Admittedly, what Voltaire wanted was hardly revolution or even representative government but a wise monarchy that would sideline aristocrats and clergy and create space for people like himself. As he argued in his Essay on the Manners and Spirit of Nations (1756), the European monarchies by emasculating the nobility and the Church had created the order of law and peace; they had made possible the activities of the intellectual and commercial classes – true progress for which a strong central authority was indispensable.
Wishing to modify the institutional and political system for the sake of self-interested individuals like themselves, the Encyclopedists sought workable models for it in despotic Russia and Prussia as well as England. Voltaire began his intellectual career with a eulogy to Britain’s constitutionalist monarchy. In 1750, the year he became court philosopher to Frederick of Prussia, he hailed the century of Louis XIV. He helped popularize a flattering sobriquet, ‘le Grand’, for the enlightened and war-addicted Frederick of Prussia. In his two-volume biography of Peter the Great, Voltaire presented the arbitrary Tsar as an outstanding ruler who by his own initiative had forced his country to move forward along the continuum from barbarism to civilization.
Peter may have ordered the mass beheading of his mutinous palace guards, Voltaire argued, but he had struck a grievous blow against religious fanaticism by appropriating Church property. When Frederick demurred with such praise of a tyrant, Voltaire offered an early version of the after-all-he-made-the-trains-run-on-time argument: ‘I accept that he was a barbarian; but after all, he was a barbarian who had done good to men; he founded cities, he built canals.’
Voltaire also keenly endorsed Catherine of Russia’s plan to ‘preach tolerance with bayonets at the end of their rifles’ in Poland. Exhorting Catherine to learn Greek as she prepared to attack the Ottoman Empire, he added that ‘it is absolutely necessary to chase from Europe the Turkish language, as well as all those who speak it’.
Radicals Against Their Will
This rationalism of the French Enlightenment, defined in opposition to the irrational inequalities of the old hierarchical and religious order, was often aggressively self-serving, not to mention imperialistic; it was meant primarily to benefit a rising class of educated and ambitious men, who were eventually, as the cultural historian Robert Darnton wrote, ‘pensioned, petted, and completely integrated in high society’.
Joining the posh elites was no contradiction on the part of the commoners. After all, the English-style commercial society they evangelized for was premised on mimesis, or what the French critic René Girard called ‘appropriative mimicry’: desiring objects because the desires of others tell us that they are something to be desired. But the insistence, dating back to Descartes, that all men were endowed with the gift of reason (just as they had all previously possessed immortal souls) planted the principle of equality deep in the soil of modern society.
Theoretical rationalism – speculation about a future rational and enlightened society in which all men are equal – turned out to have radically egalitarian implications in a way that few of its seventeenth-and eighteenth-century proponents and beneficiaries anticipated. The philosophes did not know until 1789 – and most of them were dead by then – that the programme of reform by a tiny literate minority cumulatively equalled the demand for a drastically new order, and that the campaign against the evidently fanatical Church would escalate into a ferocious assault on all social inequality, culminating in the public execution of a monarch and later his consort.
Liberty had been the battle cry of the men leading the revolutions in seventeenth-century England and eighteenth-century America. As it happened, the Atlantic West’s nascent bourgeoisie had just started to enjoy liberty when Rousseau’s radical heirs brought forth, during the French Revolution, far more seductive ideals of fraternity and equality. They conceived of individual autonomy within a more inclusive framework than property ownership or education. Within a decade, the 1790s, two concepts, ‘nationalism’ and ‘communism’, had been invented to define the aspirations for fraternity and equality. ‘Democracy’ came into vogue around 1830, helped by Tocqueville’s close observations of the new culture of individualism and equality in America. Almost as soon as they came into circulation in the West, the words were deployed by educated young men across Eastern Europe, and travelled, with varying interpretations, to Russia and further east.
But the execution of a king and queen during the French Revolution, the confiscation of Church property, and the killings of tens of thousands of people had already announced a new episode in human history – one that would confound all expectations of reason’s triumph, or that peace, prosperity and human freedom would be gradually extended to all.
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In this ‘monstrous tragi-comic scene’, as Edmund Burke warned, ‘the most opposite passions necessarily succeed, and sometimes mix with each other in the mind; alternate contempt and indignation; alternate laughter and tears; alternate scorn and horror.’ Thus, slaves in French colonies invoking the rights of man and citizen staged bloody insurrections (and suffered savage reprisals from Napoleon), while two of the most zealous boosters of the American Revolution, Thomas Paine and the Marquis de Lafayette, went to their graves lamenting the betrayal of those rights by the slave-owning leaders of the United States.
Edmund Burke of course amplified his dire warnings while the French Revolution was still in its Arcadian phase, and the millions of victims of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars were still alive. Many who witnessed the revolution’s degeneration into terror and Napoleon’s militarism started to have other ideas. The German Romantics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries rejected the Atlantic West’s new materialist, individualistic and imperialistic civilization in the name of local religious and cultural truth and spiritual virtue. To this monumental divergence from the path of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution we owe many fateful innovations, including nationalism.