Books: The Idea of Progress
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J.B. Bury >> The Idea of Progress
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L'an 2440 was published anonymously at Amsterdam in 1770. [Footnote:
The author's name first appeared in the 3rd ed., 1799. A German
translation, by C. F. Weisse, was published in London in 1772. The
English version, by Dr. Hooper, appeared in the same year, and a new
edition in 1802; the translator changed the title to Memoirs of the
year Two thousand five hundred.] Its circulation in France was
rigorously forbidden, because it implied a merciless criticism of
the administration. It was reprinted in London and Neuchatel, and
translated into English and German.
3.
As the motto of his prophetic vision Mercier takes the saying of
Leibnitz that "the present is pregnant of the future." Thus the
phase of civilisation which he imagines is proposed as the outcome
of the natural and inevitable march of history. The world of A.D.
2440 in which a man born in the eighteenth century who has slept an
enchanted sleep awakes to find himself, is composed of nations who
live in a family concord rarely interrupted by war. But of the world
at large we hear little; the imagination of Mercier is concentrated
on France, and particularly Paris. He is satisfied with knowing that
slavery has been abolished; that the rivalry of France and England
has been replaced by an indestructible alliance; that the Pope,
whose authority is still august, has renounced his errors and
returned to the customs of the primitive Church; that French plays
are performed in China. The changes in Paris are a sufficient index
of the general transformation.
The constitution of France is still monarchical. Its population has
increased by one half; that of the capital remains about the same.
Paris has been rebuilt on a scientific plan; its sanitary
arrangements have been brought to perfection; it is well lit; and
every provision has been made for the public safety. Private
hospitality is so large that inns have disappeared, but luxury at
table is considered a revolting crime. Tea, coffee, and tobacco are
no longer imported. [Footnote: In the first edition of the book
commerce was abolished.] There is no system of credit; everything is
paid for in ready money, and this practice has led to a remarkable
simplicity in dress. Marriages are contracted only through mutual
inclination; dowries have been abolished. Education is governed by
the ideas of Rousseau, and is directed, in a narrow spirit, to the
promotion of morality. Italian, German, English, and Spanish are
taught in schools, but the study of the classical languages has
disappeared; Latin does not help a man to virtue. History too is
neglected and discouraged, for it is "the disgrace of humanity,
every page being crowded with crimes and follies." Theatres are
government institutions, and have become the public schools of civic
duties and morality. [Footnote: In 1769 Mercier began to carry out
his programme of composing and adapting plays for instruction and
edification. His theory of the true functions of the theatre he
explained in a special treatise, Du theatre ou Nouvel Essai sur
l'art dramatique (1773).]
The literary records of the past had been almost all deliberately
destroyed by fire. It was found expedient to do away with useless
and pernicious books which only obscured truth or contained
perpetual repetitions of the same thing. A small closet in the
public library sufficed to hold the ancient books which were
permitted to escape the conflagration, and the majority of these
were English. The writings of the Abbe de Saint-Pierre were placed
next those of Fenelon. "His pen was weak, but his heart was sublime.
Seven ages have given to his great and beautiful ideas a just
maturity. His contemporaries regarded him as a visionary; his
dreams, however, have become realities."
The importance of men of letters as a social force was a favourite
theme of Mercier, and in A.D. 2440 this will be duly recognised. But
the State control which weighed upon them so heavily in 1770 is not
to be entirely abolished. There is no preventive censorship to
hinder publication, but there are censors. There are no fines or
imprisonment, but there are admonitions. And if any one publishes a
book defending principles which are considered dangerous, he is
obliged to go about in a black mask.
There is a state religion, Deism. There is probably no one who does
not believe in God. But if any atheist were discovered, he would be
put through a course of experimental physics. If he remained
obdurate in his rejection of a "palpable and salutary truth," the
nation would go into mourning and banish him from its borders.
Every one has to work, but labour no longer resembles slavery. As
there are no monks, nor numerous domestics, nor useless valets, nor
work-men employed on the production of childish luxuries, a few
daily hours of labour are sufficient for the public wants. Censors
inquire into men's capacities, assign tasks to the unemployed, and
if man be found fit for nothing but the consumption of food he is
banished from the city.
