We do not know exactly when Meslier became an atheist. Everything suggests, however, that his unbelief may have predated his ordination – and that 1716 marked less a conversion than a strategic turning point, when, after being disciplined by the archbishop for confronting the local lord, he shifted his efforts from the pulpit to the page, carrying the struggle onto another terrain: that of writing. Meslier states the logic of this secret, posthumous intervention in the opening sentence of his Mémoire:

My dearest friends, since I would not have been permitted – and since it would have brought consequences both dangerous and grievous – to say openly during my lifetime what I thought of the conduct and government of men, of their religions and their morals, I resolved to tell you after my death.

Meslier wrote for a readership he could reach only once he was beyond punishment. He copied out the manuscript by hand, intending it to survive him. That posthumous strategy turned a private contradiction into a political intervention.

His great text was born of that lived contradiction. After the affair of 1716, when he realised he could no longer fight the alliance between lord and archbishop openly – at the scale of the village – he displaced the struggle. He was no longer attacking only a brutal country lord; he was facing up to the system as a whole. His reasoning was this: if feudal power oppressed the peasants, it was because it was upheld by the Church. If the Church was able to uphold the feudal lords, it was because the Church itself rested on religion. And if religion held men in its grip, then one had to go back to the heart of the mechanism, and dismantle the springs of faith. One might object that Meslier collapses religion, as organised by the Church, into faith. In any case, that is how the Mémoire des pensées et sentiments de Jean Meslier (Memoir of the Thoughts and Sentiments of Jean Meslier) came into being: a huge text, which he copied out by hand three times, intended for his parishioners and, beyond them, for ‘all those like them’. Nothing in that title announces a simple exercise in freethought, let alone an attack on what Meslier himself called ‘the conduct and government of men’.

This point is crucial, and it has often been missed. Meslier was not writing for a circle of literate readers curious about antireligious arguments. That is precisely what sets him apart from the philosophes of the Enlightenment who would come a few decades later. He wrote for ordinary people. He wrote for those crushed by the social order, whom he called on to be ‘disabused’. His atheism was therefore, from the start, popular in its intended audience and political in its purpose. While many 18th-century atheists remained tied to aristocratic or learned circles shaped by the Enlightenment, Meslier addressed the people. No wonder some people have likened him to Marx avant la lettre.