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3秒自动关闭窗口“Contre Barthes” by Patrick Henry
CONTRE BARTHES
Published in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth
Century, vol. 249 (1987). The Voltaire Foundation: Oxford,
By PATRICK HENRY
Roland Barthes's article, "Le dernier des &crivains
heureux",1 is a civil piece of writing but an absolute
negation of the relevancy of Voltaire to the modern world. While, in
fact, much of Voltaire's literary corpus fails to appeal to modern
sensibility, Barthes lumps everything together and, in his turn,
fails to uncover key works that do indeed prefigure man in the modern
world. In addition to Po&me sur le d&sastre de
Lisbonne and the correspondence, which is replete with
philosophical reflections that flatly contradict the so-called
classical vision of Voltaire, it is precisely the conte
philosophique - a new genre not practised by the preceding age
and free of the constraints of the classical genres - specifically
Histoire d'un bon bramin and Candide, that give the lie
to Barthes's limited view of the most prolific writer of the French
Enlightenment.
After five years in sanatoria in the Alps, Roland Barthes emerged
at the end of World War II a Sartrean and a Marxist.2 Although
he would partially disagree with Sartre on the concept of
engagement and the importance of formalism,3 the double
influence of Sartre and Marx can be readily detected in his criticism
of Voltaire, written in 1958, and, as we shall later see, in his
attacks on Camus, Sartre's description of the same period in 1947 in
Qu'est-ce que la litt&rature? In both their views,
writers of the eighteenth century were the last to find an effective
role whereby they articulated a critical vision of the world that was
also that of their class.4 Although, by their own admission,
the issue does in fact become less clear-cut in France at the end of
the eighteenth century, according to Sartre and Barthes, it was not
until 1848, when the bourgeoisie had developed an ideology to justify
its newly established predominance, that literature became
problematic and writers began to view literature as a class
institution. As of that moment, writers had to choose between
supporting that ideology and living in bad faith, or attacking it and
living as outcasts.
It is not surprising then that Barthes's view of Voltaire is a
negative one. He begins by asking rhetorically: 'Qu'avons nous de
commun, aujourd'hui, avec Voltaire?' (p.9). His philosophy is
de dialectics has killed off
Manicheism and no-one speaks any more about the ways of Providence.
Once more, as regards the evils in today's world,
'l'&normit& m&me des crimes racistes, leur
organisation par l'Etat, les justifications id&ologiques dont
on les couvre, tout cela entra'ne l'&crivain d'aujourd'hui
bien au-del& du pamphlet, exige de lui plus une philosophie
qu'une ironie, plus une explication qu'un &tonnement'
In short, Barthes concludes, what separates us from Voltaire,
'c'est qu'il fut un &crivain heureux' (p. 10). He then goes on
to enumerate three types of happiness that were Voltaire's but are no
longer ours. 'Le premier bonheur de Voltaire fut sans doute celui de
son temps' (p.11). No period, according to Barthes, assured a writer
more that he was fighting for a just and natural cause -
'C'&tait d&j& un grand bonheur, une grande paix
que de combattre un ennemi si uniform&
[...] C'&tait en effet un bonheur singulier que
d'avoir & combattre dans un monde o& force et
b&tise &taient contin&ment du m&me bord'
(p.12). Voltaire was 'du m'me c&t& que l'histoire' and
blissfully profiting from this 'situation privil&gi&e
pour l'esprit' (p.12).
There is more. 'Le second bonheur de Voltaire fut
pr&cis&ment d'oublier l'histoire, dans le temps
m&me o& elle le portait. Pour &tre heureux,
Voltaire s'il a une philosophie, c'est celle de
l'immobilit&' (p.12). Having forgotten history and immobilised
the world, Barthes would have us believe, Voltaire now goes on to
dissociate ceaselessly 'intelligence et intellectualit& -
posant que le monde est ordre si l'on ne cherche pas abusivement
& l'ordonner, qu'il est syst&me, & condition que
l'on renonce & le syst&matiser' (p16). That was
Voltaire's third happiness and, as Barthes continues, 'c'est
l& une conduite d'esprit qui a eu une grande fortune par la
suite: on l'appelle aujourd'hui anti-intellectualisme' (p.16).
As my title indicates, I believe that Barthes's view of Voltaire
is essentially flawed. Whether or not this flaw is primarily due to a
Marxist perspective, I am not sure. I am certain, however, that
Barthes presents us with a disfigured, even at times grotesque, image
of Voltaire that demands rectification. In attempting to repair that
image, I will address several issues under three general topics:
history, happiness, and philosophy.
1. History
While Barthes is, of course, correct to claim that the philosophy
of time was the contribution of nineteenth-century Germany (p.13),
this does not mean that all prior historians rejected history, or
that they were all cast in the same mould, or can be summarily
rejected. Even Lionel Gossman, who, in the main, subscribes to
Barthes's thesis about Voltaire, notes, in a very recent and balanced
article, that the fact that we refer to the Age of Voltaire reflects
not only the objective congruence of his life with the last century
of the ancien r&gime but signifies his success in
revising traditional ways of viewing history.5 So, having made
his mark as a historian, Voltaire stands between what preceded him
and what followed him, unable to be fully identified with either.
Brumfitt had already shown conclusively that French Enlightenment
historiography, as epitomised by Voltaire, stands midway between that
of the seventeenth century and that of modern times. Positing as
great a distance between Bossuet and Voltaire as between Voltaire and
Michelet or Taine, Brumfitt concludes by claiming that 'Vico's seed
would not have prospered had not the ground been prepared for it.
Among those who accomplished this task, Voltaire's role is one of the
greatest.6 Nor, we might add, is it odd that this point in
time be seen as a moment of cleavage between the classical and the
modern. Indeed, Michel Foucault sees a 'mutation
arch&ologique' at the end of the eighteenth century when the
classical &pist'me gives way to the modern and we witness the
emergence of man.7
It is precisely this complexity about both the time itself, which
ended one age and began another, and Voltaire, who had a foot in both
worlds that is conspicuously absent from Barthes's analysis.
Voltaire's ambivalence is immediately clear in his range of genres -
emulating the values of French neo-classical writers in his epic
poetry and tragedies and mocking the heroic in his philosophical
tales - and his marginality is geographically symbolised by his
residence at Ferney. If Voltaire's 'chronologies' do not constitute
modern history, as Barthes maintains, it simply is not accurate to
say that 'Voltaire a &crit des livres d'histoire pour dire
express&ment qu'il ne croyait pas & l'Histoire' (p.13).