These are some of the leading features of the ideal future to which
Mercier's imagination reached. He did not put it forward as a final
term. Later ages, he said, will go further, for "where can the
perfectibility of man stop, armed with geometry and the mechanical
arts and chemistry?" But in his scanty prophecies of what science
might effect he showed curiously little resource. The truth is that
this had not much interest for him, and he did not see that
scientific discoveries might transmute social conditions. The world
of 2440, its intolerably docile and virtuous society, reflects two
capital weaknesses in the speculation of the Encyclopaedist period:
a failure to allow for the strength of human passions and interests,
and a deficient appreciation of the meaning of liberty. Much as the
reformers acclaimed and fought for toleration, they did not
generally comprehend the value of the principle. They did not see
that in a society organised and governed by Reason and Justice
themselves, the unreserved toleration of false opinions would be the
only palladium of progress; or that a doctrinaire State, composed of
perfectly virtuous and deferential people, would arrest development
and stifle origiality, by its ungenial if mild tyranny. Mercier's is
no exception to the rule that ideal societies are always repellent;
and there are probably few who would not rather be set down in
Athens in the days of the "vile" Aristophanes, whose works Mercier
condemned to the flames, than in his Paris of 2440.
4.
That Bohemian man of letters, Restif de la Bretonne, whose
unedifying novels the Parisians of 2440 would assuredly have
rejected from their libraries, published in 1790 a heroic comedy
representing how marriages would be arranged in "the year 2000," by
which epoch he conceived that all social equalities would have
disappeared in a fraternal society and twenty nations be allied to
France under the wise supremacy of "our well-beloved monarch Louis
Francois XXII." It was the Revolution that converted Restif to the
conception of Progress, for hitherto his master had been Rousseau;
but it can hardly be doubted that the motif and title of his play
were suggested by the romance of Mercier. L'an 2440 and L'an 2000
are the first examples of the prophetic fiction which Mr. Edward
Bellamy's Looking Backward was to popularise a hundred years later.
The Count de Volney's Ruins was another popular presentation of the
hopes which the theory of Progress had awakened in France. Although
the work was not published till after the outbreak of the
Revolution, [Footnote: Les Ruines des empires, 1789. An English
translation ran to a second edition (1795).] the plan had been
conceived some years before. Volney was a traveller, deeply
interested in oriental and classical antiquities, and, like Louis Le
Roy, he approached the problem of man's destinies from the point of
view of a student of the revolutions of empires.
The book opens with melancholy reflections amid the ruins of
Palmyra. "Thus perish the works of men, and thus do nations and
empires vanish away ... Who can assure us that desolation like this
will not one day be the lot of our own country?" Some traveller like
himself will sit by the banks of the Seine, the Thames, or the
Zuyder Zee, amid silent ruins, and weep for a people inurned and
their greatness changed into an empty name. Has a mysterious Deity
pronounced a secret malediction against the earth?
In this disconsolate mood he is visited by an apparition, who
unveils the causes of men's misfortunes and shows that they are due
to themselves. Man is governed by natural invariable laws, and he
has only to study them to know the springs of his destiny, the
causes of his evils and their remedies. The laws of his nature are
self-love, desire of happiness, and aversion to pain; these are the
simple and prolific principles of everything that happens in the
moral world. Man is the artificer of his own fate. He may lament his
weakness and folly; but "he has perhaps still more reason to be
confident in his energies when he recollects from what point he has
set out and to what heights he has been capable of elevating
himself."
The supernatural visitant paints a rather rosy picture of the
ancient Egyptian and Assyrian kingdoms. But it would be a mistake to
infer from their superficial splendour that the inhabitants
generally were wise or happy. The tendency of man to ascribe
perfection to past epochs is merely "the discoloration of his
chagrin." The race is not degenerating; its misfortunes are due to
ignorance and the mis-direction of self-love. Two principal
obstacles to improvement have been the difficulty of transmitting
ideas from age to age, and that of communicating them rapidly from
man to man. These have been removed by the invention of printing.
The press is "a memorable gift of celestial genius." In time all men
will come to understand the principles of individual happiness and
public felicity. Then there will be established among the peoples of
the earth an equilibrium of forces; there will be no more wars,
disputes will be decided by arbitration, and "the whole species will
become one great society, a single family governed by the same
spirit and by common laws, enjoying all the felicity of which human
nature is capable." The accomplishment of this will be a slow
process, since the same leaven will have to assimilate an enormous
mass of heterogeneous elements, but its operation will be effectual.
