^{page 19 note 1} Jefferson and France (Yale University Press, 1967), p. 3.Google Scholar

^{page 20 note 1} Renwick, John, ‘Marmontel on the Government of Virginia (1783)’, in Journal of American Studies, I, no. 2, 181–9.Google Scholar The person in question was Filippo Mazzei.

^{page 21 note 1} This was probably Vaillant's edition, London, 1767.

^{page 21 note 2} Oeuvres de Marmontel (Paris: Née de la Rochelle, 1787), pp. iv, 323–4.Google Scholar

^{page 21 note 3} Pastor of the Eglise Réformée in Charleston from 1759 until 1772. See South Carolina Gazette, 19 July 1760; 28 November, 1771.

^{page 22 note 1} Bélisaire (Paris: Merlin, 1767), pp. 245–7.Google Scholar

^{page 22 note 2} Ibid. 242–54.

^{page 22 note 3} Ibid. 248–9.

^{page 23 note 1} At this point it would perhaps be advisable to state the difference between religious intolerance and civil intolerance as understood in the eighteenth century. Religious intolerance was the refusal of the Established Church to recognize any doctrine which was different, and likewise the refusal to minister in any way to those who did not accept its teachings. Such intolerance was practically unknown in America. By civil intolerance, the contemporaries of Marmontel meant the propagation of the dominant Faith by force (again practically unknown in America) and the exclusion of all dissenters from civil rights and public posts, however menial. The latter sort of intolerance was, of course, not unknown in the Colonies. For example, Roman Catholics, non-Christians and Jews were denied the franchise. In Connecticut, Unitarians and Deists were excluded from holding office. And in Virginia, Baptist and other dissenting ministers (like the Huguenot pastors in France), ran the great risk of prosecution for ministering to their flocks. As late as 1768—the date of Bélisaire's arrival—many of the former had been imprisoned for having ‘disturbed the peace’.

My colleague, Dr Jack Pole, has drawn my attention—very rightly—to the fact that religious disabilities on the franchise were present in colonial laws, but that it would be somewhat difficult to say that they were ever seriously and persistently enforced. This is so; but one may surely object that such legislation laid the ground for an even more serious moral problem. For the very existence of restrictive legislation of this sort—as history has shown in Europe, particularly as regards Huguenots and Jews—was (and is still to an equal extent) a powerful, if not always fully grasped, incitement to prejudice.

^{page 27 note 1} Bélisaire, p. 80. Or, as Himeli's contemporaries would have read in Vaillant's edition: ‘The very worst arrangements of civil policy, and the most defective form of government, have their admirers, and their zealots.’

^{page 27 note 2} This point is important, and will be dealt with in the proper place.

^{page 28 note 1} Ibid. pp. 108–9: ‘Alas! were it his aim to live in harmony with his people, he would have no party but his subjects, no interest but that of the state.’

^{page 28 note 2} The History of the Revolution of South-Carolina from a British Province to an independent State (2 vols.) (Trenton: printed by Isaac Collins, 1785), vol. I, p. 7.Google Scholar

^{page 29 note 1} Ibid. p. 7.

^{page 29 note 2} See in particular pp. 84–114 of Bélisaire—at the start of the political treatise proper—which are a thinly veiled discussion of this topic. Only the precise appellation is lacking. But the whole theme of Belisarius's counselling Justinian is an exercise in the practical interpretation of the fundamental laws. In Marmontel's opinion they could evidently be reduced to one great fundamental: the interests of public felicity and equanimity. And such a law, catholic in the extreme, could hence suit anybody's tastes and purposes, anywhere, at any time.

^{page 29 note 3} Ibid. pp. 149–74. Here Marmontel deals first with taxation, and then with corruption.

^{page 30 note 1} In this instance it would be better to give examples of Marmontel's complaints in their contemporary English rendering, for the simple reason that the translation produced for Vaillant in London, which was almost certainly the one which Himeli spoke of, provided glosses and, here and there at important points, used English political terminology. The thesis therefore took on an even wider meaning in an Anglo-Saxon environment.

