Dear Editor,
AFTER reading Mr. Ian Mc Donald’s article on Francois Marie Arouet, known by his nom-de-plume, Voltaire, in the Stabroek News of October 20, 2019, I wondered how we could have had so different views of one person. Voltaire, according to Mc Donald, was a poet, dramatist, philosopher, political activist. With all of that, I was surprised to see the absence of philanthropy. He was also described as a great civil rights leader of his era. That I find very interesting.

Voltaire’s targets were many, says Mc Donald: Fanaticism, persecution, injustice, cruelty, fossilised institutions, a rigged State authority, and corrupt highhandedness. But through all of this, Voltaire was the ultimate capitalist. He was never interested in social equality. His view was that of self-love. “It is as impossible for a society to be formed and be durable without self-interest, as it would be to produce children without carnal knowledge.”
It was said that he loathed the standard bearers of the status quo, yet he was one of the principal standard bearers of the status quo. During the Enlightenment era, he enjoyed the patronage of Frederick of Prussia and Catherine of Russia. In his biography of Peter the Great, Voltaire omitted various atrocities committed by Peter; instead, he recounted that Peter pushed his country forward from barbarism to civilization. It was common knowledge in Europe at the time that Catherine had attained power by deposing of her husband, PeterIII. None of this really mattered, because she immediately started posing as Peter the Great’s intellectual heir.

Voltaire, on the other hand, still seeking status even in his 70s, agreed with Catherine to become the patron saint of Russian aristocracy, introducing Voltarianism, signifying: Rationalism, skepticism, and reformism.
During the confrontation with the Ottoman Empire, Voltaire endorsed Catherine to use

TOLERANCE with bayonets at the end of their rifles in Poland; as he congratulated her on her partitioning of the country, he called her “a powerful and cunning aggressor.”  While preparing for her encounter with the Ottoman Empire, Voltaire told her to teach Enlightenment at gunpoint to the Turks. During this war, he followed her military advance closely. He, at the time, regretted his immobility. “I wish I had at least been able to help you kill a few Turks.” In 1772, in his last letter, he prostrated himself to Catherine.
According to Goethe (German Writer and Statesman), Voltaire often expressed hatred of the canaille (the common people) “the ignoble masses who only respect force and don’t think.”  He was quoted as saying we never claimed to enlighten shoemakers and servant girls.

In 1736, Voltaire published ‘Le Mondain’, an eloquent ode to the good life.
See how that fleet, with canvas wings,
From Texel, Bordeau, London brings,
By happy commerce to our shores,
All Indus, all Ganges stores;
Whilst France, that pierced the Turkish lines,
Sultans made drunk from with rich French Wines.
Voltaire often confessed his love for the conspicuous consumption, and his dictum was “never to make people conscious of inequalities of wealth.”” For him, Parisian high society on the prime were the apogee of social and cultural refinement. Voltaire made a life of luxury and comfort seem a legitimate, even necessary, political and economic goal.
One of Voltaire’s fiercest critics and enemies was John Jacques Rousseau; their battles were legendary. The gulf between them was intellectual, moral, temperamental and fundamentally political. Voltaire denounced Rousseau as “a tramp who would love to see the rich robbed by the poor.” He condemned articles by Rousseau, using words like depraved, pitiful, abominable, and false. Rousseau (the gutter snipe of genius, so called by Isaiah Berlin) had already began to denounce modern commercial society (which Voltaire was a big part of) for its moral corruption.

Nietzsche (German philosopher and cultural critic) claimed that the battle between Voltaire and Rousseau was the unfinished problem of the civilisation. On the one side the representative of the victorious ruling classes and their valuations; on the other a vulgar plebeian overcome by his primordial resentment of a superior civilisation.
The Catholic monarchist, Joseph de Maistre disliked both. Voltaire who undermined the political structure by corrupting morals. Voltaire, on the other hand, had already dismissed the Christian past as one long night of ignorance, prejudice and deprivation.  For Rousseau, the feeling was that he was driven by a certain plebeian anger that excites him against every kind of superiority.

At the time of his death in 1778, Voltaire was one of the richest commoners in Europe. He began his enrichment in early 18th Century England. He was presented as a fine connoisseur or aristocrat. Surrounded with Gobelin Tapestries. By being a member of the globally elite network, he was allowed to import grain from North Africa and re-export it to Italy and Spain.

Regards,
Milton Bruce