The Age of Voltaire

by Will Durant

  IV. “I kiss you a thousand times. My soul kisses yours; my cazzo, my heart are enamored of you. I kiss your pretty bottom and all your person.”91

  V. Translation by Dr. Besterman: “I shall be coming [to Paris] only for you, and if my miserable condition permits, I will throw myself at your knees and kiss all your beauties. In the meantime I press a thousand kisses on your round breasts, on your ravishing bottom, on all your person, which has so often given me erections and plunged me into a flood of delight.”97

  BOOK III

  MIDDLE EUROPE

  1713–56

  CHAPTER XII

  The Germany of Bach

  1715–56

  I. THE GERMAN SCENE

  IT was not to be expected that Voltaire, as he passed through Germany, could discipline his volatile Parisian mind to an appreciation of German bodies, features, manners, speech, Gothic letters, music, and art. He had probably never heard of Johann Sebastian Bach, who died on July 18, 1750, eighteen days after Voltaire reached Berlin. And presumably he had not seen Hume’s description of Germany in 1748 as “a fine country, full of industrious honest people; were it united it would be the greatest power … in the world.”1

  It was fortunate for France and England that these virile folk, numbering then some twenty millions, were still divided into more than three hundred practically independent states, each with its sovereign prince, its own court, policy, army, coinage, religion, and dress; all in various stages of economic and cultural development; the whole agreeing only in language, music, and art. Sixty-three of the principalities—including Cologne, Hildesheim, Mainz, Trier, Speyer, Würzburg—were ruled by archbishops, bishops, or abbots. Fifty-one cities—chiefly Hamburg, Bremen, Magdeburg, Augsburg, Nuremberg, Ulm, and Frankfurt-am-Main—were “free,” i.e., loosely subject, like the princes, to the head of the Holy Roman Empire.

  Outside of Saxony and Bavaria, most of the German land was cultivated by serfs legally bound to the soil they tilled, and subject to nearly all the old feudal dues. As late as 1750, of the eight thousand peasants in the bishopric of Hildesheim 4,500 were serfs.2 Class divisions were sharp, but they were so mortised in time that the commonalty accepted them with very little complaint; and they were mitigated by a greater survival and honoring of seignorial obligations to protect the peasant in misfortune, to care for him in sickness and old age, to look after widows and orphans, and to maintain order and peace.3 The Junker landlords in Prussia distinguished themselves by competent management of their domains, and their quick adoption of improved agricultural techniques.

  Now that Germany had had sixty-seven years to recover from the Thirty Years’ War, industry and commerce were reviving. The Leipziger Messe was the best-attended fair in Europe; it surpassed the Frankfurt fair even in the sale of books. Frankfurt and Hamburg reached in this century a degree of mercantile activity equaled only by Paris, Marseilles, London, Genoa, Venice, and Constantinople. The merchant princes of Hamburg used their wealth not merely for luxury and display, but for the enthusiastic patronage of opera, poetry, and drama; here Handel had his first triumphs, Klopstock found shelter, and Lessing wrote his Hamburgische Dramaturgie— essays on the Hamburg theater. The German cities were then, as now, the best-administered in Europe.4

  Whereas in France and England the king had succeeded in bringing the nobles into subservience to the central government, the electors, princes, dukes, counts, bishops, or abbots who ruled the German states had deprived the emperor of any real power over their domains, and had brought the lower nobility into attendance at the princely courts. Aside from the free cities, these courts (Residenzen) were the centers of cultural as well as political life in Germany. The wealth of the landowners was drawn to them, and was spent in immense palaces, sumptuous expenditure, and magnificent uniforms that in many cases were half the man and most of his authority. So Eberhard Ludwig, Duke of Wurttemberg, commissioned J. F. Nette and Donato Frizoni to build for him (1704–33) at Ludwigsburg (near Stuttgart) an alternative Residenz so lordly in design and decoration, and so replete with elegant furniture and objects of art, as must have cost his subjects many thalers and arduous days. The great Schloss, or castle, at Heidelberg, begun in the thirteenth century, added in 1751 a cellar vat with a capacity for brewing 49,000 gallons of beer at a time. At Mannheim Duke Charles Theodore, during his long rule as Elector Palatine (1733–99), spent 35 million florins on artistic and scientific institutions, museums, and libraries, and in support of architects, sculptors, painters, actors, and musicians.5 Hanover was not large or magnificent, but it had a resplendent opera house, luring Handel. Germany was as mad about music as Mother Italy herself.

