The Age of Voltaire: A History of Civilization in Western Europe from 1715 to 1756, with Special Emphasis on the Conflict between Religion and Philosophy

1058 Pages·1980·3.71 MB·English

by  Will Durant

THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (tm) Ver. 4.8
9: The Age of Voltaire Durant, Will & Ariel
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THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION
VOLUME NINE

THE AGE OF VOLTAIRE
1965

A History of Civilization in Western Europe from 1715 to 1756,
with Special Emphasis on the Conflict between
Religion and Philosophy

by Will and Ariel Durant

Copyright (C) 1965 by Will and Ariel Durant

Exclusive electronic rights granted to World Library, Inc.
by The Ethel B. Durant Trust, William James Durant Easton,
and Monica Ariel Mihell.

Electronically Enhanced Text (c) Copyright 1994 World Library, Inc.

DEDICATION
-
TO OUR BELOVED
GRANDSON
JIM

Apology
-
BLAME for the length of this volume must rest with authors
fascinated to exuberant prolixity by the central theme- that pervasive
and continuing conflict between religion and science-plus-philosophy
which became a living drama in the eighteenth century, and which has
resulted in the secret secularism of our times. How did it come
about that a major part of the educated classes in Europe and
America has lost faith in the theology that for fifteen centuries gave
supernatural sanctions and supports to the precarious and
uncongenial moral code upon which Western civilization has been based?
What will be the effects- in morals, literature, and politics- of this
silent but fundamental transformation?
The scale of treatment in each volume has grown with the
increasing number of past events and personalities still alive in
their influence and interest today. This and the multiplicity of
topics- all aspects of civilization in Western Europe from 1715 to
1756- may offer some excuse for the proliferation of the tale. So The
Age of Voltaire *09000 has burst its seams, and spills over into a
contemplated Part X, Rousseau and Revolution, which will carry the
story to 1789. This will look at the transformation of the world map
by the Seven Years' War; the later years of Louis XV, 1756-74; the
epoch of Johnson and Reynolds in England; the development of the
Industrial Revolution; the flowering of German literature from Lessing
to Goethe, of German philosophy from Herder to Kant, of German music
from Gluck to Mozart; the collapse of feudalism in the France of Louis
XVI; and the history of those peripheral nations- Sweden, Denmark,
Poland, Russia, Turkey, Italy, Portugal, Spain- which have been
deferred from this volume partly to save space, and as not directly
involved (except through the papacy) in the great debate between
reason and faith. This final volume will consider the later phases
of that debate in the revolt of Rousseau against rationalism, and
the heroic effort of Immanuel Kant to save the Christian theology
through the Christian ethic. The perspective of the age of Voltaire
will be completed in that Part X of The Story of Civilization. The
epilogue to the present volume reviews the case for religion; the
epilogue to Rousseau and Revolution, surveying all ten volumes, will
face the culminating question: What are the lessons of history?
We have tried to reflect reality by combining history and biography.
The experiment will legitimately invite criticism, but it carries
out the aim of "integral history." Events and personalities go hand in
hand through time, regardless of which were causes and which were
effects; history speaks in events, but through individuals. This
volume is not a biography of Voltaire; it uses his wandering and
agitated life as connective tissue between nations and generations,
and it accepts him as the most significant and illustrative figure
of the period between the death of Louis XIV and the fall of the
Bastille. Which, of all the men and women of that turbulent era, is
more vividly remembered, more often read, more alive in influence
today, than Voltaire? "Voltaire," said Georg Brandes, "summarizes a
century." `09001 "Le vrai roi du dix-huitieme siecle," said Victor
Cousin, "c'est Voltaire." `09002 Let us follow that living flame
through his century.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
-
The manuscript has had the advantage of being read by Dr. Theodore
Besterman, Director of the Institut et Musee Voltaire in Geneva; we
thank him for his patience, and for opening to us his great collection
of Voltaireana. He found one serious error in our text, but
otherwise voted us "a very high degree of accuracy." Doubtless some
errors still remain. We shall welcome all corrections that are
tempered with mercy.
Our warm appreciation to Sarah and Harry Kaufman for their help in
classifying the material, and to our grandson, James Easton, for
revising the chapter on the history of science. Our daughter Ethel not
only typed the manuscript but improved it by her suggestions. And we
have had again the benefit of expert and scholarly editing of the
text, the notes, and the index by Mrs. Vera Schneider.

