Voltaire’s ‘Le Mondain’ presents its author as a refined connoisseur of the glorious present: a would-be aristocrat, surrounded with Gobelin tapestries, works of art, fine silverware and an ornate carriage. Rousseau hailed the wisdom of François Fénelon, who in the most widely read book of the Enlightenment, The Adventures of Telemachus (1699), claimed that the Sun King’s project of grandeur through promotion of luxury had created deep economic, social and moral imbalances in France. He asserted that the moral order was imperilled by the rich, who, drowning in luxury, had cut themselves off from any possibility of sympathy for the poor.
Voltaire’s biggest foe was the Catholic Church, and religious faith generally. Rousseau, though an agnostic and deeply critical of religious authority, saw religion as having a crucial bearing on the morality of ordinary people; it also made the life of the poor tolerable. In his view, the Enlightenment philosophes, aligned with the rich, were contemptuous of the simple feelings of ordinary people. In his critique of Voltaire’s portrait of the Prophet Mohammed, Rousseau claimed that those attacking religious fanaticism were infected by its secular variant. ‘The most cruel intolerance,’ he wrote, ‘was, at bottom, the same on both sides.’ Voltaire riposted that Rousseau ‘speaks as many insults of the philosophers as of Jesus Christ’.
Voltaire saw monarchs as likely agents and allies of enlightened people like himself, who could expedite the making of history and the advance of reason. In his vision the rational man of action inevitably triumphs over the dumb hordes of ‘canaille’, such as the Poles, about whom he quipped: ‘One Pole – a charmer; two Poles – a brawl; three Poles – ah, that is the Polish Question.’ According to Voltaire, Russia under the modernizing autocrat Peter the Great ‘represented perhaps the greatest époque in European life since the discovery of the New World’. He exhorted Catherine to teach European enlightenment at gunpoint to the Poles and Turks.
Rousseau, on the other hand, believed that ‘liberty is not inherent in any form of government, it is in the heart of the free man’. He looked forward to a world without despots and monarchies. He thought of Catherine, whose partition of Poland had been applauded by Voltaire and other philosophes, as ‘a powerful and cunning aggressor’. Rousseau advised the Poles to enter into a pact with the Ottoman Empire; he told them that the Turks lacked in ‘enlightenment and finesse’ but had ‘more honesty and common sense’ than the Christian powers of Europe.
Getting to Like the Despots
The gulf between Voltaire and Rousseau was intellectual, moral, temperamental and fundamentally political. From the vantage point of the present, however, their disagreements over the meaning of modernity for backward peoples in the East have the profoundest implications.
Voltaire was an unequivocal top-down modernizer, like most of the Enlightenment philosophes, and an enraptured chronicler in particular of Peter the Great. Russian peasants had paid a steep price for Russia’s Westernization, exposed as they were to more oppression and exploitation as Peter tried in the seventeenth century to build a strong military and bureaucratic state. Serfdom, near extinct in most of Western Europe by the thirteenth century, was actually strengthened by Peter in Russia. Coercing his nobles into lifetime service to the state, postponing the emergence of a civil society, Peter the Great waged war endlessly. But among educated Europeans, who until 1789 saw civilization as something passed down from the enlightened few to the ignorant many, Russia was an admirably progressive model.
In the eyes of the Enlightenment philosophers, Russia seemed to have taken a big step towards Europe with its improved military technology and a rationalized organization of administration and finance. Thus, Montesquieu set aside his critique of despotism to hail Peter for giving ‘the manners of Europe to a European nation’. It was Diderot who in 1766 recommended to Catherine his protégé, the sculptor Étienne-Maurice Falconet; the latter’s monument to Peter on the embankment of the Neva river, the Bronze Horseman, became the symbol of Westernizing Russia. Diderot himself came away from Russia marvelling at how quickly the Russians were becoming French.
Voltaire asserted in his very first encomium to Peter in 1731 that the latter civilized his benighted subjects, and carved a European-style city out of the wilderness. Russian noblemen spoke French, pulled on silk stockings, donned a wig, and wore a sword. ‘At present,’ Voltaire gushed, ‘there are in St Petersburg French actors and Italian operas. Magnificence and even taste have in everything succeeded barbarism.’
