Marechal

From Philosopedia

Maréchal, Pierre Sylvain (15 August 1750 - 18 January 1803)

Maréchal was an articulate and militant atheist and materialist at the time of the French Revolution. A librarian, playwright, and lawyer, he wrote Almanach des honnêtes gens (1788, Dictionary of Notables), which helped lead Charles Gilbert Romme to design the French Republican calendar that was adopted by the Jacobin-controlled National Convention on 24 October 1793.

In addition to writing some erotic poetry, he parodied the Bible in Livre échappé au Déluge (1784, Book Salvaged from the Flood). His Dictionnaire des athées anciens et modernes (1800, Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Atheists) included Saint Augustine, Blaise Pascal, and Jacques-Bénigne Boussuet.

Known as “l’homme sans Dieu,” he listed three main categories of atheism:

• true atheists– Bruno, Diderot, d’Holbach, Epicurus, Hobbes, Hume,

La Mettrie, Lucretius, Meslier, Vanini

• possible atheists– Averroës, Bayle, Campanella, Cicero, Descartes,

Molière, Montaigne, Spinoza

• atheists but only from the standpoint of the strictest religious orthodoxy –

Aristotle, Bacon, Gassendi, Leibniz, Locke, Malebranche, Newton, Plato, Rousseau

As opposites of atheists, he lists

St. Augustine, Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, Jansenius, Jesus, François de la

Mothe-Fénelon, Pascal

Maréchal’s Dictionnaire des athées was the first biographical dictionary of skeptics. According to J. M. Robertson, it is one of the best examples of a general historic treatment of the subject, along with Joseph Mazzini Wheeler’s Biographical Dictionary of Freethinkers (1889). Robertson prefers Wheeler’s work, for Maréchal’s work “exhibits much learning, but is made partly fantastic by its sardonic plan of including a number of typical religionists (including Job, John, and Jesus Christ!), some of whose utterances are held to lead logically to atheism.” McCabe, however, found Maréchal both a scholar and a man of great learning, adding that the book was the result of strong persuasion by the mathematician Lalande.

Maréchal’s Almanach des honnêtes gens (1788), which was not an attack upon religion but which on a calendar substituted the names of renowned laymen for saints, was instantly denounced by the Parlement de Paris. Its printer was prosecuted, Maréchal was imprisoned for four months, and the censor who had passed the book was exiled thirty leagues from Paris.

Although a major figure in his time, Maréchal is seldom included today in standard reference books. However, Gordon Stein wrote “Pierre Sylvain Maréchal” in American Rationalist (July-August 1991), praising him.

{BDF; EU, Aram Vartanian; JMR; JMRH; RAT}