Voltaire
Voltaire
François Marie Arouet (1694-1778), known since his youthful literary beginnings solely by his pen name, Voltaire, was the most conspicuous figure of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and remains a culture hero for the spiritual heirs of that movement all over the world. His writings cover an enormous range, from light verse, epic and dramatic poetry, and prose fiction to history and many-sided pamphleteering. His correspondence alone, recently edited in 107 volumes by Theodore Besterman, provides material for a synopsis of the ideas, attitudes, and tactics of the philosophes of the Enlightenment (see Correspondence).
Voltaire was briefly imprisoned in the Bastille on two occasions—in 1717 and in 1726—and his whole life was a series of verbal battles with what nowadays would be called the Establishment and, most vehemently, with the Roman Catholic church. But he was not quite the always-endangered rebel he has sometimes been made out to be, for the French government of the eighteenth century was an inefficient and self-distrustful one, its leaders themselves often inspired by the ideas of the Enlightenment. Voltaire had friends in high places quite as powerful as his enemies. He came from a Parisian legal family and never knew economic want, or indeed serious economic difficulties, for his business talents were as great as his literary ones. In 1778, the year of his death, he made a triumphal progress from his estate at Ferney, near Geneva, to Paris, where he was given the kind of reception we associate with modern mass societies. This “apotheosis” is seen by many historians, not implausibly, as one of the major signs of the coming French Revolution.
Voltaire’s direct influence on the social sciences is greatest in the field of historical writing. He did indeed toss off a number of witty and often quoted remarks that were hardly befitting a serious historian. But when he said that “history is but a chronicle of crimes and misfortunes” he was casually expressing the view of a moralist outraged by naive optimism, and when he called history a fable convenue (a remark adapted from Fontenelle) he was referring specifically to histoires anciennes and implying that modern historians can do better. Both remarks are reflections of the fact that his “hundred volumes” (the duodecimo form of the eighteenth-century Kehl edition of Voltaire’s works is in 92 volumes) were not the work of a systematic social scientist but of a brilliant, excitable, and inconsistent reformer and a close observer of human behavior.
Voltaire’s major historical works—Le siècle de Louis XIV (see 1751) and Essai sur les moeurs (1756)—are still read, not only for their literary virtues but also for their contributions to cultural history. Voltaire had strong, unconcealed, and unsupported convictions of the kind historians are now not supposed to have—or if they do have them, must attempt to conceal or suppress. He hated organized Christianity for its basic belief in the supernatural and for what he held to be its support of social injustice. He therefore endorsed and intensified the eighteenth-century view that the Middle Ages were a period of barbarous misery. He disliked the Jews, not because of racial prejudice but because they seemed to him responsible for Christianity. He had an implicit belief—"theory” is too strong a word—in historical cycles and thought there had been four peaks of high cultural achievement: Periclean Athens, Augustan Rome, Renaissance Italy, and the France—indeed the Europe—of Louis xiv. He had, however, no real explanation for cyclical change and certainly no theory of systematic progress. His great ages are marked by the classic virtues of good taste and good manners and, above all, by the rule of reason; but he had no explanation of why the great ages gave way to disorder, barbarity, and the rule of superstition and fanaticism.
Yet judged even by today’s professional standards, Voltaire’s virtues as a historian far outweigh his weaknesses. His use of sources and his critical apparatus could not satisfy the first generation of “scientific” historians in the late nineteenth century, but their successors have been kinder to him. For he did apply to his sources the common-sense, skeptical rationalism that helped to make him the representative of the Enlightenment that he was; even more important, although he by no means neglected war, diplomacy, and politics, he also paid close attention to what we now call economic, social, intellectual, and cultural history—the record, insofar as he could reconstitute it, of the lives of ordinary men and women; and, finally, he had a real sense for comparative history, although in some cases—for example, when he dealt with Far Eastern subjects—a somewhat uncritical one.
