The Age of Voltaire

by Will Durant

  Montesquieu was modest and right in ascribing part of the value of the book to its subject and aim. To find laws in laws, some system in their variation in place and time, to enlighten rulers and reformers by considering the sources and limits of legislation in view of the nature and place of states and men—this was a majestic enterprise, whose scope made faults forgivable. Herbert Spencer failed in the same enterprise129 148 years later, despite a corps of research aides, and because of a similar passion for generalization; but both attempts were increments of wisdom. Montesquieu’s achievement was the greater. He had predecessors;VI he did not inaugurate, but he powerfully advanced the historical method for the comparative study of institutions. He anticipated Voltaire in establishing a philosophy of history independent of supernatural causes; and he achieved a breadth and impartiality of view never reached by Voltaire. Burke called Montesquieu “the greatest genius which has enlightened this age”;130 Taine considered him “the best instructed, the most sagacious, and the best balanced of all the spirits of the time.”131 Horace Walpole thought The Spirit of Laws, “the best book that ever was written.”132 Perhaps not, but it was the greatest book of the generation.

  It exhausted its author. He wrote to a friend in 1749: “I confess that this work has nearly killed me. I shall rest; I shall toil no more.”133 He continued to study nevertheless. “Study has been for me,” he said, “the sovereign remedy against all the disappointments of life. I have never known any trouble that an hour’s reading would not dissipate.”134

  He visited Paris occasionally, and enjoyed his fame, which at that time (1748) equaled Voltaire’s. “The Spirit of Laws,” said Raynal, “has turned the heads of the whole French people. We find this work in the libraries of our scholars and on the dressing tables of our ladies and our fashionable young men.”135 He was again welcomed in the salons, and he was received at court. But for the most part he stayed at La Brède, content to be a grand seigneur. His book so pleased the English that they sent in large orders for the wine grown on his lands. In his last years he became almost blind. “It seems to me,” he said, “that the little light left to me is but the dawning of the day when my eyes will close forever.”136 In 1754 he went to Paris to end the lease on his house there; but on that visit he developed pneumonia and died, February 10, 1755, aged sixty-six. He had received the last rites of the Catholic Church, but the agnostic Diderot was the only man of letters who attended his funeral.137 His influence spread over centuries. “In the forty years since the publication of The Spirit of Laws,” wrote Gibbon, “no work has been more read and criticized, and the spirit of inquiry which it has excited is not the least of our obligations to the author.”138 Gibbon, Blackstone, and Burke were among the English writers who profited from The Spirit of Laws and The Greatness and Decadence of the Romans. Frederick the Great thumbed L’Esprit des lois only next to The Prince; Catherine the Great thought it should be “the breviary of sovereigns,”139 and made extracts from it for the men whom she appointed to revise Russia’s laws.140 The framers of the American Constitution took from Montesquieu not only the separation of governmental powers but the exclusion of cabinet members from Congress; and their writings were interspersed with quotations from his work. The Spirit of Laws became almost the bible of the moderate leaders in the French Revolution, and from The Greatness and Decadence came, in part, their admiration for the Roman Republic. “All the great modern ideas,” said Faguet, “have their commencement in Montesquieu.”141 For a generation it was Montesquieu, not Voltaire, who was the voice and hero of the mind of France.

  * * *

  I. In 1849 Eugène Scribe and Ernest Legouvé produced in Paris their successful but not quite accurate drama, Adrienne Lecouvreur; and in 1902 Francesco Cilèa composed an opera on the same theme.

  II. “All hearts are moved like mine by mortal grief. I hear on every side the distracted arts cry out in tears, ’Melpomene [Muse of tragedy] is no more!’ What will you say, you of tomorrow, when you learn the withering injury done by heartless men to these desolated arts? They deprive of burial her who in Greece would have had altars. I have seen them adoring her, crowding about her; hardly is she dead when she becomes a criminal! She charmed the world, and you punish her! No! those banks will never henceforth be profane; they hold your ashes; and this sad tomb will be for us a new temple, honored in our chants, and consecrated by your shades.”

