Voltaire, War Correspondent at Large

Abstract

Although the european eighteenth century was long called the “age of Voltaire” (at least in textbooks), it was also an age of war. Courts and cities were undergoing a progressive pacification, as Norbert Elias has argued, but elsewhere the “civilizing process” was more bellicose. To finance the expansionist wars of Louis XIV, whose reign ended in 1715, and those of Louis XV, including the War of Austrian Succession (1740–48) and the Seven Years' War (1756–63), the French state expended two-thirds of its revenues on war (Meyer 57). Despite the Anglomania that marked progressive intellectual and literary circles in France around mid-century, between 1689 and 1815 France and England were officially at war for sixty-two years, not including minor conflicts. Against this backdrop, the image of Voltaire is that of an unflagging pacifist. Standing for all wars, the fictional war between the Abares and the Bulgares in which the naive hero of Voltaire's Candide finds himself caught up is described by the text's narrator, in a bitingly ironic oxymoron, as “a heroic slaughter” (114). War for Voltaire represented yet another instance of infamous unreason, odious intolerance, and despicable evil. It was the collective, generalized form of the l'infâme (“the despicable”), against which he publicly and tirelessly railed. The phrase écrasez l'infâme (“crush the despicable”), appended to his letters beginning in the early 1760s, signified the Enlightenment project of rooting out error, superstition, and intolerance by means of reasoned argument, common sense, and often a healthy dose of sharp irony. Quickly becoming a battle cry, penned in condensed, symbolic form as “ÉCRLINF,” the phrase had preserved all its caustic energy when, a century later, Friedrich Nietzsche inserted it throughout his Ecco Homo. Voltaire's attempts to stamp out this evil took local forms, such as the highly public letter-writing campaigns he mounted to spark indignation and obtain justice for the victims of intolerance, as in the causes célèbres involving the protestant Calas and Sirven families, the young chevalier de La Barre, and Lally-Tollendal.