Voltaire in Geneva

This series has easy 5 minute installments.

Introduction
To set an exact date as marking the culmination of the vast influence of Voltaire upon the world is not easy. He was the chief leader, the most prominent and central figure, of that widespread intellectual revolt which extended from France over Europe during the middle of the eighteenth century. The spirit of doubt, questioning all ancient institutions, challenging them to prove their truth, arose everywhere, at times mocking, bitter, and superficial, or again earnest, thoughtful, deep as the deepest springs of human being. It has become almost a commonplace to say that Voltaire and his chief successor, Rousseau, caused the French Revolution.

François Marie Arouet, who himself assumed his literary name, Voltaire, was born in 1694. He was recognized as among the foremost writers of France at least as early as 1723, and Frederick the Great of Prussia established a friendship with him which resulted in Voltaire’s living at the Prussian court as king’s chamberlain for nearly three years (1750-1753). It was largely due to Voltaire’s influence that the celebrated French Encyclopædia, the first volume of which appeared in 1751, took its tone of skepticism, of cold, scientific criticism. It preached heresy and revolution. The publication was repeatedly stopped by the government but was encouraged by Madame Pompadour and others, and finally finished in 1765.

Meanwhile Voltaire, who had been repeatedly exiled from the French court for the daring of his writings, settled near Geneva in 1755 and resided there during his active and fiery old age. The beginning of this residence has, therefore, been selected as marking the acme of his power. From his mountain château his writings poured like a torrent over the surrounding countries. Wherever there was oppression, his voice was raised in protest; wherever there was falsity, his rapier wit assailed it. He held correspondence with and influenced most of the crowned heads of Europe. He became the hero of his countrymen. Christianity, and especially Catholicism, served only too often as his subjects of assault but he was never, as his enemies called him, an atheist.

In 1778, an old man of eighty-three, he ventured to return to Paris to see the production of his last tragedy, Irene. Tremendous was the enthusiasm. Paris, grown more Voltairean than Voltaire himself, went mad in its reception of its teacher. The excitement proved too much for his feeble frame, and he died in the full tide of his triumph.

The selections are by John Morley. and George W. Kitchin. We begin with John Morley.

Time: 1754 – 1758
Place: Geneva

When the right sense of historical proportion is more fully developed in men’s minds, the name of Voltaire will stand out like the names of the great decisive movements in the European advance, like the Revival of Learning or the Reformation. The existence, character, and career of this extraordinary person constituted in themselves a new and prodigious era. The peculiarities of his individual genius changed the mind and spiritual conformation of France, and in a less degree of the whole of the West, with as far-spreading and invincible an effect as if the work had been wholly done, as it was actually aided, by the sweep of deep-lying collective forces. A new type of belief, and of its shadow, disbelief, was stamped by the impression of his character and work into the intelligence and feeling of his own and the following times. We may think of Voltairism in France somewhat as we think of Catholicism or the Renaissance or Calvinism. It was one of the cardinal liberations of the growing race, one of the emphatic manifestations of some portion of the minds of men, which an immediately foregoing system and creed had either ignored or outraged.

Voltairism may stand for the name of the Renaissance of the eighteenth century, for that name takes in all the serious haltings and shortcomings of this strange movement, as well as all its terrible fire, swiftness, sincerity, and strength. The rays from Voltaire’s burning and far-shining spirit no sooner struck upon the genius of the time, seated dark and dead like the black stone of Memnon’s statue, than the clang of the breaking chord was heard through Europe, and men awoke in new day and more spacious air. The sentimentalist has proclaimed him a mere mocker. To the critic of the schools, ever ready with compendious label, he is the revolutionary destructive. To each alike of the countless orthodox sects his name is the symbol for the prevailing of the gates of hell. Erudition figures him as shallow and a trifler; culture condemns him for pushing his hatred of spiritual falsehood much too seriously; Christian charity feels constrained to unmask a demon from the depths of the pit. The plain men of the earth, who are apt to measure the merits of a philosopher by the strength of his sympathy with existing sources of comfort, would generally approve the saying of Dr. Johnson, that he would sooner sign a sentence for Rousseau’s transportation than that of any felon who had gone from the Old Bailey these many years, and that the difference between him and Voltaire was so slight that “it would be difficult to settle the proportion of iniquity between them.” Those of all schools and professions who have the temperament which mistakes strong expression for strong judgment, and violent phrase for grounded conviction, have been stimulated by antipathy against Voltaire to a degree that in any of them with latent turns for humor must now and then have even stirred a kind of reacting sympathy. The rank vocabulary of malice and hate, that noisome fringe of the history of opinion, has received many of its most fulminant terms from critics of Voltaire, along with some from Voltaire himself, who unwisely did not always refuse to follow an adversary’s bad example.

Yet Voltaire was the very eye of eighteenth-century illumination. It was he who conveyed to his generation in a multitude of forms the consciousness at once of the power and the rights of human intelligence. Another might well have said of him what he magnanimously said of his famous contemporary, Montesquieu, that humanity had lost its title-deeds, and he had recovered them. The fourscore volumes which he wrote are the monument, as they were in some sort the instrument, of a new renaissance. They are the fruit and representation of a spirit of encyclopædic curiosity and productiveness. Hardly a page of all these countless leaves is common form. Hardly a sentence is there which did not come forth alive from Voltaire’s own mind or which was said because someone else had said it before. His works as much as those of any man that ever lived and thought are truly his own. It is not given, we all know, even to the most original and daring of leaders, to be without precursors, and Voltaire’s march was prepared for him before he was born, as it is for all mortals. Yet he impressed on all he said, on good words and bad alike, a marked autochthonic quality, as of the self-raised spontaneous products of some miraculous soil, from which prodigies and portents spring. Many of his ideas were in the air and did not belong to him peculiarly; but so strangely rapid and perfect was his assimilation of them, so vigorous and minutely penetrative was the quality of his understanding, so firm and independent his initiative, that even these were instantly stamped with the express image of his personality. In a word, Voltaire’s work from first to last was alert with unquenchable life. Some of it, much of it, has ceased to be alive for us now in all that belongs to its deeper significance, yet we recognize that none of it was ever the dreary still-birth of a mind of hearsays. There is no mechanical transmission of untested bits of current coin. In the realm of mere letters Voltaire is one of the little band of great monarchs, and in style he remains of the supreme potentates. But literary variety and perfection, however admirable, like all purely literary qualities are a fragile and secondary good which the world is very willing to let die, where it has not been truly begotten and engendered of living forces.

Continued.

We want to take this site to the next level but we need money to do that. Please contribute directly by signing up at https://www.patreon.com/history

Some History Moments selections posted before 2012 need to be updated to meet HM’s quality standards. These relate to: (1) links to outside sources for modern, additional information; (2) graphics; (3) navigation links; and (4) other presentation issues. The reader is assured that the author’s materiel is faithfully reproduced in all History Moments posts.