The Eve of the French Revolution

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A few days later, Voltaire was dining at the house of the Duke of Sulli.
A servant informed him that some one wanted to see him at the door. So
Voltaire went out, and stepped quietly up to a coach that was standing
in front of the house. As he put his head in at the coach door, he was
seized by the collar of his coat and held fast, while two men came up
behind and belabored him with sticks. The Chevalier de Chabot, his noble
adversary, was looking on from another carriage.

When the tormentors let him go, Voltaire rushed back into the house and
appealed to the Duke of Sulli for vengeance, but in vain. It was no
small matter to quarrel with the family of Rohan. Then the poet applied
to the court for redress, but got none. It is said that Voltaire's
enemies had persuaded the prime minister that his petitioner was the
author of a certain epigram, addressed to His Excellency's mistress, in
which she was reminded that it is easy to deceive a one-eyed Argus. (The
minister had but one eye.) Finally Voltaire, seeing that no one else
would take up his quarrel, began to take fencing lessons and to keep
boisterous company. It is probable that he would have made little use of
any skill he might have acquired as a swordsman. Voltaire was not
physically rash. The Chevalier de Chabot, although he held the
commission of a staff-officer, was certainly no braver than his
adversary, and was in a position to take no risks. Voltaire was at first
watched by the police; then, perhaps after sending a challenge, locked
up in the Bastille. He remained in that state prison for about a
fortnight, receiving his friends and dining at the governor's table. On
the 5th of May, 1726, he was at Calais on his way to exile in England.
[Footnote: Desnoiresterres, _Jeunesse_, 345.]

Voltaire spent three years in England, years which exercised a deep
influence on his life. He learned the English language exceptionally
well, and practiced writing it in prose and verse. He associated on
terms of intimacy with Lord Bolingbroke, whom he had already known in
France, with Swift, Pope, and Gay. He drew an epigram from Young. He
brought out a new and amended edition of the "Henriade," with a
dedication in English to Queen Caroline. He studied the writings of
Bacon, Newton, and Locke. Thus to the Chevalier de Chabot, and his
shameful assault, did French thinkers owe, in no small measure, the
influence which English writers exercised upon them.

While in England, Voltaire was taking notes and writing letters. These
he probably worked over during the years immediately following his
return to France. The "Lettres Philosophiques," or "Letters concerning
the English Nation," were first published in England in 1733. They were
allowed to slip into circulation in France in the following year.
Promptly condemned by the Parliament of Paris as "scandalous and
contrary to religion and morals, and to the respect due to the powers
that be," they were "torn and burned at the foot of the great
staircase," and read all the more for it.

It is no wonder that the church, and that conservative if sometimes
heterodox body, the Parliament of Paris, should have condemned the
"English Letters." A bitter satire is leveled at France, with her
religion and her government, under cover of candid praise of English
ways and English laws. What could the Catholic clergy say to words like
these, put into the mouth of a Quaker? "God forbid that we should dare
to command any one to receive the Holy Ghost on Sunday to the exclusion
of the rest of the faithful! Thank Heaven we are the only people on
earth who have no priests! Would you rob us of so happy a distinction?
Why should we abandon our child to mercenary nurses when we have milk to
give him? These hirelings would soon govern the house and oppress mother
and child. God has said: `Freely ye have received; freely give.' After
that saying, shall we go chaffer with the Gospel, sell the Holy Ghost,
and turn a meeting of Christians into a tradesman's shop? We do not give
money to men dressed in black, to assist our poor, to bury our dead, to
preach to the faithful. Those holy occupations are too dear to us to be
cast off upon others."[Footnote: Voltaire, xxxvii. 124.]

Having thus attacked the institution of priesthood in general, Voltaire
turns his attention in particular to the priests of France and England.
In morals, he says, the Anglican clergy are more regular than the
French. This is because all ecclesiastics in England are educated at the
universities, far from the temptations of the capital, and are called to
the dignities of the church at an advanced age, when men have no
passions left but avarice and ambition. Advancement here is the
recompense of long service, in the church as well as in the army. You do
not see boys becoming bishops or colonels on leaving school. Moreover,
most English priests are married men. The awkward manners contracted at
the university, and the slight intercourse with women usual in that
country, generally compel a bishop to be content with his own wife.
Priests sometimes go to the tavern in England, because custom allows it;
but if they get drunk, they do so seriously, and without making scandal.

