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  • Lettres à Sophie: ‘Lettres sur la religion, sur l’âme humaine et sur l’existence de Dieu’
  • Graham Gargett
Lettres à Sophie: ‘Lettres sur la religion, sur l’âme humaine et sur l’existence de Dieu’. Édition critique par Olivier Bloch. Paris: Champion, 2004. 310 pp. Hb €60.00.

Olivier Bloch provides an exemplary edition of this ‘clandestine’ work of the late Enlightenment, his lengthy but clear and stimulating introduction illuminating all aspects of the Lettres. Taking as his base text the 1770 edition, he also comments comprehensively on the Bibliothèque Mazarine’s manuscript copy (entitled Lettres sur la religion . . .). As with many other clandestine works, manuscript diffusion preceded (and often followed) publication, and both may interact, as here, since Bloch concludes – with much detailed and convincing evidence – that the Mazarine manuscript was copied from the 1770 published version, though by a very ‘hands-on’ scribe, who sometimes modified and ‘corrected’ the text. Ranging through a gamut of anti-Christian topics (critical examination of the lives of Christ and the apostles; attacks on pious frauds, ‘miracles’ and relics; dismissal of the ideas of creation and the immortality of the soul, etc.), the Lettres à Sophie, dateable precisely through a remark [End Page 207] in the chevalier de Redmond’s correspondence, appear to have made little impression on contemporaries, yet their significance in the annals of materialist thought emerges from Sade’s wholescale borrowing – without clear acknowledgement – in La Nouvelle Justine (1799) of letters 16–21. Sophie is intriguing in several ways, especially in its obvious familiarity with libertin writers of the seventeenth century: in contrast, few references occur to the philosophes of the Enlightenment, though the Lettres’ materialism and exactly contemporaneous appearance with d’Holbach’s Système de la nature exemplify one aspect of contemporary Zeitgeist. Moreover, for Bloch the author’s tentative sketching of a history of religions in Part II of the Lettres shows awareness of ongoing work in the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. Bloch demonstrates that, beneath a display of scholarship lies one major source: Seigneux de Correvon’s translation of Addison’s The Evidences of the Christian Religion (1721), published (Lausanne, 1757) as De la religion chrétienne. Indeed, the Lettres seem almost a reply to the latter, though other texts, notably the Examen critique des apologistes de la religion chrétienne (attributed to Levesque de Burigny) are also exploited. Bloch feels the anonymous author may have been a disenchanted Calvinist turned atheist (indicators include references to early French Protestant translations of the Bible). The Lettres à Sophie emerge as a text of very unequal value, some chapters bristling with apparently learned footnotes, others virtually bereft of them. Often chapter title and content have little mutual connection; the logic and argumentation are debatable, the work – like many other clandestine manuscripts – being a patchwork of material lifted from secondary sources. On balance, Bloch considers that one writer (not two, or a team) was responsible for the Lettres and that his humour and sense of the ludic compensate for their weaknesses. The Lettres represent a late continuation of the libertin tradition, their author, clearly an erudite man, perhaps being a librarian or a secretary. Bloch has produced a distinguished piece of scholarship, informative and intriguing for anyone interested in attitudes to religion in the French Enlightenment.

Graham Gargett
Portstewart
...

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