The Voltairean anecdote

In a dossier in the Monde devoted to Voltaire and Rousseau, Roland Barthes writes: " Voltaire starts from the futile, maintains it by the simple thrust of the anecdote, but along the way takes in slingshot all the seriousness of the world : history, ideas, civilizations, crimes, rites, bad faith, in short all this tumult in which we are still struggling. [...] Don't we see that it's all the same works of fiction, however mediocre they may be artistically, that best shake political feeling ? " (Roland Barthes, " D'eux à nous ", Le Monde, April 7, 1978, Œuvres complètes, Seuil, 1995, t.3, p. 822.)

La " prise en écharpe " du réel : analyse d'un mécanisme poétique

Broussin knew and executed admirably the recipe for Robert's sauce, which mixes mustard, vinegar and onions. An epigram on the subject opens the Credo article in the Dictionnaire philosophique, preceding the origin and dogmatic definition of " symbole ", which is the content of what is recited in the Credo. From there, through the history of the symbol's evolution and variations, unfolds a veritable compendium of the history of the Councils, to which Voltaire contrasts the theistic credo of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre.

The epigram on the most superficial and flimsy subject was thus the pretext for a review of the most serious issues, which constitute the object of the Dictionnaire philosophique and the stakes of Voltaire's fight against the infamous. This reversal in the course of the text, but also this paradoxical interplay between two levels of discourse, on the one hand witty and pleasant conversation, on the other indignation, revolt and militant commitment, led Roland Barthes, in a dossier in Monde, to say that " Voltaire starts from the futile, maintains it by the simple thrust of the anecdote, but along the way takes in slingshot all the seriousness of the world : history, ideas, civilizations, crimes, rituals, bad faith, in short, all the tumult in which we are still struggling. " And Barthes adds : " Don't we see that it's all the same works of fiction, however artistically mediocre, that best shake political feeling?"

To the poetic paradox, which orders the writing of the article around a reversal from the futile to the serious, from the anecdotal trait to the deployment of the world's problems, Barthes superimposes a strategic paradox : the Dictionnaire philosophique is not a fiction but a device that manipulates fictions (biblical, exotic, worldly) and doesn't hesitate itself to decry their mediocrity. Mediocre and futile, it is nonetheless these fictions that most effectively accomplish the shaking of the reader, and the crystallization within him, through the pleasure of the text, of a political consciousness.

We'll begin by examining the textual mechanism of the " prise en écharpe " : how Voltaire reverses the futile that served as his hook and, through it, addresses all the seriousness of the world.

Secondly, we'll ask what's at stake in this " prise en écharpe " : while we quickly grasp the religious contours of Voltaire's polemic, the appeal to " sentiment politique " suggested by Barthes is a priori more surprising.

This is why, in a third step, we'll return to the very process of the " prise en écharpe " : this " poussée " of the anecdote, this " tumulte " of the world, this " ébranlement " politique suggest something quite different from a concerted strategy : a veritable pulsionnel body of Voltairian writing.

Anecdotes abound in the Dictionnaire philosophique, much to the reader's delight. In the Chinese Catechism, Voltaire picks up on a story by Berossus about the religious discussions of the Chaldeans : they worshipped " a famous pike named /// Oannès " (4^e entretien, p. 77), forbade eating pike, and divided themselves into two parties, some claiming that pike was laite, others - œuvé. King Daon put both parties on a fast, had a pike opened in front of them, its belly containing " the most beautiful milt in the world " itself composed of eggs, and forced both to eat the pike. The apologue of course implicitly refers to the dietary prohibitions of the Bible, but beyond that to all scholastic quarrels on this or that point of dogma, such as those disputing the Trinity (article Antitrinitarians), the divinity of Jesus (article Arius), the nature of the soul and its immortality (article Soul), the celebration of the Eucharist (article Transubstantiation).

