The Age of Voltaire

by Will Durant

  She was probably the most cultured woman of her time. She had a library of 3,500 volumes, 738 of them on history, 215 on philosophy, many on art, some on politics or law, several romances of love. Apparently, besides amusing the King, fending off her enemies, and helping to govern France, she found time to read good books, for she herself wrote excellent French, in letters rich in substance as well as charm. She begged her lover to rival his great-grandfather in the patronage of literature, but his piety and parsimony held him back. When she tried to shame him by noting that Frederick the Great had given d’Alembert a pension of twelve hundred livres, he answered, “There are so many more beaux-esprits… here than in Prussia, I should be forced to have a very large dinner table to assemble them all”; and he began to count them on his fingers—“Maupertuis, Fontenelle, Lamotte, Voltaire, Fréron, Piron, Destouches, Montesquieu, Cardinal de Polignac.” People around him added, “D’Alembert, Clairaut, Crébillon fils, Prévost …” “Well,” sighed the King, “for twenty-five years all that might have been dining or supping with me!”119

  So Pompadour took his place as patron. She brought Voltaire to court, gave him commissions, tried to protect him from his faux-pas. She helped Montesquieu, Marmontel, Duclos, Buffon, Rousseau; she eased Voltaire and Duclos into the French Academy. When she heard that Crébillon père was living in poverty she secured a pension for him, gave him an apartment in the Louvre, supported a revival of his Catilina, and had the royal printing office issue an elegant edition of the old man’s plays. She chose as her personal physician François Quesnay, protagonist of the physiocrats, and assigned him a suite of rooms directly under her own at Versailles. There she entertained Diderot, d’Alembert, Duclos, Hélvetius, Turgot, and others whose ideas would have startled the King; and (Marmontel reports) “not being able to invite that group of philosophers to her salon, she would come down herself to see them at table and talk with them.”120

  Naturally the clergy, and the party of the dévots at court, led by the Dauphin, looked with shocked consternation at this coddling of infidels. Moreover, Pompadour was known to favor the taxation of ecclesiastical property, even its secularization, if this should prove the only escape from the bankruptcy of the state.121 The Jesuits advised the King’s confessor to refuse him the sacraments so long as he kept this dangerous mistress.122 The King’s children defended the clergy, and the eldest daughter, Henriette, whom he loved best, used her influence to divorce him from Pompadour. Every Easter was a crisis for the lovers. In 1751 Louis expressed a longing for the Eucharist. In an effort to calm him and appease his confessor, Father Pérusseau, the Marquise took to religious observances, went daily to Mass, prayed with high visibility, and assured the confessor that her relations with the King were now platonically pure. Unconvinced, the priest demanded her departure from the court as a condition precedent to the King’s admission to the Sacrament. Pérusseau died, but his successor, Père Desmarets, was equally firm. She stood her ground, but continued her outward piety. She never forgave the Jesuits for not taking her “conversion” seriously; perhaps her resentment played a minor part in their expulsion from France in 1762.

  She was probably telling the truth in claiming that she no longer had sexual relations with Louis; d’Argenson, one of her enemies, confirmed this.123 She had already confided to her intimates her increasing difficulty in rising to the royal heats;124 and she confessed that on one occasion her lack of enthusiasm had cooled the King into an angry impotence.125 She drugged herself with love philters,126 with little result but damage to her health. Her foes at court became aware of the situation, and renewed their plots to supplant her. In 1753 d’Argenson arranged to have the voluptuous Mme. de Choiseul-Romanet slip into the King’s arms, but she demanded rewards that were thought incommensurate with her sacrifice, and Pompadour was soon able to have her dismissed. It was now that the harassed maîtresse-en-titre resigned herself to the abomination of the Parc aux Cerfs.

