Difference and globalization

I. The difference in uses

An anthropology of difference

Burning of women in India (Madelslo, Voyages de Perse aux Indes)

In the first edition of the Essai sur les mœurs, the Cramer edition of 1756, we can read in chapter 120, " Du Japon, &c. ", the following reflection on the fundamental difference that shares humanity :

" It is an object worthy of a Philosopher's attention, that this difference between the usages of the East & ours, as great as between our languages. The most polite peoples of these vast lands have nothing of our police¹. Their Arts are not ours. Food, clothing, houses, gardens, laws, worship, decorum, everything differs. Is there anything more opposed to our customs than the way in which the banians trade in Indoustan? The most important deals are concluded without speaking or writing; everything is done by signs. How can so many Eastern customs differ from our own? Nature is not the same in their climes as in our Europe². In southern India, marriageable age is seven or eight. Marriages contracted at this age are common. These children, who become fathers, enjoy the measure of reason that nature grants them in an age when ours is barely developed. " (Essay sur l'histoire generale, & sur les Mœurs & l'Esprit des Nations, depuis Charlemagne jusqu'à nos jours, vol. 3, chap. 120, " Du Japon, &c³ ", p. 201-202)

The philosopher fixes his attention on an object, and this object is not the Man of the moralists of the Grand Siècle, but difference. What becomes essential, what making tableau takes the place of essence, is difference, a difference of uses that Voltaire relates to the difference of languages which, in a way, symptomatizes it. But from where, from what vantage point, can the philosopher fix such globalized attention? The place for such a lookout is technically impossible; only a thought experiment can realize it, i.e., a theoretical fiction, an operation of the mind making up for an unrealizable physical experience.

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On the one hand, then, we have to suppose an impossible observer whose gaze would embrace the entire globe, and simultaneously perceive all its activities or, more precisely, all its human transactions, all its exchanges. On the other hand, in the object, i.e., in these relationships, it's a question of highlighting the difference each time, insofar as this difference comes down to the difference of languages. In other words, it's not a question of absolute heterogeneity; there is indeed somewhere a general linguistics that governs these differences, a higher rationality from which the variety of languages, i.e. the variety of uses, polices and ways of trading, is declined.

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This general linguistics is presupposed by the very device of the thought experiment, by the possibility of a philosopher turning his attention to this difference of usages. The philosopher represents the intelligence of this linguistics, his gaze designating this reason for differences. When difference bursts forth and shocks, it brings us back, in its very singularity, to our similarity through the relationship it establishes: " the way the banians deal in Indoustan " astonishes us, there's nothing more " opposed " to our customs ; but the way the banians deal in Indoustan " astonishes us, there's nothing more " opposed " to our customs . /// This custom, by which the Banians, India's merchant caste, seem radically different from us, incomparably distant, concerns precisely trade, i.e. not only that which organizes the relationships of objects and people in India, but also that by which our continent enters into relationship with them. We make deals in an incredibly exotic and disconcerting way, in a way that bears no relation to our own; but these are deals that we make, including deals that we ourselves are led to make with them. We're outraged to learn that girls are considered nubile, and therefore married, at seven or eight, while boys become fathers at the same age: sex, marriage and filiation are all links that make up the social fabric, in the same way as trade, and even more intimately. The difference is about the link  the spectacle of difference organizes a globalized management of links.

The ontological problem of human nature

Negro climbing a palm tree (Nouvelle relation de l'Afrique occidentale, 1728)

The interplay of usages, the system of fonts, the grammar of relationships rest on no ontology : for Voltaire, there is no universal essence of man, there is no unique human nature : what nature shows and produces in the world is not locked down by a metaphysical hypostasis. The object of the philosopher's attention is not nature. There is no longer any nature. We need to be careful with this term nature, which in the classical language is both physical and metaphysical: nature is, phenomenologically, what we see in Nature, and it is also what, ontologically, defines the nature of things. Voltaire first wrote, in 1756, " Nature is not the same in their climates as in our Europe ", where nature defined the productions of nature and their variation according to climate. But productions involve species, and their nature. The 1756 wording was obviously problematic, as it is corrected in the Kehl edition:

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" Nature, whose background is everywhere the same, has prodigious differences in their climate and ours. "

Nature is both ontologically one and phenomenologically diverse. While the ontological unity of nature is reaffirmed in the relative incidental that is added, the difference in its manifestations as a function of climate is exacerbated and becomes hyperbolic. There is indeed a similarity of nature, but this similarity engages only the individual :

" All these peoples resemble us only by the passions, & by the universal reason which counterbalances the passions, & which imprints this Law in all hearts, ndon't do what you wouldn't want done to you. These are the two characters that nature imbues in so many different races of men, & the two eternal bonds with which she unites them⁴. All the rest is the fruit of the soil of the land, & of costume. Here was the city of Pegu, guarded by crocodiles swimming in ditches full of water. Here was Java, where women stood guard at the King's Palace. " (Ibid., p. 202)

Negro playing the Balafo (New relation of West Africa, 1728)

The Cartesian grammar of the passions, and the rational principles of morality that delimit their permissible perimeter, are universal : this rigorously private perimeter of individual determinations, of invisible motivations, is opposed to the police and exchanges that draw the variegated pictures of different societies. What the world shows, what makes the picture as a world, is the public play of differences, which is at the same time the social system of relationships. In other words, the façade of differences, their horizontal and surface play, becomes the essential philosophical issue. In this polarity of substance and façade, the traditional metaphysical hierarchy that promotes substance against attributes, essence against appearances, being against phenomena, is overturned: Voltaire inaugurates the age of the human sciences, with its networks, its horizontal relationships, its differences. It is in this new globalized horizontality that the social game of relationships, the public space of this game, and the politics that administers this space, can be thought of, starting from trade.

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The system of differences, the general linguistics that governs them, defines, on a global scale, a politics. This policy administers public space  it manages and protects it, guards its strategic locations. Significantly, the two examples given by Voltaire are examples of guarding. The point is to see how the port of Pegou⁵ or the royal palace of Java⁶  are guarded: the manners are picturesque, manifesting the difference in uses, but the issue, always the same, is the preservation of the community, in the same way that the universal moral law, by limiting actions, preserves the territories of singularities.

Voltaire's racism

At the interface of individual territories, where the moral law is exercised, and public territories, whose guarding is guaranteed by political government, Voltaire evokes " so many different races of men " : race is not yet " the fruit of the soil of the earth, & of custom ", but it is already no longer the character of nature, which is the character of universal man. For Voltaire, race is what underpins the interplay of differences; it is the primordial difference. In 1765, when he published a Philosophie de l'histoire that was to become the introduction to the Essai sur les mœurs, Voltaire wrote just after the " Changements dans le globe " a chapter II entitled " Des différentes races d'hommes ". The aim is to establish, at the most fundamental, essential level, the link between the horizontal interplay of differences and a way of thinking about globalization. The physical world is in perpetual " revolution " the word appears four times in chapter I  to these revolutions, or upheavals of nature, corresponds in chapter II " the sensible difference of the species of man which populate the four known parts of our world ". This difference is of nature, and in its description, the idea of a common moral and rational characteristic has disappeared :

" It is only permitted to a blind man to doubt that Whites, Negroes, Albinos, Hottentots, Lapps, Chinese, Americans, are entirely different races.
There is no educated traveler who, passing through Leiden, has not seen the part of the reticulum mucosum⁷ of a Negro dissected by the famous Ruysch. The rest of this membrane was transported by Peter the Great to the rarities cabinet in Petersburg. This /// The membrane is black, and it is this membrane that gives Negroes their inherent blackness, which they lose only in diseases that can tear this tissue, and allow the fat, escaping from its cells, to make white patches under the skin.
Their round eyes, their thick noses, their lips that are always large, their ears that are differently figured, the wool of their heads, the very measure of their intelligence, all set them apart from other species of man. Their round eyes, their blunt noses, their ever-large lips, their differently-figured ears, the wool of their heads, the very measure of their intelligence, put between them and the other species of men prodigious differences. And what shows that they do not owe this difference to their climate, is that Negroes and Negresses, transported to the coldest countries, always produce animals of their species, and that mulattoes are only a mongrel race of a black and a white, or a white and a black⁸. "

Marcello Malpighi's 1665 discovery of reticulum mucosum was the talk of the Enlightenment. Thanks to the then-new use of the microscope, Malpighi had revealed the structure of the skin, its organization into superimposed layers and, within these layers, cellular networks. His discoveries were revolutionary, and to this day in medicine we speak of the layers of Malpighian epithelium that make up the epidermis. Malpighi's mistake was to imagine a reticulum mucosum specific to blacks⁹, containing the black pigment of their skin in the form of a liquid that they alone were capable of secreting, thus founding in kind the racial difference between blacks and whites. Of course, this liquid could never be isolated: after unsuccessfully repeating Malpighi's experiment in Paris in 1702, Alexis Littré concluded that black skin was partly due to climate, partly to the reticulum mucosum, which is taken up by Pierre Barrère in a Dissertation sur la cause physique de la couleur des nègres, de la qualité de leurs cheveux, et de la dégénération de l'un et de l'autre, defended before the Bordeaux Academy and published in 1741. The reticulum mucosum would fuel the racist discourse legitimizing slavery in the XIX^th century¹⁰.

The Negress Carried in a Hammock (Tenture of the New Indies, 6th) - Desportes

Voltaire's speech proclaiming the essential difference of races horrifies us today : from a picture of infinite variety, the statement drifts towards the implicit establishment of a hierarchy, by " the very measure of their intelligence ". Nothing can excuse such insinuations. This is not an isolated instance in Voltaire's corpus. It reappears in the Questions sur l'Encyclopédie¹¹. This is because the phenomenology of differences, which organizes Voltairean thinking on globalization, stumbles over the ontological principle of the universality of human nature, which is above all, in Voltaire's time, a Christian principle, defended by the Church. Voltaire does not believe that all men are descended from Adam and Eve, and the spectacle of the variety of men supports his criticism: " After that, get away with Adam and Eve ", he concludes mischievously.