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There's a certain gratuitousness to the apologue. Voltaire is not necessarily aiming for the seriousness of a committed discourse, nor the construction of religious or political reasoning. The apologue is both the beginning and the end of the article, which he uses not to reveal its content, but to reduce it, to fix it in a pleasant, demeaning image. At the end of the long article Religion, itself broken down into eight questions, Voltaire relates the story of a dissension between Tibetan monks, some of them followers of Fo, others of Sammonocodom. The anecdote comes from the Histoire générale des voyages (1746-1754), to which Prévost contributed. The Dalai Lama summoned to settle this dissension (like King Daon faced with the two Chaldean factions of pike worshippers) " begins, according to his divine usage, by distributing his pierced chair  to them" (p. 347).

Dried, enshrined in rosaries, the turds are devoutly kissed, then thrown " at the vice-god's nose " when conciliation fails. The Dalai Lama laughs and again distributes " his pierced chair to anyone willing to receive the good father lama's droppings. "

To sling all the seriousness of the world in a sling, then, is not just to grasp it from an anecdote ; it's also to reduce it to an anecdote, to conjure its symbolic efficacy, to defuse the devastating discourses that polarize and brutalize it.

The verbal joust, the clash of discourses are reduced to an absurd and derisory coprophagy, found in Ezekiel : Voltaire claims there that the Lord would have commanded the prophet to eat bread covered in human excrement. " As it is not customary to eat such jams on one's bread, most men find these commands unworthy of the divine majesty. " Ezekiel's jams, the image of which Voltaire repeated in his correspondence and writings for over twenty years, are the pretext for an iconoclastic reading of Ezekiel as the contradicter of Moses, who is said to have " given the Jews precepts that are not good ". The garbage Voltaire complacently picks out in the text is the pretext for a generalized desacralization of the biblical word. And the article concludes with this famous tip : " Whoever loves Ezekiel's prophecies deserves to have lunch with him. "

It's not just a matter of telling new anecdotes, of producing fable : Voltaire fictionalizes everything he tackles  he reprocesses the familiar data of a known and supposedly respected history. Such is the case of Abraham, whose deliriously itinerant travels take him to Egypt with " his wife Sara, who was extremely young, and almost a child compared to him, for she was only 65 " (p. 7). Abraham prostitutes Sara to Pharaoh, then to the king of the " horrible deserts of Kadesh ". The life of the Bible's greatest patriarch becomes a vaudeville as grotesque as it is absurd, while the sojourn in Egypt, which, from Genesis onwards, paves the way for the Mosaic epic of the Exodus, is presented as an illogical and extravagant interlude. Under Voltaire's pen, the Genesis narrative becomes futile, splintering into anecdotal fragments that are, in effect, anecdotal. /// disseminate them, deconstructing their discursive effectiveness.

Voltaire accuses the Jews of falsifying the stories they relate : " The Jews therefore did with history and ancient fable what their fripiers do with their old clothes  they turn them inside out and sell them as new as dearly as they can " (Abraham, p. 9). This finger-in-the-glove reversal characterizes precisely the mechanism of Voltairean reversal in the articles of the Dictionnaire philosophique : through the play of the futile and the stroke, the old, the stale (a Bible we no longer read, an ecclesiastical history to die for, theological disputes where we get lost) is turned around and sold as new by Voltaire. This reversal is certainly polemical and strategic  it reverses the meaning of the discourses he manipulates ; but it's also an economic reversal, a clever sleight of hand to monetize, to commercialize out-of-use rhetoric, prose that has become unreadable.

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The stakes of the " prise en écharpe " : the Voltairean commitment

We sometimes wonder what is really at stake in the Voltairean article. If the fictional manipulation is obvious, if the back-and-forth from the futile to the serious, from the anecdotal fringe to unfeigned revolt, is proven, this back-and-forth seems rather to orchestrate a circulation than a progression, whose final word, the last word is neither necessarily political nor necessarily serious.

The young Sara in the Abraham article is gratuitously portrayed as a purely grotesque image, in the same way as the " seven virgins of seventy and ten years each " of whom Voltaire relates with verve, according to Fleury and Ruinart, the danger they ran of " losing the oldest of virginities ", the drowning, the fishing out and the burial, at the beginning of the Martyre  article: " We're being fobbed off with laugh-out-loud martyrdoms. " (P. 280.) We do indeed chuckle : but is there anything in this inverted apologue other than a technically fearsomely effective, but ideologically, politically futile and vain  enunciative device?