  In this “Stag Park,” at the farther end of Versailles, a small lodging was equipped to house one or two young women, with their attendants, until such time as Louis received them in his private apartments or came to their cottage, usually in the guise of a Polish count. Gossip said that the girls were many; legend added that some were only nine or ten years old. Apparently there were never more than two at a time,127 but a succession of them was brought and trained to give the King the droit du seigneur. When one of them became pregnant she received from 10,000 to 100,000 livres to help her find a husband in the provinces, and the children so born were given a pension of some 11,000 livres per year. Mme. de Pompadour knew of this incredible seraglio, and held her peace. Unwilling to be displaced by some noble mistress who would doubtless exile her from the court, perhaps from Paris, she preferred that the King’s depraved tastes should be sated by young women of lower estate and moderate ambitions; and in this she herself sank to her lowest estate. “It is his heart that I grudge,” she told Mme. du Hausset, “and all these young women, who have no education, will not rob me of that.”128

  The court was not audibly shocked by the new arrangements; several courtiers themselves maintained cottages for their mistresses in that same Parc aux Cerfs.129 But Pompadour’s enemies presumed that her reign had now come to an end. They were mistaken; the King remained her devoted friend long after she had ceased to be his concubine. In 1752 he had officially accorded her the status of duchess. In 1756, over the Queen’s protests, he gave her the high post of dame du palais de la reine. She attended the Queen, assisted her at dinner, accompanied her to Mass. As her new position required her residence at court, the Jesuits withdrew their demand for her expulsion; the excommunication under which she had long lived was annulled, and she was admitted to the sacraments. The King’s daughters, so long hostile to her, came to visit her at Choisy.

  Louis spent hours with her almost every day, still taking pleasure in the intelligence of her conversation, and the charm of her unfailing grace. He continued to respect, and often to follow, her advice on appointments, domestic measures, even foreign policy. She gave orders to ministers, received ambassadors, chose generals. Sometimes she spoke of the King and herself as sharing the government: “nous” (we); “nous verrons” (we shall see). Place seekers crowded her anteroom; she received them courteously, and could say no graciously. Her foes admitted the surprising extent of her political knowledge, the skill of her diplomatic address, the frequent justice of her views.130 She had long since pointed to the incompetence of French generals as a source of France’s military decline; in 1750 she proposed to Louis the establishment of an École Militaire, where the sons of officers slain or impoverished in the service of the state should receive instruction in the art and science of war. The King agreed, but was slow in providing funds; Pompadour transferred to the enterprise her own income for one year, and raised additional money through a lottery and a tax on playing cards; at last (1758) the school was opened, as an adjunct to the Hôtel des Invalides.

  Now this bewitching minister without portfolio advised a daring revision of foreign policy for France. Probably the initiative in this fateful “reversal of alliances” was taken by Count von Kaunitz, the Austrian ambassador at Paris; it was furthered by the reluctant condescension of the pious Empress Maria Theresa, who addressed Pompadour as “ma bonne amie” and “ma cousine” and by Frederick the Great’s insulting reference to the Marquise as “Cotillon Quatre” Petticoat Four, at the French court. Mme. de Châteauroux and the Marquis d’Argenson had directed foreign policy toward friendship with Prussia. Kaunitz and Pompadour pointed out that the new Prussia—strengthened by victory in the War of the Austrian Succession, armed with 150,000 trained soldiers, and led by an able, ambitious, and unscrupulous general and king who had twice betrayed France by signing a separate peace—would soon be a greater danger than Austria, which had now lost Silesia, and could no longer expect support from a Spain under Bourbon rule; the old Hapsburg encirclement of France was gone. The argument took on sharper po
int when (January 16, 1756) Prussia signed an alliance with England—France’s historic enemy. The French Council of State replied by signing an alliance with Austria (May 1). The Marquise de Pompadour, now again spitting blood, still but thirty-five years old, and with but eight years of life left in her, had played her part in setting the stage for the Seven Years’ War.

