Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

History and structure of our Traité des trois imposteurs

  • Chapter
Heterodoxy, Spinozism, and Free Thought in Early-Eighteenth-Century Europe

  • 120 Accesses

Abstract

Other papers presented here cover the material we are about to treat here from diverse points of view. Their authors are philosophers and historians of philosophy, of ideas, of the Huguenot diaspora, of Dutch intellectual history.... The Traité des trois imposteurs can surely support discussion from all these points of view, and indeed profit from them. We shall adopt a literary point of view since literature is our discipline. However, we are dix-huitiémistes, and the professional deformation of anyone in that field is a tendency to study the history of ideas, whether in the old-fashioned, teleological sense of ‘how did humanity, i.e., European and American thought, get from there—whatever starting-point seems most pertinent—to the optimum where it is now’, or in the Foucaldian sense that examines diversity, lines of thought with little or no posterity, because such historians who follow his example are much less certain that where (Occidental) humanity is now represents a moral or political optimum. We shall thus try to apply to the Traité des trois imposteurs both the perspective of the history of ideas and some of the techniques that one of us (Schwarzbach) half recalls from the late Jean Hytier’s lectures and from his remarkable book on Gide.2 Of course, Hytier would never have dreamt of working on the Traité des trois imposteurs, not literary enough for him.

This lecture is a synthesis of our two articles, ‘Sur les rapports entre les éditions du “Traité des trois imposteurs” et la tradition manuscrite de cet ouvrage’, Nouvelles de la république des lettres, 1987/11: 111–136, and ‘Notes sur deux manuscrits clandestins’, Dix-huitième siècle, 22 (1990): 433–440. Unfortunately, there are many typographical errors, skipped lines, and other faults in the first article, for which the compositors and not the authors are responsible, which render it incomprehensible in spots, and one error in the second article, p. 435, towards the bottom, IV.7 for VI.7, for which we are indeed responsible, so this lecture corrects details and refines the arguments of its two predecessors. We refer often to Silvia Berti’s ‘La Vie et l’Esprit de Spinosa (1719) e la prima traduzione francese dell’Ethica’, Rivista storica italiana, 98/1 (1986): 5–46, whose English version is The first edition of the “Traité des trois imposteurs” and its debt to Spinoza’s “Ethics”‘, in M. Hunter and D. Wootten (eds.), Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), and to her ‘Scepticism and the Traité des trois imposteurs’, in Richard H. Popkin and Arjo Vanderjagt (eds.), Scepticism and irreligion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Leiden, New York, and Cologne: E. J. Brill, 1993), 216–29, and to four overlapping articles by Françoise Charles-Daubert, ‘Les Principales Sources de l’Esprit de Spinosa, traité libertin et pamphlet politique’, Travaux et documents du Groupe de recherches spinozistes, No. 1 (1989): 61–108; ‘Les Traités des trois imposteurs et l’Esprit de Spinosa’, Nouvelles de la république des lettres, 1988/1: 21–50, ‘L’Image de Spinoza dans la littérature clandestine et l’Esprit de Spinosa’, in Spinoza au XVIII e siècle, ed. Olivier Bloch (Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1990), 51–74, and ‘Les Traités des trois imposteurs aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècle’, in Guido Canziani (ed.), Filosofia e religione nella letteratura clandestina, secoli XVII e XVIII (Milan: Francoangeli, 1994) which has just reached us (April 1995), so we have not yet been able to analyse it and the evolution of Charles-Daubert’s position. At a glance she appears to have accepted several of the theses first advanced here. We must also add to the bibliography Gianluca Mori, ‘Un frammento del “Traité des trois imposteurs” di Etienne Guillaume’, Rivista di storia della filosofia (1993, no. 2): 359–76, which we have not yet studied thoroughly. We shall have occasion to refer to clandestine tracts by their number in Miguel Benítez’s localization list, ‘Matériaux pour un inventaire des manuscrits philosophiques clandestins des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles’, Rivista di storia della filosofia (1988, no. 3): 501–31.

