Beyond Lycurgus and Solon: Ethics, Eroticism and Politics in Sylvain Maréchal’s Antiquity

The author has been working for many years on French intellectual history of the late Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and on the atheist poet and egalitarian moralist Sylvain Maréchal (1750-1803) in particular, using manuscript sources previously unknown to scholars. Among these sources, a manuscript on the peoples of Ancient Greece effectively states ideas which do not confirm our stereotype of the French “Rousseauian” republican – such as his bad opinion of Lycurgus and his use of religion to sacralize his laws, implying Maréchal’s more general political view that the perpetuation of any form of power entails the scandal of the concealment of truth – and offers insights into the very modern cultural, ethical, and political meaning of his preference not only for the Ancients, but for the Greeks and even the Egyptians over the Romans. From 1780, he was the author (more or less censored in different editions) of the text of the Antiquités d’Herculanum, the monumental presentation of the archeological finds that had revived in enlightened Europe the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, now the object of renewed historiographical debate. In another unpublished work, La raison écrite ou le Livre du Peuple et des Législateurs, written perhaps after the failure of Babeuf’s Conspiracy of Equals (Maréchal remained its only undetected leader), he wrote: “Peuple! Ne fouille et ne mutile que les monuments antiques qui peuvent te nuire: épargne et répare les autres, la Postérité te rendra la pareille”. Without idealizing Antiquity, he clearly saw it as a political enjeu. The ethical models he proposed were not the legislators or the citizen-soldiers, as for Maréchal patriotism was a false virtue, although he found it sometimes politic to partly dissimulate this idea. His heroes were Pythagoras the peaceful vegetarian (a figure he would use in 1799 in the Voyages de Pythagore, an attempt to bequeath to posterity the heritage of 18th century materialism and its political implications as he had seen them since the 1780s, still more valid for him than the Revolution itself); the Cynics, wise even in their shamelessness, because they lived according to Nature, as did the women who wore phallic symbols and followed the cult of fertility; or, last but not least, Lucretius, whose poetical work Maréchal tried all his life to emulate. In Maréchal’s projections on Antiquity (as in his vision of faraway peoples) we can discover not a mythical vision directly or indirectly leading toward the naturalistic justification of Terror, as has been recently suggested, but on the contrary some evidence of the presence of political antibodies in revolutionary culture itself