Impostors and Revolution: on the ‘Philadelphie’ 1796 edition of the Traité des trois imposteurs

Abstract

Among the eighteenth-century printed editions of the Traite des trois imposteurs, the most unusual is the last, which, according to the tide page, was printed in ‘Philadelphie sous les auspices du general Washingthon [sic]’ in 1796. This edition is full of poems celebrating the French Republic and condemning its enemies foreign and domestic. Although the earlier editions of the Traite were used to promote a Spinozist view of God, or even atheism, this one states that ‘Le peuple francais reconnant l’etre supreme, l’immortalite de l’ame, et la liberte des cultes’, reflecting instead the patriotic and providential deism of the Revolution. Who was responsible for this edition? We will see that it was one ‘citoyen Mercier’, who used the Traite to promote an idea of a deist civil religion recommended by Rousseau and put into execution by Roberspierre and others. For this reason, the only relation that this book had to America or Washington is imaginary and symbolic, a ‘pious fraud’ in the civil religion of the French Revolution.