Horror and strength

Voltaire's Essai sur les mœurs can be read as an immense compilation of the catastrophes that have befallen mankind : invasions, crusades, wars of religion, all the episodes of universal history seem to boil down to a common mechanism, to which Voltaire returns again and again, which he rehashes and refines, where philosophy of history¹ and writing practice find themselves conjoined. We propose here to identify the characteristics of this mechanism, through which Voltaire's famous irony embraces the very structure of the catastrophe and gives rise to a fictional device that takes the place of a philosophy of history.

The catastrophe as origin

The very word catastrophe hardly ever appears in the Essai sur les mœurs ; catastrophe is a term of poetics in classical language, designating above all the tragic denouement of a theatrical plot : catastrophe presupposes a scene, a place and determined characters  catastrophe, above all, assigns a term, sets a limit, an end. What is the subject of Essai sur les mœurs is exactly the opposite : a blind force, an absurd horror, without origin and without end, a kind of vague and indefinite collapse from which, on the contrary, everything begins, new institutions, governments, despotisms, fanaticisms.

Cata-strophe : that which turns around at the end. Voltaire prefers its Latin equivalent, revolution. Revolution is first and foremost a natural phenomenon²  it manifests itself, in the 1765 Introduction, as " changes in the globe " :

" It may be that our world has undergone as many changes as the states have experienced revolutions. It seems proven that the sea has covered immense lands, laden today with great cities and rich harvests. There is no shore that time has not moved farther or closer to the sea. " (P. 3³.)

The starting point of Essai sur les mœurs is a non-place, an unstable, changing scene, a turning of the earth, a geological revolution that precedes the political revolutions of human History. " Nature bears witness everywhere to these revolutions " (p. 4) ; " we have proof enough of the great revolutions of the globe " (p. 5) ; " The greatest of all revolutions would be the loss of the Atlantic land, if it were true that this part of the world had existed. " (Ibid.)

The point here is not to support a historical mechanism on a natural one, to propose a historical physics : what the natural revolutions of the globe hint at is a vanished Atlantis that probably never existed. In the beginning is an abyss, a void for language and spirit, a stage collapsed into the ocean. The revolution posits this prior non-place, engulfing it in myths, fables and discourses of origin. The origin is an abyss : the historian's job will be to exhibit this original catastrophe, on which all institutions, all powers, all religions rest.

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" But this is what happened in almost all nations, after the revolutions of many centuries. A man who had done great things, who had rendered services to the human race, could not, in truth, be looked upon as a god by those who had seen him tremble with fever, and go to the wardrobe ; but the enthusiasts persuaded themselves that having eminent qualities, he held them from a god  that he was the son of a god. " (P. 17.)

The revolutions of the centuries establish as sublime truths the most absurd fables: revolution here is not just the passing of time;  it figures a mechanism of reversal. Fever and wardrobe become divine qualities;  the misery of the most trivial humanity is turned into mystery, into the truth of adoration.

In history, revolution reiterates the abyss of origins. Greece keeps in its soil the testimonies of " physical revolutions it had to experience " (p. 84). "These great revolutions plunged [the Greeks] back into barbarism, when the nations of Asia and Egypt were flourishing" (p.85). Natural disaster or barbarian invasion, it's all one and the same: history resets the counters without warning, wiping out humanity's efforts to emerge from the original chaos. The Greek miracle blossomed after sinister revolutions  in the same way, revolution stalks England as it painfully emerges from barbarism :

" The kings of England, from St. Edward down to King William III, daily performed a great miracle, that of curing écrouelles, which no physician could cure. But William III did not want to perform miracles, and his successors refrained from doing so as he did. If England ever experiences some great revolution that plunges her back into ignorance, then she will have miracles every day. " (P. 119.)

The ironic trait here consists in combining the collapse of reality (" some great revolution that plunges her back into ignorance ") with the proliferation of the symbolic (" she'll have miracles every day "). The plunge into catastrophe triggers superstitious belief and lends credence to the thaumaturgical power of kings. Catastrophe produces the symbolic  plunging into the abyss of revolutions implements a force, that very force, fascinating and absurd, on which all institutions⁴ rest.

