by Voltaire
I have omitted it, again on literary grounds (the observation is too heavy and commonplace), despite its superior claim to a position in the text.
108. Francis Leopold Rakoczy (1676–1735), who was briefly king of Transylvania in the early 18th century. After 1720 he was interned in Turkey.
109. From the eastern Mediterranean.
110. A page to the sultan.
111. The two callings of barber and surgeon, since they both involved sharp instruments, were interchangeable in the early days of medicine.
112. Rigorous determinism requires that there be no empty spaces in the universe, so wherever it seems empty, one posits the existence of the “plenum.” “Subtle matter”: describes the soul, the mind, and all spiritual agencies, which can, therefore, be supposed subject to the influence and control of the great world machine, which is, of course, visibly material. Both are concepts needed to round out the system of optimistic determinism.
113. Knightly assemblies.
114. A morganatic marriage confers no rights on the partner of lower rank or on the offspring. Pangloss always uses more language than anyone else to achieve fewer results.
115. Voltaire’s anti-Semitism, derived from various unhappy experiences with Jewish financiers, is not the most attractive aspect of his personality.
116. The gate of the sultan’s palace is often used by extension to describe his government as a whole. But it was in fact a real gate where the heads of traitors, public enemies, and ex-officials were gruesomely exposed.
117. An expounder of Muslim law. “Viziers”: intimate advisers of the sultan. “Divan”: a council of state. Everyone who takes part in affairs of state, whether civil or religious, dies, sooner or later, an atrocious death.
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Appendix
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VOLTAIRE
Letter on the Subject of Candide
[When Candide was first published, in early 1759, Voltaire’s name did not appear on the title page, which stated simply that the work was “translated from the German of Doctor Ralph.” No one was intended to believe this, and the novel was widely attributed to Voltaire, though in private correspondence he continued to deny his authorship of the work. In March 1759, the Journal encyclopédique, a publication sympathetic to the cause of the philosophes, carried a review of Candide stating that “we do not believe at all in the existence of the German original of this novel, which is attributed to M. de V.…” The following letter is Voltaire’s reply to this review. Its date, April 1, 1759, might be a hint to the reader to treat the letter as an April fool. Since the letter appeared in the Journal encyclopédique in July 1762, either the journal withheld it for three years (but why?) or, more likely, Voltaire sent the letter at the later date and predated it to add a further element of mystification. In any case, the reference to the power-hungry Jesuits was all the more relevant in 1762, when there was a series of crises that would lead to the final suppression of the Jesuit Order in France, in 1764.
The Socinians were originally a sixteenth-century sect that rejected the idea of the Holy Trinity and the doctrine of original sin. In the seventeenth century, the label Socinian came to be used loosely to describe skeptics and freethinkers. So Voltaire’s suggestion here that the novel was designed to combat the beliefs of the Socinians is a further piece of mischief-making on his part, meant to confute critics who accused him of being irreligious. Voltaire constantly experiments with his authorial posture, and he especially relishes strategies that allow him to hint at his authorship of works that are ostensibly anonymous (see N. Cronk, “Voltaire and the Posture of Anonymity,” Modern Language Notes, 126 [2011], pp. 768–84). This letter, inventing the character Demad, whose brother is alleged to be a friend of the invented Dr. Ralph, is a good example of the pleasure Voltaire takes in mystifying his authorial stance.—Nicholas Cronk]
Gentlemen,
You say, in the March issue of your journal,1 that some sort of little novel called Optimism or Candide is attributed to a man known as Monsieur de V … I do not know what Monsieur V … you mean; but I can tell you that this book was written by my brother, Monsieur Demad, presently a Captain in the Brunswick regiment; and in the matter of the pretended kingdom of the Jesuits in Paraguay, which you call a wretched fable, I tell you in the face of all Europe that nothing is more certain. I served on one of the Spanish vessels sent to Buenos Aires in 1756 to restore reason to the nearby settlement of Saint Sacrament; I spent three months at Assumption; the Jesuits have to my knowledge twenty-nine provinces, which they call “Reductions,” and they are absolute masters there, by virtue of eight crowns a head for each father of a family, which they pay to the Governor of Buenos Aires—and yet they only pay for a third of their districts. They will not allow any Spaniard to remain more than three days in their Reductions. They have never wanted their subjects to learn Spanish. They alone teach the Paraguayans the use of firearms; they alone lead them in the field. The Jesuit Thomas Verle, a native of Bavaria, was killed in the attack on the village of Saint Sacrament while mounting to the attack at the head of his Paraguayans in 1737—and not at all in 1735 as the Jesuit Charlevoix has reported; this author is as insipid as he is ignorant. Everyone knows how they waged war on Don Antequera, and defied the orders of the Council in Madrid.
