This is a translation of Sylvain Maréchal’s Pour et Contre la Bible (For and Against the Bible), originally published in 1801. Maréchal, an atheist and revolutionary, edited one of France’s best-known radical journals, Révolutions de Paris, from 1790 to 1794. His Almanach des Honnêtes Gens (Almanac of Upright People) served as one of the bases of the revolutionary calendar. He was a friend and close collaborator of “Gracchus” Babeuf, whose failed 1796 coup—the so-called “Conspiracy of Equals”—against the Directory marked, for Maréchal, the end of the French Revolution. In For and Against the Bible, Maréchal engages in a critical analysis of Jewish and Christian scripture, evaluating both its negative and positive content. His rationalistic approach, in the tradition of Spinoza, Voltaire and others, anticipates nineteenth-century Bible criticism and much scholarship of our own day. Thus, the text is an important historical document for those interested in a critical approach to the study of religion.
Warren S. Goldstein, Ph.D.
Center for Critical Research on Religion