Rodama: a blog of 18th-century & Revolutionary France: January 2026

Friday, 30 January 2026

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 not a single anecdote or petty detail enlivens the perfunctory outline of Menoux's early life supplied in 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.

On the road with Voltaire

Joseph Highmore, Painting showing a scene from Richardson's Pamela, 1744.
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (Wikimedia)

Travel by road was hazardous in the 18th century, even for those who could afford the luxury of a private coach and good horses. The account which follows is taken from the memoirs of Voltaire's secretary Longchamp, who accompanied Mme du Châtelet and Voltaire on an eventful journey from Paris to Cirey in the late 1740s. Today the same journey by car (so Google Maps informs me) would take three-and-a-half hours.

Voltaire in Lunéville

Voltaire reading his play Seminaris to King Stanislas, lithograph by the 19c Spanish artist, Vicente García de Paredes (1845-1903).
Private collection (Meisterdrucke)

There is a whole scholarly industry centred on Voltaire and, now, almost as much ink spilt on on Émilie du Châtelet and her scientific works. What follows is merely intended to summarise Voltaire's various sojourns at the Court of Lorraine and ask what evidence remains to evoke his physical surroundings. The chronology of events is taken mostly from the René Vaillot's book in the "Voltaire en son temps" series, Avec Madame du Châtelet, published in 1988.

The visit of May-June 1735 [Vaillot, p.17-20]

The chronology of Voltaire's earliest trips to Lorraine has recently been revised. In a letter to the président Hénault, traditionally dated to 1729, he describes how he and two friends made a round trip to Nancy in order to avail themselves of an issue of government shares [D366]. This letter, and hence the episode, has now been redated to1720 to fit with in financial records for Lorraine. See André Courbet, "Voltaire en Lorraine: les séjours de 1720 et 1735", Cahiers Voltaire, No.13 (2014) p.51-67. https://c18.net/18img/cv13-specimen.pdf

Nonetheless, Voltaire undoubtedly did accompany the duc de Richelieu to the spa at Plombières, and probably also to Nancy, on more than one occasion in the late 1720s.

A more substantial sojourn took place in 1735. Voltaire had arrived in Paris from Cirey on 30th March, but six weeks later, on 12th May, he fled the capital for Lorraine in the company of the duchesse de Richelieu. His motives are not altogether certain - possibly he had delivered to an ultimatum to Mme du Châtelet to stay with Maupertius in Paris or retire to Cirey to study with him. The Duchess was on friendly terms with the dowager Duchess Elisabeth-Charlotte and Voltaire had left a reputation in 1729 as a gen d'esprit and was greeted with joyous familiarity. A court with reputation for its love of poetry, theatre, belles-lettres and the arts. In his letters frequents familiarly the prince de Beauvau-Craon and his numerous children, and attends balls, concerts, comedies; the Court had a theatre and troupe of actors. Physics was all the rage. He saw the "salle de machine" where the the duke's machinist Philippe Vairinge, "simple serrurier devenu philosophe" , built his own apparatus and gave lectures [D870, 15th May]. The duchesse de Richelieu even gave a lecture on the theories of Newton, at which the Jesuit Dallemant, caused amusement to onlookers by engaging in disputation [D882, c.20th June] .Voltaire returned to Cirey on 25th June.