Doubt, disbelief and irreligion. From Montaigne's skepticism to Meslier's atheism

Abstract

In this chapter, I try to reconstruct the pathway that goes from disbelief to irreligion. Better to say, the pathway that leads from the skeptical premises sketched in Montaigne´s Essais to the atheistic conclusions we find in Meslier´s Mémoire. In the first section, after a brief introduction, I reflect on Montaigne´s writing, paying special attention to the unfinished, discordant, and -above all- implicit character that he gives to his Essais. In the second section, I reconstruct Meslier´s reading strategies, showing how the priest uses those few books that were available to him. In the third and final section, I make a brief comparison between the Essais and the Mémoire. In short, I try to show how different skeptical passages of Montaigne leave us on the verge of disbelief and how they are transformed by Meslier to extract from them irreligious conclusions. My work is located at the intersection of two areas of study that, in recent decades, have begun to change our perception of the history of modern philosophy: skepticism and clandestine literature.