The Age of Voltaire

by Will Durant

  Was he correct in his facts? Usually, but of course he made mistakes. The Abbé Nonnotte published two volumes, Erreurs de Voltaire, and added some of his own.47 Robertson, himself a great historian, was impressed by Voltaire’s general accuracy in so wide a field.48 Covering so many subjects in so many countries through so many centuries, Voltaire made no pretense of confining himself to original documents or contemporary sources, but he used his secondary authorities with discrimination and judicious weighing of the evidence. He made it a rule to question any testimony that seemed to contradict “common sense” or the general experience of mankind. Doubtless he would have confessed today that the incredibilities of one age may be accepted routine in the next, but he laid it down as a guiding principle that “incredulity is the foundation of all knowledge.”49 So he anticipated Barthold Niebuhr in rejecting the early chapters of Livy as legendary; he laughed Romulus, Remus, and their alma mater wolf out of court; he suspected Tacitus of vengeful exaggerations in describing the vices of Tiberius, Claudius, Nero, and Caligula; he doubted Herodotus and Suetonius as retailers of hearsay, and he thought Plutarch too fond of anecdotes to be entirely reliable; but he accepted Thucydides, Xenophon, and Polybius as trustworthy historians. He was skeptical of monkish chronicles, but he praised Du Cange and the “careful” Tillemont and the “profound” Mabillon. He refused to continue the ancient custom of imaginary speeches, or the modern custom of historical “portraits.” He subordinated the individual in the general stream of ideas and events, and the only heroes he worshiped were those of the mind.

  In the Essai and elsewhere Voltaire suggested rather than formulated his philosophy of history. He wrote a “Philosophie de l’histoire,” and prefixed it to an edition of the Essai in 1765. He had an aversion to “systems” of thought, to all attempts to squeeze the universe into a formula; he knew that facts have sworn eternal enmity to generalizations; and perhaps he felt that any philosophy of history should follow and derive from, rather than precede and decide, the recital of events. Some wide conclusions, however, emerged from his narrative: that civilization preceded “Adam” and “the Creation” by many thousands of years; that human nature is fundamentally the same in all ages and lands, but is diversely modified by different customs; that climate, government, and religion are the basic determinants of these variations; that the “empire of custom is far larger than that of nature”;50 that chance and accident (within the universal rule of natural laws) play an important role in generating events; that history is made less by the genius of individuals than by the instinctive operations of human multitudes upon their environment; that in this way are produced, bit by bit, the manners, morals, economies, laws, sciences, and arts that make a civilization and produce the spirit of the times. “My principal end is always to observe the spirit of the times, since it is that which directs the great events of the world.”51

  All in all, as Voltaire saw it in his “Récapitulation,” history (as generally written) was a bitter and tragic story.

  I have now gone through the immense scene of revolutions that the world has experienced since the time of Charlemagne; and to what have they tended? To desolation, and the loss of millions of lives! Every great event has been a capital misfortune. History has kept no account of times of peace and tranquillity; it relates only ravages and disasters.… All history, in short, is little else than a long succession of useless cruelties, … a collection of crimes, follies, and misfortunes, among which we have now and then met with a few virtues, and some happy times, as we see sometimes a few scattered huts in a barren desert.… As nature has placed in the heart of man interest, pride, and all the passions, it is no wonder that … we meet with almost a continuous succession of crimes and disasters.52

  This is a very dyspeptic picture, as if composed amid those fretful days in Berlin, or amid the indignities and frustrations of Frankfurt. The picture might have been brighter if Voltaire had spent more of his pages in reporting the history of literature, science, philosophy, and art. As the picture stands, one wonders why Voltaire went to so much trouble to depict it at such length. He would have answered: to shock the reader into conscience and thought, and to stir governments to remold education and legislation to form better men. We cannot change human nature, but we can modify its operations by saner customs and wiser laws. If ideas have changed the world, why may not better ideas make a better world? So, in the end, Voltaire moderated his pessimism with hope for the dissemination of reason as a patient agent in the progress of mankind.

