Sarkozy should read Baron d'Holbach.

Editor,

Nicolas Sarkozy would do well to contemplate the following, written by Paul Henri Thiry, baron d'Holback, in 1772:

"We are perpetually told that without a God there would be no moral obligation; that people and even sovereigns require a legislator powerful enough to contain them. Moral constraint supposes a law; but this law arises from eternal and necessary relations of things with one another; relations that have nothing common with the existence of a God. The rules of man's conduct are derived from his own nature, which he is capable of knowing, and not from the divine nature of which he has no idea . . .

"Whether there exists a God or not, whether this God has spoken or not, the moral duties of men will be always the same, so long as they retain their peculiar nature, that is, as long as they are sensible beings. Have men then need of a God whom they know not, of an invisible legislator, of a mysterious religion and of chimerical fears, in order to learn that every excess evidently tends to destroy them, that to preserve health they must be temperate; that to gain the love of others it is necessary to do them good, that to do them evil is the sure means to incur their vengeance and hatred?"

M. Sarkozy would benefit also from reading Thomas Jefferson -- and Thomas Paine -- and others writing in the 18th Century in France and the U.S.A. about religion and the state -- if he has the time.