Voltaire must also figure in the history of economic thought, if only because his poem Le mondain (written in 1736; see Morize 1908) and his prose expansions of its thesis were, after Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1714), the most widely read of the whole series of eighteenth-century apologies for “luxury.” Its paradox, le superflu, chose tres ne-cessaire, is Voltairean indeed. Moreover, many of his tales and his pamphlets touch on such matters as free trade, currency, and the like, always a bit unprofessionally and journalistically but with a firm, pragmatic common sense and a determination to reject “evidence” based on the transcendental, the ineffable, and the marvelous, above all when such evidence was supported by convention. In sum, Voltaire’s work is a major part of the great eighteenth-century matrix—part propaganda, part moralizing, part science, and, save for economics and jurisprudence, still relatively undifferentiated—out of which have emerged our present specialized social sciences. Voltaire’s own central attitude is nicely summarized in what today is certainly his most widely read work, Candide (1759)—II faut cultiver notre jardin, or, man must and can make himself and his society.
The whole of Voltaire’s writings, save for some light verse and prose badinage, was devoted to the cause of the Enlightenment. This is true even of his tragedies, which are full of lines like:
Nos prêtres ne sont pas ce qu’un vain peuple pense; Notre crédulité fait toute leur science.
(Oedipe, Act iv, scene i)
He was a tireless defender of civil liberties, especially in cases involving religious prejudices; in the Calas case, the De la Barre case, and many others he brought all his talents to bear in defense of victims of the church, which he called I’infâme.
Voltaire’s methods as a propagandist make a still useful case study of the spread of the Enlightenment. He poured out anonymous or pseudonymous pamphlets, essays, and tales, often with a false place of publication, such as Amsterdam. (Generations of scholars have labored on these, so that today it is fairly well known just what he did and what he did not write.) His vast correspondence, some of which is written in adequate, often picturesque English, contributed almost as much as his other writings to the diffusion of the Enlightenment. Networks of correspondents played a role in the early development of the social sciences comparable to their role in the somewhat earlier development of the natural sciences. In the end, the acclaim accorded him along the road from Ferney (now officially Ferney-Voltaire) to Paris in 1778 shows that his reputation, his legend, and, no doubt in a vulgarized version, his ideas, had penetrated, at least in France, far beyond the intelligentsia or even the bourgeoisie, deep into the hearts and minds of the many.
The legend of Voltaire (or rather legends, for he is villain in some, hero in others) is not the least important aspect of his existence for the social scientist. The range of judgments about him, well displayed in Peter Gay’s Prologue to his Voltaire’s Politics (1959, pp. 3-32) is remarkable. To the Christian apologist, like Joseph de Maistre, or to the conventional romanticist, like Wordsworth, who dared to call Candide“that dull product of a scoffer’s pen,” Voltaire is, of course, anathema. To the freethinker, the anticlerical of any sect, he is just as naturally a hero and a leader. But several generations of scholars and critics, professionally trained in objectivity, have made quite as varied and contradictory judgments of what Voltaire really meant. It is true that the taxonomist of ideas has an especially difficult task with the brilliant, witty, and verbally facile rebel, such as Voltaire—or Nietzsche, or Bernard Shaw—whose rebellion is to an important degree directed against all systems become conventions. The “real” Voltaire can hardly be given a Linnaean label.
For the historian of ideas, the most interesting aspect of Voltaire’s thought is the place he attributed to reason in human nature. Had Voltaire read German (which in his day few Frenchmen did), he would probably have concluded that the distinction in that language between Vernunft and Verstand is nonsense. What Voltaire meant by la raison, a word he constantly used, was what it meant to ordinary, reasonably bright Frenchmen: practical, empirical thinking of the kind done by the bookkeeper and, duly refined, by the scientist. But he by no means held, as some lesser philosophes, such as Helvetius, seem to have done, that given the right education and the right social environment, all men can use the gift of reason perfectly; nor did he hold that even the full gift of reason can unlock for those who have it all the mysteries, or solve all the problems, with which the universe confronts men. He summed up his position nicely in a letter written to Le Cati in 1741: ’That which our eyes and mathematics demonstrate to us, we must hold to be true. In all the rest we must say only: I do not know” (see Gay 1959, p. 26).
