The Department of French and Italian invites you to an engaging talk by Dr. Ruggero Sciuto from USC. He will explore the intriguing topic of women atheists in eighteenth-century Paris.

Join us for this enriching discussion!

Speaker: Dr Ruggero Sciuto (USC, Department of French and Italian)

When: Thursday, 7 November at 10 am

Where: Taper Hall 309K

Abstract: 

Outside of tribunals and torture chambers, most early modern thinkers believed that no one could genuinely reject God’s existence. Female atheism, in particular, was often perceived as an impossibility. If Samuel Johnson pointed to the ‘female atheist[s who talk] you dead’ as one of the many factors that made life in eighteenth-century London unbearable, Bayle better voiced his contemporaries’ view when he wrote in the Pensées diverses that ‘Sûrement ce n’est point le vice des femmes que l’athéisme’.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, two French philosophes set out to fill this alleged gap and “create” women atheists. They did so in seemingly very different ways. In the Lettres à Eugénie (1768), Paul-Thiry d’Holbach set out to promote atheism amongst women by means of (condescending) proselytism, without for all that excluding the possibility of female unbelief independent of male intervention. Conversely, Diderot’s Entretien d’un philosophe avec la maréchale de *** (1774) normalised women atheists’ existence by means of an elegant dialogue revolving around the notion of hypocrisy. No need for proselytism, he seemed to suggest, women atheists are already among us.

Did either of the two philosophes actually contribute to the religious emancipation of women? Well, at least one of them may have… And not only that, for religious and social emancipation go hand in hand.