This was no mere quarrel of rival authors.  It marked a fundamental divergence in thought, and proclaimed the beginning of a disastrous reaction in the very heart of the school of illumination.  Among the most conspicuous elements of the reaction were these:  the subordination of reason to emotion; the displacement of industry, science, energetic and many-sided ingenuity, by dreamy indolence; and finally, what brings us back to our starting-point, the suppression of opinions deemed to be anti-social by the secular arm.  The old idea was brought back in a new dress; the absolutist conception of the function of authority, associated with a theistic doctrine.  Unfortunately for France, Rousseau’s idea prospered, and ended by vanquishing its antagonist.  The reason is plain.  Rousseau’s idea exactly fitted in with the political traditions and institutions of the country.  It was more easily and directly compatible than was the contending idea, with that temper and set of men’s minds which tradition and institutions had fixed so disastrously deep in the national character.

The crisis of 1758-59, then, is a date of the highest importance.  It marks a collision between the old principle of Lewis XIV., of the Bartholomew Massacre, of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and the new rationalistic principle of spiritual emancipation.  The old principle was decrepit, it was no longer able to maintain itself; the hounds were furious, but their fury was toothless.  Before the new principle could achieve mastery, Rousseau had made mastery impossible.  Two men came into the world at this very moment, whom destiny made incarnations of the discordant principles.  Danton and Robespierre were both born in 1759.  Diderot seems to have had a biblical presentiment, says Michelet.  “We feel that he saw, beyond Rousseau, something sinister, a spectre of the future.  Diderot-Danton already looks in the face of Rousseau-Robespierre."[147]

A more vexatious incident now befell the all-daring, all-enduring Diderot, than either the decree of the Council or the schism of the heresiarch at Montmorency.  D’Alembert declared his intention of abandoning the work, and urged his colleague to do the same.  His letters to Voltaire show intelligibly enough how he brought himself to this resolution.  “I am worn out,” he says, “with the affronts and vexations of every kind that this work draws down upon us.  The hateful and even infamous satires which they print against us, and which are not only tolerated, but protected, authorised, applauded, nay, actually commanded by the people with power in their hands; the sermons, or rather the tocsins that are rung against us at Versailles in the presence of the king, nemine reclamante; the new intolerable inquisition that they are bent on practising against the Encyclopaedia, by giving us new censors who are more absurd and more intractable than could be found at Goa; all these reasons, joined to some others,