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He nevertheless remains dependent on the framework /// established since the Renaissance by the Church, which differentiates between Amerindians, whom it recognizes as equal, and Blacks, whose slavery it does not condemn. The list of races that Voltaire announces at the start of his development effectively enables him, in a true spirit of tolerance and a revolutionary concern for cultural decentering, not only to promote the police, customs and mores of all kinds of peoples, but to exalt their reason against our ignorance, stupidity and prejudices. In his novels, which follow the example of his theater, the perfect Zadig is a Babylonian follower of Zoroaster, Cacambo, the most intelligent character in Candide, is a quarter Spaniard, i.e. a three-quarters Amerindian mestizo, and l'Ingénu, a veritable superhero, is half-Breton, half-Huron : none of Voltaire's novel heroes are white Europeans, nor are any of them Negroes. Like the Church, Voltaire excludes blacks from this salutary humanist exercise in reversing points of view, and his article Slaves in the Questions sur l'Encyclopédie is embarrassing, to say the least¹².

II. Sufficient and disparate reason for events

The horizontal description of differences clashes head-on with the theological, vertical account of similarities : God created man in his own image, and from original man proceeds the whole of humanity, grasped as a world. The sequence of causes defines the other, vertical logic, against which the multicolored picture of planetary mores militates: all (earthly) causes can be traced back to a (divine) origin, to what Leibniz calls a "sufficient reason". At the intersection of these two logics, between description and narration, between the logic of morals and the logic of beings, between anthropology and metaphysics, we find the event: the event makes a tableau on a stage, in a site or a territory, and the event takes its place in a chain of events, in a sequence that has its reason. There is a horizontal site and a vertical reason for the event. The new economy of differences that Voltaire promotes immediately confronts the verticality of reasons.

Critique de la raison suffisante : Candide

Thérèse spies Madame C... and Abbé T... in the garden (Thérèse philosophe, London, 1782)

The deconstruction of the verticality of the event and the promotion of its horizontality of scene, site and territory constitute the decisive poetic stakes of Candide, for which the parody of Leibnizian optimism provides the philosophical clothing and alibi. The thesis that we live in the best of all possible worlds constitutes the word of Candide, to which all its events come to be articulated. This powerfully organizing word defines, displays the fadiness of Pangloss's supposedly philosophical galimatias. But it does not constitute the substance of what is philosophically at stake in Candide. What is at stake is the verticality that enables the metaphysician to reduce all events to sufficient reason, i.e. all effects to a single cause, which is God. The principle of sufficient reason forms the basis of Leibnizian metaphysics, the substratum of his theory of possible worlds and of the theodicy it implements: there is a rationality of event, which makes it possible to explain each of them, and to reduce the infinite variety of phenomena to a single, essential origin. It's this verticality of causal chain that Voltaire sets out to attack  the key word of Candide, the intended target, is not /// not the optimism of Pangloss, but more essentially the principle of sufficient reason.

The term appears as early as the first chapter of Candide, and right from the start in carnivalesque form. Cunégonde takes a stroll in the park of Thunder-ten-tronkh's castle and surprises Pangloss in the arms of Paquette, his mother's maid. Pangloss gives her " a lesson in experimental physics ", and we later learn that he's catching the pox in the process :

" As Mademoiselle Cunégonde had a great disposition for the sciences, she observed, without breathing, the repeated experiments she witnessed ; she saw clearly the doctor's sufficient reason, the effects and the causes, and returned all agitated, all pensive, all filled with the desire to be learned, thinking what could be young Candide's sufficient reason, which could also be her own. " (p. 39)

Voltaire parodies a scene from a libertine novel, where the young novice breaks in on the libertine in action and learns by what she sees. The apprenticeship is twofold, since the libertine himself practices sex as a lesson, " a lesson in experimental physics " : the lesson Cunégonde learns from it is a lesson in teaching, the content of which is designated as " la raison suffisante ", and glossed as " les effets et les causes ". Sufficient reason is the word of the stage, the word of the philosopher, and of Leibnizian philosophy. In the discourse, it manifests itself as an indirect teaching (what I've called a teaching of teaching: Cunégonde learns from what she sees Pangloss teach Paquette), but on stage it is the new object Cunégonde discovers, the sex in action of her philosophy teacher. She wonders what young Candide's sex might be like, and whether it might not return to her, be hers, whether she in turn might not be able to enjoy it. The carnivalesque game here consists, through metalepsis, in taking sufficient reason both in the most abstract sense of an organizing principle for all events, and in making the event itself happen through it, immediately before Cunégonde's eyes.

Dorinde shows Merindor her poxed face (L'Astrée, 1733, IV, 4) - Guélard

The term " sufficient reason " returns in chapter IV, when Candide finds Pangloss disfigured and mutilated by the pox. This time, we hear the philosopher speak directly, describing the effects of his illness. But is it really Pangloss who is speaking?

" The Turks, the Chinese, the Siamese, the Japanese, don't know it yet ; but there's reason enough for them to know it in their turn in a few centuries. " (p. 48)

Leibnizian discourse is parasitized by Voltairean irony, which introduces against the shortcut effect of sufficient reason the deployment of diverse peoples in space and contagion in time. Voltaire speaks through Pangloss and against him: the " marvelous progress " of syphilis, which Candide comments on with an ecstatic " voilà qui est admirable ", is one of the most horrible scourges of the modern age. What is said to be marvellous and admirable is neither marvellous nor admirable  here we recognize the markers of irony. But what is more fundamentally at stake in this parasiting of discourse is the conflict between the metaphysical verticality of sufficient reason and the horizontality, in space and time, of effects.

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But /// what exactly is this sufficient reason that would be the key concept of Leibnizian metaphysics ? Curiously, the term is not to be found in La Théodicée, although the entire work is governed by this principle. Moreover, Voltaire had probably not read Leibniz directly, whose philosophy had spread widely in France notably through the Encyclopédie. From 1751 to 1756, before the banning of the Encyclopédie and the interruption of its publication in 1757, " raison suffisante " appears notably in articles by Abbé Yvon (Ame, Ame des bêtes, Appétit, Athéisme, Attribut), but also by D'Alembert (Attraction, Continuité, loi de, et surtout Espace), Formey (Contradiction), Morellet (Fatalité).

Leibniz evokes sufficient reason as early as the Confessio Philosophi :

" I think it can be shown that no thing ever exists that it is not possible (at least to an omniscient mind) to assign sufficient reason why it is rather than not, and why it is such rather than otherwise. Whoever denies this destroys the distinction between being itself and non-being. The thing, whatever it is, will certainly have all the requisites to exist  or, all the requisites to exist taken together are the sufficient reason to exist  therefore everything that exists has a sufficient reason. " (Leibniz, Confessio Philosophi / La Profession de foi du philosophe [1673], text, translation and notes, new revised and expanded edition, Vrin, Paris, 2004, p. 35.)

Nothing exists without reason : of everything that exists, it is possible to render reason. Sufficient reason defines a philosophy of rational responsibility : reason is accountable, of every event it can and must give an account. But, as Jacques Bouveresse points out¹³, Leibniz never says that we, that man in general, is capable of " assigning sufficient reason " from things. This reason can be assigned : but very often only " an omniscient mind ", i.e. God himself, is capable of doing so.

In Chapter V, Voltaire describes the Lisbon catastrophe in some detail, with its first act, the earthquake at sea that causes the storm and the shipwreck of the travelers, and its second act, the tidal wave that destroys the city (" the sea rises bubbling in the harbor ", p. 50). The scene of the city's collapse, treated in the theatrical manner of the earthquake in Indes galantes¹⁴, constitutes the event from which it is then a question of extracting the word, the end word, i.e. the background behind the façade of the show¹⁵ :

" The sailor was saying, whistling and swearing  "There will be something to gain here. - What can be the sufficient reason for this phenomenon?" said Pangloss. - This is the last day of the world!" cried Candide. " (p. 50)

The cynical, brutal sailor who has just drowned the Anabaptist sees the earthquake as an opportunity for enjoyment and profit  he demystifies the dramatic, sensitive picture of the event, tipping it into the trivial brutality of a behind-the-scenes scene, where the only thing that counts is the interest one can derive from it  this is one way of accounting. Pangloss invokes the metaphysical reason for the event, and Voltaire respects Leibniz's system. /// not sufficient reason, which only an omniscient mind could account for  he merely questions it. Finally, Candide prepares for the Apocalypse, which is the third form of "rendering an account", the Christian unveiling of the last end in catastrophe. This triple reaction to the event obeys the logic of the 3F : the sailor reveals the background plan, Pangloss unrolls the fadaise and Candide continues to play on the façade of the world's theater.

Wreck on the way back to Spain (Vita I. Loiolæ, 1622)

Sufficient reason accounts for and engages a metaphysical responsibility of reason in the face of event, it guarantees the rationality of reality ; sufficient reason on the other hand is very often only accessible, knowable by an omniscient mind : this is why it is destined to be postulated rather than enunciated, and thus stands before us as a horizon of explanation, much more than behind us as a cause, present certainly but unknowable a priori ; lastly, sufficient reason determines the event, it is through it that things are rather than they are : through sufficient reason, it is the being of the event that is engaged and guaranteed, and from this circumstantial being the entire divine Being.

In their very parodic play, the reactions Voltaire describes of the sailor, Pangloss and Candide figure these three essential characteristics of sufficient reason :

• the rationality of the event is the money the sailor will be able to make ;

• the unknowability of sufficient reason is recalled by Pangloss's question, ridiculous in this jargonized form, but also able to be read, in an underlying way, as a painful questioning of faith ;

• the question of being and existence manifests itself in Candide's cry, for whom this is the end.

The parody of sufficient reason, or recourse to sufficient reason as a principle, therefore does not simply engage a critique of what is called, a little hastily, Leibnizian optimism. Its parody attacks the very legitimacy of being, and systematically manifests itself in formulations and situations where being is threatened, where death threatens, where the world seems to be coming to an end. In the chapter on heroic butchery, it's the bayonet's work of death on the battlefield: " The bayonet was also reason enough for the death of a few thousand men. " (p. 43) Here, it's the apocalypse of the Lisbon earthquake¹⁶.

The fact and the statement : the two sufficient reasons

Leibniz returned to the question of sufficient reason in the Monadology, clearly articulating what it engages on the metaphysical level (the reason for the existence of things and events) with what it designates on the logical level (in reasoning) :

" 31. Our reasonings are based on two great Principles, celuy de la Contradiction, by virtue of which we judge false that which envelops¹⁷, and vray that which is opposed or contradictory to the false.

