Voltaire's Beatings: Part I

In Brief

In this first episode in our series about Voltaire's public beatings, the Enlightenment poet insults a rich member of Parisian society whose brother happens to run the Bastille. Oops! Lumps and bruises later, we find Voltaire languishing in France's most infamous prison.

Party On

You might also be interested in: Voltaire's Beatings: Part III Voltaire gets the snot beat out of him. Again. Voltaire's Beatings: Part IV Voltaire finally beats up a detractor. About time. Voltaire's Beatings: Part II Voltaire gets the snot beat out of him. Again. De Sade De Sade was apparently not only a man with interesting tastes, but one with a knack for jailbreaks.

Voltaire, the greatest man of letters France produced in the eighteenth century, always found himself at odds with the local aristocracy. Voltaire was obviously a man of great talent, yet was surrounded by dolts who commanded much more power and respect than he. He spent his life toadying to the rich and powerful, and they wholeheartedly rejected him. Fortunately, he was able to derive some satisfaction by verbally thrashing his opponents. Yes, thrashing. Lord Macauley opined that "of all the intellectual weapons that have ever been wielded by man, the most terrible was the mockery of Voltaire. Bigots and tyrants who had never been moved by the wailings and cursings of millions, turned pale at his name." Unable to respond, his targets instead initiated a seemingly never-ending series of public beatings. Luckily,Voltaire's got some company. Here's what our friend A. Owen Aldridge has to say about it in his Voltaire and the Century of Light:

A whole book has been written on the subject of the role of beatings in literary history. The authors of these crimes were rarely condemned by public opinion, and it was the innocent victims who suffered ridicule -- their discomfiture being considered comical, like the plight of cuckolded husbands. The bishop of Blois... who had many times received Voltaire, coldly remarked, 'We would indeed be in a bad way if poets did not have shoulders.'[1]

By February 1726, at the age of 32, Voltaire had already been to the Bastille for 11 months, exiled from Paris three times, and made himself rather famous by writing plays and whatnot. He wrote Candide, his most famous work, around 1759. Everyone knows someone like this -- they spent all their time in lunch detention in high school. He'd also changed his name from Arouet to Voltaire, prompting the French noble chevalier de Rohan to ask him, "Monsieur de Voltaire, Monsieur Arouet, exactly what is your name?" Aldridge describes the scene as outlined by Voltaire's friend Nicolas-Claude Thieriot: "I myself do not bear a great name," he said, "but I know how to honor the one I carry." Sort of a 'I know you are, but what am I?' response, eh? The remark was to have some more dire consequences, for a few days later, whilst dining at his good friend the Duc de Sully's, Voltaire was called to the front door:

As Voltaire stepped out into the street and made his way to a carriage that was stationed there, he was seized by two hoodlums and beaten by a cudgel while Rohan, who had hired the thugs for the purpose, sat in his coach and watched. According to one account, he commanded, 'Don't hit him on the head, something good may come out of it.'

Voltaire managed to escape and ran back into his host's dining room. He begged Sully to follow him back to the authorities to lend some credence to the accusations he was planning to make. After all, he would be accusing a noble of assault, and trying to arrest nobility in those days was like trying to convict O.J. Simpson: you'd need all the evidence you could get, and even then you needed a whole lot of luck. As Aldridge puts it,

Sully, who had to choose between embroiling himself with one of the most influential families in the realm and affording satisfaction to the tenuous honor of a mere poet, placed discretion above the laws of hospitality and refused to take any steps on Voltaire's behalf. At this point Voltaire was faced with the bitter truth that he as a poet had merely been tolerated rather than accepted by most of his titled acquaintances. Like his friends at the theater, he was regarded as a paid entertainer.

A harsh life these poets lead! William Butler Yeats chased the same woman (Maud Gonne) for thirty years, and when he couldn't get her, proposed to her daughter instead. She turned him down, too, and he remained a virgin until he was thirty! (After which he commented that he regretted every single day he'd saved himself.) Yipes! Next time: Voltaire ends up in the Bastille... again.

Footnotes

1. Yes, we want that book too. Too bad it's been out of print for a century and it's in French.

Bibliography

1. Alfred Owen Aldridge. Voltaire and the Century of Light. Princeton University Press, 1975.

 
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