In February 1778 Voltaire, then eighty-five, returned to Paris after a thirty-year absence. This visit created enormous excitement. Any Parisian considered to be a writer made an effort to celebrate the Ferney patriarch, while the elite class outdid itself in finding clever ways to catch a glimpse of the man whose name was on people's lips all over Europe. Visitors in greater and greater numbers flocked to the home of the Marquis de Villette, where Voltaire was staying. The Académie Française received him with great pomp. Benjamin Franklin solemnly asked him to bless his grandson. These tributes culminated in an improvised ceremony at the Comédie-Française where Voltaire attended the production of his tragedy Irène and in front of a wildly excited audience his bust was crowned with laurels, while an actor recited poetry in his honor. This is generally cited as the symbolic sanctification of the writer, the moment when Enlightenment philosophers gained social and cultural prestige, liberating them from their traditional role and giving them instead secular and spiritual power that reached its zenith in the age of Romanticism.1 The crowning of Voltaire's bust seems to prefigure the official ceremony in 1791 that accompanied the transfer of Voltaire's remains to the Panthéon, the first celebration of its kind, a public tribute to a great man. And this is the way that literary historians have interpreted the episode, as a “triumph” and an “apotheosis.”2
But is this interpretation so absolutely obvious? The scene is almost too good to be true. And in fact, the canonical story repeated for the last two and a half centuries has inspired writings by Voltaire admirers who have given the episode a flattering appearance.3 However, some witnesses to the event mocked it. Adversaries of the Enlightenment philosophers, annoyed by the success of their old enemy, were vocal in their anger.4 Other members of French cultural life, although they did not have religious or political motives, were still skeptical and sarcastic, even openly hostile. Louis Sébastien Mercier, a distinguished connoisseur of theater life, wrote in his Tableau de Paris: “This famous coronation was simply a farce in the eyes of anyone with good sense.”5 Far from being impressed by the show, he saw only its clownish aspect, orchestrated by enthusiastic fans, which dimmed Voltaire's prestige by throwing him pell-mell into the limelight. “An epidemic curiosity made people rush to catch sight of Voltaire's face, as if the soul of a writer were no longer in his writings but in the way he looked.” Instead of an apotheosis or triumph, Mercier only saw vaguely grotesque buffoonery during which the great writer was overwhelmed with frantic applause and signs of unseemly familiarity. What most displeased Mercier was not the tribute rendered Voltaire but the form it took, reducing the author of Oedipe to the level of a public curiosity, celebrated like an actor with much more excitement than true admiration.
Indeed, the theater might appear to be an ambivalent setting for an apotheosis. If it was the place par excellence where the glory of heroes was represented in tragedies, of which Voltaire was the uncontested master and had been for decades, the theater was also the place where reputations of actors and authors were made and unmade by public acceptance or rejection, depending on how good the intriguing partisan claques were or how loud the derisive catcalls. The theater was as much a social gathering place for the rich as it was a place of merrymaking for the common people, so much so that the police had to be on their toes to keep order. And above all, theaters were the principal arena for the new culture of celebrity, where actors were the main protagonists, despite their lack of social status. Far from being an official, solemn ceremony, the performance on March 30, 1778 was very much an exuberant party, almost a kind of costume ball, and it is not known if Voltaire particularly enjoyed himself. It appears that he was conscious of the potentially ridiculous nature of the situation; despite the applause, he immediately took off the crown of laurels that the Marquis de Villette had placed on his head,6 questioning, perhaps, if it were really appropriate to be celebrated in this way while still alive?
The crown of laurels recalled another famous episode in literary history very much on the minds of Enlightenment philosophers: the coronation of Petrarch on the grounds of the Capitoline in Rome in 1341.7 But Petrarch had been crowned by Robert of Naples, the king's representative, one of the most powerful patrons of his time. This alliance between the glory of a sovereign ruler and the renown of a poet, powerfully manifested throughout European courts up until the reign of Louis XIV, was now in crisis. And Voltaire knew this better than anyone. Could the excited public at the Comédie-Française really substitute for a prince? Didn't public homage risk discrediting the author? Wasn't this parody of a coronation more like the tributes paid to actresses and singers than the consecration of a great poet?