Here the genius interrupts his prophecy and exclaims, turning toward
the west, "The cry of liberty uttered on the farther shores of the
Atlantic has reached to the old continent." A prodigious movement is
then visible to their eyes in a country at the extremity of the
Mediterranean; tyrants are overthrown, legislators elected, a code
of laws is drafted on the principles of equality, liberty, and
justice. The liberated nation is attacked by neighbouring tyrants,
but her legislators propose to the other peoples to hold a general
assembly, representing the whole world, and weigh every religious
system in the balance. The proceedings of this congress follow, and
the book breaks off incomplete.
It is not an arresting book; to a reader of the present day it is
positively tedious; but it suited contemporary taste, and, appearing
when France was confident that her Revolution would renovate the
earth, it appealed to the hopes and sentiments of the movement. It
made no contribution to the doctrine of Progress, but it undoubtedly
helped to popularise it.
CHAPTER XI
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION: CONDORCET
I.
The authority which the advanced thinkers of France gained among the
middle classes during the third quarter of the eighteenth century
was promoted by the influence of fashion. The new ideas of
philosophers, rationalists, and men of science had interested the
nobles and higher classes of society for two generations, and were a
common subject of discussion in the most distinguished salons.
Voltaire's intimacy with Frederick the Great, the relations of
d'Alembert and Diderot with the Empress Catherine, conferred on
these men of letters, and on the ideas for which they stood, a
prestige which carried great weight with the bourgeoisie. Humbler
people, too, were as amenable as the great to the seduction of
theories which supplied simple keys to the universe [Footnote: Taine
said of the Contrat Social that it reduces political science to the
strict application of an elementary axiom which renders all study
unnecessary (La Revolution, vol. i. c. iv. Sec. iii.).] and assumed
that everybody was capable of judging for himself on the most
difficult problems. As well as the Encyclopaedia, the works of
nearly all the leading thinkers were written for the general public
not merely for philosophers. The policy of the Government in
suppressing these dangerous publications did not hinder their
diffusion, and gave them the attraction of forbidden fruit. In 1770
the avocat general (Seguier) acknowledged the futility of the
policy. "The philosophers," he said, "have with one hand sought to
shake the throne, with the other to upset the altars. Their purpose
was to change public opinion on civil and religious institutions,
and the revolution has, so to speak, been effected. History and
poetry, romances and even dictionaries, have been infected with the
poison of incredulity. Their writings are hardly published in the
capital before they inundate the provinces like a torrent. The
contagion has spread into workshops and cottages." [Footnote:
Rocquain, L'Esprit revolutionnaire avant la Revolution, p. 278.]
The contagion spread, but the official who wrote these words did not
see that it was successful because it was opportune, and that the
minds of men were prepared to receive the seed of revolutionary
ideas by the unspeakable corruption of the Government and the
Church. As Voltaire remarked about the same time, France was
becoming Encyclopaedist, and Europe too.
2.
The influence of the subversive and rationalistic thinkers in
bringing about the events of 1789 has been variously estimated by
historians. The truth probably lies in the succinct statement of
Acton that "the confluence of French theory with American example
caused the Revolution to break out" when it did. The theorists aimed
at reform, not at political revolution; and it was the stimulus of
the Declaration of Rights of 1774 and the subsequent victory of the
Colonies that precipitated the convulsion, at a time when the
country had a better prospect of improvement than it ever had before
1774, when Louis XVI. came to the throne. But the theories had
prepared France for radical changes, and they guided the phases of
the Revolution. The leaders had all the optimism of the
Encyclopaedists; yet the most powerful single force was Rousseau,
who, though he denied Progress and blasphemed civilisation, had
promulgated the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, giving it
an attractive appearance of mathematical precision; and to this
doctrine the revolutionaries attached their optimistic hopes.
[Footnote: It is interesting to observe how Robespierre, to whom the
doctrines of Rousseau were oracles, could break out into admiration
of the progress of civilised man, as he did in the opening passage
of his speech of 7th May 1794. proposing the decree for the worship
of the Supreme Being (see the text in Stephen, Orators of the French
Revolution, ii. 391-92).] The theory of equality seemed no longer
merely speculative; for the American constitution was founded on
democratic equality, whereas the English constitution, which before
had seemed the nearest approximation to the ideal of freedom, was
founded on inequality. The philosophical polemic of the masters was
waged with weapons of violence by the disciples. Chaumette and
Hebert, the followers of d'Holbach, were destroyed by the disciples
of Rousseau. In the name of the creed of the Vicaire Savoyard the
Jacobin Club shattered the bust of Helvetius. Mably and Morelly had
their disciples in Babeuf and the socialists.