Barthes's charge that, at the very moment it supported him, Voltaire
forgot history and suspended time, thus creating a philosophy of
immobility, is unfounded and distorts the meaning of his work.
Furthermore, it is no accident that the very works of Voltaire that
modern man has found fully relevant - only a handful in an
enormous corpus - are precisely those that give the lie to many of
Barthes's theses. In the present case, it is a mythological reading
of the three centrally located gardens of Candide that shows,
at once, that Voltaire rejected myth but embraced history, and that
Barthes's Lamartine-like vision of Voltaire suspending time is pure
fiction, as unreal as Eldorado.
A close look at this central mythical design of Candide -
the symmetrically placed gardens of Westphalia, Eldorado, and
Candide's garden in Constantinople - serves to reinforce the modern,
secular cosmic view of Voltaire's masterpiece, for it underscores the
tension between myth and history that pervades the narrative. The
Westphalian garden of chapter one has a two-fold function. It serves,
first of all, to describe, on the broadest mythical plane, the
perfection of the beginnings of things, the original golden age of
the past where one observes a pre-established vertical harmony
between men and gods. Here we are in the realm of mythical time or
sacred history, or perhaps of no time, for in the Christian tradition
from Augustine onward time begins with the Fall. The Westphalian
garden follows the traditional topos of a garden as natural
locus amoenus and place of eternal summer. On the Christian
mythical level, one finds here a parody of the book of Genesis that
symbolically represents the paradisiac desire to leave Eldorado. At
the end of the tale, after numerous adventures and visits to other
gardens, he founds his own collective enterprise. Against the
backdrop of Westphalia and Eldorado, Candide's community marks an
evolution from stasis to dynamism, from otiosity to work, from the
sacred to the profane, and from myth to history. The great mistake of
much recent criticism9 has been to assume that Candide's final
view can be equated with that of the Turk, when, in reality, they are
radically different. The garden of the Turk, who eschews all social
commitment and attributes only a negative value to work - 'le travail
&loigne de nous trois grands maux, l'ennui, le vice et le
besoin' (p.220) - exists at the familial level whereas Candide's
garden exists at the social level, stressing positive activity,
communal work, the concept of limits, and human solidarity. Here, for
the first time, dignity has been granted to work which heretofore had
been nothing but slavery and exploitation. The case of
Girofl&e who, after entering Candide's garden, becomes a
carpenter and an honest man, proves that work is now not only an
anodyne but a nutriment for the human person.
Candide's garden is not a locus amoenus. It needs to be
cultivated, and while work is indeed an anodyne and a nutriment, it
is not an antidote or a panacea. At the social level, a harvest is
with solidarity and tolerance man can ameliorate his
condition. No such hope emanates at the cosmic level. In this
respect, the resounding metaphor of the dervish sets a climate of
rupture rather than continuity with Eldorado. 'Quand Sa Hautesse
envoie un vaisseau en Egypte, s'embarrasse-t-elle si les souris qui
sont dans le vaisseau sont & leur aise ou non?' (p.220). In
Eldorado, God provided everything here the
creator is indifferent toward his creatures. Candide's garden marks
the end of the pre-established vertical harmony between man and God
that characterised both the Westphalian and Eldoradean gardens. The
only rapport, if there is one, is that of reciprocal indifference.
The indifference of the creator is clear in the above metaphor and
that of the inhabitants of the garden is implicit. First of all,
there is no chapel in Candide's garden, and whereas two priests might
have entered into this final garden, neither one ultimately does so.
Cun&gonde's brother is denied entrance because of his
insufferable pride and Girofl&e voluntarily defrocks himself
before joining Candide and his comrades. Unlike Westphalia and
Eldorado, Candide's garden is a horizontal one dedicated solely to
the cultivation of the human sphere.
Whereas modern religious man sees religion as an element in the
structure of consciousness, modern profane man, foreshadowed here in
Voltaire's tale, views religion as a stage in the history of
consciousness. Candide has learned that the meaning of his life can
only be created by himself at the purely human level outside the
structure of myth. Voltaire demythologises his hero, for, as the tale
clearly demonstrates, myth sends man either back to the golden age of
the past or forward to the equally mythical golden age of the future.
In both cases, man shuns the necessity of commitment to the present.
Westphalia and Eldorado excepted, the universe of Candide
depicts the desacralised universe of modern man who, having passed
the stage of myth, chooses lucidly and stoically to inhabit the
profane time of history.
Far from establishing a philosophy of immobility, Voltaire rejects
the static nature of myth in favour of the dynamic world of history.
It is precisely the rejection of myth and immutability that marks the
discontinuity between Eldorado and Candide's garden. As Candide
peregrinates from one to the other, he journeys from the realm of
being to the world of becoming and from circular, reversible sacred
time to irreversible profane time. In Eldorado, the golden age of the
future assumes many forms that distinguish it from the paradise of
prelapsarian man without, however, placing it in historical or
profane time. The absence of historical tensions in this world of
'being' denotes, if not its meta-historical, at least its
post-historical nature.10
Voltaire's espousal of history, moreover, can be ascertained and,
of course, further elucidated by looking outside his fictional
universe. As indicated earlier, critics such as Gossman and Brumfitt
have noted the specificity of Voltarean historiography and have
related it to preceding and succeeding historians. Whether he is,
along with Montesquieu, Gibbon, and Giannone, among the first modern
historians,11 his insistence on attested facts, more extensive
documentation and natural and social causation certainly
differentiated him from his pre-Enlightenment predecessors. Despite
the ever-present tension in his histories between the useful and the
impartial, propaganda and objectivity, 'sagesse' and
'v&rit&',12 with Le Si&cle de Louis
XIV and Essai sur les moeurs he replaced the purely
chronological approach to historiography by the analytical and moved
the writing of history from the chronicles of battles to the history
of society and the progress of mankind.
Peter Gay noted with absolute accuracy that 'Voltaire was the
symbol of his age, and it is the fate of symbols to be exploited
rather than to be understood.'13 Voltaire wanted the modern
historian to be a narrator, a moralist, and an artist concerned with
form. Like Bolingbroke, he defined history as philosophy taught by
examples, but his preoccupation with modern history (beginning with
the end of the fifteenth century) cannot solely be accounted for by
the fact that the post-fifteenth-century periods could serve more
readily than ancient history as sources of morality for modern man.
