Anglomania (6 page)

Voltaire was in fact objecting to the result of the very liberties, commercial as well as social, that he professed to admire. Like many admirers of the United States today, Voltaire was more in love with the idea of freedom and commercial competition than with its cruder manifestations. What goes for the theater (or American movies) applies to the press as well. A Swiss traveler in England named de Saus-sure remarked in 1727 how the English were “great newsmongers.” He found “nothing more entertaining” than the sight and sound of English workmen in the morning “discussing politics and topics of interest concerning royalty.”

The British press is still relatively free, but for sheer crassness and vulgarity there is nothing in Europe to match the British tabloids. It
is indeed the taste of the mob at Bear-garden, or whatever its modern equivalent would be—the nastier sections of video rental stores perhaps. Fastidious French or Germans or Dutch look at the British tabloids with horror. European politicians and bureaucrats—“
UP YOURS, DELORS
!”—are easily offended by them. The mixture of prurience, hypocrisy, and xenophobia is not a pretty one. The humor is that of the seaside postcard turned vicious. But Voltaire recognized the link with his idea of England: “ ’Tis great pity that your nation is overrun with such prodigious numbers of scandal and scurrilities! However one ought to look upon them as the bad fruits of a very good tree called liberty.”

He wrote this in 1749 to his friend Sir Everard Fawkener, a silk merchant with a taste for antique coins. Voltaire worked on his English while staying at Fawkener’s house in Wandsworth. No doubt Fawkener, a studious bachelor with a deep knowledge of the classics, was soothing company. And Wandsworth, still a village then, was a good place for Voltaire to concentrate on his studies. But there was something else. Fawkener’s class, and not the aristocracy, conformed most closely to Voltaire’s ideal of England. After his return to France, he was fond of repeating to English (and Scottish) visitors, with increasing frequency as he got older, that England was like a hogshead of beer: froth at the top, dregs at the bottom, the middle excellent.

Voltaire was interested in business. He approved of trade. He was good at making money himself. The idea of free trade was crucial to his Anglophilia. A visit to the Royal Exchange in London elicited a tribute to the business of making money that makes Voltaire sound like a nineteenth-century liberal, or a twentieth-century Thatcherite. The Royal Exchange, he wrote in
Letters concerning the English Nation
, was a “place more venerable than many courts of justice, where the representatives of all nations meet for the benefit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian transact together as tho’ they all profess’d the same religion, and give the name of Infidel to none but bankrupts.” In the marketplace, men of every creed have to work together in mutual trust. Then, after business is done, this man “is baptiz’d in a great tub,” and that man “has his son’s foreskin cut off,” while yet others “retire to their churches, and there wait for the inspiration of heaven with their hats on.” This is shrewd and funny enough, but then comes the most often quoted paragraph: “If one religion
only were allowed in England, the government would very possibly become arbitrary; if there were but two, the people would cut each other’s throats; but as there are such a multitude, they all live happy and in peace.”

This was a little too ideal to be true. How happy were, say, the Roman Catholics to be deprived of government jobs and the right to vote? Still, Voltaire’s admiration for the marketplace put him firmly in the liberal Anglo-Saxon tradition. This included the marketplace for religious creeds. He watched Quakers babbling and quaking with the same fascination as a European watching TV evangelists in the United States today. Trade, he wrote in
Letters
, not only enriched the citizens in England, but it contributed to their freedom, and this freedom extended their commerce, which was the source of Britain’s glory. Coming from a nation whose economy still depended largely on patronage, and where trade was treated with disdain, Voltaire was impressed by a country where merchants compared themselves to the citizens of Rome and even aristocrats took an active part in trade.

This, too, was an exaggeration: there was plenty of snobbery about trade in Britain too, and aristocratic patronage was still of huge importance. But the idea of the nation of traders and shopkeepers was not entirely beside the point. Voltaire saw how the landowning class was enriching itself by dabbling in the marketplace. The fact—highly unusual in Europe—that aristocratic titles were inherited by eldest sons, while the younger ones went into business, meant that lofty disdain for commerce coexisted with active participation in it. Not just that, but traders often received official honors. Fawkener was more than a shopkeeper. Among other things he became British ambassador to Constantinople (the source of his silk trade) and private secretary to the duke of Cumberland, whom he accompanied in 1746 to Culloden Moor, where he watched the Jacobite rebellion end in a bloody defeat.

