The people’s atheist

Listen to this essay 22 minute listen One Sunday in 1716, in the small Ardennes village of Étrépigny in northeastern France, a parish priest climbed into the pulpit to perform one of those habitual, ordinary gestures. Like many country priests under the Ancien Régime, Jean Meslier was expected, during Mass, to commend the local lord to the prayers of the faithful. But this lord, Antoine de Toully, was known in the village for mistreating the poor and robbing orphans. Meslier knew it. His parishioners knew it too. But silence prevailed. Instead of covering up the injustice, the priest subtly turned the ritual inside out. He obeyed, and did indeed pray for the local lord, but he invited the faithful to pray for him not in order to celebrate his authority, but so that he might atone for the injustices he inflicted on the poor. The scandal was immediate. Complaint, reprimand, punishment, a forced retreat to nearby Reims: the ecclesiastical machine at once placed itself in the service of the local petty nobility to punish this insolent priest. This tiny scene, minute on the scale of European history, already contains Meslier’s central idea, the kernel of his political philosophy. Power does not hold only by force, taxation or law. It holds because it gets itself blessed. It holds because it succeeds in passing off injustice as order, domination as hierarchy, suffering as something meritorious. People have often tried to turn Meslier into a slogan: a Marxist before Marx, an anarchist before anarchism, an evolutionist before Darwin. These comparisons are not entirely absurd. They do tell us something about how far ahead of his time this priest was. But they reveal less than they conceal. Meslier’s real singularity lies not in having ‘anticipated’ later doctrines. It lies in having seen, from within a small Ardennes village, how domination is built in layers: by lords, by kings, by the Church, but also by the feelings these institutions organise – fear, guilt, hope, resignation. In other words: before he dreamed of a new society, he understood why the old one endured. To understand how radical that intuition was, we need to return to the France in which Meslier grew up and wrote. He was born under Louis XIV and died at the start of Louis XV’s reign, in an absolute monarchy where the Church was not a mere spiritual backdrop, but one of the main pillars of social order. The Ardennes, a border region, lived to the rhythm of the kingdom’s wars: troops quartered in private homes, requisitions of food and fodder, convoys, pillage, devastated villages. To this military brutality there was added, after 1685, confessional brutality. By revoking the Edict of Nantes – the legal framework that allowed Protestants to practise their faith within the kingdom – the monarchy revived forced conversions of non-Catholics, deportations, condemnations and the policing of conscience. In Sedan in the Ardennes, young girls were pushed into the convent of the Daughters of the Propagation of the Faith; the royal army officer Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, passing through the region, remarked that there were enough there ‘to fill a martyrology’. In such a world, absolutism did not first appear as a theory: it was lived as a daily pressure. The higher clergy – rich, landed and close to the powerful – upheld the established order; the lower country clergy baptised, buried, kept registers, acted as public scribes, settled disputes, and partly shared the life of the peasants. It was in this zone of friction, between altar, lordship and the rural poor, that Meslier’s thought was formed. Born in 1664 at Mazerny, educated at the seminary in Reims, appointed parish priest in 1689, Meslier was nothing like the worldly philosophes of the Enlightenment. He spent 40 years in the same parish. He kept his registers impeccably. Outwardly, he led a regular priestly life. And that is precisely what has so often troubled his readers: how can a man preach by day what he destroys by night? The question is anachronistic. Under the Ancien Régime, one did not simply defrock oneself. One did not freely leave the Church. Apostasy exposed a man to banishment, ruin, and sometimes worse. Meslier remained a priest not despite his atheism, but because of it: the position gave him the material conditions, the time and the shelter he needed to write. Any other profession risked exposing him to persecution. If religion held men in its grip, then one had to go back to the heart of the mechanism, and dismantle the springs of faith We do not know exactly when Meslier became an atheist. Everything suggests, however, that his unbelief may have predated his ordination – and that 1716 marked less a conversion than a strategic turning point, when, after being disciplined by the archbishop for confronting the local lord, he shifted his efforts from the pulpit to the page, carrying the struggle onto another terrain: that of writing. Meslier states the logic of this secret, posthumous intervention in the opening sentence of his Mémoire: My dearest friends, since I would not have been permitted – and since it would have brought consequences both dangerous and grievous – to say openly during my lifetime what I thought of the conduct and government of men, of their religions and their morals, I resolved to tell you after my death. Meslier wrote for a readership he could reach only once he was beyond punishment. He copied out the manuscript by hand, intending it to survive him. That posthumous strategy turned a private contradiction into a political intervention. His great text was born of that lived contradiction. After the affair of 1716, when he realised he could no longer fight the alliance between lord and archbishop openly – at the scale of the village – he displaced the struggle. He was no longer attacking only a brutal country lord; he was facing up to the system as a whole. His reasoning was this: if feudal power oppressed the peasants, it was because it was upheld by the Church. If the Church was able to uphold the feudal lords, it was because the Church itself rested on religion. And if religion held men in its grip, then one had to go back to the heart of the mechanism, and dismantle the springs of faith. One might object that Meslier collapses religion, as organised by the Church, into faith. In any case, that is how the Mémoire des pensées et sentiments de Jean Meslier (Memoir of the Thoughts and Sentiments of Jean Meslier) came into being: a huge text, which he copied out by hand three times, intended for his parishioners and, beyond them, for ‘all those like them’. Nothing in that title announces a simple exercise in freethought, let alone an attack on what Meslier himself called ‘the conduct and government of men’. This point is crucial, and it has often been missed. Meslier was not writing for a circle of literate readers curious about antireligious arguments. That is precisely what sets him apart from the philosophes of the Enlightenment who would come a few decades later. He wrote for ordinary people. He wrote for those crushed by the social order, whom he called on to be ‘disabused’. His atheism was therefore, from the start, popular in its intended audience and political in its purpose. While many 18th-century atheists remained tied to aristocratic or learned circles shaped by the Enlightenment, Meslier addressed the people. No wonder some people have likened him to Marx avant la lettre. It would, nevertheless, be misleading to place Meslier entirely outside the Enlightenment. He belongs at its dawn: not on the side of the dazzling Enlightenment of salons, academies and great printed controversies, but on the side of what we might call a quieter Enlightenment, advancing through manuscripts, clandestine copied works, texts passed from hand to hand. Meslier was not a worldly philosopher, nor a man of networks. He had neither the Parisian stage, nor the ‘Republic of Letters’, nor the conversation of elites. Yet that very deprivation helps explain the form of his radicalism: he wrote to break the alliance between religion and subjection. Meslier made the move from disbelief or scepticism to materialism. Matter, for him, did not need to be created, but it possessed existence and motion in itself. Also, he believed that the soul was not an immaterial substance awaiting judgment, but part of the body, and mortal with it, which may well explain his move to irreligion. This is also what separates him so sharply from Voltaire. The two men shared a hostility to the Church as a force of domination. But they were not aiming at the same target. Voltaire wanted to break the Church’s grip without giving up the idea of a God morally useful to civil order; he fought fanaticism, not belief as such. Meslier went much further: he saw in the Christian religion itself – and not merely in its abuses – a technique for governing conduct. Where Voltaire preserved, for the people, a religion that he thought was socially necessary, Meslier wanted precisely to deprive the powerful of this inner lever of obedience. The disagreement was not only theological. It involved two different politics of critique: one sought to purify belief, the other to disarm the power that belief exerts. If hell is earthly, its causes are earthly too. And, if its causes are earthly, they can be fought politically In that respect, Meslier occupies a singular place even among the boldest thinkers of the 18th century. Denis Diderot or Baron d’Holbach would be closer to him than Voltaire in their materialism and irreligion, but Meslier retained something they never quite had: an atheism addressed not to a few strong minds, but to parishioners, peasants, ordinary readers. To borrow a helpful phrase, his unbelief was an atheism from below. It did not seek to distinguish a ‘clear-sighted’ elite from a credulous mass; it sought to disabuse those whom the social order both exploited and consoled. That is how he fully belongs to the Enlightenment: he radicalised its religious critique by turning it, from the outset, into a social critique. What religious fiction makes possible, in his view, is first of all a very concrete distribution of suffering. In a striking passage of his text, Meslier redefines paradise and hell in materialist terms. Meslier puts the contrast starkly: Some always live in prosperity and in the abundance of every