Be that as it may, the depressed tones of August and early September are closely related to the search for a new home. Voltaire approached de Brosses about Tournay on 9 September (D7853). A month later he has bought that château and, more important still for his future life, is about to buy the one at Ferney (D7896). He has taken a new decision, to renounce urban life (D7936). The tone of contentment begins to return to the correspondence. To his friend Formont he writes: ‘I do not know of any situation preferable to mine’ (D7888, [c. 3 October 1758]). True, he protests perhaps too much in his fulminations against a Paris that he can no longer hope to see; but elsewhere, too, the sense that the life of philosophers is much better than that of kings (D7936) and that he can now cultivate his garden in tranquillity (D7943) emerges clearly.
Thus far one might say that Voltaire is merely repeating in 1758 the search previously undertaken in 1755. But a remarkable letter of 18 November, the importance of which Besterman has rightly stressed, marks the beginning of a new and final period in Voltaire’s life. He has been inspecting his new estate at Ferney and finding that there is more involved than the cultivation of plants. He has acquired peasants who depend on him. What is the state of the community? Half the land lies fallow, the curé has celebrated no marriages in seven years, the countryside is depopulated as people rush to nearby Geneva. Taxation (especially the salt-tax) destroys those who remain; either the peasants pay and are reduced to abject poverty, or they evade payment and are clapped in jail. ‘It is heart-breaking to witness so many misfortunes. I am buying the Ferney property simply in order to do a little good there.… The prince who will be my liege lord should rather help me to drag his subjects out of the abyss of poverty, than profit from his ancient feudal rights [‘du droit goth et visigoth des lods et ventes’]17 (D7946, 18 November 1758).
This is a new voice in Voltaire’s letters. We have seen how many times he had sought to intervene on the social or political scene and been frustrated. Here at last the right opportunity in time and place comes to hand. By acquiring seigneurial rights he is freer, he says, than when he possessed only his house in Lausanne and his ‘country cottage [guinguette]’ in Geneva, where the people were ‘a little arrogant’ and the priests ‘a little dangerous’; Ferney and Tournay have added ‘deux grands degrés’18 to his happiness (D7976). The rôles of ‘maçon’ and ‘jardinier’19 which he has long since arrogated to himself are now supplemented by a new one: ‘seigneur’ (D7985). Once again, as in 1755 (D6214), he claims that he is becoming a patriarch (D7970); this time the claim will have a firmer grounding. Already before he is even installed at Ferney he has taken up the cudgels against the curé of Moëns, who is the malefactor extorting moneys from Voltaire’s peasants and forcing them to sell their own lands. His appeal to the diocesan bishop at Annecy (D7981, 16 December 1758) marks the beginning of a long campaign against the priest.
This note of social concern enters into Candide, but only just. From late August 1758 another spate of parallels with the conte is to be found in the correspondence: Westphalia (D7838); shipwreck (D7839, 7848, 7862); the earth covered with corpses and beggars (D7852) reminding us of Chapters 3–4; the cultivation of pineapples in India (D7875), as in Turkey in Chapter 30; te deums as thanksgiving after battle (D7890, 7908, 7928): these and other phrases reminiscent of the conte suggest that the latter was in the forefront of Voltaire’s mind up to early November. But most of these are not new and indicate no more than elaboration of the finished product. However, one episode, that of the black slave in Chapter 19, is more important, because we now know that it did not figure in the earliest manuscript version of Candide. René Pomeau has shown that the source for this passage lies in Voltaire’s reading of Helvétius’s De l’esprit, which contains strikingly similar references to slavery, around 18 October 1758 (cf. D7912). Not that Voltaire was unaware of the horrors occurring to blacks in the colonies; he had already written about them in the Essai sur les moeurs the previous January. But Helvétius recalled the institution of slavery to mind as one of the horrors which no comprehensive account of the world’s evils should ignore. It also linked up for Voltaire with his new experiences as seigneur de Ferney.
