Introduction: historical writing in the Age of Reason

The Encyclopédie's “Discours préliminaire” famously distinguished among three different branches of knowledge corresponding to three different faculties of the human mind: “History which is related to memory; Philosophy, which is the fruit of reason; and the Fine Arts, which are born of imagination.”Footnote ¹ J. G. A. Pocock has observed that Jean Le Rond d'Alembert's encyclopedic tree seemed to relegate “the scholar's enterprise to the lowest of the three rigorously separated capacities of the mind.”Footnote ² Indeed, d'Alembert defined memory as “the passive and almost mechanical collection of this same knowledge,” suggesting that it was inferior to the other faculties.Footnote ³ He divided the literary world of gens des lettres into three “republics,” which were similar to each other only in the “lack of esteem” that their members held for one another: “The poet and the philosopher both treat each other as madmen who feed on fancies. Both regard the scholar as a sort of miser who thinks only of amassing facts without enjoying and who indiscriminately heaps up the basest metals along with the most precious ones.”Footnote ⁴ D'Alembert's article “Érudition” in the fifth volume of the Encyclopédie somewhat rehabilitated erudite learning, suggesting that “certain branches of erudition,” such as “criticism,” were “necessary in the study of sciences.”Footnote ⁵ However, he still distinguished between érudition, which he defined as “the knowledge of facts,” and science, which was a term “reserved for knowledge that more immediately requires reasoning and reflection, such as physics and mathematics.”Footnote ⁶ D'Alembert thus drew a sharp contrast between philosophy and history, between reason and memory—in other words, between enlightenment and erudition.

This tension between natural philosophy and erudite scholarship also led to what Arnaldo Momigliano has described as a clash between “antiquarian” and “philosophic” historians.Footnote ⁷ Indeed, the apparent distinction between the passive collection of factual knowledge, characteristic of erudite humanism, and philosophical narratives about the progress of human understanding that appeared in the “Discours préliminaire” informed how eighteenth-century philosophes reframed the goals of historical inquiry. In his Essai sur le moeurs (known in English as the Essay on Universal History, the Manners, and Spirit of Nations, 1756), Voltaire declared that the aim of his work was to describe “the spirit, the manners, and the customs of the most considerable nations” and “not to learn in what year a prince unworthy of being known, succeeded to a barbarous sovereign in an uncivilized nation.” Focusing on kings “who have improved the manners and contributed to the happiness of their people,” Voltaire claimed to present a new kind of history. It was a narrative that depicted the progress of the human mind and the gradual softening of customs.Footnote ⁸

Swayed by the philosophes’ triumphalist rhetoric that stressed the novelty and originality of their approaches to the past, some of the early scholarship about Enlightenment historical writing, beginning with the philosophes themselves and extending into the twentieth century, described a sharp contrast between the antiquarian histories of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century humanists and the philosophical histories of the eighteenth century. In his influential book Voltaire Historian, J. H. Brumfitt has argued that “Enlightenment historiography becomes a reality” with Henry de Boulainvilliers's Histoire de l'ancien gouvernement de France (1727) and Montesquieu's Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734), while “the task of interpreting history as a whole from the point of view of the Enlightenment is reserved for Voltaire.” In Brumfitt's view, scholars prior to Voltaire “lacked any principle by which they could distinguish fact from fiction and fable,” and he dismissed the influence of most of their work.Footnote ⁹ More recently, Blandine Kriegel's account of historical writing in France has similarly argued that the clash between philosophy and erudition at the dawn of the Enlightenment ended in the definitive “defeat of erudition.” She has suggested that d'Alembert's distinction between the barrenness of bookish historical studies and the “fertile garden” of reason consigned the former to the margins of learned culture while promoting the mathematical and physical sciences. The relegation of histoire savante also coincided with a reorientation of the historical discipline as a whole.Footnote ¹⁰ Chantal Grell has likewise emphasized the decline of the humanist tradition, citing its inability to “renew itself,” and argued that Enlightenment historiography was characterized by an increasingly secular framework.Footnote ¹¹

Scholars have thus tended to define philosophical history as a new, secular, and revolutionary genre made possible by Enlightenment freethinking and explicitly articulated in Voltaire's Histoire de la philosophie (1765).Footnote ¹² The genre included works such as Adam Ferguson's An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), John Millar's Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1778), and Nicolas de Condorcet's Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain (1795), among other texts. Philosophical histories increasingly relied on explanatory factors that no longer referenced divine causes, looking instead to explanations that focused on the environment, material factors, and various human motivations. The genre also articulated conjectural accounts of the earliest societies and offered new narratives about the stadial theories of human development that outlined several stages through which all cultures passed. Philosophical history thus triumphantly depicted the rise of the modern world, focusing on concepts such as civilization, progress, and commercial society.Footnote ¹³

It was the disagreement with this sharp distinction between memory, reason, and imagination that, according to Momigliano and Pocock, informed how Edward Gibbon, the most prominent historian of the eighteenth century, started to think about the relationship between erudition and enlightenment. Provoked by “D'Alembert's contempt for erudition,” Gibbon “aimed at blending in himself the philosopher and the antiquarian.” For the English historian, that connection would prove to be inseparable, and it would deeply inform The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88), in which he “unexpectedly reconciled two methods of writing history which so far had seemed to be inevitably opposed.”Footnote ¹⁴ Gibbon began this attempt at reconciliation in his Essai sur l’étude de la littérature (1761), where he set out to defend erudition against the attacks of philosophes such as d'Alembert. He appeared uneasy about the way in which d'Alembert relegated memory, history, and antiquarian scholarship to the lowest rank among intellectual endeavors. Gibbon's “project of affirming the intellectual autonomy of l’érudition” was based on his skepticism about the triumphalist narrative of the progress of the human mind and his suspicion of the “hegemony of mathematics” and philosophy. In Pocock's influential interpretation, Gibbon defended the importance of studying history and literature in tandem: he proposed that one could only make sense of texts by “anchoring” them “in their historical contexts,” which are discovered by the study “of past states of society and culture, recovered by philosophy and erudition, the exercise of the imagination and the judgment.”Footnote ¹⁵

