Sidetracks

by Richard Holmes

  Voltaire withheld the publication of Micromégas for several years. Meanwhile, on the strength of his growing reputation as a historian, he sought to place himself back at the centre of political power in Europe. It was the time of the ‘Enlightened Despots’, and Voltaire flirted with them. He began a mutually flattering correspondence with Frederick the Great of Prussia, and much to Madame du Châtelet’s consternation (she was not invited), Voltaire visited his court. He was then in turn invited back to Versailles, where he was appointed Royal Historiographer to Louis XV in 1745, and elected to the Académie Française in 1746. Again, Madame du Châtelet was largely excluded from this glory, and doubts and recriminations began on both sides.

  Voltaire now wrote his second great conte philosophique, entitled Zadig (1748). This time he used the conventions of the oriental tale, with its thousand and one twists, to show the absurdities of the supposedly benevolent workings of Providence. The young Zadig, ‘an affectionate young man who did not always wish to be right’, pursues his fortune (he is briefly Prime Minister of Babylon) and the beautiful Astarte through a series of wildly improbable adventures, accompanied by talking parrots and other portents. The story is notable for its two, alternative endings. One is happy: ‘Zadig glorified heaven.’ The other is hopeless: ‘But where shall I go? In Egypt they’ll make me a slave. In Arabia they’ll probably have me burned to death. In Babylon they’ll strangle me. But somehow I must find out what has become of Astarte. Let us depart, and see what my sorry destiny still has in store for me.’

  The second ending was nearer the truth, for Voltaire. In his absence from Cirey, Madame du Châtelet took a lover, became pregnant, and died in childbirth in September 1749. Voltaire was half-mad with grief and regret. At Cirey he fell down the stairs. In Paris he roamed through the streets at night, weeping, and believing his happiness was lost for ever. He quarrelled with the French king, and unwisely accepted an official post at Frederick’s court in Berlin. (The huge pink-and-blue marble working desk that Frederick gave him, presumably as a form of paperweight, has now somehow found its way to the Café Procope.) Voltaire remained for three unhappy years, finally fleeing in 1753, to be imprisoned briefly on Frederick’s instructions at Frankfurt. The Enlightened Despots of Europe were finished with Voltaire.

  But Voltaire, as it turned out, was also finished with them. With his amazing powers of resilience, he again chose independence. He moved to Geneva in 1754, rented an estate at Les Délices, and finding the intellectual air (and the banking) to his liking, finally settled just inside the French border (so he could slip easily into exile) at Ferney in 1758. This would be his home until the final months of his life. Immediately, he began to write his masterpiece, Candide, or Optimism, which became the epitome of all his adventures.

  Voltaire was not alone at Ferney. He had taken a new lover: a fat, blonde, domestically-minded young woman known to history as Madame Denis. It is said that she dressed like a Watteau, but looked like a Rubens. Madame Denis also happened to be Voltaire’s niece, his sister’s daughter. This mildly incestuous arrangement seemed to work admirably. Voltaire’s enemies said she was little more than a coarse housekeeper and crude bed-warmer. But she proved a skilled secretary and administrator, she obviously adored her capricious uncle, and Voltaire’s erotic letters to her (he was now in his late fifties) are hymns of autumnal concupiscence.

  He wrote from Germany, while they were still apart, in 1753: ‘My heart is pierced by everything you do. None of my tragedies contains a heroine like you. How can you say I don’t love you! My child, I shall love you until the grave. I get more jealous as I get older … I want to be the only man who has the joy of fucking you … I have an erection as I write this, and I kiss your beautiful nipples and your lovely bottom a thousand times. Now then, tell me that I don’t love you!’

  With Madame Denis at Ferney, Voltaire reconstructed the lost happiness of Cirey on a grander basis. His investments had made him rich, and he could create a little enlightened kingdom of his own. He spread himself en grand seigneur, developing a model farm, building a theatre and a chapel (‘erected for God by Voltaire’ over the lintel), employing some sixty servants and even starting a silk farm for the manufacture of fine stockings to the gentry. Not only letters but visitors now came from all over Europe, including the young James Boswell, who questioned him on the immortality of the soul (‘desirable, but not probable,’ thought Voltaire) and excessively admired his buxom Swiss serving girls. Voltaire’s grin seemed genial to Boswell. Voltaire told him: ‘There is evidently a sun, and there is evidently a God. So let us have a religion too. Then all men will be brothers under the sun.’ Voltaire, like Candide, had decided to cultivate his garden.