The horror of the catastrophe opens up a space of incomprehensibility in which the pas-de-sens⁵ of Voltairian irony occurs, paradoxically instituting powers and legitimacies : irony is the flip side of the institutions it targets ; but it draws on the same original non-place, the same revolution.

" A thousand local revolutions have certainly changed part of the globe physically and morally, but we don't know them ; and men have been so late in taking the trouble to write history that the human race, ancient as it is, seems new to us. " (P. 203.)

It will not be a question, with the Essai sur les mœurs, of bringing new positive knowledge to shed light on those areas of history we know nothing about. The Voltairean enterprise is above all critical : it points to these misunderstandings, these shadowy areas, and more generally it designates the " thousand revolutions " as the abysmal starting point for all history writing.

Catastrophe as the driving force of history

" The circuses, the amphitheaters raised in all the provinces are changed into hovels covered with straw. These great roads, so beautiful, so solid, established from the foot of the Capitol to Mount Taurus, are covered with stagnant water. The same revolution is taking place in the minds of men, and Gregory of Tours and the monk of St. Gallen Frédegaire are our Polybius and our Titus Livius. Human understanding becomes stultified by the most cowardly and senseless superstitions. [...] The whole of Europe languished in this debasement until the 16th century, and only came out of it with terrible convulsions. " (P. 310.)

The revolution here designates both the physical, architectural collapse of the Roman empire and the decline of the spirit, which falls from the Greek and Roman models of ancient historiography into the most infantile and ridiculous stammerings of medieval chronicles. But these stammerings are the origin of our History; our modernity is founded on them and /// The revolution is a reversal; an antiquity, a model collapses; barbarism, absurd horrors see order, a new form germinate.

The world is a new place.

But Voltaire doesn't herald a golden age of the Renaissance from the dark days of the Middle Ages  to the revolutions of feudal barbarism, he superimposes the convulsions of the Wars of Religion. The revolutionary reversal does not proceed from historical optimism⁶  collapse threatens man with death  refoundation crushes him with its barbarism. The force highlighted by the historian has nothing to do with the Enlightenment. A brutal, barbaric force of life, it triggers the spirit only when taken in reverse, by that revolution within the revolution that is the mot d'esprit.

" Force, which has done everything in this world, had given Italy and the Gauls to the Romans : the barbarians usurped their conquests ; Charlemagne's father usurped the Gauls from the Frankish kings  the governors, under Charlemagne's race, usurped all they could. The Lombard kings had already established fiefdoms in Italy; this was the model on which the dukes and counts based their rule from the time of Charles the Bald. Little by little, their governments became patrimonies " (P. 425.)

" The origin of this feudal government ", whose rules and system Voltaire intends to lay down in chapter XXXIII, is a series of coups de force : the coup de force is, in history, what emerges from catastrophe and establishes, by successive usurpations, new legitimacies. The same is true when describing the election of Hugues Capet to the throne of France, in opposition to Duke Charles:

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" It was not a parliament of the nation that deprived him [=Charles] of the right of his ancestors, as so many historians have said, it was what makes and defeats kings, force aided by prudence. " (P. 447.)

The origin of the Capetian dynasty is a coup de force : to point to this force is to critique History, to denounce its function of institutional legitimation. Force is a challenge to art and culture⁷, as shown by the formation of Genghis Kan's " new empire " on the " debris of the caliphate " of Baghdad (chap. LX) :

" If we compare these vast and sudden depredations with what is happening nowadays in our Europe, we will see an enormous difference. Our captains, who understand the art of war infinitely better than the Genghis and so many other conquerors ; our armies, a detachment of which would have dissipated with a few cannons all those hordes of Huns, Alans and Scythians, can barely take a few cities today in their most brilliant expeditions. In those days, there was no art, and force decided the fate of the world" (P. 64.)

Art immobilizes History. Civilization and culture cushion the shocks of force, and prepare the collapse of the institutions that produced them. Revolutions go from being planetary catastrophes that engulf entire peoples in invasions, anarchy and brigandage, to palace revolutions in which the forms of the state and the tradition of institutions, by maintaining themselves, become exhausted, aged and prepare for a greater overthrow. Such is the case with Chinese imperial rites:

" This custom has sustained itself for forty centuries, in the midst even of revolutions and the most horrible calamities. " (P. 69.)

