Voltaire under the scalpel

A new TV documentary starring the irrepressible Philippe Charlier has recently aired on France 5: this time it is Voltaire, no less, who finds himself "under the scalpel".  The core of the programme concerns the forensic investigation, prompted by recent conservation work, of  Voltaire's heart, which resides in the base of his statue at the Bibliothèque nationale.   

The documentary also takes the opportunity to present the whole remarkable story of Voltaire's death, dissection and posthumous peregrinations.  It is fairly well-trodden ground, but nonetheless a televisual treat, especially since Charlier is filmed at all the relevant locations, many of which are not normally accessible to the public.  Some fairly unobtrusive, talking-heads (Jennifer Ruimi, Laurence Macé, and the venerable Didier Masseau) contribute helpful comments, and  dark, slightly gruesome dramatic reconstructions add to the atmosphere (though I don't see why the dying Voltaire sports that improbable white curly wig).

INTRODUCTION:  

Philippe Charlier tells us that, after Voltaire's death, his corpse was autopsied and his body parts subjected to a "veritable dispersion" as though they were holy relics.  A heart, an embalmed brain, and a body extricated clandestinely by night from Paris to escape the religious authorities -  their incredible and farcical fate resembled Voltaire's own fiction. Charlier declares his intention to track down and investigate these individual remains, in particular the heart.

Voltaire was 83 when he died, with a catalogue of forty ailments. Charlier wants to examine the state of his health and, perhaps, uncover the true cause of his death.

La Branche Verte

Just over sixty years ago the so-called "Branche Verte" was  a conspicuous landmark on the D878  between La Prévière and Juigné-des-Moutiers, on the edge of the forest, a short distance from the Royalist memorial site, the tomb of the "Émigré de La Préviere".  An ancient beech tree boasted a single branch which, as though by miracle, sprouted new leaves in early March, when the rest of the tree, and all those around it, were still bare: "It grew green prematurely before all the other trees in the Forest of  Cornillé" .

Postcard of about 1900 (Wikimedia)

Perhaps unsurprisingly here, on the borders between Anjou and Brittany, this unusual natural phenomenon was associated with a "place of memory". Local tradition had it that during the Revolution a young girl had been hanged from the tree. In some versions her attackers - whether Republican soldiers or Chouans  -  raped her before hanging her by the hair; in others she hanged herself to escape  her persecutors.

Michel Lagree and Jehanne Roche in their survey of memorial sites, tell us that the local folklorist Joseph Chapron, writing in the 1930s, referred to a second "tombe à la Fille", now lost, which was located nearby.  According to Chapron, the woods of La Rochette once sheltered several graves from the 1790s which have since disappeared.  This one was said to have belonged to a young girl who was "encountered by an armed troop and martyred by the bandits."[quoted Lagree (2003), p.69].  The Republican Alfred Genoux, author of La sylve castelbriantaise 1934, specified that the girl had murdered to prevent her from betraying whereabouts of the Chouan chief  Fresnais de Beaumont  (later seized and guillotined in Châteaubriant).  The local journalist and historian Louis Bessière, on the other hand,  preferred to blame Republican troops for her death [Lagree, p.69; and  Reading below]

The "Tombe à la Fille"

It is the suffering, finally, of this young woman of 1796 which has been erected into a sacred phenomenon.

Françoise Gründ, ethnoscénographe, speaking in 2011

The "Tombe à la Fille" in 2007 (photo posted on X by Paul Chopelin)

Again associated with a sainte-bleue, the "Tombe à  la Fille" in the  Forest of Teillay, is still an active - indeed oddly thriving - place of pilgrimage.  Attention was drawn to its existence in a notice which appeared in the AHRF in 1952, shortly after Lefebvre's article on Perrine Dugué, and the two sites are often considered together in the academic literature. The name of the girl involved is given as Marie Martin (occasionally Marguérite or Thérèse), her age "about 19".  She is also often referred to as  "Sainte-Pataude", "pataud" being a pejorative term for "patriot" in the local patois.  It is not known why she was killed; in some versions she is said to have revealed a rebel hideout; in others, perhaps more plausibly, she is said to have refused to betray her master.

There is only one surviving contemporary account, a report of September 1797, written by the Directory's Commissaire in nearby Bourg-des-Comptes (identified as a lawyer from Bain, Paul François Martin).  This document dates events to the beginning of Year IV, that is late 1795, about six months prior to the death of Perrine Dugué. The writer specifies only that the young woman had "showed her aversion" to the Chouans. In 1833 the Orléanist journal L'Auxilliaire Bréton briefly included the case in a catalogue of royalist  atrocities in the region. Otherwise, nothing was written down before the 1870s and we are reliant on oral tradition. The fullest modern account is in Michel Lagree and Jehanne Roche's Tombes de mémoire, published in 1993.

