The Age of Voltaire
Page 112
The philosophes rejected nationalism and patriotism on the ground that these emotions narrowed the conceptions of humanity and moral obligation and made it easier for kings to lead their people into war. The article “Patrie” in the Dictionnaire philosophique condemned patriotism as incorporated egotism. Voltaire begged the French to moderate their boasting of superiority in language, literature, art, and war, and reminded them of their faults, crimes, and defects.88 Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, and d’Alembert in France, like Lessing, Kant, Herder, Goethe, and Schiller in Germany, were “good Europeans,” and Frenchmen or Germans afterward. As one religion and one language had promoted cosmopolitanism in Western Europe in the Middle Ages, so cosmopolitanism developed on the Continent as a result of the spread of the French language and culture. Rousseau in 1755 spoke of “those great cosmopolitan minds that make light of the barriers designed to sunder nation from nation, and who, like the Sovereign Power that created them, embrace all mankind within the scope of their benevolence.”89 Elsewhere he wrote, with characteristic exaggeration: “There are no longer Frenchmen or Germans, … there are only Europeans.”90 This was true only of the nobility and the intelligentsia, but in those strata the cosmopolitan spirit extended from Paris to Naples and St. Petersburg. Even in wartime aristocrats and literati mingled with others of their class across frontiers; Hume, Horace Walpole, Gibbon, and Adam Smith were welcomed in Parisian society while England and France were at war, and the Prince de Ligne felt at home in almost any European capital. Soldiers too had a bit of this internationalism. “Every German officer,” said Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick, “should feel honored to serve under the French flag”;91 an entire regiment in the French army—the Allemands Royaux—was composed of Germans. The Revolution put an end to this cosmopolitan camaraderie of manners and minds; the ascendancy of France faded, and nationalism advanced.
So the intellectual revolt, which in part had risen out of a moral revulsion against the cruelties of gods and priests, passed from a rejection of the old theology to an ethic of universal brotherhood that was derived from the finest aspect of the superseded faith. But the question whether a moral code unsupported by religion could maintain social order remained unsolved. It is still with us; we live in that critical experiment.
VI. RELIGION IN RETREAT
Meanwhile, for the time being, the philosophes appeared to have won their war against Christianity. That admirably impartial historian Henri Martin described the people of France in 1762 as “a generation which had no belief in Christianity.”92 In 1770 the avocat général Séguier reported:
The philosophes have with one hand sought to shake the throne, and with the other to upset the altars. Their purpose was to change public opinion on civil and religious institutions, and that revolution, so to speak, has been effected. History and poetry, romances and even dictionaries have been infected with the poison of incredulity. Their writings are hardly published before they inundate the provinces like a torrent. The contagion has spread into workshops and cottages.93
As if to illustrate this report, Sylvan Maréchal compiled in 1771 a Dictionnaire des athées, which he expanded somewhat by including Abélard, Boccaccio, and Bishop Berkeley.94 In 1775 the Archbishop of Toulouse declared that “le monstrueux athéisme est devenu l’opinion dominante”95 Mme. du Deffand supposed that belief in the Christian miracles was as extinct as belief in the Greek mythology.96 The Devil survived as an expletive, hell as a jest;97 and the heaven of theology had been upset in space by the new astronomy, just as it recedes from space with the planetary explorations of our age. De Tocqueville spoke in 1856 of “the universal discredit into which all religious belief fell at the end of the eighteenth century.”98
All these statements were exaggerated, and were probably made with Paris and the upper and literate classes in mind. Lecky’s judgment was more discriminating: “The anti-Christian literature represented the opinions, and met the demands, of the great body of the educated classes; and crowds of administrators in all departments [of the government] connived at, or favored, its circulation.”99 The French masses still cherished the medieval faith as the prop and poetry of their toilsome lives. They accepted not only old miracles but new ones. Peddlers found a profitable market for miracle-working statuettes of the Virgin.100 Statues and relics were carried in processions to avert or end some public calamity. The churches, even in Paris, were filled on the great festivals of the religious year, and the church bells caroled through the city their reverberating invitations. Religious confraternities numbered many members, at least in the provincial towns. “Frère” Servan, writing from Grenoble to d’Alembert (1767), assured him: “You would be astonished at the progress of philosophy in these barbarous regions”; and at Dijon there were sixty sets of the Encyclopédie. But these cases were exceptional; by and large the provincial bourgeoisie remained faithful to the Church.