  III. This was followed in 1751 by Mémoires pour servir de suite aux Considérations. Duclos’ Mémoires secrets sur les règnes de Louis XIV et de Louis XV was not published till 1791. Part of this was translated into English as Secret Memoirs of the Regency.

  IV. The word originally meant cave dwellers; literally, those who dig holes and live in them, like our political opponents.

  V. Montesquieu thought, in 1721, that the population of Europe was hardly a tenth of what it had been under the Roman Empire,65 that it would continue to decrease, and that Negroes would soon die out in America. Caveat vates.

  VI. Hippocrates’ Airs, Waters, and Places; Aristotle’s Constitutions of Athens; Machiavelli’s Discorsi; Bodin’s Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem; Grotius’ De Jure Belli et Facts; Vico’s Scienza nuova; Pufendorf’s De Jure Naturae et Gentium; etc.

  CHAPTER XI

  Voltaire in France

  I. IN PARIS: 1729–34

  ON returning from England, late in 1728 or early in 1729, Voltaire took an inconspicuous lodging in St.-Germain-en-Laye, eleven miles northwest of Paris. He mobilized his friends to secure informal annulment of his exile from France and then from the capital. They succeeded, even to getting his royal pension restored; by April he was again bobbing about Paris. At one gathering he heard the mathematician La Condamine calculate that anyone who should buy all the tickets in a lottery just issued by the city of Paris would make a fortune. Voltaire rushed off, borrowed money from his banker friends, bought all the tickets, and won as predicted. The Comptroller General refused to pay; Voltaire took the matter to the courts, won his case, and was paid.1 Later in this year 1729 he traveled 150 miles—in two nights and a day—from Paris to Nancy to buy shares in the public funds of the Duke of Lorraine; this venture too brought him substantial gains. Voltaire the poet and philosopher was supported by Voltaire the financier.

  In 1730 we see him back in Paris, feverish with enterprise. He had usually several literary irons in the fire, passing from one to another as if finding refreshment in the change without losing time. Now he was writing Letters on the English, and a History of Charles XII, and The Death of Mademoiselle Lecouvreur, and the beginnings of La Pucelle (The Maid). One day in 1730 the guests of the Duc de Richelieu, discussing Jeanne d’Arc, suggested to Voltaire that he write her history. Jeanne had not yet been accepted as the uncanonized patron saint of France; to the freethinker Voltaire the supernatural elements in her legend seemed to invite a humorous treatment; Richelieu dared him try it; Voltaire composed the proem that day. His plaint for Lecouvreur was not yet published, but his bumbling friend Nicolas Thieriot recited it too widely, and theological hornets resumed their buzzing around Voltaire’s head. As if hungry for enemies he staged on December 11 the story of Lucius Junius Brutus, who, in Livy’s account, had expelled King Tarquinius and shared in setting up the Roman Republic; the play denied the inviolability of kings, and proclaimed the right of the people to change their rulers. The actors complained that there was no love theme in the plot; Paris agreed that this was an absurd innovation; after fifteen performances it was withdrawn. Sixty-two years later it was revived with great success, for Paris was in a mood to guillotine Louis XVI.

  Meanwhile he had secured the royal privilège to publish his Histoire de Charles XII, roi de Suède. Here was a subject that could hardly offend Louis XV or the Church, and it should please the Queen by its very favorable treatment of her father, Stanislas. An edition of 2,600 copies was printed when, without a word of warning, the royal permission was suddenly withdrawn, and the whole edition was confiscated except a
copy in Voltaire’s possession. He protested to the Keeper of the Seals; he was informed that a change in foreign policy made it necessary to please Charles’s opponent and victim, Augustus “the Strong,” who was still king of Poland. Voltaire resolved to ignore the prohibition. He moved in disguise to Rouen, lived there for five months as an “English lord,” and directed the secret printing of his history. By October, 1731, it was circulating freely and selling like fiction.