The same goes for the religion of Zoroaster :

This theology of the magi was respected in the East under all governments ; and in the midst of all revolutions, the ancient religion had always sustained itself in Persia " (p. 253).

But the Chinese fell under the /// domination of Genghis Khan's Tartars, then of the " Tartars mantchoux " (II, 787). As for the " ancient religion of the Magi ", it survives, like that of the Jews (this is Voltaire speaking), only as a despised and ignorant relic of a lost civilization (p. 263). The same is true of Constantinople, the scene of incessant revolutions:

" Despite so many disasters, Constantinople was still for a long time the most opulent Christian city, the most populous, the most commendable by the arts.
[...] All these sudden revolutions of the palace, the crimes of so many emperors slaughtered one by one, are storms that hardly fall on hidden men who cultivate in peace professions that one does not envy.
[...] The horrible revolutions we have just seen frighten and disgust  however, it must be admitted that since Constantine, nicknamed the Great, the empire of Constantinople had hardly been governed otherwise  and if you except Julian and two or three others, which emperor did not stain the throne with abominations and crimes ? " (P. 409.)

Here, revolution is neither an abyss, nor the non-place of an original misunderstanding. Constantinople is a bloody theater, a focal point offered to the greedy concupiscences of the world. "The mechanical and fine arts, pushed to the last degree of opulence and refinement, attract catastrophe. However, we must distinguish between the scene of continuous revolutions, in which the City remains equal to itself over the centuries, and the ultimate revolution which marks, in 1452, the theatrical catastrophe of its downfall. The story of this historical catastrophe is announced in chapter XCI, entitled " De la prise de Constantinople par les Turcs "  but the reader will be disappointed. True to the device of critical reversion he adopted for the whole of Essai sur les mœurs, Voltaire deconstructs the dramatic narrative forged by historians and unravels the stage of history with its theatrical effects, whose Christian prejudices and apologetic aims he denounces. First of all, there was not one but " three Eastern empires ", in Constantinople, Andrinople and Trebizond (p. 816) : the scene thus bursts into three places, disseminating the narrative. Next, Mahomet II, the mastermind behind the fall of Byzantium, is the subject of an anti-portrait :

" The monks painted this Mohammed as a senseless barbarian, who sometimes cut off the head of his alleged mistress Irene to appease the murmurs of the janissaries, sometimes had fourteen of his pages slit open their stomachs to see who among them had eaten a melon. We still find these absurd stories in our dictionaries, which have long been, for the most part, alphabetical archives of lies. " (P. 817.)

That which makes a tableau is repudiated as an absurd  fable: decapitated Irene, pages ripped open, are juxtaposed with the misery of a ridiculous stake, soothing a murmur⁸, finding a quarter of a melon. Horrifying and absurd, the implausible scene implodes before our eyes  the visual effectiveness of one of history's most important moments is turned against itself, reduced to the rhetorical inanity of a textuality as pure as it is vain : the dictionary or, in other words, the " alphabetical archives of lies ".

From then on, the entire narrative will focus on Mohammed II's clemency and his desire to preserve a city he " already regarded as his property, which he spared " (p. 821). The horror of the catastrophe is then, as it were, diverted from the disappearance of the jewel of Christianity to the absurdity of Chalcondyle⁹ and Ducas¹⁰'s narratives, the object of Voltairean indignation :

" Is one more moved to pity /// that seized with indignation when we read in Ducas that the sultan "sent orders into the camp to light fires everywhere, which was done with that impious cry which is the particular sign of their detestable superstition ? This impious cry is the name of God, Allah, which the Mohammedans invoke in all battles. The detestable superstition was, among the Greeks who took refuge in Saint Sophia, on the faith of a prediction which assured them that an angel would descend into the church to defend them.
A few Greeks were killed in the forecourt, the rest were made slaves  and Mohammed only went to thank God in this church after having washed it with rose water. " (P. 821.)