It was precisely the invention of the printing press at that time
that would enable historians of that and later periods to possess
more reliable information about a particular historical
moment.14 Regardless of the prejudice that this statement
unmasks on the part of Voltaire toward ancient cultures and writing
systems,15 it does indicate a desire for better documentation
in order to decipher the specifics of a particular time in history, a
concern for the 'real', the climate, the factual. Once more,
Voltaire's belief in the universality of human nature did not
preclude his analyses of the specifics of the historical moment in
question. He gives, for example, in his constant perusal of natural
and social causation, pertinent economic interpretations, such as the
accomplishments of Colbert under Louis XIV and a balanced analysis of
John Law's system in Histoire de Parlement. This economic
penchant prompted Brumfitt to write: 'In the emphasis he places,
particularly in his later years, on economic causes, he appears to
serve as a link between Machiavellian realism and nineteenth-century
theories of economic determinism.'16
Voltaire has no ri he sees no unique overall
he has no real philosophy of history. No one has
better seized Voltaire's political pragmatism than Peter Gay and no
one has defended Voltaire better than Gay against the
nineteenth-century historians who, like Barthes, dismissed
Enlightenment historiography as fundamentally anti-historical. Not
oblivious to the faults of Enlightenment historians, Gay, none the
less, charges nineteenth-century German historians with being 'more
didactic and less historical than they knew', cites Nietzsche's
castigation of the 'self-satisfied historicism in the 1880s', and
notes with characteristic insight that 'the celebrated remarks made
by Hume and Voltaire about unchanging human nature do not do justice
to their own work - their sense of history, of change, of the
evolution of unique events was far superior to their methodological
pronouncements' (Gay, pp.11, 12).
Voltaire's break with providential causality not only, as Brumfitt
points out, 'displac[ed] the Christian European from his
comfortable seat at the centre of the universe' (Brumfitt, p.165),
but dissipated any theoretical predilection for Europe and
Christendom and opened up new vistas for European historians who
moved on to study other continents and other civilisations. This new
material contributed to the creation of two new concepts whose
acceptance, according to Trevor-Roper, 'may be said to have created
the positive historiographical revolution of the Enlightenment. These
new concepts were the concept of the organic nature of society and
the idea of progress' (p.1670). The idea of progress alone shows
conclusively, against Barthes, that Voltaire did accept history and
that his view of history was not a static one. There would be no
utopia at the 'end' of history - Voltaire, we noted, rejected myth -
but mankind was slowly ameliorating its lot. It is certainly ironic,
in our context, that Trevor-Roper should note that Voltaire, like
Marx, 'regarded the past as an armoury of weapons by which the
continuity of history, so respected by the conservative historians,
must be broken and its course changed' (p.1687).
I agree, none the less, with Barthes that were Voltaire alive
today, among his enemies would be the Marxists (p.89). Unlike
Barthes, however, I believe this to be true, not because Voltaire
rejects history and establishes a philosophy of immobility, but
precisely because he accepts history and rejects myth, its immobility
and, as his portrayal of Eldorado suggests, all concepts of
post-'historical' utopias. Although Voltaire's language would
unquestionably be different, I believe that he would see Marxism in
the same light as Mircea Eliade, which is to say, as a modern myth of
the golden age, stripped, of course, of the religious trappings of
earlier myths - the return of the dead, immortality - but still
positing a more or less classless society, outside history in its
traditional sense, a kind of earthly paradise - 'to be introduced by
the final triumph of the proletariat' - which, like Eldorado, has
plenty of food, little if any work, and machines that enable 'man' to
become homo otiosus.17
In this respect, Eliade notes that it is possible to recognise
'several great biblical myths in Marx and Marxism: the redemptive
role of the Just Man, the ultimate eschatological struggle between
Good (proletariat) and Evil (bourgeoisie) followed by the
inauguration of the Golden Age.'18 Perhaps Voltaire wold also
have unearthed this political eschatalogy and seen that, at the end
of the Marxist philosophy of history, lies the age of gold of the
archaic eschatologies. He would have derided the mythical nature of
Marxism - 'le nouveau meilleur des mondes possibles' - but he would
have attacked with vehemence the justification of 'necessary' evils
along the road to final deliverance and the aggravation of evil as
'the premonitory symptom of the approaching victory that will put an
end to all historical "evil"'.19
We know quite well what Voltaire thought about the notions of
'particular evil' and 'general good' and the justification of the
individual's suffering in the name of that general good. The incident
of the 'n&gre de Surinam' in Candide, to choose but one
example, is not only a vivid condemnation of all societies where
economic or political values are esteemed more than human ones, but a
brilliant parody of the Leibnizean notions of 'individual evil' and
'general good'. Clearly Voltaire would have seen Marxism in the same
light and would have condemned this philosophy of history where the
end justifies the means. Once more, we are well aware or Voltaire's
antipathy toward Manicheism and one wonders if he would not have
unearthed a secular form of cosmic Manicheism in the Marxist struggle
between the good proletariat and the evil bourgeoisie.
We can only conclude here, against Barthes, that Voltaire accepts
history but rejects myth, immobility and utopia. Like Camus, Voltaire
would have rejected prophetic Marxism and Christianity for the same
reason - they both justify suffering and death in the present in the
name of future salvation. Barthes can only be right in his assertions
about Voltaire if the rejection of the Marxist view of history is
tantamount to the rejection of history. The tension between present
and future, however, is a constant in Voltaire's work and that
relationship, as it is incorporated in Candide's garden, incarnates
Camus's view found in L'Homme r&volt&: 'La vraie
g&n&rosit& envers l'avenir consiste &
tout donner au pr&sent.'20
2. Happiness
&In Le Neveu de Rameau, writes Lionel Gossman,
'despite its brilliance and high spirits, the much touted
bonheur of the eighteenth century already seems to be breaking
down' (p.49). Yet Gossman does not associate Voltaire with this new
phenomenon. 'With Voltaire', he continues, 'the alienated
consciousness still experiences its alienation above all as freedom
and happiness' and this, in large measure, because of the
'astonishing security' of Voltaire. One way in which Barthes projects
this image of security is by claiming that 'les romans de Voltaire
sont moins des enqu&tes que des tours de propri&taire'
(p.15). It is precisely this image of ownership, of harmony between
the traveller and the terrain, that falsifies the reality of travel
in Candide and allows Barthes and others to postulate
Voltaire's security and happiness.
Barthes wold agree that the theme of travel reached its apogee in
eighteenth-century literature and many of his remarks about travel in
Voltaire are accurate for Microm&gas, Le Monde comme
il va, and L'Ing&nu. Once again, however, he
slights the specificity of Candide and, as a result, ignores its
startling innovations. Whereas in Microm&gas, Le
Monde comme il va, and L'Ing&nu, the traveller is a
stranger only on the social level, in Candide, homo
viator is both a stranger in societies of corrupted conventions
and a metaphysical stranger in a universe whose meaning escapes him.
