts the manners, the sciences soften them; like to those prayers in Homer, which constantly pursue injustice, to appease the fury of that cruel deity.⁷¹

Rousseau's historical logic was based on antithesis, and it required an almost immediate decision, a conversion, a regeneration. Gibbon, by disarming the antithesis, had no need to require urgent action. He de-dramatized what Rousseau and his revolutionary disciples tended to overdramatize. By conferring upon history a span of very long duration, Gibbon provided himself with the possibility of determining the slow process of civilization as it made its way through all its ruptures, disasters, and collapses.⁷² Nothing is more revealing than the commentaries on a quotation from the last chapter of De Sublimitate with which Gibbon concludes chapter 2 of the Decline and Fall:

“In the same manner,” says he [Longinus], “as some children always remain pigmies, whose infant limbs have been too closely confined; thus our tender minds, fettered by the prejudices and habits of a just servitude, are unable to expand themselves, or to attain that well proportioned greatness which we admire in the ancients; who, living under a popular government, wrote with the same freedom as they acted.” This diminutive stature of mankind, if we pursue the metaphor, was daily sinking below the old standard, and the Roman world was indeed peopled by a race of pigmies when the fierce giants of the north broke in, and mended the puny breed. They restored a manly spirit of freedom; and after the revolution of ten centuries, freedom became the happy parent of taste and science.⁷³

In the expanded perspective which Gibbon unfolds before our eyes, the dramatic opposition between republican freedom and the servitude of the imperial age is surmounted and overwhelmed by the vision of a new freedom, reappearing, with beneficial consequences for culture, after a long interval. For Gibbon, who invites us to consider the entire chain of history, freedom had already returned after a long eclipse; and it happened that its worst defeat was at the same time the necessary condition for its rebirth; for those, especially in France, who were attempting to set up parallels between present and Roman times, freedom had again been lost, though no one had concerned himself very much with how it had been able to return in the interval.⁷⁴ So Longinus's accusation was gladly repeated in order to cast an anathema upon the present. “De te fabula narratur,” shouted Diderot (about an aesthetic point, it is true), in evoking “Longinus's pigmies.”⁷⁵

In the last decades of the seventeenth century, the desire to return to first principles, which had already animated geometric and mathematical thought and were then seen as applicable everywhere, turned to a less abstract domain and became an even more emphatic desire to return to historical origins, to primitive revelations, to irreducible vital forces, and to the laws of mechanics.⁷⁶ Much has been said, and rightly so, about the “crisis of the geometrization of the universe”⁷⁷ that took place around 1750. At that time, the “erudite” study of documents had its revenge. In an aesthetic climate of “anticomania” and with the help of some novelistic touches, the Abbé Barthélemy, a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, had one of the most stunning literary successes of the century with his Voyage du jeune Anacharsis (1788): an erudite avenged his confreres for all the affronts about which Massieu, Du Resnel, and Gibbon had complained. And the writer whose Essai sur l'étude de la littérature might have seemed completely misdirected in 1761 came to be seen as the precursor of a movement that was later to be represented in France by Sismondi, Augustin Thierry, Michelet, and, especially, Renan, whose Avenir de la science (1848) recognized philology as the key science.

Assuredly, in the judgment he brought against Christianity and the priests and in his accusation of the Empire's excessive extent, Gibbon was close to Montesquieu, Voltaire, and the philosophes. But his way of thinking, which excluded antithetical formulations, dichotomies, pressing summations in the name of collective salvation, and idealizations of the past or future, was as foreign as it could be to the more or less systematic statements that formed the language of the Revolution in France. In September, 1789, when the revolutionary process began to accelerate, Gibbon saw France as being in a state of “dissolution.”⁷⁸ The loudest speakers then were those whose purpose it was to put an end to decadence and degeneration and to restore the fundamental pact of the nation. But seeing that the effort to restore the primitive liberties had culminated in precisely the contrary of what had been sought, Gibbon could only feel justified by the definition of the “philosophical genius” he had provided in his youth:

A philosophical genius consists in the capacity of recurring to the most simple ideas; in discovering and combining the first principles of things. The possessor of this distinguishing faculty has a view as piercing as extensive. Situated on an eminence, he takes in a wide extensive field, of which he forms a precise and exact idea; while a genius of an inferiour cast, tho' what he sees he distinguishes with equal precision, is more contracted in his views, and discovers only a part of the whole. …

What a retrospect is it to a genius truly philosophical, to see the most absurd opinions received among the most enlightened peoples; to see barbarians, on the other hand, arrive at the knowledge of the most sublime truths; to find true consequences falsely deduced from the most erroneous principles; admirable principles, bordering on the verge of truth, without ever conducting thither. …⁷⁹

