The Age of Voltaire by Will Durant
“How I love the English!” he later wrote to Mme. du Deffand. “How I love these people who say what they think!”85 And again:
See what the laws of England have achieved: they have restored to every man his natural rights, from which nearly all monarchies have despoiled him. These rights are: full freedom of person and property; to speak to the nation through his pen; to be judged in criminal matters by a jury of free men; to be judged in any matter only according to precise laws; to profess in peace whatever religion he prefers, while abstaining from those employments to which only members of the Anglican Church are eligible.86
The last line shows that Voltaire recognized the limits of English freedom. He knew that religious liberty was far from complete; and in his notebooks he recorded the arrest of “Mr. Shipping” for derogatory remarks on the King’s speech.87 Either house of Parliament could summon authors to trial for unpleasant statements about M.P.s; the lord chamberlain could refuse to license plays; Defoe had been pilloried for a sarcastic pamphlet. Nevertheless, Voltaire felt, the government of England, corrupt as it was, gave the people a degree of liberty creatively stimulating in every area of life.
Here, for example, commerce was relatively free, not shackled by such internal tolls as hobbled it in France. Businessmen were honored with high posts in the administration; friend Falkener was soon to be made ambassador to Turkey. 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 “If I were to follow my inclination,” he wrote on August 12, 1726, “I would stay right here, for the sole purpose of learning to think”; and in a burst of enthusiasm he invited Thieriot to visit “a nation fond of their liberty, learned, witty, despising life and death, a nation of philosophers.”89
This love affair with England was clouded for a while by the suspicion, in Pope and others, that Voltaire was acting as a spy on his Tory friends for the Walpole ministry.90 The suspicion proved unjust and was soon rejected, and Voltaire won considerable popularity among the aristocracy, and the intelligentsia of London. When he decided to publish La Henriade in England, nearly all literate circles, beginning with George I, Princess Caroline, and the rival courts, sent in subscriptions; Swift solicited, or commanded, a number of these. When the poem appeared (1728) it was dedicated to Caroline, now Queen, with an incidental bouquet to George II, who responded with a gift of four hundred pounds and an invitation to royal suppers. Three editions were sold out in three weeks, despite the princely price of three guineas per copy; from this English edition Voltaire estimated his receipts at 150,000 francs. He used part of the money to help several Frenchmen in England;91 the remainder he invested so wisely that he later judged this windfall to have been the origin of his wealth. He never ceased to be grateful to England.
He owed to it, above all, an immense stimulation of mind and maturing of thought. When he returned from exile he brought Newton and Locke in his baggage; he spent part of his next twenty years introducing them to France. He brought also the English deists, who supplied him with some of the ammunition that he was to use in his war against l’infâme. As England under Charles II had learned good and evil from the France of Louis XIV, so the France of Louis XV was to learn from the England of 1680–1760. Nor was Voltaire the only medium of exchange in this generation; Montesquieu, Maupertuis, Prévost, Buffon, Raynal, Morellet, Lalande, Helvétius, Rousseau also came to England; and others who did not come learned enough English to become carriers of English ideas. 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.92
Nevertheless he was lonesome for France. England was ale, but France was wine. He repeatedly begged permission to return. Apparently it was granted on the mild condition that he avoid Paris for forty days. We do not know when he left England; probably in the fall of 1728. In March, 1729, he was in St.-Germain-en-Laye; on April 9 he was in Paris, chastened but indestructible, bursting with ideas, and itching to transform the world.
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I. In Germany he signed himself Handel; in Italy and England, Händel.41
BOOK II
FRANCE
1723–56
CHAPTER VII
The People and the State
THE France that Voltaire returned to in 1728 had some nineteen millions population, divided into three états (states, or classes): the clergy, the nobility, and the tiers état (Third Estate), all the rest. We must look at each “state” carefully if we would understand the Revolution.
I. THE NOBILITY
The territorial seigneurs who derived their titles from the land they owned (approximately a fourth of the soil) called themselves la noblesse d’épée, the nobility of the sword. Their chief duty was to organize, and lead the defense of, their seigniory, their region, their country, and their king. In the first half of the eighteenth century they headed some eighty thousand families comprising 400,000 souls.1 They were divided into jealous ranks. At their top stood the offspring and nephews of the reigning king. Below these were the pairs, or peers, of France: princes of the blood (lineal descendants of previous kings); seven bishops; fifty dukes. Then came lesser dukes, then marquises, then counts, viscounts, barons, chevaliers … Various ceremonial privileges distinguished the several grades; so there were tragic disputes over the right to walk under parasols in the Corpus Christi procession, or to sit in the presence of the king.
