The Age of Voltaire

by Will Durant

  In August—just a month before her death—Mme. du Châtelet, presumably at Voltaire’s urging, wrote from Lunéville to her kinsman the governor of Vincennes, and begged him at least to mitigate the conditions of Diderot’s imprisonment. About August 10 Berryer offered to let the prisoner enjoy the freedom and comforts of the castle’s great hall, with permission to receive books and visitors, if he would make an honest confession. On August 13 the chastened philosopher addressed to Berryer the following document:

  I admit to you … that the Pensées, the Bijoux, and the Lettre sur les aveugles are debaucheries of the mind that escaped from me; but I can … promise you on my honor (and I do have honor) that they will be the last, and that they are the only ones.… As for those who have taken part in the publication of these works, nothing will be hidden from you. I shall depose verbally, in the depths [secrecy] of your heart, the names both of the publishers and of the printers.19

  On August 20 he was released from his cell, was promoted to a comfortable room, and was allowed to receive visitors and to walk in the gardens of the château. On the twenty-first he signed a promise not to leave the building or its grounds without official permission. His wife came to comfort and upbraid him, and his old love for her revived. D’Alembert came, and Rousseau, and Mme. de Puisieux. The entrepreneurs of the Encyclopédie brought him manuscripts, and he resumed his editorial work. Learning that his brother had told his father of his arrest, he wrote to the ailing cutler, claimed that his incarceration was due to a woman’s spite, and asked for financial aid. The father answered in a letter (September 3, 1749) that reveals the human side of the conflict between religion and the philosophes:

  MY SON:

  I have received the two letters which you wrote to me recently, informing me of your detention and its cause. I cannot help saying that there surely must have been other reasons than those given in one of your letters. …

  Since nothing happens without God’s consent, I do not know which is better for your moral well-being: that your imprisonment should be ended, or that it should be prolonged for several months during which you could seriously reflect on yourself. Remember that if the Lord has given you talents, it was not for you to work to weaken the doctrines of our Holy Religion. …

  I have given you sufficient proof of my love. In giving you an education it was in the hope that you would make good use of it, and not that its results should throw me, as they have done, into the most bitter sorrow and chagrin on learning of your disgrace. …

  Forgive, and I shall forgive you. I know, my son, that no one is exempt from calumny, and that they may impute to you works in which you have had no share. …

  You will never receive any consideration from me until you have informed me, truly and unequivocally, whether you are married, as they have written to me from Paris, and whether you have two children. If this marriage is legitimate and the thing is done, I am satisfied. I hope you will not refuse your sister the pleasure of bringing them up, and me the pleasure of seeing them under my eyes.

  You ask for money. What! A man like you, who is working on immense projects, … can need money? And you have just spent a month in a place where it cost you nothing to live! …

  Remember your poor mother. In the reproaches that she made to you she told you several times that you were blind. Give me proofs to the contrary. Once again, and above all, be faithful in the execution of your promises.

  You will find enclosed a draft for 150 livres, … which you will spend as you see fit.

  I await impatiently the happy day which will calm my worries by informing me that you are free. As soon as I find out I will go render thanks to the Lord.

  Meanwhile, my son, with all the love that I owe to you,

  Your affectionate father,

  DIDEROT20

  We do not have Denis’ answer; he would have been hard put to equal that letter in nobility.

  He was released on November 3, 1749, after three and a half months of imprisonment. He went home happy to his wife and child, and for a time he forgot Mme. de Puisieux. But on June 30, 1750, his son, aged four, died of a violent fever. A third child, born soon afterward, was badly injured at its baptism, being dropped to the floor of the church by an attendant; it died before the year was out. Three births, three deaths. Diderot went back to his evenings at the Café Procope. About 1750 Rousseau introduced him to Friedrich Melchior Grimm, and there began a triune friendship of some importance to literature. This was the year in which Voltaire abandoned France for Berlin, Rousseau wrote his prize-winning essay on civilization as a disease, and Diderot’s prospectus announced the Encyclopédie.