The eighteenth century wrestled with the problem of man's place in
nature and a dichotomy became apparent between that part of man which
belongs to nature and that part of him which transcends nature.
Robert Mauzi sums up this question by noting: 'En tant
qu'animal, il [l'homme] appartient & l'univers.
Mais, en tant que conscience, il devient un &tre
solitaire, presque &gar&.'21 Candide incarnates
man as an alien, estranged from nature by his rational faculties and
lost in an incomprehensible universe that does not correspond to his
In the twentieth century, Albert Camus, writing at length of his
own travels to Prague in L'Envers et l'endroit, attributes to
the theme of travel profound metaphysical proportions, namely the
discovery of the individual's cosmic alienation and the awareness of
the absurdity of the human condition. Similarly Candide's journeys
are a learning experience, as he himself recognises during his stay
in Eldorado: 'il est certain qu'il faut voyager' (p.179). Ironically,
travel forces him into himself, and logically, it affords him a naked
glance at extramental reality. His travels ultimately teach him what
Camus appears to have learned in Prague. In foreign places, out of
the domain of habit and routine, far from the familiar and comforting
barriers that mask the absurd, the traveller loses the sense of
belonging to either society or the cosmos. When the walls of
familiarity topple over, the perplexed wayfarer discovers his own
alienation. As he peruses the world in all its nakedness, Candide
encounters the absurd in the juxtaposition of opposing phenomena.
Socially, his desire for brotherhood and justice contrasts with the
religious and political institutions that preclude their
establishment. Metaphysically, his need for permanence, his quest for
the harmonious, and his desire to comprehend by cause and effect are
opposed by the discontinuity of human existence, the chaos of the
cosmos and the reign of chance, leaving him tottering between 'les
convulsions de l'inquietude' and 'la l&thargie de l'ennui'
Travelling in Candide destroys the interior d&cor of
the hero, and the encounter of self with self, self with other, and
self with cosmos affords the hero a new awareness, thus giving the
lie to Barthes's claim that the Voltarean journey 'n'est m&me
pas une op&ration de connaissance, mais seulement
d'affirmation' (p.15). Barthes still does not have it right when he
maintains that in Voltaire's tales 'l'on discute, non de ce que l'on
voit, mais de ce que l'on est' (p.15), for, as in Camus, it is
travelling itself in Candide, seeing what one sees, that
allows the hero to discover what he is. Finally, inasmuch as
Candide is clearly a Bildungsroman, the following
assertion by Barthes cannot be accurate: 'S'agrandir pour se
confirmer, non pour se transformer, tel est le sens du voyage
voltarien' (p.15). Travelling in Candide illuminates and
transforms - homo viator there discovers that he is, in fact,
homo errans and, as we have made clear, the garden that the
hero founds at the end of the tale is the visible harvest of his
inner transformation.
Another work that casts doubt upon Barthes's thesis concerning
happiness in Voltaire is a brief tale entitled Histoire d'un bon
bramin. Although not published until 1761, it was written at
about the same time as Candide and portrays the impasse
between the bliss of the ignorant and the unsatisfied mind of the
sage. Here not only does reason not lead to happiness but it is
opposed to felicitousness: 'plus il [the good Brahmin] avait
de lumi&res dans son entendement et de sensibilit& dans
son coeur, plus il &tait malheureux' (p.115). Once more,
assuming that man could renounce reason to find the happiness of the
ignorant, very few persons would be willing to do so. The Brahmin
looked high and low but could find no one 'qui voul&t accepter
le march& de devenir imb&cile pour devenir content'
(p.116). In this respect, the narrator concludes 'si nous faisons cas
du bonheur, nous faisons encore plus de cas de la raison' (p. 116).
This brilliantly concise tale gives the lie to the eudemonistic view
of the Enlightenment, that happiness is the end of man. One cannot
but agree with Lionel Gossman that by 1761, the date of Le Neveu
de Rameau and Histoire d'un bon bramin, the 'much-touted
bonheur' of the eighteenth century was already breaking down.
However, several of Voltaire's tales would suggest that their author
was hardly experiencing his alienation as freedom and happiness.
Twenty-five years separate the publication of Le Mondain and
Histoire d'un bon bramin and, philosophically, Voltaire has
come a long way from the earlier work that ended with the line: 'Le
paradis terrestre est o& je suis.'22
Six years before the publication of Histoire d'un bon
bramin, however, Voltaire had already written the Po&me
sur le d&sastre de Lisbonne. The earthquake on 1 November
1755 had such a shattering effect on Voltaire - the correspondence
for a good year after the catastrophe attests to Voltaire's obsession
with it - that he immediately, in December of the same year, wrote a
poem in the first person about the disaster and the philosophical
conclusions to be drawn from it. Despite the precautionary rhetoric
of the preface, the poem questions the ideas of Providence, optimism,
and moral order in the universe. A close reading of the text -
'l'homme, &tranger & soi, de l'homme est
ignor&./Que suis-je, o& suis-je, o& vais-je, et
d'o& suis-je tir&?'23 - indicates that
Voltaire's world vision has been shaken to its roots and that what he
is experiencing is hardly security or 'alienation as happiness'. This
shattered sense of cosmic security is explored in greater detail and
at greater length in Candide where the hero begins as an
example of Hegelian happy consciousness, not because he has overcome
duality and discovered a unity beyond separation but because he
epitomised the na&ve consciousness not yet aware of its
misfortune. He ends as the incarnation of the unhappy consciousness,
since his self-consciousness and sense of alienation have created a
feeling of duality while his rationality precludes transcendence
toward unity.
In her otherwise illuminating book on Roland Barthes, Annette
Lavers, citing on occasion 'Le dernier des &crivains heureux',
makes the following observation: 'Voltaire was "the last happy
writer", who could enjoy his humanitarian fight with a clear
conscience, without being forced by history, as the post-1848 writers
were, to acknowledge that "his happiness left a lot of people at the
gate".' 24 There is something very troubling about this image
of Voltaire enjoying his humanitarian fight with a clear
conscience and without acknowledging that his happiness
precluded the happiness of others. It is simply not accurate.
