The Age of Voltaire

by Will Durant

  Se soumettre, adorer, espérer, et mourir

  —“Submit, adore, hope, and die.” No one was satisfied; he gave in, and added twenty-nine lines, yielding himself to Providence, and trusting that “only God is right.”

  Nevertheless the poem shocked not only the orthodox, but the philosophes as well; such a despondent tone seemed to take all the wind out of philosophic sails. Rousseau sent to Voltaire a long and eloquent letter explaining that all human ills are the result of human faults; the Lisbon earthquake was a just punishment of man for abandoning a natural life and living in cities; if men had kept to the simple life of scattered villages and modest homes, there would have been relatively few victims. We must put our faith in the goodness of God, said Jean Jacques, for that is the sole alternative to a suicidal pessimism; we must continue to believe, with Leibniz, that since God has created this world, everything in it, in the long run and the long view, must be right. Some printer secured a copy of this letter and published it; it was widely acclaimed as an able reply to Voltaire’s poem. Voltaire kept his peace for an unusually long time. When he dealt again with optimism it was in his most perfect production, a book that in a generation went around the world, and that is now the most living relic and symbol of Voltaire.

  IV. CANDIDE

  It was published early in 1759 as Candide, ou l’optimisme, purportedly “translated from the German of Dr. Ralph, with additions found in the pocket of the Doctor when he died at Minden.” The Great Council of Geneva almost at once (March 5) ordered it to be burned. Of course Voltaire denied his authorship; “people must have lost their senses,” he wrote to a friendly pastor in Geneva, “to attribute to me that pack of nonsense. I have, thank God, better occupations.”31 But France was unanimous: no other man could have written Candide. Here was that deceptively simple, smoothly flowing, lightly prancing, impishly ironic prose that only he could write; here and there a little obscenity, a little scatology; everywhere a playful, darting, lethal irreverence; if the style is the man, this had to be Voltaire.

  It begins innocently, but soon betrays the master’s twinkling eye:

  In the country of Westphalia, in the castle of the most noble Baron Thunder-ten-tronckh, lived a youth whom nature had endowed with a most sweet disposition.… He had a solid judgment joined to the most unaffected simplicity; and for that reason, I believe, he was named Candide. The old servants of the house suspected him to have been the son of the Baron’s sister, by a good and honorable gentleman of the neighborhood, whom that demoiselle refused to marry, because he could produce no more than seventy-one quarterings;

  he was inadmissible in marriage, though adequate in bed. The handsome young bastard is tutored by Professor Pangloss (All-tongue), who

  could prove to admiration that there is no effect without a cause, and that in this best of all possible worlds the Baron’s castle was the most magnificent of all castles, and Milady the best of possible baronesses [despite her 350 pounds]. It is demonstrable, said he, that things cannot be otherwise than as they are; for, as all things have been created for some end, they must necessarily have been created for the best end. Observe, for instance, the nose is formed for spectacles, therefore we wear spectacles. The legs are visibly designed for stockings; accordingly we wear stockings.… They who assert that everything is right do not express themselves correctly; they should say that everything is best.

  Candide “listened attentively, and believed implicitly,” for Mlle. Cunégonde, the Baron’s daughter, was obviously the best and most beautiful creature that could possibly have been created. She invites him to fall in love with her; he falls; the Baron gives him several “grands coups de pied dans le derrière,” and puts him out of the castle.

  Candide wanders, and is captured by recruiters who impress him into the Bulgarian (with Voltairean reminiscences of the Prussian) army. “There he was made to wheel about to the right, to the left, to draw his rammer, to return his rammer, to present, to fire, to march, and they gave him thirty blows with a cane.” He sees battle, deserts, and comes upon Pangloss, who is now minus the end of his nose, and will soon lose an eye and an ear, as the result of excessive propinquity with the pretty wench Pacquette, “who was infected with an ailment which she had received from a learned Cordelier [Franciscan friar], who … had it from an old countess, who had received it from a captain of cavalry, who owed it to a marquise, who had it from a page, who had it from a Jesuit, who had received it from one of the companions of Christopher Columbus.”32

  Candide and Pangloss are shipwrecked near Lisbon, and reach shore just in time for the earthquake. They survive, but are arrested as heretics by the Inquisition; Pangloss is hanged; Candide escapes through the aid of Cunégonde, who, having been raped by soldiers, and then sold to a Jew, had recently been sold to a leading Inquisitor. Candide and Cunégonde flee with the help of an old lady, who silences their complaints by telling how she came near being eaten at the siege of Azor by the starving Turks among whom she had fallen; but, by the mercy of half-blind fate, they began by merely cutting off one buttock of each available woman; the siege ended before any further samplings; “now,” concludes the old woman, “stop bemoaning your misery, and rejoice that you can sit on two buttocks.”