Gibbon's unease about the sharp distinction between philosophy and erudition should make us skeptical about the triumphalist depictions of philosophical history as an entirely new form of writing about the past that broke definitively with earlier traditions. Voltaire's polemical Essai sur le moeurs certainly reframed some of the ways in which his contemporaries thought about the history of humankind. However, Voltaire's decision to focus not on particular political events and wars, but on intellectual and cultural history, reflected a by then widespread approach adopted by many eighteenth-century scholars to the study of the past. Similarly, Voltaire's view that history should describe the “progress of the human mind” had already been embraced by a number of historians by the time he set out to write his Essai sur le moeurs. These trends were particularly notable and prevalent at the French Académie royale des inscriptions and belles-lettres.Footnote ¹⁶

There, academicians who studied the cultures of ancient and extra-European societies focused not only on political events and diplomatic relations, but also on artistic achievements, intellectual developments, and daily practices. They explored a variety of past civilizations, examining the gradual changes in the belief structures, cultural activities, and forms of political organization. Voltaire, who in Momigliano's words “abolished footnotes altogether,” did not explicitly acknowledge the influence of the Académie des inscriptions for his own writings.Footnote ¹⁷ However, his knowledge of antiquity, embrace of global history, and methodological focus all reveal important debts to the research of its members.Footnote ¹⁸ Unlike Voltaire, Gibbon made it clear that the academician’s erudite studies were instrumental to his formation as a scholar and informed his understanding of the essential connection between enlightenment and erudition.Footnote ¹⁹ As Pierre Force has recently argued, Gibbon's “call to combine erudition and philosophy came from within the érudit tradition itself,” as members of the Académie des inscriptions such as Nicolas Fréret “showed that it was possible to write ancient history in a way that was intellectually defensible.”Footnote ²⁰

The academicians’ work, which contemporaries and modern scholars have sometimes dismissed as mere antiquarianism, provided foundational content for Enlightenment theories about human societies.Footnote ²¹ Their analyses of ancient religions and cults informed critical examinations of revealed religion, including Christianity. Their studies of social customs and practices changed how eighteenth-century philosophers thought about the political, social, economic, and cultural factors that contributed to the rise and fall of empires. The seemingly tedious erudite scholarship of the Academy of Inscriptions thus gradually produced seismic intellectual transformations and served as a cradle of the Enlightenment.Footnote ²²

This article investigates important continuities between antiquarian erudition and Enlightenment philosophy, showing that so-called revolutionary developments in eighteenth-century historical writing emerged from an older scholarly tradition.Footnote ²³ The academicians’ erudite examinations of past cultures, with a focus on religious beliefs, daily practices, and customs—all broadly defined as moeurs—reflected a methodological transformation. Their approach to history amounted to what might be called “cultural history” or “the history of culture” (histoire des moeurs, as eighteenth-century authors called it) that explored how those different beliefs and practices contributed to the functioning of past societies.Footnote ²⁴ Their work was crucial to the development of the genre of philosophical history, for which it uncovered new materials and offered novel explanatory modes. Their studies shaped how other historians analyzed the complex elements that contributed to the rise and decline of ancient and modern civilizations, leading their contemporaries and their heirs to think more critically and self-reflexively about the age in which they lived. The academicians’ erudite research thus provided the intellectual raw materials for subversive Enlightenment critiques of religious and political authorities.

The origins of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres

The Académie was established at the dawn of the age of Louis XIV. The Sun King was waging wars of expansion in Europe, seeking to cement his absolutist rule in a country that had suffered a series of civil wars at the beginning of his reign, and building the palace of Versailles. France's imperial ambitions spread armies, scholars, and missionaries all over Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. These agents of empire returned with new commodities and new knowledge in the form of texts and artefacts. Louis and Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the superintendent of royal buildings and the controller-general of finances, sought to turn France into the preeminent military and cultural power, importing technical experts, artists, authors, and institutions from all over Europe. The Academy of Inscriptions was established alongside the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Fine Arts, based on private Italian learned societies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The academies became an important tool in the centralization of royal patronage while simultaneously fulfilling the needs of the growing administrative state.Footnote ²⁵ In Colbert's mind, the academies would help the French Crown harness knowledge in service of political control, a phenomenon that Jacob Soll has called érudition d’état.Footnote ²⁶ Colbert saw information gathering as essential to strengthening the power of the Crown and of the state, and history was to serve a major part in this project.Footnote ²⁷ He dispatched agents all over France to gather documents and charters in local archives, and he also sent some scholars as far as the Ottoman Empire to collect manuscripts, books, and artefacts.Footnote ²⁸ Some of the academicians, such as Nicolas-Joseph Foucault, also proved instrumental in overseeing the Crown's repressions of Huguenots prior to and following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685.Footnote ²⁹

The Académie was thus Colbert's brainchild, and it played an important part in the Crown's image-making campaign as “a historical research team for political propaganda.”Footnote ³⁰ Louis XIV fashioned himself as the reincarnation of the Greek god Apollo, Alexander the Great, and the Roman emperor Augustus, in challenging other European monarchs for primacy on the world stage.Footnote ³¹ Seeking to provide historically informed representations of Louis XIV (with heroic images and statues that filled the halls of Versailles), Colbert founded the Little Academy (la Petite académie) in 1663. The inaugural members Jean Chapelain, Amable de Bourzeis, Jacques Cassagne, and François Charpentier—all prominent members of the Académie française—met in Colbert's library, initially without an official charge or mission statement.

