Jean Meslier

Life and Historical Context

Jean Meslier (1664–1729) was a French Catholic priest whose posthumous writings made him one of the earliest systematically atheist and materialist thinkers in modern Europe. Born in the rural village of Mazerny in the Ardennes region, he came from a modest background: his father was a small artisan, and Meslier received a basic clerical education before ordination.

In 1689 he was appointed curé (parish priest) of Étrépigny, later also serving the nearby village of Balaives. His outward life appeared conventional and pious. Contemporary records portray him as diligent in his pastoral duties, though occasionally in conflict with local elites, especially over the treatment of poor parishioners and abuses by the nobility.

Meslier lived under the Ancien Régime, a rigidly hierarchical society in which the Catholic Church was closely aligned with monarchical power. Intellectually, his lifetime overlaps with early Enlightenment currents in France, including the rise of rationalist critique of superstition and authority. However, unlike more cautious deists and reformers, Meslier’s critique—preserved in secret—would prove far more radical.

He died in June 1729 in Étrépigny. Only then did his parishioners and local officials discover that their priest had left behind a massive, incendiary manuscript attacking religion, monarchy, and social inequality.

The Testament and Its Themes

Meslier’s principal work is commonly known as the Testament (or Mémoire des pensées et sentiments de Jean Meslier). It is a sprawling, multi-volume manuscript—thousands of pages long—composed over many years and left in several copies. Meslier apparently intended it as his intellectual last will, to be read after his death so as to avoid persecution while alive.

The central thesis of the Testament is that all religions are false, human inventions created and maintained to control populations and justify the power of rulers and clergy. Meslier denounces what he calls the “triple alliance” of king, noble, and priest, presenting religion as a key ideological support for economic and political domination.

Among its major themes:

• Radical atheism: Meslier does not merely criticize certain doctrines or church practices; he asserts that God does not exist, miracles are illusions or deceptions, and sacred texts are contradictory human documents, not divine revelation. He argues that the idea of God is incoherent or superfluous in explaining the world.

• Materialism: For Meslier, reality consists only of matter in motion. There is no immaterial soul; consciousness and thought are properties or arrangements of material bodies. He rejects dualism and spiritual substances, anticipating later Enlightenment materialists.

• Critique of Christian morality: Meslier contends that Christian teachings on humility, resignation, and obedience serve to pacify the oppressed and discourage resistance. He interprets promises of heavenly reward as a strategy to make people tolerate earthly suffering.

• Social and economic critique: The Testament expresses intense sympathy for peasants and the rural poor. Meslier condemns feudal dues, seigneurial rights, and aristocratic privilege as unjust exactions. He attacks the hereditary nobility and monarchy, sometimes in language that later commentators have seen as proto-socialist or proto-communist.

• Violence and revolt: Shockingly for a priest, Meslier at times endorses violent revolutionary justice, including the wish that the “great ones” of the earth might be strangled with the guts of priests—a phrase later popularized (and stylized) by Enlightenment and revolutionary writers. This rhetoric aims to dramatize his belief that genuine justice requires overturning both clerical and aristocratic domination.

The Testament circulated only in manuscript form for decades. In the mid-18th century it came to the attention of philosophes. Voltaire produced a highly selective and sanitized version, emphasizing deistic critique of “superstition” and omitting Meslier’s hard atheism and social radicalism. Only in the 19th and 20th centuries were more accurate editions of the full text published, allowing scholars to reconstruct Meslier’s original positions.

Philosophical Views and Legacy

Meslier’s philosophical stance can be summarized as a combination of atheist metaphysics, empiricist rationalism, and egalitarian political theory.

On metaphysics, Meslier rejects any transcendent or spiritual reality. The universe is eternal or self-sufficient matter; natural processes do not require a divine designer. He argues that appeals to God explain nothing that cannot be better explained by physical causes. This places him among the earliest fully explicit atheist philosophers in the Latin Christian tradition, contrasting with the more cautious deism of contemporaries who still posited a non-interventionist creator.

In epistemology, Meslier appeals to reason and experience as the only legitimate foundations of belief. He criticizes faith, authority, and tradition as unreliable guides, insisting that doctrines must be tested against observable reality and logical coherence. Biblical contradictions, reported miracles, and the diversity of religions are, for him, strong evidence that no revealed religion is true.

Ethically and politically, Meslier’s views anticipate later republican and socialist critiques:

• He defends the moral worth and rights of common people against aristocratic privilege.
• He condemns economic exploitation and extreme inequality as incompatible with justice.
• He sometimes gestures toward communal ownership or at least strong redistribution of property, though his proposals remain unsystematic.

Some historians identify Meslier as a forerunner of socialism or communism, while others caution that his thought lacks a developed economic theory and is best seen as a moral-political protest against feudal injustice.

Meslier’s legacy is complex. During his lifetime he was completely unknown as a philosopher. After his death, his Testament gained a clandestine readership among freethinkers and radicals. Enlightenment figures such as Voltaire, Diderot, and d’Holbach drew on or responded to elements of his thought, though they often distanced themselves from his extremity. In the 19th century, socialist and anticlerical movements in France and beyond celebrated Meslier as a symbolic “first atheist priest” and a martyr of conscience.

Modern scholarship typically emphasizes:

• His role as a pioneer of explicit atheism within a Christian context;
• His contribution to materialist philosophy before the more famous systems of La Mettrie and d’Holbach;
• His importance as an early articulation of radical Enlightenment linking critique of religion with demands for social and political transformation.

Interpretations of Meslier remain divided. Proponents of the “radical Enlightenment” thesis see him as exemplary of a subterranean tradition of thoroughgoing secularism and egalitarianism. More cautious historians underline the idiosyncratic and unsystematic nature of his manuscript, warning against treating Meslier as a fully developed theoretical precursor to later atheism or socialism.

Nonetheless, Jean Meslier has come to be regarded as a significant, if belatedly recognized, figure in the intellectual history of unbelief and social critique. His Testament offers a rare document: an extensive, systematic denunciation of religion and hierarchy written not by an outsider, but by someone who spent his entire adult life as an ordained priest within the very institution he so fiercely condemned in secret.