by Will Durant
Next in influence to the patriciate was the Consistory of the Calvinist clergy. It regulated education, morals, and marriage, and allowed no secular interference with its authority. There were no bishops here, and no monks. The philosopher d’Alembert praised the morals of the Genevan clergy, and described the city as an island of decency and sobriety, which he contrasted with the moral riot of upper-class France. Mme. d’Épinay, after several liaisons, applauded the “strict manners of … a free people, enemy of luxury.”24 According to the clergy, however, Genevan youth was going to the devil in cabarets, and family prayers were being scrimped; people gossiped in church, and some blasé worshipers in the rear puffed at their pipes to help the sermon go down.25 The preachers complained that they could inflict only spiritual penalties, and that their exhortations were increasingly ignored.
Voltaire was delighted to find that several members of the Genevan clergy were rather advanced in their theology. They came to enjoy his hospitality at Les Délices, and privately confessed that they retained little of Calvin’s dour creed. One of them, Jacques Vernes, advised in his Instruction chrétienne (1754) that religion be based on reason when addressing adults, but that “for the common people … it will be useful to explain these truths by some popular means, with proofs fit to … make a greater impression upon the minds of the multitude.”26 Voltaire wrote to Cideville (April 12, 1756): “Geneva is no longer the Geneva of Calvin—far from it; it is a land full of philosophers. The ’reasonable Christianity’ of Locke is the religion of nearly all the ministers; and the adoration of a Supreme Being, joined to a system of morality, is the religion of nearly all the magistrates.”27 In the Essai sur les moeurs (1756), after denouncing Calvin’s role in the execution of Servetus, Voltaire added: “It seems that today an amende honorable is made to the ashes of Servetus; the learned pastors of the Protestant churches … have embraced his [Unitarian] sentiments.”28D’Alembert, after visiting Geneva and Les Délices (1756), talking with some ministers, and comparing notes with Voltaire, wrote for Volume VII (1757) of the Encyclopédie an article on Geneva in which he lauded the liberalism of its clergy:
Several of them do not believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ, of which their leader Calvin was so zealous a defender and for which he had Servetus burned.… Hell, one of the principal points in our belief, is today no longer one for many of Geneva’s ministers; it would, according to them, insult the Divinity to imagine that this Being, full of goodness and justice, was capable of punishing our faults by an eternity of torments.… They believe that there are punishments in another life, but for a time; thus purgatory, which was one of the principal causes of the separation of the Protestants from the Roman Church, is today the only punishment many of them admit after death; here is a new touch to add to the history of human contradictions.
To sum up in a word, many of Geneva’s pastors have no religion other than a complete Socinianism, rejecting all those things which are called mysteries, and imagining that the first principle of a true religion is to propose nothing to belief which offends reason.… Religion has been practically reduced to the adoration of a single God, at least among all those not of the common classes.29
When the Genevan clergy read this article they were unanimously alarmed—the conservatives to find such heretics in Calvinist pulpits, the liberals to find their private heresies so publicly exposed. The Company of Pastors examined the suspects; they warmly repudiated d’Alembert’s allegations, and the Company issued a formal reaffirmation of Calvinist orthodoxy.30
Calvin himself was part cause of the unseemly enlightenment praised by d’Alembert, for the academy that he had founded was now one of the finest educational establishments in Europe. It taught Calvinism, but not too intensely; it gave excellent courses in classical literature, and it trained good teachers for Geneva’s schools—with all expenses borne by the state. A library of 25,000 volumes lent books to the public. D’Alembert found “the people much better educated than elsewhere.”31 Coxe was astonished to hear tradesmen discoursing intelligently on literature and politics. Geneva, in this century, contributed to science the work of Charles Bonnet in physiology and psychology, and of Horace de Saussure in meteorology and geology. In art it literally gave Jean Étienne Liotard to the world: after studying in Geneva and Paris he went to Rome, where he portrayed Clement XII and many cardinals; then to Constantinople, where he lived and worked for five years, then to Vienna, Paris, England, and Holland, buttering his bread with portraits, pastels, enamels, engravings and paintings on glass. He drew a remarkably honest portrait of himself in old age,32 looking more simian than Voltaire.
Geneva did not do well in literature. Alert censorship of print stifled literary ambition and originality. The drama was outlawed as a nursery of scandal. When Voltaire in 1755 first staged a play—Zaïre— in the drawing room at Les Délices, the clergy grumbled, but tolerated the crime as the private foible of a distinguished guest. When, however, Voltaire organized a company of actors from among the young people of Geneva, and projected a series of dramatic performances, the Consistory (July 31, 1755) called upon the Grand Conseil to enforce “the decrees of 1732 and 1739 forbidding all representations of plays, as well public as private,” and it bade the pastors to forbid their parishioners to “play parts in tragedies in the home of the Sieur de Voltaire.” Voltaire professed repentance, but staged plays in his winter home at Lausanne. Probably at his suggestion, d’Alembert introduced into the aforesaid article on Geneva a plea for removal of the prohibition:
It is not because Geneva disapproves of dramas [spectacles] in themselves, but because (they say) it fears the taste for finery, dissipation, and libertinage which theatrical companies spread among the young. However, would it not be possible to remedy these disadvantages by laws severe and well enforced? … Literature would progress without increasing immorality, and Geneva would unite the wisdom of Sparta with the culture of Athens.
