The Age of Voltaire

by Will Durant

  The philosophes (i.e., those French philosophers who joined in the attack upon Christianity) protested against the censorship as condemning French thought to sterility. But they themselves sometimes asked the censor to check their opponents. So d’Alembert begged Malesherbes to suppress Fréron’s antiphilosophe periodical, L’ Année littéraire; Malesherbes, though pro-philosophes, refused.14 Voltaire asked the Queen to prohibit the performance of a parody on his play Sémiramis; she would not, but Pompadour did.15

  Meanwhile the philosophes contrived a variety of ways to elude the censorship. They sent their manuscripts to foreign publishers, usually to Amsterdam, The Hague, or Geneva; thence their books, in French, were imported wholesale into France; almost every day forbidden books arrived by boat at Bordeaux or other points on the French coast or frontier. Disguised with innocent titles, they were peddled from street to street, from town to town. Some nobles not overfriendly to the centralized monarchy allowed such volumes to be sold in their territory.16 Voltaire’s correspondence, which unified the philosophic campaign, escaped much of the censorship because his friend Damilaville for a time held a post in the finance administration, and was able to countersign with the seal of the comptroller general the letters and packages of Voltaire and his associates.17 Many government officials, some clergymen, read with pleasure the books that the government or the clergy had condemned. French authors of foreign-published volumes rarely put their names on the title page, and when they were accused of authorship they lied with a stout conscience; this was part of the game, sanctioned by the laws of war. Voltaire not only denied the authorship of several of his books, he sometimes foisted them upon dead people, and he confused the scent by issuing criticisms or denunciations of his own works. The game included devices of form or tricks of expression that helped to form the subtlety of French prose: double meanings, dialogues, allegories, stories, irony, transparent exaggeration, and, all in all, such delicate wit as no other literature has ever matched. The Abbé Galiani defined eloquence as the art of saying something without being sent to the Bastille.

  Only second to the censorship as an obstacle to free thought was the control of education by the clergy. In France the local curés taught or supervised the parish schools; secondary education was in the hands of the Jesuits, the Oratorians, or the Christian Brothers. All Europe acclaimed the Jesuits as teachers of classical languages and literatures, but they were less helpful in science. Many of the philosophes had had their wits sharpened by a Jesuit education. The University of Paris was dominated by priests far more conservative than the Jesuits. The University of Orléans, famous for law, and the University of Montpellier, famous for medicine, were relatively secular. It is significant that neither Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, Maupertuis, Helvétius, nor Buff on attended a university. The French mind, struggling to free itself from theological leading strings, flowered not in universities but in academies and salons.

  Learned academies had sprung up in this century in Berlin (1701), Uppsala (1710), St. Petersburg (1724), and Copenhagen (1743). In 1739 Linnaeus and five other Swedish scholars formed the Collegium Curiosum; in 1741 this was incorporated as the Kongliga Svenska Vetenskaps-academien, which became the Swedish Royal Academy. In France there were provincial academies in Orléans, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Auxerre, Metz, Besançon, Dijon, Lyons, Caen, Rouen, Montauban, Angers, Nancy, Aix-en-Provence. The academies steered clear of heresy, but they encouraged science and experiment, and they tolerated and stimulated discussion; it was the prize competitions offered by the Dijon Academy in 1749 and 1754 that started Rousseau on his way toward the French Revolution. In Paris the French Academy of moribund Immortals was awakened from dogmatic slumbers by the election of Duclos (1746) and d’Alembert (1754); and the rise of Duclos to the strategic post of “permanent secretary” (1755) marked the capture of the Academy by the philosophes.

  Learned journals added to the intellectual stimulation. One of the best was the Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des sciences et des beaux-arts, edited by the Jesuits from 1701 to 1762, and known as the Journal de Trévoux from their publishing house at Trévoux, near Lyons; this was the most erudite and liberal of the religious publications. There were seventy-three periodicals in Paris alone, led by the Mercure de France and the Journal des savants. Two of Voltaire’s most effective and persistent enemies edited influential journals: Desfontaines founded the Nouvelles littéraires in 1721, and Fréron published the Année littéraire from 1754 to 1774. Germany followed suit with Brieve die neueste Literatur betreffend, which numbered Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn among its frequent contributors. In Italy the Giornale dei letterati covered science, literature, and art, while Caffé was a journal of opinion on the style of The Spectator. In Sweden Olof von Dalin made Svenska Argus a messenger of the Enlightenment. As nearly all these periodicals used the vernacular and were independent of ecclesiastical control, they were a rising leaven in the ferment of their time.

