When Voltaire died at the end of May 1778, Rousseau remarked that his own death must follow soon, since their lives had been inextricably bound each with the other. Almost as if to prove his point, he in fact expired five weeks later. Neither Rousseau nor Voltaire could have foreseen, however, that it was their fate to be joined together in resurrection, apotheosis and damnation as well. Disinterred from their quiet country graves in the 1790s, the remains of these two most prominent figures of the French Enlightenment were brought to Paris and lodged opposite one another in the Pantheon, where in such partnership they came to be venerated as the heroes of a revolution of which the occasional prospect in their own lifetimes had dismayed them both. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, when revolutionary fortunes sagged, they were vilified by conservatives who, like Maistre, blamed them for their mutual responsibility in bringing down the ancien régime; and by the mid-nineteenth century, when the radical tide had turned again and leading socialists argued that the Revolution of 1789 had not been pursued far enough, the blinkered doctrines of Rousseau and Voltaire once more (or even of ‘Rousseau-Voltaire’ in the Gilbertonsullivan compound sometimes cemented by Marx) were held to express the nature of its limitations and the extent of its failure.
Of course these transfigured links between the two men drawn by their political admirers and critics alike form a grotesquely monochrome distortion of Rousseau’s view, since he clearly meant that Voltaire was his mortal antagonist rather than confederate in the same camp. ‘I hate you’, he exclaimed in a letter of 1760, protesting that Voltaire had betrayed the hospitality shown him in Geneva, where he had been granted asylum from his persecutors. ‘This mountebank’, ‘this impious braggart’, ‘this man of so much talent put to such vile use’, he continued elsewhere, had destroyed the morals of Genevans by introducing the love of luxury, satire and theatre in their midst, with the loss of their liberty the likely outcome and permanent monument of his stay among them. Worst of all, the scoundrel had stirred the population against him so much that he could never again make his home there, and Jean-Jacques—who had first proclaimed himself ‘citizen of Geneva’ in an earlier letter to Voltaire—supposed his worst fears confirmed when the city’s governing council condemned and ordered the burning of both Emile and the Contrat social and commanded his arrest in case he should return to his native soil.
Voltaire, for his part, filled the margins of his copies of the political writing of Rousseau with such fine expletives as ‘ridiculous’, ‘depraved’, ‘pitiful’, ‘abominable’ and ‘false’. Infuriated by the suggestion that in Geneva he had sought and been offered asylum, and dismayed by Rousseau’s disclosure that he was the author of an anti-Christian tract which, as usual, he had taken the precaution to publish anonymously, he retorted that Rousseau was a ‘bastard of Diogenes’s dog’ whose veins were filled with vitriol and arsenic, a ‘monster’ whom he would have to see beaten senseless, were it not for the fact that the lunatic was on his way to Bedlam already. In his Sentiment des citoyens, moreover, he accused Jean-Jacques of, among other things, attempting to overthrow the government of the city he had betrayed; of having contracted a venereal disease as a consequence of his debaucheries (Rousseau suffered from a congenital urinary complaint); of having abandoned his children to a foundlings home (the first public disclosure of his most terrible secret); and of having brought about the death of the mother of his mistress (still very much alive when Voltaire made the allegation). So scurrilous was this attack that eighteenth-century publishers chose not to incorporate the Sentiment in their collections of Voltaire’s writings, and even in our own time the distinguished editor of his correspondence and devoted disciple of his ideas, Theodore Besterman, has stood alone against nearly all other authorities in doubting that such a libel of Rousseau could really have been drafted by Voltaire himself. Yet, just as Besterman was inviting his readers to admire Voltaire’s remarkable forbearance in the face of preposterous and malevolent charges, Ralph Leigh, the world’s most eminent scholar of Jean-Jacques’s writings, was meticulously documenting the lies and calumnies about him, circulated by Voltaire, in his own superb edition of Rousseau’s correspondence. Still, there is nothing so useful as a revolution to bury or blur personal and doctrinal differences, and a dismal blend of the philosophy of ‘Rousseau-Voltaire’ has come to encapsulate the popular image of the Enlightenment from 1789 to this day.
