Voltaire: A Sketch of His Life and Works

Madame du Chàtelet has been much laughed at; but in the days when ladies take prizes in mathematics, that should be a thing of the past. Hard intellectual labor rather than the pursuit of pleasure characterised life at Cirey, or rather its inmates found their pleasure in their work. Madame would be translating Newton or studying Leibnitz. Her mathematical tutor worked at physical science in a gallery which had been built expressly for him. Voltaire would be aiding each in turn, or, ever faithful to his first love the drama, occupied with the writing or production of a tragedy or comedy for the theatre also attached to the premises. His production was as ever incessant. At the time of his first settlement there, Pope’s Essay on Man had been published. It suggested a Discourse on Man, in which he sought not to justify the ways of God to man, but to make man contented with his lot, not vainly inquiring into the why and wherefore of things. With Madame he wrote Elements of the Newtonian Philosophy, a work highly praised by Lord Brougham, who says: “The power of explaining an abstract subject in easy and accurate language, language not in any way beneath the dignity of science, though quite suited to the comprehension of uninformed persons, is unquestionably shown in a manner which only makes it a matter of regret that the singularly gifted author did not carry his torch into all the recesses of natural philosophy.” The French Government, despite the influence of aristocratic friends, refused to print a work opposed to the system of Descartes, and the volume had to be printed in Holland. For Madame, who despised the “old almanack” histories then current, in place of which Voltaire aimed at producing something more profitable to the readers, he wrote his Essay on the Manners and Spirit of Nations, in which for the first time in modern literature he applied philosophy to the teaching of history. He dissipated the dull dreams and deceits of the monks, and fixed attention on the real condition of things. With Voltaire, the commonest invention which improves the human lot is of more importance than battles and sieges. He gives importance to the physical and intellectual improvement of man. Brougham remarks that Voltaire’s Philosophy of History was written as a prelude to the Essay on the Spirit of Nations, but the whole work deserves that title. Buckle classes him with Bolingbroke and Montesquieu, the fathers of modern history, and all sceptics; and even now, says Lecky, no historian can read him without profit. Other contributions to history were the History of Charles XII., a masterpiece of vivid and vigorous narrative, and The Age of Louis XIV. It was here he wrote his too famous Pucelle, which he afterwards described as “piggery,” as well as some of the most famous of his plays, including. Ilzire, Zuline, L'Enfant Prodigue, Mahomet and Mérope, the best of his tragedies. With that impish spirit in which he ever delighted, he induced the Pope to accept the dedication of his play of Mahomet, and then laughed at his infallible Holiness for being unable to see that the shafts supposed to be directed at the impostor of Arabia were really aimed at fanaticism in another quarter.

To his first and last love, the French theatre, Voltaire contributed nearly sixty pieces, the majority of which are tragedies. Zaire and Mérope suffice to show the excellence he obtained in the classic drama. The first-named was written in three weeks, a wonderful tour de force. Olympic– written in old age – occupied but six days, though in this we must agree with the friend who told the author that he should not have rested on the seventh day. Voltaire’s plays indeed contain occasional fine passages, but they have not the rich delineation of character necessary for works of the first rank. It has been well remarked that in his dramas, as in history, he sought to portray not so much individuals as epochs. In Mahomet his subject is a great fanaticism; in Alzire, the conquest of America; in Brutus, the formation of the Roman power; in the Death of Cœsar, the rise of the empire or the ruin of that power. It is noteworthy that, despite his excess of comic talent, Voltaire preferred to devote his mind to tragedy rather than to comedy, in which one might have fancied he would have excelled. In truth, his desire to support the dignity of the stage stood in the way of his shining in comedy. Voltaire also at this period wrote a Life of Molière, in which he mingled criticism with biography.

Madame de Grafigny, who visited at Cirey, says he was so greedy of his time, so intent upon his work, that it was sometimes necessary to tear him from his desk for supper. “But when at table, he always has something to tell, very facetious, very odd, very droll, which would often not sound well except in his mouth, and which shows him still as he has painted himself for us —

Toujours un pied dans le cercueil,
De l’autre faisant des gambades.”[4 - Ever one foot in the grave,And gambolling with the other.]

“To be seated beside him at supper, how delightful!” she adds. Voltaire at Cirey was out of harm’s way, and could and did devote himself to his natural bent in literary work. Madame du Châtelet was sometimes “gey ill to live with.” but she preserved him from many annoyances and helped him somewhat at Court. Thanks to the Duc de Richelieu, his patron and debtor, he was appointed historiographer-royal in 1745, with a salary of two thousand livres attached, and in the following year was elected one of the Forty of the French Academy.

