Mandeville’s supposedly scandalous presumptions about the nature of humans, animals and God prompted outrage not only in Britain, but also in France.76 Scholars
have given full overviews of both English and French reviews; here, I underline two common aspects of most critiques, the first referring to Mandeville’s conception of the relationship between man and animal, and the second referring to the question of an inborn sense of morality.77 Critics, mostly members of the traditional elites in the
75 On the differences between Adam Smith’s and Mandeville’s vitalism, see Packham, pp. 107–8. 76 Private Vices, Publick Benefits? The Contemporary Reception of Bernard Mandeville, ed. by J.
Martin Stafford (Solihull: Ismeron, 1997) provides a collection of British reactions to the text. On the French context, see, in addition to Gottmann, ‘Châtelet’,
77 On English reviews, see Stafford, Private vices, publick benefits?; F. B. Kaye, ‘The Influence of
Bernard Mandeville’, Studies in Philology, 19.1 (1922), 83–108. On French reviews, see Elena Muceni, ‘Mandeville and France: The Reception of the Fable of the Bees in France and Its Influence on the French Enlightenment’, French Studies, 69.4 (2015), 449–61; Letizia Gai, Il Man of Devil attraversa la Manica: Mandeville nei periodici francesi del settecento’, Studi filosofici, 27 (2004), 217–43. Elena Muceni, ‘Mandeville and France: The Reception of the Fable of the Bees in France and Its Influence on the French Enlightenment’, French Studies, 69.4 (2015), 449–61.
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universities and among the clergy, objected to the idea that society was formed not by free, rational and virtuous rational souls but by material, passionate bodies.78 They
argued that Mandeville’s claim that their authority was based on hypocrisy and deceit rather than God-given superiority would open the door to atheism and moral and political chaos. As William Law (1686-1761), a High-Churchman and former Cambridge don who published an extensive refutation of the Fable in 1724 complained:
For how weak is it to suppose, that the Animal Life should be the Foundation of Laws of nature, so as to make it fit for us to act agreeable to its Wants and Desires; and that the Rationality of our Beings, which is, in some degree, a Likeness to God, should be the Foundations of no Laws of Nature, so as to make it fit for us to act suitable to its Perfection and Happiness.79
Law thus complained that Mandeville had made man so similar to animals as to deny that men entered society primarily as reasonable beings, rather than in order to satisfy their ‘wants and desires’. In this, of course, he was echoing Shaftesbury, whom, as we have seen, the satirist had critiqued for having mistakenly conceived of reason as a rider controlling his horse.
In France, too, the brunt of the criticism concerned Mandeville’s conception of the relationship between (human) reason and the (beastly) passions, and the way in which these entered into the composition of the social whole. Across the Channel some of the Fable’s staunchest critics were, predictably, clerics and theologians. A good decade before Du Châtelet embarked on her project, French periodicals published extensive (and mostly negative) reviews, including excerpts as well as translations of British reviews of the Fable.80 French reviewers commented on the scandal the Fable
had provoked in England and generally agreed on the ‘danger’ that Mandeville’s ideas represented for French audiences. As early as 1725, for example, the Bibliothèque
78 Cook, Matters of Exchange, pp. 406-409.
79 William Law, Remarks Upon a Late Book, Entitled, The Fable of the Bees, Or Private Vices, Public Benefits: In a Letter to the Author: To Which Is Added, a Postscript, Containing an Observation Or Two Upon Mr. Bayle, Second Edition (London: William and John Innys, 1725), p. 29. For a (sympathetic) account of Law’s critique, see Andrew Starkie, ‘William Law and The Fable of the Bees’,
Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 32.3 (2009), 307–19.
80 For an overview of the reactions in the French periodical press, see Muceni,‘Mandeville’; Gai, ‘Il
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angloise published an extensive summary and some translated passages, giving French readers access to large portions of the text.81 The first official translation of the Fable
into French was published in 1740 and was then republished in 1750.82 The text did
not agree with the French authorities, who, in 1745, placed it on the Index of Prohibited Books, had it condemned by the Sorbonne and ritually burned by the public hangman.83
One of the Fable’s earliest reviewers in French summed up the novelty of Mandeville’s approach to human morality in the following way: the fabulist’s remarks on the connection between bodily sensations and human actions ‘font voir que l’auteur a peut-être étudié la Physique plus que la Morale’.84 According to this reviewer, the
poet denies that humans act out of free will – understood as the capacity to follow or reject revealed moral laws – and studies them as one would ‘les animaux les plus abjects’. The extracts the reviewer chose to translate were those that showed that for the author of the Fable, human sociability was not natural or God-given, but the effect of a series of well-channelled physiological impulses uncontrolled by reason, or ‘les passions de l’ame independamment de la volonté’. Most of the reviews’ authors considered the Fable as an assault on the idea of a universal, God-given, inborn sense for moral ‘natural’ conduct that when listened to by enough individuals would guarantee social harmony. An image that occurred time and again was the idea, taken from Romans 2:15 and from Aquinas, that these universal moral laws were impressed onto the human heart as the seat of the soul; Mandeville fails to notice, one reviewer complained that:
Les Loix naturelles, qui sont gravées dans nôtre cœur, dépendent si peu de nous, que les plus grands scélérats ne peuvent les en effacer entiérement, quelques peines qu’ils se donnent pour en venir à bout. Il y a plus, c’est que les
81 Armand Boisbeleau de la Chapelle, Bibliothèque angloise, ou, Histoire littéraire de la Grande Bretagne (Amsterdam: Pierre de Coup, 1725), 13:1, pp. 97–125.
82 Bernard de Mandeville, La fable des abeilles, ou Les fripons devenus honnêtes gens. Avec le commentaire où l’on prouve que les vices des particuliers tendent à l’avantage du public. Traduit de l’anglois sur la sixième édition, trans. by Jan Van Effen (London: aux dépens de la Compagnie, 1740); Bernard Mandeville, La fable des abeilles, ou Les fripons devenus honnestes gens: avec le commentaire, où l’on prouve que les vices des particuliers tendent à l’avantage du public, trans. by J. Bertrand (London: Jacques Nourse, 1750).
83 Hundert, Enlightenment’s Fable, p.104.
84 Armand Boisbeleau de la Chapelle, Bibliothèque raisonnée des ouvrages des savans de l’Europe
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ignorans même sont convaincus, sans qu’ils y ayent jamais réfléchi, qu’elles sont gravées dans le cœur des autres hommes.85
The author of this Lettre critique sur la Fable des abeilles opposed what they saw as Mandeville’s absurd proposition that human societies could prosper without following inborn and universally valid moral ‘natural laws’ and accused the Anglo-Dutch poet of ignoring human morality in favour of human physicality.86 For this author, the social
bond is guaranteed through the existence of God-given laws, engraved into the human heart from the beginning of time. For Mandeville, of course, the social bond was formed on the basis of the universal existence of bodily passions. While Mandeville thus considered men in the same way as all living beings – they all tended towards self-preservation – his critics assumed the existence of a set of God-given moral laws, restricted to ensouled humans, which human individuals could know through reason and freely assent to.87