Such distinctions are important if we are to understand the history of optimism, but in practice they were seldom made by the eighteenth-century public. Pope’s poem was enormously successful in France: no less than four different translations, two of which were frequently reprinted, appeared between 1736 and 1750; and it was very commonly, though erroneously, supposed that Pope had been influenced by Leibniz. Interest in Leibniz, indeed, which had somewhat languished in France since his death in 1716, was revived precisely by the controversy which sprang up over Pope’s poem. It is significant that the fullest discussion ever accorded to Leibniz’s Théodicée in a French periodical appeared, not in a review of the first edition of 1710, but in 1737, the year after the publication of the first French translation of the Essay on Man, when the Jesuit Mémoires de Trévoux devoted four articles to reviewing an edition of the Théodicée published in 1734.
The issue at stake in the controversy was a crucial one. The optimism expressed in Pope’s poem, and which was commonly supposed to be that of Leibniz also, appeared in the 1730s as a characteristically deistic view. It presented God as a rational Supreme Being, the creator of a rational, ordered, perfect universe; it clearly left no room for such notions as the Fall, original sin, Christ’s atonement, redemption by divine grace, or even, in the eyes of many, for freedom of the will. And at that date deism was the commonest form assumed by the growing European movement of free thought, the strongest enemy with which the Church had to contend. The forces of orthodoxy consequently reacted vigorously, condemning such doctrines as unchristian and above all fatalistic; but their attraction remained strong in an age which tended to complacency, was impressed by the achievements of the new science, and found the rationalistic notions of deism more congenial than the dogmas of revealed religion.
If Leibniz, who was little read, became better known, and by some better thought of, as a result of this renewed French interest in optimism, his reputation scarcely benefited in France from a further development, which served nevertheless to keep his name before the public in the following two decades. Owing chiefly to Leibniz’s unwillingness to publish systematic expositions of his views, his philosophy, for all its originality and importance, exercised extremely little direct influence: but early in the eighteenth century there appeared in Germany an academic disciple of Leibniz whose impact was considerable. Christian Wolff (1679–1754), a professor in the universities of Halle and Marburg, was above all a systematizer and an expositor, developing some of Leibniz’s principal conceptions into an all-embracing philosophical structure which covered every aspect of human thought, from logic to theology, from metaphysics to ethics. This he presented in lectures to students over a period of thirty years and published in some forty quarto volumes, in which his thought is set out in a rigidly organized pattern resembling that of a textbook of geometry. The apparently solid, ‘mathematically’ proven certainties of this arid and pedantic philosophical system had great appeal for his contemporaries, however, and before his death Wolff’s philosophy had become the established orthodoxy in the universities of northern Germany.
It was in these Protestant areas of the country that many thousands of Huguenots had settled when in 1685 the revocation of the Edict of Nantes had forced them to leave France. These refugees, and especially the second generation, born in exile, while they preserved their religious traditions and their national language, also came inevitably under the influence of contemporary German movements. Some became enthusiastic Wolffians, and consequently tried to win further adherents by spreading knowledge of Wolff’s system in the French-speaking world. French translations and expositions of Wolff were published in the late 1730s and the 1740s by Jean Deschamps, a little-known pastor in Berlin who later lived in London, and by the much more influential J. H. S. Formey, a Huguenot minister and professor who became the permanent Secretary of the Berlin Academy of Sciences in 1748, contributed articles to Diderot’s Encyclopédie, and was extremely active throughout his career as a publicist and journalist. Formey’s most ambitious attempt at presenting Wolff to French readers was La Belle Wolfienne (6 vols., 1741–53), a work which, in the early volumes at any rate, tried to emulate the conversational method of popular scientific exposition used so successfully by Fontenelle in his Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes habités half a century before. But certainly more influential than this was his journalistic work. From 1734 until its disappearance in 1760 Formey was on the editorial staff of a periodical primarily concerned with presenting German literary and intellectual life to French readers, the Bibliothèque germanique, and in the 1740s and ’50s he was able to use it as an organ of Wolffian propaganda, consistently publishing articles and reviews in which Wolff’s philosophy was expounded and put forward in a favourable light.
