“THE SCIENCE OF POLITICS,” wrote Alexander Hamilton in 1787, like “most other sciences has received great improvement.”1 Hamilton had some right to his self-assurance; the Federalist papers, in which his dictum appears, were in themselves impressive evidence of how great that improvement had been. Yet everywhere shadows clouded certainties, and the philosophes found themselves often baffled and silent, often wavering between contradictory prescriptions, too often desperately satisfied with superficial solutions that were no solutions at all.
Differences of opinion, of course, were to be expected: they emerged quite naturally from the variety of the philosophes’ political experience at home and abroad, and they fed on the philosophes’ highly individual, sometimes idiosyncratic manner of interpreting their experience.2 In addition, perception was obstructed by sheer novelty; the kind of politics the philosophes’ thought implied, in fact demanded, was only in its rudimentary stage in the eighteenth century. The men of the Enlightenment sensed that they could realize their social ideals only by political means, and, with their verbal facility, with their partisan pamphlets, tendentious histories, and semi-public letters, they set the stage for the kind of politics they needed. As professional men of the word, the philosophes did more than feed political discussion; in some countries they did nothing less than to bring it into being. Yet, the very idea of politics by discussion, on which they staked so many of their hopes, was untried, precarious, and in many states, impossible. The public airing of public issues is a social habit like any other, subject like all habits to development and decay, and responsive like all habits to encouragement or inhibition. If, in the German states, there was little talk about politics, that silence sprang less from fear than from lack of practice and indifference; Germans were simply unaccustomed to such talk, and found other issues, notably religious controversy, far more rewarding subjects for the exercise of their contentiousness. As one Aufklärer, the Berlin journalist G. N. Fischer, rather pathetically complained as late as 1788: “Many people think only of religion when they hear of Aufklärung.” Fischer acknowledged that “Aufklärung is of course of the greatest importance in the field of religion,” but he insisted, obviously running against the mainstream, that it should extend “far beyond the comparatively narrow field of religion.”3 Politics here was only implied, not specifically mentioned. In such model states as Weimar, with its impressive collection of poets and thinkers, resident intellectuals won the right to hold unconventional ideas about personal morals and religion by tacitly surrendering their rights in the political arena, and by sublimating whatever political discontent they felt by writing melodramas.
In some countries, of course, debate on political issues was a well-established tradition; while there were firm limits on the innovations one could safely advocate in Great Britain, preachers and lawyers, vocally seconded by educated amateurs, had long put their political thoughts and passions into accessible printed form. The French situation was more complicated: it was officially fettered but actually fairly free, though, at least in the philosophes’ view, in need of a steady growth of freedom. The Encyclopédie said that countries were “enlightened” by the “continual discussion” of such affairs,4 but this was the formulation of a wish masquerading as a statement of fact, and the most prominent French philosophes labored long to make that wish into a fact; both Diderot, with his devoted service to the Encyclopédie, and Voltaire, with his dogged scribbling of pamphlets, eloquently testify to the philosophes’ high expectations for that new, still shapeless phenomenon, public opinion. They thought it possible to mobilize that opinion, and possible that that opinion would have power over policy. At the end of a century of Enlightenment it was by no means certain that they had been right.
The obstructions in the way of the politics of discussion pointed to some fundamental difficulties. As the philosophes understood it, the science of politics was a supremely practical science with two related tasks: to provide intelligent, humane administration, and to discover forms of government that would establish, strengthen, and maintain rational institutions in a rational political atmosphere.5 There was trouble with both of those tasks, more with the second than the first: the state within, and the state system as a whole, appeared to have aims incompatible with enlightened ideals; the most flexible and decent of ruling groups fell short of the philosophes’ demand. Enlightened politics is modern liberal politics, and such politics requires forums for the debate and formulation of policies, some degree of responsibility of governors to the governed, some measure of participation by the governed in the government, unofficial channels for the generation of opinion and for its translation into policies—in short, parliamentary regimes, political parties, widespread literacy, and a free press. As I have suggested, in the age of the Enlightenment such institutions were scarce, and in many places unimaginable. The persistence of habit, the burden of deference, the difficulties of communication, the enormous social distance between rulers and ruled—these were the enemies of modern liberalism. The state, it seemed, functioned simultaneously as the subverter of traditional institutions and as a bulwark against liberalism. Almost everywhere, it had weakened the old deliberative bodies; in some states, it had dismantled them altogether. While provincial estates or parlements had for centuries been predominantly and fiercely devoted to the interests of the privileged orders—of plutocracies of urban notables or landed nobles—they had at least acted as restraints on centralized power and as arenas for debates or quarrels. In Prussia, the diets that survived in a few provinces met mainly to ratify the tax demands of the king; in France, the parlements—that is to say, the great courts which claimed a share in the law-making power—and the provincial estates, did little more than to obstruct royal policies.6 Most European states had no representative institutions at all; their only constraints on power were custom and the good will, laziness, or intelligence of the ruling house. Poland, the most dramatic exception to this pervasive concentration of power, only offered convincing arguments for the proponents of absolutism: the country was an anarchy of self-willed and unruly aristocrats, the standing joke of Europe, a chaos that no one envied and no one wished to reproduce.
Fortunately for the philosophes, Poland was unique, and the Prussian pattern was not universal. Great Britain and the Dutch Republic proudly displayed parliamentary institutions that were more than memories or impotent debating societies, and, with equal pride, gave relatively free reign to public discussion on touchy issues. Both were oligarchies, governments by and for the rich, the gently born, or the well-connected; fond as the philosophes were of them, they were realistic enough to see that. But compared to the rest of the civilized world, these two countries were veritable models of public responsibility, free speech, open circulation of the elite, and political participation. With all their imperfections, therefore, Great Britain and the Dutch Republic functioned as models for the Enlightenment; they demonstrated that liberal regimes were not fantasies but possibilities.
This meant a great deal to the philosophes, for they took institutions seriously: Montesquieu’s political sociology and Hume’s quarrel with Pope’s view that only fools argued about forms of government are only two instances of their alertness to the decisive impact that the political order exercises on the substance of policy. This is why the establishment of a “science du gouvernement,” of a “divine science” of politics, of the “principles of political architecture”7 seemed such urgent business to them: perhaps the most important way to improve the world was to improve political institutions. Their very demand for a political climate in which debate would be possible and meaningful was a radical demand for new, or at the very least, drastically reformed, types of government.
At the same time, the constricted repertory of political possibilities and the untried quality of political debate imposed severe limitations on the philosophes’ political thinking and compelled many of them, more in despair than in hope, to subordinate their appetite for fundamental change to the satisfaction of concrete demands that might be realized in, and through, the institutions they found around them. For many of the philosophes, enlightened absolutism was a refuge, a response to overpowering realities rather than a first preference, an imposed rather than a free choice. Philosophes in Berlin and Milan, Vienna and St. Petersburg, hedged in by censors, awed by the presence of power, and depressed by the general illiteracy, widespread destitution, and total absence of responsive institutions, could either advocate a new regime (which was a risky, and at best a utopian, venture), withdraw from politics as the arena of futility (which was a seductive temptation), or work for specific changes without alienating the powerful (which appeared to many of them the most promising course). But whatever their choice, with their besetting uncertainty over political means, their frequent silences in the midst of political agitation, their support of rulers they did not trust, the philosophes demonstrated to the sheer novelty of modern politics as such.
While the philosophes’ political opinions ranged from the democratic radicalism of Rousseau to the relativism of Voltaire and the absolutism of Beccaria, there is one philosophe who seems to stand outside this wide spectrum, David Hume.8 Hume posed, and often wrote, as an urbane conservative. The portrait is familiar: the corpulent, good-humored Epicurean indifferent to the reforming passions of his brethren; the skeptical psychologist intent on vindicating the powers of habit and the rights of belief against the claims of reason; the reactionary historian who found sympathetic words for Charles I; the contented man of letters looking back to the Revolution of 1689 rather than forward to the Revolution of 1789—in short, the ancestor not of Robespierre but of Burke. But this portrait, to which Hume contributed a good deal of material, is nothing better than a plausible caricature. Like the other philosophes, Hume was deeply engaged with the world around him; he had, if anything, fewer illusions and needed fewer fictions than the rest of the philosophic flock. He commanded the political writings of Plato and Machiavelli and Montesquieu, but the energy animating his political thinking stems from what he saw around him. The general and the particular nourished one another in his mind. As a philosophe he defined what he called superstition and fanaticism as the supreme threats to civilized life; as an unbeliever of Presbyterian origins, he was inclined to identify superstition with Roman Catholicism and fanaticism with the Puritans. As an educated man, he was, like his fellow philosophes, hopeful of diffusing enlightenment and uncertain just how much light the untutored common man could bear; as a Scot, he welcomed the burgeoning Scottish Enlightenment and the booming Scottish economy and despised the Scottish Kirk. The great political event of his life was the last serious threat to the Hanoverian dynasty, the famous Forty-Five, this “miserable war,”9 Hume called it, which ended, as it had to end, with the rout of the ragged forces of the Young Pretender by the British army. “When the shock was over,” H. R. Trevor-Roper has written, “all parties in Britain were determined that no such thing should happen again. One step taken to prevent it was the abolition, in 1747, of the feudal jurisdiction of the Scottish nobility. Another was the repudiation by the English tories of the last relics of their jacobite loyalty.”10 This meant that Hume could afford to repudiate the Whiggish notions of the “social compact” without seeming disloyal to the British crown and without being compelled to adopt the reactionary Tory notions of “passive obedience”; he could, in short, contentedly enjoy the blessings of his government while criticizing the elaborate if useful lies on which it was based.
Contentment is normally a prop for conservatism; it invites acceptance of things as they are. David Hume (although in his later years he looked upon the conduct of domestic affairs with some alarm), in the main found his experience of Britain a source of real satisfaction: the country was prosperous, more prosperous than other countries; its social structure gave room to talent, more room than other societies; its government extended freedom of speech even to infidels like himself, more freedom than other governments. Had he lived in France or Prussia, Hume might have been a consistent radical—it is impossible to know. But the point after all is that he lived in Britain, a country that already enjoyed what others still longed for. The Anglomania widespread among continental philosophes was a tribute to British institutions. Moreover, Hume’s epistemology and psychology reinforced the lessons of his immediate experience. In Hume’s view, knowledge, though adequate to the conduct of human affairs, always remained ultimately uncertain; behavior was governed by belief and habit—men inclined to do what they did because they had done it before; the passions and the imagination generally prevailed over the constructions of reason and even the calculations of self-interest. Such a theory of knowledge made most programs for reform look rash, unrealistic, downright foolish, and offered support for existing institutions that had proved themselves workable simply by existing. It was in character for Hume to have little use for revolutions, to admire long-lived institutions for the wisdom they enshrined, and to urge that change, if change must come, be slow.
But while Hume believed all this, he did not profess it with the ideological purity and the almost religious intensity that Burke would profess similar ideas two or three decades later. Hume, the critic of human stupidity, knew perfectly well that while custom may be the accumulation of man’s best knowledge, it may also be a repository of foolishness. Christianity—an example always in Hume’s mind—was an institution which, despite its longevity, demanded not passive acceptance, let alone worship, but alert, continuous, skeptical examination. Hume thought that revolutions often destroy what is valuable and produce what is pernicious, but he admitted that some revolutions are inevitable, others plainly a good thing. Plans go wrong, designs do not work, experiments are unsuccessful, but men, to the extent that they can muster intelligence and self-criticism, must continue to make plans, designs, and experiments. In his best conservative style, Hume warned that “an established government has an infinite advantage, by that very circumstance of its being established,” and he thought it wisdom in a magistrate to “adjust his innovations, as much as possible, to the ancient fabric.”11 At the same time, his writings on economics sharply rejected prevailing policies, and he even indulged himself in constructing a perfect commonwealth, which turns out to be a responsible, representative republic equipped with a moderately wide franchise, safeguards for property, and provisions for exhaustive debate. It was not a dream or a game; Hume explicitly designed his personal utopia as a possible basis for future large-scale reform. If he was not a radical, he was not a conservative either; Hume was as skeptical of immobility as he was of revolution. It was only that the generally satisfactory course of events in Great Britain made moderate demands on his capacities for devastating criticism; Hume did not believe in expending more effort than was necessary.