The Voltairian narrative defuses the theatrical effect of the catastrophe, which is seen only in the second degree, as a shameless distortion of the facts by Ducas's chronicle. Once again, the visual effect is annihilated by the face-to-face confrontation of the two images: the Turks' impious cry, on the one hand, which is simply an invocation of God, and the Greeks' imprisonment in Saint Sophia, on the other, motivated by a superstition as detestable as it is ridiculous. The scene of the Fall implodes in this indignant face-off, from which nothing remains to be seen: no camp, no fires, no cries outside, everything being dubious; no miracles in the church, of course, everything being all too certain. The massacre of the Greeks slips out of the scope of the representation  " On tua quelques Grecs dans le parvis " ; et alors ? there's nothing to outrage Voltaire about. As for the church, Mohammed II legitimately purified it with rosewater, stained as it was by so many basenesses and superstitions. The church is the focus of indignation  but an empty church. The scene of the catastrophe, it remains an invisible scene, washed clean.

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The construction of the Voltairian narrative should not, however, be seen simply as a new ideological hijacking of the facts. Reversing the chronicles' narrative means defusing the theatricalization of the facts, and thereby critically recapturing the brutal, foundational emergence of the real in the catastrophe. Undoing the scene allows us to grasp the very mechanism of history, this system of revolutions that turns collapses into foundations.

" Rome's empire in the West was wiped out. A deluge of barbarians, Goths, Heruli, Huns, Vandals, Franks, flooded Europe, when Mohammed threw, in the deserts of Arabia, the foundations of the Muslim religion and power. " (P. 254.)

The barbarian flood (whose omnipresent metaphor extends and reverses into the flood of the Crusades) is juxtaposed with the birth of Islam, the Roman destruction with the emergence of a new law, born admittedly of a coup de force (see chap. VI), but, according to Voltaire, more tolerant, less superstitious than another.

The face-off, at the time of Rome's collapse, can be handled differently, between Byzantium and Ravenna for example. Stephen II was then pope in Ravenna (752-757), under Lombard domination, and Constantine V Copronymus exercised a sham reign in Constantinople (741-775) :

" This miserable emperor sent for all help a palace officer¹¹, with a letter for the Lombard king. It was this weakness of the Greek emperors that was the origin of the new Western empire and of pontifical greatness. " (P. 309.)

Audacious shortcut ! While a simple letter instead of troops or subsidies seems to reduce the pope to the last extremities in the face of Astolfe, the Lombard invader, historical perspective shows that it was the very weakness of the Eastern Empire that enabled the emancipation and development of the Church's temporal power. The immediate catastrophe prepares the foundation of new laws, powers and legitimacies.

The non-place of catastrophe

Voltaire will return to this subject on several occasions. /// The original paradox of pontifical greatness. Thus, with regard to John VIII, at the end of the 9th century:

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" However this pontiff, tributary of the Muslims, and prisoner in Rome, escapes, embarks and passes into France. He comes to crown Louis le Bègue emperor, in the town of Troyes, following the example of Leo III, Adrian, and Stephen III, persecuted at home, and giving crowns elsewhere. " (P. 383¹².)

There's a pas-de-sens de la puissance : the symbolic is made out of nothing. This nothingness is the condition of possibility, which catastrophe alone, providing a void, an institutional vacancy, makes possible¹³. For Jean VIII, Rome is the non-place of revolution, the invisible space where the empire collapses and yet where the power of the popes establishes its legitimacy. The pope fled Rome to distribute crowns in Rome's name. Similarly, Mohammed II invests Saint Sophia to celebrate a Te Deum, but in a church that is no longer one, whose symbolic prestige he recovers but whose institutional identity he abolishes.

Another place of which Voltaire makes the catastrophic non-place where horror and force turn into each other, Jerusalem collapses to see the birth of Saladin's power :

" An earthquake, more widespread than the one felt in 1755, toppled most of the cities of Syria and this little state of Jerusalem  the earth swallowed up animals and men in a hundred places. They preached to the Turks that God was punishing the Christians, they preached to the Christians that God was declaring Himself against the Turks, and they continued to fight over the debris of Syria.
Amidst so much ruin, the Turks and the Christians continued to fight over the debris of Syria. In the midst of so many ruins stood the great Salaheddin, known in Europe as Saladin" (P. 575.)

