VOLTAIRE, FRANçOIS MARIE AROUET DE

(b. Paris, France, 21 November 1694; d. Paris, 30 May 1778), literature.

Voltaire’s importance for the history of science lies particularly in his having composed a famous popularization of Newton. Eléments de la philosophie de Newton (1738), while also collaborating with his companion and mistress, Émilie, marquise du Châtelet, on her translation of the Principia into French, and more generally in his having referred, with the lightness of touch that made him a serious critic of the human condition, his moral philosophy to what he took to be the Newtonian, and hence the correct, account of physical reality.

Born François Arouet, his father having been a lawyer of the middling bourgeoisie and a notary, he took the pen name Voltaire when setting up as a young poet and playwright prior to 1725, one who soon had a certain success in the world of letters and fashion with his Oedipe and Henriade. The footing there proved slippery when Voltaire exchanged man-about-town insults in January 1726 with a young nobleman whom he had unrealistically thought to be a friend, the chevalier de Rohan. Instead of being accorded the satisfaction of a duel, Voltaire was beaten in the street by lackeys and was then incarcerated as a nuisance in the Bastille. He was released on condition that he exile himself until the embarrassment that his temerity had caused a great and noble family should be forgotten.

It was thus in the wake of shocking injustice and humiliation that Voltaire was in London between 1726 and 1729. He was present for Newton’s funeral in Westminster Abbey in 1727. The first mention of scientific matters in his published work occurs in the Lettres philosophiques, or Letters sur les Anglais, which he drafted during his English period, although it did not appear until 1734. Among the many merits of life in England that it celebrates, to the disadvantage by comparison of life in France, was the dignity that Voltaire there found accorded in society to men of science and letters. A wellknown passage contrasts the physical picture of Paris, where the world is full of Cartesian vortices, to that of London, where it is empty of all but Newtonian attraction. Voltaire discussed Bacon, Locke, Newton, and inoculation against smallpox approvingly in letters 11 through 17, after praising religious pluralism, commercial enterprise, and representative government, and before turning to the theater and literature.

Voltaire had thus already adopted Newtonianism in principle, and had read in and about science, before his association with Mme du Châtelet, which began in 1733. Both were also friendly with Maupertuis, who had verified what he said about Newton in the Lettres philosophiques, and with Clairaut. Fearful of arrest agian, Voltaire took up residence at Mme du Châtelet’s château at Cirey near the border of Champagne and Lorraine in 1734. They lived there until her death in 1749, and it was there that he undertook intensive study and correspondence with experts preparatory to writing the Éléments, in which (he wrote to a friend) he proposed “to reduce this gaint to the measure of the dwarfs who are my contemporaries.” A frequent visitor to Cirey was Francesco Algarotti, the success of whose 11 Newtonianismo per le dame (1737) is often said to have inspired Voltaire to write a more serious work.

Voltaire’s title is accurate, whether designedly or no, in that the book is about the philosophy that he read out of (or into) Newton and is not a technical guide to the science, whether mathematics, mechanics, or optics. Part I handles the metaphysical and theological issues of the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence, part II the theory of light and colors, and part III gravity and cosmology. Even in the optical part, only four out of fourteen chapters discuss Newton’s actual work. The rest of it consists of an overview of seventeenth-century optics in general, so presented as to make it appear that color perception supports the associationist psychology. It is not perfectly clear from the chapters on the Opticks itself that Voltaire had grasped the distinction in Newton’s mind between the phenomena of refraction, which established the composite character of white light, and the production of colors in thin transparent media, which exhibited the interaction of light and matter and which were later called interference effects. In any case, it was the latter aspect that Voltaire emphasized, probably for the reason that it could more easily be discussed in connection with his favorite among Newton’s principles, the principle of attraction.