In the Martyrdom article, there is indeed a " thrust of the anecdote ", and a shift away from the initial register of the absurd (the virginal virginity of the seven virgins of Ancyre, the tongue of Saint Romain, the little stutterer) towards the spasm of Voltairian indignation. From " a hundred tales of this sort " we move on to " good barbarities well proven, good massacres well witnessed, streams of blood that have indeed flowed " (p. 281) : the sling is taken up, and the reversal takes place from delirious tale to real barbarism, from the futility of fable to the horror of History. The real renovates the fable, restoring to it the visual, pathetic, theatrical effectiveness that the irony of absurd horrors had robbed it of.

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Is the evocation of the crusade against the Albigensians, of the massacres at Mérindol and Cabrières perpetrated against the Cévennes Protestants, of " l'épouvantable journée de la Saint-Barthélemy, the real object of the Martyre article, or does it feed in horrific energy, in the power of abomination, a Voltairian verb delivered unchecked to this fearsome and irrational pulsation ?

There is undoubtedly, in the Dictionnaire philosophique, a Voltairean discourse articulated to a real commitment on the part of the writer, which took concrete form in the 1760s notably through the role Voltaire played in the rehabilitation of the Calas family and in the defense of the Sirven family : the insertion of Voltaire's texts into a political action that goes beyond them, which militates for institutional reform, clearly marks that the circulation of the futile to the serious is not a matter of poetic efficiency alone, but has the function of operating a shift from writing to politics.

The article Torture provides an undeniable example of this. Evidently, the history of the " question ", in which /// is pure fantasy: " toutes les apparences sont que cette partie de notre législation dit sa première origine à un voleur de grand chemin " (p. 381). Readers familiar with Voltaire know that when " toutes les apparences " is announced, when information is prepared and solemnized in this way, one must expect a trap : the great legislator who should come here to endorse the use of torture in the judiciary was simply and simply an anonymous " highway robber ", i.e. a client of the administrative machine that needs to be explained, the object instead of the subject of justice, what it pursues instead of what motivates it.

After the thieves come the conquerors, after the conquerors, Providence who tortures us with " stone, gravel, gout, scurvy, leprosy, pox great or small, the tearing of entrails, the convulsions of nerds ". Finally, despots imitate Providence, and the judicial question is instituted. Voltaire describes it, again using, if not anecdote, then at least the vivid, concrete picture, the vivid fiction of portraiture : facing the " conseiller de la Tournelle " (not a judge in general, but this detail of la Tournelle which rings true because it particularizes the scene), he portrays " a man brought to him haggard, pale, defeated, his eyes dull, his beard long and dirty, covered with the vermin with which he was eaten in a dungeon " (p.382). So, on the one hand, we follow the Voltairean word as it slings the world from top to bottom (thieves, conquerors, God), then from top to bottom (God, despots, a Tournelle councillor)  on the other hand, with each protrusion, we are caught up in what R. Barthes calls the " ". Barthes calls the " thrust of the anecdote " : the thief burning the feet of travellers whose money he wants to extort  the conqueror torturing those whose desire for freedom he suspects  Providence and its stomachaches  the magistrate summoning his defendant " to great and small torture " ? Every protrusion, every real or fictional outburst that pushes the anecdote carries with it the perverse convulsion of an intimate attack, of atrocious brutality. It's not the development of a discourse  what logic is there in moving from the suspicious conqueror to the enumeration of the chronic illnesses God sends us ? It's not a reasoned sequence, but a succession of shocks and jolts that push the text towards a convulsive paroxysm, where irony and barbarism are stretched in opposite directions (the distance, lightness and detachment of irony ; the biting indignation and revolt of the depiction of barbarism) and constitute what we might call, using Lacanian terminology, the semiotic arc of the Voltairean pas-de-sens¹.