Voltaire’s political ideas were consonant with his appraisal of ordinary human capacities. He was not a defender of “enlightened despotism” on the other hand, he was not a very good democrat, if such a democrat must really believe that the many can be trusted to make policy, to guide the state by referenda. In the balance, he leaned toward an almost Fabian hope or trust that an intelligent minority will act as guide—but never as tyrant— and would leave ordinary men reasonably free to behave reasonably well.
Voltaire, then, was in a sense a skeptic, at least in not accepting conventional Christianity or indeed any formal theology or metaphysics; but he was also in a sense a believer, and from his work, along with that of many others, has been built up a world view, a faith that has no church but many followers. All these followers have in common a rejection of traditional sacramental Christianity and its immanent God; many of them are also optimistic, rationalistic, egalitarian, and democratic in a way that Voltaire, whom they almost always revere, was not. Yet one suspects that even today he would not altogether repudiate his children.
Although in his style, and in much of his substance, Voltaire conforms to the stereotype of the French national character current among French and foreigners alike, he has never quite been accepted in France as that essential figure in modern nationalism, the one great writer who is both supremely national and supremely universal. France has no Shakespeare, no Dante, no Cervantes, no Goethe. For so many of his countrymen Voltaire’s écrasez I’infdme is still so partisan and so bitter a memory as to deprive him of such a place in the hearts of all his countrymen.
Crane Brinton
WORKS BY VOLTAIRE
(1733) 1961 Philosophical Letters. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill. ? First published as Letters Concerning the English Nation. The French edition was published in 1734.
(1751) 1962 The Age of Louis XIV. New York: Dutton. ? First published as Le siecle de Louis XIV.
(1756) 1963 Essai sur les moeurs et I’esprit des nations et sur les principaux faits de I’histoire depuis Charlemagne jusqu’a Louis XIII. 2 vols. Paris: Gamier.
(1759) 1966 Candide: Or, Optimism. Translated and edited by Robert M. Adams. New York: Norton. ? First published as Candide: Ou Voptimisme.
Correspondence. Edited by Theodore Besterman. 107 vols. Geneva: Institut et Musee Voltaire, 1953-1965. ? Includes letters dated 1704-1778 in 98 volumes, and 9 volumes of appendixes, bibliographies, and indexes.
Oeuvres completes de Voltaire. 92 vols. in duodecimo. Kehl (Germany): Imprimerie de la Societe Litteraire-typo-graphique, 1785-1789. ? Edited by Beaumarchais, Condorcet, and Decroix. The Societe also published a 70-volume edition in octavo.
Oeuvres completes de Voltaire. 52 vols. Edited by Louis Moland. Paris: Gamier, 1877-1885. ? Includes the 2-volume Table ginerale et analytique, by Charles Pierrot.
The Portable Voltaire. Edited with an introduction by Ben Ray Redman. New York: Viking, 1949.
The Romances of Voltaire. New York: Dial, 1928. ? Contains Candide, Zadig, Princess of Babylon, The Child of Nature, Micromegas, Cosi-sancta, Memnon, and The One-eyed Porter. First published in French.
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bengescu, George 1882-1890 Voltaire: Bibliographic de ses oeuvres. 4 vols. Paris: Perrin. ? An index to the Bibliographic was published in 1953 by the Institut et Musee Voltaire in Geneva.
Brumfitt, J. H. 1958 Voltaire: Historian. Oxford Univ. Press.
Gay, Peter 1959 Voltaire’s Politics: The Poet as a Realist. Princeton Univ. Press. ? See especially the Prologue and the “Bibliographical Essay,” pages 355-395.
Lanson, Gustave (1906) 1966 Voltaire. Translated by Robert A. Wagoner, with an introduction by Peter Gay. New York: Wiley. ? First published in French.
Mandeville, Bernard (1714) 1957 The Fable of the Bees: Or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon. ? A paperback edition was published in 1962 by Putnam.
Morize, Andre (1908) 1909 L’apologie du luxe au XVIII” siecle, et Le mondain de Voltaire: Etude critique sur Le mondain et ses sources. Paris: Didier.
Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century.? Published by the Institut et Musee Voltaire in Geneva since 1955. The 44 volumes issued to date (1966) were edited by Theodore Besterman.