A Letter from Voltaire to Earl Bathurst

Allen Bathurst, 1st Earl Bathurst engraved by Charles Bestland
National Portrait Gallery
https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw66712/Allen-Bathurst-1st-Earl-Bathurst

I came across this letter from Voltaire to Earl Bathurst on the Electronic-Enlightenment website and decided to post it for no better reason than that I live in Cirencester, where Bathurst, abetted by Alexander Pope, created his wonderful Park. 

The letter has little substance, but shows how thoroughly Voltaire managed to insinuate his way into fashionable society during his sojourn in England.  Voltaire's innate sense of style - and instinctive obsequiousness -  translates seemingly effortlessly into a flowing, idiosyncratic English prose. (He rather overdoes the Earl's credentials as a virtuous family man; I read elsewhere that "he was a larger-than-life personality, with an unbounded appetite for food, drink, sex and good company..had many mistresses, and was famed for his gregariousness".) 

Richings House, where Voltaire enjoyed the run of the library, has long since disappeared, as have the grounds which once boasted a canal of 1,600 feet.  However, much of Bathurst's grandiose visions of landscape are still available for visitors to Cirencester to enjoy.

Voltaire, sadly, seems to have been totally oblivious to the aesthetics of planting and gardening.

Reference
Electronic Enlightenment [Festschrift for Paul LeClerc] - Voltaire to Bathurst, 18th October 1729, [Transcription and notes by Nicholas Cronk]

http://e-enlightenment.com/coffeehouse/event/leclerc2011/voltfrEE0010002c_1key001cor.html

Round Cirencester [blog]
https://roundciren.blogspot.com/

News from Ferney

1st June

Yesterday, President Macron, accompanied by Françoise Nyssen, the French Minister of Culture, visited the château de Ferney-Voltaire  ahead of today's reopening after three years of renovations. It was a suitably glossy occasion, with much trumpeting of patriotic and liberal values - how Voltaire himself would have adored it all!

Perhaps we really are back in the 18th century, for President Macron took the occasion to announce a brand new national lottery project.  The scheme will features 15-euro "heritage" scratchcards and is intended to finance the restoration of a whole list of national historic buildings. 

Emmanuel Macron‏Verified account @EmmanuelMacron  May 31

Refuser la fatalité de la bêtise et le repli sur soi, telle est l'identité de l'esprit français. Nous le devons à Voltaire et à son combat continu pour la tolérance. Venir chez lui, à Ferney-Voltaire, c'est souligner la force de nos valeurs.

The restoration at Ferney, which is state-owned, has been organised by the Centre des monuments nationaux (CMN) and has cost some 8 million euros.  Much of the work has been necessary and structural - treatment for dry rot, a new roof, new sandstone facing for the facades, a new veranda to showcase the view of Mont Blanc. The garden, which was in a really sorry state, has also been completely renewed.  I was a little worried what would happen to the interior, but the renovation has been very carefully handled and, judging from the photos, the artefacts are pretty much where they always were.  (I was particularly relieved to see the horrible "Apotheosis of Voltaire", so beloved of the great man, has retained its prominent place....)

The photos of the interior are by Marshall B (Jun 2018), on Trip Advisor

Here is also a  nice video of the renovations as they near completion:

"Le château de Voltaire entièrement rénouvelé", TV Léman Bleu, 29.05.18 

http://www.lemanbleu.ch/fr/News/Le-chateau-de-Voltaire-entierement-renove.html


Personally, I am still quite glad that I was able to go to Ferney in 2015 and see the château in its dilapidated (and more or less deserted) state.  Not quite sure why:  maybe it just seemed more like a real house in its rundown condition. Let's hope the new renovations draw in the crowds though - they will certainly need a few more visitors to pay off the bills!

Voltaire wins the lottery

The authorities issued tickets in exchange for Hôtel de Ville rentes, and winning lots were paid in cash and all in such a way that any group of people who had bought all the tickets stood to win a million francs. Voltaire entered into association with numerous company and struck lucky.

Historical Commentary on the Works of the Author of La Henriade (1776)

For collectors of historical trivia, it is a delicious fact that the great Voltaire acquired his fortune, not by inheritance, not by his pen,  but by outsmarting a state lottery.   

A fragment of Voltaire's dressing gown

Huber, Voltaire en déshabille  

A fragment of Voltaire's dressing gown?  Now there's some real trivia......

In December last year the Wren Library at Trinity College Cambridge announced that it had received a bequest of  over 7,500 books from Mary, Duchess of Roxburghe, who had died in 2014 at the age of 99. The collection, which included several important first editions and literary manuscripts, had been amassed by her father, Robert Crewe-Milnes, and her grandfather, the poet and politician Richard Monckton Milnes.  Milnes had been fascinated by the French Revolution and over half the works are in French. Some of the rarest items had been stored in an old blue suitcase referred to by the duchess as the "holy of holies":

"Opening the suitcase was an exciting moment," said Dr Bell [the Wren Librarian]. "It contained some exceptionally rare first editions of Shelley's poems, books inscribed by William Beckford and Oscar Wilde, a pristine first edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and some bizarre curiosities such as a fragment of Voltaire's dressing gown." 

