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Le Vassor wrote in 1688:
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People talk only of reason, of good taste, of force of mind, of the advantage of those who can raise themselves above the prejudices of education and of the society in which one is born. Pyrrhonism is the fashion in many things: men say that rectitude of mind consists in 'not believing lightly' and in being 'ready to doubt.' [679] Pascal and Huet between them had only multiplied doubters. On both lines, obviously, freethought was the gainer; and in a Jesuit treatise, Le Monde condamné par luymesme, published in 1695, the Préface contre l'incrédulité des libertins sets out with the avowal that
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Such was France to a religious eye at the height of the Catholic triumph over Protestantism. The statement that the libertins formed the majority of
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is of course a furious extravagance. But there must have been a good deal of unbelief to have moved a priest to such an explosion. And the unbelief must have been as much a product of revulsion from religious savagery as a result of direct critical impulse, for there was as yet no circulation of positively freethinking literature. For a time, indeed, there was a general falling away in French intellectual prestige, [680] the result, not of the mere
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in literature, as is sometimes argued, but of the immense diversion of national energy under Louis XIV to militarism; [681] and the freethinkers lost some of the confidence as well as some of the competence they had exhibited in the days of Molière. [682] There had been too little solid thinking done to preclude a reaction when the king, led by Madame de Maintenon, went about to atone for his debaucheries by an old age of piety.
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The king had been put in such fear of hell that he believed that all who had not been instructed by the Jesuits were damned. To ruin anyone it was necessary only to say, 'He is a Huguenot, or a Jansenist,' and the thing was done.