A seventeenth-century Epicurean poet: Guillaume Amfrye de Chaulieu

Abstract

It has long been recognized that beneath the apparent unity of France under Louis XIV after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, there remained some dissenters. The Church, in close alliance with the State, was perhaps stronger and certainly had more efficient methods of coercion at its disposal than ever before. But no amount of coercion can convince a man of something he does not believe. Behind closed doors, among friends, were discussed matters about which in public it was dangerous to have any doubt. People who had in common a certain resistance to authority, to enforced orthodoxy, to imposed standards of morality, found themselves naturally drawn together into small groups, where they could talk freely and live as they pleased. One such group was the seventeenth-century Epicureans. The Epicurean revival which took place in France towards the middle of the seventeenth century, and which reached its zenith in the last years of the century, has often been dismissed as a mere protest of the flesh against the restrictions of Catholic asceticism. In practice, however, in spite of the teachings of the Church, morality was exceedingly lax both among believers and non-believers, and such a protest would hardly have been necessary: Gassendi, to whom was due the rehabilitation of Epicurus in the seventeenth century, was an extremely frugal man, and one who sincerely believed himself to be a good Catholic. Admittedly, Epicureanism was adopted in the second half of the century as an alternative to Christianity by those who found the dogmas of religion unacceptable. But the fact remains that Epicureanism was first and foremost an intellectual attitude and not just an excuse for loose-living. Those who felt that man's place was on this earth, and that he should concentrate on reaching the utmost possible happiness here, rather than look forward to an uncertain after-life, were attracted by the Epicurean philosophy. They based their ideas and actions on the actual, and not on the hypothetical. A delight in the capabilities of the human intelligence led to intellectual independence and to an unwillingness to accept anything without verifying it by personal experience. This earned them the hostility of established authority and Epicureanism, in spite of Gassendi's rehabilitation, remained to the great majority synonymous with immorality and rebellion. The Epicureans were not on the whole interested in making proselytes to their way of thinking. But when they wrote, it was naturally their own ideas which they expressed. As it became increasingly dangerous to attack or even to criticize the Church or the King, or anything for which they stood, Epicurean thinking was driven underground. Only in one spherewas any tolerance granted: it was possible to speak much more freely in light verse than in any other form of writing, since the very fact that it was "light" was supposed to make it harmless. Now light verse was one of the forms of writing most