Within the noblesse d’épée a minority tracing its titles and possessions through many generations designated itself la noblesse de race, and looked down upon those nobles who owed their titles to the ennoblement of recent ancestors or themselves under Louis XIII or Louis XIV. Some of these new titles had been conferred as reward for services to the state in war, administration, or finance; some had been sold for as little as six thousand livres by the late needy Grand Monarque; in this way, said Voltaire, “a huge number of citizens—bankers, surgeons, merchants, clerks, and servants of princes—obtained patents of nobility.”2 Certain governmental offices, such as chancellor or chief justice, automatically ennobled their holders. Under Louis XV any commoner could achieve nobility by buying for 120,000 livres appointment as a secretary of state; under Louis XVI there would be nine hundred such imaginary secretaries. Or one could buy a title by buying a nobleman’s estate. By 1789 probably ninety-five per cent of all nobles were of middle-class origin.3
Among these the majority had arrived at exaltation by studying law and becoming judicial or administrative magistrates. In this number were the members of the thirteen parlements that served as law courts in the greater cities of France. As a magistrate was allowed to transmit his office to his son, a new hereditary aristocracy took form—la noblesse de robe, the nobility of the gown. In the judiciary, as in the clergy, the gown was half the authority. Overwhelming in their scarlet robes, massive mantles, frilled sleeves, powdered wigs, and plumaged hats, the members of the parlements ranked just below the bishops and the territorial nobility. But as some magistrates, through their legal fees, became richer than most pedigreed landholders, the barriers between the noblesse d’épée and the noblesse de robe broke down, and by 1789 there was an almost complete amalgamation of the two nobilities. The class thus formed was then so numerous and powerful that the King did not dare oppose it, and only the Jacqueries of the Revolution could overthrow its costly privileges.
Many of the old nobility were impoverished by careless or absentee management of their domains, or by unprogressive agricultural methods, or by exhaustion of the soil, or by depreciation of the curren
Before the seventeenth century the landed nobility had served economic and administrative, as well as military, functions. However their property had been acquired, the seigneurs organized the division and cultivation of the soil, either through serfdom or through leasing parcels to tenants; they provided law and order, trial, adjudication, and punishment; they maintained the local school, hospital, and charity. On hundreds of seigniories the feudal lord had performed these functions as well as the natural selfishness of men allowed, and the peasants, recognizing his usefulness, gave him obedience and respect, sometimes even affection.
Two main factors changed this feudal relationship: the appointment of intendants by and after Cardinal Richelieu, and the transformation of the major seigneurs into courtiers by Louis XIV. The intendants were middle-class bureaucrats sent by the king to govern the thirty-two districts into which France was divided for administration. Usually they were men of ability and good will, though they were not all Turgots. They improved the sanitation, lighting, and embellishment of the towns; they reorganized the finances; they dammed rivers to irrigate the soil, or diked them to prevent floods; they gave France in this century a magnificent network of roads then unequaled elsewhere in the world, and began to line them with the trees that shade and adorn them today.6 Soon their greater diligence and competence displaced the territorial lords from regional rule. To accelerate this centralizing replacement, Louis XIV invited the seigneurs to attend him at court; there he gave them lowly offices glorified with exalted titles and intoxicating ribbons; they lost touch with local affairs while drawing from their manors the revenues needed to maintain their palaces and equipages in Paris or Versailles; they clung to their feudal rights after abandoning their feudal tasks. Their loss of administrative functions, in both the economy and the government, opened them to the charge that they were dispensable parasites on the body of France.
II. THE CLERGY
The Catholic Church was an essential and omnipresent force in the government. The number of her clergy in France has been estimated at 260,000 in 1667,7 420,000 in 1715,8 194,000 in 1762;9 these figures are guesses, but we may assume a decline of some thirty per cent during the eighteenth century, despite an increase in the population. Lacroix calculated that in 1763 France had eighteen archbishops, 109 bishops, 40,000 priests, 50,000 vicaires (assistant priests), 27,000 priors or chaplains, 12,000 canons regular, 20,000 clerks, and 100,000 monks, friars and nuns.10 Of 740 monasteries 625 were in commendam—i.e., they were governed by assistant abbots on behalf of absentee abbots who received the title and half or two thirds of the revenue without being required to live an ecclesiastical life.