Gibbon was too perceptive—at once too ironic and too skeptical—to be unaware of the metaphoric⁸⁰ character of the terms (so frequently borrowed from the organic scale) which he used in his great history. They “are ideas justified by language.” These terms were the tools he used to explain the changes that had taken place in the world since the Antonine era: Does the historian have any other language available to him? But we would do well to remember that he mistrusted any political action that was inspired by the prestige of antithesis or metaphor. It is this mistrust, as much as his mildly Tory opinions, that, it seems to me, determined his attitude toward the French Revolution. He knew that, at best, the outcome would be “a Richelieu or a Cromwell, arising, either to restore the Monarchy, or to lead the Commonwealth.”⁸¹

Notes

1. Memoirs of My Life, ed. Georges A. Bonnard (London, 1966), p. 103.

2. As set forth in Richelet's Dictionnaire (1680).

3. Encyclopédie, under the entry for “Erudition.”

4. D'Alembert continues: “Erudition, considered in relation to the current state of letters, is comprised of three main branches: knowledge of history, of languages, and of books. The knowledge of history can be divided into several sub-branches: ancient and modern history; the history of our own country and of foreign countries; the history of arts and sciences; chronology; geography; medals and antiques.” Clearly, the traditional classing of history in company with eloquence and poetry troubles d'Alembert; it is hard for him to see it as a product of the imagination. This is why, at the end of the first paragraph of the entry for “Erudition” cited above, a simple “etc.” marks the henceforth vacant place of history among “the pleasant products of the mind.” According to the figurative “system of human knowledge” and the ramifications of the encyclopedic tree, history and erudition will draw closer as products of memory. This is not at all to exclude history from the system of letters. The system of letters simply ceases to belong to one branch alone; it cuts across several branches of the encylopedic tree. Consequently, a considerable distance separates history, a product of memory, from poetry, a product of the imagination. Philosophy, a product of reason, occupies an intermediate position between the two, while eloquence tends to fade as a specific genre and is soon reduced to a natural talent which can do without rules.

5. Marmontel's text is an addition to the main entry for “Littérature,” written by Jaucourt. It is a significant addition, for it responds to a need for terminological preciseness. The Eléments de littérature, presented in dictionary form, uses all Marmontel's contributions to the Encyclopédie.

6. Cf. the Essais, Book II, chap. 19, on the subject of Julian the Apostate: “Among other rare qualities, he excelled in all kinds of literature.”

7. “Discours préliminaire de l'Encyclopédie,” in Encyclopédie (Lausanne, 1778), I, p. xxxiii. English text taken from Richard N. Schwab, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot (New York, 1963), p. 60.

8. Ibid., p. xxxvi.

9. Ibid., p. xxxvii.

10. Ibid., p. xxxv, Schwab, p. 63-64.

11. As a result of so many distinctions, the positions ultimately drew closer. Those whom Gibbon treats as adversaries were openly critical of “wit.”

12. In no way did d'Alembert exclude such a collaboration: “To the advantage of the exact sciences, much is made of the philosophical spirit which they have certainly contributed to spread among us. But can we not think that the philosophical mind finds frequent exercise in matters of erudition?,” Encyclopédie, “Erudition.”

13. Essai sur l'étude de la littérature, chap. 26, in Miscellaneous Works, II (London, 1796), p. 463 (henceforth cited as Essai).

14. Essai, chap. 47, p. 475. This and subsequent passages were taken from the translation, An Essay on the Study of Literature, published in London in 1764.

15. Cf. note 4, above.

16. What Gibbon said about Voltaire's superficiality has been quoted many times—and rightly so. See “Extraits raisonnés de mes lectures,” Miscellaneous Works, II (1796), p. 69.

17. Contemporary views are in agreement. D'Alembert: “A taste for witty, brilliant works and for the study of exact sciences has taken the place of our fathers' taste for erudite subjects. Those of our contemporaries who still cultivate such study complain of the exclusive and invidious preference we give to other objects” (in “Erudition”). Jaucourt: “It is time to seek and point out the reasons for the decline of literature, which falls more out of favor each day, at least in our nation; assuredly, we cannot flatter ourselves for having sought a remedy. The time has come in this country when no account is made of a learned man who uses his erudition to interpret or correct difficult passages from the authors of antiquity, or to explain a chronological point or an interesting question concerning geography or grammar. Erudition is considered pedantry. …” The Encyclopédie entry for “Littérature.”

18. Essai, chap. 2, p. 450.

19. Essai, chap. 6, p. 451.

20. Parrhasiana, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1699), I, pp. 223-24.

21. Note for March 14, 1761, in “Extraits raisonnés de mes lectures,” Miscellaneous Works, II (1796), p. 1.

22. Parrhasiana, I, p. 225.

23. Ibid., pp. 259-60. Writing in a Protestant country, Le Clerc sees the intervention of other, but less serious, obstacles (pp. 256-57).

