Radical Customs: Maréchal’s Critique of Religion and Politics in Serial Works on Distant Civilizations

In French intellectual and cultural history, the 1780s are a liminal period in which the plural cultures of the Revolution were formed in many of their basic elements before their exponents knew they would, or could, actually be revolutionary. Much attention has rightly been paid by historians to the role of clandestine and unauthorized publications and their circulation in the origins of revolutionary attitudes. We will focus here instead on a particular author’s veiled uses of commercial and authorized media to convey anti-religious and politically radical contents. If we now tend to see that story as a linear progression – even though we still discuss the concurrent causes of the event – it should not be considered unimportant that the protagonists may have had different time perceptions. Sylvain Maréchal – one of the future leaders of Gracchus Babeuf’s Conspiracy of Equals – seemed almost ready to give up the fight at the age of 37, in 1788, mere months before the first premonitory signs of a radically changing political climate appeared. In January the Parisian poet was arrested for his anti-religious Almanach des honnêtes gens: this episode would later become his revolutionary credential as a martyr of free thought and make the publication itself a best-seller. However, at the time it happened, being jailed at Saint-Lazare – the prison for immoral people and rebel sons – shocked and shamed this man who had raised himself from lower class origins through education and prized his self-image of personal virtue and dignity. His three months in jail conditioned his attitude even into the revolutionary years. After his release in mid-April, Maréchal prudently went back to clandestine publishing or anonymity for his openly political and anti-religious writings. On the other hand, he was still quite visible as the author of commercial serial works on less obvious subjects which still allowed scope for the dissemination of some of his ideas. Maréchal’s work offers an interesting case-study relevant to the broader subject of the state of the book in the late 18th century. From 1770 to 1802, his writing career – not unlike those of other professional writers in his generation – not only spans all types of genres and self-representations, but of publishing forms as well: from clandestine to commercial, from erudite to propagandistic. The focus here will be on one form and period: multi-volume commercial works of the 1780s on the culturally revealing and connected subjects of peoples distant in space or time. These publications responded to the strong demand of the time for instructive reading including sets of good-quality illustrations and curiosities stimulated in the reading public by travel narratives and various aesthetic and cultural fashions. Maréchal began writing on commission at the beginning of the 1780s, drawing on his vast and partly self-taught learning, especially on the classical world. This became his only way to support himself when, in 1784, he was fired by the Bibliothèque Mazarine, where he was an assistant librarian. He was removed because of the radical political and social critique in his Livre échappé au deluge and the fact that he had dared circulate it from the library itself. The Mazarine, as the clergymen who directed it knew, was a meeting place for a few unconventional thinkers and their young admirers. It was there that Maréchal had met the men who were his own “professors of atheism,” as the abbé Mulot called one of them, the economist Fréville, who liked to advocate his ideas in public. Maréchal’s life became very difficult. Even before that time, however, he had needed to go against his opinions, as when …