A half-forgotten history...

Marie Martin is universally agreed to have been a native of Tresboeuf, a commune a dozen or so kilometres to the east of the district capital of Bain-en-Bretagne and ten kilometres from Teillay.  Her father is known to have died in 1791. She is often said to have been living at a local farm, perhaps with an uncle, or alternatively "en chambre" in Teillay itself. 

The house in Tresboeuf where
 Marie Martin perhaps lodged

An archived version of the Teillay commune website has a different version. It states that Marie was lodging at at the time of her death not in Teillay but in the centre of Tresboeuf, with a merchant named Jean Martin (no known relation); he is said elsewhere to have been a "livestock dealer".  His house, on the place de l'Église, still stands and is now the agence de poste.  Martin had fallen foul of the Chouans through his acquisition of biens nationaux.  

This information doesn't quite make sense geographically - Marie was surely more likely to have been living in Teillay close by  the forest where she was left for dead.  However, according to Michel Lagree, several purchasers of  biens nationaux in Tresboeuf did indeed have the surname Martin; the insurgents reserved for such beneficiaries "their most ferocious hatred and cruellest treatment"(Lagree (1978) nt.37)

Perrine Dugué - the saint with tricolour wings

Woodcut by Pierre-François Godard, engraved in Alençon and dated 1796.
From a popular edition of the Complaintes en l'honneur de Perrine Dugué. [Wikimedia] 
Posted by J.P. Morteveille, Vice President of the Amis de Ste-Suzanne/Musée de l'auditoire.
 

Christians, come and listen/ To the story of Perrine Dupré [sic]/Aged only seventeen /

This pretty young girl /Has been reduced to a memory.

On the heath near Blandouet/ On her way to Saint-Suzanne/ 

A villain stopped her/ Eagar for mischief/He wanted to abuse her

Seized by fear/ She said to him in tears/ You treacherous and evil heart!/ 

I would a hundred times rather die/ Than lose my poor soul/ By consenting to your desire

Immediately the wretch/ Knocked her to the ground with great blows/ 

Cracking open her skull/ Like an enraged beast,/Then crushing her under his horse's hooves.

In the spot where he left her/ Where she is buried/ God has created an oracle/

 To show her sanctity/ She often performs miracles/ For those who visit her

By praying to her with devotion/ She will obtain relief/ For all our afflictions and sorrows/

Let us pray to God on her tomb/He will show acceptance of our prayers/ By a new miracle.

In his article of 2012 on the "martyrs" of the Revolution,  which I translated in a previous post, Jean-Clément Martin draws attention to the spontaneous veneration of "patriot saints" which grew up alongside Catholic and Counter-Revolutionary commemorations in the frontier zones of war-torn Brittany.  An odd phenomenon this, which provides an intriguing insight into popular beliefs, and challenges the conventionally accepted boundaries between religious sentiment and allegiance to the Revolution.

The most celebrated examples concern two young women, Perrine Dugué and Marie Martin, both probably murdered by the Chouans. Of the two, Perrine Dugué, the so-called "Saint with tricolour wings", is the better documented. Sources for her life include not only several contemporary reports, but also three printed Complaintes or popular ballads rediscovered by Léon de La Sicotière in the 1890s.  

Plombières - some 18th-century visitors

Illustrious visitors to Plombières.  Banner on the façade of the splendid but currently derelict hôtel Baumont.
Photograph from Vosgesmatin.fr, 15.05.2024

Today the idea of a European spa town carries with it the image of a polished monied élite.  However Plombières in the earlier 18th century seems to have been quite a modest place with a wide range of visitors. The capacity of the baths was considerable and the costs of a cure, though real, fell within the grasp of most of the reasonably well-to-do. One imagines the little town filled with valetudinarians of all sorts - aristocratic travellers certainly, but also local gentry, lawyers, bourgeois ladies of Nancy, ecclesiastics and nuns, to say nothing of the charitable cases who populated the hospital. Soldiers were also conspicuous. In 1748 Louis XV had plans were drawn up for military hospital though nothing came of this so-called "projet de France". The Fermier des Bains François Géhin reports that nonetheless serving French soldiers were frequently sent to the baths and billeted on the bourgeois of the town; only the intercession of Mesdames finally put a stop to this inconvenience.

The Plombières of King Stanislas

[continued from previous post]

According to the 19th-century historian of  Plombières, Jean-Dominique Haumonté, the memory of King Stanislas, le roi bienfaisant, was always held in great esteem in the town, not just for the  improvements he himself made but also for the later revitalisation of the thermal station which he set in train (p.174-5).  The story goes that in 1798, when the Director Reubell came to take a cure, the mayor gave him to understand that Stanislas's portrait, which used to hang in the town hall, been destroyed;  Reubell observed that, although Stanislas had been a king, the portrait should nonetheless have been preserved "as souvenir of your benefactor" (p.300)

Portrait presented by Stanislas himself to his hospital in Plombières,

on display today in the salon of its modern successor.

https://pop.culture.gouv.fr/notice/palissy/PM88000667

After the Revolution, his memory continued to be honoured. In 1860 the principal road, was renamed rue Stanislas and in 1882 the Hôtel des Dames, now transformed into a luxurious thermal establishment, became known as the "Bain Stanislas".