In Paris the new movement reached every class. The workers were increasingly anticlerical; the cafés had long since dismissed God. A nobleman told how his hairdresser said to him, while powdering his hair: “You see, sir, though I am a miserable scrub, I have no more religion than anyone else.”101 The women of the proletariat carried on the old worship, and fondly fingered their rosaries. Fashionable women, however, followed the philosophic mode, dispensing with religion until they reached desiccation; nearly all of them sent for the priest when they were sure of imminent death. Most of the major salons belonged to the philosophes. Mme. du Deffand despised these men, but Mme. Geoffrin let them dominate her dinners; d’Alembert, Turgot, and Condorcet reigned around Mille, de Lespinasse, and Grimm presided for Mme. d’Épinay. Horace Walpole described the intellectual atmosphere of the salons in 1765:
There is God and the King to be pulled down; … men and women are devoutly employed in the demolition. They think me quite profane for having any belief left.102 … The philosophes are insupportable, superficial, overbearing, and fanatic; they preach incessantly, and their avowed doctrine is atheism; you would not believe how openly. Don’t wonder, therefore, if I should return a Jesuit.103
Nevertheless the Academy chose nine philosophes to its membership in the fourteen elections between 1760 and 1770; and in 1772 it made d’Alembert its permanent secretary.
The nobles consumed with anticlerical delight the offerings of the esprits forts. “Atheism was universal in high society,” reported Lamothe-Langon; “to believe in God was an invitation to ridicule.”104 “After 1771 irreligion prevailed in the aristocracy.”105 The Duchesse d’Enville and the Duchesses de Choiseul, Gramont, Montesson, and Tessé were deists. Men high in the government—Choiseul, Rohan, Maurepas, Beauvau, Chauvelin—mingled amiably with d’Alembert, Turgot, Condorcet. Meanwhile the philosophes explained to France that feudalism had outlived its usefulness, that hereditary privileges were injustice fossilized, that a good shoemaker is better than a wastrel lord, and that all power stems from the people.
Even the clergy took the contagion. Chamfort in 1769 measured the degree of sacerdotal unbelief with the grades of the hierarchy: “The priest must believe a little; … the vicar can smile at a proposition against religion; the bishop laughs outright; the cardinal adds his own quip.”106 Diderot and d’Holbach numbered several skeptical abbés among their friends. The Abbés Torné, Fauchet, Maury, de Beauvais, and de Boulogne “were among the most outspoken of the philosophes.”107 We hear of a “Société de Prêtres Beaux-Esprits”; some of these “witty priests” were deists, some were atheists—Mesliers come to life. Priestley, dining with Turgot in 1774, was informed by the Marquis de Chastellux “that the two gentlemen opposite were the Bishop of Aix and the Archbishop of Toulouse, but ’they are no more believers than you or I.’ I assured him that I was a believer, and M. Le Roy, the philosopher, told me that I was the only man of sense he knew that was a Christian.”108
Even in the monasteries atheism had some friends. Dom Collignon, to avoid scandal, had his two mistresses at his table only when his other guests were
trusted friends; he did not allow the Apostles’ Creed to interfere with his pleasures, but he considered religion an admirable institution for maintaining morals among commoners.109 Diderot told (1769) of a day he had passed with two monks:
One of them read the first draft of a very fresh and very vigorous treatise on atheism, full of new and bold ideas; I learned with edification that this was the current doctrine in their cloisters. For the rest, these two monks were the “big bonnets” of their monasteries. They had intellect, gaiety, good feeling, knowledge.110
A fervent Catholic historian tells us that toward the end of the eighteenth century “a sentiment of contempt, exaggerated but universal, had replaced everywhere the profound veneration which the great monasteries had so long inspired in the Catholic world.”111