good, amid pleasure and joy, as though in a kind of paradise, while others, by contrast, always live in pain, suffering, affliction and the miseries of poverty, as though in a kind of hell. There is no need to wait for the next world: it is all already here. The social world is enough to produce its blessed and its damned. This shift is crucial. It removes from religion its monopoly over salvation and misfortune. It shows that, if hell is earthly, its causes are earthly too. And, if its causes are earthly, they can be fought politically. From that point on, Meslier’s religious critique ceases to be merely speculative. Of course, his Mémoire is organised around ‘arguments’ against religions, scriptures, miracles and the spirituality of the soul. But this refutation always has a more concrete background. Meslier called all religions ‘purely human inventions and institutions’. What priests preached, he wrote, consisted of ‘illusions, errors, lies, fictions and impostures, first invented by shrewd and cunning politicians’. An unjust society cannot survive long if it appears naked. It needs mystery, ceremony, deferred promises, internalised guilt. It needs to teach the poor that their misery has meaning, and the powerful that their power has been blessed. Not exactly views that you’d expect from a parish priest. This is what gives Meslier’s thought its unsettling modernity. He does not explain domination by coercion alone. He understood that an order of domination endures, above all, when those it crushes come, in part, to consent to the reasons for their own crushing. The instrumentalisation of religion is not merely a false discourse about the afterlife; it is an administration of conduct. It produces subjects who accept, who wait, who resign themselves. It turns suffering into merit, hierarchy into natural order, inequality into trial. We might say, in a vocabulary not his own but one he would have understood, that it governs men’s inner lives and habits. That is why, for Meslier, criticism of religious discourse is not an end in itself. It is a means of breaking subjection. To undo religious discourse is to undo the moral blackmail that protects monarchy, nobility and clergy. It is to deprive masters of their most convenient source of legitimacy. And it is also to restore to the oppressed a capacity for judgment. Meslier repeats that the people need only a little more light to see the vanity of the errors imposed upon them; but they also need union, common intelligence, organisation. His text is, therefore, not a mere rant. It is an attempt to turn dispersed indignation into collective intelligence. Meslier’s novelty lies not in anticipating Darwin, but in helping to de-theologise the very idea of nature This is also where the dimension later readers have called ‘proto-communist’, or even ‘pre-Marxist’, comes from. Meslier observes that some monastic communities live by holding their goods in common, and enjoying in common the fruit of their labour. He then turns this model against Christianity itself: if such an arrangement works for monks, why should it not work for entire parishes – and, by extension, on a larger scale, for a much larger part of society? He imagines people able to live ‘peacefully all together in common’, to work in common, and to enjoy in common the fruits of the earth. Separate property, for him, is not merely unjust; it is an ‘abuse’ that mechanically produces a multitude of unhappy people. We must nevertheless be precise. Meslier is not simply a pre-communist or an anarchist before the word. He does not dream of a society without rules, or even of a community abandoned to spontaneous nature. Recent readings are right to stress that he also imagines forms of regulation, a just subordination, ‘wise magistrates’ exercising a ‘wise authority’. What he destroys is not all institution, but the sacralisation of power, the excess of hierarchy, hereditary privilege, and the parasitic enjoyment of other people’s labour. His horizon is a society without hereditary lords or a privileged clergy. Social life would still require magistrates, but their authority would be practical, limited and stripped of sacred legitimacy. The same care and caution are needed when it comes to his supposed ‘pre-Darwinism’. Meslier, quite obviously, develops no theory of evolution in the modern sense. But he does develop a materialist naturalism that strips the order of the world of its theological meaning. Beauty, apparent order, the forms of living things do not prove, for him, the existence of a divine artisan. There is a better, alternative account. They can be explained by matter itself – its movements, its irregularities, its combinations. We should not make Meslier into a Darwin before Darwin. The point is more interesting: he belongs among those who, as David Hume would later, in works such as his posthumous Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), shift the explanation of the living world out of the providential frame. We must, however, avoid a flattering anachronism. Meslier’s naturalism remains largely speculative: it rests neither on an empirical investigation of living things nor on a mechanism of species transformation, but