Here lies Voltaire

Oy vey. I think even I am growing tired of my tirades. I think it’s time to pause and take a breath between critical introspections for a moment of remembrance. For whom, you ask? The figure of this remembrance sits adorned a chair, cast into eternal form, in an oak paneled room in the National Library in Paris (see picture of statue above). I took that picture after sneaking past a distracted guard (which was really a woman in a booth by the door texting on her cell phone) and discovering the object of my quest, Voltaire himself, with a wry smile that was no doubt a deliberate stroke of the sculptor’s hand intended to portray perhaps the greatest personality of France in his most probable expression.

He was born in 1694 to the name of Francois Marie Arouet, and he died on May 30, 1778 to the name of Voltaire. In the able words of historian and philosopher Will Durant,

“Never has a writer had in his lifetime such influence. Despite exile, imprisonment, and the
suppression of almost every one of his books by the minions of church and state, he forged
fiercely a path for his truth, until at last kings, popes and emperors catered to him, thrones
trembled before him, and half the world listened to catch his every word.”

His works reportedly fill 90 volumes. He wrote plays, novels, essays, a philosophic encyclopedia, letters and much more. And almost all of it was exceptional. His raison d'être? To prove that education and the pursuit of truth could enlighten human kind to a state of reason, where dogmas would find no harbor, where the vices of power would have a weaker grip over the ruled, and where the tragedies of life would diminish in occurrence and effect. He was always at odds with the propagation of falsehoods, especially when they came from the mouths of those in power, whether they were government officials or wearers of ecclesiastical garb. He sought perspective, and he disseminated it. He strived towards unearthing “a unifying principle by which the whole history of civilization in Europe could be woven on one thread”:

“Battles and revolutions are the smallest part of the plan; squadrons and battalions
conquering or being conquered, towns taken and retaken, are common to all history…Take away
the arts and the progress of the mind, and you will find nothing” in any age “remarkable
enough to attract the attention of posterity…I wish to write a history not of wars, but of
society; and to ascertain how men lived in the interior of their families, and what were the
arts which they commonly cultivated….My object is the history of the human mind, and not a
mere detail of petty facts; nor am I concerned with the history of great Lords…; but I want
to know what were the steps by which men passed from barbarism to civilization.”

He made tireless efforts in searching out and consuming information. He poured over long histories, and was precise in his organization of facts. Yet, at the same time, he was the most creative and artistic writer France had ever seen; he was “sheer intelligence transmuting anger into fun, fire into light”; “a creature of air and flame, the most excitable that ever lived, composed of more ethereal and more throbbing atoms that those of other men; there is none whose mental machinery is more delicate, nor whose equilibrium is at the same time more shifting and more exact.” In what are described as “humorous picaresque novelettes,” Voltaire wrote romantic comedies where the “heroes are not persons but ideas, the villains are superstitions, and the events are thoughts.” I excerpt for you Durant’s discussion of his novelette Micromegas:

Micromegas is an imitation of Swift, but perhaps richer than its model in cosmic imagination.
The earth is visited by an inhabitant from Sirius; he is some 500,000 feet tall, as befits
the citizen of so large a star. On his way through space he has picked up a gentleman from
Saturn, who grieves because he is only a few thousand feet in height. As they walk through
the Mediterranean the Sirian wets his heels. He asks his comrade how many senses the
Saturnians have and is told: “We have seventy-two, but we are daily complaining of the
smaller number.” “To what age do you commonly live?” “Alas, a mere trifle;…very few on our
globe survive 15,000 years. So you see that in a manner we begin to die the very moment we
are born: our existence is no more than a point, our duration an instant, and our globe an
atom. Scarce do we begin to learn a little when death intervenes before we can profit by
experience.” As they stand in the sea they take up a ship as one might pick up some
animalcule, and the Sirian poises it on his thumb-nail, causing much commotion among the
human passengers. “The Chaiplains of the ship repeated exorcisms, the sailors swore, and the
philosophers formed a system” to explain this disturbance of the laws of gravity. The Sirian
bends down like a darkening cloud and addresses them:

“O ye intelligent atoms, in whom the Supreme Being hath been pleased to manifest his
omniscience and power, without doubt your joys on this earth must be pure and exquisite;
for being unencumbered with matter, and—to all appearance—little else than soul, you must
spend your lives in the delights of pleasure and reflection, which are the true
enjoyments of a perfect spirit. True happiness I have nowhere found; but certainly here
it dwells.”