The growth of toleration resulted chiefly from the decline of religious belief; it is easier to be tolerant when we are indifferent. Voltaire’s success in the cases of Calas and the Sirvens moved several provincial governors to recommend to the central government a mitigation of the laws against Protestants. This was done. The edicts against heresy were not repealed, but they were only mildly enforced; the Huguenots were left in peace, as Voltaire had proposed. The Parlement of Toulouse showed its repentance by extending toleration to a degree that alarmed the King.112 Some prelates—e.g., Bishop Fitzjames of Soissons in 1757—issued a pastoral letter calling upon all Christians to regard all men as brothers.113
Voltaire gave philosophy the credit for this victory. “It seems to me,” he wrote to d’Alembert in 1764, “that only the philosophers have in some measure softened the manners of men, and that without them we would have two or three St. Bartholomew Massacres in every century.”114 We must note again that the philosophes themselves were sometimes intolerant. D’Alembert and Marmontel exhorted Malesherbes to suppress Fréron (1757),115 and d’Alembert asked him to prosecute some critics of the Encyclopédie (1758). Mme. Helvétius urged him to silence a journal that had vilified her husband’s De l’Esprit (1758). Voltaire on several occasions begged the authorities to suppress parodies and libels against the philosophic group;116 and so far as these were real libels—injurious falsehoods—he was justified.
There were other factors besides philosophy in promoting toleration. The Reformation, though it sanctioned intolerance, generated so many sects (several of them strong enough to defend themselves) that intolerance seldom dared go beyond words. The sects had to dispute by argument, and they unwillingly accepted the test—and promoted the prestige—of reason. The memory of the “religious” wars in France, England, and Germany, and of the economic losses thereby incurred, turned many economic and political leaders to toleration. Mercantile centers like Hamburg, Amsterdam, and London found it necessary to put up with the different creeds and customs of their customers. The growing strength of the nationalist state made it more independent of religious unity as a means of maintaining social order. The spread of acquaintance with different civilizations and cults weakened the confidence of each faith in its monopoly of God. Above all, the advances of science made it difficult for religious dogma to proceed to barbarities like the trials of the Inguisition and the executions for witchcraft. The philosophes embraced most of these influences in their propaganda for toleration, and could reasonably claim much credit for the victory. It was a measure of their success that whereas in the first half of the eighteenth century Huguenot preachers were still being hanged in France, in 1776 and 1778 a Swiss Protestant was summoned by a Catholic king to save the state.
VII. SUMMING UP
So we end as we began, by perceiving that it was the philosophers and the theologians, not the warriors and diplomats, who were fighting the crucial battle of the eighteenth century, and that we were justified in calling hat period the Age of Voltaire. “The philosophers of different nations,” said Condorcet, “embracing in their meditations the entire interests of mankind, … formed a firm and united phalanx against every description of error and every species of tyranny.”117 It was by no means a united phalanx; we shall see Rousseau leaving the ranks, and Kant striving to reconcile philosophy and religion. But it was truly a struggle for the soul of man, and the results are with us today.
By the time Voltaire left Ferney for his triumph in Paris (1778), the movement that he had led had become the dominant power in European thought. Fréron, its devoted enemy, described it as “the malady and folly of the age.”118 The Jesuits had fled, and the Jansenists were in retreat. The whole tone of French society had changed. Nearly every writer in France followed the line and sought the approval of the philosophes; philosophie was in a hundred titles and a thousand mouths; “a word of praise from Voltaire, Diderot, or d’Alembert was more valued than the favor of a prince.”119 The salons and the Academy, sometimes even the King’s ministry, were in “philosophic” hands.