The Little Academy's members received generous pensions. They were charged with locating ancient monuments, coins, medals, and inscriptions that could be used as models for commemorating the military triumphs and achievements of the Sun King. They were “responsible for the public image of the king, and as the creators of objects that would long outlast him, their works would hold an enduring influence over his memory.”Footnote ³² One of the academy's first projects was the publication of a historical account of Louis XIV's reign in medals. The academicians designed these medals, describing the events they commemorated for posterity.Footnote ³³ They also collected documents to support the Crown's legal claims over the church and the nobility.

The academy's connection to the Crown's project of state building and the centralization of royal authority thus revealed the extent to which the Republic of Letters was connected to what Jacob Soll has called “the dialectic between learning and power.”Footnote ³⁴ This dialectical relationship extended from the sixteenth century and the foundation the Bibliothèque royale under Guillaume Budé to the eighteenth century, when the state used the royal academies founded under Louis XIV to solidify a monopoly on patronage. As Dan Edelstein has observed, the state thus became “the necessary sponsor of the Enlightenment,” as “there was a basic convergence between the French Crown and the philosophes.”Footnote ³⁵ The entanglements between erudition and absolutism thus reveal the complex origins of Enlightenment learned culture and the tensions inherent in modern disciplinary structures and academic institutions.

Originally composed of only five scholars who met in Colbert's house, the academy expanded to forty members over its first forty years and became an official institution of the French state. In 1691, when Louis Phélypeaux II, compte de Pontchartrain, the future Chancellor of France, came to oversee the work of the royal academies, he instituted a number of important administrative changes. His nephew Jean-Paul Bignon was appointed inaugural president of the Academy of Sciences, and he quickly helped to make it the preeminent institution of scientific learning in Europe. This was a moment when, according to J. B. Shank, the Academy of Sciences turned into “a more emphatically administrative institution than it had previously been” and was transformed “into the protoprofessional and publicly oriented institution that would become its hallmark during the French Enlightenment.”Footnote ³⁶

Bignon's reforms at the Académie des sciences would serve as a blueprint for the changes he would bring about at the Petite académie. The structure and the procedures of the Little Academy became more formalized under Bignon's leadership, and, in 1701, it was officially reconstituted and gained the title of the Académie royale des inscriptions et médailles. This official recognition was accompanied by a formal constitution that included a total of forty-nine regulations regarding the election of its members, the schedule of meetings, and the expectations for individual research projects. The academy's membership was expanded to forty and divided into four different classes: honorary members, pensionary members supported by the Crown, associate members, and students, who were attached to one of the pensionaries.

The academy's early members included a broad range of prominent figures such as poets Jean Racine and Nicolas Boileau, the Benedictine historian Jean Mabillon, and the classical philologist André Dacier, among others. Despite differences in social standing and profession, the members were united by their curiosity about ancient history and their commitment to the erudite philological practices that had developed as a defining feature of humanist scholarship since the Renaissance.Footnote ³⁷ The forty members met every Tuesday and Friday (as they still do) to present their work in closed sessions at the Louvre. Twice a year they opened their sessions to the public. Procedures became increasingly regularized, and the academicians began to keep detailed minutes of their meetings starting in 1694. These included attendance records and transcripts of presented papers. After new rules were outlined for the academy in 1701, the members were expected to work on various collaborative projects. Each academician was also supposed to choose some specific object of study and report on it during the meetings.

After the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1714, the academy could accept foreign scholars as corresponding members. The initial inductees included Cardinal Filippo Antonio Gualterio, the papal nuncio to France; the Benedictine numismatist Anselmo Banduri, who served as the librarian of Philippe II, duc d'Orléans (regent to King Louis XV); and Gisbert Cuper, a Dutch philologist and antiquarian who had been elected the mayor of Deventer. The foreign members maintained an active correspondence with their French counterparts, sending questions and reports about the curiosities they came across. These additions boosted the academy's international standing in the Republic of Letters, allowing its scholarship to circulate all over Europe while providing information about the findings of new artifacts and texts.Footnote ³⁸

Following Louis XIV's death in 1715, the academy was renamed the Académie royale des inscriptions et belles-lettres. It continued to advance the monarchy's image, but its members also undertook increasingly independent historical research. Voltaire's own account of these changes in the academy's structure in Le siècle de Louis XIV (1751) is enlightening:

Voltaire would be one of many beneficiaries of the academicians’ reexaminations of the past, although he questioned the relevance and applicability of ancient history.Footnote ⁴⁰

The Académie des inscriptions thus went from serving as a propaganda tool for promoting Louis XIV's absolutist regime to becoming the first modern historical research institute and an important part of the enlightened public sphere. While seventeenth-century scholars had also engaged in studies of past cultures and religions, the Académie provided a blueprint for how humanism could come under the purview of the state. Its members were fully devoted to engaging in historical research, presenting their work to peers, sharing their findings with the public, and judging essay contests. It would also serve as a model for similar institutions around Europe.

In 1717, the academy began to publish a periodical journal, the Mémoires de littérature tirez des registres de l'Académie des inscriptions, that made the scholarship of its members accessible to readers all over Europe. In his Letters Concerning the English Nation (1733), Voltaire mocked the “Collection of Transactions that abound with curious Researches and Critiques” for treating arcane subjects, but he admitted that the “Transactions are already esteem'd by Foreigners.”Footnote ⁴¹ Among these foreigners was the young Gibbon, who recalled “the joy with which I exchanged a bank-note of twenty pounds for the twenty volumes of the Memoires of the Academy of Inscriptions.” The English historian described this journal as a “large and lasting fund of rational amusement” and credited it with feeding his own interests in ancient history and literature.Footnote ⁴²

Although the academicians’ work was sponsored by the Crown, their research sometimes served to undermine the established order. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the Académie des inscriptions would become an important source of subversive ideas and one of the major “sites of antiabsolutism.”Footnote ⁴³ Close examinations of past societies led scholars to intentionally and unintentionally unsettle the political and religious fabric of the Old Regime. Antiquarian erudition provided alternative ways—political, religious, and cultural—of conceptualizing the world. Encounters with previously little-known civilizations and new examinations of familiar sources allowed Enlightenment thinkers to formulate original understandings of the past. These new perspectives, in turn, shaped their reflections on the age in which they lived and informed their prognostications of humanity's future.

