The Age of Voltaire

by Will Durant

  Most minor operations were performed without anesthesia. The ancients had used various soporific potions—“nepenthe,” opium, henbane, mandrake, hemlock, etc.; God himself, said the Book of Genesis, put Adam into “a deep sleep” before taking out a rib. Dioscorides, in the first century of the Christian Era, prescribed mandragora wine in surgical operations.41 India used Cannabis indica (Indian hemp). Surgical sleeping draughts were mentioned by Origen in the second century, and by St. Hilary of Poitiers in the fourth. Most of the old soporifics continued in use in the Middle Ages; so the famous medical school of Salerno advocated a “sleeping sponge.” In modern Europe the favorite anesthetic was drunkenness. Only in 1799 did Sir Humphry Davy discover the anesthetic properties of nitrous oxide (“laughing gas”). The anesthetic possibilities of ether were discovered in 1839 by Dr. Crawford Long of Danielsville, Georgia.

  VI. THE PHYSICIANS

  The growth of wealth, the rise of the middle classes in number and purse, and the progress of medical science and education gave a higher status and income to physicians than they had usually known before. La Mettrie, himself a physician, rejoiced: “Everything gives way to the great art of the healer. The doctor is the one philosopher who deserves well of his country.… The mere sight of him restores our calm, … and breeds fresh hope.”42 Voltaire was critical of medicines—“regimen is superior to medicine”; and of most doctors—“out of every hundred physicians ninety-eight are charlatans”; but he added: “Men who are occupied in the restoration of health to other men, by the joint exercise of skill and humanity, are above all the great of the earth. They even partake of divinity, since to preserve and renew is almost as noble as to create.”43 Diderot praised the Faculty of Medicine in the University of Paris44 whose Faculty of Theology was the bane of his life. “There are no books I read more gladly,” he said, “than books about medicine, no men whose conversation is more interesting to me than that of doctors—but only when I am well.”45 He made Dr. de Bordeu the central character in Le Rêve d’Alembert. The profession was satirized as usual, as in the plays of Goldoni, the pictures of Chodowiecki, the Ferdinand Count Fathom of Smollett, and the delectable caricatures of Thomas Rowlandson.

  Better fees and incomes raised physicians to better status. Most of them, in England, charged a guinea for a visit. Some of them earned six thousand pounds a year. Sir Hans Sloane, the first physician to be made a baronet, became president of the Royal Society, and Josef von Quarin was made a baron by Joseph II of Austria. Physicians were welcomed in the best clubs of London, in the best salons of Paris. They no longer wore the lugubrious soutane, or black robe; they dressed in the best fashion of the upper middle class. In England they displayed a coat of red satin or brocade, knee breeches, buckled shoes, goldheaded cane, and sometimes a sword; in France they dressed with the pomp of a high ecclesiastic.

  Some physicians call for special remembrance. Simon André Tissot was famous in Lausanne as a leading advocate of inoculation and an authority on epilepsy; he labored not only to heal the sick but also to keep the well well; his Avis au peuple sur la santé, or Advice to the People on Health (1760), ran through ten editions in six years, and was translated into every major language of Europe. Leopold Auenbrugger was chief in a circle of great doctors who gave honor to Vienna under Maria Theresa; he was loved for his modesty, honesty, and charity, “a noble example of the substantial worth and charm of old-fashioned German character at its very best.”46 Not quite so popular was Dr. Joseph Ignace Guillotin, who served as a deputy in the States-General of 1789, upheld capital punishment, and proposed the use of a beheading machine that would avoid the misstrokes of executioners. And Théodore Tronchin was the most famous physician in Switzerland.

  He was a favorite pupil of Boerhaave at Leiden, practiced twenty years in Amsterdam, married the granddaughter of Jan de Witt, moved back to his native Geneva, and there introduced inoculation (1749) by beginning on himself and his children. In 1756 the Due d’Orléans invited him to Paris to inoculate his son the Due de Chartres and his daughter the current Mlle. de Montpensier. Paris marveled at such courage; but when the patients came through with no perceivable harm, the elite world flocked to Tronchin’s lodgings in the Palais-Royal, eager to be made immune to a disease that had long maintained a high rate of mortality in France.