"That indefinable being, who is neither a layman nor an ecclesiastic, in
a word, that which we call an _abbe_, is an unknown species in
England. Here all priests are reserved, and nearly all are pedants. When
they are told that in France young men known for their debauched lives
and raised to the prelacy by the intrigues of women make love publicly,
amuse themselves by composing amorous songs, give long and dainty
suppers every night, and go thence to ask the enlightenment of the Holy
Spirit, and boldly call themselves successors of the apostles, they
thank God that they are Protestants;--but they are vile heretics, to be
burned by all the devils, as says Master Francois Rabelais. Which is why
I have nothing to do with them."[Footnote: Voltaire, xxxvii. 140.]

While the evil lives of an important part of the French clergy are
thus assailed, the doctrines of the Church are not spared. The
following is from the letter on the Socinians. "Do you remember a
certain orthodox bishop, who in order to convince the Emperor of the
consubstantiality [of the three Persons of the Godhead] ventured to
chuck the Emperor's son under the chin, and to pull his nose in his
sacred majesty's presence? The Emperor was going to have the bishop
thrown out of the window, when the good man addressed him in the
following fine and convincing words: `Sir, if your Majesty is so angry
that your son should be treated with disrespect, how do you think that
God the Father will punish those who refuse to give to Jesus Christ
the titles that are due to Him?' The people of whom I speak say that
the holy bishop was ill-advised, that his argument was far from
conclusive, and that the Emperor should have answered: `Know that
there are two ways of showing want of respect for me; the first is not
to render sufficient honor to my son, the other is to honor him as
much as myself.'"[Footnote: Voltaire, xxxvii. 144.] Such words as
these were hardly to be borne. But the French authorities recognized
that there was a greater and more insidious danger to the church in
certain other passages by which Frenchmen were made to learn some of
the results of English abstract thought.

Among the French writers of the eighteenth century are several men of
eminent talent; one only whose sinister but original genius has given a
new direction to the human mind. I shall treat farther on of the ideas
of Rousseau. The others, and Voltaire among them, belong to that class
of great men who assimilate, express, and popularize thought, rather
than to the very small body of original thinkers. Let us then pause for
a moment, while studying the French Philosophers and their action on
the church, and ask who were their masters.

Montaigne, Bayle, and Grotius may be considered the predecessors on the
Continent of the French Philosophic movement, but its great impulse came
from England. Bacon had much to do with it; Hooker and Hobbes were not
without influence; Newton's discoveries directed men's minds towards
physical science; but of the metaphysical and political ideas of the
century, John Locke was the fountain-head. Some Frenchmen have in modern
times disputed his claims. To refute these disputants it is only
necessary to turn from their books to those of Voltaire and his
contemporaries. The services rendered by France to the human race are so
great that her sons need never claim any glory which does not clearly
belong to them. All through modern history, Frenchmen have stood in the
front rank of civilization. They have stood there side by side with
Englishmen, Italians, and Germans. International jealousy should spare
the leaders of human thought. They belong to the whole European family
of nations. The attempt to set aside Locke, Newton, and Bacon, as guides
of the eighteenth century belongs not to that age but to our own.

The works of Locke are on the shelves of most considerable libraries;
but many men, now that the study of metaphysics is out of fashion, are
appalled at the suggestion that they should read an essay in three
volumes on the human understanding, evidently considering their own
minds less worthy of study than their bodies or their estates. It may be
worth while, therefore, to give a short summary of those theories, or
discoveries of Locke which most modified French thought in the
eighteenth century. The great thinker was born in 1632 and died in 1704.
His principal works were published shortly after the English Revolution
of 1688, but had been long in preparation; and the "Essay on the Human
Understanding" is said to have occupied him not less than twenty years.