It was nonetheless shockingly progressive of Voltaire—for a Frenchman, that is—to dedicate his play
Zaïre
in 1732 to “Mr Fawkener, English merchant.” Voltaire wrote: “You are an Englishman, my dear friend, and I was born in France; but lovers of the arts are fellow-citizens … At the same time I rejoice in the opportunity of telling my own country in what light men of business are regarded in yours, and in what esteem England can hold a calling which makes the greatness of the State.” No French author had done such a thing before. The
earlier dedication of
La Henriade
to Queen Caroline was more conventional, though suffused with Enlightenment sentiments: “
YOUR MAJESTY
will find in this Book, bold impartial truths, Morality unstained with Superstition, a Spirit of Liberty, equally abhorrent of Rebellion and of Tyranny, the Rights of Kings always asserted, and those of Mankind never laid aside.”

The shift from monarch to merchant was indicative of a general shift from official patronage to the marketplace. Voltaire believed in a Republic of Letters, where lovers of the arts were fellow citizens, or indeed fellow aristocrats of the mind. But he also believed in the writer as a businessman. He was unimpressed by British amateurism. When William Congreve, whom Voltaire admired, told him he thought of himself as a gentleman, whose plays were mere trifles, Voltaire was offended. If it hadn’t been for the plays, he thought, he never would have bothered to visit Congreve. Even though he solicited, and certainly accepted, support from Frederick of Prussia, among other noble patrons, Voltaire aspired to be what we would call a public intellectual, independent of official patronage. He thought the freedom of England would give him that chance. It is an arresting notion: a French thinker coming to England to become a successful intellectual. But if we think of the many Europeans in the twentieth century who went to America for just that reason, it is perhaps less strange.

V
OLTAIRE
’
S
L
ETTERS CONCERNING
the English Nation
, the outstanding product of his time spent in England, was written in English for the British market. It is a most unusual book, for which Voltaire had invented a new genre. Unlike the authors of the kind of travel book, popular in his day, who concentrated on famous sites and exotic descriptions, Voltaire approached his subject as an intellectual traveler. The book is a journey of ideas. Voltaire made no effort to describe what England looked like; he was concerned with what Englishmen thought. Because of this, his actual life in England remains obscure. We know he met Swift, visited the theater, dined with Lord Chesterfield, met two kings (George I and II), was accused of being a spy, attended Quaker meetings, wrote a play (
Brutus
) comparing English
liberty to French tyranny, and made love to Lord Hervey’s wife (and possibly Lord Hervey himself). We know little more.

The longest sections in the book are about the ideas of Newton and Locke. Wielding the empiricism of the English thinkers and his own rather heavy irony as his bludgeon, Voltaire hammers Descartes, especially his notion of innate ideas: “Descartes … maintains that the Soul is the same Thing with Thought, and Mr. Locke has given a pretty good Proof of the contrary.” He contrasts French dogmatism with the skepticism of “English thinking,” which affirms “nothing but what it conceives clearly …” It was Voltaire who popularized the anecdote of Isaac Newton’s apple and his theory of gravity. He had heard the story from Newton’s niece and was terribly impressed with this example of empirical thinking. The way they thought is what Voltaire liked best about the English; the way they ate or played had little appeal. The English, he liked to say, knew how to think, while the French knew how to please.

But it was not just on the level of abstract ideas that Voltaire praised English thinkers. He compared their position in society favorably to that of writers (such as himself, of course) in France. Voltaire was in London on the day of Newton’s state funeral in 1727 and observed how the body was borne to Westminster Abbey at night, by torchlight, on a state bed, followed by a procession led by the lord chancellor and ministers of the crown. Possibly with a hint of envy, Voltaire wrote: “His countrymen honour’d him in his Life-Time, and interr’d him as tho’ he had been a King who had made his People happy.”

