Voltaire to the lawyer Dupont, 13th November 1764.
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| Charles-Eugene, Duke of Württemberg Anonymous portrait at the Ludwigsburg Palace [Wikimedia] |
....In late 1752 Voltaire was desperate to escape from the court of Frederick the Great in Berlin and was looking for a way to transfer his money ("un fonds d'environ quatre mille écus d'Allemagne") back to France. According to La Mettrie, the Prussian king had dismissed his illustrious guest as an orange to be squeezed for its juice - a bon mot which made Voltaire all the more determined to "take all possible care of the orange-peelings" (Memoirs, p.133).
The impecunious Duke of Wurtemberg provided him with a convenient solution.
In what was in effect the purchase of life annuity, Voltaire entered into two contracts with the Duke, in September 1752 and January 1753, by which he surrendered most of his capital in exchange for a lifetime pension.
The figures don't really mean a great deal but, since they are readily to hand, here they are:
- By a first contract, on 27th September 1752, Voltaire paid the Duke the equivalent of 150,000 livres in German thalers; in return he was to receive an annual income (payable quarterly) of 15,750 livres (ie. at a rate of 10.5 %), with Mme Denis to receive 7,500 livres (5% of the original capital sum) in the event of his death.
- On 31st January 1753 Voltaire repeated the procedure, this time transferring the equivalent of 112,500 livres, for which he was to receive an annual income of 12,375 livres (11%) and Mme Denis a lump sum of 2,250 livres.
It is generally agreed that these rates of interest, though high by today's standards, were in line with those of the time.
The loans were guaranteed by a mortgage ("une hypothétique") on Montbéliard, and various other properties held by the Duke in Franche-Comté and Alsace.
As Roger Pearson notes, from now on this sort of arrangement was to become a major form of investment for Voltaire, made the more attractive to creditors by his insistence that he was in fragile health and not long for this world. In France his debtors included the duc de Richelieu and various members of the Guise family. No doubt it gratified his ego to have aristocrats and petty princes in hock. (see Pearson, Voltaire Almighty, p.129-30).
For both parties, the Württemberg agreement was to prove an onerous arrangement. The premises were sound: Voltaire was nearly sixty - even were he to live another ten years, the Duke would only have to repay the capital and would end up paying virtually no interest on his "loans". In return Voltaire would be able to count on a reliable income. Unfortunately for the Duke, Voltaire was to live to be eighty-three. Equally unfortunately - though perhaps more predictably - for Voltaire, the Duke fell constantly behind with his payments.
The tribulations of the Württemberg loan
Voltaire was to pursue the Duke for payments energetically and with varying degrees of success for the rest of his life. Details of his dealings with the Regency Council of Montbéliard, on whom responsibility for the loan had devolved, and with the Duke's various agents agents, are difficult to unravel without full access to Voltaire's correspondence (and with my feeble grasp of 18th-century financial niceties!). Many of the originals letters to be found in the archives of the Haut-Rhin and in Stuttgard. Additional missives, mostly penned by Voltaire's secretary Wagnière, still occasionally surface - indeed, several were included in the Lambert-David collection of manuscripts donated to McGill university as recently as 2023.
The possibility of acquiring the collateral property rather than pursuing his arrears occurred to Voltaire at various points in proceedings. The first was in Autumn 1753 when Voltaire was safely ensconsed in Colmar and already finding his dealings with the Duke's agents vexatious. (They insisted on certificats de vie before each payment: "I write, therefore I live," wrote Voltaire with irritation - clearly a literal rather than a philosophical assurance!). On 23rd October he visited the Duke's nearby manor at Horbourg (now Horbourg-Wihr) with a view to buying the property and deducting the outstanding amount he was owed from the purchase price.. He rapidly changed his mind, finding there only "hovels and poorly cultivated fields"(See Alessandro Collini , Mon séjour auprès de Voltaire (1807), p.117). The castle had been dismantled by Turenne in the 1670s and most of the dependencies already sold off.
- By a first contract, dated 10th October 1764, Voltaire paid the Duke, 200,000 livres, in return for a annuity of 24,000 livres (11%), with 16,000 livres to Mme Denis at his death.
- Finally on 28th December 1764, he surrendered 80,000 livres for annuity of 10,000 livres (12.5%) with 2,000 livres for his niece Mme de Florian, 2,000 livres for his nephew the abbé Mignot, and 2,000 livres for his great-nephew Dompierre d'Hornoy (who lived on until 1828!).
