Chapter 9 No.9

In the same years in which Montesquieu was busy on the composition of the Esprit des lois, Voltaire was writing his Age of Louis XIV. and his Essay on the Manners and Mind of Nations, and on the Principal Facts of History from Charlemagne to the Death of Louis XIII. The former work, which everybody reads still, appeared in 1751. Parts of the Essay, which has long since fallen into neglect, were published in the Mercure de France between 1745 and 1751; it was issued complete in 1756, along with the Age of Louis XIV., which was its continuation. If we add the Precis of the Reign of Louis XV.

(1769), and observe that the Introduction and first fourteen chapters of the Essay sketch the history of the world before Charlemagne, and that China, India, and America are included in the survey, Voltaire's work amounts to a complete survey of the civilisation of the world from the earliest times to his own. If Montesquieu founded social science, Voltaire created the history of civilisation, and the Essay, for all its limitations, stands out as one of the considerable books of the century.

In his Age of Louis XIV. he announced that his object was "to paint not the actions of a single man, but the mind of men (l'esprit des hommes) in the most enlightened age that had ever been," and that "the progress of the arts and sciences" was an essential part of his subject. In the same way he proposed in the Essay to trace "l'histoire de l'esprit humain," not the details of facts, and to show by what steps man advanced "from the barbarous rusticity" of the times of Charlemagne and his successors "to the politeness of our own." To do this, he said, was really to write the history of opinion, for all the great successive social and political changes which have transformed the world were due to changes of opinion. Prejudice succeeded prejudice, error followed error; "at last, with time men came to correct their ideas and learn to think."

The motif of the book is, briefly, that wars and religions have been the great obstacles to the progress of humanity, and that if they were abolished, with the prejudices which engender them, the world would rapidly improve.

"We may believe," he says, "that reason and industry will always progress more and more; that the useful arts will be improved; that of the evils which have afflicted men, prejudices, which are not their least scourge, will gradually disappear among all those who govern nations, and that philosophy, universally diffused, will give some consolation to human nature for the calamities which it will experience in all ages."

This indeed is not the tone of the Abbe de Saint-Pierre. Voltaire's optimism was always tempered with cynicism. But the idea of Progress is there, though moderately conceived. And it is based on the same principle-universal reason implanted in man, which "subsists in spite of all the passions which make war on it, in spite of all the tyrants who would drown it in blood, in spite of the imposters who would annihilate it by superstition." And this was certainly his considered view. His common sense prevented him from indulging in Utopian speculations about the future; and his cynicism constantly led him to use the language of a pessimist. But at an early stage of his career he had taken up arms for human nature against that "sublime misanthrope" Pascal, who "writes against human nature almost as he wrote against the Jesuits"; and he returned to the attack at the end of his life. Now Pascal's Pensees enshrined a theory of life-the doctrine of original sin, the idea that the object of life is to prepare for death-which was sternly opposed to the spirit of Progress. Voltaire instinctively felt that this was an enemy that had to be dealt with. In a lighter vein he had maintained in a well-known poem, Le Mondain, [Footnote: 1756.] the value of civilisation and all its effects, including luxury, against those who regretted the simplicity of ancient times, the golden age of Saturn.

O le bon temps que ce siecle de fer!

Life in Paris, London, or Rome to-day is infinitely preferable to life in the garden of Eden.

D'un bon vin frais ou la mousse ou la seve

Ne gratta point le triste gosier d'Eve.

La soie et l'or ne brillaient point chez eux.

Admirez-vous pour cela nos aieux?

Il leur manquait l'industrie et l'aisance:

Est-ce vertu? c'etait pure ignorance.

To return to the Essay, it flung down the gage of battle to that conception of the history of the world which had been brilliantly represented by Bossuet's Discours sur l'histoire universelle. This work was constantly in Voltaire's mind. He pointed out that it had no claim to be universal; it related only to four or five peoples, and especially the little Jewish nation which "was unknown to the rest of the world or justly despised," but which Bossuet made the centre of interest, as if the final cause of all the great empires of antiquity lay in their relations to the Jews. He had Bossuet in mind when he said "we will speak of the Jews as we would speak of Scythians or Greeks, weighing probabilities and discussing facts." In his new perspective the significance of Hebrew history is for the first time reduced to moderate limits.

But it was not only in this particular, though central, point that Voltaire challenged Bossuet's view. He eliminated final causes altogether, and Providence plays no part on his historical stage. Here his work reinforced the teaching of Montesquieu. Otherwise Montesquieu and Voltaire entirely differed in their methods. Voltaire concerned himself only with the causal enchainment of events and the immediate motives of men. His interpretation of history was confined to the discovery of particular causes; he did not consider the operation of those larger general causes which Montesquieu investigated. Montesquieu sought to show that the vicissitudes of societies were subject to law; Voltaire believed that events were determined by chance where they were not consciously guided by human reason. The element of chance is conspicuous even in legislation: "almost all laws have been instituted to meet passing needs, like remedies applied fortuitously, which have cured one patient and kill others."

On Voltaire's theory, the development of humanity might at any moment have been diverted into a different course; but whatever course it took the nature of human reason would have ensured a progress in civilisation. Yet the reader of the Essay and Louis XIV. might well have come away with a feeling that the security of Progress is frail and precarious. If fortune has governed events, if the rise and fall of empires, the succession of religions, the revolutions of states, and most of the great crises of history were decided by accidents, is there any cogent ground for believing that human reason, the principle to which Voltaire attributes the advance of civilisation, will prevail in the long run? Civilisation has been organised here and there, now and then, up to a certain point; there have been eras of rapid progress, but how can we be sure that these are not episodes, themselves also fortuitous? For growth has been followed by decay, progress by regress; can it be said that history, authorises the conclusion that reason will ever gain such an ascendancy that the play of chance will no longer be able to thwart her will? Is such a conclusion more than a hope, unsanctioned by the data of past experience, merely one of the characteristics of the age of illumination?

Voltaire and Montesquieu thus raised fundamental questions of great moment for the doctrine of Progress, questions which belong to what was soon to be known as the Philosophy of History, a name invented by Voltaire, though hardly meant by him in the sense which it afterwards assumed.