The Age of Voltaire

by Will Durant

  We remember him chiefly for his Considérations sur les moeurs de ce siècle (1750),III a work of calm and often penetrating analysis of French morals and character. Written before he was forty-five, it begins with the solemnity of a senile sage: “I have lived; I wish to be useful to those who shall live.” He regrets that “the most civilized peoples are not also the most virtuous.”

  The happiest epoch would be that in which virtue would not be considered a merit. When it begins to be remarked, manners are already altered; and if it becomes an object of ridicule, that is the last stage of corruption.29

  “The great defect of the Frenchman,” in his judgment, “is to have always a youthful character; thereby he is often amiable, rarely stable; he has almost no age of maturity, but passes from youth to decrepitude.… The Frenchman is the child of Europe”30—just as Paris is its playground. Duclos does not entirely sympathize with the Age of Reason, which he feels swirling around him: “I am not sure that I have too high an opinion of my century, but it seems to me that a certain fermentation of reason tends to develop everywhere.”31

  We declaim a great deal in these days against prejudices; perhaps we have too much destroyed them. Prejudice is a kind of common law among men.… In this matter I cannot avoid blaming those writers who, … wishing to attack a superstition (a motive that could be praiseworthy and useful if the discussion were kept on a philosophical plane), sap the foundations of morality and weaken the bonds of society.… The sad effect which they produce on their readers is to make, of the young, bad citizens and scandalous criminals, and to engender unhappiness in old age.32

  Grimm, the Parisian correspondent of foreign dignitaries, was one of many who resented these delicate aspersions on philosophy by one who had sampled many bosoms—“When one has a cold heart and a spoiled taste, he should not write on morals and the arts”;33 but Grimm had been Duclos’ rival for the favors of Mme. d’Épinay. The Mémories of that tender lady picture Duclos as rough and tyrannical in possession, and coarsely bitter in defeat; but Grimm edited those Mémories. If we may believe these hot and tearful pages, Madame drove Duclos from her home as a treacherous satyr. The learned Academician wandered to other beds and other lands, and so, at sixty-seven, to death.

  Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues, was more lovable. At the age of eighteen he joined the army, drunk with Plutarch and with ambition to earn glory in the service of the King. He took part in the disastrous adventure of Maréchal de Belle-Isle in the Bohemian campaign of 1741–43; in the bitter retreat from Prague his legs were frozen; he fought at Dettingen (1743), but his health was so impaired that he was soon afterward retired from the army. He sought employment as a diplomat, and through Voltaire’s help was on the point of securing it, when an attack of smallpox disfigured his face. His eyesight began to fail, and a chronic consumptive cough disabled him from active life.

  Books became his consolation. After all, he said, “the best things are the most common; you can purchase the mind of Voltaire for a crown.”34 He warned against judging books by their weight; “even the best authors talk too much,” and many are ponderously obscure; “clearness is the ornament of deep thought.”35 The volume that he himself sent to the press in 1746 was a seventy-five-page Introduction à la connoissance de l’ esprit humain, followed by 607 réflexions et maximes in 115 pages. A year later, in a dingy Paris hotel, he died, aged thirty-two, the Mozart and Keats of French philosophy.

  “Philosophy,” said Vauvenargues, “has its fashions, like dress, music, and architecture.”36 His own ideas took little color from his time. Only a few years before Rousseau’s idealization of nature and equality, he pictured “nature” as a brutal struggle for power, and equality as a delusion.

  Among kings, among peoples, among individuals, the stronger gives himself rights over the weaker, and the same rule is followed by animals and inanimate beings, so that everything in the universe is executed by violence; and this order, which we blame with some semblance of justice, is the most general law, the most immutable, and the most important in nature.37

  All men are born unfree and unequal.

