IX. VOLTAIRE AND ROUSSEAU

1

Voltaire was so engrossed in the struggle against ecclesiastical tyranny that during the later decades of his life he was compelled almost to withdraw from the war on political corruption and oppression. "Politics is not in my line: I have always confined myself to doing my little best to make men less foolish and more honorable." He knew how complex a matter political philosophy can become, and he shed his certainties as he grew. "I am tired of all these people who govern states from the recesses of their garrets"; "these legislators who rule the world at two cents a sheet; . . . unable to govern their wives or their households they take great pleasure in regulating the universe." 2 It is impossible to settle these matters with simple and general formulae, or by dividing all people into fools and knaves on the one hand, and on the other, ourselves. "Truth has not the name of a party"; and he writes to Vauvenargues: "It is the duty of a man like you to have preferences, but not exclusions.” 3

Being rich, he inclines towards conservatism, for no worse reason than that which impels the hungry man to call for a change. His panacea is the spread of property: ownership gives personality and an uplifting pride. "The spirit of property doubles a man's strength. It is certain that the possessor of an estate will cultivate his own inheritance better than that of another." 4

He refuses to excite himself about forms of government. Theoretically he prefers a republic, but he knows its flaws: it permits factions which, if they do not bring on civil war, at least destroy national unity; it is suited only to small states protected by geographical situation, and as yet unspoiled and untorn with wealth; in general "men are rarely worthy to govern themselves." Republics are transient at best; they 1 Correspondence, Sept. 18, 1763.

2 In Pellissier, 237, note, and 236.

3 Pellissier, 23; Morley, 86.

4 Dictionary, art. "Property."

are the first form of society, arising from the union of families; the American Indians lived in tribal republics, and Africa is full of such democracies. But differentiation of economic status puts an end to these egalitarian governments; and differentiation is the inevitable accompaniment of development. "Which is better," he asks, "a monarchy or a republic?"—and he replies: "For four thousand years this question has been tossed about. Ask the rich for an answer -they all want aristocracy. Ask the people-they want democracy. Only the monarchs want monarchy. How then has it come about that almost the entire earth is governed by monarchs? Ask the rats who proposed to hang a bell about the neck of the cat." 1 But when a correspondent argues that monarchy is the best form of government he answers: "Provided Marcus Aurelius is monarch; for otherwise, what difference does it make to a poor man whether he is devoured by a lion or by a hundred rats?" 2

Likewise, he is almost indifferent to nationalities, like a traveled man; he has hardly any patriotism in the usual sense of that word. Patriotism commonly means, he says, that one hates every country but one's own. If a man wishes his country to prosper, but never at the expense of other countries, he is at the same time an intelligent patriot and a citizen of the universe. Like a "good European" he praises England's literature and Prussia's king while France is at war with both England and Prussia. So long as nations make a practice of war, he says, there is not much to choose among them.

For he hates war above all else. "War is the greatest of all crimes; and yet there is no aggressor who does not color his crime with the pretext of justice." 4 "It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets." 5 He has a

1 Dictionary, art. "Fatherland."

2 Correspondence, June 20, 1777.

3 Pellissier, 222.

4 The Ignorant Philosopher.

5 Dictionary, art. "War."

terrible "General Reflection on Man," at the end of the article on "Man" in the Dictionary:

Twenty years are required to bring man from the state of a plant, in which he exists in the womb of his mother, and from the state of an animal, which is his condition in infancy, to a state in which the maturity of reason begins to make itself felt. Thirty centuries are necessary in which to discover even a little of his structure. An eternity would

be required to know anything of his soul. But one moment suffices in which to kill him.

