Voltaire—Bringing England to France

[Cypress]

Voltaire—Bringing England to France

source credit: Alan Charles Kors, Ph.D. Professor of History University of Pennsylvania

Few works had greater impact in popularizing the intellectual revolution of the 17th century and in inaugurating debates that would shape the 18th century in France than Voltaire’s Lettres Philosophiques (Philosophical Letters) from England, published in 1734. Voltaire celebrates English religious, political, commercial, and intellectual liberty, and he popularizes the systems of Locke and Newton.

His Philosophical Letters are a celebration of English thought and political life and an assault upon orthodox, absolute, and aristocratic France. Many historians have seen them as the first essential work of the French Enlightenment.

He uses England as a foil to criticize what he sees as the despotism and unenlightened government of France. Voltaire idealizes English life. He identifies the following factors as sources of England’s success. It has a government of laws, not of arbitrary individual wills. Government power is limited by civil liberties and legal equality. Civil strife, fanaticism, and persecution are limited by means of religious tolerance. Commercial freedom produces a commercial prosperity that allows the individual to serve his own interest in a way that enriches the society at large. In English society, the arts and sciences are free, respected, and flourishing. For Voltaire, all of these positive qualities are interrelated, each reinforcing the other.

France—intolerant, anti-commercial, aristocratic and despotic—looks especially unappealing when contrasted with Voltaire’s idealized picture of England—tolerant, secular, governed by law and liberty, and engaged in productive commerce.

Voltaire introduces his readers to (and popularizes) English empiricism, and especially the thought of Bacon, Locke, and Newton. In his letter on inoculation against smallpox, Voltaire expresses the philosophy of the Enlightenment in outline: reason and experience allow us to employ a method which saves lives and reduces suffering. Voltaire urges the French to recognize the superiority of Locke to Descartes. He asserts the superiority of empiricism over rationalism as a means of acquiring knowledge of the world from the world. He argues on behalf of Locke’s sensationalism and against Descartes’s notion of innate ideas.

He defends Locke’s argument that philosophical skepticism is the only honest conclusion, since it would be impious to assume that an omnipotent God could not have created matter capable of thought. This is not materialism, but an appropriate recognition of the limits of human knowledge. Avoiding metaphysical hypotheses and irresolvable arguments, let us study ourselves and the world through our limited natural faculties. Voltaire criticizes theologians who claim that Locke and other philosophers threaten morality and society. He holds that the theologians themselves have bred discord and war. Voltaire lauds Newton’s application of Lockean empiricism to the study of nature

[kudzu]

Very cool........... We forget what an important contribution he made.

He identifies the following factors as sources of England’s success. It has a government of laws, not of arbitrary individual wills. Government power is limited by civil liberties and legal equality.

Civil strife, fanaticism, and persecution are limited by means of religious tolerance. Commercial freedom produces a commercial prosperity that allows the individual to serve his own interest in a way that enriches the society at large.

In English society, the arts and sciences are free, respected, and flourishing. For Voltaire, all of these positive qualities are interrelated, each reinforcing the other.

[Cypress]

Very cool........... We forget what an important contribution he made.

He identifies the following factors as sources of England’s success. It has a government of laws, not of arbitrary individual wills. Government power is limited by civil liberties and legal equality.

Civil strife, fanaticism, and persecution are limited by means of religious tolerance. Commercial freedom produces a commercial prosperity that allows the individual to serve his own interest in a way that enriches the society at large.

In English society, the arts and sciences are free, respected, and flourishing. For Voltaire, all of these positive qualities are interrelated, each reinforcing the other.

While our intellectual and artistic heritage is most often credited to our Greco-Roman connections, and while France - and in particular, Paris - was later held out as the intellectual center of the western universe, I tend to forget that The Enlightenment, the beginning of empiricism, indeed the modern era, really begins in England via Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke. They are the touchstones.

[Cypress]

I also gained an appreciation for Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a contemporary of Voltaire and other French Enlightenment thinkers. A dissenting voice against the prevailing confidence in the scientific revolution and technological progress.

There are some pretty good Rousseau nuggets.

The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had someone pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: "Do not listen to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!”
― Jean Jacques Rousseau

“To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say, and to finish without knowing what you have written.”
― Jean Jacques Rousseau

“In truth, laws are always useful to those with possessions and harmful to those who have nothing; from which it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only when all possess something and none has too much.” ― Jean Jacques Rousseau