However averse to revolutions in general, in one area of political theory Hume’s thought was beyond doubt revolutionary, and marks an epoch in the internal history of the Enlightenment. Hume had no use for the “mere philosophical fictions”12 that underlay current political philosophy. His most conspicuous target was “the suppos’d state of nature” the “fallacious and sophistical” theory of the social contract,13 and with it the whole school of natural law. He piously insisted that he was in wholehearted agreement with the liberalism of the natural lawyers; he professed to share their aims and to reject only their reasoning. Despite these reassurances, however, Hume’s attack on natural law remains an ambiguous venture; it was part of the Enlightenment’s general attack on fictions, but it exposed the attackers to considerable risks. After all, natural law, almost from its emergence among the Greeks and codification among the Romans, had served ends to which the philosophes also subscribed. Reformers found arguments from natural law extraordinarily convenient: the distinction between nature and convention that lay at its heart, a distinction, it was argued, that was easy to discover in the hearts of good men everywhere and therefore universal in its application, made it a potentially devastating critic of existing laws and institutions. It gave rational men good reasons for disapproving and perhaps disobeying positive law. Aristotle had already said that an unjust law is not a law, and Roman lawyers had drawn the implication from this distinction by arguing that while the positive law depends quite simply on man’s will, the natural law rests firmly on his noblest endowment, his reason. Slavery, as we know, was legal in the courts of men, but not in the court of nature.
For the Stoics and other natural lawyers in antiquity, these claims had metaphysical, even religious status; the appeal from positive law to natural law, from lex scripta to recta ratio, was an ethical injunction: as a participant in the universal right reason which he often violates but to which he is still subject, man has a duty to discover what he ought to do. In the Christian era, natural law had been overshadowed by higher laws; compared to divine edicts manifesting themselves in revelations, to Scriptures and the decrees of the church, it was humble enough. But humble things had their place in the Christian scheme of the world, and natural law served effectively in the pious endeavor to discover the legal order in which Christian men should live. Then, in the seventeenth century, when natural-law doctrines like the state of nature, the social contract, and natural rights became staples of political argumentation, natural law was secularized. Grotius, the greatest among the founders of modern natural law and a widely read if controversial author in the Enlightenment, was anything but impious, yet he insisted that the law of nature would retain its universal validity, and should still be obeyed, even if there were no God. Early in the Enlightenment, Montesquieu said precisely the same thing: “Even if there should be no God, we should always love justice”; indeed, “though we might be freed from the yoke of religion, we should never be free from the yoke of equity,” for in truth, “justice is eternal and does not depend on human conventions.”14 Montesquieu’s beloved Cicero had not put it any differently.
In the hands of the philosophes, natural law was, in effect, secular, a modern version of classical pagan speculation: there are eternal immutable principles of morality that stand as critics of positive law, for they often contradict it. “In vain do the civil laws make chains,” said Montesquieu, “natural law will always break them.”15 The Encyclopédie devoted several articles to natural law—Boucher d’Argis’s “Droit de la nature,” Jaucourt’s “Loi naturelle,” Diderot’s own “Hobbisme”—and all of them took Montesquieu’s position: there are laws independent of, and superior to, human enactments; they are engraved in men’s hearts, eternal, immutable, universal, and they impose moral obligations on the ruler and give moral rights to the ruled. Casually, occasionally, these writers would speak of God as the author of the natural law and as the source of its authority, but in actuality they all derived its origin and binding quality from the nature of man, the agreement of wise men across the world and through history, the testimony of reason, man’s natural sense of justice, and, as Diderot put it in a revolutionary if still tentative way in the Encyclopédie, the infallible general will of men.16 No wonder that orthodox Christian apologists took such small comfort in the religious tatters in which these secular thoughts were clothed. “I grant legislative power neither to the individual nor to the species …,” André Chaumeix wrote in his attack on the Encyclopédie. “I recognize a Superior, above humanity, and it is to his tribunal that I refer my case.”17 The philosophes recognized no such Superior; their highest tribunal was humanity itself.
By claiming standards independent of positive law and professing that they had found them in man, history, reason, or the general will, those philosophes who still used natural-law rhetoric embroiled themselves in a dilemma that they resolved with a characteristic compromise. Natural law is essentially a rational and a rationalist construct. As historians and sociologists, the philosophes recognized differences in men’s ways; as reformers, they insisted on the imperfections of positive laws. Now these very differences and imperfections proved the assertions of natural law to be organized wishes rather than current realities, moral imperatives rather than generalizations from experience. True, the philosophes called upon factual evidence to make their generalizations; Diderot in particular, with his appeal to the practice of nations and the universal passions of men, sought to give the natural law an empirical grounding. Just as the philosophes had repudiated objective laws in aesthetics but argued for a consensus on works of art, so in their political writings the philosophes thought they possessed good grounds for asserting the existence of laws that were higher than the laws in the statute books.
It was a brave but unsuccessful attempt to rescue what the philosophes should not have tried rescue. Yet, while they were destroying the logic of natural law with their epistemology, their sociology, and their history, they continued to use its language as a support for their social criticism and guide for their reform program. Natural law appears in their writings as a commonplace, a kind of shorthand on which all educated, and many uneducated men, may be presumed to agree, or, with Kant, as an aim toward which mankind should strive. It is no accident that natural-law phrases should figure prominently in the pamphlets of the American and French Revolutions: they were appealing battle cries, slogans of reform, humanity, and constitutionalism. As pragmatists, many of the philosophes preferred effectiveness to consistency, and they persisted in proclaiming what their own thought made implausible.
But this is only one side of a complicated history. While philosophes continued to profess that they saw eternal standards independent of positive legislation, they dismissed the essential fictions intimately associated with that position, notably the state of nature or the social contract, with contempt or in silence; with rare exceptions, they overlooked or ridiculed the professional lawyers who continued the great seventeenth-century tradition of Grotius and Pufendorf into the eighteenth century. While in authoritarian central and eastern Europe natural-law doctrines continued to furnish the rationale for legal and administrative reforms, in the West the philosophes gave Wolff and Burlamaqui and Blackstone a harsh reception. Diderot could still commend Burlamaqui’s Éléments du droit to Catherine of Russia, but Voltaire, who derided Grotius, Pufendorf, Vattel, and other natural lawyers as bores, mediocrities, and imitators, was far more characteristic of the Enlightenment’s dominant view. As the century went on, the philosophes’ attitude toward natural law became more and more skeptical, their relation to it more and more tenuous: the variety of the Enlightenment’s political experience was a variety not of space alone, but of time as well. In France, utilitarian doctrines began to compete with natural law in the late 1750s, with the fertile suggestions of Maupertuis and the bald utilitarian account of political origins and political obligation offered by Helvétius in his De l’esprit. In Britain, Bentham took the ideas of Hume, Helvétius, and Beccaria to their logical conclusions in his first book, the polemical Fragment on Government of 1776: “It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.”18 This, Bentham said, is the fundamental axiom of public life.
Utilitarianism, which dominates the second half of the Enlightenment, as natural law had dominated the first, was less dramatic than natural law but in all other respects a proper foundation for enlightened political thought: it professed to base its propositions on the science of man, and to dispense with the fictions on which earlier generations had lived. In this way, it brought the philosophes’ theory of knowledge into line with their political program. Increasingly (though, it is worth repeating, by no means exclusively), the philosophes came to legitimize the state on the ground of its utility, rather than on tradition or an original contract. This justification was a test of governmental conduct and if necessary a call to revolution: Bentham complained that Blackstone’s natural-law doctrines were actually a defense of conservatism, and insisted that utilitarianism alone, with its persistent questioning, was consistently progressive. It gave the philosopher the freedom to judge governments by their works and to condemn them if they failed to do their obvious duty. Only that government is acceptable, and deserves to survive, that devotes itself to the general happiness; the state exists not for its own sake, not by divine command or historical prescription, but quite simply because it has a task to perform that private individuals, large families, and even gathered clans cannot perform.
By the 1770s, these arguments were widely repeated, but most of them go back to David Hume’s critique of Locke’s political ideas. Government, Hume argues, establishes social stability by guaranteeing peace, the security of private property, and ease of mutual intercourse. There are always reasons, or passions, that lead men to indulge in “fraud or rapine”; hence some kind of government is inevitable. “Men must, therefore, endeavour to palliate what they cannot cure.”19 It is not probable that government was instituted by some legal contract—Locke is simply wrong. “Reason, history, and experience shew us, that all political societies have an origin much less accurate and regular.”20 It is far more probable instead that government arose during time of war, when the superiority of one man over another, as well as the need for an arbiter, became glaringly apparent. Like everything else, the state is the fruit of experience; like everything else, it persists because men are creatures of habit. Hume urges “reasoners” to “look abroad into the world”21; it is there that they will find the realities that should govern their philosophizing. The point of Hume’s argument is not to vindicate authority at all costs; on the contrary, he constructed it to show that while the doctrines of natural law are untenable in logic and history alike, their disappearance in no way implies a return to religious or traditionalist doctrines of authority. The point was to move from fiction, no matter how comfortable, and metaphysics, no matter how grandiose, to realities, no matter how trying, to justify authority by arguments that were historically, logically, sociologically sound. This meant, once again, that authority was not automatically justified simply by its existence, but by its actions. Politics, Hume said, is a difficult science, but it can become a science, and it can do so only if men see the real tensions within society rather than the imagined harmonies of which philosophers have always dreamed. “In all governments, there is a perpetual intestine struggle, open or secret, between AUTHORITY and LIBERTY; and neither of them can ever absolutely prevail in the contest. A great sacrifice of liberty must necessarily be made in every government; yet even the authority, which confines liberty, can never, and perhaps ought never, in any constitution, to become quite entire and uncontroulable.”22 This was Hume’s general view of politics, realistic in its awareness of conflict, hard-headed in its call for order, but, at the same time, liberal in its insistence on a domain of freedom, and, above all, flexible in its very generality. It was an invitation not to this system or that, but, within the secure bounds of reason and humanity, an invitation to a civilized, tolerant relativism.
As consistent eclectics in their philosophical style, the philosophes found relativism in politics sensible, attractive, perfectly natural. Their relativism, to be sure, did not lead them to superb indifference to forms of government: David Hume, after all, was at once a relativist and a partisan of constitutional government; Montesquieu, who encouraged a whole century to think comparatively about forms of government, condemned despotism, as we know, as always and absolutely evil. The political relativists of the Enlightenment were, so to speak, relativists about their relativism; they firmly retained their respect for certain values that transcended all differences and remained valid in all climates. Their relativism amounted essentially to the recognition that political experiences varied because realities varied from country to country and that therefore different states at different stages of development would flourish best under different institutions.
