His commitment to the freedom of ideas is historically significant. The French rightly celebrate him as the first ‘engaged’ intellectual who attached himself to specific social and political causes. For them, Voltaire laid the foundations – in an almost architectural sense – of a unique European tradition. They see a line that runs straight as the ‘Grand Axis’ in Paris (that great vista from the seventeenth-century Louvre palace to the twentieth-century Arche de la Défense), from Voltaire via Hugo and Zola to Sartre and Camus. When General de Gaulle was urged to arrest Sartre for subversion during the 1960s, he replied ‘one does not put Voltaire in the Bastille’.
For Voltaire, the essence of intellectual freedom was wit. Wit – which meant both intelligence and humour – was the primary birthright of man. The free play of wit brings enlightenment and also a certain kind of laughter: the laughter that distinguishes man from the beasts. But it is not a simple kind of laughter: it is also close to tears. Voltaire’s symbolic grin (as we begin to examine it) contains both these elements when he surveys the human condition. Life amuses and delights him; but it also causes him pain and grief. In his Questions sur L’Encyclopédie (1772), he wrote this entry about ‘Le Rire’, an epitome of both his thought and his style.
Anyone who has ever laughed will hardly doubt that laughter is the sign of joy, as tears are the symptom of grief. But those who seek the metaphysical causes of laughter are not foolish. Anyone who knows precisely why the type of joy which excites laughter should pull the zygomatic muscle (one of the thirteen muscles in the mouth) upwards towards the ears, is clever. Animals have this muscle like us. But animals never laugh with joy, any more than they weep tears of sadness. It is true that deer excrete fluid from their eyes when they are being hunted to death. So do dogs when they are undergoing vivisection. But they never weep for their mistresses or their friends, as we do. Nor do they burst into laughter at the sight of something comic. Man is the sole animal who cries and laughs.
The simple conclusion is profoundly deceptive. The sentences gather irony even as they shorten, and the blows strike home. What is this entry really about? Is it human laughter, or human stupidity, or human cruelty? Voltaire’s wit is so often double-edged like this. His tales, his essays, his epigrams cut as we smile. And nothing is sacred. Consider what he wrote about human love-making, in one of his letters:
Snails have the good fortune to be both male and female … They give pleasure and receive it at the same time. Their enjoyment is not just twice as much as ours, it also lasts considerably longer. They are in sexual rapture for three or four hours at a stretch. Admittedly, that is not long compared to Eternity. But it would be a long time for you and me.
This is the intellectual physiognomy, so to speak, of Voltaire’s grin. But what gave it the particular historical twist, which makes it seem like the insignia of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment? Voltaire’s father François Arouet (originally from Poitou) was a successful lawyer to the French aristocracy. His beautiful mother (Voltaire always travelled with her portrait) died when he was only six. The youngest surviving child, he was born in November 1694 in the heart of Paris, on the Île de la Cité.
The comfortable house stood within sight of the Palais de Justice (also the police headquarters) and the long rows of bookstalls already established along the Seine. There is something symbolic in this position. Voltaire’s literary genius always contained both the lawyer’s delight in argument and the poet’s sense of fantasy. His wit – from childhood, swift, logical and provocative – somehow combined these two contradictory elements. (Flaubert said long afterwards, in Madame Bovary, that ‘every lawyer carries inside him the wreckage of a poet’).
Young François-Marie Arouet (le jeune) was hyperactive, almost a child prodigy – clever, mischievous and barely governable. He started as he meant to go on. He flourished under his Jesuit teachers at the Collège Louis-le-Grand, driving them to distraction with his pranks. There is a famous story of how he got the school fires lit earlier than usual one winter term. The rule was that no heating was permitted until the water froze in the stone holy-water stoop in the school chapel. Arouet accelerated this process by bringing in a large sheet of ice from the schoolyard, and slipping it unnoticed into the stoop. He was flogged when the trick was discovered, but in recompense the fires were also lit. It was a young poet-lawyer’s solution: the letter of the law was observed, because the holy water did indeed freeze; but the spirit of the law was made a mockery, because Arouet had invented the ice. It was perhaps his first conte philosophique in action.