The Consistory made no response to this appeal, but Jean Jacques Rousseau (as we shall see) replied to it in a famous Lettre à M. d’Alembert sur les spectacles (1758). After buying the seigniory of Ferney Voltaire by passed the prohibition by building a theater at Châtelaine, on French soil but close to the Genevan border. There he produced plays, and secured for the opening Paris’ leading actor, Henri Louis Lekain. The Geneva pastors forbade attendance, but the performances were so popular that on those occasions when Lekain was to appear the pit was filled hours before the program began. The old warrior at last won his campaign; in 1766 the Grand Conseil ended the Genevan prohibition of plays.
IV. THE NEW HISTORY
An eyewitness of Lekain’s performance in Voltaire’s Sémiramis described the author’s appearance there:
Not the least part of the exhibition was Voltaire himself, seated against a first wing, in view of all the audience, applauding like one possessed, now with his cane, now by exclamations—“It could not be better! … Ah, mon Dieu, how well that was done!” … So little was he able to control his enthusiasm that when Lekain left the stage … he ran after him … A more comic incongruity could not be imagined, for Voltaire resembled one of those old men of comedy—his stockings rolled upon his knees, and dressed in the costume of the “good old times,” unable to sustain himself on his trembling limbs except with the aid of a cane. All the marks of old age are imprinted upon his countenance; his cheeks are hollow and wrinkled, his nose prolonged, his eyes almost extinguished.33
Amid theatricals, politics, visitors, and gardening, he found time to complete and publish at Les Délices two major works, one notorious for alleged indecency, the other marking a new epoch in the writing of history.
La Pucelle had been with him, as a literary recreation, ever since 1730. Apparently he had no intention of publishing it, for it not only made fun of the heroic Maid of Orléans, but satirized the creed, crimes, rites, and dignitaries of the Catholic Church. Friends and enemies added to the circulating manuscripts bits of obscenity and hilarity that even V
oltaire would not have put upon paper. Now, in 1755, just as he was finding peace in Geneva, there appeared in Basel a pirated and garbled version of the poem. This was banned by the Pope, was burned by the Paris Parlement, and was confiscated by the Geneva police; a Paris printer was sent to the galleys for reissuing it in 1757. Voltaire denied authorship; he sent to Richelieu, Mme. de Pompadour, and some government officials copies of a relatively decent text; in 1762 he published this, and suffered no molestation for it. He tried to atone to Jeanne d’Arc by giving a fairer and soberer account of her in his Essai sur les moeurs.34
That Essai was intended as his chef-d’oeuvre, and was also in one sense a monument to the mistress whose memory he revered. He had accepted as a challenge the contempt that Mme. du Chátelet had poured upon such modern historians as she knew:
What does it matter to me, a Frenchwoman living on my estate, to know that Egil succeeded Haquin in Sweden, and that Ottoman was the son of Ortogrul? I have read with pleasure the history of the Greeks and the Romans; they offered me certain great pictures which attracted me. But I have never yet been able to finish any long history of our modern nations. I can see scarcely anything in them but confusion: a host of minute events without connection or sequence, a thousand battles which settled nothing.… I renounced a study which overwhelms the mind without illuminating it.35
Voltaire agreed with her, but he knew that this was only history as written. He mourned the diverse transmogrifications of the past by current prejudices; in this sense “history … is nothing but a pack of tricks that we play upon the dead.”36 IV And yet to ignore history would be to endlessly repeat its errors, massacres, and crimes. There are three avenues to that large and tolerant perspective which is philosophy: one is the study of men in life through experience; another, the study of things in space through science; a third, the study of events in time through history. Voltaire had attempted the second by studying Newton; now he turned to the third. As early as 1738 he laid down a new principle: “ll faut écrire l’histoire en philosophe”—one must write history as a philosopher.38 So he suggested to the Marquise:
If amid so much material rude and unformed you should choose wherewith to construct an edifice for your own use; if, while leaving out all the details of warfare, … all the petty negotiations which have been only useless knavery; … if, while preserving those details that paint manners, you should form out of that chaos a general and well-defined picture; if you should discover in events the history of the human mind, would you believe you had lost your time?39
He worked on the project intermittently for twenty years, reading voraciously, making references, gathering notes. In 1739 he drew up for Mme. du Chátelet an Abrégé de Phistoiregénérale; in 1745–46 parts of this were printed in Le Mercure de France; in 1750 he issued his History of the Crusades; in 1753, at The Hague, the Abrégé appeared in two volumes, in 1754 in three; finally at Geneva in 1756 the full text was published in seven volumes as Essai sur Phistoiregénérale; this contained Le Siécle de Louis XIV and some preliminary chapters on Oriental civilizations. In 1762 he added a Précis du Siécle de Louis XV. The edition of 1769 established Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations depuis Charlemagne jusqu’à nos jours as the definitive title. The word moeurs meant not only manners and morals but customs, ideas, beliefs, and laws. Voltaire did not always cover all these topics, nor did he record the history of scholarship, science, philosophy, or art; but in the large his book was a brave approach to a history of civilization from the earliest times to his own. The Oriental portions were sketchy preludes; the fuller account began with Charlemagne, where Bossuet’s Discours sur l’histoire universelle (1679) had left off. “I want to know,” wrote Voltaire, “what were the steps by which men passed from barbarism to civilization”—by which he meant the passage from the Middle Ages to “modern” times.40