  Munich too had a great opera house, financed by a tax on playing cards. But the duke-electors of Bavaria made their capital famous also for architecture. When his duchy was overrun by Austrians in the War of the Spanish Succession, Maximilian Emanuel had found refuge in Paris and Versailles; when he returned to Munich (1714) he brought with him a flair for art and the rococo style. With him came a young French architect, François de Cuvilliés, who built for the next Elector, Charles Albert, in the park of Nymphenburg, that masterpiece of German rococo, the little palace called the Amalienburg (1734–39). Simple without, it is a wilderness of ornament within: a domed and dazzling Hall of Mirrors (Spiegelsaal), with silvered stucco carved in latticework and arabesques; and a Yellow Room (Gelbes Zimmer) where the gilt stucco baffles the eye that tries to follow its intricate design. In the same overwhelming style Josef Effner began and Cuvilliés completed the Empire Rooms (Reichen Zimmer) in the ducal residence at Munich. Cuvilliés had left France at the age of twenty, before acquiring the full discipline of French taste; unchecked by him, the German artists elaborated the stucco with amateur abandon, achieving retail perfection within gross exaggeration. The Empire Rooms were shattered in the Second World War.

  Frederick Augustus I “the Strong,” Elector of Saxony (r. 1694–1733), was not to be outdone by any Münchner duke. Despite passing to Warsaw (1697) as King Augustus II of Poland, he found time to tax the Saxons sufficiently to make Dresden “the Florence on the Elbe,” leading all German cities in expenditure on art. “The town is the neatest I have seen in Germany,” reported Lady Mary Montagu in 1716; “most of the houses are new built; the Elector’s palace very handsome.”6 Augustus collected pictures almost as avidly as concubines; his son, Elector Frederick Augustus II (r. 1733–63), poured out money on horses and pictures, and, said Winckelmann, “brought the arts to Germany.”7 In 1743 this younger Augustus sent Algarotti to Italy with ducats to buy paintings; soon afterward the Elector bought for 100,000 sequins ($500,000?) the collection of Duke Francesco III of Modena; and in 1754 he bought Raphael’s Sistine Madonna for twenty thousand ducats, a then unprecedented price. So the great Gemäldegalerie of Dresden took form.

  A handsome opera house rose in Dresden in 1718; its company must have excelled, for Handel raided it for his English ventures in 1719; and under Johann Hasse its orchestra was among the best in Europe.8 It was in Dresden that Meissen porcelain was born—but that must have a story of its own. In the architecture of the Saxon capital the great name was Matthäus Daniel Pöppelmann. For Augustus der Starke he built in 1711–22 the famous Zwinger Palace as a festival center for the court: a brilliant baroque complex of columns, arches, lovely mullioned windows, balconies, and crowning cupola. The Zwinger was destroyed by bombing in 1945, but the magnificent gate has been rebuilt on the original design. For the same inexhaustible Elector the Roman architect Gaetano Chiaveri raised in Italian baroque the Hofkirche, or Court Church (1738–51); this too was largely ruined and successfully restored. History is a contest between art and war, and art plays the part of Sisyphus.

  II. GERMAN LIFE

  Germany was now leading Europe in elementary education. In 1717 King Frederick William I of Prussia made primary education compulsory in his kingdom, and during the next twenty years he founded 1,700 schools to instruct and indoctrinate the young. These schools
were usually taught by laymen; the role of religion in education was diminishing. Stress was laid on obedience and industry, and flogging was de rigueur. One schoolmaster reckoned that in fifty-one years of teaching he had given 124,000 lashes with a whip, 136,715 slaps with the hand, 911,527 blows with a stick, and 1,115,800 boxes on the ear. In 1747 Julius Hecker, a Protestant clergyman, established in Berlin the first Realschule, so named because it added mathematics and industrial courses to Latin, German, and French; soon most German cities had similar institutions.