His life with Madame du Châtelet had shown him the possibility of woman being man’s intellectual companion. With what scorn does he make a lady, who claims equal rights in the matter of divorce with her husband, say:

“My husband replies that he is my head and my superior, that he is taller than me by more than an inch, that he is hairy as a bear, and that, consequently, I owe him everything and that he owes me nothing.” This was long before woman’s rights were thought of.

Voltaire and Frederick the Great.

While still at Cirey, Voltaire received many a flattering invitation from the Prince Royal of Prussia. Their correspondence, in the words of Carlyle, “sparkles notably with epistolary grace and vivacity,” though now mainly interesting as an illustration of two memorable characters and of their century. Voltaire helped him with his Anti-Machiavelli, remarking afterwards that had Machiavelli had a prince for a pupil, the very first thing he would have advised him to do would have been so to write. Frederick was bent on having the personal acquaintance and attendance of the renowned poet and philosopher. Much incense and mutual admiration passed, and at length, when he ascended the throne, Voltaire paid him several visits. On one occasion it was a diplomatic one, to cement a union between France and Prussia. Macaulay sneers at this “childish craving for political distinction,” and Frederick remarks that he brought no credentials with him. The correspondence and mutual admiration continued. Carlyle characteristically says: “Admiration sincere on both sides, most so on the Prince's, and extravagantly expressed on both sides, most so on Voltaire’s.” In one of his letters, Frederick says “there can be in nature but one God and one Voltaire.” If Voltaire was more extravagant than this, at least the paint was laid on more delicately. Frederick’s flattery, indeed, was not very carefully done. Thus, in writing to Voltaire he says: “You are like the white elephant for which the King of Persia and the Great Mogul make war; and the possession of which forms one of their titles. If you come here you will see at the head of mine, ‘Frederick by the Grace of God, King of Prussia, Elector of Brandenburg, Possessor of Voltaire, &c., &c.’” But the Marquise du Chàtelet considered that no King should displace a lady. She loved him; “jamais pour deux” she says; and perhaps, at the bottom of her heart, regretted the reputation which must have been ever a rival. At her death, Frederick renewed his invitation, expressing himself as now “one of your oldest friends,” and Voltaire, cut loose from his moorings, submitted to be tempted to the atmosphere of a court which he had before found little suited to a lover of truth, justice, and liberty.

The first of these visits, in September 1740, is thus satirically described by Voltaire: “I was conducted into his majesty’s apartment, in which I found nothing but four bare walls. By the light of a wax candle I perceived a small truckle bed, two feet and a half wide, in a closet, upon which lay a little man, wrapped up in a morning gown of blue cloth. It was his majesty, who lay sweating and shaking, beneath a beggarly coverlet, in a violent ague fit. I made my bow, and began my acquaintance by feeling his pulse, as if I had been his first physician. The fit left him, and he rose, dressed himself, and sat down to table with Algarotti, Keizerling, Maupertuis, the ambassador to the states-general, and myself; where, at supper, we treated most profoundly on the immortality of the soul, natural liberty, and the Androgynes of Plato.” Frederick says, in a letter to Jordan, dated September 24th: “I have at length seen Voltaire, whom I was so anxious to become acquainted with; but, alas! I saw him when I was under the influence of my fever, and when my mind and my body were equally languid. Now, with persons like him, one must not be ill; on the contrary, one must be very well, and even, if possible, in better health than usual. He has the eloquence of Cicero, the mildness of Pliny, and the wisdom of Agrippa: he unites, in a word, all that is desirable of the virtues and talents of three of the greatest men of antiquity. His intellect is always at work; and every drop of ink that falls from his pen, is transformed at once into wit. He declaimed to us Mahomet, an admirable tragedy he has composed, which transported us with delight: for myself, I could only admire in silence.”

The intercourse and disruption of the friendship between Voltaire and Frederick – “the two original men of their century,” as Carlyle calls them – has been inimitably told by that great writer whose temperament and training enabled him to do so much justice to the one and so little to the other. Voltaire must be excused for wishing to lead the King in the path of reason and enlightened toleration to peace. But the Court of Potsdam was in truth no place for him, and the Frenchmen not unnaturally regarded him as a deserter. Macaulay says: “We have no hesitation in saying that the poorest author of that time in London, sleeping in a hulk, dining in a cellar with a cravat of paper and a skewer for a shirt-pin, was a happier man than any of the literary inmates of Frederick’s Court.” Voltaire’s position was sure to excite jealousy, and his scathing wit was bound to get him in trouble. He could touch up the King’s French verses for a consideration, but could not be kept from laughing at his poetry. “I have here a bundle of the King’s dirty linen to bleach,” he said once, pointing to the MSS. sent to him for correction; and the bearers of course conveyed the sarcasm to his Majesty. On the other side Voltaire heard from Julien Offray de la Mettrie, author of Man a Machine, whom Voltaire called the most frank atheist in Europe, that the King had said: “I still want Voltaire for another year – one sucks the orange before throwing away the skin.” That orange-skin stuck in Voltaire’s throat, and when atheist La Mettrie died 11th November,

