Tuesday, September 25, 2001

Dope.

In 1725, Voltaire was thirty one years old. He'd established himself at the great houses by this time, where the Names could enjoy the dangerous turn of his epigrams. His wildly successful plays were thought to be the successor of Racine's (although now they are considered the last clunk of classic theater, heading for the garbage chute). He had, it was true, spent time in the Bastille in 1717 for writing verses that satirized the Regent. It was also true that he was the prematurely wizened child of a conseiller de roi, a bourgeois, and that his father did not count his poet son among his worldly successes - in the Arouet family the ornament was the older son, Armand, a lawyer like papa.

Voltaire, however, considered himself the peer of his titled friends -- ennobled, so to speak, by his brain.

It is a sign of the times that Voltaire could so easily allow himself this presumption. In the seventeenth century, a Moliere could see a king, but couldn't sup with a prince. Voltaire, however, felt himself fully entitled to break bread with princes -- or, more usually, princesses. The habits of Louis XIV's regime, in which a conscious effort was made to codify, and so stabilize, the hierarchy in order to control the nobility, so inclined in the first half of the seventeenth century to frightening Frondes, had been swept away during the Regency. In particular, the Mississippi bubble, John Law's attempt to take a seventeenth century society into the age of floating currencies and stock options, had turned life upside down, bankrupting old houses and enriching outsiders, until it all came down with a crash. Law's paper currency was a real, if unintended, assault on the feudalist order, and succeeded in weakening that order even if it did not succeed in floating France's debt.

In December, 1725, Voltaire had an altercation with the Chevalier de Rohan-Chabot (the link has another version of this story) in the dressing room of an actress. Rohan-Chabot made a cutting remark, Voltaire replied in kind, the Chevalier raised his can, Voltaire raised his sword, friends intervened, and the broil was brought to a close.

A few days later Voltaire was at the table in the Duc de Sully's hotel, with the family, when a servant came in and told him he was wanted outside. In the street stood two closed carriages, to one of which Voltaire advanced. He was grabbed, thrust inside, and assaulted with sticks and fists. From the second carriage, the Chevalier de Rohan's voice was heard: "don't hurt his head, something good may come out of it." After being beaten, Voltaire was thrown back out into the street.

He made his way upstairs to the Duc de Sully's table, disheveled and presumably bleeding Let me quote from Jean Orieux's biography: "He called on them [the dinner guests] to help him -- first of all the Duc de Sully, whose guest he was, and on whose doorstep he had been assaulted. He begged Sully to go with him to lodge a complaint; his assailants had tried to murder him. But the duc calmly refused. The faces of all present were impassive; everyone was silent. Voltaire realized then that no one was going to aid him..."

I love this story. I, too, have seen those faces -- the face the established order shows the outsider. I saw it when I was a young man in Shreveport, Louisiana. In a way, it was a rare privilege. This story could have happened yesterday in any number of places: Russia, the Philippines, Indonesia... and Louisiana. It could happen anywhere, in other words, where the roots of civil society are weak; where clans are strong; where the monopoly of violence is not entirely conceded to the state, and where the state recognizes, in its daily working, the de facto right of groups to enforce extra-legal punishments. What Votaire saw, sealed in the impassivity of the circle of faces that confronted him, was the naked substructure of the very society he moved in. Rohan's henchmen woke him up. Voltaire made a leap in place that moment. He became the Voltaire we know, realizing, beyond his vanity, what the point was: the great target, really, of the whole Enlightenment project in the first half of the 18th century. The traditional order, the rule of authority rather than reason, was based on just this moment when the face closes. He realized that he could expect no quarter from these people. He'd have to forge his arms himself.

So he did. He operated under the aegis of satire, the downstairs weapon. Scapin's revenge. (actually, the denouement of this story does have a Scapin-esque feel - Voltaire made it known that he was consorting with underworld thugs, learning fencing, and Rohan, a notorious coward, prevailed on the king to issue a lettre de cachet, putting Voltaire in the Bastille again. A sign of the regime's essential weakness is that Voltaire was soon released -- there was a certain shame about what Rohan had done. Follow the shame - it is always a clue). To implant a sense of the judicial equality of persons in a society that doesn't, in its social tissues, feel that equality, requires more toxic methods than the arguments of rationality. It required all the tactics of ridicule, imprudence and pointed analogy that the philosophes inherited from the ancients, and from the kindred spirits of the century before: Montaigne and the libertine circle around St. - Evremond. Even in this early stage of modernity, shock was the weapon of choice, because the other weapons -- the closed carriages and the cudgels -- were all held by the other side. As we will see in my third tableaux -- you see, I am thinking of my posts about this subject as pictures in a triptych -- this ingrained habit of satire stood between Voltaire and Rousseau, making it impossible for either party to understand the other one. Satire, in other word, has its great historic moment in the 18th century. It is the dark star twinned with optimism in the Enlightenment program. That relationship contains in itself the seed of its own dialectical destruction.

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