The air of Geneva was sultry with storms in this season of 1766; or Voltaire had upon him one of those pugnacious moods in which he had rent limb from limb Pompignan, Fréron, Desfontaines. To be sure, he seldom gave the first blow; but the moment he saw a chance of a fight he was as agog to join in it at seventy-two as he had been at twenty-two.
The Protestant minister called Jacob Vernet was the unlucky person who offended him now. Vernet was clever, and himself a writer. He had been friendly with Voltaire until 1757, when he sharply criticised the “Essay on the Manners and Mind of Nations.” Then they further fell out on that vexed topic, a theatre in Geneva; and when d’Alembert’s famous article appeared in the “Encyclopædia,” Vernet broke off all intercourse with Voltaire, telling him the reason. Then Vernet drew a portrait of Voltaire in his “Critical Letters of an English Traveller.” The likeness was not sufficiently flattering to please the original, who thereupon attacked Vernet in a “Dialogue between a Priest and a Protestant Minister.” Vernet complained to the Councils that he had been libelled. And in May, 1766, Voltaire wrote against Vernet one of the most virulent of personal satires which ever fell from his pen—“The Praise of Hypocrisy.” It lent his hand cunning for that kind of work. His next was the famous poem entitled “The Civil War of Geneva.”
The excuse for this savage personal polemic was the case of one Covelle, who in 1763 had been condemned, for an offence against morals, to make confession of the same to the Consistory of Geneva, to kneel to the President of the Consistory, be reprimanded, and ask pardon. He confessed, but more than that he declined to do.
The mode of punishment has long been decided to be an unwise one. Voltaire, always in advance of his age, considered it an unwise one then. He took the part of Covelle, who personally was a wretched creature, as deficient in brains as in morals. But he stood for a cause.
After having been remanded for a fortnight for consideration, he presented to the Consistory a paper, the substance of which had been supplied by Voltaire, and which stated that the ecclesiastical laws did not compel kneeling to the Consistory, being reprimanded by it, or asking pardon from it.
Covelle published this statement, or rather Voltaire did, and between my Lord of Ferney and the authorities began a battle of pamphlets. They fill three large volumes, and may still be seen in Geneva. Voltaire also wrote twelve public letters in the name of Covelle, allowed him a small pension, and then made him the hero of “The Civil War of Geneva.”
The hatred expressed in that poem redounded, as hatred is apt to do, on the hater. Bitterness and anger are not gay. They spoilt, artistically, “The Civil War of Geneva.”
The poem is, unluckily for Voltaire, not only a satire on parties, though it is a satire on that retrograde and conservative faction which he held was ruining Geneva. It is also a savage satire against individuals. It attacks with a sudden blind fury (Voltaire having hitherto been temperate in his dislike of him) “that monster of vanity and contradictions, of pride and of meanness,” Jean Jacques Rousseau. It tore Vernet’s reputation to shreds. It descended to personal insult, and, that there might be no possible mistake, its victims were spoken of by name. The malice kills the wit. More indecent than the “Pucelle,” “The War of Geneva” is much less clever and amusing. A picture of a travelling Englishman, that Lord Abingdon who had introduced Wilkes at Ferney and must needs put his spoke into the wheel of the Genevan party quarrels, is certainly happy. The young gentleman who, with his “phlegmatic enthusiasm,” drags his dogs and his boredom all over Europe, and expects, no matter where he is, the mere fact of his being English to remove all obstacles and alter all conditions which he is pleased to dislike, will be certainly recognised as a type.
But as a whole “The Civil War of Geneva” contains Voltaire’s vices without his virtues. The poem, like all his writings, certainly did something. In 1769 the decree to which Covelle had refused to submit was abolished. “The War of Geneva,” which was brought out canto by canto, appeared complete in 1768.
The strife of parties which that poem celebrated, and should have celebrated exclusively, had not been healed by the mediators sent by France. Very well, says France—if persuasion will not do, we will try force. By the January of 1767 French troops were quartered along the Lake of Geneva with the view of bringing the aggravating little Genevan republic to its senses by famine and blockade, and unlucky, and comparatively innocent, Ferney was almost unable to get the necessaries of life.