posted on 12 Dec 2016

Wicked Company : Freethinkers and Friendship in Pre-Revolutionary Paris by Philipp Blom

I feel slightly hesitant to be enthusiastically recommending a book about the influence of the European Enlightenment in 18th century France because I’m sure that there will be plenty of people who won’t make it past this first sentence. It does, I admit, sound like a rather niche interest but I can honestly say that I found it accessible, stimulating and, at times, genuinely amusing (even humorous).

What Philipp Blom has done here is to take us back to pre-revolutionary Paris to experience the impact that the ferment of ideas we now call the Enlightenment had on a group of philosophers, writers and artists who were, unknown to them at the time, prefiguring the sort of political and social changes that ripple out across the Western world over the coming two centuries.

And like in so many of these stories, the key players are often an unprepossessing bunch in many ways. Paris in the middle of the 18th century was the city to be in if you wanted to experience the cut and thrust of the new ideas of the time and the salon of Baron d’Holbach, German by nationality, was where it was at. Here we witness the trials and tribulations of Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Wilhelm Grimm and a legion of big names that come and go or orbit around this salon – Voltaire, David Hume, Laurence Sterne amongst them.

It probably won’t surprise you to hear that it was also a very masculine environment – what else could it have been in these times – but Blom does try hard to ensure that the influence of Diderot’s much put upon mistress, Sophie Volland, and the spirited and individually minded author, Louise d’Epinay get their fair share of acknowledgement for the contributions they made.

In many ways this is a high grade soap opera – undying friendships are declared before an inevitable falling out turns into undying enmity and reputations are built and broken almost overnight. Central to the story is the relationship between Diderot and Rousseau and between Rousseau and just about everyone else. Blom, I think, comes down on the side of those who thought that Rousseau was a paranoid prima donna who would have been pretty unbearable to spend much time around while the author’s admiration for Diderot, despite his obvious failings, also cuts through.

If this was just a book about friendships made and broken it would be marginally interesting but what lifts it above that are the ideas and the importance of the ideas that these people were forging between them. Here were the origins of what we now think of as the free-thinking , liberal tradition – sceptical, enquiring, challenging authority and fundamentally humanist. At the heart of all this was a commitment to the dangerous beliefs of atheism – still seen as a criminal offence at this time and something which could get you a very nasty spell of time in prison as Diderot himself found out.

However, finding ways to break the stranglehold of religion and building logical arguments in favour of a world that runs on natural rather than supernatural principles was their goal – and the philosophy that underpinned this was subtle, inventive and good enough in most cases to keep them out of the grasp of the authorities.

What Blom does really excellently is to give you a digestible, intelligent and wholly readable summary of some devilishly difficult philosophical positions. So we get Descartes, Spinoza, Hume and a host of other thinkers summarised without compromising their complexity but at the same time making them wholly accessible and understandable. Diderot’s great triumph, his massive encyclopaedia, becomes in his hands a directory of the ideas of the Enlightenment as reflected through the ideas bounced around this salon of thinkers and is revealed as a task akin to herding a bunch of reluctant cats.

This is a rich book and one which helps us to understand how it was ideas and the daring to use ideas that led to not just the French Revolution but the wider revolution in thinking that saw us break free from the stranglehold of religious superstition.

 

Terry Potter

December 2016