He gave credit to Bossuet for attempting a “universal history,” but he protested against conceiving this as a history of the Jews and the Christians, and of Greece and Rome chiefly in relation to Christianity. He pounced upon the bishop’s neglect of China and India, and his conception of the Arabs as mere barbarian heretics. He recognized the philosophic endeavor of his predecessor in seeking a unifying theme or process in history, but he could not agree that history can be explained as the operation of Providence, or by seeing the hand of God in every major event. He saw history rather as the slow and fumbling advance of man, through natural causes and human effort, from ignorance to knowledge, from miracles to science, from superstition to reason. He could see no Providential design in the maelstrom of events. Perhaps in reaction to Bossuet he made organized religion the villain in his story, since it seemed to him generally allied with obscurantism, given to oppression, and fomenting war. In his eagerness to discourage fanaticism and persecution Voltaire weighted his narrative as heavily in one direction as Bossuet had in the other.
In his new cosmopolitan perspective, made possible by the progress of geography through the reports of explorers, missionaries, merchants, and travelers, Europe assumed a more modest position in the panorama of history. Voltaire was impressed by “the collection of astronomical observations made during nineteen hundred successive years in Babylonia, and transferred by Alexander to Greece”;41 he concluded that there must have been, along the Tigris and Euphrates, a widespread and developed civilization, usually passed over with a sentence or two in such histories as Bos-suet’s. Still more was he moved by the antiquity, extent, and excellence of civilization in China; this, he thought, “places the Chinese above all the other nations of the world.… Yet this nation and India, the most ancient of extant states, … which had invented nearly all the arts almost before we possessed any of them, have always been omitted, down to our own time, in our pretended universal histories.”42 It pleased the anti-Christian warrior to find and to present so many great cultures so long antedating Christianity, quite unacquainted with the Bible, and yet producing artists, poets, scientists, sages, and saints generations before the birth of Christ. It delighted the irate, moneylending anti-Semite to reduce Judea to a very small role in history.
He made some efforts to be fair to the Christians. In his pages not all the popes are bad, not all the monks are parasites. He had a good word for popes like Alexander III, “who abolished vassalage, … restored the rights of the people, and chastised the wickedness of crowned heads”;43 and he admired the “consummate courage” of Julius II, and “the grandeur of his views.”44 He sympathized with the efforts of the papacy to establish a moral power checking the wars of states and the injustices of kings. He admitted that the bishops of the Church, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, were the ablest governors in that disintegrating, reintegrating age. Moreover,
in those barbaric times, when the peoples were so wretched, it was a great consolation to find in the cloisters a secure retreat against tyranny.45 … It cannot be denied that there were great virtues in the cloister; there was hardly a monastery which did not contain admirable beings who did honor to human nature. Too many writers have made it a pleasure to search out the disorders and vices with which these refuges of piety were sometimes stained.46
But by and large Voltaire, caught with the embattled Encyclopedists in a war against the Catholic Church in France, emphasized the faults of Christianity in history. He minimized the persecution of Christians by Rome, and anticipated Gibbon in reckoning this as far less frequent and murderous than the persecution of heretics by the Church. He gave another lead to Gibbon in arguing that the new religion had weakened the Roman state. He thought that priests had usurped power by propagating absurd doctrines among ignorant and credulous people, and by using the hypnotic power of ritual to deaden the mind and strengthen these delusions. He charged that popes had extended their sway, and had amassed wealth, by using documents such as the “Donation of Constantine,” now generally admitted to be spurious. He declared that the Spanish Inquisition and the massacre of the heretical Albigenses were the v
ilest events in history.
The Middle Ages in Christendom seemed to him a desolate interlude between Julian and Rabelais; but he was among the first to recognize the debt of European thought to Arab science, medicine, and philosophy. He praised Louis IX as the ideal of a Christian king, but he saw no nobility in Charlemagne, no sense in Scholasticism, no grandeur in the Gothic cathedrals, which he dismissed as “a fantastic compound of rudeness and filigree.” His hunted spirit could not be expected to appreciate the work of the Christian creed and priesthood in forming character and morals, preserving communal order and peace, promoting nearly all the arts, inspiring majestic music, embellishing the life of the poor with ceremony, festival, song, and hope. He was a man at war, and a man cannot fight well unless he has learned to hate. Only the victor can appreciate his enemy.