I've struggled to find out any more about the piece of dressing gown.  The 1955 biography of Monckton Milnes by James Pope-Hennessy tells us only that  he owned "a piece of Voltaire's dressing-gown folded into a fine edition of La Pucelle" (as well as such items as Richard Burton's passport to Mecca and the visitors' book from Burns' cottage at Alloway).
https://books.google.co.uk/books?redir_esc=y&id=c5knAQAAMAAJ&dq=Monckton+Milnes+voltaire%27s+dressing+gown+pucelle&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=voltaire+dressing+gown

The fragment has now been carefully mounted.  My friend who saw it and took this photograph for me, commented only that she "thought it would be more woolly"; me too - this evidently isn' t the hefty affair depicted in Huber's pictures.

References

The  Crewe collection, Wren Library Trinity College (links to YouTube video, catalogue and digitised works)
https://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/library/the-crewe-collection/

A portrait of Voltaire's mother

Nicolas Largillière, Portrait of Marie-Marguerite, Madame d'Arouet, c.1700

Seventy years after her death, this  portrait of Madame Arouet hung in Voltaire's bedroom in Ferney - the only image he possessed of a mother he could scarcely remember: it is listed in his inventaire après décès (Besterman,ed. Correspondence and related documents App. D 503).  In 1979 it was included in an exhibition at the Bibliothèque Nationale together with a companion portrait of François Arouet, père.  The catalogue confirms that  "a long family tradition" identified the sitters as the parents of Voltaire, painted by Largillière:  Madame Denis took the portraits (of her grandparents, don't forget) back to Paris and, on her death, they were inherited by Voltaire's great-nephews Dompierre d'Hornoy. The owner in 1979 was identified as the "comte de Dompierre d'Hornoy".  The portrait of Voltaire's mother was subsequently sold by auction on 25th May 1986, and so presumably passed out of the family.  The image is now available commercially as part of the Bridgeman Art Library - no further information is given, apart from the fact that the picture is in a  "private collection".

René Pomeau, who had seen both portraits, was circumspect.  The "presumed" portrait of Voltaire's father shows a young man about town,  a "petit maître",  rather than a serious man of the law. He also commented wisely on the fruitlessness of speculations concerning the resemblance between mother and son, based only on Largillière's (disappointingly non-descript) portrait.  [René Pomeau, D'Arouet à Voltaire 1694-1734 (1985) p. 28 nt 3].

References

Bridgeman Art Library - Nicolas, Largillière:  Portrait de Madame Arouet, mère de Voltaire.
http://www.bridgemanimages.com/fr/asset/370265/largilliere-nicolas-de-1656-1746/marie-marguerite-arouet-nee-d-aumart-c-1700-oil-on-canvas

 Voltaire : un homme, un siècle, [catalogue of an exhibition held at the Bibliothèque nationale, 25 janvier-22 avril 1979], Nos. 4 and 5.
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6538375g/f27.image

Voltaire: Jansenist?

Voltaire : was he influenced by Jansenism? 

René Pomeau has argued persuasively that a preoccupation with religion was a key aspect of Voltaire's psyche from an early age. In the years 1719-1722 he was already voicing his opposition to the "Dieu terrible" of the Jansenists and displayed a precocious anti-clericalism "whose origin escapes us"(La Religion de Voltaire, p.34).  It is hard not to see the negative influence of Armand: at the time of their father's death in 1722 both brothers were nominally still living together under the same paternal roof.  Their quarrels were echoed in the 1721 Epître in which Voltaire maintained that his brother would laugh at his funeral; Voltaire's accompanying note reports that he used to enrage Armand, "an extreme Jansenist",  by defending the Jesuits against him.(Epître XXI, A M. le Maréchal de Villars, 1721)

Pomeau concluded that the family background had created two brothers who were both obsessed with religion - Armand, a Jansenist troubled by doubt, and Voltaire, whose passionate hostility to religion was "un fanatisme retourné " (p.36)  A stark dichotomy between unbelief and absolute faith characterises the Jansenist mindset of the 1720s - Montgeron's spectacular conversion is a case in point.  According to the Jansenist manuscript Notes historiques, Voltaire himself maintained that one must be "either a deist like himself, or a secouriste like his brother (Gazier, p.625).  Much later in his life Jacob Vernet made the same point: Voltaire saw no middle ground between libertinism and religious enthusiasm (See Pomeau, p.36-7)

Armand Arouet, Voltaire's Jansenist brother

 "I  have two fools for sons, one in prose and the other in verse"
Attributed to François Arouet, father of Voltaire: 
 (Duvernet, Vie de Voltaire p.35)

"I used to have a Jansenist brother;  his ferocious manner gave me a distaste for 'the party'"
Letter of Voltaire to the marquis d'Argens, August 1752


Armand, brother of Voltaire

It is a fascinating, if little known, fact that Voltaire's elder brother Armand was a fanatical Jansenist.  Frustratingly, we know very little about him; Voltaire's writings amount to several million words but he is almost entirely silent on the subject of his family. Most of the information available derives from the researches of  Auguste Gazier who in 1906 published an article in the Revue des Deux Mondes entitled  "Le frère de Voltaire".

