Mettons Toujours Londres: Enlightened Christianity and the Public in Pre-Revolutionary Francophone Europe

摘要

The existence of a Christian Enlightenment in eighteenth-century francophone Europe has started to gain some recognition in recent studies. Using a case study of the letters Georg-Jonathan von Holland sent to the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel while in the process of publishing his refutation of the baron d’Holbach's materialist Système de la nature, this article confirms this idea and examines the underlying conditions that led to such fundamental changes in Christian apologetic writing. It argues that during the latter half of the eighteenth century, the public sphere became the principal arena for the defence of Christianity in French. As a result, religious and conservative authors began to concentrate on deploying innovative strategies tailored to convince the body of individual readers that comprised the public. In the process, they experimented with new literary forms, discourses and approaches towards the publication process, and the Christian Enlightenment emerged.