5 - Voltaire and the myth of England

Summary

'It's a sad state of affairs . . . that while the University of Cambridge produces admirable books every day, astute foreigners regard France as nothing more than the whipped cream of Europe' ('C'est une chose deplorable . . . tandis que l'universitéde Cambridge produit tous les jours des livres admirables, les étrangers habiles ne regardent la France que comme la créme fouettée de l'Europe', D901). Voltaire's appreciation of English intellectual achievements, recorded here in a letter of 1735, serves a typical purpose. English habits and practices are validated chiefly insofar as they offer a contrast with, and reproach to, the French modus vivendi. Voltaire's enthusiasm for England recurrently nourishes and justifies his satirical disaffection with France, a nation, the analogy seems to suggest, given to frivolity ('cream') yet subject also to persecution ('whipped'). But if England provides Voltaire with a useful foil to France, it disconcerts, challenges and illuminates him in more profound and lasting ways. England's own contradictions and idiosyncrasies reveal, or perhaps elicit, different facets of Voltaire's thought.

England had already been deemed an acceptable destination for French thinkers by the time Voltaire disembarked in 1726. He was following in the footsteps of writers such as the Seigneur de Saint-Évremond. A journey across the English Channel was to become practically de rigueur for a self-respecting French thinker in the eighteenth century. Even Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire's faithful adversary, who professed to dislike travel in general and England in particular, would make the journey. But Voltaire's sojourn produced a frisson without precedent: he was, for one thing, one of the first foreigners in history to write and bring to publication a work in the English language.