Foreign visitors angled for admission to salons where they might meet and hear the famous philosophes; returning to their own lands, they spread the new ideas. Hume, though in many of his views he preceded Voltaire, looked up to him as a master; Robertson sent to Ferney his splendid Charles V; Chesterfield, Horace Walpole, and Garrick were among a score of Voltaire’s English correspondents; Smollett, Franklin, and others joined in preparing an English translation and edition of Voltaire’s works in thirty-seven volumes (1762). In America the founders of the new republic were deeply stirred by the writings of the philosophes. As to Germany, hear Goethe’s remarks to Eckermann in 1820 and 1831:
You have no idea of the influence which Voltaire and his great contemporaries had in my youth, and how they governed the [mind of the] whole civilized world.… It seems to me quite extraordinary to see what men the French had in their literature in the last century. I am astonished when I merely look at it. It was the metamorphosis of a hundred-year-old literature, which had been growing ever since Louis XIV, and now stood in full flower.120
Kings and queens joined in acclaiming Voltaire, and proudly listed themselves among his followers. Frederick the Great had been among the first to sense his importance; now in 1767, after thirty years of knowing him in all the faults of his character and the brilliance of his mind, he hailed the triumph of the campaign against l’ infâme: “The edifice [of superstition] is sapped to its foundations,” and “the nations will write in their annals that Voltaire was the promoter of this revolution that is taking place, in the eighteenth century, in the human spirit.”121 Catherine II of Russia and Gustavus III of Sweden joined in this adulation; and though the Emperor Joseph II could not so openly declare himself, he unquestionably owed to the philosophes the spirit of his reforms. Admirers of Voltaire rose to power in Catholic Milan, Parma, Naples, even Madrid. Grimm summed up the situation in 1767: “It gives me pleasure to note that an immense republic of cultivated spirits is being formed in Europe. Enlightenment is spreading on all sides.”122
Voltaire himself, overcoming the natural pessimism of old age, sounded a note of victory in 1771:
Well-constituted minds are now very numerous; they are at the head of nations; they influence public manners; and year by year the fanaticism that overspread the earth is receding in its detestable usurpations.… If religion no longer gives birth to civil wars, it is to philosophy alone that we are indebted; theological disputes begin to be regarded in much the same manner as the quarrels of Punch and Judy at the fair. A usurpation odious and injurious, founded upon fraud on one side and stupidity on the other, is being at every instant undermined by reason, which is establishing its reign.123
Let us give him his due. We may admit, with our hindsight knowledge of the Revolution’s excesses and of the reaction that followed, that the philosophes (excepting Voltaire) had too sanguine a confidence in human nature; that they underestimated the force of instincts generated in thousands of years of insecurity, savagery, and barbarism; that they exaggerated the power of education to develop reason as a sufficient controller of those instincts; that they were blind to the demands of imagination and sentime
nt, and deaf to the cry of the defeated for the consolations of belief. They gave too little weight to traditions and institutions produced by centuries of trial and error, and too great weight to the individual intellect that at best is the product of a brief and narrow life. But if these were serious misjudgments, they were rooted not merely in intellectual pride but also in a generous aspiration for human betterment. To the eighteenth-century thinkers—and to the perhaps profounder philosophers of the seventeenth—we owe the relative freedom that we enjoy in our thought and speech and creeds; we owe the multiplication of schools, libraries, and universities; we owe a hundred humane reforms in law and government, in the treatment of crime, sickness, and insanity. To them, and to the followers of Rousseau, we owe the immense stimulation of mind that produced the literature, science, philosophy, and statesmanship of the nineteenth century. Because of them our religions can free themselves more and more from a dulling superstition and a sadistic theology, can turn their backs upon obscurantism and persecution, and can recognize the need for mutual sympathy in the diverse tentatives of our ignorance and our hope. Because of those men we, here and now, can write without fear, though not without reproach. When we cease to honor Voltaire we shall be unworthy of freedom.
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I. “The other day, down in a valley, a serpent stung John Fréron. What think you happened then? It was the serpent that died.”
Epilogue in Elysium
Persons of the Dialogue: Pope Benedict XIV and Voltaire
Scene: A place in the grateful memory of mankind
BENEDICT. I am happy to see you here, monsieur, for though you did much damage to the Church which I was allowed to head for eighteen years, you did much good in chastising the sins and errors of the Church, and the injustices that shamed all of us in your time.