  The faults of the Essai sur les moeurs were soon pointed out. Not only Nonnotte but Larcher, Guénée, and many others pounced upon its errors of fact, and the Jesuits had no trouble in exposing its distorting bias. Montesquieu agreed with them in this regard; “Voltaire,” he said, “is like the monks who write not for the sake of the subject that they treat, but for the glory of their order; he writes for his convent.”53 Voltaire replied to his critics that he had stressed the sins of Christianity because others were still defending them; he quoted contemporary authors who commended the crusades against the Albigenses, the execution of Huss, even the Massacre of St. Bartholomew; the world surely needed a history that would brand these actions as crimes against humanity and morality.54—Perhaps, with all his illuminating conception of how history should be written, Voltaire mistook the function of the historian; he sat in judgment on each person and event, and passed sentence on them like some Committee of Public Safety pledged to protect and advance the intellectual revolution. And he judged men not in terms of their own disordered time and restricted knowledge, but in the light of the wider knowledge that had come since their death. Written sporadically over a score of years, amid so many distracting enterprises and tribulations, the Essai lacked continuity of narrative and unity of form, and it did not quite integrate its parts into a consistent whole.

  But the merits of the Essai were numberless. Its range of knowledge was immense, and testified to sedulous research. Its bright style, weighted with philosophy and lightened with humor, raised it far above most works of history between Tacitus and Gibbon. Its general spirit alleviated its bias; the book is still warm with love of liberty, toleration, justice, and reason. Here again, after so many lifeless, credulous chronicles, historiography became an art. In one generation three more histories transformed past events into literature and philosophy: Hume’s History of England, Robertson’s History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire— all of them indebted to the spirit, and in part to the example, of Voltaire. Michelet wrote gratefully of the Essai as “this History which made all historiography, which begot all of us, critics and narrators alike.”55 And what are we doing here but walking in the path of Voltaire?

  When the Seven Years’ War ranged France against Frederick, Voltaire’s latent love of his country rose again, perhaps mingled with old memories of Frankfurt and a new distrust of Geneva. After d’Alembert’s article, and the retreat of the Geneva clergy from the audacities to which it had pledged them, Voltaire felt as unsafe in Switzerland as in France. When could he return to his native soil?

  For once fortune favored him. The Duc de Choiseul, who enjoyed the exile’s books, became minister of foreign affairs in 1758; Mme. de Pompadour, though in physical decline, was at the height of her influence, and had forgiven Voltaire’s gaucheries; now the French government, while the King dallied in his seraglio, could wink at the terrible heretic’s re-entry into France. In October, 1758, he moved three and a half miles out of Switzerland, and became the patriarch of Ferney. He was sixty-four and still near death; but he ranged himself against the strongest power in Europe in the most basic conflict of the century.

  * * *

  I. There were many Tronchins, chiefly: (1) Jean Robert, banker and procureur general of Geneva; (2) Jakob, councilor; (3) Francois, author and painter; (4) Theodore, physician. “Tronchin” will mean Theodore unless otherwise stated.

  II. It is still there (1965), much redu
ced in area, but maintained by the city of Geneva as the Institut et Musée Voltaire.

  III. It is now (1965) an art gallery, with some minor relics of Voltaire.

  IV. It was apparently Fénelon, not Voltaire, who said that “l’histoire n’est qu’une fable convenue” (history is nothing but a fable agreed upon).37 The agreement is not evident.

  BOOK IV

  THE ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING

  1715–89

  CHAPTER XV

  The Scholars

  I. THE INTELLECTUAL ENVIRONMENT

  THE growth of knowledge was impeded by inertia, superstition, persecution, censorship, and ecclesiastical control of education. These obstacles were weaker than before, but they were still far stronger than in an industrial civilization where the competition of individuals, groups, and nations compels men to search for new ideas and ways, new means for old ends. Most men in the eighteenth century moved in a slowly changing milieu where traditional responses and ideas usually sufficed for the needs of life. When novel situations and events did not readily lend themselves to natural explanations, the common mind ascribed them to supernatural causes, and rested.