  Typical of the eighteenth century, as of our own, was a spreading eagerness for knowledge—precisely that intellectual lust which the Middle Ages had condemned as a sin of foolish pride. Authors responded with a zeal to make knowledge more widely available and intelligible. “Outlines” abounded; books like Mathematics Made Easy, The Essential Bayle, L’Esprit de Montaigne, and L’Esprit de Fontenelle strove to put science, literature, and philosophy à la portée de tout le monde— within the comprehension of all the world. More and more professors taught in the vernaculars, reaching audiences incapable of Latin. Libraries and museums were expanding, and were opening their treasures to students. In 1753 Sir Hans Sloane bequeathed to the British nation his collection of fifty thousand books, several thousand manuscripts, and a great number of pictures, coins, and antiquities; Parliament voted twenty thousand pounds to his heirs in recompense, and the collection became the nucleus of the British Museum. The Harleian and Cottonian collections of manuscripts, and the accumulated libraries of the kings of England were added; and in 1759 the great museum was opened to the public. In 1928 it had 3,200,000 printed volumes and 56,000 manuscripts on its fifty-five miles of shelves.

  Finally, encyclopedias took form to gather, order, and transmit the new stores of knowledge to all who could read and think. There had been such works in the Middle Ages, as by Isidore, Bishop (c.600–636) of Seville, and Vincent of Beauvais (c.1190-C.1264). In the seventeenth century there had been Johann Heinrich Alsted’s Encyclopaedia (1630) and Louis Moreri’s Grand Dictionnaire historique (1674). Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697) was rather an assemblage of disturbing facts and suggestive theories than an encyclopedia, but it had more influence on the mind of educated Europe than any similar work before Diderot’s. At London, in 1728, Ephraim Chambers published in two volumes a Cyclopoedia, or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences; it omitted history, biography, and geography, but by its system of cross references, and in other ways, it gave a lead to the epochal Encyclopédie (1751 f.) of Diderot and d’Alembert. In 1771 there appeared in three volumes the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, or Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, “by a society of gentlemen in Scotland, printed in Edinburgh.” A second edition (1778) ran to ten volumes, and advanced upon its predecessors by including history and biography. So it has grown, from edition to edition, through two hundred years. How many of us have foraged in that harvest ten times a day, and pilfered from that treasury!

  By 1789 the middle classes in Western Europe were as well informed as the aristocracy and the clergy. Print had made its way. That, after all, was the basic revolution.

  II. THE SCHOLARLY REVELATION

  Classical scholarship was in modest decline from its peak under the Scaligers, Casaubon, Salmasius, and Bentley; but Nicolas Fréret upheld their tradition of scholarly devotion and far-reaching results. Admitted to the Académie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres at the age of twenty-six, he read to it in that year (1714) a paper, Sur l’Origine des Francs, which upset the proud legend that t
he Franks were “free” men coming from Greece or Troy; rather, they were South German barbarians. The Abbé Vertot denounced Fréret to the government as a libeler of the monarchy; the young scholar was sent to the Bastille for a short stay; thereafter he confined his researches to other lands than France. He drew up 1,375 maps illustrating ancient geography. He gathered illuminating data on the history of classic science and art, and on the origins of the Greek mythology. His eight volumes on ancient chronology corrected the epochal work of Joseph Justus Scaliger, and established Chinese chronology on lines accepted today; this was one of a thousand scholarly pinpricks that punctured the Biblical conception of history.