Historical studies of culture

Such dramatic changes occurred gradually, however, growing out of erudite examinations of past cultures. In the first volume of their serial publication, the academicians explained why the institution was being renamed from the Académie royale des inscriptions et medailles to the Académie royale des inscriptions et belles-lettres. Their work, they noted, had long been concerned not only with the “deciphering of ancient medals and inscriptions or making new ones,” but also had “encompassed almost all forms of erudition” including that which was “most obscure or most singular” in ancient and modern history. They sought to investigate ancient chronology and to uncover “the most instructive and the most useful” information provided by sources and “monuments … from different centuries and different countries.”Footnote ⁴⁴ The publications were supposed to include general information related to “the origin of sciences among diverse peoples, to the cults of their divinities, to the details of their games and practices, to the knowledge of their laws and their systems [of thought].”Footnote ⁴⁵ The academicians developed their broad approach to the historical study of cultures by using the tools of humanist erudition and antiquarianism to reveal, dissect, and reconstruct the sheer complexity of past societies. The historians at the Academy of Inscriptions saw a clear relationship between religious beliefs, popular practices, and customs, on the one hand, and forms of political, social, and economic organization, on the other.

One could organize the articles of the Mémoires into several broad categories. The journal's coverage ranged from discussions of individual poets, philosophers, and historians to explorations of ancient myths and cults, to accounts of comparative chronologies, to studies of inscriptions and monuments, and, finally, to pieces about dance, athletics, and daily life. Among the tables of contents, one finds subjects as diverse as an account of nudity in the Greek Olympic games, a history of celibacy, an examination of the origins of the French nobility, an attempt to date the birth of Jesus Christ through numismatic evidence, the history of poor relief, and accounts of chronology in ancient China. The geographical scope of the academy's research expanded over the course of the eighteenth century to cover ever greater portions of the globe, especially as the academicians began to learn Mandarin, Sanskrit, and other extra-European languages. The inclusion of Asia, Africa, and the Americas was one of the key features in the transition from the biblically centered universal history to a truly global history.Footnote ⁴⁶

Many articles revealed an awareness of significant methodological differences between previous examinations of ancient and medieval cultures and the approach that the academicians were taking. For example, in his analysis of ancient oaths the abbé Guillaume Massieu noted that while a number of authors had previously written about the subject, “they treated it solely on the basis of legal or moral principles,” while he was hoping to examine it with respect to “belles lettres.”Footnote ⁴⁷ This meant analyzing the origin of oaths from their earliest appearance in human history, unearthing the divinities by which the ancients swore these oaths, studying the different ceremonies that accompanied them, and examining the “role they played in civil society,” among other questions.Footnote ⁴⁸ Massieu tried to make sense of how these particular practices functioned within their respective cultures. His article explained how the swearing of oaths established trust and promoted bonds of cohesion in different societies of antiquity.

Similarly, Antoine Banier tried to make sense of the variety of ancient myths in Egypt, the Near East, Greece, and Rome. He disputed the notion that these myths had a single source, as some historians had assumed, but argued, instead, that they were “the fruit of the human mind that was always drawn to the miraculous.”Footnote ⁴⁹ At the same time, Banier insisted that if one examined myths carefully and in the context of the “different times and countries in which one first saw them emerge,” one would be able to discern “some utility” that they had.Footnote ⁵⁰ The various stories could be interpreted allegorically, and they offered explanations of the “great mysteries,” such as the creation of the world and the generation of plants, to people who did not possess a solid grasp on natural philosophy. In other cases, the allegorical accounts contained faint traces of historical facts about the founding of particular cities or states.Footnote ⁵¹

Banier's approach to pagan religions reflected a broader mythographical movement known as euhemerism, named after the ancient Greek thinker Euhemerus. Those who subscribed to this view (including Giambattista Vico, Bernard de Fontenelle, and Isaac Newton) believed that ancient myths were actually exaggerated accounts of real historical events.Footnote ⁵² The gods and heroes of Egyptian and Greek mythology were based on regular human beings who were wise lawgivers, able military leaders, or people who invented various arts and sciences. It was thus “useful and in some sense necessary to know mythology,” Banier noted in his larger treatise La mythologie et fables expliquées par l'histoire (1738), because they have “a real connection with the history of the first centuries,” describing “considerable events” from that period.Footnote ⁵³ Banier and his colleagues at the Academy of Inscriptions tried to reexamine myths in ways that allowed them to find the underlying historical events. Eighteenth-century mythography thus became a historical science, one that sought to comb through myriad ancient accounts in the hope of “separating truth from nonsense, fiction from fact, superstition from actual occurrence,” while shedding light on the nature of the civilizations that had produced them.Footnote ⁵⁴

The tradition of ars historica, detailed by Anthony Grafton in his account of scholars such as Jean Le Clerc and Jacob Perizonius, continued to offer essential philological tools for analyzing and interpreting ancient sources. However, the academicians and their contemporaries began to approach these texts less as repositories of moral and political lessons for guiding behavior in the present and more as windows into cultures that were fundamentally different and that needed to be understood on their own terms.Footnote ⁵⁵ Texts from antiquity needed to be supplemented with material evidence and analyzed with reference to theories about the origins and functions of pagan religions. Such contextual reconsiderations offered more nuanced representations of the past, while helping to deal with the relative scarcity of textual evidence from the earliest periods of human history.

