Jean Meslier (1664–1729)

Early French utopian socialist thinker in the 18th century; militant atheist and materialist.

Meslier was born in 1664, in the village of Mazerny, Champagne, France, into a textile worker’s family. During his childhood, he studied in a religious school, and after graduating from the religious school in 1687, he took up a teaching post and worked as a village priest for 40 years.

He attended a religious school during his childhood, and after graduating from the religious school in 1687, he took up a teaching position and worked as a village priest for 40 years. In order to make the believers open their eyes to the power of truth itself, and to get rid of the bondage of religious theological superstition, under extremely difficult conditions, Meslier collected and read a large number of Christian evangelistic books, various documents as well as famous works of literati, historians and philosophers from ancient Greece and Rome, the Middle Ages to the present as he could find at the time. In his later years, he wrote his famous book, The Testament, the full text of which was to be published for the first time in Amsterdam, Holland, only in 1864.

In The Testament, Meslier exposed and criticized the system feudal absolutism and religious theology, and proclaimed the ideas of militant materialism and atheism. On the basis of exposing and criticizing the actual social inequality and private property, Meslier put forth his ideal blueprint for the future society, namely, Everyone engages in legitimate and useful labour, and jointly appropriates and enjoys all wealth and land resources on an equal footing; the members of the society love each other, live together, live in peace and mutual assistance, and are organized into communes like a big family, with unions concluded between the communes. Meslier’s materialist thought a great deal of conjecture and speculation, and his description and design of the ideal society in the future was tinged with utopian egalitarian communism.