It is the principal doctrine of Locke that all ideas are derived from
sensation and reflection. He acknowledges that "it is a received
doctrine that men have native ideas and original characters stamped upon
their minds in their very first being;" but he utterly rejects every
such theory. It is his principal business to protest and argue against
the existence of such "innate ideas." Virtue he believes to be generally
approved because it is profitable, not on account of any natural leaning
of the mind in its direction. Conscience "is nothing else but our own
opinion or judgment of the moral rectitude or pravity of our own
actions." Memory is the power in the mind to revive perceptions which it
once had, with this additional perception annexed to them, that it has
had them before. Wit lies in the assemblage of ideas, judgment in the
careful discrimination among them. "Things are good or evil only in
reference to pleasure or pain;" ... "our love and hatred of inanimate,
insensible beings is commonly founded on that pleasure or pain which we
receive from their use and application any way to our senses, though
with their destruction; but hatred or love of beings incapable of
happiness or misery is often the uneasiness or delight which we find in
ourselves, arising from a consideration of their very being or
happiness. Thus the being and welfare of a man's children or friends,
producing constant delight in him, he is said constantly to love them.
But it suffices to note that our ideas of love and hatred are but
dispositions of the mind in respect of pleasure or pain in general,
however caused in us."

We have no clear idea of substance nor of spirit. Substance is that
wherein we conceive qualities of matter to exist; spirit, that in which
we conceive qualities of mind, as thinking, knowing, and doubting. The
primary ideas of body are the cohesion of solid, and therefore separate
parts, and a power of communicating motion by impulse. The ideas of
spirit are thinking and will, or a power of putting body into motion by
thought, and, which is consequent to it, liberty. The ideas of
existence, mobility, and duration are common to both.

Locke's intelligence was clear enough to perceive that these two ideas,
spirit and matter, stand on a similar footing. Less lucid thinkers have
boldly denied the existence of spirit while asserting that of matter.
Locke's system would not allow him to believe that either conception
depended on the nature of the mind itself. He therefore rejected the
claims of substance as unequivocally as those of spirit, declaring it to
be "only an uncertain supposition of we know not what, i. e., of
something whereof we have no particular, distinct, positive idea, which
we take to be the substratum or support of those ideas we know." Yet he
inclines on the whole toward materialism. "We have," he says, "the ideas
of matter and thinking, but possibly shall never be able to know whether
any mere material being thinks, or no; it being impossible for us, by
the contemplation of our own ideas, without revelation, to discover
whether omnipotency has not given to some system of matter, fitly
disposed, a power to perceive and think, or else joined and fixed to
matter so disposed a thinking immaterial substance, it being, in respect
of our notions, not much more remote from our comprehension to conceive
that God can, if he pleases, superadd to matter a faculty of thinking,
than that he should superadd to it another substance, with a faculty of
thinking; since we know not wherein thinking consists, nor to what sort
of substances the Almighty has been pleased to give that power, which
cannot be in any created being, but merely by the good pleasure and
power of the Creator."... "All the great ends of morality and religion,"
he adds, "are well secured without philosophical proof of the soul's
immateriality." As to our knowledge "of the actual existence of things,
we have an intuitive knowledge of our own existence, and a demonstrative
knowledge of the existence of God; of the existence of anything else, we
have no other but a sensitive knowledge, which extends not beyond the
objects present to our senses."[Footnote: Is not an intuitive knowledge
suspiciously like an innate idea? Locke's _Works_, i. 38, 39, 72,
82, 137, 145, 231; ii. 10, 11, 21, 331, 360, 372 (Book i. ch. 3, 4, Book
ii. ch. 1, 10, 11, 20, 23, Book iv. ch. 3).]

The eulogy of Locke in Voltaire's "Lettres Philosophiques" gave
especial offense to the French churchmen. Voltaire writes to a friend
that the censor might have been brought to give his approbation to all
the letters but this one. "I confess," he adds, "that I do not
understand this exception, but the theologians know more about it than
I do, and I must take their word for it."[Footnote: Voltaire, li. 356
(_Letter to Thieriot,_ 24 Feb. 1733).] The letter to which the censor
objected was principally taken up with the doctrine of the materiality
of the soul. "Never," says Voltaire, "was there perhaps a wiser or a
more methodical spirit, a more exact logician, than Locke."
... "Before him great philosophers had positively decided what is the
soul of man; but as they knew nothing at all about it, it is very
natural that they should all have been of different minds." And he
adds in another part of the letter, "Men have long disputed on the
nature and immortality of the soul. As to its immortality, that cannot
be demonstrated, since people are still disputing about its nature;
and since, surely, we must thoroughly know a created being to decide
whether it is immortal or not. Human reason alone is so unable to
demonstrate the immortality of the soul, that religion has been
obliged to reveal it to us. The common good of all men demands that we
should believe the soul to be immortal; faith commands it; no more is
needed, and the matter is almost decided. It is not the same as to its
nature; it matters little to religion of what substance is the soul,
if only it be virtuous. It is a clock that has been given us to
regulate, but the maker has not told us of what springs this clock is
composed."[Footnote: Voltaire, xxxvii. 177, 182 (_Lettres
philosophiques._ In the various editions of Voltaire's collected works
published in the last century these letters do not appear as a series,
but their contents is distributed among the miscellaneous articles,
and those of the _Dictionnaire philosophique_. The reason for this
was that the letters, having been judicially condemned, might have
brought their publishers into trouble if they had appeared under their
own title. Bengesco, ii. 9. Desnoiresterres, _Voltaire a Cirey_, 28,
Voltaire, xxxvii. 113. In Beuchot's edition the letters appear in
their original form).]