Theodore Besterman and the politics of Voltaire studies

Voltaire was a great admirer of the "English nation", and that admiration has been amply repaid by the attention of modern British scholars.  In particular, it is at first sight surprising that the massive ongoing enterprise of publishing the new, definitive Complete Works is based not, as one might expect, in France but at the Voltaire Foundation in Oxford.

Jean Huber, Un dîner de philosophes, 1772 ou 1773, Voltaire Foundation, Oxford

The reason for English involvement doesn't really need much explanation - it is the legacy of one energetic and dominant personality, Theodore Besterman.  

Besterman at Les Délices

An Englishman of Polish descent, Besterman was not an academic but had followed an extreme successful career as a writer, researcher and bibliographer.  From the 1950s he devoted himself entirely to Voltaire studies, embarking upon the considerable project of editing Voltaire's letters. To a man of Besterman's mindset the only appropriate setting for such a labour was a residence of the great man himself.  He set his sights on Les Délices, the house in Geneva where Voltaire had lived between 1754 and 1760.


In 1929 the City of Geneva had been called upon to purchase Les Délices in order to safeguard the legacy of Voltaire but had yet to carry out extensive renovations or determine its final use. Besterman proposed to develop a research centre and museum; in return for funding for the necessary works, he agreed to place at the disposal of the municipality his collection of Voltaire-related paintings and works of art, together with his extensive archive of autograph letters and other manuscripts.  The renovations took place between December 1951 and Autumn 1954.The first floor became two apartments with three bathrooms for Mr and Mrs Besterman, and the attic was arranged to accommodate a housekeeper and maid.  The new Institut et Musée Voltaire was solemnly inaugurated on 2nd October 1754.


Over the next decade Besterman published prolifically: the two large volumes of Voltaire’s Notebooks appeared in 1952, the first volume of his magisterial edition of Voltaire’s correspondence in 1953 (it was107 volumes by 1965 when a second, ‘definitive’, edition was begun). His biography of Voltaire appeared in 1962. Besterman admitted his total identification  with his subject:  "For forty years I have been a Voltaire enthusiast, for twenty I have passed all my days in his company; for six I have lived in his house, slept in his room, in his library read his letters, opened his correspondance, explored his most intimate secrets;  I have become, longo intervallo, almost Voltaire himself...."
The biography was admired for its scrupulous scholarship, though reviewers such as Peter Gay felt it lacked sufficient 18th-century context.  Besterman's Voltaire was an urban freethinker; his approach contrasted with that of the leading French expert René Pomeau, whose La Religion de Voltaire (1953) had emphasised Voltaire;s serious engagement with the philosophical preoccupations of his time.

As well as pursuing his own research, Besterman orchestrated a prodigious amount of activity from scholars around the world. The International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies - which today has its secretariat in Oxford at the Voltaire Foundation - .first met in the Château de Coppet outside Geneva in 1963: "It was memorable for the talks, the atmosphere, and the generous organisation including a dinner in the château at Chillon, ending with large sugar ‘cygnes du lac’ and a late-night private steamer back along the lake to Geneva" (Barber, 2010, p.4.) The Society continues to hold four-yearly conferences - though sadly not on so lavish an entertainment budget. There are thirty or so national affiliated societies. La Société Française d'étude du 18e siècle was founded in 1964 but, under the successive presidencies of Jean Guéhenno, Jean Fabre et Yvon Belaval, it was from the first firmly under the aegis of French academia.

In 1971 Besterman came into serious conflict with the city of Geneva, when he attempted to raise funds by the sale at Sotheby's of materials which were considered part of the museum's assets.  The Institut was closed down and a warrant issued for Besterman's arrest on the grounds that he was in possession of stolen papers. Fortunately for him he was attending the ISEC conference in Nancy at the time and, with the tacit collusion of the French government, managed to allude the Genevan authorities.   He now settled permanently in England.

Following Besterman's departure, the  Institut et Musée Voltaire, now simply the Musée Voltaire, became part of the Bibliothèque de Genève.  Its director for the next thirty years was the Rousseau scholar Charles Wirz (1973-2002) who is universally praised for his diplomatic and creative leadership.  The present director is François Jacob, formerly a director of studies at the University of  Franche-Comté. Between 1989 and 1994.  Charles Wirz presided over the renovation of the property in preparation for the tricentenary celebrations.  The library welcomes visiting scholars and the beautiful museum is open to the general public - well worth a visit!

Besterman in Oxford

Returning to England, Besterman lived for a time in St James' but later moved to Northhamptonshire where he acquired the old manor of Thorpe Manderville, a late 18th-century ironstone house. Here he was within easy reach of London, of his printer in Banbury and of the facilities of the University of Oxford.

