Books: The Great Gadfly

THE AGE OF VOLTAIRE by Will & Ariel Durant. 898 pages. Simon & Schusfer. $12.

“What industry, loquacity, pertinacity! He has something to say on nearly everything, and almost always something of still-living interest. There are here many bits of frivolity, triviality, or superficiality … but no man can be wise through a thousand pages . . .”

Historians Will Durant, 79, and his wife Ariel, 67, are commenting on Voltaire, but this quote could also serve as a fair estimate of the Durants’ own achievement in this, the ninth and penultimate volume of their Story of Civilization, a spirited march through history begun 30 years and 8,000 pages ago. For in The Age of Voltaire (1715-1756), the Durants have clearly come upon a kindred soul, and often agreeably identify with the great French gadfly.

Another Matter. Like Voltaire, Will Durant was a Jesuitic dropout, and he finds in Voltaire an early and pristine mirror of “the decline of religious belief begetting the pessimism that would be the secret malady of the modern soul.” With his ferocious assault on Christianity in a thousand plays, poems, stories, letters and polemical tracts, Voltaire accelerated more than any single man the decline of the church’s authority in the 18th century.

But unlike many of his fellow philosophes, Voltaire was large-minded enough to realize what the end of faith meant, and wise enough to have no undue optimism about the nature of man without God. “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him,” goes one of Voltaire’s best-known epigrams. Less well-known is his balancing phrase, “but all nature cries out to us that he does exist.” Nothing summed up Voltaire’s puckish, often contradictory private honesty more than an incident in his 80th year. Overwhelmed by the beauty of a hilltop sunset, he knelt and cried, “O Mighty God, I believe!” However, as he got to his feet he had second thoughts: “As to Monsieur the Son and Madame his mother, that is another matter!”

Voltaire thus exemplifies, say the Durants, the “conflict between religion and science-plus-philosophy which became a living drama in the 18th century, and which has resulted in the secret secularism of our times.” The drama as told by them ranges through the bustling courts and cafés of some half a dozen nations, is crowded with a cast of hundreds, from Voltaire’s royal on-and-off admirer, Frederick the Great of Prussia, to Lord Chesterfield, writing elegant letters on morals to his bastard son.

Writers on Wednesdays. In London the era of the coffeehouse was in full Johnsonian flower—a man’s world where only such freshly limned ladies as Fanny Hill and Fielding’s Sophia Western were admitted to the discourse. Parisian culture was conducted far differently: it was the women who presided over the salons of serious talk. On Tuesdays, for example, the Marquise de Lambert was wont to entertain scientists in her stately salon, and on Wednesdays writers, artists and scholars. “She was one of the hundreds of gracious, cultured, civilized women who make the history of France the most fascinating story in the world.”

The great confrontation between the rationalists and the defenders of the faith was by no means a dignified battle. Voltaire was not above scatology or slander as a weapon, and the Christian apologists pinned on Voltaire’s cadre a nickname that nearly ruined them: cacouacs, suggesting the “cacophony of quacking ducks, the bedlam of insane prattlers, sometimes (as the word intended) the odor of latrines.” The outcome in the battle of ideas was never certain; Voltaire was in the Bastille and out before he was 25, was forced to live much of his later life as an exile from Paris. But in the end, the philosophes carried the day, and Voltaire returned to Paris to die in triumph as the most honored man of his time. Without Voltaire, anticlericalism rushed on to the excesses of the French Revolution, and the pendulum swung part way back toward faith— but a faith more tolerant and more human as a result of Voltaire’s cauterizing pen.