The positive effect of this campaign in France itself was not very great. The only French convert to Wolffianism of any significance was Voltaire’s mistress, Madame Du Châtelet. Won over, at least temporarily, by the enthusiasm of a disciple of Wolff whom she employed for a time as a mathematics tutor, Samuel König, she prefaced a popular introduction to physics which she published in 1741, the Institutions de physique, with an outline of the metaphysical conceptions of Leibniz (including the doctrines of the Théodicée), ‘puisées dans les ouvrages du célèbre Wolff.’ The general effect, however, of such pro-Wolffian activities was at least to keep the names of Leibniz and Wolff before the French public by provoking opposition. Apart from Madame Du Châtelet’s book, during the twenty years preceding Candide virtually nothing was published on the subject in France itself which was not hostile to the Wolffian philosophy. It appeared to most French minds as an extreme example of a kind of dogmatic speculation which the new scientific progress, based upon observed fact only, had shown to be valueless. Condillac dealt this sort of philosophy a crushing blow with his devastatingly critical Traité des systèmes in 1749, and D’Alembert in 1751 recorded the decease of systematic metaphysics in his Discours préliminaire de l’Encyclopédie: ‘Le goût des systèmes, plus propre à flatter l’imagination qu’à éclairer la raison, est aujourd’hui presqu’absolument banni des bons ouvrages.’
The interest in the doctrines of optimism which Pope’s Essay on Man had stimulated in France was thus reinforced to some extent by the attempts of Madame Du Châtelet and the Huguenot enthusiasts in Germany to attract French support for the philosophy of Leibniz and Wolff. Pope and Leibniz were continually linked together by controversialists, ‘le meilleur des mondes possibles’ and Pope’s ‘tout est bien’ (‘Whatever is, is right’) became the catch-phrases of the discussion: but even those in France who sympathized with the optimistic solution of the problem of evil were rarely disposed to accept also the complete metaphysical system in which Wolff had embedded it. The outlines of that system became better known in France than Leibniz’s own thought had ever been, thanks to the efforts of the Wolffian propagandists: but Frenchmen, it seems, if they were able now to recognize such technical phrases as ‘l’harmonie préćtablie,’ ‘la raison suffisante,’ or ‘les monades’ as characteristically Leibnizian, saw no reason to take Leibnizian metaphysics seriously, and now also associated it with the pedantic aridity and prolixity of Wolff—who in these respects well exemplified the current French conception of German pedagogues and scholars.
Optimism itself, moreover, though defended by enthusiasts in Germany, continued to come under fire in France. As we have seen, the forces of religious orthodoxy condemned it, emphasizing especially the fatalistic implications which were inseparable from it; and to many men of sense it seemed less and less in accordance with the observable facts of existence—an impression which was of course enormously strengthened by the Lisbon earthquake of 1755.
We are now in a better position to understand the immediate success of Candide. In it Voltaire is making fun of a philosophy much discussed in France, but generally rejected there: one which aroused great interest, because it was concerned with a problem of acute importance for the
age, but which had also acquired an aura of ridicule through becoming associated in the public mind with the academic jargon of German pedants and their infatuated disciples. In creating Pangloss, the German pedagogue, with his Leibnizian clichés, his irrepressible passion for metaphysical dogmatizing, and his blind devotion to optimism, Voltaire was setting up a butt for satire at which all France could laugh.
