by Ian Buruma
VOLTAIRE’S LETTERS CONCERNING the English Nation, the outstanding product of his time spent in England, was written in English for the British market. It is a most unusual book, for which Voltaire had invented a new genre. Unlike the authors of the kind of travel book, popular in his day, who concentrated on famous sites and exotic descriptions, Voltaire approached his subject as an intellectual traveler. The book is a journey of ideas. Voltaire made no effort to describe what England looked like; he was concerned with what Englishmen thought. Because of this, his actual life in England remains obscure. We know he met Swift, visited the theater, dined with Lord Chesterfield, met two kings (George I and II), was accused of being a spy, attended Quaker meetings, wrote a play (Brutus) comparing English liberty to French tyranny, and made love to Lord Hervey’s wife (and possibly Lord Hervey himself). We know little more.
The longest sections in the book are about the ideas of Newton and Locke. Wielding the empiricism of the English thinkers and his own rather heavy irony as his bludgeon, Voltaire hammers Descartes, especially his notion of innate ideas: “Descartes … maintains that the Soul is the same Thing with Thought, and Mr. Locke has given a pretty good Proof of the contrary.” He contrasts French dogmatism with the skepticism of “English thinking,” which affirms “nothing but what it conceives clearly …” It was Voltaire who popularized the anecdote of Isaac Newton’s apple and his theory of gravity. He had heard the story from Newton’s niece and was terribly impressed with this example of empirical thinking. The way they thought is what Voltaire liked best about the English; the way they ate or played had little appeal. The English, he liked to say, knew how to think, while the French knew how to please.
But it was not just on the level of abstract ideas that Voltaire praised English thinkers. He compared their position in society favorably to that of writers (such as himself, of course) in France. Voltaire was in London on the day of Newton’s state funeral in 1727 and observed how the body was borne to Westminster Abbey at night, by torchlight, on a state bed, followed by a procession led by the lord chancellor and ministers of the crown. Possibly with a hint of envy, Voltaire wrote: “His countrymen honour’d him in his Life-Time, and interr’d him as tho’ he had been a King who had made his People happy.”
It was a constant theme in Voltaire’s writing about England: the superior treatment of writers and artists, in comparison to France, where great writers could be thrashed by brainless nobles with impunity. English thinkers not only enjoyed the “peculiar Felicity” to “be born in a Country of Liberty” in an age when “Reason alone was cultivated,” but they were lionized too. He was moved to see statues erected to writers and scientists in Westminster Abbey. He was sure these monuments inspired Englishmen to achieve greatness. Voltaire wanted to be more than a visitor in England; he wanted to be an English writer, for the English “generally think, and Learning is held in greater Honour among them than in our Country; an Advantage that results naturally from the Form of their Government.”
What was the form of government that Voltaire, and other French philosophes, so admired? It was based, in theory at least, on equality before the law and on the separation of legislative and executive powers. The English, Voltaire thought, were the only people on earth who had limited the power of kings by resisting them. Under the English form of government, he said, the monarch had all the power to do good but was restrained from doing evil. The nobles were great without being insolent, and most important of all, “the people share in the government without confusion.”
As usual, he painted a very rosy picture. In fact only a small number of people shared in the government. And the nobles, who did, could be very insolent indeed. Montesquieu, in his enthusiastic description of English government, was more cautious. All he knew was that liberty was established in English laws. Whether it was actually enjoyed by the English people was not for him to say. Still, Voltaire was not talking about universal suffrage; nobody was at the time. He was only referring to a system that protected the people from despotism. What Voltaire did not endorse was the popular notion that English liberties were ancient, or bred by nature in English blood and soil. There is nothing in his writing about King Alfred and ancient rights. He admitted that there had been parliaments before and after William the Conqueror, but these had been composed of “ecclesiastical tyrants” and “titled plunderers.” The idea that these men should have been the guardians of public liberty and happiness was, in Voltaire’s view, absurd.