In his later hagiography of Peter, which Jean d’Alembert, Diderot’s colleague in the Encyclopédie, privately described as ‘vomit’, Voltaire perfected his style as a later apologist for Catherine’s imperialism. Peter may have been a warmonger, he argued, but war was always a means for him, not an end. He fought in order to remove impediments to commerce and manufacturing. He showed an admirable spirit of learning, curiosity and experimentation, whether in warfare or administration.
Rousseau, on the other hand, treated Russia’s Westernization with coruscating scorn. In The Social Contract (1762), Rousseau accused Peter of having condemned Russians to painful self-division:
He wished to produce at once Germans or Englishmen, when he should have begun by making Russians; he prevented his subjects from ever becoming what they might have been, by persuading them that they were what they were not. It is in this way that a French tutor trains his pupils to shine for a moment in childhood, and then to be forever a nonentity.
This was a devastating verdict on Peter’s pioneering venture; it went straight to the heart of the Russian dilemma, as experienced and articulated by Russia’s greatest writers and thinkers over the next two centuries. In the eighteenth century, however, Rousseau was alone in his vision of how the Enlightenment programme of willed, abstract social reform could cause deracination, self-hatred and vindictive rage. His colleagues, like later European and American supporters of authoritarian regimes, had invested their hopes in modernization from above; they made Rousseau suspect that intellectuals constituted another self-seeking priesthood.
The Intellectual as Networker
The mutually beneficial relationship between the philosophes and Russia’s despotic ruler, Catherine, verified Rousseau’s misgivings about the literati. In 1762, Catherine acceded to the Russian throne, and immediately started looking for respectability and legitimacy. It was common knowledge in Europe that she had attained power by deposing her husband Peter III and sidelining her son Paul from the succession; it was also rumoured that she had murdered her husband. But none of this mattered as she started to pose as Peter the Great’s intellectual heir, opening her court to the thinkers of enlightened Europe.
Catherine outpaced even Frederick of Prussia in her overtures to the philosophes. When the publication of the Encyclopédie was forbidden in Paris, she offered to move the entire operation to St Petersburg. She gave Diderot a lifetime sinecure by purchasing his library for a handsome sum. In the very first year of her reign, at the age of thirty-four, she asked D’Alembert to become the tutor of her heir, and opened a mutually flattering correspondence with Voltaire, who at nearly seventy was the patriarch of the European republic of letters.
Voltaire was soon turned, with Catherine’s encouragement, into a patron saint for the secular Russian aristocracy. Voltairianism, vaguely signifying rationalism, scepticism and reformism, became her official ideology. Almost all of Voltaire was translated into Russian; no library was deemed complete if it did not contain a collection of Voltaire’s works in the original French. The high-backed easy chair on which Voltaire was often depicted sitting was much imitated among Russian aristocrats. (It is known even today as a ‘Vol’terovskoe kreslo’ or ‘Voltaire chair’.)
Another of Catherine’s regular correspondents was Frédéric-Melchior Grimm, who rephrased the Lord’s Prayer to read ‘Our mother, who art in Russia…’ and changed the Creed into ‘I believe in one Catherine.’ Catherine eventually repaid his attentions by appointing him as her minister in Hamburg. Grim
m, faithful to the last, zealously endorsed Catherine’s plan to vivisect Poland, comparing the country to a ‘little slut’ who needed someone to ‘shorten her petticoats’.
Helvétius dedicated his work On Man, His Intellectual Faculties and His Education to Catherine, the ‘bulwark against Asiatic despotism’. Jeremy Bentham, whose brother had entered Russian service, was one of her fervid enthusiasts. Diderot actually travelled to St Petersburg in 1773, and was so carried away with enthusiasm by his role as counsellor to the Empress that he kept pinching Catherine’s thigh, prompting the latter to put a table between them.