Professors Berti, Benitez, and McKenna have kindly read a draft of this paper and have called our attention to several errors. This does not constitute an endorsement of its theses because each of these colleagues has his/her own theory regarding the composition of the Traité.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 169.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 219.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 219.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Similar content being viewed by others

REferences

  1. This lecture is a synthesis of our two articles, ‘Sur les rapports entre les éditions du “Traité des trois imposteurs” et la tradition manuscrite de cet ouvrage’, Nouvelles de la république des lettres, 1987/11: 111–136, and ‘Notes sur deux manuscrits clandestins’, Dix-huitième siècle, 22 (1990): 433–440. Unfortunately, there are many typographical errors, skipped lines, and other faults in the first article, for which the compositors and not the authors are responsible, which render it incomprehensible in spots, and one error in the second article, p. 435, towards the bottom, IV.7 for VI.7, for which we are indeed responsible, so this lecture corrects details and refines the arguments of its two predecessors. We refer often to Silvia Berti’s ‘La Vie et l’Esprit de Spinosa (1719) e la prima traduzione francese dell’Ethica’, Rivista storica italiana, 98/1 (1986): 5–46, whose English version is The first edition of the “Traité des trois imposteurs” and its debt to Spinoza’s “Ethics”‘, in M. Hunter and D. Wootten (eds.), Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), and to her ‘Scepticism and the Traité des trois imposteurs’, in Richard H. Popkin and Arjo Vanderjagt (eds.), Scepticism and irreligion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Leiden, New York, and Cologne: E. J. Brill, 1993), 216–29, and to four overlapping articles by Françoise Charles-Daubert, ‘Les Principales Sources de l’Esprit de Spinosa, traité libertin et pamphlet politique’, Travaux et documents du Groupe de recherches spinozistes, No. 1 (1989): 61–108; ‘Les Traités des trois imposteurs et l’Esprit de Spinosa’, Nouvelles de la république des lettres, 1988/1: 21–50, ‘L’Image de Spinoza dans la littérature clandestine et l’Esprit de Spinosa’, in Spinoza au XVIII e siècle, ed. Olivier Bloch (Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1990), 51–74, and ‘Les Traités des trois imposteurs aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècle’, in Guido Canziani (ed.), Filosofia e religione nella letteratura clandestina, secoli XVII e XVIII (Milan: Francoangeli, 1994) which has just reached us (April 1995), so we have not yet been able to analyse it and the evolution of Charles-Daubert’s position. At a glance she appears to have accepted several of the theses first advanced here. We must also add to the bibliography Gianluca Mori, ‘Un frammento del “Traité des trois imposteurs” di Etienne Guillaume’, Rivista di storia della filosofia (1993, no. 2): 359–76, which we have not yet studied thoroughly. We shall have occasion to refer to clandestine tracts by their number in Miguel Benítez’s localization list, ‘Matériaux pour un inventaire des manuscrits philosophiques clandestins des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles’, Rivista di storia della filosofia (1988, no. 3): 501–31. Professors Berti, Benitez, and McKenna have kindly read a draft of this paper and have called our attention to several errors. This does not constitute an endorsement of its theses because each of these colleagues has his/her own theory regarding the composition of the Traité.

    Google Scholar 

  2. L’Examen critique des apologistes de la religion chrétienne: les frères Lévesque et leur groupe’, in Le Matérialisme du XVIII’ siècle et la littérature clandestine, ed. Olivier Bloch (Paris: Vrin, 1982), 45–66.

    Google Scholar 

  3. Margaret Jacob, The radical Enlightenment (London, 1981), 217–25.

    Google Scholar 

  4. Richard H. Popkin, ‘Spinoza and the conversion of the Jews: Spinoza’s political and theological thought’, in International symposium commemorating the 35oth anniversay of Spinoza: Amsterdam, 24–27 November 1982, ed. C. de Deugd (Amsterdam, 1984), 171–83, esp. 176–7. See also id., ‘Serendipity at the Clark: Spinoza and the Prince of Condé’, The Clark newsletter (1986): 2–4, and especially id., ‘Some new light on the roots of Spinoza’s science of Bible study’, in Marjorie Green and Debra Nail (eds.), Spinoza and the sciences (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1986), 171–88.

    Google Scholar 

  5. Charles-Daubert, ‘Les Principales Sources’.

    Google Scholar 

  6. ames O’Higgins, Yves de Vallone: the making of an esprit fort (The Hague, Boston, and London: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982).

