by Will Durant
Voltaire’s politics stemmed partly from a suspicion that many people would be incapable of digesting education even if it were offered them. He referred to “the thinking portion of the human race—i.e., the hundred-thousandth part.”76 He feared the mental immaturity and emotional excitability of the people at large. “Quand le populace se mêle de raisonner, tout est perdu” (When the populace takes to reasoning, all is lost).77 And so, until his mellower years, he had little sympathy with democracy. When Casanova asked him, “Would you see the people possessed of sovereignty?” he answered, “God forbid!”78 And to Frederick: “When I begged you to be the restorer of the fine arts of Greece, my request did not go so far as to beg you to re-establish the Athenian democracy. I do not like government by the rabble.”79 He agreed with Rousseau that “democracy seems to agree only with small countries,” but he added further limitations: “only with those happily situated, … whose liberty is assured by their situation, and whom it is to the interest of their neighbors to preserve.”80 He admired the Dutch and Swiss republics, but there too he had some doubts.
If you remember that the Dutch ate on a grill the heart of the two brothers De Witt; if you … recall that the republican John Calvin, … after having written that we should persecute no man, even such as deny the Trinity, had a Spaniard, who thought otherwise than he about the Trinity, burned alive by green [slow-burning] fagots; then, in truth, you will conclude that there is no more virtue in republics than in monarchies.81
After all these antidemocratic pronouncements we find him actively supporting the Genevan middle class against the patricians (1763), and the unfranchised natifs of Geneva against both the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie (1766); let us defer this story to its locale.
Indeed, Voltaire seemed to become more radical as he aged. In 1768 he sent forth his L’Homme aux quarante écus—The Man with Forty Crowns. It went through ten printings in its first year, but was burned by the Parlement of Paris, which sent the printer to the galleys. This severity was due not to the ridicule which the story lavished upon the physiocrats, but to its vivid picture of peasants reduced to destitution by taxation, and of monks living in idleness and luxury on properties tilled by serfs. In another pamphlet in 1768, called L’A, B, C (which Voltaire was at great pains to disavow), he made “Monsieur B” say:
I could adjust quite easily to a democratic government. … All those who have possessions in the same territory have the same right to maintain order in that territory. I like to see free men make the laws under which they live.... It pleases me that my mason, my carpenter, my blacksmith, who have helped me to build my lodging, my neighbor the farmer, my friend the manufacturer, will raise themselves above their trade, and know the public interest better than the most insolent Turkish official. In a democracy no laborer, no artisan, need fear either molestation or contempt. … To be free, to have only equals, is the true, the natural life of man; all other ways of life are unworthy artifices, bad comedies in which one man plays the part of master, the other that of slave, one that of parasite, the other that of procurer.82
In or soon after 1769 (aged seventy-five), in a new edition of the Dictionnaire philosophique, Voltaire gave a bitter description of governmental tyrannies and abuses in France,83 and praised England by comparison:
The English constitution has in fact arrived at that point of excellence whereby all men are restored to those natural rights of which, in nearly all monarchies, they are deprived. These rights are: entire liberty of person and property; freedom of the press; the right of being tried in all criminal cases by a jury of independent men; the right of being tried only according to the strict letter of the law; and the right of every man to profess, unmolested, what religion he chooses while he renounces offices which only the members of the Established Church may hold. These are … invaluable privileges. … To be secure, on lying down, that you will rise in possession of the same property with which you retired to rest; that you will not be torn from the arms of your wife and your children in the dead of night, to be thrown into a dungeon or be buried in exile in a desert; that … you will have the power to publish all your thoughts; … these privileges belong to every one who sets foot on English soil. … We cannot but believe that states not established upon such principles will experience revolutions.84
Like so many observers, he foresaw revolution in France. On April 2, 1764, he wrote to the Marquis de Chauvelin:
Everywhere I see the seeds of an inevitable revolution, which, however, I shall not have the pleasure to witness. The French come late to everything, but finally they do come. Enlightenment has been so widely spread that it will burst out at the first opportunity; and then there will be quite a pretty explosion. The young are fortunate; they will see great things.
And yet, when he recalled that he was living in France by sufferance of a King whom he had offended by taking up residence in Potsdam; when he saw Pompadour and Choiseul and Malesherbes and Turgot turning the French government toward religious toleration and political reform—and perhaps because he longed for permission to return to Paris—he took, generally, a more patriotic tone, and deprecated violent revolution:
When the poor strongly feel their poverty, wars follow such as those of the popular party against the Senate at Rome, and those of the peasantry in Germany, England, and France. All these wars ended sooner or later in the subjection of the people, because the great have money, and money in a state commands everything.85
So, instead of an upheaval from below, where ability to destroy would not be followed by ability to rebuild, and the simple many would soon again be subject to a clever few, Voltaire preferred to work for a nonviolent revolution through enlightenment passing from thinkers to rulers, ministers and magistrates, to merchants and manufacturers, to artisans and peasants. “Reason must first be established in the minds of leaders; then gradually it descends and at length rules the people, who are unaware of its existence, but who, perceiving the moderation of their superiors, learn to imitate them.”86 In the long run, he thought, the only real liberation is education, the only real freedom is intelligence. “Plus les hommes sont éclairés, plus ils seront libres” (The more enlightened men are, the more they will be free) .87 The only real revolutions are those that change the mind and heart, and the only real revolutionists are the sage and the saint.
