In the spring of 1761, an aging François-Marie Arouet (a.k.a. Voltaire) took it upon himself to rebuild the small parish church that stood on his sprawling estate at Ferney. The self-proclaimed Deist, mocker of the Biblical storyline, and indefatigable critic of ecclesiastical abuses spared little expense in this latest—and most curious—project of reform and reformation. In place of the old façade, he erected a new one in the modern neoclassical style, with two handsome bell towers, each capped with a gleaming dome. Over the altar, he installed a baldachino as well as an imposing crucifix (costing 1,200 livres) by a prominent sculpture from Lyon. A letter to the Pope, inquiring if his Holiness had any relics to spare, produced—somewhat disappointingly—a hair shirt once worn by St. Francis (Voltaire had been hoping for a couple of bones). And then, with the renovations complete, the manor lord did something that no one could have foreseen; he became a regular attendee at Sunday Mass—even, it was reported, receiving communion on the Easter feast day.
Had Voltaire been softened by years of exile and his impending rendezvous with the great Clockmaker in the sky? Had he somehow lost that contrarian edge, which had made him one of the most feared (and celebrated) figures in the Western world? For Roger Pearson, Professor of French at Oxford and author of Voltaire Almighty—a satisfying new biography—such episodes are less exceptions that prove the rule than examples of what he calls “the complex reality of the man.”
Despite its movie-marquee title, Pearson’s work is not—thank God!—another insipid panegyric to the Enlightenment project. Over the past few decades, academics have sought to hijack Voltaire and his brethren and remake them in their own modern, secular image. By contrast, Pearson presents his subject living, thinking, and dying within the multifarious—and often paradoxical—universe of the ancien régime. His Voltaire is a highly protean character, as much insider as outsider, eager courtier as notorious gadfly, shameless operator as prophet of change. Thus, Voltaire Almighty is as much a reflection on the nature of the eighteenth century as it is on its extraordinary protagonist.
Voltaire left an enormous paper trail during his eighty-four years: more than twenty thousand letters, over fifty plays, six major histories, as well as countless poems, essays, philosophical tales, and reviews. Yet few of his works can be read today without extensive footnotes, so enmeshed are they within their particular time and place. More popularizer than original thinker, Voltaire’s real genius lay in identifying those ideas whose time had come and presenting them in the most accessible and beguiling way possible. His Letters Concerning the English Nation (1733) introduced Newtonian physics and British constitutional government to the stylish, yet hopelessly backward, French, while Candide (1756) signaled an end to the smug complacency of Europe at mid-century. His writing was famous for infuriating the powers that be, but they too were his public, and he always managed to delight enough of them to ensure that he would write and publish (often secretly) another day. His literary work, like his life, was a conscious exercise in straddling the fine line between the socially acceptable and the profane.
Pearson’s overview and analysis of Voltaire’s complicated relationship with Catholicism is particularly revealing. For more than sixty years, the infamous philosophe preached religious toleration in a society where Protestant worship could send a man or woman to prison for life; his highly publicized defense of French Huguenots brought his name back into prominence years after his plays ceased to attract large audiences. Yet the Jesuit-educated Voltaire never went so far as to renounce his faith. He remained friends with numerous clerics from the highest levels of the Church hierarchy throughout his life (he kept a Jesuit around as a chess partner). And although he constantly threatened the limits of doctrinal acceptability, he took care never to cross the line that led to excommunication. True, he would cheekily refuse communion in his final days: “Monsieur l’abbé, I would remind you that I am constantly spitting blood. We really must avoid getting the Almighty’s blood mixed up with mine.” But he also saw fit to prepare a written statement in which he expressed a desire “to die in the holy Catholic religion into which I was born, hoping that God in His divine mercy will deign to forgive me all my errors; and that if I have offended the Church I beg forgiveness of God and of it.”