But it was Voltaire who brought a truly religious ardour to the cult of Catherine. As the Empress entered into war with Poland and Turkey in 1768, Voltaire became her cheerleader. Catherine claimed to be protecting the rights of religious minorities residing in the territories of her opponents. The tactic, repeatedly deployed by later European imperialists in Asia and Africa, had the expected effect on Voltaire, who promptly declared Catherine’s imperialistic venture to be a crusade for the Enlightenment.
He had initially hoped for Frederick to give him the pleasure of seeing ‘the Muslims driven out of Europe’. Now he thought that ‘these barbarians deserve to be punished by a heroine … It is clear that people who neglect all the fine arts, and who shut up women, deserve to be exterminated.’ The Poles, like the Muslims in Voltaire’s view, were hopelessly backward. ‘I still give five hundred years to the Poles to make the fabrics of Lyon,’ he wrote. He reminded them of the benefits of modernization, such as Catherine’s acquisition of Diderot’s library: ‘My friends, begin by learning how to read and then someone will buy libraries for you.’
From his retirement home on Lake Geneva, Voltaire sent Catherine a design for a two-man chariot (he also managed to cajole her into buying some very expensive watches produced by his company in Switzerland). He convinced himself that ‘if ever the Turks should be chased from Europe, it will be by the Russians’. Envisaging conquered Constantinople as the new capital of the Russian Empire, Voltaire asked ‘your majesty for permission to come and place myself at her feet’ as she sat on ‘Mustapha’s throne’ in her new court on the Bosporus.
He followed her military advance closely, wondering in his letters whether ‘you are also the mistress of Taganrog’. In 1769 he wrote to Catherine, ‘Madame, your imperial majesty gives me new life in killing the Turks.’ The Turks, and Muslims generally, were then settling into the French and British imagination as an effeminate and decadent people. In 1772 he imagined a mock crusade in which Catherine would ‘pull the ears of Mustapha and send him back to Asia’. Voltaire regretted his immobility: ‘I wish I had at least been able to help you kill a few Turks.’ In his last letter in 1777 his quasi-erotic obsession with Catherine’s power to repulse the feminized Turks reached its zenith: ‘I prostrate myself,’ he declared, ‘at your feet, and I cry in my agony: Allah, Allah, Catherine rezoul, Allah.’
* * *
Rousseau naturally developed a dislike of Catherine – a kind of deflected hostility towards Voltaire, which then attracted him to ‘modernizing’ Russia’s victim, the Poles. But it was Catherine herself who finally repudiated her expedient alliance with the philosophes. Like most European potentates, she recoiled from the French Revolution, that ‘monstrous child’, as she said, ‘of perverse and subversive teachings’. Encouraging the kings of Prussia and Austria to wipe out the ‘Jacobin pest’ in Paris, she herself annexed large bits of Poland on the pretext of fighting Jacobinism in Warsaw. Poland effectively ceased to exist for more than a century – a geographical erasure facilitated by Enlightenment philosophers.
The philosophes’ fervent support of despotic and imperialistic modernizers in ‘uncivilized’ societies revealed, very early on, a near-fatal contradiction in their project of human emancipation. They saw the exercise of reason as the best way to secure individual autonomy, a way of life not determined solely by the contingencies of nature and fate or constrained by religious authority. But, as Tocqueville shrewdly pointed out, determined to ‘rebuild society according to an entirely new plan, which each of them elaborated by the light of reason alone’, these men of letters developed:
a taste for abstract, general theories of government, theories in which they trusted blindly. Living as they did almost totally removed from practical life, they had no experience that might have tempered their natural passions. Nothing warned them of the obstacles that existing realities might pose to even the most desirable reforms. They had no idea of the perils that invariably accompany even the most necessary revolutions. Indeed, they had no premonition of them because the complete absence of political liberty ensured that they not only failed to grasp the world of affairs but actually failed to see it. They had nothing to do with that world and were incapable of recognizing what others did within it.