Does he therefore think of revolution as a remedy? No. For first of all, he distrusts the people: "When the people undertake to reason, all is lost." 1 The great majority are always too busy to perceive the truth until change has made the truth an error; and their intellectual history is merely the replacement of one myth by another. "When an old error is established, politics uses it as a morsel which the people have put into their own mouths, until another superstition comes along to destroy this one, and politics profits from the second error as it did from the first." 2 And then again, inequality is written into the very structure of society, and can hardly be eradicated while men are men and life is a struggle. "Those who say that all men are equal speak the greatest truth if they mean that all men have an equal right to liberty, to the possession of their goods, and to the protection of the laws"; but "equality is at once the most natural and the most chimerical thing in the world: natural when it is limited to rights, unnatural when it attempts to level goods and powers. 8 "Not all citizens can be equally strong; but they can all be equally free; it is this which the English have To be free is to be subject to nothing but the This was the note of the liberals, of Turgot and Condorcet and Mirabeau and the other followers of Voltaire

won.

laws." 4

1 Correspondence, April 1, 1766.

2 Voltaire's Prose, p. 15.

3 Dictionary, art. "Equality.'

4 Art. "Government."

who hoped to make a peaceful revolution; it could not quite satisfy the oppressed, who called not so much for liberty as for equality, equality even at the cost of liberty. Rousseau, voice of the common man, sensitive to the class distinctions which met him at every turn, demanded a leveling; and when the Revolution fell into the hands of his followers, Marat and Robespierre, equality had its turn, and liberty was guillotined.

Voltaire was sceptical of Utopias to be fashioned by human legislators who would create a brand new world out of their imaginations. Society is a growth in time, not a syllogism in logic; and when the past is put out through the door it comes in at the window. The problem is to show precisely by what changes we can diminish misery and injustice in the world in which we actually live.1 In the "Historical Eulogy of Reason," Truth, the daughter of Reason, voices her joy at the accession of Louis XVI, and her expectation of great reforms; to which Reason replies: "My daughter, you know well that I too desire these things, and more. But all this requires time and thought. I am always happy when, amid many disappointments, I obtain some of the amelioration I longed for." Yet Voltaire too rejoiced when Turgot came to power, and wrote: "We are in the golden age up to our necks!" 2-now would come the reforms he had advocated: juries, abolition of the tithe, an exemption of the poor from all taxes, etc. And had he not written that famous letter?

Everything that I see appears to be throwing broadcast the seed of a revolution which must some day inevitably come, but which I shall not have the pleasure of witnessing. The French always come late to things, but they do come at last. Light extends so from neighbor to neighbor, that there will be a splendid outburst on the first occasion; and then there will be a rare commotion! The young are fortunate; they will see fine things.3

1 Pellissier, 283.

2 In Sainte-Beuve, i. 234.

3 Correspondence, April 2, 1764.

Yet he did not quite realize what was happening about him; and he never for a moment supposed that in this "splendid outburst" all France would accept enthusiastically the philosophy of this queer Jean Jacques Rousseau who, from Geneva and Paris, was thrilling the world with sentimental romances and revolutionary pamphlets. The complex soul of France seemed to have divided itself into these two men, so different and yet so French. Nietzsche speaks of "la gaya scienza, the light feet, wit, fire, grace, strong logic, arrogant intellectuality, the dance of the stars"-surely he was thinking of Voltaire. Now beside Voltaire put Rousseau: all heat and fantasy, a man with noble and jejune visions, the idol of la bourgeoise gentile-femme, announcing like Pascal that the heart has its reasons which the head can never understand.

In these two men we see again the old clash between intellect and instinct. Voltaire believed in reason always: "we can, by speech and pen, make men more enlightened and better." 1 Rousseau had little faith in reason; he desired action; the risks of revolution did not frighten him; he relied on the sentiment of brotherhood to re-unite the social elements scattered by turmoil and the uprooting of ancient habits. Let laws be removed, and men would pass into a reign of equality and justice. When he sent to Voltaire his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, with its arguments against civilization, letters, and science, and for a return to the natural condition as seen in savages and animals, Voltaire replied: "I have received, sir, your new book against the human species, and I thank you for it. . . . No one has ever been so witty as you are in trying to turn us into brutes; to read your book makes one long to go on all fours. As, however, it is now some sixty years since I gave up the practice, I feel that it is unfortunately impossible for me to resume it." 2 He was chagrined to see Rousseau's passion for savagery continue into the Social Contract: "Ah, Monsieur," he writes to M. Bordes,

1 Selected Works, 62.

2 Correspondence, Aug. 30, 1755.