24. Ibid., pp. 260-61.

25. Ibid., p. 261.

26. Ibid., p. 289. As a good Arminian, Le Clerc adds that intolerance hastens the decline of the state.

27. Ibid., p. 276.

28. Ibid., p. 277.

29. Ibid., p. 280.

30. Ibid., p. 277.

31. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (DF), one volume (London, 1831), chap. 68, p. 1173.

32. Dictionnaire historique et critique, entry “Alegambe,” note D. On the scorn of erudition for the sake of “politeness” (generally put forward by the great and by men of standing), see La Bruyère, who takes the defense of erudition (fragments 18 and 19 of the chapter “Des Jugements”).

33. Dictionnaire historique et critique, entry “Aconce,” note D. Fifty years later, Voltaire says much the same thing in the entry “Gens de lettres,” edited for the Encyclopédie: “In the past, during the sixteenth century and early in the seventeenth century, the littérateurs were generally occupied by grammatical criticism of the Greek and Latin authors. It is to their work that we owe our dictionaries, our corrected editions, and the commentaries on the masterpieces of antiquity. Today, such criticism is less necessary and has been succeeded by the philosophical mind: it is this philosophical mind which seems to form the character of our lettered people. And when good taste is joined to it, the result is an accomplished litterateur. … The thorough and purified reason that some men have helped spread through their conversations has contributed much to the instruction and polish of the nation, their criticism is no longer aimed at Greek and Latin words, but, supported by a healthy philosophy, it has destroyed all the prejudices which infected society.” Note the quick and quite natural transition from “textual criticism” to “social criticism.”

34. Dictionnaire historique et critique, entry “Meziriac,” note C.

35. On the quarrel in general, see Jean Seznec, “Le Singe antiquaire,” in Essais sur Diderot et l'Antiquité (Oxford, 1957), pp. 79-96.

36. Voltaire dodges the accusation by making a distinction between the “man of letters” and the “wit”: “A man of letters is not what is called a wit: wit alone supposes less culture, less study, and demands no philosophy. It consists, for the most part, in a brilliant imagination, in the pleasures of conversation helped along by common reading. A wit could easily not deserve in any way the title of man of letters; the man of letters might well be unable to claim the brilliance of wit” (entry “Gens de lettres”).

37. Translator of Pope, in 1750 Du Resnel brought the censure of the theological faculty at Paris upon himself. Cf. Robert Shackleton, Montesquieu (Oxford, 1961), p. 368.

38. Histoire de l'Académie, XVI (1751), p. 15.

39. Ibid., p. 23. On the role of philological criticism in the formation of the philosophical mind in the eighteenth century, cf. Reinhard Koselleck, Kritik und Krise (1973), especially pp. 81-103.

40. We might add that Du Resnel strove to demonstrate the usefulness of the knowledge of the ancients to the exact sciences, as Fréret did later, and Gibbon did in chapters 40-48 of his Essai.

41. Histoire de l'Academie, XVI, p. 36.

42. De Pompignan, Bishop of Puy, La Dévotion réconciliée avec l'esprit (Montauban, 1755), pp. 38-39. We should note, however, that the Bishop does not take up the defense of erudition. Religious educators, such as the Abbé Fleury, mistrust the “curious sciences” which come close to being “useless sciences.” Cf. Claude Fleury, Traité du choix et de la méthode des études (Paris, 1753), pp. 247-58, in which the study of Oriental languages is held to be dangerous: “They flatter vanity by their singularity and prodigy. Moreover, they are the mark of profound erudition, because ordinarily they are only learned after the more common tongues.”

43. De la Décadence des lettres et des moeurs, depuis les Grecs et les Romains jusqu'à nos jours (Paris, 1787), p. 385.

44. Ibid., p. 348.

45. Ibid., p. 476.

46. Gibbon finds Fontenelle charming in the Eclogues, but he judges the Histoire des Oracles “somewhat superficial.” Miscellaneous Works, II (1976), p. 55.

47. Memoirs of My Life (cited above, note 1), p. 103.

48. Raymond Savioz, Mémoires autobiographiques de Charles Bonnet de Genève (Paris, 1948), pp. 168-69.

49. George A. Bonnard, “Gibbon's Essai sur l'étude de la littérature as Judged by Contemporary Reviewers and by Gibbon Himself,” English Studies, XXXII:4 (August, 1951), pp. 145-53.