  His success gave weight to his views on other matters. He preceded Rousseau in urging mothers to nurse their children. He told his patients to take less medicine and more exercise in the open air, to eat simple foods, to bathe more frequently, to wash in cold water, discard their wigs, nightcaps, and bed curtains, and retire and rise at an early hour. He startled the court at Versailles by ordering the windows of the palace—which had always remained closed—to be opened at least part of every day, even in winter. His ideas became fashionable. Highborn ladies took walks in the early morning hours, clad, for ventilation’s sake, in short skirts that were soon named tronchines.47

  When Voltaire settled in Geneva he put himself under Tronchin’s care. “He is a man six feet tall,” said Voltaire, “wise as Aesculapius, and as handsome as Apollo.”48 Tronchin did not reciprocate these compliments, but, as Voltaire said of himself and Haller, perhaps they were both mistaken. Mme. d’Épinay, who had come all the way from Paris to Geneva to take treatment from Tronchin, gave a very flattering picture of him:

  I am going to spend two or three days at Voltaire’s house with M. Tronchin. Really, I discover every day new features in Tronchin which inspire me with boundless respect and regard for him. His charity, his distinterestedness, his affection and care for his wife, are unexampled. Now that I know her, I declare to you that she is the sulkiest and most unendurable woman in existence.49

  But who can trust one woman on another?

  It was not an especially great century in the history of medicine; the medical scene was still darkened with mysticism, quackery, and theories that should already have been shamed by experience. But the progress of anatomy and physiology had now placed medicine upon a sounder basis than before; medical education was more thorough and more widely available; unlicensed practice was fading away; specialties were increasing knowledge and improving care; surgery was liberated; miraculous cures were losing repute; and the triumphs of medicine were playing their quiet part in that basic conflict between faith and reason which was taking the forefront in the life of the mind.

  BOOK V

  THE ATTACK UPON CHRISTIANITY

  1730–74

  CHAPTER XVIII

  The Atheists

  1730–51

  I. THE PHILOSOPHIC ECSTASY

  LET us define our terms. By philosopher we shall mean anyone who tries to arrive at reasoned opinions on any subject whatever as seen in a large perspective. More specifically, in these chapters, we shall apply the term to those who seek a rational view of the origin, nature, significance, and destiny of the universe, life, or man. Philosophy must not be understood as in opposition to religion, and any large perspective of human life must make room for religion. But since many philosophers in eighteenth-century France were hostile to Christianity as they knew it, the word philosophe took on an anti-Christian connotation;I and usually, in our use of the French term, it will carry that implication. So we shall call La Mettrie, Voltaire, Diderot, d’Alembert, Grimm, Helvétius, and d’Holbach philosophes; but we shall not so term Rousseau—though we should call him a philosopher, if only because he gave a reasoned argument in defense of feeling and faith. We must also allow for the fact that a philosophe might oppose all the religions around him, and yet, like Voltaire, consistently and to the end profess belief in God. The debate that agitated the intellectual classes in the half century before the Revolution was not quite a conflict between religion and philosophy; it was primarily a conflict between the philosophes and Catholic Christianity as it then existed in France. It was the pent-up wrath of the French mind after centuries in which religion had sullied its services with obscurantism, persecution, and massacre. The reaction went t
o extremes, but so had the Massacre of St. Bartholomew (1572), the assassination of Henry IV (1610), and the dragonnades of the Revocation (1685).

  Never had there been such a multitude of philosophers. Helvétius remarked “the taste of our age for philosophy,”2 and d’Alembert wrote:

  Our century has called itself the century of philosophy par excellence.… From the principles of the profane sciences to the foundations of revelation, from metaphysics to questions of taste, from music to morals, … from the rights of princes to those of peoples, … everything has been discussed, analyzed, disputed.… One cannot deny that philosophy among us has shown progress. Natural science from day to day accumulates new riches.… Nearly all fields of knowledge have assumed new forms.3