    Google Scholar 

  7. Frédéric Deloffre, ‘Un “Système de religion naturelle”: du déisme au matérialisme du Militaire philosophe’, in Le Matérialisme du XVIII’ siècle,67–76.

    Google Scholar 

  8. Giles Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (London, 1918), p. vii.

    Google Scholar 

  9. Charles-Daubert, ‘L’Image de Spinoza’. “ Charles-Daubert, ‘Les Principales Sources’.

    Google Scholar 

  10. Wade, The clandestine organization and diffusion of philosophical ideas in France from 1700 to 1750 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1938; repr. New York: Octagon Books, 1967), 183–5, and his The intellectual development of Voltaire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 537–47 and passim. They are cited, and refuted, in Schwarzbach, ‘The problem of the Kehl additions to the Dictionnaire philosophique: sources, dating and authenticity’, Studies on Voltaire and the eighteenth century, 201 (1982), §x, pp. 46–9, to which it should be added that Voltaire’s apparent first contact with the Traité was in 1769.

    Google Scholar 

  11. Essay on human understanding, iv.xviii.2,3; but cf. 5,6 whose thrust is contrary, that a revelation cannot contradict reason.

    Google Scholar 

  12. Livy, 1.xix.5. In fact, conventionally religious thinkers such as Bishop Warburton, The divine legation of Moses (London, 1755 and subsequent rev. edns), and Voltaire, who was less conventionally religious (see s.vv. ÂME and ENFER in the Dictionnaire philosophique),held that it was precisely the function of religion, by its promise of posthumous reward or punishment, to support good morals and political order. This position is, as the late Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz has argued, quite blasphemous. It makes religion serve politics, just as the three-impostor thesis had claimed. See his ‘n-r= 1117i11 Tiring lrT1’ and ‘1 ‘n1 1”3/12-lrinn nn1Ui l’, in his NM’ Lnntzr n3’1n1 ‘111’ n3) (Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv: Schocken, 1976), 108–37. We would add that the difference between Warburton and the three-impostor treatises depends precisely upon their opinion of the worthiness of the political position that a religion, true or false, sets out to support. Our three-impostor treatise is, as we shall see, politically radical in certain regards, even if not quite so radical as the Testament of the curé Jean Meslier.

    Google Scholar 

  13. See François Laplanche, L’Ecriture,le sacré et, l’histoire (Amsterdam and Maarssen: APAHolland University Press, 1986), 1.111, § 1.1v; max, § 2.11. See also Guy Dodge, The politics of the Huguenots of the Dispersion (New York, 1947), passim.

    Google Scholar 

  14. See Elisabeth Labrousse, Plaidoyer pour le nicodémisime’, Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, 82(1987): 259–70. 18 E.g., s.v. MÉCHANT in the Dictionnaire philosophique.

    Google Scholar 

  15. For the record, Sommervogel, in his Bibliographie de la Compagnie de, Jésus, 11.1459 attributes this book to one J. Goret and remarks that its approbation is dated 14 August 1688. See Pierre M. Conlon, Prélude au siècle des lumières, 1692–1699 (Geneva: Droz, 1971), Vol. 2, no. 9390.

    Google Scholar 

  16. “Dissertationes in Irenaeum (Oxford, 1689), 1: 38–9.

    Google Scholar 

  17. Certain aspects of the debate on noncanonical histories ofJesus are discussed in Schwarzbach, ‘The sacred genealogy of a Voltairean polemic: the development of critical hypotheses regarding the composition of the canonical gospels’, Studies on Voltaire and the eighteenth century, 245 (1986): 303–49 (where we neglected to mention the Dialogues, sur l’âme, Benitez no. 28, which include an extended discussion of the New Testament apocrypha); and in Francis Schmidt, ‘LEcriture falsifiée. Face à l’inerrance biblique: L’apocryphe et la faute’, Le temps de la réflexion V (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), and ‘John Toland, critique déiste de la littérature apocryphe’, in La Fable apocryphe: Actes du colloque du centenaire de la section des sciences religieuses de l’E.PH.E. (Sept. 1986), ed. P. Geoltrain and J. C. Picard (Turnhout: Brepols, 1989).