Jeremy Bentham put the case with perfect lucidity. Relativism is both rational and practical: “I should think myself a weak reasoner and a bad citizen,” he wrote, “were I not, though a Royalist in London, a republican in Paris.”23 Less dramatically, but to the same end, the chevalier de Jaucourt argued that taxation must be analyzed state by state rather than in general terms: “But how shall taxes be raised? Should they be laid on persons, land, consumption, merchandise, or other things? Each of these questions … calls for a profound treatise which would, moreover, be adapted to different countries, in accord with their circumstances, size, government, products, and commerce.”24 Even Rousseau, despite his uncompromising love of equality and insistence on universal participation in the good state, showed himself relatively indifferent to specific forms of government, and thought that these forms should depend, as Montesquieu had said they should, on physical factors such as size and climate. If there was any principle to which the majority of the philosophes subscribed in politics, it was not absolutism no matter how enlightened, but this restricted relativism—relativism was, quite simply, good sense.
The representative political relativist in the Enlightenment, impressive alike in the range of his political information and the flexibility of his political preferences, was doubtless Voltaire. Voltaire’s politics displays the politics of the Enlightenment at its best, and at its worst as well. Even in his early years, in his most exclusively literary phase, Voltaire was a thoroughly political animal; when his experience was still rather confined, his gifts of observation and absorption were already highly developed. When he talked nonsense about politics, he talked nonsense because he was inadequately informed or because he kept himself inadequately informed on purpose. When he wanted to flatter a despot with at least a semblance of good conscience, ignorance was the best possible equipment. Thus Voltaire induced himself to believe that Catherine of Russia had not had her husband murdered, and that she had invaded Poland for the sake of securing religious liberty there—specimens of willed credulity nothing less than astonishing in an observer as intelligent and as cynical as he was. Yet, Voltaire’s political writings abound in shrewd appraisals; the spectrum of his political ideas mirrors the spectrum of the political possibilities of his time, and the wide range of his ideas testifies not to irresponsibility or an inclination to abstract thinking, but, quite the contrary, to his clear-sightedness and his realism. As I shall show, in his own country he supported the monarchy against the claims of the aristocratic coalition concentrated in the parlements. In England, which he loved from his youth for being a country “where one obeys to the laws only and to one’s whims,”25 he welcomed the growing power of the House of Commons because, he thought, it represented “the most numerous, even the most virtuous, and consequently the most respectable class of men, consisting of those who study the law and the sciences, of businessmen, of artisans.”26 In the Dutch Republic, he spoke approvingly of parties, “necessary in a republic,”27 and of the egalitarianism and simplicity of the ruling oligarchy. It was different with Frederick of Prussia and Catherine of Russia: with both, self-interest dulled his judgment; they had too much of what he wanted. He thought it a good thing, as he himself admitted, to have a crowned head up his sleeve, and he was reluctant to jeopardize his cozy arrangements with the King of Prussia and the Empress of all the Russians—though, as his quarrel with Frederick shows, he was too irrepressible, and he had, although he valiantly tried to deny it, too much self-respect to be consistently servile.
While Voltaire’s dealings with reigning monarchs are too self-serving to make pleasant reading, his intervention in Genevan politics offers a welcome contrast and, besides, a splendid example of his political empiricism. Voltaire had settled on Genevan soil, at Les Délices, in the winter of 1775–6, and his natural associates were the patrician families that had, for a century or more, subverted the republican constitution of the little state by engrossing all political power in their hands through intermarriage, bribery, nepotism, and threats of violence. These patricians were the French-educated elite of Geneva who came to visit Voltaire and enjoyed his private theatrical parties despite the pious disapproval voiced by the Calvinist pastorate. For some years, in fact, Voltaire’s relations with this plutocracy were excellent, but in the early 1760s, when a bourgeois party around Rousseau demanded its constitutional right to participate in the political process, Voltaire moved to the left under the pressure of his experience, and found himself, to his surprise, Rousseau’s ally, although by then he thought Rousseau nothing better than a treacherous madman. In 1765, after Rousseau himself had retired from Genevan politics, Voltaire became the active spokesman for his party and developed, almost incidentally, a general liberal position applicable to situations beyond Geneva itself. “To burn a rational book,” he wrote, “is to say ‘We do not have enough intelligence to reply to it.’ … In a republic worthy of its name, the liberty to publish one’s thoughts is the natural right of the citizen.… A criminal code is absolutely necessary for citizens and magistrates.… The magistrates are not the masters of the people; the laws are masters.… We have the right, when we are assembled, to reject or approve the magistrates and the laws that have been proposed to us.… Civil government is the will of all, carried out by a single person or by several, in accord with the laws that all have supported.… When a law is obscure, all must interpret it, for all have promulgated it.… It is to insult reason and law to pronounce these words: civil and ecclesiastical government. We must say, civil government and ecclesiastical regulations, and these regulations can only be made by the civil power.… It is perhaps useful to have two parties in a republic, because then one watches over the other.”28 There is not a word here in which advocates of despotism or absolutism could take comfort. These dicta, firm, clear, and consistent, contain the essence of modern liberalism: secular government, popular sovereignty, the rule of law, the need for free speech, and the advantage of party. While these principles are general in language, each sentence goes back to the Geneva of the 1760s and recalls a particular incident or a particular demand. It was prudent of Voltaire to clothe a partisan position in universal form; but his disguise adds up to a philosophy of politics.
The spectacle of Voltaire the political ally and political heir of Rousseau is odd enough, but by 1766, Voltaire had moved to the left of Rousseau, and taken a position that the great democrat had never even considered. Once again he was learning. In that year, to avert civil war, the Genevan oligarchs called in outside powers to mediate. At this point the political pariahs, the so-called Natives, gathered up their courage to address the mediators and ask for redress of their pressing grievances. The Natives made up three quarters of the population; most of them were third- and fourth-generation Genevans, respectable watchmakers and property owners, yet all of them were kept out of higher grades in the army and the liberal professions, hampered by burdensome and humiliating taxes and regulations, denied citizenship and thus deprived of the vote. Now Voltaire, the flatterer of kings, the friend of aristocrats, the snobbish landed gentleman, found it possible to assist the Natives’ cause. He was not, and would never become, a consistent democrat; his convictions were a lasting mood without becoming a doctrine. But he discovered late in life that there were some among the peuple, more in the city than in the country and more in Protestant than in Catholic lands, but peuple still, who had taste, knowledge, and judgment: “But let us distinguish,” he told Linguet in 1767, “in what you call peuple, between the professions that demand a decent education and those that call only for the labor of one’s arms and daily fatigue.”29 He could not have written this five years before: the Natives, well-informed and responsible, had taught him much. Nothing came of the protests of the Natives; the government harshly repressed them, and Voltaire could do little more than give them refuge on his extensive property and rail against the oppressors. But the point is that despite his advanced age—and by the time the Natives entered Genevan politics, Voltaire was over seventy—his old habit of listening to the evidence had not atrophied. The politics of experience, the counterpart of his relativism, never deserted him.
THE PHILOSOPHES’ DEVOTION to empiricism did not guarantee unanimity. In France, where the concentration of philosophes was densest and the political struggle least concealed, the philosophes’ experience pointed in conflicting directions; the intellectual contest among them faithfully mirrors the political contest for France in the eighteenth century. The old saying that if two men see the same thing they do not see the same thing applies to this contest with special force: just as Diderot’s and Voltaire’s Frederick II appear to be two different kings, Montesquieu’s and Voltaire’s France appear to be two different countries, while Diderot’s France changed its shape with bewildering rapidity, like a landscape in a dream.
The battle for France was rationalized and in many ways exacerbated by two competing positions which political and legal theorists had first seriously stated in the sixteenth century, the thèse nobiliaire and the thèse royale. The “noble thesis,” upheld and in the course of the eighteenth century imaginatively elaborated by parliamentary and aristocratic publicists, amounted to the historical claim that the French kingdom had been a constitutional monarchy from its beginning, when the Franks had invaded Gaul. Royal assertions of a monopoly of legislative, judicial, and executive power were therefore usurpation; absolutism was tyranny. The separation of executive and judicial functions, as Montesquieu put it in a famous phrase, had “come from the German forests,”30 and must be preserved at all costs. Some parliamentary ideologists went so far as to describe the parlements as the successors of the feudal lords who had made legislation in open and free assemblies. “It is a fundamental law,” wrote the anonymous author of the tract Judicium Francorum, published in 1732, “that nothing can be imposed on the subjects of the king, and that no officer can be created, no new title can be granted, without the consent of parlement, which represents the general consent of the people. That is the essential form of the French government.”31 While nobles of the robe and nobles of the sword disagreed on much, while each inclined to exaggerate the importance and inflate the authority of their own ancestors, both accepted this version of the French past and this interpretation of its contemporary import.
It was a fanciful theory. It was bad history and bad law, a transparent defense of privilege in the guise of constitutional principles; it had wider application only because it came to be expressed in universal terms as the eighteenth century went on. At once self-serving and inaccurate, it deserved, and would have found, little sympathy among the philosophes except for its articulate advocacy on the part of Montesquieu.
Montesquieu was far more than an ideologist. His sympathy was comprehensive; as we know, it included slaves and Jews and victims of the courts quite as much as the courts themselves, and his sociological generalizations about the institutions that guarantee freedom applied to many political systems. Montesquieu, as his critics did not fail to point out, came from a robe family, had for some years been a judge, had long associated with robe nobles and enjoyed the company of spokesmen for the thèse nobiliaire, but his intelligence, his detachment, his catholic reading and extensive travels had enabled him to enlarge his ideas beyond the confined sphere of aristocratic ideology. Yet, though not confined, Montesquieu was pervasively indebted to the philosophy that dominated all segments of the French aristocracy; it was the distinction of his mind, the scholarly appearance of his work, and the philosophical tone of his theories that did much to rescue the thèse nobiliaire at mid-century. For when his De l’esprit des lois appeared in 1748, this aristocratic position had been severely damaged by historical and legal criticism, most effectively by the abbé Dubos. In 1734, fifteen years after he had published his bulky work on aesthetics,32 Dubos published an even bulkier work, Histoire critique de l’établissement de la monarchie Française, which, for all its immense size was an immense success. Challenging the thèse nobiliaire in its most dubious position, its account of early history, Dubos argued that the Franks had come to Gaul as allies and followers of the Romans and had brought with them essentially Roman, not Germanic, institutions, including kingship. If there had been usurpation in French history, it was the work of feudal lords; the centuries-long attacks on the nobility by the crown had been defensive actions, designed to restore a legitimate and traditional order. As Dubos’s public well knew, this historical argument had contemporary political bearing: it legitimized Louis XIV’s silencing of the parlements and his insistence that their only task was the prosaic one of presiding over law suits, and it justified Louis XV’s claim to a monopoly of legislative as well as executive authority.
Dubos’s argument impressed the public because it was contentious and exhaustive; it also happened to be largely sound. Montesquieu’s “refutation,” which came fourteen years later in his De l’esprit des lois, impressed the public even more because it was aphoristic and brilliantly evasive. Montesquieu covered his right flank, as it were, by criticizing Boulainvilliers’s extreme feudal interpretation of early French history; then, under the cover of independence, he concentrated his fire on Dubos. “It is true,” Franz Neumann has justly said, that Montesquieu “seemed to reject Boulainvilliers’s views as a conspiracy against the third estate, and Dubos’s as one against the nobility; but in reality, he followed Boulainvilliers closely. He thus identified himself with the reactionary trend of French politics, that trend which ultimately produced the French Revolution. No contemporary of Montesquieu was in doubt about Montesquieu’s position and his effect upon the scene of French politics.”33 Montesquieu had learned much from Dubos, and he adroitly acknowledged his good qualities: “If that great man has erred, what must I not fear?”34 But in two circumstantial though somewhat demagogic chapters, Montesquieu overcame his fear and demonstrated to his own satisfaction that Dubos had erred.