  A thousand superstitions survived side by side with the rising enlightenment. Highborn ladies trembled at unfavorable horoscopes, or believed that a drowned child could be revived if a poor woman would light a candle and set it afloat in a cup to set fire to a bridge on the Seine. The Princesse de Conti promised the Abbé Leroux a sumptuous equipage if he would find her the philosopher’s stone. Julie de Lespinasse, after living for years with the skeptical scientist d’Alembert, kept her faith in lucky and unlucky days. Fortunetellers lived on the credit given to their clairvoyance; so Mme. de Pompadour, the Abbé de Bernis, and the Duc de Choiseul secretly consulted Mme. Bontemps, who read the future in coffee grounds.1 According to Montesquieu, Paris swarmed with magicians and other impostors who offered to ensure worldly success or eternal youth. The Comte de Saint-Germain persuaded Louis XV that the sick finances of France could be restored by secret methods of manufacturing diamonds and gold.2 The Duc de Richelieu played with black magic—invoking Satan’s aid. The old Prince of Anhalt-Dessau, who won many battles for Prussia, did not believe in God, but if he met three old women on his way to hunt he would return home; it was “a bad time.”3 Thousands of people wore amulets or talismans to avert evils. A thousand magical prescriptions served as popular medicine. Religious relics could cure almost any ailment, and relics of Christ or the saints could be found anywhere—a bit of his raiment at Trier, his cloak at Turin and Laon, one of the nails of the True Cross in the Abbey of St.-Denis. In England the cause of the Stuart Pretenders was advanced by the widely held notion that they could by their touch cure scrofula—a power denied to the Hanoverian kings because they were “usurpers” not blessed by divine right. Most peasants were sure that they heard elves or fairies in the woods. The belief in ghosts was declining; but the learned Benedictine Dom Augustin Calmet wrote a history of vampires—corpses that went out of their graves at night to suck the blood of the living; this book was published with the approval of the Sorbonne.4

  The worst superstition of all, the belief in witchcraft, disappeared in this century, except for some local vestiges. In 1736 the “divines of the Associated Presbyteries” of Scotland passed a resolution reaffirming their belief in witchcraft;5 and as late as 1765 the most famous of English jurists, Sir William Blackstone, wrote in his Commentaries: “To deny the possibility, nay, actual existence, of witchcraft and sorcery is flatly to contradict the revealed word of God; … the thing itself is a truth to which every nation in the world hath in its turn borne testimony.” Despite Blackstone and the Bible the English law that had made witchcraft a felony was repealed in 1736. No execution for witchcraft is recorded in France after 1718, none in Scotland after 1722; an execution in Switzerland in 1782 is the last recorded on the European Continent.6 Gradually the increase of wealth and towns, the spread of education, the experiments of scientists, the appeals of scholars and philosophers reduced the role of devils and ghosts in human life and thought, and judges, defying popular fanaticism, refused to hear accusations of sorcery. Europe began to forget that it had sacrificed 100,000 men, women, and girls to just one of its superstitions.7

  Meanwhile persecution of dissent by Church and state, by Catholics and Protestants, exerted its terrors to keep from the public mind any ideas that might disturb vested beliefs and powers. The Catholic Church claimed to have been established by the Son of God, therefore to be the depository and sole authorized interpreter of divine truth, therefore to have the right to suppress heresy. It concluded that outside the Church no one could be saved from eternal damnation. Had not Christ said, “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; he that believeth not shall be condemned”?8 So the Fourth Lateran Ecumenical Council, in 1215, had made it part of the fides definita— required every Catholic to believe—that “there is one universal Church of the faithful, outside which no one at all can be saved.”I

  Louis XV accepted this doctrine as logically derived from Scriptural texts, and as useful in molding a unified national mind. In 1732 the public exercise of Protestant worship in France was forbidden on pain of torture, the galleys, or death.9 The Catholic population was more tolerant than its leaders; it condemned these savage penalties, and the edict was so laxly enforced that in 1744 the Huguenots of France dared to hold a national synod. But in 1767 the Sorbonne, the Faculty of Theology at the University of Paris, reiterated the old claim: “The prince has received the temporal sword in order to repress such doctrines as materialism, atheism, and deism, which cut the bonds of society and instigate crime, and also to crush every teaching threatening to shake the foundations of the Catholic faith.”10 In Spain and Portugal this policy was strictly enforced; in Italy, more leniently. In Russia the Orthodox Church required similar unanimity.