1751, from eating a pie supposed to be of pheasant but in reality of eagle and pork, Voltaire observes: “I should have liked to put to La Mettrie, in the article of death, fresh inquiries about the orange-skin. That fine soul, on the point of quitting the world, would not have dared to-lie. There is much reason to suppose that he spoke the truth.” Voltaire could neither submit to the domination of the Court coterie nor to that of their master. He offended Frederick, not so much by writing as by publishing his merciless ridicule of Maupertuis, the President of the Berlin Academy of Sciences – an institution suggested by Voltaire, who had indeed recommended Maupertuis as President – in his inimitable Diatribe of Doctor Akakia, Physician to the Pope, which Macaulay says, even at this time of day, it is not easy for any person who has the least perception of the ridiculous to read without laughing till he cries. But a public insult to the President of his Academy was an insult to the King, and the work was publicly burnt and Voltaire placed under arrest. But the matter blew over, though Voltaire sent back his cross and key of office, which the King returned. Voltaire wisely tried to rid himself of the intolerable constraint, and made ill-health the pretext of flight, going first to Plombières to take the waters. But he could not resist sending another shot at poor Maupertuis; and the King, perhaps considering he had forfeited claim to consideration, resolved to punish him. At Frankfort, nominally a free city but really dominated by a Prussian resident, he was arrested, together with his niece Madame Denis, and detained in an inn, even after he had given up his gold key as chamberlain, his cross and ribbon of the Order of Merit, and his copy of a privately printed volume of the royal rhymester’s poetry, for which he was ordered to be arrested. The volume was evidently the most important article in such mischievous hands, especially as it was said to contain satires on reigning potentates. Voltaire had left it at Leipsic, and had to wait, guarded by soldiers, till it arrived, and also till the King’s permission was accorded him to pass on to France. Voltaire relieved his rage by composing what he called Memoirs of the Life of M. de Voltaire, in which all the king’s faults and foibles, real and imaginary, as well as his literary pretensions, were unsparingly ridiculed. Frederick forgave Voltaire for having been ill-used by him, and some time after took the first step in reconciliation by sending him back the volume of poems. An amicable correspondence was renewed, though probably each felt they were better at a distance. Voltaire, even while he kept in his desk this libellous Life which perhaps he never, intended to publish, was generous and far-sighted enough to seek to make peace between Prussia and France at a time when Frederick was at the lowest ebb of his fortunes; while Frederick was great enough to permit the free circulation of the libel in Berlin. Morley says: “To have really contributed in the humblest degree, for instance, to a peace between Prussia and her enemies, in 1759, would have been an immeasurably greater performance for mankind than any given book which Voltaire could have written. And, what is still better worth observing, Voltaire’s books would not have been the powers they were but for this constant desire in him to come into the closest contact with the practical affairs of the world.” “What sovereign in Europe do you fear the most?” was once asked of Frederick, who frankly replied “Le roi Voltaire,” for here he knew was a potentate whose kingdom had no bounds, and who would transmit his influence to posterity. Frederick lived to pronounce a panegyric upon him before the Berlin Academy, in the year of his death. “The renown of Voltaire,” he predicted, “will grow from age to age, transmitting his name to immortality.”

“CANDIDE”

After this disastrous termination of court life Voltaire determined to try complete independence. Permission to establish himself in France being refused, he purchased an estate near Geneva. His residence here brought him into correspondence, at first amicable, with the most famous of her citizens, Jean Jacques Rousseau. There was a natural incompatibility of temper which speedily led to a quarrel. Both were sensitive, and Rousseau could not bear even kindly-meant banter. On Rousseau’s Social Contract Voltaire said it so convinced him of the beauty of man in a state of nature that, after reading it, he ran round me room on all fours. His reply to Rousseau’s rebuke for his pessimist poem on the earthquake of Lisbon was the immortal Candide, and Rousseau’s revenge was to say, slightingly, that he had not read it. When Rousseau thought fit to include Voltaire in the imaginary machinations against him, with which he absurdly changed Hume, Voltaire wrote to D’Alembert: “I have nothing to reproach myself with, save having thought and spoken too well of him.”

