The Age of Voltaire

by Will Durant

  Never before, so far as we know, had there been such activity, rarely such excellence, in the once lesser fields of aesthetic enterprise. In this period the artist and the artisan were again made one, as in medieval Europe, and those who could beautify the intimate appurtenances of life were honored with the painters, sculptors, and architects of the age.

  Never before had furniture been so exquisite. In this “style of Louis Fifteenth” it was no longer so monumental as under the Great King; it was designed for comfort rather than for dignity; it was more fitted to feminine contours and finery than to majesty and display. Sofas took on a diversity of shapes to suit attitudes and moods; “today,” Voltaire wrote, “social behavior is easier than in the past,” and “ladies can be seen reading on sofas or daybeds without causing embarrassment to their friends and acquaintances.”1 Beds were crowned with delicate canopies, their panels were painted or upholstered, their posts were handsomely carved. New types of furniture were developed to meet the needs of a generation that preferred Venus to Mars. The large, deep-cushioned, upholstered armchair (fauteuil or bergère), the tapestried sofa, the chaise-longue, the writing table (escritoire), the desk (or secrétaire), the commode, the footrest, the console, the chiffonier, the buffet—these took now the forms, often the names, that they have in essence retained to our time. Carving and other ornamentation were profuse to an extent that provoked a reaction in the second half of the century. The “buhlwork” introduced by André Charles Boulle under Louis XIV—an inlay of furniture with metal or shell—was carried on by his sons as cabinetmakers to Louis XV; and a dozen variations of marquetry broke up the surface of painted, veneered, or lacquered wood. Voltaire ranked some lacquerwork of eighteenth-century France as equal to any that had come from China or Japan. Craftsmen like Cressent, Oppenordt, Oeben, Caffiéri, and Meissonier achieved such pre-eminence in the design or adornment of furniture that cabinetmakers came from abroad to study their techniques, and then spread French styles from London to St. Petersburg. Juste Aurèle Meissonier included in one mind a dozen arts: he built houses, decorated their interiors, fashioned furniture, molded candlesticks and silverware, designed snuffboxes and watch cases, organized pompes funèbres or galantes, and wrote several works to transmit his skills; he was almost the uomo universale of his time.

  As the ceremonious publicity of the seventeenth century was replaced by the intimacies of life under Louis XV, interior decoration passed from splendor to refinement; and here again the age marked a zenith. Furniture, carpets, upholstery, objets d’art, clocks, mirrors, panels, tapestries, drapes, paintings, ceilings, chandeliers, even bookcases were brought into gratifying harmonies of color and style. Sometimes, we may suspect, books were bought for the color and texture of their bindings as well as for their contents; but we can understand that pleasure too, and we gaze with envy at personal libraries housed behind glass in handsome cases set into the wall. Dining rooms were rare in France before 1750; dining tables were usually made to be easily multiplied and removed, for dinner guests might be incalculably numerous. Chimneypieces were no longer the massive monuments that had come down from the Middle Ages to Louis XIV, but they were richly embellished, and now and then (a rare instance of poor taste in this period) female figures were used as caryatids upholding the mantelpiece. Heating was almost entirely by open fireplaces, protected by ornamental screens, but here and there we find in France a stove faced, as in Germany, with decorated faïence. Lighting was by candles in a hundred different fixtures, culminating in immense and glittering chandeliers of rock crystal, glass, or bronze. We marvel at the amount of reading that was done by candlelight; but perhaps the difficulties diminished the production and consumption of trash.