32. Et celuy de la Raison suffisante, en vertu duquel nous considerons qu'aucun fait sauroit se trouver vray ou existant, aucune Enontiation veritable, sans qu'il y ait une raison suffisante, pourquoy /// it is so and not otherwise, although these reasons most often cannot be known to us. (Leibniz, Monadology [1714], ed. Laurence Bouquiaux, Gallimard, Tel, 1995, p. 99)

This first definition does not exactly overlap with the previous one : sufficient reason is not considered for what it directly determines in reality, but for what it orders in discourse. More precisely, Leibniz draws a parallel between fact and enunciation, that is, between the way in which events are concatenated and the coherence according to which a demonstration is articulated. Sufficient reason is placed on the same level as the principle of non-contradiction: it determines a mathematical truth (and beyond that, a fictional verisimilitude) far more than it authenticates the data of reality. In fact, the term " existing " that applies to fact no longer applies to enunciation.

On the other hand, the reasons " most often cannot be known to us " : in the chain of causes and effects, Leibniz introduces a clause of unknowability  certain causes exceed the investigative and calculative capacities of the human mind and are accessible only to the omniscient mind of God. In the causal chain, then, there's a game, a mystery, an incomprehensible leap that somehow blurs the evidence, the direct verticality of sufficient reason: we have to calculate the causes, and in this calculation sometimes proceed to the infinite iteration of an operation, to think of a passage to the limit whose succession we can't follow linearly and step by step. Thinking about this logical leap is fundamental to Leibniz : it's notably what enables him to formalize and develop the differential calculus.

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Leibniz therefore distinguishes two kinds of " truths ", corresponding to the two planes of reasoning and fact between which he drew a parallel. The truths of reasoning pose no problem, either because they are simple truths, or because they are a combination of them: the search for reasons will consist in breaking down the statement into a combination of principles, i.e. simple truths. But things get more complicated with truths of fact, because of the infinite variety of reality :

" 36. But sufficient reason must also be found in contingent or factual truths, i.e. in the sequence of things spread by the universe of Creatures, where Resolution into particular reasons could go to limitless detail, because of the immense variety of things in Nature and the infinite division of bodies. There is an infinity of figures and movements, present and past, which enter into the efficient cause of my present writing, and there is an infinity of the little inclinations and dispositions of my soul, present and past, which enter into the final cause.

37. And as all this detail envelops only other contingens anterior or more detailed, each of which still needs a similar Analysis to give a reason for it, we are no further advanced : and it is necessary that the sufficient or final reason be outside the suite or serie of this detail of contingencies, however infinite it may be.

38. And this is how the last reason of things must be in a necessary substance, in which the detail of changes is only eminently, as in the source, and this is what we call God. " (Monadology, op. cit., p. 100)

Truths of fact are not of a different nature from truths of reasoning, but they engage an incomparably, even infinitely greater number of elements. In the causality of facts, reason must take into account a heterogeneous infinity of determinations, i.e., Leibniz is confronted with exactly the same infinite difference on which Voltaire the historian bases his thought of globalization : the global is the passage to the limit of a /// This double infinity, as Leibniz tells us, is only possible if the global is based on a calculation that takes into account an infinite number of elements subject to an infinite number of parameters. In other words, the global can only be thought of from a calculation that takes into account an infinity of elements subject to an infinity of parameters : this double infinity, Leibniz tells us, can only be apprehended " eminently ", that is, from a superior intelligence, placed in overhang and capable of grasping globally what in the minutiae of point-by-point calculation, is lost and dissolved without being able to reach the end.

Only God, then, in the end, fully disposes of sufficient reason, which in turn, retroactively, demonstrates God's existence. Leibniz thus guarantees, through the incalculability of sufficient reason, the metaphysical principle of the unity of being. Sufficient reason is therefore not only "the last reason of things", arriving last upstream from an infinite succession of causes; it is also an argument of last resort to save metaphysics, and with it the verticality of the One, a final lock before the general invasion of differences, before the explosion and triumph of the bigarrures of the diverse. The whole paradox lies in the fact that Leibniz, while maintaining to the end, as a metaphysician, the ultimate unknowability of sufficient reason other than through the omniscient mind of God, creates, as a mathematician, the conditions of possibility of this global and infinite knowledge through the invention of the differential calculus.

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We touch here on the fundamental paradox of difference in its articulation with globalization : the statement of differences poses, or at least predisposes, the evaluation, the taking into account, the calculation of them. The table of differences globalizes them as a world. In Leibniz, faced with " the [infinite] succession of things spread by the universe of Creatures ", metaphysics ultimately affirms the unique originary principle of sufficient reason, and mathematics implements the human, finite, reasonable modalities of its infinite calculation. Voltaire's Essai sur les mœurs proclaims, as " essai ", the end of a universal history that would be carried by a teleological discourse, and insists on the diversity of polices and usages, angrily proclaiming the radical difference of the races that bear them ; at the same time, the Voltairean novel accumulates the disparity of events with pleasure  but at the same time, the difference in mores orders a globalized economy of relationships, and the bric-a-brac of narrative accidents, compulsively recalled, is concatenated into an ever simpler, smaller, faster and more easily enunciated chain. The emerging paradigm of the heterogeneous, the disparate, the hybrid feeds Voltairian thinking on globalization, which is at once an ideology, an economy and a poetics, completely innervated by the Leibnizian calculus it rejects on the surface.

III. The hole and the leap : processes of Voltairian globalization

Lisbon before and after the 1755 earthquake - D. Herrliberger

In Candide, the narrator relayed by his characters insists heavily on the disparate nature of events. In Voltaire's novel, the difference in morals, which occupies Voltaire as historian, is matched by the parochialism in the sequence of events. Circumstantially and superficially, Pangloss' speech parodies Leibnizian optimism in the face of the Europe-wide catastrophe of the Lisbon earthquake, one of the first events relayed by Voltaire's characters. /// the nascent international press. More profoundly, this discourse repeats and relaunches, at every stage of the narrative (at least in the early chapters of Candide) the principle of sufficient reason as a rational principle of explanation of (apparently) inexplicable causalities. Yet causal enchainment is not simply a matter of post-scholastic controversy, which should or could satisfy, or on the contrary indispose this or that philosophical school : from the poetic point of view, i.e. here from the point of view of the making of the novel, causal enchainment is the condition of possibility of the narrative, whose a minima coherence it conditions. When this sequence is attacked, the narrative itself unravels, disintegrates and loses its reader's support.

There is thus a double detachment, of the event from the chain of causes, and of the narrative from verisimilitude. This splitting corresponds to the two Leibnizian categories of truth of fact and truth of enunciation. In both, the principle of sufficient reason comes into play: it is only denounced on the surface. Fundamentally, sufficient reason is capable of accounting for the disparate : the disparate signals in causality an incalculable, and imposes the positing, in front of the phenomenon, of an omniscient mind that thinks it, or in other words operates the logical leap of differential calculus, or again establishes by thought experiment a device from which to take into account the globality of the world, to account for the gobal.

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In the sequence (of facts, of statements) a detachment takes place, not a rupture : the chain unfolds from the façade of the event, from the scene of the world, and folds back, shortens, tangles, knots as nonsense, as an absurd tableau, from which the real points. This is the dynamic of fadaise  fadaise, even if it proceeds from a façade of things, is not reduced to a façade of discourse. Pangloss is not talking about the apparent explanation of things. Quite the opposite, in fact: appearances always work against him. By invoking sufficient reason, Pangloss goes to the heart of the matter, which is to question the causes of the event. But the recourse, precisely because it summons the shortcut of sufficient reason, not only fails to convince but causes scandal.

Difference, disproportion and reversal : the example of Thunder-ten-tronckh Castle

Yet, and this is the whole paradox, the narrative is on Pangloss 's side: the narrative manages events according to the very principle of concatenation of disparates that is the principle of sufficient reason. On the first page of Candide, for example, we read :

" Monsieur le Baron was one of the most powerful Lords of Westphalia, for his Castle had a door & windows. " (p. 37¹⁸)

The cause cloche : there's no obvious connection between the first proposition, which asserts the Baron's power, and the second, which describes his castle in the most summary way. Between this assertion and this description, we are not given an element of reality that would allow us to make the connection. Instead, the disproportion between the assertion of power and the mere mention of a door and windows is brutally apparent. But how are we to understand this disproportion that makes us laugh? It's up to the reader to reduce the disproportion by completing the explanation, that is, to fill in a gap, a lack in the causal chain presented to him.

The château was apparently reduced to a simple house with a door and windows, but such a simple house manifested an unheard-of luxury in a province plunged into misery. By presenting this causality with holes in it as a matter of course, the narrator demonstrates the discrepancy between a Westphalian point of view, for whom a simple door with windows is a natural, and a Westphalian point of view, for whom a simple door with windows is a natural, and a Westphalian point of view. /// windows is a mark of wealth and therefore power, and the French reader's point of view is one of bewilderment, as he imagines a wretched dwelling in place of the château. Voltaire is perhaps alluding to the Window Tax introduced by the English in 1696 and recently increased in 1758: it made doors and windows the principal external sign of wealth, and condemned the less well-off owners to block up their windows, plunging whole districts of London into insalubrity. The mention of windows suggests the small number of windows: the very fact that they are mentioned in the plural is a tour de force of power!

Voltaire doesn't set the action in Westphalia  by chance: it was the Treaty of Westphalia that in 1648 had put an end to Germany's bloodiest and longest-running civil war, the Thirty Years' War. And it was in Westphalia that the Seven Years' War was raging, just as Voltaire was writing : it would conclude in 1762 with the complete destruction of Arnsberg, capital of the Duchy of Westphalia.

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Palace interior with figures conversing near the fountains - J. de Lajoüe

The Baron de Thunder-ten-tronkh's castle thus appears in the narrative via a truncated causality. Voltaire will, directly or indirectly, make further references to the castle in the rest of the story. When the Old Woman tells her story, she proudly declares:

Thunder-ten-tronkh's castle is the only one of its kind in the world.