  It is not true that equality is a law of nature. Nature has made nothing equal; her sovereign law is subordination and dependence.… He who is born to obey will obey even on the throne.38

  As for free will, that too is a myth. “The will is never the first cause of an action, it is the last spring.” If you give the classic instance of free will, that you can choose odd or even “at will,” Vauvenargues replies: “If I choose even, it is because the necessity of making a choice offers itself to my thought at the instant that ‘even’ is present to it.”39 The belief in God, however, is indispensable; only through that faith, Vauvenargues felt, could life and history have any meaning other than everlasting strife and final defeat.40

  The most individual feature of Vauvenargues’ philosophy is his defense of the passions. They must not be destroyed, for they are the root of personality, genius, and all vigor of thought.

  The mind is the eye of the soul, but not its force. Its force is in the heart; that is to say, in the passions. The most enlightened reason does not give us the power to act and to will. …41 Great thoughts come from the heart.… Perhaps we owe to the passions the greatest accomplishments of the intellect. …42 Reason and feeling advise and supplement each other turn by turn. Whoever consults only one of them, and renounces the other, foolishly deprives himself of a part of the resources given us for our conduct.43

  Vauvenargues admitted the pervasiveness of self-love, but refused to consider it a vice, since it is the first necessity of nature’s first law, self-preservation. Neither is ambition a vice, it is a necessary spur; “the love of glory makes great careers of nations.”44 He adds that “one is not born to glory if he does not recognize the value of time.”45 There are real vices, however, which must be controlled by laws and moral codes; and “the science of government lies in guiding them [vices] to the public good.”46 There are real virtues too, and “the first days of spring have less grace and charm than the growth of virtue in a youth.”47

  Despite his concessions to Hobbes and La Rochefoucauld, and despite his own experience of evil in life, Vauvenargues kept his faith in mankind. Said his friend Marmontel:

  He knew the world and did not despise it. Friend of men, he ranked vice among the misfortunes [rather than among the crimes] of men, and pity held in his heart the place of indignation and hatred.… He never humiliated anyone.… An unalterable serenity concealed his pains from the eyes of his friends. To sustain adversity one needed only his example; seeing the equanimity of his spirit, we did not dare be unhappy before him.48

  Voltaire described him as “the most unfortunate of men, and the most tranquil.”49

  One of the most gracious aspects of French literature in the eighteenth century is the warm sympathy and friendly aid that Voltaire, apostle of reason, extended to Vauvenargues, defender of Pascal and the “heart.” The youthful philosopher confessed his admiration for “a man who honors our century, and who is not less great, nor less celebrated, than his predecessors.”50 And the older man wrote to him in a moment of modesty: “If you had been born a few years earlier, my writings would have had more worth.”51 The most eloquent passage in all the hundred volumes of Voltaire is his funeral eulogy of Vauvenargues.52

  V. MONTESQUIEU: 1689–1755

  1. Persian Letters

  Voltaire found it harder to like Montesquieu, for The Spirit of Laws (1748) was generally rated the greatest intellectual production of the age. It appeared when its author was fifty-nine; it was the fruit of fifty years of experience, forty years of study, twenty of composition.

  Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, was born at La Brède, near Bordeaux in the country of Montaigne, on January 18, 1689. He boasted good-humoredly of descent from those Goths who, after conquering the Roman Empire, “established everywhere monarchy and liberty.”53 In any case he belonged to the nobility, both
of sword and of robe: his father was chief justice at Guienne, and his mother brought as her dowry the castle and domain of La Brède. At the moment of his birth a beggar presented himself at the castle gate; he was brought in and fed, and was made the godfather of the child, allegedly in the hope that Charles would never forget the poor.54 The boy’s first three years were spent at nurse among the village peasants. At eleven he was sent to the college of the Oratorians at Juilly, twenty miles from Paris. At sixteen he returned to Bordeaux to study law; at nineteen he received his law degree.

