From his retirement home on Lake Geneva, Voltaire sent Catherine a design for a two-man chariot (he also managed to cajole her into buying some very expensive watches produced by his company in Switzerland). He convinced himself that ‘if ever the Turks should be chased from Europe, it will be by the Russians’. Envisaging conquered Constantinople as the new capital of the Russian Empire, Voltaire asked ‘your majesty for permission to come and place myself at her feet’ as she sat on ‘Mustapha’s throne’ in her new court on the Bosporus.
He followed her military advance closely, wondering in his letters whether ‘you are also the mistress of Taganrog’. In 1769 he wrote to Catherine, ‘Madame, your imperial majesty gives me new life in killing the Turks.’ The Turks, and Muslims generally, were then settling into the French and British imagination as an effeminate and decadent people. In 1772 he imagined a mock crusade in which Catherine would ‘pull the ears of Mustapha and send him back to Asia’. Voltaire regretted his immobility: ‘I wish I had at least been able to help you kill a few Turks.’ In his last letter in 1777 his quasi-erotic obsession with Catherine’s power to repulse the feminized Turks reached its zenith: ‘I prostrate myself,’ he declared, ‘at your feet, and I cry in my agony: Allah, Allah, Catherine rezoul, Allah.’
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Rousseau naturally developed a dislike of Catherine – a kind of deflected hostility towards Voltaire, which then attracted him to ‘modernizing’ Russia’s victim, the Poles. But it was Catherine herself who finally repudiated her expedient alliance with the philosophes. Like most European potentates, she recoiled from the French Revolution, that ‘monstrous child’, as she said, ‘of perverse and subversive teachings’. Encouraging the kings of Prussia and Austria to wipe out the ‘Jacobin pest’ in Paris, she herself annexed large bits of Poland on the pretext of fighting Jacobinism in Warsaw. Poland effectively ceased to exist for more than a century – a geographical erasure facilitated by Enlightenment philosophers.
The philosophes’ fervent support of despotic and imperialistic modernizers in ‘uncivilized’ societies revealed, very early on, a near-fatal contradiction in their project of human emancipation. They saw the exercise of reason as the best way to secure individual autonomy, a way of life not determined solely by the contingencies of nature and fate or constrained by religious authority. But, as Tocqueville shrewdly pointed out, determined to ‘rebuild society according to an entirely new plan, which each of them elaborated by the light of reason alone’, these men of letters developed:
a taste for abstract, general theories of government, theories in which they trusted blindly. Living as they did almost totally removed from practical life, they had no experience that might have tempered their natural passions. Nothing warned them of the obstacles that existing realities might pose to even the most desirable reforms. They had no idea of the perils that invariably accompany even the most necessary revolutions. Indeed, they had no premonition of them because the complete absence of political liberty ensured that they not only failed to grasp the world of affairs but actually failed to see it. They had nothing to do with that world and were incapable of recognizing what others did within it.
Such cosseted writers and artists would in the twentieth century transfer their fantasies of an ideal society to Soviet leaders, who seemed to be bringing a superhuman energy and progressive rhetoric to Peter the Great’s rational schemes of social engineering. Stalin’s Russia, as it ruthlessly eradicated its religious and evidently backward enemies in the 1930s, came to ‘constitute’, the historian Stephen Kotkin writes, ‘a quintessential Enlightenment utopia’. But the Enlightenment philosophes had already shown, in their blind adherence to Catherine, how reason could degenerate into dogma and new, more extensive forms of domination: authoritarian state structures, violent top-down manipulation of human affairs (often couched in terms of humanitarian concern) and indifference to suffering.
The trahison des clercs of the Enlightenment philosophes seems to have helped Rousseau identify a whole schema of modernity in which power flows unequally to a networked elite, especially a smug Republic of Letters that actively accentuates social differences at home while pursuing fantasies of universal transformation abroad. Rousseau of course never had much time for enlightened absolutism. He also had the advantage of knowing that the age of the masses was at hand. ‘We are approaching a state of crisis and the age of revolutions,’ he wrote in 1762 in émile. ‘I hold it impossible that the great monarchies of Europe still have long to survive.’ He rejected all forms of despotism, enlightened or otherwise, in the name of popular self-government.
Rousseau had inaugurated his career with a declaration of war on his own cosmopolitan realm of privilege and wealth. He continued to insist that the artists and poets, weaving ‘garlands of flowers to cover the iron chains’, abetted the corruptions and oppressions of an unequal society. As he grew older, he vigorously sought to expose intellectuals as intolerant secular priests, whose apparently universalist philosophy was sectarian ideology in disguise. Writers and intellectuals, he alleged, were the biggest victims of amour propre, who flatter to deceive, and provide literary and moral cover to the unjust and the powerful. They help entrench inequality, and the suffering and violence it breeds.
The Good (and Very Stern) Society
Accusing Enlightenment philosophers of failing to challenge unjust social and economic institutions even as they ranged themselves ostentatiously against religious tyranny, Rousseau tried to outline a social order where morals, virtue and human character rather than commerce and money were central to politics. Catherine’s war on the Poles offered Rousseau an opportunity to draw up a blueprint for Sparta in the modern era. Since Voltaire and many other philosophes had become ardent champions of the partitioning overlords, Catherine and Frederick, Rousseau chose to become an advisor to their enemies, the Polish nationalists, known as the Confederate Poles.