" I was brought up until I was fourteen in a Palace to which all the Castles of your German Barons would not have served as stables ; & one of my dresses was worth more than all the magnificence of Westphalia. " (chap. XI, p. 64)

The same disproportion is repeated, but this time the causal chain is replaced by the system of differences that orders a global observation of the world. The Old Woman's narrative brings the castle of chapter I into the series of " all the Castles of your German Barons ", and then this series into the stable of the Italian Palace of Pope Urban X's daughter. The comparison contrasts, on the one hand, the magnificence and refinement of Italian architecture and culture  on the other, the crude rusticity of German hovels pompously named castles. But this comparison is at the same time an inclusion : just as the differences in the Essai sur les mœurs concerned commerce, marriage and the whole range of relationships and liaisons, so the difference in castles implies a serialization and the virtual, monstrous construction of a gigogne castle that reverses the relationships of interlocution : " your German barons " designates the barons whom Cunégonde, the Old Woman's mistress, respects and reveres. These foreign, inaccessible barons legitimize Cunégonde's superiority, her position of mastery. But the Old Woman's narrative metonymically brings your Barons into my palace, into the palace stable where, as a little girl and princess, the Old Woman was raised. From the Old Woman's point of view, what is yours and is considered great and respectable by you enters my apanages, in the most humiliating and reduced form.

The Old Woman takes her revenge. Through her narrative, she reverses perspectives and hierarchies. But precisely because this narrative presents itself as one of revenge, the reader reads it as such, without therefore necessarily adopting the Old Woman's point of view. Here again, a game, a floating of meaning, is left to the reader's appreciation  not really a freedom of interpretation, but rather a margin of floating, a /// undecidable and must remain so. The interplay of differences, then, does not simply establish a disproportion between the realities being compared  it insinuates, from this disproportion, a double point of view : more precisely, it discredits local points of view one by one, forcing a hermeneutic leap, a passage to the limit and a leap towards the thought-experience of globalization.

The comparison of castles resurfaces, in attenuated form, at the start of the Eldorado episode, when Candide and his valet Cacambo arrive within sight of a first village. They surprise some rascals, whom they take to be princes, playing shuffleboard¹⁹ with discs of gold and precious stones. Their master calls to them, they throw the pucks, Candide rushes to bring back the pebbles, which the master throws to the ground again.

" Cacambo was as surprised as Candide. At last they approached the first house in the village ; it was built like a European palace. " (chap. XVII, p. 87)

The simple inn at the entrance to the village seems to them " a palace of Europe " : the only palace of Europe mentioned before is the palace where the Old Woman told of being raised. The comparison thus reverses the previous disproportion : the palace of the Princess of Palestrina, into whose stable Thunder-ten-tronckh's castle entered, becomes the equivalent of a very modest inn in a small village on the edge of Eldorado. But here again, the narrative establishes a double point of view: Candide's and Cacambo's surprise and admiration are superimposed on the innkeeper's amused apology: " You've had a bad time here because it's a poor village  but everywhere else you'll be received as you deserve to be. " (p. 88) In comparison, the superior is always liable to be overturned into the inferior in favor of a new comparator. Or as an almost mocking expression, bordering on condescension, of the superiority of a rich people over two poor migrants who can afford the luxury of hospitality? Judgment on the value of the château thus remains undecidable.

In the next chapter, while they are still in Eldorado, Candide, after their conversation with the wise old man, once again evokes the castle of Thunder-ten-tronkh :

" This is quite different from Westphalia & from the Castle of Mr. the Baron : if our friend Pangloss had seen Eldorado, he would no longer have said that the Castle of Thunder-ten-trunkh was the best thing on Earth  it is certain that one must travel. " (chap. XVIII, p. 90)

To hear Candide tell it, the superiority of El Dorado contradicts Pangloss's Leibnizian discourse on the best of all possible worlds. In Leibniz, the best of all possible worlds is, globally speaking, the whole of our world; in Pangloss's Leibnizian parody, this best of all possible worlds has become local, a simple and ridiculous parochial crow²⁰. As a result, it becomes, spatially, horizontally, comparable to other worlds, instead of remaining, by sufficient reason, vertically and ontologically incomparable.

But in this comparison made possible by the phenomenological revolution of differences, judgment can always be turned around :

" Candide kept saying to Cacambo, Il est vrai mon ami, encor une fois, que le Château où je suis né ne vaut pas le pays où nous sommes ; mais enfin Mademoiselle Cunégonde n'y est pas, & vous avez sans doute quelque maîtresse en Europe. " (p. 92)

Here, of course, we understand Voltaire's narrative strategy: he has to find a reason to get his characters out of the house. /// protagonists of Eldorado for the story to move forward. The evocation of Cunégonde can even be seen as a parodic reference to Ulysses' nostalgia for Penelope, as he lives happily ever after with Calypso. But this ultimate reversal, by restoring to Thunder-ten-tronckh's castle its original value, which had been steadily depreciating over the course of the journey, above all makes visible, in the relationship of difference as in the causal chain, the disorganizing opening of a lack, of a steeple, of a flaw. Cunégonde is missing just as, in the reason for the superiority of a door and windows, the circumstances of this superiority were missing from the first page of Candide.

In the difference, and therefore in the comparison, something is missing ; in the enchainment, something of the causality escapes ; and this something has to do with desire.

The chain and the sum : genealogy of the pox

When Candide finds Pangloss disfigured by the pox²¹ in chapter IV, Pangloss explains to Candide the circuitous route the disease took to spread to Paquette, the Baroness's pretty maid, from whom he caught it :

" Paquette had this gift from a very learned Cordelier, who had traced the source ; for he had had it²² from an old Countess, who had received it from a cavalry captain, who owed it to a Marquise, who had it from a Page, who had received it from a Jesuit, who being a novice had had it in a straight line from one of Christopher Columbus's companions. As for me, I won't give it to anyone, because I'm dying" (chap. IV, p. 47)

The comedy of the relative sequence lies in its disproportion : the succession of contagions is both too brief to move and too long not to titillate the reader's exasperation. We are spared nothing, and at the same time we perceive implausible shortcuts at every turn. Of the Cordelier, Pangloss tells us that he " had gone back to the source ", giving us hope of an imminent first cause ; but our expectation is immediately disappointed, as we are only at the beginning of the sequence. From the novice Jesuit, Pangloss goes back " in a straight line " to what we finally hope is the first carrier, but discover is still a satellite, " one of Christopher Columbus's companions ", from whom we are not told where he got it. And how could a succession of two and a half centuries have been made by just seven people, whose age difference could hardly have been, each time, more than thirty-five years...?!

What is certain, however, is that we were then lost in conjecture about the origin of the disease. Charles Musitan, in his Traité de la maladie vénérienne, summarizes the various hypotheses put forward. Historians and physicians, he writes, agree that the disease appeared in 1494, during the siege of Naples by the armies of Charles VIII, King of France²³. The disease appears in the French camp, but where does it come from? Girolamo Fracastoro asks in his Latin poem Syphilis, sive Morbus Gallicus, published in 1526, reprinted several times, translated into Italian and then French in 1753²⁴ ; Musitan translates the first verses :

" Whence came the seeds of this evil unknown for so many centuries, & by what forebears has it spread in our days with such fury throughout Europe, in part of Asia, & even to the Cities of Africa? In Italy, the disease has penetrated through the wars waged by the French, and has taken its name from this nation. /// href="#sdfootnote25sym" id="sdfootnote25anc" name="sdfootnote25anc">²⁵. "

Syphilis fascinates as a disease of globalization. But the network it draws as it spreads can be read in both directions every time, blurring and rendering undecidable the question of origin :

" But it is impossible to unravel whether it was the Franks who besieged Naples, or the Neapolitans who were besieged, or the Spaniards who came to their aid, who first infected the human race with this contagion, or whether they received it from elsewhere ; & this uncertainty led them all to blame each other for this malefice, & to give the disease the name of each of these Nations²⁶. "

Musitan adds, at the end of his chapter, a series of remarks through which the American hypothesis emerges. He begins by rejecting it outright:

" The opinion of the transmission of the verole from the West Indies to Europe, by the Spaniards who had followed Christophle [sic] Columbus to the discovery of the New World, has been received from most Authors, on a very uncertain tradition : the facts they report to support it, being false in their most essential circumstances, & denied by the most authoritative Historians, as we shall see in the sequel²⁷. "

Musitan first summons Antoine d'Herrera²⁸, according to whom Columbus on his return did not land in Naples but in Portugal, was not accompanied by a large troop, and arrived two years before the French siege of Naples. Musitan also refutes, based on Mézeray²⁹, that there was a siege of Naples: the city surrendered almost immediately to Charles VIII. Based on Mézeray, he thus synthesizes the aporias with which this question of the origins of syphilis is confronted :

" Three things can be inferred from this Historian's relation.

1°. That this opinion commonly received among Medecins touching the origin of verole is not quite certain.

2°. Que la maladie épidémique qui regnoit aux Isles de l'Amerique dans le temps que l'en fait la découverte, puoit être differente de la verole, telle que nous la voyons presentement, & qu'elle a été connuë depuis l'Expedition de Naples.

3°. Que l'on n'a peut-être pas plus de sujet d'avancer que les Espagnols ont apporté cette maladie du nouveau Monde en Europe, que de dire qu'ils l'ont porté d'Europe aux Indiens, s'il est vrai sur tout, qu'elle n'ait été connuë y qu'au tems qu'Herrera nous a marqué l'origine de cette maladie [...], which according to him arrived in the year 1503³⁰. "

Voltaire could not have been unaware, if not of the details of these debates, at least of their existence : he was assiduously reading Mézeray for the Essai sur les mœurs and the conjectures of Herrera, Frascator, Musitan on one of modern Europe's most terrifying epidemics were widely circulated³¹. The consensus seems to have been that it was impossible to determine whether the Spaniards had caught syphilis from the Indians, or whether they had brought it to them in America, and if so where it had come from in Europe. The example of syphilis was thus a golden example for testing the doctrine of sufficient reason : it provided a textbook case of the undecidability of causes.