On 10 November 1976, following Besterman's death, the Voltaire Foundation was created and vested permanently in the University of Oxford, which Besterman named as his residual legatee.  Besterman's books and manuscripts were also transferred to a dedicated "Voltaire Room" in the Taylor Institution (Modern Languages Faculty library). The core mission of the new Foundation was to be the publication of a new Complete Works of Voltaire.  Andrew Brown, Besterman's former secretary, became its first director. There was at first some doubt as to the scholarly standing of the Foundation's publishing enterprise.  According to Haydn Mason, "concerns were allayed" by René Pomeau's agreement to edit the critical edition of Candide for the Complete Works. (It appeared in 1980). In the 1980s and 90s the Foundation produced not only the works of Voltaire but new editions of other Enlightenment thinkers, notably the correspondence of Rousseau.   It also published the four-volume biography Voltaire et son temps, a monumental project directed by René Pomeau.  The Foundation's monograph series Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth century  (now Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment) currently runs to over 160 volumes.

The "Voltaire Room" at the Taylor Institution, Oxford

Andrew Brown at Ferney

In 1998 the Foundation was rocked by a scandal which Voltaire himself would have relished, when its long-time director Andrew Brown was forced to resign under a cloud. What exactly happened has not been made  public.  There were hints of financial mismanagement. According to the official statement Mr Brown face disciplinary charges "relating to the competence of his management of staff" .   He first agreed to take "special leave" then in 1998 resigned altogether. His wife Ulla Thulying who was in charge of editing the Complete Works also departed.

Andrew Brown

Taking a leaf from his mentor's book, Mr Brown then found a Voltaire residence of his own and settled in Ferney-Voltaire close to Voltaire's chateau, which the State was about to purchase.  In May 1999 he founded a new Voltaire organisation, the Société Voltaire, with a brief for "the encouragement, promotion and co-ordination of all studies, research and publications relating to Voltaire". He has since since become actively - and fruitfully - involved with the Association Voltaire à Ferney, the organisation which oversees the heritage of Voltaire at the chateau.  Mr Brown and his wife now also preside over the Centre international d’étude du xviiie siècle which has published a range of 18th-century editions. (This sounds like it has some sort of official status, but I am not sure...)

In response to Mr Brown's new society, in June 2000 the Voltaire Foundation set up the Société des Études Voltairiennes (SEV)  with a virtually identical mission:"to promote, encourage and co-ordinate all studies, research and publications relative to Voltaire". Slightly farcically, both organisations claimed the inspiration of René Pomeau who, shortly before his death in 2000, suggested that a dedicated Voltaire organisation should be set up on French soil.  The SEV had stronger ties with French academia: it is based at the Sorbonne, and has close links with the University of Lyon which hosts its website:  its Revue Voltaire is published by the Presses Universitaires de la Sorbonne (PUPS).

Confusion reigned for a while but, fifteen years on, some sort of modus vivendi has been established between the rival societies and publications. In an interview in 2015 Andrew Brown, who was riding high after his involvement in the discovery of Madame du Châtelet's scientific manuscripts, defended the need for two Voltaire associations; he has buried the hatchet with the Sorbonne, though not yet, it may be inferred, with his former colleagues in Oxford.


The Voltaire Foundation today

At the beginning of the new century the Foundation was reported to be in severe financial difficulties and was desperately casting around for sponsorship.  The new director Nicholas Cronk improved matters by undertaking to finish the Complete Works by 2018 (which means a smart publication schedule of  six volumes per year)  The Foundation has also moved into e-publication as part of the "Electronic Enlightenment" project which was launched in 2008.  I suspect, however, that the long term future remains uncertain.  One problem is that the Foundation's publications, the Electronic Enlightenment included, remain eye-wateringly expensive and beyond the reach of all but the largest university libraries; "ordinary" dix-huitièmistes are lucky to see more than a Google Books snippet.  I do wonder if at least some of this scholarship be made available at a more modest price?  I am sure Voltaire (if not Theodore Besterman) would approve.


List of relevant websites

Voltaire Foundation
Voltaire Foundation website
http://www.voltaire.ox.ac.uk/www_vf/default.ssi

Voltaire Foundation blog
https://voltairefoundation.wordpress.com/ 

Société des études voltairiennes (SEV)
http://voltaire.lire.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/

The Electronic Enlightenment
http://www.e-enlightenment.com/


Besterman and the Voltaire Foundation

Giles Barber "Biography of Theodore Besterman, founder of the Voltaire Foundation", February 2010.[on the Voltaire Foundation Website]
http://www.voltaire.ox.ac.uk/www_vf/about_us/documents/Bbiog4Vfwebsitev3.pdf

Haydn Mason, "A history of the Voltaire Foundation"[on the Voltaire Foundation website]
http://www.voltaire.ox.ac.uk/www_vf/about_us/documents/History-of-VF.pdf

Tristram Besterman, "Theodore Deodatus Nathaniel Besterman: a personal memoir of his step-grandfather" March 2015 [on the Voltaire Foundation website]
http://www.voltaire.ox.ac.uk/www_vf/about_us/documents/Besterman-memoir.pdf

Aurélie Julia, "Voltaire in Oxford: the Voltaire Foundation" (2011)
http://www.voltaire.ox.ac.uk/www_vf/newsEvents/VoltaireFoundation_RevueDeuxMondes_Eng.pdf

