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Simon Nicolas Henri Linguet, 1736-1794.
Simon Nicolas Henri Linguet was a celebrated 18th Century French lawyer (he only lost two cases in his career), sometime historian and bombastic journalist who's principal claim to fame is as an irascible opponent of the Enlightenment philosophers and economists.
Linguet was not a knee-jerk supporter of the Ancien regime -- having indeed fallen foul of it on several occasions and was a personal friend to Voltaire But Linguet's consistently contrarian stance against reformist doctrines, his embrace of a romantic absolutism, earned Linguet the label of a "reactionary", the "advocate of Neros, sultans and viziers", as Mirabeau would call him. But others -- like Karl Marx -- proudly regarded Linguet as something of an early socialist. Overall, Linguet was more of a destructive than constructive thinker. It would not be unfair to regard him as an 18th Century French version of England's own 19th Century specimen, Thomas Carlyle, whom he closely resembled both in doctrine and in tone.
Born in Rheims, Linguet was educated at the College de Beauvais in Paris, where his father had been assistant principal. After a sojourn in Poland in the service of the Count Palatine of Zweibrucken, Linguet returned to Paris in 1751 and quickly fell in with the philosophes. However, he was soon disgusted by what he perceived to be their petty cliqueishness, their fraudulent poses and self-serving reforms. After a quarrel with d'Alembert in 1762, Linguet declared war on the Enlightenment, directing his acerbic pen and his court-honed debating skills against them. Linguet began with cannonades against the philosophes (1764) and their darling icon Montesquieu (1767, 1774). The Theorie des Loix (1767), perhaps Linguet's most serious effort, builds up a defense of absolutism on the contention that society lives off the destruction of liberty. As Karl Marx put it, "Linguet wrecked Montesquieu's illusory esprit des lois with a single word: the esprit des lois is property."
In 1771, Linguet directed his sarcastic wit against the Physiocrats, denouncing them as a sect, ridiculing their doctrines, poking fun at Quesnay's Tableau, that "ridiculous hieroglyph", which he reprinted alongside Confucius's Y-King, to demonstrate how both are "equally incomprehensible". The Tableau, Linguet contended, was "an insult to common sense, to reason, to philosophy, with its columns of figures of reproduction nette terminating always in a zero, striking symbol of the fruit of the researches of any one simple enough to try in vain to understand it." (Linguet, 1771; as quoted in Higgs).
In 1775, the Abbé Morellet wrote a feeble reply to Linguet's attacks, but that only encouraged him. Linguet's Theorie du Libelle (1775) dismantled Morellet and took the opportunity to launch into yet another venomous tirade against the Physiocrats.
Predictably, the increasing range of Linguet's caustic attacks began hitting fellow-lawyers and he was disbarred in 1775. Undaunted, Linguet turned to journalism, founding the Journal de politique et de litterature, as a vehicle for his romanticized despotism and against would-be social reformers. But he overreached himself again and an attack on the French Academy prompted the government to intervene. Linguet was forced to cede the Journal to La Harpe and go to exile in London in 1776.
But Linguet would not be silenced. From London, in 1777, Linguet launched a new journal, the Annales politiques, civiles, et litteraires du dix-huitieme siecle, in collaboration with Jacques Mallet du Pan, and continued his sarcastic assaults on the sacred cows of French intelligentsia and the French government. The Annales was, of course, a scandalous hit. The Physiocrats were targeted once again by his pen in a 1778 Annales article.
After a brief stay in Brussels, Linguet returned to Paris in 1779 but was quickly in trouble again. For an attack on the Duke of Duras, Linguet was arrested in 1780 and thrown into the Bastille (he would publish a memoir of his stay there in 1783). Mallet du Pan would continue the Annales in his absence. After his release from the Bastille in 1783, Linguet returned to exile in London and, once again, soon found himself in Brussels. Breaking with Du Pan, Linguet relaunched the Annales politiques on his own (Mallet du Pan's publication being renamed Memoirs historiques in 1783 and annexed to the Mercure de France)
While in Brussels, Linguet was rewarded with a pension and title of nobility by the Austrian Emperor Joseph II, for supporting him in his reforms and in the Scheldt affair (the repudiation of the Barrier Treaty). Linguet returned to France in 1786 in the capacity of an Austrian official and immediately sued the former minister of foreign affairs, the Duke of Aiguillon, for back legal fees. Picked up as a favorite by the French Queen Marie Antoinette (sister of his benefactor, Joseph II), Linguet enjoyed a brief celebrity in the halls of power, rivaling Beaumarchais for eminence.
With the opening of the Estates-General in 1789, Linguet bombarded the French public with a series of pamphlets ridiculing the pretensions of the reformers, taking particular aim at the Count of Mirabeau (estranged son of the Physiocrat, Marquis de Mirabeau). He had a few cranky proposals of his own -- not least of which was that the French state should simply repudiate the public debt (Etienne Claviere's response to this would include one of the earliest uses of the term "capitalist").
In one of his few non-reactionary moments, Linguet undertook a special journey to Vienna to plead for the Brabantine rebels. Linguet returned to Paris in 1791 to personally defend the interests of Santo Domingo in the National Assembly. He also put up a strong defense of Louis XVI. Linguet fled Paris in 1793 to escape the Terror, but was soon arrested and charged with flattering despots and referring to bread as a "slow poison". Indeed, it was ultimately for slandering the "nutrition of the people" that Linguet was condemned to death and executed by guillotine in 1794.
On an interesting aside, it has been alleged that Claude Chappe stole the
design for his electrical telegraph from notes written by Linguet.
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All rights reserved, Gonçalo L. Fonseca