  Some critics claimed there was too much fiction in it; a learned historian has called it “a romance,” vivid in narrative, inaccurate in detail.2 Yet Voltaire had prepared the book with scholarly care. He had not only examined masses of state papers, but he had gone out of his way to consult men who could give him firsthand information: ex-King Stanislas, the Maréchal de Saxe, the Duchess of Marlborough, Bolingbroke, Axel Sparre (who had been at the battle of Narva), Fonseca (a Portuguese physician who had served in Turkey during Charles’s stay there), and Baron Fabrice (former secretary to Charles). Moreover, Voltaire had lived for a while with Baron von Görtz, Charles’s favorite minister; the execution of von Görtz in 1719 may have turned Voltaire to study the “Lion of the North.” In 1740 Joran Nordberg, who had served Charles as chaplain, published memoirs in which he pointed out inaccuracies in Voltaire’s narrative; Voltaire incorporated these corrections in subsequent editions. There were other flaws, especially in the detailed descriptions of battles. Later critics3 argued that Voltaire had overrated Charles as “perhaps the most extraordinary man who has ever been on earth, who united in himself all the great qualities of his ancestors, and who had no other defect or unhappiness except to have them all in excess.”4 The last word may redeem the hypertrophe. Voltaire explained that Charles “carried all the heroic virtues to that excess at which they become faults”; he listed these as prodigality, rashness, cruelty, tyranny, and inability to forgive; he showed how these faults in her King had injured Sweden; and he concluded that Charles “was an extraordinary rather than a great man.”5 In any case the book was a work not only of scholarship but of art—of structure, form, color, and style. Soon all educated Europe was reading Charles XII, and Voltaire’s reputation achieved a spread and depth that it had not had before.

  After his return from Rouen (August 5, 1731), Voltaire became the house guest of the Comtesse de Fontaine-Martel in her mansion near the Palais-Royal. She found him such pleasant company that she continued to lodge and feed him till May, 1733. He presided with incomparable vivacity at her literary suppers, and staged plays, preferably his own, in her private theater. During that stay he wrote the libretto for Rameau’s Samson (1732). It was presumably from the Comtesse’s box at the Théâtre-Français that he saw the failure of his Ériphile (1732), and the rapturous success of his romantic tragedy Zaïre (August 13, 1732). He wrote to a friend:

  Never piece was so well played as Zaïre at the fourth representation. I wished you there; you would have seen that the public did not hate your friend. I appeared in a box, and the whole pit clapped me. I blushed, I hid myself, but I should be a hypocrite if I did not confess to you that I was sensibly touched.6

  Of all his dramas this remained to the end his favorite. They are all dead now, slain by changing fashions of mood and style; but we should exhume at least one of them, for they played a fond and exciting role in his life. Zaïre is a Christian captured in her infancy by the Moslems during the Crusades, and brought up in the Islamic faith; she knows little of France except that it is the land of her birth. She is now a beauty in the seraglio of the Sultan Orosmane at Jerusalem. He has fallen in love with her, she with him; and when the play opens she is about to become his wife. Another Christian captive, Fatima, reproaches her for forgetting that she was once a Christian. In Zaïre’s reply Voltaire expresses the geographical determination of religious belief:

  Our thoughts, our manners, our religion, all

  Are formed by custom, and the powerful bent

  Of early years. Born on the banks of Ganges

  Zaïre had worshiped pagan deities;

  At Paris I had been a Christian; here

  I am a happy Mussulman. We know

  But what we learn; the instructing parent’s hand

  Graves in our feeble hearts those characters

  Which time retouches, and examples fix

  So deeply in the mind, that nought but God

  Can e’er efface.7

  Voltaire depicts Orosmane with evident predilection as a man with all the virtues except patience. The Christians are shocked to see that a Moslem can be as decent as any Christian, and the Sultan is surprised to find that a Christian can be good. He refuses to keep a harem and pledges himself to monogamy. But Voltaire is just to his Christian characters too; he writes gracious lines on the beauty of the truly Christian life. One Christian, Nerestam, also captured in infancy, grows up with Zaïre; he is freed on his pledge to return with ransoms for ten Christian captives. He goes, returns, devotes his private fortune to make up the required sum. Orosmane rewards him by liberating not ten but a hundred Christians. Nerestam grieves that these do not include either Zaïre or Lusignan, once (1186–87) the Christian king of Jerusalem. Zaïre pleads with Orosmane for Lusignan’s release; it is granted; the aged King identifies Zaïre as his daughter and Nerestam as his son. She is torn between her love for the generous Sultan and the demand of loyalty to her father, her brother, and their faith. Lusignan appeals to her to abandon Orosmane and Islam:

  Oh, think on the pure blood

  Within thy veins, the blood of twenty kings,

  All Christians like myself, the blood of heroes,

  Defenders of the faith, the blood of martyrs!