A spa town: Plombières in the earlier 18th century

Still in Lorraine,  welcome news was announced in December  that the French State has pledged 7 million euros towards a rescue package to save the spa of Plombières-les-Bains,  its patrimony and architecture. The baths at Plombières, which still represent the lifeblood of the little town, have been entirely closed down since the end of 2024  when the owners of the facilities, the AVEC Group, went into liquidation. 

The real heyday of  Plombières as a fashionable resort was was in Napoleonic times and, later, during the Second Empire, but its growth is already evident in Lorraine's years of economic revival and urban renewal under Duke Leopold and King Stanislas. 

Voltaire (almost) acquires a German castle

The Duke of Württemberg has had the kindness to offer me the château of Montbéliard; I could pass the winters there with all my entourage; but I am frightened I should find everywhere covered in snow.  What is this Montbéliard like, I should like to know...
Voltaire to the lawyer Dupont, 13th November 1764.

Here is another episode from Voltaire's travels in the east of France the astute "capitaliste"...

Today, the chief claim to fame of  Montbéliard, Franche Comté's second city, is as the site of the vast Peugeot car factory.  In Voltaire' time, however, it was the "Comté" of Montbéliard, a miniscule German Protestant enclave in French territory, by a quirk of dynastic history a possession since the late 14th century of the Dukes of Württemberg.   Then, as now, the medieval fortress on its rocky outcrop dominated the township. Voltaire's Duke of Württemberg was Charles-Eugene, nephew by marriage to Frederick the Great, and one of those splendid larger-than-life 18th-century princelings. He built the Rococo palaces of La Favorite and La Solitude was at sometime patron of Schiller.....  His extravagant lifestyle was rivalled only by the excessiveness of his spending; by the time of his death in 1793 his personal debts were said to total over 30 million livres..... 

Father Menoux - Jesuit man of letters

 Yes, Messieurs, we live in the century of light ("le siècle des Lumières") and good taste; minds are more enlightened, discernment has become finer; a happy harmony characterises all our good books...
Joseph Menoux, Jesuit and famous anti-philosophe, 11th March 1751

He is a man of great talent and nonetheless much wit, who is a good Philosopher,  yet also a good Christian.

Fréron, commenting on Menoux in the Année littéraire in 1758.

Frontispiece to Menoux's Discourse on History

[continued from previous post]

Father Menoux's more direct dealings with the world of letters once again show the delicacy of his situation, this time in his relationship with Stanislas and his courtiers, and in his role in the Academy of Nancy. Far from being simply a heavy-handed opponent of the philosophes, he laboured under great difficulties to find any effective strategy to counter the advocates of Enlightenment irreligion. He seems finally to have given way under the strain and retired, to die largely forgotten and unlamented in 1765.

Father Menoux - Jesuit preacher and missionary

The Jesuit priest Father Joseph Menoux is remembered today, if at all, chiefly as an adversary of Voltaire. He warrants barely a footnote in the great sea of Voltaire studies or, at best, a repetition of Voltaire's own dismissive caricatures.  I decided to try and discover a little more about Menoux's life. It  proved to be an interesting exercise, and one which supplies something of an alternative perspective on the world of the Enlightenment writers. 

Early life

Sadly, there is not a single anecdote or petty detail to enliven the perfunctory outline of Menoux's early life supplied by the biographical dictionaries.  We learn only that he was born in Besançon on 14th October 1695 - making him not quite a year younger than Voltaire  -, that he belonged to an "excellent famille de robe", and that he was always destined for an ecclesiastical career.  He began his studies with the Jesuits at the age of fourteen and remained in the order; we can assume that he attended the Jesuit college in Besançon, the imposing buildings of which still survive today.   He entered the Novitiate on 8th September 1711 and, having taught in a number of colleges, was singled out by his eloquence for a career as a preacher. 

The Jesuit college in Besançon  - now College Victor-Hugo
https://structurae.net/en/structures/college-victor-hugo 

The preacher

In 18th-century Catholic France a talented preacher could command a great deal of prestige.  Jesuits like Bourdaloue, and more recently, Charles Porée (d.1741), star of the Parisian house, attracted huge crowds.  They rubbed shoulders with the highest echelons of society, and attracted attention from the  Enlightenment world of culture and letters - to which the Jesuits themselves contributed through their Journal de Trévoux edited from the Maison professe in Paris.