  They cross the Atlantic in hopes that the New World will be less cruel than the Old. In Buenos Aires the commandant appropriates Cunégonde to himself. Candide is banished; he enters the Jesuit colony in Paraguay, finds there Cunégonde’s brother, who attacks him for daring to think of marrying her; Candide kills him, and resumes his desolate wandering. In a secluded Peruvian valley he comes upon El Dorado, a land where gold is so abundant that no one values it; a land without money or prisons, or lawyers, or priests, or economic strife; its happy people live to two hundred years, and have no religion except a simple worship of one God. Candide picks up some gold and moves on, still hungering for Cunégonde. He sails back to Europe, and reaches Portsmouth in time to see Admiral Byng shot for losing a battle; in this country, says Candide’s new friend Martin, it is considered wise to kill an admiral now and then, “pour en-courager les autres”— to encourage the others.33

  Learning that Cunégonde is in Venice, Candide takes ship to Italy. In Venice he is depressed by learning about the miseries of the prostitutes. He hears gondoliers singing, and concludes that he has found some happy men, but Martin checks him:

  “You do not see them at home with their wives and their brats [marmots d’enfants]. The doge has his griefs, the gondoliers have theirs. It is true that, all in all, the lot of a gondolier is preferable to that of a doge; but I believe the difference is so trifling that it is not worth the trouble of examining it.”34

  Cunégonde is not in Venice, she is in Constantinople. Candide hurries there, finds that she is now an old and ugly slave; nevertheless he frees her and marries her. Pangloss, having been insufficiently hanged by the Inquisition, rejoins his pupil and resumes his defense of optimism. They meet an almost happy man, who entertains them with home-grown fruits and nuts. “You must have a large estate,” Candide inquires. “I have only twenty acres,” replies the Turk; “I cultivate them with my children; our labor keeps away three great evils—boredom, vice, and need.”35 Candide decides to do likewise; he, Cunégonde, and their friends till a plot of ground and grow their own food; the one-buttock woman, a reformed prostitute, and her friend the friar put their hands to various tasks; they labor, are tired, eat, are a bit bored, but moderately content. Pangloss argues that this must be the best of all possible worlds, since their sufferings have brought them to this peace. That was well said, replies Candide, “mais il faut cultiver notre jardin”—we must cultivate our garden. The little novel ends.

  Voltaire had managed to put into small compass, within the frame of a story of adventure and love, a telling satire of Leibniz’ theodicy, Pope’s optimism, religious abuses, monastic amours, class prejudices, political corruption, legal chicanery, judicial venality, the barbarity of the penal code, the injustice of slavery,
and the destructiveness of war; Candide was composed while the Seven Years’ War dragged through its hither and thither of victory, devastation, and death. Flaubert called Voltaire’s masterpiece “le” résumé de toutes ses oeuvres,” the summary of all his works.36 It had the defect of most satires, absurd exaggeration; but Voltaire knew quite well that few men ever encounter so bitter a concatenation of catastrophes as Candide’s. He must have known, too, that though it is good to cultivate one’s garden, to do well one’s individual and immediate task, it is also good to have larger interests than one’s field. He cultivated well his garden at Ferney, but he cried out to all Europe against the execution of Calas.

  V. THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE

  Jean Calas was one of a small group of Huguenots—Calvinist Protestants—left in Toulouse after a century of persecution, confiscation of property, and compulsory conversion to Catholicism. The law of France not only excluded Protestants from public office, it declared them ineligible to be lawyers, or physicians, or apothecaries, or midwives, or booksellers, or goldsmiths, or grocers. If they had not been baptized they had no civil rights whatever. If they had not been married by a Catholic priest they were held to be living in concubinage, and their children were accounted illegitimate.37 Protestant services were forbidden; men found at such services were to be sent to the galleys for life; women so found were condemned to life imprisonment; and the officiating clergyman was put to death. These laws were not strictly enforced in or near Paris; the severity of their enforcement varied with distance from the capital.