What happened on that particular day had to do with the difficult alignment of various aspects of Voltaire's personality: highly respected author of the Henriade and Oedipe; a celebrated writer exiled to Ferney whose comings and goings were known throughout Europe; and the great man he already was for his admirers and the classical author he would become. Because Voltaire embodies for us a great writer of the Enlightenment, the first author admitted into the Panthéon, we see in this episode simply the first step towards posthumous glory. But for his contemporaries and for Voltaire himself, the stakes were more ambiguous. Was it possible to transform the intense public scrutiny focused on his person into an anticipation of his glory? This process was more complicated than it might seem in hindsight because it supposed a solution to the thorny problem of how the fame an individual enjoys while alive relates to the image that posterity eventually receives, the one image that alone assures eternal glory.
Voltaire's celebrity in 1778 was unchallenged. It had largely surpassed the narrow framework of the literary world, the recognition that came from peers and critics. Even those who had never read his books had heard his name. Newspapers detailed his activities. In the Mémoires secrets de la République des lettres, a popular chronicle of cultural life, his name appeared over and over again. Voltaire knew like nobody else how to keep his name in the news through literary polemics and political engagement, through his wit and his brilliance. He had for some time been not only an admired writer but also a public figure who excited curiosity. Beginning writers and those less well known looked for ways to profit from his fame, and as early as 1759 a young Irish writer, Oliver Goldsmith, published the fake Mémoires de M. de Voltaire, playing on the curiosity of the public in order to launch his own career with a stock of anecdotes that were more or less true and others that were totally invented.8 The lawyer Jean-Henri Marchand amused himself for over thirty years parodying and publishing works such as the Testament politique de M. de V*** (1770) and the Confession publique de M. de Voltaire (1771).9
Voltaire did not need anyone to orchestrate his celebrity. A trip to visit him, exiled now and living in Ferney, became obligatory for all travelers. It was not enough to read his work; one had to see this great figure of contemporary Europe in person. Voltaire greatly enjoyed these visits and jubilantly welcomed visitors with a ceremony, a cross between theater and court ritual, encouraging visitors to spread picturesque anecdotes about the life of the great writer they had just seen.10 Nonetheless, these visits were also a constant source of embarrassment, a waste of time and energy, and he never hesitated to dismiss importunate people who came to see him out of curiosity and from whom he had nothing to gain. Charles Burney reports on the bad treatment received by some English visitors who were asked by Voltaire: “Well, gentlemen, you now see me, and did you take me to be a wild beast or a Monster that was fit only to be stared at, as a show”11 There was not a lot of difference between a celebrity and a circus animal. This was a comparison that would be encountered in the work of other writers as well, a common thread, but suffice it here to underscore the ambiguities of public curiosity. Curiosity for a celebrity was both a resource and a menace: at any moment it could transform the famous man into a simple object on display.
Curiosity did not concern only the elite, nor simply newspaper readers. Voltaire's name was a publicity strategy that fanned the greed of publishers and encouraged forgeries. The philosopher was well aware of this and played a complex and crafty game with the world of publishing, denouncing publishers who pirated his works while at the same time using their services. He openly invoked the consequences of his “unhappy fame,” for example, in order to complain that someone had just published a phony collection of letters written in his name: “There will always be some copies that escape. What can you do? It's the sacrifice one has to make for this unhappy celebrity, which it would be so nice to exchange for peaceful obscurity.”12 There was no doubt a tongue-in-cheek element in this disdain he claimed to have for his celebrity, and that he actually kept alive through being the great publicity agent that he was. Nonetheless, the attitude became broadly shared and his correspondents fell in line. When François Marin suggested that Voltaire put together a volume of his private letters in order to get even with the “cursed booksellers” in Holland who published anything bearing his name, he immediately said as if it were a commonplace: “That is one of the misfortunes attached to being a celebrity.”13 This wasn't just a simple matter of one's reputation, but a social condition with all its servitude, which included the watchful eye of the curious, the nosiness of printers, and the maneuvers of unscrupulous publishers. Already in 1753, even though Voltaire was not yet the patriarch of literature crowned at the Comédie-Française, he was the most celebrated writer of his time, whose complex relationship with Frederick II helped pay for the writing he was publishing. His niece, Madame Denis, wrote to Georges Keith: “It is sad that my uncle's fame means he cannot lift a finger without having all of Europe watching. He definitely has decided to find a retirement area far away and so forgotten that perhaps they will let him die in peace.”14 Fame is both greatness and enslavement, given that it makes of the famous person a public figure, imposing obligations such as being exemplary and having to justify oneself publicly. According to Jean Robert Tronchin, Voltaire had to be ready to defend himself against accusations of impiety: “The more celebrated a person, the more he must show great delicacy when attacked in such a sensitive area.”15