  The death of his father (1713) left him, at twenty-four, considerable property and moderate wealth; he was to speak frequently of “my domain” and “my vassals,”55 and we shall find him firmly upholding feudalism. A year later he was admitted to the Bordeaux Parlement as a councilor and magistrate. In 1716 his uncle, who had bought the presidency of the Parlement, bequeathed to him his fortune and his office. Later Montesquieu would defend “the sale of employments” as “good in monarchical states, because it makes it the profession of persons of family to undertake tasks which they would not assume from disinterested motives alone.”56 While retaining the presidency of the Parlement, he spent most of his time in study. He made experiments, presented papers on physics and physiology to the Academy of Bordeaux, and planned a “geological history of the earth.” He never wrote it, but the material he gathered for it forced its way into The Spirit of Laws.

  He was thirty-two when he caught the mood and ear of Regency Paris with the most brilliant of his books. He did not give his name to the Lettres persanes (1721), for it contained passages hardly becoming a magistrate. Probably he took its scheme from L’Espion du Grand Seigneur (1684) of Giovanni Marana, in which an imaginary Turkish spy reported to the sultan, with some fetching ribaldry, the absurd beliefs and behavior of the Christians of Europe, and the delightful or murderous contrasts between Christian professions and practices. A similar device of picturing Occidental civilization as seen through Oriental eyes had been used in Addison’s Spectator; Charles Dufresny, in Amusements sérieux et comiques, had conceived the comments of a Siamese in Paris; Nicolas Gueudeville had shown French customs as seen by an American Indian. Antoine Galland’s translation of the Arabian Nights—Mille et une Nuits (1704–17)—had sharpened French interest in Mohammedan life; so had the travelogues of Jean (Sir John) Chardin and Jean Tavernier. From March to July, 1721, the Turkish ambassador treated Paris to the exotic charm of his dress and ways. Paris was ready for the Lettres persanes. Eight editions were sold out within a year.

  Montesquieu presented the letters as written by Rica and Usbek, two Persians traveling in France, and by their correspondents in Isfahan. The letters did not merely expose the foibles and prejudices of the French; they revealed also, through the writers themselves, the absurdities of Oriental conduct and creeds; laughing at these faults, the reader was compelled to accept with good grace the ridicule of his own. It was done with so light a touch—who could take offense at these unconscious epigrams, these rapier thrusts with politely buttoned foils? Moreover, certain of the letters contained alluring confidences from Usbek’s seraglio in Isfahan. Zachi, his favorite, writes to tell him how painfully she misses his passion; and Rica describes a Mohammedan lady’s conception of Paradise as a place where every good woman has a harem of handsome and virile men. Here Montesquieu let himself go into details in the reckless style of the Regency.

  Only during that interregnum could the political and religious heresies of the Lettres have escaped official rebuke. The old King was dead, the new one was a boy, the Regent was tolerant and gay; now Montesquieu could make his Persians laugh at a “magician” ruler who made people believe that paper was money (Law’s System had just crashed).57 He could expose the corruption of the court, the idleness of spendthrift nobles, the maladministration of state finances. He could praise the ancient republics of Greece and Rome, and the modern republics of Holland and Switzerland. “Monarchy,” says Usbek, “is an abnormal condition which always degenerates into despotism.”58 (See below for a different view.)

  In Letters XI-XIV Usbek illustrates the nature of man and the problem of government by telling of the Troglodytes, whom he conceives to be Arabian descendants of the Troglodytai described by Herodotus59 and Aristotle60 as bestial tribes living in Africa.IV Usbek’s Troglodytes, resenting governmental interference, killed thinking magistrates, and lived in a paradise of laissez-faire. Every seller took advantage of the consumer’s need, and raised the price of the product. When a strong man stole the wife of a weak man there was no law or magistrate to appeal to. Murder, rape, and robbery went unpunished except by private violence. When the inhabitants of the highlands suffered from drought, the lowlanders let them starve; when the lowlanders suffered from flood the highlanders let them starve. Soon the tribe died out. Two families survived by emigration; they practiced mutual aid, raised their children in religion and virtue, and “looked upon themselves as one single family; their flocks were almost always intermixed.”61 But as they increased in number they found their customs inadequate to govern them; they chose a king, and submitted to laws. Usbek’s conclusion: government is necessary, but fails in its function if it is not based on virtue in ruler and ruled.