After graduation (rhetoric, classics, mathematics and a first brush with theology), a dangerously handsome young Arouet ran riot as a junior diplomat in Holland. When he proposed to marry his voluptuous Dutch mistress, Pimpette, he was brought home to Paris in disgrace, and promptly moved into a libertine aristocratic set and began publishing satires and political squibs. (He was supposed to be studying law.) He did his first stint in the Bastille prison, having offended the Court, in 1717; and emerged with his verse tragedy Oedipe, which made his name. Already it was allegro vivace.
Having made his name, he promptly changed it. By a swift transposition of letters, ‘Arouet Le J’ became ‘Voltaire’. (The sleight of hand is rather puzzling here, but scholars explain that it was done by assuming the ‘u’ to be a ‘V,’ and the ‘J’ to be an ‘i’, which just about works, though it would not appeal to Scrabble players.) But Arouet had done something strikingly modern: he had repackaged himself under a new brand name, carrying instant associations of speed and daring: voltige (acrobatics on a trapeze or a horse), volte-face (spinning about to face your enemies), volatile (originally, any winged creature). It meant he was a highflyer, and everyone would know it.
For the next decade, Voltaire soared to increasingly dizzy heights in France, writing plays, collecting gold medals and mistresses, moving in and out of royal favour with King Louis XV at Versailles. He was the supreme literary dandy about town, dining with the aristocrats as their enfant terrible, and ‘passing his life from chateau to chateau’. His portrait was painted, his witticisms admired, and his arrogance became insupportable. The portrait in the Musée Carnavalet from this period shows him rouged and powdered in an extravagant wig, a bottle-green coat over his pink silk waistcoat, lace frothing at his wrists, and an expression of delicate self-satisfaction on his impudent, unmarked face. Much of what he wrote at this time, except for a few erotic poems (‘L’Êpitre à Uranie’) has since been forgotten. Then in January 1726 came nemesis.
Showing off in front of his mistress Adrienne Lecouvreur, in her box at the Comédie Française, Voltaire traded insults with a particularly brutish member of the French aristocracy, the Chevalier de Rohan-Chabot. The Chevalier queried the writer’s name (‘Arouet? Voltaire?’) The writer queried the Chevalier’s lineage. The mistress – having granted favours to both chevalier and writer – even-handedly and prudently fainted between them. Scandal.
Some nights later, Voltaire was wittily dining at the Duc de Sully’s hôtel particulier on the rue Saint Antoine. (This superb baroque building, with decorated courtyard of naked nymphs and barrel-vaulted coach-entrance, is now visitable as the Caisse Nationale des Monuments Historiques.) Called down by an urgent messenger into the cobbled street outside, Voltaire was set upon by a posse of the Chevalier’s hired thugs, and beaten with clubs until he collapsed. The Chevalier, meanwhile, looked on from a closed carriage, and shouted out to his men the one remark by which history remembers him. ‘Don’t hit his head: something valuable might still come from that!’ The beating recalls the one delivered to the British poet John Dryden in Rose Alley, London, by henchmen of the Earl of Rochester. But the consequences were somewhat different.
Voltaire staggered back up to the Duc de Sully’s dining room, but was mortified to discover that neither the Duc nor his delightful friends were prepared to take his part against a fellow nobleman. Bruised and bitterly humiliated, Voltaire attempted to challenge the Chevalier t
o a duel with swords, but was promptly put back into the Bastille. He had learned that the intellectual must defend himself with other weapons.
One might say that if the French Enlightenment began anywhere, it was on the cobblestones outside the Hôtel de Sully in 1726. A small plaque, beneath the nymphs, might not come amiss. Thenceforth Voltaire’s career – he was thirty-two – followed a wholly different trajectory. He never forgot the beating, and years later Candide was to undergo a similar batonnade in Lisbon, at the hands of the Inquisition. ‘They walked in procession, and listened to a very moving sermon, followed by a beautiful recital of plainchant. Candide was flogged in time to the singing.’