NOTES ON THE USE OF THIS BOOK
-
1. Dates of birth and death will be found in the Index.
2. Voltaire reckoned a 50 per cent depreciation of French currency
between 1640 and 1750. `09003 The general reader may use the following
rough equivalents, as between 1750 and 1965, in terms of the
currency of the United States of America:
-
crown, $6.25 guilder, $5.25 penny, $.10
ducat, $6.25 guinea, $26.25 pound, $25.00
ecu, $3.75 gulden, $5.25 shilling, $1.25
flourin, $6.25 livre, $1.25 sou, $.0625
franc, $1.25 louis d'or, $25.00 thaler, $4.00
mark, $16.67
-
3. The location of works of art, when not indicated in the text,
will usually be found in the Notes. In allocating such works, the name
of the city will imply its leading gallery, as follows:
-
Amsterdam- Rijksmuseum
Berlin- Staatsmuseum
Bologna- Accademia di Belle Arti
Budapest- Museum of Fine Arts
Chicago- Art Institute
Cincinnati- Art Institute
Cleveland- Museum of Art
Detroit- Institute of Art
Dresden- Gemalde-Galerie
Dulwich- College Gallery
Edinburgh- National Gallery
Frankfurt- Stadelsches Kunstinstitut
Geneva- Musee d'Art et d'Histoire
The Hague- Mauritshuis
Kansas City- Nelson Gallery
Leningrad- Hermitage
London- National Gallery
Madrid- Prado
Milan- Brera
Naples- Museo Nazionale
New York- Metropolitan Museum of Art
Paris- Louvre
San Marino, Calif.- Henry E. Huntington Art Gallery
Vienna- Kunsthistorisches Museum
Washington- National Gallery
-
4. Passages in reduced type are especially dull and recondite, and
are not essential to the general picture of the age.
PROLOGUE