Such cosseted writers and artists would in the twentieth century transfer their fantasies of an ideal society to Soviet leaders, who seemed to be bringing a superhuman energy and progressive rhetoric to Peter the Great’s rational schemes of social engineering. Stalin’s Russia, as it ruthlessly eradicated its religious and evidently backward enemies in the 1930s, came to ‘constitute’, the historian Stephen Kotkin writes, ‘a quintessential Enlightenment utopia’. But the Enlightenment philosophes had already shown, in their blind adherence to Catherine, how reason could degenerate into dogma and new, more extensive forms of domination: authoritarian state structures, violent top-down manipulation of human affairs (often couched in terms of humanitarian concern) and indifference to suffering.
The trahison des clercs of the Enlightenment philosophes seems to have helped Rousseau identify a whole schema of modernity in which power flows unequally to a networked elite, especially a smug Republic of Letters that actively accentuates social differences at home while pursuing fantasies of universal transformation abroad. Rousseau of course never had much time for enlightened absolutism. He also had the advantage of knowing that the age of the masses was at hand. ‘We are approaching a state of crisis and the age of revolutions,’ he wrote in 1762 in Émile. ‘I hold it impossible that the great monarchies of Europe still have long to survive.’ He rejected all forms of despotism, enlightened or otherwise, in the name of popular self-government.
Rousseau had inaugurated his career with a declaration of war on his own cosmopolitan realm of privilege and wealth. He continued to insist that the artists and poets, weaving ‘garlands of flowers to cover the iron chains’, abetted the corruptions and oppressions of an unequal society. As he grew older, he vigorously sought to expose intellectuals as intolerant secular priests, whose apparently universalist philosophy was sectarian ideology in disguise. Writers and intellectuals, he alleged, were the biggest victims of amour propre, who flatter to deceive, and provide literary and moral cover to the unjust and the powerful. They help entrench inequality, and the suffering and violence it breeds.
The Good (and Very Stern) Society
Accusing Enlightenment philosophers of failing to challenge unjust social and economic institutions even as they ranged themselves ostentatiously against religious tyranny, Rousseau tried to outline a social order where morals, virtue and human character rather than commerce and money were central to politics. Catherine’s war on the Poles offered Rousseau an opportunity to draw up a blueprint for Sparta in the modern era. Since Voltaire and many other philosophes had become ardent champions of the partitioning overlords, Catherine and Frederick, Rousseau chose to become an advisor to their enemies, the Polish nationalists, known as the Confederate Poles.
Rousseau also knew Poland only from afar and through second-hand accounts. But Voltaire was in his sights; and he countered his rival’s fantasy of cosmopolitan Russia with an idea of a defiantly nationalist Poland that would not surrender itself to the universal reign of amour propre and the pursuit of wealth and power. In Considerations on the Government of Poland, written in the early 1770s, Rousseau urged the Poles to maintain their national costu
me. No Pole, he urged, should appear at court dressed as a Frenchman; he criticized Peter the Great again for abandoning Russian national customs and dress. He deplored the fact that ‘civil and domestic usages’ are ‘daily being bastardized by the general European tendency to adopt the tastes and manners of the French’. For, he wrote, ‘it is national institutions which shape the genius, the character, the tastes and the manners of a people; which give it an individuality of its own; which inspire it with that ardent love of country, based on ineradicable habits.’
Europeans were increasingly interchangeable. But a Pole must remain a Pole for the sake of his dignity and freedom. His moeurs, the inheritance of all Poles, could be invigorated by patriotic passions. To this end, a citizens’ militia, public festivals and national holidays were the right means; Rousseau himself designed competitions, uniforms and decorative badges of merit.
* * *
In Rousseau’s conception, patriotism required the segregation of the sexes as well as public ceremonial and military exercises. Woman ‘must make herself agreeable to man rather than provoke him’ and her place is in the home, making virtuous citizens out of men. Any equality between the sexes, according to him, should be based on different roles in distinct domains of activity; and the demand for women to be educated like men, and increased similarity between the two sexes, would lessen the influence women have over men. (The rapid overturning of these entrenched prejudices in our time is one major source of male rage and hysteria today.)
Age of Anger Page 10