by Will Durant
He went about his task cautiously. He offended no one, delighted everyone. He paid his respects not only to Vergennes but to Mirabeau père and Mme. du Deffand; his bald head shone at the salons and at the Académie des Sciences. A young noble, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, was proud to be his secretary. Crowds ran after him when he appeared in the streets. His books, translated and published as Oeuvres complètes, had a wide welcome; one volume, La Science du bonhomme Richard (Poor Richard’s Almanac), went through eight editions in three years. Franklin attended the Neuf Soeurs Lodge of the Freemasons, and was made an honorary member; the men he met there helped him to win France to an alliance with America. But he could not ask at once for open support from the government. Washington’s army was in retreat before Sir William Howe, and its morale seemed shattered. While waiting for more propitious events Franklin settled down in Passy, a pleasant suburb of Paris, and studied, negotiated, wrote propaganda under pseudonyms, entertained Turgot, Lavoisier, Morellet, and Cabanis, and flirted with Mme. d’Houdetot at Sannois and Mme. Hel-vétius at Auteuil; for these women had a charm that made them agelessly attractive.
Meanwhile Beaumarchais and others were sending supplies to the colonies, and French army officers were enlisting for service under Washington. Silas Deane wrote in 1776: “I am well-nigh harassed to death with applications of officers to go out to America. … Had I ten ships here I could fill them all with passengers for America.”99 All the world knows how the Marquis de Lafayette, nineteen years old, left a devoted and pregnant wife to go (April, 1777) and serve without pay in the colonial army. He confessed to Washington, “The one thing for which I thirst is glory.”100 In that quest he faced many dangers and humiliations, was wounded at Brandywine, shared the hardships of Valley Forge, and earned warm affection from the usually reserved Washington.
On October 17, 1777, a force of five thousand British soldiers and three thousand German mercenaries, coming down from Canada, was overwhelmed at Saratoga by a colonial army of twenty thousand men, and surrendered. When news of this American victory reached France the plea of Franklin, Deane, and Lee for an alliance found more acceptance among the King’s advisers. Necker opposed it, unwilling to see his almost balanced budget upset by the expenses of a war. Vergennes and Maurepas won reluctant consent from Louis XVI by warning him that England—long since aware and resentful of French aid to America—might make peace with her colonies and turn her full military force against France. On February 6, 1778, the French government signed two treaties with “the United States of America”: one established relations of trade and assistance, the other secretly stipulated that if England should declare war upon France the signatories would join in defense; neither would make peace without the other’s consent, and both would continue to fight England until American independence had been won.
On March 20 Louis received the American envoys; Franklin put on silk stockings for this occasion. In April John Adams arrived to replace Deane; he lived with Franklin at Passy, but found the old philosopher so occupied with women that little time was left for official business. He quarreled with Franklin, tried to have him recalled, failed, and returned to America. Franklin was made minister plenipotentiary to France (September, 1779). In 1780, aged seventy-four, he proposed, in vain, to Mme. Helvétius, aged sixty-one.
The war was popular with almost every Frenchman except Necker. He had to raise the great sums that France lent to America: a million livres in 1776, three million more in 1778, another million in 1779, four in 1780, four in 1781, six in 1782.101 He entered into private negotiations with Lord North (December 1, 1779) in the hope of finding a formula of peace.102 In addition to these loans he had to raise money to finance the French government, army, navy, and court. Altogether he borrowed, from bankers and the public, 530,000,000 livres.103 He coaxed the clergy into lending fourteen million, repayable in installments of a million livres a year. He still refused to raise taxes, though the prosperity of the upper classes might have made this comparatively painless; his successors were to complain that he left to them this unavoidable necessity. The financiers favored him because he allowed them, on their loans, the high interest rates which they demanded on the ground that they were running increasing risks of never being repaid.