  A similar blow was struck at classic fables when Pouilly read before the same Academy (1722) a paper questioning Livy’s account of early Roman history. Lorenzo Valla had suggested such doubts on this point about 1440; Vico had developed them in 1721; but Pouilly’s wide research definitely discredited as legends the stories of Romulus and Remus, of the Horatii and the Curiatii; the way was made straight for the work of Barthold Niebuhr in the nineteenth century. Not quite within the temporal bounds of this chapter, but belonging to the eighteenth century, were the Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795), in which Friedrich Wolf disintegrated Homer into a whole school and dynasty of singers; and Richard Porson’s meticulous editions of Aeschylus and Euripides; and Joseph Eckhel’s Doctrina Numorum veterum (1792–98), which founded the science of numismatics.

  It was not till the discovery of Herculaneum that the world of classical scholarship felt again the ecstasy of such a revelation as had come through the humanists of the Renaissance. In 1738 some workmen preparing the foundations of a hunting lodge for King Charles IV of Naples unearthed by accident the ruins of Herculaneum; in 1748 a first inspection revealed some of the astonishing structures of Pompeii, also buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79; and in 1752 the majestic temples built by Greek colonists at Paestum were recovered from the jungle growth of darkened centuries. The master engraver Piranesi described the excavated temples, palaces, and statues of Pompeii in etchings whose prints found eager purchasers everywhere in Europe. The result of these discoveries was a fervent revival of interest in ancient art, a strong impetus to the neoclassical movement led by Winckelmann, and an immense addition to modern knowledge of ancient ways.

  We must pause to acknowledge the debt of scholarship to monks who used their libraries and manuscript collections to make researches and compile records extremely helpful to the modern mind. The Benedictines of St.-Maur continued their old devotion to historical studies. Dom Bernard de Montfaucon founded the science of paleography with his Palaeographica graeca (1708); he illuminated ancient history by means of ancient art in his Antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures (ten volumes, 1719–24), and he turned his painstaking studies to his own country in five folio volumes, Les Monuments de la monarchic française (1729–33). Dom Antoine Rivet de la Grange began in 1733 the Benedictine Histoire littéraire de la France, which served as progenitor and storehouse for all later histories of early French literature. The greatest of these eighteenth-century Benedictine scholars was Dom Augustin Calmet, whose monastery at Senones gave Voltaire asylum in 1754; Voltaire never ceased to profit, and sometimes he pilfered, from Calmet’s Commentaire littéral sur tous les livres de l’Ancien et du Nouveau Testament (1707–16). Despite certain shortcomings,18 these twenty-four volumes were acclaimed as a monument of erudition. Calmet wrote several other works of Biblical exegesis, followed Bossuet in composing an Histoire universelle (1735), and spent nearly all his waking hours in study and prayer. “Who is Madame de Pompadour?” he asked Voltaire in happy ignorance.19 He refused a bishopric, and wrote his own epitaph: “Hic jacet qui multum legit, scripsit, oravit; utinam bene! Amen” (Here lies one who read much, wrote much, prayed much; may it have been well! Amen).20

  Some bold laics joined in Biblical criticism. The physician Jean Astruc, assuming the Mosaic author of the Pentateuch, studied its sources in his Conjectures sur les mémoires originaux dont il paraît que Moïse s’est servi pour composer le livre de la Genése (1753); here for the first time it was pointed out that the use of two different names for God, Yahveh and Elohim, indicated two original stories of the Creation, loosely and repetitiously combined in the Book of Genesis. Other Biblical students tried to calculate, on the basis of the Pentateuch, the date of the Creation, and arrived at two hundred diverse results. Orientalists disturbed the orthodox by quoting Egyptian chronology that claimed to go back thirteen thousand years, and Chinese calculations that Chinese civilization had lasted ninety thousand years. No one believed the Indian Brahmins who held that the world had existed through 326,669 ages, each of which had contained many centuries.21