So, when Pangloss, " the great /// man ", confidently describes the origin of the disease, we must beware that it is by no means Voltaire who speaks on his behalf, but that he continues, as in the whole narrative, to caricature the principle of sufficient reason :

" O Pangloss!" cried Candide, "here's a strange genealogy! wasn't it the Devil who was the stock of it? Not at all, replied this great man  it was an indispensable thing in the best of worlds, a necessary ingredient  for if Columbus had not caught, in an Isle of America, that disease which poisons the source of generation, which often even prevents generation, & which is obviously the opposite of nature's great goal, we'd have neither chocolate nor cochineal  it should also be noted that to this day, in our Continent, this disease is peculiar to us, like the controversy³². The Turks, the Indians, the Persians, the Chinese, the Siamese, the Japanese, do not yet know it ;; but there is sufficient reason for them to know it in their turn in a few centuries. " (p. 47-48)

Facing Master Pangloss, the pupil Candide, caricaturing the religious prejudices of the time, is astonished by a " strange genealogy " whose origin can only be the Devil. The point of view of popular Christianity, which doesn't bother with a ready-made diabolical origin, reminds us that the opposite, rational, philosophical, scientific point of view should be that of... Voltaire! But Voltaire is attacking the principle of genealogical linkage, wherever it comes from, and he shows its absurdity in the two opposing points of view. What he's aiming at is the transcendent verticality of causality : to point to the Devil or to point to Christopher Columbus as the origin is to produce two explanations of causes whose shortcuts are dismissed back to back as equally ridiculous.

What's ridiculous is the shortcut, of which Pangloss delivers the most truculent expression when he explains that thanks to syphilis, we have chocolate and cochineal³³. As in the presentation of Thunder-ten-tronckh's castle in the first chapter of Candide, the causality here is perforated : for the castle, we couldn't see the direct connection between the mention of a door and windows and the baron's power  here in the same way, the link from the pox to the chocolate has to be supplied by the reader. And it's of the same order  what's missing, what remains informal, are the circumstances, the history, the economy, the real.

The idea put forward half-heartedly by Pangloss, and in a form so shortened as to become ridiculous, is that the pox is a collateral effect of the colonization of the New World, from which Europe derived the greatest commercial benefits. Chocolate and cochineal are two examples, two emblematic objects of the new luxury economy that developed as a result of trade with the West Indies: new tastes and flavors on the one hand, new dyeing techniques on the other, contributed to the birth of the new industrial Europe. Significantly, Voltaire does not refer to the importation of American gold, which brought immediate wealth to Spain but ruined its economy in the long term, but to the chocolate and cochineal of Dutch traders, which made the fortune of the United Provinces.

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As a result, the shortcut in the causal chain, which is supposed to make the vertical efficacy of sufficient reason and its metaphysical principle sensible, produces a completely different effect at the same time : in contrast to the first paragraph, devoted to the chain of events (" l'avait euue de ", " l'avait reçue de ", " la devait à ", " la tenait de ", l'avait reçue de "...), the following paragraph takes as its overall object " le meilleur des mondes ", /// that is, from a simple " island of America ", " our continent " and, from there, " Turks, Indians, Persians, Chinese, Siamese, Japanese ". Epidemics, like trade, spread according to a similar process of globalization³⁴. Dissemination is the horizontal principle of articulation between difference and globalization. The pox " poisons the source of generation ", and often even " prevents generation ", i.e. the vertical line of succession of generations : we can see here how the two principles, vertical and horizontal, oppose and even fight each other.

IV. Towards a visual device

From sum to device

Candide kills the Jew in love with Cunegonde (Voltaire, Kehl t44, 1785)

In chapter VIII, when Cunégonde tells her story, her narrative appears shot through with the same tension between vertical and horizontal, paradigmatic and syntagmatic extension :

" Agitated, distraught, sometimes out of myself, & sometimes ready to die of weakness, my head was filled with the massacre of my father, my mother, my brother, the insolence of my ugly Bulgarian soldier, the stab wound he gave me, my servitude, my profession as a cook, my Bulgarian Captain, my vile Don Issachar, my abominable Inquisitor, the hanging of Doctor Pangloss, that great misereré in faux-bourdon during which you were spanked, & especially the kiss I gave you behind a screen, the day I saw you for the last time. " (p. 59)

After resuming " the thread of her story " (p. 57), Cunégonde has arrived here almost at its end, so that this long sentence is essentially a recapitulation of events : there is a thread and there is a sum, that is, two contradictory logics.

The enumeration of events takes place through a succession of agent complements, all of which depend on the past participle " fulfilled ". For the sense, these complements synthetically retrace the sequence of events, and thus follow each other in time : Cunégonde first saw her family massacred, then raped, then stabbed, then enslaved as a cook, then as a courtesan to Issachar, then divided between the Jew and the Inquisitor  finally she saw the auto-da-fé. But this succession for meaning contradicts the syntactic articulation of all complements to the single participle " remplie " : syntactically, all complements constitute equivalent paradigms, and occupy the same grammatical function, i.e. they have the same logical status from the point of view of sentence construction.

Voltaire's stylistic device here is the extension of paradigm into syntagm  he blocks the syntactic advancement of the sentence, but still develops the progression from event to event through the play of paradigm variation and declension. Paradigm difference takes the place of syntagmatic concatenation, with the interplay of differences making up for the lack of concatenation.

Or the participle chosen to trigger the extension of the paradigm in /// syntagm is full of meaning : " j'avais la tête remplie " implies that all the events that follow will accumulate in Cunégonde's head, i.e. that a global vision of the totality of events is constituted in her head, that the interplay of differences is globalized into a vision of which this recapitulation sets up the device.

Cunégonde concludes her list with a final event that doesn't follow all the others, but on the contrary precedes them and in a way constitutes their origin : it's the kiss given to Candide behind the screen and surprised by the baron, in chapter I, i.e. the trigger for the whole narrative. " And especially of the kiss " : the kiss sums up the events it preceded. Yet it did not cause these events : it is certainly not, sub specie æternitatis, the sufficient reason for the war between the Avars and the Bulgars, for the massacres and rapes, for Cunégonde's servitude. But for Cunégonde, in her filled head, it's this kiss that gives meaning to everything else and constitutes her story, her life. The kiss visually globalizes the discursive sequence. We then move from a causality with holes to a global vision, the reason for which lies in the story's thought experience, in Cunégonde's attention, in the way she looks at events, and thus makes them her own.

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The kissing scene behind the screen becomes the visual product of the hyper-concatenation of disparate events delivered by the narrative. It's a kiss behind : Cunégonde projects herself through the narrative onto the other side of the screen, into the gaze of the Baron her father, who has surprised her behind the screen. She establishes a screen device : between the baron's gaze and the sight of the kiss is interposed the screen of the folding screen : écran, in eighteenth-century language, incidentally, also means paravent.

In chapter X, as Candide, Cunégonde and the Old Woman, fleeing the Portuguese inquisition, have embarked in Cadiz for Buenos-Aires, the conversation falls on comparing each other's misfortunes. La Vieille suggests that her misfortunes have been greater than those of her mistress, much to the latter's scandal :

" Alas! she said to him, my maid, unless you have been raped by two Bulgarians, received two stab wounds in the stomach, had two of your castles demolished, had the throats of two mothers & two fathers, and seen two of your Lovers whipped in an Auto-da-fè, I don't see that you can prevail over me; add that I was born a Baroness with sixty and twelve quarters, and that I used to be a cook. Mademoiselle," replied the old lady, "you don't know what I was born with  & if I showed you my behind, you wouldn't talk the way you do, & you'd suspend your judgment. " (p. 63)

On the surface, Cunégonde repeats the same recapitulation process. This time, it's circumstantial subordinate propositions of concession, all related to the opening " unless ", that play the role of the agent complements of chapter VIII. The disparate effect of events is accentuated, as they are no longer stated in chronological order: the slaughtered parents, who initiated the chain in chapter VIII, arrive here in 4th ^{position. But above all, Cunégonde has multiplied everything by two: it's not her story, but the delirious proliferation of a doubled story that we're now comparing her story to that of the Old Woman. In other words, /// the horizontal principle of difference and dissemination has become a little more generalized.}

Finally, propositions depend on a " unless ", which therefore orders them according to a subtraction, whereas in Chapter VIII complements depended on a " filled with ", which set up an addition. The generalization of difference is subtractive. In the dialogue that begins between Cunégonde and the Old Woman, Cunégonde insists on the disproportion between her seventy-two quarters of nobility and the humiliation of having served as a cook, to which the Old Woman responds with this initially comically incomprehensible word : " you don't know what my birth is ; & if I showed you my bottom, you wouldn't talk the way you do, & you'd suspend your judgment ". " You don't know what my birth is " plays to the seventy-two quarters, and indeed we'll learn that the Old Lady is the daughter of a pope and an Italian princess of the highest lineage³⁵. As for the butt of the Old, it alludes to the Russian siege of the Turkish fortress of Azov³⁶, during which the female prisoners, including the narrator, each had a buttock cut off, thanks to the intervention of a pious imam, who persuaded the janissaries to make this compromise so as not to starve to death while sparing the lives of their captives. The Old Woman thus counters a disproportion (Cunégonde is a baroness and a cook) with a greater disproportion (born Princess, she is mutilated by a buttock). The dialogue thus establishes a difference, a disproportion between two disproportions.

These disproportions themselves call for a term-by-term comparison : Cunégonde is a baroness, but the Old Woman is a princess ; Cunégonde is a cook, but the Old Woman has had a buttock cooked. Voltaire does it on purpose  Cunégonde, raped, forced mistress of a Jew and an Inquisitor, has known worse than being a cook  Voltaire chooses to mention the kitchen for its metonymic link with the buttock  on the imaginary level, the comparison is an inclusion, the disproportion a devouring. Her buttocks on display, says the Old Woman, would cut short Cunégonde's speech of superiority; it would stop her jesting and suspend her judgment. The backside shown would make silence and tableau : but the backside cannot be shown, not only for reasons of modesty, but because what must be shown is lacking, is spectacular precisely because it is lacking.