They are so powerful that in 1743 they obtained from Philip the Fifth a confirmation of their authority which no one has been able to shake. I know very well, gentlemen, that they have no such title as King, and therefore you may say it is a wretched fable to talk of the Kingdom of Paraguay. But even though the Dey of Algiers is not a King, he is none the less master of that country. I should not advise my brother the Captain to travel to Paraguay without being sure that he is stronger than the local authorities.
For the rest, gentlemen, I have the honor to inform you that my brother the Captain, who is the best-loved man in his regiment, is an excellent Christian; he amused himself by composing the novel Candide in his winter quarters, having chiefly in mind to convert the Socinians. These heretics are not satisfied with openly denying the Trinity and the doctrine of eternal punishment; they say that God necessarily made our world the best of all possible ones, and that everything is well. This idea is manifestly contrary to the doctrine of original sin. These innovators forget that the serpent, who was the subtlest beast of the field, tempted the woman created from Adam’s rib; that Adam ate the forbidden fruit; that God cursed the land He had formerly blessed: Cursed is the ground for thy sake: in the sweat of thy face shall thou eat bread. Can they be ignorant that all the church fathers without a single exception found the Christian religion on this curse pronounced by God himself, the effects of which we feel every day? The Socinians pretend to exalt providence, and they do not see that we are guilty, tormented beings, who must confess our faults and accept our punishment. Let these heretics take care not to show themselves near my brother the Captain; he’ll let them know if everything is well.
I am, gentlemen, your very humble, very obedient servant,
Demad
At Zastrou, April first, 1759
P.S. My brother the Captain is the intimate friend of Mr. Ralph, well-known Professor in the Academy of Frankfort-on-Oder, who was of great help to him in writing this profound work of philosophy, and my brother was so modest as actually to call it a mere translation from an original by Mr. Ralph. Such modesty is rare among authors.
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1. N.B. This letter was lost in the post for a long time; as soon as it reached us, we began trying—unsuccessfully—to discover the existence of Monsieur Demad, Captain of the Brunswick Regiment [Note by the Journal].
BACKGROUNDS
RICHARD HOLMES
Voltaire’s Grin†
His enemies said he had the ‘most hideous’ smile in Europe. It was a thin, skull-like smile that sneered at everything sacred: religion, love, patriotism, censorship and the harmony of the spheres. It was a smile of mockery, cynicism, and l
echery. It was the sort of smile, said Coleridge, that you would find on the face of ‘a French hairdresser.’
It was certainly the most famous smile in eighteenth-century Europe. But as reproduced in a thousand paintings, statues, busts, caricatures, miniatures and medallions, you can now see that it was more of a tight-lipped grin. Voltaire himself rather tenderly called it the grin of ‘a maimed monkey’ (un singe estropié). And he wrote to his fellow philosophes, ‘let us always march forward along the highway of Truth, my brothers, grinning derisively.’ To understand just something of that celebrated monkey grin—which symbolises both Voltaire’s intelligence and his mischief—is to understand a great deal about the Europe he tried to change.
This last year, 1994, has been Voltaire’s tricentenary. Learned foundations have been celebrating his birthday in Oxford, Geneva, Berlin, St Petersburg, and Paris. He has been, especially, the toast of the French intellectuals, publishers and media men. He has appeared (by proxy) on the influential Bernard Pivot television show, ‘Bouillon de Culture’ (‘Culture Soup’). A great exhibition of his life and times, ‘Voltaire et l’Europe,’ has been running for two and a half months at the Hôtel de la Monnaie, Paris, organized by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. The deputy editor of Le Monde, Edwy Plenel, has christened him ‘the father of investigative journalism.’