The "Lettres philosophiques" may be considered the first of Voltaire's
polemic writings. They exhibit his mordant wit, his clear-sightedness
and his moral courage. There is in them, perhaps, more real gayety,
more spontaneous fun, than in his later books. Voltaire was between
thirty-five and forty years old when they were written, and although
he possessed to the end of his long life more vitality than most men,
yet he was physically something of an invalid, and his many exiles and
disappointments told upon his temper. From 1734, when these letters
first appeared in France, to 1778, when he died, worn out with years,
labors, quarrels, and honors, his activity was unceasing. He had many
followers and many enemies, but hardly a rival. Voltaire was and is
the great representative of a way of looking at life; a way which was
enthusiastically followed in his own time, which is followed with
equal enthusiasm to-day. This view he expressed and enforced in his
numberless poems, tragedies, histories, and tales. It formed the
burden of his voluminous correspondence. As we read any of them, his
creed becomes clear to us; it is written large in every one of his
more than ninety volumes. It may almost be said to be on every page of
them. That creed may be stated as follows: We know truth only by our
reason. That reason is enlightened only by our senses. What they do
not tell us we cannot know, and it is mere folly to waste time in
conjecturing. Imagination and feeling are blind leaders of the
blind. All men who pretend to supernatural revelation or inspiration
are swindlers, and those who believe them are dupes. It may be
desirable, for political or social purposes, to have a favored
religion in the state, but freedom of opinion and of expression should
be allowed to all men, at least to all educated men; for the populace,
with their crude ideas and superstitions, may be held in slight
regard.

Voltaire's hatred was especially warm against the regular clergy.
"Religion," he says, "can still sharpen daggers. There is within the
nation a people which has no dealings with honest folk, which does not
belong to the age, which is inaccessible to the progress of reason, and
over which the atrocity of fanaticism preserves its empire, like certain
diseases which attack only the vilest populace." The best monks are the
worst, and those who sing "Pervigilium Veneris" in place of matins are
less dangerous than such as reason, preach, and plot. And in another
place he says that "a religious order should not a part of history." But
it is well to notice that Voltaire's hatred of Catholicism and of
Catholic monks is not founded on a preference for any other church. He
thinks that theocracy must have been universal among early tribes, "for
as soon as a nation has chosen a tutelary god, that god has priests.
These priests govern the spirit of the nation; they can govern only in
the name of their god, so they make him speak continually; they set
forth his oracles, and all things are done by God's express commands."
From this cause come human sacrifices and the most atrocious tyranny;
and the more divine such a government calls itself, the more abominable
it is.

All prophets are imposters. Mahomet may have begun as an enthusiast,
enamored of his own ideas; but he was soon led away by his reveries; he
deceived himself in deceiving others; and finally supported a doctrine
which he believed to be good, by necessary imposture. Socrates, who
pretended to have a familiar spirit, must have been a little crazy, or a
little given to swindling. As for Moses, he is a myth, a form of the
Indian Bacchus. The Koran (and consequently the Bible) may be judged by
the ignorance of physics which it displays. "This is the touchstone of
the books which, according to false religions, were written by the
Deity, for God is neither absurd nor ignorant." Several volumes are
devoted by Voltaire to showing the inconsistencies, absurdities and
atrocities of the Old and New Testaments, and the abominations of the
Jews.