  While working on the first volume of this project he digressed into another psychological inquiry, whose results he published (1751) in a Lettre sur les sourds et muets à l’usage de ceux qui entendent et qui parlent (Letter on the Deaf and Dumb, for the Use of Those Who Hear and Who Speak). Not yet having forgotten Vincennes, he avoided heresy, and received from the censor (now the kindly Malesherbes) “tacit permission” to publish the essay in France without his name and without fear of prosecution. Diderot proposed to ask questions of a deaf-mute, to observe the gestures with which the deaf-mute answered, and to illuminate thereby the origin of language through gestures. A great actor (for Diderot was already pregnant with his Paradox of the Actor) sometimes conveys a thought or a feeling more effectively through a gesture or a facial expression than through words. The first words were probably vocal gestures—sounds illustrative of the idea in mind. In poets the word chosen has not only an intellectual denotation, or meaning, but also a symbolic connotation, or nuance; it has visual implications (e.g., compare see and gaze) or overtones of sound (compare say and murmur); hence real poetry is untranslatable.

  As usual in Diderot, the discourse is vacillating and disorderly, but rich in suggestive asides. “My idea would be to decompose a man, so to speak, and to consider what he derives from each of his senses” (Condillac later [1754] built his Traité des sensations around this notion). Or again, contrast poetry with painting: the poet can narrate events, the painter can show only one moment: his picture is a gesture, which tries to express at once past, present, and future; here was one germ of Lessing’s Laokoon (1766).

  But by this time the first volume of the Encyclopédie was ready for publication.

  III. HISTORY OF A BOOK: 1746–65

  The Encyclopédie, said the Roman Catholic critic Brunetière, “is the great affair of its time, the goal to which everything preceding it was tending, the origin of everything that has followed it, and consequently the true center for any history of ideas in the eighteenth century.”21 “It belonged only to a philosophical century to attempt an encyclopedia,” said Diderot.22 The work of Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Spinoza, Bayle, and Leibniz in philosophy; the advances made in science by Copernicus, Vesalius, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Huygens, and Newton; the exploration of the earth by navigators, missionaries, and travelers, and the rediscovery of the past by scholars and historians: all this mounting knowledge and speculation waited to be put in order for public accessibility and use.

  Chambers’ Cyclopoedia, or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1728) seemed at first to meet this need. In 1743 a Paris publisher, André François Le Breton, proposed to have it translated into French, with changes and additions suited to French needs. The project grew until it aimed at ten volumes. To meet the expense Le Breton took into partnership, for this undertaking, three other publishers—Briasson, David, and Durand. They engaged the Abbé de Gua de Malves as editor, obtained a license to print with the privilège du roi, and issued (1745) a tentative prospectus. In December they or Gua de Malves enlisted the aid of Diderot and d’Alembert. In 1747 Gua de Malves withdrew, and on October 16 the publishers appointed Diderot editor in chief, with a salary of 144 livres per month, and asked d’Alembert to take charge of the articles on mathematics.

  As the work proceeded Diderot became increasingly dissatisfied wit
h the Chambers text. We can measure this by his giving fifty-six columns to anatomy, which in Chambers had received one, and fourteen columns to agriculture, which in Chambers had rated thirty-six lines. Finally he recommended that Chambers’ book be put aside, and that an entirely new encyclopedia be prepared. (Malves may have already suggested this.) The publishers agreed, and Diderot (not yet the heretical author of the Letter on the Blind) persuaded the earnestly orthodox Chancellor d’Aguesseau to extend the privilège du roi to the extended enterprise (April, 1748).

  But how was this to be financed? Le Breton reckoned it would cost two million livres; actually it cost less—some 1,140,000; even so there must have been many doubts about securing sufficient subscribers to warrant going to press. Diderot had already commissioned many articles—and secured some—for the first volumes when his imprisonment at Vincennes interrupted the work. Released, he gave all his time to it, and in November, 1750, the publishers sent out eight thousand copies of a prospectus written by Diderot. (In 1950 the French government reprinted this in national commemoration of the event.) It announced that a company of well-known men of letters, experts, and specialists proposed to gather existing knowledge of the arts and sciences into an orderly whole, alphabetically arranged, and fitted with cross references that would facilitate use by scholars and students. “The word encyclopédie” said the prospectus, “signifies the interrelationship of the sciences”; literally it meant instruction, or learning, gathered in a circle. Not only had knowledge grown immensely, said Diderot, but the need for its dissemination was urgent; it would be of no use if not shared. All this, according to the prospectus, was to be compressed into eight volumes of text and two of plates. Subscriptions were solicited at 280 livres for the set, payable in nine installments. The whole was to be completed in two years. In our hindsight this prospectus appears as one of the first announcements that the reign of science had begun, and that a new faith had been offered for the salvation of mankind.

