On the eve of the French Revolution the National Assembly of France made Louis XVI sign a decree ordering Voltaire’s remains to be transferred to Paris. This was done with great pomp and ceremony. A long procession with banners and music passed through the city. An immense sarcophagus, forty feet high, surmounted by a full-length figure of Voltaire and a winged figure of Immortality, was drawn along by twelve white horses. On it was written, “He avenged Callas, La Barre, Sirven, and Montbailli. Poet, philosopher, historian, he gave a great impulse to the human mind; he prepared us to become free.” A hundred thousand people walked in the procession through crowds of hundreds of thousands more. The body was buried in the Panthéon. But this was not its last resting-place. In 1814, on the restoration of the Bourbon Kings, his bones were removed and thrown into a waste place outside the city. This was discovered in 1864, when his heart, which had been in the possession of the Villette family, was placed inside the empty tomb.
It has been impossible to enumerate even Voltaire’s principal writings, but mention must be made of one of the most remarkable of his works, which was his “Philosophical Dictionary.” It contained brief articles on an enormous variety of subjects, each one brimful of interest, whether they were treated with serious thought and profound learning or with sarcasm and biting irony. He kept on adding to it until it reached eight volumes, and, needless to say, it shocked and infuriated as well as delighted those who read it. He also assisted with many contributions to the great encyclopædia which Diderot and d’Alembert helped to compile, and which created a great stir and exercised a considerable influence on the contemporary thought of France.
Madame du Deffand, one of the many brilliant women of eighteenth-century France, who knew Voltaire well and corresponded with him for many years, said of him that “he was good to read and bad to know.” His faults were certainly very marked, and to some extent spoilt his virtues. His vanity was almost ridiculous; he was quite unscrupulous in making money, in attacking his enemies, and in defending himself; he scoffed with cruel and bitter words, but he never mocked at any men who lived good lives. Mischief prompted him more than malice. He could not help laughing at people who pulled long faces and were incapable of laughing at themselves.
He certainly disbelieved in the creeds of the Church; but by partaking, on one occasion, of the Communion, building a church, and joining a religious order, it looked as if he were insincere, though he is not the only person who has conformed to religious observances in which he did not really believe. But Voltaire scandalized people by doing it all with his tongue in his cheek; in fact, he was altogether irreverent by nature, and reverence is a quality which the strongest opponent of any creed ought always to display. Granting all these defects, however, Voltaire’s influence in opening men’s minds, showing up what was false, sham, and hypocritical, was quite immeasurable. He had, too, the great virtue of humanity. This is not just sentimental kindness and empty sympathy, but, as John Morley expresses it, “Humanity armed, aggressive, and alert; never slumbering and never wearying; moving like an ancient hero, over the land to slay monsters, is the rarest of virtues, and Voltaire is one of its master types.”
A great upheaval was not far off, and gradually the way was being prepared for a better day in France and in Europe. Another man was at work, Jean Jacques Rousseau, whom Voltaire knew, but did not like. While Voltaire was appealing to the minds of the thoughtful, Rousseau was reading the hearts of the people and stirring their imagination. The age was one of extreme corruption, frivolity, and luxury on one side, and poverty, degradation, and misery on the other: an age of bad laws, stale traditions, and reckless cruelty. Voltaire and his friends were sowing the seeds of revolt. The people, only half-conscious, were being driven, as they so easily can be in any country where they are kept ignorant, partly by circumstances, partly by weak men, and partly by an atrocious social system, into the precipice of disaster.
The crash came in the great French Revolution, the greatest convulsion through which any country has ever passed. With all its bloodshed and violent excesses, and in spite of the reaction which quickly followed it in the rise of Napoleon, the Revolution finally destroyed a disastrous method of government, and freed the people from the worst forms of oppression which had grown up in the long reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV. Voltaire did not live to see this tremendous change; he would have deplored its violence, but his responsibility for the growth of the ideas which made such a thing possible was by no means small.
A. P.