The academicians thus sought new ways to overcome the paucity and limitations of ancient sources, which often relied on oral traditions, myths, and legends. They thought that it was possible to interpret such information in new ways and to make sense of ancient myths and rituals in their specific cultural contexts. Examinations of the contents of past beliefs and rituals could reveal genuine insights into the attitudes of the peoples who had embraced them, thus providing a more complete understanding of their moeurs. In Force's analysis, Voltaire had distinguished between ancient and modern history, insisting that investigations into moeurs or the history of culture could only be fruitfully undertaken with respect to more recent history, while the study of antiquity was confined to the gathering of arcane facts: “as one went further into the past, things became less relevant and interesting.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Voltaire would have thus been surprised to find that the members of the Académie des inscriptions were writing cultural histories of antiquity.

The origins of ancient religions and cults

Eighteenth-century scholars were increasingly interested in making sense of the startling variety of religions they encountered in historical writings and travel accounts.Footnote ⁵⁷ Books such as Jean Frederic Bernard's and Bernard Picart's Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (1723–43) provided descriptions of diverse theologies and offered illustrations of how people around the globe practiced their beliefs.Footnote ⁵⁸ Comparative analyses of religions allowed for the exploration of both the diversity and the structural similarity of past and present beliefs. Religion appeared as the central unifying factor of human culture, and it offered a key to understanding other times and places.

Although some of the first academicians, such as Jean Mabillon, were notable historians of the Church, much of the eighteenth-century research at the Académie des inscriptions focused on pagan religions. The Académie's studies of ancient cults and religions, which significantly outnumbered their research into the history of Christianity and Church history, offer insight into how eighteenth-century scholars, most of whom were still devout Christians, tried to make sense of alien systems of belief. In many cases, the academicians adopted what might be called proto-sociological explanations for what they saw as superstitious and erroneous beliefs of the ancients. Many tried to offer psychological accounts of superstition, citing, above all, a combination of fear and ignorance in the face of natural disasters and calamities. Nevertheless, the academicians often tried to see things from the perspective of their historical subjects. They sincerely attempted to describe what people in the past believed and to explain the possible reasons for those beliefs.

Although the vast majority of the academicians were not deists or atheists, their studies of past religions proved to be subversive to Christian dogma. They exposed difficulties about the age of the Earth and of humanity, which was problematic for Judeo-Christian chronology; they showed how religious leaders acted as impostors to fabricate miracles and manipulate popular superstitions; and they revealed uncanny similarities between Christianity and other mythological systems. The cumulative effect of the academy's erudite studies was thus inevitably corrosive to religious orthodoxy, and it is crucial to explaining the central paradox about the subversive nature of state-sponsored scholarship.

One of the more important questions touched on the origins of the various religions encountered in antiquity. The academicians and their counterparts debated whether human beings were initially monotheists or polytheists. Generally, the notion of a primitive monotheism that had been revealed to Adam was the more orthodox and theologically acceptable alternative. The abbé Nicolas-Hubert Mongault maintained, with many of his contemporaries, that the original belief in a single God became corrupted and turned into idolatry among the Assyrians, the Persians, and the Egyptians. Having forgotten the “true ideas of religion … their mind, instead of lifting itself up to the supreme being and the cause of all good things, stopped at inferior and sensible causes.” Physical bodies such as the sun, he argued, “became the object of their cult that was regulated by their different” natural and social needs.Footnote ⁵⁹

The academicians sought to explain the origin of cults and superstitions in ancient societies. They usually resorted to psychological or functionalist accounts. In his article on the cult of the god Bonus Eventus, Philibert-Bernard Moreau de Mautour attributed the origins of cults to “self-interest, self-love, and other passions and vices.”Footnote ⁶⁰ He compared “the religious and healthy fear that, in a soul enlightened by the lights of faith, is the principle of wisdom” with a primal, unenlightened fear that “troubles human beings … and that was the main source of the superstition of the pagans.”Footnote ⁶¹ The academicians thus popularized the idea that religious cults were informed by the ignorance of nature's laws and motivated by basic psychological needs.

The notion that primal fear was the main motivating factor in the establishment of ancient systems of belief became a widely shared assumption among the academicians. In his article on the representations of the gods Fear and Pallor on Roman medals, Moreau de Mautour argued that the destructive powers of nature caused people to become idolatrous and “to seek protectors who would save them from perils that menaced them.” They became accustomed “to fear a hidden and secret power” that caused fortunes and misfortunes in their lives, and over time they established formal cults.Footnote ⁶²

Abbé Claude François Fraguier's article on curses that fathers placed on their children connected notions of paternal authority with the origins of cults. He argued that there was nothing more natural for those who felt oppressed and weak than to call upon the help of “a superior power” for protection or “vengeance for the evils that they had suffered at the hands of others.”Footnote ⁶³ He suggested that in order to discover the origins of cults and religions, one had to look back to a time before the establishment of states and political institutions. In these early societies, the children's “duty to their fathers extended” quite far and became a “formal aspect of religion.” Those who dared to violate this duty would incur the “anger and vengeance of the gods.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Over time, Fraguier argued, inner feelings of remorse, shame, and guilt became externalized, transforming into divinities (the Furies) who would punish transgressors.Footnote ⁶⁵

The idea that the pagan gods were fashioned through attempts to externalize guilt and shame had many supporters at the Académie des inscriptions. Étienne Lauréault de Foncemagne's essay on the goddess Laverna highlighted the anthropomorphic nature of the Greek and Roman gods, observing that people tried to justify their “most shameful weaknesses by recognizing as the object of [their] cult divinities as weak as them and susceptible to the same passions [as them].”Footnote ⁶⁶ Even theft, which was a crime “that most directly attacked civil society,” was “consecrated in the person of Mercury,” as “the son of Jupiter was chosen as the patron of thieves.”Footnote ⁶⁷ In his dissertation on the Fates (parques), the abbé Antoine Banier similarly argued that the true origin of these divinities was to be found in human self-love and desire to shun blame and responsibility for improper actions. It was precisely to “avoid the remorse of a criminal conscience,” he argued, that people “invented Gods that drove us to crimes by a fatal necessity.”Footnote ⁶⁸ As a result, ancient tragedies always blamed the gods for the misfortunes that human beings seemingly brought upon themselves. Banier's essay on the Furies likewise insisted that paganism was originally conceived as a way to indulge human passions, thereby justifying the weakness of human nature. Consequently, the gods of the ancient pagans resembled human beings in their decadent behaviors, and religion provided a kind of excuse for unvirtuous acts.Footnote ⁶⁹