Voltaire's humanitarian fight was a constant struggle that one cannot
suppose he enjoyed but rather endured because of ideals he believed
in. Of course, at moments when reason triumphed over fanaticism,
Voltaire exulted, and perhaps nowhere more movingly than on his
deathbed in his final letter at the news of the repeal of the
condemnation of Lally: 'Le mourant ressuscite en apprenant cette
grande nouvelle [...] il mourra content.' 25 More
common in his correspondence, however, is the note of despair at the
persistence of intolerance and bigotry. At the news of La Barre's
execution in July 1766, Voltaire writes to Damilaville: 'Mon cher
fr&re, mon coeur est fl&tri, je suis atterr&
[...] Je suis tent& d'aller mourir dans une terre
&trang&re o& les hommes soient moins injustes'
(Best.D13394). A month later, he writes to d'Alembert that he will
die "d&testant le pays des singes et des tigres" where even
the 'honn&tes gens [...] sont des l&ches'
(Best.D13485).
Once more, no one was more conscious than Voltaire of the fact
that the happiness of those who profited from the status quo negated
the happiness of those that did not. Voltaire was never willing to
discount the suffering of the individual in the name of the happiness
of the group. At the cosmic level too, this is why he rejected any
vindication of individual suffering on behalf of the so-called
general good. 'Quel crime, quelle faute ont commis ces enfants / Sur
le sein maternel &cras&s et sanglants?', he writes with
passion in his Po&me sur le d&sastre de Lisbonne
where he also refers to the victims at Lisbon as his 'brothers'.
26 The only thing that outraged Voltaire's sense of justice
and human solidarity more than the Lisbon disaster itself was the
theological justification of it. At the social level, one need only
reflect on the incident of the n&gre de Surinam -
'C'est & ce prix que vous mangez du sucre en Europe' (p.182) -
to grasp the author's sense of human brotherhood and solidarity.
Finally, that great mirror of his long life, his correspondence, is a
living tribute, perhaps the most impressive, to his defence of those
individuals who, for different reasons, were crushed and marginalised
by the society of his day.
The question of Voltaire's happiness is obviously a very complex
issue. Unlike Barthes, I do not find him privy to any unique pre-1848
felicity that we have since been stripped of. Like any sane social
thinker, he sought the happiness of the individual in the
collectivity. He came to see, as is demonstrated in Histoire d'un
bon bramin, a conflict between reason and happiness, and a need
in most educated men to follow lucidly the exigencies of their
reason. 27 Of all his fictional characters, perhaps la
vieille in Candide, who incarnates the obstinate will to
live despite the sufferings which life imposes, sums up best
Voltaire's attitude. In the tale, no one more than she is aware of
the insane character of daily agitation and the uselessness of
suffering, yet her choice is overwhelmingly for life - 'je voulus
cent fois me tuer, mais j'aimais encore la vie' (p.163). She affirms
both the horror and love of human existence, anticipating the
Camusian dictum that 'le bonheur et l'absurde sont deux fils de la
m&me terre'. 28
Most striking of all, however, in this survey of 'happiness' in
Voltaire, is the great man's consciousness of the suffering of others
and his desire to reduce that suffering. This preoccupation is
ubiquitous in his correspondence beginning in late 1758 when,
suddenly, the condition of the peasants triggered off what Theodore
Besterman refers to as a 'trumpet-call of social protest'. It first
appears in a letter dated 18 November 1758 to Antoine Jean Gabriel Le
Bault: 'La moiti& des habitans p&rit de mis&re,
et l'autre pourrit dans des cachots. Le coeur est
d&chir& quant on est t&moin de tant de malheurs.
Je n'ach&te la terre de Fernex que pour y faire un peu de
bien.' 29 In contrast to the picture drawn by Barthes of a
Voltaire blissully waging his humanitarian battles with a clear
conscience without acknowledging that his happiness negated that of
others, I propose the following image of Voltaire, not only uneasy in
his happiness but ashamed of it and having difficulty savouring it
because of his knowledge of the suffering of others: 'Quand j'ay
parl& en vers des malheurs des humains mes confr&res
[in his Po&me sur le d&sastre de
Lisbonne], c'est par pure g&n&rosit&,
car & la faiblesse de ma sant& pr&s, je suis si
heureux que j'en ai honte' (Best.D6875). 30
3. Philosophy
&Barthes suggests that Voltaire's way of looking at the world
constitutes a form of anti-intellectualism that becomes prevalent in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The only way, however, that
one can draw a line from Voltaire to M. Homais is to read Voltaire as
M. Homais would have done. One has to read Voltaire without any
imagination in order to 'prove' that he does not have any. Barthes's
statement that in today's world the nature of racist crimes by the
State demands 'plus une philosophie qu'une ironie, plus une
explication qu'un &tonnement' (p.10) unmasks a blindness
toward the way in which one has to read the conte
philosophique. Lionel Gossman has already noted judiciously that
Voltairean discourse 'is made up, like a conversation, of
discontinuous witty shafts that erode a position without confronting
it directly, and indicate one without defining it' (p.41). Perhaps
Candide is scriptible rather than lisible; 31
certainly it demands a reader's response. In any event, the text does
contain a 'philosophy' but it is up to the reader to explicate the
astonishment, turn around the irony - thus bringing to the surface
its positive substratum - and define the indicated position. Once
more, to say that Voltaire is outmoded at a time when we have, by
Barthes's admission, greater intolerance and fanaticism is to stand
logic on its head. Our universe of gas chambers and concentration
camps does not render his message of tolerance less relevant but
more, and human survival in the current nuclear situation demands a
Voltarean solution which is precisely the opposite of Barthes's claim
that 'Personne ne peut plus donner de le&on de
tol&rance & personne' (p.10).
I noted above that Candide contains a 'philosophy' and put
that word in quotation marks because I consider Voltaire more of a
moralist than a philosopher. 32 He was interested in thought
as it could be applied to action and he had no philosophical system.
He was anti-theoretical, wedded to the practical, and sought a way of
life rather than a body of thought. Yet, while not a creator of
systems, he was a systematic thinker and, despite Barthes's claim, a
real, committed intellectual. To equate Voltaire's lack of a system
with anti-intellectualism, as Barthes does, is a grave error. It is
precisely because Voltaire believed in history as a devenir,
the end of which could not be ascertained in advance, rather than as
an &tre, that he refused to close himself up in any
system. In a special sense, this makes him a greater champion of the
intelligence than the system makers, for he would not imprison his
mind with slavish adherence to a particular theory or abstraction,
believing, as he did, that all systems, theories, and abstractions
ultimately contradict factual reality to which he wanted to remain
faithful. Perhaps Nietzsche had this in mind when he saluted Voltaire
in Ecce homo as 'vor allem ein grandseigneur des
Geistes', 33 and when he noted elsewhere that 'la
volont& du syst&me est un manque de loyaut&'.
