a famous friend of the philosophes. He was mostly sympathetic with their agenda and remained a long-time advocate for restraint in censorship. He was, though, also a conscientious administrator concerned for the integrity of his office, and no doubt believed that little was to be gained either by the philosophes themselves or more generally by writers and booksellers from any kind of controversy. He therefore ordered the printing of De l’Esprit stopped and took the unusual measure of having the work reexamined by a second censor who proposed a series of suppressions involving passages too transparently critical of the Church. Helvétius readily complied with these cuts, and the printing was resumed.17
De l’Esprit became available on July 27, provoking an instant outcry beginning in the camp of dévots at court, gathered around the queen. Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Suard recalls in his Mémoires being in the antechamber of the dauphin soon after the work was published, when the latter burst out of his apartment with a copy of the book, exclaiming that he was going to show the queen what Helvétius, a maître d’hôtel in her retinue, was printing.18 The outrage spread to the Parlement, the Jesuits, and the Sorbonne. Malesherbes at once ordered Durand to suspend sales of the book, and under mounting pressure, he had the privilège revoked by an arrêt du Conseil hastily signed by the king on August 11.19 Helvétius was forced to make a series of retractions, as demanded first by the queen, to whom he was personally attached through his family and court post;20 then by the Jesuits who deemed the first retraction to be insufficiently repentant and far too self-justifying;21 and finally by the Paris Parlement whose firebrand avocat général, Jean-Omer Joly de Fleury, had made a mission of curtailing the proliferation of “encyclopedic” writing. The philosophe was dismissed from his position in the queen’s household. And while some contemporaries were actually surprised by the leniency with which he was treated—for instance, he was saved from imprisonment or exile by the intervention of powerful court allies such as Madame de Pompadour and the duc de Choiseul— Helvétius was shaken enough by the episode never again to publish; De l’Homme appeared posthumously in 1772.
Two significant aspects of the affair can be retained, each allowing it to be interpreted in a markedly divergent way. First and no doubt more familiarly, the episode has come across as an emblematic and powerful illustration of the plight of the philosophes in their struggles against reactionary forces in the Old Regime. Indeed, if the event has passed into literary history, it is above all as it has been integrated into a broader story about the increasing repressiveness of the 1750s and early 1760s, when various factions were beginning to perceive and denounce the dangers that an emerging group of writers appeared to pose, articulating in the process the group’s cohesiveness as a rising movement, party, or “sect.” The attacks were underway in 1752 when the first two volumes of the Encyclopédie were suppressed following the scandal unleashed by the heterodox Sorbonne thesis of the abbé de Prades, who was a contributor to the edition. In the years to come, opposition to the “encyclopedists” would take hold in numerous venues including among the dévots at court, among the Jesuits at the Journal de Trévoux, in Parlement where Jansenist sympathies always ran strong, and in “anti-philosophical” journalism and pamphleteering, where writers such as Fréron and Palissot found a platform. From as early as Duvernet’s 1786 biography of Voltaire, the retelling of this mounting hostility has accorded a central place to the mobilization against Helvétius and De l’Esprit, proffered as evidence of the darkening climate.22 Indeed, the affair often stands as a “critical date” or a threshold opening onto a whole sequence of markedly repressive responses.23
In this view, the affair plays into a conventional understanding of the philosophes that construes their intellectual lives as a function, first and foremost, of censorship. That is, philosophes by definition said what was not supposed to be said, and thus for them writing and publication were in essence direct clashes with the authorities enforcing the limits of what was permissible to say. In this sense, their prison stints, arrests, burned books, and years on the run mark their ascendency just as surely as their bestsellers, academic seats, and theatrical triumphs.24 Belin considers Helvétius a martyr to the encyclopedic cause for having borne the brunt of the government’s heavy-handed efforts to muffle dissent.25 David Smith’s account of the affaire is subtitled “A Study in Persecution,” which underscores a heroic dimension of the philosophical enterprise by portraying Helvétius as a writer who, for the modernity of his ideas, suffers the antagonism of the conservative institutional interests entrenched at court, in the Parlement, and in the Church. Of course, Helvétius was also a retired fermier général, sitting on an immense personal fortune that had allowed him to withdraw to his country estate. His family attachments to the queen provided him with the coveted position of maître d’hôtel ordinaire, and thus credibility and access at the court. This is not to minimize his “persecution” throughout the summer, fall, and winter of 1758–59. The pursuit was indeed relentless, continuing far beyond several points at which it might have been abandoned, say, at the moment of the revocation of the privilège in August or of the initial public retraction soon afterward. And it is clear from his correspondence that, in particular, the possibility of exile was a visceral and terrifying one for Helvétius, especially in light of how much he had to lose. We can track a series of desperate letters from September and October in which Helvétius expresses his fear of the impending censure of the Sorbonne, the continued opposition of the dauphin, and a mounting sense that he was going to have to flee.26
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