With all their political overtones, these historical excursions were in themselves interestingly and evidently relevant. But Montesquieu went beyond them; his whole theory of freedom stands as a long critique of Dubos and the thèse royale. Monarchies, Montesquieu holds, need “intermediate powers” for their well-being: “Intermediate, subordinate and dependent powers constitute the nature of monarchical government.”35 The “most natural” of these powers is the nobility as it enters “in some fashion” into the very “essence of monarchy”—whence the maxim, “no monarch, no nobility; no nobility, no monarch.”36 And nobility here included the nobility of the robe: the parlements. Other intermediate powers like the church, or privileged bodies like the cities, also had their part to play in the protection of freedom, but Montesquieu never doubted that the nobility was the principal safeguard of the healthy monarchical state. It followed that monarchy is poisoned at its source when the monarch deprives the intermediate powers of their privilege—there is the road to despotism. With commendable consistency, Montesquieu saw much good in the well-entrenched French practice of treating public office as private property; the buying, selling, trading, and bequeathing of judgeships and most other official positions, which critics derided as “venalitv,” struck him as a massive counterpoise against the concentration of power in royal hands. Actually, the trade in offices was a grave abuse; it led to the multiplication of offices, the installment of incompetents, and the dictatorship of the rich. Accordingly, proponents of the thèse royale were appalled at Montesquieu’s defense of venality. But venality fitted smoothly into Montesquieu’s logic: it was precisely because the holding of office was a large and valuable investment that it must lead to restrictions on the crown’s range of action.37
Montesquieu’s celebrated and influential interpretation of the British Constitution forms part of the same logical fabric. Power tends to corrupt; power undivided cannot escape this tendency, hence power divided is the only realistic protection freedom can call upon. In France, power was divided between the king and the owners of office; in Britain, power was divided among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government, above all the executive and legislative branches. The two systems, the French and the British, then, sought the same effect with similar methods; what made them all the more comparable was that British freedom, precisely like the French, had come out of the German forests.38 To keep his own countrymen vigilant, Montesquieu acknowledged that Great Britain was actually superior to France in its constitutional arrangements: Britain, Montesquieu said flatly, is the one country in the world whose constitution directly aims at political liberty.39
From the day Montesquieu published his admiring, tendentious analysis of the British Constitution to our own time, critics have called attention to its obvious defects: Montesquieu had taken the partisan cant of the opposition to Walpole, especially of Bolingbroke, for political reality. In actuality, the executive met and mingled with the legislature in the House of Commons; the peers exercised judicial as well as legislative functions; and there were other mutual invasions of presumably reserved territory that compromised the neatness of Montesquieu’s model. The fabric of freedom in England, such as it was, consisted less of formal devices than of slowly emerging habits and a dawning sense that Britain was secure enough, both against domestic and foreign enemies, to afford the luxury of a certain measure of dissent. Montesquieu did not see it that way. “The love of power is natural,” he noted in 1730, during his English visit, characteristically borrowing the idea from Bolingbroke’s Craftsman. “It is insatiable almost constantly whetted never cloyed by possession.” Almost twenty years later, though long removed from the circle of Walpole’s detractors, Montesquieu translated this observation into a famous maxim: “To prevent the abuse of power,” he wrote in his De l’esprit des lois, it is necessary to “have power check power.”40 Stated this comprehensively, it is a tough-minded principle; it admirably faces the realities of political society. But Montesquieu’s justified fear of power drew in its wake (or, shall I say, used as its fuel?) an unjustified claim to power on the part of privileged orders that received without giving, craved influence without responsibility, and denounced reforms as tyranny. Voltaire, whom Montesquieu little liked and only grudgingly respected, saw things more clearly. Just as Voltaire’s England, with its increasing influence of the House of Commons, was closer to facts than Montesquieu’s fanciful balancing act, so was Voltaire’s France.
Through his long career as a political publicist, from the day he entered public controversy to his death over sixty years later, Voltaire was a loyal and outspoken partisan of the thèse royale in France. He recognized, and often reiterated, that Parliament and parlement, though the same word and indeed designating institutions with similar origins, were by no means the same thing: the instrument of freedom, reason, and middle-class participation in England was the instrument of repression, cant, and aristocratic privilege in France. “It is ridiculous to say,” Voltaire noted about the parlement of Paris, “that it represents the nation. The very word ‘parlement’ makes up part of its power.”41 In France, therefore, Voltaire was convinced, “the cause of the king is the cause of the philosophes.”42
This was a political judgment, aimed at the struggles of Voltaire’s own time; it was also a judgment on French history. As early as 1723, three years before he first saw England, Voltaire advocated the thèse royale in La ligue, the first version of his epic poem celebrating Henri IV. In addition to staking Voltaire’s claim to being the Vergil of France, in addition to being an appeal for toleration and a broadside against the clergy, La ligue, like its better-known final version, Henriade, is a spirited defense of royal sovereignty. Voltaire portrays Henri IV, the French king he most admired, as a reasonable political leader who brings a measure of toleration and stability to his country only because he has subdued the League, that insolent troop of superb feudal lords. This is the political message of Voltaire’s epic: certainly in France the road to freedom and political sanity had always been the road leading away from “feudal anarchy” toward the unity of powers. Dubos’s masterly Histoire critique, whose publication in 1734 coincided with the publication in France of Voltaire’s book on England, offered copious historical justification for the ideas that Voltaire, the youthful royalist, had held for over a decade: it gave Voltaire good reasons for arguing that what was true in the early eighteenth century under Louis XV and had been true at the turn of the seventeenth century under Henri IV had been true from the very inception of the French state. Voltaire warmly thanked Dubos for having “so ably disentangled the chaos”43 of French origins, asked Dubos’s assistance with the Siècle de Louis XIV, and continued his historical explorations in Dubos’s spirit. His royalist convictions find ample room for play in his two historical masterpieces; in Le siècle de Louis XIV Voltaire examines a French reign whose end he had witnessed and whose shadow still hung over French politics decades after its close; in the Essai sur les mœurs, which takes a generous, world-wide sweep across history, he devotes ample space to the growth and travail of the French monarchy through the centuries.
The very title of Voltaire’s earlier work is freighted with political significance: the second half of the seventeenth century and the first decades of the eighteenth are the age of Louis XIV; it was a French king who had put his stamp on a century. Yet, though precise and meaningful, this title also has its less felicitous side; it seems to imply, and has often been taken to be, a panegyric on the Sun King. In fact, despite its reputation, Le siècle de Louis XIV is often extremely critical of its illustrious protagonist; the age was the age of Louis XIV for ill quite as much as for good. Voltaire’s Louis XIV is in love with war, so enamored of glory, territory, revenge that he conducts inhuman campaigns, neglects the poor at home, and forgets that a good king must above all bring peace. Worse than this, in addition to his fatal love of glory, Louis XIV is cursed, especially in his later years, by a sinister piety which leads him to countenance, and even instigate, acts of shocking intolerance against religious minorities. One could hardly expect Voltaire, as a self-proclaimed champion of tolerance, to find excuses for a king who revoked the Edict of Nantes, especially since this edict of toleration bore the imprint of that greatest of French kings, Henri IV. For Voltaire, Louis XIV stands condemned as a monarch who missed some of his greatest opportunities: he failed to do all the good it had been in his power to do.
Granting all this, Voltaire had no doubt that Louis XIV was also a great king. It was in his reign, and with his active participation, that France became the cultural center of the Western world. This, for Voltaire, the conscious heir of Corneille and Racine, weighed heavily in the balance of judgment. But his most unreserved praise for Louis XIV often comes indirectly, through comparisons with his domestic rivals. The glory of Louis shines at its brightest against the gloomy background of seditious nobles, obstructive judges, and bigoted clerics. If the King failed to do all the good in his power, his adversaries did all the harm in theirs. They instigated civil war; they failed to criticize, let alone correct, the viciously inequitable tax structure that worked in their favor; they were blind to starvation, resisted progress in science and administration, and generally turned their faces toward the past. They supported the crown only when it legislated intolerance; Voltaire found it incomprehensible that anyone should regard the magistrates as the fathers of the country or as bulwarks of freedom. It was a puzzle that would agitate liberal reformers and hard-working public servants like Turgot throughout the eighteenth century.
The history of France could not be reduced to a single issue, but the one thread running through it all was the fortunes of royal power. “France a poor thing up to Louis XIV,” Voltaire laconically said in one of his notebooks. “Kings without power before Louis XI. Charles VIII and Louis XII unlucky conquerors. Francis I beaten, civil wars up to Henri IV, under Louis XIII feebleness and faction.”44 In its chapters on France, the Essai sur les mœurs traced this often pathetic history down to Louis XIII; in some later, more overtly polemical historical essays, Voltaire would bring it up to date, to feebleness and faction under Louis XV.
The Essai sur les mœurs, as I have said before, is far more than a tendentious tract; it is pioneering social history, generous in scope and remarkably catholic in judgment. Nor are its chapters on France mere propaganda: Voltaire finds the justification of the thèse royale in the events themselves; the thesis is more than an ideology: it is a historical judgment. Yet Voltaire never denied his passionate involvement in the political controversies of his own time, and it would have been pointless to deny it, for it emerges in his sarcastic treatment of the antiroyalist forces. When in the 1470s Louis XI humbles the nobility, “about fifty families” deplore his policy, but “more than five hundred thousand had cause to celebrate.”45 It had been that way before and would be that way after Louis XI: the interest of the French people lay in the assertion of royal power.
In the early 1750s, when Voltaire’s two great histories appeared, he was no longer in France; in the nearly thirty years that remained to him, he observed the vicissitudes of the royal cause from Potsdam, Geneva, and Ferney. During the previous decade, Voltaire had wasted much time at the French Court, pursuing his career with a thick-skinned singlemindedness that dismayed some of his warmest admirers. But if he had fantasies of shaping the policies of Louis XV, his writings, both published and unpublished, give no evidence of it: he traveled with the royal entourage, wrote slight comedies, composed mediocre poems, and turned servile compliments to further not the cause of France but his own. He had his rewards: in 1745 he was appointed Royal Historiographer; in the following year he finally won his seat in the Académie française, which he had coveted for over a decade. In some of his moments of lucidity and self-awareness, he complained that he was acting the part of a poor buffoon,46 and his writings of those years show traces of restlessness, disappointment, and occasional self-disgust. Zadig, the reasonable man in an unreasonable society, is Voltaire: hard-working, public-spirited, utterly vulnerable to the capricious favor of the powerful: “Zadig said, ‘At last, then, I am happy!’ But he was deceived.”47
Zadig was written in 1748. In the following year, Machault d’Arnouville, the contrôleur général des finances, imposed his five-per cent income tax, the vingtième, on all orders. It was a brave attack on privilege in a country built on privilege: money was, of course, the perennial problem of the French monarchy, and the two first estates almost entirely escaped any fiscal obligations whatever—the nobility paid few taxes, and the first estate, the church, immensely rich, clung to its traditional right of granting the state a “voluntary gift” assessed at its quinquennial assemblies, a substantial sum but a pittance still. The vingtième was a tax that Voltaire wholeheartedly approved of, and he entered the controversy at the very start. Two weeks after Machault had issued the decree, Voltaire sent him a long memorandum expressing his support both on the general principle that tax burdens should be equal and on the concrete economic consideration that France could afford the tax and should pay for the costs of war in times of peace. Resistance to the impost varied: the parlements accepted it with surprising meekness, and after courteous remonstrances, registered the tax decree. The clergy, on the other hand, put up a spirited fight; it was defending both the principle of voluntary self-taxation and its wealth: the vingtième would roughly have doubled its contribution to the treasury. Bishops protested and in early 1750, the Assembly of the Clergy reiterated its traditional position: the church is not of this world, and its property, which is the property of the poor, must not be touched by profane hands—a love offering must not be degraded into a forced tribute.