Clare Fletcher, "Besterman’s commitment to the Eighteenth Century is still alive"  Voltaire Foundation blog, post dated 4th February 2014.
https://voltairefoundation.wordpress.com/tag/theodore-besterman/

Robert Wokler, "Preparing the definitive edition of the Correspondance de Rousseau", Rousseau, the Age of Enlightenment, and Their Legacies (2012)  p.145-155
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=g2he0PsjadsC&pg=PA145#v=onepage&q&f=false


Les Délices

Bibliothèque de Genève,  Musée Voltaire - présentation
http://institutions.ville-geneve.ch/fr/bibliotheque-de-geneve/connaitre-la-bibliotheque/sites/musee-voltaire/presentation


Later quarrels in Oxford

Julian Coman ,"Oxford exile enlists French in war for Voltaire's legacy" The Telegraph 17/09/2000
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1355782/Oxford-exile-enlists-French-in-war-for-Voltaires-legacy.html

Sir Alan Budd, Letter dated February 2002 concerning the resignation of Andrew Brown [on the Voltaire Foundation website]
http://www.voltaire.ox.ac.uk/www_vf/newsEvents/budd.ssi

Interview with Andrew Brown, 21/08/2014 Gazette des Délices 42 Summer 2014.  .
http://institutions.ville-geneve.ch/wwwextras/bge-gazette/42/grand_salon.html



Andrew Brown at Ferney

Vincent Noce, "'Etat acquiert le château de Voltaire. Ferney a été vendu par Christie's pour 17 millions de francs" Libération, 6 June 1998 .
http://next.liberation.fr/culture/1998/06/06/l-etat-acquiert-le-chateau-de-voltaire-ferney-a-ete-vendu-par-christie-s-pour-17-millions-de-francs_240613

La Société Voltaire.
http://www.societe-voltaire.org/societe.php

Centre international d'étude du XVIIIe siècle de Ferney-Voltaire 

http://c18.net/18/a.php?nom=c_accueil

Association Voltaire à Ferney blog
http://blog.voltaire-a-ferney.org/

Voltaire, vegetarian?

In 2014 a collection of Voltaire's "pensées végétariennes"  were edited by Renan Larue, a professor of French and Italian at the University of Santa Barbara.  According to Professor Larue, vegetarianism is a scattered but persistent theme in Voltaire's writings from the 1760s onwards.  His interest was stimulated by his own dietary concerns and his reading, particularly of the Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry, whose treatise on abstinence from eating meat was translated into French by the the abbé de Burigny  in 1761.  As Professor Larue himself admits, Voltaire's treatment is limited; it was always subsiduary to his battle against religious hypocrisy and his continued, unresolved meditations on the problem of evil in the world.

I admit I was a little sceptical that Voltaire really cared much about animals or entertained "vegetarianism" at all; but Voltaire surprises.  The passages which Professor Larue has assembled give  impressive evidence of his willingness - perhaps unique among 18th-century writers - to empathise with the plight of butchery animals. Although he may not have considered vegetarianism as a serious option for modern men, his defence of historical vegetarians seems to go well beyond the immediate requirement of anti-Christian polemic.

Animals and humans – the starting point.

The premise behind Voltaire's position was his long standing conviction that men and animals are fundamentally alike in nature.  His view harps back to the criticism of Cartesian dualism and early 18th century debates on the nature of  "animal souls". Thus in the Letters from Memmius to Cicero, XVI. (1772): "Animals have the same faculties as us.  Organised like us, they receive life like us and give it in the same way. They initiate movement in the same way and communicate it .They have senses and sensations, ideas, memory".  Animals are not totally without  reason  they possessed it in proportion to the number and acuity of their senses. Some individual  animals -  dog, orangutan or elephant - might be more worthy than imbecilic humans, among whom Voltaire pointedly gives pride of place to "our old gourmands struck down by apoplexy",

The main thrust of this philosophy, of course, was to dethrone men from their privileged place in creation and to challenge the, to Voltaire vacuous, concept of an immortal soul. In late works, however, Voltaire seems increasingly willing to emphasise the corollory, that men should have regard for the experience and welfare of animals.


The suffering of animals

In one of his last major essays, Il faut prendre un parti ["We must take sides"], composed in 1772 or 1773, Voltaire takes the human capacity to empathise with animal suffering as the very starting point for his discussion of the problem of evil: "We have never had any idea of good and evil, save in relation to ourselves.  The sufferings of an animal seem to us evils, because, being animals ourselves, we feel that we should excite compassion if the same were done to us".  The suffering which Voltaire has specifically in mind  is being killed and eaten. He depicts a nature red in tooth and claw.  All creation is caught up in a violent and brutal ecological cycle: "From the smallest insects to the rhinoceros and the elephant the earth is but a vast battlefield, a world of carnage and destruction". "What can be more abominable", concludes Voltaire, "than to feed constantly on corpses?"



Human responsibility for butchery animals 

Elsewhere, Voltaire is more inclined to emphasise human responsibility for the suffering of animals, Again he singles out slaughter and butchery.  Men are blinded by habit from seeing "the awful destiny of the beasts that are intended for our table":  "Children who weep at the death of the first chicken they see killed laugh at the death of the second".  The article "Viande" in Questions sur l'Encyclopédie asks:"What barbarous person would roast a lamb, if that lamb could plead with us in a moving discourse not to be both assassin and cannibal?"