  The French philosophers were a new breed. First of all, they were clear. They were not solemn recluses, talking to themselves or their like in esoteric gibberish. They were men of letters, who knew how to make thoughts shine through words. They turned their backs on metaphysics as a hopeless quest, and on systems of philosophy as pretentious vanities. They wrote not long convoluted treatises, laboriously evolving the world from one idea, but relatively short essays, diverting dialogues, novels sometimes spiced with obscenity, satires that could slay with laughter, epigrams that could crush with a line. These philosophers attuned their speech to the men and women of the salons; in many cases they addressed their works to distinguished ladies; such books were bound to be intelligible, and might make atheism charming. So philosophy became a social force, moving out of the schools into society and government. It took part in the conflict of powers; it was in the news. And since all educated Europe looked to France for the latest notions, the works of the French philosophers reached into England, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Sweden, and Russia, and became European events. Frederick the Great and Catherine the Great were proud to be philosophes, and perhaps they were not disturbed when French conservatives predicted that the freethinkers of France were undermining her morals, unity, and power.

  Gutenberg was having his effect: print was spreading science, history, Biblical criticism, the pagan classics; the philosophers could now speak to a larger and better-prepared audience than ever before. They did not disdain to come down from their towers and “popularize” knowledge. Not that they put much trust in the “common man” as they knew him in that age; but they were confident that the dissemination of “truth” would improve the conduct and happiness of mankind. D’Alembert regarded “the art of instructing and enlightening men” as “the noblest portion and gift within human reach.”4 Sapere aude—“to dare to know”—became the motto of this éclaircissement, or enlightenment, this Age of Reason triumphant and fulfilled.

  For now the faith in reason, which had had its chanticleer in Francis Bacon a century before, became the foundation and instrument of “liberal” thought—i.e., in this aspect, thought liberated from the myths of the Bible and the dogmas of the Church. Reason appeared in all the glory of a new revelation; it claimed authority henceforth in every field, and proposed to re-form education, religion, morals, literature, economy, and government in its own bright image. The philosophes admitted the frailty of reason, as of everything human; they knew that it could be deceived by bad logic or a mistaken interpretation of experience; and they did not have to wait for Schopenhauer to tell them that reason is usually the servant of desire, the handmaiden of the will. Hume, who dominated this Age of Reason in Britain, was the strongest critic that reason ever encountered, possibly excepting Kant. Voltaire time and again acknowledged the limits of reason, and Diderot agreed with Rousseau that feeling is more basic than reason. Nearly all the philosophers of the Enlightenment recognized that the majority of men, even in the most civilized nation, are too pressed by economic necessities and toil to have time for the development of reason, and that the masses of mankind are moved far more by passion and prejudice than by reason. Even so, the hope remained that reason could be spread, and could be freed from narrow selfishness and interested indoctrination.

  And so, despite their periods of pessimism, a spirit of optimism prevailed among the philosophes. Never had men been so confident that they could remold, if not themselves, at least society. Despite the disasters of the Seven Years’ War, despite the loss of Canada and India to England, there rose in the second half of the eighteenth century an élan of the mind that seemed to make old and ailing France young and strong again. Not since the days of the Greek Sophists had there been so many ideas in the air, or so invigorating a spirit of inquiry and debate; no wonder Duclos sensed around him “a certain fermentation of reason tending to develop everywhere.”5 And because Paris was now the intellectual capital of Europe, the Enlightenment became as wide a movement as the Renaissance and the Reformation. Indeed, it seemed the logical culmination of the earlier movements. The Renaissance had gone back beyond Christianity to explore the pagan mind; the Reformation had broken the bonds of doctrinal authority, and, almost despite itself, had let loose the play of reason. Now those two preludes to modernity could complete themselves. Man could at last liberate himself from medieval dogmas and Oriental myths; he could shrug off that bewildering, terrifying theology, and stand up free, free to doubt, to inquire, to think, to gather knowledge and spread it, free to build a new religion around the altar of reason and the service of mankind. It was a noble intoxication.

  II. THE BACKGROUND OF REVOLT

  But how had all this come about? Why had so many philosophers, especially in France, turned against Christianity, which, after all, had mingled hope with its terrors, charity with its crimes, beauty with its sins?