To foster confidence in the financial community, Necker, with the King’s consent, published in January, 1781, a Compte rendu au Roi, which purported to inform the King and the nation of the government’s revenues and expenses. It brightened the picture by excluding military outlays and other “extraordinary” charges, and ignoring the national debt. The Compte rendu was bought by the public at the rate of thirty thousand copies in twelve months. Necker was acclaimed as a wizard of finance who had saved the government from bankruptcy. Catherine the Great asked Grimm to assure Necker of her “infinite admiration for his book and for his talents.”104 But the court was angry that the Account Rendered to the King had exposed so many fiscal abuses of the past, and so many pensions that went out from the treasury. Some attacked the document as merely a eulogy of the minister by himself. Maurepas became as jealous of Necker as he had been of Turgot, and joined several others in recommending his dismissal. The Queen, though she had been vexed by Necker’s economies, defended him, but Vergennes called him a revolutionist,105 and the intendants, who feared that Necker planned to undermine them by establishing more provincial assemblies, joined in the cry and hunt. Necker contrived his own fall by declaring that he would resign unless given the full title and authority of a minister, with a seat on the Conseil du Roi. Maurepas told the King that if this were done all the other ministers would abandon their posts. Louis yielded, and let Necker go (May 19, 1781). All Paris except the court mourned his fall. Joseph II sent condolences; Catherine invited him to come and direct the finances of Russia.106
On October 12, 1779, Spain joined France against England, and the combined French and Spanish fleets, 140 ships of the line, now almost equaled the 150 vessels of the British navy,107 and interrupted Britannia’s rule of the waves. This change in the balance of naval power vitally affected the American war. The main British army in America, seven thousand men under Lord Cornwallis, held a fortified position at Yorktown on the York River near Chesapeake Bay. Lafayette with five thousand men and Washington with eleven thousand (including three thousand Frenchmen under the Comte de Rochambeau) had converged on Yorktown and had captured all feasible land approaches. On September 5, 1781, a French fleet under the Comte de Grasse defeated an English squadron in the bay, and then shut off all escape by water for Cornwallis’ outnumbered force. Having exhausted his provisions, Cornwallis surrendered with all his men (October 19, 1781). France was able to say that de Grasse, Lafayette, and Rochambeau had played major roles in what proved to be the decisive event of the war.
England asked for terms. Shelburne sent separate missions to the French government and to the American envoys in France, hoping to play one ally against the other. Vergennes had already (1781) meditated peace with England on the basis of partitioning most of North America among England, France, and Spain.108 He entered into an understanding with Spain to keep the Mississippi Valley under European control.109 In November, 1782, he proposed to support the English in their endeavor to exclude the American states from the Newfoundland fisheries.110 These negotiations were quite in line with diplomatic precedents, but the American envoys, learning of them, felt warranted in operating with similar secrecy. Vergennes and Franklin agreed that each ally might deal separately with England, but that neither should sign any treaty of peace without the other’s consent.111
The American negotiators—chiefly John Jay and Franklin—played the diplomatic game brilliantly. They won for the United States not only independence but also access to the Newfoundland fisheries, half of the Great Lakes, and all the vast and rich area between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi; these were far better terms than the American Congress had expected to obtain. On November 30, 1782, Jay, Franklin, and Adams signed a preliminary treaty with En
gland. Formally this violated the agreement with Vergennes, but it stipulated that it was not to have validity until England had made peace with France. Vergennes complained, then accepted the situation. On September 3, 1783, the definitive treaty was signed—“in the name of the most Holy and undivided Trinity”112—between England and America at Paris, between England, France, and Spain at Versailles. Franklin remained in France as United States ambassador till 1785. When he died in Philadelphia, April 17, 1790, the French Constituent Assembly wore mourning for three days.
The French government was made bankrupt by the war, and that bankruptcy led to the Revolution. Altogether France had spent a billion livres on the conflict, and the interest on the national debt was dragging the treasury down day by day toward insolvency. Nevertheless that debt was an affair between the government and the rich; it hardly affected the people, many of whom had prospered from the stimulation of industry. The monarchy was critically injured, but not the nation; otherwise how could history explain the success with which the economy and the armies of Revolutionary France withstood half of Europe from 1792 to 1815?
