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Voltaire: A history that never moved By Boy Kampmark Why should history move? Consider it a frozen tableau, an unchanging picture. There are only emotions rather than causation. Even if there is historical causation, Voltaire (Francois Marie About) (1694 - 1778) wrote in his works History of Charles XII, History of Louis XIV and his Essai sur les Moeurs et l'Esprit des Nations against its usefulness. This is largely because Voltaire, through his desire to write a history freed from a chronology, merely reshaped it by means of adventure rather than exegesis. Rather than explaining causes, he merged them in forms that could not be said to be true causes of change.
Voltaire's history so contended is not a view of progress, but in its method of stillness in history, the inevitable stasis of change that was no change. It is true that Voltaire used movements, ideas, individuals and nations to develop history. He tried to define allegorically the chronological morass of history, by looking at the motivation behind history. But by attempting to do so, Voltaire wrote of a sequestered history disunited by the exploits of unique individuals and unique historical phenomena.
Evolution is not linked but disparate. Trapped by a France that produced Descartes, a figure disinterested of history, and Melebrance's a historical stance, Voltaire is reduced to a teller of fables. Along with that it is a France that loves history as fiction rather than history as fact. "The fear of the Bastille and a hope for government pensions had a dismal effect on the historian's taste for truth and objectivity. " Well and good the fable teller was out and ready to produce. But did the fables reveal a teleological purpose?
Voltaire must have reasoned that progress was possible there must have been progress from a maleficent God who destroyed Lisbon to a disinterested God who had deferred his authority to destroy to an amoral nature. Without some definitive progress the pleasantries of the present age would not have been possible. There would be no Turgot, no Condorcet, no Diderot. What is being submitted is that it was never clear how that resulted. Was it Idea? Was it Spirit?
Not free will, since free will is constrained. Not God who lies too high in the sky. Voltaire mentions the figures from the past, Suleiman the Magnificent for instance or Charles XII, he mentions the Oriental perspectives brilliantly, but he does not link them definitively. Like Umberto Ecos William of Baskerville, he sees signs without a connection. He displays a delight for exoticism. He is far too interested in his present, where modernity is undertaking a dynamic revolution through literature.
Voltaire's history begins where Gibbons account of it ends. Thus Voltaire's history is a modern history made by modern men. For Voltaire truth resides in the spontaneous brilliance of men, manners of nations, spirits of endeavour. It is a world brilliantly illuminated by such geniuses as Newton, a world that Voltaire nourishes to an extreme. This is one paradox of the intellectual thought of Voltaire. Suddenly the universe seems full of men who shaped history.
To this end his history does assume some structural definition history cannot be still as great men are never quiet. He writes of Louis XIV as if he shaped Europe. But Voltaires galaxy is one of non-related phenomena, almost in the version of Hume's self-scepticism. There is minimal causation. "I never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception, " wrote Hume.
Thus this history is a perspective isolated which can never observe anything but itself. Louis XIV with the Bourbons is by itself. But once one is dead that is the end of the matter. No thought, no perception, no love, no pleasure, and no history. The world is merely one of confused phenomena. "Pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations succeed each other, and never all exist at the same time." These impressions exist independently, and can exist separately from each other. There is no whole, no organic definition of the world, no true totality.
This is essential Voltaire, phrased through Hume's comprehension of mind itself with regards to his history. Hume's analysis makes mind irrelevant. Voltaire's reasoning made history impossibly confused, though brilliantly illuminated. Here Voltaire has to reason with an extraordinary paradigm -the notion of causation in a world that runs in accordance with divine dictates. Whilst anti-clerical, Voltaire cannot help but revere the Newtonian religious adoration of the physical laws of the universe that he is a part. At work here was an iconoclasm against the causal God.
Voltaire's Elements partly worshipped the divinity of Space and the enormity of God. In this scheme of the Universe, time is eternal, space only relevant in filling time. There is ultimately no problem for Voltaire if what he was illustrating was the distance of God from the acts of history and the acts that influenced human life and human creation. By emphasising the enormity of infinite space and time, one emphasises the untouched distance to the highest pillars of divinity. God is simply one with the Universe, a natural phenomenon of nature itself. Thus history cannot be explained in the Augustinian sense of God revealing himself, nor can it even be explained as the Hegelian self-revealing of the Absolute.
God is quite simply an incoherent part of history that began with him but also ceased with his creation. In effect history never existed and God never intervened after creation. Voltaire's agnostic tendency renders his history inquisitive but distant, factual, but inconclusive. It was as if history, like matter has its own secrets, almost impossibly impenetrable, a case he exhibited, imitating Hesiod, in his Philosophical Dictionary: "O man! God has given thee understanding to guide thee aright, and not to penetrate into the essence of things He has created." Voltaire reduces history, a hidden element, the living unknown, to an anecdotal picture of folly, lunacy and criminality. But history is not after all merely a "tableau of crimes and misfortunes." There must be some other basis of reason.
He uses the beauty of theatrical writing to symbolically portray his intellectual insights, through mind, and perhaps through the heart itself. Reading Voltaire is reading the expression of emotion itself, but an emotion that is guided by the versatile mind of the author. Such a theme could be found in the Since de Louis XIV. But the Voltairean emotion is the desire to see no single nation glorified in zealous patriotic idolatry, no nation seen as exceptional. History, whilst confused, is nonetheless a canvass which every nation has left its mark upon positively. The task for Voltaire, is a task to reason history not in terms of the vulgarity of human misfortune, but in terms of some equitable inquiry: I would like to discover what human society was like, how people lived in the intimacy of the family, and what arts were cultivated, rather than repeat the story of so many misfortunes and military combats - the dreary subject matter of history and the common currency of human perversity.
The history that results from this method is one typical of the Enlightenment. But rather than confronting the institutions of the day, as he did in his other letters and publications, Voltaire explored history as a sociological phenomenon that cultivates within itself - spirits, manners and institutions. He was depressed by history as perversity and therefore focused on its cultural variations that lead to creation rather than destruction. Thus, by featuring a medium as art, we focus on a medium that is difficult to reason in terms of progress.
Art changes, but this does not confer upon it the mobility of progress. Likewise with manners and mores. Whilst Montesquieu can say that some ages were crude and rude, whilst others were civil and humane, Voltaire whether consciously or not used a changing medium without the discernible mark of progress: manners. Despite his refusal to expressly recognise some teleological method, he inadvertently classifies ages as rude and crude in their outlook and their mores. He thus merges a teleological perspective with a non-teleological method. Thus Voltaire the historian becomes the figure we know best, Voltaire the idealist.
Historical change does not become external, but idealized by mind - the intellectual conditions of mind that are affected by the external phenomena of life. By his reasoning, there must be some moral basis to life, some means of spurring the lives and minds of men. Thus there are some grounds for reason and some prospect for its progress, a progress that would alleviate the onerous tendencies of man to be destructive rather than creative, dogmatic rather than rational. How are we to ascertain what is important in history? By a method of selection, one has to eliminate the relevant from the needless. A monarch's every detail is hardly enjoyable. "Everything which one reports must be true but I believe that one must suppress many useless and odious details." Annalists should keep records available at shortest notice for the historian to find.
But one is free to import some subjective inferences in the material of presentation. Thus a tableau had to be gentle to sensibilities and sensible to the conscience. Oppressive turgidity was inexcusable, whilst extensive anecdotes were far more favourable. But never reveal all to the reader even progress. History should be seductive, delivered in the manner of a seductress. "The way to be a bore is to say everything." Yet the method does not render history a coherent whole...
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