The publishers did him proud. New critical studies (Voltaire Le Conquérant, by Pierre Lepape), new anthologies (Le Rire de Voltaire by Pascal Debailly), new paperbacks (Voltaire Ecrivain de Toujours, by René Pomeau). Candide appeared as a cartoon strip by Wolinski. The Pléiade library completed the publication of his correspondence in thirteen volumes. The Voltaire Foundation (by a quirk of fate, based at Oxford) continued its monumental edition of the Complete Works in 150 volumes, the Life in five volumes, and Voltaire for the desktop on CD-ROM. The magazine Lire sold terra-cotta busts of his monkey head by mail order, price 3,500 francs plus postage on the eight-kilo package.
Although much of Voltaire’s life was spent in exile (England, Holland, Switzerland, and Germany), he has become a palpable presence in Paris. A street, a lycée, a métro station, a café, a bank note, and even a style of armchair (upright, for hours of reading) have been named after him. His grinning statues can be found everywhere, in unexpected corners of the city, bringing the touch of irony to some grand historic purlieus: gingerly seated in the Comédie Française; niched like a Bacchus upstairs at his old Quartier Latin haunt in the Café Procope; hovering downstairs in the musty crypt of the Pantheon; genially hosting a reception room (‘La Salle des Philosophes’) in the Musée Carnavalet; or peering mockingly out of a little shrubbery outside the Institut de France at the bottom of the rue de Seine.
But there is a paradox in this stately, official spread of his works and influence. Voltaire was, par excellence, the free intellectual spirit. All his life he hated organizations, systems, canonizations, state authorities, and scholarly apparatus. He quarrelled continuously with the Church, the Government, the Law, and the intellectual Establishment of his time. He even quarrelled with his fellow authors of the great Encyclopédie, that monument to the French eighteenth-century Enlightenment, because he thought the edition was too big and too long for the ordinary reader, whom he championed.
Though Voltaire began his professional life as an author of epic poems (La Henriade, 1723), of vast histories (Le Siècle de Louis XIV, 1740–1751), and of mighty verse tragedies (Œdipe, 1718, La Mort de César, 1735), his true genius emerged as the master of brief forms. Speed and brevity are the hallmark of his gift and style. His great work is always scored allegro vivace. The short story, the pungent essay, the treatise, the ‘portable’ dictionary, the provoking letter, even the stinging single-sentence epigram: these now appear as the enduring and popular vehicles of his art.
Almost everything he has to say is somewhere touched on in the twenty-six contes philosophiques which he wrote between 1738 (Micromégas) and 1773 (The White Bull). All were the fiery distillations of age, observation, and bitter experience: an eau de vie of literature. They are set over the entire globe, and also out of it; and many of them take the form of fantastic travellers’ tales. They were frequently published anonymously (like Candide), and while delighting in their success Voltaire often continued to deny authorship, and mocked the whole enterprise. His modesty was perverse. He once wrote: ‘I try to be very brief and slightly spicy: or else the Ministers and Madame de Pompadour and the clerks and the maidservants will all make paper-curlers of my pages.’
His bon mots have travelled more widely than anything else, though their precision is often difficult to translate. They give some measure of the man. ‘Use a pen, start a war.’ (‘Qui plume a guerra a.’) ‘God is not on the side of the big battalions, but of the best shots.’ ‘In this country [England] it is thought a good idea to kill an admiral, from time to time, to encourage the others.’ ‘The superfluous, that most necessary commodity.’ (‘Le superflu, chose très nécessaire.’) ‘If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.’ ‘We owe respect to the living, but to the dead we owe nothing but the truth.’ ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ This often-cited dictum of free-speech is actually an attribution, and has no precise French original. It is a paraphrase of Voltaire’s letter to Helvétius (on the burning of Helvétius’s De L’esprit in 1759), first made by S. G. Tallentyre (E. Beatrice Hall) in her book The Friends of Voltaire (1907).
