The Newton Wars and the Beginning of the French Enlightenment

"I think this is a really important book because it helps us rethink the important early part of Voltaire’s career. The Lettres philosophiques is something of a political catastrophe because the censorship turns out to be far more severe than he had expected—and only on account of one letter. In Letter 13, Voltaire explores very tentatively whether Locke could be used to support a theory of materialism. This idea that the universe is made up of nothing apart from matter is commonly taken in the eighteenth century to be synonymous with atheism. Voltaire believes that he is being sufficiently elusive to slip by the censors, but this turns out to be a miscalculation. The book is condemned in the strongest possible terms. Voltaire narrowly escapes prison in 1734, and effectively has to leave the capital in unofficial exile. At that point, he goes to the Château de Cirey, staying there for the next 15 years with Madame du Châtelet, who is now his lover and intellectual companion. After this scandal of the Lettres philosophiques , he wonders how he can regain his place in the Republic of Letters. He thinks that one way to do it might be by being more of a scientist. At that point in his career, he does think about being taken seriously as a scientific researcher. For some years, there had been a major scientific debate about the movement of planets. You could look with a telescope and see that planets move in slightly strange shapes. So, you’ve got to try to explain their movement. Essentially, the Cartesian tradition said that that the atmosphere is filled and that there were vortices—these geometrical corkscrews—that are supposed to explain why planets move as they do. Newton came up with an idea that is totally different: he said that, actually, space is empty once you get out of the earth’s atmosphere. There is a void. But the planets move in the way they do because they are pulled by gravitational force. What J B Shank shows is that the way in which the fight between the Newtonians and the Cartesians evolved was essentially an institutional war. In the history of ideas, particular theories do not triumph because they’re right or wrong. They triumph because a particular group or sect promoting those ideas is in the ascendant. So it was with these two competing theories. Fontenelle was the secretary of the Academy of Science—a major position of power—and he espoused the Cartesian cause. There was a younger scientist, Maupertuis, who was much more persuaded by the Newtonian argument. From his correspondence with Maupertuis, Voltaire is quite clearly converted to the Newtonian faith (his term!), both intellectually but also sociologically—he wants to identify with the young turks. In due course, he writes a book intended to explain Newton to a bigger audience called Elements of the Philosophy of Newton . In many ways, it’s a very un-Voltairean book; it’s a serious exposition of Newtonian thinking. It’s quite a big book too, with diagrams and pictures. It doesn’t have much Voltairean humour in it but he’s still a very good expositor. It’s very clear and forceful. Voltaire is never an obscure writer. It comes out in the early 1740s and has a huge impact across Europe. The reception of Newton in continental Europe is largely on account of Voltaire’s book. “The reception of Newton in continental Europe is largely on account of Voltaire’s book” It’s because of this that Voltaire is made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1743, whereas he fails twice to get into the French Academy before he’s finally elected only in 1746. So, his first big academy is the Royal Society on the grounds that he had done all this work to promote Newton. At this point in his career, Voltaire tries to be a Newtonian natural philosopher, but this turns out to be a sort of a heroic failure. The summary of Newton’s thought is clearly a success, but his attempts at original scientific work are not. He just hasn’t got that sort of mind. With the Newton wars, you could just argue that Fontenelle is wrong, Maupertuis was right, and Voltaire just recognises that the Newtonian theory is right. But, at some level, it’s an institutional struggle. At this stage, it’s like the young turks versus the old guard. Voltaire wants to be seen as being in the new wave. He also has an interest at this point in getting back to Paris and being seen as a ‘scientist’. There’s even a moment in the early 1740s when he angles to become the secretary of the Academy of Sciences. What J B Shank shows brilliantly is that the way that people came down on the side of either Descartes or Newton was much more to do with who their friends were and which network they were in—whether they were inside or outside of the Academy, for example. It’s a conflict of generations and a conflict of institutions. He shows how the history of ideas is not neutral or transparent but is always tied up with lots of other cultural forces and influences. Yes, absolutely, but curiously enough, this approach had not previously been applied to the scientific debates of the early French Enlightenment. I think this approach makes much more sense and gives you a handle on what’s going on, and it also gives you a much better sense of how Voltaire’s career is (or is not) developing. He’s not naturally a gifted scientist, but after the fiasco of the Lettres philosophiques , he wants to be back in Paris. It’s very hard to be a French writer and not be very well-received in the capital. So, he thinks that science will be a route back. He’s picking a camp—picking a cause—partly intellectually, but it’s also to do with institutions and identities. It doesn’t entirely work, but he does write the book on Newton which, importantly, gets him into the Royal Society. In the end, he will go back to Paris using a different route. He goes back as a courtier in the 1740s. What J B Shank does is to give a much more nuanced understanding of how Voltaire is trying to make his career in that early period. It’s the most important new insight into Voltaire’s intellectual evolution to come out for the last generation. She’s a formidable intellectual from a very high-born aristocratic family. She lives with Voltaire publicly as a couple, while her husband lived in another chateau just accepting the whole thing. The English would say it’s a very French arrangement. But in a way, she did something more scandalous. It wasn’t that Mme du Châtelet lived with a man that she wasn’t married to—it was that she did science! Her love affair with Voltaire was passionate, at least in the early years, before it settled into more of an arrangement. But it’s quite clear that she taught him science. There was a rather patronising view in the previous generation that Voltaire taught her, but it’s clearly the other way around: she had a much more sophisticated scientific mind than he did. She published a very important book called Foundations of Physics trying to reconcile the different modern theories of physics. Her other huge achievement was translating Newton’s Principia from Latin into French. If you now go into a bookshop in Paris and buy the Principia , her French translation is still the only one in existence. It was, and is, an extraordinary scholarly achievement. She and Voltaire lived together for about 15 years. She later had an affair with a poet called Saint-Lambert, by whom she became pregnant. This was thought at the time to be extraordinary—not that she was carrying a child whose father was neither her husband nor her official companion, but that she was pregnant at all in her early forties. It was regarded as terribly infra dig . Tragically, she died in childbirth. I don’t think Voltaire was particularly fazed by her pregnancy, but he was hugely distressed by her death and so left Cirey definitively. It was obviously a very profound relationship, intellectually as well as emotionally."