A naive confidence that the political upheaval meant regeneration
and inaugurated a reign of justice and happiness pervaded France in
the first period of the Revolution, and found a striking expression
in the ceremonies of the universal "Federation" in the Champ-de-Mars
on 14th July 1790. The festival was theatrical enough, decreed and
arranged by the Constituent Assembly, but the enthusiasm and
optimism of the people who gathered to swear loyalty to the new
Constitution were genuine and spontaneous. Consciously or
subconsciously they were under the influence of the doctrine of
Progress which leaders of opinion had for several decades been
insinuating into the public mind. It did not occur to them that
their oaths and fraternal embraces did not change their minds or
hearts, and that, as Taine remarked, they remained what ages of
political subjection and one age of political literature had made
them. The assumption that new social machinery could alter human
nature and create a heaven upon earth was to be swiftly and terribly
confuted.
Post uarios casus et tot discrimina rerum
uenimus in Latium,
but Latium was to be the scene of sanguinary struggles.
Another allied and fundamental fallacy, into which all the
philosophers and Rousseau had more or less fallen, was reflected and
exposed by the Revolution. They had considered man in vacuo. They
had not seen that the whole development of a society is an enormous
force which cannot be talked or legislated away; they had ignored
the power of social memory and historical traditions, and misvalued
the strength of the links which bind generations together. So the
Revolutionaries imagined that they could break abruptly with the
past, and that a new method of government, constructed on
mathematical lines, a constitution (to use words of Burke) "ready
made and ready armed, mature in its birth, a perfect goddess of
wisdom and of war, hammered by our blacksmith midwives out of the
brain of Jupiter himself," would create a condition of idyllic
felicity in France, and that the arrival of the millennium depended
only on the adoption of the same principles by other nations. The
illusions created by the Declaration of the Rights of Man on the 4th
of August died slowly under the shadow of the Terror; but though the
hopes of those who believed in the speedy regeneration of the world
were belied, some of the thoughtful did not lose heart. There was
one at least who did not waver in his faith that the movement was a
giant's step on the path of man towards ultimate felicity, however
far he had still to travel. Condorcet, one of the younger
Encyclopaedists, spent the last months of his life, under the menace
of the guillotine, in projecting a history of human Progress.
3.
Condorcet was the friend and biographer of Turgot, and it was not
unfitting that he should resume the design of a history of
civilisation, in the light of the idea of Progress, for which Turgot
had only left luminous suggestions. He did not execute the plan, but
he completed an elaborate sketch in which the controlling ideas of
the scheme are fully set forth. His principles are to be found
almost entirely in Turgot. But they have a new significance for
Condorcet. He has given them wings. He has emphasised, and made
deductions. Turgot wrote in the calm spirit of an inquirer.
Condorcet spoke with the verve of a prophet. He was prophesying
under the shadow of death. It is amazing that the optimistic Sketch
of a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind should
have been composed when he was hiding from Robespierre in 1793.
[Footnote: Published in 1795.]
Condorcet was penetrated with the spirit of the Encyclopaedists, of
whom he had been one, and his attitude to Christianity was that of
Voltaire and Diderot. Turgot had treated the received religion
respectfully. He had acknowledged Providence, and, though the place
which he assigned to Providence was that of a sort of honorary
President of the development of civilisation who might disappear
without affecting the proceedings, there was a real difference
between his views and those of his friend as to the role of
Christianity and the civilisation of the Middle Ages.
A more important difference between the two thinkers is connected
with the different circumstances in which they wrote. Turgot did not
believe in the necessity of violent changes; he thought that steady
reforms under the existing regime would do wonders for France.
Before the Revolution Condorcet had agreed, but he was swept away by
its enthusiasm. The victory of liberty in America and the increasing
volume of the movement against slavery--one of the causes which most
deeply stirred his heart--had heightened his natural optimism and
confirmed his faith in the dogma of Progress. He felt the
exhilaration of the belief that he was living through "one of the
greatest revolutions of the human race," and he deliberately
designed his book to be opportune to a crisis of mankind, at which
"a picture of revolutions of the past will be the best guide."