These pious arguments both amused and enraged Voltaire, and he replied with some witty fables and an aggressive pamphlet, La voix du sage et du peuple, probably Voltaire’s first political polemic. In one of these fables, Voltaire has an Indian philosopher visiting Turkey; there he sees “about twenty beautiful two-footed animals” pass by, evidently priests. He asks a Turkish palace guard just how many of these “well-made big fellows” there are in Turkey. “Nearly a hundred thousand of different kinds,” the Turk replies. They would be fine workers, the Indian muses: “How I would like to see them, spade, trowel, square rule in hand!” The Turk agrees but adds: “They are too great saints to work.” What, then, do they do? the Indian asks. “The sing, they drink, they digest,” the Turk replies. “How useful to the state!” says the Indian.48 In another invention Voltaire imagines a decree from the Papal Inquisition in the proper pompous language of officialdom: “Antichrist has already come; said Antichrist already has sent several circular letters to the bishops of France, in which he has had the audacity to treat them as Frenchmen and subjects of the king,” and tried to prove that “the clergy form part of the body politic, instead of affirming that they are essentially its masters.” Never averse to a little hyperbole, Voltaire has the Inquisition continue: Antichrist suggests “that those who have a third of the revenue in the state owe at least a third in contributions; he seems to forget that our brethren are made to have everything and to give nothing.”49
La voix du sage et du peuple translates these playful pinpricks into serious political discourse. The broadside draws upon the thèse royale in all its guises: it calls upon French history, the logic of political theory, and the practical demands of the day in about equal degree. “There ought not to be two powers in the state” is a maxim, Voltaire writes, propounded by sound political thinking and confirmed by history: “The happy years of the monarchy were the last years of Henri IV, the years of Louis XIV and Louis XV, when these kings governed by themselves.” As ready to pose as a good Christian as he was to oversimplify French history, Voltaire argued that the clergy deserved respect, but not authority; unfortunately the French church has abused “the distinction between spiritual power and temporal power.” Precisely like any other public body, the church in France must subordinate itself to the sovereign: “The prince must be absolute master of all ecclesiastical regulations, without any restriction, since those ecclesiastical regulations are a part of the government; and just as the father of a family prescribes to the preceptor of his children the hours of work, the kind of studies, etc., so the prince may prescribe to all ecclesiastics, without exception, all that has the least bearing on the public order.” This meant, in 1750, that the clergy must “contribute to the expenditures of the state in proportion to its revenues.”50.
Voltaire got little thanks for writing La voix du sage; its political effect apparently was negligible. In 1750 Louis XV reaffirmed his tax edict, but in 1751 he withdrew it, overborne by his timidity, his indolence, and his fear of damnation. As Voltaire pathetically wrote in August 1750, from Potsdam: he had tried “to sustain the rights of the king. But the king hardly cares to have his rights sustained.”51 As other royalists would discover over and over again, this was only a slight exaggeration, but Voltaire could not abandon his feeble and inconstant ally; the king might be a small hope, but he was also, as far as Voltaire could see, the only hope for France.
Voltaire’s specific application of the thèse royale to the recalcitrant clergy in 1750 suggests its pragmatic, and in a sense, defensive, role in his political thought. During the 1750s and 1760s, in isolated pamphlets and in the Dictionnaire philosophique, Voltaire applied it wherever it seemed applicable: to the combat between Jesuits and their post-Jansenist enemies in the early 1760s, to the conflict between provincial estates and the crown a few years later. It was not until the mid-sixties that he could apply it once again to the central target of his scorn, the parlements. In 1766, after two years of watching an obstructive alliance of provincial parlements and estates paralyze royal administration in Brittany, Louis XV had another access of courage: on March 3, 1766, he confronted the parlement of Paris and read it a stern lecture that has become known to history, a little melodramatically, as the séance de flagellation: “Sovereign power,” the king said, restating the thèse royale with all the vigor at his speech-writer’s command, “resides in my person alone,” and “Legislative power belongs to me alone,” and “My courts derive their authority from me alone.” Voltaire responded to this lecture with unabashed euphoria: “It’s been a long time,” he wrote to a Paris correspondent, “since I have read anything so wise, so noble, and so well written.”52
This time the king held firm: in 1768 he elevated René-Nicolas de Maupeou, an ambitious, hard-working, abrasive official and ruthless adversary of the parlements, to the chancellorship, and Maupeou developed a program for reducing the magistrates to obedience. As with Machault nearly two decades before, so now again Voltaire plunged into the battle without hesitation. He did not need to generate any new ideas: his interpretation of French politics served him in the late 1760s as it had in the early 1720s. The king was still in the right. So was his minister, even though Maupeou detested the philosophes and tried, though without success, to stifle free expression in France: in moments of crisis, Voltaire chose allies not on the basis of affection or congeniality, but of utility.
In the spring of 1769, Voltaire delivered his support for the thèse royale by placing his talent for history into the service of politics: his Histoire du Parlement de Paris, though filled with accurate facts and often quite objective, is wholly partisan in intent. Lying or distortion would not have served Voltaire’s cause: there were too many alert lawyers and historians about for that. Hence he wrote of the parlement soberly, with few overt allusions to current controversy, and with generous paragraphs on its occasional good sense. The truth, especially with Voltaire’s irony playing over the whole spectacle, was damaging enough. And that truth, as every intelligent reader could piece together for himself, buttressed Maupeou’s enterprise. Clearly, the parlement was not now, as it had rarely been, in a position to make sound policy; in 1768, as before, it was reactionary, selfish, divisive, irresponsible, superstitious, and intolerant. Voltaire amply documented each of these adjectives. Had it not obstructed the establishment of the Académie française and the distribution of the Encyclopédie? Had it not served the interests of a small minority with the affecting rhetoric of popular rights? Had it not instigated religious, civil, and class war through the centuries? Had it not capriciously tried the dauphin Charles in 1420 without a shred of legal authority? Had it not condemned the first printers in France and applauded the massacre of Saint Bartholomew? And had it not, over and over, harassed men of letters, persecuted Huguenots, and victimized the innocent? Moreover, the parlement had acquired no new rights at any time: its task was to try court cases, not royal ministers; its foundation was separate from that of the other parlements, hence all attempts to establish a union of parlements so as to better resist the crown were temerarious and illegal. Finally, its right to act as a depositary of the laws was now, as always, a purely administrative act rather than an authorization to participate in the making of the laws. Voltaire’s conclusion was inescapable: in the present crisis, the parlements could do only one thing—obey.
Oddly enough, at least one philosophe, Diderot, thought that Voltaire had handled the parlement rather too gently. Unlike Montesquieu and Voltaire, Diderot had come to politics almost reluctantly, drawn into the arena mainly by intense likes and dislikes, an editor’s troubles with censors, and humane impulses. As a young writer, in 1747, he had complained mildly about the prohibitions that impeded authors from touching upon religion and politics—but this was an evident response to the banning of his own philosophical debut, the Pensées philosophiques, in the previous year. But during the early 1750s, in the midst of noisy, prolonged disputes over Machault’s tax program, Diderot had very little to say, unless his article “Autorité politique” may be taken as an oblique comment on them.53 But if it is one, that comment is ambiguous; it mixes some audacious remarks on the necessary limits on power with a call for obedience. Just which of the parties these generalities were designed to support remains obscure.
“Autorité politique” appeared in 1751, in the first volume of the Encyclopédie. Later in the decade, and in the 1760s, Diderot occasionally spoke about politics, mostly in theoretical terms which, unlike Voltaire’s, had little relevance to France. The great events that moved Europe in those years, like the Seven Years’ War, did not move him—at least not visibly. Diderot was a humanitarian and a libertarian, and his observations on authoritarian regimes abroad mark a deepening of his political awareness. But in France his ambiguities remained unresolved. His brief flirtation with the Physiocrats in the late 1760s demonstrates his uncertainty over political methods; for two or three years he embraced enthusiastically what he was to repudiate with equal enthusiasm after Galiani and other critics had shown him the error of the Physiocrats’ ways.
Diderot’s response to the parlements demonstrates his uncertainty, if anything, even better. In June 1769, Diderot correctly identified Voltaire as the author of the pseudonymous Histoire du parlement de Paris, and warmly praised its style, its organization, its assembly of information, and its logic: “Voltaire clearly proves,” he thought, that the parlements are “merely simple salaried courts of law whose supposed privileges are only a sort of usurpation founded on fortuitous, sometimes quite frivolous circumstances.” But then, surprisingly enough, Diderot complains that Voltaire had treated the subject rather too superficially. Taking the line that Voltaire had followed all his life and using some of Voltaire’s very words, Diderot now argues that had Voltaire been more thorough he would have been even more critical of the magistrates than he was in this book. Had he gone back all the way to the origins of the parlement of Paris, he would have shown the parlement displaying esprit de corps at its worst. “We would have seen that body having itself exiled, refusing to deal out justice to the people, and bringing about anarchy when its chimerical rights were involved but never when it was a question of defending the people. We would have seen its intolerant, bigoted, stupid, preserving its gothic and vandal privileges and proscribing good sense. We would have seen it burning to meddle in everything: religion, government, war, finance, the arts and sciences, and mixing up everything with its ignorance, its self-interest, and its prejudices. We would have seen it too bold under feeble kings, too feeble under firm kings. We would have seen it further behind the times, less in touch with intellectual progress than the monks locked in the cells of Chartreux.” Moreover, “we would have seen it sold to authority; most of its members pensioned by the court, and the most violent enemy of all liberty, be it civil or religious,” and so on, through a whole catalogue of misdeeds. For the Diderot of this letter, no criticism seemed strong enough: pretending to reform the laws, the magistrates had left the laws in chaos; sworn to uphold justice, they had only pursued privileges and wealth at any price; perhaps worst of all, they had been the eager servants of “sacerdotal fury”: at the instance of fanatical priests, they had “lit the stakes and prepared the instruments of torture.”54
One should have thought that no fate, surely not dismissal, would be too harsh for such entrenched, deliberate, habitual criminals. Voltaire certainly thought so. When in the midst of winter in 1770–1 Maupeou exiled the magistrates to their estates in the country and replaced them by new courts, Voltaire approved. “You seem to be afraid,” Voltaire warned the parlements, “that tyranny might some day take the place of reasonable power. But let us be even more afraid of anarchy, which is only a tumultuous tyranny.” Seeking to stem the popular tide of sympathy for the magistrates, Voltaire harangued his readers, once again, on the limits of parliamentary authority: they are, or rather ought to be, “respectable organs of the laws, created to follow and not to make them.”55 This view was perfectly consistent with Voltaire’s lifelong position, and with Diderot’s critique of the parlements, but suddenly Diderot found much to admire in the magistrates. “Surely,” says Rameau’s nephew, speaking this once for his creator, “surely you would never have written Mahomet, but then, you wouldn’t have written the panegyric on Maupeou either.”56 It was logical and understandable for a philosophe to detest both the parlements and the chancellor: both were open enemies of the new ideas and equally intent on hobbling, if not crushing, their advocates. But Diderot’s position, far from being subtle, was simply inconsistent. By early 1771 he regarded the royal policy on the parlements as an attack on liberty: the magistrates, those enemies of reason, humanity, and freedom had somehow been transformed in his mind into their greatest champions. His much-quoted remark, “Every century has its spirit that characterizes it; the spirit of our century seems to be that of liberty,”57 is part of a long letter in which he excoriates Maupeou’s destruction of the parlements. He notes that Maupeou’s action had aroused widespread emotion “among all the orders of the state”; princes, tribunals, nobles are showering remonstrances on the king. Men grow heated, and he approved of this emotion: “This fire is spreading by degrees; the principles of freedom and independence, hitherto hidden in the hearts of a few thinking men, are at present establishing themselves, and are openly professed.”58
This, of course, was true enough; one of the unintended consequences of Maupeou’s coup d’état was the efflorescence of libertarian rhetoric. But Diderot did not see this bold talk as a fortunate accident; he thought it appropriate to the occasion and the parlements as objects worthy of his solicitude. “We are at the point of a crisis that will end in slavery or freedom; if it is to be slavery, it will be a slavery similar to that now existing in Marocco or Constantinople. If all the parlements are dissolved and France is inundated with little tribunals composed of magistrates without conscience and without authority, and subject to dismissal at the first sign of their master, then farewell to all the privileges of diverse estates which form a corrective principle preventing monarchy from degenerating into despotism.”59 Diderot had displayed great admiration for Montesquieu, an admiration that seems to have waned with the years. In fact, not long after he had written the letter I have just quoted, he told Catherine of Russia that he simply could not understand Montesquieu’s affection for feudalism: what is good about the feudal form of government, he said, can be summed up in ten pages, while its defects would take up a thousand.60 Yet here in 1771, the advocate of the open society, the radical, the near-democrat Diderot sounded like one of Montesquieu’s most loyal disciples.
