The Epicurean Stoicism of the French Enlightenment

Abstract

Roman Stoic texts, and especially the works of Seneca, were a central influence on French Enlightenment thought. Parallels between the social and political conditions in the first and eighteenth centuries gave his works a renewed relevance. For example in his De beneficiis Seneca set forth the three graces that bind a hierarchical world; gracious giving, grateful receiving, and graceful requiting make the world go round – a traditional gift economy anticipating a market exchange of goods and services. The poor or powerless can requite their debt to the rich and powerful with praise or services instead of money. Patronage in the eighteenth century took the form of economic support – the tribute or obligation that opulence owes to genius or talent as Rousseau and Burke had it – or political protection. Frederick the Great and Catherine the Great were the foremost patrons of the FrenchEnlightenment, but Catherine would not permit Voltaire’s and Diderot’s writings to be published in Russia; and Frederick would not allow Rousseau to write on politics or religion while in Prussian territory, although Frederick, and his Field Marshall, James Keith, were Rousseau’s most reliable patrons. Keith’s friend, David Hume, another recipient of aristocratic patronage, persuaded Rousseau to come to England, telling him that the better price authors received from booksellers would facilitate economic independence. Hume, and other Britons, held the enlightened illusion that booksellers were the modern patrons of literature. All major writers of the eighteenth century were recipients of aristocratic or royal patronage and most prided themselves on their independence of mind. The republic of letters was not a self-sustaining marketplace of ideas. Jean d’Alembert decried patronage in Essai sur la societe des gens de lettres et des grands although he was in receipt of five pensions. Seneca’s views on patronage and Stoic virtue helped eighteenth-century thinkers negotiate the challenge of combining political servility with intellectual autonomy, the real servility of Epictetus with the imagined sovereignty of Marcus Aurelius. The age of Enlightenment was the age of Frederick, as Kant firmly declared in response to his question “What is Enlightenment?” Besides the monarchical Stoicism of Seneca, the republican figures of Cato and Brutuswere widely deployed in eighteenth-century literature on both sides of the English Channel. The two Catos (Marcus Portius and Marcus Portius Utencensis) and two Brutuses (Lucius Junius and Marcus Junius) were often merged in eighteenth-century literature as exemplars of republican virtue. In this age of imperial rivalries, French thinkers invariably presented England as Carthage, which, as Cato the Elder indicated, should be destroyed (Andrew 2011). Theseverity of republican Stoicism was embodied in the French Revolution by Maximilien Robespierre who tarnished for subsequent generations the Stoic ideals of virtue and duty. However, before the Revolution, the Senecan ideals of generosity, clemency and tranquil happiness corresponded to the ideals of the Roman Empire more than the Roman Republic; as Miriam Griffin (1984: 95) pointed out, the Senecan virtues of generosity and clemency “presuppose the inferior position of those they benefit.” Senecan virtues were not those of the austerity and severity associated with the names of Cato and Brutus; they were also quite distant from the Machiavellian republicanism of miserly economy, cruel justice, and restless acquisitiveness (Brooke 2012: 22-5). In this chapter, I wish to present other reasons why les lumieres found Stoicism attractive besides its role in justifying patron-client relationships and the imperialist republicanism of the English Civil War and the American and French revolutions.