Voltaire and the Ministers of Geneva

Abstract

“There is no city where cultured people and philosophers are to be found in greater number than in Geneva,” Voltaire wrote in March 1756. His praise had been constant since he had settled there a year before. After leaving Louis XV for the service of Frederick II, he had broken away from the latter in the most humiliating circumstances of his existence; forbidden now by the French King to return to Paris, he was in a frame of mind particularly susceptible to enjoy republican hospitality and to appreciate the very original character of his city of refuge. Geneva was as democratic as ancient Athens and ruled, in principle at least, by the universal suffrage of its citizens; its stabilility and conservatism, on the other hand, had allowed the development of a distinguished patrician society; his new residence was provided with a back-drop both picturesque and elegant. The intellectual life of the city could have been matched by very few capitals: Theodore Tronchin, the first doctor of Europe (and Voltaire's excuse for having settled there), Charles Bonnet, the naturalist and paleontologist, the philologist Abauzit, among scores of others, were in the vanguard of scientific progress. Above all, Geneva symbolized a major victory over Catholicism; true, it had stopped half way, in his judgment, but matters had progressed since the sixteenth century and the present prospects were very hopeful: “Geneva is not any more the Geneva of Calvin,” he wrote to Cideville, “not by a long shot; it is a country filled with philosophers…” And to Pierre Rousseau, a year later: “Geneva is at present perhaps the city in Europe where there are most philosophers…”