I've recently finished reading Philipp Blom's new book, A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment, actually the first book I've read all the way through on my Barnes & Noble Nook.
I found it a bit derivative of Peter Gay's book, originally published in the 1960's, titled The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism, but I enjoyed Blom's book nonetheless as an exercise in popular intellectual history. Blom, more so than Gay, emphasizes the fundamental divisions between what he characterizes as the radical Enlightenment, centered around Baron d'Holbach, Denis Diderot and their circle, versus the soft Enlightenment represented by Rousseau and Voltaire (despite the differences between the latter).
The radical Illuminists emphasized materialism, atheism, education, scientific progress, the championing of the interests of the oppressed and the destruction of artificial hierarchies which, they argued, lack rational justification and fill the world with unnecessary suffering. The soft Illuminists, by contrast, wanted mainly to reform religion in the direction of deism, and they felt comfortable with the existing social and political structure, apart from the Church's malign influence. You can see this in their respective lifestyles. Holbach had his own money from inheritance, which he applied towards running a "propaganda factory for atheism," as Peter Gay phrases it; while Diderot until relatively late in life made a precarious livelihood as an independent man of letters because he wanted to preserve his intellectual freedom. By contrast, Rousseau often sought handouts and patronage from aristocrats, while Voltaire lent money from his personal fortune to princes.
The social forces which led to the French Revolution tended to favor the soft Illuminsts' agenda, as evidenced by the contrast between each side's leaders' final dispositions. Holbach's and Diderot's remains wound up scattered and almost forgotten in the ossuary of an obscure Parisian church, while Rousseau's and Voltaire's intact remains eventually wound up in the Panthéon, in recognition of their higher attributed status and social acceptability.
I plan to write about the substance of Blom's book in a future post, but in this one I'd like to write about how I imagine the reality of Holbach's and Diderot's world. The French suffer from the stereotype now about desultory hygiene, in the 21st Century, despite otherwise enjoying the good health which comes from living in a developed country. But what about their ancestors' hygiene and physical condition in the 18th Century? Even upper class French people almost never bathed, and almost everyone must have gone through life itching with lice, fleas, mites, or scabies crawling on his or her skin, probably literally from birth. Diderot, probably itching himself from his own parasites, must have witnessed an endless stream of stinking, filthy, infested, malformed, brain damaged or otherwise physically impaired people on the streets of Paris, thanks to ignorance, poverty, exhaustion, malnutrition, chronic diseases, exposure to environmental toxins, chronic anxiety induced by superstition, and the stress hormones generated by living in a hierarchical society which freely employed violence and capital punishment to keep the lower orders in line.
And not to mention that the French people had to eat from depleted topsoils which had undergone cultivation since pre-Roman times. French intellectuals noted that their visitors from the New World, like Thomas Jefferson, often stood a head taller than them. The colonists tended to display better physical condition than their fellow tribesmen still in Europe because the former grew up eating from topsoils which had only recently begun their drawdown of nutrients with transplanted Eurasian crops.
Yet somehow Diderot and his friends saw beyond all that ugliness to envision a much better way for humans to live, even if they lacked the knowledge of public health we now possess. They thought they could lay the groundwork for this better world with their subversive writings based on certain philosophical and scientific ideas. Given what they confronted on a daily basis, their vision seems all the more impressive.
I'll get back to Blom's message in a day or two.
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