Voltaire at first seems to have been captivated by the doctrine of Pope’s Essay on Man. He, however, afterwards wrote: “Those who exclaim that all is well are charlatans. Shaftesbury, who first made the fable fashionable, was a very unhappy man. I have seen Bolingbroke a prey to vexation and rage, and Pope, whom he induced to put this sorry jest into verse, was as much to be pitied as any man I have ever known, misshapen in body, dissatisfied in mind, always ill, always a burden to himself, and harassed by a hundred enemies to his very last moment. Give me, at least, the names of some happy men who will tell me 'All is well.’” His optimism got injured during his journey through life, and was completely shattered by the earthquake at Lisbon in 1755. On this subject he produced a grave poem, notable for its confession of the difficult reconciling the evil of the world with the Beneficence of God? The same subject was dealt with in grotesque fashion in Candide, one of the wisest as well as one of the wittiest of works. A philosophy was never more triumphantly reasoned and ridiculed out of court than is optimism in Candide. Incident crowds on incident, argument jostles satire, illustration succeeds raillery, all to show the miseries of existence disprove this being the best of all possible worlds. At one moment we are forced to tears at contemplating the atrocities of inhumanity; the next we are forced to laugh at its absurdities. Prudes may be shocked at some incidents. Voltaire said he was not born to sing the praises of saints. He was himself no saint, but rather one of those sinners who had done the world more good than all its saints. But the influence of the work is profoundly good. It is purely humanitarian, War, persecution for religion, slavery, torture, and all forms of cruelty are made hateful by a recital of their facts; and all this is done in so charming, even flippant a manner, that we are laughing all the while we are most profoundly moved. Schopenhauer and Hartmann both enjoyed life, while Voltaire was an invalid most of his days; but they never threw into their pessimism the gaiety of Candide. And his peculiarity is, that he makes all man’s lower instincts ridiculous as well as detestable.

This character appears in all his work, but, as a fantastic tale, Candide stands alone. It brings out Voltaire’s most characteristic qualities: his keen eye for whimsicalities and weaknesses; his abhorrence of cruelty and iniquity in high places; his contempt for shams and absence of all veneration for the majesty of nonsensical custom. For mordant satire it is surpassed by Gulliver's Travels. But it is briefer; the touch is lighter, and instinct not with morose misanthropy, but hearty philanthropy. The characters are gross caricatures. Was there ever so preposterous an absurdity as Dr. Pangloss? And the incidents are improbable. Was ever so luckless a hero as Candide? What a succession of misfortunes! Candide travels the world in search of his lost beloved Cunégonde, meeting war, the Inquisition, torture, shipwreck, piracy, and slavery, with all their attendant horrors. Even the earthquake of Lisbon is brought in; yet with whimsical pertinacity, Pangloss clings to his flimsy philosophy.

When he re-meets Candide, who had left his tutor as dead, he thus relates his adventures: “But,” my dear Pangloss, “how happens it that I see you again?” said Candide. “It is true,” answered Pangloss, “you saw me hanged; I ought properly to have been burnt; but, you remember, it rained in torrents when they were going to roast me. The storm was so violent they despaired of kindling the fire; so I was hanged, because they could do no better. A surgeon bought my body, carried it home, and dissected me. He made first a crucial incision from the navel to the neck. One could not have been more badly hanged than I. The executioner of the Holy Inquisition was a sub-deacon, and truly burnt people capitally, but, as for hanging, he was a novice; the cord was wet, and not slipping properly, the noose did not join – in short, I still continued to breathe. The crucial incision made me shriek so that my surgeon fell back, and, imagining it was the devil he was dissecting, ran away in mortal fear, tumbling downstairs in his fright. His wife, hearing the noise, flew from the next room, and saw me stretched upon the table with my crucial incision. Still more terrified than her husband, she ran down also, and fell upon him. When they had a little recovered themselves, I heard her say to the surgeon, ‘My dear, how could you think of dissecting a heretic? Don’t you know that the devil is always in them? I’ll run directly to a priest, to come and exorcise the evil spirit.’ I trembled from head to foot at hearing her talk in this manner, and exerted what little strength I had left to cry out, ‘Have pity on me!’ At length, the Portuguese barber took courage, sewed up my wound, and his wife even nursed me. I was upon my legs in about a fortnight. The barber got me a place as lacquey to a Knight of Malta, who was going to Venice; but finding my master had no money to pay me my wages, I entered into the service of a Venetian merchant, and went with him to Constantinople. One day I took the fancy to enter a mosque, where I saw no one but an old Iman and a very pretty young female devotee, who was saying her prayers. Her neck was quite bare, and in her bosom she had a fine nosegay of tulips, roses, anemones, ranunculuses, hyacinths, and auriculas. She let fall her bouquet. I ran to take it up, and presented it to her with a bow. I was so long in replacing it, that the Iman began to be angry, and, perceiving I was a Christian, he cried out for help. They took me before the Cadi, who ordered me to receive one hundred bastinadoes, and sent me to the galleys. We were continually whipt, and received twenty lashes a day, when the concatenation of sublunary events brought you on board our galley to ransom us from slavery.”