Voltaire’s travels now began. Despite brief returns to Court favour, he was not to feel really safe in Paris again until the last months of his life, fifty years later. First he fled to London, arriving ‘without a penny, sick to death of a violent ague, a stranger, alone, helpless’ (his own rather racy English). But being Voltaire, he was soon airborne again, and remained for two years, a decisive period of intellectual expansion. He met Pope, Congreve and Swift, who became crucial influences on his writing. (His letter of introduction to Swift is delightfully dated from ‘the Whiter Perruke, Maiden Lane, Covent Garden’.) He read the works of Locke and Newton in detail, and judged them superior to Descartes (with his nonsense about ‘innate ideas’) and Pascal (with his gambler’s view of heaven). He studied the liberal English civil code, which granted large freedoms of worship and citizenship. The British right of habeas corpus (as opposed to the arbitrary French lettres de cachet) deeply impressed him. He visited the Court, the Parliament, the lively and outspoken salons and coffeehouses, the bustling Stock Exchange. (Voltaire’s brilliance as a private investor dates from this time, and he never again depended on book sales or aristocratic patrons.) He attended productions of Shakespeare’s plays (then being revived), with their sublime ignorance of the three classical unities. He found ‘a nation fond of liberty; learned, witty, despising life and death; a nation of philosophers’. It was an exile’s idealization of course; but another conte philosophique as well.
Everything Voltaire saw went into his first distinctive prose work, a hymn to British liberty and eccentricity, Les Lettres philosophiques (1733), also known as his Letters Concerning the English Nation. An anthology of essays and travel sketches, it is a compendium of free-thinking specifically designed to provoke established opinions and prejudices in France: the Quakers at worship, the Parliament in debate, Newton doing experimental science, the stockbrokers trading, or Hamlet contemplating suicide. (Hamlet’s ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy is exquisitely rendered into classical French alexandrines, a perfect backhanded compliment to the Bard.) Each scene is given Voltaire’s special spin of irony, as in his famous sketch of the British doing business, from the Sixth Letter.
Go into the London Exchange, a place more dignified than many a royal court. There you will find representatives of every nation quietly assembled to promote human welfare. There the Jew, the Mahometan and the Christian deal with each other as though they were all of the same religion. They call no man Infidel unless he be bankrupt. There the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist, and the Anglican accepts the Quaker’s bond … If there were only one religion in England, there would be a risk of despotism: if there were only two, they would cut each other’s throats; as it is, there are at least thirty, and they live happily and at peace.
Voltaire’s return to France was uneasy. He was no longer the darling of Paris, he was increasingly suspected of liberal and unpatriotic ideas, and his attempt at a sparkling satire of French cultural dullness, Le Temple de Gout (1733) – inspired by Alexander Pope’s Dunciad – produced not dinner invitations but denunciations. He skulked in an aged comtesse’s apartment in the Palais Royal (no plaque), and indulged his lifelong love of amateur theatricals, while preparing for his next débâcle with the authorities. When the Lettres philosophiques was published, a warrant was immediately issued for his arrest.
But Voltaire was dancing again. He had met the remarkable woman who was to shape the whole middle period of his career. The Marquise du Châtelet was a handsome, headstrong eccentric of twenty-seven, with a passion for geometry and jewellery. A portrait shows her at her desk, in a tender flutter of blue silk ribbons, one milky elbow on a pile of books, an astrolabe at her shoulder, and a pair of gold dividers held thoughtfully, yet rather erotically, between her fingertips. She was married to a bluff and kindly career soldier, who was always away at some European front. Having borne him two children, the Marquise was ready to take a lover of greater finesse, and she already had the mathematician Maupertuis in tow. She met Voltaire at a party in Saint-Germain, and they talked about Newton and fell in love. Voltaire said she had green eyes and could translate both Euclid and Virgil, and make him grin. It was an Enlightenment love match.
