Abstract
Jean-Pierre Brissot de Warville’s relationship to early modern scepticism is interesting for two main reasons. Firstly, he does not share the common preference of the Enlightenment philosophers for what they called a “mitigated scepticism,” which they thought was an important methodological warrant against systematic thought. On the contrary, Brissot de Warville insists on the necessity to revisit scepticism and to come back to a “general system of Pyrrhonism” which, like that of the Ancients, would undermine any kind of knowledge. Secondly, this sceptical stand of Brissot’s evolves during his lifetime. In youth texts that are still very little known of, particularly in an unpublished manuscript, he establishes the foundations of what is meant to be an absolute scepticism. However, the French Revolution forced him to change his views and to favour a form of dogmatism – his dogmatic defence of the Girondists, indeed, causing his death. This evolution interestingly revives Myles Burnyeat’s discussion of whether the sceptic can really live his scepticism. This example would prompt me to answer that there are historical periods in which scepticism is not only a fruitless, but actually an impossible view to hold.
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Notes
- 1.
Robert Darnton, “The Grub Street Style of Revolution: J.-P. Brissot, Police Spy”, The Journal of Modern History, 40, 1968, pp. 301–327.
- 2.
Apart from the two articles Popkin explicitly dedicated to Brissot, which we will return to later, he shared his discovery of Brissot with the public in 1992, in “New Views on the Role of Scepticism in the Enlightenment”, Modern Language Quarterly, 53, 1992, pp. 279–297. He also devoted a passage to Brissot in his entry “The French Enlightenment”, which appeared in The Columbia History of Western Philosophy, New York, Columbia University Press, 1999, p. 468.
- 3.
Regarding this reversal in Popkin’s thinking, see my introduction to the present volume.
- 4.
Richard H. Popkin, “Scepticism and Optimism in the Late 18th Century”, in Lothar Kreimendahl, Aufklarüng und Skepsis. Studien zur Philosophie und Geistesgeschichte der 17. und 18. Jahrunderts, Stuttgart, Fromman Verlag, 1995, pp. 173–184.
- 5.
Ibid., p. 176: “At the very end of his treatise, Brissot said that he hoped to discover in each science the very few truths that there are. He thought it would take him several years to do so. Then, in a footnote at the end, he said that if his work on legislation and politics permit, in two or three years he could present a ‘tableau’ of these truths along with a universal scepticism applied to all the sciences, and this would constitute a reasonable scepticism. Unfortunately Brissot was executed before he could complete his work because he was the leader of the Girondists.”
- 6.
Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville, manuscript “Plan raisonné du système de scepticisme universel”, Paris, Archives nationales, pressmark 446 AP 21. All translation are mine unless otherwise stated. James Burns has proposed recently an interesting and precise abstract of this manuscript (“Jacques-Pierre Brissot: From Scepticism to Conviction”, History of European Ideas, 38, 4, 2012, p. 508–526), even if he didn‘t have a full version of it (as we can see p. 512 or 516), which was the case also for Richard Popkin, or made some confusions (between Diderot and d‘Alembert as reader of the manuscript for example, p. 510 and 521, or between Cordemoy and Cordenier, p. 517). On this, see my note 12.
- 7.
Brissot, Mémoires (1754–1793), Paris, Alphonse Picard & Fils, 1910, vol. I, p. 121.
- 8.
Popkin, “Scepticism and Optimism in the Late 18th Century”, op. cit., p. 176.
- 9.
Popkin, “Brissot and Condorcet: Skeptical Philosophers”, in J. van der Zande and R. H. Popkin (eds.), The Sceptical Tradition around 1800, Dordrecht, Kluwer, 1998, p. 31.
- 10.
Popkin himself acknowledges this: “These last two philosophers, Brissot and Condorcet, opened the door to more radical forms of scepticism than had been entertained by earlier philosophes. So far I have found no indication that their sceptical views were taken seriously or influenced subsequent thinkers. Brissot was remembered mainly as a failed politician and a publicist. And Condorcet was seen primarily as the apostle of the possibility of unlimited progress in human affairs. But they did, each in his own way, suggest a deeper scepticism than had been offered by their Enlightenment predecessors” (“Brissot and Condorcet: Sceptical Philosophers”, op. cit., p. 38–39).