No doubt there has been at least some justification for amalgamating the two thinkers in the service of a common cause. Their early exchanges were entirely cordial, and even in the letter of 1760, which marks the break between them, Rousseau reiterated the admiration he had originally professed for Voltaire’s works. Voltaire, in turn, often regarded Rousseau less as an adversary to be opposed than as a madman to be pitied (as on the occasion he reported to Hume that Jean-Jacques suspected him of having persuaded the authorities in Berne to decline his request to lock him up for ever), and when, on the other hand, he described him as a ‘Judas’ and ‘false brother’, this was because Rousseau had apparently abandoned and deserted the camp of the philosophes to which he had been previously allied. If the two men could not be friends, nor hold to the same principles of Enlightenment, they were at least both critics of the Enlightenment’s enemies, and from different perspectives they attacked similar targets—obscurantism and superstition in theology, metaphysics and dogmatism in philosophy, and despotic systems of tyranny and privilege in politics and economics. In company with many leading thinkers of their day, Voltaire and Rousseau fulminated against a Christian gospel that was enshrouded in mysteries and revelations of which only prophets and priests were held to be the true curators. Both condemned fanaticism and intolerance fired by religious credulity and fanned by self-appointed ministers of God, in their place endorsing the benign, simple and rational principles of a natural theology, the one especially in his Dictionnaire philosophique, the other most notably in Emile. Voltaire occasionally expressed his approval of certain aspects of Rousseau’s writings on religion, and, with some justice, d’Alembert once reminded him that Rousseau had hurled his own bolts against l’infâme, much as he had done.
Both figures were also generally critical of the great speculative systems of European philosophy that prevailed in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Voltaire challenging mainly the metaphysics of Descartes and the theodicy of Leibniz, Rousseau objecting more to the natural law philosophies of Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf and even Locke. They opposed these doctrines partly because of their inadequate treatment of our moral sentiments such as the desire for happiness or the pursuit of virtue, partly, too, because Voltaire and Rousseau were commonly distrustful of what they regarded as transcendental dogmas about the nature of the cosmos or of mankind which they uncharitably and unsoundly characterized in terms of the esprit de système of an earlier philosophical epoch. There is thus a good deal of historical irony in the fact that one of the most widespread misconceptions of the Enlightenment as a whole—which we owe to the ill-informed eloquence of Burke and Tocqueville among others—is that it was an ‘Age of Reason’ dominated by conceptual abstractions divorced from the real world of human affairs. As a rule, the philosophes decried speculation of this kind. When Voltaire spoke of the English as ‘a nation of philosophers’, he hailed their wit and their devotion to liberty rather than their impractical pursuit of abstract reason, while Rousseau maintained that he was not a philosopher at all but rather a lover of truth. Nowhere, indeed, was their contempt for metaphysical doctrines more evident than in their political ideas.
Throughout his life, Voltaire advocated policies and commended forms of government that promoted a spirit of toleration, the abolition of privilege, the rule of law and efficient but humane public administration. Yet he never propounded a theory of politics in which these principles were mapped out, and he hardly ever spoke of the nature of authority, or the duties of subjects, in general. While he venerated the reign of Louis XIV and the absolutist monarchy of France as against the aspirations of the church and nobility, he also praised the more liberal and more limited monarchy of England, admirably tempered, as it was, he maintained, by the Houses of Lords and Commons. From his endorsement of the autocratic regimes of Prussia and Russia, moreover, some of his interpreters have wrongly inferred that he was a consistent advocate of enlightened despotism, thus neglecting, among other things, the radical republican constitution he commended to the Genevans, after first aligning himself with their nation’s ruling patrician party. This flexibility of approach, this commitment to reform in terms of what was suitable, expedient or opportune, might strike some as no political philosophy at all; at any rate it lacks precisely the speculative, abstract, esoteric frame of reference which critics of the Age of Reason have so often ascribed to the Enlightenment as a whole.
The pragmatic character of Rousseau’s politics is more striking still, though less frequently recognized. Like Voltaire, he thought distinct forms of government appropriate to different states, on this point supplementing Voltaire’s views regarding the stability of political traditions with claims about the needs arising from variations of climate, terrain and population which he drew largely from Montesquieu. Rousseau even enjoyed something of a political career, not only as secretary to the French ambassador in Venice (a matter of record Voltaire refused to believe, claiming he had only been the ambassador’s discredited valet), but also as invited legislator of the constitutions of Corsica and Poland during the brief periods of their autonomy. Both Voltaire and Rousseau counted princes and ministers among their correspondents, yet while Voltaire’s proposals for reform could exercise only indirect influence upon policy through his role as preceptor to rulers, the circulation of Rousseau’s doctrines had a more immediate effect on public affairs—once helping to distract popular feeling in Paris away from the King’s expulsion of the parlement long enough to avert a major upheaval, on another occasion nearly provoking a civil war in Geneva. In his own lifetime aspiring rebels throughout Europe were intoxicated with his political ideas, and even if Robespierre’s claim to have visited him just before his death was probably a fabrication, we know that other radicals sought and received his advice. If he had not been so suspicious of the real motives of insurrectionists, or so pessimistic about the outcomes of revolutions, he might, like Bakunin a century later, have entrusted his disciples with the task of circulating incendiary material throughout those states of the modern world he believed to be corrupt. He certainly imagined that Voltaire had assembled agents to discredit him, and Voltaire, for his part, thought Rousseau capable of inflicting a comparable amount of damage quite on his own.