Once again, in order to underscore Voltaire's
anti-intellectualism, Barthes asserts that he dissociated ceaselessly
intelligence and intellectuality, 'posant que le monde est ordre si
l'on ne cherche pas abusivement & l'ordonner, qu'il est
syst&me, & condition que l'on renonce & le
syst&matiser' (p.16). Here we enter a very thorny and much
debated aspect of Voltaire's thought dealing with God and evil.
Voltaire wrote in his notebooks in English that 'God cannot be
nor denied, by the mere force of our reason'35 and
inasmuch as his main arguments that favour the existence of God
normally revolve around the social need for belief and the perils of
atheism, Theodore Besterman not only concludes the Voltaire was 'at
most an agnostic' but that 'were any toughminded philosopher to
maintain that this type of agnosticism is indistinguishable from
atheism, I would not be prepared to argue with him'. 36 At the
other end of the critical spectrum we find Ren& Pomeau who
repeatedly affirms Voltaire's belief in the existence of a God who is
responsible for the order in the universe: 'Ce Dieu des cieux est
pur. Il est l'ordre.' 37
The problem arises then with the simultaneous existence of God and
evil for the non-Christian Voltaire who cannot see how they can be
reconciled. As suggested earlier, however, Le Po&me sur le
d&sastre de Lisbonne, Candide, and scores of
remarks in the Correspondence either negate the existence of a
rational and moral order in the universe, precisely because events
contradict it, or indicate that if such an order exists, it remains
impervious to the human mind. John Weightman affirms that in
Candide 'gradually it becomes clear that the world has no
pattern' and, arguing against Pomeau, avers that Candide is
'l'&tranger, a fatherless bastard whose cosy sense of
belonging to a coherent society and a comprehensible universe is a
childhood illusion'. 38 With particular poignancy, Weightman
notes elsewhere that Voltaire 'was caught in a dilemma which has
never ceased to torment post-Enlightenment man' and that
Candide 'expresses in permanent form the emotion of the
agnostic who cannot believe in the senselessness of the universe and
yet cannot make sense of it. 39
The lesson to be drawn here is not simply that the problem of evil
is insoluble nor that, given natural disasters and the nature of man,
so is the question of God, but that, like all theorising, these
issues must be transcended by meaningful action. This is not only the
lesson of Candide but of the activities that constitute the
final twenty years of Voltaire's life. He cannot be taxed with
anti-intellectualism because he asserts both order and disorder
(assuming that he does) unless for Barthes, as it appears once again,
not having a system necessarily constitutes anti-intellectualism.
Voltaire's depiction of men at odds with incomprehensible forces
should allow us to see that Barthes is equally mistaken when he
claims that 'Voltaire n'eut pas l'esprit tragique' (p.11). This may
indeed appear true in the greater number of his tragedies for he was
not a tragic poet, but it is certainly not the case in all the
philosophical tales nor in his correspondence, where he often writes
about the human condition, depicting man as an animal lucidly
awaiting the inevitable slaughter. 40 But once again it is
Candide, that brilliant summa of Enlightenment
thinking, at once so modern and yet so clearly a product of its age,
that gives the lie to Barthes's assertion. Here Voltaire presents the
tragic view of life, painting man's existence, despite his resilience
and zest for life, as one of suffering and death in a world where he
is unable to establish any transcendent order or meaning. Barthes's
view that there is no tragic spirit because 'la grandeur de
l'adversaire' (p.11) is absent cannot be accurate, for here we find
man adrift 'entre deux &ternit&s qui
[l']engloutissent' (Best.D14528) in a universe not only
fundamentally incomprehesible but overwhelmingly evil. It is the
tragic view of life, as Weightman once remarked, 'couched in the gay
and elegant prose of the eighteenth century', lyrically tragic from
start to finish.41 Candide found disorder where he had
expected order, chaos where he had anticipated justice, discontinuity
where he had hoped for permanence. This did not mean that the world
had no meaning but that, God either withdrawn or non-existent, it was
up to man to give it one. We should recall here that the modern idea
of the 'death of God', as Mircea Eliade points out, is not a radical
innovation: 'In short, it is a revival of the notion of deus
otiosus, the idle god - the god who made the world, then left it
to shift for itself.' 42 Once more, as Lester Crocker
suggests, whether one was an atheist or a deist was not necessarily
crucial: 'Voltaire and Diderot both said that if God were a
do-nothing God, if his justice was not ours, then it was the same as
if there were no God.' 43 The humanism of Candide is a
stoical, tragic humanism, elevating man amidst the forces that will
crush him, and recalling at the cosmic level by its lucid modesty
Schiller's statement that 'il n'est pas n&cessaire
d'esp&rer pour entreprendre'. 44
If Voltaire were alive today, Barthes asserts, 'ses ennemis
seraient les doctrinaires de l'Histoire, de la Science [...]
ou de l'E marxistes, progressistes, existentialistes,
intellectuels de gauche'. 'Voltaire les aurait ha&s, couverts
de lazzi incessants', he continues, 'comme il a fait, de son temps,
pour les j&suites' (p.16). Aside from the fact that, in my
judgement, Voltaire would see himself, like Camus, as a partisan of
the left - 'I'm for the left,' wrote Camus, 'despite myself and
despite it'45 - I believe that Barthes's statement is accurate.
Although we differ in that he defines Voltaire's position as a
negative one,46 I find Barthes's statement accurate in that it
clarifies Voltaire's position as an &crivain
engag&, fully committed to representing the world and
bearing witness to it. This is what he did in the eighteenth century
and there is no reason to believe that, were he alive today, he would
cease doing so. Literature for Voltaire had a deep relationship to
history and society. The writer's function was no longer simply to
amuse his public but to guide humanity. He himself may have had this
in mind when he wrote that 'Jean-Jacques [Rousseau]
n'&crit que pour &crire et moy j'&cris pour
agir' (Best.D14117).