“Well, my dear Pangloss,” said Candide to him, “now you have been hanged, dissected, whipped, and tugging at the oar, do you continue to think that everything in this world happens for the best?” “I have always abided by my first opinion,” replied Pangloss; “for, after all, I am a philosopher; it would not become me to retract. Leibnitz could not be wrong, and ‘pre-established harmony’ is, besides, the finest thing in the world, as well as a ‘plenum’ and the ‘materia subtilis’.”

When Cunégonde is at last found, she is no longer beautiful – but sunburnt, blear-eyed, haggard, withered, and scrofulous. Though ready to fulfil his promise, her brother, a baron whom Candide has rescued from slavery, declares that sister of his shall never marry a person of less rank than a baron. The book is a mass of seeming extravagance, with a deep vein of gold beneath. All flows so smoothly, the reader fancies such fantastic nonsense could not only be easily written, but easily improved. Yet when he notices how every sally and absurdity adds to the effect, how every lightest touch tells, he sees that only the most consummate wit and genius could thus deftly dissect a philosophy of the universe for the amusement of the multitude.

Voltaire tried to save England from the judicial murder of Admiral Byng, who was sacrificed to national pride and political faction in 1757, yet how lightly he touches the history in a sentence: “Dans ce pays ci il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres.” The pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war had no charms for Voltaire. He shows it in its true colors as multitudinous murder and rapine. Religious intolerance and hypocrisy, court domination and intrigue, the evils attendant on idlers, soldiers and priests, are all sketched in lightest outline, and the reader of this fantastic story finds he has traversed the history of last century, seen it at its worst, and seen, too, the forces that tended to make it better, and is ready to exclaim: Would we had another Voltaire now!

The philosophy of Candide is that of Secularism. The world as we find it abounds in misery and suffering. If any being is responsible for it, his benevolence can only be vindicated by limiting his power, or his power credited by limiting his goodness. Our part is simply to make the best of things and improve this world here and now. “Work, then, without disputing; it is the only way to render life supportable.”

Carlyle did much to impair the influence of Voltaire in England. Yet what is Carlyle’s essential doctrine but “Do the work nearest hand,” and what is this but a translation of the conclusion of Candide: “Il faut cultiver nôtre jardin”?

Those who forget how far more true it is that man is an irrational animal than that he is a rational one, may wonder how Voltaire, having in Candide sapped the foundations of belief in an all-good God by a portrayal of the evils afflicting mankind, could yet remain a Theist. The truth seems to be that Voltaire had neither taste nor talents for metaphysics. In the Ignorant Philosopher Voltaire seeks to answer Spinoza, without fully understanding his monistic position. He appears to have remained a dualist or modern Manichean – an opinion which James Mill considered was the only Theistic view consistent with the facts. Writing to D’Alembert on the 15th of August, 1767, Voltaire says: “Give my compliments to the Devil, for it is he who governs the world.” It is curious that on the day he was writing these lines, one Napoleon Bonaparte had just entered upon the world.

Voltaire appears to have been satisfied with the design argument as proving a deity, though he considered speculation as to the nature of deity useless. He showed the Positivist spirit in his rejection of metaphysical subtleties. “When,” he writes, “we have well disputed over spirit and matter, we end ever by no advance. No philosopher has been able to raise by his own efforts the veil which nature has spread over the first principles of things.” Again: “I do not know the quo modo, true. I prefer to stop short rather than to lose myself.” Also: “Philosophy consists in stopping where physics fail us. I observe the effects of nature, but I confess I know no more than you do about first principles.” But a deist he ever remained.

Baron de Gleichen, who visited him in 1757, relates that a young author, at his wits’ end for the means of living, knocked one day at the poet’s door, and to recommend himself said: “I am an apprentice atheist at your service.” Voltaire replied: “I have the honor to be a master deist; but though our trades are opposed, I will give you some supper to-night and some work to-morrow. I wish to avail myself of your arms and not of your head.”

He thought both atheism and fanaticism inimical to society; but, said he, “the atheist, in his error, preserves reason, which cuts his claws, while those of the fanatic are sharpened in the incessant madness which afflicts him.”

Voltaire seems to have been at bottom agnostic holding on to the narrow ledge of theism and afraid to drop.

He says: “For myself, I am sure of nothing. I believe that there is an intelligence, a creative power, a God. I express an opinion to-day; I doubt of it to-morrow; the day after I repudiate it. All honest philosophers have confessed to me, when they were warmed with wine, that the great Being has not given to them one particle more evidence than to me.” He believed in the immortality of the soul, yet expresses himself dubiously, saying to Madame du Deffand that he knew a man who believed that when a bee died it ceased to hum. That man was himself.