Such similarities, however, can hardly be taken to constitute the stuff of which the supposed alliance between these two heroes of the Enlightenment was forged, and, in any case, they are heavily outweighed by doctrinal differences. Even at those points Voltaire and Rousseau seem most akin to one another, the resemblance is often superficial. Thus, for instance, whereas Voltaire’s campaigns against religious intolerance on behalf of Calas, Sirven and La Barre expressed his profound conviction that political fanaticism was just the outward form of religious credulity, Rousseau was more concerned to challenge ritual, miracles and the appurtenances of a Church that interposed its priesthood between God and man, all the while earnestly maintaining the orthodox (Calvinist or Catholic) Christianity of his beliefs. He also stressed the importance of a zealous civil religion for consolidating the patriotic allegiance of citizens in a properly constituted state, a doctrine criticized as dangerous by Voltaire, for whom there could be no article of compulsory faith that does not eventually give rise to bigotry and conflict.
Of course Voltaire was convinced that ‘If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him’. But the God required by society he sometimes described had little in common with the Creator so fervently trusted by Rousseau. Voltaire’s Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne proclaimed that it was illusory to suppose God had manufactured the best possible world for us, to which Rousseau replied in his ‘Lettre sur la Providence’ that he believed God was perfect and that the misfortunes to which we may be subjected by Nature are less cruel than the evils inflicted upon us by man. Voltaire, in turn, rebutted Rousseau on the subject of providence in his most celebrated work, Candide.
If the two men differed about the nature of God and the function of religion, their respective philosophies of history, which perhaps gave rise to these differences, were even more fundamentally opposed. For Voltaire, modern Christianity was, by and large, the vestige of a barbarous Judaic superstition, from whose thraldom rational and progressive men of science and culture were coming to release us. For Rousseau, on the other hand, culture was in general the stultifying product of luxury that only embellished the social and political evils we had brought upon ourselves in the course of our evolution. ‘The arts, literature, and the sciences weave garlands of flowers round the chains under which men are crushed’, he lamented in his Discours sur les sciences et les arts, and this was a thesis he reaffirmed in all his major writings.
Voltaire, moreover, despite his misgivings about grand philosophical systems, had a special fascination for doctrines conceived by Englishmen, particularly the physics of Newton and the epistemology of Locke. Having come to England in 1726 just after his second release from imprisonment in the Bastille, he found there a fresh new world and breathed in its clear ideas. On his return to France his eloquence and enthusiasm quickly succeeded in making those ideas fashionable, and over the next fifty years he established himself as the foremost Anglomaniac of the whole Enlightenment. Rousseau, for his part, had not much to say about Newton and was more hostile than receptive to the philosophical teachings of Locke. England may at first have welcomed him as a fugitive from persecution, but, suffering from paranoia, he soon saw himself ensnared even in this refuge from which he eventually felt obliged to flee, and, not surprisingly perhaps, the English political theorist with whom he felt the closest affinity was ‘the unfortunate Sidney’.
The differences between Voltaire and Rousseau over England are, in fact, even sharper with regard to their assessments of its social institutions. For Voltaire, the most remarkable feature of those institutions was their spirit of free and open assembly, lavishly praised by him in his Lettres philosophiques, particularly in its manifestations on the floor of the London Stock Exchange. For Rousseau, however, the most salient characteristic of English political and economic life was its representative system of government, under which voters, free only at elections, were deprived of their real sovereignty. Unable to take part in legislation, the people of England, he argued, had no substantive civil or moral liberties, of which the proper safeguard, in any case, was not the prosperity engendered by a stock exchange, but the general economic equality of all subjects, both urban and rural. Such notions were quite alien to Voltaire’s social thought. Liberty (about which he generally had less to say than is often supposed) he identified with toleration rather than sovereignty, and he showed nothing but contempt for Rousseau’s insane notion, as he put it, ‘that all men are equal and that a state can exist without subordination’.