Clearly what distinguished Voltaire from other great writers was the fact he was not just a famous name; he was also a famous face. There were numerous portraits of him, as well as busts and engravings, and they had increased since 1760.16 One artist in particular specialized in images of Voltaire: Jean Huber, a master of découpure, a technique consisting of representing the silhouette or the face of someone by cutting it out of fabric.17 After having painted many portraits of Voltaire and having represented him in a number of découpures, in 1772 Huber created a series of small paintings showing him doing everyday things: drinking coffee, playing chess, taking walks around Ferney. The journal La Correspondance littéraire mentioned the success of these paintings “representing diverse scenes in the private life of the most famous man in Europe,” and reported that Voltaire criticized Huber for coming too close to caricature.18 When one painting showed him getting up in the morning and clumsily pulling on his pants, all the while dictating to his secretary (Fig. 1), and then the painting was copied and engraved and put up for sale by all the engraving merchants in Paris and London, Voltaire got angry. Huber cleverly retorted that the very essence of celebrity was an invitation to play with a subject's public image, introducing “a bit of ridicule” in order to excite public interest, without for all that tarnishing his prestige. “The fervor of your idolatrous Public for everything that represents you, well or badly, forces me to vex you constantly. I feed the public's idolatry through my images, and my Voltairianism is incurable.”19 This was a valuable insight because it came from an artist who was particularly sensitive to the changes in visual culture.
Images of a famous person geared to public curiosity about that person's private life, including its most commonplace aspects, distinguished celebrity images from representations of glorious sovereigns or even great writers. Voltaire was not represented as a writer in the midst of all the symbols of his intellectual activity, as in traditional images of writers who were surrounded by books and paper and pen and ink. He is shown in a very “domestic scene,” whose interest lies in seeing what constitutes the life of a writer when he is not writing, when he is being an individual like other individuals. The appeal of this image is less in an admiring distance than a desire for intimacy at a distance, curiosity about the famous man as a special individual, both different from others because of his fame and at the same time familiar. A bit of the ridiculous is not bad, either; in fact, it humanizes the public man, making him more accessible.
Public clamor for images showing Voltaire in his private life at Ferney was all the more surprising because this series of paintings had initially been commissioned by Catherine II. But infatuation with Voltaire was such that art merchants, smelling success, had the images engraved. Other scenes painted by Huber were also reproduced in quantity, notably Voltaire Playing Chess, Voltaire Receiving a Visitor, or Voltaire Whipping a Rearing Horse, making the gaunt face of the patriarch of Ferney a familiar image, partly smiling, partly grimacing.20 It was neither a classic look nor a true caricature. Huber's series of paintings fed the feeling of paradoxical intimacy which the public desired to have with Voltaire, keeping a distance because of his prestige, his age, and his exile, and at the same time intimate because the public could see him doing ordinary things like getting up, getting dressed, eating, and exercising. The success of the Lever de Voltaire was in large part due to the spontaneous nature of the sketches, which appeared to take him by surprise, as if the viewer had the power to surreptitiously step into the bedroom with the great writer.
Intimate images of a famous man, stolen and then reproduced by unscrupulous merchants for a curious and passionate public whose idolatry was confined to voyeurism: there is no need to push this description any further to see a familiar mechanism at work today. Add to this Voltaire's anger and Huber's reaction to his anger and one can see that the effects were intriguing. Did circulation of these kinds of images improve the standing of the Ferney philosopher or did it tarnish his reputation? Two well-known engravings from the Lever de Voltaire, one French, one English, include ironic verses, giving the impression that the images were interpreted as caricatures.21 However, the same images were sought after by both the fans of Voltaire and those who wanted to make fun of him. Above all, people were interested in them mostly because of the illusion they gave that through these images the viewer could gain access to and observe the philosopher's most intimate moments. Huber wanted to make money from this market demand and encouraged his English correspondents to announce that the engravings were “the only way to see the real Voltaire in every possible aspect.”22 The public didn't want stereotyped images that could be interchanged with similar ones; they wanted images of Voltaire that allowed them to see a unique individual.
