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.
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.
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.
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