Voltaire was not impressed by the Magna Carta either: “This great Charter which is consider’d as the sacred origin of the British liberties, shews in it self how little Liberty was known.” For there was no mention of the House of Commons in the charter, only of the freemen of England, “a melancholy Proof that some were not so.” But the important point is that the English people had fought for their freedom “and waded through seas of blood to drown the Idol of arbitrary Power.” Other nations had waded through much blood too, but unfortunately “the blood they split in the defence of their Liberties, only enslaved them the more.”
For a universalist and a man of the Enlightenment this posed a vexing problem, which continues to exercise us more than ever. Can political arrangements that guarantee liberties in one country do the same in another? This is, of course, the question of Voltaire’s coconuts. Those who tend to take an organic view of nations, as communities that grow naturally, according to the conditions of climate, blood, and soil, are skeptical. Montesquieu, despite his belief in universal values, was a skeptic in this regard. He believed that English legal and political institutions were the results of peculiar geographical and climatic conditions. The eighteenth-century German thinker Johann Gottfried von Herder is the most famous exponent of the organic view. He likened national cultures to flowers and trees that cannot be transplanted. Herder was a ferocious critic of Voltaire’s view that there were timeless, universal models of the rational society, exemplified by late republican Rome or eighteenth-century Britain, which would be adopted everywhere, if only men were not such fools.
Voltaire did not deny the existence of national character. Indeed he had some arresting views on the difference between the “rugged” character of the English and the more feline disposition of the Catholic French. Many a king and queen were killed by the rugged English, he said, in the field and on the scaffold, but never by poison. This method was used only in countries under priestly domination. But this was really a matter of style. It did not mean that English liberties were a unique extension of the English character. A tradition of “obstinate” individualism helped, to be sure. But in the end liberties were the product of reason, and reason was universal. The love of liberty, he wrote, “appears to have advanced, and to have characterized the English, in proportion as they have advanced in knowledge and in wealth.” This is a common position, but it is open to doubt. Knowledge and wealth don’t invariably lead to liberty, even though liberty tends to increase both. But Voltaire was surely right about this: “To be free is to be dependent only on the laws.” The English love the laws “as fathers love their children, because they are, or at least, think themselves, the framers of them.” That is what Voltaire meant by his coconut tree: If it bears fruit in England, why then, let’s plant it in France!
AT SOME POINT in 1728 Voltaire suddenly decided to leave England. He had had enough. He was depressed again. The circumstances of his departure are as vague as the timing, but there had been problems. His friend and benefactor, Lord Peterborough, remarked in November 1728 that Voltaire “has taken his leave of us, as of a foolish people who believe in God and trust in ministers.” Voltaire himself later wrote that he liked English books better than Englishmen. The London Journal, a Whig paper, hinted at bad behavior: Voltaire had enriched himself through shady means. He was no longer welcome in the homes of those noblemen and gentlemen who had received him so warmly at first. Voltaire had “left England full of resentment.”
The rumor—spread, it should be said,
by people who did not like Voltaire—was as follows. Lord Peterborough had asked Voltaire to write a book and paid him a considerable sum to have it published. Most of the money stuck to Voltaire’s hands; almost nothing was received by the publisher. Naturally, the publisher complained to Peterborough, who, furious at Voltaire’s bad faith, accosted the writer in a park and drew his sword, crying, “I will kill the villain.” Voltaire ran for his life and instantly made for the Continent, apparently without his hat. M. de Saint-Hyacinthe, the Frenchman who related the story, was not sure whether Voltaire “strolled into the garden without [his hat], or that it fell in his flight.”
