Testament: Memoir of the Thoughts and Sentiments of Jean Meslier

"This is a book I only learnt about fairly recently. I’ve been doing some work recently on atheism, writing a book that will be out in September called Atheism: The Basics for Routledge. One of the things I wanted to do was to do some pen portraits of atheists for one of the chapters on the history of atheism. When I was researching that chapter and reading up on some other people, I discovered that Meslier is actually a very important figure in the history of European atheism and probably isn’t discussed as much as he ought to be. Jean Meslier (1664—1729) was a Catholic priest in a small, quite isolated village. He lived his whole life as a Catholic priest. He was in some respects slightly idiosyncratic, but never to the extent that any of his superiors thought that it warranted serious attention. He did the kind of things that you might expect a priest to do: for example, when he had spare cash at the end of each financial year, he would give it away to his parishioners. There were many things that made it hard to guess that he was leading a kind of double life. For the last ten years of his life, he was working on his ‘Testament’ in which he was developing a series of very radical ideas. It turns out that the ideas he was developing were atheism, materialism, a kind of political internationalism, and a kind of hedonism. The whole book is a mess. It’s extremely difficult to read. I wasn’t sure whether I should include the book in this list or not, but what’s important about it is its influence. “The criticism is extremely ferocious. Pick any kind of line of attack that the New Atheists have made on religion and you can find it there in Meslier.” After he died, he’d left four copies of his ‘Testament’. Somehow or other the church didn’t capture all of the copies; more copies were made and they were circulated in Paris in the late 1720s and 1730s. And over the next sixty years, there were a number of publications that drew on his work. Voltaire published an extract in which he made it out that Meslier was a deist, rather than an atheist, and that he shared Voltaire’s political sympathies. So, he wasn’t exactly true to the original text. But Voltaire did pick out the good parts in the arguments that Meslier had that could be used to support deism. In about 1770, Holbach published a book called The Good Sense which was, again, a kind of synopsis of Meslier’s work but it didn’t include everything. In the Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Boudoir , all the philosophy in that work is basically taken straight from Meslier. Across the eighteenth century, Meslier was enormously influential. Holbach published a whole lot of stuff, much of it owed quite a bit to Meslier, but published it anonymously because it wasn’t safe for an atheist to put their names to pamphlets that they published. Holbach had very reasons why, throughout his life, he didn’t want to put his name to the forty or fifty atheist books that he wrote. It wasn’t until about 1860 that a full edition of Meslier’s work was published. The first English translation only just appeared a couple of years ago. So, there are reasons why he’s not particularly well-known. Going back to the original text is not all that rewarding because it’s so hard to read. The criticism is extremely ferocious. Pick any kind of line of attack that the New Atheists have made on religion and you can find it there in Meslier. There’s a line that goes something like, ‘Common folk will not be free until the last of the nobles is strangled with the intestines of the last priest’ — that’s one of Meslier’s lines. It’s a very famous line, and many have repeated it, but the first person to put it in writing — and probably its inventor — was Meslier. He was very radical politically, and quite important for the French Revolution, as was Holbach’s coterie — all of whom were familiar with Meslier’s work. He didn’t hold back at all in his criticism of either religion or politics. He attacked the church on many different fronts. Why did he remain a priest? I think because he quite liked the life that he was living. It was pretty comfortable, and he was quite happy working in the service of his parishioners. I have no idea how he coped with preaching and that side of things during the last part of his life. That’s really odd. Meslier dies in 1729, and Strauss isn’t writing his stuff until a hundred years later. It’s a very important book in the history of atheism, one whose importance — I expect — has become more deeply appreciated over time. Onfray has some really interesting things to say about what’s in the Testament . He has written a couple of fairly lengthy articles expounding it and also complaining about the way that, for example, Voltaire treated the text."