Voltaire seemed genuinely disturbed by the gratuitous cruelty of farming and slaughtering.  He relates, with horrified credulity, that men once ate animals limb by limb whilst they were still living (Traité sur la tolerance, XII note)   Modern practices also excite condemnation:  the hen Dialogue between a capon and a fattened hen relates her miserable fate:
"An accursed servant took me over her knees, stuck a long needle in my  backside, seized my womb twirled it around the needle, ripped it out and gave it to her cat to eat"
"I am peaceable and have never done any wrong; I have even nourished these monsters by giving them my eggs.  Why should I be castrated, blinded, beheaded and roasted?"

The vegetarian option

Is there an alternative to"this frightful habit, which has become part of our nature"? Voltaire is pessimistic about the likelihood of modern men adopting vegetarianism. Predictably, his  most scathing comments are reserved for the prevarication and hypocrisy of Jewish and Christian dietary laws; under guise of abstinence, monks have given up meat only to become "murderers of soles and turbots, if not of partridges and quails."  Genuine vegetarianism has, however, existed.

Voltaire's first example is the faraway civilisation of Indian. His interest in India and the religion of the "Brahmins" dates back to the 1740s, but at this time he had very little information, other than the Jesuit letters from missions, the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses.  He was aware of Indian respect for the cow, but interpreted it as the result of a belief in metempsychosis; the Indians feared they might be harming the souls of  their dead relatives.  It is this position that was  parodied in Zadig. By the 1760s, however, Voltaire  had acquired new source material, including the so-called Ezour Veidam, a manuscript supposedly from the time of the Vedas, which presented the religion of the Brahmins as a simple monotheism, devoid of superstition. In Voltaire's view this included genuine vegetarianism.  Thus in the Princesse de Babylone (1768) the shepherds of the Ganges are said to live in perfect equality and never kill their flocks; it is considered a "horrible crime" to "kill and eat ones fellow creatures". In the Lettres d'Amabed (1768) a Jesuit missionary excites hatred because he is capable of "murdering chickens".  

Voltaire also revisited the longstanding idea of an Ancient Greek vegetarian tradition, which started with  with Orpheus and including Pythagoras and his disciples.  In 1761 the abbé de Burigny sent him a copy of the treatise of Porphyry who henceforth acquired pride of place among Voltaire's vegetarians. At all times, Voltaire asserted, there have been sects prepared to embrace vegetarianism on grounds of religious scruple.

Voltaire vegetarian?

None of this is to say,of course, that Voltaire entertained vegetarianism as a serious personal option.  If he abstained from meat it was for dietary reasons; on occasion he humorously  bemoaned the necessity of following  "the regime of Porphyry" but he never saw it as an ethical choice.  At the time that he wrote his Dialogue of the capon and the hen, the livres de compte at Ferney show that he bought a considerable amount of meat and fish, and often offered fine meats to his guests.  

References

Renan Larue:
https://www.facebook.com/larue.renan/?fref=photo

ed. Voltaire, Pensées végétariennes  Fayard/Mille et une nuits (2014)

"Voltaire et le problème de la souffrance animale" (2010 lecture)
http://ecole-thema.ens-lyon.fr/IMG/pdf/Article_Larue-2.pdf

Renan Larue, "Le végétarisme dans l'oeuvre de Voltaire (1762-1778)"
Dix-huitième siècle, 2010/1 n° 42, p. 19-34
http://bibliodroitsanimaux.free.fr/Renan-Larue-Le-vegetarisme-dans-l-oeuvre-de-Voltaire.pdf

"Voltaire aurait-il signé le manifeste Les animaux ne sont pas des choses?"  Le Devoir:  libre de penser, 22 février 2014
http://www.ledevoir.com/societe/le-devoir-de-philo/400817/ledevoirdephilo-voltaire-aurait-il-signe-le-manifeste-les-animaux-ne-sont-pas-des-choses

See also

Jim Chevallier, Vegetarians in Old Regime France (2009)  16p.
https://www.academia.edu/232131/Vegetarians_in_18th_Century_France


Extract from Il faut prendre un parti "We must take sides"(1772)
 translated by Joseph McCabe in Toleration and other essays:  (London, 1912)
https://archive.org/stream/tolerationother00volt#page/228/mode/2up


X OF THE PRINCIPLE OF ACTION CALLED THE SOUL

We talk incessantly of "the soul", though we have not the least idea of the meaning of it.....We may be quite sure that there would be just as much reason to grant the snail a hidden being called a "free soul" as to grant it to a man.  The snail has a will, desires, tastes, sensations, ideas and memory.  It wishes to move towards the material of its food or the object of its love.  It remembers it, has an idea of it, advances towads it as quickly as it can;  it knows pleasure and pain. Yet you are not terrified when you are told that the animal has not a spiritual soul; that God has bestowed on it these gifts for a little time; that he who moves the stars moves also the insect.  But when it comes to man you change your mind.....(p.222-3)