  Many Protestant states agreed with the Catholics on the necessity of persecution. In Denmark and Sweden the laws demanded adherence to the Lutheran faith; in practice other Protestants, and even Catholics, were unmolested, though they remained ineligible to hold public office. In Switzerland each canton was free to choose its own faith and enforce it. In Germany the rule that the people must follow the religion of the prince was increasingly ignored. In the United Provinces Protestant ecclesiastics rejected toleration as an invitation to religious indifference, but the laity refused to follow the clergy in this matter, and relative freedom from persecution made Holland a refuge for unorthodox ideas and publications. In England the laws allowed religious dissent, but they harassed Dissenters with social and political disabilities. Samuel Johnson declared in 1763 that “false doctrine should be checked on its first appearance; the civil power should unite with the Church in punishing those who dared to attack the established religion.”11 The British government occasionally burned books, or pilloried authors, that had questioned the fundamentals of the Christian faith; so Woolston was fined and jailed in 1730, and in 1762 Peter Annet was sentenced to the pillory, then to a year’s imprisonment with hard labor, for his attacks on Christianity. The laws against Catholics were loosely administered in England, but in Ireland they were enforced with rigor until Lord Chesterfield, as lord lieutenant in 1745, refused to apply them; and in the second half of the eighteenth century some of the severe regulations were repealed. In general the theory of persecution was maintained by both the Catholic and the Protestant clergy till 1789, except where Catholics or Protestants were in the minority, but the practice of persecution declined as a new public opinion took form with the development of religious doubt. The instinct to persecute passed from religion to politics as the state replaced the Church as the guardian of unanimity and order and as the object of heretical dissent.

  Censorship of speech and press was generally more relaxed in Protestant than in Catholic countries; it was mildest in Holland and England. It was strict in most of the Swiss cantons. The city fathers of Geneva burned a few unorthodox books, but seldom took ac
tion against the authors themselves. In Germany censorship was handicapped by the multiplicity of states, each with its own official creed; a writer could move across a frontier from an unfriendly to a friendly or indifferent environment. In Prussia censorship was practically abolished by Frederick the Great, but was restored by his successor in 1786. Denmark, except for a brief interlude under Struensee, maintained censorship of books till 1849. Sweden forbade the publication of material critical of Lutheranism or the government; in 1764 the University of Uppsala issued a list of forbidden books; but in 1766 Sweden established full freedom of the press.

  In France censorship had broadened from precedent to precedent since Francis I, and was renewed by an edict of 1723: “No publishers or others may print or reprint, anywhere in the kingdom, any books without having obtained permission in advance by letters sealed with the Great Seal.” In 1741 there were seventy-six official censors. Before giving a book the permission et privilége du roi the censor was required to testify that the book contained nothing contrary to religion, public order, or sound morality. Even after being published with the royal imprimatur a book might be condemned by the Paris Parlement or the Sorbonne. In the first half of the eighteenth century the royal censorship was only loosely enforced. Thousands of books appeared without the privilége and with impunity; in many cases, especially when Malesherbes was chief censor (1750–63), an author received permission tacite—an informal pledge that the book in question might be printed without fear of prosecution. A book published without the permission of the government might be burned by the public executioner, while the author remained free; and if he was sent to the Bastille it was usually for a brief and genteel imprisonment.12

  This era of relative toleration ended with the attempt of Damiens to assassinate Louis XV (January 5, 1757). In April a savage edict decreed death for “all those who shall be convicted of having written or printed any works intended to attack religion, to assail the royal authority, or to disturb the order and tranquillity of the realm.” In 1764 another decree forbade the publication of works on the finances of the state. Books, pamphlets, even prefaces to plays, were subjected to the most detailed scrutiny and control. Sentences varying from the pillory and flogging to nine years in the galleys were imposed for buying or selling copies of Voltaire’s La Pucelle or his Dictionnaire philosophique. In 1762 d’Alembert wrote to Voltaire: “You cannot imagine what degree of fury the Inquisition has reached [in France]. The inspectors of thought … delete from all books such words as superstition, indulgence, persecution.”13 Hatred grew tense on both sides of the conflict between religion and philosophy; what had begun as a campaign against superstition rose to the pitch of a war against Christianity. Revolution came in France, and not in eighteenth-century England, partly because censorship by state or Church, which was mild in England, was so strong in France that the imprisoned mind could expand only by the violent destruction of its bonds.