This two-sided aspect of celebrity, curiosity and admiration, was prevalent at the time of Voltaire's visit to Paris. He was recognized at the gates of Paris the minute he arrived: “My God! It's Monsieur de Voltaire,” one guard apparently shouted.23 Once it was known he was in Paris, his presence created a sensation. “The appearance of a prophet or an apostle could not have caused more surprise and admiration than the arrival of Monsieur de Voltaire. For a short while, nothing else was of interest except this new prodigy,” wrote the Correspondance littéraire, entirely won over by him.24 The Journal de Paris, the first French daily, created the year before, described the sensation caused by the presence of Voltaire in the capital: “In cafés, at plays, in society, he was the only one talked about. Have you seen him? Have you heard him?” Provincial newspapers avidly reported the tiniest details and witticisms of his Parisian visit.25 Taking advantage of this general curiosity, François de Neufchâteau publicly boasted of having spent a wonderful hour with Voltaire, while, in the name of a discretion too often abused, refusing to divulge any secrets. “Celebrity has the disadvantage of creating around the famous person a kind of spying on his words, his thoughts,”26 Neufchâteau wrote in a tone that seemed to chastise the publishers of the Journal de Paris, showing that celebrity had become a cause to be debated. Madame du Deffand noted with irony that “all of Parnassus, from the gutter to its exalted heights,” was hurrying to see Voltaire.27 She herself could not resist the desire to see him again.
Voltaire incited unanimous but also ambiguous curiosity. The coronation at the Comédie-Française had created a new model, the glorification of a great man. The ceremony sought to produce a consensual posthumous image among Voltaire's contemporaries, as if they could see posterity's view of him, as though he were already dead. “They want me to die,”28 Voltaire allegedly said, focusing on all the excessive honors given the living while at the same time seeing a dangerous proximity of these same honors to posthumous glory. Jean-François Ducis said something similar but with more solemnity when he succeeded to Voltaire's chair at the Académie Française the following year: “Alive, he witnessed his own immortality. His century paid in advance the debt that centuries to come would owe him.”29 In a way this was also the meaning of the nude statue Pigalle sculpted of Voltaire a few years earlier. Public opinion was shocked, but this nudity clearly expressed a singular message: the emaciated body of the writer anticipated his death and authorized the portrayal of him as an ancient hero. Voltaire was already a great man, so he was permitted, a little in advance, the honors that posterity would render unto him in the future.
The coronation evening at the Comédie, on the other hand, was somewhat dubious, marked more by excitement than by solemnity. This was seen in even the most favorable reviews, like that in the Correspondance littéraire, which focused on the excitement, the disorder, the jostling. “The whole room was filled with dust caused by the rising excitement of the agitated crowd. This enthusiasm, this kind of universal delirium, lasted more than twenty minutes, and it was only with great difficulty that the actors were able to begin the play.”30 Consequently, the most severe critics wrote ironically about the theatrical, disorderly quality of this supposed apotheosis. That this coronation took place on stage in a theater, with the star role played by an actress disguised as a maid, only added to the almost parodic character of the evening. A few weeks later, the nearly clandestine burial of Voltaire showed that his moment of official recognition had not yet come and that celebrity did not lead directly to glory. “The vulgar homage he was accorded while alive deprived him of funeral honors,” Mercier remarked ironically.