The 62,125 livres in annuities owed to Voltaire were guaranteed against all the goods, properties and chattels of the Duke, and particularly his seigneuries and domains in Montbéliard, Franche-Comté and Alsace... Montbéliard, properly speaking, was a miniscule enclave in French territory, situated astride the rivers Doubs, Allan, Luzine and Savoureuse. It centred on the little town of Montbéliard, with its old Germanic fortress, flanked by two massive towers, overlooking the valley of the Allan. Vineyards, mines, tile factories, windmills and agricultural land, plus the forges at Audincourt, constituted the principal sources of revenue. On the outskirts of the principality, in what is now the departments of the Doubs and the Haute-Saône, various domains, restored to the Duke by France at the Treaty of Versailles in 1748, offered revenue from forestland, farms, mills, saltworks and feudal dues. In addition there were two seigneuries in Alsace, at Riquewihr, with six villages, and Horbourg, with 11 villages. The total revenues here were perhaps 250,000 in a good year (which were not frequent in the miserable climate of Alsace).In addition to Voltaire's rentes, which accounted for 62,125 livres in 1765, there were numerous officials and functionaries to be paid; Charles-Eugene's personal debts more than absorbed the rest. Since he was constrained within Württemberg by the Council in Stuttgart, Charles-Eugene found it convenient to burden the little principality of Montbéliard with a host of financial commitments.To the polite lie of the patriarch of Ferney, "I have only my pension to live on", the Regency Council could reply in all honesty "Our coffers are empty" .The archives at Besançon give a snapshot of the charges to be met in pensions and interest payments: 1,200 livres to a Colonel de Wehlen, 13,50 livres to the Republic of Berne, 7,500 livres to Dietrich of Strasbourg, 4,000 livres to the Baron Georges de Wimpfen, 200 livres to the lawyer Chauffour in Colmar etc. Other debts included 114,767 livres to the Duke's tailor in Paris and 49,933 livres to assorted merchants in Lyon.
Voltaire complained ceaselessly and melodramatically to his correspondents about the Duke's failure to pay and his extravagant "obsession with imitating Louis XIV" [D13931 to d'Argental]. By February 1765 Voltaire was telling Richelieu, another debtor, "I am getting rid of Les Délices because, having the largest part of my assets dependent on M. de duc de Württemberg, and my affairs with him not being completely settled, I fear to die of hunger as well as of old age."
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| The château in the 18th century. Musée d'Art et d'Histoire - Hôtel Beurnier-Rosse, Montbéliard. (Wikimedia) |
By all accounts 18th-century Montbéliard was an unprepossessing backwater:
At the beginning of the eighteenth century the capital of the County possessed a main square, into which several streets converged, and suburbs of ill repute where it was dangerous to wander at night. It was an agglomeration of one- or two-storeyed houses with huge roofs pieced with mullioned windows such as can still be seen in Alsace. The interiors were very simple, with wooden cottage furniture. In the main room, which also served as a kitchen, the people lived a sober existence, their staple diet being onion soup and flour pancakes.
Fauchier-Magnan, The Small German Courts, p.252.
The medieval fortress, built on the edge of an escarpment, had been partly dismantled on the orders of Louis XIV. To prevent total ruin, a new extension, the Château-Derrière ou Neuf-donjon, was built by the Governor, Baron Reinhard von Gemmingen, in 1751. Only the great 15th and 16th century towers survived from the older construction. With its dark furniture and great Germanic stoves, the interior remained old-fashioned and cheerless.
In 1768 Montbéliard welcomed, for the first time since the death of Leopold-Eberhard in 1723, a resident member of the Württemberg dynasty. This was Duke Charles-Eugene's brother Frederick-Eugene, who was formally named Governor of Montbéliard for life. His installation in the château was greeted with great enthusiasm. However, he lost no time in abandoning the lugubrious old castle for more comfortable surroundings. In 1770 he began building a new summer residence in Étupe which, due to the family's dynastic connections - his daughter married Archduke Francis of Austria - attracted frequent visits from the Emperor Joseph and other members of the ruling Hapsburgs. This new property was abandoned in 1792, sold off as a "bien national"and demolished in 1801.
References
TheWürttemberg loan:
https://archive.org/details/voltairecranci00volt/mode/2up
https://archive.org/details/lesrentesviagr00mull/mode/2up
Émile Lizé. “Voltaire créancier du duc de Württemberg. Correspondance inédite.” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France (1986). Vol.86 (5): p.876–86. [On JStor]
https://collections.geneve.ch/gazette-delices/15/pdf_15/15_voltaire.pdf
Montbéliard and its castle:
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k56801356
https://www.chateaumontbeliardwurtemberg.fr/
https://www.estrepublicain.fr/culture-loisirs/2024/12/21/le-nouveau-parcours-historique-du-chateau-de-montbeliard-wurtemberg-enfin-devoile
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