The Age of Voltaire: The Story of Civilization, Volume IX

by Will Durant

Being wiser by two years and one sex, she answered that he had better make his peace with his father and become a good lawyer.

On September 1, 1715, Louis XIV died, to the great relief of Protestant Europe and Catholic France. It was the end of a reign and an age: a reign of seventy-two years, an age—le grand siècle—that had begun in the glory of martial triumphs, the brilliance of literary masterpieces, the splendor of baroque art, and had ended in the decay of arts and letters, the exhaustion and impoverishment of the people, the defeat and humiliation of France.

he shared the weakness of philosophers—the ability and willingness to see so many sides to a subject that time was absorbed in discussion, and decisive action was deferred.

It is one of the pitiful tragedies in the history of France that this man with so many virtues of mind and heart was sullied and weakened with the debauchery of his class and time. Son of a sexual invert, tutored by an ecclesiastical rake, he grew up almost devoid of restraint in sexual indulgence. “He would have had virtues,” said Duclos, “if one could have them without principles.”

when the stern and repentant King was succeeded by the skeptical, licentious, and tolerant Regent, these restraints fell away, and the resentment of suppressed instincts broke out in a wave of irreligion and self-indulgence similar to the sensual riot of English society in Restoration England after a generation of Puritan ascendancy (1642–60). Immorality was now a badge of liberation and sophistication; “debauchery became a kind of etiquette.”

Few of the younger generation thought of going from Catholicism to Protestantism; they went to atheism, which was much safer.

in the nobility at Paris, in the floating gentry of the town, in the addicts of literature or art, in the financiers and the abbés commendataires, the moral precepts seemed quite forgotten, and Christianity was remembered only for a Sunday social hour.

Marriage was accepted to preserve the family, its possessions, and its name; but beyond that no fidelity was demanded, by the mores of the time and class, from either the husband or the wife.

Half the painting of France through the next one hundred years was a memory of Watteau. His influence continued through Boucher to Fragonard to Delacroix to Renoir, and the Impressionists found in his technique suggestive foreshadowings of their theories of light and shade and mood.

Philippe d’Orléans does not impress us as a bad man, despite the gamut of his sins. He had the vices of the flesh rather than of the soul: he was a spendthrift, a drunkard, and a lecher, but he was not selfish, cruel, or mean. He was a man of mercy, brave and kind.

the poet invites Uranie to make up her own mind on religion, in full trust that God, who “has placed natural religion in your heart, will not resent a simple and candid spirit. Believe that before his throne, in all times, in all places, the soul of the just man is precious; believe that the modest Buddhist monk, the kindly Moslem dervish, find more grace in his eyes than a pitiless [predestinarian] Jansenist or an ambitious pope.”

Wood had hitherto been the major fuel for homes and shops, but forests were being thinned to extinction; of sixty-nine great forests known to medieval England sixty-five had disappeared by the end of the eighteenth century.

the clock, so necessary in science, industry, and navigation, was almost perfected in the seventeenth century; by 1758 it reached a degree of accuracy (one minute’s deviation in six hundred days) not surpassed till 1877.11

The guilds, still theoretically governing most European industry, resisted the capitalistic reorganization of production and distribution. But the guild system was predicated on handicrafts rather than machines; it was equipped to supply local needs rather than a national, much less an international, market; it could not meet the rising demands of armies, cities, and colonies; it was hampered by fidelity to traditional methods and norms; and it was deteriorating into a coterie of masters exploiting apprentices and journeymen.

Aristocracy was passing into plutocracy; money was replacing birth as a title to power.

fifty-nine per cent of all children born in London died before reaching the age of five, sixty-four per cent before reaching ten.

Beer or ale was the national drink. The London male consumed a hundred gallons a year, or a quart per day, as safer and tastier than water. The damp climate created a demand for rum, punch, brandy, gin, cordials, whiskey; and wine was a favorite medicine. Taverns and liquor stores were everywhere; out of 7,066 houses in the parish of Holborn 1,350 sold liquor. Landowners—and therefore Parliament—smiled on the whiskey trade, since it opened an added market for their barley and wheat;

“No man,” said Samuel Johnson, “will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail.… The man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.”

Of the 74,000 slaves transported to America in the one year 1790, the French carried 20,000, the Dutch 4,000, the Danes 2,000, the Portuguese 10,000, and the British 38,000—more than half the total.

The people of eighteenth-century England were a tough breed, accustomed to hardship and violence, and capable of surviving anything except death. Two corporals fought each other with bare fists till both expired; two sergeants dueled till both suffered mortal wounds. A soldier who asked leave to marry an army prostitute was punished with a hundred lashes; he appeared the next day, his back all raw, before the same officer, and repeated his plea; this time it was granted.

In 1689 there had been fifty such; by 1820 there were 160. Murder, treason, counterfeiting, arson, rape, sodomy, piracy, armed smuggling, forgery, destroying ships or setting them on fire, bankruptcy with concealment of assets, highway robbery, housebreaking, burglary of over forty shillings, shoplifting above five shillings, maiming or stealing cattle, shooting at a revenue officer, cutting down trees in an avenue or a park, setting fire to a cornfield, sending threatening letters, concealing the death of a husband or a child, taking part in a riot, shooting a rabbit, demolishing a turnpike gate, escaping from jail, committing sacrilege—all of these, and a hundred more, were, under the first three Georges, capital crimes.