Certainly the spirit of France was uplifted. Statesmen saw in the peace of 1783 a triumphant resurrection from the debasement of 1763. The philosophes hailed the result as a victory for their views; and indeed, said de Tocqueville, “The Americans seemed to have executed what our writers had conceived.”113 Many Frenchmen saw in the achievement of the colonies an inspiring presage of democracy spreading through Europe. Democratic ideas infected even the aristocracy and the parlements. The Declaration of Rights issued by the Virginia constitutional convention on June 12, 1776, and the Bill of Rights added to the American Constitution, became part models for the Declaration of the Rights of Man promulgated by the French Constituent Assembly on August 26, 1789.
It was the final glory, the culminating chivalry, of feudal France that it died in helping to establish democracy in America. It is true that most French statesmen thought in terms of revitalizing France. But the enthusiasm of nobles like Lafayette and Rochambeau was real; they risked their lives time and again in serving the newborn state. “I was far from being the only one,” wrote the young Comte de Ségur, “whose heart palpitated at the sound of the awakening of liberty, struggling to shake off the yoke of arbitrary power.”114 The famous surrender of feudal rights by the aristocrats in the Constituent Assembly (August 4, 1789) was here prefigured and prepared. It was a brave hara-kiri. France gave money and blood to America, and received in return a new and powerful impulse to freedom.
CHAPTER XXXV
Death and the Philosophers
1774-1807
I. VOLTAIRE FINALE
1. Twilight in Ferney
HE was eighty in 1774. He had some fainting spells in these years; we call them little strokes, he called them petites avertissements. He shrugged them off, being long since accustomed to dying; he lived on and savored the adulation of kings and queens. Catherine the Great called him “the most illustrious man of our age.”1 Frederick the Great reported in 1775: “People tear at one another in the struggle for the busts of Voltaire at the manufactory of porcelain” in Berlin, “where they do not turn them out fast enough to meet the demand.”2 Ferney had long since become a goal of pilgrimage for intellectual Europe; now it was almost a religious shrine. Hear Mme. Suard after her visit in 1775: “I have seen M. de Voltaire. The transports of St. Theresa never surpassed those which I experienced on seeing this great man. It seemed to me that I was in the presence of a god, a god cherished and adored, to whom I had at last been able to show all my gratitude and all my respect.”3 When he passed through Geneva in 1776 he was nearly stifled by the enthusiastic crowd that surrounded him.4
He continued, even in his eighties, to take an interest in politics and literature. He celebrated the accession of Louis XVI with an Éloge historique de la raison in which, by the device of prediction, he suggested some reforms that might endear the new ruler to posterity:
The laws will be made uniform. … Pluralities [several benefices held by one ecclesiastic], superfluous expenditure, will be cut away. … To the poor who work hard will be given the immense riches of certain idle men who have taken a vow of poverty. The marriages of a hundred thousand [Protestant] families useful to the state will no longer be regarded as concubinage, nor the children held illegitimate. … Minor offenses will no longer be punished as great crimes. … Torture will no longer be employed. … There will cease to be two powers [state and Church], because there can exist but one—that of the king’s law in a monarchy, that of the nation in a republic. … Lastly, we shall dare to pronounce the word tolerance? 5
Louis accomplished many of these reforms, barring the ecclesiastical. Sincerely pious, and convinced that the loyalty of the Church was an indispensable support of his throne, he deplored the influence of Voltaire. In July, 1774, his government instructed the intendant of Burgundy to keep watch on the aged heretic, and to seize all his papers immediately after his death; Marie Antoinette sympathized with Voltaire, wept at a performance of his Tancrède, and said she would like to “embrace the author”;6 he sent her some pretty verses.