    Google Scholar 

  18. Hellenistic culture: Fusion and diffusion (Morningside Heights, NY: Columbia University Press, 1959), ch. 8.

    Google Scholar 

  19. Richard Simon, Bibliothèque critique (Amsterdam, 1708), Vol. 1, ch. 9, pp. 131–42. Voltaire tries to use this material in his histories of ancient Israel, e.g. in his Philosophie de l’histoire, ch. 13.

    Google Scholar 

  20. Antonius van Dale, De oraculis ethnicorum (Amsterdam, 1683). ‘5 Oral communication.

    Google Scholar 

  21. Histoire des oracles,ed. Louis Maigron (Paris, 1908), p. x.

    Google Scholar 

  22. Charles-Daubert, ‘Les Principales Sources’, 78; ‘L’Image de Spinoza’, S9.

    Google Scholar 

  23. This is one of the principal themes of the Examens de la Bible, Benitez no. 58, attributed to Mme du Châtelet, e.g. II: 5o, 59, etc. in the forthcoming edn.

    Google Scholar 

  24. See ‘? non,]1 rip=‘J1n’, in his trnDri’’tU nn’Tivn (Jerusalem: Magnes Press of the Hebrew University, 1988), 13 ff.

    Google Scholar 

  25. Opera minora (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969), Vol. I, pp. 82–5.

    Google Scholar 

  26. Thomas Beard, Theatre of God’s iudgements (1597), cit. J. Leslie Hotson, The death of Christopher Marlowe (London and Cambridge, MA, 1925), II-12.

    Google Scholar 

  27. Richard H. Popkin, ‘The third force in seventeenth-century philosophy: scepticism, science and biblical prophecy’, Nouvelles de la république des lettres, (1983), no. 1:35–64. For the documentation of that disappointment, see Gershom Sholem, l”ri’n’d r1’A2fl11U7 rann-i11’ZY’21Zt 3 (Tel-Aviv: Am-’Oved, 1956–7), ch. 7; trans. J. Zwi Werblowsky, Sabbatai Sevi,the mystical Messiah, 1626–1676 (Princeton, 1973), 789–820.

    Google Scholar 

  28. Michael Heyd, ‘La Réaction à l’enthousiasme et la sécularisation des sensibilités religieuses au début du dix-huitième siècle’, in Problèmes d’histoire du christianisme, No. 13, Sécularisation, ed. Michèle Mat (Brussels: Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1984), 5–38.

    Google Scholar 

  29. Walter Grossmann, ‘Elie Merlat on discernment of false inspiration’, Revue de synthèse, 6’ série, no. 4 (Oct.—Dec. 1990): 423–33.

    Google Scholar 

  30. In the discussion after the delivery of this paper it was pointed out to us that in the early i8th c. there was an extensive literature on all sorts of charlatanry of which we were not aware. We do not agree, however, that the books by Jean-Baptiste Thiers, Traité des superstitions regardant les sacrements (Paris, 1697), and Pierre Le Brun, Histoire critique des pratiques superstitieuses (Rouen, 1702) are part of that literature. As a matter of fact, we had occasion to read long extracts from those books some years before, and as we recall, they are directed against popular—in the authors’ terms, pagan—religious expression that did not conform to the Tridentine decrees and the evolving sense of decency.

    Google Scholar 

  31. Samuel Krauss, Das Leben Jesu nach jüdischen Quellen (Berlin, 1902); cf. Charles-Daubert, ‘Les Traités des trois imposteurs et l’Esprit de Spinosa’,32; Jean-Pierre Osier, L’Evangile du ghetto, ou Comment les juifs se racontaient Jésus (Paris: Berg International, 1984).

    Google Scholar 

  32. See Jean Seznec, La Survivance des dieux antiques (London, 1940); trans. Barbara E Sessions, The survival of the pagan gods (New York, 1953).

    Google Scholar 

  33. See Don Cameron Allen, Mysteriously meant: the rediscovery of pagan symbolism and allegorical interpretation in the Renaissance (Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 75–8.

    Google Scholar 

  34. Ernest Renan, Averroès et l’averroïsme, in his OEuvres complètes, ed. Henriette Psichari (Paris, [1949 J), 111: 316.

    Google Scholar 

  35. Bodleian MS D 920, fol. 108. See B. E. Schwarzbach, ‘Un Fragment inédit de Richard Simon’, Oratoriana, 12 (1966):53–6.