Some mild protests were raised against the severity of the penal code. Johnson, no sentimentalist, pointed out in 1751 the danger in making so many crimes capital: “To equal robbery with murder is to … incite the commission of a greater crime to prevent the detection of a less.”

A “characteristic of a well-bred man is to converse with his inferiors without insolence, and with his superiors with respect and ease.”

Politicians were Tory or Whig according as they favored either the titled nobility or the gentry (lesser landowners) and the commercial interests.

“History is philosophy teaching by examples.…

Voltaire had learned his skepticism in France—partly from the English exile Bolingbroke—before coming to England; but his three years in England (1726–28) startled him with the sight of orthodoxy in decay, Catholicism humiliated, Protestantism breaking up into feeble sects, and deists challenging everything in Christianity

This fable of Christianity … was now [1728] so exploded in England that any man of fashion or condition would have been almost as much ashamed to own himself a Christian as formerly he would have been to profess himself none.

It was a sign of the times that the Established Church had become broadly tolerant of different theologies and rituals among its members. Pitt described it as “a Calvinist creed, a Popish liturgy, and an Arminian clergy”9—i.e., the official doctrine was predestinarian, the ritual was semi-Roman Catholic, but a Latitudinarian spirit allowed Anglican ministers to reject Calvin’s determinism and adopt the free-will teaching of the Dutch heretic Arminius.

Toleration grew because faith declined. Heresies like Hume’s, which would have startled seventeenth-century England, made now but a slight ripple on the stream of British thought.

Nearly all ardent English Protestants were now in the sects dissenting from the Established Church. Voltaire laughed and rejoiced at their multiplicity: Independents (Puritans), Presbyterians, Baptists, Congregationalists, Quakers, Socinians (Unitarians). The Presbyterians, having lost political power, were becoming tolerant; they did not take predestination very seriously, and many of them were quietly content with a human Christ.

If one religion only were allowed in England, the government would very possibly become arbitrary; if there were but two, the people would cut one another’s throats; but as there is such a multitude, they all live happy and in peace.

the decline of religious belief was begetting the pessimism that would be the secret malady of the modern soul.

Look at any really religious person, and you will find an inner conviction, not an intellectual conclusion. For the simple soul faith must be an accepted tradition; for the mature spirit it must be a direct feeling of a supernatural reality.

Hume begins by accepting as a starting point the empiricism of Locke: all ideas are ultimately derived from experience through impressions.

The “laws of nature” that we talk of are merely sequences customary in our experience; they are not invariable and necessary connections in events; there is no guarantee that they will hold tomorrow. Science, therefore, is an accumulation of probabilities subject to change without notice.

In the end Hume turns his back upon argument as a guide to life, and trusts to animal faith, to the belief, based upon custom, that reality is rational, permeated with causality.

Unfortunately religion became more intolerant as it became more unified. Polytheism had allowed many varieties of religious belief; monotheism demanded uniformity.

seventeenth-century France had weighted the world with love stories far longer than love.

Most “great men,” Fielding held, had done more harm than good to mankind; so Alexander was called “the Great” because, after “he had with fire and sword overrun a vast empire, had destroyed the lives of an immense number of innocent wretches, had scattered ruin and desolation like a whirlwind, we are told, as an act of his clemency, that he did not cut the throat of an old woman and ravish her daughters.”

The thief should have an easier conscience than the “statesman,” since his victims are fewer and his booty less.

The Messiah survives its repetitions and dismemberments partly because it enshrines the central doctrines of Christianity, dear even to those who have shed them, but chiefly because its profound chants and triumphal choruses make it, all in all, the greatest single composition in the history of music.

Voltaire the businessman liked the practicality of the English, their respect for facts, reality, utility, their simplicity of manners, habits, and dress even in opulence. Above all he liked the English middle class. He compared the English with their beer: froth at the top, dregs at the bottom, but the middle excellent88

Voltaire later summed up the debt in a letter to Helvétius: We have borrowed, from the English, annuities, … sinking funds, the construction and maneuvering of ships, the laws of gravitation, … the seven primary colors, and inoculation. Imperceptibly we shall acquire from them their noble freedom of thought, and their profound contempt for the petty trifling of the schools.

Next to the king with his army, the Church was the strongest and richest power in France. She owned, by diverse estimates, from six to twenty per cent of the soil,20 and a third of the wealth.

Let us remember, as we record the bitter conflict between religion and philosophy, and share the anger of the philosophes at stifling censorship and disgraceful superstition, that there was devotion as well as wealth in the hierarchy; dedication as well as poverty among the village priests; and, among the people, an abiding, indestructible love for a faith that gave some saving discipline to pride and passion, and brought a consoling vision to toilsome days.

The “political economy” that Carlyle branded as the “dismal science” wondered whether the poor are poor because they are ignorant, or ignorant because they are poor. The question can be answered by contrasting the proud independence of the French paysan today with the degrading indigence of the French peasant in the first half of the eighteenth century.

Children were numerous, but death cut most of them down before maturity; there was hardly any increase in the population of France between 1715 and 1740. War, disease, and famine operated with Malthusian regularity.

The favorite amusements at court were gossip, eating, gambling, hunting, and adultery. “In France,” reported the Neapolitan ambassador, “nine tenths of the people die of hunger, one tenth of indigestion.”

Rococo was the art of an epicurean moneyed minority eager to enjoy every pleasure before the disappearance of its fragile world in an anticipated deluge of change.

Saint-Pierre foresaw our modern problem: that while science and knowledge have made immense advances, there has been no commensurate progress in morals or politics; knowledge implements vice as much as it enlightens morality.