The transition that Voltaire made from color to gravity would lead the reader to suppose that Newton had extended this cardinal principle from optics to cosmology and had thus come to explain the system of the world. Discussing the Principia, Voltaire did give a qualitative sketch of that last topic, which occupies its third book. Newton had himself advised readers that, in addition to Book III , the minimum requisites for comprehending the Principia consisted in a command of the definitions and laws of motion and the first three sections of Book I (motion in conic sections under the influence of central forces). Of that Voltaire gave his readers only a verbal summary of proposition 1. There is no discussion of physical quantities and no statement of the laws of motion. In general, the technical level is indicated by a remark apropos of the Opticks which informs the reader that there is a constant proportion between the sines of the angles of incidence and refraction but dispenses him from an explanation of what a sine is, since that would surpass the mathematical demands to be placed on him.

Evidently Voltaire’s book may be taken as an index to what a clever writer thought could be expected scientifically of the literate public. It cannot be supposed to have told technically proficient readers anything substantive about Newton’s work. The point needs emphasis since something more positive is often attributed to Voltaire’s transmission of Newtonian physics in works of general history, which usually credit him with having converted French opinion—whatever that may mean—from Cartesianism to Newtonianism, and also since Voltaire himself does seem to have entertained briefly the desire to make some small contribution to science. He and Mme du Châtelet installed a laboratory a Cirey and made experiments. In 1736 the Académie des Sciences set the problem of the nature of fire for the prize it proposed to award in 1738. Both partners entered memoirs in the competition, which was won by Euler. Voltaire also wrote a piece defending the Newtonian measure of force in the vis viva controversy (on which issue he disagreed with Mme du Châtelet), composed several essays of natural history, and published clarifications and corrections of the cosmological discussion in the Éléments; Errors had found their way into the first edition, he explained, because the Dutch printer had made changes in the text without his knowledge.

None of that made any significant difference, however, either to science or probably to Voltaire, who did not persist in these researches. What really mattered to him about science was the vantage point he thought it offered to intelligence in the battle that did count, that of fact against dogma and illusion, which he waged throughout his life. Scholarship has established that it was almost certainly in 1739 that he composed Micromégas (not published until 1752 in London). It was his first fully successful venture in the genre of the contephilosophique, the form that he brought to its highest state of perfection. The observations of the extraplanetary visitor from Sirius light-heartedly reduce man to his true proportions in the scheme of things. Voltaire wrote it when his head was full of the information he had assembled for the Éléments. As for his masterpiece, Candide, there is nothing of science in that famous tale. But we need to appreciate the reason for Voltaire’s admiration of Newton in order to take the full thrust of his scorn for Leibniz in the caricature of Dr. Pangloss. For Pangloss is the personification of mealy-mouthed dogma, denaturing every fact and justifying every illusion, however absurd, in the name of principles— “All is for the best in the best of possible words” —that will leave untroubled the beneficiaries of the systematic deceptions that rule in society.