CHAPTER I: France: The Regency: 1715-23

I. THE YOUNG VOLTAIRE: 1694-1715
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HE was not yet Voltaire; till his release from the Bastille in
1718 he was Francois Marie Arouet. He was born in Paris on November
21, 1694, and became its distilled essence till 1778. His
presumptive father, Francois Arouet, was an affluent attorney,
acquainted with the poet Boileau and the courtesan Ninon de Lenclos,
whose wills he wrote, and with the dramatist Pierre Corneille, whom he
described as "the most boring mortal" he had ever met. `09011 The
mother, Marie Marguerite Daumard, was of slightly noble lineage,
daughter of an official of the Parlement, and sister of the
comptroller general of the royal guard; through them she had access to
the court of Louis XIV. Her vivacity and sprightly wit made her home a
minor salon. Voltaire thought she possessed all the intellect in his
parentage, as his father had all the financial skill; the son absorbed
both of these gifts into his heritage. She died at the age of forty,
when he was seven. Of her five children the eldest was Armand, who
adhered zealously to the Jansenist theology and the patrimonial
property. Francois Marie, the youngest child, was so sickly in his
first year that no one believed he could survive. He continued till
his eighty-fourth year to expect and announce his early death.
Among the friends of the family were several abbe's. This title,
meaning father, was given to any secular ecclesiastic, whether or
not he was an ordained priest. Many abbes, while continuing to wear
ecclesiastical dress, became men of the world and shone in society;
several were prominently at home in irreverent circles; some lived
up to their title literally but clandestinely. The Abbe de Chateauneuf
was the last lover of Ninon de Lenclos and the first teacher of
Voltaire. He was a man of wide culture and broad views; he passed on
to his pupil the paganism of Ninon and the skepticism of Montaigne.
According to an old but questioned story, he introduced to the boy a
mock epic, La Moisade, which was circulating in secret
manuscripts; its theme was that religion, aside from belief in a
Supreme Being, was a device used by rulers to keep the ruled in
order and awe. `09012
Voltaire's education proceeded when his abbe tutor took him on a
visit to Ninon. The famous hetaera was then (1704) eighty-four years
old. Francois found her "dry as a mummy," but still full of the milk
of woman's kindness. "It pleased her," he later recalled, "to put me
in her will; she left me two thousand francs to buy books
with." `09013 She died soon afterward.
To balance this diet he was entered, age ten, as a resident
student at the Jesuit College of Louis-le-Grand on the Left Bank of
Paris. It was reputed the best school in France. Among its two
thousand pupils were such sons of the nobility as could bear an
education; in his seven years there Voltaire made many of the
aristocratic friends with whom he maintained an easy familiarity
throughout his life. He received a good training in the classics, in
literature, and especially in drama; he acted in plays presented
there, and, aged twelve, wrote a play himself. He did well in his
studies, won many prizes, and delighted and alarmed his teachers. He
expressed disbelief in hell, and called heaven "the great dormitory of
the world." `09014 One of his teachers sadly predicted that this young
wit would become the standard-bearer of French deism- i.e., a religion
that discarded nearly all theology except belief in God. They
endured him with their customary patience, and he reciprocated by
retaining, through all his heresies, a warm respect and gratitude
for the Jesuits who had disciplined his intellect to clarity and
order. He wrote, when he was fifty-two:
-
I was educated for seven years by men who took unrewarded and
indefatigable pains to form the minds and morals of youth.... They
inspired in me a taste for literature, and sentiments which will be
a consolation to me to the end of my life. Nothing will ever efface
from my heart the memory of Father Poree, who is equally dear to all
who have studied under him. Never did a man make study and virtue so
pleasant.... I had the good fortune to be formed by more than one
Jesuit of the character of Father Poree. What did I see during the
seven years that I was with the Jesuits? The most industrious, frugal,
regulated life; all their hours divided between the care they took
of us and the exercises of their austere profession. I call to witness
the thousands educated by them, as I was; there is not one who would
belie my words. `09015
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After graduation Francois proposed to make literature his
profession, but his father, warning him that authorship was an open
sesame to destitution, insisted on his studying law. For three years
Francois, as he put it, "studied the laws of Theodosius and
Justinian in order to know the practice of Paris." He resented "the
profusion of useless things with which they wished to load my brain;
my motto is, TO THE POINT." `09016 Instead of absorbing himself in
pandects and precedents he cultivated the society of some skeptical
epicureans who met in the Temple- the remains of an old monastery of
the Knights Templar in Paris. Their chief was Philippe de Vendome,
grand prior of France, who had enormous ecclesiastical revenues and
little religious belief. With him were the Abbes Servien, de Bussy,
and de Chaulieu, the Marquis de La Fare, the Prince de Conti, and
other notables of easy income and gay life. The Abbe de Chaulieu
proclaimed that wine and women were the most delectable boons
granted to man by a wise and beneficent Nature. `09017 Voltaire
adjusted himself without effort to this regimen, and shocked his
father by staying out with such revelers till the then ungodly hour of
10 P.M.
Presumably at the father's request, Voltaire was appointed page to
the French ambassador at The Hague (1713). All the world knows how the
excitable youth fell in love with Olympe Dunoyer, pursued her with
poetry, and promised her eternal adoration. "Never love equaled mine,"
he wrote to her, "for never was there a person better worthy of love
than you." `09018 The ambassador notified Arouet pere that
Francois was not made for diplomacy. The father summoned his son home,
disinherited him, and threatened to ship him off to the West Indies.
Francois, from Paris, wrote to "Pimpette" that if she did not come
to him he would kill himself. 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. He received paternal pardon on condition that he
enter a law office and reside with the lawyer. He agreed. Pimpette
married a count. It was apparently Voltaire's last romance of passion.
He was as high-strung as any poet, he was all nerves and
sensitivity, but he was not strongly sexed; he was to have a famous
liaison, but it would be far less an attraction of bodies than a
mating of minds. His energy flowed out through his pen. Already at the
age of twenty-five he wrote to the Marquise de Mimeure: "Friendship is
a thousand times more precious than love. It seems to me that I am
in no degree made for passion. I find something a bit ridiculous in
love... I have made up my mind to renounce it forever." `09019
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 siecle -
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. Everyone turned with
hope and doubt to the government that was to succeed the magnificent
and unmourned King.