This whole collection of issues, moreover, permeates their extraordinary battles over the fate of Geneva. On the one hand, Rousseau saw Voltaire’s promotion of the theatre there as fostering the cultural trappings of moral decadence and political subjugation, and he was not yet so estranged from the country of his birth, he wrote in his Lettres de la montagne, that he could view the oppression of its citizens with tranquility. He dedicated his Discours sur l’inégalité to the Genevan Republic; he conceived both his Lettre sur les spectacles and the Contrat social, each emblazoned by the signature ‘citizen of Geneva’ on its title page, with the constitution of that state of mind; and he was never more impassioned than in his commitment to the restoration of its democratic principles, so much eroded in practice under the rule of Voltaire’s governing patrician friends. On the other hand, Voltaire deplored the ascetic, mystical, zealous and intolerant brand of patriotism which he saw Jean-Jacques as upholding, and he thought justice well served when the Calvinist pastorate, which he loathed for much the same reasons, joined the patriciate of Geneva in condemning Rousseau’s ideas. Yet Voltaire’s interest in the politics of his adopted city was earnest as well, and, after discrediting Rousseau’s ‘unsocial contract’ he in fact took up the republican cause with gusto (he was then already in his seventies), actively negotiating alliances between factions and employing or, rather, manipulating, his good offices everywhere on behalf of reforms which finally proved so radical that they dismayed patricians and democrats alike. There are many paradoxical features about Voltaire’s and Rousseau’s Genevan campaigns, among them such facts as that the sovereign assembly, whose powers Rousseau sought to restore, had always been the preserve of only a small fraction of its population; and that when he became the patron saint of the republican cause in the early 1760s he declined to join it, instead abdicating his citizenship and later graciously encouraging his followers to seek the advice of Voltaire, whom they might otherwise have shunned. Nevertheless, the ideological and temperamental distinctions between the two men stand out most conspicuously in their views on the politics and culture of Geneva.
Even on those subjects about which they did not directly conflict, the paths of Voltaire and Rousseau tended more to diverge than to complement one another. When they turned their attention to history, Voltaire, one of the major historians of the century, wrote principally about the grandeur of the reigns of some modern European monarchs, Rousseau about the republics of antiquity and the decline of the human race ever since. They each made important contributions to Enlightenment science, but whereas Voltaire dealt largely with optics and physics, Rousseau was more generally concerned with anthropology and botany. Their works filled an even more prominent place on the eighteenth-century stage, for which, however, Voltaire wrote plays and Rousseau especially ballet and opera.
Music, the subject of Rousseau’s most extensive output, was an interest they shared, and yet on the only occasion they had a hand in the same composition (Les Fêtes de Ramire, originally orchestrated by Rameau but still their sole achievement truly warranting the ‘Rousseau-Voltaire’ epithet), it was Voltaire who wrote the libretto, Rousseau who revised mainly the score. In their own epoch they were both esteemed particularly for their literary genius, but Voltaire as France’s leading poet as well as foremost playwright, Rousseau as its greatest novelist and autobiographer. Jean-Jacques, moreover, only occasionally emulated Voltaire’s alexandrine verse, and Voltaire, who thought Rousseau’s continual outpourings about himself in grossly bad taste, found what he regarded as the confessional moral homilies of La Nouvelle Héloïse insufferably dull. If in his own mind he drew his greatest inspiration from Corneille, for Rousseau he was cast more in the disingenuous mould of Molière; he, in turn, imagined Rousseau to be lurking in the demented shadows of Pascal, for him the most perverse writer of all.
At least some of these variations of literary form are actually important markers of the substantive philosophical and political distinctions between the two men, distinctions which are themselves all the more noteworthy because they had no real personal contact with one another (having met only once, before Rousseau was known to the public), so that the enmity displayed in their writings differed in that respect from the antagonisms which separated Jean-Jacques from most of his former friends among the other philosophes. In his commitment to the cause of reform, Voltaire felt free to employ every artistic stratagem, every sarcastic distortion of the aims of his reactionary foe, every ingratiating tribute to a potentially influential ally, which he supposed might take seed or bear fruit. Yet if his own crusade on behalf of enlightenment had so often to be fuelled by useful lies, Rousseau, in his view—introspective, self-righteous, unworldly and vain—was concerned with little else but the torch he might set to himself and the truth that would lead to his martyrdom. For Rousseau, on the other hand, the deliverance of man from corrupt society required an uncompromising integrity of purpose that could only be sustained if all the Voltairean masks of pretence, subterfuge and deception were first removed from one’s character. His vision of the transformation of human nature was at once more sublime and more intimate than Voltaire’s insight into what was possible with good will and a little cunning, and in an utterly oppressive world it seemed that there could be no room, even in the fraternity of the philosophes, for the solitary prophet of the brotherhood of man.
Besterman has observed that Voltaire, while pursuing his goals, came to know practically everyone who was anybody in the Enlightenment. Rousseau, however, came to stand for everyone who was nobody. A moral critique of institutions under which individuals were estranged from themselves and enchained to each other was articulated with more passion and fire in his writings than in the work of anyone else in pre-revolutionary France, and Voltaire’s remark that he did ‘not think the tocsin of Rousseau will create a dangerous situation’ for the authorities was eventually proved a mistake. Either because they are unimpressed by the success of Voltaire’s reforms, or undiscouraged by the failure of modern revolutions to advance beyond them, there are many, even today, who share Rousseau’s plaintive grievances about the world men have created and his fervent hope that they might still set themselves free.