Two colossi of intellect facing each other, Voltaire and Rousseau. Philosopher of freedom of spirit and tolerance, the first. Of insubordination and popular will, the second. They are the two greatest representatives of the Age of Enlightenment in France. And of the revolution of ideas that will soon give rise to the French Revolution. They both died shortly before this, in 1778. And they are both buried together in the Pantheon in Paris. How did two free, cultured and famous men come to confront each other so much?
Voltaire was born in Paris in 1694; Rousseau, in Geneva in 1712. Each one was aware of the other's publications. With the same wandering life, with their comings and goings between France and Switzerland, they seemed to pursue each other. They met in Geneva in Voltaire's villa, Les Délices, since 1755 (today a museum where the two are remembered). And they had maintained a brief correspondence in 1745.
They had in common the collaboration with the Encyclopedia and the friendship with its promoters, Diderot and D'Alembert. Plus other aspects that united them: free thinkers, deists in religion, supporters of democracy – which they maintained was only possible in small countries – and moral reformers, in the line of Montaigne, Pascal, La Bruyère or Montesquieu. In philosophy, they are not supporters of Descartes and are supporters of British thinkers such as Locke, in the case of Voltaire, or Hume, in that of Rousseau.
France is the country of intellectuals and the debate of ideas; For this reason, the conflict between Rousseau and Voltaire is not strange in other pairs of Frenchmen: Robespierre and Danton, Chateaubriand and Napoleon, Hugo and Zola, Sartre and Aron.
The opposition between Voltaire and Rousseau is one of doctrine and character. Voltaire is worldly and a regular in salons and palaces. He likes luxury – “the superfluous, a very necessary thing” – and he is a theater lover. He is ironic to the point of lacerating sarcasm.
Rousseau, on the other hand, is a failed pursuer of glory, and an austere life. Fleeing from misery, he takes refuge in music (he premiered an opera, Le devin du village) and adores nature: in his maturity, he collects and classifies plants, “herborizes.” He is cold and scathing in his analysis of it. Always distrustful, and unable to keep his friends. He must live with Thérèse, a servant, with whom he has five children, all of them dedicated to public charity, something not uncommon in Paris at that time. He thus becomes convinced that he is “the people,” and in this spirit he writes The Social Contract (1762), which advocates a direct and egalitarian democracy.
Voltaire, in contrast, shuns the plebs, is a supporter of the “enlightened elite”, and even more than justice, as is clear in his Treatise on Tolerance (1763), he cares about happiness and that everyone “cultivates their garden.” ”. He praises Louis XIV and feels happy in the palace of the king of Prussia. For his part, Rousseau renounces being presented to the king of France; He detests ostentation and hypocrisy. These and other books by both thinkers were banned, and their authors persecuted, to the point of having to go into exile from their country.
How and why did their declared enmity arise? First, they disagree about the value of “civilization.” Voltaire despises the essay Discourse on Inequality that Rousseau sent him in 1755, and of which he acknowledged receipt with acid irony. First puja. In this work, man is defended in his state of nature, which civil society corrupts.
Voltaire answers: “Never has so much talent been used to want to turn us into beasts; "You feel like walking on all fours when you read his work." In response to Rousseau's criticism of the literati, he adds: “Letters feed the soul, rectify it, console it; "They serve you, sir, during the time that you write against them."
Another confrontation is about “providence.” After the great earthquake in Lisbon in 1755, Voltaire wrote a poem in which he questioned: “How can we conceive of God as goodness itself?” Rousseau replied in a letter on August 18, 1756: “I have suffered too much in this life not to hope for another.” The consolation of poor people like him, he tells him, is to think that not everything is bad and to trust in providence. Voltaire does not answer him. He will do so in the narrative of Candide (1759), criticizing naivety and optimism. The Genevan feels provoked.
They even fight over theater, a spectacle so creative, and consolidated at the time in France. Voltaire wants to install a large theater hall in Les Délices in Geneva, but clashes with the city government. He argues that there are no theaters in it, which is reflected in the article “Geneva” of the Encyclopedia, although it is signed in 1757 by D'Alembert. Rousseau, however, supports the city's decision in his Letter on Spectacles (1758), arguing the immorality of the art of comedy. Given this, Voltaire accuses him of being a traitor to the philosophical spirit.
Rousseau's response opens another front of opposition: their role as “philosophes.” It is found in chapter . After which Voltaire would take revenge in his four furious Letters on the new Heloise (1761), signed with a pseudonym.
However, faced with the attacks received by Rousseau following the publication of Emile, or Education (1762), burned in both Paris and Geneva, Voltaire offered him refuge in Switzerland in the name of solidarity between philosophers. But Rousseau renounces this. He even denounces him as the irreverent author of the text Sermon of the Fifty in his Letters from the Mountain (1764), written in defense of “religion, freedom and justice” with the clarity and audacity of all of his writings. This one was also burned.
In response, an angry Voltaire accuses Rousseau of the same and of inciting citizens with the short writing Sentiment of the Citizens (1764). He begins: “You have pity on a madman; But when dementia becomes all the rage, things get complicated. Tolerance, which is a virtue, would then be a vice.” He calls for capital punishment for this “vile seditionist.” Even the neighbors of Môtiers, in his native Switzerland, where Rousseau had taken refuge after Emilio's incident, stoned his house.
The persecuted man will go to England in 1766 in the company of David Hume, a renowned essayist and also accused of being an atheist. But, after a year, she will break up with him and return, ill, to France. Meanwhile, Voltaire did not leave him alone with another brief writing of mockery and denunciation, Letter to Dr. Jean-Jacques Pansofo, published in 1767 in London itself, with the pretext of the Genevan's contempt for the ideas of the English. Soon he published the heroic-satirical poem Geneva Civil War, referring to his adversary as “this gloomy madman. This enemy of human nature.” Without mercy, like this, for a persecuted, sick and poor person.
The opposition around the very idea of “man” radically confronted both freethinkers, although both were supporters of Reason. According to Rousseau, man is “naturally good” and is made for solitude and life in nature, as reflected in his last writing, almost in an existentialist key: The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, begun in Paris in 1776 and published after death. of the.
It is this vocation for a moral and autonomous existence – not in vain will it be admired by Kant – that makes him seek in the “social contract” the guarantee of the dignity and rights of man, the “common freedom.”
For Voltaire, on the other hand, the human being is made for enjoyment and freedom. He does not believe in natural goodness; good is, above all, useful. He writes: “I wish my lawyer, my tailor, my servants, even my wife, to believe in God, and I think that then I will be robbed and deceived less often.”
If Rousseau advocates for the “natural man,” Voltaire does so for the “civil man.” One believes that society is what degrades us and another that it is exactly what saves us. Although the two intellectuals conceive themselves as “citizens.”
Rousseau's appeal to the feeling of "the people", even his animosity towards the "philosophers", and, on the contrary, their defense by Voltaire, plus his sympathy for the "enlightened elite", must be understood from the constant personal concern of both authors for literary glory and political influence.
Voltaire, brilliant and incisive, quite accomplished both. But not Rousseau, who, in the end, believed himself persecuted by everyone, without losing his independent genius. Being two famous thinkers, equal and different at the same time, their fierce rivalry was almost announced.
Perhaps each hated in the other what he would have wished for himself. The republic of letters makes citizens very free and quite equal, but often not on good terms. Impossible to take sides with Voltaire or Rousseau. Without them the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789 would not have been possible. With both, in any case, we learn to think.