  CHAPTER VIII

  Morals and Manners

  I. EDUCATION

  ONE of the many basic conflicts fought in eighteenth-century France was the effort of the Church to retain—and the effort of the philosophes and others to end—ecclesiastical control over education. The contest culminated in the expulsion of the Jesuits from France in 1762, the nationalization of French schools, and the triumph of secularized education in the Revolution. In the first half of the century the controversy was only beginning to take form.

  The great majority of the peasants could not read. In many rural communities, even up to 1789, the municipal authorities “could hardly write.”1 Most parishes, however, had a petite école where the priest or his appointee taught reading, writing, and catechism, chiefly to boys, for a small fee paid by the parents per pupil.2 Children whose parents could not afford to pay were admitted gratis if they applied. Attendance was legally required by the edicts of 1694 and 1724, but these were not enforced.3 Many peasant fathers kept their children from school, partly through need of them on the farm, partly because they feared that education would be a troublesome superfluity in those destined to till the land. Education could not guarantee a rise in status, for class barriers were almost insurmountable in the first half of the century. In the villages and small towns those who had learned to read seldom read anything other than what concerned their daily work. Everyone knew the catechism, but only in the cities was there any knowledge of literature, science, or history.

  In the middle and upper classes most education was carried on at home by governesses, then by tutors, finally by dancing masters; these last were expected to teach to both sexes the difficult arts of sitting, standing, walking, talking, and gesturing, with courtesy and grace. Some girls received private lessons in Latin; nearly all above the poor learned to sing and to play the harpsichord. The higher education of girls was carried on in convents, where they progressed in religion, embroidery, music, dancing, and the proper conduct of a young woman and a wife.

  Secondary education for boys was almost wholly in the hands of Jesuits, though the Oratorians and the Benedictines shared in the work. Skeptics like Voltaire and Helvétius were among the many distinguished graduates of the Jesuit College of Louis-le-Grand, where Père Charles Porée, professor of “rhetoric” (i.e., language, literature, and speech) left loving memories among his students. The curriculum in the Jesuit schools had hardly changed in two centuries. Though it continued to emphasize religion and the formation of character, the material was largely classical. The authors of ancient Rome were studied in the original, and for five or six years the young scholars lived in intimacy with pagan thought; no wonder their Christian faith suffered some questioning. Furthermore, the Jesuits “spared no efforts to develop the intelligence and zeal of their students.”4 These were encouraged to debate, to speak in public, and to act in plays; they were taught rules for the arrangement and expression of ideas; part of the clarity of French literature was a product of Jesuit colleges. Finally, the student received rigorous courses in logic, metaphysics, and ethics, partly through Aristotle, partly through the Scholastic philosophers; and here again, though the conclusions were orthodox, the habit of reasoning remained—became, indeed, the outstanding mark of this specifically “Age of Reason.” Flogging was also a part of the curriculum, even for students of philosophy, and with no distinction of rank; the future Marquis d’Argenson and the Duc de Boufflers were flogged before their classes for having shot peas at their reverend professors.5

  Already there were complaints that the curriculum paid little attention to the advances of knowledge, that the instruction was too theoretical, giving no preparation for practical life, and that the insistent religious indoctrination warped or closed the mind. In a once famous Traité des études (1726–28) Charles Rollin, rector of the University of Paris, defended the classical curriculum and the stress on religion. The chief goal of education, he held, is to make men better. Good teachers “have little regard for the sciences where these do not conduce to virtue; they set no store by the deepest erudition when it is not accompanied by probity. They prefer an honest man to a man of learning.”6 But, said Rollin, it is difficult to form moral character without basing it on religious belief. Hence “the aim of our labors, the end of all our teaching, should be religion.”7 The philosophes would soon call this in question; the debate on the necessity of religion for morality would continue throughout the eighteenth century, and through the next. It is alive today.