  But Candide is not a treatise on gardening, or even on happiness. It is more like a treatise on misery. From his stronghold at Ferney, Voltaire looked round the world and saw squalor, injustice, disease, ignorance, cruelty and fanaticism. The figure of Candide, the young man from Westphalia ‘whose soul was written upon his countenance’, is a sort of brilliant animation or personification of that all-seeing Voltairian gaze. Candide travels the earth – Germany, Portugal, England, Eldorado, Surinam, Constantinople, Italy, France – and witnesses and suffers the absurdities and horrors of existence. It is a catalogue raisonné of historical disasters: the Lisbon earthquake, the Spanish Inquisition, the German wars, the South American Jesuits, even the English executing a heroic admiral on his own quarterdeck.

  The clear glassy fire of the narrative is unique. Candide has been described as The Thousand and One Nights, condensed by Swift, and translated by Montaigne. Yet its speed and wit and counterpoint are wholly Voltairian. Journeying on with his faithful companions – Pangloss the Optimist, Martin the Pessimist, Cunégonde the fat Princess – Candide plays out a constant dialogue between hope and despair, innocence and disenchantment.

  ‘But for what purpose was this world created, then?’ asked Candide.

  ‘To drive us all mad,’ replied Martin.

  ‘But don’t you find it absolutely amazing,’ continued

  Candide, ‘the way those two girls I told you about – the ones who lived in the land of Lobeiros – loved those two monkeys?’

  The question is pure Candide; but it is Candide’s reply that is pure Voltaire. Moreover Voltaire’s world of rational absurdities is not safely fixed in the eighteenth century. Again and again, it flashes up towards our own. Fundamentalism, genocide, civil war, ideological persecution, environmental disaster: all are foreseen. Uneasy shadows stir at the edge of each bright page.

  After the good Dr Pangloss has been temporarily mislaid from the narrative in Germany (these sudden disappearances of the faithful companions are a favourite device), he turns up again in Bulgaria: gaunt, racked with coughs, and half his nose rotted away. The cause, he tells the appalled Candide, is love.

  You remember Paquette, that pretty lady’s maid to our noble Baroness. Well, in her arms I tasted the delights of paradise, and in turn they have led me to these torments of hell. She had the Foul Disease, and may have died of it by now. Paquette was made a gift of it by a learned Franciscan, who had traced it back to its source. For he had got it from an old Countess, who had contracted it from a Captain in the Cavalry, who owed it to a Marchioness, who had it from a page-boy, who caught it from a Jesuit, who – during his novitiate – inherited it in a direct line from one of Christopher Columbus’s shipmates. For my part, I shall bequeath it to nobody, because I’m dying of it.

  Needless to say, Dr Pangloss, being an optimist, survives. But he only lives to insist that his lethal infection was ‘a necessary ingredient’ in the best of all possible worlds. Without it, how could Columbus have discovered America, or the cafés of Europe have served delicious hot chocolate drinks?

  Voltaire denied authorship of Candide, and called it ‘une coionnerie’ (in effect, ‘a load of old balls’). But it immediately bounced right across Europe, first published in Geneva, and then instantly pirated in Paris, Amsterdam,
London and Brussels. It was the greatest international best-seller of its time. In its first year it sold over thirty thousand copies, an astonishing figure for a work of fiction in the mid-eighteenth century, over three times the sales of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) in a similar period.

  With Candide – ‘my diabolical little book’ – Voltaire had broken through to a new international, middle-class readership, and created the voice that all Europe recognized. For the remaining nineteen years of his life at Ferney, stories, satires, squibs and treatises poured from his pen. Largely ignoring the kings, the despots, the courts and the academies, Voltaire wrote and published directly for a new liberal intelligentsia: a Fourth Estate who began to believe that the world could be changed through the battle of ideas. His first edition of The Portable Philosophic Dictionary was published in 1764, with 118 alphabetical entries, a true ‘pocket’ book. (Subsequent editions enlarged it to 600 entries.) Its compact declarations – some less than a page – on Love, Laughter, Fanaticism, Equality, Liberty, Torture, Tolerance, War, Dogma, Virtue and Beauty, went round the world. Voltaire launched his fighting motto: ‘Ecrasez l’infame’ – a vivid but almost untranslatable rallying cry to the liberal conscience everywhere. One version would be: ‘Crush bigotry and superstition (the infamous thing).’ Another, more spirited version, might run: ‘Make war on the fanatics.’