  In England the revolt, as expressed by the deists, had met with a relatively tolerant hearing, even from the Established Church; and perhaps for that reason the fire of revolt had died down. Moreover, the Church in England was subject to the state, and no longer made any active pretense to be a rival independent power. But in France the Church was a powerful organization owning a large share of the national wealth and soil, and yet bound by supreme allegiance to a foreign power. It seemed to be draining more wealth from secular into ecclesiastical hands through its role in the making of wills and the guidance of bequests; it refused to pay taxes beyond its occasional “gratuitous gift”; it held thousands of peasants in practical serfdom on its lands; it maintained monks in what seemed to be fruitless idleness. It had repeatedly profited from false documents and bogus miracles. It controlled nearly all schools and universities, through which it inoculated the minds of the young with stupefying absurdities. It denounced as heresy any teaching contrary to its own, and used the state to enforce its censorship over speech and press. It had done its best to choke the intellectual development of France. It had urged Louis XIV into the inhuman persecution of the Huguenots, and the heartless destruction of Port-Royal. It had been guilty of barbarous campaigns against the Albigenses, and of sanctioning massacres like that of St. Bartholomew’s Day; it had fomented religious wars that had almost ruined France. And amid all these crimes against the human spirit it had pretended, and had made millions of simple people believe, that it was above and beyond reason and questioning, that it had inherited a divine revelation, that it was the infallible and divinely inspired vicegerent of God, and that its crimes were as much the will of God as were its charities.

  The Church offered many answers to this indictment; we shall hear them in due course. Meanwhile these proliferating charges moved thousands of minds to resentment and protest, and finally to an impassioned hostility. Skeptics multiplied to the point where they ceased to fear the clergy, and openly harassed them with difficult questions. When, about 1730, Father Tournemine, at the Collège Louis-le-Grand, invited unbelievers to meet him, “his room,” we are told, “was soon filled with freethinkers, deists, materialists; he converted hardly any.”6 The clergy were appalled at the number of Frenchmen and Frenchwomen who died rejecting the sacraments of the Church. Mme. de Prie threatened to have her servants throw through the window the curé who impor
tuned her to accept extreme unction.7 A priest complained that “the moment we appear we are forced into discussion. We are called upon to prove, for example, the utility of prayer to a man who does not believe in God, and the necessity of fasting to a man who has all his life denied the immortality of the soul. The effort is very irksome, while those who laugh are not on our side.”8

  Barbier remarked in 1751, “We may see in this country a revolution in favor of Protestantism.”9 He was mistaken. The expulsion of the Huguenots had left no halfway house between Catholicism and unbelief. French liberal thought skipped the Reformation, and went at one leap from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. So in France it was not to the Jansenists or to the few surviving Protestants that the French mind turned in its rebellion; it was to Montaigne, Descartes, Gassendi, Bayle, and Montesquieu. When the French freethinkers went back to Descartes they rejected nearly all of him but his “methodic doubt” and his mechanistic interpretation of the objective world. Bayle was honored as the subtlest of reasoners, whose doubts had generated a thousand doubts more; his Dictionnaire was an inexhaustible armory for the enemies of the Church.

  The example of England was an emboldening inspiration to the freethinkers of France. First, Francis Bacon, whose call to inductive science seemed to promise so much more fruit than Descartes’ magical deduction of God and immortality from the existence of Descartes. Then Hobbes, whose blunt materialism never ceased to agitate Diderot. Then Newton, who seemed to have reduced God to a button-presser in the world machine; the French did not yet know that Newton was more prolific in theology than in science. Then the English deists, who had given courage and impetus to Voltaire. And finally Locke, for the French skeptics thought that all religion collapsed before the proposition that all ideas are derived from sensation. If sensation is a product of external forces, mind is a product of experience, not a deathless gift of an invisible God. And if experience creates character, character can be changed by altering educational methods and content, and reforming social institutions. From these two propositions men like Diderot, Helvétius, and d’Holbach drew revolutionary conclusions. “Can there be anything more splendid,” asked Voltaire, with Locke in mind, “than to put the whole world into commotion by a few arguments?”10 (Voltaire died before 1789.)