  Wall panels, lightly colored and delicately adorned, replaced tapestries as the century advanced, and in this period the art of tapestry had its final flowering. In almost every variety of textiles—from damasks, embroideries, and brocade to immense carpets and drapes—France now challenged the finest weaves of the Orient. Amiens specialized in pictured velvets; Lyons, Tours, and Nîmes were famous for decorated silks; in Lyons Jean Pillement, Jean Baptiste Huet, and others made wall hangings stamped and sewn with Chinese or Turkish motifs and scenes that captivated Pompadour. Tapestries were woven in the nationalized factories of Paris and Beauvais, and in private shops at Aubusson and Lille. They had by this time lost their utilitarian function of protecting against damp and drafts; they were purely decorative, and were often reduced in size to suit the tendency to smaller rooms. The weavers at Les Gobelins and Beauvais followed designs prepared, and the colors prescribed, by the leading painters of the age. Especially beautiful were the fifteen tapestries woven by the Gobelins (1717) after cartoons provided by Charles Antoine Coypel to illustrate Don Quixote. The Beauvais weavers, as we shall see, produced some fine tapestries after designs by Boucher. The Savonneries—originally soap works—were reorganized in 1712 as the “Royal Factory for the Manufacture of Carpets in the Persian and Near-Eastern Styles”; soon they were weaving massive carpets distinguished by careful drawing, varied colors, and soft velvet pile; these are the finest pile carpets of eighteenth-century France. It was the tapestry factories that made the painstaking upholstery for the chairs of the well-to-do. Many humble fingers must have been worn to calluses to prevent the same on thriving fundaments.

  French potters were entering upon an adventurous age. The wars of Louis XIV gave them an opportunity: the old King melted his silver to finance his armies; he replaced his silverware with faïence, and bade his subjects do likewise; soon the faïence factories at Rouen, Lille, Sceaux, Strasbourg, Moustiers-Ste.-Marie, and Marseilles were meeting this new demand; and after the death of Louis XIV the taste for dishes and other objects in faïence encouraged the potters to produce some of the finest wares of the kind in European history. Artists as famous as Boucher, Falconet, and Pajou painted scenes or molded forms for French faïence.

  Meanwhile France was moving toward the production of porcelain. Soft-paste varieties had long since been made in Europe—as far back as 1581 in Florence, 1673 in Rouen. These, however, were imitations of Chinese exemplars; they were made not from the hard-paste kaolin, or china-stone clay, as fused at high temperatures in the Far East, but from softer clays fired at low temperatures and covered with a glossy “frit.” Even so, these pâte-tendre porcelains—especially those fired at Chantilly, Vincennes, and Mennecy-Villeroi (near Paris)—were very beautiful. Hard-paste porcelain continued to be imported from China or Dresden. In 1749 Mme. de Pompadour coaxed 100,000 livres from Louis XV, and 250,000 from private sources, to expand the production of soft-paste wares at Vincennes. In 1756 she had Vincennes’ hundred artisans moved to a more commodious building at Sèvres (between Paris and Versailles), and there, in 1769, France began to make true hard-paste porcelain.

  Goldsmiths and silversmiths had the advantage that the French monarchy used their products as a national reserve, transferring bullion into extravagant forms of beauty that could be readily fused in emergency. Under Louis XV the middle classes enlarged the demand for silverware as utensils and decoration. Almost every type of cutlery now used took its present form in eighteenth-century France: oyster forks, ice spoons, sugar spoons, hunting services, traveling services, folding knives and forks; add exquisitely carved or molded salt cellars, teapots, ewers, jugs, toilet articles, candlesticks … ; in this field the Louis Quinze is “the purest of all French styles.”2 The goldsmiths and silversmiths made also the little boxes that men as well as women carried to hold snuff or pills or cosmetics or sweets, and a hundred types of containers for the toilet table and the boudoir. The Prince de Conti had a collection of eight hundred boxes, all of different form, all of precious metal, and all of fine workmanship. Many other materials were used for similar purposes—agate, mother-of-pearl, lapis lazuli … The cutting and setting of jewelry were the privilege of the 350 master craftsmen of the goldsmiths’ guild.

  Metalwork bore the mark of the age in its delicate patt
ern and finish. Andirons took fabulous forms in intricate designs, usually of fantastic animals. Gilt bronze was used to make or decorate andirons, torches, candela-bras, or chandeliers, or to mount clocks, barometers, porcelain, or jade; the eighteenth century was the heyday of modern bronze. Clocks could be monsters—watches could be gems—of bronze, enamel, silver, or gold, chased in the most exquisite style. Torches were in some cases masterpieces of sculpture, like that which Falconet made for Versailles. Miniatures and medallions were among the temptations of the time. One family, the Roettiers, produced within a century five graveurs de médailles, all so distinguished for their work that they were welcomed into the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts along with the greatest painters and sculptors. It was in the little things of life that the eighteenth century displayed its most careless wealth and most careful art. “Those who have not lived before 1789,” said Talleyrand, “will never know how sweet life could be”3—if one could choose his class and dodge the guillotine.