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The word derrière, sent by the Old Woman against Cunégonde's life story, which it disparages in retrospect, also echoes what concluded the recapitulation of that story in chapter VII, the " kiss I had given you derrière a screen " : in both cases, the derrière acts as a screen, revealing a painting and concealing it, suggesting a scene and barring it from view. At the end of the globalization process initiated by the interplay of differences, the disparate nature of events and their concatenation in the narrative, their dissemination and comparison, a visual device asserts itself and becomes clearer, based here in Chapter X on the face-to-face meeting of the two women, each sizing up the other.

" If I showed you my bottom, you wouldn't talk the way you do " : if I showed you issues a challenge, ensnares Cunégonde's gaze and, through it, that of the reader. Si je vous montrais incites one to want to look, triggers a desire to see, opens the trap of the gaze  immediately after comes the second trigger of the trap, you wouldn't talk the way you do, which thanks to the amazement created cuts off speech, imposes silence, raises the screen and installs the bankruptcy of the signifier with the image of the cut buttock.

Voltaire didn't completely invent this story. It has nothing to do with the siege of the /// Azov fortress by the armies of Peter the Great : he found it in a letter from St. Jerome to Jovinian that Simon Pelloutier quotes in his Histoire des Celtes, a reading Voltaire no doubt makes to feed his Essai sur les mœurs :

" St. Jerome teaches us to the truth, that having had occasion in his youth, to make a journey in the Gauls, he had seen there Scots who eat human flesh. In the forests, he says, they find whole herds of pigs and other livestock, but they prefer to cut off the buttocks of shepherds and the udders of women. These are for them the most delicious of all dishes³⁷. "

Pelloutier expresses his greatest doubts about the authenticity of the facts. But Voltaire takes great pleasure in peddling the anecdote, which we find in the continuation of the article Anthropophage for the Questions on the Encyclopédie (1770³⁸) and in Un chrétien contre six Juifs (1776³⁹). The Old Woman's story operates, in relation to Saint Jerome's account, condensation (the Old Woman's buttock for " the buttocks of shepherds, & the mammils of women ") and displacement (from " the buttocks of shepherds ", reformulated by Voltaire into " the buttocks of young boys ", to a woman's buttock that has become sexually repulsive).

The screen of the visual device that comes into being thanks to the tilting effected by the process of difference and globalization could well be covering a primitive scene concealed by the cross-dressing of the Saint Jerome anecdote : is there here the unrecognizable memory of a homosexual attack? and its articulation to a fantasy of annal devouring⁴⁰? Should we link this scene to the episode of the bâtonnade of the Chevalier de Rohan, in which Voltaire found himself spanked? Be that as it may, a device is put in place that articulates a spatial arrangement (a face-to-face encounter and the interposition of a screen), the scopic abjection of an encounter (a horrifying vision, an attack) and the symbolic deployment of a new economy (a thought of globalization, the globalized management of a system of exchanges).

The Negro of Surinam

The concatenation of events in a life story turning to a list of contaminations (Pangloss's pox), or transactions (the Old Woman sold, then Cacambo and Cunégonde sold⁴¹), or simply of places (the inns where the Old Woman worked, then the cities where Candide looked for Cunégonde⁴²) prepares a double devaluation of the discourse, both as metaphysical discourse and as fictional narrative : the chain of events turns into nonsense. At the same time, the very principle of Leibniz, at work in the sufficient reason apparently castigated in the person of Pangloss, is at work: the infinite iteration of the sequence, the passage to the limit of the addition of differences, brings about the shift towards globalized vision, i.e. both towards a way of thinking about globalization and towards the implementation of a visual device capable of accommodating it. This device takes the form of the (mis)encounter.

The narrative, in Candide, is punctuated by encounters or reunions : Candide's reunion with Pangloss disfigured by the pox at the end of chapter III (p. 45-46), with Cunégonde who has become a courtesan in chapter VII (p. 55-56), with Cunégonde's brother at the Jesuits' in Paraguay in chapter XIV (p. 77), with Paquette and frère Giroflée in chapter XXIV (p. 116)  with Cacambo in chapter XXVI (p. /// 125), with Pangloss and the Baron's brother turned galley slaves in chapter XXVII (p. 130-131), with disfigured Cunégonde and the Old Woman in chapter XXIX (p. 135). The reunion scene, in Candide, produces the visual effect of difference : it confronts Candide each time with the other face, rendered unrecognizable by the vicissitudes of the event ; it crystallizes in the face-to-face the work of dissemination (the other has been lost in the world), of alteration (the hazard of the event has disfigured him), the play and weight of a globalized system of transactions (this hazard has been commanded or overtaken by a transaction, first sexual, then commercial).

Aside from these recognition scenes, encounter scenes are quite rare in Candide : the Anabaptist Jacques (III, 45), the Old Woman (VI, 54), Cacambo (XIV, 74), Martin (XIX, 98), are introduced into the narrative without an encounter scene. As for episodic scenes, such as that of the women pursued by the monkeys (XVI, 80), that of Vanderdendur's ship sunk by a pirate (XX, 100) or that of the admiral shot in Portsmouth (XXIII, 114), these are scenes seen, tableaux without encounter, without direct interaction with the story's protagonists. Finally, episodic characters such as the old man from Eldorado (XVIII, 89), the abbé Périgourdin (XXII, 105) or the seigneur Pococuranté (XXV, 119-120) are introduced to give this or that speech, or to show this or that place, without their encounter in itself being dramatized.

The encounter with the Surinamese Negro thus occupies a very special place in the overall economy of the story. It is not treated as an episodic encounter, but adopts the model of recognition scenes. It is first portrayed as a horror of disfigurement, before being brought back to the familiarity of the community through dialogue. Cacambo and Candide have just left Eldorado and are heading for the coast, to re-embark in Europe. They approach a town that Cacambo " suspects to be Surinam, belonging to the Dutch ". Surinam is in fact the name of the Dutch colony, then administered by the Amsterdam-based West India Company : it was in Surinam that this company then made most of its sales. The country is erroneously named Surina in Trévoux's Dictionary. There is an article Surinam or Suriname in the Encyclopédie (XV, 689b, 1765), which explains that it was a river that gave the country its name. Surinam's main city is Paramaribo, a trading post founded in 1650, whose name is unknown to both Trévoux and the Encyclopédie. Strictly speaking, there never was a city of Surinam, and Voltaire's Surinam is a historical approximation. For the 18th-century reader, the name evokes only a vague connection with trade in the Americas.

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Or Voltaire never administers places at random. During Candide's escape from Lisbon to Cadiz, he precisely established, on the map he had in his possession, the towns through which the fugitives pass⁴³. There's no reason why he should have done otherwise here. Several maps had been drawn up in the early 17th^e century /// locating Eldorado on the Guiana Plateau in northern Brazil, on the shores of a legendary Lake Parimé⁴⁴. Based on these maps, it was logical for Candide to return to Europe via one of the coastal Guiana colonies. However, while Cacambo declares at the end of chapter XVIII " Marchons vers la Cayenne ", i.e. to the east, it is to Surinam in the north that Voltaire finally brings his travelers. Voltaire thus announces French Guiana before leading his characters to Dutch Guiana, which undoubtedly acts as a screen for the virulent satire of the effects of slavery he indulges in here, effects that concern French territories, people and economic interests alike :

" As they approached the City, they came across a Negro lying on the ground, with only half his garment left, that is, a pair of blue canvas shorts  this poor man was missing his left leg and right hand. My God!" said Candide in Dutch, "what are you doing here, my friend, in the horrible state I see you in? I'm waiting for my master Monsieur Vanderdendur⁴⁵ the famous merchant, replied the Negro. Was it Mr. Vanderdendur," said Candide, "who treated you like this? Yes, sir," said the Negro, "it's customary. We're given a pair of canvas shorts for clothing twice a year. When we work in the sugar mills, and the millstone catches our finger, they cut off our hand: when we want to run away, they cut off our leg: I've found myself in both cases. This is the price you pay for eating sugar in Europe" (chap. XIX, p. 94-95)

Candide addresses the negro " in Dutch " (when and where did he learn this language ?), the negro's owner is a Dutchman, Mr. Vanderdendur : Voltaire insists heavily on the fact that we are in Dutch territory. He can criticize, it has nothing to do with France! But Cayenne, he reminds us, is just a stone's throw away, and Cayenne is France. As for Holland, Voltaire evoked this country in chapter III  it was in Holland that Candide found refuge after the heroic slaughter  indeed, he had heard " that everyone was rich in that country, and that they were Christians " (p. 44). Surinam will therefore present the other side of the Dutch coin, on which this wealth and Christian good conscience are based.

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The Negro Candide and Cacambo meet is disfigured, as Pangloss was disfigured in chapter III, and as Cunégonde will be in chapter XXIX. The Negro's body has been mutilated, as the Old Woman reveals she has been mutilated in chapter XII, and as Cunégonde's brother is disembowelled in chapter XV. These comparisons in no way minimize the suffering the negro has endured : on the contrary, they integrate this suffering into Candide's human community, which is a community of differences and mutilations. Through his mutilations, in the paradoxical universe of Candide, the negro becomes part of the family.

In fact, it's not the mutilated body but the garment cut in half that first strikes Candide and Cacambo. The first visual effect is that of the garment. Half the garment is missing, and the blue canvas surface is incomplete. Voltaire had very poor eyesight⁴⁶, and here he describes the emergence of the image for the myopic. He also places the lack at the origin: from the lack of fabric we move on to the missing leg and hand, from which we move on to the missing /// is missing from the law that organizes it, from this law, to the establishment of the disproportion that operates the leap of globalization by the formula "  it's at this price that you eat sugar in Europe ".

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The visual priming that defines this sequence as a scene doesn't prevent the text from following the same process of holey concatenation and passage to the limit that characterizes Voltairian writing and thinking about difference and globalization. But the hole is no longer logical  it is reclaimed by the scenic device, it becomes what is immediately manifested, visually, in the encounter.

The power of this scene lies in the tranquility with which, in a tone of obviousness and without any manifestation of revolt, the negro from Surinam explains to Candide the reason for his two mutilations. This reason is once again a sufficient reason, and as such perfectly rational : a rationality can be radically immoral ; if we actually cut off the hand of blacks whose finger had been caught by the millstone grinding sugar cane, it was to avoid gangrene ; and if we cut off the leg of recidivist runaways (very numerous on the edge of an unguardable equatorial forest⁴⁷), it was indeed a rational and effective way of preventing further escape.

