A Note on Voltaire

I cannot say I am utterly at home with Voltaire’s works, though, being no great admirer, I confess I have little desire to change this state of affairs — but I must say that the characterisation quoted below rings somewhat false to me, at least as far as Voltaire’s opinions on the Turks are concerned:

Long before the late Eduard Said invented “Orientalism” to exalt Arab culture and Islamic society at the expense of the West, bien-pensants like Voltaire inclined to express their rebellion against the dwindling vestiges of Christendom by representing Europeans as bigots or clowns and raising up exotic foreigners — Voltaire himself wrote about Turks and Persians of the Muslim fold — to be the fonts of wisdom and models of refined life in their tracts and stories. [1]

I have been and still am under the impression — perhaps false after all — that Voltaire was a lifelong reviler of the Turks, expressing himself in a hostile manner thereto countless times in his long career. As he wrote in his twilight years:

I am seventy-nine, if you please, and upon the stroke of eighty. Thus shall I never see, what I have so passionately wished for, the destruction of those rogues, the Turks, who shut up the women, and do not cultivate the fine arts. [2]

Nor, whilst I am making note, can I rightly say that he was the anti-religionist of modern secularist fable, his being somewhat religious himself. It is nevertheless true to say that he was a gadfly and a trouble-maker, and, to a devout Roman Catholic such as Mozart, nothing more than a rogue. As the composer expressed it to his father at the time of Voltaire’s death: “I give you news which you will perhaps already know, namely, that the godless arch-scoundrel Voltaire has died wretchedly like a dog — like a brute.” [3] Naturally there are all sorts of fables about Mozart too. I have even heard it said that he was a political and social revolutionary in whom modern revolutionaries might take some comradely interest — said, that is, by modern revolutionaries who would have made Voltaire look to Mozart like a saint and a staunch conservative.

[1] Thomas F. Bertonneau, “The West’s Cultural Continuity: Aristotle at Mont Saint-Michel”, The Brussels Journal, 5th January 2009.

[2] Voltaire, “Extract of a Letter from M. Voltaire to the King of Prussia”, Annual Register, Vol. XVII, December 1774, p.177, republished online at the Internet Library of Early Journals. (Another example: “How I should like to see those scoundrels hunted out of the country of Pericles and Plato: it is true, they are not persecutors, but they are brutes.” Letter to M. d’Alembert, 4th September 1769, in Voltaire in His Letters; Being a Selection from His Correspondence, tr. S.G. Tallentyre (London: John Murray, 1919), p.228.)
[3] [“Nun gebe ich Ihnen eine Nachricht, die Sie vielleicht schon wissen werden, daß nemlich der gottlose und Erz-Spitzbub Voltaire so zu sagen wie ein Hund — wie ein Vieh crepirt ist.”] Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Letter to His Father (no.107), 3. Juli 1778, in Mozarts Briefe (Salzburg: Verlag der Mayrischen Buchhandlung, 1865), p.165.