When the warrant for his arrest was issued, Voltaire decamped for Madame du Châtelet’s charming chateau at Cirey, far away in the misty borderlands of Lorraine. Here they made a new life together over the next decade, redecorating the rambling apartments, establishing a garden, writing for ten or twelve hours a day, receiving inquisitive visitors, and occasionally playing host to the Marquis on his return from a dull military campaign. One of the first things they did together was to submit prize essays, without consulting each other’s findings, on the subject of ‘The Propagation of Fire’, for an award offered by the French Academy of Sciences. They were suitably outraged to find that both had lost.
There are many accounts of their stormy, and highly productive, ménage a trois. Nancy Mitford once wrote a diverting book about it, Voltaire in Love (1957), which she described as less of a biography and more ‘a Kinsey report on his romps with Mme du Châtelet’. Both sexually and intellectually, it was a time of high stimulation. Encouraged by Madame du Châtelet, Voltaire turned away from pure literature, and began to publish a stream of histories and popular science, most notably his Eléments de la philosophie de Newton (1737). This contained the famous story of Newton and the falling apple, which ‘demonstrated’ the universal law of gravity. At their long suppers (the only meal their guests could rely on), they argued everything from physics to theology, and Voltaire did ludicrous imitations of their enemies. There were poetry readings, picnics, laboratory experiments and financial investments. There were letters from all over Europe. And there was endless, enchanting talk, punctuated by the occasional amorous row. André Maurois once described Madame du Châtelet’s main interests as ‘books, diamonds, algebra, astronomy and underwear’. Voltaire shared them all.
Once, driving back to Cirey one freezing winter’s night, their coach overturned and help had to be sent for. The servants were amazed to find them peacefully curled up together in a pile of rugs and cushions, deep in a snow drift, carefully identifying the outlines of the lesser constellations.
It was with Madame du Châtelet that Voltaire, complaining perpetually of ill-health and middle age (he was now in his forties), began to concentrate on the problem of happiness. He viewed it not as a domestic matter, but as a profound philosophical conundrum in a world of ignorance, injustice and fanaticism. His inquiries went into the short stories he began to write: the first of which was Micromégas (‘Mini-Mighty’), begun at Cirey about 1738.
His initial target was the philosopher Leibniz, whose sturdy complacence had produced an immensely sophisticated argument to prove that, in accordance with the inevitability of Divine Providence, everyone lived ‘in the best of all possible worlds’. All local suffering was part of a greater system of good. Curiously, this was a view highly fashionable among Enlightenment intellectuals, and had been popularized by Pope in his Essay on Man:
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good;
And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,
One truth is clear: Whatever is, is right.
Voltaire attacked this absurdity with what was in effect ‘An Essay
on Space Monsters’, one of the earliest pieces of science fiction. Micromegas is approximately twenty miles high in his stockings, and comes from a deeply civilized planet near Sirius. He surfs through outer space on comets, making notes on everything he sees, because he, too, is a philosopher. Arriving on Earth (with a five-mile dwarf from Saturn as his companion), he believes it is uninhabited until he spots a whale in the Baltic, using his pocket microscope with a two-thousand-foot lens.
At last, Micromegas discovers a scientific expedition sailing back from the Arctic Circle, and questions the ‘mite-sized philosophers’ on the nature of human existence (he uses an improvised hearing trumpet made from a fingernail paring). They wisely quote Aristotle, Descartes and Leibniz, which cuts no ice with Micromegas at all. Only a follower of Locke, who affirms that ‘there are more things possible than people think’, makes any sense to the Space Giants.
Finally, a Thomist theologian, in full academic regalia, steps forward. He tells them that everything – the stars, the planets, the sun and they themselves – is created by God uniquely for man’s benefit. ‘On hearing this, our two Travellers fell about, choking with that irrepressible laughter which, according to Homer, is the portion of the gods.’ The philosophers’ tiny ship is nearly engulfed, but the shaken survivors are sent home to report to the Paris Academy of Sciences.
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