Voltaire

Voltaire

On the morning of November 1, 1755, All Saints' Day, the churches of Lisbon were full when the ground began to move. The shocks brought the stone roofs down on the congregations; fire and a harbor wave took most of what the shocks had left; tens of thousands of people were gone by nightfall. Polite Europe had a philosophy on hand for this. Leibniz had argued that a perfect God, choosing among every possible world, must have created the best of them, and Alexander Pope had compressed the doctrine into a couplet schoolboys memorized: whatever is, is right. Voltaire, sixty-one years old and the most famous writer alive, read the dispatches near Geneva and answered within weeks in verse: "Come, ye philosophers, who cry, 'All's well,' and contemplate this ruin of a world." Underneath the poem sits the question that organized the last quarter-century of his life, and it is the question this room turns on. What is a philosophy for? If a doctrine cannot survive being said aloud in a burning city, what exactly was it doing for us in the salon?

The cartoon and the man. The standard cartoon gives us Voltaire the smirker: a salon cynic who believed nothing, mocked everything, and left behind a heap of quotations. (The most famous quotation of all, the one about defending your right to say what I detest, he never wrote; an English biographer coined it in 1906 as a summary of his conduct, and as a summary it is accurate.) The cartoon misses nearly everything. Voltaire believed a great deal: in God, whom he defended against the fashionable atheists of Paris as stubbornly as he attacked the persecutors of Toulouse; in the physics of Newton and the modest epistemology of Locke, which he spent two decades smuggling into France; in legal reform, religious liberty, and the civilizing ordinariness of trade. What he did not believe was that any of this mattered as theory alone. His wager, and the thesis of this room, is that ideas are answerable for what they do to the people who hold them: a metaphysics that consoles the comfortable while excusing the wheel and the stake has refuted itself, whatever its logic. He invented a job that did not exist before him, the writer who turns fame into legal and political force on behalf of strangers, and every public intellectual since has worked in the space he cleared.

England as an argument. In 1726 the chevalier de Rohan, stung by the poet's wit, had his servants beat Voltaire in the street while he watched from his carriage; when Voltaire demanded satisfaction, the family's answer was the Bastille, then exile. He crossed to England and stayed nearly three years, and what he saw there became the most consequential travel book of the century. The Letters on England (1733) wear the costume of reportage: Quakers, the Royal Exchange, Parliament, smallpox inoculation, actors and poets honored like statesmen. The argument is never stated and impossible to miss: across the Channel, liberty works. Letter VI compresses the discovery into one sentence: "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 are such a multitude, they all live happy and in peace." Plurality is not a threat to order; past a certain number, it is the mechanism of order. The letters on ideas run the same comparison. Bacon is "the father of experimental philosophy" (Letter XII); after "a multitude of reasoners" had "written the romance of the soul," Locke is the sage who "gave, with an air of the greatest modesty, the history of it" (Letter XIII); and the Frenchman arriving in London "had left the world a plenum, and he now finds it a vacuum" (Letter XIV), the vortices of Descartes giving way to Newton's demonstrations. The parlement of Paris condemned the book to the flames. It kept selling, which was itself one of the book's arguments.

What this room reads. Four public-domain volumes, all verified Project Gutenberg texts. Candide appears in the 1918 Modern Library text from Boni and Liveright, with Philip Littell's introduction; the translator goes unnamed in that printing. The Letters on England follow Henry Morley's 1894 Cassell's National Library printing of the eighteenth-century English translation, twenty-four letters. The one-volume Philosophical Dictionary is the Carlton House reprint whose contents match the selection H. I. Woolf published in 1924, roughly a hundred articles running from "Adultery" to "Why?". And Joseph McCabe's Toleration and Other Essays (1912) carries the Treatise on Toleration together with the Sermon of the Fifty, the Questions of Zapata, On Superstition, the late credo We Must Take Sides, and the Poem on the Lisbon Disaster in McCabe's verse rendering. Cite Candide by chapter (Candide, ch. 19), the Letters by number (Letter XIII, On Mr. Locke), the Dictionary by article (art. "Tolerance"), and the Treatise by section title ("Of Universal Toleration"). The gaps the chat will disclose plainly: the Dictionary here is a selection, not the full and ever-expanding original; the famous remarks on Pascal that close many editions of the Letters are absent; and the correspondence, the histories, and the other tales (Zadig, Micromegas, L'Ingenu) are outside the corpus, so questions landing there are answered from general knowledge and labeled as such.