  The religious heresies in the Persian Letters were more startling than the political. Rica observes that Negroes conceive God as black and the Devil as white; he suggests (like Xenophanes) that if triangles confabulated a theology, God would have three sides and sharp points. Usbek marvels at the power of another magician, called pope, who persuades people to believe that bread is not bread, and wine is not wine, “and a thousand things of a like nature.”62 He laughs at the conflict between Jesuits and Jansenists. He is horrified by the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition, where “dervishes [Dominican monks] cause men to be burned as they would burn straw.”63 He smiles at rosaries and scapulars. He wonders how long the Catholic countries can survive in competition with Protestant peoples, for he thinks that the prohibition of divorce, and the celibacy of nuns and monks, will retard the growth of population in France, Italy and Spain (cf. twentieth-century Ireland); at this rate, Usbek calculates, Catholicism in Europe cannot last five hundred years more.64 V Moreover, these idle and supposedly continent monks “hold in their hands almost all the wealth of the state. They are a miserly crew, always getting and never giving; they are continually hoarding their income to acquire capital. All this wealth falls as it were into a palsy; it is not circulated; it is not employed in trade, industry, or manufactures.”66 Usbek is troubled by the thought that Europe’s benighted infidels, who worship Christ instead of Allah and Mohammed, seem all destined to hell, but he has some hope that ultimately they will accept Islam and be saved.67

  Usbek, in a transparent parable, considers the Revocation (1685) of Henry IV’s tolerant Edict of Nantes:

  You know, Mirza, that some ministers of Shah Suleiman [Louis XIV] formed the design of obliging all the Armenians of Persia [the Huguenots] to quit the kingdom or become Mohammedans [Catholics], in the belief that our empire will continue polluted as long as it retains within its bosom these infidels.… The persecution of the Ghebers by our zealous Mohammedans has obliged them to fly in crowds into the Indies, and has deprived Persia of that people which labored so heartily.… Only one thing remained for bigotry to do, and that was to destroy industry, with the result that the Empire [France in 1713] fell of itself, carrying along with it that very religion which they wished to advance.

  If unbiased discussion were possible, I am not sure, Mirza, that it would not be a good thing for a state to have several religions.… History is full of religious wars; but … it is not the multiplicity of religions which has produced wars; it is the intolerant spirit animating that one which believed itself in the ascendant.68

  The ideas of the Persian Letters seem trite to us now, but when they were expressed they were for the author a matter of life and death, at least of imprisonment or banishment; they are trite now because the figh
t for freedom to express ideas was won. Because the Lettres persanes opened a way, Voltaire was able, thirteen years later, to issue his Lettres sur les Anglais, putting an English torch to French debris; these two books announced the Enlightenment. Montesquieu and his liberty survived his book because he was a noble and the Regent was tolerant. Even so he did not dare acknowledge his authorship, for there were some disapproving voices amid the general acclaim. D’Argenson, who himself would later criticize the government, thought “these are reflections of a kind which a witty man can easily make, but which a prudent man ought never allow to be printed.” And the cautious Marivaux added: “A man must be sparing of his wit on such subjects.” Montesquieu recalled: “When I had in some degree gained the esteem of the public, that of the official classes was lost, and I met with a thousand slights.”69

  Nevertheless he came to Paris to sip his fame in society and the salons. Mme. de Tencin, the Marquise de Lambert and the Marquise du Deffand all opened their hearths. Having left his wife behind at La Brède, he had no difficulty falling in love with the ladies of Paris. He aimed high—at Marie Anne de Bourbon, sister of the Duc de Bourbon who became prime minister in 1723. For her, we are told, he composed a little prose poem, Le Temple de Gnide (1725), ecstatic with love. He anointed its wantonness by pretending that it was a translation from the Greek, and so obtained royal permission to print it. He pulled wires—especially those of Mme. de Prie—to secure admission to the Academy; the King objected that he was not a resident of Paris; he hurried to Bordeaux, resigned his presidency of its Parlement (1726), returned to Paris, and joined the Forty Immortals in 1728.