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The Idea of Progress, An inguiry into its origin and growth

J.B. Bury

Section 12 of 21 - Table of Contents
CHAPTER X

THE YEAR 2440

1.

The leaders of thought in France did not look far forward into the
future or attempt to trace the definite lines on which the human
race might be expected to develop. They contented themselves with
principles and vague generalities, and they had no illusions as to
the slowness of the process of social amelioration; a rational
morality, the condition of improvement, was only in its infancy. A
passage in a work of the Abbe Morellet probably reflects faithfully
enough the comfortable though not extravagant optimism which was
current. [Footnote: Reflexions sur les avantages d'ecrire et
d'imprimer sur les matieres de l'administration (1764); in Melanges,
vol. iii. p. 55. Morellet held, like d'Holbach, that society is only
the development and improvement of nature itself (ib. p. 6).]

Let us hope for the amelioration of man's lot as a consequence of
the progress of the enlightenment (des lumieres) and labours of the
educated (des gens instruits); let us trust that the errors and even
the injustices of our age may not rob us of this consoling hope. The
history of society presents a continuous alternation of light and
darkness, reason and extravagance, humanity and barbarism; but in
the succession of ages we can observe good gradually increasing in
ever greater proportion. What educated man, if he is not a
misanthrope or misled by vain declamations, would really wish he had
lived in the barbarous and poetical time which Homer paints in such
fair and terrifying colours? Who regrets that he was not born at
Sparta among those pretended heroes who made it a virtue to insult
nature, practised theft, and gloried in the murder of a Helot; or at
Carthage, the scene of human sacrifices, or at Rome amid the
proscriptions or under the rule of a Nero or a Caligula? Let as
agree that man advances, though slowly, towards light and happiness.

But though the most influential writers were sober in speculating
about the future, it is significant of their effectiveness in
diffusing the idea of Progress that now for the first time a
prophetic Utopia was constructed. Hitherto, as I have before
observed, ideal states were either projected into the remote past or
set in some distant, vaguely-known region, where fancy could build
freely. To project them into the future was a new thing, and when in
1770 Sebastien Mercier described what human civilisation would be in
A.D. 2440, it was a telling sign of the power which the idea of
Progress was beginning to exercise.

2.

Mercier has been remembered, or rather forgotten, as an inferior
dramatist. He was a good deal more, and the researches of M. Beclard
into his life and works enable us to appreciate him. If it is an
overstatement to say that his soul reflected in miniature the very
soul of his age, [Footnote: L. Beclard, Sebastien Mercier, sa vie,
son oeuvre, son temps (1903), p. vii.] he was assuredly one of its
characteristic products. He reminds us in some ways of the Abbe de
Saint-Pierre, who was one of his heroes. All his activities were
urged by the dream of a humanity regenerated by reason, all his
energy devoted to bringing about its accomplishment. Saint-Pierre's
idea of perpetual peace inspired an early essay on the scourge of
war.

The theories of Rousseau exercised at first an irresistible
attraction, but modern civilisation had too strong a hold on him; he
was too Parisian in temper to acquiesce for long in the doctrine of
Arcadianism. He composed a book on The Savage to illustrate the text
that the true standard of morality is the heart of primitive man,
and to prove that the best thing we could do is to return to the
forest; but in the process of writing it he seems to have come to
the conclusion that the whole doctrine was fallacious. [Footnote:
Mercier's early essay: Des malheurs de la guerre et des avantages de
la paix (1766). On the savage: L'homme sauvage (1767). For the
opposite thesis see the Songes philosophiques (1768). He describes a
state of perfect happiness in a planet where beings live in
perpetual contemplation of the infinite. He appreciates the work of
philosophers from Socrates to Leibnitz, and describes Rousseau as
standing before the swelling stream, but cursing it. It may be
suspected that the writings of Leibnitz had much to do with
Mercier's conversion.] The transformation of his opinions was the
work of a few months. He then came forward with the opposite thesis
that all events have been ordered for man's felicity, and he began
to work on an imaginary picture of the state to which man might find
his way within seven hundred years.

L'an 2440 was published anonymously at Amsterdam in 1770. [Footnote:
The author's name first appeared in the 3rd ed., 1799. A German
translation, by C. F. Weisse, was published in London in 1772. The
English version, by Dr. Hooper, appeared in the same year, and a new
edition in 1802; the translator changed the title to Memoirs of the
year Two thousand five hundred.] Its circulation in France was
rigorously forbidden, because it implied a merciless criticism of
the administration. It was reprinted in London and Neuchatel, and
translated into English and German.