This passage in Candide is surely the one where the most direct assault is made on the reader’s conscience: ‘This is the price you pay for eating sugar in Europe.’ It also leads to one of Candide’s few impassioned outbursts against Optimism. But it is poorly integrated into the plot, as was almost inevitable given the date of its interpolation, and has no direct impact upon anything subsequent to it. An element of hesitation can be discerned on the author’s part. It relates to the ambiguity of Voltaire’s views on social commitment in the conte. The Ferney epoch with all its glorious activities in social protest and reform is only just opening after virtually the whole of Candide has been completed. One of the reasons for the unique tragi-comic quality of the tale must surely be sought in its period of gestation: the relative contentment of the Geneva years is beginning to dissolve as Voltaire begins work on it, a sharp decline in morale accompanies the Schwetzingen phase when it is generally thought to have been for the most part composed, and the prospect of a new era opening out, as yet full of possibility but of uncertainty too, is descried as it is finished. No biography of a writer can, or should, attempt to explain his art through his life. Voltaire’s Candide, infinitely complex, savagely lucid, is the author’s most brilliant of his innumerable attacks on the strongholds and methods of obscurantism. Like all such creations, it will not yield its ultimate secrets. The biographer, confronted by such mysteries, has but one useful function. By delineating the area where echoes from the world of Candide overlap into the world of Voltaire’s daily life, he may hope to catch an element that went into the amalgam of forces creating the conte.
At the end of 1758, Voltaire tells d’Argental with pride that he has created for himself ‘a rather nice kingdom’ (D7988). At last he has his own principality: he is now both roi and philosophe. His installation at Tournay on Christmas Eve 1758 was of fitting dignity and pomp, with sound of cannon, fife and drum, all the peasants bearing arms and girls presenting flowers to his two diamond-bedecked nieces. ‘M. de Voltaire,’ writes a spectator, ‘was very pleased and full of joy … He was, believe me, very flattered’ (D7998). Henceforth rank and authority will be used to advance social good. By the New Year Voltaire sees this as involving the overthrow of superstition (D8029); it is the tone of ‘écrasez l’infâme,’ and the famous phrase itself will make its appearance in 1760 (D9006).20 As Candide begins to enjoy, a few weeks later, the success which has never since deserted it, so too does Voltaire enter at last into his kingdom. In his sixty-fifth year, François-Marie Arouet has finally realised himself as M. de Voltaire.21
* * *
† From Voltaire (London: Century Hutchison Publishing Ltd., 1975), pp. 79–92. Reprinted by permission of the author and The Random House Group Limited.
1. D preceding a number indicates the position of a letter in the immense Besterman edition of Voltaire’s correspondence.
2. Everything is at war.
3. To encourage others.
4. He loved the arts, and his soul was candid.
5. His features admirably expressed his soul … they called him Candide.
6. As ignorant as mice in a ship of the intentions of those controlling her.
7. When His Highness sends a ship to Egypt, does he worry whether the mice on board are comfortable or not?
8. What to do then? Nothing, keep quiet, live in peace …
9. ‘What shall we do then? Asked Pangloss. —Hold your tongue, said the dervish.’
10. Poor scholar who had worked ten years for the booksellers …
11. A few acres of snow near Canada.
12. The rabble of your convulsionaries.
13. His niece but al
so his mistress.
14. Our story is unusual.
15. So she took up the thread of her tale.
16. The whole world is ruined.… Ah, what an age! —What a gloomy age. —The shipwreck seems universal. —A plank, quickly!
17. From the gothic and visigothic rights of dues and fines.
18. Two great rises.
19. Mason; gardener.
20. “Ecrasez l’infâme” is a slogan many times repeated by Voltaire in the course of his crusades against bigotry, intolerance, and cruelty in the church of his day. “Wipe out the disgrace” is a literal translation, but the phrase implies much more.
21. François-Marie Arouet is the name of an insignificant Paris bourgeois; M. de Voltaire (wherever his name comes from) is a gentleman, a seigneur, a person of European repute.