In the light of events, of course, it is possible to argue that Diderot’s new-found thèse nobiliaire was hardly more irrelevant to France than Voltaire’s consistent advocacy of the thèse royale was to become. It is true that the battle of the early 1770s, though exhilarating and for some years promising, was in its denouement, pathetic. “I shall never change,” Louis XV proclaimed, and for the last four years of his life he remained true to his word; the new courts did their work, if not without scandal, at least with some effectiveness. Then, in 1774, Louis XV died, and Louis XVI dismissed Maupeou and recalled the parlements. But the young king also gave power to Turgot, a public servant who seemed to embody the thèse royale at its best. Like others, the aged Voltaire took new hope at the appointment; if ever reform from the top had a chance in his country, it was now. But then in May 1776 Louis XVI dismissed Turgot, and Voltaire, now within two years of his death, collapsed as the thèse royale collapsed around him. As late as September 1776 he lamented to Condorcet: “Since that fatal day, I have not followed anything, I have asked nobody for anything, and I am waiting patiently for someone to cut our throats.”61 It was cold comfort to the old man that Montesquieu’s position had always been bad history and bad politics, and that Diderot’s divagations were a sign of confusion rather than subtlety: his own position, good history always and good politics for decades, had now become simply pointless. In a revolutionary situation, it seemed, empiricism was not enough.
FOR A PHILOSOPHE to support the king in France was a natural thing to do; it raised neither logical nor moral difficulties. For a philosophe to support other kings further east might seem just as natural, but in fact it raised difficulties both logical and moral. These central European rulers were powerful and ambiguous figures. Far more visibly than Louis XV, they embodied the possibilities and the problems of enlightened absolutism; Frederick II of Prussia in particular engaged the imagination of his time and stirred up questions about the political philosophy of the Enlightenment. Frederick was a philosopher and a king: if anyone might fill the role of modern philosopher-king with éclat, it was he. D’Alembert was only one among the little flock to call him roi philosophe; from his youth, Frederick had appeared to the philosophes as the fulfillment of a cherished wish.
It was in 1736, while he was still crown prince, that Frederick had begun a correspondence with Voltaire, and as Voltaire never failed to tell his friends, it was significant that it was Frederick who had taken the initiative. In his long and uncomfortable intercourse with the Prussian king, Voltaire, always ready with a pleasing comparison, found many synonyms calculated to please; as one patient scholar62 has discovered, Voltaire likened Frederick to Caesar, Augustus, Marcus Aurelius, Trajan, Antoninus Pius, Titus, Julian, Vergil, Pliny, Horace, Maecenas, Cicero, Catullus, Homer, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, Boileau, Solomon, Prometheus, Apollo, Patroclus, Socrates, Alcibiades, Alexander, Henri IV and Francis I—a rather miscellaneous but shrewdly conceived list. Yet, however grossly Voltaire would later shower his facile adulation on his royal admirer, their peculiar friendship began with the prince adulating the poet. In his malicious Mémoires, Voltaire acknowledges that he had found the King attractive both for his private and his public virtues: “He had wit and charm and,” Voltaire added candidly, “what is more, he was king, which, given human weakness, is always a great seduction.” But this seduction had been reinforced by Frederick’s eagerness to court a mere writer: “Ordinarily, we men of letters flatter kings; this one praised me from head to toe.”63 Then, in 1740, when Frederick ascended the throne, he rapidly took a series of actions that further ingratiated him with philosophes other than the uniquely privileged Voltaire. As king, Frederick restored the Berlin Academy and practically handed it over to French savants; he proclaimed freedom of conscience and proved his good intentions by recalling the philosopher Christian Wolff from the exile that his father, Frederick William I, had imposed on him; he sent his architect Knobelsdorff abroad to gather experience; took an active, comprehensive, salutary interest in the economic affairs of the state; and, as I have said, reduced the savagery of punishments. Prussia under Frederick II seemed on the verge of a cultural, political, legal, and economic renaissance, destined to become, in Voltaire’s hyperbole, the Athens of the North. That the philosophes should have high expectations of such a king requires no explanation; idealization was a response to palpable realities: to compare Frederick with that bullying, coarse, single-minded drill sergeant, his father, or with that interesting but ultimately disappointing lot, his contemporaries, made admiration and hope plausible attitudes rather than a delusion or the consequence of principled devotion to the doctrines of enlightened absolutism.
The philosophes discovered soon enough that the Athens of the North was only a frigid Sparta after all; the philosopher-king was more the militarist king than the pacific philosopher. Frederick’s cynical invasion of Silesia, his patent unreliability as an ally, his reimposition of censorship, his shabby and, whatever the provocations, brutal treatment of Voltaire after their friendship began to pall in 1752, his disheartening failure to overhaul the laws and humanize the army, his low estimate of man (which even Voltaire found troublesome), and his principled refusal to take the philosophes’ advice on anything besides his verses—all this decisively outweighed his ostentatious affection for French men of letters, his irreligiosity, and his diligence. Voltaire’s visits to Prussia culminating in that disastrous stay of 1750–3 and d’Alembert’s suave letters to Frederick are in the long run less significant than the philosophes’ reserve, their refusal of pressing invitations, and their outright hostility.
Some of the philosophes’ most weighty reservations were, to be sure, nonpolitical: they did not want to settle in Prussia because they were happy in France or calculated that, even though occasionally persecuted, they would be happier in Paris than in Potsdam. They did not want to leave their mistresses, especially for a court that had no women. They disliked the raw Prussian climate and the crude provinciality of Berlin society. They were dissatisfied with the skimpy terms that Frederick had to offer them. But personal reasons shaded into political ones. The philosophes simply liked their freedom too well. That is why Voltaire allowed his relations with Frederick to deteriorate at the very time that his return to Paris was cut off. That is why d’Alembert, a foundling, a bastard, a commoner, a man with no means, would give the King of Prussia nothing more than soothing letters and a visit of three months.
The philosophes’ preference for freedom to this kind of servitude is in itself a commentary on their political thought, but beyond that, it was a commentary on Frederick’s conduct. Rousseau spoke for the philosophes in 1758 when he called himself an “admirer of the talents of the King of Prussia, but in no way his partisan”—a meaningful distinction. “I can neither esteem nor love a man without principles, who tramples on all international law, who does not love virtue, but who considers it as a bait with which to amuse fools, and who began his Machiavellianism by refuting Machiavelli.”64
With the passage of time the philosophes’ distrust grew stronger, but it was not until the 1770s that Diderot gave final expression to them. As a self-respecting man of letters and a good bourgeois, Diderot rightly judged that he would never be happy at court. His odd friendship with Catherine II in no way contradicts this sense of himself: his kindly feelings for her were compounded of gratitude for her delicate generosity, susceptibility to her personal charm, and inadequate information about Russia, and punctuated in any event by candid criticisms of all the aspects of her regime he understood. Diderot kept himself rigorously independent of Frederick: he refused to visit Potsdam even when it would have been convenient for him to do so; he refused to lavish praises on the Prussian king in his published writings, the kind of coy, indirect message that the philosophes generally liked to send because monarchs generally liked to receive them. He never even wrote to Frederick; his only “letter” was a cold little essay of 1771 which, far more than a personal message, goes quite directly to the critical problems of political thought in the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s Lettre to Frederick is the tailpiece of a debate, a rejoinder to a reply.65 Early in 1770 there appeared an anonymous treatise, Essai sur les préjugés, a highly characteristic product of the Holbachian factory: it denounced with all the customary vehemence, all the customary dogmatism, the vices of the priesthood and the absurdity of Christian belief. But the unknown author also ventured into politics, a field that Holbach and his friends had so far left untouched. As doctrinaire here as in its assaults on religion, the Essai denounced absolute princes as “despots,” and characterized despots as the scourges of their country, the victims of poisonous flatterers, war-loving criminals, and oppressive impostors who mislead the world with their dubious academies that are in reality nothing better than slave societies. Frederick read the treatise with unfeigned disgust soon after it appeared, and correctly applied its heavy-handed sarcasms to himself. What troubled him most was the largely implicit but fundamental thesis of the Essai that man is made for the truth, and should be told the truth; cynical and self-protective, Frederick in his refutation squarely took the opposite position: “Man is made for error”; lies to the people, in political and religious matters, are essential to sound government.66
Diderot entered the discussion at this critical point, spurred on by his passion for truth and aversion for the Prussian king. He had probably read the Essai in draft and discussed it with Holbach; it is significant that Voltaire, normally well-informed in such matters, thought that Diderot might actually have written it.67 In fact, Diderot’s own effort was more economical, less turgid, and if possible even more aggressive: The world may be full of errors, but that is the fault not of man but of “the villainous preachers of lies” who crowd the world; man is born for truth, needs the truth, flourishes on the truth. Like the other sociologists in the Enlightenment, Diderot was happily free from the illusion that men do the good once they know it: powerful lying villains “deliver to their dupes eulogies to the truth.” There are so many enemies of truth and goodness in the world! so many corrupt laws! so many bad governments! so many men whose interest lies in evil!68
“So many” meant “one”—Frederick of Prussia, whom servile men had already begun to call “The Great.” Unfortunately, Diderot’s letter never reached the address for which it was intended; it was not published until the 1930s, when a far more vicious regime than Frederick’s held power in Germany. It seems a pity: one wonders how much Stoicism the King of Prussia could have mustered in the face of Diderot’s characterization of him as a mediocre thinker, poor poet, disappointing king, in a word, bad sovereign. The royal author had written in the transparent disguise of a philosopher. “May God preserve us,” Diderot piously concludes his riposte, “from a sovereign who resembles that kind of philosopher.”69 Frederick, obviously enough, was too much the despot and not enlightened enough to deserve more than the most perfunctory and the most self-interested support from the philosophes.
Sheer passion, no matter how well intentioned or fiercely phrased, could not dispose of absolutism; it was and remained the most prominent political system for theorists and practitioners of government alike. I have already commented on the history of eighteenth-century states: with the partial exception of Great Britain and the Dutch Republic and the ludicrous exception of Poland, the tide was running toward absolutism, and absolutism was in decisive ways more modern, more efficient, and to the surprise of some philosophes, more “enlightened” than the older political systems it was attacking. Absolutism was aggressive in part because it felt itself on the defensive; rather than calling the eighteenth century the century of the rising bourgeoisie, we might call it the century of the rising aristocracy. In Poland the nobility was wholly, in Russia largely, in France fatally, triumphant, and everywhere monarchs did battle with recalcitrant privileged orders, or struck uneasy alliances with them. Where representative forms were not dead or moribund, they were reactionary, and in these countries reformers found their choice restricted to an authoritarianism that took pride in its modernity and a traditionalism that took pains to reject modernity.
