Micromégas

The scientists in the ship were real

The ship the giants pick up is a real one, slightly bent. In April 1736 a party of French scientists, among them Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis and Alexis Clairaut, left Paris for Lapland. Their job was to measure a stretch of the earth near the Arctic Circle and settle the argument over the planet's shape. The Moland edition of Voltaire's works names the men in the ship as Maupertuis, Clairaut, Camus and Le Monnier, back from measuring a degree in Lapland.

In early June 1737 the boat carrying their equipment back to Stockholm was caught in a storm, took on water and ran aground. The scientists were home in Paris on 20 August 1737. They reported to the Academy of Sciences at the end of that summer. Their measurements agreed with Isaac Newton: the earth is flattened at the poles.

Voltaire lands his giants on the Baltic coast on 5 July 1737, in time to meet that voyage home. His narrator says the newspapers reported the scientists' ship ran ashore on the coast of Bothnia. He adds that nobody ever learns what really goes on in this world. In his version, a giant lifted the ship out of the water.

Voltaire had taken Newton's side of that argument long before. In the fourteenth of his Letters on the English, printed in 1733, he wrote that people in Paris imagined the earth shaped like a melon, while in London it was flattened. Georges Pilard and Karen Chidwick point out that the Lapland voyage helped prove Newton right.

The last scene is in Paris

The tale ends at the Academy of Sciences in Paris, where the giant's book of philosophy turns out to be blank. The Moland edition identifies the old secretary who opens it as Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle. He was about eighty in 1737. He gave up the post of permanent secretary in 1740.

Fontenelle is also the dwarf from Saturn, the giant's companion for the whole trip. Voltaire describes the secretary of the Academy of Saturn as a man who had invented nothing himself but explained other people's inventions very well. He also wrote small poems and large calculations. The Moland notes put Fontenelle's name against that sentence.

When the dwarf first tries to describe nature, he compares it to a flower bed, then to a crowd of fair and dark women, then to a picture gallery. Micromégas stops him each time. Nature is like nature, he says. A note in the Moland edition says Voltaire was mocking the flowery style of Fontenelle's popular book on the plurality of worlds.

The man in the square cap, the one who says everything was made for mankind, is Parisian too. The Moland notes identify him as a doctor of the Sorbonne, the theology faculty of the University of Paris. He claims the whole secret is in the Summa of Thomas Aquinas. His speech is what sets the two giants laughing.

Good at measuring, poor at everything else

The humans in the ship are very good at numbers. With a quadrant they get the dwarf's height exactly right, and they measure the giant with a chain of triangles. They know the distance to the moon and the weight of the air. Micromégas decides that nothing should ever be judged by its size.

On the soul they are hopeless. One philosopher quotes Aristotle, another René Descartes, then Nicolas Malebranche, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and John Locke, and no two agree. Only the follower of Locke pleases the giants. He doubts that God is unable to give matter the power of thought. Voltaire had made the same case for Locke in the thirteenth of his Letters on the English.

The war the philosopher describes was real as well. A hundred thousand men in hats are killing a hundred thousand men in turbans, for a scrap of land none of them will ever own. The Moland notes read the passage as the war between Russia and the Ottoman Empire of 1736 to 1739. The rulers who start such wars, the philosopher says, never go near the fighting.

The two moons of Mars

On the way to Earth the travellers pass Mars and see two moons that no astronomer has noticed. The narrator expects a Father Castel to write against them. He leaves the matter to people who reason by analogy, since a planet so far from the sun could surely not manage with fewer than two moons.

Nobody saw a moon of Mars until August 1877. Asaph Hall found two with the new 26-inch telescope at the Naval Observatory in Washington. Writing in 1879, John Le Conte pointed back to Micromégas and to Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, which also gave Mars two moons. Voltaire had been mocking people who reasoned by analogy, and Le Conte noted that the discovery turned the tables on him.

Paris had its part in that discovery too. Le Conte records that a Monsieur Henry of the Paris Observatory saw the two moons on 27 August 1877, once the glare of the planet was screened out.