Profane Illuminations

Two decades ago, while studying in Paris, I stumbled across the wonderful bookstore of the Libre Pensée ("Free Thought") association. Tucked away in the narrow streets of the Fifth Arrondissement, near where Balzac set Le Père Goriot, it seemed a relic of the past: shabby, dim and cluttered, the gentle odor of old book leather hinting at hidden treasures on the shelves. And indeed, most of the books appeared, delightfully, to have come out of an alternate timeline in which the age of Voltaire had never ended. Thick volumes denounced the hidden conspiracies of the Jesuits and chronicled the crimes of the Inquisition. Pamphlets offered concise defenses of Deism. And a rickety postcard stand displayed, alongside the usual images of the Pantheon and the Seine, engravings of the execution of Jean Calas, an eighteenth-century victim of religious bigotry posthumously exonerated through the efforts of Voltaire. One half expected to see the philosophe himself browsing quietly at the next shelf.

Back then, in the mid-1980s, La Libre Pensée seemed like nothing more than a pleasant curiosity. After all, the great battles of the Enlightenment had burned out long before. Religious intolerance and fanaticism were no longer matters of major concern. Indeed, for many of my French fellow students, the great enemy was the Enlightenment itself. Every week they would cram into a crowded lecture hall at the Collège de France to hear Michel Foucault, then in the last year of his life, explain how the eighteenth century saw the imprisoning of the Western world in a straitjacket of mental discipline. They struggled to grasp the quicksilver sentences in which Jacques Derrida deconstructed the criteria of rationality and truth that eighteenth-century philosophy had taken as axiomatic. They spoke derisively of an Enlightenment that had culminated not in modern democracy but in Auschwitz.

Today, things look rather different. Pace Foucault, enlightened psychiatrists and prison reformers do not seem particularly dangerous compared with suicide bombers and book burners. In the twenty-first century the Enlightenment appears anything but the triumphant imperial "project" denounced by vulgar postmodernists. Its heritage is fragile and endangered. Admittedly, its works remain in the "canon"--but perhaps only because they go largely unread in certain quarters. I sometimes wonder what would happen if, for instance, a public university system asked all entering students to read Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary, with its deep, deliberate offensiveness toward Christianity. What if a major studio attempted to film his Mahomet, a play far more systematically disparaging of the Prophet than Rushdie's Satanic Verses?

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