Abstract

This chapter proposes a very condensed overview of some three centuries of Spinoza reception in France, from around 1670 to 1970. Spinoza's presence in the history of French philosophy is pervasive, deep, and varied. The chapter presents some of the most important figures and stages in that inextricable double history of both Spinozism from the viewpoint of French philosophy and French philosophy from the viewpoint of Spinozism. The translation is a testimony to the depth with which the French libertine tradition of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century sometimes appropriated Spinoza's philosophy for its own subversive purposes. One way of coming to grips with Spinoza's biblical scholarship was to drown his argument in a deluge of superior erudition. Spinoza's philosophy, by contrast, was universally condemned as fatalist and pantheist.