In the German states—Prussia, the smaller southern regimes, and the Hapsburg Empire—this limited choice was at its most clear-cut. There, specialists in the science of government, the Cameralists, found their proper place in administration. They pressed for efficient bureaucracies, intrigued against obstructive aristocrats, and drafted reforms for the benefit, but without the participation, of the masses. Christian Wolff in Halle, Joseph von Sonnenfels in Vienna, J. H. G. von Justi in Vienna and Göttingen, are only the three best known among a tribe of authoritarian rationalists whose ideas and ideals all seem cast from the same mold or copied from one another. Their aims were ambitious, though, and from their point of view, realistic: they sought to produce and increase happiness by reasonable enactments. Their political theory constitutes an escape from politics into management, the tactful evasion of a challenge to real power that would have been hopeless.70 Without a historical, social, or educational basis for liberalism, liberalism seemed to them Utopia, paternalism the only way to general betterment.
As the Cameralists understood it, the prerequisite for successful paternalism is a correct grasp of human motives that the legislator then translates into administrative action. Sonnenfels and the others were eager to subordinate pity or other commendable emotions to sober calculation, in the service of the benevolent manipulation of the people. “A properly constituted state,” wrote Justi in a characteristic passage, “must be exactly analogous to a machine in which all the wheels and gears are precisely adjusted to one another; and the ruler must be the foreman, the mainspring, or the soul—if one may use the expression—which sets everything in motion.”71 Sonnenfels’s metaphors were, if anything, even more picturesque: “We perceive society,” he wrote, “we perceive ourselves as part of it in the sovereign, in this permanent oracle of general intelligence—of which he is the symbol, the mirror, the awe-commanding image.”72 The word Polizei, like the word police, had a generous meaning in the eighteenth century: it meant the rational superintendence of domestic affairs, and for the Cameralists, political theory was exhausted in the work of Polizei. It seemed self-evident to these writers that the single purpose of government is to diffuse happiness. But their definition of happiness did not include the freedom of the subject; the subject had other, well-defined duties. As the ruler must make his people happy, the subject must, by God, obey and be happy: “All the duties of people and subjects,” wrote Justi, “may be reduced to the formula: to promote all the ways and means adopted by the ruler for their happiness, by their obedience, fidelity and diligence.”73 The Cameralists were very fond of formulas; Rousseau’s caricature of their style of thinking was deadly in its accuracy.
This view of government had absolute monarchy as its most plausible corollary. To do his duty adequately, the ruler must have at his disposal a perfectly obedient bureaucracy, all the knowledge it is possible for him to gather, and unlimited authority to translate his programs into law. Popular participation in such a scheme was not so much impious or impudent as simply irrelevant. If the ruler was the physician of his country, supremely knowledgeable and uniquely wise, there was no reason why he should consult his ignorant and superstitious patients; Plato had made that point long ago, and authoritarians made it again in the eighteenth century. Frederick II, deeply imbued with this rationalism, said flatly that men are governed by two mainsprings of action—“fear of punishment and hope for reward.”74 Hence the system of guidance that the ruler must devise for his subjects is simple, as simple as their psychology; it would only be obstructed by such nonsense as representative institutions or a free press.
Since there was no tradition of liberalism in the German states, opposition to this kind of paternalism came from conservatives dismayed by the vanishing of beloved and time-honored institutions, and by the ease with which closet philosophers and their princely disciples thought society could be improved. Society, these conservatives argued, is not a watch but an organism, incorporating through its long, slow growth the accumulated wisdom of the ages; to reshape it by means of a few simple rules drawn from academic psychology and administrative technology is to destroy what makes life worth living for the sake of a chilling nightmare. “These idées simples et uniques,” wrote Justus Möser, “mark the clear path to monarchical (and, in the same way, also to democratic) despotism.”75
Though in many details eminently just, these criticisms lost much of their force and their disinterested quality by being yoked to a reactionary ideology; the argument in behalf of moving slowly all too often took the form of an argument in behalf of not moving at all. Yet in their insistence on the variety of human experience, the difficulty of reform, and the respect that men owe to history, Möser and his allies also laid bare the essentially unenlightened character of the so-called enlightened reform in the Hapsburg lands and elsewhere and thus laid bare the problem the philosophes faced: the philosophes wanted reform for other reasons and, for the most part, with other means, yet in most of Europe there were no other means, at least not in sight.
The theories of the Cameralists enjoyed success at least in this: they were put into practice. In the second half of the eighteenth century, breaking down the determined resistance of principle, inertia, and self-interest, a number of European rulers took the advice of their “enlightened” tutors and undertook often far-reaching reforms in institutions and policies. These rulers, summarily labeled “Enlightened Despots” by nineteenth-century historians, make up an extensive but inconclusive list: Catherine II of Russia, Frederick II of Prussia, Charles III of Spain, Gustavus III of Sweden, Emperors Joseph II and Leopold II have undisputed claim, Maria Theresa of Austria, Louis XV of France, Joseph I of Portugal a somewhat uncertain claim to membership.
This collection of monarchs was something more than an accidental collocation.76 Their reigns coincided, and they knew and watched one another; they often admired the same ideas, competed for the same celebrities, and mouthed the same slogans; their education and their cultural milieux were strikingly similar: “The courts where they grew to manhood and rulership in many cases already reflected much of the secularism, wit, and cultural cosmopolitanism that were so much the earmarks of the polite intellectual world of the salons and the philosophes of the eighteenth century.”77 Moreover, the repertory of reform was of necessity restricted, and therefore the efforts of all these rulers bear a certain family resemblance; they were all essentially efforts to establish effective government in their realm. These emperors, kings, czarinas, and grand dukes worked to clear up a morass of regulations, to lighten the financial burdens on trade, to make more or less sincere moves toward humanizing the criminal law, to aid the education of farmers and craftsmen—in a word, as much as their talents and their opposition would let them, to rationalize their states.
Yet such resemblances fade in the face of dissimilarities. None of these rulers was a visionary; each was intent above all to solve real problems for the eminently practical purpose of surviving in the jungle of international relations. Hence each found his own way of rationalizing government and neutralizing opposition. In Vienna, Maria Theresa and her son, co-regent, and successor Joseph II, greatly expanded the authority of the central administration over the provinces and supervised bureaucrats through a pervasive system of espionage. In Potsdam, Frederick II employed the same method of control, and, in addition, kept all threads of government in his own hands by demanding written reports from officials on which he acted alone, but, precisely that he might retain sole power, he distributed bureaucratic authority among widely scattered offices: unlike the Hapsburg system, his system combined the tightest personal supervision with administrative decentralization. Leopold of Tuscany, for his part, followed yet another direction: like Frederick, he decentralized his administration; unlike Frederick, he gave his officials wide powers. Charles III of Spain centralized and decentralized his government at once, by increasing the duties of local governments and those of his royal cabinet.
Dissimilarities pile on dissimilarities. While Catherine II burdened Russia’s peasants with new exactions and drove them into unprecedented slavery, the Hapsburg rulers practically abolished serfdom; where Joseph II timidly restricted the use of torture, his brother Leopold and Frederick II abolished it altogether. Even the role of the nobility, obviously a matter of the highest importance, varied from enlightened state to enlightened state: Catherine depended strongly on the support of her aristocracy and cemented it by granting it ever more privileges; Frederick II reversed his father’s relatively liberal policy and restored the Prussian nobility to its exclusive status, which gave it extensive power over its hapless dependents. In contrast, both Joseph II and Leopold II attacked the privileges of the privileged estates, sometimes with undisguised disdain and overt hostility.
The philosophes thus came by their political disagreements honestly; their debates over Catherine II or Frederick II reflect not simply a difference in their temperament or in their expectations, but real bafflement at princes who were doing so many different things in so many different ways with such similar rhetoric. The policies even of a single prince often left his most benevolent observers confused. Du Pont’s ambivalence over Joseph II is an almost poignant illustration of the philosophes’ dilemma: “The Emperor is hard to judge,” Du Pont complained. “When one observes what he has done and is doing daily for his country, he is a prince of the rarest merit.” On the other hand, in international affairs, in his “avidity for war,” his “desire for aggrandizement,” his “disrespect for old treaties” and his “inclination to decide everything by force” he appeared not as a “noble-minded eagle” but as a “terrible bird of prey.”78 Other rulers were just as puzzling. There can be little doubt: this so-called group of so-called Enlightened Despots was not what the philosophes were—a family.
And the so-called theory of Enlightened Despotism was not even a theory, at least not for the philosophes. Voltaire’s friendship with Frederick, Diderot’s visits to Catherine on the one hand, and the princes’ moves against the Jesuits and against torture on the other, suggest a certain natural affinity; philosophes and princes could use one another to their own profit, and philosophes and princes could agree, in very general terms, on the advantages of reason over superstition, order over chaos, humanity over cruelty. But then all educated men in the eighteenth century, Christians and atheists, writers and rulers, agreed on these matters: Boswell defended the slave trade on the ground that the British colonies were more humane than the African states. Where the autocrats and the philosophes parted company, though they often did so politely, was on the critical issue of freedom.
Even the political thought of the Physiocrats, which comes closer than any other system in the West to an apology for “despotism,” contains a pervasive and ultimately dominant libertarian strain. The Physiocrats’ political theory was an adjunct to their economic theory; property came before the state, both in time and in importance. They were monarchists; as French writers concentrated on France, haunted by their vision of obstructions in the way of the natural laws of social life, they could hardly be anything else. But much of their writing on forms of government reads like a prosaic restatement of Pope’s poetic relativism: forms of government are largely irrelevant; that government is best which best administers the natural laws that the Physiocrats have discovered.79 This superb pose was bad enough; the Physiocrats’ fatal love for pithy formulations, on which I have commented before, was worse. Turgot, who was himself half a Physiocrat, saw the danger clearly: the Physiocrats’ favorite political slogan, “legal despotism,” far from clarifying their views, only obscured them. “That devil ‘despotism,’ ” he wrote to Du Pont, “will forever stand in the way of the propagation of your doctrine.”80
Forever is a long time, but for two hundred years Turgot has been right. The term “despotisme légal” caused an immediate and inconclusive debate. Its father, Le Mercier de la Rivière, who in 1767 used it prominently in his authoritative exposition of physiocratic politics, dropped it as soon as its dangerous potentialities became apparent. By then it was too late: slogans have a life of their own and a tenacity that permits them to survive the most convincing explanations and conclusive refutations; they subsist, it seems, on a level too deep for reason to penetrate. In its own day, though, the phrase “despotisme légal” stood in the Physiocrats’ way because it testified not so much to their aversion to freedom as to their inability to think. While Mably attacked it as a chimera that must lead to tyranny and barbarism, that view largely anticipated later fears.81 In the 1760s the characteristic criticism was that of Rousseau: “Stop talking to me about your legal despotism,” he candidly told Mirabeau. All he could see, he wrote, was “two contradictory words which, put together, mean nothing to me.”82 And it is significant that Diderot, whose alertness to any trace of authoritarianism was marked, found Le Mercier’s book a marvel of lucidity and logic. This was during his brief, passionate infatuation with physiocracy, to be sure, but when he turned against it he did so, as we know, only because Galiani had persuaded him that it was too doctrinaire on the grain trade.83 That physiocratic devil “despotism” was never a devil for Diderot.