  Voltaire now engaged with the authorities in a new and daring way. He began to take up specific causes, particularly cases of injustice or malpractice, and fight them through the press. The first and most famous was that of Jean Calas in 1762.

  Monsieur Calas was an ordinary, middle-class citizen of Toulouse, in south-west France. He owned a successful cloth shop in the rue des Filatiers, and lived above the premises with his English wife Rose, and their grown-up children. Monsieur Calas and his wife were Protestants, in a city that was overwhelmingly Catholic and had a long history of persecutions dating back to the Albigensian wars. Their eldest son, Marc-Antoine Calas, who was twenty-eight, had converted to Catholicism. One evening in October 1761, Marc-Antoine’s body was found hanging from a rafter in the lower part of the shop. Jean Calas was arrested, tortured, tried for murder, broken on a wheel, and after a two-hour respite for ‘confession’ (which was not obtained), executed by strangulation. The Toulouse law court pronounced that Monsieur Calas’s motive for murdering his son was Marc-Antoine’s conversion to Catholicism.

  When news of the case reached Ferney, Voltaire’s lawyer’s instinct was aroused. After extensive investigations and a long, searching interview with Calas’s younger son, Voltaire took up the case in April 1762. He was convinced that there had been a grave miscarriage of justice, born out of fanatical religious prejudice in Toulouse.

  His grounds for appeal rested on two salient points. First, Jean Calas was not in the least anti-Catholic. His family servant of many years was Catholic, and one of his other sons, after also converting to Catholicism, had continuing financial support from Calas. So there was no convincing motive for murder. Second, the twenty-eight-year-old Marc-Antoine had been the one misfit in the family. He had been an endless source of worry to his parents: moody, immature, theatrical. He had failed to marry, failed to become a lawyer, and failed to pay large gambling debts. He had dined with the Calas family on the very evening of his death, and left early, ‘feeling unwell’. Almost certainly he had committed suicide in a fit of depression. So there had been no murder anyway.

  Voltaire pursued justice on several fronts, with all his customary energy (he was now nearly seventy). He contacted government ministers in Paris, and drew Madame de Pompadour to his cause. He wrote letters to all the contributors to the Encyclopédie. He publicized the case in the English newspapers. Most important of all, he published his classic Treatise on Toleration (1762). It begins with a brilliant (and indeed thrilling) forensic analysis of the Calas case, and ends with a moving declaration of the principle of universal tolerance.

  Let all men remember that they are brothers! Let them hold in horror the tyranny that is exercised over men’s souls … If the curse of war is still inevitable, let us not hasten to destroy each other where we have civil peace. From Siam to California, in a thousand different tongues, let us each use the brief moment of our existence, to bless God’s goodness which has given us this precious gift.

  In June 1764 the judgement against Jean Calas was annulled by the Supreme Paris court. Legal compensation for the family was never obtained, but the King was shamed into providing a large grant in aid. Voltaire had achieved a small legal victory, but a great moral one. He took up several similar cases over the next decade, and the authorities trembled whenever he moved. (The most terrible concerned a young man in Abbeville, twenty-year-old La Barre, who was convicted of singing blasphemous songs, urinating on a tomb, and possessing Voltaire’s Dictionary. He had his tongue pulled out, his right arm chopped off, and was executed by burning. For years Voltaire supported his family and friends, seeking compensation. But La Barre was a chevalier.)

  Voltaire had established what were to become the crucial weapons of the ‘engaged intellectual’ over the next two hundred years: investigation, exposure, dispassionate argument, ridicule and ‘the oxygen of publicity’. Above all he had established the fighting power of plain truth, ‘the facts of the case’, the small stubborn foot soldiers of veracity, which can rout the greatest armies of church or state by using ‘the best shots’. He had become what Pierre Lepape calls ‘Voltaire the Conqueror’.