We don't mind that the earthquake of 1182 demolished entire towns. But what is this engulfment of animals and men ? Nourished by the marvel of the historical fable, the Voltairean imagination in turn goes to work  engulfment necessarily precedes foundation  the original catastrophe must turn the stage of History into an abyss, a chasm¹⁴. Saladin is not in Jerusalem when the earthquake strikes; there is no immediate connection between his first conquests and this natural catastrophe: the Voltairian fictional device is therefore in full effect, superimposing natural revolution on political revolution, the clean slate of a non-place on the advent of a new empire.

The device is the same in chapter CXCV, which describes the end of the Chinese dynasty of Chinese emperors and the beginning of Manchu domination. Voltaire first idealizes Chinese civilization, where " cities were flourishing as much as the countryside was fertile " (II, 786) :

" This happiness was followed, around the year 1630, by the most terrible catastrophe and the most general desolation. The family of the Tartar conquerors, descendants of Genghis kan, had done what all conquerors have tried to do : they had weakened the nation of the conquerors, so as not to fear, on the throne of the conquered, the same revolution they had made there. " (II, 786.)

The passage is worth quoting if only for Voltaire's very exceptional use of the word catastrophe. Catastrophe here clearly refers to the fall, the end of the Ming dynasty, and is contrasted with revolution, which marked the beginning of Tartar domination.

Voltairian narrative quickly focuses attention on the place of the fall, the imperial palace in Peking which, like Rome prey to the barbarians, like Jerusalem desolated by an earthquake, like Saint Sophia invested by Mohammed's soldiers /// II, constitutes a space of invisibility where the scene of the end, the theatrical catastrophe, is retracted, disseminated and deconstructed. While outside, the leader of the Manchu Tartar hordes, Taïtsou, "established laws in the midst of war", China's emperor remains cloistered in his palace, powerless and invisible. Taïtsou institutes laws in the midst of the kingdom's general collapse  he carries the principle force of history's renewal. The emperor, for his part, is stripped of even his name, crossed out for History  " the emperor of China, whose name became obscure, and who was called Hiaitsong, remained in his palace with his wives and eunuchs  so he was the last Chinese emperor. " (P. 788.) As surrender became inevitable, the empress organized the escape of her children and hanged herself in her bedroom. The emperor is only able to order his other wives to do the same, and slaughters his daughter with a sword. " It is expected that such a father, such a husband will kill himself over the bodies of his wives and daughter¹⁵ ; but he went to a pavilion outside the city to wait for news. " (II, 789¹⁶.) Voltaire creates the dramatic scene that could theatrically conclude this catastrophe. But it never happens. The visual effect is sabotaged, suggested but immediately denied : the Voltairean catastrophe always resolves itself in a non-place.

In our introduction, we suggested that the historical mechanism of catastrophe, which forms the matrix of the fictional device of the Essai sur les mœurs, was the very mechanism of irony. Voltaire each time describes a revolution, i.e. a collapse that turns into a coup de force. The fine arts, refined manners and civilization are annihilated, while a brute force emerges, the shapeless form of reality that has not been taken seriously, not seen, not foreseen. The moment of catastrophe is the conjunction of this symbolic institution collapsing and this symbolic principle emerging. An unlikely conjunction of two irreconcilable levels or registers. This conjunction establishes a pas-de-sens, which Voltaire defines as " horreurs absurdes ".

Suddenly, language establishes a brutal distance from its object. Horror grips, dismays, paralyzes. Absurd horrors make you laugh. The mot d'esprit is the fruit of this conjunction of the two symbolic, this pas-de-sens de l'histoire.

" Such was the state of Asia Minor and Syria, when a pilgrim from Amiens stirred up the Crusades. He had no other name than Coucoupêtre, or Cucupiètre, as the daughter of Emperor Comnène, who saw him in Constantinople, puts it. We know him as Pierre l'Ermite. " (P. 558.)

One of history's great catastrophes, the history of the Crusades, is linked to the legendary figure of Peter the Hermit. Voltaire superimposes a ridiculous name, a parody of a name, on the legendary name consecrated by the cantors of the Crusades. The name of nothing refers to the emergence of reality against the backdrop of a collapsed Orient (" such was the state of Asia... "). Coucoupêtre, or piètre cul-cul, makes one laugh wildly, turning catastrophe into a witticism.

Notes