Feeling that he is personally doomed, he consoles himself with
brooding on the time, however remote, when the sun will shine "on an
earth of none but freemen, with no master save reason; for tyrants
and slaves, priests and their stupid or hypocritical tools, will all
have disappeared." He is not satisfied with affirming generally the
certainty of an indefinite progress in enlightenment and social
welfare. He sets himself to think out its nature, to forecast its
direction, and determine its goal, and insists, as his predecessors
had never done, on the prospects of the distant future.
4.
His ambitious design is, in his own words, to show "the successive
changes in human society, the influence which each instant exerts on
the succeeding instant, and thus, in its successive modifications,
the advance of the human species towards truth or happiness." Taken
literally, this is an impossible design, and to put it forward as a
practical proposition is as if a man were to declare his intention
of writing a minute diary of the life of Julius Caesar from his
birth to his death. By stating his purpose in such terms, Condorcet
reveals that he had no notion of the limitations which confine our
knowledge of the past, and that even if he had conceived a more
modest and practicable programme he would have been incapable of
executing it. His formula, however, is worth remembering. For the
unattainable ideal which it expresses reminds us how many periods
and passages of human experience must always remain books with seven
seals.
Condorcet distinguished ten periods of civilisation, of which the
tenth lies in the future, but he has not justified his divisions and
his epochs are not co-ordinate in importance. Yet his arrangement of
the map of history is remarkable as an attempt to mark its sections
not by great political changes but by important steps in knowledge.
The first three periods--the formation of primitive societies,
followed by the pastoral age, and the agricultural age--conclude
with the invention of alphabetic writing in Greece. The fourth is
the history of Greek thought, to the definite division of the
sciences in the time of Aristotle. In the fifth knowledge progresses
and suffers obscuration under Roman rule, and the sixth is the dark
age which continues to the time of the Crusades. The significance of
the seventh period is to prepare the human mind for the revolution
which would be achieved by the invention of printing, with which the
eighth period opens. Some of the best pages of the book develop the
vast consequences of this invention. The scientific revolution
effected by Descartes begins a new period, which is now closed by
the creation of the French Republic.
The idea of the progress of knowledge had created the idea of social
Progress and remained its foundation. It was therefore logical and
inevitable that Condorcet should take advance in knowledge as the
clew to the march of the human race. The history of civilisation is
the history of enlightenment. Turgot had justified this axiom by
formulating the cohesion of all modes of social activity. Condorcet
insists on "the indissoluble union" between intellectual progress
and that of liberty, virtue, and the respect for natural rights, and
on the effect of science in the destruction of prejudice. All errors
in politics and ethics have sprung, he asserts, from false ideas
which are closely connected with errors in physics and ignorance of
the laws of nature. And in the new doctrine of Progress he sees an
instrument of enlightenment which is to give "the last blow to the
tottering edifice of prejudices."
It would not be useful to analyse Condorcet's sketch or dwell on his
obsolete errors and the defects of his historical knowledge. His
slight picture of the Middle Ages reflects the familiar view of all
the eighteenth century philosophers. The only contribution to social
amelioration which he can discover in a period of nearly a
millennium is the abolition of domestic slavery. And so this period
appears as an interruption of the onward march. His inability to
appreciate the historical role of the Roman Empire exhibits more
surprising ignorance and prejudice. But these particular defects are
largely due to a fundamental error which runs through his whole book
and was inherent in the social speculations of the Encyclopaedists.
Condorcet, like all his circle, ignored the preponderant part which
institutions have played in social development. So far as he
considered them at all, he saw in them obstacles to the free play of
human reason; not the spontaneous expression of a society
corresponding to its needs or embodying its ideals, but rather
machinery deliberately contrived for oppressing the masses and
keeping them in chains. He did not see that if the Progress in which
he believed is a reality, its possibility depends on the
institutions and traditions which give to societies their stability.
In the following generation, it would be pointed out that he fell
into a manifest contradiction when he praised the relative
perfection reached in some European countries in the eighteenth
century, and at the same time condemned as eminently retrograde all
the doctrines and institutions which had been previously in control.
[Footnote: Comte. Cours de philosophie positive, iv. 228.] This
error is closely connected with the other error, previously noticed,
of conceiving man abstracted from his social environment and
exercising his reason in vacuo.
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