On the appearance, however, in 1770 of the Baron d’Holbach’s System of Nature– in which he was very considerably helped by Diderot – Voltaire took alarm at its openly pronounced atheism. “The book,” he wrote,

“has made all the philosophers execrable in the eyes of the King and his court. Through this fatal work philosophy is lost for ever in the eyes of all magistrates and fathers of families.” He accordingly took in hand to combat its atheism, which he does in the article Dieu in the Philosophical Dictionary, and in his History of Jenni (Johnny), a lad supposed to be led on a course of vice by atheism and reclaimed to virtue by the design argument. Voltaire’s real attitude seems fairly expressed in his celebrated mot: “S’il n’y avait pas un dieu, il fraudrait l’inventer” – “If there was not a God it would be necessary to invent one,” which, Morin remarks, was exactly what had been done. Morley says: “It was not the truth of the theistic belief in itself that Voltaire prized, but its supposed utility as an assistant to the police.”

THE ENCYCLOPÆDIA

Voltaire was a great stimulator of the French Encyclopædia, a work designed to convey to the many the information of the few. Here again the inspiration was English. It was the success of the Cyclopcedia of Arts and Sciences, edited by the Freethinker Ephraim Chambers, in 1728, which suggested the yet more famous work carried out by Diderot and D’Alembert, with the assistance of such men as Helvetius, Buffon, Turgot, and Condorcet. Voltaire took an ardent interest in the work, and contributed many important articles. The leading contributors were all Freethinkers, but they were under the necessity of advancing their ideas in a tentative way on account of the vigilant censorship. Voltaire not only wrote for the Encyclopædia, but gave valuable hints and suggestions to Diderot and D’Alembert, as well as much sound advice. He cautioned them, for instance, against patriotic bias. “Why,” he asks D’Alembert, “do you say that the sciences are more indebted to France than to any other nation? Is it to the French that we are indebted for the quadrant, the fire-engine, the theory of light, inoculation, the seed-sower? Parbleu! you are jesting! We have invented only the wheelbarrow.”

Voltaire wrote the section on History. The first page contained a Voltairean definition of sacred history which even an ignorant censor could hardly be expected to pass. “Sacred History is a series of operations, divine and miraculous, by which it pleased God formerly to conduct the Jewish nation, and to-day to exercise our faith.” The iron hand beneath the velvet glove was too evident for this to pass the censorship. Vexatious delay and the enforced excision of important articles attended the progress of the work.

It was the attempted suppression of l'Encyclopcedie which showed Voltaire that the time had come for battle.

In 1757 a new edict was issued, threatening with death any one who wrote, printed, or sold any work attacking religion or the royal authority. The same edict assigned the penalty of the galleys to whoever published writings without legal permit. Within six months advocate Barbier recorded in his diary some terrible sentences. La Martelière, verse-writer, for printing clandestinely Voltaire’s Pucelle and other “such” works, received nine years in the galleys; eight printers and binders employed in the same printing office, the pillory and three years’ banishment. Up to the period of the Revolution nothing could be legally printed in France, and no book could be imported, without Government authorisation. Mr. Lecky says, in his History of England in the Eighteenth Century: “During the whole of the reign of Lewis XV. there was scarcely a work of importance which was not burnt or suppressed, while the greater number of the writers who were at this time the special, almost the only, glory of France were imprisoned, banished, or fined.” Voltaire determined to render the bigots odious and contemptible, and henceforth waged incessant war, continued to the day of his death. In satire on one of the bigots he issued his Narrative of the Sickness, Confession, Death and Reappearance of the Jesuit Berthier, as rich a burlesque as that which Swift had written predicting and describing the death of the astrologer Partridge, in accordance with the prediction. Every sentence is a hit. A priest of a rival order is hastily summoned to confess the dying Jesuit, who is condemned to penance in purgatory for 333,333 years, 3 months, 3 weeks, and 3 days, and then will only be let out if some brother Jesuit be found humble and good enough to be willing to apply all his merits to Father Berthier. Even putting his enemy in purgatory, he only condemned the Jesuit every morning to mix the chocolate of a Jansenist, read aloud at dinner a Provincial Letter, and employ the rest of the day in mending the chemises of the nuns of Port Royal.

From Ferney he poured forth a wasp-swarm of such writings under all sorts of pen-names, and dated from London, Amsterdam, Berne, or Geneva. He had sufficient stimulus in the bigotry, intolerance, and atrocious iniquities perpetrated in the name of religion.

Voltaire, moreover, determined himself to uphold the work of the Encyclopædia in more popular form. He put forward first his Questions upon the Encyclopædia, in which he deals with some important articles of that work, with others of his own. This was the foundation of the most important of all his works, the Philosophical Dictionary, which he is said to have projected in the days when he was with Frederick at Berlin. In this work he showed how a dictionary could be made the most amusing reading in the world. Under an alphabetical arrangement, he brought together a vast variety of sparkling essays on all sorts of subjects connected with literature, science, politics and religion. Some of his headings were mere stalking-horses, under cover of which he shot at the enemy. Some are concerned with matters now out of date; but, on the whole, the work presents a vivid picture of his versatile genius. An abridged edition, containing articles of abiding interest, would be a service to Free-thought at the present day.