At the same time, Banier agreed with his fellow academicians that pagan religions contained mechanisms for regulating behaviors. Well before the Christians, the ancients came up with notions of the afterlife in which crimes and transgressions would be punished, while virtues would be rewarded.Footnote ⁷⁰ Even in periods of great ignorance when “the depravity of the heart cast shadows over the mind,” he noted, people could still understand that “virtue is not always recompensed in this world nor are crimes [always] punished.” Consequently, they came up with the notion that there had to be a place “to punish the evil and reward the good,” and that is how they came up with the idea of the Elysian Fields.Footnote ⁷¹

These accounts tried to demonstrate how corrupted understandings that lost sight of original monotheistic ideas tried to make sense of the world around them. Although primitive monotheism was widely supported, the academicians’ accounts of ancient religions focused almost exclusively on paganism. They explained how the ancients worshipped their gods and shed light on the psychological origins of various superstitions. Such an approach signaled a subtle shift away from the humanist pursuit of prisca sapientia, of pristine theological and philosophical knowledge that supposedly had been available to the ancients. Rather than looking at how the purportedly original and true religion was perverted by pagan beliefs, the academicians attempted to examine ancient paganism on its own terms, treating antiquity as a foreign culture worthy of exploration for its own sake.

Not all embraced the theory of primitive monotheism, however. Charles de Brosses, who invented the term “fetishism,” claimed that the ancient Egyptian religion was always based on the practice of animal worship. He rejected the notion that this practice contained any underlying figurative or mystical meanings, as earlier scholars like Athanasius Kircher had claimed. Comparing Egyptian ceremonies to religious practices in contemporary Guinea (about which he read in travel accounts), de Brosses insisted that all religions of early human societies involved similar structural elements of what he called “brute-worship.” So-called primitive human beings reasoned in the manner of children and were missing the spark of true religion. De Brosses argued that they worshiped animals and objects because they were unable to formulate abstract notions of the divinity, suggesting, as David Hume had three years earlier, that the first societies were not monotheistic, but polytheistic and idolatrous.Footnote ⁷² Such views challenged the orthodox Christian concept of an original Adamic religion, and they would be taken up by atheist thinkers, such as the baron d'Holbach and Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger.Footnote ⁷³

Boulanger's work in particular revealed strong debts to the Académie's research. His L'antiquité dévoilée par ses usages (1766) cited the Mémoires of the Académie des inscriptions in numerous places, and his analysis of the psychological origins of pagan religions strongly resembled the reasoning of academicians such as Banier, de Brosses, Fraguier, and Moreau de Mautour. Like his earlier Recherches sur l'origine du despotisme oriental (1761), Boulanger's L'antiquité dévoilée traced the origins of ancient religions to how early societies responded to natural disasters, such as floods and fires. References to these events and to the universal Flood appeared in the histories of all ancient peoples, testifying to the high likelihood that the deluge was in fact universal. Following the Flood, Boulanger hypothesized, human nature became fundamentally transformed. Traumatized by such calamities and subject to the whims of nature, the earth's inhabitants lived in a state of constant fear. They reconstituted societies anew, inventing religious ceremonies and rituals that, according to their feeble understanding of the laws of nature, would pacify deities who they thought controlled natural phenomena.Footnote ⁷⁴ Thus, Boulanger attributed the origins of ancient religious and political institutions to the traumatic experiences of the universal deluge. Like his counterparts at the Académie des inscriptions, he saw myths and fables as important sources for uncovering the historical foundations of human societies.Footnote ⁷⁵

Functionalist explanations of religious practices

In seeking to make sense of ancient religions and cults, the academicians often adopted functionalist explanations of the role that people's beliefs and practices played in the maintenance of the social order. Rather than highlighting the ignorance and superstition of those who believed in the pagan divinities, the scholars at the Académie examined how different religious rituals worked to promote human association. They also highlighted the ways in which these practices helped to establish laws and contribute to the functioning and progress of ancient societies.

While the academicians were frequently critical of ancient superstitions, they also perceived the social and political utility of pagan religions. For example, in explaining the origins of the cult of the god Terminus, Claude Gros de Boze, the perpetual secretary of the Académie from 1706 to 1742, examined how Roman king Numa Pompilius tried to curb popular passions. Seeking to curtail the human drive to expand one's domination over others, which inevitably led to violent wars, Numa established this cult of Terminus, the god of boundaries. According to Gros de Boze, Numa revived an ancient law but “added new penalties” and, to make it “more sacred and inviolable, he persuaded people that there was a particular god” who served as “the protector of borders and the avenger of usurpations.” The Roman legislator thus found it necessary “to involve religion in politics” in order to “restrain by the fear of the Gods” those who were not controlled by established laws.Footnote ⁷⁶ Like Niccolò Machiavelli's examination of the practical effects of the Roman religion in the Discourses on Livy (1531), Gros de Boze's analysis drew on Livy but also relied on other historians, including Polybius, Plutarch, Suetonius, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus. After exploring Numa's attempts to use the fear of the gods to pacify unruly Romans, the article explained how different kings, consuls, and emperors made use of the cult of Terminus.