The higher clergy were practically a branch of the nobility. All bishops were appointed by the king, usually on nomination by the local seigneurs, and subject to papal consent. Titled families, to keep their property undivided by inheritance, secured bishoprics or abbacies for their younger sons; of 130 bishops in France in 1789 only one was a commoner.11 Such scions of old stock brought into the Church their habits of worldly luxury, sport, and pride. Prince Cardinal Édouard de Rohan had an alb bordered with point lace and valued at 100,000 livres, and his kitchen utensils were of massive silver.12 Archbishop Dillon of Narbonne explained to Louis XVI why, after prohibiting the chase to his clergy, he himself continued to hunt: “Sire, my clergy’s vices are their own; mine come from my ancestry.”13 The great age of French ecclesiastics—Bossuet, Fénelon, Bourdaloue—had passed; the epicurean riot of the Regency had freed men like Dubois and Tencin to rise in the hierarchy of the Church despite their achievements in both forms of venery. Many bishops lived most of the year in Versailles or Paris, joining in the gaiety and sophistication of the court. They kept one foot in each world.
Bishops and abbots had the rights and duties of seigneurs, even to providing a bull to service their peasants’ cows.14 Their vast domains, sometimes enclosing whole towns, were managed as feudal properties. Monasteries owned a great part of the city of Rennes, and most of the environing terrain.15 In some communes the bishop appointed all judges and officials; so the Archbishop of Cambrai, suzerain over a region comprising 75,000 inhabitants, appointed all administrators in Cateau-Cambrésis, and half of those in Cambrai.16 Serfdom survived longest on monastic estates;17 the canons regular of St.-Claude, in the Jura, had twelve thousand serfs, and fervently resisted any reduction of feudal services.18 The immunities and privileges of the Church were bound up with the existing social order, and made the ecclesiastical hierarchy the most conservative influence in France.
The Church annually collected, with some moderation and consideration, a tithe of every landholder’s produce and cattle; but this décime was seldom an actual tenth; more often it was a twelfth, sometimes only a twentieth.19 With this, and gifts, legacies, and the revenue from her realty, the Church maintained her parish priests in poverty and her bishops in luxury, she relieved the destitute, and educated and indoctrinated the young. 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.21 The bishop of Sens had a yearly income of 70,000 livres; the bishop of Beauvais, 90,000; the Archbishop of Rouen, 100,000; of Narbonne, 160,000; of Paris, 200,000; the Archbishop of Strasbourg had over a million a year.22 The Abbey of Prémontré, near Laon, had a capital of 45 million livres. The 236 Dominican friars of Toulouse owned French property, colonial plantations, and Negro slaves, valued at many millions. The 1,672 monks of St.-Maur held property worth 24 million livres, earning eight million a year.
None of the Church’s possessions or income was taxable, but periodically the higher clergy in national convocation voted a free donation to the state. In 1773 this amounted to sixteen million livres for five years, which Voltaire reckoned to be a just proportion of the Church’s income.23 In 1749 J. B. Machault d’Arnouville, comptroller general of finances, proposed to replace this don gratuit by extending to the Church, as well as to all the laity, a direct annual tax of five per cent on all income. Fearing that this was a first step toward despoiling the Church to salvage the state, the clergy resisted with “an inflexible passion.”24 Machault proposed also to outlaw legacies to the Church without state sanction; to annul all religious establishments set up without royal approval since 1636; and to require all holders of ecclesiastical benefices to report their revenues to the government. An assembly of the clergy refused to obey these edicts, saying, “We will never consent that that which has heretofore been the gift of our love and respect should become the tribute of our obedience.” Louis XV ordered the dissolution of the assembly, and his Council bade the intendants collect an initial levy of 7,500,000 livres on the property of the Church.
Voltaire sought to encourage Machault and the King by issuing a pamphlet, Voix du sage et du peuple, which urged the government to establish its authority over the Church, to prevent the Church from being a state within the state, and to trust to the philosophers of France to defend King and minister against all the forces of superstition
The power of the Church rested ultimately on the success of the parish priest. If the people feared the mitered hierarchy, they loved the local curé, who shared their poverty and sometimes their agricultural toil. They grumbled when he collected the “tithe,” but they realized that he was compelled to do it by his superiors, and that two thirds of it went to his bishop or some absentee beneficiary, while the parish church, as like as not, languished in a disrepair painful to piety. That beloved church was their town hall; there their village assemblies met under the presidency of the priest; in the parish register, as the witness of their patient continuity through the generations, were recorded their births, marriages, and deaths. The sound of the church bells was the noblest music to their ears; the ceremonies were their exalting drama; the stories of the saints were their treasured literature; the feasts of the Church calendar were their grateful holidays. They did not look upon the exhortations of the priest, or his instruction of their children, as a mythical indoctrination to support ecclesiastical authority, but as an indispensable aid to parental discipline and moral restraint, and as the revelation of a divine order that redeemed with eternal significance the dreary routine of their earthly lives. So precious was that faith that they could be inflamed to kill anyone who tried to take it from them. The peasant father and mother welcomed religion into the daily routine of their home, transmitted its legends to their children, and led them in evening prayer. The parish priest, loving them as they loved him, sided with them in the Revolution.