Voltaire: Art, Thought, and Action

Abstract

In recent years, we have grown used to seeing the names of prominent figures in many non-political walks of life film stars, theatre people, artists, sculptors, poets, novelists, scientists, scholars invoked in support of, or in opposition to, all sorts of public causes, political, social, economic, environmental. Their signatures on letters and petitions, their views in print, on television or radio, are apparently accepted as having some greater weight than those of ordinary private citizens, however remote from the issue in question their own field of eminence may be. Those who go beyond voicing opinions to play an active part in public life have sometimes achieved a striking effect in a particular situation; one thinks of the success of Bob Geldof's campaign to provide help for the starving in Ethiopia. Sometimes they have been brought forward by popular acclaim to accept a position of leadership at a moment of national rebirth, as happened to the pianist Paderewski when Poland won its independence after 1918, and most recently to the dramatist Vaclav Havel after the Velvet Revolution in Prague. The theme of the artist in public life can scarcely be mentioned without reference to the outstanding German example: it was because Goethe was already a literary celebrity that the Duke of Weimar invited him to his court in I775, but the poet's successful career there, over many years, as a politician and administrator, and above all his ability to incorporate this experience of the world's practical problems into the wider poetic vision expressed in his mature writings, helps to make Goethe into a surely unique model, in post-Renaissance times at least, of the genius as universal man. In France there is nothing comparable. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic upheavals threw up two distinguished men of letters who for a time played leading parts in political life, both in office and in opposition, Benjamin Constant and Chateaubriand; but a more striking example in the nineteenth century is provided by Victor Hugo. By 1848 Hugo had won national acclaim as a major poet and dramatist, and his conversion to Bonapartism had made him a powerful influence in the growth of the Napoleonic legend which swept Louis Napoleon to power, first as President and then in 851 as Emperor. By then Hugo had become a strong critic of the new ruler's authoritarian and oppressive policies, and as an emigre throughout the period of the Second Empire he became the mouthpiece of the liberal opposition, excoriating the regime in such works as Les Chatiments and Napoleon le petit, and when he returned to Paris in 1870 the day after the Third Republic was proclaimed, it was to a hero's welcome. This tradition of the creative writer as dissident, as the champion of the oppressed or the advocate of some new social order, has continued since Hugo's time to produce many notable French examples, from Emile Zola to Malraux and Sartre, and of course in the last half-century it has assumed such a dominant role in the literature of Central and Eastern Europe that it is not yet clear what new inspirational driving force will replace it under more liberal post-communist regimes. What