Back in France, however, Voltaire remained a committed Anglophile. It surely helped that Letters, published in London in 1733, was a huge success. The first English edition sold out in three weeks, and fifteen more would appear before 1778. The French edition, entitled Lettres philosophiques, soon followed, but the church authorities complained that the book was anti-clerical, which it was, and the Parlement decreed that it was also “contrary to good morals and the respect due to the ruling powers.” On June 10, 1734, Voltaire’s ode to England was publicly torn up and burned in Paris by the hangman. The bookseller survived but was sent to the Bastille. Voltaire had to lie low in Lorraine. The clandestine edition, published in Rouen, continued to sell in large numbers. Before Voltaire, such names as Addison, Pope, and even Shakespeare were hardly known in France. Soon they became all the rage, along with Samuel Richardson’s romances, horse racing, gardening, frockcoats, and pudding. The rage was known as anglomanie.
Before Anglomania reached its first frothy crest in the 1760s, Voltaire retired to Cirey, in Champagne, with his mistress, Mme. Emilie du Châtelet, the wife of the marquis du Châtelet. There, in “Cirey-shire,” they dedicated themselves to writing and to scientific enquiry. It must have been a peculiar household. The “divine Emilie,” described by a bitchy contemporary as “a colossus in all her proportions,” with “a skin like a nutmeg grater,” was converted to Anglomania by Voltaire. Together they would discuss the ideas of “Mr Loke” and “Sir Newton,” and she wrote a commentary on Newton’s Principia Mathematica. The marquis du Châtelet was occasionally in attendance, but he had no interest in English thinking and remained discreetly in the background. Voltaire and Emilie often quarreled, sometimes in front of the guests. They almost invariably did so in English. And when they made up, they did that in English as well.
If Voltaire was responsible for the philosophical underpinnings of French Anglomania, he could not be held responsible for its peculiar excesses. Voltaire, as well as Montesquieu, had popularized English letters and philosophy: Newtonian science, British law, Deism, and even Freemasonry. Montesquieu’s book The Spirit of the Laws was a best-seller in France. It was read by scholars and lawyers, but by the fashionable Anglomanes too. The intellectual vogue for England gave some people the idea that all Englishmen were deep thinkers. When one elderly English nobleman, known more for his appetite than his intellect, fell asleep after a copious dinner in Paris, his French hostess whispered in awe: “Quiet. He’s thinking.” But what had started as an intellectual fashion—anglomanie was also known as philosophisme—became a matter of style, in dress, sports, and entertainment. Women, especially, were avid readers of English romances, and they sported high bonnets, which bore such romantic names as “stifled sighs” and “bitter complaints.” The craze for English millinery included hats trimmed with fruits and vegetables. The French widow of a British admiral wore a hat trimmed with gauze, representing ships on a stormy sea.
Even English food was fashionable. Roast beef and puddings were served at the best Parisian dinner parties. The maréchale de Villars once organized a party at home for the duchess of Bedford. Halfway through the main course of roast beef, she threw up her hands in a panic and said (in English, of course): “Oh, Jesus! They have forgot! Yet I bespoke them, and I am sure they are ready. You English have hot rolls!” And in due course an enormous silver bowl appeared, filled with hot rolls swimming in melted butter, like ducks in a bathtub.
The English taste in garden-parks was widely imitated, and not just in France. Continental travelers in England much admired the Chinese pagodas and other picturesque additions to the designed English landscape. All over France, formal French gardens were transformed into English-style parks with artificial ruins, Gothic follies, romantic glades, hermitages, grottoes, and aviaries filled with rare and exotic birds. Montesquieu himself liked to take his English guests for a stroll through his jardin anglais, making a point of jumping over fences, for that, he thought, was the way of hearty English gentlemen.
Not all visitors were impressed by French versions of the English taste. A Mrs. Cradock saw a park in Toulouse that had an artificial mountain with a cascade painted on wood. On top of the mountain was a windmill, whence the figure of a woman emerged to meet a miller who was just arriving with a donkey laden with sacks. At the bottom of the mill was a cottage with a dovecote on the roof filled with pigeons. Outside the cottage were figurines of an old man, a young man, a dog, and a pig. The young man was offering grass to three sheep. Mrs. Cradock thought the whole thing was “absolutely ridiculous.”