To describe the development of Voltaire’s attitude to the question of optimism it is not necessary, or possible, to go back to the earliest years of his career: the successful young court poet and dramatist of the Regency had as yet no serious personal concern with such profound matters as the problem of evil. Yet, with his early interest in Bayle and impatience with religious orthodoxy, he can scarcely have failed, even as a very young man, to be aware of the importance of the question. He of course read his friend Pope’s Essay on Man as soon as it appeared in 1733, and it is noteworthy that, although he qualified his first praise of it with the remark that ‘Now and then there is some obscurity’ (letter, in English, to Thieriot, 24 July 1733, Best. 614), his own earliest recorded opinions on the subject, which belong to this period, are on the whole in harmony with Pope’s views. In his Lettres philosophiques (1734) he includes an attack on Pascal which opposes to Pascal’s deep sense of original sin the assertion that all is well with creation, that man, even if he has his imperfections, is nevertheless in his rightful place in the divinely created order. Pope’s optimism thus had its part to play as a weapon against Christian orthodoxy where doctrines of sin and redemption were concerned; but when, a year or two later, he attempts for the first time, in his Traité de métaphysique, to argue seriously the case for deism, he tries to exonerate God from responsibility for evil, from charges of cruelty and injustice towards man, by a new approach. He does not follow Pope to the optimistic extreme of maintaining that all evil is a means to good, but rather asserts that man is in no position to make judgments at all on the subject. To reproach God with injustice is to apply to Him a notion which is meaningful only with reference to one man’s treatment of another; to condemn creation as imperfect is absurd unless we have some more perfect universe with which to compare it; God’s ways, in short, are not our ways.
Such arguments give the impression of having been sought out as a way of answering the orthodox opponents of deism, rather than as springing from any very profound conviction. And Voltaire in the 1730s had little personal inclination to take the problem very seriously. As he makes clear in his epicurean poem of 1736, Le Mondain, he thought the world a pleasant place: ‘le paradis terrestre est où je suis’; and, without denying the existence of evil in the world (he seems to have felt, indeed, that Pope tended too easily to gloss it over), he sees little point at this stage in his career in arguing over such problems, when life offers so much to enjoy:
Sans rechercher en vain ce que peut notre maître,
Ce que fut notre monde, et ce qu’il devrait être,
Observons ce qu’il est, et recueillons le fruit
Des trésors qu’il renferme et des biens qu’il produit.
(Sixième Discours sur l’homme, 1738)
Voltaire’s acquaintance with the philosophy of Leibniz began effectively only in 1736, when the future Frederick the Great, at that time a devotee, sent him some French translations of Wolff’s works. Further contacts undoubtedly came through the Leibnizian enthusiasm of Madame Du Châtelet, which began in 1739: it seems to have been about this date that Voltaire first acquired some knowledge of the Théodicée. It is clear that Voltaire rapidly lost patience with the Wolffian enthusiasts, whose pedantic metaphysical dogmatism and supreme confidence in their own speculations he found exasperating—the complete antithesis of everything he admired in Locke and Newton, with their cautious scepticism and persistent refusal to go beyond the established facts. It is Leibnizian metaphysics, not the Leibnizian doctrine of optimism, that Voltaire makes fun of at this time, however; believing no doubt, with many of his contemporaries, that Leibniz and Pope were at one on the latter subject, he would have felt no desire to attack a view with which he was then largely in sympathy.
By 1744, however, the first signs of a different attitude begin to emerge. In that year, in a bitterly mocking reply to an attack which a Wolffian professor of philosophy, L. M. Kahle of Göttingen, had made on his Métaphysique de Newton, Voltaire includes Leibnizian optimism in his ridicule, closing his letter with the sarcastic gibe: ‘Quand vous aurez aussi démontré en vers ou autrement pourquoi tant d’hommes s’égorgent dans le meilleur des mondes possibles, je vous serai très obligé’ (Best. 2745). This sense that the realities of human suffering and evil are fundamentally irreconcilable with the doctrine of optimism, that, far from making them comprehensible and tolerable, optimism merely mocks at them, is one that comes more and more to dominate Voltaire’s thinking on the subject in the ensuing years, and it is this which inspires Candide.