  In the universities the study of Greek rose to new prominence, laying the foundations for later German supremacy in Hellenic scholarship. Additional universities rose at Göttingen (1737) and Erlangen (1743). Financed by the Elector of Hanover (become King of England), Göttingen followed the University of Halle in according freedom of teaching to its professors, and expanding instruction in natural science, social studies, and law. University students now discarded the academic gown, wore cloak, sword, and spurs, fought duels, and took instruction from the looser ladies of the town. Except in philosophy and theology, German was the language of education.

  Nevertheless the German language was now in bad repute, for the aristocracy was adopting French. Voltaire wrote from Berlin (November 24, 1750): “I find myself here in France; no one talks anything but French. German is for the soldiers and the horses; it is needed only on the road.”9 The German theater presented comedies in German, tragedies in French—usually from the French repertoire. Germany was then the least nationalistic of European states, because it was not yet a state.

  German literature suffered from this lack of national consciousness. The most influential German author of the age, Johann Christoph Gottsched, who gathered about him a literary circle that made Leipzig “a little Paris,” used German in his writings, but he imported his principles from Boileau, denounced baroque art as a glittering chaos, and called for a return to the classical rules of composition and style as practiced in the France of Louis XIV. Two Swiss critics, Bodmer and Breitinger, attacked Gottsched’s admiration of order and rule; poetry, they felt, took its power from forces of feeling and passion deeper than reason; even in Racine a world of emotion and violence welled up through the classic form. “The best writings,” Bodmer urged, “are not the result of rules; … the rules are derived from the writings.”10

  Christian Gellert, who exceeded all German writers in popularity, agreed with Bodmer, Breitinger, and Pascal that feeling is the heart of thought and the life of poetry. He deserved his Christian name; he was so respected for the purity of his life and the gentleness of his ways that kings and princes attended his lectures on philosophy and ethics at the University of Leipzig, and women came to kiss his hands. He was a man of unashamed sentiment, who mourned the dead at Rossbach instead of celebrating Frederick’s victory; yet Frederick, the greatest realist of the age, called him “le plus raissonable de tous les savans allemans”— the most reasonable of all German savants.11 Frederick, however, probably preferred Ewald Christian von Kleist, the virile young poet who died for him in the battle of Kunersdorf (1759). The King’s judgment of German literature was harsh but hopeful: “We have no good writers whatever; perhaps they will arise when I am walking in the Elysian Fields.… You will laugh at me for the pains I have taken to impart some notions of taste and Attic salt to a nation which has hitherto known nothing but how to eat, drink, and fight.”12 Meanwhile Kant, Klopstock, Wieland, Lessing, Herder, Schiller, and Goethe had been born.

  One German of the time won Frederick’s active sympathy. Christian von Wolff, son of a tanner, rose to be professor at Halle. Taking all knowledge as his specialty, he tried to systematize it on the basis of Leibniz’ philosophy. Though Mme. du Châtelet called him “un grand bavard” a great babbler, he pledged himself to reason, and in his stumbling way began the Aufklärung, the German Enlightenment. He broke precedent by teaching science and philosophy in German. Just to list his sixty-seven books would clog our course. He began with a four-volume treatise on “all the mathematical sciences” (1710); he translated these volumes into Latin (1713); he added a mathematical dictionary (1716) to facilitate the transition to German. He proceeded with seven works (1712–25) on logic, metaphysics, ethics, politics, physics, teleology, and biology, each title beginning bravely with the words Vernünftige Gedanke,” reasonable thoughts,” as if to fly the flag of reason at his mast. Aspiring to a European audience, he covered the same vast area in eight Latin treatises, of which the most influential were the Psychologia empirica (1732), the Psychologia rationalis (1734), and the Theologia naturalis (1736). After surviving all these pitfalls he explored the philosophy of law (1740–49); and to crown the edifice he wrote an autobiography.