    Google Scholar 

  36. Charles-Daubert, ‘L’Image de Spinoza’, 56–7. François Berriot, ‘Les Libertins de la Renaissance et du début du XVIIe siècle et les penseurs antiques’, in Les religions du paganisme antique, dans l’Europe chrétienne, XVI’ XVIIIesiècle: Colloque tenu en, Sorbonne les 26–27, mai 1987 (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris—Sorbonne, 1988), 37–50 bis. Antony McKenna has recently studied the manuscripts of Beurrier held in the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris, and he concludes that Beurrier’s anecdotes are edifying and homiletical but nearly empty of valid testimony regarding the free-thought of his time. Beurrier attributes to the free-thinkers the notions which he thinks that they ought to defend, including the thesis of the three impostors, which is not proof that, to his knowledge, such a text was actually in circulation among them. See McKenna, ‘Le Père Beurrier et le libertinage: témoignage ou imposture littéraire?’, Correspondances:, mélanges offerts à Roger Duchêne, ed. Wolfgang Leiner and Pierre Ronzeaud (Tübingen, 1992), 493–503.

    Google Scholar 

  37. Popkin, ‘Some new light’, 177 ff.

    Google Scholar 

  38. François de Rosset, Les Histoires mémorables et tragiques de ce temps (Paris, 1619), 189–90.

    Google Scholar 

  39. Professor Benitez has reminded us that Wade had already published this text in his Organization and diffusion, 136–8, drawing the same conclusion that we have: that it is not a résumé of our Traité. Profesor Benitez argues that it is in fact a résumé of the tract on the subject of the three impostors by the curé Guillaume. See Benitez, ‘Autour du “Traité des trois imposteurs”: l’affaire Guillaume’, Studi francesi, 91 (1987): 21–36.

    Google Scholar 

  40. Wolfgang Gericke, Das Buch ‘De tribus impostoribus’: Quellen (Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1982), no. 2, and his four articles cited in the bibliography, ibid., 122.

    Google Scholar 

  41. Introductio ad notitiam rei litterariae… Accessit dissertatio de doctis impostoribus, znd edn (Jena, 1706). This material has been treated with greater precision by Miguel Benitez, ‘La Diffusion du “Traité des trois imposteurs” au xvtne siècle’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 40 (1993): 137–57.

    Google Scholar 

  42. John S. Spink, La Libre Pensée franfaise de Gassendi à Voltaire, trans. Paul Meier (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1966), 281n. 2.

    Google Scholar 

  43. Charles Favre de Vaugelas, Remarques sur la langue française utiles à ceux qui veulent bien parler et bien escrire (Paris, 1647), [3].

    Google Scholar 

  44. Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz, OEuvres (Paris, 1870–96), v: 180.

    Google Scholar 

  45. Histoire des oracles, 34.

    Google Scholar 

  46. Abraham Wolf, The oldest biography of Spinoza (London, 1927), 93.

    Google Scholar 

  47. (Paris, 1716), 8, 17, 21, 63, etc.

    Google Scholar 

  48. (London,1692), 2S3; this work was reissued in 1697 with a Life of Mohammed. Our citation does not appear in the French translation (1699).

    Google Scholar 

  49. Essays de littérature pour la connoissance des livres (Paris, 1702), 100, 106, 237.

    Google Scholar 

  50. Reimmannianae bibliothecae theologicae catalogus systematico-criticus continuatus (Hildesheim, 1731), 1029–30.

    Google Scholar 

  51. See Silvia Berti, ‘Jan Vroesen autore del “Traité des trois imposteurs”?’, Rivista storica italiana, 103 (1991): 528–43, which assumes the reliability of Marchand’s and his friends’ memories of what had happened thirty and forty years earlier, and that they were as well-informed at that time as they thought they were. Miguel Benitez shares our scepticism about the value of Marchand’s and Fritsch’s attribution of the Traité to Vroesen. See his ‘La Coterie hollandaise et la Réponse à M. de la Monnoye sur la traité De tribus impostoribus’, Lias, 21 (1994): 71–94.

    Google Scholar 

  52. ‘La Diffusion du “Traité des trois imposteurs”‘, 949.