It was a constant theme in Voltaire’s writing about England: the superior treatment of writers and artists, in comparison to France, where great writers could be thrashed by brainless nobles with impunity. English thinkers not only enjoyed the “peculiar Felicity” to “be born in a Country of Liberty” in an age when “Reason alone was cultivated,” but they were lionized too. He was moved to see statues erected to writers and scientists in Westminster Abbey. He was sure these monuments inspired Englishmen to achieve greatness. Voltaire wanted to be more than a visitor in England; he wanted to be an English writer, for the English “generally think, and Learning is held in greater Honour among them than in our Country; an Advantage that results naturally from the Form of their Government.”

What was the form of government that Voltaire, and other French
philosophes
, so admired? It was based, in theory at least, on equality before the law and on the separation of legislative and executive powers. The English, Voltaire thought, were the only people on earth who had limited the power of kings by resisting them. Under the English form of government, he said, the monarch had all the power to do good but was restrained from doing evil. The nobles were great without being insolent, and most important of all, “the people share in the government without confusion.”

As usual, he painted a very rosy picture. In fact only a small number of people shared in the government. And the nobles, who did, could be very insolent indeed. Montesquieu, in his enthusiastic description of English government, was more cautious. All he knew was that liberty was established in English laws. Whether it was actually enjoyed by the English people was not for him to say. Still, Voltaire was not talking about universal suffrage; nobody was at the time. He was only referring to a system that protected the people from despotism. What Voltaire did not endorse was the popular notion that English liberties were ancient, or bred by nature in English blood and soil. There is nothing in his writing about King Alfred and ancient rights. He admitted that there had been parliaments before and after William the Conqueror, but these had been composed of “ecclesiastical tyrants” and “titled plunderers.” The idea that these men should have been the guardians of public liberty and happiness was, in Voltaire’s view, absurd.

Voltaire was not impressed by the Magna Carta either: “This great Charter which is consider’d as the sacred origin of the British liberties, shews in it self how little Liberty was known.” For there was no mention of the House of Commons in the charter, only of the freemen of England, “a melancholy Proof that some were not so.” But the important point is that the English people had fought for their freedom “and waded through seas of blood to drown the Idol of arbitrary Power.” Other nations had waded through much blood too, but unfortunately “the blood they split in the defence of their Liberties, only enslaved them the more.”

For a universalist and a man of the Enlightenment this posed a vexing problem, which continues to exercise us more than ever. Can political arrangements that guarantee liberties in one country do the
same in another? This is, of course, the question of Voltaire’s coconuts. Those who tend to take an organic view of nations, as communities that grow naturally, according to the conditions of climate, blood, and soil, are skeptical. Montesquieu, despite his belief in universal values, was a skeptic in this regard. He believed that English legal and political institutions were the results of peculiar geographical and climatic conditions. The eighteenth-century German thinker Johann Gottfried von Herder is the most famous exponent of the organic view. He likened national cultures to flowers and trees that cannot be transplanted. Herder was a ferocious critic of Voltaire’s view that there were timeless, universal models of the rational society, exemplified by late republican Rome or eighteenth-century Britain, which would be adopted everywhere, if only men were not such fools.

Voltaire did not deny the existence of national character. Indeed he had some arresting views on the difference between the “rugged” character of the English and the more feline disposition of the Catholic French. Many a king and queen were killed by the rugged English, he said, in the field and on the scaffold, but never by poison. This method was used only in countries under priestly domination. But this was really a matter of style. It did not mean that English liberties were a unique extension of the English character. A tradition of “obstinate” individualism helped, to be sure. But in the end liberties were the product of reason, and reason was universal. The love of liberty, he wrote, “appears to have advanced, and to have characterized the English, in proportion as they have advanced in knowledge and in wealth.” This is a common position, but it is open to doubt. Knowledge and wealth don’t invariably lead to liberty, even though liberty tends to increase both. But Voltaire was surely right about this: “To be free is to be dependent only on the laws.” The English love the laws “as fathers love their children, because they are, or at least, think themselves, the framers of them.” That is what Voltaire meant by his coconut tree: If it bears fruit in England, why then, let’s plant it in France!