  Southern France was especially intense in its religious hatreds; there the struggle between Catholics and Huguenots had been most merciless; each side had committed atrocities that were yet warm in transmitted memories. In Toulouse, in 1562, the victorious Catholics had slain three thousand Huguenots, and the Parlement of Toulouse had condemned two hundred more to torture and death.38 Every year the Catholics of Toulouse commemorated that slaughter with grateful ceremonies and a religious procession. The guilds of craftsmen, the various grades of nobles and clergy, the “companies” of White Penitents, Black Penitents, and Gray Penitents marched solemnly through the city, carrying awesome relics—the skull of the first bishop of Toulouse, a piece of the Virgin’s dress, and bones of children killed in Herod’s legendary “slaughter of the innocents.” It was unfortunate for Calas that the approaching year was the bicentenary of the events of 1562.

  The Parlement of Toulouse, which was as powerful in Languedoc as that of Paris was in central France, was now predominantly Jansenist—i.e., Catholic with a strong infusion of Calvinistic rigor and gloom. It lost no chance to prove itself more inflexibly Catholic than the Jesuits. On March 2, 1761, it condemned to death the Huguenot Pastor Rochette for conducting Protestant services, and it decreed death for three “gentlemen of the Comte de Foix” who had tried to free Rochette from the gendarmes.39 On March 22 it ordered the torture and execution of a Huguenot shopkeeper on the charge that he had killed a son who had proposed to become a Catholic.

  It should be said, in fairness to fanatics, that Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion gave some ground for their belief that Calvinists considered it permissible for a father to kill a disobedient child. In times when law was still weak, and the family was the chief—almost the only—source of discipline, many societies gave the father the right of life and death over his children. Something of this patriarchal code may have been in Calvin’s mind when he wrote: “The Lord commands all those who are disobedient to their parents to be put to death.”40 Calvin referred to Deuteronomy xxi, 17–21, and Matthew xv, 4–6; those passages, however, merely allow the parents to accuse their son before “the elders of the city,” who then may condemn him to death; and doubtless this is what Calvin meant. But the excited Catholics of southern France suspected that Huguenot parents, unable to appeal to the “elders of the city,” would take that old law into their own hands.

  It is against this dark background that we must see the case of Jean Calas.

  He was a marchcend d’indiennes— dealer in linens—who kept a store on the main street of Toulouse, where he had lived for forty years. He and his wife had four sons and two daughters. For thirty years they had kept a Catholic, Jeanne Vignière, as governess of their children, even after she had converted one son, Louis, to Catholicism. Louis now lived as an apprentice in another street, and received a regular allowance from his father. Donat, the youngest son, was apprenticed at Nîmes. Two other sons, Pierre and Marc Antoine, lived with their parents. Marc Antoine, the oldest, had studied law, but when he was prepared to practice he found the profession closed to all but Catholics. He tried to conceal his Protestantism, and to secure a certificate of Catholicism; his deceit was discovered, and he faced a choice of abandoning Protestantism or letting his years of law study go to waste. He took to brooding, gambling, and drink. He liked to declaim Hamlet’s soliloquy on suicide.41

  On October 13, 1761, the Calas family gathered in their rooms over the store. Gaubert Lavaysse, a friend of Marc Antoine, had just arrived from Bordeaux; he accepted the father’s invitation to stay for dinner. After the meal Marc Antoine went down to the shop. Wondering why he did not return, Pierre and Lavaysse descended, and found him hanging from a bar that he had placed between two doorposts. They took him down, called the father, and sent for a doctor. They tried to revive him, but the doctor pronounced him dead.

  At this point the father made a tragic error. He knew that a law then in force required that a suicide be drawn naked through the streets, be pelted by the populace with mud and stones, and then be hanged; and all his property was to be forfeited to the state. The father begged, and persuaded, his family to report the case as a natural death.42 Meanwhile the cries of Pierre and the arrival of the doctor had brought a crowd to the door of the shop. An officer came up, heard the story told him, saw the rope and the mark it had left on the dead man’s neck, and ordered the family, Lavaysse, and Jeanne Vignière to the Hotel de Ville. There they were locked up in separate cells. On the next day each of them was questioned. All abandoned the claim of a natural death, and testified to a suicide. The commandant of police refused to believe them, and charged them with having killed Marc Antoine to prevent his becoming a convert. The accusation was taken up by the populace and by many members of the Toulouse Parlement. A frenzy of revenge closed the minds of the people.