This semiotic arc of biting irony is particularly noticeable when evoking the Jews in whose books " there is never a question, torture ". It's a pity, exclaims Voltaire, who evokes in passing some of the absurd rites employed in the Bible, in the absence of torture, to discover the truth : playing truth with dice, discovering it by manipulating the urim and the thumim, and above all relying on God. " This was the only thing missing from the morals of the holy people ", Voltaire concludes.

The horror of biblical barbarity barely scratches the surface of the text, which points it out but keeps it quiet. Similarly, when evoking the Chevalier de La Barre, Voltaire focuses the accusation on the Chevalier's songs and hat, weighed against the atrocity of the tortures, " that they tore out his tongue, cut off his hand, and burned his body with a small fire " (p. 383). The semiotic arc consists in this superimposition of the futile, the light (songs, hats) and the horrible, the barbaric (torture). The sling leads to this /// semiotic arc, this biting irony, this revolting pas-de-sens.

The shaking is physical, convulsive even before it's intellectualized. But it is politically oriented : the world is watching France, which must be reformed. The conclusion of the Torture article is scathing, and takes on prophetic resonances : " Woe to a nation which, having long been civilized, is still governed by ancient atrocious customs ! "Why should we change our jurisprudence ?" she says : Europe uses our cooks, our tailors, our wigmakers  therefore our laws are good. " (P. 384.)

What's at stake in the sling is the law and therefore the investment of politics. But the law, but the political space where it is decided, are the great French unthought of the Enlightenment : in an absolute monarchy, there is no political sphere. Voltaire cobbles it together in the imaginary place where the seriousness of the world is taken up by the futile. Right up to the end of Torture, the futile is maintained as the negative basis of the semiotic arc that stretches the discourse. The France of cooks, tailors and wigmakers, of refined but useless luxury, is the real, visible, media base from which to build the inverted representation - not fictional, but fictional because hidden - of the France of torture, of the horror of its prisons, of the state injustice that governs it. What we see is luxury, the futile, graceful brilliance of the Enlightenment: " Foreign nations judge France by spectacles, by novels, by pretty verses, by opera girls. " (P.383.) But the barbaric underside of this resplendent showcase is invisible, inaccessible, removed from the stage : " They don't know that there is no nation at heart crueler than the French. "

Barbarism, that atrocious backdrop to Voltairean revolt, which pushes sensitive shaking to the point of political demand, is an unrepresentable force. The horror underlying the law cannot be theatricalized: for this reason too, Voltaire resorts to anecdote, to which he adds a fictional imaginary of the abomination. In the article Torture, the evocation of " Jewish books " seems a priori totally gratuitous, since Voltaire only mentions them, only to note that there is neither legislation nor even the practice of torture there. After evoking the despot and before the judge, the Jewish detour appears gratuitous, unnecessary.

Yet it is fundamental : " the Jewish books ", i.e. the Pentateuch, hold the foundations of the Law, the origin of all Law, which both fascinates and revolts Voltaire. The absence of torture in the Book of the Law is a religious preparation for the political condemnation of torture at the end of the article. But this endorsement is not rational: it is not even explicit. Only the provision of the Torture article makes it appear, as the product of condensation (biblical lacuna // French horror) and displacement (religious law -> political law).

The impulsive body of Voltairian writing

The whole problem with this Voltairean political aim lies in the fundamental irrationality of the poetic process that drives it. Voltaire has no political program, or a program that is not only timid, but in many ways cynical. In the Catechisme du curé, he advocates Sunday work:

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" I will allow them, I will even urge them to cultivate their fields on feast days after divine service, which I will do very early. [This work is necessary for the State. Let's suppose five million men who do a day's work for ten sous, one carrying the other, and this account is quite moderate  you make these five million men useless thirty days of the year  it is thus thirty times five million pieces of ten sous that the State loses in labor. " (P. 88.)