XV OF EVIL AND,  IN THE FIRST PLACE, THE DESTRUCTION OF BEASTS

We have never had any idea of good and evil, save in relation to ourselves.  The sufferings of an animal seem to us evils, because, being animals ourselves, we feel that we should excite compassion if the same were done to us.  We should have the same feeling for a tree if we were told that it suffered torment when it was cut;  and for a stone if we learned that it suffers when it is dressed.  But we should pity the tree and the stone much less than the animal, because they are less like us.  Indeed, we soon cease to be touched by the awful destiny of the beasts that are intended for our table.  Children who weep at the death of the first chicken they see killed laugh at the death of the second.
It is only too sure that the disgusting carnage of our butcheries and kitchens does not seem to us an evil.  On the contrary, we regard this horror, pestilential as it often is, as a blessing of the Lord;  and we still have prayers in which we thank him for these murders.  Yet what can be more abominable than to feed constantly on corpses?

Not only do we spend our lives in killing, and devouring what we have killed, but all the animals slaughter each other;  they are impelled to do so by an invincible instinct.  From the smallest insects to the rhinoceros and the elephant, the earth is but a vast battlefield, a world of carnage and destruction.  There is no animal that has not its prey, and that, to capture it, does not employ some means equivalent to the ruse and rage with which the detestable spider entraps and devours the innocent fly.  A flock of sheep devours in an hour, as it crops the grass, more insects than there are men on the earth.

What is still more cruel is that in this horrible scene of reiterated murder we perceive an evident design to perpetuate all species by means of the bloody corpses of their mutual enemies.  The victims do not expire until nature has carefully provided for new representatives of the species.  Everything is born again to be murdered.

Yet I observe no moralist among us, nor any of our fluent preachers or boasters, who has ever re-flected in the least on this frightful habit, which has become part of our nature.  We have to go back to the pious Porphyry and the sympathetic Pythagoreans to find those who would shame us for our bloody gluttony; or we must travel to the land of the Brahmans.  Our monks, the caprice of whose founders has bade them renounce the flesh, are murderers of soles and turbots, if not of partridges and quails.  Neither among the monks, nor in the Council of Trent, nor in the assemblies of the clergy, nor in our academies, has this universal butchery ever been pronounced an evil.  There has been no more thought given to it in the councils of the clergy than in our public-houses.

Hence the great being is justified of these butcheries in our eyes; or, indeed, we are his accomplices.

Voltaire spares a thought for the poultry! Dialogue du Chapon et de la Poularde

Anne Vallayer-Coster, Still life: cock and hen. c.1787.  Musée de Tessé. LeMans.

Another one for the festive season -  Voltaire's dialogue of 1763 between a capon and a fattened hen.  In the Dialogue the two birds confide to one another that they have both been neutered; the capon informs his naive companion that they will soon be killed,  cooked and eaten.  In the end the sous-chef arrives and the hapless birds say their farewells. Their laments provide Voltaire with a convenient pretext to denounce the cruelty of human beings, their injustices and hypocrisies.

DIALOGUE BETWEEN A CAPON AND A FATTENED HEN (1762)

THE CAPON:  Dear God, my sweet Hen, why are you so miserable?

THE HEN: My dear friend, you ought to ask instead why I am not more miserable!  An accursed servant took me over her knees, stuck a long needle into my backside, seized my womb,  twirled it around the needle, ripped it out and gave it to her cat to eat.  Now I cannot receive the favours of the Cockerel, nor lay any eggs.

THE CAPON: Alas! my good Hen, I have lost more than you.  The operation they did on me was doubly cruel.  Neither you nor I will find consolation any more in this world: we have been made into a poularde and, in my case, a capon.  The only idea that sweetens my deplorable state, is that I heard two Italian abbés talking near my hen-house  who had suffered the same outrage so that they could sing in a clearer voice before the pope.  They said that men had begun by circumcising their kind and finished up by castrating them; they cursed their fate, and the human race.

THE HEN: Are they going to eat us?  The monsters!

It is their custom.  They put us in prison for several days, force us to swallow a pâté of a secret recipe, gouge out our eyes so that we are not distracted;  finally, when the fete day arrives, they pull out our feathers, cut our throats and roast us.  They bring us in before them on a large silver platter;  each one says what he thinks of us; they give our funeral oration: one says that we taste of hazelnut, another notes our succulent flesh; they praise our thighs, our wings, our posterior, and that's our time in this world finished for good.


THE HEN: What abominable wretches!  I am ready to faint. What!  Snatch out my eyes!  Cut my throat!  I'm going to be roasted and eaten! Do these scoundrels have no remorse?

THE CAPON:  No, my friend.  The two abbés that I told you about said that men never feel remorse about things that they are accustomed to do by habit.

THE HEN: What a detestable breed!  I bet they  continue to laugh and tell amusing stories as they eat us, as though nothing has happened.

La cuisine bourgeoise by Jean-Baptiste Lallemand.

THE CAPON: You've guessed it.  But you should know, for your consolation (if such is possible), that these animals - who are bipeds like us, and are very inferior to us because they lack feathers - have often treated their own kind just as badly.

