The Friends of Voltaire

by Evelyn Beatrice Hall

He had begun by sitting and listening to criticisms, mostly adverse, on his ‘Christianity Unveiled’ and the pamphlets which followed it, which were all from his pen. Many people start a literary career under as thick a veil of anonymity. A few have died still under the disguise. But no book has ever attracted such howls of rage and imprecation, such a storm of universal loathing and opprobrium as did ‘The System of Nature,’ while its author sat in perfect peace and comfort, beloved by all his fellows, safe, unsuspected, and serene. D’Holbach, said Grimm long after, when d’Holbach was dead and the secret out, never ran any danger from his books, save the danger of being bored by them.

Naigeon, La Grange, and Diderot were in his confidence. Diderot was more than in it. To most of the Baron’s works—certainly to ‘The System of Nature’—he lent some of the colour and fire of his genius. Poor Diderot was always suspect of anything rash and extreme. ‘The System of Nature’ was published quite early in August. On the 10th of that month, Denis slipped off to Langres and the baths of Bourbonne. The Baron went on having dinner parties. On the 18th, the book was condemned to be burnt. The Baron continued to dine in peace. Then, as men read it, and passed it secretly from one to the other, the murmurs of horror and hatred swelled to a roar—the roar of the great multitude, always deafening and terrible. Above it, d’Holbach heard, close, distinct, and scathing, the bitter condemnations of his own guests and friends. He went on dining to that accompaniment.

From Ferney, Voltaire pronounced the work ‘a philippic against God’ and ‘a sin against nature;’ swore it had wrought irreparable harm to philosophy; passionately refuted it in his article on ‘God’ in the Philosophical Dictionary; while it wrung from him, in a letter to the Duc de Richelieu, that famous confession: ‘I think it very good to sustain the doctrine of the existence of a punishing and rewarding God: society has need of this opinion.’ Galiani declared ‘this Mirabaud’ to be ‘the Abbé Terrai of metaphysics: he causes the bankruptcy of knowledge, of happiness, and of the human mind.’ La Harpe called it ‘this infamous book.’ Young Goethe said he fled from it as from a spectre. It caused Frederick the Great to break with the philosophic party. Grimm, indeed—but this was after d’Holbach’s death, when it was no longer dangerous to hold such opinions—praised the purity of its author’s intentions, and the passages of ‘imposing eloquence’ the book contained—though these, he added, Grimm-like, ‘were by Diderot.’

Who reads ‘The System of Nature’ now? It never was in any sense a great book. But it certainly was one of the three or four most famous books of an age richer in them than any other age in history. It was, after all, simply the logical outcome, the natural, though the extreme result of the rationalistic criticism of the fifty or sixty years which preceded it. The philosophers had sought to define God. D’Holbach said aloud, what the fool of David’s time said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’

In Part I. he disposed of Kings as effete, luxurious, war-making, and tyrannical. Then he expounded his views on Happiness. Men will never be happy till they are enlightened, and never enlightened till they have ceased to believe in a God. Study Nature, and obey Nature’s laws—that is the way to felicity, if way there be. Then he went on to Mind. All Mind is Matter. Of Free Will he denied the existence, as twelve years earlier his friend Helvétius had denied it in his book ‘On the Mind.’ Still, even if one cannot help one’s wrong-doing, punishments there must be, for the good of society; only such punishments should be reformative and never cruel. In his protest against torture and the brutalising effect of public executions, one sees for a moment the man behind the book. With regard to the Immortality of the Soul, since there is no such thing as soul, it cannot be immortal. The false doctrine of Hell is useless even as a deterrent from sin.

Part II. contains what is certainly the most burning and outspoken attack on the Existence of God to be found in literature. That there is a Force behind Matter, I admit. He who does not admit this, must be a madman. But further I will not go. As for morality depending on a belief in a Deity—not at all. Nature bids man do right as his own best interest. Let each try to do his utmost for the greatest good of the greatest number, and there stands established a high and an unselfish ideal.

Preached, as these doctrines were, in a style not a little vehement and abundant, with much Teutonic pomposity and rhetoric, it could soon be said of d’Holbach that he had ‘accommodated atheism to chambermaids and to hairdressers.’ More learned critics disliked his manner as much as his matter. ‘Four times too many words in the book,’ says Voltaire acidly. But the uneducated, or the half-educated, prefer both their oratory and their literature rich and fruity.

Simple and learned alike would, or should, had they known him, have given the author credit for the certain fact that ‘no sordid end, no personal consideration, attached him to his dismal system.’ If his anonymity shielded him from danger, it kept from him fame and celebrity too, and gave him the wholesome, but not soothing, experience of hearing expressed to his face criticisms of the kind generally only made behind one’s back. He did not gain even the painful glories of martyrdom; and had money been an object to him, by the publication of such works as his, he can only have lost it.

Long before the tumult ‘The System of Nature’ raised had passed away, the Baron was busy supplementing it. In 1772 appeared ‘Good Sense, or Natural Ideas opposed to Supernatural Ideas,’ which was a sort of simplification of ‘The System of Nature.’ It was burnt. Then appeared ‘The Social System,’ which tried to establish a rule of morality totally unfounded on religion. That was burnt too. Then there was a translation from Hobbes. The last, or one of the last, of d’Holbach’s published works was entitled ‘Universal Morality, or the Duties of Man founded on his Nature.’ This appeared in 1776. He had the pleasure of watching all the bonfires from a distance where there was not the least danger of scorching.