The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  Civilization, then, according to Voltaire, was no monopoly of France, nor of any one people or language. The first of the three earlier happy ages was classical Greece in the time of “Philip and Alexander, or rather of Pericles, Demosthenes, Aristotle, Plato, Apelles, Phidias, Praxiteles . . . the rest of the known world being in a barbarous state.” The second was the era of Caesar and Augustus, “distinguished by the names of Lucretius, Cicero, Livy, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Varro and Vitruvius.” The third was the Renaissance, “the hour of Italy’s glory.” “The arts, for ever transplanted from Greece to Italy, fell on favourable ground, where they flourished immediately. France, England, Germany, and Spain, in their turn, desired the possession of these fruits.” “The fourth age is that which we call the age of Louis XIV; and it is perhaps of the four the one which most nearly approaches perfection.” Enriched by the earlier discoveries, it accomplished more than the other three together. “All the arts, it is true, did not progress further than they had under the Medici, under Augustus or under Alexander; but human reason in general was brought to perfection.” Finally “rational philosophy” came to light and spread its beneficent influence to England, Germany, Russia, and a revived Italy.

  With his Age of Louis XIV (1751) Voltaire earned his title as “the first historian of civilization.” He named his work after the Sun King of Versailles, for, he wrote, “no single person could epitomize the high level that European civilization had reached in the late seventeenth century better than Louis XIV.” Voltaire’s Charles XII (1730) had focused on a few leading figures, mostly military and political. In this later work too he gave ample accounts of Louis’s diplomatic and military exploits, salted with anecdotes of the court and the condition of Europe. And he puzzled and piqued critics by abandoning the simple chronological for a topical treatment. A third of his pages, which sum up the work, are finally devoted to social and fiscal institutions, laws, science, literature, and the arts, religion, and ecclesiastical affairs. He includes a brisk polemic chapter illustrating his “terrible reproach” that the Christian Church had caused that “blood should have been shed for so many centuries by men who proclaimed the god of peace. Paganism knew no such fury. It covered the world in darkness, but shed hardly a drop of blood save that of beasts.” “The spirit of dogma bred the madness of religious wars in the minds of men.” In a surprising final chapter, Voltaire savors the irony of how Dominican opposition to Chinese ceremonies for reverencing ancestors led to the banning of Christianity in China.

  Voltaire surveys the achievements of Molière, Corneille, Racine, Boileau, and La Fontaine, the painting of Poussin, Colbert’s Academy of Painting, the Academy of Science, and the countless minor advances with “useful arts.” Revealing his ecumenical view of Europe as a community of civilization, he offers a chapter on “the Useful Arts and Sciences in Europe during the Reign of Louis XIV.” The Age of Louis XIV was planned and arranged (in Gustave Lanson’s phrase) “as an apotheosis of the human spirit.” With his customary elegance Voltaire summed up what his concept of civilization added to familiar ways of thinking about history:

  Of those who have commanded battalions and squadrons, only the names remain. The human race has nothing to show for a hundred battles that have been waged. But the great men I speak to you about have prepared pure and lasting pleasures for men yet to be born. A canal lock uniting two seas, a painting by Poussin, a beautiful tragedy, a newly discovered truth—these are things a thousand times more precious than all the annals of the court or all the accounts of military campaigns. You know that, with me, great men come first and heroes last.

  I call great men all those who have excelled in creating what is useful or agreeable. The plunderers of the provinces are merely heroes.

  Voltaire’s personal experience proved to him that the progress of the human spirit (l’esprit humain) carried promise for all enlightened mankind. “Voltairism,” John Morley observes, “may be said to have begun from the flight of its founder from Paris to London.” It was “the decisive hegira.” Voltaire’s two and a half years in England (May 1726-February 1729) inspired him with admiration for “that intellectual and fearless nation,” which he soon expressed with his usual irony and eloquence in Letters Concerning the English Nation (1733). In these essays he succinctly celebrated some distinctive triumphs of civilized enlightenment in England: the Parliament; the Quakers; inoculation against smallpox; the physics and optics of the adorable Newton (“who was buried like a king who had benefited his subjects”); the spirit of toleration; and the persons of rank who cultivate learning. Voltaire’s hegira showed how nations could enrich one another, and share their civilization. That experience, if no other, would have cured Voltaire of French chauvinism. It had no such effect in France. Under its title of Lettres Philosophiques his brief volume was condemned on June 10, 1734, by the Parlement of Paris to be lacerated and burned by the hangman as “likely to inspire a license of thought most dangerous to religion and civil order.”

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  But how did barbarous peoples become civilized? Voltaire saw a melodramatic example in his own lifetime. Russia, he observed, occupied the whole of northern Asia and Europe from the frontiers of China to the borders of Poland and Sweden. “Yet the existence of this immense country was not even realized by Europe before the time of the Czar Peter. The Russians were less civilized than the Mexicans at the time of their discovery by Cortez; born the slaves of masters as barbarous as themselves, they were sunk deep in ignorance, and unacquainted with the arts and sciences, and so insensible of their use that they had no industry.”

  Yet Voltaire would actually see Russia become “civilized.” The process and the hero, Peter the Great, fascinated him. In his History of Charles XII, he had given almost as much attention to Peter as to the announced subject of the book. “If I were younger, I would make myself Russian,” he was reported to have told Catherine the Great, who herself had actually gone through that process. To participate in analyzing a great barbarous nation was a tempting prospect for Voltaire. And he dramatized the encounter of cultures in his poem “The Russian in Paris” (1760). In 1744, when he had proposed to write a biography of the civilizer of Russia, Peter the Great, the reigning empress of Russia, Elizabeth, offered to provide him with all the documents. Then, as he proceeded, in order to avoid emphasizing Peter’s personal weaknesses, he refocused his work under the title History of the Empire of Russia under Peter the Great (1759). In this work his praise of the civilizer of Russia was so extravagant that it irritated his correspondent Frederick the Great of Prussia. After Frederick saw the book, he stopped writing to Voltaire. Only when Voltaire learned that Frederick had been ill did he succeed in resuming the correspondence.

  Voltaire reports in detail how Peter “civilized” Russia. How, for example, “in a desolate district,” Peter built Petersburg in 1703 to be his “window into Europe,” which he made his national capital in 1712, and which he made a lively center of culture. “The sciences, which in other parts have been the slow product of centuries, were, by his care, introduced into his empire in full perfection.” The climax of Voltaire’s History of Charles XII is Peter’s victory at the decisive battle of Poltava (1709) “between the two most famous monarchs that were then in the world . . . the one [Charles XII] glorious for having given away dominions; the other for having civilized his own.” Alert to the ironies of history, Voltaire reminds us, “He civilized his people, but remained savage himself. He carried out his sentences with his own hands, and at a debauch at table he displayed his skill in cutting off heads.”

  Civilization, in Voltaire’s eyes, is an achievement of all mankind, not just of the Europeans. And in his longest work, his Essay on the Customs and the Spirit of Nations (1756), a pioneer effort at an Enlightenment universal history, he reaches all across the globe. He abandons the biblical chronology and Bossuet’s eloquent espousal of divine Providence. Beginning with geography and the different races of men, through “the Usages and Sentiments Common t
o Almost All Ancient Peoples,” Voltaire gives way to the Chaldeans, Indians, and Chinese—“the first nations to become civilized.” He sees the piecemeal progress of civilization. “Even in these uncivilized times [thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in Europe], certain useful inventions were made, the fruit of the mechanical inventiveness which nature has given to men and which is quite independent of their scientific or philosophical knowledge.” Among these in the fifteenth century, his surprising examples are the invention of spectacles to aid eyesight, then windmills, faience, glass, and mirrors. But he notes that the compass, paper, and printing were still hidden in the future.

  As Voltaire recounts it, the progress of civilization is seldom easy. The king of France, Charles V, who collected about nine hundred volumes a hundred years before the Vatican library was founded by Nicholas V, “tried in vain to encourage talents; the soil was not prepared for these exotic fruits. Some of the wretched compositions of these days have been collected, but this is like hoarding a heap of stones from some ancient hovel when one lives in a palace.” Voltaire concludes his universal history by reminding us of the task of the historian—“to give posterity an account of all the misfortunes which man has suffered, to describe all the pillage, the crimes, the losses, the ineffective measures and the inadequate resources.” All other civilizations serve Voltaire as sticks to beat the cruel fanaticism of religion in his age. He finally acknowledges those who accused him of “having painted crimes, above all those of religion, in too somber colors, and of having made fanaticism execrate and superstition ridiculous.” Voltaire declares his fault is that he has not said enough. “It is clear that there are still unfortunates who are the victims of this spiritual disease and who are afraid to be cured.” Still the undaunted Voltaire “cannot but believe that reason and human industry will continue to make further progress.”

  In the idea of civilization, Voltaire encourages us with hope for the common possibilities of the human spirit everywhere. He observes in his Philosophical Dictionary:

  The use of history consists above all in the comparison which a statesman or an ordinary citizen can make between the laws and customs of other countries and those of his own; this is what leads modern nations to emulate each other in the arts, in agriculture and in commerce.

  The great faults of the past are also very useful in many ways; the crimes and misfortunes of history cannot be too frequently pondered on, for whatever people say, it is possible to prevent both.

  While Voltaire was chronicling the triumph of civilization in the France of Louis XIV and witnessing the rise of civilization in Russia, his France saw the building of a magnificent literary monument to civilization, a witness to the powers of collaboration of an enlightened people. The Encyclopédie ou Diction-naire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers, edited by Voltaire’s friend Denis Diderot, had begun as the ambitious commercial venture of the French bookseller-publisher Le Breton, who owned the largest printing house in Paris. He planned to publish a French translation of the Scottish Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia, or Universal Dictionary of the Arts and Sciences, which had appeared in 1728. But when Le Breton put his project in the hands of d’Alembert and Diderot, it became a monument far overshadowing its model. The twenty-eight volumes (seventeen of text; eleven of illustrations) (1751-65), covering all knowledge and the arts, 71,818 articles and 2,885 plates, was the work of the leading French thinkers of the age. It included some of the best essays of Voltaire and articles by Rousseau, Turgot, d’Holbach, and Quesnay. It was both a compendium of the latest knowledge and a manifesto of the Enlightenment. Its comprehensive view of the world came to be called Encyclopedism.

  There were some two thousand subscribers to the first volume, and the subscribers multiplied with each volume despite (or because of) the increasing opposition of the authorities. Without doubt this was a dangerous—even explosive—book, for it urged readers to consult only reason and their own senses in place of the dictates of church and state. What the Encyclopédie offered was not just a point of view but the whole of knowledge. Traditional learning was treated as prejudice or superstition. Here was the harvest of new science in an age of brilliant scientists and Seekers—from the physics of Bernoulli to the natural history of Buffon, and the sociology of Quesnay. Its articles challenged the ideas on which the tottering ancien régime relied. Diderot’s article on “Political Authority” degraded the authority of the king to the mere consent of the people. D’Holbach urged a constitutional monarchy. Rousseau espoused his subversive ideas of the general will. And articles on many subjects dissolved the Bourbon and Catholic dogmas.

  Diderot’s work was an omen of the revolution to come, which only the blind could fail to see. The king revoked the privilege of publishing the book in 1759. In that same year, too, Pope Clement XII put the Encyclopédie on the Index of Forbidden Books and warned all Catholics who owned the book to have it burned by a priest or face excommunication. The great intellectual monument of the age stood overwhelmingly condemned by the age’s highest authorities. But it attested the enduring powers of “civilization” toward which Voltaire and other philosophes were collaborating.

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  Rousseau Seeks Escape

  If a skillful dramatist had sought a foil for Voltaire, he could hardly have done better than to invent Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), a Seeker who idealized the savage and believed that “a thinking man is a depraved animal.” Rousseau, like Voltaire, purported to base his view of “civilization” on history. But while Voltaire founded his opinions on his work as a pioneer historian of civilization and the achievements of enlightened mankind, Rousseau sought his views in introspection. The same epoch that produced Voltaire’s unexcelled paeans to civilization and man’s power to enlighten himself and his neighbors produced Rousseau’s influential polemics against civilization.

  Rousseau, always the self-obsessed Seeker, proved adept at transforming his personal grievances into a philosophy of history. He was born “feeble and ill” into the repressed society of Geneva in 1712. His mother, niece of a Calvinist minister, died a few days after his birth. And his father, a watchmaker, citizen of Geneva, commonly beat Jean-Jacques, whom he blamed for the death of the boy’s mother. Jean-Jacques was self-educated, mostly by the books in his father’s workshop.

  When Jean-Jacques was only ten his father left Geneva, and he was sent to live with a minister, Jean-Jacques Lambercier and his family outside the city. His boyhood experience with Madame Lambercier revealed the masochism that stayed with him. After reporting in his Confessions that he enjoyed being spanked by Madame Lambercier, he naively asked: “Who would believe that this punishment received at the age of eight from the hands of a girl of thirty determined my tastes, my desires, my passions for the rest of my life?” Using his talent for melodrama to make his point, he even misstated their ages—he being eleven and she forty. Back in Geneva he was apprenticed to an engraver. But, mistreated by his master, he left Geneva for Annecy and Turin, where he was converted to Roman Catholicism.

  Rousseau would spend much of the rest of his life as an intellectual and emotional vagabond—always seeking a maman. He seemed to have an uncanny appeal for women—especially married women. When he met Madame de Warens, who had left her husband, she soon became Rousseau’s mistress and his patron. He earned his living as a tutor to a prominent family before going to Paris to publish his new scheme of musical notation.

  After a brief tour in Venice as secretary to the French ambassador, with whom he quarreled, he returned to Paris. There he became friendly with Denis Diderot, and wrote the articles on music for the Encyclopédie. There, too, he was enamored of Thérèse Le Vasseur, a chambermaid at his hotel. The children he had by her were all sent to a foundling home, a not unusual procedure in those days in Paris. When he returned briefly to Geneva in 1754, he returned also to Calvinism. Instead of settling in Paris, he went to Montmorency, where Madame d’Epinay had lent him her country house, and there he devoted himself to w
riting. When his books were condemned by the Parlement of Paris, he fled again to Switzerland, then to England where he enjoyed the friendship and patronage of the philosopher David Hume. But when Rousseau’s paranoia led him to suspect Hume of a plot against his life, he returned to France in 1767. To protect himself against these imagined “conspirators,” he took an assumed name, “Renon.” He wrote a plan to reform the government of Poland, he married Thérèse Le Vasseur, and he wrote the Confessions, which would be his most durable and widely read work. He died in 1778. His remains were moved to the Pantheon in Paris during the Revolution.

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  Rousseau’s intellectual life was a saga of conflict between a need for discipline and a demand for freedom. He curiously resolved this conflict in his political theory, The Social Contract (1762), which would become a sacred text of the French Revolution of 1789. This populist dogma made the “General Will” of the people inalienable, indivisible, and infallible (pedantically distinguished from “the will of all”). So he designed a populist totalitarianism that has appealed to revolutionaries ever since, often with disastrous consequences.

  With little information about man in the state of nature, which he idealized, Rousseau focused his lifelong polemic on the evils of civilization, of which he thought he had enough personal knowledge. He first secured public notice by his winning essay in the competition of the Dijon Academy (1750) on the question “Has the Restoration of the Arts and Sciences had a purifying effect upon morals?” And this essay was well designed to shock. The arts, literature, and the sciences, he argued, “fling garlands of flowers over the chains which weigh them down. They stifle in men’s breasts that sense of original liberty, for which they seem to have been born; cause them to love their own slavery, and so make of them what is called a civilized people. . . . It is not through stupidity that the people have preferred other activities to those of the mind . . . useless thinkers were lavish in their own praises, and stigmatized other nations contemptuously as barbarians. . . . The arts and sciences owe their birth to our vices. . . . Astronomy was born of superstition, eloquence of ambition, hatred, falsehood and flattery; geometry of avarice; physics of an idle curiosity and even moral philosophy of human pride.”