So it's not about how Mr. Vanderdendur " treated " his slave, as Candide suggests. This matter is not personal, is not left to the free moral appreciation of a treatment. What is at issue is the logic of treatment, of which the Code Noir⁴⁸ is the necessary consequence, and the inevitable application. Candide addressed the negro as a person : "  t'a traité " ; but the latter responds to him as a people, or a population subject to a certain regime of treatment : " on nous donne ", " nous tavaillons ", " nous attrape ", " on nous coupe "...

Candide's word, " Is it Mr. Vanderdendur who has treated you thus? " makes syllepsis, it carries within it, behind the treatment, the trade, behind the moral problem of implementation, the economic logic of the colonial system that initiated political globalization. The Negro replies " yes " to Candide, but on a misunderstanding : he doesn't reproach Mr. Vanderdendur for having mistreated him  he explains to Candide that his master treated him according to the rules instituted within the framework of the Negro trade. " C'est l'usage⁴⁹ " takes up " traité ", but changes the meaning. Finally, at the end of the explanation, comes the formula " c'est à ce prix que vous mangez du sucre en Europe ", where this time it's the word prix that sylleps. In the negro's speech, " c'est à ce prix " means that it's thanks to this usage, thanks to these rules that frame the treatment of slaves, that cane sugar can be produced in America and reach us in Europe. But the word price at the same time points to the economic principle of reason developed by the negro : it's not a matter of treatment, it's a matter of price. ; slavery makes it possible to lower prices.

The scene thus took us from the façade, the Negro's blue garment, to the background, the price of sugar, following the development of the fadaise, which rationally explains (according to an ignoble rationality, it must be remembered) why the Negro has been mutilated. The first mutilation is collateral damage to economic activity; the second prevents further escape, and is therefore a police measure. There is no question in either case of /// neither fault nor punishment  they are sent one and the other back to back : from the point of view of the body, they are, equally, two mutilations.

The condemnation of the treatment of slaves therefore lies entirely in the way Candide and Cacambo look at the Negro and what he says. There are no words for it  it's taken care of by the stage device alone, by the face-to-face (bad) encounter. The word of the Surinamese negro, his line, " that's the price you pay to eat sugar in Europe " not only points to the fundamentally economic spring of the abomination  it brings it down to something we eat. Symbolically and by concatenation, when we eat sugar, we eat the body of the negro: to the crunched sugar corresponds the mutilated body. In the circulation of discourse, the lack deferred from stage to stage thus makes us anthropophagi, and links this scene to that of the Old Woman's severed buttock, where the same primitive scene of abomination is at work.

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This correspondence is very important, as it identifies Voltaire himself with the mutilated negro. We have seen to what racist remarks, in the very name of an ideology of generalized difference, Voltaire could be driven. Voltairean tolerance and commitment to justice can only be achieved through the experience of radical difference. The double syllepsis, first of traité and then of prix, symptomizes the flaw in the interlocution : the white European from Westphalia, a disciple of Leibniz via Pangloss, can't understand what the negro from Surinam has to say to him, what's more in Dutch  they understand each other, agree only through this double syllepsis, i.e. a double misunderstanding. Syllepsis precipitates the ironic line and, in irony, brings into play a latitude of meaning that allows Voltaire not to pronounce completely. The discourse of the Negro of Surinam continues as follows:

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" However, when my mother sold me ten écus patagons on the coast of Guinea, she said to me, My dear child, bless our Fetishes, adore them always, they will make you live happily  you have the honor of being a slave of our Lords the Whites, & you are thereby making the fortune of your father & of your mother. Alas, I don't know if I made their fortune, but they didn't make mine. Dogs, monkeys and parrots are a thousand times less unfortunate than we are: the Dutch Fetishes who converted me tell me every Sunday that we are all children of Adam, black and white. I'm no genealogist, but if these preachers are right, we're all first cousins. But you'll have to admit that you can't use it against your parents in a more horrible way" (p. 95)

While in its first phase, the speech of the Surinamese Negro rendered reason according to the logic of the Code Noir and the colonial economy, in other words by borrowing the words and manners of the white planters, in this second phase, speech becomes subjective and Africanized  an " je " replaces the " nous ", fetishes and the exotic bestiary of monkeys and parrots appear. The mutilation had turned the Surinam negro into a Candide-like figure; this second stage of his discourse brings him back to an irreducible difference.

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On the substance, the accusation shifts. At first, custom was blamed, if only indirectly through Candide's indignant silence  now it's the mother's naivety or inconsistency that is pointed out  how could she sell her son for ten patagons⁵⁰? Basically, the mother is the culprit. If the ten écus patagons he mentions are indeed the silver thalers with Burgundian crosses minted in 1616 by the archdukes Albert and Isabelle, nicknamed patagons and equivalent in value to a French ecu, the mother has obtained a handsome sum: commercially, she has made, she thought she had made, a good sale. /// affaire  there's nothing to say about this honest transaction (we're talking here, of course, from the ignoble point of view of the slave trader, in the logic of the slave trade). If, on the other hand, we understand the term "patagons" in the derivative sense it has come to have, as " [bis]horny and badly made " currency, therefore worthless, the buyer has moreover cheated the mother out of a derisory sum.

Commentators generally interpret the text in this second sense, which somehow clears the mother and leads to the episode being interpreted as Voltaire's general condemnation of slavery. The first meaning, however, is the most plausible: coins known as patacòn or pataca, coins of little value distinct from the Patagonian ecu of 1616, appeared in America and the Far East in the XIX^e or even XX^e century, well after Voltaire. In Voltaire's time, a Patagonian ecu was a silver coin used for international trade transactions: its value tended to appreciate as the metal became scarce. In the 18th century, an ecu was worth around six livres ; according to a passage in the Essai sur les mœurs that Voltaire probably wrote just after Candide, a " beau nègre " traded at fifty livres⁵¹ : the Surinam negro was sold above the market price.

In other words, the Surinam negro is perfectly aware that by selling him his mother was securing a good nest egg. This explains his bitter exclamation : " Hélas, je ne sçai pas si j'ai fait leur fortune, mais ils n'ont pas fait la mienne. " Voltaire here suggests that Africans are responsible for their slavery, because nothing forces them to sell their children. He has just published, in the Essai sur les mœurs, the following remark along the same lines :

" On the contrary, in all of Asia, there are no slaves other than those bought or taken in war : none are bought in Christian Europe  prisoners of war are not reduced to servitude⁵². Among Asians there is only domestic servitude, among Christians only civil servitude. The Polish peasant is a serf on the land, not a slave in his Lord's house. We only buy domestic slaves from Negroes. We are reproached for this trade  a people that trades in its children is even more reprehensible than the buyer  this trade demonstrates our superiority  he who gives himself a master was born to have one. " (Essay sur l'histoire générale..., Genève, Cramer, 1757, tome 7, chap. CCXI, " Résumé de cette histoire ", p. 26 ; Essai sur les mœurs, ed. Pomeau, op. cit., t. 2, chap. CXCVII, p. 805)

Let's try to suspend our indignation to understand the movement of Voltaire's thought. First of all, it's a movement of globalization : starting from the differences in slavery practices across the globe, it's a matter of thinking globally about slavery, which breaks down into different modes, different practices, which Voltaire begins by not ranking in order of importance. The juxtaposition of practices reveals inconsistencies, absurdities, what I've called the hole in the chains : why do we only buy domestic slaves from negroes ?

At this point in the discourse arises the reproach : " On nous reproche ce commerce ", not this practice but this trade, not the principle of slavery but the economic transaction. And here Voltaire, caught up in the " nous " he has installed, defends himself and blames the victims. Immediately, emerging from the indistinguishability of " on " and " il y a ", which describes a picture of varia, this " nous " re-establishes a hierarchy, and the most ignoble one at that : the long, embarrassed note from the Kehl editors in 1785 tries in vain to disguise the meaning here, which is indeed to clear the slave traders. The outrageous formula at the end, the word, the line that synthesizes the thought here, " celui qui se donne un maître était né pour en avoir ", by its very outrageousness, marks Voltaire's unease.

This is much more than a mood swing. The commercial transaction is the culmination of horizontal thinking about differences, /// which, from the declension of varieties, disparities and disproportions, establishes the measure of differences and creates links between peoples, passages between worlds, equalities between goods and the universality of transactions. At the heart of this generalized circulation, the slave trade emerges abruptly, not as a marginal peculiarity, as a special territory deserving of an exceptional regime, but as the very heart of the colonial economy, which is, in Voltaire's time, the new economy of globalization. The transaction establishes not equality, fixed by price, but radical superiority, established by the relationship between master and slave, and masked by the alleged moral superiority of the people who do not traffic in their children over those who do. There is this ignominy in the text, which Voltaire wrote as early as 1757, and which he continued from edition to edition right up to the posthumous Kehl edition.

But condemning it as ignominy does nothing to change the fundamental contradiction revealed here in the thinking of globalization, of which Voltaire is one of the pioneers : the horizontality of the relations of difference it disseminates clashes with the verticality of its original principle, even when this principle shifts from Leibnizian sufficient reason to the slave trade as the general spring of the globalized colonial economy. The Surinamese Negro episode should be read as an attempt to resolve this contradiction. Starting from the commercial transaction, the discourse of the Surinam negro, in its final development, re-establishes an equivalence of morals despite the relationship of domination introduced by slavery: the fetishes of Guinea are matched by the Dutch fetishes, which reduce Christianity to idolatry like any other, while the discourse of the fetishes, the Christian fadaise, reminds us that " we are all children of Adam ".

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This comment, reported by the Surinam negro, in no way expresses Voltaire's deeper thinking, and in no way reintroduces, at the end of the sequence, a Voltairean credo humanist. This should be seen in relation to the development on the reticulum mucosum in the Ignorance article of the Questions sur l'Encyclopédie : " Après cela, tirez-vous d'affaire comme vous pourrez avec Adam et Eve. " Voltaire, in the mouth of the Negro from Surinam, parodically stylizes the hypocritical discourse of the Church⁵³, which proclaims the gospel message of equality while endorsing slavery  he does so not to indict slavery, but to indict the gospel message of equality.