In the end, Voltaire succeeded in finagling a Christian burial. When he died in Paris on May 30, 1778, all of France wondered openly how the Church would handle the death of one of its most implacable foes. With a matter as delicate and controversial as the funeral of a national icon (or heretic?), Parisian church officials chose a course of action not uncommon for people in their situation; they punted. After allowing for a secret autopsy (his brain and heart were removed), they re-clothed Voltaire’s corpse, propped it up in a carriage, and sent it on its way out of the city as if he were still alive. Fortunately for Voltaire, his nephew, the Abbé Mignot, was in possession of a pile of papers testifying to his uncle’s fitness for Catholic internment. And so, when the playwright had reached a point of decomposition beyond which his retinue could endure, Mignot quickly located a church, shoved the testimonials in the face of the local cleric, and thus sent his uncle into the beyond with the proper seal of approval. The grandees of the church were furious—and that, one assumes, is how François-Marie would have wanted it.
But was Voltaire’s interest in remaining Catholic just a matter of social propriety or some kind of cynical acceptance of Pascal’s wager? According to Pearson, the prince of reason not only believed in God but at least on one occasion displayed a depth of religious feeling bordering on—dare one say—the Romantic. In early 1776, Voltaire awoke at three in the morning to view the sunrise from the top of a nearby mountain peak. As the first tendrils of light broke across the horizon, he dropped to the ground prostrate before the heavens. “I believe, I believe in you,” he chanted. “Almighty God, I believe!”
Voltaire had no patience for atheism. The myriad wonders of the universe proved His existence, and the laws of Nature, as outlined by Newton, were testament to His divine plan. He would have been as horrified by Europe’s loss of faith over the last two centuries as he would Robespierre’s overblown and pretentious Cult of the Supreme Being. To the world, he declared himself a Deist. Yet his Deism had been the legacy of his freethinking Jesuit teachers at his elite Parisian lycée, not of his fellow philosophes. Had the star pupil taken his religion classes a little too seriously?
How much of an iconoclast was he? In some respects, Voltaire’s rebel status had as much to do with his restlessness, both intellectual and physical, than it did with any consciously developed subversive creed. Pearson sketches a convincing portrait of the ultimate eighteenth-century insider, a poet-entrepreneur who grew fabulously wealthy, less from the success of his writings than through his many lucrative investments. At the same time he was churning out plays for the Parisian stage, he was buying and selling commodities from America, North Africa, and the East and West Indies. When he was not attacking the concept of war, he was provisioning the French army with food and clothing. His social connections enabled him to provide loans to the nobility at exorbitant rates of interest. Born into the haute bourgeoisie, he never abandoned his class’s respect for capital accumulation and free markets. In fact, his crusade for religious toleration can partly be attributed to his belief that the return of the Huguenots would invigorate France’s stagnant economy. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was not merely unjust, it was bad for business.
Like most members of the French middle class, he yearned not for revolution—but for a chance to become an aristocrat. He would add the “de” to his name, serve as a courtier to kings (Royal Historiographer to Louis XV, consultant to Frederick the Great), and even encourage the rumor that he was a bastard because the leading candidate happened to be a nobleman. At Ferney, the life of the estate was meant to mimic that of the grandest seigneur. Suffice it to say, Voltaire was not a political radical. He believed in constitutional monarchy but abhorred democracy, universal suffrage, the education of the masses, and social programs to aid the sick and indigent. He urged reform but was no Utopian. He had seen too much of life to ignore its many follies. The world had its delights, to be sure, but it was also deeply flawed. For Candide, as for most of mankind, the best option is to turn away from big plans and schemes and tend to one’s garden.
In November 1790, more than a year after the fall of the Bastille, the Constituent Assembly decided to disinter Voltaire—“the glorious revolution had been the fruit of his work,” said one revolutionary nobleman—and place his body in the newly constructed Panthéon. As the enormous chariot carrying his coffin made its way through the reverential Parisian crowds, Louis XVI, now a prisoner, was said to have caught a glimpse of the spectacle from his window at the Tuileries. Although Voltaire had never thought much of the doltish young king, he would have pitied his present condition. Likewise, he would have recoiled from the now universal belief that he was himself one of the intellectual godfathers of an event that would soon spiral out of control in an orgy of violence and fanaticism. If Voltaire was a man of his century, as Roger Pearson asserts, he stood for the values of order and reform that characterized its first half, not the impulse to turn the world upside down that marred its end. If Enlightenment ideas had led in part to the tragedy of the French Revolution, one can hardly blame Voltaire. The General Will was Rousseau’s idea after all, not his. “I am a tolerant man,” he wrote Frederick the Great, “and I consider it a good thing that people think differently from me.”