  Voltaire’s Treatise on Toleration contains one vital exception to the universal principle. Philosophically this has profound implications for those who have inherited it, from the French Revolutionaries and the American Founding Fathers down to our present governors. Chapter 18 is entitled ‘The One Case in which Intolerance is a Human Right’. In it, Voltaire grasps the nettle that stings all liberals. How can we tolerate those groups in society who are themselves intolerant, and thereby threaten the principle itself?

  Voltaire’s answer is succinct: we cannot. For the individual, toleration is an absolute right and an absolute duty. But for society and its legislators, toleration has a limit. Where intolerance becomes criminal, the laws of the liberal state cannot tolerate it. And the fanatical intolerance of any social group, where it is sufficient to ‘trouble society’ at large, is always to be condemned as criminal. This is Voltaire’s ‘one case’.

  Here is the vital passage. ‘For any Government to abrogate its right to punish the misdeeds of citizens, it is necessary that these misdeeds should not class as crimes. They only class as crimes when they trouble society at large. And they trouble society at large, the moment that they inspire fanaticism. Consequently, if men are to deserve tolerance, they must begin by not being fanatics.’

  The most problematic issue raised by Voltaire’s ‘one exception’ to tolerance is painfully illustrated by his own attitude to the Jews. How exactly do we measure the supposed ‘fanaticism’ of another social or religious group, who may merely hold strong beliefs and separate traditions, without falling into ‘fanaticism’ ourselves? Voltaire’s weird, anti-Jewish prejudice runs like a barbed thread throughout his work; over thirty of the entries in the Philosophical Dictionary contain anti-Jewish statements; and the article on Toleration itself refers to the Jews as historically ‘the most intolerant and cruel of all the peoples of Antiquity’.

  It has been argued that Voltaire’s position was essentially anti-Biblical and satirical – part of his general attack on the ludicrous extremes of Old Testament Christianity – rather than anti-Semitic in any modern sense. Certainly the persecution of the Jews by the Inquisition appalled him.

  As Prince Hamlet says, ‘Aye, there’s the rub.’ Voltaire had not shown how the battle could be won. But he had defined the field of combat. For him, ‘fanaticism’ is expressed essentially by religious or racial persecution, the two great curses of civilization. Two hundred years on, one might think he was still right. Wherever there are pogroms, lethal fatw
as, book burnings, race riots, ethnic cleansing, apartheids, his spirit looks down grinning with pain. But out of that grin is born the notion of Human Rights, a term he specifically uses.

  The British philosopher A. J. Ayer once observed that Voltaire’s concept of toleration was based on one of the most noble dreams of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. All religions and racial codes prepared us for the emergence of one universal, rational morality which would gradually come to be accepted over the entire globe.

  ‘Voltaire … wishes to maintain that there is a law of morality that holds universally, like Newton’s law of gravitation.’ The good action, the proper decision, the right thing to do, should be as obvious as the fall of an apple.

  Voltaire lived on at his beloved Ferney until he was over eighty. There are many accounts of his kindly, eccentric household, and sheet after sheet of brilliant caricatures made by Jean Huber, a local Swiss artist, whom Voltaire allowed to make mocking sketches of his most intimate moments. (When Voltaire got irritated with his intrusions, Huber merely quoted from Voltaire on Toleration.) One of Huber’s best paintings is of Voltaire in his bedroom, standing on one foot, pulling on his knickerbockers, and dictating a letter. Voltaire seems to have lived permanently in a series of brilliantly coloured dressing gowns, with silk slippers that were always falling off his feet.

  He never stopped writing, and guests record that he was often at his desk for fifteen hours a day. In the 1770s he wrote or dictated over five hundred letters a year. In 1770 he began a series of philosophic essays, Questions on the Encyclopaedia, which eventually extended to nine volumes. He continued to add to his contes philosophiques, still usually published anonymously, slipped into newspapers or surreptitiously circulated in pamphlets purporting to be printed in Brussels or Amsterdam. Notable among these are The Ingenue (1767), a sly attack on Rousseau’s theories of education; The Princess of Babylon (1768), an interesting excursion into sexual politics; and The White Bull (1773).