Anglomania (7 page)

A
T SOME POINT
in 1728 Voltaire suddenly decided to leave England. He had had enough. He was depressed again. The circumstances of his departure are as vague as the timing, but there had been problems. His
friend and benefactor, Lord Peterborough, remarked in November 1728 that Voltaire “has taken his leave of us, as of a foolish people who believe in God and trust in ministers.” Voltaire himself later wrote that he liked English books better than Englishmen. The
London Journal
, a Whig paper, hinted at bad behavior: Voltaire had enriched himself through shady means. He was no longer welcome in the homes of those noblemen and gentlemen who had received him so warmly at first. Voltaire had “left England full of resentment.”

The rumor—spread, it should be said, by people who did not like Voltaire—was as follows. Lord Peterborough had asked Voltaire to write a book and paid him a considerable sum to have it published. Most of the money stuck to Voltaire’s hands; almost nothing was received by the publisher. Naturally, the publisher complained to Peterborough, who, furious at Voltaire’s bad faith, accosted the writer in a park and drew his sword, crying, “I will kill the villain.” Voltaire ran for his life and instantly made for the Continent, apparently without his hat. M. de Saint-Hyacinthe, the Frenchman who related the story, was not sure whether Voltaire “strolled into the garden without [his hat], or that it fell in his flight.”

Back in France, however, Voltaire remained a committed Anglophile. It surely helped that
Letters
, published in London in 1733, was a huge success. The first English edition sold out in three weeks, and fifteen more would appear before 1778. The French edition, entitled
Lettres philosophiques
, soon followed, but the church authorities complained that the book was anti-clerical, which it was, and the Parlement decreed that it was also “contrary to good morals and the respect due to the ruling powers.” On June 10, 1734, Voltaire’s ode to England was publicly torn up and burned in Paris by the hangman. The bookseller survived but was sent to the Bastille. Voltaire had to lie low in Lorraine. The clandestine edition, published in Rouen, continued to sell in large numbers. Before Voltaire, such names as Addison, Pope, and even Shakespeare were hardly known in France. Soon they became all the rage, along with Samuel Richardson’s romances, horse racing, gardening, frockcoats, and pudding. The rage was known as
anglomanie
.

Before Anglomania reached its first frothy crest in the 1760s, Voltaire retired to Cirey, in Champagne, with his mistress, Mme. Emilie
du Châtelet, the wife of the marquis du Châtelet. There, in “Cirey-shire,” they dedicated themselves to writing and to scientific enquiry. It must have been a peculiar household. The “divine Emilie,” described by a bitchy contemporary as “a colossus in all her proportions,” with “a skin like a nutmeg grater,” was converted to Anglomania by Voltaire. Together they would discuss the ideas of “Mr Loke” and “Sir Newton,” and she wrote a commentary on Newton’s
Principia Mathematica
. The marquis du Châtelet was occasionally in attendance, but he had no interest in English thinking and remained discreetly in the background. Voltaire and Emilie often quarreled, sometimes in front of the guests. They almost invariably did so in English. And when they made up, they did that in English as well.

If Voltaire was responsible for the philosophical underpinnings of French Anglomania, he could not be held responsible for its peculiar excesses. Voltaire, as well as Montesquieu, had popularized English letters and philosophy: Newtonian science, British law, Deism, and even Freemasonry. Montesquieu’s book
The Spirit of the Laws
was a best-seller in France. It was read by scholars and lawyers, but by the fashionable Anglomanes too. The intellectual vogue for England gave some people the idea that all Englishmen were deep thinkers. When one elderly English nobleman, known more for his appetite than his intellect, fell asleep after a copious dinner in Paris, his French hostess whispered in awe: “Quiet. He’s thinking.” But what had started as an intellectual fashion—
anglomanie
was also known as
philosophisme
—became a matter of style, in dress, sports, and entertainment. Women, especially, were avid readers of English romances, and they sported high bonnets, which bore such romantic names as “stifled sighs” and “bitter complaints.” The craze for English millinery included hats trimmed with fruits and vegetables. The French widow of a British admiral wore a hat trimmed with gauze, representing ships on a stormy sea.