He had an optimistic spell when his friend Turgot was made controller general of finance; but when Turgot was dismissed he fell into a dark Pascalian pessimism about human affairs. He recovered happiness by adopting a daughter. Reine Philiberte de Varicourt was introduced to him in 1775 as a girl whose family, too poor to provide her with a dowry, was planning to send her to a nunnery. Her innocent beauty warmed the old man’s bones; he took her into his ménage, called her “Belle et Bonne,” and found a husband for her—the young and moneyed Marquis de Villette. They were married in 1777, and spent their honeymoon at Ferney. “My young lovers are a joy to see,” he wrote; “they are working night and day to make a little philosopher for me.”7 The childless octogenarian rejoiced at the thought of being a father, if only by proxy.
Meanwhile he composed his last drama, Irène, and sent it to the Comédie-Française. Its reception (January, 1778) created a problem. The custom of the company was to stage each play in the order of its acceptance; two other dramas had been received and approved before Voltaire’s—one by Jean-François de Laharpe, one by Nicolas Barthe. Both authors at once waived their prior rights to performance. Barthe wrote to the company:
A new play by Monsieur de Voltaire has been read to you. You were on the point of considering L’Homme personnel. There is only one thing for you to do: do not think of my play any longer. I am aware … of the prescribed procedure. But what writer would dare to call upon the rule in a case like this? Monsieur stands above the law like a king. If I am not to have the honor of making my contribution to the pleasure of the public, the least I can do is not to stand in the way of the public delight that will surely be occasioned by a new drama from the pen that created Zaire and Mérope. I hope you will stage this play as soon as possible. May its author, like Sophocles, continue to write tragedies until he is a hundred years old, and may he die as you, messieurs, live—flooded with applause.8
When news of this reached Voltaire he played lovingly with the idea of going to Paris to direct the staging of his play. After all, there was no official or express prohibition of his coming to Paris. What if the clergy should attack him in their pulpits? He was accustomed to that. What if they persuaded the King to send him to the Bastille? Well, he was accustomed to that too. What a joy it would be to see the great city again, now the capital of the Enlightenment! How it must have changed since his last flight from it twenty-eight years ago! And besides, Mme. Denis, who had long since tired of Ferney, had often begged him to take her back to Paris. The Marquis de Villette offered to put him up in comfort in his hotel on the Rue de Beaune. A dozen messages from Paris cried out: Come!
He decided to go. If the trip killed him it would only advance the inevitable triflingly; it was time to die. The servants of his household, the caretakers of his farm, the peasants on his land, the workers in his industrial colony, p
rotested and mourned; he promised to return in six weeks, but they were sadly sure that they would never see him again; and what successor would treat them as kindly as he had done? When the caravan left Ferney (February 5, 1778) his dependents gathered about him; many of them wept, and he himself could not hold back his tears. Five days later, after a three-hundred-mile trip, he sighted Paris.
2. Apotheosis
At the city gates the officials checked the carriage for contraband. “By my faith, gentlemen,” Voltaire assured them, “I believe there is nothing here contraband except myself.”9 Wagnière, his secretary, assures us that his master “had enjoyed all the way the best of health. I never saw him in a more agreeable humor; his gaiety was delightful.”10
Rooms had been prepared for him in the residence of M. de Villette at the corner of the Rue de Beaune and the Quai des Théatins on the left bank of the Seine. Immediately after alighting from his coach Voltaire walked along the quay to the nearby home of his friend d’Argental, now seventyeight years old. The Count was not at home, but he soon appeared at the Hôtel Villette. “I have left off dying to come and see you,” said Voltaire. Another ancient friend sent a note of welcome; he replied with his usual obituary flourish: “I arrive dead, and I wish to be revived only to throw myself at the knees of Madame la Marquise du Deffand.”11 The Marquis de Jaucourt brought word that Louis XVI was furious at Voltaire’s coming to Paris, but Mme. de Polignac came to assure him that Marie Antoinette would protect him.12 The clergy wished to have him expelled, but no official ban forbidding Voltaire’s visit could be found in the records, and Louis confined himself to rejecting the Queen’s plea that the world-famous writer be allowed to present himself at court.13