  It seems incredible to us now that anyone should believe in the murder of a son by his father to prevent a change of faith; but that is because we are thinking as individuals, and after two centuries of decline in religious faith. The people of Toulouse thought en masse, as a crowd; and crowds can feel but they cannot think. The frenzy was fed by a ceremony which the White Penitents staged in their chapel; over an empty coffin a skeleton was suspended, holding in one hand an inscription, “Abjuration of Heresy,” and in the other a palm branch, symbolizing martyrdom; below was the name “Marc Antoine Calas.” Assuming that the youth was not a suicide, they buried the corpse with great pomp in the Church of St. Stephen. A part of the clergy protested in vain against this anticipation of a verdict of murder.43

  The trial of the Calas family took place before the twelve judges of the municipal court of Toulouse. An admonition was sent out, to be read on three successive Sundays in every church, summoning to the witness stand all who knew anything about the death. Several persons appeared. A barber testified that he had heard a cry from the Calas house on the fatal evening: “Ah, mon Dieu, they are strangling me!” Others claimed to have heard such cries. On November 10, 1761, the municipal court pronounced Jean Calas, his wife, and Pierre guilty, and sentenced them to be hanged; it condemned Lavaysse to the galleys, and Jeanne Vignière to five years’ imprisonment. The Catholic governess had sworn to the innocence of her Protestant employers.

  The decision was appealed to the Parlement of Toulouse, which appointed a panel of thirteen judges. Sixty-three additional witnesses were heard. All the hostile evidence was hearsay. The tr
ial dragged on for three months, during which the Calas family and Lavaysse were kept in separate confinement. The final decision condemned only the father. No one explained how a man sixty-four years old, unaided, could have overcome and strangled his mature son. The court hoped that Calas, under torture, would confess. He was subjected to the question ordinaire: his arms and legs were stretched until they were pulled from their sockets. He was repeatedly exhorted to confess; he repeatedly affirmed that Marc Antoine had committed suicide. After half an hour’s rest he was put to the question extraordinaire; fifteen pints of water were poured down his throat; he still protested his innocence; fifteen further pints were forced into him, swelling his body to twice its normal size; he still maintained his innocence. He was allowed to expel the water. Then he was taken to a public square before the cathedral; he was laid upon a cross; an executioner, with eleven blows of an iron bar, broke each of his limbs in two places; the old man, calling upon Jesus Christ, proclaimed his innocence. After two hours of agony he was strangled. The corpse was bound to a stake and burned (March 10, 1762).44

  The other prisoners were freed, but the property of Calas was confiscated by the state. The widow and Pierre crept into hidden retirement at Montauban. The two daughters were sent to separate convents. Donat, finding his position at Nîmes endangered, fled to Geneva. Voltaire, hearing of the tragedy on March 22, invited Donat to meet him at Les Délices. “I asked him,” wrote Voltaire to Damilaville, “if his father and mother were of violent character. He told me that they had never beaten any of their children, and that there were no parents more tender and indulgent.”45 Voltaire consulted two Genevan merchants who had lodged with Calas at Toulouse; they confirmed Donat’s statement. He wrote to friends in Languedoc; “both Catholics and Protestants replied to me that the guilt of the family was beyond reasonable doubt.”46 Voltaire communicated with the widow; she sent him a statement so manifestly sincere that he was moved to action. He appealed to Cardinal de Bernis, to d’Argental, to the Duchesse d’Enville, to the Marquise de Nicolaï, to the Duc de Villars, to the Duc de Richelieu, to beg the King’s ministers, Choiseul and Saint-Florentin, to order an investigation of the trial. He took Donat Calas into his family, brought Pierre Calas to Geneva, and persuaded Mme. Calas to take lodging in Paris, where she could be available for examination. He engaged lawyers to advise him on the legal technicalities of the case. He published a pamphlet, Original Documents concerning the Death of Sieur Calas,47 and followed this up with further publications. He appealed to other authors to lend their pens to the effort to rouse the conscience of Europe. He wrote to Damilaville: “Cry out yourself, and let others cry out; cry out for the Calas family and against fanaticism.”48 And to d’Alembert: “Shout everywhere, I beg you, for the Calas family against fanaticism, for it is l’infâme that has caused their misery.”49 He solicited funds to help him bear the expense of the campaign, which he had thus far paid himself. Contributions came from a hundred quarters, including the Queen of England, the Empress of Russia, the King of Poland. A prominent Paris lawyer, Élie de Beaumont, agreed, without fee, to prepare the case for presentation to the Council of State. The daughters of Calas were moved to Paris to join their mother. One of them brought a letter from a Catholic nun appealing for the Calas family.50 On March 7, 1763, mother and daughters were given audience by the King’s ministers. The verdict was unanimous that the case be examined. All relevant documents were ordered from Toulouse.