Here is a slight specimen of his style taken from the article on Fanaticism: “Some one spreads a rumor in the world that there is a giant in existence 70 feet high. Very soon all the doctors discuss the questions what color his hair must be, what is the size of his thumb, what the dimensions of his nails; there is outcry, caballing, fighting; those who maintain that the giant’s little finger is only an inch and a half in diameter, bring those to the stake who affirm that the little finger is a foot thick. ‘But, gentlemen, does your giant exist?’ says a bystander, modestly.

“‘What a horrible doubt!’ cry all the disputants; ‘what blasphemy! what absurdity!’ Then they all make a little truce to stone the bystander, and, after having assassinated him in due form, in a manner the most edifying, they fight among themselves, as before, on the subject of the little finger and the nails.”

“L’Infâme.”

Voltaire had other provocations to his attack on the bigots, and as he greatly concerned himself with these, they must be briefly mentioned. In 1761 a tragedy of mingled judicial bigotry, ignorance, and cruelty was enacted in Languedoc. On October 13th of that year, Marc Antoine, the son of Jean Calas, a respectable Protestant merchant in Toulouse, a young man of dissolute habits, who had lived the life of a scapegrace, hanged himself in his father’s shop while the family were upstairs. The priestly party got hold of the case and turned it into a religious crime. The Huguenot parents were charged with murdering their son to prevent his turning Catholic. Solemn services were held for the repose of the soul of Marc Antoine, and his body was borne to the grave with more than royal pomp, as that of a martyr to the holy cause of religion. In the church of the White Penitents a hired skeleton was exhibited, holding in one hand a branch of palm, emblem of martyrdom, and in the other an inscription, in large letters, “abjuration of heresy.’’ The populace, who were accustomed yearly to celebrate with rejoicing the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day, 1572, were excited against the family. The father, who for sixty years had lived without reproach, was arrested, with his wife and children. The court before whom the case was brought, at first was disposed to put the whole family to the torture, never doubting that the murder would be confessed by one or other of them. But they ended by only condemning the father to be tortured, in order to extract a confession of guilt before being broken on the wheel, after which his body was to be burned and the ashes scattered to the winds. He was submitted first to the question ordinaire. In sight of the rack he was asked to reveal his crime. His answer was that no crime had been committed. He was stretched on the rack until every limb was dislocated and the body drawn out several inches beyond. He was then subjected to the question extraordinaire. This consisted in pouring water into his mouth from a horn, while his nose was pinched, till his body was swollen to twice its size, and the sufferer endured the anguish of a hundred drownings. He submitted without flinching to all the excruciating agony. Finally, he was placed upon a tumbril and carried through the howling mob to the place of execution. “I am innocent.” he muttered from time to time. At the scaffold he was exhorted to confess by a priest: “What!” said he, “you, too, believe a father can kill his own son!” They bound him to a wooden cross, and the executioner, with an iron bar, broke each of his limbs in two places, striking eleven blows in all, and then left him for two hours to die. The executioner mercifully strangled him at last, before burning the body at the stake. To the last he persisted in his innocence: he had no confession to make. By his unutterable agony he saved the lives of his wife and family. Two daughters were thrown into a convent, and the property was confiscated. The widow and son escaped, and were provided for by Voltaire.

He spared no time, trouble, or money to arrive at the truth, and that once reached, he was as assiduous in his search for justice. He went to work with an energy and thoroughness all his own. He interested the Pompadour herself in the case. By his own efforts he forced justice to be heard. “The worst of the worthy sort of people,” he said, “is that they are such cowards. A man groans over his wrong, shuts his lips, takes his supper, and forgets.” Voltaire was not of that fibre. Wrong went as a knife to his heart. He suffered with the victim, and might have justly used the words of Shelley, who compared himself unto “a nerve, o’er which do creep the else unfelt oppressions of the world.” Voltaire had to fire others with his own fervor. He issued pamphlet after pamphlet in which the shameful story was told with pathetic simplicity. He employed the best lawyers he could find to vindicate the memory of the murdered man. For three years he left no stone unturned, until all that was possible was done to right the foul wrong of those in authority. During this time no smile escaped him of which he did not reproach himself as a crime. Carlyle speaks of this as “Voltaire’s noblest outburst, into mere transcendant blaze of pity, virtuous wrath, and determination to bring rescue and help against the whole world.”

He had his pamphlets on the Calas case, seven in number, translated and published in England and Germany, where they produced a profound effect. A subscription for the Calas family was headed by the young Queen of George III. When at length judgment was given, reversing the sentence, he wrote to Damilaville: “My dear brother, there is, then, justice upon the earth! There is, then, such a thing as humanity! Men are not all wicked rascals, as they say! It is the day of your triumph, my dear brother; you have served the family better than anyone.”

