Reinventing Voltaire: The Politics of Commemoration in Nineteenth-Century France

"I’ve chosen this book because it’s the first really comprehensive study of the different phases in which Voltaire was reinvented and then celebrated after his death. There’s also a chapter on popular editions of his work and the extent to which Voltaire is read by a broader reading public—a more working class reading public. There’s Voltaire the writer, who we’ve been talking about, but there’s also Voltairianism. Voltaire has become a shorthand for a certain set of values. Voltaire is absolutely central to the French republican tradition, as he was central to the intellectual construction of the French Revolution. The revolutionaries needed intellectual predecessors and they created Voltaire—with Rousseau, bizarrely—as the great progenitor. It’s Voltaire and Rousseau, far more than Diderot or Montesquieu, who are the two authorities that somehow legitimate the Revolution in the eyes of the revolutionaries themselves. “There’s Voltaire the writer, but there’s also Voltairianism. Voltaire has become a shorthand for a certain set of values” There’s no need to make the obvious point that this is not what he would have wanted—Voltaire would clearly have loathed the Revolution. He was a monarchist; he believed in hierarchies and stability . . . He was fanatically anti-fanaticism. He would have hated the Terror and all of those things. But the fact is that, in the Revolution, Voltaire is reinvented as the intellectual predecessor of the movement. He is the first writer to be interred in the Pantheon in 1791, in one of the great ceremonies of the Revolution. There was a great procession that went through Paris that took two days—the coffin rested on the stones of the ruined Bastille before travelling along the Left Bank of the Seine, in front of the house where he died, and being installed in the Pantheon. Rousseau was also moved to the Pantheon two years later, but Voltaire was the first. He has the aura of the first revolutionary intellectual. “Voltaire would clearly have loathed the French Revolution” French politics in the nineteenth century is an incredible rollercoaster of republican and anti-republican sentiment. They try out different republics and then try to go back to the monarchy and then another republic comes along. But at every single political turn, Voltaire is always there as a set of values. Again, it’s not so much what he really said that counts as the way in which contemporaries read him. He wrote so much that, to some extent, you could almost pick from the great corpus the text that most suited your cause. If you want to be anti-church, then you pick the really vicious attacks on Catholicism in the Dictionnaire philosophique . If you want a more comforting Voltaire, you can go to his history of the reign of Louis XIV which is quite pro-monarchy, a paean of praise in favour of the greatness of France. Voltaire had a position in the culture where, on the one hand, he was seen as the great opponent of Catholicism, but, on the other, he was viewed as the author who gave France its sense of history, even its sense of identity. He explicitly connected the greatness of Louis XIV with the greatness of the writers of that reign. This was also a period of great military conquest, of course—celebrated by Voltaire who, at other times, attacks war. So, there are inconsistencies aplenty, but you can also see how people from different political traditions can find different things in Voltaire to champion. Even if you were a Catholic who didn’t like the religious politics, you probably still saw his plays at the theatre. They remained widely performed up until the end of the nineteenth century, with all the great actresses including Sarah Bernhardt playing the leading roles. Absolutely! He is the model of the engaged public intellectual for later generations. Victor Hugo is closest thing to a Voltaire of the mid-ninetenth century in terms of his stature, his prolific output, and his campaigning against the death penalty. In 1878, marking the centenary of Voltaire’s death, Hugo makes a remarkable speech reported in all the papers describing the importance of Voltaire. And then, at the end of the 19th century you have the Dreyfus Affair with Émile Zola. In the way that the Dreyfus Affair unfolds, there are clearly echoes of the Calas Affair. Zola sees himself as the successor of Voltaire as the leading public intellectual who is using the press to manipulate public opinion. Nearer our time, Sartre would be another example. I think it’s a question of the difference between being famous and being a celebrity. Fame is one thing. But once you’re a celebrity, somehow the public have a handle on you, they think they own you, and you have to live up to what the public think you should be. So at that point, it’s fine to invent quotations by Voltaire that he never actually said. There’s a story that at the end of his life in 1778 when he’s dying of cancer, he goes back to Paris—he’s eighty-four—and attends a performance of his last great tragedy Irène at the Comédie-Française. He sits in a box and is applauded by the audience. At the end of the show, his bust is brought on to the stage and the leading actress of the day crowned the bust with laurel. He would die a few days later. It’s reported that when he left the theatre that night, he got into the cab and someone in the street shouted, “That’s Voltaire!”. So, the people in the street chased the cab as it drives away, shouting “L’homme aux Calas! L’homme aux Calas!” Now, is this true? Who knows? But it is reported seriously by people at the time—so, even if it’s not true, it should be. As he said of God, if he didn’t exist, we’d have had to invent him. It’s the same with the anecdotes about Voltaire. He had become this living legend. The myth is real, whether it’s true or not, and the people chasing the dying man down the street probably hadn’t read much or any Voltaire. But they knew his name. It was a a symbol for something, which then explains why he became this figure in the Revolution. And that attracts all those quotable quotes. It’s also true that Voltaire was brilliant at creating memorable quips— Candide is full of them—and a whole string of them have become proverbial. So it’s only right that we continue inventing his quips. It’s a really good question. At one level, one would say that the values of free speech, the use of robust common sense to attack intolerance, seem all too relevant. The idea of examining people’s reasoning and looking at how prejudice creeps into rational discourse, looking at how people distort arguments, or how people sway others with fake emotions—all of that is really quite relevant to fake news and all the interconnected issues that are worrying us now. On the other hand, it’s interesting to think about hate speech with Voltaire. He does use harsh words and harsh language. The satire is very aggressive sometimes, which can and should make us uneasy. Maybe the answer is that making you uneasy is what satirists do. I would much rather have a Voltaire that unsettles than a Voltaire who is patronised by Roland Barthes as “the last of the happy writers”. And that doesn’t go out of date. It gets often terrifyingly modern. I completely agree. At the end of the article ‘Sensation’ in the Pocket Philosophical Dictionary , Voltaire finishes like this: “What can we conclude from all that? You who can read and think, you conclude.” As a final word, that hasn’t dated."