  The most audacious and far-reaching contribution to Biblical studies in the eighteenth century was made by a German professor of Oriental languages in the Hamburg Academy. Hermann Reimarus left at his death in 1768 a four-thousand-page manuscript on which he had labored for twenty years—“Schutzschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes” (Apology for the Rational Worshipers of God). No one dared publish it until Lessing issued (1774–78) seven portions of it as “fragments of an anonymous work [Fragmente eines Ungenannten] found at Wolfenbüttel” (where Lessing was librarian). Nearly all literate Germany except Frederick the Great rose in protest; even the liberal scholar Johann Semler called Lessing mad to serve as godfather to so devastating a criticism of orthodox beliefs. For in the seventh fragment, Von dem Zwecke Jesu and Seine Jünge (On the Aim of Jesus and His Disciples), Reimarus not only rejected the miracles and resurrection of Christ, but pictured him as an earnest, lovable, deluded young Jew who was faithful to Judaism to the end, accepted the belief of some Jews that the world was soon to be destroyed, and based his ethical principles on this premise as a preparation for the event. Reimarus thought that Jesus interpreted the phrase “Kingdom of Heaven” in the sense then current among his people, as a coming kingdom of the Jews liberated from Rome.22 His despondent cry on the Cross, “My God, my God, why hast Thou abandoned me?,” was a confession of his humanity and his defeat. After his disappearance some of the Apostles transferred this promised kingdom to a life after death. In this sense it was not Christ but the Apostles who inaugurated Christianity. All in all, says Reimarus’ erudite interpreter, Albert Schweitzer, “his work is perhaps the most splendid achievement in the whole course of the historical investigation of the life of Jesus, for he was the first to grasp the fact that the world of thought in which Jesus moved was essentially eschatological”—based on the theory of an imminent end of the world.23

  From the study of Jewish antiquities scholars passed timidly to Oriental peoples that had rejected Christ or never heard his name. Galland’s French translation of the Arabian Nights (1704–17), de Reland’s Religion des Mahométans (1721), Burigny’s Histoire de la philosophie païenne (1724), Boulainvilliers’ Vie de Mahomet (1730), and Sale’s English translation of the Koran (1734) revealed Islam as not a world of barbarism but as the domain of a powerful rival creed, and of a moral order that seemed to work despite its concessions to the natural polygamy of mankind. Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron opened another realm by translating the Scriptures of the Parsees. He was attracted by reading in a Paris library some extracts from the Zend-Avesta; he abandoned his preparation for the priest-hood, and resolved to explore at first hand the sacred books of the East, Too poor to buy passage, he enlisted, aged twenty-three (1754), as a soldier in a French expedition to India. Arrived at Pondicherry, he quickly learned to read modern Persian; at Chandernagor he took up Sanskrit; at Surat he persuaded a Parsee priest to teach him Pahlavi and Zend. In 1762 he returned to Paris with 180 Oriental manuscripts and set himself to translate them; meanwhile he lived on bread, cheese, and water, and avoided marriage as an impossible expense. In 1771 he published his French version of the Zend-Avesta, and fragments of other books of the Parsees; and in 1804 he issued Les Oupanichads. Slowly the awareness of non-Christian religions a
nd moral codes shared in undermining the dogmatism of European faiths.

  Of these ethnic revelations the most influential was the opening up of Chinese history and philosophy by European missionaries, travelers, and scholars. It had begun with Marco Polo’s return to Venice in 1295; it was advanced by French and English translations (1588) of the Jesuit Father Juan Gonzales de Mendoza’s Historia del reino de la China (Lisbon, 1584), and with Hakluyt’s English translation, in his Voyages (1589–1600), of a Latin treatise, Of the Kingdom of China (Macao, 1590). The new influence appeared in Montaigne’s essay “Of Experience” (1591?): “China, in whose realm the government and the arts, without any knowledge of our own institutions, surpass these in many points of excellence.”24 In 1615 the Jesuit Nicolas Trigault published his account De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas; it was soon translated into French, and into English in Purchas his Pilgrimes (1625). Trigault and others lauded the Chinese system of making specific and detailed education a prerequisite for public office, of admitting all classes of the male population to examination for office, and of submitting all governmental agencies to periodical inspection. Another Jesuit, the amazing polymath Athanasius Kircher, published in 1670 a veritable encyclopedia, China illustrata, in which he praised the Chinese government as administered by philosopher-kings.25