An Introduction to the History of Western Europe

by James Harvey Robinson

Voltaire

Voltaire, 1694–1778.

214. By far the most conspicuous and important reformer of the eighteenth century was Voltaire (1694–1778), who was born twenty years before Louis XIV died, and yet lived to see Louis XVI mount the throne. "When the right sense of historical proportion is more fully developed in men's minds, the name of Voltaire will stand out like the names of the great decisive movements in the European advance, like the Revival of Learning or the Reformation. The existence, character, and career of this extraordinary person constituted in themselves a new and prodigious era" (Morley). To understand Voltaire and the secret of his fame would be to understand France before the Revolution. His mission was to exalt and popularize reason; and since a great part of the institutions of his day were not based upon reason, but upon mere tradition, and were utterly opposed to common sense, "the touch of reason was fatal to the whole structure, which instantly began to crumble."

Voltaire's wide influence and popularity.

Voltaire had little respect for the past which had bequeathed to France her disorderly government and, above all, her church. His keen eye was continually discovering some new absurdity in the existing order, which, with incomparable wit and literary skill, he would expose to his eager readers. He was interested in almost everything; he wrote histories, dramas, philosophic treatises, romances, epics, and innumerable letters to his innumerable admirers. He was a sort of intellectual arbiter of Europe, such as Petrarch and Erasmus had been. The vast range of his writings enabled him to bring his bold questionings to the attention of all sorts and conditions of men,—not only to the general reader, but even to the careless playgoer.

Voltaire's attack upon the church.

While Voltaire was successfully inculcating free criticism in general, he led in a relentless attack upon the most venerable, probably the most powerful, institution in France, the Roman Catholic church. The absolute power of the king did not greatly trouble him, but the church, with, as he deemed, its deep-seated opposition to a free exercise of reason and its hostility to reform, seemed to him fatally to block all human progress. He was wont to close his letters with the exhortation, "Crush the infamous thing." The church, as it fully realized, had never encountered a more deadly enemy. Not only was Voltaire supremely skillful in his varied methods of attack, but there were thousands of both the thoughtful and the thoughtless ready to applaud him; for many had reached the same conclusions, although they might not be able to express their thoughts so persuasively as he. Voltaire repudiated the beliefs of the Protestant churches as well as of the Roman church. He was, however, no atheist, as his enemies—and they have been many and bitter—have so often asserted. He believed in God, and at his country home near Geneva he dedicated a temple to Him. Like many of his contemporaries he was a deist, and held that God had revealed Himself in nature and in our hearts, not in Bible or church.

Were there space at command a great many good things and plenty of bad ones might be told of this extraordinary man. He was often superficial in his judgments, and sometimes jumped to unwarranted conclusions. He saw only the evil in the church, and seemed incapable of understanding all that it had done for mankind during the bygone ages. He maliciously attributed to evil motives teachings which were accepted by the best and loftiest of men. He bitterly ridiculed even the holiest and purest aspirations, along with the alleged deceptions of the Jesuits and the quarrels of the theologians. He could, however, fight bravely against wrong and oppression.[386] The abuses against which he fought were in large part abolished by the Revolution. It is extremely unfair to notice only his mistakes and exaggerations, as many writers, both Catholic and Protestant, have done, for he certainly did more than any one else to prepare the way for the great and permanent reform of the church, as a political and social institution, in 1789–1790.