on a metaphysical refutation of creationism. His novelty lies not in anticipating Charles Darwin, but in helping to de-theologise the very idea of nature. We can understand the world without the need to postulate the existence of a Creator. If Meslier has remained unknown for so long, despite the originality and precocity of his ideas, it is not only because he wrote from a village. It is also because his thought was transformed very early by the way it was circulated. After his death in 1729, his Mémoire entered clandestine circuits from about 1734-35 onward. Copies circulated among ‘rich and curious’ readers. Some Enlightenment philosophers – Diderot, Claude-Adrien Helvétius, Holbach – knew it. But because the text was long, difficult, repetitive and explosive, it was mostly abridged versions that were read. And this is where Voltaire came in. He played a decisive role in Meslier’s fame – but at the price of a major distortion. In 1762, he published a reworked, shortened, expurgated extract in which the materialism, the agrarian communism and the political radicalism largely disappeared. He even added a deist colouring foreign to the author, who rejected the notion of a God altogether. Voltaire’s 1762 edition also popularised the title ‘Testament’ – a misleading one, since it shifted the reading from the political programme of an insurgent towards the moral confession of a dying man. The story does not end there. Under the French Revolution and then in the 19th century, further confusions accumulated. Texts that were not by him – notably Holbach’s Le Bon Sens (Common Sense, 1772) – were republished as written by him. His reputation travelled more than his work. He became at times a simple anticlerical, at times a vague precursor of scientific socialism, at times a curiosity in the history of ideas. For a long while, the real Meslier – the materialist, the advocate of common ownership, the hater of the twin tyrannies of political and religious power – remained partly buried beneath the successive uses of his name. It took the complete Amsterdam edition of 1864, and then, above all, the scholarly turn of the 1960s and ’70s, for him to emerge more clearly. Yet his work is still not widely known. People are dominated not only by what is taken from them, but by what they are made to believe This editorial history is not a detail. It prolongs Meslier’s own lesson. Radical thought is not always silenced by frontal censorship; it can also survive by being transformed into something less dangerous, softened, repackaged, made publishable. The text does not disappear altogether but circulates in a gentler, less pugnacious version: its function changes. The people’s atheist becomes a presentable deist. The critic of the alliance between religion and inequality becomes a moralistic anticlerical. The theorist of common ownership becomes a mere name in the history of ‘advanced ideas’, not someone who might rouse the rabble into action. There is another way, then – less visible but very effective – to neutralise a political charge: not by banning the text, but by rewriting it just enough so that it no longer attacks its original target. This, too, is why Meslier still speaks to us. Not because he offers a ready-made programme, or because it would be enough to recycle his anger. But because he asks a question that has lost none of its force: what allows a manifestly unjust social order to take hold and endure? His answer, formulated in the language of the early 18th century, remains strikingly timely. Meslier himself describes, in almost physical terms, the relationship of dependence that exists between this unjust social order and those it governs: It is only through your industry and arduous labour that the abundance of all the goods and riches of the earth is produced. It is this abundant sap, which they draw from your hands, that sustains them, feeds them, fattens them, and makes them so strong, so powerful, so proud, so haughty and so arrogant. An order endures when it manages to enter the imagination of those it governs; when it ties domination to morality; when it makes enduring, waiting, keeping quiet or blaming oneself seem more reasonable than understanding, uniting and resisting. We often think of unbelief as a private conviction or a cultural provocation. Meslier gives it a political meaning. For him, atheism is not simply a rejection of religious doctrine; it is a critique of obedience. It begins with a refusal to let heaven be invoked to justify earthly misery. It begins with the insight that the powerful need not only docile bodies, but persuaded and alienated consciences. It begins when one understands that people are dominated not only by what is taken from them, but by what they are made to believe so that they become unwitting contributors to their own demise. When Meslier died in 1729, he vanished almost without a trace. The archives preserve his signature until his last months, but his death entry does not even appear in the parish registers. And yet, he left behind a text meant to carry on the struggle by other means. A text addressed to parishioners, to the poor, to ‘all those like them’. The attempt to erase him failed.