Anglomania (8 page)

I
T WAS FITTING
that Voltaire should have spent his later years on the border of France and Switzerland: too subversive to be accepted by the authorities in Paris, too much of a Frenchman to live away from France. There, just outside Geneva, in Ferney, he built his own tomb, so he would be assured of a proper burial. It is a pyramid built into the chapel wall: “Wags will say that I’m neither in nor out.” On the same chapel is a plaque that reads “Deo Erexit VOLTAIRE,” meaning “to God, erected by VOLTAIRE.” The letter size makes it quite clear which of the two was deemed more important.

Voltaire did not just move to Ferney. He designed most of it himself. It was his very own “colony,” as he called it. To build your own village, filled with grateful artisans and industrious peasants, might smack of Marie-Antoinette’s dairy farm, but Voltaire’s Ferney, though no less Anglophile in inspiration, was a model of Enlightenment, a kind of theme park of tolerance. In his colony, he offered refuge to political and religious dissenters, mostly from Geneva. He relieved the peasants from feudal tax burdens. And he spent a great deal of time, in the manner of the eighteenth-century British landowner, on landscaping his garden.

Voltaire still dominates Ferney today. Wherever you go, you come across the Patriarch, as he is known. There is a Voltaire art gallery, a Voltaire estate agent, a Voltaire restaurant, a Voltaire stationer’s, a Voltaire café, a Voltaire antique shop, a Voltaire school, a Voltaire cinema, and a Voltaire fountain on the market square. I had a cup of coffee at the Café le Patriarche, next to a fountain gurgling under Voltaire’s bust, and around me I heard French, English, German, Italian, Dutch, and even Persian: an overweight Iranian was talking loudly into his portable phone, while his wife and children were tackling their baguettes. On their table was a postcard of Voltaire’s garden. I could almost hear a sardonic cackle come from the Patriarch’s stony lips.

Ferney in the 1760s and 1770s was a fixture on the Grand Tour, an absolute must for men of taste or pretension. Hundreds of visitors from
Britain came to pay homage to the old man, as though he were a shrine: first the great paintings in Paris, then Voltaire, and thence on to Italy. Charles James Fox came. As did Goldsmith. And Wilkes. And Gibbon. And Boswell, who asked Voltaire: “What, sir, would you do if you were shut up alone in a tower with a new-born baby?” (Voltaire’s answer is unknown.) But there were many others too, who simply came to gawk at the old Anglomane, wandering through his rooms in a blue satin dressing gown and a gold-tasseled cap, dusting his prize busts of Isaac Newton and Lady Coventry. The attention could be tiresome, but Voltaire was too flattered to turn many admirers down. And the national pride of his English visitors was tickled by Voltaire’s compliments to their country, made frequently in the bawdy English of early eighteenth-century libertines.

Voltaire was a snob, like most Anglophiles. He enjoyed showing off his wealth. His table was waited on by liveried servants, and his silver plates all bore his family crest. He was an eccentric and often casual dresser, but on Sundays he would dress very grandly, with lace cuffs stretching to his fingertips, for this, in his opinion, gave him “a noble air.” In 1759, Voltaire celebrated the British victory over France in Quebec with a splendid fireworks display, depicting various Indian trophies, the Niagara Falls, and the star of St. George. The only fly in this rich, Anglomaniacal ointment was Shakespeare, whose works Voltaire would criticize at the slightest provocation.

British worship at the shrine of Ferney was well suited to Voltaire’s old-fashioned expletives, for both were part of a style that was slowly slipping away. Voltaire’s Anglomania, as well as his popularity in Britain, were products of enlightened cosmopolitanism. This had set the tone in many French salons, Scottish drawing rooms, and English stately homes. But as the century wore on, more and more members of the English elite began to adopt the insular and anti-French attitudes of the lower orders—partly to ensure their continued dominance over those orders. The Seven Years War with France, ending in 1763, had done much to stir up popular Gallophobia in England. “Ancient” English liberties, going back to King Alfred and celebrated in Hogarth’s prints, had to be defended against France, with its popish despots, artificial manners, congenital insincerity, and foppish manners.

