D’Alembert’s article hardly goes beyond what to us seem the axioms of all men of sense.  We must remember the time.  Even members of the philosophic party itself, like Grimm, thought the article misplaced and hardy.[139] The Genevese ministers indignantly repudiated the compliment of Socinianism, and the eulogy of being rather less irrational than their neighbours.  Voltaire read and read again with delight, and plied the writer with reiterated exhortations in every key, not to allow himself to be driven from the great work by the raging of the heathen and the vain imaginings of the people.[140]

While the storm seemed to be at its height, an incident occurred which let loose a new flood of violent passion.  Helvetius published that memorable book in which he was thought to have told all the world its own secret.  His De l’Esprit came out in 1758.[141] It provoked a general insurrection of public opinion.  The devout and the heedless agreed in denouncing it as scandalous, licentious, impious, and pregnant with peril.  The philosophic party felt that their ally had dealt a sore blow to liberty of thought and the free expression of opinion.  “Philosophy,” said Grimm, by philosophy, as I have said, meaning Liberalism, “will long feel the effect of the rising of opinion which this author has caused by his book; and for having described too freely a morality that is bad and false in itself, M. Helvetius will have to reproach himself with all the restraints that are now sure to be imposed on the few men of lofty genius who still are left to us, whose destiny was to enlighten their fellows, and to spread truth over the earth."[142]

At the beginning of 1759 the procureur-general laid an information before the court against Helvetius’s book, against half a dozen minor publications, and finally against the Encyclopaedia.  The De l’Esprit was alleged to be a mere abridgment of the Encyclopaedia, and the Encyclopaedia was denounced as being the opprobrium of the nation by its impious maxims and its hostility to morals and religion.  The court appointed nine commissaries to examine the seven volumes, suspending their further sale or delivery in the meanwhile.  When the commissaries sent in their report a month later, the parliament was dissatisfied with its tenour, and appointed four new examiners, two of them being theologians and two of them lawyers.  Before the new censors had time to do their work, the Council of State interposed with an arbitrary decree (March 1759) suppressing the privilege which had been conceded in 1746; prohibiting the sale of the seven volumes already printed, and the printing of any future volumes under pain of exemplary punishment.[143] The motive for this intervention has never been made plain.  One view is that the king’s government resented the action of the law courts, and that the royal decree was only an episode in the quarrel then raging between the crown and the parliaments.  Another opinion