In the middle and late 1740s, too, Voltaire returned to the life of a courtier at Versailles. With its continual insecurity, its petty jealousies, its frivolous demands upon his time and literary energies, the flattery and insincerity which it necessitated, such an existence soon destroyed the sense of personal contentment which had underlain his earlier epicurean sympathy with Pope. At the same time, however, he had not altogether abandoned the intellectual conviction (implicit in his sincere deism) that, the universe being rational, a rational explanation of the fact of evil must exist. The conflict between the two attitudes, the one intellectual, the other at bottom emotional and personal, emerges clearly in the first of Voltaire’s contes to be published, Zadig, the earliest version of which appeared in 1747.
In this tale the central theme is the problem of destiny: not whether it exists—Voltaire by this date was a convinced determinist, and his oriental hero has the traditional fatalism of his race—but why it treats men as capriciously and unjustly as it does.
Zadig is a young man of talent and virtue, yet his career is continually beset with undeserved misfortune: both men and events seem to conspire maliciously against him. Finally, after many adventures, he is on the point of winning the hand of his beloved, Queen Astarte, only to be cheated by the treachery of his last rival, a knight in green armour whom he had defeated in single combat. Zadig can endure no more: ‘Il lui échappa enfin de murmurer contre la Providence, et il fut tenté de croire que tout était gouverné par une Destinée cruelle qui opprimait les bons, et qui faisait prospérer les chevaliers verts’ (chap. 17). At this climax in the story, Zadig meets a mysterious hermit, who offers to enlighten and console him. On their way together, however, the hermit baffles and horrifies Zadig by his strange behaviour: he steals from one man who offers them generous hospitality, burns down the house of another, richly rewards those who treat them badly, and finally recompenses a hospitable and virtuous widow by deliberately drowning her nephew. The hermit, who has access to the book of destiny, is able to show Zadig how each of these actions was in fact beneficial, in spite of appearances: even the murder of the nephew was for the best, for if the boy had lived he would have killed his aunt, and Zadig too! The hermit now reveals himself to be the angel Jesrad, and the seal of supernatural authority seems to be set upon the interpretation of the workings of destiny which these episodes imply: whatever man, with his limited knowledge, may think, all is in fact for the best when it is seen from the transcendental viewpoint available to celestial beings.
Zadig, however, is not satisfied with these explanations. He continues to ask questions: would it not have been better to have changed the boy’s destiny, and made him virtuous, rather than to have drowned him? Why should crime and unhappiness be necessary at all? What if there were only goodness, and no evil? These questions the angel tries to answer by again insisting upon the ultimate justice and beneficence of Providence: ‘Les méchants, répondit Jesrad, sont toujours malheureux. Ils servent à éprouver un petit nombre de justes répandus sur la terre, et il n’y a point de mal dont il ne naisse un bien??
? (chap. 18). And to the question why evil exists at all, he answers merely that without evil this world would be a different world, nearer to the divine perfection, occupying a different place in the universal order from that to which God has in fact assigned it. Man must merely submit, and accept the purposes of Providence, which he cannot hope to understand. Zadig, inevitably, finds these answers unsatisfactory; but he is given no further opportunity for argument: ‘ “Mais,” dit Zadig … Comme il disait Mais, l’Ange prenait déjà son vol vers la dixième sphère.’
From a transcendental standpoint, Voltaire seems here to be implying, it may well be true that the universe is rationally and beneficently ordered, but for the individual this can never be more than a matter of faith. The sense of personal injustice and unmerited affliction remains and the reality of suffering is not mitigated by such remote and metaphysical considerations.
It is upon the inescapable fact of human suffering that Voltaire now begins to place the greatest emphasis in his treatment of the subject. In Babouc (1748), where he is concerned chiefly with satirizing French society and its institutions, he concludes, indeed, that ‘si tout n’est pas bien, tout est passable’; but in the following year in another tale, Memnon, he returns to the dilemma of Zadig. Memnon too, after a horrifying series of undeserved misfortunes, including the loss of an eye, is confronted with an angelic mentor. He complains to him that this world must surely be the Bedlam of the universe—