  The response to the prospectus was inspiring, especially from the upper middle class. After Mme. Geoffrin’s death it was disclosed that she and her husband had contributed over 500,000 livres to the expenses of the Encyclopèdie.23 With this work in France, and Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) in England, European literature declared its independence of aristocrats and servile dedications, and addressed itself to the larger public whose eye and voice it proposed to be. The Encyclopédie was the most famous of all experiments in the popularization of knowledge.24

  The first volume appeared on June 28, 1751. It contained 914 large double-columned folio pages. The frontispiece, engraved by Charles Cochin, was typical of the eighteenth century: it showed humanity groping for knowledge, which was represented by a beautiful woman in diaphanous gauze. The title was impressive: Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts, et des métiers, par une Société de gens de lettres. Mise en ordre et publiée par M. Diderot, … et quant à la partie mathématique par M. d’Alembert.… Avec approbation et privilege du Rot. The volume was judiciously dedicated to “Monseigneur le comte d’Argenson, ministre et secrétaire d’état et de guerre.” It was not encyclopedic in our present sense: it did not propose to include biographies or history; but some biographies, strangely enough, were given under the birthplace of the person. On the other hand, it was in part a dictionary, defining many terms, listing synonyms, and giving grammatical rules.

  The most memorable part of Volume I was the “Discours préliminaire.” D’Alembert was chosen to write this because he was known both as a leading scientist and as a master of French prose. Despite these distinctions he was living in stoic poverty in Paris. When Voltaire described the majestic view from Les Délices, d’Alembert replied: “You write to me from your bed, whence you command ten leagues of lake, and I answer you from my hole, whence I command a patch of sky three ells long.”25 He was an agnostic, but he had not joined in any public criticism of the Church. In the “Discours” he tried to disarm ecclesiastical opposition:

  The nature of man is an impenetrable mystery when one is enlightened by reason alone. We can say the same of our existence present and future, of the essence of the Being to whom we owe it, and of the kind of worship he requires from us. Hence nothing is more necessary to us than a revealed religion which instructs us in such diverse subjects.26

  He apologized to Voltaire for these obeisances: “Such phrases as these are notarial style, and serve only as passports for the truths that we wish to establish.… Time will teach men to distinguish what we have thought from what we have said.”27

  Following a proposal by Francis Bacon, the “Discours préliminaire” classified all knowledge according to the mental faculty involved. So history came under “Memory,” science under “Philosophy,” and theology under “Reason”; literature and art came under “Imagination.” Diderot and d’Alembert were quite proud of this scheme, and made from it, as a folded insert after the “Discours,” a chart of knowledge which evoked great admiration in its day. Next to Bacon’s, the strongest influence in the Encyclopédie was that of Locke. “It is to sensations that we owe all our ideas,” said the “Discours.” From this statement the editors hoped, in the course of the eight volumes, to deduce an entire philosophy: a natural religion that would reduce God to an initial push, a natural psychology that would make mind a function of the body, and a natural ethic that would define virtue in terms of man’s duties to man rather than to God. This program was cautiously implied in the “Discours.”

  From these first principles d’Alembert passed on to survey the history of science and philosophy. He praised the ancients, deprecated the Middle Ages, and rejoiced in the Renaissance.