“We have matter enough,” answered one of the philosophers, “to do abundance of mischief…
You must know, for example, that at this very moment, while I am speaking, there are
100,000 animals of our own species, covered in hats, slaying an equal number of their
fellow-creatures, who wear turbans; at least they are either slaying or being slain; and
this has usually been the case all over the earth from time immermorial.”

“Miscreants!” cried the indignant Sirian; “I have good mind to take two or three steps,
and trample the whole nest of such ridiculous assassins under my feet.”

“Don’t give yourself the trouble,” replied the philosopher; “they are industrious enough
in securing their own destruction. At the end of ten years the hundredth part of these
wretches will not survive…Besides, the punishment should not be included upon them, but
upon those sedentary and slothful barbarians who, from their palaces, give orders for
murdering a million of men, and then solemnly thank God for their success.”

Voltaire lived for the hope of enlightenment of humankind, but sadly came to believe in his later years that humankind was all too often the victim of forces moving in the opposite direction. After the French clergy declared that the great earthquake of Lisbon in 1755 (with a death toll of 30,000) was a punishment exacted by God on the sinners of Lisbon, and the outbreak of the Seven Years War which followed a few months later, Voltaire wrote Candide, where “never was pessimism so gaily argued; never was man made to laugh so heartily while learning that this is a world of woe.” In the end, despite his wearied condition, Voltaire never abandoned hope in the reforming power of education and the development of the intellect. He knew that “men form institutions, and institutions form men,” and that to break this vicious circle you cannot simply change the nature of the institution, you must change the nature of the man (or woman). Was he hopeful in this respect?

"Do you believe," said Candide, "that men have always massacred each other as they do to-day, that they have always been liars, cheats, traitors, ingrates, brigands, idiots, thieves, scoundrels, gluttons, drunkards, misers, envious, ambitious, bloody-minded, calumniators, debauchees, fanatics, hypocrites, and fools?

"Do you believe," said Martin, "that hawks have always eaten pigeons when they have found
them?"

"Yes, without doubt," said Candide.

"Well, then," said Martin, "if hawks have always had the same character why should you
imagine that men may have changed theirs?"

"Oh!" said Candide, "there is a vast deal of difference, for free will----

And reasoning thus they arrived at Bordeaux.

On May 30, 1778, Voltaire drew his last breath. He was buried in Scellieres, France, until 1791 when, after the French Revolution, his remains were brought back to Paris and “the dead ashes of the great flame that had been were escorted through Paris by a procession of 100,000 men and women, while 600,000 flanked the streets. On the funeral car were the words: ‘He gave the human mind a great impetus; he prepared us for freedom.” On his tombstone only three words were necessary:

"Here lies Voltaire.”

I wish, as it were, that I had time to type out the entire chapter on Voltaire in Durant’s The Story of Philosophy and share it here. I urge anyone who found the excerpts here as interesting as I did to do just that (read, not type). I guess if I was posed with a demurrer from a reader, I would reply that if there was any mortal figure whose intellect, at least, I could model my own after, it would be his. Literary brilliance, scientific aptitude, and remarkable wit, combined with tireless energy and passion for truth. This describes Voltaire, and I find him inspiring.

The statue pictured above is, in one way, a living monument: the very heart of Voltaire lies inside it. As I walked past the statue after taking the picture I brushed my hand over the stone, with a feeling that I would never come closer to the man himself.