Throughout part I of the Éléments, Leibniz is the obstacle to enlightenment in metaphysics, as Descartes had been in physics, and for similar reasons; both had presumed to project their doctrines upon God or nature in the guise of necessities. Not so Newton, who had generalized his laws from phenomena, confirmed them by experience, and restricted them within the scope of mathematical formulation. Nothing pleased Volatire more than repeating how Newton had made no pretense of stating the cause of attraction and had confined himself to demonstrating its quantity. The modern reader who expects to encounter eighteenth-century skepticism in Voltaire may be surprised to find that the Éléments opens with the argument that Newton gave in the General Scholium of the Principia for the existence and dominion of God. In further chapters Voltaire developed Newton’s view that space and time are attributes of God, who, all unconstrained by Leibniz’ principle of sufficient reason, had been perfectly free to constitute things as he saw fit. Thus the Newtonian philosophy, in consequence of which it followed that God had accorded a portion of his infinite liberty to man in the form of free will. Now then, all this about God may very well have been tongue-in-cheek on Voltaire’s part, but not the part about liberty. For what he really cared about was improving the possibility that an informed man may have to make reasoned choices in a world of events that are largely indifferent to his wishes. The enemy of such a liberty was dogma and never fact. “Droit au fait” was a favorite among his sayings, fortified by what he understood of science; and as for dogma, reinforced by prejudice and tradition a nd armed by authority, that was the infamy to scotched in the injunction “Écrasez l’infâme!” yet more regularly repeated in his later, more political, more moral, and (in the highest sense) more journalistic years.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Éléments de la philosophie de Newton mis à la portée de tout le monde (Amsterdam, 1738) was published in a revision in 1741 and in a 2nd ed. in 1745. The latter is the version included in vol. XXXI of the Kehl ed. of his works (1784–1789) and in most later collections. Other writings on “Physique” include (1) the letters and a “Défense” of Newtonianism (1739): (2) the “Essai sur la nature du feu et sur sa propagation” and “Doutes sur la mesure des forces mortices et sur leur nature” (1741); (3) and abstract of Mme du Châtelet’s memoir on fire, “Mémoire sur un ouvrage de physique de Madame la Marquise du Châtelet” (1739), and a lengthy commentary on her book about Leibniz, “Exposition du livre des Institutions Physiques” (1740): and (4) writings on natural history: “Relation touchant un Maure blanc amené d’Afrique à Paris en 1744,” “Dissertation …sur les changements arrivés dans notre globe, et sur les pétrifactions qu’on prétend en être les témoignages” (it was in this essay, sent to the Academy in Bologna in 1746, that Voltaire advanced the opinion that it was more probable that fossils found in the Alps had been dropped by travelers than that revolutionary changes have occurred in the order of nature), “Des singularités de la nature” (1768), and “Les colimaçons du Révérend Père l’Escarbotier …” (1768). Voltaire reprinted much of ch. 9, pt. III , of the Éléments in the article “Figure de la terre,” in his Questions sur l’Encyclopédie (1770), taking the occasion to make several corrections. Three further fragments appear in the Mélanges littéraires of the Kehl ed., “A.M.***” (1739) and “Courte réponse aux longs discours d’un docteur allemand” (1740), both about Newtonianism, and finally, “Lettre sur la prétendue cométe” (1773), the appearance of which was vulgarly supposed to herald the end of the world. The 1827 ed. of Oeuvres complétes includes these fugitive pieces in its second Physique volume (XLII). Theodore Besterman has edited Voltaire’s Correspondence, 107 vols., Institut et Musée Voltaire (Geneva, 1953–1965). A convenient modern ed. of the Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence is that by H.G. Alexander (Manchester, 1956).

II. Secondary Literature. The important work on Newtonianism in France, Pierre Brunet. L’introduction des théories de Newton en France au XVIII^e siécle avant 1738 (Paris, 1931), was never completed Ira O. Wade, The Intellectual Development of Voltaire (Princeton, 1969), draws on the author’s earlier, more specialized studies with scientific themes in Voltaire’s work. See, especially. Wade’s ed. of Micromégas (Princeton, 1950), where the 1739 date of composition is convincingly argued. There is a valuable discussion of Candide in Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 1 (New York, 1966), 197–203. Robert Walters, “Voltaire and the Newtonian Universe,” an unpublished dissertation (1954) in the Princeton Univ. library, is a study of the Éléments. See also Martin S. Staum, “New ton and Voltaire: Constructive Skeptics,” in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 62 (1968), 29–56; and two articles by Henry Guerlac, “Three 18th-Century Social Philosophers: Scientific Influences on Their Thought,” in Daedalus, 88 (1958), 12–18; and “Where the Statue Stood: Divergent Loyalties to Newton in the 18th Century,” in Earl Wasserman, ed., Aspects of the 18th Century (Baltimore, 1965), 317–334. The interpretation of the present article is developed more fully in an essay by the undersigned, “Science and the Literary Imagination: Voltaire and Goethe,” in David Daiches and A. K. Thorlby. eds., Literature of the Western World, IV (London, 1975), 167–194.

Charles C. Gillispie