IV. THE REFORMER
Instead of agitating for a radical political revolution, Voltaire labored for moderate, piecemeal reform within the existing structure of French society; and within this self-denying circle he achieved more than any other man of his time.
His most basic appeal was for a thorough revision of French law, which had not been revised since 1670. In 1765 he read, in Italian, the epochal Trattato dei delitti e delle pene of the Milanese jurist Beccaria, who in turn had been inspired by the philosophes. In 1766 Voltaire issued a Commentaire sur le livre des délits et des peines, frankly acknowledging Beccaria’s lead; and he continued to attack the injustices and barbarities of French law till 1777, when, aged eighty-two, he published Prix de la justice et de l’humanité.
He demanded, to begin with, the subordination of ecclesiastical to civil law; a check on the power of the clergy to require degrading penances or to enforce idleness on so many holydays; he asked for a mitigation of the penalties for sacrilege, and a repeal of the law insulting the body, and confiscating the property, of suicides. He insisted on distinguishing sin from crime, and ending the notion that the punishment of crime should pretend to avenge an insulted God.
No ecclesiastical law should be of any force until it has received the express sanction of the government. … Everything relating to marriages depends solely upon the magistrates, and priests should be confined to the august function of blessing the union. … Lending money at interest is purely an object of civil law. … All ecclesiastics, in all cases whatsoever, should be under the perfect control of the government, because they are subjects of the state. … No priest should possess authority to de
prive a citizen of even the smallest of privileges under pretense that that citizen is a sinner. … The magistrates, cultivators, and priests should alike contribute to the expenses of the state.88
He compared the law of France to the city of Paris—a product of piecemeal building, of chance and circumstance, a chaos of contradictions; a traveler in France, said Voltaire, changed his laws almost as often as he changed his post horses.89 All the laws of the various provinces should be unified and brought into general harmony. Every law should be clear, precise, and as far as possible immune to legalistic chicanery. All citizens should be equal in the eyes of the law. Capital punishment should be abolished as barbarous and wasteful. It is surely barbarous to punish forgery, theft, smuggling, or arson with death. If theft is punishable with death, the thief will have no reason for avoiding murder; so in Italy many highway robberies are accompanied by assassination. “If you hang on the public gallows [as happened at Lyons in 1772] the servant girl who stole a dozen napkins from her mistress, she will be unable to add a dozen children to the number of your citizens. … There is no proportion between a dozen napkins and a human life.”90 To confiscate the property of a man condemned to death is plain robbery of the innocent by the state. If Voltaire sometimes argued from a merely utilitarian standpoint, it was because he knew that such arguments would outweigh, with most lawmakers, any humanitarian appeal.
But on the subject of judicial torture his humanitarian spirit spoke out forcefully. Judges were allowed by French law to apply torture to elicit confessions before a trial, if suspicious clues suggested guilt. Voltaire sought to shame France by referring to Catherine II’s edict abolishing torture in supposedly barbarous Russia. “The French, who are considered—I know not why—to be a very humane people, are astonished that the English, who have had the inhumanity to take all Canada from us, have renounced the pleasure of using torture.”91
Some judges, he charged, were bullies who acted like prosecutors instead of judges, apparently on the assumption that the accused was guilty until proved innocent. He protested against keeping the accused in foul jails, sometimes in chains and for months, before bringing him to trial. He noted that a person accused of a major crime was forbidden to communicate with anyone, even with a lawyer. He related again and again the treatment of the Calas and the Sirvens as illustrating the hasty condemnation of innocent persons. He argued that the evidence of only two persons, even if eyewitnesses, should no longer be held sufficient to convict a man of murder; he adduced cases of false witness, and urged that capital punishment be abolished if only to prevent the execution of one innocent in a thousand instances. Death sentences could in France be passed by a majority of two among the judges; Jean Calas had been sent to death by a vote of eight to five. Voltaire demanded that a death sentence require an overwhelming majority, preferably unanimity. “What an absurd horror, to play with the life and death of a citizen in a game of six to four, or five to three, or four to two, or three to one!”92
By and large the reforms suggested by Voltaire were a compromise between his middle-class heritage, his hatred of the Church, his experience and investments as a businessman and a landholder, and his sincere sentiments as a humanitarian. His demands were moderate, but they were in many cases effective. He campaigned for freedom of the press, and it was immensely extended—if only by governmental winking—before he died. He asked for an end to religious persecution, and in 1787 it was practically ended in France. He proposed that Protestants be permitted to build churches and transmit or inherit property, and enjoy the full protection of the laws; this was done before the Revolution. He asked that marriages between persons of different religions be legalized; they were. He denounced the sale of offices, the taxes on necessaries, the restrictions on internal trade, the survival of serfdom and mortmain; he advised the state to recapture from the Church the administration of wills and the education of youth; and in all these matters his voice had influence on events. He led the campaign to exclude spectators from the stage of the Théâtre-Français; it was done in 1759. He recommended that taxes fall upon all classes, and in proportion to their wealth; this had to wait for the Revolution. He wanted a revision of French law; it was done in the Code Napoléon (1807); the most permanent achievement of the warrior-statesman, who determined the legal structure of France till our own time, was made possible by jurists and philosophers.
