Letters on the English

Overview

Twenty-five short letters, about a hundred and sixty pages, published in English in London in 1733 as Letters Concerning the English Nation and in French the following year as Lettres philosophiques. They are not real letters and were not sent to anyone.

The occasion was exile. In 1726 Voltaire, then thirty-one and already famous as a poet, made a joke at the expense of the Chevalier de Rohan, a member of one of the great families. Rohan had him beaten by his footmen in the street while he watched from a carriage. Voltaire took fencing lessons and issued a challenge; Rohan’s family obtained a lettre de cachet, and Voltaire went to the Bastille and then into exile in England.

He stayed nearly three years, learned excellent English, met Pope, Swift, Congreve and Berkeley, read Locke and Newton, attended Newton’s funeral, and went to the theatre constantly. What he wrote afterwards is not a travel book but an argument conducted entirely by description.

The method is the thing. Voltaire almost never says that France is badly governed, intolerant, or contemptuous of trade and science. He describes England and lets the reader supply the comparison, and when the reader occasionally fails to, he adds a sentence.

The French parlement condemned it as scandalous and contrary to religion and good morals, ordered it burned by the public executioner in June 1734, and sent the publisher to the Bastille. Voltaire left Paris and spent the next fifteen years at Cirey with Madame du Chatelet, translating Newton.

The argument

Letters 1 to 7: religion. He begins with the Quakers, and gives them four letters, which is disproportionate and deliberate. He recounts visiting an eminent Quaker who does not remove his hat, addresses him as thou, refuses wine, and explains that they have no baptism, no communion, no priests and no wars. Voltaire is funny about them, describing a Quaker meeting where people sit in silence until one is moved to make faces and groan, and he is also plainly impressed: here is a Christianity with no hierarchy, no money and no violence.

Then the Anglicans, briefly, who are noted for keeping their clergy poor and their bishops in the House of Lords. Then the Presbyterians, sour and Sunday-observing, and in that letter the passage about the Royal Exchange: the Jew, the Muslim and the Christian trading together, reserving the word infidel for bankrupts, and the argument that thirty religions live in peace where two would fight.

Letter 7 on the Socinians, who deny the Trinity, lets him note quietly that this heresy is discussed in England without anyone being burned.

Letters 8 to 10: government and trade. Parliament, and a comparison with Rome: the English, he says, are the only people who have limited the power of kings by resisting them, and their civil wars produced a constitution where the Romans’ produced slavery.

Letter 9 explains that taxation is by consent, that the nobility pay, and that a peasant is not afraid to fatten his cattle for fear of an increased assessment. For a French reader in 1733, whose nobility was exempt from the principal tax, this is the most inflammatory thing in the book.

Letter 10, on commerce, is the shortest and most quoted. Trade made England powerful and free; a younger son of a peer goes into business without shame; the merchant who gives orders to Surat and Cairo contributes to the happiness of the world, while a powdered marquis who knows the exact hour the king rises and goes to bed gives himself airs. Voltaire does not say which country is which.

Letter 11: inoculation. A practical essay recommending the Turkish and now English practice of variolation against smallpox, with statistics and a defence against the objection that it usurps providence. He had had smallpox himself. This letter did real work: inoculation was resisted in France for decades, and Voltaire returned to the subject repeatedly.

Letters 12 to 17: philosophy and science. The heart of the book’s intellectual influence.

Bacon is presented as the father of experimental philosophy, the man who saw what was needed before anyone could do it. Locke gets the longest treatment: Voltaire praises him for describing the mind as a naturalist describes a body, refusing to speculate about substance, and building knowledge from sensation. He lingers, with obvious relish, on Locke’s suggestion that God might for all we know have given matter the power of thought, a proposition that got Voltaire into as much trouble as anything in the book.

Then Descartes and Newton, in the letter that begins with the Frenchman arriving in London and finding the world empty. Voltaire concedes Descartes’ genius and geometry and says his physics was a novel, built downward from principles. Newton’s was built upward from measurement, and it is right. Two further letters explain gravitation and optics, in prose, for readers with no mathematics, and they are a model of scientific exposition.

Letters 18 to 24: literature. Shakespeare, tragedy, comedy, the standing of writers, and the academies.

Voltaire’s Shakespeare is the famous double judgement: a genius full of force and fertility, without the smallest spark of good taste or knowledge of the rules, who has ruined the English stage by his example. He translates the To be or not to be soliloquy into French alexandrines, which is worth reading as a document of what neoclassical taste did to Hamlet.

He notes that in England writers are honoured, given places and pensions, buried in the Abbey, while in France they are patronised and imprisoned. Addison was a Secretary of State; Newton was Master of the Mint and had a state funeral. The comparison needs no comment and Voltaire supplies none.

Letter 25: against Pascal. Added in the French edition and the reason the book was burned rather than merely banned.

It is a point-by-point reply to the Pensees. Pascal says man is wretched, corrupt, lost in a universe that terrifies him, and that only Christianity explains him. Voltaire answers, with considerable cheerfulness, that man is neither angel nor beast but exactly what he should be, that curiosity is natural and not a disease, that we are not made for infinity and do not need to be, and that a man who is content with his condition is not therefore deceived. He does not argue with the Christianity directly. He argues with the misery, which he regards as an insult to life.

How to read it

Read letters 6, 8, 9, 10, 13 and 14, and then letter 25. That is perhaps fifty pages and it is the book.

Read every English observation as a French accusation. The form only works if you supply the other half, and Voltaire’s readers did.

Notice how short the paragraphs are. This is the beginning of the style that made him the most readable writer in French: no periods, no subordination, one point per sentence, jokes at the end. Compare a page of Pascal’s Provincial Letters, which he admired, and a page of Bossuet, which he did not.

Read the Newton letters even if you know the physics. They are an extraordinary piece of popularisation, done by someone who had recently learned the material himself, and they explain why the book mattered scientifically as well as politically.

Do not take his England literally. He omits the penal laws against Catholics, the Test Act, the corruption of Walpole’s parliament, and the brutality of English criminal law. He was writing an argument, and the England he describes is partly a country he needed to exist.

And read the attack on Pascal as the book’s real subject. Everything else describes a better-run country; letter 25 says that human life is not a disaster and that the doctrine which says otherwise is both false and harmful. Candide, twenty-five years later, complicates that position without abandoning it.

Questions it raises

• Is toleration best defended on the grounds Voltaire gives, that many sects keep each other in check, or does that reduce it to a balance of power?
• He says a country where merchants are respected is better governed. Is the claim about trade or about who holds status?
• Voltaire’s England leaves out its penal laws and its corruption. Does a polemic have an obligation to be complete?
• Locke suggests matter might think. Why was that more dangerous than anything political in the book?
• Shakespeare has genius and no taste. What is Voltaire’s standard, and what does it cost him?
• Against Pascal, Voltaire says we are exactly what we ought to be. Which of them has the better account of being human?