[62] It has been counted that he used no fewer than a hundred and thirty different pseudonyms; and the perpetual prosecution and confiscation of his books explains the procedure. As we have seen, the Lettres philosophiques (otherwise the Lettres anglaises) were burned on their appearance, in 1734, and the bookseller put in the Bastille; the Recueil des pièces fugitives was suppressed in 1739; the Voix du Sage et du Peuple was officially and clerically condemned in 1751; the poem on Natural Law was burned at Paris in 1758; Candide at Geneva in 1759; the Dictionnaire philosophique at Geneva in 1764, and at Paris in 1765; and many of his minor pseudonymous performances had the same advertisement. But even the Henriade, the Charles XII, and the first chapters of the Siècle de Louis XIV were prohibited; and in 1785 the thirty volumes published of the 1784 edition of his works were condemned en masse. [↑]
[63] Diderot, critique of Le philosophe ignorant in Grimm’s Corr. Litt. 1 juin 1766; Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, Stück 10–12, 15; Gibbon, ch. i, note near end; ch. li, note on siege of Damascus. Rousseau was as hostile as any (see Morley’s Rousseau, ch. ix, § 1). But Rousseau’s verdict is the least important, and the least judicial. He had himself earned the detestation of Voltaire, as of many other men. In a moment of pique, Diderot wrote of Voltaire: “Cet homme n’est que le second dans tous les genres” (Lettre 71 à Mdlle. Voland, 12 août, 1762). He forgot wit and humour! [↑]
[64] Prof. Jowett, of Balliol College. See L. A. Tollemache, Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol, 4th ed. pp. 27–28. [↑]
[65] See details in Lord Morley’s Voltaire, 4th ed. pp. 165–70, 257–58. The erection by the French freethinkers of a monument to La Barre in 1905, opposite the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, Montmartre, Paris, is an expression at once of the old feud with the Church and the French appreciation of high personal courage. La Barre was in truth something of a scapegrace, but his execution was an infamy, and he went to his death as to a bridal. The erection of the monument has been the occasion of a futile pretence on the clerical side that for La Barre’s death the Church had no responsibility, the movers in the case being laymen. Nothing, apparently, can teach Catholic Churchmen that the Church’s past sins ought to be confessed like those of individuals. It is quite true that it was a Parlement that condemned La Barre. But what a religious training was it that turned laymen into murderous fanatics! [↑]
[66] M. Lanson seems to overlook it when he writes (p. 747) that “the affirmation of God, the denial of Providence and miracles, is the whole metaphysic of Voltaire.” [↑]
[67] Lord Morley writes (p. 209): “We do not know how far he ever seriously approached the question ... whether a society can exist without a religion.” This overlooks both the Homélie sur l’Athéisme and the article Athéisme in the Dictionnaire Philosophique, where the question is discussed seriously and explicitly. [↑]
[68] Horace Walpole, Letter to Gray, Nov. 19, 1765. Compare the mordant criticism of Grimm (Corr. litt. vii, 54 sq.) on his tract Dieu in reply to d’Holbach. “Il raisonne là-dessus comme un enfant,” writes Grimm, “mais comme un joli enfant qu’il est.” [↑]
[69] Browning, The Two Poets of Croisic, st. cvii. [↑]
[70] Cp. Ständlin, Gesch. des Rationalismus und Supernaturalismus, 1826, pp. 287–90. Hagenbach, Kirchengeschichte des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts, 2te Aufl. 1848, i, 218–20. [↑]
[71] Zimmerman, De causis magis magisque invalescentis incredulitatis, et medela huic malo adhibenda, Tiguri, 1739, 4to. Prof. Breitinger of Zurich wrote a criticism afterwards tr. (1741) as Examen des Lettres sur la religion essentielle. De Roches, pastor at Geneva, published in letter-form 2 vols. entitled Défense du Christianisme, as “préservatif contre” the Lettres of Mdlle. Huber (1740); and Bouillier of Amsterdam also 2 vols. of Lettres (1741). [↑]