This iconoclastic interpretation deserves closer investigation. After targeting the coronation's disrespectful clowning, Mercier puts forward a less biased view by comparing Voltaire's success with an even greater one, that of the comic actor Volange at the Variétés-Amusantes, one of the new boulevard theaters. The clamor aroused by Voltaire's Parisian visit was, in fact, soon eclipsed by the prodigious success of Volange and the figure Janot that he played in a low-class farce. The play Janot ou Les battus paient l'amende was very far from the tragedies of Voltaire. In the most famous scene, the contents of a chamber pot were thrown over the head of Janot and he wondered what the liquid could be. “Is it? Isn't it?” This response made Paris laugh for months and was repeated in conversations everywhere. There were several hundred performances of the play and the leading actor became very fashionable. “He not only amuses the public on stage but also in society. He is invited to every party and creates much merriment. Recently, when he came down with a cold his house was inaccessible because of the carriages sent by high society women to find out how he was doing, and the most distinguished lords came themselves for news of his health. There is no telling how long this delirium will last,”31 wrote the editor of Les Mémoires secrets, disconcerted by this collective infatuation. The Correspondance littéraire mentioned the prodigious success of the Janot character, now “a national icon,” and contrasted the public enthusiasm for Volange with its loss of interest in Voltaire's tragedies only weeks after the coronation event. “While there have been enormous audiences for the hundred and twelve performances of Battus paient l'amende, not even two box seats have been sold for the opening of Rome sauvée by M. de Voltaire, and a third of the theater is empty.”32 Public admiration is an invaluable resource, sought after constantly by celebrities. Mercier pushes the comparison even further, going to the very heart of celebrity culture: “In the end, Janot has been modeled in porcelain as much as Voltaire. Today, the vaudeville actor sits on every mantelpiece.”33
This wry remark makes an essential point: celebrity puts a great writer and a popular actor on the same level; a tragedy equals a vaudeville farce. On the applause meter, how does one distinguish between a great man with indisputable talent and the ham actor whose slapstick quips are loved by the audience; an author whose works are admired by posterity and the man whose success is short-lived? Mercier's irony is bitter. While he rails against novelty shows that are put on the same level as works of greatness, he points to an astonishingly modern political reading: “There is no need to persecute a living celebrity. When someone like Voltaire comes to the fore, there will always be a Jeannot [sic] to set against him.” What is at stake is the very capacity of a public figure to be heard. Voltaire's fame did not rest solely on his tragedies, but rather on the battles he fought for a quarter of a century through polemical pamphlets combating religious fanaticism and prejudice, incarnating in the eyes of all Europe the new militant and critical philosophy of the Enlightenment. To take to the public stage was a philosophical strategy, a way to fight for the truth, a way to change minds and manners.34 But what happens if public speech is a cabaret show, if the philosopher is simply an entertainer who could just as well be replaced by a circus performer?
Seen in this way, the coronation of Voltaire has another meaning, much more complex than the one usually attributed to it. It is not merely a step on the ineluctable journey from Ferney to the Panthéon, but rather the spectacular and ambivalent manifestation of Voltaire's celebrity. A controversial celebrity, however: was the coronation necessarily a sign of his genius, as admirers and others who stood with him in his struggles wanted to see it? Or was it perhaps just a sign of what was fashionable, of moral decadence, as his adversaries believed? Or was it, as Mercier suggested, proof that the changing moods of the public held sway and the public's “epidemic curiosity” transformed the greatest writers into mere performing artists at the expense of their life's work and their commitments? Another observer, Simon Linguet, a former lawyer turned journalist and pamphleteer, addressed the same issue and reproached the public for transforming the writer into a “theatrical hero.” For him, the coronation ceremony was simply a farce, “a childish pantomime the audience should have been ashamed of, a marionette show far beneath the quality of street theater for the rabble [populace].”35 There is a marked difference between the “public” and the “rabble.” If manifestations of celebrity are so quick to be criticized, now as in the eighteenth century, it is because the audience itself is so controversial and its judgments can so easily be dismissed.
Historians have quite rightly pointed to the work of public validation and “public opinion” in the eighteenth century. It is certainly true that today public opinion is sought after, whether it is a matter of evaluating the merits of a theater piece or denouncing political injustice. However, this elevation of the public to a reasoning critic is unfinished. The public is easily suspected of being manipulated, of becoming unthinkingly enthusiastic about ephemeral issues, of judging by pleasure and not by reason, of yielding to curiosity and the line of least resistance. Newspapers that denounced the public excitement over Voltaire reminded readers of the calm judgment of posterity: “A powerful claque has risen up among us. What won't it do to seduce the vulgar, to impose its opinion on a multitude of idiots and to attain its ends? […] Stripped of all ambition, passion, or bias, posterity alone can assign a writer his place in history.”36 Two very different attitudes are at work here. The contemporary world prefers fan clubs and the “multitude of idiots,” while glory can only come from the serene judgment of posterity embodied by “cultural institutions and people of good taste.”
It is not simply a single step from the reputation of a writer cherished by a nation's literary world and the posthumous glory of a great man. Celebrity opens a new area between practice and discourse, fed by the indiscretions of the media, by a widespread circulation of images, and by the curiosity of the public, which, intrigued, wants to know what the fuss is all about. The surprising comparison (to our mind) of Voltaire and Volange-Janot, of a great writer and an entertainer, shows that celebrity does not concern the literary or artistic world alone. The theater is a perfect milieu for it, constituting the privileged arena of this new culture of celebrity. It is here that the investigation must begin.