The English style, not unlike the Anglo-American cultural invasion of the 1960s, did loosen things up. The politics may have been superficial, or even beside the point, but anglomanie was socially liberating. It became fashionable for young nobles to go out drinking with their coachmen. Dress became much less formal. One young Anglomane, M. Lauraguais, observed to an English lady that a “strange and sudden revolution has happened.” The petits-mâitres, who had been “dressed, perfumed and painted like dolls,” now sported jockey boots and riding coats (la redingote) and rode their horses to “le Vauxhall” on the Champs-Elysées. They swore and they gambled like London bucks; they played whist and they were addicted to the races.
Voltaire was actually rather irritated by anglomanie, especially when the French developed a taste for Shakespeare and romantic novels. Corneille, not Shakespeare, was in his view the universal European genius. In 1761, he prepared the complete works of Corneille and solicited subscriptions from nobles, notables, and monarchs all over Europe, including England. For Corneille, he said, “belongs to every nation,” whereas “English plays are like English puddings: nobody has any taste for them but themselves.” This nonsense was said in a spirit of pique. Voltaire published a manifesto in that same year, entitled Appeal to All the Nations of Europe, denouncing the Shakespeare cult. He was annoyed by the sight of modish vulgarians clumping on his turf. For had not he, Voltaire, been the first to introduce English culture in France, including the wretched Shakespeare? And by holding up Corneille as the universal genius, he hoped to lay claim to be his successor. The best of England, in Voltaire’s opinion, was the enlightened, universal, skeptical rationalism of English thinkers. Shakespeare’s entertainments, however, seemed to him to stand for the opposite. They were not only local but extreme and irrational.
Still, since Voltaire was the most famous Anglomane in France, he was blamed for the fashion he had done so much to promote. An Anglophobic reaction was inevitable. Anglophobia has always been more common in France than the occasional gusts of enthusiasm for things British or American. The nature of the Anglophobic attacks on Voltaire helps to bring not only his particular form of Anglophilia into sharper focus but also Anglophilia after his time. The battle lines between Anglophiles and Anglophobes (or pro- and anti-Americans) were already clearly drawn before the French Revolution. The arguments revolve around the idea of liberalism—not democracy, but liberalism—in economics and in politics.
One of the more amusing attacks on Voltaire and French Anglomania was a booklet entitled Préservatif contre l’anglomanie (Antidote to Anglomania), written in 1757 by H. L. Fougeret de Monbron. Monbron begins conventionally enough by citing the superiority of French culture: French tapestries, French cuisine, French jewels, French theater, and so forth. English culture, on the other hand, is shal
low, gross, and debauched. Voltaire might well have agreed. Monbron then makes an observation common to nativists everywhere: talent can grow only on native ground; transplanted, it will degenerate like a seed that cannot bear fruit in alien soil. I don’t know what Voltaire would have made of this. It didn’t fit his coconut theory, to be sure, but Voltaire was talking about politics, not culture.
It was of course about politics and society, not the arts, that Monbron and Voltaire were most at odds. Voltaire admired British merchants and their status in society. Monbron had utter contempt for those “arrogant, insular people” who, “like the Dutch, are nothing but a bunch of shopkeepers.” All they were capable of, in Monbron’s view, was calculating the price of their goods, and making sure they got it.
And what was this vaunted British liberty anyway? It was, according to Monbron, something that existed only for the mob. It gave license to insult one’s betters, to behave grossly, to abuse foreigners, especially Frenchmen, and to stoop to the level of the lowest rabble. If that was liberty, surely it was better for decent people to live under a peaceful yoke? Peace, order, and some idea of decent people were Monbron’s main preoccupations. “Popular British government” meant disorder, indecency, strife. A government divided in two chambers, filled with venal politicians looking out for their own interests, was a recipe for trouble and corruption. England, in short, was a barbarous place where “the excrement of humanity has so many privileges, and decent people have so few.” There were, in Monbron’s view, only two positive things to report about the barbarous English: “They have excellent horses and very fine dogs.”