It's in the last sentence, when the Negro from Surinam takes his interlocutors as witnesses, that Voltaire speaks on his own behalf : " Or vous m'avoüerez qu'on ne peut en user avec ses parents d'une maniére plus horrible. " It's important to understand what is being said here  " with one's parents " means with us Negroes, who have been converted to Christianity on the grounds that in this religion we are all related. "His " refers to " on ", who is the invisible, impersonal agent of the trade, and at the same time the subject of Christian discourse. What is condemned here is not directly the " horrible way " (slavery), but the contradiction between evangelical comedy and plantation reality, between facade and substance.

Nor does the Surinamese Negro ever directly accuse his interlocutors (who are, incidentally, a German and a three-quarterquarter Amerindian, total strangers to the slave trade) : " on " is neither the " vous " of the interlocution, nor the " nous " of the Essai sur les mœurs (" On nous reproche ce commerce "), nor even /// specifically the master of the Surinam negro, M. Vanderdendur. He points to a vague collusion, of preachers and planters, with whom it is easier, for Voltaire, to disassociate.

Conclusion

To conclude, we do not find, in the episode of the Surinam negro, a radical condemnation of slavery, which Voltaire was not ready to pronounce, as is shown by the confrontation of this novel scene with texts from the Essai sur les mœurs, the Questions sur l'Encyclopédie and Un chrétien contre six Juifs, which deal with the same issue. This embarrassment must be seen in relation to that of the Encyclopédie, whose long article Slavery by the Chevalier de Jaucourt (1755) carries a firm, reiterated and unappealable condemnation, while the article Negroes by Le Romain (1765) justifies and even idealizes slavery in the West Indies.

Does this, however, minimize the power of indignation and the political scope of what is denounced here by Voltaire ? Not at all, in our view : if the slave trade is not denounced, the treatment inflicted on slaves, exposed here in all its horror and indignity, scandalizes the patriarch of Ferney. This scandal is not just moral, it's political  it radically contradicts the Christian proselytizing discourse of equality, which endorses and accompanies colonial expansion, with the radical inequality of conditions instituted by a slave society.

Voltaire goes as far as this contradiction, but doesn't go so far as to call inequality into question, because his thinking is a thinking of differences. This is both his strength and his weakness. Through the generalized implementation (poetic and political) of a logic of differences, he moves on to globalization, he thinks globalization : the aesthetics of enumeration, of the sum, the extension of the paradigm into syntagm, the shift from fadaise to the visual device of the encounter are the poetic means of this passage  the articulation of worlds, the interplay of transactions, the economic principle of this interplay, what we would today call its liberalism, are ordered into thought and political system.

For all that, Voltaire is not the apostle of this system, of this new economy whose logic and contours his entire work outlines. He constantly perceives and denounces its stumbling block : stumbling block against the principle of sufficient reason, which by justifying differences re-establishes the ontological verticality of the Christian providential God  stumbling block against slavery which, by relying on an essential difference of races and on a radical liberalism of transactions, legitimizes the most scandalous and inhuman of institutions.

There are many other stumbling blocks in the dissemination of differences ordered by the new global economy. We mentioned the pox of chapter IV (" we would have neither chocolate nor cochineal ") ; we should also mention Voltaire's speech on the Jews⁵⁴. Each time, the contradiction of the overall logic of the differences gives the impression of a disparate Voltairian thought, a weakness.

But is it really a weakness ? And isn't it precisely the strength of the Enlightenment, of which Voltaire is a worthy representative in this respect, that it never unfolds as a system without immediately proposing a critique of that system, that it never produces a discourse without grasping and denouncing the fadaise ?

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Notes

Voltaire chose Java and Pegou as " countries of which we have little knowledge " and which can hardly " enter into the plan of this general history " (Essai sur les mœurs, ed. R. Pomeau, op. cit., t. 2, chap. CXCVI, " Du Japon au XVII^e siècle ", p. 798).

The reticulum mucosum is also mentioned in William Cheselden's The Anatomy of the Human Body, l. III, chap. 1, " Of the external parts, and common integuments ", London, 1763, p. 134

It's not without reason that I use the horse and the donkey for /// terms of comparison between whites and negroes. The resemblance of affinity, and the negation of identity, seem so striking on both sides, that we are invincibly led to draw this result: the white man is to the negro, what the horse is to the donkey. But the negro with the white man produces fertile individuals, the character of identity  the horse and the donkey produce, at least commonly, only infertile individuals, the character of disparity. I have already proposed some reflections against this argument  I add here that even if one were to grant this faculty of engendering fertile subjects, all the possible force of induction in favor of identity, which I do not find in it, this induction would be sufficiently balanced by another character as powerfully exclusive of identity, namely, that reticulum mucosum which makes the black skin of the negro, essentially black. This sign of disparity seems to me as decisive against the identity of nature between the white man and the negro, as the sign of infertility, in the second degree, seems decisive to naturalists in inferring non-identity between the horse and the donkey. I even see that the sign of exclusion of identity between the white man and the negro, by which I mean the black network that makes the negro's skin black, is constant, invariable  whereas the sign of disparity between the horse and the donkey is not constant. The reticulum mucosum is always black in negroes, it will always be black  it is not an accident, it is a physical essence. In the horse and donkey, on the other hand, the sign of disparity has varied, it has been denied  mules have begotten. The fact and the reasoning seem to me to be of some weight.

From these intellectual considerations, I move on to simpler ones, and which fall partly under the senses  they are not to be neglected. What could be more opposite than black and white, day and night? This argument is within the grasp of anyone with eyes  within the grasp of beasts themselves, who give in to its evidence by pouncing on blacks as if on prey destined for them, while sparing the whites. The argument of infertility is only in the hands of scholars, who are sometimes mistaken. Which is better? The first is the argument of nature ; the second is the invention of men. " (F. Valentin de Cullion, Examen de l'esclavage en général, et particulièrement de l'esclavage des nègres dans les colonies françaises de l'Amérique, Paris, Desenne, 1802, t. 2, p. 201-202)

Monsieur l'abbé, the opposite is constant. You don't know that negroes have a black reticulum mucosum, even though I've said so twenty times. You should know that no matter how many children you have in Guinea, you'll never make anything but Welches [=Frenchmen] who won't have that beautiful oily black skin, those black lippish lips, those round eyes, or that curly wool on their heads, which make the specific difference between negroes. Know that your Welch family, established in America, will always have a beard, whereas no American will. After that, pull yourself out of trouble as you can with Adam and Eve. " (Voltaire, Questions sur l'Encyclopédie, article Ignorance)

The most disturbing aspect of this investigation into Voltaire's possible involvement in the slave trade is the map it draws  Buenos Aires, Surinam, Guinea are all found in Candide. Voltaire is perfectly aware of the neuralgic locations of the new globalized colonial economy.

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Syphilis has only been known to be treated since the 1940s, thanks to antibiotics.

In classical language, the term pox is ambiguous : the big pox is syphilis, but the small pox is chickenpox.

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Voltaire had begun writing about Peter the Great a few years after his Histoire de Charles XII (1731). In 1748, he published the Anecdotes sur le czar Pierre le /// Grand ; in 1757 he received a commission from Count Schouvaloff ; in 1759, the same year as Candide, the first part of Histoire de Russie sous Pierre le Grand was published in Geneva by Cramer (the 2nd^e vol. was published in 1763).

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The French Code Noir played a decisive role in the institutionalization of globalized colonial slavery, with the publication of Hispanic Black Codes in Santo Domingo and Louisiana in the second half of the 18th century.

There is a brief, anonymous Code noir article in the Encyclopédie (III, 581-582, 1753), which focuses above all on the religious dimension : expulsion of Jews from the French colonies (article 1), prohibition of Protestantism, obligation for slaves to be Catholics. The Code Noir is mentioned in several other articles: Esclave, /// Manioc, Manumission, Maron, Nègres, Patron, Sucrerie. The article Nègres (XI, 83, 1765) contains a detailed presentation of the edict by Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Romain, engineer in Martinique. He makes no condemnation, insisting on the contrary on the chance for them to come and work in America under a climate that is more favorable to them, and on the humanity with which they are treated... !

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There was no Code Noir in Dutch Surinam. In the absence of a Code, the slave owner had all the power, and the condition of slaves was even harsher. See the well-documented article by François J.-L. Souty, " Agriculture et système agricole au Suriname de la fin du XVII^e à la fin du XVIII^e siècle ", Revue française d'histoire d'outre-mer, 1982, n°256, p. 193-224.

It seems that patagon was originally the nickname given to the Burgundian cross thaler, a silver coin put into service in southern Flanders in 1616, during the reign of Archdukes Albert and Isabelle, and struck in their effigy. This coin had an internationally recognized and appreciated value  it was still in circulation in the 18th century, and in use in Eastern Europe, as far afield as Russia, which even made it an official currency for a time, the jefi mok.

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It was the soldiers of the Spanish armies who gave this currency the depreciative nickname of patagon, or patacón. The Trévoux gives a series of possible etymologies  it has also been suggested that the word was forged from the Arabic batakká, window : coins minted in the Middle Ages by the Arabs had on one of their faces a design representing a mihrab (the empty niche which in the mosque indicates the direction of prayer). The mihrab was reminiscent of a window, which by metonymy evoked an Arab coin for the Spanish soldiers.

The nickname of the 1616 thaler seems to have subsequently swarmed to designate all sorts of other coins, of much lesser value. In Italian, patácca means junk, or even counterfeit money. In Portuguese colonies, such as Macau, the pataca is found. The patacón is found in several Latin American countries.

Voltaire again refers to patagon ecus in the VII^e letter of the Questions sur les miracles, (1765) : " A good fat pig is worth about ten patagon ecus ". We'll appreciate the price equivalence with the Surinam negro...

In the letter about Valais in La Nouvelle Héloïse, Saint Preux experiences such an onslaught of hospitality from the people of Valais that he "couldn't find to place a patagon" (I, 23, GF p. 110), as one would say a centime, a kopeck or a liard. Rousseau adds in a note /// "écu du pays", or the equivalent of three French pounds.

54See Stéphane Lojkine, " Voltaire et les Juifs : le côté obscur de la force voltairienne ". https://utpictura18.univ-amu.fr/Voltaire/VoltaireJuifs.php

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