Although I do not believe that Barthes is correct in claiming that
Voltaire reduced 'les conflits d'id&es & une sorte de
lutte manich&enne entre la B&tise et l'Intelligence'
(p.16) - this can neither account for physical evils in the universe
such as earthquakes or plagues nor for evil tendencies inherent in
human nature - his thesis here does indeed capture some of the
single-mindedness of Voltaire's crusade against
l'inf&me. In his litt&rature
engag&e, Voltaire denounces the reign of 'isms' -
optimism, pessimism, Manicheism, Jesuitism, Jansenism - that crush
the individual, negate his importance, and discount his suffering in
the name of an abstraction. Candide prefigures our world of
'isms' where abstract systems, dogmas, and ideologies have victimised
the individual and reduced him from an end to a means, and where the
promise of future justice has become the excuse for a present
injustice. It is precisely because Voltaire did not adhere to a
particular system, unless that system was the hatred of all systems,
that Barthes is certainly wrong to assert that 'Le monde est simple
pour qui termine toutes ses lettres [...] par "Ecrasons
l'inf&me"' (p.17). Ecrasons l'inf&me was a general
cry implying that evil could spring up anywhere and that wherever it
sprung up, under whatever banner, it had to be denounced. The world
was not simple for Voltaire who, with difficulty, managed to carve
out a middle ground and forge an authentic humanism between the
atheists and the fanatics, the optimists and the pessimists. Voltaire
had no banner under which he allowed his dogma the privilege of
committing atrocities that he denounced in all other camps. He did
not believe that the end justifies the means nor that individual man
could be sacrificed in the name of Man. In a very Camusian sense,
Voltaire's inf&me seems synonymous with 'abstraction'
and, as Camus writes in his Carnets: 'Que l'abstraction est le
mal, elle fait les guerres, les tortures, la violence.' 47
I have referred to Camus throughout this article primarily
because, in many respects, I see him as a modern proponent of the
Voltarean spirit and an example of a major literary figure since 1848
who does not follow the pattern established by Barthes. I mention him
also because his work La Peste was, accordingly, also
criticised by Barthes and for reasons not wholly dissimilar from
those that we have examined in reference to Voltaire. Barthes makes a
few good points in his criticism, most notably the failure of the
novel as an allegory of the Occupation where men were not battling a
non-human epidemic but other men. This not only made good and evil
easily definable but avoided the question of violence. 48 In
the name of what he would later term 'mat&rialisme
historique', 49 Barthes, none the less, goes on to make the
surprising claim that La Peste founds an anti-historical
morality and a politics of solitude. Camus defended himself, on the
one hand, by calling his own evolution from L'Etranger to
La Peste 'le passage d'une attitude de r&volte
solitaire & la reconnaissance d'une communaut& dont il
faut partager les luttes' and, on the other, by affirming his
solidarity with 'notre histoire pr&sente'. 50
As regards Voltaire (and Camus), Barthes asks: 'Que peut donc
l'homme sur le Bien et le Mal?' (p.13). Not surprisingly, he
responds: 'Pas grand-chose.' This is an astonishing misreading of the
two great meliorists. Although human solidarity, charity, and the
notion of limits will never put a final end to evil, this does not
mean that man cannot ameliorate his present social situation nor
arithmetically reduce the sum of human misery in the world. Like
Camus, Voltaire leans toward cosmic pessimism and his humanism, as we
noted above, is a tragic one, for, like Camus's, it stresses the
limits of man and the omnipresence of evil. Voltaire's horizontal
humanism, however, which, at once, separates him from Pascal and
Rousseau and links him to Camus, offers man the opportunity, through
lucidity and moral dignity, to eke out that small portion of
happiness that may be his own. Camus speaks for himself but Voltaire
too when he writes: 'Celui qui esp&re en la condition humaine
est un fou, mais celui qui d&sesp're des
&v&nements est un l‚che.' 51
In 'Le dernier des &crivains heureux', Barthes uses the
term 'heureux' in at least two different senses: fortunate and
felicitous, but, as I hope to have shown, neither of these seems
particularly applicable to Voltaire. I certainly do not want to imply
that Voltaire was nor is it my quarrel with
Haydn Mason who observes, 'For all his exiles, alarums and
disappointments, he [Voltaire] was a happy man: partly
because of his marvellously buoyant temperament, but also because in
the end circumstances were good to him [...] He was rich and
in both these respects he was fortunate.'
52 My disagreement is with the notion that happiness is a sign
of shallowness, that it is somehow inconsistent with the first-rate
intelligence and sensitivity, and that somehow, after 1848, things
changed drastically so that Voltaire, for example, has come to seem
fortunate in ways no longer possible for intellectuals: saved somehow
from the 'real' view of the human condition. Certainly Voltaire
believed, like Camus, that happiness is a legitimate and natural
goal. He would have applauded Camus's letter to Guy Dumur where Camus
derides 'un amour de l'angoisse pour l'angoisse elle m&me' that
he attributes to certain forms of existentialism: 'Elles font de
l'angoisse une limite de l'homme, un sommet qu'il ne peut
d&passer. Or l'angoisse n'est ni plus ni moins consciente que
le bonheur, ou la patience, ou l'int&r&t, ou la
satisfaction. L'&chelle des valeurs qu'on introduit ainsi me
para&t basse' (Essais, p.1670). Voltaire obviously
believed, as his last twenty years demonstrate, that the absurd was
only a starting point and that not only could man construct an ethics
upon it, but that a pessimistic cosmological outlook did not preclude
an amelioration of man's social condition. To Barthes's view of
Voltaire, I oppose Camus's: 'Voltaire a soup&onn&
presque tout. Il n'a &tabli que tr&s peu de choses,
mais bien' (Carnets II, p.319). As Barthes uses the term,
Voltaire was not an '&crivain heureux'; a very rich segment of
his work proves that he is still our contemporary.
1. Roland Barthes, 'Le dernier des &crivains heureux',
Romans et contes (Paris 1972), pp.9-17. All references will be
to this edition and will be inserted parenthetically in the text. The
article appears in English as 'The last happy writer', in Roland
Barthes. Critical essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston,
Illinois 1972), pp.83-89.
2. Jonathan Culler, Roland Barthes, (New York 1983), p.18.
3. In this respect, Dominick La Capra points to 'a facile equation
of political radicalism and formal innovation in all guises and under
all conditions' and attaches Roland Barthes to it. Dominick La Capra,
History and Criticism (Ithaca 1985), p.112.
4. Philip Thody notes that Barthes's lack of sympathy with the
intellectual atmosphere of the eighteenth century can also be seen in
his essay on Les Planches de L'Encyclop&die, which is
'full of a sense of effortless superiority towards people who
entertained such naive concepts as Diderot or d'Alembert held about
the importance of clarity, intellectual tolerance and bourgeois
democracy' (Philip Thody, Roland Barthes: a conservative
estimate, Chicago 1983, p.121).
5. Lionel Gossman. 'Ce beau g&nie n'a point compris sa
sublime mission - an essay on Voltaire', French review 56
(1982). p.40.