  II. ARCHITECTURE

  Architecture almost ignored rococo. Styles change less readily in building than in decoration, for the requirements of stability are less fluid than the tides of taste. The Académie Royale de l’Architecture, organized by Colbert in 1671. was now led by inheritors of the Louis XIV traditions. Robert de Cotte continued the work of Jules Hardouin-Mansard, who had completed the Palace of Versailles; Germain Boffrand was a pupil of Mansard; Jacques Jules Gabriel and his son Jacques Ange were collateral descendants of Mansard; so the stream of talent obdurately dug its bed. These men preserved the baroque, even the semi-classical, exteriors of the grand siècle with columns, capitals, architraves, and cupolas; but many of their constructions allowed a frolic of rococo within.

  The decline of faith left little stimulus for new churches; two old ones, however, had their façades renewed. Robert de Cotte faced St.-Roch with classical columns and pediment (1736), and Jean Nicolas Servandoni provided St.-Sulpice (1733–45) with a massive two-storied portico of Doric and Ionic colonnades in somber Palladian style. But it was secular architecture that expressed the spirit of the age. Several of the palaces built in this period later became national ministries or foreign embassies: so the Hôtel de Matignon (1721) became the Austrian embassy, and then the home of the prime minister; the Palais-Bourbon (1722–50) was partly incorporated into the Chambre des Députés; the Hôtel de Soubise (remodeled in 1742) became the Archives Nationales.

  Under the Marquis de Marigny as commissioner of buildings a large number of architects, sculptors, painters, and decorators prospered; he found lodgings and commissions for them, and saw that they were adequately paid. His favorite architect was Jacques Ange Gabriel, who accepted wholeheartedly the classical tradition. After the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748) Edme Bouchardon was engaged to cast an equestrian statue of Louis XV, and Gabriel was asked to design the entourage for this monument. Around an open space between the Jar-dins des Tuileries and the Champs-Élysées he placed a ring of balustrades and sunken gardens; on the north side he raised the present Hotel Crillon and the present Ministry of the Marine, both in purely classic form; and to adorn the square he set up four mythological figures, which the Parisians soon named after the royal mistresses—Mailly, Vintimille, Châteauroux, and Pompadour. The square was named Place Louis Quinze; now we call it Place de la Concorde. It is a comfort to know that there were traffic jams there two hundred years ago. This same James Angel Gabriel in 1752 built the perfectly proportioned École Militaire, whose Corinthian columns are as graceful as any in the Roman Forum.

  It was not only Paris that had its face remodeled in this reign. At Chantilly the Duc de Bourbon engaged Jean Aubert to set up for his horses and dogs stables so palatial as to invite contrast with the cottages of the peasants. In Lorraine Stanislas Leszczyński made Nancy one of the fairest cities in France. There Boffrand finished the cathedral that had been begun by his master Jules Hardouin-Mansard. Emmanuel Héré de Corny laid out (1750–57) the “New City” at Nancy: a rococo Hôtel de Ville, or City Hall; the Place Stanislas, leading through a public garden and a triumphal arch to the Place de la Carrière and the Palais du Gouvernement; and Jean Lamour guarded this Place Stanislas with iron grilles (1751–55) that are the finest of their kind in modern art. Lyons now gave itself the Place Louis-le-Grand; Nantes, Rouen, Reims, and Bordeaux each opened a Place Royale; Toulouse raised a noble Capitole; Rouen provided lovely fountains; stately bridges beautified Sens, Nantes, and Blois; and Montpellier spread out its promenade. Between 1730 and 1760 Jean Jacques Gabriel transformed Bordeaux into a modern city with open squares, wide avenues, airy parks, a handsome waterfront, and public buildings in majestic Renaissance style.

  Finally French architecture crossed frontiers; French architects were commissioned to build in Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, Russia, Italy, Spain. By the middle of the century, when France was declining in military power and political prestige, she reached the height of her influence in manners and art.

  III. SCULPTURE

  Sculpture in this period was fighting an angry struggle for recognition as a major art. Its function had long been mainly decorative; but whereas under Louis XIV it had commissions to adorn great palaces and extensive gardens, it was less favored now that the royal passion for building had exhausted itself and France. The rich were hiding in smaller structures, and heroic statuary found no place in drawing rooms and boudoirs. Sculptors complained that the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture gave most of its prizes to painters; Pigalle proposed that there be a royal sculptor as well as a royal painter, and personally campaigned for the order of St.-Michel to break down the tradition that only painters received this reward. Reluctantly the sculptors turned to decorating homes with small pieces, vases, and reliefs, and sought to rival the portrait painters by giving to decaying, paying flesh the illusion of lasting bronze or stone. Some of them, entering more intimately into the home, adopted the elegance, naturalness, and playfulness of rococo, while still favoring the sobriety of classic lines.

  As with painters and artisans, the sculptor’s art tended to run in families. Nicolas Coustou helped his teacher, Antoine Coysevox, to decorate the royal palaces at Marly and Versailles; he designed the great figures, symbolizing French rivers, that are now in the Hôtel de Ville at Lyons; his Descent from the Cross is still in Notre-Dame-de-Paris; and his Berger Chasseur is one of a dozen masterly statues that face time and weather in the Gardens of the Tuileries. Nicolas’ younger brother, Guillaume Coustou I, turned Marie Leszczyńska into marble as Juno,4 and carved the powerful Horses of Marly (1740–45)—originally for that palace, but now rebelling against the bridle at the west and east approaches to the Place de la Concorde. Guillaume’s son, Guillaume Coustou II, made for the Dauphin the tomb in the cathedral of Sens.

  Nancy gave birth to another artistic dynasty. Jacob Sigisbert Adam transmitted sculpture and architecture to three sons. Lambert Sigisbert Adam, after ten years of tutelage in Rome, went up to Paris, where he collaborated with his younger brother, Nicolas Sébastien, in designing the Neptune and Amphitrite Fountain in the gardens of Versailles. Then he moved to Potsdam and carved for Frederick the Great, as gifts from Louis XV, two marble groups—Hunting and Fishing— for the grounds of Sanssouci. Nicolas Sébastien returned to Nancy and designed the tomb of Katharin Opalinska in the Church of Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours. A third brother, François Balthasar Gaspard, helped to decorate Stanislas’ capital.

  A third family of sculptors began with Filippo Caffieri, who left Italy in 1660 to work with his son François Charles for Louis XIV. Another son, Jacques Caffiéri, brought the genius of the line to its peak, surpassing all his contemporaries as a worker in bronze. Nearly all the royal palaces competed for his time. At Versailles he and his son Philippe adorned the chimneypiece in the apartment of the Dauphin, and made the rococo bronze pedestal for the King’s famous astronomical clock. The bronze mounts that Jacques made for furniture are now treasured beyond the furniture itself.5

  Edme
Bouchardon, whom Voltaire called “our Pheidias,”6 accepted completely the classical principles proclaimed by his patron the Comte de Caylus. For many years he labored in rivalry with Pigalle, until Pigalle thought himself surpassed; Diderot quoted the younger sculptor as saying that he had “never entered Bouchardon’s studio without coming out with a sense of discouragement that lasted entire weeks.”7 Diderot thought that Bouchardon’s Amour (Cupid)8 was destined to immortality, but it hardly catches the fire of love. Better is the fountain that the sculptor carved for the Rue de Grenelle in Paris—a masterpiece of classic dignity and strength. In 1749 the city commissioned him to execute an equestrian statue of Louis XV. He worked on it nine years, cast it in 1758, but did not live to see it set up. Dying (1762), he asked the municipal authorities to let Pigalle finish the enterprise; so their long rivalry ended in a gesture of admiration and trust. The statue was erected in the Place Louis Quinze, and was demolished as a hated emblem by the Revolution (1792).