The /// Voltairean tolerance therefore has economic ulterior motives, which the article Tolérance unabashedly puts forward: all religions must be tolerated, because in the stock market, all nations and therefore all religions must be able to trade with each other, within the framework of a globalized economy. Tolerance is built on the economic model of the stock market, whose development it in turn fosters. It's a form of liberalism, and it's only logical that Voltaire should be consistent in his praise of luxury. In the article Luxe, he refers to the peasants of his villages, all well-dressed, well-shod and well-fed. But just as it would be absurd for Voltaire's ploughman to plough " with his fine habit, with white linen, his hair curled and powdered " (p. 278), so this peasant luxury would appear, in a London or Paris showroom, as " the crudest and most ridiculous skimp ".

The apology of luxury is a discourse legitimizing social inequality. Voltaire will be much clearer in the Questions sur l'Encyclopédie². In the article Impôt, he acknowledges that the peasant coming from the capital is likely to be scandalized by the luxury displayed there by the Grands du royaume endowed by pensions on roi :

" Si par hasard l'homme agreste va dans la capitale, il voit avec des yeux étonnés une belle dame vêtée d'une robe de soie brochée d'or, traînée dans un carrosse magnifique par deux chevaux de prix, suivie de quatre laquais habillés d'un drap à vingt francs l'aune  il s'adresse à un des laquais de cette belle dame, et lui dit : Monseigneur, where does this lady get so much money to spend so much money? My friend," said the lackey, "the king gives her a pension of forty thousand livres. Alas!" said the lout, "it's my village that pays this pension. Yes, says the lackey  but the silk you collected, and sold, was used for the cloth she's dressed in  my sheet is partly made from the wool of your sheep  my baker made my bread from your wheat  you sold at market the poulardes we eat : so Madame's pension went to you and your comrades. "

The aristocratic luxury generated by unequal taxation sustains the village, which complains through the work it provides, even if " the peasant doesn't quite agree with the axioms of this philosophical lackey ". The article Impôt begins with a biting satire of the unequal system of taxation " in despotic kingdoms, or to put it more politely, in monarchical states ". Voltaire disapproves of it, yet justifies it, just a few lines away  he is caught between bourgeois identification with aristocratic luxury and bourgeois disapproval of the privileges of the same aristocracy. His position is therefore not stable, and constantly reverses itself, according to the bipolar principle of the semiotic arc.

Tolerance thus manifests itself as a pulsional device : it liberates identities only to promote jouissances ; it deregulates the separations, frameworks, constraints of the symbolic institution in the name of the market economy, aiming for the froth of profit and the unabashed refinement of its pleasures³. For Voltaire, the luxury economy takes the place of wealth redistribution.

Voltaire seeks accommodation above all. With regard to the Calas affair, in the Traité sur la tolérance, he does not plead for the political and civil equality of Protestants, but for a simple relaxation of discriminatory legislation, on the model of the status of English Catholics. On the subject of schools, in the article Fertilisation in the Questions sur l'Encyclopédie, he reminds us " that one only needs a feather for two or /// three hundred arms ", and admits to fearing the schools he himself has established on his lands.

The undermining of political sentiment, in the Dictionnaire philosophique, is therefore an essentially negative undermining : soften, soften the law, yes  radically reform institutions, no. The slinging of the futile reveals the voltairian text's law of pleasure, which moves, thrust by thrust, towards ever greater enjoyment. Both the theistic credo in the Credo article and the proposed laws in the Lois civiles et ecclésiastiques article point in the direction of abolishing a number of privileges, ecclesiastical ones in particular. For example, Voltaire calls for the taxation of priests and the abolition of ecclesiastical jurisdictions, which exempt them from common law. His program is entirely negative  he intends to do away with instituted differences, abolish particular laws ; he expresses himself in poor articles, which are not the flagship texts of the Dictionnaire. The end of the article Lois civiles et ecclésiastiques is eloquent in this respect  " si l'usage est bon, la loi ne vaut rien ". Voltaire's policy is one of use against law, of trade and circulation against the state and its restrictions. It is an anti-politics, which identifies law with the biblical abomination and the despotic abomination. This abomination, which produces the fictional shaking of which Roland Barthes speaks, constitutes the pulsating body of Voltairian writing, through the depression of the symbolic and the political.