Optimism satirized, hope kept. The target of Candide was never hope; it was a doctrine that had hardened into anesthesia. Leibniz's optimism is serious metaphysics: if God is perfect, the world he selected must be the best possible, and what we call evil must be a necessary shadow in an optimal design. By mid-century the argument had relaxed into a slogan that comforted the comfortable, and the Lisbon poem attacks it precisely at the point of use: stand in the rubble, say "all is well," and listen to yourself. The poem's own resolution is exact and usually missed. Hope may say that all will be well "one day"; the "idle dream" it refuses is that all is well now, and the difference between those two sentences is the difference between working and excusing. Rousseau wrote to protest that the poem robbed the afflicted of consolation and that providence must be defended; the long answer arrived three years later as a short novel. Pangloss, professor of "metaphysico-theologico-cosmolo-nigology," explains each catastrophe as it lands on the innocent, until the book's hinge in Surinam, where Candide, faced with a slave mutilated by the sugar trade, finally defines his master's doctrine: optimism "is the madness of maintaining that everything is right when it is wrong" (Candide, ch. 19). The famous ending is not a shrug but a substitution. "We must cultivate our garden" replaces theodicy with work: where explanation excused the evil, labor removes a piece of it. Martin supplies the operating instruction: "let us work without disputing; it is the only way to render life tolerable."

The Calas case. The Treatise on Toleration opens like a wire dispatch: "The murder of Calas, which was perpetrated with the sword of justice at Toulouse on March 9, 1762, is one of the most singular events that deserve the attention of our own and of later ages." Jean Calas was a Huguenot shopkeeper of sixty-eight whose adult son was found lifeless in the family shop; Toulouse, feverish with confessional rumor, convinced itself that the father had killed the son to block a conversion to Catholicism, and the parlement condemned him to the wheel. Voltaire, at Ferney, began by doubting everyone, interrogated the surviving family and the record, became convinced of the innocence, and then did something no philosopher had done before: he ran a campaign. Pamphlets, legal memoranda, letters to ministers and crowned heads, money for lawyers, public opinion coordinated across Europe; within three years the royal council annulled the verdict and the family was compensated and restored. The Treatise, written in the middle of the fight, generalizes it: section by section it argues that intolerance is not natural law, was not the practice of the Greeks or the Romans, and was not taught by Christ, arriving at "Of Universal Toleration" and the Dictionary's blunt corollary that "the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster." This is what his battle cry meant. Ecrasez l'infame, crush the infamous thing, named neither God nor his neighbor's faith but fanaticism holding legal power, and he understood before anyone that the instrument for crushing it was organized publicity.

A pocket arsenal, a two-front war. The Philosophical Dictionary (1764) was published anonymously and built small on purpose: a book sized for a coat pocket and an afternoon, alphabetical so it could be opened anywhere, deniable so it could travel. Magistrates burned it in Geneva and Paris; it went through edition after edition anyway. Inside, the actual shape of his theology is nothing like the cartoon's unbelief. "Atheism is the vice of a few intelligent persons, and superstition is the vice of fools," says the article on atheism, which also observes that "a catechist proclaims God to the children, and Newton demonstrates Him to the learned." The article "Final Causes" sides with design against Epicurus and Lucretius: "If a clock is not made to tell the hour, I will then admit that final causes are chimeras." The article "Theist" is a self-portrait: a man "firmly persuaded of the existence of a Supreme Being as good as He is powerful," who counts the difficulties against Providence as "merely great difficulties, and not proofs," and whose religion is doing good rather than winning metaphysical arguments. Around this minimal creed stands Locke's modesty: "Soul" and "Limits of the Human Mind" are essays in how little we know about substances. Beneath it sits the demolition gear: the Sermon of the Fifty and the Questions of Zapata, both in this room's corpus, are the biblical criticism that cleared the ground the creed stands on. He fought the dogmatic atheist and the persecuting priest with the same pen, and considered the two enemies secretly allied in their certainty.

The line he started is easy to trace. When Zola threw J'accuse across a front page in 1898 to force the Dreyfus case back open, he was repeating the Calas maneuver almost step for step; when modern constitutions and rights conventions write religious liberty and free expression into law, they codify arguments the Letters and the Treatise made portable; and whenever a writer anywhere spends a public name to reopen a wrongful verdict, the method is Ferney's. Montesquieu anatomized institutions and Rousseau reimagined their foundations, but Voltaire built the working tool, the campaign, and philosophy has never entirely gone back indoors since. The texts themselves are short. An evening for Candide, ten minutes for Letter VI, two pages for the article "Tolerance," an hour for "Of Universal Toleration"; then bring the hard question to the chat: is the garden an answer to evil or an evasion of it? He preferred an argument to a monument, and the garden he asked us to cultivate was never only his own.