    Google Scholar 

  53. Nouvelles de la république des lettres (1987), no. 2: 939. 6’ Nouvelles littéraires, x: 41–74.

    Google Scholar 

  54. Nieuw nederlandisch biografisch woordenboek, ed. Moluysen and Blok (Leiden, 1918), Vol. iv, s.v.

    Google Scholar 

  55. Histoire des ouvrages des gavants, (Feb. 1694): 278 if

    Google Scholar 

  56. Menagiana, Iv: 283–312.

    Google Scholar 

  57. See Jacob, The radical Enlightenment, zoz. Benitez, ‘La Diffusion du “Traité des trois imposteurs”‘, 138, joins us in doubting that Rousset was the author.

    Google Scholar 

  58. Dictionnaire des journalistes, ed. Jean Sgard (Grenoble, 1976), s.v.

    Google Scholar 

  59. (Leipzig, 1717), 143–4. We have worked from a transcription of the copy in the Munich Staatsbibliothek very kindly executed for us by Miss Victoria Doebner, whom we thank most profusely.

    Google Scholar 

  60. Andrew Fix, ‘Angels, devils, and evil spirits in seventeenth-century thought: Balthasar Bekker and the Collegiants’, journal of the history of ideas, (1989): 527–47.

    Google Scholar 

  61. Benitez no. 59. See B. E. Schwarzbach and A. W. Fairbairn, ‘The Examen de la religion: a bibliographical note’, Studies on Voltaire and the eighteenth century, 249 (1987): 93–156.

    Google Scholar 

  62. Marracci, Prodomus ad refutationem Alcorani… (Rome, i681) and Refutatio Alcorani (Padua, 1688), the second volume of his edition and Latin translation of the Koran; Kinckelmann, AlCoranus s. lex islamica Muhammedis… (Hamburg, 1694).

    Google Scholar 

  63. P. 88 of ‘Les principales sources…’ OEuvres philosophiques, de Vanini, trans. M. X. Rousselot [Paris, 18421, 220–21, Schramm, De vita et scriptis Vanini (see below), 59.

    Google Scholar 

  64. Gabriel Naudé, Apologie des grands hommes qui ont été faussement soupçonnez de, magie (Paris, 1625), 232 ff.; id., Considérations politiques sur les coups d’état (n.p., 1667), 145.

    Google Scholar 

  65. Fairbairn thanks his colleagues in the classics department of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, and Schwarzbach thanks Prof. André Caquot of the Collège de France for their kind and expert assistance in deciphering the Greek of the Sloane manuscript. It was not obvious!

    Google Scholar 

  66. See Katalog der Handschriften der Königl. Öffentlichen Bibliothek zu Dresden, ed. Ludwig Schmidt (Leipzig, 1906), Vol. in, no. 68.

    Google Scholar 

  67. Gianluca Mori dates it a year later in his Per l’attribuzione a du Marsais dell”Examen de la religion’ (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1993), and though he may be right we are not yet entirely convinced. In any event, that does not change the history of the MS diffusion of the Examen de la religion, which seems to have been highly restricted until about 1735. See Ann Thomson, ‘L’Examen de la religion’, in Canziani (ed.), Filosofia e religione nella letteratura clandestina, 355–72, for further data regarding its diffusion. 84 ‘The Examen de la religion’, 104ff.

    Google Scholar 

  68. Miguel Benitez, ‘Du bon usage du Tractatus theologico-politicus: la Religion du chrétien’, in Spinoza au XVIII’ siècle, 75–84.

    Google Scholar 

  69. O’Higgins, Yves de Vallone, passim.

    Google Scholar 

  70. For Fontenelle’s relations with the clandestine tracts—this is not the only one to incorporate citations from the Histoire des oracles—and for the claim that he was the author of at least one and possibly two more, see Antony McKenna, ‘Réflexions sur l’argument de M. Pascal et de M. Locke: un manuscrit clandestin attribué à Fontenelle’, in Fontenelle: Actes du colloque tenu à Rouen du 6 au 10 octobre 1987,ed. Main Niderst (Paris: PUF, 1989), 351–61; Main Niderst, ‘Fontenelle et la littérature clandestine’, in Canziani (ed.), Filosofia e religione nella letteratura clandestina, 161–74.