In a similar fashion, Moreau de Mautor, who wrote on the gods Fear and Pallor, described how the deification of fear, which he saw as the origin of religious superstition, played a role in the political and judicial systems of ancient states. He argued that leaders attempted to harness human anxieties in order to establish and maintain political control. He mentioned several examples, including the Spartans, who erected the temple of Fear near the tribunal of the ephors, and the Corinthians, who made regular sacrifices to the statue of Fear.Footnote ⁷⁷ The academicians thus saw pagan cults as playing a key role in the institution of laws and in the maintenance of the social order.

Pagan religions could also serve to establish and preserve bonds of cohesion among rival groups and tribes. In his account of Roman religious ceremonies, the abbé Jean-Baptiste Couture suggested that in seeking political stability, the Senate and the consuls inculcated fear and obligation in the people. They appointed a dictator who would “implore the assistance of heaven” and would be endowed with supernatural authority in the minds of the people.Footnote ⁷⁸ Similarly, he argued that Tarquin the Proud, the last king of Rome, tried to form a confederation among the neighboring tribes and cement it with “the seal of religion” and communal celebrations.Footnote ⁷⁹

Nicolas Fréret, who followed Gros de Boze as the academy's perpetual secretary from 1742 to 1749 and whose name was used on several clandestine deist manuscripts in the second half of the eighteenth century, likewise explained how ancient politicians exploited common credulity.Footnote ⁸⁰ In his article on ancient miracles he distinguished between two kinds of supposedly supernatural events. The first category included occurrences that “could not be explained without recourse to a supernatural cause” and “without supposing that God” produced these occurrences to further deceive human beings, which would undermine the “miracles in favor of the true religion.” Citing examples from Roman mythology, Fréret argued that “one should regard all such facts and all those that resemble them as fables invented by corrupt priests and believed by an ignorant and superstitious public.” The second category of ancient miracles included “purely natural effects” that “occurred less frequently and, appearing contrary to the ordinary course of nature, were attributed to a supernatural cause by the superstition of men scared by the sight of unknown objects.” He observed that this second category of seemingly supernatural events was frequently used by politicians to “inspire in people feelings that conformed with their designs” to make them believe that particular courses of action were divinely sanctioned.Footnote ⁸¹ Such descriptions of the practical uses of belief would become an important theme in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's theory of civil religion in Du contrat social (1762). These approaches also reflected a more general trend, as Enlightenment thinkers increasingly considered religion from a more utilitarian rather than metaphysical perspective.Footnote ⁸²

The academicians thus explained how religious beliefs, cults, and superstitions played important roles in the functioning of ancient societies. While they explained such perspectives with reference to what might be described as psychological reductionism, their analyses seemed to accept the fact that these beliefs were real for those who had embraced them in so far as they helped to inform people's behaviors and practices. Their comparative studies of religions would form the foundations of the emerging field of comparative religious studies. Their scholarship also provided new perspectives from which Enlightenment thinkers could critically examine their own faiths.

The contours of how many of the Académie's members studied ancient religions indeed would inform how deist and atheist critics approached the study of Christianity. Baruch Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670), the Traité sur les trois imposteurs, or Jean Méslier's Testament (1729), among other clandestine texts, directly challenged the divine origins of Christianity and pointed to the unholy alliance between religious and political authorities that had conspired to usurp power over the ignorant masses.Footnote ⁸³ Eighteenth-century readers did not need to access these clandestine atheist texts, however, to arrive at the notion that common superstitions could be easily exploited for the sake of political control. Accounts of the way that ancient religious and political authorities made use of popular beliefs were readily available on the pages of the Académie's Mémoires. The academicians’ erudite studies provided ample evidence that had dramatic implications for how Enlightenment thinkers would look at all organized religions, especially Christianity.

The study of daily life

The Académie's studies of past societies also involved examinations of rituals and daily practices. Such information provided key insights into how ancient societies functioned as complex units and how their customs shaped forms of legal and political organization. It also allowed scholars to engage in comparative historical analyses and seek the origins of modern states.Footnote ⁸⁴ For example, René Aubert de Vertot's article on the beginnings of the French nation analyzed the conformity between the customs of the various Germanic tribes and of the Gauls. He noted the similarity between the languages, the laws, the customs, the structure of public assemblies, the conduct of war, and the management of domestic affairs of the Germans and of the first French. Vertot highlighted the militaristic nature of these societies, which distinguished their leaders for bravery in combat, but he also observed the consultative nature of their political organization that required the consent of the whole people in the making of important decisions.Footnote ⁸⁵ They placed great value on liberty and resisted foreign domination. He noted that the Roman conquest of the French transformed their customs, as they exchanged swords for plowshares and began to cultivate the land.Footnote ⁸⁶ However, he was ambivalent about the consequences of this transformation, noting that by following seemingly “savage and ferocious” customs, the “first French people conquered the greater part of Europe,” while their descendants have “squandered” those conquests “through their luxury and idleness.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Vertot's analysis suggested a complex interplay between the military success of societies and their level of refinement. He implied that the barbarous virtues of the ancient Gauls were not altogether negative, while the advancement of polite mores had its downsides. Critics of Enlightenment theories of progress, such as Rousseau and his acolytes, would later take up similar arguments.

The series of articles on the private life of the Romans by Jean-Baptiste Couture is another prime example of the way in which the academicians perceived the complex relationship between cultural practices and historical development. Couture noted a clear connection between the corruption of morals, visible in the daily life of the Romans, and changes in their political structure. Under the kings, he observed, “people lived in great mediocrity and, therefore, in great simplicity.”Footnote ⁸⁸ However, after they expelled the Tarquin monarchs, the Romans “had no other brake but reason, and since reason is very weak” at restraining human passions, the patricians and plebeians could not “moderate their desires” and became increasingly dissatisfied with one another.Footnote ⁸⁹ Couture traced the corruption of mores by looking at the changes in how the Romans spent different hours of the day. While earlier generations, driven by rustic ideals, had distinguished themselves by rising early and working hard on the land, the love of luxury gradually corrupted Roman citizens. Couture blamed the increasing greed and laziness on the Greeks, who perverted the Romans by bringing a penchant for extravagance and idleness to Italy. This general degeneration of mores was difficult to stop, and it trickled down from the patricians to the lower classes. Eventually, it led to the proliferation of slavery, which provided more time for various pleasantries and amusements.Footnote ⁹⁰