50. J.-J. Rousseau, Correspondance Générale, ed. Dufour-Plan, IX, p. 327.

51. Voltaire, Commentaire sur l'esprit des lois (1777), art. 19.

52. Massieu, Oeuvres de M. de Tourreil, I (1721), Preface, pp. xvii-xix.

53. As Jean Seznec has pointed out, letter 145 contains a precise allusion (and with what wit!) to the conflict between philosophy and erudition: “A philosopher possesses a sovereign scorn for a man whose head is loaded with facts, and, in his turn, he is considered a dreamer by a man with a good memory.” It must be added that the Lettres Persanes also raises the problem of the decline of nations (in connection with the Ottoman Empire), and, in an essay conducted through a series of letters, proposes some conjectures (which are hardly indulgent toward Christian institutions) about the reasons behind the depopulation of the globe.

54. Cf. H. R. Jauss, “Aesthetische Normen und geschichtliche Reflexion in der ‘Querelle des Anciens et des Moderns,’” in Charles Perrault, Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes en ce qui regarde les arts et les sciences (reprinted, Munich, 1964).

55. Voltaire, Siècle de Louis XIV, Oeuvres complètes (Paris, 1827), I, chap. 32, p. 940; translation taken from J. H. Brumfitt, The Age of Louis XIV (New York, 1963), pp. 185-87.

56. Voltaire, Epître à Mademoiselle Clairon.

57. Voltaire, Siècle de Louis XIV, chap. 32; Brumfitt, p. 188.

58. We quote from the Essai sur la société des gens de lettres et des grands (1752), after the text of Volume I of Mélanges de littérature, d'histoire et de philosophie (1759).

59. Diderot, Essai sur la vie de Sénèque le philosophe (Paris, 1778; dated 1789 on the title page), pp. 38-39.

60. Ibid., p. 37.

61. Entry for the Encyclopédie in Diderot, Oeuvres complètes, II (Paris, 1969), pp. 379-80.

62. Rousseau, Essai sur l'origine des langues, chap. 20.

63. Cf. Du Contrat social, Book II, chap. 8.

64. Specifically, I am referring to the text published under the title Essais sur les causes et les effets de la perfection et de la décadence des lettres et des arts, to the ode “Jeu de Paume,” and especially to “L'Invention.”

65. We have to admit that, from around 1770, French literary production showed an abundance of mediocre works. See Robert Darnton's study on “The High Enlightenment and the Low Life of Literature in Pre-Revolutionary France,” in Past and Present, 51 (May, 1971), pp. 81-115.

66. Essai, chap. 11 and 12. This is the thesis upheld by Hume in the essay “Of Eloquence,” as Gibbon reminds us in a discreet note to chapter 12. Diderot, in one of his “Pensées détachées,” discusses the same idea. Cf. Oeuvres complètes, X (Paris, 1971), pp. 80-81.

67. For example: “Every popular government has experienced the effects of rude or artificial eloquence. The coldest nature is animated, the firmest reason is moved by the rapid communication of the prevailing impulse; and each hearer is affected by his own passions, and by those of the surrounding multitude” (DF, chap. 22, p. 6). See also, in chapter 50, the remarks about the eloquence of the Arabs.

68. Or again: “The sober historian is forcibly awakened from a pleasing vision; and is compelled with some reluctance, to confess, that the pastoral manners, which have been adorned with the fairest attributes of peace and innocence, are much better adapted to the fierce and cruel habits of a military life” (DF, preamble to chap. 26).

69. The Letters of Edward Gibbon, ed. Prothero (London, 1896), II, p. 210.

70. Discours sur les sciences et les arts, in Oeuvres complètes, III (Paris, 1964), p. 22.

71. Essai, chap. 82.

72. See the famous “Observations” which conclude chapter 38.

73. DF, concluding lines of chap. 2.

74. Even though Diderot and many others along with him delighted in comparing Louis XV's France to the Rome of Claudius and Nero, they remained rather vague—and with good reason—when it came to defining a preceding French period which would then correspond to Rome's Republican era.

75. Pensées détachées sur la peinture, in Oeuvres complètes, XII (Paris, 1971), p. 337.

76. One example among many: “Unfortunately, literature is becoming a profession and a trade: most authors write without having anything to say; everything is reduced to useful speculation. …

77. Yvon Belaval, “La Crise de la géométrisation de l'univers dans la philosophie des Lumières,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie, XXI:3 (1952).

78. The Letters of Edward Gibbon (above, note 70), II, p. 206.

79. Essai, chaps. 46-47.

80. Cf. Randolph Starn, “Meaning-Levels in the Theme of Historical Decline,” History and Theory, 1975, pp. 1-31; cf. also H. Vyverberg, Historical Pessimism in the French Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), and R. Mortier, “L'idée de décadence littéraire au XVIII^e siècle,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, LVII (1967), pp. 1013-29.

81. The Letters of Edward Gibbon (above, note 70), II, p. 210.