Letters on the English

Burned at the foot of the great staircase

The Parlement of Paris was the kingdom's senior law court, and it could condemn books. On 10 June 1734 the king's lawyer, Pierre Gilbert de Voisins, put the Lettres philosophiques before the judges. He told them the book was spreading fast and was fit to encourage the most dangerous free thinking about religion and public order.

The court ordered the book torn up and burned by the public executioner. The burning was to happen in the courtyard of the Palais, the old palace on the Île de la Cité where the court sat, at the foot of its great staircase. The order called the book scandalous, against religion and good morals, and short of the respect owed to those in power.

The order banned anyone from printing, selling or handing out the book, on pain of corporal punishment. Anyone holding a copy had to surrender it to the court. The sentence was carried out the same day, at eleven in the morning, as the court rose. A senior clerk, Marie-Dagobert Ysabeau, signed the record that the book had been torn and thrown into the fire.

Adrien Beuchot drew the obvious lesson in his notes on the book. The authorities did not yet understand, he wrote, that condemning a book makes it famous. The letters rose from their ashes and spread everywhere.

A printer in the Bastille, an author in hiding

Voltaire's Rouen printer, Claude-François Jore, had printed the French text years before and held it back. When copies began to circulate in 1734, suspicion fell on him. He was arrested and put in the Bastille. He came out fourteen days later, once the police found that his type did not match the seized edition.

The police kept looking. On 9 June and 7 July they found a store of books against the Church and the State belonging to Jore. They also found an edition printed in secret by René Josse, a Paris bookseller, with a paper-maker named Coubray. On 23 October 1734 the royal council stripped Jore's son, Josse and a printer in Bayeux of their trades.

Voltaire was away from Paris, at Montjeu, when the trouble started. In May 1734 he took refuge at Cirey in Champagne with Émilie du Châtelet. He was not allowed back into Paris until the lieutenant of police gave permission by a letter of 2 March 1735, eight months later.

For years afterwards the book could not appear under its own title. Beuchot explains that later editions of Voltaire's works broke the letters up and scattered them among other pieces, so the banned title would not stop them at the French border. Rome condemned the book only on 4 July 1752.

Paris against London

Voltaire keeps setting London beside Paris, and Paris keeps losing. A Frenchman arriving in London, he writes in Letter XIV, finds that the world has changed. In Paris the universe is full of whirling currents of fine matter, as René Descartes taught. In London it is empty space held together by Newton's gravity. Paris imagines the earth shaped like a melon; London says it is flattened.

In Letter X, anyone who reaches Paris from the provinces with money and a name ending in -ac or -ille can call himself a marquis and sneer at merchants. Voltaire asks which is more use to a country. One is a powdered lord waiting in a minister's anteroom. The other is a merchant sending orders from his office to Surat and Cairo.

In Letter XI he counts the cost of French caution about inoculation. Twenty thousand people died of smallpox in Paris in 1723, he writes, who would have lived if a French ambassador's wife had brought the practice home from Constantinople.

Letter XXIII turns to how each country treats its artists. Isaac Newton was buried with honours in Westminster Abbey, and so was the actress Anne Oldfield. In France, Voltaire says, the actress he calls Mademoiselle Le Couvreur was buried in disgrace in the fields. He adds that the English writer Joseph Addison, had he been French, might have ended up in the Bastille.

Paris wins only once. In Letter XXIV Voltaire prefers the Academy of Sciences in Paris to the Royal Society in London, because a seat in Paris is paid and hard to win. He is much less kind about the Académie française. Its published speeches, he says, are mostly compliments.

Locke, and a question about the soul

Letter XIII is about John Locke, and it carries the book's riskiest idea. Voltaire praises Locke for tracing how a child's mind grows from what the senses bring in. He then repeats Locke's modest suggestion that we may never know whether a purely material being can think.

Churchmen in England, Voltaire says, took that as a claim that the soul is material and mortal. He replies that the question is one for philosophy, not faith. Locke's opponents, he says, only had to ask whether thinking matter is a contradiction, and whether God could give thought to matter.

Voltaire came back to the same point nearly twenty years later in Micromégas. There the one human philosopher who impresses the visiting giants is a follower of Locke. He doubts very much that God is unable to give matter the power of thought.