II. THE STRUGGLE FOR THE REGENCY: 1715
-
There was a new king, Louis XV, great-grandson of Louis XIV, but
he was only five years old. He had lost his grandfather, his father,
his mother, his brothers, his sisters, his great-grandfather last of
all. Who would be regent for him?
Two dauphins had preceded Le Roi Soleil to death: his son Louis, who
had died in 1711, and his grandson, the Duke of Burgundy, who had died
in 1712. Another grandson had been accepted as Philip V of Spain, on
condition of renouncing all rights to the throne of France. Two of the
old King's illegitimate sons survived him; he had legitimized them,
and had decreed that in default of princes of the royal blood, they
should inherit his crown. The elder of them, Louis Auguste, Duc du
Maine, now forty-five, was an amiable weakling whose consciousness
of his club foot intensified his shyness and timidity; he might well
have been content with the luxury and ease of his 900,000-livre estate
at Sceaux (just outside of Paris), had not his ambitious wife
prodded him to compete for the regency. The Duchesse du Maine never
forgot that she was the granddaughter of the Great Conde; she
maintained an almost royal court at Sceaux, where she patronized
artists and poets (including Voltaire), and gathered about her a gay
and faithful entourage as a prelude and springboard to sovereignty.
She had some charms. She was immaculate in body and garb, so short and
slim that she could have been taken for a girl; she had wit and
cleverness, a good classical education, a ready tongue, an
inexhaustible and exhausting vivacity. She was sure that under her
thumb her husband would make a delightful regent. She had prevailed
sufficiently with the forces about the dying King to have drawn from
him (August 12, 1715) a will that left to the Duc du Maine control
of the young Louis' person, education, and household troops, and a
place on the Council of Regency. However, a codicil (August 25) to
that will named, as president of the Council, Philippe II, Duc
d'Orleans.
Philippe was the son of the old King's androgynous brother
Philippe I ("Monsieur") by a second wife, the robust and realistic
Charlotte Elisabeth, Princess Palatine. The youth's education had been
entrusted to an abbe whom both Saint-Simon's Memoirs and Duclos'
Secret Memoirs of the Regency describe as a cloaca maxima of
vices. The son of a provincial apothecary, Guillaume Dubois studied
hard, earned his living by tutoring, married, then left his wife, with
her consent, to enter the College Saint Michel at Paris, where he paid
his tuition by zealously performing menial tasks. Graduating, he
accepted a position as aide to Saint-Laurent, officer of the household
to "Monsieur." He took the tonsure and minor orders, apparently
forgetting his wife. When Saint-Laurent died Dubois was made tutor
to the future Regent. According to the rarely impartial Duclos, "the
Abbe felt that he would soon be despised by his pupil if he did not
corrupt him; he left nothing undone to accomplish this end, and
unfortunately was but too successful." `090110 Saint-Simon, who
hated unpedigreed talent, enjoyed himself describing Dubois:
-
A little, pitiful, wizened, herring-gutted man in a flaxen wig, with
a weazel's face brightened by some intellect. In familiar terms, he
was a regular scamp. All the vices unceasingly fought within him for
supremacy, so that a continual uproar filled his mind. Avarice,
debauchery, ambition were his gods; perfidy, flattery, footlicking his
means of action; complete impiety was his religion; and he held the
opinion, as a great principle, that probity and honesty are chimeras
with which people deck themselves, but which have no existence....
He had wit, learning, knowledge of the world, and much desire to
please and insinuate himself, but all was spoiled by an odor of
falsehood which escaped in spite of him through every pore of his
body.... Wicked,... treacherous, and ungrateful, expert in the
blackest villainies, terribly brazen when detected. He desired
everything, envied everything, and wished to seize everything. `090111
-
Saint-Simon was close to Philippe's family, and must not be rashly
contradicted; we must add, however, that this abbe was a good scholar,
an able aide, a wise and successful diplomat, and that Philippe,
knowing the man well, remained faithful to him to the end.
The pupil, perhaps already botched by his paternal ancestry, took
readily to his tutor's instructions, and bettered them in mind and
vice. He delighted his teacher by his tenacious memory, his
intellectual acumen, his penetrating wit, his understanding and
appreciation of literature and art. Dubois secured Fontenelle to
ground the youth in science, and Homberg to initiate him into
chemistry; later Philippe, like Charles II of England and Voltaire
at Cirey, was to have his own laboratory, and seek in chemical
experiments some respite from adultery. He painted tolerably, played
the lyre, engraved illustrations for books, and collected art with the
most discriminating taste. In none of these fields did he dig
deeply; his interests were too varied, and his amusements had an
option on his time. He was quite devoid of religious belief; even in
public he "affected a scandalous impiety." `090112 In this and in
his sexual license he gave a symbol and impetus to his country and
century.
Like most of us he was a confusion of characters. He lied with
ease and sly delight at need or whim; he spent millions of francs,
drawn from an impoverished people, on his personal pleasures and
pursuits; however, he was generous and kindly, affable and tolerant,
"naturally good, humane, and compassionate" (said
Saint-Simon), `090113 and more faithful to his friends than to his
mistresses. He drank himself drunk as a nightly ritual before going to