^{page 30 note 2} Ibid. pp. 149–50, for the original French.

^{page 30 note 3} Ibid. p. 153, for the original.

^{page 30 note 4} Ibid. pp. 154–5, for the original.

^{page 31 note 1} Ibid. pp. 163–4, for the original.

^{page 31 note 2} The fault lay with the translator, although there are extenuating circumstances in that Marmontel's argument tends, on one or two points, to be a little nebulous. (Nebulous notions, however—sometimes the result of fundamentally hazy terminology, or of one word's doing the job for several different ideas—are not wholly unknown in his work.) The original stated: Les plus abusives des loix, sont celles qui donnent prise sur les biens. Car on n'en veut guère à la vie ni à la liberté des peuples; & quand on leur lie les mains ce n'est que pour les délpouiller. His meaning is, nevertheless, reasonably clear. The mistranslation, backed up by the use of the words ‘liberties of the people’ (which had taken on a very distinctive flavour in an American context) is, however, of little importance. For the remainder of the argument (indeed the whole thesis) cancels out this semicontradiction in English.

^{page 32 note 1} See Ramsay, Davidop. cit. pp. 14–15.Google Scholar

^{page 32 note 2} It would seem that, in South Carolina, a fair number of people believed that the Declaratory Act was passed in deference to what they had been contending, i.e. that taxation is not included in the legislative power. Christopher Gadsden was one of the few who drew his fellow citizens' attention to the preamble of the act, and forcibly pressed upon them the folly of rejoicing at an act which still asserted and maintained the absolute dominion of Great Britain. And what makes for the interest of Bélisaire in this respect is that it arrived, after the Townshend Acts, at the very moment when the earlier Gadsden view had gained universal credence.

^{page 32 note 3} Bélisaire, pp. 71–2.

^{page 33 note 1} This was no new preoccupation with Marmontel. Ten years previously he had sustained the same thesis in the seventh volume of the Encyclopédie, in the articles Gloire Grands and Grandeur. Moreover, should the monarch miss the meaning of the thesis in Bélisaire, he could perhaps be orientated in the correct direction at the end of the work, pp. 275–340, where these three articles were reprinted. I would also add that the thesis, both in 1757 and 1767, was undoubtedly self-interested in great measure.

^{page 33 note 2} Ibid. pp. 2; 3; 71; 118; 122–3; 166–7; 176; 178; 196; 200; 204; 209; 226–7; 272.

^{page 33 note 3} Ibid. p. 118.

^{page 33 note 4} Ibid. pp. 122–3.

^{page 34 note 1} Quoted in McCrady's, History of South Carolina under the Royal Government 1719–1776, p. 539.Google Scholar

^{page 35 note 1} Bélisaire p. 107.

^{page 35 note 2} Ibid. p. 209.

^{page 35 note 3} In no sense did Marmontel ever see the error of his belief (at least not until 1793). For he was to say, some ten years later, in his Essai sur le Bonheur: c'est en traitant des moyens d'établir l'opinion, les lots pour la garde des moeurs…c'est là qu'on peut développer et fonder en principes le système de l'optimisme civil, politique et moral.

^{page 36 note 1} Nouveaux Lundis (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1892), vol. 3, pp. 234–5.Google Scholar

^{page 37 note 1} Bélisaire, pp. 226–7.

^{page 37 note 2} Ibid. p. 228.

^{page 38 note 1} Oeuvres (1787), iv, pp. 325–8.Google Scholar Marmontel was completely polarized around the subject of intolerance. For in 1767 the XVth chapter of Bélisaire had been severely censured and its author subjected to persecution by the Sorbonne. He was so obviously inflamed by this behaviour that the subject cropped up in his correspondence for years to come. In fact, he had been so disgusted by the Sorbonne's refusal to accept his pleas for toleration that he straightway set about writing his epic novel Les Incas, which dealt, not surprisingly, with the bloody persecution meted out by the Spaniards in the Americas. He was still working on it in 1769, hence the polarization, and its unmistakeable expression in a letter to an American correspondent.