These discussions were not only of historical interest, but also had concrete political implications for France in the years after the death of Louis XIV. Debates about whether the French economy should follow the models set by the commerce-based Dutch Republic and Great Britain or focus on the development of agriculture would feature prominently in a number of intellectual circles.Footnote ⁹¹ Couture's account of ancient Rome implicitly described the potential dangers that commerce and luxury could bring to otherwise virtuous societies. His praise for the rustic simplicity of the Romans resembled François Fénelon's portrayal of the fictional Baetica in Les aventures de Télémaque (1699) and foreshadowed the success of the Physiocrats, who placed primary importance on the productivity of agriculture.

These articles appeared well before Montesquieu published his Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence in 1734. Montesquieu was quite close with several members of the Académie, and his analysis of Rome's decline echoed the findings of scholars like Couture. He too observed that the Romans had been corrupted by their riches.Footnote ⁹² Montesquieu's examination of the causes of the ruin of the Roman Republic, as well as his later De l'esprit des lois (1748), drew on the contents and methods of historical analysis that had been developed over several decades by numerous members of the Academy of Inscriptions. Montesquieu and Voltaire learned from the academicians that a proper historical analysis of past societies required a nuanced understanding of the mosaic of cultural elements that gave coherent identities to those cultures. One could not properly analyze the causes of the rise and fall of empires without taking note of the various customs and motivations that shaped their inhabitants.

Progress and decline

Studies of the past led the academicians and their contemporaries to think about the age in which they lived and to become more self-reflexive about their own place in the process of historical evolution. By analyzing the parallel development of civilizations, they formulated new theories of human progress and philosophies of history. Their research helped to generate stadial theories of development that posited several distinct stages through which all civilizations passed. Versions of these theories would appear in the works of Enlightenment philosophers such as Adam Ferguson and Nicolas de Condorcet and nineteenth-century thinkers such as Auguste Comte and Karl Marx.

The academicians were especially interested in examining “the advancement of letters,” which spread “general knowledge, taste, and discernment that contributed to a preeminence of nations,” as the preface to the first volume of the Mémoires declared.Footnote ⁹³ Many articles revealed progressive conceptions of history and of human reason that were becoming a characteristic trait of eighteenth-century learned culture. Dan Edelstein has argued that the emergence of this self-reflexive narrative was the defining feature of the Enlightenment. It was based on the recognition by eighteenth-century thinkers that they lived in an enlightened age, in which the progress of science combined with a new philosophical spirit to bring humankind to an unprecedented apex of intellectual and cultural achievement.Footnote ⁹⁴

While not all thinkers shared this view of progress, many of the Académie's members subscribed to aspects of it. In the first article of the inaugural volume of the Mémoires, the abbé Eusèbe Renaudot described the gradual improvement in the study of astronomy and chronology among the ancients and the moderns. He traced this history from what he called the “crude” and “ridiculous” opinions of the Egyptians, the Babylonians, and the Chaldeans, all of whom had maintained superstitious views about the role of the heavenly bodies in human affairs.Footnote ⁹⁵ Renaudot followed this progressive account to what he described as increasingly sophisticated understandings of astronomy among the medieval Jews and Arabs, to thinkers such as Roger Bacon, Nicolaus Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, and Galileo Galilei.Footnote ⁹⁶ For many academicians, progress in the sciences went hand in hand with progress of letters. Their accounts often resembled triumphalist histories of the rise of modern philosophy that appeared in the late seventeenth century and would feature prominently in the “Discours préliminaire” to the Encyclopédie and in so many of its articles that cited the Académie's Mémoires.Footnote ⁹⁷

The Académie was also caught up in the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns—a late seventeenth-century debate about whether modern authors and artists surpassed the ancients in literary and artistic abilities—and its members often sided with the ancients.Footnote ⁹⁸ Many of them had become so fascinated by the cultural and intellectual achievements of antiquity that they did not share the moderns’ unequivocal belief in the progress of the human mind. The enigmatic Nicolas Fréret, for example, concluded his article on ancient miracles by expressing reservations about the extent to which his century surpassed previous ages in learning. He speculated that “people have had more or less the same level of enlightenment in all ages,” and urged his contemporaries to not “show contempt for the knowledge and reflections of those who preceded” them.Footnote ⁹⁹

Some academicians also believed in the moral degeneration of the original human nature among the most ancient peoples that resembled biblical accounts of humanity's fall from grace. For example, Guillaume Massieu's treatise on oaths posited a golden age, during which human beings behaved with a view for “common utility” and without regard for personal interest. People began to make oaths and promises only after human nature was corrupted, and they sought to deceive, outwit, and destroy one another.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Vertot, who wrote on the history of the early French and observed a general progress in letters since the middle ages, shared this view of ancient decline. He argued that “if men had conserved the customs and the innocence of the first age” they would not need to resort to using oaths. However, self-interest, ambition, and violent passions corrupted human nature, giving birth to infidelity and lying.Footnote ¹⁰¹

These debates about the progress and degeneration of humanity would become central to later Enlightenment contestations. By the middle of the eighteenth century, we see a clear split between the progressive visions of Voltaire, d'Alembert, and Condorcet, the cyclical model posited by Montesquieu, and Rousseau's portrayal of humanity's moral decay. The Académie's members did not share a consensus on the matter, but their dissertations provided the content and themes for future debates, and they offered the general contours of the positions their heirs would take. This lack of consensus complicates the narrative according to which most Enlightenment thinkers held a decisively optimistic view of human progress. Historical examples provided by the academicians served to undermine overly simplistic and linear narratives that some philosophes proposed.