3.

As the motto of his prophetic vision Mercier takes the saying of
Leibnitz that "the present is pregnant of the future." Thus the
phase of civilisation which he imagines is proposed as the outcome
of the natural and inevitable march of history. The world of A.D.
2440 in which a man born in the eighteenth century who has slept an
enchanted sleep awakes to find himself, is composed of nations who
live in a family concord rarely interrupted by war. But of the world
at large we hear little; the imagination of Mercier is concentrated
on France, and particularly Paris. He is satisfied with knowing that
slavery has been abolished; that the rivalry of France and England
has been replaced by an indestructible alliance; that the Pope,
whose authority is still august, has renounced his errors and
returned to the customs of the primitive Church; that French plays
are performed in China. The changes in Paris are a sufficient index
of the general transformation.

The constitution of France is still monarchical. Its population has
increased by one half; that of the capital remains about the same.
Paris has been rebuilt on a scientific plan; its sanitary
arrangements have been brought to perfection; it is well lit; and
every provision has been made for the public safety. Private
hospitality is so large that inns have disappeared, but luxury at
table is considered a revolting crime. Tea, coffee, and tobacco are
no longer imported. [Footnote: In the first edition of the book
commerce was abolished.] There is no system of credit; everything is
paid for in ready money, and this practice has led to a remarkable
simplicity in dress. Marriages are contracted only through mutual
inclination; dowries have been abolished. Education is governed by
the ideas of Rousseau, and is directed, in a narrow spirit, to the
promotion of morality. Italian, German, English, and Spanish are
taught in schools, but the study of the classical languages has
disappeared; Latin does not help a man to virtue. History too is
neglected and discouraged, for it is "the disgrace of humanity,
every page being crowded with crimes and follies." Theatres are
government institutions, and have become the public schools of civic
duties and morality. [Footnote: In 1769 Mercier began to carry out
his programme of composing and adapting plays for instruction and
edification. His theory of the true functions of the theatre he
explained in a special treatise, Du theatre ou Nouvel Essai sur
l'art dramatique (1773).]

The literary records of the past had been almost all deliberately
destroyed by fire. It was found expedient to do away with useless
and pernicious books which only obscured truth or contained
perpetual repetitions of the same thing. A small closet in the
public library sufficed to hold the ancient books which were
permitted to escape the conflagration, and the majority of these
were English. The writings of the Abbe de Saint-Pierre were placed
next those of Fenelon. "His pen was weak, but his heart was sublime.
Seven ages have given to his great and beautiful ideas a just
maturity. His contemporaries regarded him as a visionary; his
dreams, however, have become realities."

The importance of men of letters as a social force was a favourite
theme of Mercier, and in A.D. 2440 this will be duly recognised. But
the State control which weighed upon them so heavily in 1770 is not
to be entirely abolished. There is no preventive censorship to
hinder publication, but there are censors. There are no fines or
imprisonment, but there are admonitions. And if any one publishes a
book defending principles which are considered dangerous, he is
obliged to go about in a black mask.

There is a state religion, Deism. There is probably no one who does
not believe in God. But if any atheist were discovered, he would be
put through a course of experimental physics. If he remained
obdurate in his rejection of a "palpable and salutary truth," the
nation would go into mourning and banish him from its borders.

Every one has to work, but labour no longer resembles slavery. As
there are no monks, nor numerous domestics, nor useless valets, nor
work-men employed on the production of childish luxuries, a few
daily hours of labour are sufficient for the public wants. Censors
inquire into men's capacities, assign tasks to the unemployed, and
if man be found fit for nothing but the consumption of food he is
banished from the city.

These are some of the leading features of the ideal future to which
Mercier's imagination reached. He did not put it forward as a final
term. Later ages, he said, will go further, for "where can the
perfectibility of man stop, armed with geometry and the mechanical
arts and chemistry?" But in his scanty prophecies of what science
might effect he showed curiously little resource. The truth is that
this had not much interest for him, and he did not see that
scientific discoveries might transmute social conditions. The world
of 2440, its intolerably docile and virtuous society, reflects two
capital weaknesses in the speculation of the Encyclopaedist period:
a failure to allow for the strength of human passions and interests,
and a deficient appreciation of the meaning of liberty. Much as the
reformers acclaimed and fought for toleration, they did not
generally comprehend the value of the principle. They did not see
that in a society organised and governed by Reason and Justice
themselves, the unreserved toleration of false opinions would be the
only palladium of progress; or that a doctrinaire State, composed of
perfectly virtuous and deferential people, would arrest development
and stifle origiality, by its ungenial if mild tyranny. Mercier's is
no exception to the rule that ideal societies are always repellent;
and there are probably few who would not rather be set down in
Athens in the days of the "vile" Aristophanes, whose works Mercier
condemned to the flames, than in his Paris of 2440.