My two abbés said that the Greek Christian emperors never failed to gouge out the eyes of their brothers and cousins.  In the country where we are now, there was a certain Débonnaire who put out the eyes of his nephew Bernard.  As to roasting each other, nothing is more common among this species.   My two abbés said that more than twenty thousand men had been roasted for opinions which it would be difficult for a capon to explain, and which I care very little about.

THE HEN: So are they roasted to be eaten?

THE CAPON: I can't tell you that for certain; but I remember clearly having heard that there were countries - among them that of the Jews - where men have sometimes eaten one another.

THE HEN: Let's leave it at that.  It is proper that the representatives of such a perverse species should devour one another, and that the earth should be purged of that race.  But what about me?  I am peaceable and have never done any wrong; I have even nourished these monsters by giving them my eggs.  Why should I be castrated, blinded, beheaded and roasted?!  Do they treat us like that in the rest of the world?

THE CAPON: The two abbés say no.  They confirm that in a country called India, which is much larger, more beautiful and fertile than ours, men have had for thousands of years a sacred law which forbids them to eat us.  A certain Pythagoras, who traveled among these just peoples, brought this humane law back to Europe where it was followed by his disciples.  The good abbés read Porphyry the Pythagorian, who wrote a fine book against meat-eating.

Oh great man!  Oh divine Porphyry!  With wisdom, force and tender respect for the Divinity, he proved that we are the allies and relatives of men. God has given us the same organs, the same feelings, the same memory, the same seed of understanding, developed in us to a point determined by eternal laws.  In short, my dear Hen, it is an outrage against God to say that we have senses but do not feel and a brain but do not think. These imaginings, of a fool named Descartes, are the height of ridiculousness and an empty excuse for barbarity.

Thus the greatest philosophers of Antiquity never had us spit-roasted. They tried to learn our language and to understand our behaviour, which is so superior to that of the human race.  We were safe with them as in a Golden Age.  Sages do not kill animals, said Porphyry; it is only barbarians and priests that kill and eat them.  He wrote his admirable book to convert one of his disciples who had become a Christian through gluttony.

THE HEN: Well, then. Do they put up altars to this great man who taught virtue to the human race, and saved the lives of animals?

THE CAPON: No. He is regarded with horror by Christians who eat us, and who still detest his memory today; they say that he was impious, that his virtues were false, because he was a pagan.

THE HEN:  Gourmandise creates terrible prejudices.  The other day I hear a man addressing other men in the big building near our hen-house.  He announced that "God has made a pact with us and with those other animals called men; that God has forbidden them to eat our blood and flesh."  How can they reconcile this prohibition with devouring our boiled and roasted limbs?  When they cut our throats, it is impossible to leave no blood in our veins; this blood mingles with our flesh; they are evidently disobeying God by eating us.  Besides isn't it a sacrilege to kill and devour people with whom God has made a pact? It would be a strange agreement where the only clause is to deliver us to death.   Either the Creator did not made a pact with us, or it is a crime to kill and cook us;  there is no middle ground.

THE CAPON: That isn't the only contradiction to be found among these monsters, our eternal enemies.   They have long been reproached because they cannot agree among themselves on anything.  They make laws only to violate them; and what is worse they violate them in conscience.  They have invented a hundred subterfuges, a hundred sophisms, to justify their transgressions.  They use reason only to justify injustice and words only to disguise their thoughts. Consider:  in the little country where we live, it is forbidden to eat us on two days of the week. They have found a way to evade this law. Indeed, this law, which seems favourable to you, is actually very barbarous;  it requires that on these days they eat instead the inhabitants of the water; they go and find their victims in the depths of seas and rivers.  They consume creatures where a single fillet often costs more than a hundred capons;  they call this fasting, doing penance.  In short, I don't believe it would be possible to imagine a species more ridiculous and at the same time more abominable, extravagant and bloodthirsty.

Colour plate from Jules Gouffé, Livre de cuisine (1867)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gouffe-Poularde_a_la_Godard.jpg

THE HEN:  Oh, my God!  Can't you see  - the villainous sous-chef is about to arrive with his great knife?

THE CAPON: We are done for, my Friend, our final hour has come! Let us commend our souls to God.

THE HEN:  I hope  I give the rogue who eats me an indigestion so bad that he wretches. But little people always try to avenge themselves on the powerful with useless wishes and the powerful just laugh at them.

THE CAPON:   Agh! I am being seized by the neck.  Let us forgive our enemies

THE HEN:  I am no more.  They have grabbed me, they are carrying me off.

THE CAPON:  Goodbye, for all eternity, my dear little Hen.


 References 

In France the dialogue is on the Baccalaureate syllabus; there are many different versions in French on the internet and a nice critical edition: Voltaire, Dialogue du chapon et de la poularde, Manucius, 2014, 9782845784352, collection «Littéra».  No English versions though. There is a discussion of the dialogue in Carlo Ginzburg, Threads and traces: true, false, fictive (2010) p.109-111. 
https://www.researchgate.net/file.PostFileLoader.html?id=5628c8855e9d978c9f8b45d6&assetKey=AS%3A287317957857287%401445513347743