- 11.
The fact that numerous other of Brissot’s books were republished during the Revolution strengthens the credibility of this theory.
- 12.
To illustrate my point: Popkin mentions a manuscript about 90 pages long, whereas, although the extant manuscript ends at page 86, a quick examination revealed to me that it had been significantly altered (it is lacking a good quarter of its leaves). I went through several boxes of the archives to unearth most of the missing passages and was able to reconstitute them almost in their entirety.
- 13.
Brissot, De la vérité ou méditations sur les moyens de parvenir à la vérité dans toutes les connaissances humaines, Neuchâtel, Imprimerie de la Société typographique, 1782, p. 361. We can assume this was the title Brissot finally settled on, because the title as it appears on the manuscript itself, “Plan raisonné du système de scepticisme universel”, is scratched out.
- 14.
Brissot, “Plan raisonné du système de scepticisme universel”, op. cit., leaf 1.
- 15.
Brissot, op. cit., leaf. 6v–7r.
- 16.
It is necessary to read, in parallel with the manuscript, contemporary texts by Brissot on the Christian religion that display a virulence hardly consonant with sceptical moderation: Lettres philosophiques sur saint Paul, sur sa doctrine politique, morale et religieuse et sur plusieurs points de la religion chrétienne considérés politiquement, Neuchâtel, 1783, and L’autorité législative de Rome anéantie, ou examen rapide de l’histoire et des sources du droit canonique, n.p., 1784.
- 17.
For example, see what Brissot says in his Tableau de l’état présent des sciences et des arts en Angleterre, I, 3, March, 1784, p. 189–190: “What man can ever flatter himself that he can slough off that thick crust of prejudices in which his nurse, his parents, his tutor, and ultimately his country have been wrapping his soul from the moment he opened his eyes to the light of day? Reflection can eventually dissipate the prejudices that cloud our reason, but the prejudice based on physical feeling is ineradicable.”
- 18.
On the subject of immaterialism and scepticism in the Age of the Enlightenment, see my Berkeley au siècle des Lumières. Immatérialisme et scepticisme au XVIII e siècle, Paris, Vrin, 2003; and Silvano Sportelli, Egoismo metafisico ed egoismo morale. Storia di un termine nella Francia del settecento, Pisa, Edizioni ETS, 2007. This question is of such interest to Brissot that it turns up in two places in the manuscript and arises recurrently in the rest of his work (see for example De la vérité, op. cit., p. 39 or p. 50).
- 19.
On Brissot’s passage from a radical scepticism on moral and political issues to a progressive adoption of a defense and a valorization of the human rights policy, see my article “From General Skepticism to Complete Dogmatism: Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville”, to be published in Skepticism and Politics in Early Modern Europe, eds. John Christian Laursen and Gianni Paganini (forthcoming).
- 20.
Brissot, De la vérité, op. cit., p. 1.
- 21.
Ibid., p. 13.
- 22.
Ibid., p. 49–50.
- 23.
On this subject, see the mission Brissot assigned to his Licée as set out in the first number of the Journal du Licée de Londres, 1784, p. 5.
- 24.
De la vérité, op. cit., p. 155–163 for the critique of public courses and p. 163–188 for the critique of the academies.
- 25.
Ibid., p. 136: “The weakness of the human mind, the imperfect nature of our organs, the impossibility of obtaining all the observations required to form the foundations of a good theory, the fickleness of reason, the experience of centuries: all these go to prove to us that certainty cannot, or can only rarely, exist for everyone.”
- 26.
Ibid., p. 358–359.
- 27.
I owe this expression to Frédéric Brahami.
Bibliography
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Charles, S. (2013). From Universal Pyrrhonism to Revolutionary Scepticism: Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville. In: Charles, S., J. Smith, P. (eds) Scepticism in the Eighteenth Century: Enlightenment, Lumières, Aufklärung. International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 210. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4810-1_16
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