4.

That Bohemian man of letters, Restif de la Bretonne, whose
unedifying novels the Parisians of 2440 would assuredly have
rejected from their libraries, published in 1790 a heroic comedy
representing how marriages would be arranged in "the year 2000," by
which epoch he conceived that all social equalities would have
disappeared in a fraternal society and twenty nations be allied to
France under the wise supremacy of "our well-beloved monarch Louis
Francois XXII." It was the Revolution that converted Restif to the
conception of Progress, for hitherto his master had been Rousseau;
but it can hardly be doubted that the motif and title of his play
were suggested by the romance of Mercier. L'an 2440 and L'an 2000
are the first examples of the prophetic fiction which Mr. Edward
Bellamy's Looking Backward was to popularise a hundred years later.

The Count de Volney's Ruins was another popular presentation of the
hopes which the theory of Progress had awakened in France. Although
the work was not published till after the outbreak of the
Revolution, [Footnote: Les Ruines des empires, 1789. An English
translation ran to a second edition (1795).] the plan had been
conceived some years before. Volney was a traveller, deeply
interested in oriental and classical antiquities, and, like Louis Le
Roy, he approached the problem of man's destinies from the point of
view of a student of the revolutions of empires.

The book opens with melancholy reflections amid the ruins of
Palmyra. "Thus perish the works of men, and thus do nations and
empires vanish away ... Who can assure us that desolation like this
will not one day be the lot of our own country?" Some traveller like
himself will sit by the banks of the Seine, the Thames, or the
Zuyder Zee, amid silent ruins, and weep for a people inurned and
their greatness changed into an empty name. Has a mysterious Deity
pronounced a secret malediction against the earth?

In this disconsolate mood he is visited by an apparition, who
unveils the causes of men's misfortunes and shows that they are due
to themselves. Man is governed by natural invariable laws, and he
has only to study them to know the springs of his destiny, the
causes of his evils and their remedies. The laws of his nature are
self-love, desire of happiness, and aversion to pain; these are the
simple and prolific principles of everything that happens in the
moral world. Man is the artificer of his own fate. He may lament his
weakness and folly; but "he has perhaps still more reason to be
confident in his energies when he recollects from what point he has
set out and to what heights he has been capable of elevating
himself."

The supernatural visitant paints a rather rosy picture of the
ancient Egyptian and Assyrian kingdoms. But it would be a mistake to
infer from their superficial splendour that the inhabitants
generally were wise or happy. The tendency of man to ascribe
perfection to past epochs is merely "the discoloration of his
chagrin." The race is not degenerating; its misfortunes are due to
ignorance and the mis-direction of self-love. Two principal
obstacles to improvement have been the difficulty of transmitting
ideas from age to age, and that of communicating them rapidly from
man to man. These have been removed by the invention of printing.
The press is "a memorable gift of celestial genius." In time all men
will come to understand the principles of individual happiness and
public felicity. Then there will be established among the peoples of
the earth an equilibrium of forces; there will be no more wars,
disputes will be decided by arbitration, and "the whole species will
become one great society, a single family governed by the same
spirit and by common laws, enjoying all the felicity of which human
nature is capable." The accomplishment of this will be a slow
process, since the same leaven will have to assimilate an enormous
mass of heterogeneous elements, but its operation will be effectual.

Here the genius interrupts his prophecy and exclaims, turning toward
the west, "The cry of liberty uttered on the farther shores of the
Atlantic has reached to the old continent." A prodigious movement is
then visible to their eyes in a country at the extremity of the
Mediterranean; tyrants are overthrown, legislators elected, a code
of laws is drafted on the principles of equality, liberty, and
justice. The liberated nation is attacked by neighbouring tyrants,
but her legislators propose to the other peoples to hold a general
assembly, representing the whole world, and weigh every religious
system in the balance. The proceedings of this congress follow, and
the book breaks off incomplete.

It is not an arresting book; to a reader of the present day it is
positively tedious; but it suited contemporary taste, and, appearing
when France was confident that her Revolution would renovate the
earth, it appealed to the hopes and sentiments of the movement. It
made no contribution to the doctrine of Progress, but it undoubtedly
helped to popularise it.
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