Voltaire had fought against popish despotism all his life, but his style of Anglomania was hardly that of Hogarth’s Roast Beef and Olde
England. He remained popular in Britain during his lifetime, especially among the Whiggish gentry. He was more popular even than native authors such as Pope, Arthur Young, or James Thomson. A translation of his complete works was published in 1770, and again in 1779. There is no doubt that Voltaire had a huge and lasting influence on the way the English liked to see themselves. But a decade or so later, his reputation in Britain was greatly damaged because of the revolution he had never actively promoted but had done so much to prepare.

Voltaire did not live to see the French Revolution. Instead, he had a reconciliation of sorts with the court—though not with the Catholic church. After the death of Louis XV and the succession of Louis XVI, Voltaire was at last allowed to return to Paris. He was eighty-four, frail, cadaverous even, but still writing furiously. His latest play,
Irene
, was to be performed at the Comédie-Française. So he left Ferney, waving at the throng of weeping villagers as he passed them by in his coach. When he stopped to rest on the way, he was served by local grandees disguised as tavern waiters. In Paris he was greeted as though he were a returning king, rather like Newton’s funeral in London, except that Voltaire, in his Regency-style periwig and his fur-trimmed hat, was alive to see his own apotheosis. Women tried to pluck tufts of fur from the Patriarch’s coat to pass on as relics to their children. The entire Academy—except for its clerical members—waited for him at the theater as he arrived in a blue carriage covered with gold stars to see the performance of his play. When he entered the theater, leaning on his cane, the crowd stood up to cheer: “Long live Voltaire! Long live the universal man!” The stage curtain opened to reveal a bust of Voltaire, and the actors and actresses filed past, one by one, to crown its marble head with laurel wreaths. More people waited to see Voltaire outside, after the performance was over. “What crowds to greet you!” an admirer said. “Just as many as would come to see me on the scaffold,” he answered.

Two months later Voltaire was dead. Cancer of the prostate. The church refused to bury him. A common ditch was pronounced good enough, as it had been for his old lover, Adrienne Lecouvreur. But Voltaire was spared this final indignity, which he had feared all his life, by his friends, who secretly drove his embalmed corpse, still splendidly got up in dressing gown and tassled hat, out of town on a moonlit night. They buried the body outside Paris. But first they removed the
heart, which was sent to Ferney, and later, in 1864, back to Paris, where it was placed in the Salon d’honneur of the Bibliothèque nationale. It is still there.

Precisely ten years after Voltaire’s death the Revolution came. His corpse was moved to Paris not long after, to be reburied with full revolutionary honors in the Panthéon. He might have enjoyed the attention. But the effect on his reputation in Britain would have pleased him less. France was no longer identified with popery and foppishness, but with dangerous radicalism. To be “Frenchified” was not effete, but revolutionary. And Voltaire, blamed first, with some justification, for unleashing Anglomania in France, was now blamed by British and French monarchists for the French Revolution itself. Voltaire had promoted English liberty as a universal good, a tree to be planted in every country. But English nationalists saw liberty as uniquely English, a reflection of the sincere character of the English people and its plain Protestant ethic. Voltaire was a sophisticate, a radical, an atheist, and a Frog.

Displayed at the British Museum is a cream-colored earthenware Staffordshire mug, made in 1793. The style and the material are expressions of how the English began to see themselves: plain, simple, God-fearing, and honest, like a slab of roast beef or a tweed coat. On one side of the mug we read the English concept of liberty, and on the other side the French. Religion, honesty, and independence were the English virtues. Atheism, murder, and equality marked the French.
Egalité
had become a dirty word in England, something akin to godlessness.

A political print of 1803 makes a similar point in more gory detail. It is called
The Arms of France
and shows a guillotine, dripping with blood, supported by a grinning ape sporting a tricolor sash and a red hat, trimmed with jester’s bells. The ape is holding a tricolor flag inscribed
ATHEISM
, and he is sitting on Voltaire’s books. Dangling beneath this pretty ensemble, like a dirty little rag, is a pamphlet on the rights of man by Tom Paine. Paine’s idea of universal rights had cast him in the role of a dishonorable Frenchman. Cosmopolitanism was now as foreign as the notion of equality.