  Thou art a stranger to thy mother’s fate;

  Thou dost not know that in the very moment

  That gave thee birth I saw her massacred

  By those barbarians whose detested faith

  Thou hast embraced. Thy brothers, the dear martyrs,

  Stretch forth their hands from heaven, and wish to embrace

  A sister; oh, remember them! That God,

  Whom thou betrayest, for us and for mankind

  Even in this place expired … .

  Behold the sacred mountain where

  Thy Saviour bled; the tomb whence he arose

  Victorious; in each path where’er thou treadest

  Shalt thou behold the footsteps of thy God;

  Wilt thou renounce thy Maker?. . .

  ZAÏRE. Dear author of my life,

  My father, speak: What must I do?

  LUSIGNAN. Remove

  At once my shame and sorrow with a word,

  And say thou art a Christian

  ZAÏRE. Then, my lord,

  I am a Christian. …

  LUSIGNAN. Swear thou wilt keep the fatal secret.

  ZAÏRE. I swear.8

  When Nerestam learns that she still intends to marry Orosmane he is tempted to kill her. He relents, but insists that she accept baptism; she agrees. He sends her a note appointing time and place for the ceremony; Orosmane, not knowing that Nerestam is her brother, mistakes the message for a love note. He comes upon Zaïre as she keeps the appointment, stabs her, finds out that the supposed lovers are brother and sister, and kills himself.

  It is a plot cleverly conceived, consistently and dramatically developed, told in flowing melodious verse; and though the sentimental passages now seem overdone, we can understand why Paris took Zaïre and Orosmane to its heart, and why the good sad Queen wept when the play was performed for the court at Fontainebleau. Soon it was translated and produced in England, Italy, and Germany. Now Voltaire was hailed as the greatest living French poet, fit successor to Corneille and Racine. This did not rejoice Jean Baptiste Rousseau, French poet surviving in exile at Brussels; he judged Zaïre “trivial and flat, … an odious mélange of piety and libertinage.” Voltaire retorted with a long discourse in verse, Le Temple de goût (The Temple of Taste), pillorying Rousseau and exalting Molière.

  His head was in the sta
rs, but he did not cease to work. In the winter of 1732–33 he studied mathematics and Newton with his future victim Maupertuis, rewrote Ériphile, revised Zaïre and Charles XII, collected materials for Le Siècle de Louis XIV, put the finishing touches on his Lettres sur les Anglais, produced a new play, Adélaïde, and wrote innumerable trifles-letters, compliments, invitations, epigrams, amorous ditties—all agleam with wit in smoothly polished verse. When his landlady bountiful, Mme. de Fontaine-Martel, died, he moved to a house on the Rue du Long-Point, and engaged in the business of exporting wheat. Then, mingling commerce with romance, he met (1733) Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet. With that unique and enterprising woman his life was to be mingled till her death.

  She was now twenty-six (he thirty-eight), and she already had a varied career behind her. Daughter of the Baron de Breteuil, she received an unusual education. At twelve she knew Latin and Italian, sang well, played the spinet; at fifteen she began to translate the Aeneid into French verse; then she added English, and studied mathematics with Maupertuis. At nineteen she married the thirty-year-old Marquis Florent Claude du Châtelet-Lomont. She gave him three children, but otherwise they did not see very much of each other; he was usually with his regiment; she remained near the court, gambling for high stakes and experimenting with love. When her first paramour left her she took poison, but was forcibly saved by an emetic. She bore with experienced composure her desertion by a second gallant, the Duc de Richelieu, for all France knew his mobility.