    Google Scholar 

  71. Jeroom Vercruysse, ‘Bibliographie descriptive des éditions du “Traité des trois imposteurs”‘, T/dschrift van de Vr/e Universiteit Brussel, 18 (1974–5): 65–70.

    Google Scholar 

  72. See Schwarzbach and Fairbairn, ‘Sur les rapports’, 132 ff.

    Google Scholar 

  73. Pierre Gustave Brunet, Manuel du libraire (Paris, 1864), v/2: 1207.

    Google Scholar 

  74. Antoine-Alexandre Barbier, Dictionnaire des ouvrages anonymes et pseudonymes (Paris, 1879), Vol. Iv, col. 789. 9= Charles-Daubert, ‘Les Traités’, 32. 93 Pierre-Antoine Crevenna, Catalogue raisonné de la collection des livres… (n.p., 1775–6), I: 145.

    Google Scholar 

  75. (Brussels: Presses Universitaires de Bruxelles, 1970), 56–9; (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1983), 16–23. 99 (Paris, 1974), Vol. 1, pp. lviii ff.

    Google Scholar 

  76. See Roland Desné, ‘Sur un manuscrit utilisé par d’Holbach: l’Histoire critique de Jésus, fils de Marie’, in Le Matérialisme, 169–76.

    Google Scholar 

  77. The ultimate sources are Josephus, Antiquities n.ix—xvi, Clement of Alexandria, Stromata rt.xxü, and Philo, De Vita Mosis 1.3, 8, 13, 43.

    Google Scholar 

  78. Alain Niderst (ed.), L’Ame matérielle (Paris: Nizet, 1969); a rev. edn is shortly to appear in the series ‘Universitas’ of clandestine texts.

    Google Scholar 

  79. See Schwarzbach, ‘The problem of the Kehl additions’, passim.

    Google Scholar 

  80. Charles-Daubert, ‘L’Image de Spinoza’, 52. Spinoza: l’Ethique,ed. Colonna d’Istria (Paris, 1907). Gianluca Mori, ‘Boulainvilliers a-t-il traduit l’Ethique?’,Lettre clandestine,3 (1994): 37–9, doubts the attribution of this translation to Boulainvilliers.

    Google Scholar 

  81. Boulainvilliers, OEuvres philosophiques, ed. Renée Simon, Archives of the History of Ideas, 58 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973), 1: 84.

    Google Scholar 

  82. BN n.a.fr. 50978, P. 95; Arsenal 2236, fol. 360V,Sloane 2039, fol. 89v,etc.

    Google Scholar 

  83. See Alphonse Dupront, Pierre-Daniel, Huet et, l’exégèse comparatiste au XVII’siècle (Paris, 1930).

    Google Scholar 

  84. Origen, Traité d’Origen contre Celse, trans. Elie Bouhéreau (Amsterdam, 1700).

    Google Scholar 

  85. Echec à la sécularisation des Lumières? La religion comme lien social’, in Sécularisation, PP. 91–125.

    Google Scholar 

  86. Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem; or, On religious power and Judaism, trans. Allan Arkush, intro. and commentary by Alexander Altmann (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, X983).

    Google Scholar 

  87. In the original, the quoted matter from here to the end of the excerpt is printed in a bolder Fraktur fount, unavailable to our printer; we have added the quotation marks to substitute for the bold Fraktur.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Authors
  1. Bertram Eugene Schwarzbach
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. A. W. Fairbairn
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Rome, Italy

    Silvia Berti

  2. Centre Nationale de Recherches Scientifiques, France

    Françoise Charles-Daubert

  3. Washington University, St. Louis, USA

    Richard H. Popkin

  4. University of California, Los Angeles, USA

    Richard H. Popkin

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 1996 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Schwarzbach, B.E., Fairbairn, A.W. (1996). History and structure of our Traité des trois imposteurs . In: Berti, S., Charles-Daubert, F., Popkin, R.H. (eds) Heterodoxy, Spinozism, and Free Thought in Early-Eighteenth-Century Europe. International Archives of the History of Ideas / Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Idées, vol 148. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8735-8_3

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8735-8_3

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-90-481-4741-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-015-8735-8

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation