Voltaire, that ultimate freethinker and lifelong iconoclast, has
never quite lost his audience. His epigrams are among the favorites
of speechwriters and his political writings seem almost
contemporary. Indeed he would make a suitable patron of today’s
U.S. Libertarian Party if its elders cared to look back far enough.
(They tend to stop at Thomas Jefferson.)
Although Voltaire is absent from the party’s materials, his
spirit lives on in the libertarian movement, co-founder David Nolan
told me recently.
In accidental Voltairean terms, the party rejects any attempt to
constrain freedom of speech and calls for tolerance and a free,
competitive market. Its platform lines up with Voltaire in its call
for a world “where individuals are free to follow their own dreams
in their own ways, without interference from government or any
authoritarian power.”
The similarities are perhaps as much a symptom of eternal human
desires as any direct derivation from France of the 1700s. Some
trace libertarianism back to Plato. But the overlap with Voltaire
is striking. “Maybe it’s more a case of great minds thinking alike
than any attempt to copy or emulate Voltaire,” Nolan says.
Modern readers stand in awe of Voltaire 232 years after his
death, and many marvel at how this complex, contradictory writer
came to be such an intellectual force. A contemporary called him
“Monsieur Multiforme” for his mastery of the written word and his
range of views.
Even for a man of his time, however, Voltaire had his blind
spots. Like some of his high-minded contemporaries, he had a strain
of anti-Semitism and a penchant for offhand cynicism. But his
libertarian (libertaire, in French) convictions made him
basically a force for good: a fierce advocate of free will,
individual liberty, tolerance, open expression, and free trade,
none of which France provided in his lifetime.
A revival of interest in the man and his mind is now under way
as Voltaire fans celebrate the 250th anniversary of the publication
Candide, his most familiar work. In my research for a book
on his life and writings, I repeatedly find evidence of his
connection with modern times, especially in the United States. He
helps explain how we got where we are today.
WHO WAS THIS François Marie Arouet, or “Voltaire” — a loose
anagram of Arouet l.j. (for le jeune, the younger)? He was
born in 1694, and rose to become the most durable, if not the
deepest, of Europe’s 18th-century literary and philosophical
thinkers. His prolific outpourings, hostile to church and state,
won him two stays in the Bastille prison, plus a life on the run
from the French thought police.
The early Americans took easily to his anti-authoritarian views.
He is cited in writings of the early American Francophiles
Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. Jefferson, in homage, purchased a
bust of him for his Monticello estate in Virginia, where a modern
plaster copy of it still stands.
Voltaire has never entirely lost his audience. A swirl of events
and commemorations in both the French-speaking and English-speaking
worlds has been under way for the past year or so. A signal
occasion was the colloquium at Oxford last fall that brought
together the world’s leading Voltaireans. The French had their own
commemorations, and across the sea, the New York Public Library,
run by Voltaire enthusiast Paul LeClerc, created a Voltaire
exhibition and decorated its columns with a banner celebrating
Candide.
Just a few months ago, the dean of English Voltaire experts,
Prof. Nicholas Cronk of the University of Oxford, was in New York
parsing forgotten Voltaire correspondence in two prominent
collections. Other scholars are burrowing into manuscripts in
Paris, London, Oxford, Geneva, and St. Petersburg.
All this work will become part of the 200-volume Complete
Works of Voltaire now being assembled and edited by the
Voltaire Foundation under Cronk’s direction, the first academic
scholarly edition and by far the largest “complete” Voltaire. Now
in the home stretch, Cronk hopes to keep up his pace of about six
volumes per year over the next eight years to complete the
collection by 2018.
The best account of the state of Voltaire studies today is the
new Cambridge Companion to Voltaire, edited by Cronk and
including an essay by French Voltairean Christiane Mervaud and 12
other scholars from around the world. “There remain texts, some of
them important, which still await their first ever critical
edition,” says Cronk.
Satirists, cartoonists, novelists, moviemakers, and Broadway
have made a good business out of the Candide story line.
It does not lack for aggressive humor. I once made a list of the
targets at which he takes aim in the book. Among them are Homer,
Frederick the Great, philosopher-mathematician Gottfried Leibniz,
the pope, Jews, Jesuits, the Knights of Malta, sailors, the
Portuguese University of Coimbra, Westphalia, the German language,
the French and especially Parisians, suspicious foreigners, and
“Negro pirates.”
In the first sentence, he flings anti-German barbs, naming
Candide’s residence as Thunder-Ten-Tronkh, and a few lines later
cites a town in Westphalia as Waldberghoff-Trarbk-Dikdorff, a swipe
at German gutturals and reference to the French prejudice of the
period that German was a barbaric language.
Voltaire had already expressed his anti-Church views in his
“Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne” and elsewhere. In
Candide he expands his argument, mischievously inserting
an auto-da-fé (Portuguese for “act of faith”), the slow
roasting alive of three men, as the “infallible formula for
preventing the earth from quaking” again. The same day, an
aftershock occurs. Voltaire rests his case.
Candide includes a tirade against France, perhaps
unfair to all but the most extreme Franco-phobes of today. He
called his native country a place “where half the people are crazy,
others are overly crafty, still others are rather gentle and rather
stupid.” Throughout France, he wrote, “the principal occupation is
lovemaking, the second is slander and the third is talking
nonsense.”
He wavers but never quite renounces his belief that he lives in
“the best of all possible worlds.” He concludes that we must
“cultivate our garden,” meaning that we must do our part, too, to
make the world as good as it can be.
ALTHOUGH IT MAY SEEM the Voltaire legacy is mainly about
Candide, a closer look reveals that the great Frenchman
left a far more diverse collection of writing on politics and
commerce, much of it readable today.
An admirer of England, he spent nearly three years in exile in
London and wrote an enthusiastic book about his discoveries there
— by implication indicting the weaknesses of his native France. In
a chapter on trade, he made his bias clear: “Commerce, which has
enriched English citizens, has helped to make them free, and this
freedom in its turn has extended commerce, and that has made the
greatness of the nation,” he wrote. France, meanwhile, was
stagnating under the pressures of the absolute monarchy and the
Catholic Church.
Who is more valuable, Voltaire asked in one of his English
essays, a “well-powdered noble-man who knows exactly at what minute
the king gets up and goes to bed…or a businessman who enriches
his country, issues orders from his office to Surat or Cairo, and
contributes to the well-being of the world?”
London received him as the great French poet and playwright that
he certainly was, and he managed to meet some of the leading
English intellectuals of the era. He is known to have encountered
Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and John Gay and at least read the
works of Isaac Newton, John Locke, and satirist Joseph Addison.
Taking intellectual life in England as the ideal, he wrote that
he hoped that in France “the fashion for using one’s mind will come
back….In England, as a rule, people think, and literature is more
honored than in France.”
Voltaire came back to this theme in some of his poetry:
Shall Frenchmen never know what they require,
But damn capriciously what they admire?
Must laws with manners jar? Must every mind
In France, be made by superstition blind?
Wherefore should England be the only clime,
Where to think freely is not deemed a crime?
Over his lifetime, no one wrote more or better for the theater
than Voltaire, and he did not stop at writing. He was often
involved in rehearsals, even playing key roles in his plays. But it
is his private correspondence that puts his writing style best on
display and reveals most about the man.
Mme. Mervaud, president of the French Société des Etudes
Voltairienne, believes his correspondence, which she has studied
for years, provides the essential of Voltaire’s vision of the
world. She finds his personal prose “pleasant, seductive and
penetrating — the best way to get to his real thought
processes.”
Many scholars have pored over this mountain of letters, about
15,000 of which have been collected for the Foundation project.
(About another 15,000 are believed to have been lost.) Frequently
on the move-to London, to Lorraine, to Geneva-Voltaire used letter
writing to spread his ideas and to maintain contacts.
His correspondence leaves a valuable record of his times. He
lived through the Seven Years’ War and the regency after the death
of Louis XIV. And he corresponded extensively with Frederick the
Great of Prussia and Catherine the Great of Russia. These letters,
says Mme. Mervaud, reveal an “appetite for life and a desire to
communicate.” Reading them, “we breathe the very air of the 18th
century.”
Three years in the court of Frederick in Berlin ended in a
bitter break in their relations in 1754. His next stop was in the
neutral city-state of Geneva, then known for its tolerance and
freethinking ways. He purchased a chateau and called it “Les
Délices” (The Delights).
It was here that he experienced a creative burst, writing
another tragedy for the theater, a series of poems, and publishing
Candide. He said later that Geneva pleased him because
“the language is French but the thinking is English.” He moved
across the border in 1759 after strains with Geneva’s
administrators, ending his days Ferney, France, now renamed “Ferney
Voltaire” in his honor.
To be sure, Voltaire has always had his detractors, but in
today’s open society his anti-clerical polemics cause less
distress. Nevertheless, his ridiculing of French national heroine
Joan of Arc has kept a debate going in France about his influence
for good or evil. “Voltaire divides, but Joan unites,” wrote
Jean-Marie Goulemot and Eric Walter in a widely read essay in
1997.
And in the modern Anglo-Saxon world, some right-leaning
academics have written recently of Voltaire as the embodiment of
the liberal consensus they oppose. Voltaire — the arch libertarian
— would be amused at the redefinition of labels.
Mme. Mervaud told me she sees Voltaire’s thought as eternally
relevant. His principal lesson, she says, is “Dare to think for
yourself, outside of conformity and orthodoxy.” In effect, she
added, “Voltaire teaches us we are born with this ability and it
would be a shame not to use it.”
The libertarians of today would approve.
