ABSTRACT

To examine Voltaire’s attitude to, and representation of, Socrates is to intrude upon a paradoxically close relationship. Though far apart in time and space, an intimate link between the two was identified as early as February 1740, when the marquis de Valori, sometime French ambassador in Berlin, suggested that Voltaire was a modern-day Socrates who was being persecuted ‘for having defended truth against man’s wild superstition’.1 The comparison stood the test of time. In March 1776 another of his numerous correspondents, Jean-Louis de Poilly, wrote to Voltaire at his château in Ferney, near the French-Swiss border, celebrating him as ‘a new Socrates who, from his quiet retreat at the foot of the Alps, inspires, both with his words and with his actions, love of justice and virtue, not just in a few people, but throughout the whole of Europe’.2 Of course, Voltaire was not the only eighteenth-century French philosophe, or intellectual, to be compared to Socrates. In 1749, following the publication of his vigorously atheistic Lettre sur les aveugles, Diderot was imprisoned in the château de Vincennes for a hundred days, some of which time he spent translating Plato’s Apology into French.3 It is unsurprising, then, that Voltaire should refer to him, in a letter to the journalist Raynal on 30 July 1749, as ‘Socrates Diderot’, adding: ‘It is a disgrace that Diderot should be in prison while [Pierre-Charles] Roy receives a pension from the king. These contrasts make one’s heart bleed’.4 In July 1760 Voltaire wrote to the comte d’Argental to urge him to support Diderot’s candidacy for election to the

Académie Française, arguing wittily that this would be a fitting riposte to ‘fanaticism and stupidity’:

And on 23 July 1766, at the height of the scandal surrounding the chevalier de La Barre, a young noble who had been condemned to have his tongue pulled out, his right hand cut off and to be executed for some minor blasphemy, Voltaire began a letter to Diderot thus: ‘One simply has to write to Socrates when the Meletuses and Anytuses are soaked in blood and are lighting the fires at the stake’.6 For his part, Diderot actively encouraged the comparison with Socrates by self-confidently sealing his letters with red wax bearing a profile of the Athenian philosopher.7 For Diderot, Socrates alone ‘deserved the title of philosopher [philosophe] par excellence, a title which none of his successors was able to take away from him’.8 Diderot’s was not a lone voice: other eighteenth-century philosophes were keen on comparing themselves to Socrates. They saw in him a philosophe avant la lettre: he was, like them, persecuted for his unconventional ideas. In a letter to his close friend Nicolas Thiriot on 19 June 1760, Voltaire refers to the philosophes as ‘the poor Socrateses’.9 And in August 1762, Diderot wrote in Melchior Grimm’s manuscript journal, the Correspondance littéraire: ‘As he faced death, Socrates was regarded in Athens as we are regarded today in Paris. [...] Dear friends, may we in every way be like Socrates, just as his reputation resembled ours at the hour of his death’.10 The comparison became a particularly popular and eloquent one in the late 1750s and the 1760s, when Voltaire was launching his famous campaign to écraser l’infâme, to crush the unspeakable enemy that was intolerance and injustice. Voltaire, Diderot and the other philosophes were at this time increasingly subject to official oppression. The attempt made on Louis XV’s life in 1757 by RobertFrançois Damiens sensitized the authorities to the possible subversive influence of the philosophes.11 The influential journalist Elie-Catherine

Fréron subsequently waged a written war against the philosophes in general and the Encyclopédie in particular, the vast collaborative work masterminded by Diderot and d’Alembert. And Omer Joly de Fleury, the attorney general, as well as condemning Voltaire’s Candide, also condemned the Encyclopédie, vilifying its authors as ungodly subversives, and further publication was forbidden in 1759 by the Paris Parlement.12 This persecution of the philosophes explains their polemical appropriation, and reinvention, of Socrates in the mid-eighteenth century: in him they saw an exemplary and symbolic forebear.13 Given the frequency with which the philosophes compared themselves, and were compared, to Socrates, what is distinctive about Voltaire’s role in this appropriation and reinvention of the Athenian philosopher? Compared to Diderot, who was perhaps Socrates’ most committed acolyte, Voltaire’s attitude to Socrates was more ambiguous, more far-reaching and more complex than has hitherto been recognized. For not only does Voltaire discuss Socrates in a number of important religious, philosophical and historical works; he also makes him the subject of one of his now forgotten comedies, written at the height of the struggle of the philosophes against official oppression. Before looking at the comedy, it is worth considering Voltaire’s attitude to Socrates as it can be gleaned from his other writings. Voltaire’s serious interest in Socrates dates from the late 1730s. Though the timing may be coincidental, in late 1736 Frederick, then crown prince of Prussia, sent Voltaire a miniature gold bust of Socrates for his walking stick. He explained the significance of the gift in a letter sent in the following January:

The impact of the gift on the grateful recipient seems to have been significant, as Voltaire tells Frederick in March 1737: ‘This present has prompted me to reread everything Plato says about Socrates’.15