NICHOLAS CRONK
The Voltairean Genre of the Conte Philosophique: Does It Exist?†
‘The Voltaire conte does not work with established rules or procedures in the same way as, say, his tragedy. Part of its value is precisely its flexibility.’1 So writes Richard Francis, in the Introduction to his authoritative critical edition of L’Ingénu. It is this important observation about generic flexibility that I would like to explore further in this essay. The widely-used term conte philosophique is a fixture of Voltairean criticism, though in the hands of some critics it has become anything but flexible. While Gustave Lanson regarded the conte philosophique as one of the ‘formes fixes’ of eighteenth-century French prose writing in general,2 more recent critics have tended to reserve the term specifically for the short fiction of Voltaire. The venerable ‘Lagarde et Michard’ typically affirm that ideas are preeminent in Voltaire’s contes philosophiques: ‘Par une sorte de grâce, ces contes philosophiques où les idées sont souveraines nous paraissent de purs divertissements.’3 Interestingly, they note the paradoxical tension between ‘pure’ pleasure and ideas, though they do not develop the point. More matter-of-fact is the presentation of this alleged ‘sous-genre’ in a modern volume aimed at French university students:
Le conte philosophique: on peut fixer la naissance de ce sous-genre au XVIIIe siècle; il a pour ambition de mouler dans une fiction brève un contenu satirique et édifiant. Voltaire sera le meilleur illustrateur du genre (Micromégas, Zadig, Candide) et nous fournit implicitement un catalogue des règles du genre: l’utilisation de la fable (marquée par le surnaturel ou le merveilleux), la dimension parodique (on reprend, pour les transgresser ou les démystifier, les règles de l’écriture et de l’inspiration romanesques), la leçon philosophique (le conte philosophique vise à imposer un point de vue, à démontrer ou déconsidérer une thèse).4
Also writing in a book addressed to a student readership, Christiane Mervaud is exceptional in sounding a salutary note of warning about the use of this generic term: ‘La définition du conte philosophique […] privilégie souvent une démarche circulaire, prenant Candide comme point de départ pour le retrouver au point d’arrivée. Ou la question du genre ne paraît pas primordiale.’5 We can understand why the category of conte philosophique was useful to Gustave Lanson, at a time in the Third Republic when lycée and university syllabuses were a matter of keen debate, and when it was felt important to bring Voltaire’s ‘message’ to the fore. But we have continued to use the term ever since, perhaps because it seems a convenient pedagogic and critical tool, without always subjecting it to adequate scrutiny.
Literary critics working in the Anglo-American tradition have, ever since New Criticism, been wary of philosophical ideas inserted into literary structures. ‘For some reason it has never been consistently understood,’ writes Northrop Frye, ‘that the ideas of literature are not real propositions, but rather verbal formulas which imitate real propositions.’6 Ronald Crane is emphatic that we cannot apply the same criteria of logic and coherence to ideas found in a literary work as we would to a work of philosophy.7 The notion of a genre of ‘philosophical fiction’ can seem equally suspect to a philosopher too. Jonathan Rée has explored the literariness of philosophers such as Descartes or Hegel,8 but is highly sceptical about the separate status of philosophical fictions: ‘The difference between philosophy and non-philosophy is not a matter of literary genre. And philosophical non-fiction may contain as much fiction as philosophical fictions do; perhaps even more.’9
Turning to the Voltairean corpus, it is important to remember that the expression conte philosophique, though attested in the eighteenth century, is extremely rare, and certainly not a generic category. Angus Martin searched for instances of the adjective philosophique applied to eighteenth-century works of short fiction: ‘In view of our familiarity with the term conte philosophique, it comes as something of a surprise to find this particular adjective occurring in no cases before 1750 and in only eleven cases thereafter [up to 1800]. On the other hand, while one would have expected the adjective moral to occur frequently, the overwhelming total of some 140 references (all but 4, it should be noted, after the mid-century) seems curiously disproportionate with the use of the term philosophique.’10 In all, Martin can find only three works described by their authors as contes philosophiques—none of them of course by Voltaire.11 The nearest Voltaire comes is when he adds the sub-title histoire philosophique to Micromégas (which he does for the first time in the Dresden Walther edition of 1754). It is certainly true that in the collective editions produced towards the end of his life, after 1770, the short prose fictions tend to be aggregated in one or more volumes, giving them for the first time a shared identity. This process begins with volume 13 of the Cramer quarto edition, published in 1771, which bears the title ‘Romans, contes philosophiques, etc.’ This is an important innovation, but several observations should be made. Firstly, Frédéric Deloffre shows that it was clearly Cramer and not Voltaire who was responsible for the plan of the quarto edition, and that Voltaire was not consulted about the volume containing the fictions;12 it would seem then that the title ‘Romans, contes philosophiques, etc’ was more likely the publisher’s choice than Voltaire’s.13 Secondly, the corpus of contes is not entirely stable and several important tales, such as Le Taureau blanc, are omitted from volume 13 of the quarto edition. And thirdly, even if the corpus of short fictions is to some extent beginning to stabilise, the title given to it is not: volume 25 of the Lausanne Grasset edition has ‘Mélanges, contenant des romans, ou contes philosophiques’ (1772); the Paris Panckoucke editions have two volumes (24–25) of ‘Romans, contes allégoriques, philosophiques et historiques’ (1773); the ‘encadrée’ edition has two volumes (31–32) of ‘Romans philosophiques’ (1775), oddly placed together with the Eléments de Newton; while the Kehl edition presents us with two volumes (44–45) entitled simply ‘Romans’ (1784). While this clearly demonstrates that the corpus of prose contes was gradually acquiring a clearer identity, it also shows that the label conte philosophique was far from established as the usual description of that corpus. The term has come into its own in twentieth-century literary criticism, invariably in connection with Voltaire, and is not generally acknowledged as a generic category.14
It is notoriously difficult to pin down with precision the corpus of Voltaire’s short fictions.15 The term conte philosophique is problematic, for it is at one and the same time too inclusive and not inclusive enough. Too inclusive, because it lumps together works which are really rather different: Micromégas, with its roots in Lucianic satire, has little in common in terms of fictional techniques with L’Ingénu, clearly more indebted to contemporary fictional models. And too exclusive, because it fails to include many works which are evidently closely related to the canonical corpus of short prose fictions. Voltaire’s narrative skills also manifest themselves in verse, and the contes en vers, restored to their rightful place thanks to the critical edition of Sylvain Menant,16 resemble in style and manner some of the prose contes, even if they are not obviously philosophiques. There are also many short prose texts which c
ontain fictional elements and are unquestionably philosophiques yet which are not conventionally classed as contes philosophiques. These are the works which Voltaire himself, with fake nonchalance, dismisses as his rogatons, his fadaises, his petits pâtés. Writing to his publisher Michel Lambert in 1751, Voltaire refers generally to these short prose fireworks (including the works we know as the contes) as ‘ces petits morceaux d’une philosophie allégorique’ (D4369)—as good a description as any. Gianni Iotti has edited an important anthology of these works, published in the Italian Biblioteca della Pléiade, under the title Racconti, facezie, libelli,17 and he includes under this catch-all title the Sermon des cinquante, the Sermon du rabbin Akib, the Relation du voyage de frère Garaisse, and the Relation de la maladie du jésuite Berthier.
In the end, the category of the conte philosophique is a difficult critical concept to handle, because it begs too many questions, and leads too easily into circularity of argument. In one sense the term is too imprecise, since very nearly all the fiction produced in France in the eighteenth century has some content which might, in some sense, be described as philosophique. On the other hand, the term is too precise. In our search for the ‘philosophical’ ‘content’ of these fictions, we can all too easily forget to study their quintessentially self-reflexive novelistic qualities.18 Thus once you have categorised Candide as a conte philosophique, you are immediately obliged to discuss its take on the problem of theodicy, and an alternative reading, for example that Candide is first and foremost an anti-novel, is almost excluded by the definition of its genre.
If we wish therefore to avoid the question-begging term conte philosophique, what other approach might the critic adopt towards Voltaire’s short prose fictions? One possibility is to take a long historical perspective, and to examine Voltaire’s contes as part of a tradition of menippean satire stretching back through Cyrano de Bergerac and Rabelais to Lucian.19 The approach is certainly fruitful up to a point, as a certain number of the short fictions—Le Monde comme il va, Zadig, Micromégas—derive directly from Lucianic satire; in the case of other fictions, the link is looser or non-existent, so again we have a label which is somewhat helpful but which is not sufficiently comprehensive to embrace all the short fictions.