The inquisition: torture, even the stake

The mental and social universe of the epoch remained saturated by religious sentiments, and the savants could not escape this pressing reality. There is thus merit in reminding ourselves that, amongst other revealing paradoxes, Galileo almost became a monk and that Pascal denounced a rationalist Christian to the ecclesiastical authorities. The confrontations with dogma were however real indeed. The interdiction of Copernicus’ system is emblematic.  When Galileo made his Copernican beliefs public, he renounced them before the tribunal of the Inquisition, during his 1633 trial, and had to pronounce a retraction prepared by the Holy Office. But this trial had a considerable impact and contributed to inhibiting generations of thinkers residing on Catholic soil. Not without reason, it could be said: the Italian philosopher, Giordano Bruno, also prosecuted by the Institution for his Copernican ideas, ended up at the stake, burned alive in 1600 after an eight year trial.

The confessional divisions often hindered the circulation of thought and the promotion of the savants. Leibniz, a member of the Academy of Sciences, could not receive his pension because the King of France refused to subsidise a heretic. The German savant, who did not want to abjure his Lutheranism, equally had to waive prestigious posts as a librarian in Rome and in Paris. Newton, who had pretensions to theology but developed heretical ideas in the eyes of the Anglican authorities, had to carry out in secret his investigations into the divinity of Christ. The opposition between faith and reason was a radical one in the Catholic areas. In Protestant territories the idea that it was possible to combine the new science and the Reformed message was established more easily. From this we might too rapidly conclude that the very nature of Protestantism permits modernity. But that would be to fall into the trap prepared for us by the intellectual Protestants of the 18th century, who made the religious reformers of the 16^th century the precursors of the Enlightenment. That is to forget that not all of the Protestantisms put up with or adapted to the new science and that orthodox Calvinism condemned Descartes and imprisoned the Dutch philosopher Adriaan Koerbagh.

The nuisance is punished

Prudence was the rule all the more so in that the civil and ecclesiastical authorities set up systems to monitor printed material.  Censorship was often carried out a priori. In France every book had to be endowed with royal privilege and carry the name of the author and the printer. The fines were heavy, in particular for offending printers. To prevent this danger it was necessary to know what was and was not tolerated. Which, under the Ancien Régime, was not at all easy! Thus, the Protestant philosopher Pierre Bayle’s General Critique, printed in the United Provinces, was a refutation of the Jesuit Louis Maimburg’s History of Calvinism. The latter, with the persistence of a wasp, took endless heavy steps to ban its distribution. The police officer whom Maimburg kept bothering thus decided to punish the irritating author by granting him justice beyond his wildest hopes. He announced, by every town crier in Paris and by 3,000 posters, the destruction of the copies of General Critique which had been confiscated. The next day everybody set out to obtain a copy!

To get round censorship and bans, various distribution strategies were made use of. The falsification of title pages was one. The names of authors and printers were omitted or replaced by pseudonyms. Books were antedated in order to have them taken for harmless or old-fashioned books. And, despite the hazards, the new ideas circulated. Forbidden books were exchanged illicitly; titles judged impious were brought abroad.

At the beginning of the following century, that of the Enlightenment, modern science could finally become established without hindrance. The path taken by Newton (1643-1727) gives a measure of the ground covered: during the final part of his life he could finally bring his philosophy oeuvre out into the broad daylight. And if he still had to hide his thoughts it was now to continue his work devoted to alchemy and eschatology, two antiquated disciplines springing from Medieval preoccupations…