  We should be unjust if we failed to recognize our debt to Italy. It is from her that we have received the sciences which later produced such abundant fruit in all Europe; it is to her above all that we owe the beaux-arts and good taste of which she has furnished us with so great a number of inimitable models.28

  The heroes of modern thought came in for laurels:

  At the head of these illustrious personages should be placed the immortal Chancellor of England, Francis Bacon, whose works, so justly esteemed, … deserve our study even more than our praise. When we consider the sane and spacious views of this great man, the multitude of subjects surveyed by his mind, the boldness of his style—which everywhere combined the most sublime images with the most rigorous precision—we are tempted to regard him as the greatest, the most universal, and the most eloquent of philosophers.29

  D’Alembert proceeded to show how the profound genius of Descartes, so fertile in mathematics, had been hampered in philosophy by religious persecution:

  Descartes at least dared to show to alert minds how to free themselves from the yoke of Scholasticism, opinion, authority—in a word, from prejudice and barbarism; and by this revolt, of which we today gather the fruits, he rendered to philosophy a service perhaps more difficult than all those that it owes to his renowned successors. We may regard him as the chief of a sworn band, who had the courage to lead a revolt against a despotic and arbitrary power, and who, by his inspiring resolution, raised the foundations of a government more just and benevolent than any that he could live to see established. If he finished by thinking to explain everything, he at least began by doubting all; and the weapons that we must use to combat him are not the less his own because we turn them against him.

  After discussing Newton, Locke, and Leibniz, d’Alembert concluded with an expression of faith in the beneficent effects of knowledge growing and spreading. “Our century believes itself destined to change the laws in every kind.”30 Warmed with that hope, d’Alembert made his “Discours” one of the masterpieces of eighteenth-century French prose. Buffon and Montesquieu joined in praising those introductory pages; Raynal rated them as “one of the most philosophical, logical, luminous, exact, compact, and best-written pieces that we have in our language.”31

  Volume I was not visibly antireligious. The articles on Ch
ristian doctrine and ritual were almost orthodox; several of them pointed out difficulties, but they usually ended with a solemn obeisance to the Church. Quite often there were heretical asides and incidental attacks upon superstition and fanaticism, but these were hidden in articles on apparently innocent subjects like the Scythian lamb or the eagle; so the piece headed “Agnus scythicus” expanded into a treatise on evidence which left the belief in miracles in an unhappy state; and the article “Aigle,” after discussing popular credulity, concluded with transparent irony: “Happy the people whose religion asks it to believe only things true, holy, and sublime, and to imitate only virtuous actions. Such a religion is ours, in which the philosopher has only to follow his reason to arrive at the feet of our altars.”32 Slyly, here and there, the bubbles of myth and legend were pricked, and a spirit of rationalist humanism emerged.

  Nevertheless the Jesuits gave the volume a friendly reception. Guillaume François Berthier, the learned editor of the Journal de Trévoux, politely objected to the stress laid upon heretical philosophers in the “Discours préliminaire”; he pointed out inaccuracies and plagiarisms, and asked for stricter censorship of future volumes; but he praised the Encyclopédie as a “very lofty, very solid enterprise, whose editors, when it is completed, will justly be able to apply to themselves the Horatian claim, Exegi monumentum aere perennius” And he added: “No one is more disposed to recognize the fine sections of the Encyclopédie; we shall review them with complaisance in our extracts to come.”33

  Another priest was not so lenient. Jean François Boyer, former bishop of Mirepoix, complained to the King that the authors had deceived the censors. Louis sent him to Malesherbes, who had recently become chief censor of publication (directeur de la librairie). Malesherbes promised that future volumes would be more carefully screened; but during his tenure of various governmental offices he used all his influence to protect the philosophes. It was fortunate for the rebels that this Chrétien Guillaume de Malesherbes, who had been made a skeptic by reading Bayle, and who had written a book, La Liberté de la presse, was censor of publications from 1750 to 1763—the most critical period in the lives of Voltaire, Diderot, Helvétius, and Rousseau. “In a century in which every citizen can speak to the entire nation by means of print,” Malesherbes wrote, “those who have the talent for instructing men or the gift of moving them—in a word, men of letters—are, amid a dispersed people, what the orators of Rome and Athens were in the midst of a people assembled.”34 He fostered the intellectual movement by granting permission tacite to books that could not, even in his regime, receive the approbation et privilege du roi. For in his view “a man who had read only the books that … appeared with the express consent of the government … would be behind his contemporaries by almost a century.”35