If it became a devil for others, the Physiocrats had only themselves to blame. They were too singleminded, too fanatically attached to their economic laws, too confident in their “philosophical discoveries,” to develop an autonomous or flexible theory of politics. Some of their political pronouncements, though awkwardly formulated, made good sense: their insistence that sovereignty must be united rather than dispersed was a critique of privileged castes that they regarded, not without justice, as special interest groups hostile to essential economic reforms; this was their way of supporting the thèse royale in France. But other pronouncements were bound to arouse skepticism: Le Mercier offered Euclid as the model of the perfect despot whose decrees had found universal obedience.84 To the Physiocrats this must have seemed a brilliant comparison: the laws of nature, they argued, impose themselves with such force that no rational man can refuse them their assent. The other philosophes were ready to accept the proposition that there are no parties in science, and that once its truth has become evident a scientific law will enlist a unanimous following. But Le Mercier’s unhappy analogy between intellectual and political authority hinted at an authoritarian streak in his thinking and strongly suggested that the Physiocrats were contemptuous of freedom in their infatuation with order and the security of private property.
This was partially, but only partially, just. The political thought of the Physiocrats, however glib, ambiguous, manipulative, and incomplete, in essence seeks to overcome authoritarianism, at least the capricious authoritarianism of arbitrary rulership. One day the dauphin, the father of the future Louis XVI, grumbled to Quesnay that monarchy was hard work. “Monsieur,” replied the doctor, “I don’t think so.” “Really!” said the dauphin, “and what would you do if you were king?” “Monsieur,” said Quesnay, “I would do nothing.” “Who would govern, then?” the dauphin asked. “The laws,” said Quesnay.85 Admittedly a conversation is not a theory, but this conversation points to a theory. The Physiocrats’ ideal was an efficient government unhampered by privileged groups, governing with a minimum of regulations and a minimum of interference in the life of the citizen, subject to the rule of law, checked by an independent judiciary, and directed by public opinion. Like most of the philosophes, the Physiocrats came, especially in their later writings, to profess great respect for public opinion; in the accepted style, Mirabeau called it la regina del mundo. But on this point the Physiocrats went beyond commonplaces: public opinion, they argued, must be made meaningful through the support of free and universal education, and by a free press. Here, too, the Physiocrats are not above criticism: they certainly expected to make the new educational institutions into vehicles of propaganda for their doctrine. But this much remains: Their belief in the elimination rather than the proliferation of regulations, a kind of negative government that was the political counterpart of Rousseau’s negative education, their insistence on safeguards for the rights and the privacy and the property of the subject, and their fertile ideas on public opinion led the Physiocrats to advocate a constitutional absolutism, which was an incomplete form of liberalism. Only one hard question remained: how to create liberalism in an illiberal world.
1The Federalist, No. 9, 51. Other philosophes like the marquis d’Argenson, and allied reformers like the abbé de Saint-Pierre, also speak of a “science of politics.”
2 See also below, 465–6.
3 Quoted in Klaus Epstein: The Genesis of German Conservatism (1966), 35.
4 “Intendants,” in The Encyclopédie, 121. See above, chap. ii, section 1, and below, chap. ix, section 2.
5 It was admittedly hard to define practicality: one man’s realism was another man’s wishful thinking. Thus the marquis d’Argenson criticized the abbé de Saint-Pierre for his inexperience: “He is often mistaken, because he has never held public office, and neither men nor affairs may be understood when viewed only from one’s library.” (I owe this reference to Gerald J. Cavanaugh.)
6 See below, section 2.
7 See The Federalist, passim.
8 For Rousseau, see below, chap. x, section 3.
9 Hume to Sir James Johnstone of Westerhall, October 31 (1745). Letters, I, 66.
10 H. R. Trevor-Roper, reviewing Giuseppe Giarrizzo: David Hume. Politico e Storico, in History and Theory, III, 3 (1964), 385.
11 “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth,” Works, III, 480.
12 Treatise of Human Nature, 493.
13 Ibid., 549.
14 Lettres persanes, No. 83, Œuvres, I, part 3, 169–70.
15 Ronald Grimsley: “Quelques aspects de la théorie du droit naturel au siècle des lumières,” VS, XXV (1963), 728.
16 See especially Diderot to Falconet (September 6, 1768). Correspondance, VII, 117.
17 Grimsley: “Droit naturel,” VS, XXV, 736.
18 P. 93. Italics in the original. For Beccaria’s use of this phrase see above, chap. viii, section 4.
19 “Of the Origin of Government,” Works, III, 114.
20 “Of the Original Contract,” ibid., 450. I have already quoted this passage above, 335.
21 Ibid., 446.
22 “Of the Origin of Government,” ibid., 116.
23 See The Rise of Modern Paganism, 170.
24 “Impôt,” in The Encyclopédie, 111.
25 April 11, 1728. Correspondence, II, 67, in English.
26 Lettre IX, Lettres philosophiques, I, 101.
27 See Voltaire to the marquis d’Argenson, August 8 (1743). Correspondence, XIII, 32–3.
28 Idées républicaines, in Œuvres, XXIV, 414–26, passim.
29 (March 15, 1767). Correspondence, LXV, 47. See also below, chap. x, section 2.
30 De l’esprit des lois, book XXX, chap. xviii, in Œuvres, I, part 2, 327.
31 Franklin L. Ford: Robe and Sword: The Regrouping of the French Aristocracy after Louis XIV (1953), 93.
32 See above, 298–9.
33 Franz L. Neumann: “Introduction” to Montesquieu: Spirit of the Laws, xxvii.
34 De l’esprit des lois, book XXX, chap. xxv, in Œuvres, I, part 2, 358.
35 Ibid., book II, chap. iv, in Œuvres, I, part 1, 20. In the manuscript the formulation is even stronger: “The intermediate powers constitute the nature of monarchical government, that is to say of that in which one single man governs by fundamental laws.” Shackleton: Montesquieu, 279.
36 De l’esprit des lois, book II, chap. iv, in Œuvres, I, part 1, 21.
37 “The vested interests created by venality were enormous. They naturally sought protection for their investments. A strong monarchy must, of necessity, appear to them the greatest danger. Support for this investment could come only from groups and theories that made the king subject to effective controls by the privileged. A new theory of feudalism corresponded to the growing process of infeudation.” Neumann: “Introduction” to Montesquieu: Spirit of the Laws, xxii.
38 De l’esprit des lois, book XI, chap. vi, in Œuvres, I, part 1, 207–22 passim. See above, 466.
39 Ibid., chap. v, in Œuvres, I, part 1, 207.
40 Ibid., chap. iv, in Œuvres, 206; and Shackleton: Montesquieu, 300.
41 Notebooks, 94. See Voltaire’s lucid comparative analysis of Parliament and parlements in his Essai sur les mœurs, I, 787.
42 Voltaire to d’Alembert, October 16 (1765). Correspondence, LIX, 125.
43 Voltaire to Dubos, October 30, 1738. Ibid., VII, 424–7.
44 Notebooks, 110.
45 Essai sur les mœurs, II, 8. Anyone who thinks that Voltaire was an indiscriminate supporter of strong kings should read his pages on Louis XI in the Essai; they show Voltaire to be a most discriminating historian.
46 “Don’t scold a poor devil who is the buffoon of the king at fifty, and who is more burdened with musicians, decorators, actors, actresses, singers, dancers, than are the eight or nine German electors to make themselves a German Caesar. I run from Paris to Versailles, I write verses in post chaises. I must praise the king loudly, madame la dauphine discreetly, the royal family very delicately; I must satisfy the court and not displease the town.” Voltaire to Cideville, January 31, 1745. Correspondence, XIV, 103.
47 Zadig, in Œuvres, XXI, 45.
48 Des embellissements de la ville de Cachemire, in ibid., XXIII, 478.
49 Extrait du décret de la sacrée congrégation de l’Inquisition de Rome, à l’encontre d’un libelle intitulé ‘Lettres sur le vingtième,’ ibid., 463.
50 La voix du sage et du peuple, ibid., 466–71
51 Voltaire to the duc de Richelieu (c. August 31, 1750). Correspondence, XVIII, 144.
52 Voltaire to Damilaville, March 12 (1766). Ibid., LX, 152.
53 As Professor Arthur M. Wilson has pointed out, it may of course be true that Diderot did comment on political questions in some of the numerous letters of the period that obviously have been lost.
54 Diderot to Grimm (June 1769). Correspondance, IX, 64–5.
55 L’Équivoque, in Œuvres, XXVIII, 424; Les peuples aux parlements, ibid., 413.
56 Le neveu de Rameau, 15.
57 Diderot to Princess Dashkoff (April 3, 1771). Correspondance, XI, 20.
58 Ibid., 19.
59 Ibid., 20.
60 Diderot et Catherine II, ed. Tourneux (1899), 105.
61 September 7, 1776. Correspondence, XCV, 46.
62 Adrienne D. Hytier. See her “Frédéric II et les philosophes récalcitrants,” The Romanic Review, LVII, 3 (October 1966), 161.
63 Mémoires, in Œuvres, I, 17.
64 Quoted in Hytier: “Frédéric II et les philosophes récalcitrants,” 176.
65 The manuscript is dated 1771, and entitled Lettre de M. Denis Diderot sur l’examen de l’Essai sur les préjugés. It has become better known by the title that Franco Venturi gave it in 1937: Pages inédites contre un tyran. See Diderot: Œuvres politiques, 129–33. And see below, chap. x, section 1.
66 See Diderot: Œuvres politiques, 138–9 n.
67 See ibid., 131. Voltaire’s other candidates were Damilaville or Helvétius.
68 Ibid., 136.
69 Ibid., 148.
70 “Rationalist politics, like any politics orientated towards the achievement of a single end or even of a few closely linked ends, rather than towards the harmonization of a wide variety of ends, tends inevitably to lose its political character and become a matter of implementation and administration.” Geraint Parry: “Enlightened Government and its Critics in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” The Historical Journal, VI, 2 (1963), 182.
71 Quoted in ibid.
72 Quoted in Robert A. Kann: A Study in Austrian Intellectual History: From Late Baroque to Romanticism (1960), 170.
73 Quoted in Leo Gershoy: From Despotism to Revolution, 1763–1789 (1944), 53.
74 Friedrich der Grosse: Die politischen Testamente, tr. Friedrich von Oppeln-Bronikowski (1922), 37 (testament of 1752).
75 Quoted in Parry: “Enlightened Government and its Critics in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” 187.
76 For the whole question of “Enlightened Despotism,” the current status of controversy and scholarship, see Bibliographical Essay below.
77 John G. Gagliardo: Enlightened Despotism (1967), 21.
78 Quoted in Heinz Holldack: “Der Physiokratismus und die Absolute Monarchie,” Historische Zeitschrift, CVL (1932), 533.
79 While I have not seen the passage quoted by any Physiocrat, the Cameralist Sonnenfels does quote it, and with emphatic approval. See Kann: A Study in Austrian Intellectual History, 170.
80 Michel Lhéritier: “Rapport général: le despotisme éclairé, de Frédéric II à la Révolution française,” Bulletin of the International Committee of Historical Sciences, No. 35, vol. IX (1937), 188.
81 See Mably’s Doutes proposés aux philosophes économistes sur l’ordre naturel et essentiel des sociétés politiques (1768), conveniently summarized in Edmund Richner: Le Mercier de la Rivière: Ein Führer der physiokratischen Bewegung in Frankreich (1931), 80–2.
82 Rousseau to Mirabeau, July 26, 1767. Correspondance générale, XVII, 158.
83 Diderot to Falconet (July 1767). Correspondance, VII, 94—a paean of praise for Le Mercier. For Diderot and physiocracy, see above, 352–3.
84 This choice example is quoted in Geoffrey Bruun: The Enlightened Despots (1929), 28.
85 This instructive story has been reported many times, most authoritatively by G. Weulersse; see Les Physiocrates (1931), 187.