6. J.H. Brumfitt, Voltaire historian (Oxford 1958),
7. Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les choses (Paris 1966),
9. See, for example, Roy Wolper, 'Candide: gull in the garden?',
Eighteenth-century studies 3 (1969), pp.265-77, and Theodore
Braun, 'Voltaire and his contes: a review essay on interpretations
offered by Roy S. Wolper', Studies on Voltaire 212 (1982),
10. For a more extended analysis of the garden metaphor in
Candide, see my 'Sacred and profane gardens in
Candide', Studies on Voltaire 176 (1979),
pp.133-52.
11. H. Trevor-Roper writes that with these four men
'historiography, as a continuous science, begins' ('The historical
philosophy of the Enlightenment', Studies on Voltaire 27
(1963), p.1667).
12. In this respect, see J.H. Brumfitt, 'History and propaganda in
Voltaire', Studies on Voltaire', 24 191963), pp.271-87.
13. Peter Gay, Voltaire's politics: the poet as realist
(Princeton, New Jersey 1959), p.10.
14. In Voltaire, Oeuvres historiques, ed. Ren&
Pomeau (Paris 1972), see both 'Remarques sur l'histoire', p.44, and
'Nouvelles consid&rations sur l'histoire', pp.48-49.
15. See Suzanne Gearhart, 'Rationality and the text: a study of
Voltaire's historiography', Studies on Voltaire 140 (1975),
16. J.H. Brumfitt, Voltaire historian, p.167.
17. Mircea Eliade, Mephistopheles and the androgyne: studies in
religious myth and symbol, trans. J.M. Cohen (New York 1965),
18. Mircea Eliade, Ordeal by labyrinth: conversations with
Claude-Henri Rocquet, trans. Derek Coltman (Chaicago 1982),
19. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of eternal return or, cosmos and
history, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton, New Jersey 1954),
20. Albert Camus, L'Homme r&volt&, in Essais
(Paris 1965), p.707.
21. Robert Mauzi, L'id&e du bonheur dans la
litt&rature et la pens&e fran&aise au
dix-huiti&me si&cle (Paris 1960), p.52.
22. Voltaire, Le Mondain, in M&langes (Paris
1961), p.206.
23. Voltaire, Po&me sur le d&sastre de
Lisbonne, M&langes, p.308.
24. Annette Lavers, Roland Barthes: structuralism and after
(Cambridge, Massachusetts 1982), p.71.
25. Voltaire, Correspondence and related documents, The
complete works of Voltaire 85-135, ed. Theodore Besterman
(Gen've, Banbury, Oxford ), Best.D21213. Henceforth all
references to Voltaire's correspondence will be to this definitive
edition and will be inserted parenthetically in the text.
26. Voltaire, Po&me sur le d&sastre de
Lisbonne, M&langes, p.304.
27. In this respect, I cannot resist citing the following
quotation in Camus's Carnets, noted with apparent approbation:
'Cf. Stuart Mill: 'Mieux vaut &tre Socrate m&content
qu'un cochon satisfait'' (Carnets I, Paris 1962, p.147).
28. Albert Camus, Le Mythe de Sisyphe, in Essais,
29. Best.D7946. Besterman's comments are on the same page.
30. This image of Voltaire is strikingly similar to that of
Rambert, one of Camus's heroes in La Peste, who notes 'il peut
y avoir de la honte & &tre heureux tout seul'
(Th&&tre, r&cits, nouvelles,
Paris 1962, p.1387).
31. Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris 1970), passim.
32. On this distinction, see, by the present author: 'Voltaire as
moralist', Journal of the history of ideas 38 (1977),
pp141-46, and 'A critical discussion of Albert Camus, a
biography, by Herbert Lottman and Camus: a critical study of
his life and work, by Patrick McCarthy', Philosophy and
literature 8 (1984), pp.104-18.
33. F.W. Nietzsche, Werke (M&nchen 1966), p.1118.
34. Quoted by Camus, Carnets I, p.174.
35. Voltaire, Notebooks, ed. Th. Besterman, The Complete
works of Voltaire 81-82 (Banbury 1968), i.88.
36. Th. Besterman, Voltaire (New York 1969), p.223.
37. Ren& Pomeau, La Religion de Voltaire (Paris
1969), p.248, passim.
38. John Weightman, 'The quality of Candide', Candide or
optimism, ed. Robert Adams (New York 1966), pp.160, 159-60.
39. John Weightman, 'Cultivating Voltaire', New York review of
books (18 June 1970), p.37.
40. 'Nous sommes des moutons & qui jamais le boucher ne dit
quand il les tuera' (Best.D1187); 'Nous sommes dans ce monde sous la
direction d'une puissance aussi invisible que forte & peu
pr&s comme des poulets qu'on a mis en mue pour un certain
temps, pour les mettre & la broche ensuite et qui ne
comprendront jamais par quel caprice le cuisinier les fais ainsi
encager. Je parie que si ces poulets raisonnent et font un syst'me
sur leur cage, aucun ne devinera jamais que c'est pour &tre
mang&s qu'on les a mis l&' (Best.D1558). As late as
1774, Voltaire continues to present the human condition in terms of
prison and execution and, when compared with the twenty-fifth letter
of the Lettres Philosophiques, we can see, the question of
grace aside, how Pascalian his view has become: 'Nous sommes tous
dans ce monde, comme des prisonniers dans la petite cour d'une
chacun attend son tour d'&tre pendu, sans en savoir
l' et quand cette heure vient, il se trouve qu'on a tr&s
inutilement v&cu. Toutes les r&flexions sont vaines,
tous les raisonnements sur la n&cessit& et sur la
mis&re humaine ne sont que des paroles perdues'
(Best.D19116).
41. John Weightman, 'Cultivating Voltaire', p.37.
42. Mircea Eliade, Ordeal by labyrinth, p.151.
43. Lester Crocker, Nature and culture: ethical thought in the
French Enlightenment (Baltimore 1963), pp.502-503.
44. This quotation appears in Andr& Malraux, Les
Conqu&rants (Paris 1928), p.241.
45. Herbert Lottman, Albert Camus, a biography (New York
1979), p.658.
46. Annette Lavers points out that Barthes identifies Voltaire 'as
an early example of those anti-intellectualist critics with whom he
was himself having a running fight' (p.71).
47. Albert Camus, Carnets II (Paris 1964), p.133.
48. Roland Barthes, 'La Peste: annales d'une
&pid&mie ou roman de la solitude', Club
(Bulletin du Club du Meilleur Livre) (janvier 1955).
49. Roland Barthes, 'R&ponse de Roland Barthes &
Albert Camus', Club (avril 1955), p.29.
50. Albert Camus, Th&&tre, r&
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51. Albert Camus, Essais, pp..
52. Haydn Mason, Voltaire, a biography (Baltimore 1981),
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