Even English food was fashionable. Roast beef and puddings were served at the best Parisian dinner parties. The maréchale de Villars once organized a party at home for the duchess of Bedford. Halfway through the main course of roast beef, she threw up her hands in a panic and said (in English, of course): “Oh, Jesus! They have forgot! Yet I bespoke them, and I am sure they are ready. You English have hot
rolls!” And in due course an enormous silver bowl appeared, filled with hot rolls swimming in melted butter, like ducks in a bathtub.

The English taste in garden-parks was widely imitated, and not just in France. Continental travelers in England much admired the Chinese pagodas and other picturesque additions to the designed English landscape. All over France, formal French gardens were transformed into English-style parks with artificial ruins, Gothic follies, romantic glades, hermitages, grottoes, and aviaries filled with rare and exotic birds. Montesquieu himself liked to take his English guests for a stroll through his
jardin anglais
, making a point of jumping over fences, for that, he thought, was the way of hearty English gentlemen.

Not all visitors were impressed by French versions of the English taste. A Mrs. Cradock saw a park in Toulouse that had an artificial mountain with a cascade painted on wood. On top of the mountain was a windmill, whence the figure of a woman emerged to meet a miller who was just arriving with a donkey laden with sacks. At the bottom of the mill was a cottage with a dovecote on the roof filled with pigeons. Outside the cottage were figurines of an old man, a young man, a dog, and a pig. The young man was offering grass to three sheep. Mrs. Cradock thought the whole thing was “absolutely ridiculous.”

The English style, not unlike the Anglo-American cultural invasion of the 1960s, did loosen things up. The politics may have been superficial, or even beside the point, but
anglomanie
was socially liberating. It became fashionable for young nobles to go out drinking with their coachmen. Dress became much less formal. One young Anglomane, M. Lauraguais, observed to an English lady that a “strange and sudden revolution has happened.” The
petits-mâitres
, who had been “dressed, perfumed and painted like dolls,” now sported jockey boots and riding coats (
la redingote
) and rode their horses to “le Vauxhall” on the Champs-Elysées. They swore and they gambled like London bucks; they played whist and they were addicted to the races.

Voltaire was actually rather irritated by
anglomanie
, especially when the French developed a taste for Shakespeare and romantic novels. Corneille, not Shakespeare, was in his view the universal European genius. In 1761, he prepared the complete works of Corneille and solicited subscriptions from nobles, notables, and monarchs all over Europe, including England. For Corneille, he said, “belongs to every
nation,” whereas “English plays are like English puddings: nobody has any taste for them but themselves.” This nonsense was said in a spirit of pique. Voltaire published a manifesto in that same year, entitled
Appeal to All the Nations of Europe
, denouncing the Shakespeare cult. He was annoyed by the sight of modish vulgarians clumping on his turf. For had not he, Voltaire, been the first to introduce English culture in France, including the wretched Shakespeare? And by holding up Corneille as the universal genius, he hoped to lay claim to be his successor. The best of England, in Voltaire’s opinion, was the enlightened, universal, skeptical rationalism of English thinkers. Shakespeare’s entertainments, however, seemed to him to stand for the opposite. They were not only local but extreme and irrational.

Still, since Voltaire was the most famous Anglomane in France, he was blamed for the fashion he had done so much to promote. An Anglophobic reaction was inevitable. Anglophobia has always been more common in France than the occasional gusts of enthusiasm for things British or American. The nature of the Anglophobic attacks on Voltaire helps to bring not only his particular form of Anglophilia into sharper focus but also Anglophilia after his time. The battle lines between Anglophiles and Anglophobes (or pro- and anti-Americans) were already clearly drawn before the French Revolution. The arguments revolve around the idea of liberalism—not democracy, but liberalism—in economics and in politics.

One of the more amusing attacks on Voltaire and French Anglomania was a booklet entitled
Préservatif contre l’anglomanie
(
Antidote to Anglomania
), written in 1757 by H. L. Fougeret de Monbron. Monbron begins conventionally enough by citing the superiority of French culture: French tapestries, French cuisine, French jewels, French theater, and so forth. English culture, on the other hand, is shallow, gross, and debauched. Voltaire might well have agreed. Monbron then makes an observation common to nativists everywhere: talent can grow only on native ground; transplanted, it will degenerate like a seed that cannot bear fruit in alien soil. I don’t know what Voltaire would have made of this. It didn’t fit his coconut theory, to be sure, but Voltaire was talking about politics, not culture.

