Jean Meslier, a rural French priest, argued that religion is designed to produce subjects who will automatically obey

The Angelus (1857-59) by Jean-François Millet. Courtesy the Musée D’Orsay, Paris

is a journalist and a PhD student at Paris 8 University, with a focus on political philosophy and media. His writing has appeared in Le Monde diplomatique and Slate.

Edited byNigel Warburton

One Sunday in 1716, in the small Ardennes village of Étrépigny in northeastern France, a parish priest climbed into the pulpit to perform one of those habitual, ordinary gestures. Like many country priests under the Ancien Régime, Jean Meslier was expected, during Mass, to commend the local lord to the prayers of the faithful. But this lord, Antoine de Toully, was known in the village for mistreating the poor and robbing orphans. Meslier knew it. His parishioners knew it too. But silence prevailed. Instead of covering up the injustice, the priest subtly turned the ritual inside out. He obeyed, and did indeed pray for the local lord, but he invited the faithful to pray for him not in order to celebrate his authority, but so that he might atone for the injustices he inflicted on the poor.

Portrait of Jean Meslier. Public domain

The scandal was immediate. Complaint, reprimand, punishment, a forced retreat to nearby Reims: the ecclesiastical machine at once placed itself in the service of the local petty nobility to punish this insolent priest.

This tiny scene, minute on the scale of European history, already contains Meslier’s central idea, the kernel of his political philosophy. Power does not hold only by force, taxation or law. It holds because it gets itself blessed. It holds because it succeeds in passing off injustice as order, domination as hierarchy, suffering as something meritorious.

People have often tried to turn Meslier into a slogan: a Marxist before Marx, an anarchist before anarchism, an evolutionist before Darwin. These comparisons are not entirely absurd. They do tell us something about how far ahead of his time this priest was. But they reveal less than they conceal. Meslier’s real singularity lies not in having ‘anticipated’ later doctrines. It lies in having seen, from within a small Ardennes village, how domination is built in layers: by lords, by kings, by the Church, but also by the feelings these institutions organise – fear, guilt, hope, resignation. In other words: before he dreamed of a new society, he understood why the old one endured.

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To understand how radical that intuition was, we need to return to the France in which Meslier grew up and wrote. He was born under Louis XIV and died at the start of Louis XV’s reign, in an absolute monarchy where the Church was not a mere spiritual backdrop, but one of the main pillars of social order. The Ardennes, a border region, lived to the rhythm of the kingdom’s wars: troops quartered in private homes, requisitions of food and fodder, convoys, pillage, devastated villages. To this military brutality there was added, after 1685, confessional brutality. By revoking the Edict of Nantes – the legal framework that allowed Protestants to practise their faith within the kingdom – the monarchy revived forced conversions of non-Catholics, deportations, condemnations and the policing of conscience. In Sedan in the Ardennes, young girls were pushed into the convent of the Daughters of the Propagation of the Faith; the royal army officer Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, passing through the region, remarked that there were enough there ‘to fill a martyrology’. In such a world, absolutism did not first appear as a theory: it was lived as a daily pressure. The higher clergy – rich, landed and close to the powerful – upheld the established order; the lower country clergy baptised, buried, kept registers, acted as public scribes, settled disputes, and partly shared the life of the peasants. It was in this zone of friction, between altar, lordship and the rural poor, that Meslier’s thought was formed.

Born in 1664 at Mazerny, educated at the seminary in Reims, appointed parish priest in 1689, Meslier was nothing like the worldly philosophes of the Enlightenment. He spent 40 years in the same parish. He kept his registers impeccably. Outwardly, he led a regular priestly life. And that is precisely what has so often troubled his readers: how can a man preach by day what he destroys by night? The question is anachronistic. Under the Ancien Régime, one did not simply defrock oneself. One did not freely leave the Church. Apostasy exposed a man to banishment, ruin, and sometimes worse. Meslier remained a priest not despite his atheism, but because of it: the position gave him the material conditions, the time and the shelter he needed to write. Any other profession risked exposing him to persecution.

If religion held men in its grip, then one had to go back to the heart of the mechanism, and dismantle the springs of faith

We do not know exactly when Meslier became an atheist. Everything suggests, however, that his unbelief may have predated his ordination – and that 1716 marked less a conversion than a strategic turning point, when, after being disciplined by the archbishop for confronting the local lord, he shifted his efforts from the pulpit to the page, carrying the struggle onto another terrain: that of writing. Meslier states the logic of this secret, posthumous intervention in the opening sentence of his Mémoire:

My dearest friends, since I would not have been permitted – and since it would have brought consequences both dangerous and grievous – to say openly during my........

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