to progress in France in the age of Louis XV; but it chanced that
the lead fell into the hands of the most brilliant and fecund of all
the writers of the century. Voltaire [964] (1694-1778) was already
something of a freethinker when a mere child. So common was deism
already become in Paris at the end of the seventeenth century that his
godfather, an abbé, is said to have taught him, at the age of three,
a poem by J. B. Rousseau, [965] then privately circulated, in which
Moses in particular and religious revelations in general are derided
as fraudulent. [966] Knowing this poem by heart in his childhood,
the boy was well on the way to his life's work. It is on record
that many of his school-fellows were, like himself, already deists,
though his brother, a juvenile Jansenist, made vows to propitiate
the deity on the small unbeliever's behalf. [967] It may have been
a general reputation for audacious thinking that led to his being
charged with the authorship of a stinging philippic published in
1715, after the death of Louis XIV. The unknown author, a young man,
enumerated the manifold abuses and iniquities of the reign, concluding:
"I have seen all these, and I am not twenty years old." Voltaire was
then twenty-two; but D'Argenson, who in the poem had been called
"the enemy of the human race," finding no likelier author for the
verses, put him under surveillance and exiled him from Paris; and on
his imprudent return imprisoned him for nearly a year in the Bastille
(1716), releasing him only when the real author of the verses avowed
himself. Unconquerable then as always, Voltaire devoted himself in
prison to his literary ambitions, planning his Henriade and completing
his OEdipe, which was produced in 1718 with signal success.
Voltaire was thus already a distinguished young poet and dramatist
when, in 1726, after enduring the affronts of an assault by a
nobleman's lacqueys, and of imprisonment in the Bastille for seeking
amends by duel, he came to England, where, like Deslandes before him,
he met with a ready welcome from the freethinkers. [968] Four years
previously, in the powerful poem, For and Against, [969] he had
put his early deistic conviction in a vehement impeachment of the
immoral creed of salvation and damnation, making the declaration,
"I am not a Christian." Thus what he had to learn in England was
not deism, but the physics of Newton and the details of the deist
campaign against revelationism; and these he mastered. [970] Not
only was he directly and powerfully influenced by Bolingbroke, who
became his intimate friend, but he read widely in the philosophic,
scientific, and deistic English literature of the day, [971] and
went back to France, after three years' stay, not only equipped for
his ultimate battle with tyrannous religion, but deeply impressed by
the moral wholesomeness of free discussion. [972] Not all at once,
indeed, did he become the mouthpiece of critical reason for his age:
his literary ambitions were primarily on the lines of belles lettres,
and secondarily on those of historical writing. After his Pour et
Contre, his first freethinking production was the not very heretical
Lettres philosophiques or Lettres anglaises, written in England in
1728, and, after circulating in MS., published in five editions in
1734; and the official burning of the book by the common hangman,
followed by the imprisonment of the bookseller in the Bastille, [973]
was a sufficient check on such activity for the time. Save for the
jests about Adam and Eve in the Mondain (1736), a slight satire for
which he had to fly from Paris; and the indirect though effective
thrusts at bigotry in the Ligue (1723; later the Henriade); in the
tragedy of Mahomet (1739; printed in 1742), in the tales of Memnon
and Zadig (1747-48), and in the Idées de La Mothe le Vayer (1751) and
the Défense de Milord Bolingbroke (1752), he produced nothing else
markedly deistic till 1755, when he published the "Poem to the King
of Prussia," otherwise named Sur la loi naturelle (which appears to
have been written in 1751, while he was on a visit to the Margravine
of Bayreuth), and that on the Earthquake of Lisbon. So definitely did
the former poem base all morality on natural principles that it was
ordered to be burned by the Parlement of Paris, then equally alarmed
at freethinking and at Molinism. [974] And so impossible was it still
in France to print any specific criticism of Christianity that when
in 1759 he issued his verse translations of the Song of Solomon and
Ecclesiastes they also were publicly burned, though he had actually
softened instead of heightening the eroticism of the first and the
"materialism" of the second. [975]