It was of course about politics and society, not the arts, that Monbron and Voltaire were most at odds. Voltaire admired British merchants
and their status in society. Monbron had utter contempt for those “arrogant, insular people” who, “like the Dutch, are nothing but a bunch of shopkeepers.” All they were capable of, in Monbron’s view, was calculating the price of their goods, and making sure they got it.

And what was this vaunted British liberty anyway? It was, according to Monbron, something that existed only for the mob. It gave license to insult one’s betters, to behave grossly, to abuse foreigners, especially Frenchmen, and to stoop to the level of the lowest rabble. If that was liberty, surely it was better for decent people to live under a peaceful yoke? Peace, order, and some idea of decent people were Monbron’s main preoccupations. “Popular British government” meant disorder, indecency, strife. A government divided in two chambers, filled with venal politicians looking out for their own interests, was a recipe for trouble and corruption. England, in short, was a barbarous place where “the excrement of humanity has so many privileges, and decent people have so few.” There were, in Monbron’s view, only two positive things to report about the barbarous English: “They have excellent horses and very fine dogs.”

Such opinions were typical of a conservative chauvinist, defending the order of an absolute monarchy. And Monbron had a point: British politicians during the Augustan age were often venal and self-interested. But this was hardly a reason to indict the entire system of government. Monbron’s tract was in fact but a small antidote to French Anglomania. He was not a major figure. The ancien régime he tried to defend did not last much longer anyway. Monbron’s arguments are still worth rehearsing, nonetheless, for they are remarkably like modern antipathies against the greedy, perfidious “Anglo-Saxons,” particularly the Americans. The mob rule of democracy, the arrogance of imperialist merchants, the shallowness of English-speaking culture: these images still have a familiar ring.

There was another strand of Anglophobia that was more sophisticated and came from the Left. The argument here was that Britain was not free and certainly not egalitarian enough. The journalist Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguet, for example, attacked British politicians for robbing the people of their money to enrich the throne and sacrificing the rights and liberties of the nation to enrich themselves. He wrote this in 1775. Five years later, a two-year spell in the Bastille—for criticizing
a French duke—softened his views somewhat. “The Bastille,” he declared, “is an excellent telescope through which to appreciate Britain and its laws.”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau often visited England, where he was well received (and his books widely read), even though his behavior was often appalling. He argued against the English constitution on principle. The division of government powers, in his view, divided the will of the people. It was an illusion to think that an elected government guaranteed liberty. A section of English society had the right to vote for its own despots, that was all. The English, in Rousseau’s opinion, had to be stupid to think they were free. A mixed government, in any case, stood in the way of radical solutions; it was nothing but a remnant of feudal institutions.

Then there was Jean-Paul Marat, famous for being stabbed to death while sitting in his medicinal bath. Marat had worked in London as a doctor in the 1770s. He advised the National Assembly in 1789 against imitating British institutions, because they were controlled by the monarchy. A report from the National Assembly also attacked the House of Lords, a perfidious institution “where the domination of clerics and aristocratic tyranny united to oppress the nation.” Like Voltaire’s Anglomania, these views offer a caricature, shared by British radicals such as John Wilkes, whose face, by the way, appeared on the handkerchiefs of fashionable Parisian ladies—the so-called
mouchoirs à la Wilkes
.

Between them, however, the radicals on the left and the reactionary monarchists on the right ended up squashing the liberals and freethinkers in the middle, the ones who favored a British-style mixture of monarchic, aristocratic, and parliamentary rule. Voltaire was such a man. His clandestine best-seller about England has been described as “the first bomb thrown at the
ancien régime
.” But in fact he was never a political extremist. He was radically in favor of free speech and against the clergy. But it was precisely the moderation of English politics after the Glorious Revolution that appealed to Voltaire and the Anglophiles who followed him. Unlike his radical critics, Voltaire didn’t confuse liberty with egalitarianism. He wrote: “All the citizens of a state cannot be equally powerful, but they may be equally free.” This implied an acceptance of class distinctions. Montesquieu expressed the typical Anglophie
view most succinctly when he compared England to the Dutch Republic. The liberty of London, he said, was the liberty of gentlemen, while that of the Dutch was the liberty of the mob.