  II. MORALS

  Rollin’s argument seemed to be borne out by the class differences in morality. The peasants, who clung to their religion, lived a relatively moral life; this, however, may have been due to the fact that the family was the unit of agricultural production, the father was also the employer, and family discipline was rooted in an economic discipline enforced by the sequence of the seasons and the demands of the soil. In the middle classes too religion actively survived, and supported parental authority as the basis of social order. The conception of the nation as an association of families through generations of time gave the strength of solidarity and tradition to middle-class morality. The bourgeois wife was a model of industry, piety, and motherhood. She took childbearing in her stride, and was soon at her work again. She was content with her home and her neighborly associations, and rarely touched that gilded world in which fidelity was smiled at as passé; we seldom hear of adultery in the middle-class wife. Father and mother alike set an example of steady habits, religious observance, and mutual affection. This was the life that Chardin lovingly commemorated in such pictures as Le Bénédicité.

  All classes practiced charity and hospitality. The Church collected and distributed alms. The antireligious philosophes preached bienfaisance, which they based on love of humanity rather than of God; modern humanitarian-ism was the child of both religion and philosophy. Monasteries handed out food to the hungry, and nuns tended the sick; hospitals, almshouses, orphanages, and homes of refuge were maintained by state, ecclesiastical, or guild funds. Some bishops were worldly wastrels, but some, like the bishops of Auxerre, Mirepoix, Boulogne, and Marseilles, gave their wealth and their lives to charity. State officials were not mere place seekers and sinecure parasites; the provosts of Paris distributed food, firewood, and money to the poor, and at Reims a municipal councilor gave 500,000 livres to charity. Louis XV had strains of sympathy and timid tenderness. When 600,000 livres were allotted for fireworks to celebrate the birth of the new Duke of Burgundy (1751), he canceled the display and ordered the sum to be divided as dowries for the six hundred poorest girls of Paris; and other cities followed his example. The Queen lived frugally, and spent most of her income on good works. The Duc d’Orléans, son of the riotous Regent, gave most of his fortune to charity. The seamier side of the story appears in the corruption and negligence that marred the management of charitable institutions. There were several cases in which hospital directors pocketed money sent them for the care of the sick or the poor.

  Social morality reflected the nature of man—selfish and generous, brutal and kind, mingling etiquette and carnage on the battlefield. In the lower and upper classes men and women gambled irresponsibly, sometimes losing the fortunes of their families; and cheating was frequent.8 In France, as in England, the government profited from this gambling propensity by establishing a national lottery. The most immoral feature of French life was the heartless extravagance of the court aristocracy living on revenues from peasant poverty. The bedsheets of the Duchesse de La Ferté, lavish with lace, cost 40,000 crowns; the pearls of Mme. d’Egmont were worth 400,000.9 Dishonesty in office was normal. Offices continued
to be sold, and were used by the purchasers for illegal reimbursement. A large part of the money collected in taxes never reached the treasury. Amid this corruption patriotism flourished; the Frenchman never ceased to love France, the Parisian could not long live outside Paris. And almost every Frenchman was brave. At the siege of Mahón, to stop drunkenness among his troops, the Maréchal de Richelieu decreed: “Anyone among you who in future is found drunk will not have the honor of taking part in the assault”; drinking almost stopped.10 Dueling persisted despite all prohibitions. “In France,” said Lord Chesterfield, “a man is dishonored by not resenting an affront, and utterly ruined by resenting it.”11

  Homosexual acts were punishable with burning at the stake, but this law was enforced only among the poor, as upon a muleherd in 1724. The Abbé Desfontaines, who had taught in a Jesuit college for fifteen years, was arrested on such a charge in 1725. He appealed to Voltaire for help; Voltaire rose from a sickbed, rode to Fontainebleau, and persuaded Fleury and Mme. de Prie to secure a pardon;12 for the next twenty years Desfontaines was one of Voltaire’s most active enemies. Some of the King’s pages were deviates; one of them, La Trémouille, appears to have made the sixteen-year-old ruler his Ganymede.13