Perhaps most famous of all is Candide’s wry philosophic conclusion about the lesson of his terrible adventures: ‘That is well said, replied Candide, but we must cultivate our garden.’ These, and many like them, have remained part of that mysterious European currency of the ironic. They are the verbal equivalents, the linguistic icons, of Voltaire’s mocking grin.
Brevity, irony, and a particular kind of fantastical logic were Voltaire’s chosen weapons. They might appear curiously lightweight for his chosen targets: the great armies of the European night—fanaticism, intolerance, persecution, injustice, cruelty. But Voltaire was a natural-born fighter, an intellectual pugilist. He relished combat, and he committed himself absolutely to the battle of ideas. Like a later master of the ring, he ‘floated’ and danced like a butterfly but stung like a bee. For all his elegance, he could strike with stunning ferocity. A convinced anticleric, he could write of priests of every denomination who ‘rise from an incestuous bed, manufacture a hundred versions of God, then eat and drink God, then piss and shit God.’ He never pulled his punches, and he made enemies all his life, and he made them after it.
His commitment to the freedom of ideas is historically significant. The French rightly celebrate him as the first ‘engaged’ intellectual who attached himself to specific social and political causes. For them, Voltaire laid the foundations—in an almost architectural sense—of a unique European tradition. They see a line that runs straight as the ‘Grand Axis’ in Paris (that great vista from the seventeenth-century Louvre palace to the twentieth-century Arche de la Défense), from Voltaire via Hugo and Zola to Sartre and Camus. When General de Gaulle was urged to arrest Sartre for subversion during the 1960s, he replied ‘one does not put Voltaire in the Bastille.’
For Voltaire, the essence of intellectual freedom was wit. Wit—which meant both intelligence and humour—was the primary birthright of man. The freeplay of wit brings enlightenment and also a certain kind of laughter: the laughter that distinguishes man from the beasts. But it is not a simple kind of laughter: it is also close to tears. Voltaire’s symbolic grin (as we begin to examine it) contains both these elements when he surveys the human condition. Life amuses and delights him; but it also causes him pain and grief. In his Questions sur L’Encyclopédie (1772), he wrote this entry about ‘Le Rire,’ an epitome of both his thought and his style.
Anyone who has ever laughed will hardly doubt that laughter is the sign of joy, as tears are the symptom of grief. But those who seek the metaphysical causes of laughter
are not foolish. Anyone who knows precisely why the type of joy which excites laughter should pull the zygomatic muscle (one of the thirteen muscles in the mouth) upwards towards the ears, is clever. Animals have this muscle like us. But animals never laugh with joy, anymore than they weep tears of sadness. It is true that deer excrete fluid from their eyes when they are being hunted to death. So do dogs when they are undergoing vivisection. But they never weep for their mistresses or their friends, as we do. Nor do they burst into laughter at the sight of something comic. Man is the sole animal who cries and laughs.
The simple conclusion is profoundly deceptive. The sentences gather irony even as they shorten, and the blows strike home. What is this entry really about? Is it human laughter, or human stupidity, or human cruelty? Voltaire’s wit is so often double-edged like this. His tales, his essays, his epigrams cut as we smile. And nothing is sacred. Consider what he wrote about human lovemaking, in one of his letters:
Snails have the good fortune to be both male and female … They give pleasure and receive it at the same time. Their enjoyment is not just twice as much as ours, it also lasts considerably longer. They are in sexual rapture for three or four hours at a stretch. Admittedly, that is not long compared to Eternity. But it would be a long time for you and me.
This is the intellectual physiognomy, so to speak, of Voltaire’s grin. But what gave it the particular historical twist that makes it seem like the insignia of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment? Voltaire’s father, François Arouet (originally from Poitou), was a successful lawyer to the French aristocracy. His beautiful mother (Voltaire always travelled with her portrait) died when he was only six. The youngest surviving child, he was born in November 1694 in the heart of Paris, on the Ile de la Cité.