  The systematic march of his scholastic style makes him hard reading in our hectic age, but now and then he touched vital spots. He rejected Locke’s derivation of all knowledge from sensation, and served as a bridge from Leibniz to Kant by insisting on the active role of the mind in the formation of ideas. Body and mind, action and idea, are two parallel processes, neither influencing the other. The external world operates mechanically; it shows many evidences of purposive design, but there are no miracles in it; and even the operations of the mind are subject to a determinism of cause and effect. Ethics should seek a moral code independent of religious belief; it should not rely on God to terrify men into morality. The function of the state is not to dominate the individual, but to widen the opportunities for his development.13 The ethics of Confucius are especially to be praised, for they based morality not on supernatural revelation but on human reason.14 “The ancient emperors and kings of China were men of a philosophical turn, … and to their care it is owing that their form of government is of all the best.”15

  Despite Wolff’s earnest avowals of Christian belief, many Germans thought his philosophy dangerously heterodox. Some members of the Halle faculty warned Frederick William I that if Wolff’s determinism were to be accepted, no soldier who deserted could be punished, and the whole structure of the state would collapse.16 The frightened King ordered the philosopher to leave Prussia in forty-eight hours on “pain of immediate death.” He fled to Marburg and its university, where the students hailed him as the apostle and martyr of reason. Within sixteen years (1721–37) over two hundred books or pamphlets were published attacking or defending him. One of the first official acts of Frederick the Great after his accession (1740) was his warm invitation to the exile to return to Prussia and Halle. Wolff came, and in 1743 he was made chancellor of the university. He grew more orthodox as he aged, and died (1754) with all the piety of an orthodox Christian.

  His influence was far greater than one would judge from his present paltry fame. France made him an honorary member of her Académie des Sciences; the Imperial Academy of St. Petersburg named him professor emeritus; the English and the Italians translated him assiduously; the King of Naples made the Wolffian system obligatory in his universities. The younger generation of Germans called him the Sage, and felt that he had taught Germany to think. The old Scholastic methods of teaching declined, academic freedom increased. Martin Knutzen took the Wolffian philosophy to the University of Königsberg, where he taught Immanuel Kant.

  The development of science and philosophy, and the disillusioning consequences of Biblical research, shared with powerful secularizing forces in weakening the influence of religion on German life. Deistic ideas, coming in from England through translations and through the connection of England with Hanover, spread among the upper classes, but their effect was negligible compared with the result of the subordination of the Church-Catholic as well as Protestant—to the state. The Reformation had for a time strengthened religious belief; the Thirty Years’ War had injured it; now the subservience of the clergy to the ruling princes deprived them of the godly aura that had sanctified their power. Appointments to ecclesiastical office were dictated by the prince or the local feudal lord. The nobility, as in England, affected religion as a matter of political utili
ty and social form. The Lutheran and Calvinist clergy lost status, and Catholicism slowly gained ground. In this period the Protestant states of Saxony, Württemberg, and Hesse passed under Catholic rulers; and the agnostic Frederick had to conciliate Catholic Silesia.

  Only one religious movement prospered in Protestant areas—that of the Unitas Fratrum, the Moravian Brethren. In 1722 some of its members, oppressed in Moravia, migrated to Saxony and found refuge on the estate of Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf. Himself a godson of Philipp Jakob Spener, the young Count saw in the refugees a chance to revive the spirit of Pietism. He built for them on his lands the village of Herrnhut (“the Lord’s hill”), and spent nearly all his fortune in printing Bibles, catechisms, hymn-books, and other literature for their use. His travels in America (1741–42), England (1750), and elsewhere helped to establish colonies of the Unitas Fratrum in every continent; indeed, it was the Moravian Brethren who inaugurated the modern missionary activity in the Protestant churches.17 Peter Böhler’s meeting with John Wesley in 1735 brought a strong influence of the Brethren into the Methodist movement. In America they settled near Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and in Salem, North Carolina. They kept their faith and discipline almost untouched by winds of doctrine and fashions of dress, perhaps at the cost of some hardness of spirit in their family relations; but the skeptic must respect the strength and sincerity of their belief, and its exceptional accord with their moral life.

  Morals in this age were generally more wholesome in Germany than in France, except where imitation of France passed from language to lechery. In the middle classes family life was subject to an almost fanatical discipline; fathers habitually whipped their daughters, sometimes their wives.18 Frederick William I kept the court of Berlin in fearsome order, but his daughter described the Saxon court at Dresden as quite up to that of Louis XV in adultery. Augustus the Strong, we are assured on dubious authority, had 354 “natural” children, some of whom forgot their common parentage in incestuous beds. Augustus himself was alleged to have taken, as one of his mistresses, his bastard daughter Countess Orczelska,19 who later taught the ars amoris to Frederick the Great. In the early eighteenth century the faculty of law at the University of Halle issued a pronouncement defending princely concubinage.20