This is particularly clear in the Guerre article. The " infernal enterprise " of war has nothing to do with the religious question, and cannot be settled by the generalization of tolerance, even if Voltaire reminds us " that every chief of murderers has his flags blessed and invokes God solemnly before going to exterminate his neighbor ", even if, in the soul of every citizen, " natural religion " militates against the " cruelties, conjurations, seditions, brigandages, ambushes " that artificial religion encourages " (p. 222).

The origin, the spring of war is primarily political : " This invention was first cultivated by nations assembled for their common good "  the war of ancient peoples became the war of contemporary princes : " a genealogist proves to a prince that he is lineally descended from an earl whose parents had made a family pact, three or four hundred years ago, with a house whose very memory no longer survives " (p.223)  here begins the now-familiar process of anecdotal hooking and scarfing up the seriousness of the world. At the origin of the war, Voltaire places a marginal character, an offbeat fiction, at the point of a trivial detail: the apparently gratuitous, or at any rate vain, delirium of a charlatan selling a counterfeit genealogy to a prince. From this eccentric narrative of the tale, Voltaire gradually stretches the semiotic arc that polarizes the narrative between the concreteness of the realia (" the prince and his council ", " the big blue sheet at one hundred and ten sous aune ", the hats " bordered with coarse white thread ") and the blinded absurdity of the political machinery (" these speeches do not reach the ears of the prince alone " ; " the other princes who hear of this equipment take part in it ").

The semiotic arc produces the shaking, the convulsion of biting irony : apparently ancient peoples were happier than the peoples of Voltaire's time, since they themselves decided, collectively, on their extermination ; apparently, the genealogist was right to falsify lineages and alliances, since the right of the prince " is incontestable "  apparently, war is a financial boon, since peoples, learning of its outbreak, " immediately divide into two bands like harvesters, and /// are going to sell their services to anyone who wants to employ them."

There's a long way to go here, in this indignant trembling of the Voltairian voice, from the tolerant liberal laissez faire. Irony strangles the text  reality in its brutality, history in its barbarity, overturns all institutional attachments, all social respects. Here, Voltaire is the great Voltaire of pure revolt. War is one of the three great scourges of humanity, along with famine and pestilence: this is the beginning of the article War. But while the first two are the work of Providence, war is profoundly human. Yet,

" The worst thing is that war is an inevitable scourge. If we are careful, all men have worshipped the god Mars : Sabaoth, among the Jews, means the god of arms ; but Minerva, in Homer, calls Mars a furious, foolish, infernal god. " (P. 224.)

Thus emerges the polarity to which, always, the convulsive body of Voltairian writing  returns: the absurd horrors of warlike barbarity are the work of men, and yet it's an inevitable scourge ; we worship, in war, a god, Mars or Sabaoth, and yet this god, by Homer's own admission, is " insensate ", inhabited by the Voltairian pas-de-sens. War has its god, Mars, but immediately the goddess whose reverse he represents emerges opposite Mars: Minerva challenges Mars not so much as an adversary outside herself, but as one with whom she enters into polarity. Is she not, like him, helmeted? Holding his arm as he fights alongside the Trojans, she leads him away from the battle and makes him sit down on the banks of the Scamandre. From this gesture that opens Canto V, Voltaire retains, to close the War article, the imprecation against Ares :

῏Αρες Ἄρες βροτολοιγέ, μιαιφόνε, τειχεσιπλῆτα (Iliad, V, 31sq.).

Homeric imprecation does not become, in Voltaire, a pure oratorical game : like the anecdote, it links fiction and revolt, the place of the symbolic and the emergence of the real. This connection, this slinging, constitutes the semiotic arc of Voltairean writing.

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Notes

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I use the term arc sémiotique in reference to the electric arc : when a strong electrical polarity is established between two points that are nevertheless not connected, electricity still makes its way through (by ionization of the air)  this is the phenomenon of the electric arc. In the case of the semiotic arc, polarity is established between the statement (horrible) and the enunciation (ironic, joking), while the arc constitutes the pas-de-sens, i.e. both the brutal affirmation of the statement's absurdity and the pas du passage, by which this absurdity makes sense anyway.

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