The Populist Voice of the Early Enlightenment

Abstract

The anonymous author of the most outrageous clandestine manuscript of the eighteenth century, Traite des trois imposteurs (c.1710), addressed the capabilities of ordinary people directly: all men could know the truth, but they are duped by vain and ridiculous opinions put forward by “the partisans of these absurdities … if the people would learn into what an abyss of ignorance they have fallen,” they would soon rid themselves of the yoke of ignorance imposed upon them.1 They do not have to engage in “des hautes speculations,” nor penetrate the secrets of nature; they just have to have a little good sense. In contrast to the constraint endorsed by contemporary freethinkers like John Toland (d. 1722)—some ideas are meant to be kept “esoteric,” and others fit for the masses and may be classified as “exoteric”—the Traite consistently speaks in a populist voice. If ordinary people have one defect, it lies in their credulity. Hobbes would have agreed.