V. VOLTAIRE HIMSELF
How shall we sum him up, this most amazing man of the eighteenth century? We need no longer speak of his mind—it has revealed itself in a hundred pages of these volumes. No one has ever challenged him in quickness and clarity of thought, in sharpness and abundance of wit. He defined wit with fond care:
What is called wit is sometimes a startling comparison, sometimes a delicate allusion; or it may be a play upon words—you use a word in one sense, knowing that your interlocutor will [at first] understand it in another. Or it is a sly way of bringing into juxtaposition ideas not usually considered in association.... It is the art of finding a link between two dissimilars, or a difference between two similars. It is the art of saying half of what you mean and leaving the rest to the imagination. And I would tell you much more about it if I had more of it myself.93
No one had more, and perhaps, as we have said, he had too much. His sense of humor sometimes passed out of control; too often it was coarse, and occasionally it verged on buffoonery.
The quickness of his perceptions, correlations, and comparisons left him no pause for consistency, and the swift succession of his ideas did not always allow him to penetrate a subject to its humanly attainable depths. Perhaps he disposed too readily of the masses as “canaille”; we could not expect him to foresee the time when universal education would be necessary to a technologically progressive economy. He had no patience with the geological theories of Buffon, or the biological speculations of Diderot. He recognized his limits, and had his moments of modesty. “You think that I express myself clearly enough,” he told a friend; “I am like the little brooks—they are transparent because they are not deep.”94 He wrote to Daquin in 1766:
Since I was twelve years old I divined the enormous quantity of things for which I have no talent. I know that my organs are not arranged to go very far in mathematics. I have shown that I have no inclination for music. Rely upon the esteem of an old philosopher who has the folly … to think himself a very good farmer, but has not that of thinking that he has all the talents.95
It would be unfair to ask of a man who dealt with so many matters that he should have exhausted all available data on every topic before tossing it on the point of his pen. He was not all scholar; he was a warrior, a man of letters who made letters a form of action, a weapon of transformation. Yet we can see from his library of 6,210 volumes, and their marginal comments, that he studied eagerly and painstakingly an astonishing variety of subjects, and that in politics, history, philosophy, theology, and Biblical criticism he was a very learned man. The range of his curiosity and his interests was immense; so were the wealth of his ideas and the retentiveness of his memory. He took no tradition for granted, but examined everything for himself. He had a proper skepticism which did not hesitate to oppose common sense to the absurdities of science as well as the legends of the popular faith. An unprejudiced scholar called him “a thinker who amassed more accurate information about the world in all its aspects than any man since Aristotle.”96 Never elsewhere has one mind transposed into literature and action so extensive a mass of materials from such a diversity of fields.
We have to picture him as the strangest amalgam of emotional instability with mental vision and power. His nerves kept him always on the jump. He could not sit still except when absorbed in literary composition. When the lady with only one buttock asked, “Which is worse—to be ravished a hundred times by Negro pirates, to have one’s rump gashed, … to be cut to pieces, to row in the galleys, … or to sit still and do nothing?,” Candide answered thoughtfully, “That is a great question.”97 Vol
taire had days of happiness, but he seldom knew peace of mind or body. He had to be busy, active, buying, selling, planting, writing, acting, reciting. He feared boredom worse than death, and in a bored moment he maligned life as “either ennui or whipped cream.”98
We could draw an ugly picture of him if we described his appearance without noting his eyes, or listed his faults and follies without his virtues and his charm. He was a bourgeois gentilhomme who felt that he had as much right to a title as his dilatory debtors. He rivaled the lordliest seigneur in grace of manners and speech, but he was capable of haggling over small sums, and bombarded Président de Brosses with vituperative missiles over fourteen cords of wood—which he insisted on accepting as a gift and not a sale. He loved money as the root of his security. Mme. Denis accused him of parsimony in no measured terms: “The love of money torments you. … You are, in heart, the lowest of men. I shall hide as well as I pan the vices of your heart”;99 but when she wrote this (1754) she was living extravagantly in Paris on funds that were a serious drain on his purse; and for the rest of her years with him she lived in state at Ferney.