The positive religious opinions of Voltaire are less important than
his negations, for the work of this great writer was mainly to
destroy. He was a theist, of wavering and doubtful faith. He was well
aware that any profession of atheism might be dangerous, and likely to
injure him at court and with some of his friends. He thought that
belief in God and in a future life were important to the safety of
society, and is said to have sent the servant out of the room on one
occasion when one of the company was doubting the existence of the
Deity, giving as a reason that he did not want to have his throat
cut. Yet it is probable that his theism went a little deeper than
this. He says that matter is probably eternal and self-existing, and
that God is everlasting, and self-existing likewise. Are there other
Gods for other worlds? It may be so; some nations and some scholars
have believed in the existence of two gods, one good and one
evil. Surely, nature can more easily suffer, in the immensity of
space, several independent beings, each absolute master of its own
portion, than two limited gods in this world, one confined to doing
good, the other to doing evil. If God and matter both exist from
eternity, "here are two necessary entities; and if there be two there
may be thirty. We must confess our ignorance of the nature of
divinity."

It is noticeable that, like most men on whom the idea of God does not
take a very strong hold, Voltaire imagined powers in some respects
superior to Deity. Thus he says above that nature can more easily
suffer several independent gods than two opposed ones. Having supposed
one or several gods to put the universe in order, he supposes an order
anterior to the gods. This idea of a superior order, Fate, Necessity,
or Nature, is a very old one. It is probably the protest of the human
mind against those anthropomorphic conceptions of God, from which it
is almost incapable of escaping. Voltaire and the Philosophers almost
without exception believed that there was a system of natural law and
justice connected with this superior order, taught to man by instinct.
Sometimes in their system God was placed above this law, as its
origin; sometimes, as we have seen, He was conceived as subjected to
Nature. "God has given us a principle or universal reason," says
Voltaire, "as He has given feathers to birds and fur to bears; and
this principle is so lasting that it exists in spite of all the
passions which combat it, in spite of the tyrants who would drown it
in blood, in spite of the impostors who would annihilate it in
superstition. Therefore the rudest nation always judges very well in
the long run concerning the laws that govern it; because it feels that
these laws either agree or disagree with the principles of pity and
justice which are in its heart." Here we have something which seems
like an innate idea of virtue. But we must not expect complete
consistency of Voltaire. In another place he says, "Virtue and vice,
moral good and evil, are in all countries that which is useful or
injurious to society; and in all times and in all places he who
sacrifices the most to the public is the man who will be called the
most virtuous. Whence it appears that good actions are nothing else
than actions from which we derive an advantage, and crimes are but
actions that are against us. Virtue is the habit of doing the things
which please mankind, and vice the habit of doing things which
displease it. Liberty, he says elsewhere, is nothing but the power to
do that which our wills necessarily require of us."[Footnote: Voltaire,
xx. 439 (_Siecle de Louis XIV._, ch. xxxvii.), xxi. 369 (_Louis XV._),
xv. 34, 40, 123, 316 (_Essai sur les moeurs_), xliii. 74 (_Examen
important de Lord Bolingbroke_), xxxi. 13 (_Dict. philos. Liberte_)
xxxvii. 336 (Traite de metaphysique_). For general attacks on the
Bible and the Jews, see (_Oeuvres_, xv. 123-127, xliii. 39-205, xxxix.
454-464. Morley's _Diderot_, ii. 178). Notice how many of the
arguments that are still repeated nowadays concerning the Mosaic
account of the creation, etc. etc., come from Voltaire. Notice also
that Voltaire, while too incredulous of ancient writers, was too
credulous of modern travelers.]

The Church of France was both angered and alarmed by the writings of
Voltaire and his friends, and did her feeble best to reply to them. But
while strong in her organization and her legal powers, her internal
condition was far from vigorous. Incredulity had become fashionable even
before the attacks of Voltaire were dangerous. An earlier satirist has
put into the mouth of a priest an account of the difficulties which
beset the clergy in those days. "Men of the world," he says, "are
astonishing. They can bear neither our approval nor our censure. If we
wish to correct them, they think us ridiculous. If we approve of them,
they consider us below our calling. Nothing is so humiliating as to feel
that you have shocked the impious. We are therefore obliged to follow an
equivocal line of conduct, and to check libertines not by decision of
character but by keeping them in doubt as to how we receive what they
say. This requires much wit. The state of neutrality is difficult. Men
of the world, who venture to say anything they please, who give free
vent to their humor, who follow it up or let it go according to their
success, get on much better.

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