It was while the Calas case was pending that Voltaire composed his noble Treatise on Toleration, a work which, besides its great effect in Europe, caused Catherine II. to promise, if not to grant, universal religious toleration throughout the vast empire she governed.

This Calas case was scarce ended when another, almost as bad an exhibition of intolerance, occurred. Sirven, a respectable Protestant land surveyor, had a Catholic housekeeper, who, with the assent of the Bishop of Castres, spirited away his daughter for the good of her soul, and placed her in a convent, with a view to her conversion. She returned to her parents in a state of insanity, her body covered with the marks of the whip. She never recovered from the cruelties she had endured at the convent. One day, when her father was absent on his professional duties, she threw herself into a well, at the bottom of which she was found drowned. It was obvious to the authorities that the parents had murdered their child because she wished to become a Roman Catholic. They most wisely did not appear, and were sentenced to be hanged when they could be caught. In their flight the married daughter gave premature birth to a child, and Madame Sirven died in despair.

It took Voltaire eight years to get this abominable sentence reversed, and to turn wrong into right. He was now between seventy and eighty years of age, yet he threw himself into the cause of the Sirvens with the zeal and energy which has vindicated Calas; appealing to Paris and Europe, issuing pamphlets, feeing lawyers, and raising a handsome subscription for the family.

Another case was that of the Chevalier de la Barre. In 1766 a crucifix was injured – perhaps wantonly, perhaps by accident. The Bishop of Amiens called for vengeance. Two young officers were accused; one escaped, and obtained by Voltaire’s request a commission in the Prussian service. The other, La Barre, was tortured to confess, and then condemned to have his tongue cut out, his hand cut off, and to be burned alive. Voltaire, seventy years old, devoted himself with untiring energy to save him. Failing in that, he wrote one of his little pamphlets, a simple, graphic Narrative of the Death of Chevalier de la Barre, which stirred every humane heart in France. For twelve years this infidel vindicated the memory of the murdered man and exposed his oppressors. One of the authorities concerned in this judicial atrocity threatened Voltaire with vengeance for holding them up to the execration of Europe. Voltaire replied by a Chinese anecdote. “I forbid you,” said a tyrannical emperor to the historiographer, “to speak a word more of me.” The mandarin began to write. “What are you doing now?” asked the emperor. “I am writing down the order that your majesty has just given me.” Voltaire had sought to save Admiral Byng. He contended in a similar case at home. Count Lally had failed to save India from the English, had been taken prisoner, but allowed to go to Paris to clear his name from charges made against him. The French people, infuriate at the loss of their possession, demanded a victim, and Lally, after a process tainted with every kind of illegality, was condemned to death on the vague charge of abuse of authority. The murdered man’s son, known in the Revolution as Lally Tollendal, was joined by Voltaire in the honorable work of procuring revision of the proceedings, and one of the last crowning triumphs of Voltaire’s days was the news brought to him on his dying bed that his long effort had availed.

“Ecrasez L'infàme.”

These are samples of what was occuring when Voltaire was exhorting his friends to crush the infamous– a phrase which gave rise to much misunderstanding, and which priests have even alleged was applied to Jesus, their idol. A sufficient disproof, if any were needed, is that Voltaire treats “l’infàme” as feminine. Si vous pouvez écraser l'infâme, ecrasez-la, et aimez-moi.” That oft-repeated phrase was directed at no person. Nor was it, as some Protestants have alleged, directed only at Roman Catholicism. As Voltaire saw and said, “fanatic Papists and fanatic Calvanism are tarred with one brush.” “L’infàme” was Christian superstition claiming supernatural authority and enforcing its claim, as it has ever sought to do, by pains and penalties. He meant by it the whole spirit of exclusiveness, intolerance, and bigotry, persecuting and privileged orthodoxy, which he saw-as the outcome of the divine faith. Practically, as D. F. Strauss justly remarked, “when Voltaire writes to D’Alembert that he wishes to see the ‘Infâme’ reduced in France to the same condition in which she finds herself in England, and when Frederick writes to Voltaire that philosophers flourished amongst the Greeks and Romans, because their religion had no dogmas – ‘*mais les dogmes de notre infàme gâtent tout’ – it is clear we must understand by the ‘Infâme,’ whose destruction was the watchword of the Voltairian circle, the Christian Church, without distinction of communions, Catholic or Protestant.”

The Catholic Joseph de Maistre shrieks: “With a fury without example, this insolent blasphemer declared himself the personal enemy of the Savior of men, dared from the depths of his nothingness to give him a name of ridicule, and that adorable law which the Man-God brought to earth he called ‘l’infame.’” This is a judgment worthy of a bigot, who dares not look into the reason why his creed is detested. Let us try and understand this insolent blasphemer to-day.