There were of course supporters of the Revolution in Britain, like Paine. Radicalism and egalitarianism, often but not always inspired by religion, have always had a place in English history. Under Cromwell
radicalism turned violent. But the Glorious Revolution was to be Britain’s last revolution. Despite the example of Wilkes and others, the mainstream of British politics was no longer threatened by radical upheavals. And conservatism was presented more and more as a natural, organic product of the English soil. If such thinkers as Locke and Newton had inspired the men and women of the European Enlightenment, others such as Hume, and later Carlyle, inspired its conservative critics. European Anglophilia after the French Revolution reflects this. Rooted in the free-thinking, cosmopolitan Enlightenment, it became a mark of the anti-Revolution, of bourgeois politics and gentlemanly manners. This also meant it became increasingly conservative, even as French reactionaries continued to blame the French Revolution on Voltaire’s Anglomania.

Thomas Carlyle was the perfect philosopher of the earnest new age. And he would have agreed with Voltaire on one thing only: that writers should be treated as heroes. Of course Voltaire would never have spoken of “the Priesthood of writers of books.” Voltaire recognized no priests of any kind, while Carlyle was hungry for divines. Looking back on Voltaire’s century, Carlyle pursed his nineteenth-century lips. It had been “an effete world; wherein Wonder, Greatness, Godhood could not now dwell;—in one word, a Godless world!” Carlyle admitted that Voltaire had talent, but it was a shallow, superficial, frivolous talent, clever but not philosophical. There was, in Voltaire’s thinking, “not the deep natural symmetry of the forest oak, but the simple artificial symmetry of a parlour chandelier.”

In the early 1820s Carlyle was walking the streets of Paris. This was long before Baron Haussmann built his grand boulevards. The city cannot have changed a great deal since Voltaire last saw it from his star-spangled coach. Voltaire was much on Carlyle’s mind. How to overcome that godless, artificial, cosmopolitan world? How to build solid oaks? He disapproved of France and its
voltairomanie
. For if Christianity was “the highest instance of Hero-worship, then we may find here in Voltaireism one of the lowest!” Carlyle looked toward Germany for depth, truth, and heroism. But he could not get the grinning image of Voltaire out of his mind. Damn Voltaire! Damn his facile mockery! Damn his sardonic smile! And he said to himself: Cease, my much respected Herr von Voltaire, shut thy sweet voice; for the task appointed thee seems finished.

But he spoke too soon. For only months before his death Voltaire had done something extraordinary. Among his many visitors at the Hôtel de Villette was Benjamin Franklin, who came with his eight-year-old grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache. In the presence of several members of Voltaire’s entourage, including his niece and part-time mistress, Mme. Denis, Franklin asked the great man to bless his grandson. Voltaire turned his skull-like face toward the boy, passed his hand over his head, and spoke three words in English: “God and liberty.” Mme. Denis asked him to switch to French so the others could understand. Voltaire’s brittle skin creased in a toothless grin and he said: “Do forgive me. I surrendered for a moment to the vanity of speaking the language of M. Franklin.” The seed had been sown.

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

G
OETHE’S
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HAKESPEARE

O
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ANUBE
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,
IS A
large temple called Walhalla. It was built in 1807 in the classical Greek style by Prince Ludwig of Bavaria. Inside, along the walls, ranked like soldiers, are marble busts of gods in togas—gods “of the German tongue”: generals and princes, but also Goethe, Herder, Lessing, Leibniz, Bach, Wagner, and, as a polite afterthought, or perhaps by way of an apology, Albert Einstein. I visited Walhalla once. I didn’t find Shakespeare among the gods, which surprised me. For by the time Walhalla was built, Shakespeare had become a German playwright. Before that, he had been worshiped by Germans for almost half a century, as, among other things, a Nordic genius, a revolutionary freedom fighter, a romantic aesthete, a classicist, a bourgeois moralist, and a divine creator of life. But he became a German writer with A. W. Schlegel’s magisterial translations at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was the crowning achievement of the German cult of Shakespeare, known as
Shakespearomanie
.

Schlegel’s work has been hailed as more than a translation. It was a transmutation, a linguistic metamorphosis; out of Shakespeare’s
words, a new, German creation was born, expressing spiritual depths never plumbed before, depths so deep that people didn’t even know they existed. Shakespeare’s spirit had merged, so to speak, with the German
Geist
. To some Germans this proved the superiority of their language. They claimed that Shakespeare’s genius was rediscovered in German, that he really should have been German, indeed that he
was
German.